Support Your Corporate Global Sheriff

That the Republican Party has morphed into a fascist cabal is undeniably true, especially given their successful Senate "killibuster" of the Democrats' pathetically watered-down voting rights bill this week. 

But look no further than the Biden White House's own "National Strategy For Countering Domestic Terrorism" for disturbing evidence that not only is the current Democratic leadership of the enabling Vichy variety, but that they themselves have become at heart true believers in the anti-democratic authoritarian cause. 

The Biden manifesto publicly announces that the government's spy and police agencies and the unaccountable tech billionaires of Silicon Valley will formalize their co-equal partnership to create "innovative ways to foster digital literacy and build resilience to recruitment and mobilization. The United States also recently joined the Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, an international partnership between governments and technology companies that works to develop new multilateral solutions to eliminating terrorist content online while safeguarding the freedom of online expression."

This melding of corporations and oligarchs into government is just one of the definitions of a fascist state. The fact that the Biden strategy paper is careful to append promises to uphold the right to freedom of expression to its Orwellian directives is the same window dressing contained in the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 reactionary laws.  In fact, there are so many cut-and-pasted First Amendment fig leaves contained throughout the White House document that methinks they might be protesting just a tad too much.

No specifics are offered on just what these "multilateral solutions" or "the innovative ways to foster literacy and build resilience" might be. There is certainly no mention of our public education system becoming involved. There is no mention of building new schools, or hiring more qualified teachers and professors, the better to enhance the literacy of the masses. There is no mention of continuing to send stimulus checks, expand and extend food aid, forgive student loans and crushing medical debt, build guaranteed housing, implement a government jobs program, legislate single payer health coverage, or any new social programs at all to help struggling Americans to foster the "resiliency" the government says they need to resist recruitment by violent actors.

To the contrary: the White House wants to repurpose the Department of Homeland Security and the secretive network of police and spy agencies into a new Department of Education. It even envisages this top-secret behemoth birthed from 9/11 paranoia to become the very latest cool thing in psychotherapy:

Our law enforcement agencies also play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity. That is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are working to enhance public understanding of the full range of assistance that can be provided to those in need, including how mental health experts are complementing traditional law enforcement response. Additionally, the National Counterterrorism Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security will release publicly a new edition of the Federal Government’s Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization. These agencies are also working toward including a range of resources that the public may consult in the event of possible domestic terrorist recruitment or mobilization."

Previous editions of the Mobilization Indicator have heavily concentrated on identifying Muslim terrorists. The 2019 edition also lumped white nationalists in with climate and animal rights activists as "violent extremists."

The 2017 edition's scoring system to help FBI agents identify potential terrorists has more than 40 questions on a checklist as warning signs for incipient terrorists. Among them are engagement in paintball or laser tag events, the use of encryption programs on the Internet to mask identities, and people who have recently suffered a severe loss. Given that 600,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, there might be contained in the newest FBI checklist untold millions of people whose grief and anger potentially make them prime suspects or recruits.

Our "resilience training" will be under the sole purview of the Silicon Valley-Washington Partnership. The first step, though, is to root out the racism and bigotry festering within the population - but not, of course,  festering within the "woke" official government establishment.

To that end, the White House anti-terrorism report ridiculously casts the powerful, violent, official public-private government establishment as an innocent victim in its own right, as oppressed a victim as any minority or out-group, be it black, brown, Asian, LGBT. In order for the Biden administration to address the "systemic racism" that the president himself had a hand in creating and perpetuating with his Crime Bill, it insists that it must first root out the allegedly rampant racist extremism within the relatively powerless population.

The anti-terrorism report effectively ignores police violence, probably because it is the police agencies which form the buffer zones protecting  the Silicon Valley-Washington government and its wealthy donors from the woefully unresilient rabble. 

And make no mistake. The unresilient rabble as defined by the Corporate Partnership running the country potentially includes all of us. The Biden Strategy report comes right out and says so:

"Another key component of the threat comes from anti–government or anti–authority violent extremists. This significant component of today’s threat includes self–proclaimed “militias” and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. Government based on perceived overreach; anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society; sovereign citizen violent extremists, who believe they are immune from government authority and laws; or any other."

