Let Them Smoke Dope

  "It would be stupidity on steroids" for Congress not to pass a pandemic bill whose essential core is the shielding of employers from liability for workers who get sick from Covid-19, either by being forced back on the job, or being forced to work under unsafe conditions. So said multimillionaire Senator Mark Warner on the unveiling of bipartisan legislation which would also cut already-expired federal unemployment benefits right in half, forgo sending Americans a second round of $1200 stimulus checks, and utterly fail to protect people from a looming spate of evictions and foreclosures.

Democrats, after pretending for months that this liability shield was the only obstacle to them agreeing to the much more generous package then being proffered by Republicans, now plead that it's the best we can hope for. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo helped foam that runway for them when he absolved New York nursing home operators from culpability as the virus rampaged through his state's care facilities last spring. He was then handsomely rewarded, not only with campaign contributions from the same operators, but with a special Emmy award for his performance artistry during press conferences. There's a lot more money where that came from, from nursing home lobbyists and myriad other corporate predators, and Congress critters of both parties all over Plague Nation have their grasping arms stretched out so far they're practically dislocated from their shoulders.

Since it would indeed be stupidity on steroids for them to stop enabling capitalism on crack, the House of Representatives went whole hog and also finally voted to decriminalize marijuana last week. The stated objective is to rectify the institutional racism which has disproportionately jailed Black and Brown people for minor drug convictions.

 From the New York Times:

“The effects of marijuana prohibition have been particularly felt by communities of color because it has meant that people from the communities couldn’t get jobs,” Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

Mr. Nadler, who spearheaded the legislation with Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California and the vice president-elect, described the collateral consequences of a conviction for marijuana possession as creating “an often-permanent second-class status for millions of Americans.”

 The subliminal objectives of what amounts to a political stunt are twofold  First, Joe Biden, one of the leading instigators of the War on Drugs and the ensuing mass incarceration via his 1994 Crime Bill, can be seen as redeeming himself. Second, by tacitly (and ever so magnanimously) encouraging people to smoke pot, politicians from both parties hope to deflect attention from the fact that no pandemic relief is coming, and that the political class has abandoned people during the worst public health crisis in US history.

As of last week, Covid-19 is now the official leading cause of death in America. Some 11,000 additional people died of the virus in just the last week of November, with the death toll expected to reach half a million by March - when, President-elect Joe Biden desultorily forecasts, a more robust "stimulus" package may or may not come to pass. In the meantime, folks, just try to hang on. Smoke a little pot. But if you get the munchies, you're on your own. Maybe you can look at Youtube clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragging about her designer ice cream stash before she "caved" to Republicans.

 Everybody must get stoned in one way or another. Can it also be a coincidence that even Bob Dylan just caved and has sold his entire catalog to the music publishing division of Vivendi, the giant media conglomerate headquartered in France? Now owning one of the "Big Three" recording giants, Vivendi has recovered from a series of bankruptcies because of overleveraging. In 2002, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital was among the private equity vultures that swooped down to glut themselves on the leavings. 

Mitt Romney is also an integral  part of the small bipartisan Congressional cabal which authored the latest corporation-friendly Covid-19 relief package. It's a small world, a big club, and -- altogether now - You Ain't In It.

As Mitt Romney would say, if you haven't stashed away that first and only $1200 stimulus check like Nancy Pelosi's ice cream, or if you foolishly blew your entire temporary unemployment windfall on food and rent, then you obviously don't care anything for your own lives. You didn't save for the proverbial rainy day. He won't even let you ease the pain of plague-enhanced bipartisan austerity by letting you smoke marijuana for medical reasons. He'll fight legalization with his whitened teeth, his manicured nails and his gleaming little stones.

Snap, Cackle, Prop(aganda)

 The unavoidably ubiquitous Barack Obama went on Snapchat the other day to advise people who are fed up with police brutality to just snap the hell out of it and avoid using such "snappy slogans" as Defund the Police. By placing more importance on their own lives than upon the fortunes of Democratic Party politicians, Obama chided, activists risk not getting what they want. They risk alienating a whole alleged country full of racist voters through their shrill insistence upon the right to live.

