As If We Needed Another Reason to Hate Bankers

Just when you thought they couldn't sink any lower, the rentier capitalist class has burrowed down into the deepest slimy depths of shameless greed.

These ideological progeny of the slave trade are complaining that if the Black farmers trapped in debt peonage are freed by the federal government to the tune of $4 billion, with the predatory loans paid off early and in full, it wouldn't be fair to the investors in the "secondary market" who were counting on earning interest on compound interest on compound interest until either the death of the debtors and all their heirs. or until hell freezes over.

And if the federal government still insists, despite all the ravenous ongoing lobbying by banking groups, on paying back the Black farmers' loans early, the bankers proceed to demand that they and the investors in these loans should also be handsomely compensated for future paper losses. 

I suppose you can't really blame the rentiers of finance capital, given that heretofore the feds had so reliably bailed out Wall Street while shafting Main Street. It was just a little more than decade ago, for instance, that the Obama administration had rewarded the miscreants of the subprime mortgage industry and house-stealing private equity firms while allowing millions of ordinary people to lose the roofs over their heads. The Trump administration later sweetened the pot even more by lowering corporate tax rates and using the pandemic to open up the spigots of the Federal Reserve to the already-rich to the tune of trillions of dollars.

The predatory financial class simply doesn't understand why the Biden administration is allowing mere mortals, like Black farmers, to partake of even the crumbs left over from the feast.  Not that the debt peons have yet received one single crumb, mind you, because the funds approved in March as part of the $1.9 trillion rescue package are still stuck in bureaucratic limbo, along with the billions approved by Congress for rent relief.

As the New York Times reports:

Bank lobbyists, in letters and virtual meetings, have been asking the Agriculture Department to make changes to the repayment program, a U.S.D.A. official said. They are pressing the U.S.D.A. to simply make the loan payments, rather than wipe out the debt all at once. And they are warning of other repercussions, including long-term damage to the U.S.D.A.’s minority lending program.

In a letter sent last month to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, the banks suggested that they might be more reluctant to extend credit if the loans were quickly repaid, leaving minority farmers worse off in the long run. The intimation was viewed as a threat by some organizations that represent Black farmers.

“If U.S.D.A. does not compensate lenders for such disruptions or avoid sudden loan payoffs, the likely result will be less access to credit for those seeking U.S.D.A. guaranteed loans in the future, including U.S.D.A. farmers/ranchers,” they (the bankers) wrote to Mr. Vilsack in April.

If this sounds like attempted extortion, it's because it is attempted extortion.

But because the de facto oligarchy that rules these United States could never survive in our putative representative democracy without also engaging in some good old co-optation and Divide and Conquer mayhem, a different group purporting to represent white ranchers and farmers is also suing the USDA, on grounds that the federal bailout is racially discriminatory. It's called America First Legal, and it's led by Stephen Miller, late of the Trump administration.

As for USDA Secretary Vilsack, his reappointment to the post in the Biden administration elicited a flurry of complaints from civil rights leaders and Black farmers themselves for the backlog of discrimination complaints he'd allowed to accumulate during his eight years under Obama, as well as his misrepresentation of data to cover up the numbers of Black farmers who'd been losing their land for decades because of discrimination by banks.

Whether he now bows to pressure from the banking lobby and delays disbursement of funds just as planting season begins remains to be seen. But he already has a history of crumbling to right wing pressure.

In 2017, he became the only Obama cabinet member to support the confirmation of Trump's own agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue - who among his other claims to fame, moved to kick hundreds of thousands of people off their SNAP (food stamp) benefits unless they got jobs.

In 2010, a doctored video produced by the late notorious right wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart led to Vilsack firing Black USDA regional official Shirley Sherrod without getting her side of the story or demanding to see her full recorded remarks. Once Sherrod was vindicated, Vilsack merely offered her a different post, one which she refused. She was among the chorus of critics who expressed dismay at Vilsack's reappointment as ag secretary by Biden. 

That's the history that gives the predatory banking industry so much hope for a lot more federal change in their own pockets as their reward for continuing to profit off the pain and deprivation of others.

Imperial America Unmasked

The mask was ripped off the U.S. in more ways than one during the past week. And each of these ways exposes the big lie that our leaders care deeply about "our children."

But maybe, just maybe, once the government starts sending those direct cash deposits to families with children this summer, these families will forget all about the cruelty of opening all the schools before young children under the age of 12 will even qualify for vaccination against Covid-19. Maybe they will swallow whole the government's decidedly unscientific claim that unvaccinated kids cannot possibly spread the virus to others. Maybe they will ignore the warning from the country's largest nurses' union that the CDC's convoluted guidelines over whether to mask or not to mask exposes families and individuals to unnecessary danger, given that the reports of the end of the pandemic have been, ahem, somewhat exaggerated.Maybe Americans will ignore the troubling reality that even as President Biden is getting plaudits for his tax credits and his plans for Pre-K and subsidized child care, he is at the same time giving his tacit approval to the murders of other people's children. He is turning a cold and blind eye to the children of Gaza, who are being injured at the rate of about three per hour by US-subsidized Israeli airstrikes.