In other words, if you are a socialist or an anti-capitalist or are opposed to the undemocratic dispute settlement courts which are part of most "free trade" treaties - if you are "any other" whatsoever - then the Corporate Partnership of America views you as a potential extremist. The problem is not that our de facto oligarchy is harmful to society. The problem is that you mistakenly perceive them as being harmful to society.  

In order for the Corporate Partnership to combat far-right racist extremism, therefore, any critic of capitalism must be considered a potential threat to their national security, which is code for "bottom line." And it is the police state which will enforce the required resiliency. The report ominously continues:

"It (the Biden policy) thus sets a pathway for a unity of effort at the policy level, while protecting the specific work of law enforcement that must be left wholly to appropriate law enforcement entities, whether Federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial..."

"The overarching goal of this Strategy is preventing, disrupting, and deterring that violence. Pursuing that goal it is critical that we condemn and confront domestic terrorism regardless of the particular ideology that motivates individuals to violence....

 “ (It)includes reducing the factors contributing to domestic terrorism. Those factors have multiple dimensions, including incitement to imminent violence online, some transnational linkages, and certain self–proclaimed private “militia” activity that, to varying degrees, is prohibited by the laws of all 50 states. Addressing these factors contributing to domestic terrorism is, in part, a means to achieving the first objective of preventing the violence itself and handling the threats we face today; but it must also be its own objective, as reducing the contributing factors can make a difference in diminishing the threat we might otherwise face tomorrow."

This paranoid document disingenuously and simplistically foists the blame for extremism and all kinds of protest and unrest on our unfettered access to technology. It touts the fostering of the same kind of stoic "resilience" as the "Eat Your Peas" scoldings that the Obama administration preached to justify the imposition of austerity on the masses, even as the rich only got richer.

The current White House continues to gaslight the public. The deflection of blame onto the public continues apace:

Resilience can take many forms. It can mean raising public awareness of how terrorists deliberately seek overreaction, which can help to avoid precisely that overreaction and instead thwart terrorists’ own strategies. And it can mean, broader still, cultivating the type of digital literacy that can empower the American public to resist those who would use online communications platforms and other venues to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize to violence. Fostering and ultimately attaining these and other forms of resilience is a third goal, and one whose achievement would strengthen the United States against domestic terrorism as well as other threats to U.S. national security."

Tamp down your emotions while you are being evicted and starved, proles! As long as you're in touch with your feelings as you needlessly suffer, it will raise your awareness. It is the corporatist state that must be strengthened, not the masses of people. Freelance "extremism" must not be allowed to compete against the real thing, which is our currently existing corporate system.

To that end, the report also recommends the deprogramming of returning troops of the profitable Forever Wars, state-trained killers who are especially vulnerable to PTSD and depression and self-harm and the committing of domestic violence, and a handful of whom become mass shooters. The Biden government pays lip service to combating white supremacy and violence while implicitly upholding white supremacy and violence within its own ranks, most notably within the military and the outsourced mercenaries financed by private equity.

As stated before, the corporate cult of "wokeness" is just another form of capitalistic exploitation of historically marginalized people. In pitting the jobless white working class  against black and brown people, while simultaneously also foisting blame on black and brown people and various out-groups, the corporate state maintains its own supremacy at everybody else's expense.

The White House also continues the grand American Exceptionalist tradition of foisting blame on foreign countries for fomenting racial animosity here in the US, which is the exact same tactic that the FBI employed against unions and socialists during the Depression and against the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, and most recently, in its Russiagate propaganda crusade, non-fealty to which is almost considered a heresy if you're a Democrat.

Now that the official narrative states that the US has instantaneously regained its alleged "standing" in the world with the departure of Donald Trump, the Biden administration is putting pressure on its junior global partners of the unified Corporate State to crack down on their own dissidents and other threats to its manufactured polarization for the prevention of transnational populist solidarity. The administration has also issued a thinly-veiled directive to its junior partners and client states to censor news about racial unrest and police violence in the United States, lest the One Exceptional Nation be accused of hypocrisy when it bombs democracy on regimes it doesn't like.