If that scapegoating and gaslighting isn't humorous enough for you, Barack and Michelle Obama will also be producing a new comedy series for Netflix about the madcap morons in the Trump administration. Liberals who've been thriving on virtue-signaling cackles and guffaws during the past four nightmare years cannot just be expected to quit Trump cold turkey, can they? It's not enough that Netflix is  already running a widely-panned film (Hillbilly Elegy) which belittles the Hollywood stereotype of the Trump voter. Citizen-spectators will still need stronger and stronger fixes of Trump while Joe Biden goes about the sober adult work of filling his government with friendlier, smarter, more diverse types of warmongering fascists. Trump withdrawal will get underway with a vengeance before the man even lands back in Mar-a-Lago to found his own media empire and produce his own counterprogramming.

 Netflix subscribers got their early warning a week ago when the streaming giant abruptly announced that it that would be "updating" its pricing policy in order to bring more exciting programs to its dwindling audience. There's no word yet whether Rachel Maddow will cross over from MSNBC to reprise her role as Russiagate maven, or whether the Obamas themselves will make cameo appearances in the docu-comedy  series, or whether there will be a bipartisan Breaking Bad-inspired episode about the Obamas and the Bushes and the Clintons shooting each other up with Covid-19 vaccine on live TV. 

The working title of the series is "When They Go Low, We Do Low Comedy." Only kidding! The actual working title, according to Vanity Fair, is "The G Word." Don't ask me what the G stands for, but it probably has something to do with graft or grift or maybe it's grandiose or grotesque or gruesome. From the article:

Ayway, The G Word will reportedly be “part documentary, part comedy sketch,” and we do hope that at least one episode has a sort of Drunk History vibe, with someone loaded and slurring while recounting Kushner pounding his fists on the desk and yelling, “Do you know who my father is??” We also hope that that episode follows in the footsteps of the Obamas’ first documentary, American Factory, and wins a slew of awards even though that’ll probably result in Trump shitting out his small intestine.

Thank goodness for the mature elite media counternarrative to Trump's soul-destroying vulgarity.

Resisting Neoliberal Mollification

  It's probably just a coincidence, but almost as soon as I signed up for Biden Transition updates, I started getting spammed by something called the Ozy Daily Dose. At first, assuming that they were just the latest snake oil come-ons from Dr. Oz, I trashed them. But late last week, one particular email slugged The Power Brokers of the Biden Era so piqued my interest that I threw caution to the winds and I opened it.

"They may not be in the White House" Ozy teasingly dished. "but that doesn’t matter. While Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks dominated headlines this past week, the truth is that most Washington policymaking happens behind the scenes long before it lands in front of the federal agencies or on the Resolute Desk. Today we explore the Biden power brokers who may not be obvious from the outside but will play crucial roles across the country — and the world — for the incoming president." 

I was duly dosed with a list of five names (including two couples) who will be operating as a kind of deep state cabinet pulling all the strings at Joe Biden's White House. In apparent order of importance, these alleged top-secret enforcers are Barack and Michelle Obama, former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and.... Kim Kardashian.

Kim Kardashian?!?

Yes, gentle readers, The Daily Dose is pure claptrap. But it is claptrap conceived by two Goldman Sachs alum-chums and spread like a social disease thanks to the lavish financing of billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and other investors. It is not your ordinary spam. It is undiluted neoliberal propaganda filet of prime spam in a gold-plated can.

Before I get any further into the oligarchic power behind Ozy, their rationale for choosing the Obamas as Number One power brokers is interesting, to say the least:

The cachet they have, both with the Black community and Democrats in general, will be key in mollifying the base even as Biden potentially faces a struggle to get legislation passed through a closely divided Congress — whether or not Democrats nab the Senate with a Georgia double.

In other words, Barack and Michelle are the designated drugs with which to anesthetize people as they're being sliced and diced into even tinier little pieces by neoliberal capitalism's relentless scalpel. Barack, in particular, is preternaturally adept at mollifying people. As he himself blandly acknowledges in the latest volume of his auto-mythography, he was able to mollify untold thousands of people with his drones. He had to mollify them in order to save them, before they ruined their own lives with all the bad choices they were making.

"In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men...had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.

"And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."

 If only Kim Kardashian had just a hundredth of the influence that the chill and chilling Barack Obama has, we might actually stand a chance to survive the Great Mollification that the oligarchy is prescribing for us. Kim just wants to release a few carefully selected people from prison from time to time and co-opt the racial justice movement to burnish her own brand, without caring at all that her fellow neoliberals are co-opting her at the same time to put the gloss of sex and celebrity on their reign of economic terror.

