It's Always Darkest Right Before the Dawn of the Dead.

 It seems like it was only a month ago that the undertakers of the Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) were lowering shuffling old Joe Biden into his political grave before his body was even cold. 

But to prove that even moribund presidents can become reanimated zombies, the DIC-heads in the White House and their media scribes have suddenly changed the plot - they unearthed Joe Biden right out of the plot. They've transformed Joe Biden into a "bad-ass" monster named Dark Brandon. 

It's apparently meant as self-deprecating parody of the "Let's Go Brandon" pejorative  beloved of Trump fans ever since a crowd yelled "F--- Joe Biden" at Talladega Super Speedway last October. A TV commenter interviewing winner Brandon Brown had lamely tried to convince viewers that the crowd was really cheering for the athlete rather than cursing out the president.

Some bright DIC-heads unleashed the Dark Brandon persona on the world as an arch means to turn the insult right on its head. Manufactured legend has it that the Biden character is scaring whole audiences full of Republicans to death. Word has it that they're even vomiting in the aisles. Shorn of his aviator sunglasses,  Biden's newly revealed squinting red eyes are lasers blasting straight down into their soulless hypocritic innards, leaving them writhing in pain and whimpering for mercy.

Or, so the cheesy DIC narrative goes.

Now, if the monstrous Dark Brandon character reminds you of an aging Hellboy without the antlers and also happens to scare or at least nauseate you, your kids, your grandkids and your nervous Aunt Tillie, that is just necessary collateral damage in this virtual war for the democratic soul of our nation You simply must get in the spirit of DIC fun. Because despite all his loathsomeness, this is no demon from hell, people. This is the new, improved, "feisty" Joe Biden.

 According to the HuffPo, his reincarnation as Dark Brandon has millions of diehard DIC-heads all over the land thrilled in only the best of all possible worlds kind of way. If you can't beat a cartoon villain like Donald Trump with your misinformative anti-disinformation campaigns, then you might as well join him. You might as well throw all caution to the wind and turn electoral politics  into the full-bore monster movie franchise it always was anyway. 

  Imagine, if you will, the shuffling brain-dead lead zombie in Dawn of the Dead  suddenly turning into a "bad-ass" superhero right before your disbelieving eyes. Once only capable of sputtering out one gaffe or non sequitur after the other,  Dark Brandon has developed the preternatural ability to fire off pithy one-liners about rich people and their tax breaks in one breath, and in the next tell a room full of rich donors that Trump Republicans are "semi-fascists."

No matter that Dark Brandon didn't explain why they're only half-fascists and not whole ones. Because his blazing eyes and his fiery words slammed into the elite audience like a semi going a thousand miles an hour. The well-heeled patrons at that exclusive screening were reported to be shocked right into opening their wallets, if only to immunize themselves from insult, zombie virus - or god forbid, Biden threatening them with higher taxes.

 Former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer was so impressed with the new character, that his reliable stock of weasel words failed him. He was reduced to tweeting out: 

Notice that Bad-Ass Biden is not cursing his  rich donors and that he is only extending his index finger rather than the dreaded middle one. This edgy version of the meme actually communicates reassurance to the ruling class, lest they be fearful of getting parted from some of their cash against their will. Just because the propaganda about Biden has changed doesn't mean that anything else will. He did promise them that nothing affecting their coddled lives would ever fundamentally change.

Therefore, they shouldn't fret overmuch about his careful semi-forgiveness of student loans for a selected percentage of America's debt slaves. Because knocking $10,000 or as much as $20,000 off their debt is merely a band-aid over a gaping wound. The borrowers will continue to suffer and pay, while the rich themselves will never feel a thing. That's because the lower classes are being pitted against each other in yet another variation of the Divide and Conquer method which has always kept the rich wealthy and the powerful jn power. Non-grads will be instructed to resent the grads or the semi-grads for getting tossed a few extra pennies. They will not be urged to resent the for-profit colleges and the investors in the for-profit colleges - the real culprits in this overrated scam.

My advice? Pick an aisle seat close to an exit, and whatever you do, don't buy any more of their stale, dry, overpriced popcorn.

Keeping the Trump Franchise Alive

 Something must be off with my aghastitude meter, because for the life of me I just can't get excited about the ongoing saga of the FBI raid on Donald Trump's Florida estate, in search of allegedly stolen top secret classified documents.

Rumor had it that the G-Men were tipped off by an insider that Trump was hoarding the nuclear codes. This is despite numerous mainstream media reports, when he was in the White House within physical reach of the Big Red Phone, that his alarmed minions were keeping all this info out of his reckless hands. He was apparently in the habit of flushing sensitive stuff in the toilet, anyway. And besides, if he'd really wanted to sell the codes to the highest bidder, you'd think he would have struck a deal by now.

 The only thing we should really fear about nuclear war is the recent reckless provocations of the United States against both Russia and China. The manufactured fear that we'd get nuked got so intense, in fact, that New York City had taken to running public service announcements about what to do in the event of Armageddon.

 If you, like me, are of a certain age and vividly remember those useless classroom "duck and cover" drills during the First Cold war, you'll be happy to know that you can now save yourselves the modern way, without having to tax your knees and spine. All you have to do is go indoors and shut all your windows before lowering the blinds so that Russian or Chinese missiles won't see you. Or so that nobody else can see you either, given that you are also instructed to remove all your clothing and place it in a bag to contain radioactive dust. Then you should switch on the TV and await further instructions from experts who are sheltering in place in their network studios or underground bunkers. These instructions assume, of course, that you are not among the growing number of homeless people in the United States.

As it is right now, as I write this, turning on the TV or logging on to your favorite mainstream news site will subject you to one of two images: either a scowling Donald Trump raising his defiant fist, or numerous ground and aerial shots of Mar-a-Lago.

