Zients Finally Gets the Romanov Treatment

So, Joe Biden has reluctantly seized a little of his executive power and finally fired his "Covid Czar" crony Jeff Zients today. The execution was only about a year too late, given that this patently unqualified Wall Street consultant and fixer had botched his job so badly, on so many different levels, that untold millions of people all over the world have suffered preventable severe disease and death as a result.

Biden had been under pressure for months from legitimate public health experts and political progressives to give Zients the ax, not least because of the administration's passive-aggressive refusal to invoke the Defense Production Act, which would have forced private corporations to produce enough protective equipment and medication to meet surges in the pandemic. Zients also had outright balked at allocating resources to fight the virus abroad, thus lengthening the pandemic's duration and enabling more mutations to pop up and sicken more people.

As The American Prospect reported in January, when the Omicron variant of the virus was wreaking such havoc, any humanitarian efforts on the part of the Biden administration "would have required angering powerful forces in corporate America" -

Forcing Moderna to share their vaccine recipe, in an economy in which so many of the highest-valued corporations exist by exploiting flaws in our intellectual-property system (e.g., Microsoft, Apple, Big Pharma, Disney) and compelling mass production sites across the world, would have engendered corporate backlash. If the government cast aside patents for COVID vaccines, could software or movies be next? Following this corporate line of thought, and disregarding the necessity of vaccinating the world, Zients has not pushed domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity in this direction. And while President Biden endorsed waiving intellectual-property rights on vaccines last April, there’s been no movement since on that front."

So why fire Zients now? Well, as the New York Times soft-pedals it, Zients has effectively completed his job, and he has completed it quite well. There was no effort by the Times to connect the dots between Zients's departure and his replacement by a qualified physician and public health expert (Dr. Ashish K.Jha) who also just happens to be a frequent cable talking head who has been, at times, a vocal critic of the White House's pathetic response to the pandemic.

As a matter of fact, the Times spins the Zients departure to the pandemic being, if not officially over, then at least in one of those lulls that now lets the noble Zients finally take a well-deserved breather and return to "private" life. (As if what is still quaintly called "public service" is not itself effectively privatized.)

For the past 14 months, Mr. Zients has presided over a tumultuous and challenging stretch of the pandemic. Two highly infectious coronavirus variants, Delta and Omicron, caught the White House off guard. The public was often confused by the conflicting messages. And the vaccination campaign, while largely hailed as a success, ran into far more resistance than the president anticipated when he took office. As Mr. Zients prepares to depart, the nation's death toll is about to surpass one million. Now with three-quarters of Americans having received at least one dose of vaccine, officials said the federal response would become more of a long-term public health effort and less of a moment-by-moment crisis requiring rapid government action. If new variants of the virus spread, they said, Dr. Jha would be able to draw upon the tools his predecessor put in place during the past 14 months.

First, let's just say that the timing of the ouster is a bit curious. In just the past week, our revered former President Barack Obama has come down with Covid, as has VP Kamala Harris's hubby, as has the Irish prime minister in town and just about to meet privately with the vulnerable Biden, as have several more Democratic congress-critters who'd just been retreating to an unmasked ball to discuss new slogans for the mid-terms. It is hitting these people personally. They've turned out to be constructed of the same vulnerable tissue as everybody else, despite being triple-vaxxed and having access to all the concierge medicine that taxpayers' money can buy.

So, with the unmasked Democratic Ball's winning entry for new improved slogan being Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "Democrats Deliver!," and the new "stealth" Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 threatening to mess with the administration's relaxation of Covid rules for its own crass political purposes, party leaders must now come up with their own BS.2 phase of justifying the New Normal.

The Times stenography machine is only too happy to help out on this front as well, soothing its readers in a separate article that while the BA.2 variant is "highly transmissible" it is just more of the same-old, same-old and not to worry your pretty little heads about it. The only thing to fear is that the over-hyped "decline" in daily deaths and cases might be slowed down by it. Despite its extreme contagiousness, writes Carl Zimmer, BA.2 will likely not cause a new surge in the United States. This is the same reporter who so soothingly wrote last fall that the vaccines would work very well against the Omicron variant. They turned out not to prevent infections, even in the boosted - but who remembers who said what last fall?

But I digress - back to how the Times is spinning the Zients ouster.

