The Wee Hive Mind of the Ruling Class

Virginia voters last week denied former Clinton operative and ex-governor Terry McAuliffe  a second non-consecutive term. He'd apparently thought that lecturing Virginia parents that they have no say in school curricula, coupled with fear-mongering about all the Trumps under the bed, would cancel out his unappealing persona and platform, which included no economic benefits for struggling people.

The meaning (takeaway) of this rather predictable electoral outcome, according to the usual cabal of centrist scolds, is that "we" need a lot more austerian Terry McAuliffes in the nation's statehouses and in the hallowed, hollow halls of Congress. This illogical conclusion reinforces an essential truth about the media-political complex. They are either knowingly or unknowingly detached from reality. They see what they are paid to see.

A second essential truth to always bear in mind is that whenever they use the pronouns "we" and "us," they are not referring to you and me and the 330 million other citizens of this country. They mean the obscenely wealthy individuals and corporations running the joint, as well as the top nine or 10 percent of earners (the Professional-Managerial Class, or the PCM, aka the Clerisy) whose main function is to give service, succor and cover to the Upper One Percent in hopes of one day reaching the lofty One Percent themselves, while they simultaneously presume to interpret "reality" and enforce "norms" for the mere schlubs they aim to control. The bottom 90 or so percent of us, whose wealth just keeps getting sucked dry by the oligarchs and the PCM, are being set up as the lazy selfish scapegoats who must pay the price for all the capitalistic sins of the world. 

For example, as an instantly-notorious unsigned New York Times editorial published last week put it, the problem with progressives who want nice things like generous family leave, guaranteed medical care, subsidized housing and other luxuries, is that they are just too "coddled." This is quite the about-face for the Paper of Record, which only a few months ago was lauding Joe Biden's then-$3+ trillion Build Back Better package as the most sweeping social program since FDR. Well, Franklin Delano Biden, always the cutout hybrid between a sheepdog and a paper tiger for purposes of his election, has been duly cast back into the stubborn embers of neoliberalism. The real deals, according to the Times, are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are the actual heart and soul of the Democratic Party. That, of course, would be true if the Democratic Party actually had a heart and a soul.

Despite the fact that a vast majority of Not-We's support single payer health care, a living wage and student loan forgiveness, the Times, without one shred of evidence, claimed that most Americans hail from the center or center-right and oppose better living conditions for both themselves and their neighbors. Besides repeating the old canard that the taxes of hardworking Americans is the only way to make other (read: undeserving) people's lives better, the Grey Lady proved she was imbibing some really high-priced corporate powder when she snorted:

Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination — and the presidency — because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday’s drubbing. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

Never mind that as a former CIA operative whose agency has fomented plenty of global chaos in the 75 regime-changing, dirty tricks-playing years of its existence, Spanberger and her cohort believe that some brands of chaos are more preferable than other kinds of chaos, like the mental, physical and emotional chaos you experience by being unable to afford a visit to the doctor when you get sick.

Nothing defines just who the designated "we" are better than the aptly named COP 26  U.N. confab in Glasgow.  Although it stands for Conference of the Parties, the real function of this ostensible attempt to reverse and ameliorate global climate change and catastrophe has been to erect a preening, scolding venue for the same ruling and owning class experts, whose thousands of tonnes of carbon spewed in flying to the event in their private jets, and whose endless wars and relentless resource extractions are the prime cause of the planetary emergency in the first place. They have lectured their fellow oligarchs only if they happen to be from Russia, China and other places that "we" don't much like. They did party a lot, of course, and acted like the authoritarian "good cops" that they are by putting the onus on their victims. They are the drug pushers who blame the world's addiction to fossil fuels on the addicts that they themselves created through the magic of advertising, and whom they now try to shame to death.

Former President Barack Obama, fresh from cutting down hundreds of trees and destroying the iconic Women's Garden in Chicago's Jackson Park to make room for a $500 million monument to himself, flew in to Scotland by private jet to tell the world's young people that if they want to survive, they're just going to have to rev up their activism.  Far be it for Obama to tell the polluting corporations who funded his campaigns and who continue pay him for speaking gigs and other media ventures to cut out their criminal behavior. 

He was too busy rubbing their noses in his own B.S., insulting the Scots by calling it the Emerald Isle and and then quoting the English bard Shakespeare instead of revered national poet Robert Burns. Like many in his class, Obama has the preternatural ability to make his ignorance seem like genius.

Thank god that more and more people aren't buying into the Narrative any more. Just as general strikes forced FDR's New Deal legislation into existence during the last Great Depression, so too are general strikes going to force a change now, especially with Covid now reaching endemic status and inflation making a comeback. Both events have their roots in the beginning of neoliberalism and globalism, a melding of public and private interests (public expense for private profit) nearly 50 years ago. 