 If Joe Biden is sincere about restoring America's global reputation and its "soul" in the aftermath of Trump, he certainly has a strange way of showing it, what with his tepid response to a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the monster Bibi Netanyahu.

Although support for Israel may be crumbling due to the elite establishment no longer having a monopoly on news coverage and ownership of the means of persuasion, the "woke" New York Times is doing its best.

It helpfully reports, for instance,  that the "proportionality" of an estimated 40 Palestinian kids getting killed compared to only three Israeli kids can be ascribed to Palestinian mothers being lazy and having too many babies. Reporter and former Jerusalem bureau chief David M. Halbfinger ever so delicately tiptoes around the Israeli government's grotesque rationale for genocide:

Relatively few women in Gaza are employed, and the fertility rate is high, leaving the median age in the crowded coastal enclave at just 18, compared to 30 in Israel and 31 worldwide. And Israel says that Hamas positions its fighters in or underneath residential areas, deliberately exposing civilians — and children — to harm.

In other words, there are far too many children taking up space in Gaza to expect Israel to avoid bombing them to death, especially since their fecund mothers insist upon housing them above Hamas tunnels.

What is to be done? For starters, we can boycott US corporations doing business with Israel, and start harassing and scaring elected representatives in Congress, who keep right on approving military aid to genocidal maniacs no matter how many children may be killed in all our names.  The nihilistic Republicans are a lost cause. But if your congress critter happens to be one of those selectively woke Democrats who just signed a letter pledging their unconditional support for military aid to Israel, you might want to give them a friendly buzz and demand they rescind their pledge.

As reported by Truthout, virtually all GOP members of the House of Representatives and more than half of their Democratic colleagues - including several members of the Progressive Caucus - signed a letter in late April stating that Israel can violate international human rights statutes with impunity and still get its annual $3.8 billion for its fighter jets, bombs, and other child-killing hardware. You can read the letter here,  and see whether your representative signed it. You might be in for a very unpleasant surprise.

No wonder that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decreed that all her members keep their own masks on in public. Besides protecting themselves from the virus, they have to enhance the barbed wire currently surrounding the Capitol. They have to do something to hide their cynical smirks from the public.

With the help of a complicit press and generous donations from Pentagon contractors, these people have been inoculated against public accountability for far too long.

Joe Biden ostentatiously ripped off his own Covid mask last week in the Rose Garden, exposing his veneered rictus to the maudlin accompaniment of comparisons of America's victory over the Nazis and Japan in World War II

Vice President Kamala Harris, doing her own facial striptease for the cameras, chortled modestly: "What a contrast to the bad old days of lies, stupidity, denial, hyping hydroxychlroquine and bleach!"

But just as suddenly, the masks are right back on, both literally and figuratively. Transparency, what with all its exposure of their death's head grimaces, must have been more than they could bear. 

Death By a Thousand Tweaks

The New York Times headline "Biden Administration Restores Rights of Transgender Patients" is not only misleading, it deflects attention from the overarching reality that the richest country on earth still does not provide guaranteed, single-payer health care to every single one of its citizens, regardless of race, color, creed, gender or sexual orientation. Even in the middle of a deadly pandemic, tens of millions of Americans are still forgoing care because of costs, or getting sued for their inability to pay for it because they either have inadequate insurance or no insurance at all. 

Moreover, the Health and Human Services Department's reversal of a Trump-era rule which had given health care providers the option to deny care to transgender people without fear of losing federal funding for their businesses paradoxically continues to punish this population by making them prove to the government's satisfaction that any denial of care is based solely upon their existence as transgender people. Since no other group of people is similarly required to submit evidence regarding denial of medical care, the Biden administration's restoration of their rights to "access" is punitive in and of itself. It might be said to deprive these patients of their rights by forcing them to jump through hoops that no other population group is ever forced to jump through to prove that their rights were, in fact, violated.

Rather than issuing a warning salvo to care-denying providers, the Biden administration is initially placing the onus directly on victims, merely "encouraging" affected patients to file complaints. Prosecution of bad actors, such as insurance providers, under existing civil rights laws is not guaranteed. Medical or surgical treatment for transgender people is not guaranteed, nor is monetary relief.

The verbal and ostentatious bestowal of "access" rights upon transgender patients is just one more example of the government nibbling around the edges of a massive social problem rather than addressing the problem in its entirety. They may just as well have declared "We feel your pain" for all the lack of urgency and remedies that the announcement entails.

