The Horror of Congressional Hunger Games

Just as the Biden administration prematurely announced the end of the public health emergency, just as pandemic-related Medicaid coverage and enhanced food assistance are abruptly being yanked away from millions of vulnerable people, our elected congressional "representatives" in the lower house last week found it necessary to twist the knife in even further.  

 One hundred nine Democrats joined 218 Republicans in passing a resolution "denouncing the horrors of socialism."

Even the democratic, pluralistic socialism practiced in the Scandinavian countries will inevitably devolve into vicious authoritarianism, the document insinuates, as it falsely and hysterically conflates the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot with the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Among the Democrats, you might be surprised to learn that Ro Khanna of California broke ranks with the progressive caucus,  justifying his own condemnation of socialism by pleading that he is a "progressive capitalist." Fourteen other progressives decided to just play it safe and simply voted "present" in response to the GOP's red-baiting resolution.

 My own newly-elected Democratic rep, Pat Ryan, had just delivered a rousing floor speech blasting our local, private equity-owned utility for ripping off its customers .But since he'd only demanded the resignation of its CEO, and didn't actually call for taking the gas and electric company public, I wasn't too surprised when he also condemned the "horrors" that a government-run utility would inflict upon its victimized customers.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out here in America. It doesn't matter to either establishment party that more than a million of their constituents are dead of Covid, and that at least 500 of us still are being killed by it every single day. 

 The anti-socialist resolution justifies its inherent cruelty and cynicism by pointing to the puritanical principle of rugged individualism upon which this nation was founded:

Whereas the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison, wrote that it is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest; and

Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved 

 That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.

The resolution, introduced by Florida Republican Maria Salazar, is no doubt also the result of socialist politicians winning a slew of recent elections in Central and South America  US-based corporations might be thwarted in their campaign to extract natural resources, such as oil, and exploit populations in the process. The actual and potential loss of predatory power, both at home and abroad, is really what the lords of global capital and their political servants find so horrific. 

But for all its paranoid craziness, this anti-social and anti-socialist proclamation should at least put paid to the notion that the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. In fact, too many Democrats want to be Republicans. Ro Khanna voted for the resolution because his bright future in the corporate California party depends on it.

The Covid pandemic has been both a curse and a blessing to the poor. While they have sickened and died in disproportionate numbers during the last three years, our government's temporary socialistic policies of guaranteed health care,  a trio of stimulus checks,  eviction protections and rent assistance, enhanced SNAP (supplemental nutrition) stipends, unemployment benefits, and child tax credits in the way of cold hard cash to families improved their lives so much that for the first time in their lives, millions of Americans discovered what it's like to live without financial precarity and hunger. It was socialism in action, and it has absolutely horrified Congress and the very wealthy and the very tax-averse people who fund the politicians and who nevertheless actually became even richer from the pandemic.

No wonder they're yanking benefits away from vulnerable people, whose version of getting back to  Normal means going without medical care and adequate food, and becoming even more prone to losing the roofs over their heads as evictions by private equity landlords have commenced in higher numbers than ever.

Just the enhanced SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits alone, set to abruptly stop in March in the 35 states that still disbursed them, had cut child poverty by 14 percent. About 42 million people will now see their monthly food allotments drop by at least $95 or as much as hundreds of dollars, depending upon household size and income. This austerity move, passed by Congress just before Christmas, with little fanfare or media coverage, comes at the worst possible time, becaise grocery prices are still increasing and food banks are strapped for donations.

Alice Reznikova, of the Union of Concerned Scientists warns of an approaching hunger cliff, a needless crisis directly caused by bipartisan congressional malfeasance:

In December, in a rush to prevent a government shutdown, but lawmakers pitted summer child nutrition programs against the still-needed continuation of pandemic expansion to SNAP dollars, which had offered low-income households additional SNAP dollars since April 2021. While we applaud the passing of hopefully permanent support to child nutrition programs, we called out Congress for presenting a false choice between alleviating food insecurity for all SNAP recipients during the continued national emergency… and alleviating food insecurity only for SNAP households with children, only during summers. 