Given that the FBI raid and its wall-to-wall media coverage has boosted Trump ten points ahead of his closest GOP primary rival (Ron De Santis), he might consider renaming his club MAGA Largo and bragging that he is the reincarnation of that other embattled film noir hero hotelier Humphrey Bogart, holed up in his own Florida club, fighting off both the cops and the various sleazy gangsters and stool pigeons lurking about the place.

In actuality, Trump is simply the buffoon he always was. His coup attempt largely failed both because of his stupidity and lack of foresight and those of his inner circle of gangsters and stool pigeons. As historian and author (The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order) Gary Gerstle writes, 

The January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.

Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.

So as I see it, there are several "takeaways" from both the raid and the corporate media's overwrought coverage of it. The first is that just because Trump is a doofus doesn't mean that his political rivals in the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration are all that intelligent either. Did they really think that going after him on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act and stealing papers would not boost his poll numbers, his cult of victimhood, and instigate a rightwing backlash against the rightwing FBI? Or, did they stupidly assume that the raid and possible resulting indictments would make him the ideal "pied piper" candidate for the doddering Joe Biden or other weak Wall Street candidate to easily trounce in 2024? Remember how well that cynical ploy worked out for the Dems in 2016, thanks in no small part to Bill Clinton urging Trump to run.

It seems odd that the Feds only got around to getting their search warrant a year and a half after these highly sensitive documents had gone missing. They were hiding in plain sight all along, or at least were in a secure location known to the authorities.

 The whole scenario could have been lifted straight from Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of duplicates and duplicity, The Purloined Letter, plotted around a mysterious document rumored to expose the French queen's indiscretions and thus making her and various VIPS prone to blackmail and extortion. It isn't the content or even the existence of the stolen document that matters in this story. It's the suspicion that it does matter. It's the speculation of what it contains, if it does exist. It's the assigning of any importance or meaning of the recovered (or not) document.

 And we'll probably never learn about the content (or not) of Trump's purloined documents and perhaps compromising emails, photos or other intel. Censorious elites in fear of being embarrassed or compromised can and will always claim that transparency would only endanger "national security" and reward China, Russia, Iran or whatever enemy they can come up with next. Life imitates art in this case: one of the alleged documents sought and/or seized by the FBI involves the French president. Where's C. Auguste Dupin when you need him to untangle this latest mess of intra-oligarchic intrigue? Instead of the raiding FBI goons ruining Trump's day, perhaps an all-American rumpled cigar-chomping Columbo-type detective showing up at MAGA Largo HQ to flatter Trump would probably have gotten much better results than the elite army of J. Edgar Hoover has, so far anyway.

Could Trump himself have avoided all this drama if he had simply converted his palace into his official presidential library with the help of the National Archivist, as Barack Obama and others have done? Not that Obama's presidential library will contain the actual physical documents, but only an assurance that "digital" copies of same will be released, sometime in the vague and distant future. Trump's biggest offense, perhaps, is that he isn't a reader or a frequenter of libraries. He's not even offering the excuse that he is hard at work on his memoirs and thus needs copious official research material to refresh his memory and ensure accuracy, if not correct spelling or the editing out of numerous superfluous exclamation points. 

Donald Trump should be the least of our worries. The Supreme Court, the CIA, McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, the White House - they are only the first villains who come to mind. 

The MAGA Largo saga appears to be the Establishment's second act in the drama leading up to the November midterms, when both sides of the Duopoly would be perfectly fine with a banishment of both Trump fans and what's left of the progressive left. With the centrist liberal class's defense of both the police state, and their actual or attempted censorship of independent media voices, they have chosen to ignore that their FBI heroes also just raided the home of the leader of the African Black Socialists as well as other unnamed targets, accusing them of conspiring with Russia in order to undermine American democracy, interfere with the political process and worst of all offenses against neoliberal decency, "sow division." among citizens with their anti-war rhetoric. As reported by the World Socialist Website,

The APSP’s only activities noted in the indictment consist of holding rallies in various American cities opposing the “Genocide of African People in the United States” and making public statements denouncing US-NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine, while expressing political sympathy for Russia.

The case has all the hallmarks of a political frame-up targeting a political organization for its opposition to the US-NATO war against Russia. It points to an attempt to intimidate and criminalize opposition to the war more broadly.

It's gotten to the ridiculous point that any criticism of war and our leaders' reckless provocations of war, of censorship, and of the police state will get you labeled a Trump sympathizer or a fascist. They're gaslighting us not with expert propaganda, but with the equivalent of nitrous oxide. Their narratives are meant to manufacture fear and submission, but they're full of sound and furious silliness, signifying nothing so much as their own desperation. Their slapstick comedy would make us laugh if it weren't also so damned dangerous.

 

Whaddya Say, Boys - Should We Flush It Or Steal It?

 

Climate and Health, Neoliberal-Style

To call the odiously-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) a "watered-down" version of Joe Biden's original plan to fight climate change and expand the social safety net is actually doing unintended homage to such endangered bodies of water as Lake Mead, whose own declining levels are literally bringing up the bodies.

For despite the current hoopla,, there will be plenty of corpses arising from this "landmark legislation." Its very name is a dead giveaway that it is rife with debunked "trickle down" theory and tax breaks for the wealthy in lieu of cash aid to people. Despite a modest tax on corporations, stock buy-back schemes, and more money for IRS enforcement, the oligarchy will continue to profit at the expense of the rest of us. Wall Street's carried interest tax loophole, which Biden promised to close as a campaign stunt, survives and thrives. And the climate will continue to worsen.  The mere imposition of carbon offsets and the awarding of more carbon credits and threats of fines to polluters, while still allowing for the relentless destructive drilling for fossil fuels in the melting Arctic and the still-polluted Gulf of Mexico, is only one indication that this legislation is not serious. It is deeply and pathologically cynical. Joe Manchin's outrage-inducing perk of a new pipeline for West Virginia is a relatively miniscule part of it.