First, they completely ignore the fact of the firing. According to the White House, he not only is leaving voluntarily, he has had to be cajoled by Biden on numerous occasions into staying even longer than he'd originally wanted to. As far as they're concerned, Dr. Jha will simply bask in the success of his predecessor.

Next, after we're led to believe that Zients is "stepping down" by choice, we are further informed that not only was "public confusion" to blame for bad Covid outcomes, there were also the usual passive "conflicting messages" attributable to nobody in power at all. Everybody was caught in the crossfire, and nobody will ever be held accountable.

Furthermore, Dr. Jha will be able to magically "draw upon the tools" that Zients is so graciously bequeathing him. That, incidentally, is a pretty sneaky use of semantics, given that one normally uses tools rather than "drawing upon" them. Is this another way of saying that Zients's tools are simply cost-benefit analyses and spreadsheets in need of much professional TLC with a blue pencil?

It bodes ill that in announcing Jha's appointment, Biden admitted the good doctor's media savvy and "calming" cred were the factors in his getting the job - as opposed to, say, his medical cred. Despite being bound by his Hippocratic Oath of "first, do no harm," Jha might be expected to simply go along with Boss Biden's own oath to his campaign donors that "nothing will fundamentally change."

Given that Congress has sadistically refused to allocate any more money to the Covid fight, his future success as Doc Czar might be a moot point. Without the funds to "draw upon," Jha will effectively be prevented from doing his job. In fact, it looks as though he might be getting set up as the Biden administration's fall guy for when the next surge hits.

This seems quite likely, with the Times unquestioningly quoting the usual anonymous officials as saying that Jha's "background as a medical doctor makes him the right choice as the virus becomes more an endemic part of the country's health challenges." (endemic being the code word for New Normal.)

In other words, the right person to deal with the real global health emergency, which we shall now ignore and deny, was a Wall Street technocrat with no medical credentials at all. As the Times gaslights us and criticizes Zients's numerous critics,

Critics have said Mr. Zients, who made a fortune building two consultancies and taking them public, was an odd pick to run the pandemic response given his lack of experience in public health. But his past work touched on health care, both as the chief executive of the Advisory Board Company, a health care consultancy, and in the Obama administration, where he ran the effort to fix the healthcare.gov website.'

Everybody knows that making health care profitable for the oligarchy before nobly fixing a website is all the qualification one needs to deal with a global pandemic. And as long as the great Dr. Anthony Fauci himself came to Zients's defense after his predicted "summer of joy" failed to materialize, who are we to quibble with facts and cast our own stones? Nobody ever could have predicted, unless it was hordes of mere credentialed epidemiologists sounding all those alarms at the time. 

The Times actually quotes Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, as saying that all you need to fight a pandemic is "managerial talent" and being "a warm-hearted friend."  The whole West Wing is already waxing "wistful" according to the Paper of Record, because Zients got the whole country "access" to tests and vaccines. He will be maudlinly missed, big-time, by his fellow neoliberal technocrats.

Translation: if you can't have the crony, then what possible good is the capitalism?

The Global Class War Is Getting Really Ugly

The economic war declared on Russia by the US and its NATO client-states is, on the surface, payback for Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine. But this intra-global war of oligarchs is at its very essence a war of rich against poor. It's all about which oligarchy gets to extract the natural resources of one of the poorest nations on earth.

The 2014 US-backed coup against Ukraine's democratically elected president, Victor Yanukovich. was a victory not just for NATO, but for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose historical core purpose is to "open up" distressed nation-states for looting ("investment") by multinational corporations. Yanukovich had to go, because he was reneging on his agreement to impose austerity on his constituents as the price for borrowing money from the global financial system. Even worse as far as "the West" was concerned, he thought that he could get a better financial deal from Putin.

 Among the conditions that the IMF had imposed upon Ukraine for loaning it billions of dollars was raising the retirement age of Ukrainians to 60. This may sound like a reasonable demand, until you consider that Ukraine ranks a dismal 99th in the world in terms of life expectancy, and that at the time of the coup, the average Ukrainian male would be dead by the age of 67. Raising the retirement age was tantamount to a massively cruel cut in benefits.

Even so, one year after the coup, the Ukrainian government was still balking at "reforming" its pension program and raising the retirement age. It already had complied with such  IMF loan conditions as drastically increasing domestic gas prices to consumers and reducing energy subsidies.