But wait! It gets even more antisocially cynical, because at the same time that Congress allotted a measly $40 per month per needy child for a measly three months out of the year, it made the Hunger Games even more exciting by cutting out free school lunches for 30 million needy children for the other nine months of the year. That is because the income eligibility requirements relaxed due to the pandemic have now reverted to pre-Covid extreme poverty guidelines. As a result, previously enrolled families who once qualified for the program now find themselves deep in debt for their kids' school meals. 

As the New York Times reported in January, 

 It is difficult to estimate how many students are now going hungry. But school officials and nutrition advocates point to proxy measurements — debt owed by families who cannot afford a school meal, for example, or the number of applications for free and reduced-price meals — as evidence of unmet need.

  In a survey released this month by the School Nutrition Association, 96.3 percent of school districts reported that meal debt had increased. Median debt rose to $5,164 per district through November, already higher than the $3,400 median reported for the entire school year in
 the group’s 2019 survey. 

Older people and those on disability who have received enhanced SNAP benefits for the past three years now stand to lose an average of $300 a month in aid. Vulnerable recipients who relied on Instacart and other shopping services to purchase food, so as to avoid catching Covid, will not be able to afford to do so come March - not on a monthly food allotment of, in some cases,  only $18.

Meanwhile, the craven people who run the place are busily trying to make us forget about their own cruelty by creating yet another outside enemy for us to hate and fear. The latest deflection is a giant Chinese balloon, which Joe Biden bravely shot down over the weekend with a guided missile off the South Carolina coast, and whose remains are being heavily guarded by the Navy for our protection.

They really think we're idiots. So even if their xenophobic, saber-rattling propaganda doesn't work, they can at least try to starve us into submission and make us too weak to take to the streets in protest.

As centenarian Henry Kissinger ever so wisely instructed the ruling class: "Control oil, and you control nations. Control food, and you control the people."

Bleak House, USA (Mervyn Peake)

Shocker: #Russiagate Is a Big Fat Fraud

*Updated below.

As much as the US government has been infiltrating and pressuring both the corporate media and social media platforms in a fear and censorship campaign to soften up Americans for its proxy war on Russia, we're now learning that some Twitter executives, at least, were disturbed enough to feebly push back against the overreach. 

In Twitter Files #15, journalist Matt Taibbi reports that the Hamilton 68 Dashboard's list of hundreds of Twitter accounts, supposedly run by "Russian bots," is mainly comprised of innocent human users. The contrivance of an USAID-funded bipartisan think tank called the Alliance For Securing Democracy, the Dashboard has been a prime source of disinformation for such outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC,  CNN, and MSNBC. Even so-called "fact-checking" sites have treated the specious Hamilton Dashboard as a bona fide source of information for the relentless parade of anti-Russia media reports over the past several years.

Although it's long been obvious, to  some of us anyway, that the McCarthyite dashboard of dangerous Twitter accounts was pure fake news propaganda, Twitter itself was able to discern that they were, in fact, mostly legitimate accounts from the U.S., Canada and Great Britain. But its executives apparently were too cowed by the "Deep State" operatives who  persistently browbeat them into censorship compliance at the time to blow the whistle publicly. Taibbi was finally granted access to the true identities behind the list of "Russian bots," and has proceeded to notify many of them of their dubious distinction as designated Kremlin plants and stooges.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Taibbi quotes Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth as having written when the fraud was first proven beyond a doubt. 

“The selection of accounts is… bizarre and seemingly quite arbitrary,” wrote Roth. “They appear to strongly preference pro-Trump accounts (which they use to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump… even though there’s not good evidence any of them are Russian).”

Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was listed. The names ranged from well-known media figures like David Horowitz to conservatives like Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like Consortium editor Joe Lauria. It’s crucial to understand that the list captured not just Trump supporters but a range of political dissidents, including leftists, anarchists and humorists. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles, upon seeing the name of British satirist @Holbornlolz:

“A wind-up merchant,” he wrote. “I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.”