The establishment media is doing its damnedest, nevertheless, to cast the Senate passage of the IRA as a stunning victory for Democrats and a vindication for President Biden.  After all, any shallow body of water seems to take on volume in a storm. The froth and the frenzy that the headlines are whipping up makes this legislation seem more potent than it actually is. 

The media storm will die down soon enough, once people realize that there's nothing in the IRA. for them and they're still living in a cracked crater that used to be a reservoir.. There will be no debt relief, no subsidized child care, no paid family leave, no minimum wage increase, no reduction in drug prices if you're covered by private insurance or no insurance at all. The Democrats are banking on people not realizing how badly they've been screwed until after the mid-terms. The timing of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema suddenly "caving" to the program at the last minute seems to be proof that the legislation is a self-serving grab for continued political power.

Granted, Medicare will finally be able to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. But that change won't go into effect until 2026, and it will be for only ten drugs, with incremental additions kicking in thereafter. That gives lobbyists and their bought politicians plenty of time to fiddle around and whittle away. Who knows, for example, which party will be in charge three or four years from now? If a Republican Congress doesn't repeal the measure outright, then a future director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services could magically spin through the revolving doors from the pharmaceutical industry itself. That way, even if the measure were left intact, the prospect of good faith negotiations would be rendered minimal to nonexistent. 

Even were the measure to go into effect tomorrow, it would be no guarantee, given that Biden named Liz Fowler, the former WellPoint and Johnson & Johnson executive and chief architect of the insurance industry-dictated Affordable Care Act, to head the payment policy division of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It also should come as no surprise that of all the health-centered provisions of the IRA, only the COVID-based enhanced subsidies to the insurance cartel will take effect immediately. (They'd been set to expire at the end of the year.)

But meanwhile, the New York Times is creating artificial waves in the equivalent of a kiddie pool:

The legislation, while falling far short of the ambitious $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act that the House passed in November, fulfills multiple longstanding Democratic goals, including countering the toll of climate change on a rapidly warming planet, taking steps to lower the cost of prescription drugs and to revamping portions of the tax code in a bid to make it more equitable.

It does not reverse. It merely counters. It does not give relief to consumers of the for-profit health care marketplace. It is merely taking steps. Its revamping of the tax code is only a "bid" to make it fair. In other words, it's pretty much aspirational. It's pretty much a P.R. gimmick. It's a descent into yet another simmering frog-pot, which they're marketing as a thrill-packed ride in a water park.

Wheeeeeeeeee!

The government's "$400 billion investment" in climate change reversal partly consists of tax credits to well-off consumers who can afford to buy $40,000 or $50,000 electric cars, and to privatized utilities who, it is optimistically assumed, can be "prodded" but never quite required under threat of prison for CEOs, to invest in wind and solar power. 

Nonetheless,  The Times hypes the legislation as totally avoiding the "pitfalls" that 50 years of previous environmental control laws were subjected to. By using such language as "we're on the cusp" of solving global warming, the Times cheerleaders seem to contradict themselves.

But the actual goalpost is not stopping pollution.  Despite the fact that global warming will continue with a vengeance, we should be consoled. According to the Times, as long as people "believe" the evidence that they see and feel all around them, the oil and gas industry's propaganda war at least is lost.  And thus we might delay catastrophe for another relative nano-second:

All said that the incontrovertible evidence that climate change has already arrived— in the form of frighteningly extreme wildfires, drought, storms and floods afflicting every corner of the United States — has helped build political support. Increasingly, the sheer volume of real-time data has overwhelmed the well-financed, multidecade strategy of oil, gas and coal companies to sow doubt about the severity of climate change.

There was no mention in the article of the bribery power of Big Oil over corrupt politicians in Washington and in state-houses, however. That would have been a real downer for a populace which must be rendered triumphant and optimistic in time for the next election.

For the nation's poor people, whom the Times just condescended to notice in a different small-font buried headline on Monday's homepage, there will be no relief.  Instead, the IRA will dedicate "$60 billion to help disadvantaged areas that are disproportionately affected by climate change, including $27 billion for the creation of what would be "the first national “green bank” to help drive investments in clean energy projects — particularly in poor communities."

In other words. this reeks of being just one more creative way  for the wealthy to get government welfare and cast it as a way to help the poor - who simply cannot be trusted to spend money on their own.

A little history on this old bipartisan "trickle-down" neoliberal gimmick:

Promise Zones are the latest iteration of an idea first promoted by Jack Kemp, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President George H.W. Bush. He called them enterprise zones; the Republican approach offered tax incentives and regulatory relief for businesses that would provide jobs and commerce in impoverished inner-city and rural areas. Several states adopted this idea, but no federal legislation succeeded until 1993, when President Bill Clinton relabeled them empowerment zones, with little substantive difference. Modest levels of funding were attached, the bulk of which went to private-sector and government entities with claims that it would trickle down in jobs for the impoverished inhabitants. Success was likewise modest and accountability lacking.

From Barack Obama's version of the anti-New Deal regimen marketing of "poverty gold" promise zones as the lifting-up of poor people who themselves must be granted no say ordirect benefits, to Donald Trump's more blatant grift of the "opportunity zones" that his own family and cronies have directly profited from, we have now proceeded to "green banks" which I somehow doubt will be operated by just plain neighborhood "folks." Given how much Joe Biden loves his banking buddies in Delaware and at the Bank of America, look for the behemoths of hyper-capitalism to start submitting their bids and braying about their expertise and concern about the climate before his ink on the bill is even dry.