As economist Michael Hudson noted in 2014, the US-backed coup's ensuing austerity policies, administered by the US and the IMF, would not only turn Ukraine into another Greece or Spain, they'd make Ukraine (already being even poorer than Greece and Spain) "a lot more miserable":

 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the press last month, with all the sensitivity of a Cliven Bundy or Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, that Greece could serve as a model for Ukraine. This is like saying that the United States’ Great Depression could serve as a model for Ukraine.

But we don’t have to look to Greece or Spain to see the risks of signing on to a program of fiscal austerity and “reforms” run by the IMF and its European directors at this time. Ukraine has had its own experience not that long ago: in just 4 years from 1992-1996, Ukraine lost half of its GDP as the IMF and friends took the wrecking ball to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies . Ukraine’s economy didn’t start growing again until the 2000’s. For comparison, the worst years of the U.S. Great Depression (1929-1934) saw a real GDP loss of 36 percent.

Enter then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama administration's designated "point-man" for Ukraine, who brayed a year later that the austerity-driven Obama administration itself could also serve as an inspiration for Ukraine. 

 Much, actually over-much, has been made of Biden's putative task of "rooting out corruption" and punishing the "bad" oligarchs who had been looting Ukraine's treasury since the fall of the Soviet Union. (His son Hunter's own lucrative gig with a newly privatized energy sector in Ukraine was brushed off as working for a "good oligarch" who allegedly did not have a corrupt bone in his whole body.)

But when Biden showed up to give a hectoring speech to the Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, right before Christmas 2015, it was not only to inveigh against the ongoing corruption, it was also to demand that ordinary Ukrainians continue to bear the brunt of both the corruption and the predatory IMF debt.

Once Biden got through all the preliminaries, moving to soften up the the assembled politicians with the carrot of more financial aid, and the obligatory flattery for their allegiance to democracy, freedom, and human rights, he finally went full hit man and wielded his big stick: 

Yesterday I announced almost $190 million in new American assistance to help Ukraine fight corruption, strengthen the rule of law, implement critical reform, bolster civil society, advance energy security.  That brings our total of direct aid to almost $760 million in direct assistance, in addition to loan guarantees since this crisis broke out.  And that is not the end of what we're prepared to do if you keep moving. 

But for Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well.  The big part of moving forward with your IMF program -- it requires difficult reforms.  And they are difficult.  Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions.  You should deal with -- as if it’s easy to do.  Hell, we're having trouble in America dealing with it.  We're having trouble.  To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places. 

Don't misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don't understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF.  It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular.  But they're critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure.  And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is.  Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.

Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community, which is always tenuous.  It’s always tenuous.  We keep pushing that support.

Whenever neoliberal politicians inflict their pain on the masses, they love to insist that it hurts them as much as it hurts you. They are altruistic enough to risk their own careers for you! After all somebody has to save you from yourselves.  And so with the class war, as with any kind of  war, they appeal to your patriotism, asking that you "share the sacrifice" with the rich, who are being ever so politely asked to pay a bit more in taxes. You then will feel so much better about waiting a few more years to collect your Social Security, just so long as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk also have to pay reasonable capital gains taxes. Of course, despite all of this neoliberal posturing and gaslighting, the oligarchs eventually come out as the only winners. There are always a few useful idiots or bad cops like Joe Manchin or Mitch McConnell around to willingly take the blame.

So when Biden was so delicately urging Ukraine to raise its retirement age, or risk "losing the support of the international community," he was also implicitly bragging about the ultimately failed "Grand Bargain" with Republicans that he and Obama had pursued to raise both the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages in the United States, thereby imposing a massive cut in lifetime benefits. Biden tried to paint his administration as a role model for the Rada, having been so politically courageous in its own pursuit of austerity for the masses of people. 

It was not for nothing that Obama had a plaque on his Oval Office desk reading "Hard Things Are Hard." 

