Let 'Er R.I.P.

 The Biden administration on Monday ceded what little public health authority that it had still chosen to wield to a Trump judicial appointee - and a grossly unqualified appointee at that. The White House couldn't even wait until the ink was dry on her decision or before airline passengers had safely landed on the ground before declaring that mandatory masking in mass transport was at an end.

Pilots hastened to congratulate their passengers at 35,000 feet for finally achieving their long-sought freedom to spread their germs to the vulnerable person or the unvaccinated baby sitting next to them. Death and taxes may be inevitable - especially on Tax Day Monday - but masks shall never be!

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki bluntly announced that the TSA (Transportation Security Agency) would ignore the pre-existing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order to continue the mandate at least until next month. This is despite a 47 percent increase in new Covid cases nationwide reported in the last week. (The increase is likely a gross understatement, given that the government no longer tests, tracks or even treats Covid patients, especially when they are poor and uninsured.)

The beleaguered TSA at long last will be able to return to its core mission: groping and scanning passengers for the prevention of in-flight terrorism, and checking their shoes for bombs and ammo.

Meanwhile, to enhance the magical thinking magic of the No More Masks Day decision, the Easter Bunny himself crashed Psaki's press briefing, fresh from his rolling exercise on the White House Lawn. The fairy tale actually had begun quite early in the day, when Bunny prevented Biden from talking to the assembled media with just one swipe of his big furry paw.

Just when you thought the day couldn't get any more phantasmagorical, Senator Elizabeth Warren mendaciously announced in a New York Times op-ed that "Democrats are the party of working people."

But clinging tenaciously to a vestige of reality nevertheless, Warren did quickly admit that her lead sentence was just more of the same old gaslighting rhetoric:

Ahead of the 2020 election, we advanced ideas and plans that we believed would, in ways big and small, make our democracy and our economy work better for all Americans. Across this country, voters agreed with us — and gave us a majority in Washington so that we could deliver on those promises.

Oopsies! 

Warren then proceeds to follow the same old Democratic recipe: blame the Republicans, blame the Republicans and then blame the Republicans some more. But if they are to prevent a bloodbath in the November midterms, Dems have to go beyond better messaging. They have to work overtime to "convince voters that we can deliver meaningful change" in other ways than simply bashing Republicans (not to mention  beating them at their own nihilistic game by allowing a hack Trump judge to make public health policy.)

Deliverance, virtue-signaling Democratic-style, versus deliverance backwoods Dickey novel Republican-style, in Warren's world would entail abolishing the filibuster and thereby forcing the inbred congress-critters to vote in full public view - as if bellowing out ignorance and hatred in public is not a good and positive thing for their own electoral prospects.

Oh, and the corruption! Warren does deserve a little credit for taking a baby bunny-sized swipe at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her vast enrichment courtesy of decades of insider trading. But Warren is also careful not to mention Pelosi by her actual name. And she is also careful to mildly suggest that Biden cancel some student debt by executive order. However, in narrowly framing her proposal in identity politics, around the benefits that would  accrue to women and racial groups rather than to all debtors of all classes, genders and ethnicities, she passive-aggressively instigates more of the same divide-and-conquer culture war resentments that she just accused the Republicans of fomenting.

She uttered not one word in favor of this country's burgeoning bottom-up labor movement and Amazon unionization when she criticized Jeff Bezos and Amazon. For someone who claims that the Democrats are "the party of working people," her emphasis on simply taxing billionaires and corporations - without a parallel call to then redistribute the wealth by way of public benefits, such as guaranteed free universal health care for all people - falls flat. 

She supplements her strict, party-line casting of blame for all manner of domestic misery on the GOP and Putin and the interruption of the supply chain with a brief nod to the "political consultant class" and its messaging trope as a substitute for concrete action. She has not a word to say about Biden's recent order allowing more oil and gas drilling on public lands.