Remember his zoned-out promise to his donors that "nothing will fundamentally change?" It will remain a Winner Take All climate on Biden's watch.

Not for nothing is Lake Mead, rapidly being destroyed by the global warming of the Capitalocene epoch, just another endangered remnant of FDR's New Deal. It was created by the sweat and paid labor of the Civilian Conservation Corps, not a bunch of bespoke suits in a "promise zone."

A Theory of the Covid-Exhausted Leisure Class

 Mere days before a leak of a Bank of America memo calling for more bad times and fewer jobs for Americans, President Joe Biden groveled before this same megabank's CEO, thanking him for accepting his phone calls and seeking his wisdom on the financial health of "his consumers."

"It's good to see you recovering, Mr. President," Brian Moynihan gushed in return, less than two days before a maskless Biden suffered a Covid relapse and had to return to isolated splendor.

Moynihan was one of the few tycoons speaking at the Thursday White House confab who were wise enough to appear remotely, so as to protect themselves from Biden's lurking microbes, while selling the New Normal of forcing people back to in-person work if they want to keep their jobs.

Notice how narrowly Biden restricted the conversation to bank customers, rather than to the financial well-being of everybody - especially the nation's older citizens, who are still getting seriously ill and dying from Covid in disproportionate numbers.. A new study by the UMass Gerontology Institute reveals that at least half of the American seniors living alone are so badly off that they can no longer afford even the basic necessities of life. One-fourth of married retirees also report having trouble paying for even the barest essentials. 

But rule by a gerontocracy controlled by an oligarchy does not mean that geriatric problems register even a blip on their radar.

To the contrary: it soon became apparent at the plutocratic bull session that the only financial needs to be discussed in the White House that day are of those making at least $100,000 a year,

Moynihan explained:

 "At Bank of America, we have, you know, 60 million consumers and 35 million Core Checking accounts for Americans. 

Number one, they’re spending more money.  Through the first 25 days of July 2022, they have spent 10 percent more than they spent in July of 2021, the first 25 days.  And that’s consistent with what we saw in the whole second quarter in earlier this year. The second key point I’d say, Mr. President, is their balances are much higher than they were in the pandemic.  

And so, if you look at people of, sort of, $100,000-income families in our client base, you’ll see that their balances go from three to five to seven times more than they were in the pandemic. 

 The problem for these beleaguered, flush-with-cash people, he added, is not only how to spend all that excess money, but how to be approvingly noticed while doing so. What fun is isolated splendor? What good is money and bling and merch if you cannot also revel in experiences outside of the four walls of your castle?

Now, just because Moynihan had enough smarts to not expose himself to the sick president does not mean that he can't garble his own words every bit as incoherently as the sick president himself. The banker continued,

They bought everything they could — they bought a lot of stuff when they were cooped up at home; they’re now out traveling and experiencing the world due to vaccines and — and the condition of the COVID pandemic.

You have to not only conspicuously consume, you also have to  conspicuously experience the world due to vaccines and the condition of the pandemic, which itself remains deliberately murky because capitalists like him have decreed that cases are no longer counted by the government in any systematic, science-based way. He would have us accept the notion that "the condition of the COVID pandemic" is that notwithstanding the evidence, it has been decreed, out of capitalist necessity,  to be over. He tries to divert attention away from the windfall profits enjoyed by the oligarchs since the pandemic began by pointing to an alleged seven-fold increase in bank deposits of his customers. He is buying into the canard that it was government largesse that made ordinary people suddenly so rich and that it is not corporate greed, but ordinary people, who have contributed to inflation.

 It was the airline industry, remember - not groveling government officials -  which effectively decreed to the CDC this spring that in the interest of profits for the few,  the isolation period of Covid patients must be reduced from 10 days to a meager five.

(CDC is the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its actual function right now might as well be the Centers for the Prevention of Disease Control. Or, given that oligarchs have enjoyed windfall profits during Covid, maybe even Centers for the Rapacious  Accumulation of Possessions - CRAP).

And that's where Tony Capuano, head honcho of the Marriott hotel chain, came in. Unlike Moynihan, he did not have the wisdom to physically stay away from the "recovered" president; he breathed the very same stale but rarefied air as Joe Biden. There is as of yet no word whether the hotel magnate has contracted the virus as a result of the administration's "let 'er rip" policy.

Capuano's words of wisdom: 

"Well, thank you, Mr. President, for the invitation today.  I think what we’ve learned over the last couple quarters is really the resilience of travel.  And when we look at our forward-booking data, we see real evidence of that resilience."  

 Capuano fulsomely praised the intrepid pioneers of the traveling and "experiencing" class for possessing such wonderful resilience to go along with all that surplus cash. 

It was social scientist Thorstein Veblen who observed more than a century ago, during the first Gilded Age, that it's not enough to be rich in isolation. In order for wealth to have meaning, it must be tastefully flaunted in public, spreading the message to the hoi polloi that wealth is a virtue and a mark of its possessors' good character. This nostrum is precisely why wealthy liberals are so averse to Donald Trump's crude tastelessness, from his outer-Borough speech patterns to, most recently, the gold-plated coffin for his first ex-wife, whose final resting place is a tax dodge of a cemetery plot at his New Jersey golf club. His fellow oligarchs are just fine with his actual policies, including a huge war budget and tax breaks for the wealthy, to name just two.

So in the modern version, for the pandemic-exhausted leisure class, "resilience" is a virtue to be both admired and emulated by the less fortunate. The courage to get out there and insanely but politely thumb your nose at a pestilential catastrophe is the new positive marker of moral character, a trait that we should all aspire to.

The not-so-subliminal message broadcast at last week's White House confab is that if the resilient wealthy can ignore the pandemic with such courage and fortitude, then so should the rest of us. Even if we're barely making it, we can learn to cope. Not so much to experience virtuous leisure - because that ranking connotes that the wealth was earned honestly and was not at all predatory - but to return to virtuous work in person....  preferably at lower wages, of course.