To make the hard things less painful, the impending doom less noticeable or more akin to the proverbial frog boiling to death at a low temperature, Ukraine politicians have tried to salvage their own careers by raising the retirement age in six-month increments until 2025, while at the same time gradually increasing the work requirement years for people to qualify for a pension. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are fleeing their country by the millions, and their current president is begging the "international community" for fighter jets, ammo and bulletproof vests. And Joe Biden's domestic approval rating and positive media coverage have gotten just the boost that you might expect. Because hard things and hard people are hard!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deep in the throes of one of its periodic fever dreams. This current one is even more intense and xenophobic than the pandemic of paranoia and jingoism that we witnessed after 9/11. As The Guardian newspaper, for just one example of the war hysteria afflicting us these days, gushed in its Sunday edition:

 Just as Biden’s empathy was seen as ideal for meeting the moment of the coronavirus pandemic, and just as his record of bipartisanship was thought to be well suited to healing America’s divisions, so his storied foreign policy experience and faith in multinational institutions appear to bode well for this test.

That is certainly the view of Democrats who believe that Biden, who at 79 lived every moment of the cold war, including its gnawing dread of nuclear annihilation, has risen to the occasion. Last month he authorised $350m of military equipment – the biggest such package in US history – to bolster Ukraine’s courageous fighters who have exceeded all expectations.

Who needs an adequate pension, and freedom from poverty, and cancellation of onerous IMF debt when you can be pawned in their game as a courageous freedom fighter?

The State of the Onion Is Mushy

 President Biden's annual spiel to the Congressional Joint the other night was like watching him painfully peel away the soggy layers of an onion that was left way too long in the pantry. He tried to present the discarded leavings of his broken campaign promises as a smorgasbord of culinary delights for his audience to savor and sample. But once he finally got through all the belabored flaying and skinning, all that was left was an empty center. Not to mention plenty of teary eyes and held noses. We at least deserved the usual political hot air, but all we got was a cold vacuum and a lingering stench. 

There was no student debt forgiveness on his menu. And in lieu of even the public health insurance appetizer that he once vowed to champion when elected, all he is offering people now is one more free Covid test kit and free antiviral medication for those who test positive. A Probe, a Pill, and a Promise. The totality of your health care needs will remain in the iron grip of the Predators and  Profiteers of the Plutocracy. You're just like an onion. Neoliberal doctrine states that everyone must have skin in the game.

But since Biden couldn't admit this cruel, hard reality to the audience at home, he doubled right down on the callousness - with the obligatory covering of bathos, of course. He shone the spotlight on a very cute 13-year-old boy with Type 1 diabetes, who was sitting in the first lady's box. Biden commiserated with young Joshua Davis's parents, who find the cost of their child's insulin to be excessive. But rather than call for insulin to be free of cost for everybody who needs it, Biden merely suggested that it become more "affordable." (Meanwhile, of course, Josh was deemed by the mainstream media to be "absolutely delighted" to have Biden wish him a happy birthday. )

 

Now here's where it gets really cruel. You probably noticed that Joshua, despite being more vulnerable to severe Covid because of his medical condition, was not wearing a mask. Nor were Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and most of the congress-critters and dignitaries in attendance. 

That is because, in this brave new world of Learning to Live With Covid, it is no longer the Unvaxxed Deplorables who must be shunned. It's the masks themselves, now deemed to be a badge of shame by the very person ostensibly in charge of the nation's public health:

"I just know people are tired. The scarlet letter of this pandemic is the mask," CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky said, referencing the 19th century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which protagonist Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered "A" for having committed adultery.

Masks are so last month. Therefore, the bare-faced fashion-conscious politicians and elites attending the speech were all decked out in blue and yellow lapel pins, ties, scarves and even a gown or two, to express their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Senator Elizabeth Warren wore a geegaw of a sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine, on her own jacket. The sunflower is also the state flower of Kansas. But as we should all know by now, we ain't in Kansas any more. We are in the magical land of Oz, where the wicked witch of Covid has been squashed flat by implicit decree from the very highest levels of the ruling establishment.

The only fever we should care about is War Fever! Fear not what your country is doing to you. Fear instead what Putin is doing to the country of Ukraine. We are all Ukrainians now, in case you haven't heard. More than one pundit has gushed in recent days that they look just like "us", i.e. white and preferably blond-haired and blue-eyed. As Judith Butler has written, some victims of war are considered more deserving of grief and empathy than others.

Now, if you are an older person, or immune-deficient, or disabled, or otherwise vulnerable, and you're torn between being labeled a slut and preventing your death from Covid, it still just might be possible to be patriotic and to stay alive and healthy, all at the same time!