The rule reversal and possible amendments to the law are - whether wittingly or not -  guaranteed to further inflame and perpetuate the "culture wars" which have become the centerpieces of modern political campaigns and legislative battles whose lack of any concrete policy solutions is guaranteed to please nobody. Conservatives and religious groups will howl on and on about government overreach and tyranny, while liberals will self-righteously defend "science" and make the interests of the oppressed group du jour the be-all and end-all of their artificially narrow discourse. 

These cultural provocations are, in fact, built right into the pathologically bloated Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, one arcane section of which presumes to address health care rights. But for all its heft, it does not address them specifically enough, because the Biden administration will now have to spend all of its precious health reform capital on further "tweaking" the unnecessarily convoluted law, and enraging religious zealots and Trump cultists in the process.  Perhaps most importantly, it's a nifty way to delay discussing Bernie Sanders's own watered-down drive to "expand Medicare." 

From the New York Times article on the verbal restoration of transgender health rights:

Biden administration officials said they were working to write more complete new regulations on the civil rights provision of the law, known as Section 1557, that will specify which health care institutions are subject to the rules and what sorts of services they will be required to provide.

"We do anticipate engaging in further rule-making," said Robinsue Froheoese, the acting director of the Office of Civil Rights. She said the administration did not have a timeline for when a formal regulatory change would be announced. A formal rule will require reconsideration of a number of legal questions, such as whether the provisions apply to health insurers as well as health care providers. The Obama administration and the Trump administration also disagreed about whether the law's sex discrimination  language encompassed the treatment of patients who had had abortions.

Of course, transgender people could avoid being scapegoated and co-opted in the latest iteration of the culture war method of governing if the language of the ACA were simpler. For example, when the National Health Service law was enacted in England and Wales in 1948, every citizen received the following succinct letter from the ministry of health:

It will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone - rich or poor, man, woman or child - can use any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a "charity." You are all paying for it. mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in times of illness.

Contrast that to the kludge of arcane minutiae and wishy-washiness that is the "Affordable" Care Act, which in its nearly one thousand pages (and tweakily counting) had already incorporated the word "waiver" 214  times in the original bill. This number does not include the various state waivers, many of which were implemented during the Trump years and which themselves will require further tweaking by Joe Biden. The law is a document of death by a thousand tweaks and a thousand deliberately manufactured potholes in the road to the single payer system supported by seven out of 10 Americans.

 It is also a massive blank check subsidizing private health insurers and other profiteers to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the 1935 Social Security Act if it had contained a thousand pages, rather than 37?

Rather than protecting transgender patients, the ACA itself is a loaded weapon which places them smack-dab in the middle of the culture wars crossfire.  Trans teens, already vulnerable and prone to self-harm and even suicide, are being targeted in ten states by reactionary legislatures which have directly barred providers from administering hormone therapy and other care.

If we had a single payer program that guaranteed care for everybody, trans people would not only be provided with necessary treatment, they would be saved from the additional trauma of politicians either demonizing them or deliberately delaying justice for them as they tweak their timelines, in the process merrily co-opting them as pawns in their identity politics game of thrones.

*******

*Update, 5/12: I'd like to make clear that in no way am I advocating any sort of therapy, including gender reassignment surgery. Those are medical issues that I am not qualified to discuss. The point of my post was to critique the "identity politicization" of this particular medical issue by the usual suspects in the Duopoly. The Biden administration seems to be trying to score more points with the liberal class, co-opting the trans population as a way to differentiate itself from the extreme right wing of the GOP, which is demonizing trans people from many different angles, including the bathroom controversy. I found the White House's self-congratulatory bestowal of medical rights on trans people to be just another smug way to both virtue-signal and dump on Trump. I also found it hypocritical in the extreme, given Biden's abandonment even of the public option in health insurance, thus breaking one of his campaign promises. He is only playing a progressive on TV; his statement that health care is a basic human right is a lie, and his co-optation of vulnerable people, many of whom are already traumatized enough, in order to score political points, is pretty damned gross. In my opinion, of course.

Hope that clears things up.

Obama Monetizes the Bin Laden Anniversary

 In a weekend email appeal to a dwindling circle of donors to his $500 million presidential center, Barack Obama claims that his extrajudicial murder of Osama Bin Laden 10 years ago was such a noble feat of sustained cooperation and courage among experts that it will "inspire a whole new generation of leaders." 

 But in order for them to remain properly inspired by his hit job, the mythology surrounding the actual sordid event must be perpetuated within a building whose appropriately brutalistic design bears an uncanny resemblance to the Aztec temple where people similarly came to be inspired and awed by ancient blood-soaked human sacrificial rites.

Obama Center

Aztec Center

So whether the accompanying video of a mawkish mutual tongue bath between Obama and retired Admiral William McRaven will be enough to inspire more people to open their wallets in order to help perpetuate the lies surrounding the assassination remains to be seen. That's because, according to recent published reports, the Obama Foundation doesn't even have the bare minimum seed money required by law to break ground as planned this fall on his Chicago museum and entertainment complex and professional golf course.

