Fire Alarm Follies

Now that US Rep. Jamaal Bowman's lame excuse that he mistook a fire alarm for an electronic door-opener has fallen flat, he's pivoted to the default position: the Republicans who want him criminally charged or expelled from Congress are nothing but a bunch of "Nazis."

It might have been a lot smarter for him to plead that he was just taking literally the recent overheated "five-alarm" fire rhetoric of Democratic operatives kvetching that the donor money just isn't flowing in as fast as it was in the good bad old days of the Trump presidency. Fire alarm rhetoric had been spreading all over social and corporate media before the Bowman stunt.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, herself the spouse of a Democratic campaign operative, had already gotten the hysterical alarm bells ringing with a piece titled "Where Has All the Left-Wing Money Gone?"

She showcased Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voters party fundraising offshoot, who coined the phrase "five-alarm fire" as what he deemed to be just the right impetus to get people scared enough to empty their wallets for Democrats.

 Goldberg's alarmist lede:

As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”

There's nothing that galvanizes people into giving to politicians than a sentence that not only Capitalizes. Every. Word, but also adds lots of periods for emphasis. When a friendly media publishes your money-grab verbatim, all the better.

The Guardian newspaper also pumped up the "Yelling Fire" method in its own uncritical piece showcasing Billy Wimsatt and his lack of money flowing in. This lack, supposedly, is mostly because their erstwhile cash cow Donald Trump is now sitting in a whole series of courtrooms rather than behind the White House Resolute Desk. Of course, it paradoxically does somewhat help the Dems  financially every time their profit-driven corporate media partners eagerly offer Trump a free microphone with which to urge bodily harm on all the judges and prosecutors leading the "witch-hunt" against him. Because it is so not fair that every time The Donald gets indicted, his own donation money does keep flowing and his own poll numbers do keep rising - while Joe Biden's keep falling. It's so very mysterious. Lacking an agenda to give regular people a better life, the Dems are reduced to at least allowing people to get high on regular doses of shocked, self-righteous indignation. 

Forget the old liberal excuse for colluding with Republicans behind closed doors to slash the social safety net - "you can'tbring a knife to a gun fight." Nowadays, if you can't beat the Nazi arsonists, you may as well fan the flames with your own higher grade of gasoline. Then you can feel all smug, yelling fire in your side of the tottering political theater. 

Absent a Democratic platform benefiting ordinary people, the only way to motivate giving (if not actually voting) is to scare them. Thus does The Guardian newspaper dutifully follow the Times's lead, in pushing the alarm button. It turns out that the opposite of an FDR fireside chat - The Only Emotion To Experience Is Fear Itself -   requires lots of cash and gaslighting.

From the party press release as reprinted in The Guardian.

According to the Movement Voter Project, progressives have “a five-alarm fire going into 2024”. The organization’s director, Bill Wimsatt, said he was “pressing the panic button” because donor inaction is creating a movement-wide crisis.

Wimsatt said there had been a peak for progressive causes around the time of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and amid campaigning to get Donald Trump out of office. “The sense of urgency and existential necessity has dissipated in people’s minds,” he said, “though the situation going into 2024 isn’t any less existential.”

Before becoming the Democrats' go-to alarm bell ringer and Sartre co-opter, Wimsatt was an aspiring rapper and founder and/or leader of what he calls a whole series of "game-changer" networks, including the Alliance of Young Voters, Rebuild the Dream and the Coffee Party. According to his Wikipedia page, he preceded his current "five alarm fire" tour with a PR tour that flattered wealthy young liberal donors as the "Cool Rich Kids."

So, to hear Billy whine about it now, it seems that his fellow cool rich kids are no longer so cool. Therefore, what other choice do kids like Bowman and Wimsatt have but but to pull fire alarms to draw attention to themselves? It's gotten so existentially hard at Hallowed Halls High School (Congress) that they can't even keep their dress codes straight, let alone keep up with all the cheating and corruption scandals sucking the campaign money right out of the room.

But back to those stingy, cool rich non-donors. They still do have a clique called Resource Generation. Members are in the 18-35 age demographic with "wealth and/or class privilege and a commitment to the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power."

In order to continue such good works as protesting in the streets, speaking at city council meetings and becoming heads of their family foundations, members also busily fund-raise from other wealthy people like themselves in order to keep their grassroots networks networking. There's a lot of internal competition for elite cash, it seems.

To apply for membership in the Alliance of Cool Rich Kids, you or your family preferably will belong to the top 10 percent of wealth owners with assets of - and ready access to - at least $1 million in cash. But rest assured, the group is so now so inclusive that they decided several years ago to allow even those who are less-rich to join - just so long as applicants are passionate about rich people's philanthropic causes.  Tellingly enough, they identify their board of directors and staff only by their first names and initials. 