The Ozy Media Empire is there to help them achieve their goal of anesthetizing the public and tamping down social movements against the most extreme wealth disparities in human history.  Not for nothing is their target audience the "millennials" who are gravitating to socialism in ever increasing numbers because a government owned and operated by billionaires has nothing to offer people but a whole lifetime of debt and precarity. And not for nothing is Ozy's "power broker" listicle sponsored by Noom, a Dr. Oz-like diet and lifestyle app accused in a class action lawsuit of bilking its customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ozy is literally almost everywhere. Ozy is to media as Amazon is to commerce. From Forbes:

In addition to offering daily content through their digital platform, OZY currently powers three primetime television shows on PBS and the BBC, with a growing slate of programming in development. Their podcast, The Thread, is entering its third season, while their annual OZY Fest steps into its fourth year, merging live music and curated conversations with leaders across industries. OZY currently services 3 million subscribers, with a loyal audience of over 40 million followers.

 (Now, those numbers are fudged at an even greater rate than Donald Trump inflated his own inauguration numbers. Since I am unwillingly on their email list, I am counted a subscriber. They could have gotten my name and address from the Biden team. But they could just have easily gotten it from the email list of the New York Times, with whom they partner. When they talk about the corporate media being consolidated, they certainly ain't kidding!)

Although they're as scammy as Dr. Oz and aim to be as quirkily cool as Ozzie Osbourne, the name of this media megalith actually comes from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem Ozymandias. 

Since the poem is about a "colossal wreck" of a bygone pathological narcissist whose legless and armless monument is now crumbling in the desert, you might be tempted to think that the Ozy honchos are either being archly self-referential, or that they're too ignorant to realize Shelley was insulting oligarchs. 

But co-founder Carlos Watson puts his own interpretation on the poem. Shelley, it seems, simply didn't know what he was writing about. Watson says:

 The poem is commonly read as a warning against outsized egos and the impermanence of power. But we choose to read it differently. To us, it's a call to think big while remaining humble. Admittedly, ours is an unconventional interpretation – because that's who we are. In a world littered with conformity, we like to see things differently.

To that perverted end, Watson cobbles together such humble  trendsetters as Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and George W. Bush to help his audience feel that they, too, are part of a progressive plutocratic movement where capitalism just keeps right on expanding. He can rewrite history and misinterpret literature and shrill his Ode to the West Wing all he wants, but we, the "pestilence-stricken multitudes," don't have to listen to him no matter how insistently he fills our email folders with his globs of gourmet spam.

Rolling Stone aptly called the most recent Ozy confab "a neoliberal nightmare." Sadly, the last two Ozyfests in Central Park (closed to the public for the for-profit occasion) had to be cancelled, in 2019 because of a capitalism-engendered record heat wave and this year because of the capitalism-enhanced Covid-19 pandemic.

To combat neoliberalism in all its insidious and odious forms, we can take heart from Percy Bysshe Shelley's immortal words of nonviolent resistance in The Masque of Anarchy: 

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

Team Biden's Left Derangement Syndrome

 If you persist in bugging him about climate change and social justice and health care, Joe Biden won't just stop at covering his ears and rescinding that gracious invite to the kiddie table. He'll have one of his lackeys publicly accuse you of being a terrorist.

Not even Donald Trump, refusing to concede the election while willfully ignoring 200,000 daily new cases of Covid-19, has rated that epithet from Team Biden. That is just how much the corporate Democratic Party despises the left.

 From the article "Is the Left Wing Overplaying Its Hand?" in Politico:

"They can  either continue to just beat the drums on the streets or they can start to leverage the relationship they have. It's up to them what strategy they adopt."

The left wing's publicly aggressive tactics could lead Biden to just tune them out altogether. "If all you do is escalate, then people eventually think that you're enemies and not friends and they're like, 'We don't negotiate with terrorists,'" said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who supports many of the left wing's goals. 

Morales Rocketto was referring to criticism of Biden by the Sunrise Movement for his selection of Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), a recipient of oil industry largesse, for his administration, along with the Justice Democrats and other progressive groups slamming Biden's stuffing the White House with various cronies and lobbyists. Biden has also named his pal Bruce Reed, the architect of the infamous austerian Bowles Simpson "Catfood" Commission, to his staff - an ominous signal that cuts to social programs in the middle of a pandemic are very much on the grownups' table.