The question is what form this inevitable change will take. If the Dems have their way, it will be a return to Trumpism or something even worse. Just think of the surge in MSNBC and CNN's now-moribund ratings and Times subscriptions if they can only create that magical glow of Trump once again!

So now might be the time for the Squad to quit the Democratic Party altogether - that is, if they hope to remain relevant to the "Not-Wee" majority. Because we are the We who matter, and we are still the many. The rich are not quite as influential as they imagine themselves to be, given the careless Thought(less) Leaders that they are. They are mere mortals who do not equal the vast sum of their hoarded wealth.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal!

-- Robert Burns, from To A Mouse.

Playing Preying Munching Manchin

Joe Manchin is absolutely reveling in the marathon cat-and-mouse game he's playing with that increasingly tattered ball of fluff known as the Build Back Better Act.

Grizzled old unfixed feline though he may be, Manchin can't resist reverting to some kittenish antics in his dotage, mewling coquettishly just the other day that "I'm open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward. But I'm equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”

He's already eviscerated the poor little rodent with his fangs and claws. But even though it is mostly dead, if not already completely dead, the game must go on. He stuffs his prey into his maw, shakes it about in a frenzy before letting go and watching it fly across the room, to land with a pathetic thud before it skids limply across the floor in a simulacrum of panicked live-action flight. Cool cat Joe then lowers himself into the pounce position, butt wiggling and tail twitching, pretending that the dead or near-dead creature is the worst mortal enemy in the whole history of responsible and respectable fat cat-dom.

 With a growl, he springs into action and mauls the corpse anew before cradling in his arms and licking it into submission.

When the political game being played in Washington is the Mickey Mouse version of Kill Bill, and like Joe Manchin, you're not only winning but you're the only player, why would you ever call a merciful end to things? After all, you've got your myriad "owners" like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer to reward your antics with a big bowl of cream for so entertainingly torturing and killing the mouse with such insane aplomb. It certainly saved them and the rest of the Democrats the trouble of having to do it en masse by buying a mousetrap and setting the cruel, inhumane thing in full public view themselves. 

Joe Manchin is the sound of one neoliberal hand clapping... or, if you will, the spine of one nation snapping.

But I am here to tell you the Democrats do feel your pain. If you're bummed out because there will be no paid family leave, no dentures or eyeglasses for old people, no climate catastrophe reversal, please remember that it could always be worse. The brand of trap recommended by most Dems is Hav-a-Heart. 

Look at this way - the liberal class is so virtuous that they even treat the maligned Manchin humanely. Not a tail-puller or arm-twister in the bunch! As the website "Senior Cat Wellness" lays it out,

As cats are born hunters, they often kill live prey such as mice or birds. Before killing a small animal, a cat will seemingly play with it first. While this looks cruel, the cat is acting in self-preservation rather than malice.

Cats play with prey to subdue it before delivering a killing blow, which can be dangerous when hunting rodents. Mice and rats will fight to stay alive, usually by biting. This could be painful for a cat or spread disease. Playing with prey by batting or tossing it leaves small animals exhausted or injured. The cat can then safely kill and conclude a hunt.

 So you see, proles, Manchin is simply operating on a natural instinctual  level. We are deemed to be more dangerous to him than he is to us. (If only.) It's all about the self-preservation of a political party and not about nasty things like voters who are fighting to stay alive on low wages, no health care and a burning, drowning planet.

The good things in the bill may have gone the way of poor little Mousie, and prey of all species will suffer and die because of Manchin and his backup, Kyrsten Sinema.  But the bright side is that these good, rejected safety net and survival things are now finally part of the National Conversation! 

 "Paid family leave's demise this time could fuel it later," gushes a recent headline in the New York Times. Who knew? It is just like the dead mouse that the cat brings back to life by the power of its own violent imagination!

If you find that reassurance from the cat pan Liner of Record too hard to swallow, then it is your own damned fault, and the elites will be only too happy to browbeat you, gaslight you, and guilt-trip you into compliance and shame. Times scribe Jonathan Weisman outlines it thusly:

Some business groups and G.O.P. proponents of a paid leave program believe that if it had been broken out and negotiated with Republicans, the way a $1 trillion infrastructure package was at Mr. Biden’s urging, it could have survived, and some think it still could resurrected as a bipartisan initiative.

They said the problem lay with the Democrats’ decision to put paid family leave in the expansive social policy and climate bill — a multitrillion-dollar package financed by large tax increases on businesses and the wealthy — which they knew that Republicans and mainstream business groups would never support. 

It was all in the framing, stupid! Somebody could have at least belled the cat, for crying out loud. Or plugged up the mouseholes at least, to avoid all the pain and blood and gore hurting their sensitive, innocent, beneficent, elitist eyes. 