Now, if the following chart doesn't convince you that these wealthy activists are full of shit, that the wealth is actually being mal-distributed with a vengeance, that American rich kids both young and old stay that way by extracting ever-dwindling resources from the poor and working class, then nothing will.

 This is eugenics in action:

The heavy black line at the bottom represents poor people in the United States who, because of predatory capitalism and their lack of a pricey college degree, are literally falling to their deaths in record numbers. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton last week expanded upon the findings of their landmark study "Deaths of Despair" with the undeniable truth that the "mortality gap" between rich and poor is getting worse all the time. In fact, struggling people are prematurely dying at three times the rate that they were in 1992. The wealth redistribution talk of "progressives" is just so much self-regarding hot air.

The Case/Deaton report, not surprisingly, is being ignored by the corporate media, so busily focused on the pressing concerns of the educated and well-off: Trump Derangement Syndrome, Fire Alarm-gate and fund-raising goals.

Meanwhile, rather than re-declare a public health emergency which might include such remedies as direct cash aid, single payer health care, national eviction protections and rent control, and a government jobs program, the Biden administration has just allocated some $200 million for suicide prevention. The bulk of the grant will shore up the 988 suicide prevention hotlines that desperate people can call when they have no money, no health care, no food, no house and no job. This grant, of course, also blithely assumes that desperate suicidal people actually have access to a phone.

The real five-alarm emergency is that the movers and shakers of our corporacracy have completely lost their grip on reality. They're high on their own fumes. If you don't indulge them in their fantasies, they shrill, then you're just repeating Russian talking points. 

To the Grifters Belong the Spoils

In the olden days, leaders of warrior-states would at least give the appearance of waiting for the peace treaty niceties to be completed  before proceeding to their final, more leisurely phase, of plunder. Think about the Marshall Plan's reconstruction of Germany after World War Two. The bankers and investors waited until after V.E. Day before they occupied and rebuilt the place with the American military and the nascent CIA to perpetually in place to guard all the loot.

But with so many corrupt officials and arms dealers and rag-tag mercenaries already on a rampage of raping and pillaging in Ukraine, it's never too soon for the elite investor class to personally step in and cash in on the investments which the US and European publics have made on their behalf, even in the midst of bloodshed.

 If the bribe-taking and bribe-making can start right now, and at the very highest levels, then the wealthy investors in the military-industrial complex can only grow richer that much sooner.

To that end, President Biden is simply being proactive  He is appointing Penny Pritzker, one of the world's richest women and one of the  Democratic Party's wealthiest donors, to oversee the entire economic plunder rebuilding of Ukraine, even as the US proxy war with Russia waged on valuable Ukraine real estate is still grinding on with no end in sight.

 No end that has been announced publicly, at any rate. So even as they continue to send our billions of dollars and their outdated depleted uranium and cluster bombs, maybe they know something we're not supposed to know. Ukraine, and its US puppet master, are losing to Russia. Team Biden wants to beat the Kremlin to the punch while the getting's still good.

Therefore, former Obama Commerce Secretary and Hyatt Hotel heiress Penny Pritzker has been outlandishly awarded the allegedly sovereign state of Ukraine, to control as she sees fit. Or in euphemistic New York Times headline-speak: "Biden Taps Penny Pritzker to Drive Ukraine's Economic Revival."

It's the new definition of the Pritzker Prize for outstanding achievement by an architect. 

The proof that Ukraine is currently naught but an American rump state whose residents are being needlessly killed and maimed in the hundreds of thousands, is right here in the curdled journalistic pudding:

Ms Pritzker, 64, will encourage pro-investment strategies in Ukraine while also drumming up public and private investment from other nations, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the appointment was not yet official. She plans to travel to the country in the coming weeks to begin assessing the state of its economy and to meet with political and business leaders. The White House will announce the appointment on Thursday. Ms. Pritzker will work from the State Department, reporting to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

She apparently will not be meeting with everyday struggling and oppressed Ukrainians. This is purely a matter of elites talking to other elites. It's a matter of the Times blandly discussing the joy of oligarchic greed with its own elite target audience. 

It's pretty much the same way that written discourse functioned in the Middle Ages.  The late philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pithily described the medieval scribes as mere parasites of the similarly parasitic nobility that they wrote for. If the peasantry was discussed at all, the narrative was not to them but about them. Therefore, the Times would never dream of either castigating Biden or evoking images of Pritzker in $600 Manolo heels, so gruesomely sidestepping Ukrainian corpses in her pursuit of war booty. 

The oligarchs running the world don't even bother to hide their psychopathic greed any more, even shamelessly trumpeting it all over the front pages with their anonymous sources. Th Times article about Biden presumptuously bestowing one of his main political funders with a veritable country of her very own is emblematic of how the corporate sponsored media operates today. Neo-feudalism is a big part of neoliberalism.