By mouthing her assurances that she shares progressive goals with the same groups that she also obliquely accuses of terrorism, Morales Rocketto is of course engaging in nothing but good old fashioned gaslighting.

You might be tempted to buy into her sincerity and working class bona fides, given her leadership position in the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She certainly sounds like she might be a former housekeeper, nanny or caregiver who rose through the ranks to organize, doesn't she? And her group certainly sounds like a labor union.

She's not, and it isn't. The Alliance is a Democratic Party-linked advocacy organization whose objective is putting a working class and community organizing gloss on the corporate party while herding real domestic workers to the polls. It also purports to help low-paid servants to "improve their skills" in such areas as preparing nutritious meals for the children of their wealthy employers. For $5 a month, anyone can join this club and be part of the "movement" and even sign up for medical and dental discounts and special deals on theme park tickets. 

Before embarking on her current dual roles of bashing progressives as domestic terrorists while purporting to champion domestic workers, Morales Rocketto was employed by Obama For America, Hillary For America, and the Democratic National Committee. She won a coveted spot on Time Magazine's "Next 100"" roster in 2019, even scoring a written tribute from Hillary Rodham Clinton herself.

And since she's friends with George Clooney and in her "most badass" accomplishment ever, once confronted Ted Cruz in an elevator while she works tirelessly raising millions of dollars to reunite parents and children at the border, could Team Biden have possibly picked a better surrogate with which to attack the left and tamp down all that rude talk of climate justice, health justice and social justice?

One thing they aren't considering: that the critics and the protesters and the agitators might not even want a seat at Biden's precious table. Maybe getting Hillary Clinton to write nice things about us is not on everybody's bucket list. And who but the most craven careerist would ever want to be to carved up and eaten alive by a gang of criminal goons?

Oligarchic Gaslight In America's Twilight

If the billionaires who own the place want their failing state to turn an even bigger profit for them, their first task is to ensure that the superfluous population keeps fighting among themselves instead of punching up at them, their real oligarchic enemy.  

Only in America could the worst pandemic in modern human history vie for media attention with the tragedy of "divided government" and a supposed mass outbreak of violence and verbal vitriol among ordinary people fighting with each other over masks and political parties that don't care about them. If people weren't supposedly fighting each other all the time, they might stop and remember that three out of every four of them, both conservative and liberal, want the government to provide and finance their health care. And then, if people started making demands to benefit one and benefit all, the media would finally be forced to cover and report on what people really want.

To prevent that from ever happening, we're instead being fed competing stereotypical culture war narratives aimed at deflecting our attention away from the cruelty emanating from the highest of high places and directing our ire toward a whole panoply of Others. Fox News viewers get a cartoon picture of snobbish "woke" latte-sipping socialists and their hired Antifa thugs, while MSNBC fans learn to abhor supposed hordes of racist anti-mask cultists who always vote against their own interests. 

If you don't think that this hand-wringing narrative of Divided Regular Americans is all part of the plan and the "fix," look no further than two articles in Tuesday's New York Times. Regarding the tactics and aims of the ruling oligarchy, they are case studies in both self-contradiction and gaslighting.

The first, concerning "Biden's Economic Plan For the Virus," casts the oligarchs as deeply concerned and caring souls who only want the best for each and every one of us. They care so very much, in fact. that part of their propaganda is aimed at us with actual bullet points:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris yesterday outlined their plan to help restore the economy while battling the coronavirus, calling on Congress to act immediately and insisting on the need for bipartisan cooperation.

Biden and Harris spoke from Wilmington, Del., immediately after meeting via Zoom with business and labor leaders. In his remarks, the president-elect described that conversation as "very encouraging," painting it as an example of his campaign message - national unity - in action.

He said that both the C.E.O.s and the union bosses had agreed that the government must act boldly to bring the economy back up to speed. “I wish you could’ve heard — corporate leaders and labor leaders singing the same hymnal here,” he said.

That touchy-feely propaganda about a meeting (to which the public was not invited) of a new era of rich and poor being all in this together is directly contradicted by the article in the same issue called "In Georgia, Private Equity Is Investing in Divided Government." Centering around a pair of runoff elections early next year which will determine the Senate majority, it bluntly asserts that without manufactured gridlock, the rich cannot possibly get richer at the expense of everyone else. The fix is in. Despite what their lackey Joe Biden tells us,  the ruling oligarchy doesn't even remotely want to fix what they themselves have broken. And Biden knows it:

Government gridlock protects private equity’s business model, ensuring that major changes proposed by Democrats, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, won’t become law, Mr. Valadez said. (Richard Valdez of the nonprofit Americans For Financial Reform.) Mr. Biden got the most direct contributions associated with private equity in 2020, but Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas and Susan Collins of Maine were the next-biggest recipients, reflecting the sector’s preference for divided government.