 If the austere Biden aviator sunglasses look isn't for you, and you want protection both from Covid and from the facial recognition technology that's going around, this might be a more practical fashion choice  Be sure to get the largest size available so as to discreetly hide your big scarlet "A" of an N95 mask.

Ukraine solidarity merch and couture are available on Amazon and Walmart, or course, and wherever fine regime-change and war propaganda is sold. Which seems to be everywhere.

As Uncle Joe might say (and he actually did, at the end of his onion-peeling exercise): "Go get 'em!"

The Psy-Ops Blob Does Ukraine

Svengali-ized in the Name of Freedom!

In the US proxy war for regime change in Russia, it is important that the American public be convinced that this war is strictly limited to the stalwart Ukrainian people defending their democracy, against all odds, from the latest incarnation of Hitler. 

And by the millions, we are swiftly getting with the Unity Program. For when it comes to defending and expanding the US hegemon and enriching our own domestic oligarchs, there is no Republican Party, and there is no Democratic Party. There is only the one, true, all-American Party of Blob. You can't really call it the Deep State any more, given that the partying parties of the Hegemon no longer bother to hide what they do.  As long as the American people can get most or even all their news from only five or six corporate entities which insist, over and over and over again, that they are the only thing standing between you and an evil pandemic of disinformation and misinformation and even "mal-information" infecting the Internet, then the battle for your hearts and minds to support the proxy war on Russia is as good as won.

It helps, too, that the country chosen as the battleground for this latest war is populated by white people, and that its president is such an entertaining and telegenic former comic actor. It's so much easier to get Western celebrities and other professional concern trolls to "stand with" beleaguered people who are not brown and poor and Muslim. You will never, for example, see the Saturday Night Live cold opening of their latest show with a hymn for the Somalis or Yemenis being blasted to smithereens by US drones. 

You just know it's springtime for wartime whenever the establishment media subsidiary of the Blob joins together in a rare spirit of elite solidarity, putting aside all their petty partisan allegiances in the quest to engage eyeballs and ear-holes in united hatred for a common enemy. The domestic culture wars miraculously have taken a back seat in the past week in order to saturate us with lockstep coverage by outlets blaring the same scare headlines and the same war footage, which may or may not emanate from any actual scenes of battles in Ukraine. You can no longer see any difference between the deep black scare headlines of the right-wing New York Post and the "center-left" New York Times.

For just one example of the bipartisanship of this propaganda war for land, for fossil fuels, for sheer Superpower power, see the latest Times column of Michelle Goldberg. This liberal opinion writer, whose subject matter usually involves pumping up Democrats and dissing Republicans, today glowingly cited a poll commissioned by a corrupt, money-soaked GOP-controlled propaganda mill, purporting to show that most Ukrainian citizens are convinced that "they" can defeat Russia. Goldberg doesn't mention the Republican provenance of the survey, however. She does not reveal that this Ukrainian polling agency gets its commissions from the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Washington, which in turn gets its own money from the multibillion-dollar US Agency for International Development, the State Department, and donations from such entities as the government of Canada, the Bush Institute, the AFL-CIO, the American Bar Association and a whole panoply of NGOs and foundations and think tanks. Therefore, liberal-minded Times readers of Goldberg's column never get to find out that there is a direct propaganda line to the Ukrainian pollster straight from the IRI Board, which consists mainly of hawkish GOP senators currently sitting on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The IRI got its start during the Reagan years, and has a long sordid history of fomenting and orchestrating regime change coups and wars throughout the world, under the usual rubric of human rights, a free press and the general all-purpose spreading of democracy for the enrichment of the military-industrial complex. It has employed the notorious Blackwater/XE  security firm to guard both its headquarters and its personnel.

Goldberg also doesn't reveal in her column that the heroic newspaper editor-philosopher hawking the IRI's poll results, the man she placed at the very center of her column, is also on the payroll of USAID, as well as of NATO. Of course, his publication is aimed more at war-weary English-speakers in the West, rather than at the people who actually live in Ukraine, the people who are actually caught in the middle of the proxy war between Russia and the United States and its NATO clients and could use some reliable news to help them in their immediate existential plight.