These people never knew they were used for years to drive hundreds if not thousands of media headlines about supposed Russian bot infiltration of online discussions: about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, the #ReleaseTheMemo affair, the Parkland shooting, Donald Trump’s election, the #WalkAway and #IStandWithLaura hashtags, U.S. missile strikes in Syria, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the “Blexit” movement to peel black voters away from Democrats, calls to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation, and countless other issues.

Read Taibbi's whole piece for more on the neocon/neoliberal personalities involved with the Hamilton Dashoard fraud, along with reactions from some of their many unwitting victims. One Dashboard fraudster that Taibbi doesn't mention is Jake Sullivan, who is currently Joe Biden's national security adviser and a chief architect-cheerleader of the Ukraine-Russia proxy war.

Both the think tank running the Hamilton Dashboard propaganda scam and the Twitter managers who eventually uncovered the scam were well-stocked with other future Biden people, many of them alumni of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Taibbi writes:

...Twitter is not guiltless. Though people like Roth wanted to go hard at the fabulists — “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote — ultimately people like future White House and National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne advised caution. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote. Carlos Monje, future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, concurred.

“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” Monje decided.

Taibbi is expecting neither media nor political class culprits to be held accountable for the fraud, given that Twitter execs already did privately warn both complicit Congress members and media people to steer clear of the Hamilton propaganda as a source of their news and information. Don't look for any mea culpas from anybody in the halls of political and information power for their own roles in this massive deceit of the public.

As I wrote here nearly four years ago, the Hamilton 68 fraud, designed to grease the skids for their desired war on Russia, uses the same m.o. that the media-political complex sold to the public as the casus belli for the illegal invasion of Iraq:

The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of amplification.

The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much detailed information  The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.

This is what former Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2002.  His office fed New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and pointed to the New York Times as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.  To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the Times'

Now, with another manufactured debt ceiling crisis rapidly approaching, it might be a good time to remember that the gaslighting Hamilton 68 fraudsters had also blamed Russia for the shutdown mess in 2018, and that all legitimate Twitter criticism of the hapless Senate leader Chuck Schumer came not from independent-thinking Americans, but from the Kremlin, which had stealthily infiltrated the brains of Americans!

Current New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen had just (temporarily) migrated to the Democratic veal pen known as the Huffington Post from her previous top post at the Times when the former unquestioningly and breathlessly reported:

#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.

Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

As I'd reported at the time:

Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

Guess who one of those Hamilton Dashboard-identified Russian bots turned out to be?

Why, it was Joe Lauria, the current editor of Consortium News, which is critical of the war and surveillance policies of the United States. Matt Taibbi has Lauria's reaction at the above-linked Twitter Files article. Lauria was disgusted, but not all that shocked.

Even though the Hamilton Dashboard has been completely discredited,  thanks to the last bastions of independent journalism still standing, it will doubtlessly be reborn under a different name, in another think tank, another corporate newsroom, another corrupt politician beholden to the war racket and to the interests of the oligarchy. 

All that we can do is keep chipping away at their various pathological disinformation campaigns, and shooting all the disinfecting sunlight at them that we can. Since they have no shame, they will never go away quietly or voluntarily. 

*Far from it, actually. In a detailed rebuttal of Taibbi's revelations, the Alliance for Securing Democracy website pleads that its critics were either taking their dashboard way too seriously, or else all those stupid journalists, Twitter executives and doubters of all stripes were themselves irresponsible in the way that they used it.

The dashboard’s original methodology acknowledged that “the content within the network is complex and should be understood in a nuanced way.” Members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers often failed to include appropriate context when using the dashboard’s data, despite ASD experts’ extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at the time. Because the data was consistently misunderstood or misrepresented, we published multiple follow-up instructions clarifying key points, including: “Some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users. Some are in Russia, but many are not”.

This, of course, is the same kind of techno-legal babble used by many dishonest players whenever they are caught out in a crime or a scam.  For example, the Justice Department could not possibly prosecute Wall Street after the 2008 financial collapse, because the complex financial instruments of the experts could  never be understood by mere mortals. As a matter of fact, some of the same malefactors who precipitated the crisis in the first place were often elevated to government positions, the better to sort everything out while absolving themselves, if not outright proclaiming themselves saviors. If anyone was to blame, it was those greedy people who took out subprime liar loans on houses they couldn't afford.