Meanwhile, if all you designated prey out there do find yourselves struggling in the clutches of a whole clowder of capitalistic fat cats, all you need to do is relax. Or as "progressive" Guardian columnist Robert Reich adjures us, we should get to work on our resilience skills. Plus, wouldn't you rather be miserable under Biden than under Trump? If there is one thing that Reich has learned in his 50 year political career, it is that human prey are way too impatient. It is unrealistic to take the promises of a better survival by politicians too seriously. If you can't wait decades or centuries to get the housing, medical care, food or climate catastrophe reversal you urgently need right now this very minute, then you're just wallowing in fatalism. "The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed," he glibly and cheerily concludes.

Yes, my friends, we are now definitely in the terminal gaslighting phase. They haven't failed us. We have failed them.

Let us therefore show our resilience and all stop cynically chanting "Let's Go Brandon," and instead rejoice that the Pope has not excommunicated Joe Biden.

Let our new pro-austerity mantra be "Man Up, and Take It On the Chin." Or conversely: "Chin Up and Take It Like a Man!"

President Joe Manchin

For as the party of the oligarchic Demos is wont to yowl: "Don't ever let the purr-fect be the enemy of the good."

Surreal Times In the Good Old USA

Can't order find common cause with chaos? Can't sanity and insanity just please finally get along?

It's long past time to get realistic and pragmatic and centrist, people. Joe Biden's Build Back Better legislation is as good as dead in the polluted water.  So let's give three cheers for the new and improved Whittle Down Worse Wisely agenda, which is certainly a lot smarter than the reckless Shave Away to a Sad Pile of Sawdust that those nasty old Republicans are rooting for. 

American politics can be visualized as a Salvador Dali painting. As Albert Camus observed, the essence of surrealism is that it is both irrational and triumphant. "The surrealists, while simultaneously exalting human innocence, believed they could exalt murder and suicide," he wrote in The Rebel.

 The New York Times is only too happy to aid and abet the Democrats at their own hard passive-aggressive work of whittling down wisely in order to placate their murderous mutual overlords. The main tactic is to frame the narrative into an honest debate between two equal factions: the very sincere, poor people-hating deficit hawks, and the equally sincere, innocent, and very smug climate catastrophe acknowledgers.  You see,  the issue is not one of life and death. The only issue is how "we" can sustain economic growth. Everybody can irrationally agree, after all, that there can be a bright side to cancer.

Or as tax and economics reporter Jim Tankersley more decorously concern-trolls it:

It is a stealth battle over the fiscal future at a time when few lawmakers in either party have prioritized addressing debt and deficits. Each side believes its approach would put the nation’s finances on a more sustainable path by generating the strongest, most durable economic growth possible.

Get it? There are only two designated "sides" in this surreal intra-oligarchic debate. Tankersley actually recasts the Wall Street-spawned Third Way think tank as the environmentally conscious liberal good guy in the contrived narrative, while arch-conservative economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute gets to be magically transformed into a "centrist."

Strain is such a reasonable, moderate guy that his solution to poverty is to give unemployed people a bus ticket out of town so they can find a job at sub-minimum wage to help them get back on their feet without any of those horrible government handouts.

Third Way, founded by the late billionaire Pete Peterson for the sole purpose of unraveling the New Deal via deficit hysteria, desperately wants the separate infrastructure bill to pass, given that it contains so many corporate subsidies for the repair (and privatization!) of our crumbling roads and bridges. Therefore, the Times turns to Josh Freed, Third Way's vice president in charge of climate and energy, for the requisite scientific expertise. Freed says the reason to reverse climate catastrophe is not so much to save lives now as it is to avoid wasting money on the victims of future disasters, which would put a real damper on the profits of the ruling class.

Or, as Freed more decorously concern-trolls it for easy digestion by Times readers:

“Those are the table stakes for the reconciliation and infrastructure debate. It’s why we think the cost of inaction, from an economic perspective, is so enormous.”

Translation: investors have to extract and spend public money - not their own hoarded wealth, mind you - in order to make enormous private profits later. And it's all for the good of the planet. This is otherwise known as green-washing everything in sight to slap an Earth-friendly gloss over corporate greed and rapacity.

Freed, an alumnus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also serves on the board of the Clean Energy Leadership Council. which according to his Third Way profile, is "an organization dedicated to equipping a diverse set of emerging leaders with the skills and expertise to lead the transition to a clean energy economy."

Have you ever noticed that these philanthrocapitalist do-good fronts are never about solving problems in the here and now, but all about capitalism tooting its own horn and gauzily imparting its skills and inspiration to the youthful leaders of Tomorrow?

