Comfort Food For Multiple Maniacs

If you're worried about the two million Palestinians starving to death in Gaza as bombs rain down on their heads, maybe you shouldn't be.

Because to hear first lady Jill Biden tell it, our most pressing concern should be that our ruling capitalist predators get enough comfort food to eat. Stuffing their faces with gourmet treats posing as plain country fare eases their stress and strain. Their need for sustenance should prove to us mere mortals that these demi-gods are, in fact, as human as you and me. The poor beleaguered things not only are tasked with waging, marketing and profiting from ongoing multiple wars, they're also busily plotting the total global conflagrations of the future. And it takes a lot of caloric fat for the fat cats to survive and thrive for purposes of your security.

So there was no possible way, genocide in Palestine notwithstanding, that the Biden administration would ever have cancelled the state gala for the prime minister of Australia, which is now the main US base of operations for their hoped-for war with China.

"Nurturing our partnerships and relationships with our allies is critically important, especially in these tumultuous times," Jill Biden euphemistically explained as her rationale for going ahead with the dinner. "Food is comforting, reassuring and healing, and we hope that this dinner provides a little of that as well."

Given that the 300 honored guests at the state dinner included the  bloodthirsty likes of Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin III and Victoria Nuland, one can only imagine the gusto with which they gnawed into such delicacies as spareribs slathered with gobs of sarsparilla sauce.

Jill Biden came off sounding a lot like the clueless hostess in the classic Katherine Mansfield short story, "The Garden Party."  The matriarch scoffs at her conscience-stricken daughter's plea to cancel the festivities because a man had just suffered a fatal accident in the slum neighborhood located just outside the gates of their fancy estate. Putting the feelings of her poor, mourning neighbors ahead of her wealthy guests enjoying her food, her flower arrangements, and her hired musicians would have been just too "extravagant."

"You are being very absurd, Laura," she said coldly. "People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. And it's not very sympathetic to spoil everyone's enjoyment as you're doing now."

But to show that for her own part, Jill Biden is not completely insensitive to what either the Palestinians or the growing number of critics of her husband's embrace of genocide might think, she did cancel the hired entertainment part - dance music by the B-52s.  It might have looked unseemly for the gentry and proxy genocidaires to be seen rocking and rolling  to a band sharing a name with an aircraft that's been used for decades to drop US bombs all over the world, including in the Middle East to this very day.

Instead, Jill opted for the soothing jingoistic sounds of military bands from the Army, Air Force and Marines. The corporate media dutifully downplayed the party as "sedate" and "low-key" and even family-centered, given that the Bidens' grandchildren were there.

(Even as they were playing their appropriate tunes, an Army reservist in Maine - trained as a state-sanctioned weapons instructor -  was shooting up a bowling alley full of kids with his own instrument of choice: the iconic AR-15. Any upcoming sympathy visit by Joe Biden to yet another grieving community might be a little more awkward than usual, given his recent glib remark that dead Palestinian children are inevitable - because war.  Also, there's the inconvenience of his own son being under criminal indictment for an illegal gun purchase.)

But enough of all this angst and unpleasantness. Let's get back to Jill Biden's mission of comforting the comfortable. A few days before the state dinner, she was dining by candlelight with fashion industry donors at former Vogue editor Anna Wintour's multimillion-dollar townhouse in New York City's Greenwich Village. 

She told the group that, given these "fraught times"  she wouldn't trust anybody but Joe Biden to be sitting in the Situation Room for another four years. And why wouldn't she, given that the Situation Room is really a 5000-square foot a mansion within a mansion?

With its recent $50 million renovation, the Biden sitting room is many rooms, including many nooks and crannies and multiple conference rooms and even so-called "breakout rooms." The padded walls are adorned with multiple high-def video screens especially designed for the comfort of aging eyes. Even the presidential seals for the podiums have been supersized and specified to be larger than a human head. The massive main conference table is crafted from the finest fine-grained mahogany. imported from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Far East with a military base. The chairs for the armchair warriors are crafted from the finest leather, flayed from the finest American cows.

But where would comfort food and furniture be without fashion? Jill Biden is also all about the couture to take wealthy minds off all that global "tumult" and other unpleasantness. She told her fashionista donors that couture is "not only the clothes we pull out of our closets each morning, they are statements of our identity. They're our armor."