The Alliance  fatuously adds that they (unlike, they insinuate, Elon Musk and Taibbi) were sensitive to their victims' privacy rights and never "doxxed" the people whose Twitter accounts ended up on their dashboard. It's the "shoot the messenger" ploy all over again. They try to change the topic from their own bad behavior to the worse offense of the leaking of their own bad behavior.  What the people whose accounts were linked to Russia didn't know didn't hurt them, the Alliance asserts. How could anyone possibly construe that the Dashboard was a McCarthyite blacklist, when they only linked Twitter accounts to Russian influence, and were not directly responsible for anybody losing their job or getting de-platformed as a result. All they really did was warn other people to beware of the provenance of the listed accounts. And Twitter did it too, sending its users those thousands of emails warning them of certain suspicious accounts they had been reading.

The whole disclaimer is just another layer on a disinformation cake puffed up with a very generous helping of enriched gaslight. These people not only have no shame, they've severely overdosed on their own chutzpah.

War Is Peace

Since that satiric Orwellian nostrum does sound a bit trite after all these years, the New York Times tried mightily to put a more modern original gloss on it with the headline "Biden Announces 31 Abrams Tanks For Ukraine, But Says the Move Is Not Meant To Escalate the War." 

If it seems that it was only last week that he was balking at sending the tanks because it would be viewed as more provocative evidence of US involvement in its proxy war, it's because it was only last week. The U.S. hegemon's browbeating Germany to unilaterally send its own tanks didn't work, so Uncle Joe had no other choice but to cross his own phony red line in the sand and cave to his increasingly skittish NATO ally.

 And miracle of miracles: what was a provocation last week has been magically transformed into an olive branch constructed of tons and tons of military metal this week!

That is heavy stuff. The  critical term "mission creep" cannot possibly apply in this latest escalation, coming as it does after the more discreet and even stealthy procession of billions of dollars and grenade launchers and guns and CIA "advisers" and NGOs and private mercenaries and freelance arms dealers.  As creepy as these monster tanks are, they definitely can't be delivered stealthily.

Therefore, the language of war itself must be rendered ever more stealthy. Star Times correspondent Peter Baker once again does the obsequious, power-serving honors:

“These tanks are further evidence of our enduring, unflagging commitment to Ukraine and our confidence in the skill of Ukrainian forces,” Mr. Biden said, flanked by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.

But he emphasized that the buildup was not meant to expand the war into Russia. “It is not an offensive threat to Russia,” he said. “There is no offensive threat to Russia. If Russian troops return to Russia, where they belong, this war would be over today.”

They are described in contradictory, magical-thinking terms, both as harmless little toys and lethal killing machines, these Abrams tanks. Ukrainian troops may not be qualified to actually operate them, but Biden is confident in their innate skills. 

The Pentagon itself is slightly less sanguine than the president, but still euphemistically optimistic: Per the  CNBC coverage:

“The M1 (Abrams) is a very capable battlefield platform and it’s also a very complex capability. And so, like anything that we’re providing to Ukraine, we want to ensure that they have the ability to maintain it, sustain it, to train on it,” Pentagon press secretary U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

What about the mission-creep of American boots on the ground to provide those driver training courses and issue the learning permits before the Ukrainian soldiers finally pass their road tests and get their licenses and their advanced degrees in tank maintenance? To hear the military and the White House and their corporate media partners spin it, hundreds of Ukrainian troops will be required to forsake their own embattled homeland for prolonged periods, to get their training on "neutral" ground, including on US military bases.

  Have the sticklers for details never heard of dual controls?  Have they never learned that presidents can say something one week and then abruptly shift into reverse gear the next? It's called defensive driving, people!  Sheesh.

The Abrams tank is manufactured by General Dynamics, which reported Wall Street gains just as Biden made his announcement on Wednesday. However, the business press reports that these gains are from increased revenue from its other contributions to the Ukraine war rather than from  investors copiously salivating over billions more in profits from the looming tank and related hardware sales.