And sure enough, the Clean Energy Leadership Council gets the bulk of its funding from energy companies and their various representatives and lobbyists. The notorious Con Ed of New York is listed as a "foundational partner," along with the public-private New York State Energy Research and Development Association. One "kilowatt supporter" is listed as Van Ness Feldman LLP,, a law firm which boasts on its own website that it is one of the nation's top three lobbyists for the oil and gas industry. It also boasts of its "diversity and inclusion," proving once again that the Greenwashing/Wokewashing Partnership is a ubiquitous plank in corporate propaganda across multiple industries.  Pollution and greed are proud equal opportunity employers.

Another kilowatt supporter is an outfit called Adaptive Change Advisors, which modestly claims on its website that it has taught everybody from White House personnel to Google, to Microsoft, to the United Nations to the World Bank how to win friends and influence people. Based upon a Harvard University-developed system, it is essentially about elites instructing elites on how to be more elite. If there is any adapting to be done, those targets shall remain nameless. But you know who you are! I am taking a wild guess that Advanced Whittling For Dummies is part of its core curriculum. Also too, there are probably instructions on how to write a concern-trolling New York Times article which frames narratives and phony debates around rich-people interests, while hammering home the point that There Is No Alternative. So, Lessers, adapt to murder-suicide already!

Did I mention that Jim Tankersley, author of the aforementioned misleading New York Times think piece, is also a "media fellow" at Stanford University's neoliberal Institute For Economic and Policy Research? This particular think tank was founded by the late George Shultz, who held four different Cabinet positions in Republican administrations and who later headed the Board of Directors of Theranos, whose own founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is currently on trial for defrauding investors. His other claims to fame were leading the global energy company Bechtel and devising George W. Bush's policy of preemptive war.

Why else would there be no mention of the US Military being the biggest single polluter by fossil fuels on the face of the planet? Why else do you never read about the "affordability" of war in the New York Times, or in any of the five or six media conglomerates and allied tech titans that own both the discourse and the means of delivering the discourse?

There used to be a great journalistic organization called Muckety, which actually drew convoluted spider-webby diagrams explaining how virtually all the members the ruling class are interconnected.  One day, the site simply disappeared off the Internet without a trace and with no explanation.

Convoluted diagrams that resemble hairy spiders are so headache-inducing anyway. So I'll let the late great George Carlin whittle it all right down for ya:

The Grotesque Meanness of Exceptional USA

Now that they've passed the all important milestone of announcing that yes, Virginia, there will indeed be deep cuts in their own social welfare legislation to satisfy their needy corporate owners, the Democrats are regaling us with much hand-wringing over just how miserable they can make us without coming off like the mean jerks that many of them are.

The current narrative has them babbling over whether 'tis better for their re-election chances to give some of the people the least possible amount of bare-bones relief most of the time, or whether 'tis better to give all of the people slightly more bare bones relief for the shortest time possible.  

To means-test new social programs or not to means-test them? That is the manufactured question.

Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrats' current chief of the Bad Cop police, is all for means-testing stuff like universal subsidized pre-school, lest the One Exceptional Nation turn into an "entitlement society" for everyone who is not already filthy rich by virtue (or vice) of being the entitled scion of a coal mining dynasty who in turn sired a pharmaceutical baroness who nearly sextupled the price of life-saving EpiPens that prevent susceptible people from succumbing to anaphylactic shock if they're exposed to something as innocuous as a peanut  or a strawberry.

To counter that pathological Manchean meanness, House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is mulling a scheme which would give most people - even high earners - subsidized child care and direct cash aid, and dental care when they get old. To placate Manchin and other professional greedsters, though, these and other "sweeping" universal relief programs would only last for a couple of years, or at least until after the 2022 midterms. Because even if (when) the Republicans take back Congress, the Democratic calculus goes, it will be hard for even permanent de facto President Mitch McConnell to yank these goodies away from constituents. The programs will be so popular, even with diehard Trump loyalists. that the pitchforks will be out for the GOP rather than for the designated Marxist Commies of the corporate DNC. Or at least that's the hope.

Both parties have traditionally been loath to just give people money with no strings attached, money which doesn't go through a middleman like a corporate employer airily promising to create new jobs in return for tax-free sweetheart deals involving public land in "opportunity zones", or the property developer who pockets millions of dollars in public money to build luxury housing for the rich while setting aside a few "affordable" units and inviting thousands of poor people to compete for a slim chance to win a lease on one of them.

The halcyon days of stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, and cost-free medical care for Covid are long over. All that direct cash aid lifted people out of poverty, big-time. All that guaranteed housing security and freedom from wage slavery at precarious jobs lifted a weight off people they barely knew they'd been suffocating under until it was gone.  

