A Dark Speech Divided Against Itself

If those garish stage lights at Joe Biden's Independence Hall campaign event last Thursday were powered by lithium batteries, they certainly didn't do much to tone down the essential bipolar psychosis of his speech. The fact that the White House went so far as to dub the performance by his Dark Brandon persona The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation is one clue that they want us to believe that Civil War 2.0 is already well underway. If all the slanted polls say it too, then it must be true.

Come to think of it, has the first Civil War ever really ended? It was itself the direct spawn of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents created by an elite cadre of white males, a good portion of whom fancied themselves to be the literal owners of other human beings. When they decreed that all men are created equal, they weren't kidding, given that women, the enslaved and the indentured were not as entitled to the same life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as the landed property-owning gentry (and the yeoman class they needed to serve them and fight their wars for them) were. Ditto for constitutional civil and voting rights. Not for nothing did our esteemed founders also decree that the Senate would be chosen by elite politicos, and not by popular vote.  

But like all politicians before him, Biden persists in keeping the origin/founding myth alive. He sets the misleading tone right in his intro, claiming that two nonexistent things - "democracy" and "equality" - are suddenly and outrageously "under assault."

Usually when modern elite leaders fear-monger for the purpose of gaslighting and subduing the teeming, restless masses into a state of compliance and governability, they point to the Enemy Outside. But seeing that, post-9/11, Biden has a permanent, unlimited and undebated global war budget and unlimited surveillance powers, it's time to reset the terror dial.  He's got Europe under NATO control, so what better time than the coming US elections to ramp up the fear a lot closer to home? 

He wants people to believe that the MAGA movement sprung fully-formed from the fevered brow of Donald Trump, and that this form of fascism is not a result of half a century of crushing antisocial neoliberal policies, which he had a big hand in creating, thanks to his own half-century in the halls of power. 

Let his Narrative begin:

So tonight, I have come this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats, and about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it.

Now would be a good time to remind ourselves that whenever officials and elites say "we," they mean themselves  - not little old you. They've got the power, if and when and how they choose to use it. So when Biden says the future is "incredible," he doesn't necessarily mean it'll be amazing and wonderful. It's a very subtle threat that dissidents and insurgents of all stripes will never believe what just hit them.

 We, the people, have burning inside each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall — a flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, Suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, Civil Rights. 

That sacred flame still burns now in our time as we build an America that is more prosperous, free, and just.

Build Back Better is the slogan that can never die, as the red footlights enflame anew, and the shadowy Marines lurk in the background with only their blindingly white gloves broadcasting a muted dog-whistle of a Greek chorus. And remember, folks, you're in a sacred place no matter what the First Amendment says about states and religions.

That is the work of my presidency, a mission I believe in with my whole soul.

Who needs a functioning brain when you're armed with an invisible soul?  Remember, you are in a very sacred place. Faith makes its own reality. To wit: 

But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.  Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.  

 Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.  Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

He didn't mention any mainstream Republicans by name, but he had to be referring to his buddy Mitch McConnell, and maybe even the ghost of Strom Thurmond. 

Biden did make a secret, backroom mainstream deal with McConnell right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The president agreed to nominate the Senate minority leader's Kentucky crony, an anti-abortion lawyer, to a permanent federal court judgeship. The deal backfired only when fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul invoked some arcane veto power - not because of any pressure on Biden himself from progressives.

Meanwhile, the far-right makeup of the Supreme Court, so carefully orchestrated by McConnell, will remain intact under Biden's watch. The blue-ribbon panel he named last year, to recommend reforms of the highest court, came back empty. The commission put the kibosh on such democratic improvements as term limits for justices, a system of revolving judges from lower federal courts, and court-packing for purposes of balancing out the current highly skewed extremist ideology. That non-result was almost guaranteed, given that Biden had installed a roughly equal number of mild elite liberals and conservatives, even a rabid Federalist Society member named Adam White, to the cabal. It was just another example of manufactured gridlock to preserve the status quo.

Now comes the part of Biden's speech that goes full-scale bipolar. After bragging about his relationship with fine, upstanding Republicans, the president asserts that these same noble officials are being held in thrall to Trumpists, their free will mysteriously having been yanked right away from them:

 But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

Are you getting an unpleasant picture of Mitch and the gang all chained to the wall by whip-wielding leather-clad dominatrices holding fistfuls of bribery cash in their hands? Joe Biden seems to think that the solution is to save them by scolding them from the right:

And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.
 
And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. 

No wonder Trump fans are howling on and on about how insane this speech was. Biden is trespassing on their right-wing territory, accusing them of hating law and order and the police and the constitution. It kind of makes it harder for them to accuse the president of being a Marxist, even with his begrudging cancellation of a small portion of student debt for an artificially small percentage of Debt Slave Nationals.