Even so, why announce Penny Pritzker's new role as Queen of Ukraine now? 

Let's put on our speculative hats. Biden's poll numbers are still plummeting, and Donald Trump could very well put the kibosh on both war and further liberal plunder of Ukraine if he is re-elected. Better for Joe Biden to get in now while the getting's still good, especially with liberal pundits now openly calling for him to drop out of the race. 

Rumor has it that Barack Obama is the real power behind the scenes. And since Penny Pritzker was perhaps the main financial force behind his own rise to power and his current status as a centa-millionaire celebrity and media mogul. maybe Obama made Biden an offer he couldn't refuse. It might have gone something like this: "I'll keep quiet about your failing re-election campaign, as long as you do me one little favor. Give my sugar mama Penny financial control of a whole foreign country. Nobody can ever have enough power, prestige and pennies." 

For more info on Pritzker and her dynasty, you're invited to take a stroll down the seamy side of memory lane, and read the piece I wrote about Barack and Penny way back in 2013.

Plus ca change. Ka-ching goes the beat of their hearts.

Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

It is a truth increasingly, if not universally, acknowledged that the Democratic Party hates democracy .In fact, it absolutely loathes democracy. Its refusal to schedule any presidential primary debates is bad enough. But it's now reached the point where that most sacrosanct pillar of liberalism - the First Amendment to the US Constitution - has been rendered anathema to the experts of the liberal class.

Why? Because a trio of federal appellate court judges has ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds in pressuring the social media giants of Silicon Valley to censor content  Since the lawsuit was brought by a couple of Republican states' attorneys from Missouri and Louisiana, it is dismissively described by the New York Times as a "victory for conservatives." It is not only not something to be celebrated by liberals, this upholding of speech rights is something to be chagrined about. The immediate implication in the Times article is that if Republicans support a good thing, it is automatically demoted to a bad thing, or at least a thing that is highly suspect.

Democratic critics of the court ruling say that the Biden administration and its adjacent federal bureau of investigation were only trying to suppress information about the Covid pandemic that was not based upon scientific fact. These posts contained unsanctioned discourse about vaccines, masks, medication and lockdowns which the government deemed to be false and dangerous.

It's being sold as a battle between (noble) Sanctioned Information and (malign) Unsanctioned information. But at its heart it is the class war between unfettered capitalism and any freelance discourse that threatens the profits of unfettered capitalism.

The legal skirmish is even more specifically between and among the infinite varieties of snake oil. Truth or falsity is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control the production of the snake oil.

The Ivermectin treatment for Covid, for example, may or may not be bogus. It may or may not be efficacious.  That controversy is beyond my expertise and purview - and anyway, it is not the point. The point is that alternative medicine, particularly of the unpatented or patent-expired kind, might endanger the profits of Big Pharma.

Snake oil salesmen have always been an integral part of the American landscape. Plenty of people have died over the years and the centuries by relying on the little liver pills advertised in what used to be a wealth of periodicals in this country, the magnetic gizmos to cure disease and the Goop and the blood plasma transfusions for eternal youth. And of course, there's the old standby of simply praying away whatever ails people. Nobody ever said that free speech and religious cults had to be perfectly reasonable, sane or beneficent. Bullshit has always been baked into this human-inhabited planet of ours.

Not for nothing is the Times article on the First Amendment ruling written by a reporter who works on the "Misinformation Desk."  Whether this new beat is a warning that the Times itself is misinforming you is left unsaid. But Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Lee Myers immediately sets the desired snake oil tone, albeit one with the requisite gravitas. He is qualified to write about misinformation, insinuates a blurb appended to his article, because he once wrote a whole book about Putin. His misinformation expertise spans the entire globe, as a matter of fact.

So right off the bat,  it is incumbent to describe the First Amendment ruling as purely a Republican thing. That the liberal ACLU crowd also approves the Appellate decision only gets a brief mention several paragraphs in - only once readers already have been triggered to despise it.  Myers finally also allows that "others" besides Republicans also are not okay with government censorship. But as an example of this outlying otherness opposed to government censorship, he gives us Robert F Kennedy Jr, -  who, besides defending the First Amendment, is also described as an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

How do you know that journalism in the public interest has gone the way of the rotary phone? When the Paper of Record sees fit to replace its Climate Desk with a Misinformation Desk

Misinformation is a fluid word, interchangeable with Disinformation and the even more dreaded Malinformation.  It can be defined as any information, whether it be true, false or in-between, that does not pass the smell test of the delicate upturned noses of the Established Order. Information must always be disbursed from on high and never from the ground up. Brains must be well-credentialed, preferably from the Ivy League and well-funded think tanks. That is why the Times and other corporate media outlets will never, ever admit that their own Russiagate narrative was and is a huge hoax, born fully formed of the 2016 electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. That is why the Paper of Record's own current disinformation campaign is insisting that the millions of premature deaths and the lifelong disabilities from Covid 19 are just like the seasonal flu. If their cherry-picked "experts" are unconcerned about the latest surge of new strains, then neither should you be. Cases are mild, especially if you're a celebrity with concierge health care and live-in help. Any information to the contrary makes you a mere personal anecdote-spreader. If some vulnerable people are "falling by the wayside," in the unfortunate euphemistic words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, that's just the way the eugenics cookie crumbles.