Therefore, Obama has resorted to enhancing the crass mythology of the grisly event with a crass attempt to monetize it.

He fetishizes it even further by using the American flag supposedly carried by the SEAL Assassination Team on May 1, 2011 as the main set decoration in his propaganda film.

"When you walk into my office," he writes to potential donors in the form of a film teaser, "the first thing you see is the American flag signed by the team that carried out the operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, against Osama bin Laden ten years ago."

"That gift is the most meaningful object I received as president."

You might think it would have been the Nobel Peace Prize. However, since that award was merely aspirational, and the flag symbolizes an actual accomplishment, I can understand Obama's rationale for which artifact  to brag about.

We don't get to see the autographs of the SEALs in the film, because just like the Peace Prize, they're carefully hidden from public view. The placement of their signatures on the back of the flag is ostensibly to protect the SEALs, whose deadly global missions are normally kept secret, lest they provoke retaliation and deaths of more innocent people. But as journalist Seymour Hersh tells it, it was Obama himself who put people in harm's way for his own selfish political interests. When he blabbed to the nation that it was the SEALs who carried out the hit job - and not the unmanned drone as the original fake story had been planned for public consumption - McRaven and his elite squad of killers were reportedly none too pleased to be outed by their Commander in Chief, who subsequently required all of them to sign nondisclosure agreements related to the Obama administration's fabrications. According to Hersh, quoting a "retired official," 

"It (the NDA) promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private....  McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he's a died-in-the-wool SEAL, and not then a political operator, and he knew there's no glory in blowing the whistle on the president." 

 The fabrications that McRaven and his troops had to keep quiet about included the phony story of bin Laden's burial at sea after Obama blabbed that the SEALs had control of the corpse; that bin Laden had been heavily armed and guarded in his compound rather than being held prisoner by the Pakistan military; that his death was the culmination of a prolonged firefight; and most damning, that Pakistani officials had no advance knowledge of the execution and were not bribed into cooperating with it. A  couple of officials even collected most of the $25 million reward money offered by the US government for the capture or death of the al Qaeda leader.

Regarding the complicity of the Pakistan government, Seymour Hersh quotes a retired US intelligence official:

"It didn't take long to get the cooperation we needed, because the Pakistani's wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet proof limousines and security guards and housing" - all of which were and are financed by the Pentagon's off-the-books "contingency funds."

"We told them we would leak the fact that you've got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies (the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan) would not like it."

When Obama and McRaven (now, apparently, having advanced to a career as complicit political operator) schmoozed about the dangers to the American mission posed by those terrible Pakistanis, the reminiscences appear all the more cynical. The sustained cooperation and planning they boast about in the film is really about sustained bribery and shakedowns and lies. That they couldn't keep their stories straight in the aftermath of the hit is not surprising.

Perhaps the most grotesque fake news story was the CIA's John Brennan telling the media that information on bin Laden's whereabouts had been gleaned by torture. 

So it kind of makes one wonder whether the SEAL autographs facing the wall in Obama's office are actually affixed to those NDAs.

"It was important to me," Obama therefore explains in revisionary retrospect, for him to travel to Fort Campbell, Kentucky after the hit, in order "to shake every one of their hands." There was, of course, no mention of the enforced cover-up. Whenever official lies are concerned, the liars can always rely on the Grand Old Flag to erase the actual truth:

"That flag means a lot to me. When you swear an oath to be Commander in Chief, you have an obligation to the more than 1 million Americans serving in our nation's military to only send them into harm's way when absolutely necessary - and to approach the job with a level of seriousness that reflects their decision to commit to a life of service."

For his part, McRaven openly smirks in the film as he tells Obama that he was almost fooled during White House assassination planning sessions into believing that the former president was the one with 35 years of military experience.

The smirk later morphs into a maudlin catch in the voice as he describes Obama shaking all those hands. The former president, right on cue, then wipes away an invisible tear from one of his parched dry eyes.

Or as the Washington Post describes the bathos in an Obama Foundation press release disguised as a news article:

 "Well, you came off the platform. You went down..."McRaven recalled to Obama in the video. The retired SEAL pursed his lips, broke eye contact with Obama and fought to contain his emotion.

 "That's how I felt," Obama said shaking his head.

 "Receiving that flag," he later writes in his fundraising email, "I was humbled by the fact that the team recognized how much I care about them as Commander in Chief."

That, readers, is the subtle language of the protection racket. The threats are disguised as cajolery and concern, and those at the receiving end get the message. Just as Obama cynically shook down the SEALs by flattery and hand-shaking, feigning gratitude and humility, so too is he now attempting to shake down potential donors through appeals to their patriotism and fear of an outside enemy. And the media is dutifully duped.