It is certainly no accident that besides the Times giving Elizabeth Warren column space, its resident pundit Maureen Dowd did her part over the weekend by taking the  previously maligned Bernie Sanders out of mothballs and freshening up his wispy white fur for purposes of sheep-dogging more disgruntled voters to Get Out There and Vote for Democrats in November to forestall the umpteenth apocalypse. As far as I know, Maureen Dowd is not related to the delusional Elwood Dowd, played by Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, which is the name of his jumbo invisible rabbit friend. Feel the Bern, believe in the Bern and vote for the corporate Dems! Hear it often enough, and you, just like Elwood's friends and family, will also start to believe in imaginary bunnies, especially the genuine ones wearing oversized mittens.

 Never mind that the Democrats themselves are courting Armageddon with a vengeance, cheerleading the US proxy war against Russia, a nuclear power. Democratic Senator Chris Coons was just the latest hack to call for US troops on the ground in Ukraine when he appeared on a weapons manufacturer-sponsored "news"  show  on Easter Sunday.

But back to the New York Times. The controlling Sulzbergers just named Joseph F. Kahn to replace executive editor Dean Baquet, who is being forced to step down at the age of 65 solely because of family "tradition." 

The new chief's biography reads like a parody of the elite meritocracy: Harvard-educated scion of a big box store empire, brief stint at the Dallas Morning News before becoming bored by "local" news and deciding to return to Harvard and "pivot to China," as an independently funded student and journalist, a series of quick professional promotions, marriage to a former World Bank official.

From the Times puff piece announcing Kahn's appointment:

After returning to New York in 2008 as an editor, Mr. Kahn helped launch The Times’s Chinese-language website in 2011, a multimillion-dollar investment at a time of financial scarcity for the company. About six months later, Mr. Kahn was part of the team of editors who decided to publish an investigation into the hidden wealth of China’s ruling class, over the strident objections of the Chinese government....

Mr. Kahn will be taking charge of The Times when many Americans distrust mainstream sources of news, and disinformation tactics are growing increasingly sophisticated. In the interview, he acknowledged that his experience with Chinese officials, well versed in propaganda and deception, was newly relevant.

“I would not have thought,” Mr. Kahn said, “that being a foreign correspondent in China would be good preparation to be executive editor of The New York Times in 2022.”

I don't know whether to interpret that statement as Kahn championing freedom of the press in a repressive regime, or Kahn bragging that he learned censorship techniques from the best of the best.

Judging from the Paper of Record's ongoing devotion to quoting unnamed senior officials promoting US wars of hegemony, with little to no outside dissent, I would have to guess the latter. That the war is drowning out pandemic news on the front pages and in the lead stories of virtually all corporate media in the United States, I would definitely have to guess the latter.

Not that Covid coverage is not continuing. Star Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, for example, continues to scoff at the faint-hearted and pretends, day after day, that there are no poor or uninsured or chronically sick people living in the Land of the Free. Pay no attention to those "big screaming headlines" announcing that Covid is still very much with us. After all, if 82-year-old Nancy Pelosi gets it and is "just fine," then you will be just fine too.

He doesn't seem to realize that in such a wildly unequal country, there is Elite Covid, and then there is Proletarian Covid for everyone else. Leonhardt actually seems to think that since rich people with unlimited financial and medical resources are able to recover, then so should everybody else, even without paid time off, household help, reliable transportation and a bank balance. His basic metric is that there are fewer hospitalizations for the virus than there were at the start of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines. He conveniently ignores the fact that there are also many fewer hospitals serving poor and rural areas in the United States. But nevertheless, he persists:

Going forward, this newsletter will begin to pay less attention to statistics on coronavirus cases and more attention to statistics on hospitalizations. “Looking at the data in the same way we’ve been accustomed over the past two years can be misleading,” Spencer (a cherry picked epidemiologist) said.

We won’t completely ignore the case numbers, because they still have some relevance. But the cases data has become both less reliable and less meaningful than earlier in the pandemic.

In other words:

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

All They Are Saying Is "Give War a Chance!"