The First Amendment has been tacitly amended, you see. It may not be invoked by the lower orders or by other renegades or heretics or irresponsible people, especially those belonging to the wrong political party or refusing to join any political party at all. The only safe snake oil is the kind that is well-dressed, smells heavenly, and is bottled in expensive crystal decanters. Ir is usually only accessible to, and accepted by, those with the disposable incomes with which to unlock a Times paywall or to afford a cable subscription.

The Times article on the court ruling, what with its Pulitzer stamp of approval, therefore fairly reeks of class snobbery, as do most of the subscriber responses to it. Not only was the legal decision upholding the First Amendment rendered in the deep South (New Orleans) it was rendered by a mere three judges. The backwardness of the thing is a given.

Although the First Amendment says nothing specific about an inherent human right to free speech, and only bars the government from policing speech, the Times is having none of it. It actually euphemizes the ongoing censorship efforts as "the government's ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media."

That sentence broadcasts sloppy lazy thinking and/or deliberate, misdirecting vagueness. The conflation of the various conflicting theories and studies about a misunderstood series of diseases caused by Covid with easily debunked lies about polling places and election dates is ridiculous on its face. And even if you think it's ridiculous, then you are urged to take the next suggested step and get all freaked out about all the unnamed "other issues" that spread like deadly pathogens all over the Internet!

The  newspaper does not, of course, directly critique the Biden White House, the FBI, the Surgeon General or the Centers For Disease Control for their own mal-informative actions, such as as precipitously and falsely declaring the pandemic to be over. It certainly has not examined or retracted its own mal-informative reporting about the contrived and debunked Russiagate narrative with which it explains the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. You see, the snake oil being dispensed from the crystal vials of capitalistic media has been fully tested and approved. It atomizes the doses into a fine mist, keeping you alternately anesthetized and coked up with partisan rage. It aims to choke people into a state of atomized, isolated helplessness.

In its official response to the Appellate Court, the White House doubled down, tripled down, infinity-downed and sprayed its own snake oil with toxic abandon: 

“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House said in a statement. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people but make independent choices about the information they present.”

Of course, congress could pass a law reversing the protections that social media behemoths currently enjoy from libel or slander suits brought by injured parties. But that might damage the government's self-assigned role as censorship police.

Whatever happened to the idea that the best weapon against bad speech is better speech? The government and the ruling class it serves, however, find it more expedient to counter what they deem to be bad speech with lies and disinformation that suits their own agenda and serves their own needs. If they spritz out their nostrums often enough, the hope is that the body politic will have no other recourse but to helplessly absorb them by osmosis, making them integral parts of their being. 

Biden's Band-Aid Sampler Pack

Joe Biden's poll numbers are still in the tank despite the carefully-timed cascade of criminal indictments against Donald Trump. Therefore, the White House has decided to do something really radical. They will announce the 10 lucky winners of the Medicare price negotiation sweepstakes even earlier than originally planned! 

Come Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans going broke because of the high cost of prescription drugs - or, more accurately, the tens of millions of Americans who have forgone the drugs because their cash already has run out - will finally discover whether their particular medication will be somewhat more affordable, beginning as early as 2026.  Since older Americans vote in far higher numbers than younger people do, the Lucky Ten probably will be treatments for diseases that inordinately affect the elderly.

Tuesday's desperate campaign stunt highlighting Biden's drug band-aids of the future has more than a few catches.  His team should know they're in trouble when even one of their most reliable New York Times centrist stenographers -  David Leonhardt - can make  only a wishy-washy case for them. Leonhardt and co-writer Ian Prasad Philbrick have made a feeble try anyway, even awarding Biden with the title "Doctor Spend Less" as a way both to cement his deficit hawk cred and to make voters forget that during his first campaign, he'd promised to push for a public health insurance option - the standard centrist bait and switch for a true single payer system. That promise was dead in the water by inauguration day.

The Times starts out with a handy, damning chart showing that health care costs in the United States are more than double those of other advanced countries. They then pitch the half-hearted hope that readers will conclude that eventually lowering the prices for only 10 drugs will make even the slightest dent in American health care costs.