Ben Rhodes, former Obama deputy national security adviser and current Foundation official, moderated the murder retrospective. He was just a little less adept than Obama when it came to muting his own triumphalism:

But what struck me about this conversation between Admiral McRaven and the President was how they were impacted by the outpouring of emotion that followed the raid. I remember late in the evening, after the president had announced the operation to the world in the White House East Room, I walked down the colonnade next to the Rose Garden and could hear chants of “USA!” from crowds that had gathered around the White House, a sense of catharsis after a difficult decade."

Was Obama's buckraking propaganda film also a subtle warning to Joe Biden, who so distressed Neocons from both political parties as he nearly simultaneously announced the end of the war in Afghanistan, and who is featured prominently in the video, striding jauntily down the steps of Air Force One in his aviator sunglasses to join Obama on stage in Fort Campbell to soak up all the enforced appreciation from the SEALs?

Was he perhaps the NDA bagman? Did he have to sign his own NDA, knowing what he knows? So far, his lips are as sealed as those of the SEALs, one of whom had to forfeit millions of dollars in book and speaking fees after he violated his own NDA for writing his own largely phony account of the bin Laden raid.

All fake news is not created equal. Some fake news is more fake and more profit-worthy than others.  It's especially not considered fake when a president does it for flag, mom, apple pie, and personal legacy, and when corporate media establishments owned by billionaires are themselves so invested in maintaining the happy-talk myths of American exceptionalism and the fading American imperium that holding their media-political complex colleagues to account is no longer what journalism is all about.

Just ask Seymour Hersh, who could not get his piece on the assassination published at his own magazine, The New Yorker, or at any other American mainstream outlet.

If you Google the topic today, you'll find that the entire front page of search results is composed of smear pieces of varying intensity against Hersh and his article, which was ultimately published in the London Review of Books and linked above.

Biden's Latest Plan To Save the U.S. Hegemon

 The Biden administration's call for 16 years of non-means tested, guaranteed, fully funded public education for every American citizen certainly is laudable on its face.

It's the White House's rationale for extending schooling by four years - two for Pre-K and two for community college - that should be propelling our B.S. detectors into high alert.  Biden's proposed extension, along  with his plan for paid family medical leave and child care subsidies which would cap out-of-pocket costs for day care at seven percent of family income, is to ensure that parents can continue to work outside of the home. The "family" plan contains no subsidies that would actually help families spend more leisure time together instead of working till they drop. And it does not make the child tax credit increases permanent; it only extends them to 2025.

In an off-the-record press call with the media to preview Biden's speech before Congress tonight, administration officials were, in fact, selling the $1.9 trillion American Families Plan as a weapon in the US hegemon's arsenal for "competitiveness" with the rest of the civilized world. There was nary a word about enhancing American minds and bodies and spirits. It's all about both directly and indirectly subsidizing corporations and employers while preparing the work force of the future, literally from birth. 

 Senior Administration Official I couched it in typical neoliberal-speak:

The American Families Plan invests in our children and our families, helping families cover the expenses that so many struggle with now: lowering health insurance premiums; cutting child poverty; and producing a larger, more productive, and healthier workforce in the years ahead....

  It will make transformational investments from early childhood to higher education so that all children, young — so that all children and young people are able to learn and grown (sic) and gain the skills they need.... 

Skill Me Now

 The plan will also invest in our teachers, improving teacher training and support so that our schools become engines of growth at every level.  It will address teacher shortages, which have only gotten more critical in the context of the pandemic.  It’ll improve teacher preparation and strengthen pipelines for teachers of color. 

Translation of the above Senior Administration Official Neospeak:

-Children are cattle futures who need skills in order to guarantee oligarchic growth and profit for their future bosses and CEOs who "earn" at least 300 times the salary of the average worker. Children are not cast as curious sentient beings who need to be taught to think critically or to become immersed in art, literature, philosophy. These liberal arts are reserved for the children of the rich. -check.

  -Profits will still prevail over people, although some lucky people might have the chance to access more affordable care on the insurance marketplace by at least temporarily paying through only one nostril rather than through the entire nose. For right now, the Biden plan to get us through the pandemic is to continue to generously cut an average of $50 a month from predatory insurance premiums which often cost thousands. - check.

-Child poverty will pragmatically be cut (maybe) but never entirely eliminated in the richest country in the history of the planet. - check.  

-With just enough poverty being cut, some lucky children will magnanimously be allowed to  grow up into strong mature flesh in the low-income workforce of the future. How can the rich continue getting richer without able-bodied servants to fulfill their every need?  If the planter class in the antebellum south could attend to the physical needs of the enslaved for shelter and health care, then so too can our own enlightened elites at least minimally attend to the needs of the hired help - check.