This peace of mind and happiness on such a grand scale simply will not do. The State of Exception that was the Covid pandemic has been declared officially over, despite the fact that it is far from over. If it isn't quite over, the elites of the ruling class scold, it's all the fault of the willfully unvaccinated spreading their germs and their Trumpian ideologies to the righteous liberals who had so responsibly gotten their own jabs many months ago. No matter that a good percentage of people who have not been vaccinated are uninsured and live in poor or rural areas and have not enjoyed he privilege of "accessing" any kind of health care at all for themselves for entire decades, and who therefore don't trust the medical-industrial complex all that much. No matter that many, if not most, of the unvaccinated do not have paid time off to deal with the side effects of the shots. Why else would low-paid workers wait until the last possible minute to finally get vaccinated - that is, when they were threatened with the loss of those jobs?

Capitalism's response to Covid is not only a shameful public health scandal in the richest country on the planet, it has devolved into a closed political and culture war feedback loop of Maskers vs Anti-Maskers, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed - with the central battlefield becoming the already-embattled and newly reopened public school system.

If America did not already have a public school system, you can rest assured that Congress would be fighting over means-testing all the potential pupils. But since America already does have a public school system, they've had to settle for dismantling and/or defunding it. 

Public education is largely though not exclusively funded through property taxation, ensuring that rich neighborhoods have the best schools. Meanwhile, private equity vultures and other investors place bets on "charter schools" in poorer neighborhoods and treat kids like regimented cattle futures. The word "public" has become increasingly selective and exclusionary.

Meanness is baked right in to the DNA of the ruling elites. But to deflect our attention from this universal truth, these same ruling elites are in a veritable sanctimonious frenzy of pitting people against one another. It's a Hobbesian war of all against all on crack and steroids. So it's no surprise that a Korean series called Squid Game is the most popular thing on Netflix right now. You can never get enough bare survival drama, especially if you're at least flush with enough spare cash to be able to afford to watch other people compete to simply live other day from within the comfort of your own home.

And not for nothing is the economic war on the poor and working class being waged in tandem with the war on women newly surged by the grotesque cabal of black-robed Puritan fundamentalists on the Supreme Court. The Texas abortion ban is nothing if not an anti-Enlightenment evolutionary throwback.

So what better time than Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) and the season of Halloween than to acknowledge that the eternal Witch Hunt has always been an integral weapon in the class war of the rich against the rest of us?

As Marxist critic and feminist Silvia Federici observes, 

What has remained unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations in the New World, the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world...

The African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America, and the massacred native population of North America become the kin of the sixteenth and seventeenth century European witches who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact.

To extrapolate from Federici's thesis, then, what's the difference between "the woman burned at the stake for raising her pitchfork against the tax collector," and the women of Texas now being denied their reproductive rights by the paid moralizers of the oligarchy?

These right wing functionaries and pathocrats could not care less about the "right to life". What they do care about is controlling the bodies, minds and spirits of the dispossessed. Whether it's by forcing a woman to carry an unwanted and largely unaffordable pregnancy to term, and then refusing government help to the family while forcing women back to low-paid jobs right in the middle of a pandemic, it's all the same old story of oppression. 

Even the "good" rulers of the Democratic Party punish the poor of all genders by forcing them to jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops and to abjectly grovel for every last morsel of grudging relief. The poor must be controlled, punished and surveilled, whether it be from a place of liberal kindness or conservative callousness. If programs like government-subsidized child care were guaranteed for both the rich and the poor, there could be no shame, no punishment and no continued surveillance. And there would, perhaps, not be as much resentment among people and silo-ing of political interest groups trucking in outrage. Solidarity might actually stand a chance!

As the New York Times has just reported, the United States spends only $500 per year per toddler for nursery care, compared to an average of $14,000 in other advanced countries. America is indeed the One Exceptional Nation. If the ruling elites bearing their meager time-limited gifts can't make us sweat and ruthlessly compete against one another as we kiss their rings, then what possible good is their largesse?

To take just one recent example of their stingily charitable mindset, the federal government's multibillion dollar Emergency Rental Assistance Program was designed not so much as a tenant relief program as it was a landlord bailout program. In most states, all back rent awarded goes not to the tenant but directly to the landlord, who is not even legally required to accept the funds. In New York state alone, two thirds of the funds provisionally approved after lengthy delays are not yet disbursed, simply because landlords are not cooperating. They apparently relish the physical power they have over tenants, by way of evictions and extreme rent increases, more than they value getting their past-due rent money into their bank accounts.

As Bryce Covert writes in The New Republic:

Having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will face eviction. It can be difficult to make rent and support a family, especially for women of color, who on average are paid less than white women, and single mothers living on one paycheck. Landlords—eager for an excuse to rid themselves of tenants whose children might cause noise complaints or property damage, or for whom lead hazards have to be abated or child services called—are often all too happy to begin eviction proceedings.

When you consider that the vast majority of tenants who are behind in their rent, both in New York and nationally, are single women with children, the simultaneous imposition of draconian anti-abortion laws makes the essential witch-hunt aspect of neoliberal capitalism all that more grotesque.