In 2019, Michelle Goldberg recounts, when she last visited Ukraine to explore the zeitgeist of these everyday citizens, she interviewed this very same publisher, Volodymyr Yermenko of UkraineWorld. The subject that time around was not so much the alleged desire of Ukrainians to join NATO and effect regime change in Russia  as it was to sell the narrative to Times readers that everyday Ukrainians were disgusted that Donald Trump and the right-wing Republicans were falsely accusing their government of corruption. Again, the American public needed to be convinced that since the rest of the world was in danger from Trump, it is up to us to defeat Trump and thereby save the rest of the world. (for, I reckon, the preferred set of oligarchs funding the IRI and its donors and subsidiaries). Engendering worldwide anti-Trump feeling was at that time a primary task of the #Russiagate franchise. No matter that Trump, despite being an embarrassing vocal critic of NATO and an unabashed admirer of authoritarian strongmen, did end up bowing to Blob pressure and sending financial aid to Ukraine, not to mention trashing a nuclear treaty with Russia. Putin, who is now being portrayed as off his rocker, has taken to openly threatening to use nukes. (Thanks a lot, Donald!)

Adding to the tangled webs being woven by the mainstream media, IRI board member Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is adamantly refusing to respond to liberal media goading and patriotically "condemn" Trump for praising Putin at the very same time that he and his neocon cohort are commissioning anti-Russia pro-"democracy" propaganda in service to the profiteers of the proxy war.

Surprisingly, the Times published my comment to Goldberg which, in truncated form, outlined the sleazy provenance of both the commissioned poll she cited as well as her Ukrainian publishing source's own direct funding by the US hegemon. My comment was greeted with the equivalent of a group yawn, and two recommendations from fellow readers. One person did respond with the retort, "So what! Frankly, our side needs effective propaganda right now. It goes along with fighting wars; in this one, our propaganda effort is essential in getting the publics of the democracies to get behind the effort to both isolate the Russian Republic, and to keep up the supply of war materials to the Ukranians (sic), neither of which will be free of risks, and especially for our European allies, of significant costs, economically speaking. So if the vast right-wing conspiracy wants to devote some of their talents and treasure to these goals, more power to them, I say..."

USA! USA! USA!

Meantime, let's all stay tuned for tonight's State of the Onion address by Joe Biden. Or not. I'll cover it here either tomorrow or the next day.... that is, if I haven't choked on my popcorn.

A Ukraine Primer

 I'll be the first to admit that I was not up to speed on the background of the Ukraine-Russia-US-NATO conflict.  I think that even those who are or were up to speed were shocked by Putin's full-scale invasion, That is understandable, given how many times the "intelligence community" has screamed that the sky is falling. If it wasn't the  Russian nukes in the Cold War, it was the constant threat from what George W. used to so folksily call "those terrorist folks."

So, many thanks to reader Valerie for sharing this excellent lecture by political science and foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Not only is it well worth an hour or so of your time, it should also serve as an antidote to all the jingoism and fear-mongering propaganda bombarding us from the mainstream media, or rather the five corporate entities which control more than 90 percent of everything we see, hear, and read. 

Geld Vlad Better

 My fellow Americans, your government must sanction the oligarchs over there so we don't have to tax them over here.  

If only Joe Biden would expand his sanctimonious sanctioning of a few Russian billionaires in Vlad's inner circle into actually converting their "frozen" or "seized" real estate holdings in the United States into permanent, federally subsidized housing for poor people! Just think of how many people could be sheltered in the empty luxury penthouses and mansions they've been vacuuming up here since the fall of the Soviet Union, using them not as homes but as money-laundering banks.

 Then Biden finally might even start clawing his way back into positive poll territory.  After all, if he can unilaterally seize the frozen assets of the Afghan people and use them to settle lawsuits with the 9/11 survivors, then he can seize the myriad ill-gotten assets that Putin has no way of preserving for himself and his oligarchic pals. Even better, such seizure and allocation to the needy would not lead to the deaths of innocent civilians through starvation, disease and exposure to the elements. For once in the violent hegemonic history of these United States, what our leaders euphemize as their "responsibility to protect" through "humanitarian interventions" will be the real deal, and not just a fig leaf for mass destruction and violence.