There is no word yet about "who" Jill will wear as body armor when (in our imagination) she brings baskets full of state dinner leftovers to the UN trucks parked at the Egypt-Palestine border.. It would be a happy ending to ur story. It would be just like the young girl in "The Garden Party" bringing her basket of party food to the bereaved family of the accident victim. She thought she could just leave the offering at the cottage door. But then those sly underclass victims of capitalistic predation actually make her view the dead body.

 It's  nurturing comfort food for the hoi polloi, on those rare gala occasions when the comfortable actually get afflicted for a change.

Who would ever dream of canceling such a tumultuous event?

It's All About the White Settler Colonialism

 What took European invaders close to 400 years to accomplish in the Americas, the State of Israel hopes to accomplish in less than a quarter of that time. I am talking, of course, about the State of Israel's pivot from its protracted ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the outright genocide of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

Just as the Puritans self-righteously justified their own wars against native populations by pointing to their own persecution at the hands of the British, and later, by the often-violent reaction of Indians against the settler-colonists, so too do the Zionists of Israel justify their treatment of native populations by pointing to their own long history of persecution in Europe, which culminated with the Holocaust.  As long as the perpetrators can gloss over their racist white supremacy with the shield of perpetual victimhood, they feel free to do plenty of victimizing of their own. If you criticize their actions, you are labeled an anti-Semite. You might even have a Wall Street job offer rescinded if you're an Ivy League student. (Which might not be a bad thing, in the long run. Maybe these elite college kids can now oot for a teaching job in an underserved public school!)

Joe Biden, on his quick campaign stop in Israel, wasted no time in embracing both Binyamin Netanyahu and Bibi's predictable denial of responsibility for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, which has claimed the lives of at least 500 people. The US president glibly explained his belief that Hamas ("the other team") was responsible by saying that "his" defense department had already told him so. This is the same dude who had enthusiastically embraced the debunked war propaganda of decapitated Israeli babies.

It's all about the solidarity among the settler-colonialists of the world. Both the United States and Israel consider themselves to be exceptional nations, among God's chosen ones. They do pre-emptive war with impunity.

Why else would the US military, in which Biden puts so much demented faith and trust, name a whole series of its lethal weapons and hardware after the native populations it had finally conquered in the late 19th century?  

Here's just a partial list of what the perpetual US war machine has used to maim and kill untold millions of people, the majority of whom have been non-white in the ludicrously-named post World War II "Pax Americana" --

Apache attack helicopter, Tomahawk cruise missile,  a whole series of helicopters bearing such tribal names as Cayuga, Huron, and Iroquois, not to mention the high-tech spy aircraft called Kiowa, Ute and Mohawk. And who can forget that the mission to murder Osama Bin Laden was named after the great Indian warrior against US occupation - Geronimo?

Such naming is a way to continue denigrating American Indians while justifying their own modern wars of aggression. It speaks to a kind of distorted genetic memory  of all those innocent settler-folk being scalped by the "savages" who had the effrontery to resent their invaders. Not for nothing do supporters of the genocide in Palestine attempt to dehumanize the actual victims by calling thenm "savages" and "human animals." It's all too familiar. 

And now, with most of the civilized world aghast and protesting in the streets at the blatant and even downright gleeful genocide of Palestinians, the US has effectively joined Israel in being viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world.  The US itself is still an apartheid state in all but name, discriminating against and punishing its own citizens based upon their race and class and gender - and lately, even their  independent thought - despite all the sanctimonious laws that it has on the books. Jim Crow is still alive and well. Just witness the gross expansion of the US prison system, the largest in the world, with more Black people now incarcerated than there were slaves prior to the Civil War. This statistic is largely the result of then-Senator Biden's crime bills, passed with bipartisan support in the 90s.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 2023, the Biden administration is such an unabashed champion of Palestinian genocide, albeit with the usual ass-covering platitudes about humanitarian concerns. It is somewhat gratifying - or worrisome, as far as the New York Times is concerned - that even timorous "progressive" politicians are just now beginning to make the tiniest possible demands of Biden to broker a ceasefire. It was only a week ago that the Democratic Party was so unified. They voted en masse against ex-House Speaker McCarthy. Most of them already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, for cryin out loud! 