" The U.S. Government has thus prioritized obtaining from foreign partners credible intelligence and law enforcement information regarding international support for domestic terrorism in the United States, capturing it in written reporting, and sharing that intelligence and information appropriately across the Federal Government. That effort complements an increased emphasis on the sharing of relevant information with foreign partners, where appropriate, on aspects of the domestic terrorism threat of international relevance. We can also learn from our international partners’ challenges and successes in disrupting plots and responding to attacks, integrating that expertise into our own planning and operations."

"Additionally, the intelligence and law enforcement communities will enhance the government’s understanding of how foreign malign influence operations and the dissemination of disinformation, including by foreign governments, relate to the domestic terrorism threat we face. These efforts complement the U.S. Government’s coordinated activities to recognize, understand, and counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation. In addition, the Department of State will leverage public diplomacy programs and messaging to serve as a preventative measure to raise awareness in the short–term and shift sentiments over the long– term. Such efforts can also be used to counter messages from adversaries who use racially motivated violent incidents in America to attempt to erode U.S. credibility."

Credibility is code for supremacy.

But almost as an afterthought, the White House's anti-domestic terrorism report also touts the Democrats' recent efforts to deliver a modicum of financial relief to serve as a counterweight to "the economic dislocation and even despair felt by many Americans. Our continued efforts will augment and accelerate the essential work of economic recovery and sustainable development, alleviating over time (my bold) the sentiments that some domestic terrorists deliberately use to recruit and mobilize. Demonstrating that our government can deliver for all Americans is crucial to restoring confidence in our democracy."

The Biden administration does acknowledge, albeit fleetingly and glibly, that its own Corporate Partnership had a hand in creating the misery and despair leading to violent acts by the populace. But it only acknowledged this truth in one measly paragraph out of the 30 pages that do nothing but issue yet another clarion call for more surveillance, more police, more censorship.

Of course, Biden has already said there will be no student debt relief or continuation of federal unemployment benefits past September, when the national eviction moratorium also will have expired. Immediate relief takes time. First they have to stop the folks from acting out all their anger with the help of some digital literacy classes and websites operated by federal law enforcement with a little assist from Health and Human Services.

Biden's ultimate goal is to restore folks' faith in government, once the government roots out all the troublemaking folks and makes them resilient. The "crisis of misinformation and disinformation" is simply tearing hungry jobless desperate folks apart at the seams.

So What Else Is New In the Pathocracy?

Are we at the tipping point when outrage fatigue no longer feeds upon itself and we are forced to rise up en masse against the overlords who seemingly want to kill us?

The UFO invasion and the Wuhan lab leak stories, obviously designed to soften us up for some sort of war (economic, military, cyber, whatever)  against China and also Russia, are taking a back seat to the undeniable reality of the class war at home.

First comes the totally unshocking blockbuster news that billionaires pay virtually no income tax. Then, closely on the heels of these well-heeled heels, the mainstream media is finally noticing that private equity is gobbling up whole neighborhoods and forcing an ever-increasing majority of people not only to give up all hope of home ownership, but to pay artificially bloated rents to an anonymous group of private investors. 

It's getting so egregious that even the lesser elites of the multimillionaire class are taking vast umbrage. Of course, it's only pretend umbrage; but we should probably appreciate even fleeting lip service reactions from the so-called experts whenever we can get them. The emergence of the tax cheat and land-grabbing stories are, incidentally, conveniently coincident to President Biden being out of the country to pressure European leaders to take part in some sort of war against China while he manfully refuses to hold a joint press conference with Vlad Putin. America is back, baby! is the overarching corporate media theme of the G-7 revelries, with the sycophantic French leader Emmanuel Macron gushing he is so happy that Uncle Joe has rejoined "The Club."

If a select few oligarchs back home have to pretend to take the heat for a few days or weeks in lieu of paying their fair share, while Biden and their other enablers go about the wealth-serving work of helping US citizens to overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against the Forever Wars which promise to add many more billions to the Wall Street portfolios of these same tax-evading oligarchs, then so be it. Crocodiles are, after all, known for their tough hides.