And if he gets a good public response from real estate seizures from Russian oligarchs, he and the Congress he reveres might even want to expand it further with punitive taxes on the wealth of such sociopathic American tycoons as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

  But then again, the US municipalities which host the Russian oligarchs' real estate holdings could very well balk at losing their tax bases through such a federal seizure and redistribution. It would also mightily disappoint the private equity vultures doing their own predatory part of buying up homes and apartment complexes, forcing people to rent them at exorbitant rates. I assume that the foreign owners do pay some property taxes through their shell companies, despite all the sweetheart deals for concessions for buyers or developers in exchange for, as an example, allowing a little green space and one or two "affordable" apartments for the hoi polloi.

And as for the US-based zillionaires, cities are actually vying for their presence because it allegedly creates jobs, despite the fact that the municipalities themselves are on the hook for building the infrastructure and the helipads and other perks for the job-creators.

For when push comes to shove, capitalism knows no national boundaries, despite all the intra-oligarchic bickering and land grabs among the globe's nation-states. Vlad Putin's "invasion" of a small part of Ukraine the size of New Jersey is thus far limited* to diplomatically recognizing a region historically populated by ethnic Russians. There will be much bombast and posturing on both sides, with probably the biggest winner being the US military-industrial complex, standing to reap a windfall from weapons sales to a disorganized Ukraine military populated largely by neo-Nazi freedom fighters.

Speaking of freedom, official Washington is also "bracing" for the convoy of big rigs driven, allegedly, by white supremacist fascists whose only desire is to be freed from mask and vaccine mandates. Never mind that our leaders can't seem to rid themselves of the mask mandates fast enough to placate all manner of individual, ad hoc dissidents and private militias in official or unofficial service to the US-based oligarchs.  How else can the surveillance state ever use its facial recognition technology to surveil and arrest all the necessary suspects? 

The timing of the remake of Smokey and the Bandit, meanwhile, could not be more exquisite, with the arrival of the convoy of truckers coinciding with Joe Biden's State of the Union speech next week before the Congressional Joint. What a relief it must be to his own beleaguered party that he'll get away with a few whispered regrets about the failure of his Build Back Better social welfare package. He will drown them right out with a jingoistic emasculation of Vlad the Impaler! Geld Vlad Better, if you will. Can't you already hear the raucous bipartisan yells of USA! USA! USA! echoing through the hallowed halls? Can't you envision democracy itself rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the January Sixth sacrilege?

But just to keep the fear alive along with the exaltation, to maintain the free-floating anxiety so necessary for a resurgence of the Cold War if not a hotter one, the TV audience will also be regaled by at least a thousand National Guard troops policing the Capitol to supplement its actual encirclement by the same forbidding barbed wire which protected the ruling elites from the people at Biden's inaugural last year.

Biden is taking no chances. He is selling us on not just one Enemy Outside, but two. There is Putin over there, and there is the threatening convoy of Trumpy Truckers converging on Washington from all over the wild hinterlands of Outside Over Here.

We'll no doubt be hearing many plaintive cries for national unity from elites all over the political spectrum in the coming days and weeks and months. The spectrum of which I speak spans all the way from A to B, with myriad pinpoints and occult cracks in between for just a little surface variety.

It's a democracy, my fellow Americans. You have the freedom to pick from two options. Vote on which scenario will inspire, scare or disgust you the most in the latest propaganda battle for your hearts and your minds.

Is it this?

 

Or maybe this:

If, as Samuel Johnson opined, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then the appeals for "unity"  and "civility" and "bringing the country together" are its partners in psychopathy.

We should avoid this cant like the plague, whose cruel reality and human cost is what the political scoundrels themselves are working like mad to avoid addressing.

*2/24 It is now a full-scale invasion. US intelligence has been vindicated, says US. They got exactly what they wanted. The neocon and liberal interventionist hawks must be in heaven, and Biden's poll numbers from the Dems will probably soar skyward as well, in the spirit of elite solidarity. And with Trump praising Vlad, it makes one wonder if the normally war-hungry Republicans will have no choice but to disown him. It would be quite an about-face if any anti-war movement in the US ends up being led by right-wing factions.

How Dr. Mom Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Plague

 Just in case the inconsistent and contradictory guidelines on masking from Anthony Fauci, liberal America's favorite brusque old grandpa, aren't enough to convince you that Learning To Live With Covid is not a euphemism for Accepting Death Graciously, the New York Times is here to set your minds at rest. 