 This video is guaranteed to depress the hell out you and/or scare you to death. It also, hopefully, will spur you on to even greater anger at the reckless ruling class racketeers known as the foreign policy Blob. They're an incestuous clan of careerist Republicans and Democrats and their wealthy donors, the permanent security state, the  corporate media, and Hollywood. Their de facto motto in the United States' ongoing proxy war against Russia is "We're all neocons now!"

The program features The Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel, foreign policy critic and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, ,and Jack Matlock, the ambassador to the former Soviet Union in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. 

Let me know what you think in the comments section.

Fog of War, Brain Fog of Warmongers

I guess we could look on the bright side of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Covid diagnosis this week. She will be forced to postpone her provocative trip to Taiwan, which is the next apparent site of the US hegemon's "bait and bleed" operation to stop their global competitors (Russia and China, for now) right in their economic tracks by goading them into wars against their weaker neighbors.  Even the risk of nuclear war is not preventing the American gerontocracy from trying to maintain their increasingly tenuous status as Sole Remaining Superpower.

Of course, the really bad news about Pelosi's diagnosis is that even though she smugly boasts of having the emerging elite strain of the disease (she feels great because she is uber-boosted!), research clearly shows that she still is at risk for the brain fog and other sequelae in Long Covid. And since, at 82 years of age, her increasingly incoherent speech patterns might also be indicative of mental decline, the prospect of a post-Covid Pelosi traveling the globe seems especially dangerous.

It's not as though she and her cohort were not already certifiably insane. Their seemingly deliberate ploys to infect their unmasked selves at various self-congratulatory galas in the past week, and then to tweet out cheery messages of how well they're feeling and how noble they're being by isolating themselves, comprise an obvious public relations gimmick to goad the rest of us into following suit. Never mind that the elites get paid when they're out sick and have the insurance and unlimited tests and medications and wait-staff to make it all so tolerable and brag-worthy.

 The exquisite irony of them even cavalierly exposing themselves to the disease at a White House celebration of the Affordable Care Act should especially not be lost on us.

As PBS approvingly gushed,

Obama returns to the White House on Tuesday for a moment he can savor. His signature Affordable Care Act is now part of the fabric of the American health care system, and President Joe Biden is looking to extend its reach. Sign-ups under the health law have increased under Biden’s stewardship, and more generous taxpayer subsidies have cut costs for enrollees, albeit temporarily.

Didn't anybody ever tell them that stretching delicate fabric will decrease its life expectancy, if not completely ruin it?

This latest bit of White House theater is downright cruel, given that Congress has yet to renew free Covid testing and treatment for the tens of millions of uninsured citizens - the disproportionately black, brown and poor people who already were disproportionately dying from the disease - and they've agreed among themselves not to renew Covid relief for the rest of the war-torn and climate change-torn world. They seem to think there's an invisible barrier protecting the Homeland from non-American virus particles, which must be absolutely thrilled that they're being allowed to keep thriving and mutating and sneaking past Border Patrol.

For as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet,

“I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so

To punish me with this, and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

I will bestow him, and will answer well

The death I gave him. So again good night

I must be cruel only to be kind.

Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”

To divert us from the crass ingratitude that we might be feeling during these times of financial distress, meanwhile, we are supposed to cheer for the bipartisan confirmation of the first female black Supreme Court justice, revel in Congress's heroic federal criminalization of lynching, and celebrate Joe Biden's historic proclamation of the Transgender Day of Visibility. None of this political theater will do a damn thing to make people's lives better. In fact, the sheer insanity of the ruling elite will make our lives exponentially worse with every passing, cynical gesture. 

Another example of cynical kindness is Biden's extension of the student loan moratorium only through September, when he has it in his power to declare a full-scale debt jubilee and permanently forgive the loans. However, since the elites declare that such a jubilee would also unfairly reward the subset of well-educated debtors making a decent salary, they scold that permanent forgiveness would be a slap in the face to other struggling workers. Cruelty is thus conveniently redefined as kindness to the "deserving" - while the only true winners are the rent-seeking, debt-free oligarchs.

