Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a fair amount of heat this week for partnering with notorious horndog Bill Clinton, of all people, for a discussion on women's issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clinton has been serving a long stint in the media doghouse ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum during the Reign of Trump Terror, and scandals ranging from the Monica Lewinsky saga to Clinton's association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein started getting re-examined with fresh sets of woke eyes. Harris's marquee role at the Clintons' annual "Global University Initiative"  is therefore being widely lambasted as a ham-handed effort to both salvage Bill's tattered reputation and to unofficially re-cement the entire Clinton clan's role as major players in both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

As one editorial puts it, the very idea of Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton getting together to discuss "empowering women and girls of the world" is a bad joke, especially since the former president still considers himself a victim of the women and girls he has abused through the years. It's really hard to woke a comatose horndog, but Harris plans to give it the old college try anyway at her alma mater, Howard University.

What's being ignored in the critical coverage of this gabfest is that the occult purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative University is the imposition of crushing austerity on the women and girls (and men and boys) of the world.  Not for nothing does major funding for this week's confab with Kamala Harris come from the Peter J. Peterson Foundation. Begun by the late Wall Street billionaire and deficit hawk sponsor of Barack Obama's so-called Cat Food Commission and its efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, his think tank continues to spread the thoroughly debunked claim that government spending for the greater social good is bad for economic growth - a/k/a the unfettered growth of predatory capitalism.

Kamala Harris's participation in this oligarchic enterprise, which is now desperately trying to cloak itself in the masks of feminism and diversity, should disabuse us of the notion that the Biden administration is the most progressive one since FDR. With most of the relief measures in the "rescue" legislation - expanded unemployment insurance, modest food stamp increases and tax credits with direct cash disbursements to needy families with children - set to expire within the year, it should be obvious that their placement of a band-aid on the festering societal wound that they themselves created more than 40 years ago is mainly designed to placate an increasingly restive population.

The Clinton Global Initiative University continues to press for austerity, and it does so by infiltrating the nation's colleges and universities with the specious message that the economic pain of indebted students is due not to debt peonage imposed by greedy lenders, but by greedy older people depriving them, the young future leaders and budding entrepreneurs of America, of the success that they deserve.

"It's Up To Us," the students are instructed, to become politically engaged enough to willingly join the oligarchs in the austerity program. "Get Involved! Join the Movement!" the Clinton website urges, boasting that 131,000 college kids already have signed the pledge to become deficit hawks.

Among the solutions that the Clintons' Campus Crusade For Austerity urges the young people to clamor for is privatizing Medicare with a "premium support program," and raising the Social Security retirement age. It also suggests replacing the income tax with a "progressive consumption tax" - which many critics say is actually regressive, given that poor people must spend most of their incomes on necessities. 

Therefore, immediately after being empowered by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris at Friday's CGIU "plenary session," participating students will meet privately in an "Office Hours" chat with Hilary Allen, the program director for It's Up To Us, along with "special guests" from media monolith Verizon, another co-sponsor of the conference. According to her bio on the Clinton Foundation website, Allen was inspired to become a "radical moderate" by billionaire Daniel Lubetzky,  founder of KIND snacks, who proved to her that as long as the KIND label is slapped on predatory capitalism, who cares about the actual hidden ingredients?

To that end, Hillary Clinton herself will join the fun, leading yet another plenary session conversation with the theme of kindness promotion, which is mainly achieved by Chelsea Clinton's "Too Small To Fail" initiative to combat poverty by reading to children in laundromats.

As for Kamala Harris, hopefully she will have soaked up so much kindness and empathy by canoodling with the Clintons that her upcoming junkets to Central American countries so devastated by neoliberal US plunder that record numbers of refugees are crossing the Mexico-US border, will convince those political bosses to keep their subjects from ever even reaching Mexico in the first place. This act of American empathy will be accomplished by billions of dollars in kind bribery cash to be paid directly to the political bosses.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, in other words, rumors of the death of the Neoliberal Project and its relentless imposition of austerity and pain on the suffering masses of the world have been greatly exaggerated, Rescue Plan or no Rescue Plan.

And stateside, at least 30 million retired, sick, poor or disabled people have yet to receive their $1400 "stimulus checks." It seems that Congress unkindly forgot to appropriate the funds for the Social Security Administration to compile a list of beneficiaries for the IRS. You know... the desperate people that the Clinton Foundation and its corporate sponsors want you to believe are stealing our futures.