They (the Trumpies, not the debt slaves necessarily) refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

Um... I seem to recall that the Republicans stole the 2000 election right out from under Al Gore. The corrupt Florida secretary of state and the corrupt Florida governor, one Jeb Bush, fixed the election in favor of corrupt little brother George Bush, and this fix of stopping vote-counting altogether was duly given the imprimatur of approval by the corrupt Supreme Court. That set the precedent for all manner of voting restrictions and dirty tricks in the ensuing decades. The Trumpies are merely playing a very oafish game of copy-cat with their Stop the Steal dogma.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
 
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

Liberal critics have noted that Biden very carefully omitted the words "abortion bans" from his litany. Just as infuriating in my view is his critique, throughout this speech, of "political violence," as though his own hands are not soaked with blood as red as the garish color of his backdrop. He has already requested an additional $14 billion in weapons for his proxy war with Russia. He was the lead Democratic cheerleader and enabler of George Bush's invasion of Iraq. He was the architect of the militarization of local police forces with high tech surplus weaponry during the Obama administration. And that's just a portion of his half-century's worth of bellicose policy-making. It doesn't even take into account his outsize role in constructing Incarceration Nation, creating more black prisoners than there were ante-bellum slaves.

They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people.  This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.
 
That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.

Perhaps Biden finds Michael Luttig (who has not actually been a sitting judge for more than a decade) so respectable because as an adviser in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, he was integral in greasing the skids for Clarence Thomas's confirmation before then-Senate Judiciary committee chair Joe Biden. Having just been named to the federal bench himself, Luttig delayed his own swearing-in until Thomas himself was safely confirmed, so as to avoid any appearance of cronyism, corruption and conflict of interest.

Luttig eventually quit the bench to take a lucrative position as chief legal adviser at Boeing. He left that job in 2009 as part of the high level executive fallout from the 737 Max scandal, which revealed that cost-cutting measures by the defense giant had caused airplane crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia and the deaths of 346 people.  

Luttig then became chief corporate counsel for Coca-Cola, where Biden's niece, Missy Owens, was in charge of the government affairs division (lobbying)her job including working closely with the Obama/Biden administration from whence she came, as well as with the ensuing Trump White House, over an eight year period. She was recently hired by General Motors to coordinate that company's  transition to electric vehicles, with a big financial assist from the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act.

A mere six days after Luttig joined Coca Cola last year to defend the company brazen tax dodging case lobbed against it by the IRS, the company abruptly reversed a decision to stop donating to any more presidential inaugurations, having gifted the Trump gala more than $3 million in 2016. It only gave the Biden inaugural a little over $1 million; the celebrations were downgraded because of the pandemic. But that still is a very respectable amount, and Biden deems Luttig respectable by dint of his never-Trumpism and his expert lawyering at the Jan. 6th-based impeachment festivities.  Ergo, he got a mention in the Dark Brandon speech. Cronyism has nothing to do with it, of course.

Ready for more bipolarity hilarity? Biden's at it again:

I believe America is at an inflection point, one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after. And now, America must choose to move forward or to move backwards, to build a future or obsess about the past, to be a nation of hope and unity and optimism or a nation of fear, division and of darkness.

MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live, not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies. But together, together, we can choose a different path. We can choose a better path forward to the future, a future of possibility, a future to build a dream and hope, and we’re on that path moving ahead.....

MAGA Republicans, it seems are not redeemable. The subliminal message here is that if you are angry and afraid, because of a pending eviction or lack of medical care when you get sick or hurt, or if the last 50 years of neoliberal austerity and the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history has gotten you down, then you're living in some chaotic darkness as well. The only chaos you have to fear is Trump chaos itself. Never mind the new report showing that life expectancy in the richest nation on earth has taken the biggest nosedive in more than a century. In Biden's world, all you need is a path to a future of hope.

 Biden-think reaches peak wishfulness as he winds the stemwinder down (I put the obvious whoppers in bold, if only because they are so unashamedly, psychotically brazen): 

But I see a different America — an America with an unlimited future, an America that’s about to take off. I hope you see it as well. Just look around. I believe we could lift America from the depths of Covid, so we passed the largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and today America’s economy is faster, stronger than any other advanced nation in the world. We have more to go. I believe we can build a better America, so we passed the biggest infrastructure investment since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and we’ve now embarked on a decade of rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, highways, ports, water systems, high-speed internet, railroads.... 

We’re going to end cancer as we know it, mark my words. We’re going to create millions of new jobs and a clean energy economy. We’re going to think big. We’re going to make the 21st century another American century because the world needs us to. That’s where we need to focus our energy. Not in the past, not on divisive culture wars, not on the politics of grievance, but on a future we can build together. And that’s precisely what we’re doing — opening doors, creating possibilities, focusing on the future — and we’re only just beginning.

Our task is to make our nation free and fair, just and strong, noble and whole, and this work is the work of democracy, the work of this generation. It is the work of our time for all time. We can’t afford to leave anyone on the sidelines. (Yes, we can) We need everyone to do their part, so speak up, speak out, get engaged, vote, vote, vote!

Finally, he cuts to the chase. It's nothing but a boilerplate campaign speech livened up with technobabble and much horn-tooting about little things accomplished and big things unaccomplished and big thoughts about big things saved up for later, and that totally awesome road to the Future.

 Vote them back into power - not so they can make your lives better in the here-and-now, but so that they can keep BS-ing you about a future utopia that will only happen if you vote and you vote and you vote some more at the designated two and four-year intervals.

 Speak up and speak out... unless, of course, you're a MAGA person. If you're not a MAGA person, even if at times you're desperate enough to fleetingly contemplate becoming one only because you're so disgusted with the Dems, then the proper, preferred and respectable way to speak up and speak out is to vote three times. (votevotevote).

 Then, you will be cordially invited to shut up and go away.

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.