The Bank of America memo, written by one of the financial behemoth's economists, calls for increasing unemployment so as to depress wages  that, while rising somewhat in some niches, can still be considered stagnant. As The Intercept reported, 

The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to virtually every industry, income and skill level.

Therefore, the  BOA's CEO bragging to Biden about his customers having as much as seven times the money in their accounts that they did in the pandemic's early days was disingenuous at best, and a warning that the merely well-off are making too much money and got too much government aid at worst. For as hard as it may be to fathom, an estimated one-third of workers who make six-figure salaries actually do live paycheck to paycheck. The cost of living is getting crazy out there, when in some areas even $100,000 doesn't cover rent, gas, clothing and other bills. It's hard out there for the bourgeoisie, whether they be at the petit end or upper end of the top 10 or 20 or 30 percent.

Joe Biden's own crass political message is that the true underclass and the truly needy and  especially the struggling elderly will continue to be ignored on his watch.  This is especially cruel, for as the New York Times reported this past spring, 

Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.

As a senior citizen himself, Biden has not let us forget that at age 79, even with the virus, he is still working hard every single day. Even when he's sick, he feels great, and so should you. He is only in isolation so that other hard-working patriotic "folks" won't also get sick. I don't know about you, but with this kind of neoliberal rhetoric I can absolutely see cuts to Social Security and Medicare looming on the horizon, even as the old "folks" are sickening and dying in such record numbers that the trust funds that we pay into all our working lives are undoubtedly a bit more solvent than they were before the pandemic.

Rather than give more help to struggling people who don't even have the money to get to a free vaccination site, our government tries to force them out of sight and out of mind.

So back to Tony Capuano, the hospitality industry tycoon, who recently bragged on TV that the much higher prices he is charging for his hotel rooms are "sustainable." Whether this is because the globe-trotting Leisure Class is so "resilient" was not mentioned. He did tell Joe Biden that were it not for Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reversing the requirement that all incoming foreign travelers must show proof of vaccination, his coffers would not be so nearly full-to-bursting as they are now. Or, as he finessed his own word salad in the brave new spirit of Universal Leisure Class Resiliency,

"And then when we look on a global basis, the continued opening of borders, the easing of restrictions that restricted travel is having a massive impact on our global business."

Biden himself couldn't seem to stop fixating on the alleged trials and tribulations of the $100,000-plus crowd. He garbled hoarsely,

"One of the things that I find is — I look at and I take it very seriously the confidence level of the American people in the economy.  And they’re so down and they’re looking — there’s reason to be down, but I started thinking about it.  And, Brian, (he of the Bank of America) you and I talked about it just a little bit.

You know, the first year, we were able to, with the — with the Rescue Plan, we were able to send them a check for eight grand.  I mean, a check.  One — and beyond that, by the way; there was more than that.....But when you’re mak- — if you’re making 120 grand and you get a check for 8 grand, that’s a lot of money.  And so it helped save a lot of people, in terms of getting thrown out of their homes and rental housing and a whole range of things."

I don't know anybody who got a check for 8 grand, do you? Biden sent everybody $1400 after promising us two grand, because the evil Donald Trump had beat him to the punch and managed to send out an additional $600 before his first term expired. Some people have speculated that the rescue plan's direct cash aid for children might have caused Biden's brain to create its own magic 8-ball. And anyway, since this cash aid for kids was means-tested and limited to parents making below $75,000, it seems doubtful that his fantasy version of the Down and Outs got any of it.

Biden seems also  to have formed a muddled brain-picture of hordes of Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) denizens being evicted en masse from their McMansions and their luxury condos. And with the price of gas to fill their guzzling SUVs so high, and the long wait for $40,000 battery-powered cars and the dearth of charging stations, is it any wonder that Biden's folks are feeling so stressed out?

I'm curious about just how many people making those paltry low six figures ended up being evicted from their apartments. In yet another sign that Biden doesn't give a fig about truly poor people, the issue of affordable or government-subsidized housing, as well as the need for rent control laws to rein in greedy corporate landlords, was never as much as whispered about at the White House meeting. 

If you aren't solidly middle class or upper middle class, then you might as well not even exist as far as these captains of industry and their political henchmen are concerned.

Perhaps the worst part is that the meeting itself became so boring that, according to the official transcript, the White House press corps "exited" en masse before the bigwigs and various assorted government fawners even got finished garbling amongst themselves. 

Or maybe "exit" is just Leisure Class-speak for getting kicked out so that the thought leaders could freely talk about that secret Bank of America memo and discuss how to better punish the bottom 70 or 80 percent of us who irresponsibly lack the cash just to subsist, let alone wallow in our own resilient world-experiences.

Why the Armed US Hegemon Hates Reproductive Freedom

 I joked in my last post that with the way things are going for Joe Biden, his approval rating is going to plummet down to One Percent.

And lo and behold, a few days later a new poll revealed that only one percent of 18 to 29-year-olds "strongly approve" of the job that Joe Biden is doing.  The establishment media are pointing to the dreaded "generation gap," with which they have traditionally explained away all manner of social discontents. The revolt of the young was particularly strong during the 1960s, with uprisings against the military draft and and a parallel clamoring for civil rights and racial justice. Then came the 70s and the right-wing counter-revolution and the lords of finance capital co-opting all the turmoil by dividing the working class, destroying unions and making "personal responsibility" the core dogma of their neoliberal agenda. The protesters of the 60s were replaced by the debt slaves and minimum wage earners of today.