Still, the Times must go through the motions of providing fair and balanced propaganda, evidenced by its Dealbook subsidiary's hosting of a concern-trolling online summit starring such oligarchic luminaries as tech mogul Bill Gates, who has no qualms about departing from his own area of expertise to pontificate about vaccine confidence. They're saving Elizabeth Warren for the end of the long day, when people are beginning to get fatigued and tuning out, to prod her about how her mild anti-corruption bill would hurt Wall Street, pretending that it actually has a chance of passing, not to mention ever being enforced if it does get passed after the requisite watering down. They want assurances from Warren that Joe Biden will treat them well, pretending (yet again) that there is a slight chance he will not treat them well while wagging the occasional scolding finger at them for appearance's sake.

Given his administration appointments so far, they haven't got a worry in the world which they have plundered to near-extinction.

All the World's a Staged Coup

Donald Trump is at heart a showman and a provocateur, so his purging of the Pentagon and his charges of election fraud and refusal to concede are probably just the latest clumsy tools in his bottomless "make me the center of attention" toy toolbox. Or so I'd been thinking.

But now that journalists whom I respect, such as David Sirota and the writers at the World Socialist Website, are laying out perfectly plausible scenarios for how an honest-to-goodness military coup and/or the overturning of election results by Republican legislatures in such key battleground states as Pennsylvania, to be later upheld by the right-wing Supreme Court, I'm beginning to have some uncomfortable second thoughts.

And the fact that the New York Times, heretofore the mainstream media champion of #Resistance, Inc, is downplaying the coup narrative and enlisting two of its top national security reporters (a/k/a CIA mouthpieces) to do so, also makes me wonder what is really up. As long as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remains in charge, the Times article reassures us, there is no possible way that the right-wing ideologues and cronies that Trump has appointed to key positions will have the power to do much at all.     

And while the Republicans are making their own big show of supporting a second term for Trump, behind the scenes they reportedly are making arrangements to brief the Biden transition team on classified national security and intelligence matters. This to the ultimate benefit of the Uniparty and the military-industrial complex which each faction so slavishly serves.

Meanwhile, even if and when his physical coup fails, Donald Trump will have won in the psychological warfare category. Isn't he just taking his own page from the Clinton campaign's "we wuz robbed" playbook? Two can play the government-in-exile game as easily as one. The Trumpian restoration movement is already a done deal, and Campaign 2024 will be in full throttle before you know it.

Not that the defeated president's mischief-making doesn't have a bright side. The powers-that-be are aghast, for example, that Trump might finally order all the troops home from Afghanistan after a two-decade occupation. He is threatening to declassify documents that allegedly prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Russiagate is the fictional product of the de facto CIA/DNC Partnership. He is threatening to fire Gina Haspel, the CIA director who not only destroyed tapes documenting Bush-era torture but who allegedly presided over some of the torture sessions herself. 

Even when Trump does ultimately leave office, the permanent security state fears that he will become a walking, talking Wikileaks, spilling all kinds of state secrets and chipping away at whatever legitimacy and public support they still enjoy. If they're not also fearfully mentioning that he might pardon Julian Assange, it is probably because they don't want to give him any more ideas on how to jeopardize their reputations and careers.

Isn't it nerve-wracking enough that Trump is considered a long shot to replace Alex Trebek on Jeopardy?

Here, though, is the bottom-up coup that the oligarchs and their bickering apparatchiks are really afraid of. (warning: contains strong but very refreshing language.)

The Nightmare-To-Nap Transition Must Fail

We were deafened by the sound of jubilant crowds singing Hamilton show tunes in the streets, we were dazzled by the sky above Wilmington's Chase Center shrine to capitalism and entertainment lighting up with fireworks spelling J-O-E in garish patriotic hues, we were brought to tears by the president-elect shaking his fist, quoting the Bible, and blessing the great American war machine.

What better way to prove to the whole world, yearning for a return to American supremacy. that our long fascistic nightmare is finally over?