It turns out that there are limits to even what media stenographers for the Democratic Party are willing to do, as they ruefully admit that lowering drug costs for older people will probably incentivize the rapacious drug companies to  raise the prices of these same 10 drugs for people under age 65. (Not to mention raising the prices of the thousands of drugs not in the Lucky 10 for patients of all ages. 

These unlucky patients would, of course, include some of the same younger people who will have to start repaying their onerous student loans next month. These are some of the same younger people who turned out to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, based solely upon his promise to at least partially forgive student debt for everybody, with no need to jump through the endless hoops of "means-testing."

Now, this is not to say that Joe Biden is ignoring younger people or worse, completely throwing them to the wolves.  Far from it. You see, the president sent out his good friend Bernie Sanders to New Hampshire and the cable talk shows over the weekend to warn progressive people of all ages that a vote for a primary challenger or for a certain Green Party candidate will be a vote for Donald Trump, No matter that these same disaffected souls would just stay home if there was no alternative to either Trump or Biden. Sanders just repeated the spoiler canard. Failing to pull the lever for Biden would be ushering in a new era of fascism and the complete privatization of Social Security and Medicare. It would rob all the uninsured student debtors of their last best vestige of hope of actually living to 65. It would also end Bernie's task of continuing to ineffectually urge Biden to do more progressive things, such as "going after corporations."

But back to the New York Times's even worse than half-hearted defense of Doctor Spend-less's Sampler Pack.

"Some people will save a lot of money," the article quotes one health researcher as hoping. The people who will save are the tiny minority of seniors who actually still have the retirement savings to spend on their drugs.

 But nevertheless, the Times persists in denying reality. Or maybe they're just being cynical when they write of the futuristic Medicare Drug Discount bonanza coming soon to a dystopian hellscape near you:

Biden and his aides understand that these policies are popular with swing voters, who, as this newsletter has described before, tend to lean left on economic issues while being more conservative on many social issues. That’s particularly true of swing voters who don’t have a four-year college degree. The president has described his health care policies as part of “Bidenomics in action.”

There's some occult snobbery built into that last paragraph. It implies that young "swing voters who don't have a four-year college degree" are so stupid as to believe that lowering the prices of only 10 drugs for the 65+ crowd is pretty much equal to Medicare For All . Maybe these voters will also forget that even during his first run for the White House, Biden had vowed to veto M4A if by some miracle it ever reached his desk after passing both houses of congress. Team Biden knows full well that polls show that at least 70 percent of Republican voters also favor single payer health insurance. 

About those older voters: Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, they are now able to buy their hearing aids over the counter, the better to hear Biden reading off the telerompter to tout Bidenomics.

He is also, according to the Times. "trying" to enforce the Trump-era bipartisan law that prevents health care private equity vultures from sending out surprise bills to patients. It seems that the usual loopholes preventing enforcement were written into the legislation by the lobbyists working for private equity surprise-billers.

Now, in case you are thoroughly discouraged if not downright jaded by the Big Ten Sweepstakes, here are some consolations courtesy of Times:

--Five of the major predatory drug companies are still headquartered right here in the USA. Your drugs might be manufactured off-shore in low-wage sweatshops, but the CEOs still occupy their Wall Street corner offices. America is already great.

--Drug companies say lower prices on 10 drugs will hamper innovation. They are lying! They will keep re-patenting old drugs for fun and profit. It's the American way.

-- Nobody really knows yet whether the drug savings for older people will translate to higher costs for younger people. You'll just have to wait until after the 2026 band-aid reform package slowly goes into effect to find out. The election is in 2024, so what nobody knows yet cannot possibly hurt Biden you yet.

-- Perhaps most important of all, soothes the Times,

• Biden has suggested that if he wins re-election, he will try to take more steps to reduce medical costs. Among them: making Obamacare subsidies permanent and capping insulin costs for privately insured Americans. “There’s more to do,” he has said.

The Contrived Dichotomy of Power Politics

As much as I've tried to ignore the hype, it has become near- impossible to avoid the media-manufactured reality that Decision '24 is now officially underway. It's hard, because the first Republican primary debate tonight is being marketed as a blockbuster double bill. Or more accurately, it's a teaser for the much more thrilling show of Donald Trump and his racket getting booked on yet more criminal charges. Seeing as how Trump is skipping the debate, his fans will likely also skip the debate in favor of a third big draw - the rumored Tucker Carlson interview.  The target audience for the actual debate itself are the Democrats, who are reported to be getting the popcorn and the booze ready in anticipation of just how boring and out of touch Ron DeSantis will be, and how many zingers Chris Christie will manage to lob, and how many of the candidates will visibly squirm when asked if they will sign a loyalty oath to support the ultimate victor (who, by popular polling and media acclaim is said to be the absent Donald Trump.) The mainstream media outlets are rife with articles about all the complicated different ways that your captive eyeballs can glue themselves to the Fox show - not to mention all the takeaways to be had from doing your civic duty of watching it, and then listening to rival cable channels analyzing it to death into the wee, bleak hours of Thursday morning and beyond.