 Cruel kindness/kind cruelty  can be taken away at any moment, making the month-to-month brand of relief arguably more stressful for the desperate than a complete cutoff of help would be.

And then there is the temporary increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits, extended last year under the Families First Act. In order for recipients to qualify for a second monthly federal stipend of as much as several hundred dollars depending on family size, each state must make a monthly application for a "flexibility" waiver from the Department of Agriculture. This availability applies only for as long as federal and state public health emergencies are continued. Not knowing from one month to the next whether or not the supplemental grant to buy increasingly costly groceries will be forthcoming makes it difficult for families to budget from one month to the next. North Carolina just became the first state to officially cut off the supplemental SNAP benefits to recipients in that state, just at a time when food prices are rising so drastically.

This week's orchestrated super-spreader event to mark Obamacare - complete with the Great Man himself deigning to show up to "savor the moment" as if it was foie gras sadistically whipped up from the livers of tortured geese - would not have been complete without another adorable Joe Biden gaffe. This is what he tweeted out to celebrate a tiny revision of the law, which allows previously excluded family members with pre-existing conditions to begin purchasing insurance product next year - provided, of course, that they have the financial means to do so.

President Biden

@POTUS

United States government official

In America, health care should be a right — not a privilege.

The fact-checked, corrected version:

In America, health care is a right only for the privileged. 

 

Foie Gras For Me. Expiring Cheez Whiz For Thee

Biden's Manifesto of Death

Chalking up his reckless call for removing Putin from power to a spontaneous moment of righteous outrage, President Biden has quickly pivoted to calling for more disempowerment and oppression of the serfs back here in The Homeland.

His proposed 2023 federal budget is a deadly and belligerent manifesto for more austerity, more war, and a vast enhancement of the domestic police state.

In true Orwellian doublethink fashion, though, the insider-y Politico news site is calling this gruesome document a "peace offering" to Acting President Joe Manchin, senator of West Virginia. Even the usual progressive congress-critters, according to the article, are willing to give Biden "the space to play." For is not the US political establishment itself the Disneyland centerpiece of the hegemonic World Order, a theme park full of bullies, toadies and untold throngs of silent victims?

Biden was happy to revert for just a moment from his role of global warmongering bully as he addressed the media on Monday:

“The first value is fiscal responsibility. The previous administration as you all know, ran record budget deficits. In fact, it went up every year under my predecessor. My administration is turning that around. Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1,300,000,000,000. That would be the largest one-year reduction in the deficit in US history.”

And as the document itself more belligerently puts it, 

 “We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future of strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values.”

Meanwhile, following the cynical tradition of all his Democratic predecessors, Biden also made sure to tack on the usual "balancing" suggestions of modestly taxing billionaires and corporations in order to vaguely protect the environment and fund a very few new, barely adequate programs to address a panoply of domestic social and health catastrophes - funding which is guaranteed to fail in Congress. He is giving the oligarchs who own and run the country everything that they want in the way of amusement. He even took special care to emphasize that "I am a capitalist."

Or, as the New York Times spins it, the poor old reactionary is being forced to bow to"political reality" which, apparently, is the Gray Lady's euphemism for giving oligarchs and corporations everything they want.

To add further insult to the injury of this elitist "reality", Uncle Joe also finds his aged spine so buffeted by those pesky "gale-force headwinds" from the narrow-minority Republican wing of the Uniparty that he and his fellow Democrats sadly will be forced to huddle in their storm cellars without actually doing much about the worsening climate catastrophe that is killing, dispossessing and dispersing poor people from all over the globe. Unfortunately, Biden's "bipartisan unity agenda" will have to take precedence for now. The priority must not be the lives of everyday people, but the political fortunes of a few centrist Democrats in danger of losing their seats next fall.

As veteran Washington reporter Jonathan Weisman writes in his own Times-splainer about the Biden White House's proposed 2023 federal budget,

Its framing was a marked shift from the 2021 pitch for a fundamental transformation of an ailing American society. Instead, Mr. Biden’s plan was an appeal based on the reality of the moment, to both new dangers around the globe and at home, where inflation and crime are crushing the president’s political standing.