But then came Covid, and the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the pendulum may finally be swinging back into the civil revolt phase. The media-political complex is paying the usual condescending lip service to the young and discontented, acknowledging that there is an atherosclerotic gerontocracy running the place.  For its own part, the clueless White House was only too happy to prove the theory that the old codgers really do have it out for all of us, sniffing that "activists have consistently been out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party."

As if that were a bad thing, given that the party's "main stream" has become so clogged with the raw sewage of neo-McCarthyism in the service of corporatism that the law of physics all but demands that new renegade rivulets develop and set their own courses. 

And this much is obvious: the gerontocrats, as much as they despise the dissatisfied young, need to keep feasting on their blood. If you want to know the core reason that the Democratic leadership has been so remiss in codifying Roe vs Wade and taking on the reactionary Supreme Court, then look no further than the plummeting US birthrate.  The Supremes are the Democratic establishment's secret best friends.

Since there are simply not enough young bodies around any more to fight in their endless wars for corporate profit and global dominance, the right of non-elite women to guaranteed birth control and abortion is, effectively, anathema to the ruling class and their world order. And this latest "NATO" war against Russia, possibly expanding to China and beyond, is projected to last for decades. Boots on the ground will be desperately needed, decade after decade. The reproductive supply chain must not be interrupted at this fraught point in time.

But since they can't come right out and say so without looking like the sociopaths that they are, they foist the blame on today's young people for being  too dumb, too greedy, too thuggish and too fat to fight and kill for them.

Or as the New York Times more delicately headlines the distressing cannon fodder shortage: "With Few Able and Fewer Willing, US Military Can't Find Recruits:

These are tough times for military recruiting. Almost across the board, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments this year — a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops that is on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few people to function.

Covid-19 is part of the problem. Lockdowns during the pandemic have limited recruiters’ ability to forge bonds face to face with prospects. And the military’s vaccine mandate has kept some would-be troops away.

The horror. 

Not only is America's potential weaponized flesh ignorant about The Science of vaccines, they're ungrateful money-hungry little wretches who are more interested in getting rich off all the great high-paying service jobs out there than they are in dying for The Homeland. In Timespeak:

The current white-hot labor market, with many more jobs available than people to fill them, is also a factor, as rising civilian wages and benefits make military service less enticing.

If they're not greedy, then kids today are so criminally depraved and/or obese that the desperate US military is forced to reject them when they do apply.  According to the Times, fully three-quarters of military applicants have some sort of criminal record, or are physically unfit.

The paper does not delve into why this is so, never factoring in the hopelessness of those who have never known any reality but the iron heel of capitalism, with no positive government investment or intervention in their lives since the day they were born.

But the bipartisan heirs of Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal baby-mama Margaret Thatcher are all too cynically willing to bribe these needy people with bonuses if they join the cause of imperialism:

To try to counter those forces, the military has pushed enlistment bonuses as high as $50,000, and is offering “quick ship” cash of up to $10,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training in 30 days. To broaden the recruiting pool, the service branches have loosened their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. In June, the Army even briefly dropped its requirement for a high school diploma, before deciding that was a bad move and rescinding the change.

The best part of our free public education system for the military-industrial complex, in fact, is that armed forces recruiters (more lately augmented by domestic police patrols) have long been ubiquitous in American high schools. I remember getting relentless calls from all four branches of the military asking for my son and daughter, whose names and phone number they had acquired from school administrators, whose federal funding was contingent upon their cooperation. Nothing we said ever discouraged these recruiters from calling us over and over again, over a period of several years. When my son told one caller that he didn't want to kill people in a war, the recruiter outright lied and said he would never have to, dangling before him instead the prospect of easy big money, job training and subsidized education - in effect, making a cynical appeal to his nascent avarice.

The Times article at least did honestly describe US high schools as "the military's most productive hunting grounds," while not exploring the possible connection between the increased number of school shootings and the preoccupation of certain young American males with military assault rifles and accessories like camo vests and body armor.

Unfortunately, as one Air Force major general, Edward Thomas Jr,  complained to the newspaper,  

. The relationships that recruiters were not able to cultivate face to face during the pandemic’s early stages, he said, mean there is now a drought of graduates signing on the dotted line.

Oh no, not another drought! It's as bad as the nerve of the vast majority of American young folks for not approving the job performance of Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden. It's just terrible when a drought of weaponized bodies combines with Roe vs Wade activists who refuse to swim with the sharks in Democratic mainstream! Especially when the Powers That Be unhelpfully describe the worsening Covid pandemic as only a "short-term problem."

The Times article continues,

And what the military calls propensity — the share of young adults who would consider serving — has fallen steadily for several years. It stood at 13 percent before the pandemic began, General Thomas said, but is now 9 percent.

“There are just lower levels of trust with the U.S. government and the military,” he said.

Once again, there are certainly no deep dives into the "pool" to explain just why so many people, both young and old, are so dissatisfied with the consortium of politicians, corporate CEOs, generals, tech billionaires, arms dealers and bureaucrats that comprise the government.

Going with the flow, or staying within a party "mainstream," is a lot to ask of the people that our leaders are actively trying to drown: the forced dunking is the lack of guaranteed, single payer health care, housing, debt free education and the ironclad protection of reproductive rights in all 50 states.

So it's gratifying to learn that the people are, in ever increasing numbers, telling their overlords to just go soak their heads when they urge us to vote, vote and vote, even as they admonish us to leave the Supreme Court forced-birthers in peace, and above all, to only engage in the kind of regimented violence that is fully sanctioned by the oligarchic state.

When they tell you to shut up, when they try to drown you out, just keep on screaming. Our voices are the only life-preservers that too many of us have left.

Some Great Biden Replacement Theories

 It's not whether Joe Biden will run for another term. It's whether he'll outlast the first one. According to Peter Baker of the New York Times, Biden has actually taken to shuffling, as if mumbling, fumbling, and bumbling were not already bad enough.

The Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) is on a campaign of nudging the old guy out now, and eventually replacing him with younger flesh. Billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and his California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, are the two most prominent names that the establishment media are currently and delicately promoting to the liberal masses for the smooth manufacture of their consent.

Despite Biden often calling his vice president "President Harris" in what appear to be multiple episodes of senile perseveration, the DIC-heads are studiously not promoting Kamala to run in 2024. It turns out that Biden's penchant for tossing word salads is contagious, because Harris herself has developed quite the habit of uttering nonsensical answers to reporters' questions.  The DIC bet in 2020 that she'd attract women and minority voters solely by dint of her exotic identity, but that hasn't  panned out in terms of her actual performance.

It's July, the height of the silly season for idle speculation. If the establishment DIC pundits can engage in the parlor game of which potential political savior can keep them in their careers and in the Loop for just a few years longer (and also delay the Second Coming of Trump), then so can I. Or as my dad used to tease me: "Don't start crying or you'll get a soaken eye!"

I agree that since it is always better to resort to bitter laughter, if only to keep from weeping over the corrupt state of our political system, I will engage in my own idle speculation with two totally dry eyes.

Scenario #!: As I'd predicted when Biden first got the nomination, he will be such an utter failure at presiding that he could very well announce his retirement even before the November midterms in order to avoid blame when taking the whole Democratic slate down with him. The more the establishment gnashes its teeth over him, the lower his approval ratings keep going. The red line for the DIC-heads seemed to be when he became even more disapproved of than Donald Trump! And so the ratings continue to plummet exponentially, with the bad press and the Biden gaffes vying with each other in a sort of pre-horserace horserace. If this goes on much longer, Biden will end up with an approval rating of One Percent - which, given his assurance to his rich donors that "nothing would fundamentally change," seems kind of apt.

To elicit the requisite sympathy for him and to assuage the guilt of the DIC-heads nudging him out, Biden will be diagnosed with some disease; whether it's real or it's fake makes no difference. Or, his handlers might forget for one fateful moment to get the trip wires that Peter Baker was hand-wringing over out of the way of his shuffling, ancient feet. 

Scenario #2: He will resign right after the Great Congressional Shellacking of 2022. Not because he doesn't truly relish the prospect of wheeling and dealing with Mitch McConnell, and accomplishing his lifetime goal of cutting Social Security and Medicare while keeping the endless war money spigot flowing, but because the Republicans are bound to hold hearings on Hunter Biden and his various nepotistic schemes. Biden will do anything to protect his own legacy as well as the family name.

Scenario #3: Okay, so now that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy  hold off on investigating the Biden clan because he quit, and once Biden finally leaves (unless he pulls a Boris Johnson and stays), and Kamala Harris is sworn in as president, we now have the dilemma of whom she'll pick as her veep. My money is on Liz Cheney, the new anti-Trump heroine of  liberal DICsters like Robert Reich, who is already pushing her for the Democratic ticket. Plus, Mitch McConnell would ensure that Liz is handily confirmed.

Since the prospect of another Vice President Cheney is too nauseating to contemplate any further, here's where the speculation gets really wild. Scenarios could include, but are not limited to:

Due to her sheer, relentless incompetence, Default President Harris is denied the 2024 nomination by her former promoters in the DIC. 

At the last possible moment, the extremely popular Michelle Obama is nominated by acclaim convinced to run in order to prevent another Trump and to save the country from theocratic fascism. She picks Hillary Clinton as her running mate. Because why not. But as soon as she wins the election and is sworn in, Michelle resigns from office, because didn't she keep telling us over and over again how much she truly despises politics?

 By this appropriately serpentine route, Hillary is finally crowned as Leader of the New Old World Order.  Hasn't she told us over and over again that it is her turn?

Ridicule me if you must, but are my speculations any less far-fetched than, say, the vacuous Pete Buttigieg getting nominated and then getting handily defeated by the corpse of Trump, whose sudden death came too late to remove his name from the ballot?

 I've been reading that Pritzker might be the least-bad alternative to Biden and the rest, because he is at least a "pragmatic progressive" who pushed through a poverty-level $15 minimum wage for the Illinois proles.  Bernie Sanders's prediction that Joe Biden would be the reincarnation of FDR didn't work out so well, did it? But Pritzker is so rich that he could probably even force Joe Manchin to finally retire and spend more time with his coal. He is so rich he might even reduce Mitch McConnell into a state of helpless pseudo-humanity. Maybe Pritzker could even be a traitor to his whole class, just like FDR was, and thereby save both capitalism and dynastic wealth from themselves.

As always, I am very interested in hearing the thoughts and prayers and scenarios of readers. Be as far-fetched and silly as you like. Or, if that doesn't suit, you can always adopt the mantra of Kamala Harris, and opt for Smart, Sensible and Serious.

Nobody Expects the U.S. Inquisition

 Notwithstanding the Supreme Court majority's boast of being "Constitutional originalists," the First Amendment of that document apparently does not apply to them. Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion overturning Roe vs Wade that since the founding fathers had not specifically considered abortion to be a human right back in the 18th century, then the subsequent Court decision making it one 200 years later was reached in error. Or, as the nuns used to put it to those of us who went to Catholic school and lived to overcome its hellfire ideology, it was a "most grievous sin."

As a priest essentially put it to my conservative, 40-something Catholic mother when she dutifully sought his permission to go on the pill after bearing six children and suffering several miscarriages: "Be fruitful and multiply." 

 If the secular Pantheon of Founding Fathers didn't, as Alito cynically argued, consider abortion to be a human right, then it can never be a human right. He didn't mention that since the founders were largely slave-owners who raped their property, they actively and deliberately encouraged full-term pregnancies so as to produce more unpaid labor down the road, at no additional cost to themselves. It didn't matter whether the sperm for the progeny/property came from them, or whether it was from other slaves. 