Cue Maureen Dowd of the New York Times to write a feisty op-ed on the "fat cats on a hot tin roof."  What upstanding member of #Resistance Inc could ever have possibly guessed that there are more Donald Trumps than Donald Trump?

It turns out Donald Trump was the canary in the gold mine.

While everyone was outraged about the first modern president who refused to show his tax returns, real billionaires were skating.

 This tax return dump news should help Trump immensely when and if he is ever criminally indicted. As he said so many times, his tax returns and real estate empire might be crooked, but they are also perfectly legal thanks to the codes enacted by crooked congress critters in on the perfectly legalized grift.

 The real canary in the gold mine is that before Congress will even pretend to act and maybe tweak the tax codes just a tad, the government will move quickly to hunt down and catch and jail whoever within the IRS leaked the tyrants' tax documents to ProPublica. Whistleblowers are still the ultimate enemy of the ruling class.

My comment on the Dowd column: 

Meanwhile, the DOJ has made catching the whistleblower(s) who leaked the billionaires' tax records to journalists a top priority. Despite the Attorney General's recent vow to protect journalists, his office is doing its utmost to dry up journalistic sources through intimidation and prosecution.

The DOJ is not, for example, dropping the Trump era's extradition case against Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks organization exposed US war crimes. Chelsea Manning was jailed a second time for refusing to help the government prosecute Assange. Even a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, is being lambasted from all sides for referring, even obliquely, to America's sordid history of war crimes and human rights abuses. Shooting the messenger has always been exactly how our ruling elites roll. It's a vicious class war of the rich (through their political lackeys, propagandists and lobbyists) against the rest of us. It has many fronts, and new revelations of oligarchic perfidy come almost every single day. Private equity. for example, is depriving people even of the basic right to shelter by buying up huge swathes of real estate and then renting homes back out to the foreclosed, indebted and desperate multitudes at obscenely inflated prices. When I saw a picture the other day of Jeff Bezos gleefully feasting on a roast iguana, I thought what a perfect symbol of the neo-feudalism that's taken over this country. 

How much longer can it take before the long-overdue peasants' revolt?

Roadkill-R-Us

 You may have noticed that Joe Biden, after signaling left (or at least perceived by his tailgating fans to be signaling left) has suddenly swerved sharply to the right.

And what do you know - he's ended up precisely where's he's been stolidly parked for the entire half-century journey of his long political career: deep in the heart of Neoliberalville. His oft-quoted campaign promise last year to a group of wealthy donors ("Nothing will fundamentally change") has been proven more correct with every passing day. Still, his string of recent concessions to his donors and congressional Republicans stings all the more in the wake of his vague overtures to progressives and the passage this spring of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

His pulsating left-turn blinker light had way too many of these same progressives pretty much blinkered for the first hundred or so days of his administration. The narrative that Biden is the best thing to come along since FDR is getting increasingly frayed, if not yet completely tattered. He rips the rosy media narrative a new one practically every single day, his most recent pronouncement being that he will not fight the expiration of federal unemployment benefits come September, when most kids head back to their physical schools and their parents must therefore head back to their physical jobs, whether or not those physical jobs still exist. (I hear McDonald's franchises are offering signing bonuses, so what could possibly be your excuse for not being an economy-boosting team player?)

Biden's left turn signal was either draining all the energy and confidence from the oligarchic battery of overlords, or he himself was just getting tired of the relentlessly tinny refrain of Happy Days Are Here Again. It was finally time to disabuse his newfound acolytes of the notion and the narrative  that he was a blind St. Paul who'd seen the social democratic light and finally come to progressive Jesus in his enlightened dotage. 

 Biden's "sudden" right turn to Republican appeasement cut his followers right off. They're still so stunned by the ensuing pileup of about-faces and disappointments that they can't even believe that they're trapped in the wreckage. The adrenaline rush of the new UFO craze and the frenzied finger-pointing debates over that alleged Wuhan lab leak are, as the manufacturers of consent seem to hope, at least temporarily masking the pain of no minimum wage increase, no single payer health coverage, no new or recurring stimulus checks, no federal guaranteed jobs program, no student debt forgiveness. And the icing on the cake is Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a America's unelected and unaccountable Pope-Queen) Elizabeth MacDonough's edict that the Dems will only be allowed one more reconciliation bill this year, dashing their ever so sincere hopes to usher in a new New Deal. And then there are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to complete the bad cop triad.