The more I think about it, the more I doubt that the general election will, in fact, be a contest between Trump and Joe Biden. Trump looks more bloated and pasty by the day. He is spending all his political contributions on his own legal defense. His only campaign theme is martyrdom. The phony appeal to the working stiff is running a sloppy second. 

And between the Hunter mess and his own visibly deteriorating mental and physical state, Joe Biden will be lucky to outlast even his first term in office. The establishment media, which had breathlessly reported on his visit to Maui, went into radio silence mode in the wake of the actual visit. If you wanted to find out that Biden actually compared hundreds of people losing their lives to the worst United States fire in more than a century to a minor kitchen fire decades ago in his Delaware home, when -no joke - he nearly lost his wife, his cat, and his vintage Corvette, then you had to read about it in the New York Post or The Daily Mail. The New York Times abruptly stopped its own Biden-Maui coverage after a last photo of the president waving from Air Force One en route to Hawaii. Meanwhile, they are oh so subtly boosting the hapless Kamala Harris and keeping Gavin Newsom on 24-hour call. Little by little, they seem to be giving up on their Philip K. Dick simulacrum of a president. He's winding down, creaking to a halt, and painfully so. It's a case of political elder abuse if there ever was one. Dianne Feinstein is still around, in part because she serves to make Biden seem spry.

As a matter of fact, the Times coverage of the Maui catastrophe already had been taking second place to the Trump indictment, and which unknown GOP politician had just made the donation/polling cut for the debate. One of them, I forget his name, apparently got hurt in a basketball game and may or may not appear.  This news is interspersed with breaking news accounts of which Trump racketeer has had his or her mug shot taken in Georgia.

To the extent that the corporate media are covering such news as that food insecurity in the richest country on earth has increased for the fifth straight month, or squeamishly euphemizing the mass expulsion of millions of Medicaid recipients from their health care as "the Great Unraveling" rather than eugenics on steroids, or is downplaying the surge  of still more coronavirus strains in an increasingly strained denial that many more people are getting sick, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to learn about these things even if you're a stalwart doom-scroller of approved news sites. Read the comments section of any Times article trying to convince you that catching Covid, and catching it often, is actually good for your immune system. The definition of "mild" has been upgraded to anything that doesn't kill you within a week. And even then, you will be said to have died "with" Covid, not of it. New public health emergencies will be declared over your dead bodies, if not theirs. 

It's all Trump all the time if your reading is restricted to consolidated Democratic Party-aligned media. It's all Biden scandal all the time if you're more inclined toward the right-leaning outlets. Personally, I always sample everything out there.

Everything is centered on all this divisiveness that has supposedly reached such new epidemic proportions. The sub-headline in an otherwise good Times article on the health and financial effects of the Palestine, Ohio train disaster is that residents have allegedly returned to a "newly divided community." The contrived dichotomy of partisan politics must always take precedence over human solidarity, which is very threatening to the powers-that-be. 

If you consider yourself a lefty and you take too much issue with the Democrats, you're either a closet Trump supporter yourself or you are propelling others into a Trumpian orbit of doom. You could even be a Putin plant if you're anti-war.  You can preface your Biden or anti-military critiques with all the Trump disclaimers you want, and it still won't matter. If you raise your voice and persist on harping on Medicare For All, then all you will succeed in doing is ushering in a reprise of fascist rule under Donald Trump or one of his imitators. Think, for example, of Mike Pompeo,  or some other more intelligent version of Trump. Or don't even take the trouble to think, because Victoria Nuland, the newly appointed acting undersecretary of state under Biden was also a protegee of Dick Cheney.

Because of course, we already live under fascism in this country. Bertram Gross wrote about it a long time ago in his book "Friendly Fascism." So did Sheldon Wolin with his critique of "inverted totalitarianism." It's also known as corporatism, or rule by predatory capitalists. Its appeals to patriotism and nationalism may vary in intensity depending on the party in power, but it transcends all the usual geographical boundaries, which are artificially put in place by the same corporatists in every single one of their bloody climate-destroying wars for endless profit.

Getting you to fight with your neighbors and even with your family members over allegiance to one of the two US-based corporations known as legacy political parties is exactly what they want. It's their weapon on of mass distraction, so you won't focus over-much on your lack of medical care, a livable income, secure housing or a lifetime of education debt. Keeping your focus off their relentless exploitation of humanity is of the utmost importance to them. Heaven forfend that you would expend whatever physical or mental energy ou still have in organizing a labor or rent strike, or a patient-led occupation of a private equity-owned clinic or hospital.

Howard Zinn had it right when he said it's not who's sitting in the White House (or spieling on a Fox News  "debate" stage)  that should concern us, but who is out there marching or sitting in the streets or any number of semi-public spaces.