The Purge of the Stoners

 It's a good thing that Barack Obama has modestly shot down all those pleas from his adoring fans to team up with his old pal Joe in some capacity in the new administration. Because as a self-confessed pothead in his younger days, even Obama might not have passed muster.

The Daily Beast reports that Biden has summarily purged "dozens of young White House staffers" who admitted past marijuana use, either by firing them, suspending them, or sentencing them to work from "remote locations." This crackdown came as something of a shock, given that the administration had previously assured job applicants that they wouldn't be rejected just because of a little recreational marijuana use in the distant past. Even staffers who indulged in the 14 states in which cannabis is now legal were canned.

The official explanation for the purge is that pot use, even past pot use, presents a potential national security risk. Not to mention an international security risk, given that Obama had created his own Kill List  and declared all those thousands of innocent bystanders blasted to smithereens by his drones to be terrorists - unless they were found innocent post-mortem. Which they never were, not only because their unidentifiable bodies were in pieces, but because Obama's serial killing spree had made it far too dangerous for US officials to travel to the scenes of the crimes in order to investigate their own crimes.

So it kind of makes you wonder what Joe Biden himself was smoking when he blabbed to George Stephanopoulos on ABC this week that he thinks Vladimir Putin is a cold-blooded killer who "will pay a price" - details of which will be announced at a later date. This ominous remark was strangely inserted right in the middle of what is being hyped as his American Rescue Tour.

  Since Biden is failing to rescue student debtors from their onerous burdens, it is therefore absolutely vital for him to reset the American mood from despair to one of fear of an outside enemy. Biden's idea of a rescue is not to forgive debt, but to give it tax-exempt status just in case a portion of it is ever erased. It was, after all, then-Senator Joe Biden himself who wrote the bill which bars the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy court. Owe till you die while Russia and China are sowing discord in our democracy.

Here's my take on the White House purge of the potheads. Biden could be reviving the War on Drugs to help promote his son Hunter's upcoming memoir detailing his own rescue from drug abuse. It was this addiction, we are asked to infer, which propelled Hunter on his own ruinous journey to national security riskiness, via his sketchy and very lucrative deals in Ukraine and China. Biden is simply giving the same tough love to his young staffers that he has given to his own son.

 Nobody gets a free pass... unless it is on Air Force Two on a drug-free nepotistic junket to Beijing.

Ever so coincidentally, in a newly-released report, the intelligence "community" officially now has "high confidence" that Russia was behind the New York Post's scoop on Hunter's shenanigans, published in the final weeks of the presidential campaign and purged from Twitter and from all respectable mainstream publications who feared losing access to power.  

According to the latest New York Times article in the Russiagate franchise,

While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.

The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency's assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.

As you may have surmised by now, I am not a member of the "I Was So Wrong About Joe Biden, He Is the Greatest Progressive Since FDR!" Club. And I don't know about you, but all this scary talk about sowing doubt about the sowing of chaos just to sow doubt only makes me want to go out and score a lid and mellow out and then sow all the seeds from my stash.

We have to do whatever it takes to #Resist the Biden era's melding of the revived Partnership For a Drug-Free America with the Partnership for a Criticism-Free America. Because afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted are no longer what journalism is all about. What it does seem to be all about is the consolidated careerist media's access to the powerful, and the avoidance of cultural cancellation at all costs. 

There's a new designer drug going around that aims to get you high as a kite on one-time $1400 relief checks and temporary help in paying your health insurance shakedown artists.

The Biden team and its entire media chorus are nothing but pushers. Just Say No, before your brain fries like an egg.

Rescue: The Major and the Minor

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is a little bit like the saga of Biden's rescue dog. It seems that Major inflicted a "minor" injury on a White House lackey this week. Now, depending upon your point of view, both the bite and the bill are either boldly aggressive attacks portending future behavior,  or they're nothing but ineffectual nibbles that don't even leave a mark.

Whatever the case may be, I think it's safe to assume that Joe "nothing would fundamentally change" Biden would never tolerate any broken skin in the game on his watch.

Meanwhile, "landmark" and "sweeping" are only two of the gushing, go-to words the corporate media are using to hype the legislation expected to passed handily in the lower House and landing on Biden's desk for a triumphant televised signing ceremony. Gone are all the terrible memories of Donald Trump's own stingy approval of a mere $1,800 in direct cash aid to the majority of Americans last year. Because just as the fairytale princess once spun straw into gold, the Biden administration has magically transformed those promised $2,000 checks into $1,400 checks right before our very gullible eyes. It's a page right out of the playbook of that sly old yarn-spinner himself, Bill Clinton. It was he who set the centrist stage for all manner of austerian bait and switch gimmicks when he folksily and patiently explained, over and over again, why people simply cannot have nice things. "It's arithmetic!"