They've reached out to a select group of lesser epidemiologists and physicians for advice on just how to chill the hell out. These medical professionals are young, they're hip, they're healthy, they're rich, and they know their germs a lot better than mere mortals like you and I do. If they can cope with pursuing their careers and having fun while raising their families, then so can you! 

However, the fine art of ignoring the pandemic does entail a tricky learning curve. Threading the needle on Following the Science® on the one hand and wallowing in rank magical thinking on the other is not a skill that you can learn overnight. Sangfroid in the time of Covid can only be mastered with lot of time and patience. Of course, if you are an actual Covid patient (short, long, or in-between), time might not exactly be on your side. But never mind all that, because the Times article is not directed at you anyway.

It's directed at the hip, the healthy and the hedonistic. Not to mention the financially whole. For example:

 "My (my bold) family has moved away from restricting our activities as the Omicron surge has receded," said Kate Eisenberg, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester. "We do not have anyone with high risk health conditions in the household, and we're all vaccinated and boosted."

Eisenberg is currently planning some family trips, including air travel, and she is allowing her 12- and 15-year-old children to participate in most family activities. She has been avoiding indoor dining and crowded indoor settings, but as cases continue to come down, she plans to go out more.

This weekend, she is taking her younger daughter to a sold-out Billie Eilish concert at Madison Square Garden - apparently operating under the delusion that a rock concert in February in New York is not a crowded unventilated indoor setting, and that thousands of gallons of spittle emanating from the orifices of hordes of cheering fans will be magically diverted away from her and her child.

The reporter of this advice column of an article, Jonathan Wolfe, was apparently so heartened and so emboldened by this Dr. Mom and the other hip professionals he interviewed that he even made himself an editorialized part of the story, inserting the following paragraph, right out of the blue:

After we’ve spent two years of living in fear of the virus, being asked to “live with” it now may seem daunting. But in many ways, we’ve been preparing for this moment since the outbreak and it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come.

Dr. Mom Eisenberg is then allowed to chime in again herself, noting that not one of her friends or patients even bothers asking her any more whether it's safe to do this or that. "Most people have settled on their own conclusions about what works for them," she schmoozed to the Times.

Her friends, of course, are not the same kind of people as those Canadian truckers who have reached their own selfish, road-blocking, supply chain-thwarting conclusions about what works for them.  People like Eisenberg and her immediate circle would never dream of blocking traffic as they pursue their exotic getaways and rock concerts. At the very first sign of a sniffle, they have their stash of antiviral pills, and walk-in closets full of test kits. And if there is not a doctor in their actual house, then at the very least they probably have a concierge medic on perpetual call.

As long as we can follow the science® we'll be just fine. It helps immensely, of course, that Doctor Mom and her cohort are not facing eviction or foreclosure and have enough disposable income to take airplane vacation trips and dine out and ignore the plight of the Great Underclass, whose own paltry gains in income have more than been wiped out by inflation, not least by increasing rents and high grocery prices and skyrocketing fuel costs.

All you have to do in Timeswonderland is admit that unlike smallpox, Covid can never be eradicated, not that they even want it to be at this point. As the Times quotes another smugly sanguine epidemiologist as saying, we can continue on our merry ways with "an arsenal of tools" consisting of vaccines, pills and all that wonderful "paid sick leave" that she and her PMC cohort enjoy. Never mind that mandatory paid sick leave is, thanks to the oligarchy-captured US Congress and executive branch and statehouses, not something that the vast majority of US citizens enjoy.

The only arsenal that the ruling class believes in, in fact, is a trillion dollars' worth of lethal war hardware, allocated for the cause of torture and misery and death all over the world, every single year.

And the Democrats and their professional-managerial class base still have the chutzpah to wonder right out loud why the Republicans are winning over the working classes, even as they persist in working with a party that is openly fascist. The two factions each need the other to maintain the oligarchic system.

 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never seems to tire of saying so herself. How else can she maintain her own maternally therapeutic grip on power?  Like any Doctor Mom, she can't perform her quack-cure without having a preventable disease right there in front of her. And thanks to a long history of political malpractice, the US was sick unto death long before Covid appeared. It's a convenient crisis way too good for either Democrats or Republicans to waste.