"This is about freedom," as Joe Biden so originally and lyrically reminded his audience today. "Freedom for Ukraine, freedom everywhere."

He could have made his Orwellian newspeak remarks downright Oscar-worthy, and elevated Freedom to "everything everywhere all at once." 

But that would have been a lie too far for Biden's carefully crafted media image as a "decent" man.  He doesn't make promises he can't or won't keep. He has been there and done that, by way of reneging on a health insurance public option, keeping tax hikes for the wealthy purely aspirational, and only verbally "shutting down" the pandemic. The citizen-consumers of America know, or should know, that the freedom of record windfall war profits is always reserved for the very select few at the very tippy-top of the finance-capital hierarchy. That's how they keep us safe.

Meanwhile, despite assurances that Biden's tank gift to Ukraine might come too late to be anything other than one more head-fake, the announcement has at least enabled more squeamish NATO allies to send their own tanks to Ukraine. ETA's would be weeks to months for the first few shipments from the more Ukraine-adjacent allies.

 “Sending the Abrams appears to have been the key to unlocking the (German) Leopards, which will probably get to Ukraine much faster,” said Sofia Besch, an expert on European defense issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Andrew Carnegie, the robber-baron philanthropist who funded the "think tank" bearing his name and who championed the United States' entry into World War I in order to make the world "safe for democracy" (but which spawned more than a century of global conflict), the Orwellian "war for peace" thinking permanently chiseled into the brains of the Best and the Brightest doesn't come as so much of a shock.

Biden Takes Classified Documents... Seriously

 Whereas when Donald Trump smuggles top-secret papers out of the White House, he takes them very capriciously. He apparently just crumpled them up and thoughtlessly tossed them in boxes with other household miscellany.  Then the boxes got spread, willy-nilly, all over the tacky, garish grounds of MAGA-Largo.

Joe Biden, then the outgoing vice president, on the other hand carefully folded and sorted classified papers before responsibly removing them from the White House and then securely locking them in a closet in his think tank. That should prove to everyone's satisfaction how thoughtful and serious he is. 

And to prove just what a down-home regular guy Joe also is, he even folksily stashed some of the stolen papers in the humble garage of his Delaware home. He reportedly did not store them in his beach house, possibly because, unlike Trump, he knows the dangers of flooding from hurricanes, not to mention the damage that salty air can do to exposed paper. 

Feigning surprise that a team of his own lawyers just happened upon the first batch of papers in a closet during the routine performance of their professional duties, Biden scoffed during a Mexico summit press conference, in a non-admission admission that "People know that I take classified information seriously."

As Biden is fond of insisting before many a misleading statement: "No joke". He gives you his word as a Biden that he has no idea what's even in the purloined classified documents. As long as he knows people who know, what more do you want of him?  If you're not one of those people who know, then you ain't human. The same way that if you're an African-American and you didn't vote for him, you ain't Black.

The weird similarity between the discovery of Trump's stolen documents and Biden's is that both were accomplished by whole teams of lawyers - rather than, say office assistants or household cleaners. Either the job description of lawyers has radically changed, or else mere servants simply aren't good enough for presidents. Just being speculative here, but when you're a former or current president with a consciousness of guilt, it seems that using whole armies of expensive private attorneys to ethically discover your booty before the cops do is a fine way of shielding yourself you from any culpability -  before, during or after the crime.

But, hidden deep within the New York Times article on the second garage discovery, lies the real crux of this story. 

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.

The all-too-convenient discovery of the stolen documents on two of Biden's properties may give the Justice Department just the excuse it needs not to prosecute Trump for his own thefts as they go through the serious motions of investigating Biden.* They probably don't have a case. It would be uncomfortable for Garland to prosecute The Donald without also charging Uncle Joe. The Republicans would only play their hypocrisy card were Biden to be given a pass when Trump went to trial. These two sticky-fingered presidents may just end up canceling each other right out. We can put it behind us, turn the page, go forward and not backward.