Gargoyles of the Oligarchy: High Relief For Me, But Not For Thee

The Eternal Triangle of the Duopolistic Mind

 It would have been unseemly, even for the feckless Democrats, for their strongest-ever Progressive caucus in the history of Progress to cave immediately to the designated useful idiots of the Oligarchy. Their Pyrrhic victory against the so-called Centrists is just the latest diversionary skirmish in the proxy class war game currently being played out in Congress.  

The latest episode had a whopping nine rascally centrist corporatists demanding a vote on their corporation-friendly trillion-dollar infrastructure bill before taking up the larger bill which gives a modicum of relief to just plain Folks. Everybody expected the caucus of more than a hundred progressives to cave to the right wingers, like they always do. But lo and behold - they stood strong, even against the all-powerful Nancy Pelosi who, the official narrative has it, suffered the unheard-of embarrassment of having to cancel the infrastructure vote for lack of support.

Then there was the sight of Joe Manchin being heckled on his houseboat by a crew of kayakers and Kyrsten Sinema being chased into an Arizona bathroom stall by immigrant activists, and you could almost taste the progressive victory. If you didn't feel even the tiniest bit of smug schadenfreude viewing all this zany political theater, then you're even more cynical than I am.

But then Bernie Sanders went on Sunday TV to inject a tiny dose of pragmatic reality into the euphoric bubble. Only hours after railing that the $3.5 trillion (Build Back Better) social welfare package was already a compromise of its original $6 trillion form, Bernie did what the Democratic Party leadership always does best. He proceeded to compromise with himself. 

"Three and a half trillion should be a minimum, but I accept that there's gonna have to be a give and take," Sanders told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

President "Joe is a good friend of mine" Biden, it turns out, had already decreed that although Joe Manchin's figure of $1.5 trillion was way too low, Biden can live with a package as low as $1.9 trillion. Once the haggling is all done, maybe they can pass it with a $1.65 trillion price tag, to be reluctantly oozed out over such a long period of time that it will end up costing the rich absolutely nothing in the way of taxes as people starve and the world burns all around them and their fireproof saferooms and mega-yachts.

The New York Times hilariously characterized Biden's posturing as "siding with the progressives" who had boldly "flexed their muscles".

You Go, Progressives!

What's the rush, anyway? The longer that the soap opera can be drawn out, the more revenue will be forthcoming from the corporate sponsors, and the more the scaffolding under Rosie the Riveter can be sabotaged by everybody from Bernie to the corporatists of the Problem Solvers' Caucus.

 As long, for example, as there's even the faintest threat that older people will have their dental care paid for by the government beginning maybe five years from now, the lobbyists of the American Dental Association will pour millions in pocket change into the campaign coffers of cheaply bought-off senators and congress-critters. The more that corporate-owned pundits can pit old people with crumbling teeth against young kids having to learn in crumbling schools, the better it will be for the rich. Anything to take the minds of the restive public off the rich. But just in case, we will be carefully taught to hate only the bad rich and the foreign rich, such as in the recent blockbuster news about Putin and his offshore tax haven mistress and the king of Jordan and his stealthy purchase of almost an entire California neighborhood.

Biden and his good-cop henchman Bernie are simply doing their version of the old Clintonian triangulation tango. But instead of playing Republicans and Democrats off each other to punish the poor and reward the rich, they're pitting  intraparty "centrists" and "progressives" against each other. This is the current de facto duopoly. Negotiating with the GOP is a tough sell, given that it's now acceptable to call them fascists and enablers of an attempted coup.  So, unless the Dems can "compromise" among themselves, Trump will win again. Keeping the Trump-hate alive as they screw you over under heavy anesthesia and demand what little spare change you still have in your pocket is also an integral part of the plan.

Given that Halloween is becoming even more popular than Christmas, when Congress traditionally rams though its budgets and secret corporate giveaways, Crypt-keeper Nancy Pelosi has appropriately rescheduled the infrastructure vote for October 31st. I predict a booming market for Kyrsten Sinema fright wigs and public service announcements from the American Dental Association, warning little kids that selfish old people, not candy, will make the teeth rot right out of their heads.

The Horses' Asses of the Apocalypse

 It took a valiant effort, but Joe Biden managed to use practically every cliché in the book to try and explain away the horror of Haitian refugees getting whipped and prodded like cattle by the Horsemen of the Homeland Apocalypse (aka, the Border Patrol.)

 After assuring a reporter that he takes "full responsibility" for the cruel treatment of the migrants, Biden quickly cast the blame upon everyone and anyone but himself. He even seemed to blame the actual victims when he garbled: "To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over and people being strapped. It was outrageous. I promise those people will pay.”

He is already seeing to it that one subset of "those people" will pay immediately, without so much as a court hearing on their asylum requests, by being shackled and herded onto gleaming airplanes, to be unceremoniously dumped into their ravaged native land, regardless of the fact that many have not lived in their native land for years and have no home to go back to.