But even the reliably pro-Israel Times isn't quite as gung-ho about Zionist revenge as it was in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas.  Perhaps it has something to do both with the backlash from readers in the comments sections, and from the public at large. Not when "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has been expanded so disproportionately. Like Biden, Netanyahu's political viability was also in question prior to the allegedly surprise attack by Hamas.

Biden's gruesome theatrical embrace on Wednesday of this brutal right-wing leader of Israel was intended to recast him as a courageous wartime statesman rather than as a bumbling old man with low domestic approval ratings. However, any additional support or kudos that he gets from his fellow Neocons in both war parties will be diluted by the two other hawkish xenophobic presidential candidates in the mix. - Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are already indications that his political stunt has backfired.

 This creates a much bigger opening for the lone antiwar candidate, Cornel West. He may not win - actually allowed to win - the election, or even get ballot access. But at least the corporate media are now being forced to give him a regular platform. No matter if it's just an attempt to co-opt him in their corporate fold or boost their ratings among the younger demographic.

Because despite its own ham-handed efforts, the Censorship-Industrial Complex cannot control the narrative. The grotesque reality speaks for itself.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programs...

... To bring you Professor Hillary Clinton's clarion call for an official mass deprogramming of MAGA cultists.

What she would actually RE-program these Trump voters into being or thinking is carefully left unsaid.  But it's easy to imagine them as characters in "A Clockwork Orange" remake. Hillary would open up their eyes with her magical steel retractors, forcing them to watch endless televised Trump rallies interspersed with even more disgusting images of blood and gore. The deplorable lumpens would then find themselves vomitng every time they accidentally caught a glimpse of Trump on TV. The only way to settle their stomachs would be to make a beeline for the voting booth to re-elect the kindly grandpa similacrum known as Joe Biden.

 Third party candidates? Don't even ask. The alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, such as universal healthcare, debt-free education, an end to wars of aggression, stable housing and nutrition must also be surgically cleansed from the brains of every disaffected subject.

If Hillary had chosen to be honest in this interview, she would have proclaimed that it takes a cult to fight a cult. Actually, it takes the parent cult of the Duopoly to expel the bastard child cult. Trump is essentially the spawn of a rampantly promiscuous capitalism; a spawn too tastelessly open about the fascist tendencies long an integral part of the U.S. hegemon.

 Simply think, on this Indigenous People's Day of all days, of the European settler-colonists who began exterminating native populations and enslaving African people whole centuries before sanctimoniously declaring that "all men are created equal."

 Only when the unfortunate Trump byproduct is expelled, Clinton confides to CNN pundit Christiane Amanpour, can the desired make-up session between the bickering Democrats and Republicans finally go full steam ahead for the ultimate and perpetual orgiastic pleasure of the lords and ladies of Capital. Of course Hillary didn't put it that way. The oligarchic orgasm is now defined as "democracy."

 Like many a romantic before her, Hillary still labors under the delusion that it was bipartisanship and not the New Deal and the Great Society social programs that made America, America. 

Listening closely to this interview, you find that Clinton initially only singles out the elected MAGA Republicans of Congress as the insane actors in dire need of her mental cleansing. But then she swiftly pivots to the mass of powerless voters as also worthy of treatment in her asylum.  These voters, according to Clinton, were attracted to Trump by virtue of such pre-existing maladies as xenophobia, misogyny and racism. The false hope he gave to many of them, even previous Obama voters, for relief of their pre-existing economic precarity - has no cure in her neoliberal playbook. Other than shock therapy, maybe.

The fact that she herself had countered Trump's fake populist appeal by lecturing to the voters in 2016, rather than  meeting them where they lived, both geographically and existentially, seems not to have dawned upon her.

This glaring omission naturally segues to the next concerned query by  Amampour : what about those awful third party challengers? Aren't you afraid? She thus hastily absolves Hillary from examining or reprogramming her own brain, to ignore that her own lack of personal charm and political skills were  prime reasons for her defeat by Trump. It was, of course, also the fault of the Green Party's Jill Stein. 

Hillary imagines, therefore, that votes will also be "stolen" from Joe Biden - by some of the very same deplorables who lack the intellectual heft to dive deep into all his alleged accomplishments.

But just in case that kind of shaming won't work on the hordes of thick-headed lumpen, she ends the segment in hoping they still have enough of a vestigial fear center left in their rotting brains to at least stagger to the polls in favor of her own her preferred master-cult.

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.