How Biden Could Win

 According to an article in Politico,  the White House is in a hand-wringing frenzy over all the red states that are gleefully cutting millions of people off Medicaid. Mass removals began in late spring, when Joe Biden officially and prematurely declared an end to the Covid public health emergency, That action brought, in millions of cases, an abrupt end to guaranteed medical coverage for struggling people. For the three years of the emergency, they'd been spared all the onerous bureaucratic hoop-jumping and dire need-proving in order to get care. 

 His declaration ending pandemic aid, the apologetics narrative goes, resulted from a relentless and irresistible pressure campaign from the governors of these same red states - states that never in a million years would give the election to that rascally radical socialist Joe Biden.

Now, it's the Biden administration's turn to be seen as "pressuring" these same red states to please don't be so hasty and enthusiastic about it. Spread the pain out more discreetly in hopes nobody will notice. You see, when an estimated 15 million struggling Americans are expected to lose Medicaid coverage by next year, just when Campaign '24 goes into full swing, Biden's boast that people are better off due to his "Bidenomics" miracle recovery might fall a tad flat

That's what the Democrats are most worried about: not winning the next election. The fact that millions of people already have been kicked off the Medicaid rolls, just as Covid cases increased by a whopping 50 percent this summer, is of secondary importance to them.

So rather than Biden taking to the bully pulpit to blast Republicans for kicking people off their health coverage when so many more are getting sick, his administration is reported to be quietly cajoling right-wing governors in states like Texas, Florida and Arkansas to go a little slower with the sadism that he himself facilitated with the stroke of a pen. In Arkansas alone, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has already kicked off more than 300,000 Medicaid patients from their coverage in the past few months - including more than 100,000 children.

According to Politico,

But the administration has refused to publicly criticize individual states or even identify which ones it believes face the most serious issues, for fear of damaging its relationships with them. Though GOP-led states like Texas and Arkansas rank among the most aggressive in cutting people from Medicaid, states with Democratic governors such as Kansas and Kentucky are also dropping enrollees at high rates.

As long as it's bipartisan, it's like that sickly-sweet old Smuckers syrup TV commercial: it's just got to be good.  The problem is that during election season, the too-blatant embrace of eugenics as official US health policy is not a good look. 

But here's the dilemma. As the Duopoly is well aware, poor people don't turn out to vote in as great numbers as more well-off people. Therefore, all the Democrats think they  need do is to impress the well-off by posturing as "trying" to ameliorate the cruelty that they themselves passively-aggressively helped bring into being. As for the Republicans, they've apparently convinced enough of their constituents that losing their own health care is not as bad as the undeserving lazy malingerers of legend getting some of it. "Let them eat resentment" is one way of putting it. This works especially well where gerrymandering is the booster shot of choice.

The liberal opposition is the maudlin political theater described in the Politico article: 

On Capitol Hill, senior Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated with the administration’s approach, questioning its effectiveness and pushing for more aggressive steps — such as cutting off critical funding.... Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the committee that oversees Medicaid, likened some states’ attempts to stop people from losing coverage to “waving at somebody as their car goes by, and going, well, we contacted you.” 

Heaven forfend that the Democrats run the risk of being called socialists by going so far as to bring single payer health legislation up for a floor debate.  If everybody had health care, liberal politicians  would never again have to exert themselves uttering empty threats to cut off funding to those mean old states. Without manufactured gridlock, they wouldn't even know what to do with themselves.

And with Covid cases rising quite drastically in the United States this summer, and with the number of Long Covid cases being a public health crisis in and of itself, President Biden could, with just another stroke of his executive pen, re-declare a public health emergency and order guaranteed health care for every man, woman trans person and child in this country, with no requirement to prove either financial need, employability or moral deservingness. All of those tens of millions of people who don't vote because they are too poor, too sick or too tired to care or expect much from politicians might change their minds and turn out for Joe Biden at the polls in 2024. He'll at least have earned his bragging rights.

Then again, they worry, if too many people get too healthy they might also develop the energy to take to the streets in protest of such things as student loan debt, capitalism-fueled climate disasters, and America's endless wars. And then what good would a second term for Biden and even a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress do them?

 Keeping the masses of people down and out is the engine that keeps the oligarchs who fund and control the politicians in power.  And tying for-profit predatory health coverage to one's work is the main way for the overlords to crush unions and to keep labor in line.

The fact that life expectancy in the United States is decreasing, and the suicide rate in this country increased to historic levels last year is, after all, just what the concierge doctor ordered for his wealthy clients. 

In the first few years of the pandemic, the suicide rate had actually decreased, given that most people got government stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, maximum food aid, and yes... Medicaid coverage. The suicide rate increased just as the temporarily enhanced welfare state, which had cut the rate of child poverty in half, began to be dismantled as a matter of deliberate bipartisan design. People who'd finally caught a break by having enough to eat and getting protection from evictions, suddenly had it all yanked away from them. 