Or, "those people" could mean the Homeland cowboys, who were legislated into being after 9/11 with the great enthusiasm and a very hearty thumbs-up from then-Senator Joe Biden himself. The president is now trying to pretend they are a bunch of outlaws who are not operating under the direct and explicit orders of the United States government. Biden is just sorry that they got caught doing the jobs that they were hired and trained to do, and acting like they were enjoying themselves.

Biden therefore announced that the Department of Homeland Security will be investigating itself and leveling "consequences" upon person or persons or scapegoats unknown. Some 20-year-old kids will be no doubt be perp-walked, much as the US Army grunts like Lindy England were, when all on their own under orders, they tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, it seems like only last month when Biden promised "consequences" for the deaths of US troops in Afghanistan, and his  military minions promptly launched a Reaper drone attack against an innocent Afghan family, the designated "those people."  A mistake was made, but only because the US government got caught. Collateral damage happens. War is foggy, you see.

The worst thing about the atrocious treatment of the Haitian refugees for Biden, though, is that the photographic evidence of systemic US cruelty - rather than the cruelty itself - is an embarrassment to him personally. It makes him look bad, especially when the images were released just as he was belligerently touting American peace, love, democracy and freedom to the rest of the world at the United Nations' annual summit this week.

“It’s an embarrassment. It’s beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world or sends the wrong message at home," he fumed, ending his spiel with the obligatory "It's not who we are!"

It's hard to emphasize enough just how craven and downright psychopathic this statement is. Biden is saying right out loud that he is more concerned with the optics of the situation than he is with the suffering of the potentially thousands of desperate human beings that he is deporting without so much as a court hearing. His spin doctor, Jen Psaki, had been equally callous the day before when she glibly announced that in the immediate future, Homeland cowboys will not be deployed in open spaces where they can be seen and photographed whipping people. Homeland Security has traditionally mounted their horses to go after migrants in areas with tall grass, where  crueltyis less likely to witnessed and documented. More discreet methods of detention and expulsion will be used for the Haitian asylum seekers, so as to avoid upsetting Joe Biden and his party and his donors.

Not that his erstwhile defenders and enablers were all that enchanted with Status Quo Joe before the refugees began arriving in Del Rio, Texas. The tide of elite opinion had already begun to turn against him when he ended their extremely lucrative two decade-long adventure in Afghanistan. His saber-rattling against China, meanwhile, is making the oligarchs nervous because of all the lucrative business deals and investments that they have there.

It's gotten so bad for Biden, in fact, that even the long media embargo on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal is finally beginning to be lifted. Joe Biden's own Justice Department also has implicated his national security adviser, the former Clinton campaign operative Jake Sullivan, in the criminal indictment of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman and by extension, the entire #Russiagate franchise scam.

Perhaps worst of all for Biden, mainstream media outlets, including the Paper of Record, are even beginning to compare him to Donald Trump. 

Naturally, this orchestrated weakening of Joe Biden by the elites dovetails perfectly with their orchestrated weakening of his Build Back Better legislation, which they despise because it threatens to give people a pathetic modicum of relief from their elite-orchestrated hardships. Not for nothing has the establishment media long overpraised Biden's underdone agenda as a "sweeping" progressive undertaking, the likes of which have not been seen since the New Deal. They were hyping it with a frenzy, inspiring the desired paranoia in the wealthy pathocratic class. Now they're in the next phase, lowering our expectations and preparing the ground for the final collapse. 

To make the letdown complete, they've not forgotten to add the traditional Debt Ceiling manufactured crisis and countdown to Shutdown Armageddon to the orchestrated mix. They're reckoning that once again, people will be so abjectly grateful to their leaders for reaching a compromise at the last possible minute, ensuring that at least the woefully inadequate Social Security checks will still be going out, that they'll forget all about all the broken promises.

Meanwhile, we'll always have their clichés to tide us over. As reported by The Hill about the legislative negotiations:

A senior Democratic aide said the revenue framework will serve as a template for negotiations with moderate Democrats on the size and scope of the bill. (Nancy) Pelosi called it a "giant step forward."

Some rank and file Democrats complained they have absolutely no idea what this language even means for the "larger process." But recognizing the "mounting pressure to show movement," The Hill continues, "Biden stepped up and held meetings with moderates and progressives from both parties."

What, you expected him to step up and mount a horse and start whipping them into shape and finally doing right by the people who elected him, and them?

Notwithstanding that the phrase "moderates and progressives from both parties" is not only a disinformation embarrassment but an act of journalistic malpractice, let's remember that whips and chains are reserved only for the most desperate members of the human race. The elites have their frameworks and their templates and their arcane processes to propel them in their ever more gigantic steps forward to power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Oh Say, Can You AOC?