-Schools, transformed in the last, lost decades into engines of capitalism, will continue to be treated as businesses geared more toward the growth of the plutonomy than toward the growth of human minds. And teachers and pupils alike will continue to be tested to ensure that the interests of capital are being properly advanced- check.

And now let's take a look at who and what are being left out of Joe Biden's investments in America's future.

For such a woke administration that so prides itself on its diversity and "inclusiveness," it's quite telling that the middle-aged and elderly of all races and genders are almost entirely excluded from Biden's definition of the American Family. There will be no expansion of Medicare, or a lowering of the eligibility age. There will be no increase in monthly Social Security benefits. There will no negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of drugs, which in the US are the highest in the world. There will be no deals to reimport cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries which do negotiate lower prices with manufacturers, and which do have single payer health insurance systems.

On the contrary: the Biden plan would continue to engorge the for-profit health insurance industry by giving billions in direct cash payments to United Healthcare, Blue Cross and other corporations under the "Affordable" Care Act. The White House will ensure that our health care system remains the most expensive in the world  while having some of the poorest results in terms of mortality and morbidity. That is really what "competitiveness" is all about.

Even right in the middle of a pandemic.

Meanwhile, there are the usual aspirational echoes of such Obama administration plans as taxing capital gains at a comparable rate to labor, closing the carried interest loophole and reforming the dynasty-friendly inheritance tax code. The $15 minimum wage would be strictly limited to daycare workers, to supplement Biden's recent executive order raising it to $15 for employees of federal contractors.

One reporter in the off-the-record press gaggle did press Senior Administration Official I (or was it II or III?) for more specifics, such as just when those extra four years of schooling might actually come to pass.

Well, when all the Senior Administration Officials got together to iron out the specifics, it turned out that there are so many wrinkles in so much gauze and gossamer that nobody really knows the answer, even if Congress does perform a miracle and actually pass the American Family Plan.

But since there is so much yardage (not to mention gaping holes) in the material, Senior Official One allowed that  "broadly speaking, this is a 10-year program — the American Families Plan.  That’s the window.  And you know, many of these things will become permanent.  They — they phase in at different times in different ways."

So, some are immediate.  Some, like paid leave, have a ramp-up.  Some have, you know, like pre-K — you know, a different share that is paid overtime on a sliding basis by states starting at a, you know, low end, the amount that states pay, and as time goes on, an expectation that they will pay more.

Are we all clear now? No wonder the reporter didn't follow up and inquire whether Senior Administration Official, given Biden's call for Republican input on the American Family Plan, was referring to the dreaded Overton Window. Spread the negotiations out, delay implementation for a decade, give the lobbyists all the time they need to re-rip the closed loopholes on taxation, and ultimately bow to the whims of the august Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a the Pope-Queen of the United States), and Biden himself is buying all the time he needs to ensure that America's slide off the low end proceeds apace.

Read between the lines. Take the hype and the hope in his first ballyhooed speech to Congress with a grain of salt in your wounds.

Manufacturing Discontent

 "Your (sic) not gonna hate your way to Medicare For All," hatefully sneered a recent anonymous commenter on one of my numerous posts on the subject.

Once I'd relegated the comment to the spam bucket to join thousands of its brethren from both the Right and the United Center, I marveled at how low the "discourse" has descended, when the expressed desire that one's fellow human beings enjoy the same guaranteed health care that every other advanced civilization on earth considers to be a basic human right can possibly be construed as "hate."

Hate for whom, exactly? 

Well, given that President Joe Biden and his corporate Democratic Party are adamantly opposed to this basic human right, and given that Biden and the corporate Democratic Party are nonetheless being almost universally praised as human rights champions despite perpetuating violent militarism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and fealty to the uber-wealthy entities that finance their campaigns, I concede that it is accurate to say that I hate them with a pure, unyielding passion. And since that, in turn, also makes me a dreaded "purist,"  then I might as well just heartily welcome the hatred of the haters of hate.

Media critic Alan MacLeod has written a very enlightening article for FAIR on the cult of "divisiveness" which is being wholly manufactured and disseminated by the scribes of the elite for the sole and ultimate benefit of the elites who pay their salaries. 

 Such broadly popular programs as the minimum wage increase, single payer health care, and reversal of capitalism-engendered climate change are often characterized by establishment media organs as "stoking divisions," "polarizing," "controversial," "risky," "contentious," "looks good on paper," "the math doesn't add up," and the like.

Any word or phrase will do, just so long as the pathological hatred that the ruling elite harbors for the masses of people is carefully disguised by gaslighting and concern-trolling. Otherwise, the estimated 70 to 80 percent of the citizenry in favor of a single payer public insurance program will never be convinced that they're completely nuts for daring to demand universal, guaranteed, government-sponsored health care. We have to be made to feel guilty about punishing people in love with their precarious, pricey employment-based coverage and condemning the insurance adjustors who work so responsibly hard to deny our claims into lives of penury and maybe even homelessness.