Endangered Democrats in swing districts have been urging Mr. Biden to counter the messages from the far left and address the kitchen-table issues facing voters with incremental steps, not transformative legislation. For them, the budget promises deficit reduction to cool the economy and tangible steps to unclog supply-chain bottlenecks that contribute to rising prices.

Of course, Biden's call for deficit reduction is not reflected in his military budget, which includes the largest ever increase in spending, at almost $800 billion - or about $2 billion a day for the relentless waging of global war. Given his recent, reckless provocations of a fellow nuclear power, his demand for a radically increased production of nuclear weapons also comes as no great surprise.

The Times article continues,

Far from defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two popular slogans on the left, the budget robustly funds both. Customs and Border Protection would receive $15.3 billion and ICE $8.1 billion, including $309 million for border security technology — a well-funded effort to stop illegal migration. The nation’s two primary immigration law enforcement agencies would see increases of around 13 percent.

The budget even includes $19 million for border fencing and other infrastructure.

Federal law enforcement would receive $17.4 billion, a jump of nearly 11 percent, or $1.7 billion, over 2021 levels. And the president, acknowledging widespread concerns that are driving Republican attacks against Democrats, vowed to tackle the rise in violent crime.

As Biden himself proclaimedat his budget-unveiling press conference, “The answer is not to defund our police departments. It’s to fund our police and give them all the tools they need… The budget puts more police on the streets for community policing so they get to know the community they are policing.” 

When the Times opened up its article about the proposed budget to reader comments, reaction was sparse (about 50), compared to the 6.3 thousand outraged reactions to the Number One Trending story in America, concerning the Academy Awards "slapgate" controversy.

But, unlike the accolades about the Biden Wish List so dutifully being gushed out by the "progressive" congressional caucus, these 50 reader comments were almost uniformly critical of the Democrats' unabashed right-wing priorities. And not only were further comments soon cut off, within only a few hours, all the published ones were also mysteriously removed from the article. They simply were not in keeping with the usual positive responses from the paper's liberal readership to Joe Biden and his party.

Here is (was) my own published comment:

As outlined in this article, this budget is nothing less than a manifesto of death.

Increased production of nuclear weapons, and what amounts to military funding with no limits actually cancels out the window dressing of climate change amelioration. The US military already is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet and therefore the globe's biggest polluter. If the extra funding for police were earmarked for stringent programs that psychologically evaluate aspiring cops, weeding out the sociopaths with a penchant for power and cruelty, then great. But if the money will be going to more military weaponization of local police forces, and giving precedence to returning vets, a good percentage of whom suffer from PTSD as a result of long deployments in our endless wars, then we can probably look forward to a lot more George Floyds and Breonna Taylors and Eric Garners The increased funding not only should be used for psychological profiling of candidates, but to pay for the higher education of police officers, particularly in the field of social work.

The alleged motivation behind the "centrist" Biden budget, as explained in this article, is to fend off Republican criticism of the Dems allegedly being "soft on crime," increasing the re-election chances of vulnerable incumbents. In other words, the Ds are trying to beat the GOP at their own depraved game. The sound you hear in this proposed budget is not one hand clapping. It's an empire crumbling.

Orwell In the Arctic

From an official Pentagon document:

Our Army exists to protect our nation and to preserve the peace. To meet that core requirement, the Army must man, train, equip, and organize to win in the Arctic. The Arctic is simultaneously an arena of competition, a line of attack in conflict, a vital area holding many of our nation’s natural resources, and a platform for global power projection. The Army is committed to defending our Arctic interests. Accordingly, the Army will field a Multi-Domain Task Force-enabled division and adjust our Alaskan-based brigade combat teams to regain the U.S. Army’s Arctic dominance. This rejuvenated Arctic capability will increase the Army’s ability to operate in extreme cold-weather, mountainous, and high-altitude environments. This strategy poises the Army to adapt how it generates, postures, trains, and equips our forces to execute extended, multi-domain operations in extreme conditions in support of the Joint warfighter. Restoring Arctic dominance also requires an inherently Total Army approach incorporating the Army Reserve and National Guard. 