Lots of people professed to be shocked, shocked when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of all the democratic socialist celebs, so jarringly appeared amongst the bright stars and broads in stripes at this week's opulent Met Gala. 

But why shouldn't she be there? The theme of this year's exclusive charity fashion event was, after all, "American Independence." And nothing says independence like wearing a white designer gown with bloody red letters spelling "Tax the Rich" all over the back of it. It would have been so tacky and off-putting to guests who'd paid $35,000 a ticket if she'd plastered the slogan like a banner on the front of the dress where they'd actually have to look at it while schmoozing with her.

The font was eerily similar to the notorious "I Don't Care, Do U?" message worn on the back of Melania Trump's jacket during her trip to the border to visit immigrant prisons. 

 

 Maybe you would have preferred that AOC show her working class bona fides by wearing her old bartending duds, just to entrap the guests into ordering her to fetch them another drink. And worse, if she'd accessorized it with an Abolish ICE insignia, they'd only complain that their drinks were too warm, and demand a refund on their tickets.

Although AOC had a masked male lackey so gallantly holding up the streaming train of her gown as she made her grand entrance past people protesting neo-feudalism behind police ramparts, she had already pre-emptively lashed out at what she called her "haters" by tweeting that she and the gown's Black immigrant designer were about to "kick open the doors of the Met." She'd only meant to be figurative, of course, even strategically quoting Marshall McLuhan for the woefully non-savvy hordes of haters out there: "The medium is the message."

But the message-bomb that was meant to burst in the rarefied air at the Met Gala turned out to be kind of a dud, once word leaked out that designer Aurora James is actually a native of Toronto, Canada and is the girlfriend of wealthy Seagrams heir Benjamin Bronfman.

AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used. She used Met Gala founder and storied Vogue editor Anna Wintour to help elevate her brand and her progressive platform.  Wintour is a major political power player and one of the Democratic  Party's most successful bundlers and fundraising event hostesses, having raised millions of dollars for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But she has also faced significant criticism from even her own staff for excluding black and brown people from her publishing and fashion empire.

As a New York Times critique published a year ago told it:

As Ms. Wintour ascended, Vogue’s publication of “hurtful or intolerant” content rarely resulted in lasting negative attention for her. But Black journalists who have worked with Ms. Wintour, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they had not gotten over their experiences at a magazine whose workplace mirrored its exclusive pages.

Under Ms. Wintour, 18 people said, Vogue welcomed a certain type of employee — someone who is thin and white, typically from a wealthy family and educated at elite schools. Of the 18, 11 people said that, in their view, Ms. Wintour should no longer be in charge of Vogue and should give up her post as Condé Nast’s editorial leader.

“Fashion is bitchy,” one former Black staff member said. “It’s hard. This is the way it’s supposed to be. But at Vogue, when we’d evaluate a shoot or a look, we’d say ‘That’s Vogue,’ or, ‘That’s not Vogue,’ and what that really meant was ‘thin, rich and white.’ How do you work in that environment?”

Fast forward to the Met Gala one year later, and AOC, who is Puerto Rican, was personally invited by Wintour herself, in an epic feat of woke-washing, to sit at the main table, helping to burnish her own neo-diversified brand. The splashy but rear-facing "Tax the Rich" message was, of course, safely hidden from the sensitive view of the very rich, very white, and very thin Anna Wintour. If AOC knows that she herself was used as a mere ass-covering accessory, as were the rest of the minority models, movie stars and designers at the event, then she didn't let on.

Meanwhile, if she doesn't challenge Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his New York senate seat in a primary, she will be among the first in line to succeed him when he retires. And from there, she will no doubt make a run for the presidency. To achieve her goals, she is going to need Anna Wintour. AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.

We'll just have to wait and see whether she and her Squad entourage follow through on their threat to kill the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill currently in front of the House unless the already watered-down $3.5 trillion social welfare bill passes first with the unanimous Democratic support that it needs.

The latest offer on the negotiating table  to "centrists" is to delay Medicare dental coverage for the elderly until 2028. What, after all, are a few million more lost geriatric teeth, oral infections and associated morbidity and mortality in the grand scheme of things? It may be the American twilight's last gleaming, but at least if the rich get taxed the cajoling AOC way, we'll have some gleaming choppers or shiny dentures to look forward to - if we can only hang on for a few more years in fires, floods, heat waves and hurricanes.

 As sick as we are and as sickened as we might feel, let's be healthily skeptical of AOC and of course, of every other politician who claims to feel our pain. Despite her melodramatic kvetching about "I and my body (being) relentlessly policed from all corners,"  criticism of the powerful by the powerless is not hatred at all. It's an attempt both at self-preservation and the preservation of society as a whole. It's actually a form of love.

Meanwhile, I say let AOC pursue her transactional career in political performance art. Don't let the shallow spectacle get you down.