These suicides are very much part and parcel of what Case and Deaton have accurately called "deaths of despair." The last thing in the world that desperate people need right now is some politician telling them that they're better off than they think they are.

Meanwhile, the bipartisan policy now in cruel effect is essentially just a dead heat on a merry-go-ground. The Republicans pressure the Democrats to kill off more poor people, and then the queasy, compliant Democrats pressure the Republicans to tone down the sadism just a wee bit. The actual people are crushed under the political stampede before they're fatally ejected from the rickety roller coaster. of late capitalism. (They just aren't personally responsible enough to fasten their frayed seatbelts!)

Welcome to the Eugenic States of America.

The Conscience of An Elite

Revolutionary Brooks (graphic by Kat Garcia

 New York Times columnist David Brooks peered into his magic mirror recently and had a Eureka! moment. Could it possibly be that he and his righteous bipartisan group of anti-Trump resistance fighters themselves could have had a role in the rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump?

 Brooks, who has made a whole career out of demonizing the poor in his biweekly columns, has belatedly come to the realization that the disdain that his elite class harbors toward the "lesser people" is what contributed to mass resentment and the American turn to right-wing populism.

"What if we're the bad guys here? Brooks disingenuously mused, much to the chagrin of more than 4,000 responding Times subscribers - whom the Times has relentlessly indoctrinated over the last six years that the only thing they ever have to hate and fear is Trump himself, as well as his hordes of fascist Trumpies. The only thing that has sustained the liberals of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) since Hillary Clinton was trounced in 2016 are the fumes of their own moral rectitude, which is all the justification they need for the financial gains they've accrued at the expense of the have-nots. It was not neoliberal austerity policies and the offshoring of jobs that created Trump supporters, they insist. It is their incipient racism and deplorable stupidity they display in voting against their own economic interests. And besides, many Trump voters, if not wealthy elites themselves, are tacky uneducated small-business owners, like the used car salesman who rips off other uneducated people for a living.

Wealthy Democrats themselves cannot possibly be racist, because not only did they vote for Barack Obama, they still revere him. Since Obama and other Black people are now more often elevated to positions of power, it makes it so much easier for "woke" elites to ignore the worsening structural racism and class inequality that directly supports their own lives and lifestyles. Their self-declared wokeness enables them to become the same kind of censorious, reactionary authoritarians they accuse the more extreme Republicans of being. Brooks sounds like a born-again woke liberal himself when he writes:

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Brooks counted more than 900 times that Obama used the word "smart" to describe his policy decisions, ascribing its use as a way of dissing non-educated people. (I have a different interpretation, included in my published comment to his opinion piece, reposted below).

Brooks goes on, accurately enough:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago.

The big tell that Brooks is blowing so much hot air is that he offers no policy solutions in the way of wealth redistribution, higher taxes on the rich, a debt-free college education and affordable housing, guaranteed single payer health care, and increased Social Security and disability payments to begin to stem the resentments that have given rise to Trump. Instead, he merely aims to "raise awareness" among the self-satisfied and comfortable liberal class. As long they merely acknowledge their privilege and they tone down the scolding just a tad, the have-not crowd will shut up and magically fall into line.

Brooks is an even worse phony that he was before anti[Trumpism bit him in the ass, when he openly but so delicately and obliquely blamed the poor for their own plights. It's just as bad to concern-troll as it is to scold while annoyingly continuing to praise one's own inherent goodness In fact, it's even worse.

Here's how I responded to Brooks' straining effort at constipated wokeness:

 Brooks, falsely correlating higher socioeconomic status with higher intelligence, completely ignores the plight of college-educated debtors. They were fed the line that "smart" people were destined for success. And the exact opposite has turned out to be true.

 Politicians like Obama were wont to use the word "smart" in conjunction with cuts to the social safety net. Another neoliberal buzzword I've come to loathe is "common sense." Translation: if you don't believe in austerity, you just are not getting with the program. You aren't a credentialed expert. Another similar catchphrase is "sharing the sacrifice" which posits that taxing rich people at slightly higher rates would balance out gratuitous cuts to food stamps and Medicaid.

Sure, we're all in this together, even as the richest billionaires at least doubled their wealth since the economic collapse of 2008 and the Covid pandemic.

Trump is very much the creation of the neoliberal thought collective. Anti-Trumpers can roll out any number of indicted hideous Trump-heads on their shiny golden legal platters, but most people, too worried about their next rent payment or the next unexpected health crisis, could not care less at this point.

Thank goodness for the (brilliant but starving) writers' strike, and for Cornel West being one of the few remaining voices of moral rectitude.