As if on cue, therefore, the New York Times has published a front page screed placing the blame for "divisiveness" not so much on the corporate media working overtime to manufacture the discontent, but upon the media consumers themselves, whose pre-existing feeble hate-brains are only being finessed by actors employed by corporate, consolidated media. It's a remarkable sleight of pen (or keyboard) by scribe Nate Cohn, given how cleverly and stealthily he transmutes this manufactured discontent from top-down propaganda into a powerful, dangerous, bottom-up, grassroots "sectarianism" reminiscent of religious wars both past and present.

The gist of it is that the people themselves, the great unwashed ignorant rabble, are the real threat to democracy. Elites, unite!

In Cohn's telling, you see, there is no such thing as the class war. There is no rich vs poor, or poor vs rich. It is solely about Democrats vs. Republicans. Whether you know it or not, your prime identity as a human being in America is your fealty to a political party. You are either a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter.  There will be no coloring outside of these lines, for fear that the elite media's narrative center will not hold. Cohn writes:

Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral. It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drives sectarian conflict....

  And as mass sectarianism has grown in America, some of the loudest partisan voices in Congress or on Fox News, Twitter, MSNBC and other platforms have determined that it’s in their interest to lean into cultural warfare and inflammatory rhetoric to energize their side against the other.

Cohn puts the chicken before the egg in that last paragraph. It wasn't the corporate propagandists who stoked the "sectarians" with their own inflammatory rhetoric, making enormous profits for their sponsors in the process. Cohn implicitly blames the audience itself. Were it not for the pre-existing hateful rabble, those noble propagandists would never have left the safety of their desks and studios to venture forth into the vast American wasteland to soak up and report on all that grassroots hatred and angst, which has nothing whatever to do with their own outlets broadcasting hours upon hours of Donald Trump (not to mention breathlessly broadcasting hours upon hours of his empty podium with themselves as the celebrity warm-up acts) to foment more discord for more profit and sky-high ratings.

To hear Cohn and his cohort tell it, I have nothing better to do than to castigate my neighbors over their support of, or opposition to, the "cancelling" of Dr. Seuss.  Americans are divided into only two camps: the Trump lovers and the Biden lovers. And they hate each other's guts. That they have been encouraged to scapegoat one another through such top-down neoliberal job-destroying policies as NAFTA and the corporate destruction of organized labor and the deregulation of finance is, strangely enough, never even mentioned in Cohn's "political memo."

He breathlessly continues:

One-third of Americans believe that violence could be justified to achieve political objectives. In a survey conducted in January, a majority of Republican voters agreed with the statement that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 suggests that the risks of sustained political violence or even insurgency can’t be discounted.

Left unmentioned is the US ruling elites' own sustained agenda of state-sanctioned violence, from this country's estimated one thousand military bases throughout the world, its status as the world's biggest arms dealer, its legalization of assault weapons for private ownership, and its primo status as Incarceration Nation, housing more Black prisoners today than there were enslaved people immediately prior to the Civil War. 

There has always been class sectarianism you can believe in, here in these United States, and it was spawned and constantly nurtured by capitalism and the unfettered wealth of the greedy few.   

Of course, since the media is still so enveloped in its Biden honeymoon swoon, Cohn also has no choice but to delve shallowly into his self-censoring hive-brain and to cast Joe Biden as the anti-sectarian hero who wants nothing more than to bring Democrats and Republicans together for the kind of incestuous orgy that has always worked out so well for the elites who bankroll the much more desirable state-sanctioned brand of social, economic and physical violence.

After spending whole paragraphs bemoaning how a nation full of sectarian folks like you and me are turning on one other, Cohn abruptly and without warning completely contradicts himself:

The median voter prefers bipartisanship and a de-escalation of political conflict, creating an incentive to run nonsectarian campaigns.

I feel so divided right now after reading that journalistic feat of bipolar disorder that I don't know whether to flee North in a contentious search for Santa Claus, or to completely blow my quickly dwindling $1400 stimulus check on a controversial trip to the South Pole to commune with the Antarctic penguins while there's still an ice shelf and no Green New Deal in sight.

 There are, after all, only ever two Manichean choices in this life. Corporate media tells me so.  And so did unindicted war criminal George W. Bush, who upon the illegal invasion of Iraq so famously and originally proclaimed to the whole world: "You are either with us or against us."

Fast forward to a Sunday morning CBS gabfest, and this same George Bush now bemoans that people are so "polarized" that they can't even imagine him being friends with Michelle Obama, who once called him "a very funny man" and almost single-handedly paved the way for his reputation rehab in liberal circles.

Though she didn't specify whether he is funny ha-ha or funny-scary, Bush explained in that endearingly narcissistic folksy fashion of his that "anybody who likes my sense of humor, I immediately like."