In actuality, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade has set the time machine spinning back much, much further than even the horrific 1700s plantation era. The Supremes have transported us overnight right into the 12th century, when feudalism was all the rage, and the first stirrings of the Catholic Church's escalating crusades and inquisitions against heretics, infidels, and eventually, accused witches, got underway with a vengeance. 

With every single one of the Supremes who voted against reproductive freedom last week being practicing Catholics themselves, perhaps they should exchange their black robes for red ones, with beanies to match.

 Because although some critics have aptly called them an unelected monarchy, they're acting more like a College of Cardinals with infallible power over every-day basic human behavior and freedom, not to mention life and death.

Clarence Thomas, who wrote the concurring opinion, intimated that the criminalization of abortion is his intoxicating gateway drug to the criminalization of birth control, same-sex marriage and even interracial marriage. Once an aspiring Catholic priest, having studied at an Indiana seminary, Thomas in particular seems to consider himself a veritable sub-pope in the Supreme Holy See, without even the need for sacramental oil. 

 George H.W. Bush did the ordination honors, despite Thomas having served only a short time as a practicing judge. He needed that rare, conservative Black guy to tokenize and fill the shoes of the late great Thurgood Marshall.

Thomas, according to the biography "Supreme Discomfort" by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, gets really miffed when critics call him a recipient of affirmative action - because everybody should know that it was his own hard work and towering intellect that enabled his rise through the ranks of the American judiciary without ever litigating a single court case after graduation from Yale Law. His opinion overturning affirmative action is probably already written in draft form.

Alito similarly had a private Catholic education, as did Brett Kavanagh and Amy Comey Barrett. Ditto for Chief Justice John Roberts, who only voted against the ruling because he prefers more narrow restrictions and control over women. Sonia Sotomayor alone was able to rise above the dogma of her own parochial Catholic education to vociferously side with the liberal minority.

If there is one extremely faint silver lining to emerge from the overturning of Roe vs Wade, it's that it fully exposes the Democratic Party majority as the feckless enablers and moral co-conspirators that they are.

 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for one, hardly got through singing "God Bless America" on the Capitol Steps (ostensibly to celebrate some very narrow and bipartisanly ass-covering gun control legislation) before she hightailed it out of town and went straight to The Vatican to personally receive communion from the Pope himself.

Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa, Mea Minima Culpa!

You see, Nancy gets to have her cake (rather, wafer) and eat it too. She recently bragged that her production of five children in only six years should prove to the Church once and for all that she is a good Catholic, despite her excommunication by the archbishop of her San Francisco diocese for her mouthing of toothless platitudes defending the reproductive rights of others.

President Joe Biden, also a devout Catholic, merely said that he was "disappointed" in the Supreme Court justices, before hightailing it over to Europe to commune with his NATO bros and gin up more support for his bloody proxy war against Russia. Joe, you might remember, greased the skids for Clarence Thomas's installation as secular Cardinal when he allowed his Senate Judiciary star chamber of a committee to throw Anita Hill under the bus, and then refuse testimony from other women about Thomas's sexual harassment in the "equal opportunity" employment office he had previously been appointed to during the Reagan administration.

Biden only disowned his support of the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the federal Medicaid funding of abortions for poor women, when he was running for president in 2020, and then only after pressure from Planned Parenthood. For decades, he had been one of its staunchest advocates in the Senate.

Barack Obama, who took time off from playing golf in Spain to tweet out his own displeasure at the Roe vs Wade ruling, is not a religious man. Therefore, his own failure to protect reproductive rights when he had the chance is even worse than that of the Catholic leaders who are torn between their church and their state. Early in his first administration, when he enjoyed a congressional supermajority, he reneged on a campaign promise to legally codify the reproductive rights of women. It was the same old Democratic excuse: he didn't want to alienate his Republican friends. He didn't want to spend his political capital, especially if it canceled out one of his party's most lucrative fundraising gimmicks.

But he didn't stop there. When, in 2011. Kathleen Sebelius, his Catholic Health and Human Services secretary, blocked the FDA's approval of over-the-counter Plan B, or "morning-after" pills, to teenagers under 18, Obama offered his full-throated support of the ban. He chauvinistically moralized that "as the father of two young girls" he, too, felt uncomfortable with the thought of teens being able to just prance into the drugstore to buy birth control like it was candy. 

Susan F. Wood of George Washington University, who resigned from the FDA in 2005 because of delays by the George W. Bush administration in relaxing restrictions on Plan B, said she was “beyond stunned” by the decision.

“There is no rationale that can justify HHS reaching in and overturning the FDA on the decision about this safe and effective contraception,” Wood said. “I never thought I’d see this happen again.”

Remember.... nobody expects the American Inquisition. It is bipartisan, for one thing. It is always shocking whenever "your side" drops the liberal mask and goes all medieval on you.

Even after Planned Parenthood sued the Obama administration and won, the Obama administration kept right on appealing the ruling. Finally, in 2013, a federal appeals court judge issued a stinging rebuke, accusing them of bad faith and playing politics, and ordered the FDA to immediately lift the age restriction in the sale of the pills.

 Of course, birth control bans essentially have always been about women having sex, and having fun while doing so and threatening to achieve economic parity once escaping the brood mare corral. It's about men feeling squeamish about their womenfolk having uncontrolled sex and power even other women feeling squeamish about other women having sex and power. Certain powerful men like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, and yes, even Barack and Joe, must always cling to the illusion that they are the ones in charge.

As for us, as we learn to cling anew to the reality that we can never rely on any politician or feudal lord to grant or protect our rights, here's a wee bit of Pythonesque solace to tide you over until the dawning of yet another new post-post-modern day.