Now comes the hard work. The Democratic leadership's immediate task (besides pivoting from the Putin scapegoat to the AOC/Squad scapegoat to explain its electoral failures) is to start slathering so many globs of greasepaint on the Trump-cracked visage of American hegemony that it would make Hamilton fold and Broadway dim, had they not already closed and dimmed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

So the incoming Biden team is raising the curtain on a brand-new website which, if it doesn't put you right to sleep after that weekend champagne brunch you learned that you'd feasted on if you are an MSNBC-watcher or a New York Times subscriber, is at least designed to seduce you into the semi-waking world of a rebranded Normal.  

They're giving us a teaser of their play in four acts: Covid-19, Economic Recovery, Racial Equity and Climate Change. I call it a teaser because there is no actual dialogue or plot. It is still very much in the treatment stage, when they're all sitting around and pitching vague ideas. For now, the audience will just have to exist on the hype and be left guessing whether the final product will be a tragedy or a comedy.

This is the typical gambit of the Neoliberal Players who've been touring the country and the globe with their stale scripts for the past forty or so years. Only the top billings and the costumes periodically change, while the repertory ethos itself stays relatively intact.

Under the working title of "Economic Recovery," for example, we don't learn anything specific about how Joe Biden will tangibly make our lives better. We learn only that Joe Biden believes in you and respects you, as long if you get up every day to work hard to "sustain America."

"Make no mistake. America has been knocked down," he announces, as though people are either too stupid to realize they've been knocked down, or worse, are in complete denial. But he wants you to know that he believes in you anyway!

And really, who needs Medicare For All when all you really need is folksy Uncle Joe - actually an unnamed spokesperson for Uncle Joe -  reassuring you that for him, "health care is personal."

 He believes that every American has a right to the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have access to affordable, quality health care. He knows that no one in this country should have to lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering, “what will I do if she gets breast cancer?” or “if he has a heart attack?” “Will I go bankrupt?” He knows there is no peace of mind if you cannot afford to care for a sick child or a family member because of a pre-existing condition, because you’ve reached a point where your health insurer says “no more,” or because you have to make a decision between putting food on the table and going to the doctor or filling a prescription.

You don't have the right to health care. You only have the right to peace of mind knowing that you can "access health care" by some unknown means, which perhaps includes crawling on your hands and knees to the nearest private equity-staffed emergency room. You at least should have the god-given right to score an affordable sleeping pill to prevent you from worrying about death or bankruptcy or starvation.

Biden's public relations people go on to blather about an imaginary world where everybody who works hard should get a fair shot and a fair shake, which actually skates dangerously close to plagiarizing Barack Obama. And why wouldn't it, since it's probably the same P.R. team that is still churning out this verbiage.

Biden, we are told,plans to tear down the systemic racism that he had such a large part in building with his Crime Bill, by "investing in" Black, Latino and Native American entrepreneurs and helping them to "access" affordable housing. This is in lieu of actually creating a government-run jobs program and building new public housing stock.

To see this agenda through, President-elect Biden will make new, bold investments and speed up the timetable for many of the 10-year investments he has already announced. He has a plan to pay for the ongoing costs of the plan by reversing some of Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and imposing common-sense tax reforms that finally make sure the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share.

Beware the neoliberal buzzword "common-sense." It's just a sneaky way of saying that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer while perhaps getting an extra crumb here and there so that they'll still have enough strength left to toil for the rich.

As David Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, this constant touting of "common sense"is simply a gaslighting ploy to create and enforce consent in the targeted populace:

"It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day  'Common sense' can, therefore be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or  disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers or 'others') can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it (per Gramsci) becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses' to justify almost anything."

As long as the right buzzwords, like "fairness," "common sense," "access, "democracy" and "freedom" are used, all the economic power resting in a few elite hands can gain at least a modicum of, if not popular support, at least popular submission.

We snooze, we lose.

Barack Obama's sonorous voice had the magical effect of anesthetizing liberals, who became so rudely awakened when Donald Trump was elected. Joe Biden has no such oratorical talents, no comparable ability to obfuscate the cruel neoliberal agenda with anything close to Obama's glibness and charm and charisma. 

For such small favors, we should be grateful and optimistic.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just the impetus we need. They should inspire us to get up every day to sustain and hone our critical thinking skills and anger to unprecedented levels. They actually do make it ridiculously easy, not least because both have a tendency to go off their neoliberal buzzword scripts, revealing their true personalities and agendas.