Duopoly, Inc. You're Either For It Or Against It

Putting a Humanitarian Spin On Xenophobia

In order to prevent thousands of Central American migrants from making those dangerous journeys from dangerous countries, whose danger to human lives stems in large part from dangerous CIA/Pentagon death squads enabling military right-wing coups and propping up corrupt puppets, the Biden administration is now installing more native police and military guards than there are refugees at various border crossings.

It's a way to "discourage" refugees from ever leaving their climate-ravaged, violence-torn homes in the first place. And let's be honest. It takes the heat off Joe Biden, who is getting lambasted left and right for the abysmal conditions of imprisoned migrants, with the added insult of getting his carefully cultivated neo-progressive persona tarnished. 

Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced on Monday that the White House has made deals with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (where a 2009 military coup with the passive-aggressive compliance, if not direct assistance, of the Obama administration, ousted the socialist democratically-elected president) to repel or arrest - if not something even worse - would-be refugees.

Or, as the New York Times spins it, this draconian measure is only being implemented for the good of the refugees, to protect them from "making a dangerous trip North." The Biden administration will beneficently arrange for these desperate people to be turned back, jailed or even tortured or shot at places far, far away from the prying eyes of the American people - who already are getting an eye-full of the shameful conditions in pediatric "detention shelters" on our side of the border.

It's a variation on the solution devised by the kinder gentler administration which had so ostentatiously banned Bush-era torture. The Democrats simply outsourced their own torture to friendly authoritarian countries, and euphemized the outsourcing as "extraordinary rendition." 

And then there were those therapeutic "surgical" drone strikes that made future Abu Ghraib photographic scandals far less likely, mainly because remote-controlled Predators left so few intact bodies around to provide any embarrassing evidence. 

From Monday's Times:

Mexico has informed the United States that it will maintain 10,000 troops at its own southern border, aiming to double the number of migrants that it stops from traveling north, Ms. Psaki said. Guatemala has added 1,500 troops to its border with Honduras and has set up a series of a dozen checkpoints along the route that many migrants take as they head to the United States.

She also said that Honduras recently “surged” 7,000 police and troops to disperse a contingent of migrants that had gathered to make the trip north seeking refuge.

“The objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey, and make crossing the border more difficult,” Ms. Psaki said.

This is the exact same policy continued less than successfully by Donald Trump. However, the announcement that Biden is renewing it is somehow not eliciting anywhere near the same levels of outrage from the corporate press and Democratic lawmakers who decried the cruelty of outsourcing xenophobic US policy to repressive, corrupt regimes and police agencies only a few short years ago. The difference, of course, is that Trump made no effort to spin the cruelty into sanctimony and made no effort to play nice with Mexico. The Democratic side of the duopoly for its own part has always striven mightily to put the humanitarian gloss on the bipartisan, international human rights abuses that this country is so famous for. Trump was more interested in bellowing about "shithole countries" to rile up his base. Democrats talk up a kind, caring  game to placate their liberal base.

For example, Vice President Kamaa Harris is promoted by the Times as  leading a valiant effort to "improve the conditions" in the corrupt, devastated areas from which the refugees are fleeing. At the same time, these refugees are also being denigrated and dehumanized by the Biden administration and friendly establishment press as a militant "surge" that is threatening to breach our suddenly-precious border wall. The bellicose rhetoric is so ingrained in all aspects of foreign policy that there seems to be nothing that they can't or won't append their war jingo to.

The Times article uncritically puts a final spin on what is, essentially, a threat and a warning to an eminently disposable population:

The agreements with the countries are an early test of the cooperation that Ms. Harris will need in order to succeed in that mission.

“These discussions are ongoing, over a period of time and take place at several levels of the government, both here and within these countries, Ms. Psaki said.

Translation: if these violent and historically corrupt regimes don't do what the US imperium orders in order to quell the "surge" of their own people - cast almost as enemy combatants in need of some tough love, rather than as people fleeing for their very lives from violence and famine -  then Uncle Sam won't be forking over any more dollars to prop up their violent and corrupt regimes.

And if people do have to suffer and die, Psaki smarmily dog-whistles, there will be so many players and so many places involved in the abuses that the naming of any individual culprits will be impossible, not to mention unnecessary and undesirable.

This outsourcing of weaponized US immigration policy, moreover, will also make it costly and inconvenient for a US media conglomerate owned by only five or six corporations to bother setting up bureaus in southern Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala in order to cover the plights of thwarted refugees. Covering the occasional Rio Grande drowning and kids sleeping under Mylar blankets behind bars is cheap, it's easy, and it's close enough to home to keep the domestic culture wars alive, and the ratings higher. 

Why else is this whole shameful tale being constantly reported as a "border crisis" rather than the Global South climate disaster and capitalism-spawned human catastrophe that it really is?

(Hint: Follow the money. Remember who sponsors cable news. Here's looking at you, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Financialized Capital.)