Funnily enough, neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris - really no establishment Democrat that I know of - is directly challenging this latest directive. Harris, who as president of the Senate, does have the power to overrule or even fire MacDonough, is apparently otherwise occupied in Central America, trying to convince subsistence coffee growers that a new Internet app showing them worldwide market prices for their product will make them forget all about migrating to the U.S. An internet app is actually supposed to help them more than, say, being allowed to sell their coffee directly to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Don't they know that the freedom of the Free Market doesn't apply to them?

Meanwhile, according to yet another "soul-searching" effort by Democratic party operatives to discover why they barely hung on by a thread in the 2020 elections, the problem was that they recklessly assumed that black and brown voters are both progressive and anti-police. The study's authors, while decrying the notion of categorizing people into voting blocs, nonetheless assert that since there are more conservative black and brown people than there are progressive black and brown people, they must attempt more outreach to this supposed bloc of law-and-order black and brown people. The Dems have to do much, much more to fight against the GOP misinformation that slanderously insists that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a radical left-winger. Democratic candidates have to do more to convince the electorate of their own conservative and pro-war bona fides if they have a prayer of clinging to their razor-thin majorities in the 2022 congressional elections. They have to double or even triple the dosage of their fact-checking designer drugs to combat the epic epidemic of "disinformation." 

There is nothing in the report about making people's lives better. It's all about what sort of propaganda will work best to convince people that the Democrats are better than those nasty, lying Republicans.

"Our hopes for 2020 were just too high," the report summary concludes, after also blaming the pandemic, bad polling, and too much talk of wearing masks and not enough talk of "reopening the economy" for their party's bare squeaker of a victory over Trumpism. 

It's the whimper being heard round the world of Martha's Vineyard, or wherever the neoliberal elites are out to brunch these days. 

Do I even need to mention that the report was funded by, among other oligarchic influence-peddlers, the late billionaire Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank? At least the Times, in its synopsis of the "most thorough soul-searching by either party so far this year" is finally referring to this outfit as solidly "centrist" as opposed to its previous disinformative placement as "center-left."  I'll be even happier when they start properly referring to Third Way as fascist or reactionary. But with their star reporters balking at paying higher News Guild dues, rather than show solidarity with low-wage journalists at other outlets, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know about other readers, but every time I hear the term "centrist," this grisly image immediately comes to mind:

Photo credit: Tom Garcia

Roadkill is tossed to the side, the double yellow line of centrism extending beyond the infinite horizon of What Is Pragmatically Possible and Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

 The  Republicans, of course, would simply have tossed the corpse into the ditch after running over it a few more times just for sport. The Democrats at least recognize the Roadkill by cynically adorning it with the cheery bright balloon of hope.

A popular modern interpretation of folksinger Loudon Wainwright III's own song about roadkill is that centrists themselves stink like skunks for all their wishy-washiness and devotion to a bipartisan duopoly which enriches the wealthy and powerful via their governing style of gridlock and manufactured paralysis.  Wainwright wrote the ditty in 1972, at the barely noticeable beginnings of the  Neoliberal Era, and also at about the same time that Joe Biden was winning his first election.

Wainwright said he was inspired by merely encountering a literal stinky dead skunk in the middle of the road. Those must have been different times for sure, not least because six major corporations did not yet own and control practically everything we see and hear.

Fifty years later, the ruling elites blame us for lacking enough personal responsibility for our own lives when we fall under the wheels of all their speeding luxury cars. You "shoulda looked left and you shoulda looked right" before ever presuming to cross the road outside of the narrowly defined pedestrian lines. That's because your safety as a cooperative wage slave is their biggest concern.

Can't get a job or earn a living wage or been bankrupted by medical bills even though you're insured? Then you should have been an entrepreneur or at least increased your skills at your own debt-heavy expense while saving enough money for retirement.

The only traffic signal the movers and shakers seem to know is a giant middle finger aimed at their rear view mirrors, against all the unpragmatic people who simply refuse to stay in their own lanes any longer.