It's also possible that Team Biden simply created the classified documents drama as a way to deflect attention from his son Hunter's own legal troubles and imminent GOP attacks and congressional hearings. By coming clean on his own misdeeds, Joe Biden aims to be seen as seriously and nobly and pre-emptively copping to innocent mistakes that were made, in an aw-shucks kind of way. He's shielding his kid by pretending to fall on his own sword.

Since it is still theoretically possible to fool some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, Biden can even use his trademark motto ("Here's the deal, Folks!") to market the latest diversionary product in his Battle For the Soul of Our Nation franchise.

Dems Vs. GOP: The Play's the Thing, Or "You Can Bring a Sword to a Gunfight!"

*After I posted this, Garland did indeed appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden's stash of classified documents. The appointment gives the appearance of fairness and equity with Trump's own ongoing special counsel probe. It's probably only a matter of time before someone dubs this "GarageGate" - because Biden's immediate goofy defense argument was that his expensive Corvette is in the same hallowed space as the second stash of documents. And if he keeps his precious car so secure, then the documents adjacent to the car must be secure, too. Seriously.

An Auspicious Start To the New Year

As I write this, Kevin McCarthy just lost the fifth vote in his quest for the speakership of the House of Representatives. Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted strategizing with the very same jerk (Paul Gosar, R-AZ) who was censured last year for posting a cartoon of himself slashing her. Always a quick study, AOC apparently has let bygones be bygones, and is heeding the maxim of Rahm Emanuel, uttered in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown: "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste."

Or as she laughingly put it, “I think in chaos anything is possible, especially in this era.” 

 All of this chaos and intrigue is unfairly taking the spotlight off the fabulous fabulist who is being shunned by the cool kids in both establishment cliques. Not only is incoming freshman George Santos too stupid to lie and commit fraud skillfully, he has actually admitted to being a fraudster and a liar. This kind of ex post facto honesty simply will not do at Hallowed Halls High School.

Congressional Chaos also makes it easier for the mainstream media to continue ignoring the revelations in the so-called Twitter Files, which essentially prove that the FBI and CIA are engaged up to their eyeballs in the censorship of political speech. The latest scoop from Matt Taibbi is that BMOC (Big Man on Campus) Adam Schiff  personally called for banning a journalist skeptical of his beloved, discredited #RussiaGate franchise.

If you want to learn about this scandal, and other recent revelations of government/corporate censorship and attempted censorship, your only choice is to peruse such right-wing media outlets as Fox News and the New York Post. That is because liberal establishment outlets aren't touching these stories, thereby practicing censorship by omission.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden's own main concern is that the speakership voting chaos is a terrible cosmetic problem for the entire political class hierarchy. And he should know, because despite his own lies about his mediocre academic record, he'd managed to skip the Lower House altogether, matriculating straight to the Senate a whole half-century ago.  

Biden did manage to let some truth escape by admitting that the  keeping up of appearances is the only glue holding the ruling establishment together. The ongoing intramural junior varsity squabble would normally be beneath his notice, were it not for the gawking spectators in the global stands. The lack of decorum and cohesion is terribly embarrassing to him, personally, even as he strives to rise above it all by taking his former frat buddy Mitch McConnell on a joyride aboard Air Force One as a way to brag about doing bipartisan things. This would be the same Mitch McConnell who hazed the whole country by almost single-handedly packing the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues. 

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday before traveling to Kentucky for an event to highlight last year's bipartisan infrastructure law with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden said of Republicans, “I hope they get their act together.” Biden said that “the rest of the world is looking” at the chaotic scenes on the House floor but that his focus was on “getting things done.”

One of the things Biden is not getting done is returning the millions of dollars of campaign cash donated by indicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. And anyway, "getting things done" iis just bipartisan-speak for reducing social benefits to everyday people while funding the US hegemon's endless wars and corporate welfare packages and paranoid surveillance activities.

Therefore chaos at the very highest levels of government should instill just a wee smidgen of hope in the rest of us. Oppression delayed is oppression denied, even if it's only for one more day, until somebody gets bribed, and caves, and then it's trumpeted as a victory for democracy.