The opening paragraph of this grossly under-reported 2021 manifesto, effectively announcing the ultimate extension of the current proxy war of the US vs Russia (the physical battlefield being limited thus far to the impoverished, IMF-indebted US vassal state of Ukraine), is a near-perfect example of the Doublethink defined by George Orwell in his semi-fictional classic, 1984:

 The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them to forget the fact that has become inconvenient and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge and so on indefinitely, with the lie always  one step ahead of the truth.

But even going beyond the self-contradictory and mind-numbing  "war for peace" rhetoric is the arrogant assumption that the entire Arctic region is the sole property of the US-based oil companies, which are euphemized as "our national interests."

In point of fact, under international law, although no one nation-state can "own" the Arctic Ocean or the North Pole, the rapidly-melting sea ice means that Canada and Russia each own most of the Arctic coast-line. The United States owns only Alaska, which the Russian foreign minister only half-facetiously demanded be returned to it as the Ukraine invasion began.

But back to the Army's Orwellian manifesto. While readily admitting that the melting of the sea ice is directly attributable to the burning of fossil fuels, the US hegemon will fight to the death for the right of its subsidized oil companies to continue extracting these fossil fuels, even to the point of global suicide. And as the largest consumer of oil and the single largest contributor to pollution and climate change in the entire world, the Pentagon knows whereof it speaks. This is, at its essential rotten core, a fight for its own continued existence as a deadly force.

As the world's sole remaining Superpower, possessing nearly one thousand military bases compared to Russia's nine, the US hegemon nevertheless feels threatened by Russia's geographic Arctic advantage, in that the European Arctic, largely controlled by Russia, is far more accessible than the North American sections.  So, while the Army is ramping up severe weather training for its human troops in Alaska, it is also quietly occupying sections of Norway in preparation for an Arctic war for oil on the Eastern front.

Even as US troops have been surged to an increasingly vulnerable Poland, they're also playing war games in Norway, which itself owns quite a decent chunk of the thawing Arctic. Last week, this under-reported reality was brought to light with news that four Marines had been killed in a helicopter crash during "Exercise Cold Response 2022."

The official narrative of the accident, via the reliably non-critical oil and war-subsidized CNN, is every bit as Orwellian as you might expect:

According to NATO’s website, Cold Response 2022 is “a long-planned exercise bringing together thousands of troops from NATO Allies and partners, testing their ability to work together in cold weather conditions across Norway – on land, in the air and at sea.”

“This year’s exercise was announced over eight months ago,” the NATO site said. “It is not linked to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, which NATO is responding to with preventive, proportionate and non-escalatory measures.”

Preparations for an escalation of the war for oil have been duly euphemized as a triathlon of athletic competition, with the ultimate aim being the fostering of good will, peace and understanding among the good weaponized people of the earth. Russian oil and gas have zilch, nothing, nada to do with it.

As reported here, the US Marines actually landed on Norway's melting shores five years ago, for what was promised to be only a temporary, six-month-long training exercise:

For the first time since Hitler assaulted much of Europe in World War II, the American military is setting up a "rotational" base in the Scandinavian nation as a sign of chest-thumping strength against an allegedly threatening Russia. Not even during the Communist era of Cold War expansionism did Norway, always a fiercely independent social democratic country, ever invite any foreign military power to help it defend itself against a potential enemy. As a matter of fact, the Norwegian government signed an agreement with the Soviet Union immediately after World War II promising, after it joined NATO, that it would never allow foreign troops to be permanently stationed on its own soil.