The Liberal Marketing of Lowered Expectations

Since President Biden's definition of competitiveness is limited to protecting American oligarchs from Chinese oligarchs, his campaign promise of a government-run public option to compete against the for-profit health insurance industry is, unsurprisingly, not part of his proposed annual budget, to be officially delivered to Congress this week.

Therefore, what the New York Times touts as an "ideologically diverse" group of congressional Democrats is mounting a "pressure campaign" against the White House. Not to include the public option in either his infrastructure package or his budget, mind you. And definitely not to support Medicare For All, which is way too radical and inconvenient and popular a concept to even think about right in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Rest assured that these Democrats merely aim to tweak the currently-existing health insurance scheme for the elderly, in so delicate a way that the for-profit health care industry should barely even feel the pinch.

The core of this plan is to lower to the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60, and to expand coverage of this selected demographic's bills for dental, vision and hearing care. The multibillion-dollar cost of the plan would be "paid for" by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma. 

This last part is the poison pill which dooms even this pathetically modest effort to preordained failure. Cue the onslaught of drug company and hospital lobbyists bearing campaign bribery gifts to the congress critters already cowering behind their acres of barbed wire and more heavily protected than ever by their recent allocation of billions more dollars to the Capitol Police, which strangely enough did not require its own "pay-for."

"It's really unusual to get his level of intensity on a health care proposal,"  Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal enthused to the Times.

She wasn't, of course, referring to the health care lobbying onslaught, but to the fact that 150 representatives were all able to come together to pressure Joe Biden to do even less than he'd promised to do on the campaign trail, and far less than what ostensible Medicare For All proponents like Jayapal have committed to doing for their entire political careers.

But rather than admit that Democrats are cravenly caving to the insurance and drug lobbies, Jayapal is using the Times to give her cover as the Paper of Record pretends to take her "pressure campaign" seriously. Maybe readers won't notice that the obligatory "strongly-worded letter" to Biden signed by Democrats, followed by a big bold scheduled Zoom conference with White House officials, are the usual stale examples of passive-aggressive political theater. But just in case they do notice, the campaign for Medicare For a Few More Lucky Duckies will also include a slew of carefully-planted opinion pieces and more softball corporate media interviews with Jayapal and her conservative colleague Conor Lamb.

In order to engage the public in this charade, there are also the usual villains and roadblocks standing in the way of these intrepid congress-critters. The first roadblock is Biden himself, whose own health care plan is throwing more billions of public dollars at the private insurance cartels. Then there are the hospitals, which already are raking in record profits from the pandemic, not least because they have used federal bailout funds to buy up a record number of smaller hospitals and medical practices already struggling to survive and which largely had served poor, uninsured and underinsured people. This consolidation will now lead to even higher prices being charged to patients and insurance premium-paying employers, say critics.

The Times article thus smarmily concludes:

That (Biden's) proposal has widespread support, including from hospitals, which want to be paid the higher private insurance rates, and insurers, which want more people buy their products. Any effort to expand Medicare is likely to be met with resistance from those same groups.

Those same destructive groups position themselves as delicate royalty, for whom the pea-sized Medicare expansion planted by Democrats under their layers and layers of soft mattresses will viciously assault their tender bottom lines.

 So, you might ask, why not just call the bluff of these morbidly sensitive elites and kick them right off the towering corporate welfare featherbeds to which they've become so ridiculously and unhealthily accustomed?

Why not just welcome the hatred and temper tantrums of these royal pains, and mount a pressure campaign against the White House for a full-fledged Medicare For All program, which would of course also cover the therapeutic lancing of many an oligarchic butt boil, not to mention salving those totally preventable plutocratic pressure sores?

Well, because if you limit government-run health insurance to just one lucky age group, then you don't run the risk of tens of millions of people of all ages coming together clamoring for it and cheering for it, and pressuring their congressional reps to actually vote for it. 

Quite the opposite in fact, especially when the think tanks and politicians and media pundits funded by the insurance and drug cartels start kvetching anew about the old robbing the young of their futures. 

Let the peasants keep feasting on manufactured resentment and maybe they won't notice that our ruling elites are losing legitimacy by the minute.

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.

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*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.