Happy New Year, fellow Sardonickists!

Reasons For Rich People To Feel Smug in 2023

 I haven't posted in the last couple of weeks for the simple reason that I'd deliberately ignored what passes for news. This was for both mental and physical health reasons. But as neoliberal doctrine dictates to the Lessers, there shall be no more excuses.  Western culture hasn't celebrated the whole, original 12 Days of Christmas for centuries. Everybody has to get back to the New Normal before New Year's Day. And for me, that means keeping up with the New York Times so that the more squeamish among you don't have to.

It didn't take me long to find a piece guaranteed to annoy and nauseate. Titled "Reasons for Optimism in 2023," it quickly becomes obvious that this iteration of the year-end "listicle" is exclusively addressed to the people who sincerely believe that the only reason they got so much filthily richer in 2022 is because they are so "blessed." 

But on the off-chance that a twinge of guilt might threaten to afflict the sensitive rich, DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin and about half a dozen of his closest assistant scribes are here to assure them that even the Lessers never had it so good. 

The main things that rich people can safely ignore in 2023 are the "tripledemic," the "brutal war with no end in sight," and the climate crisis.

Even though more than 400 people a day are still dying of Covid, they are mainly old or they have pre-existing conditions. The good news is that vaccines became available for "children as young as six months old, a relief for parents as much of the world returned to a new normal." 

The article does not inform its well-heeled readers  that Covid has exploded in China, and that a bipartisan Congress just voted to kick millions of poor people off the Medicaid rolls come spring. That is because Congress had no interest in funding any kind of pandemic relief in the next fiscal year. 

The New York Times listicle does not report these little factoids, possibly because they might make the Smugnorati feel uncomfortable in this season of comfort and joy.

Meanwhile, as if they needed another reason to feel self-satisfied about 2022, they're reminded that rich countries finally abandoned their selfishness and agreed at the COP 27 confab to study pledging financial aid to poor countries suffering from the capitalistic pollution of rich countries.  However, since the Times doesn't want its readers to feel bad, it side-steps the inconvenient truth that it's only a pledge, not an ironclad commitment. And besides, what difference does irreversible global warming make when Science™  just made a nuclear fusion clean energy breakthrough, and Joe Biden promised to cure cancer in 20 years?

And if the rich are altruistically worried that bots and artificial intelligence will replace human sweat, the article continues, they shouldn't be. Bosses and owners should reject the notion that wage labor can ever be fully replaced by technology.

"What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company."

The article doesn't mention that such writing programs replace the office insurance grunts who normally would not only take dictation from the boss but would have the skills necessary to write a business letter. This must be especially true in the billionaire paradise of Palm Beach, where denizens have private insurance and concierge medical care, and where nobody will ever notice the millions of people getting kicked off Medicaid because "we" cannot afford it, and because poor people must always jump through hoops in order to prove their deserving need.

And speaking of poor-shaming,  that brings us to perhaps the most shameless whopper in the whole mendacious Times article:

Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.”

Conveniently left unmentioned, lest rich readers lose the soft rosy glow of their own smugnorance, is that since Congress failed to renew the temporary Child Tax Credit before they left town for their holiday break. childhood poverty already is heading right back up.

But, the twisted Times logic goes, since kids were lifted out of poverty for six whole months in 2022, that is all the reason that "we" need to celebrate now and in the years to come.  Six whole months of relief was actually a pre-Christmas miracle when you come to think about it, because for once, Congress did not impose much if any "means-testing" poison pills on recipients. Nearly every family in the United States received it, whether or not they worked or paid taxes. This shocking universality brought out all the usual elite concern trolls, who feared that it would discourage people from working.

"Even the theoretical possibility of enabling laziness was enough to make a permanent extension a complete non-starter," explained Bloomberg News.

But never mind all that, because the New York Times concludes its own feel-good piece with news about a giant fan in Iceland that can suck tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "The Department of Energy and a bevy of investors are racing to bring the technology, called direct air capture, to other parts of the world," the newspaper gushed.