So, now that the "allegedly" has finally been removed from the Russian threat, perhaps the hearts and minds of the then-recalcitrant Norwegian locals, so shocked and dismayed by the sight of Marines slogging through the snow in their jungle fatigues, will be softened enough to accept their occupation graciously. Goodness knows, judging from the civilian and media chest-thumping on display here in The Homeland, the relentless propaganda has worked its magic, and most of us have overcome the "sickly inhibitions" or unreasonable aversion to slaughter of innocents, a malady which so long ago was caustically diagnosed by the ever-ascendant Neocons as the "Vietnam Syndrome."

There are, in any case, no signs yet of another 60s-style antiwar movement. Maybe we'll protest if/when they reinstitute the draft. Never say never, because despite having outsize military strength and obscene wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs and corporations, our ruling elites are feeling more than a little paranoid. Their status of sole remaining Superpower is dwindling fast. Russia may lack the military strength, but both its existing and potential fossil fuel wealth (and possible partnership with both China and the Saudis) have made it an incipient economic superpower. Ergo, the increasing and increasingly ineffective economic sanctions by the Biden administration against it.

It's becoming a multipolar world, and as John Mearsheimer writes in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" multipolarity is the most dangerous kind. The bipolarity of the previous Cold War between the US and Russia was not as dangerous as the current situation, because MAD (mutually assured destruction of two competing nuclear powers) actually served to cancel out nuclear war.

Russia, the de facto re-emerging economic hegemon, coupled with the rise of China, has caused the US and its NATO allies to recklessly court nuclear war. Mearsheimer warned two decades ago that 

"A potential hegemon does not have to do much to generate fear among other states in the system. Its formidable capabilities alone are likely to scare neighboring great powers and push at least some of them to create a balancing coalition against their dangerous opponent. Because a state's intentions are difficult to discern, and because they can change quickly, rival great powers are inclined to assume the worst about the potential hegemon's intentions, further reinforcing the threatened states' incentive to contain it and maybe even weaken it, if the opportunity presents itself."

The upshot, Mearsheimer presciently concluded more than two decades ago, is that "hegemons generate spirals of fear that are hard to control. This problem is compounded by the fact that they possess considerable power and thus are likely to think they can solve their security problems by going to war."

Both Russia and the US are contributing mightily to the "spiral of fear," and the American oil and weapons-funded corporate media are doing their best to both speed it up and drill it down. President Joe Biden, who ghoulishly acknowledged at his NATO press conference the other day that since he is "long in the tooth" he is an expert at war, is doing his own best to contribute to the endless spiral, warning the public about incipient chemical and biological and cyber weapons attacks from the latest reincarnation of Hitler. By calling Putin a thug, a butcher and a war criminal (even if arguably true) Biden is being recklessly provocative, even now stating he is open to a first strike nuclear attack - with kinder, gentler, "smarter" bombs, no doubt.

Meanwhile, back in The Homeland, the official policy is to studiously ignore the more pressing biological problem of Covid-19 and to appoint a new Covid "czar" whose own ballyhooed talent is calming the public into even more complacency, submission and denial than has already been engendered within it. Biden would be better advised to tone down some of his taunts to Russia and save just a little of his playground name-calling for Congress. But he won't, because they're all members of the same corrupt club, and the status quo suits him just fine.

The New Orwellian Normal can be defined as learning to live with our own utterly preventable and unnecessary misery, destruction, and even deaths. We are urged to "share the sacrifice" of record food shortages and cost of living increases and endless wars for profit with the very same demented fools who cause all the problems in the first place. This foolery is not just limited to Uncle Joe or Vlad the Impaler Hitler, not by a long shot. Next in line for the US imperialist throne:

Doublethink is not only the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts and beliefs in an elite brain at the same time, but to communicate the nonsense to one's subjects effectively and with the requisite obfuscation posing as sanity. So, should we call the above example a Sad Semantic Spiral, or DoubleNegativethink?

Notwithstanding the insanity of Daylight Saving Time, the least that Kamala Harris could have done was to mangle Shakespeare and admit that the significance of the passage of time signifies nothing at all. She and her cohort should celebrate their nihilism with their words as well as with their foul deeds.

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?