I bet they are. If they can do subversive regulatory capture of government agencies that were originally formed to protect the public, and if they can suck the very life out of regular people just because it's profitable and because they can, then they can certainly do air capture.  They might even find a way to capture and privatize oxygen itself, and charge people for the privilege of breathing it.

Grandma Got Run Over By a Neoliberal Reindeer

 

Rochelle Walensky of the CDC

You probably got an inkling about your fate last January, when the nation's chief public health officer said, right out loud, that it's a good thing that the old, the sick and the immunocompromised are dying from Covid-19 in such far greater numbers than are the people who are still well enough and young enough to continue contributing to the Economy.

“The overwhelming number of deaths — over 75 percent — occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with — and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Walensky added a plug for getting vaccinated and boosted, before underscoring her earlier comment: “We’re really encouraged by these results.”

Now, with the news that more than 90 percent of the Americans dying from Covid-19 are over the age of 65, Rochelle Walensky has actually accomplished the incredible feat of making the cynical holiday tune Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer seem like a feel-good Hallmark Christmas card. You see, even when Grandma dies in a snowdrift after a Santa hit-and-run, her surviving family members still celebrate as if nothing had ever happened. Because not even death can interfere with the mindless consumption of material goods and the watching of TV sports.

 Life without Grandma is simply getting back to normal and moving on with life, and ignoring one of the worst public health catastrophes in human history.

If Joe Biden declared the pandemic to be over, then it must be over, even with close to 600 people now dying from it every day in the United States. Thank goodness, our elite policy-makers are probably muttering to themselves, that these vulnerable disposables are mostly in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and probably out of the workforce 

This is precisely why the government is currently only recommending that people don masks in public settings like grocery stores, where all those excess old people are prone to shop when they need to eat.  Because as the cult of neoliberalism has drummed into us, masking is not so much a matter of protecting others. It's about protecting yourself. (not to mention your own future Social Security and Medicare benefits.) To mask or not to mask is not even a question. This, the public health experts say, is purely about your own comfort zone and your personal choice and freedom, and being the entrepreneur of your own life.

And for Walensky, being in the zone means doubling right down on her own serial callousness. Not content to limit her disdain to the disposable victims of this pandemic, she also recently congratulated the deceased Black victims of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments for their "sacrifice" on behalf of American medical research. Since sacrifice, by definition, is all about making an informed, personal choice, she insinuates that these men knew all the risks of being unwitting guinea pigs, and chose to participate in their own destruction anyway.

In case you were wondering why Walensky still has her job, it's because she is a staunch team player in the Neoliberal Thought Collective still running this country on behalf of the oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. Her casually racist remarks on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee atrocities are all of a piece with the recent New York Times revelations about our nation-state's junior ROTC (pre-officer training) program.  The thousands of freshman high school students who are being unwillingly enrolled in this federally funded program are disproportionately Black, Brown and poor.  By dint of their race, ethnicity and social class, they are being purposely groomed to fight in the US Imperium's forever-wars. And when it's the their  inevitable turn to get maimed and even die, they'll get thanked for their sacrifice, too.

Meanwhile, even though Congress just miraculously forced railroad workers back on the job without sick or personal time off, and allocated billions more for the Arms Industry's Ukraine proxy war with Russia, it is said to still be struggling to do anything for regular people of any age or  color, other than to urge them to "share the sacrifice" for the greater good of Wall Street and the war industry. In other words, we must learn to live with a resurgence of eugenics, or what Andre Damon of the World Socialist Website aptly calls "social murder." 

But who (besides Walensky, Biden and the whole merry band of professional pathocrats, that is) said we should accept our doom graciously? Not only should we not go quietly into that good night, we should all join together, as Dylan Thomas advised, to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." 

And on a related note, if you ever happen, like Robert Frost, to stop by woods on a winter evening, and you happen to see Grandma lying in a snowdrift, give her a hand. And put on a mask. Despite what "medical ethicist" Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel trumpets about gracefully dying by age 75 to avoid being a burden on society, we are all of us, at every age, in this together. We have miles to go before we sleep.