Therefore, the title of the latest episode: "$1,400 Is the New $2,000."

In this best of all possible Panglossian worlds, the American Rescue Plan will cut child poverty almost in half! Therefore, if you're a very lucky kid, you will not be among those left drowned at the bottom of the half-full glass.

But the private insurance predators? They not only will float buoyantly to the top, they'll be riding a wave. The plan vastly increases their government subsidies to a veritable tsunami of sensible, arithmetic-based windfall profit. Rather than enact even temporary single payer universal health coverage during this terrible pandemic, our leaders have instead rationally decided to fork over billions of dollars to surfer sharks in suits, so they may go about their normal business of denying our claims while collecting their co-pays, premiums and deductibles for services rendered within very strictly proscribed networks in the health care marketplace. 

So, if you're like the uninsured 64-year-old man who tested positive for Covid antibodies but negative on the molecular test, you are now personally on the hook for a $22,368 hospital bill and deemed ineligible for government reimbursement. And even if you're a Covid patient who passed all the tests but whose primary pre-existing condition was exacerbated by the virus, then you're out of luck too.

Gig workers, among other precarious people suffering through the economic effects of the pandemic, may or may not be helped by the American Rescue Plan, which will allow them to retain "skin in the game" by either shopping around for cheaper Obamacare product or getting a nice discount on their pricey employment-based Cobra plans. The New York Times reports that musicians and actors have lost their insurance coverage in droves over the past year, not only because they were out of work, but because predatory insurance companies raised their rates even as they reaped in record profits - courtesy of government subsidies which continued flowing in to their coffers unabated. Insurance companies justify raising the rates to "health care consumers" by pointing to the high costs of the pandemic to their investors.

The Rescue Plan will also bail out 185 multi-employer pension plans, thus saving the retirements of about a million people. It will not, however, extract this money from the private equity vultures who actually looted these pension plans in the first place.

In more rescue largesse in this best of all possible neoliberal worlds, student borrowers who have a portion of their debt forgiven will no longer be on the hook to the IRS for the phantom income derived from their erased debt. In other words, the tax man won't come after you for the wealth you derive from your negative bank account. It's the arithmetic, stupid!

But act now, because many if not most of the rescue plans contained in the Biden offer are set to expire in 2025, if not sooner.  This artificial and rather cynical cut-off date gives Democrats the ability to fund-raise like mad during the election year of 2024 as they "fight for" you with every pragmatic fiber of their beings.

Better to die slowly, in increments, than be thrown right to the dogs by those nasty old Republicans.

Unless, of course, the dog is Major Biden, who is just the latest actor in the Twitterverse culture wars so carefully manufactured to distract us from all our petty cares and worries.

Bite Me

America Has a Pope-Queen

 My first reaction upon learning that an obscure Senate parliamentarian named Elizabeth MacDonough had not only single-handedly nixed passage of a $15 minimum wage through the budget reconciliation process, but that Joe Biden "respected" her ruling, was one of absolute chagrin.  Here I was, along with millions of others, so hopelessly addicted to binge-watching The Crown on Netflix, that we didn't even realize we'd had our very own Queen Elizabeth this whole time. She'd been discreetly presiding over the Sceptered Isle of the Senate for the entire past decade!

Granted, she has been pretty easy to miss, given that she only speaks publicly once a year, and that speech is to an arcane youth group. This is not fair. The least she could do is deliver an annual Christmas address to the nation, if not ink a Netflix deal or at bare minimum, go on The View.

 So much for us vanquishing King George in the American Revolution. Admittedly, we in the United States have always craved a monarch, making Hollywood celebrities and rock stars our sloppy seconds. This inbred authoritarian longing also helps explain the fascination many of us in the Colonies have with vapid exiled multimillionaires Prince Harry and Meghan, who are set to regale royalty fans with their own two-hour Oprah tell-all next week. 

But since Harry's granny, Elizabeth II, is only a constitutional monarch, a figurehead with no real power, I think it's high time that Her Majesty's subjects erupt in jealousy for our possession of an all-American monarch who has even more power than our semi-democratically elected president. This unelected and secretive and unaccountable official is able, with the dismissive wave of her little royal finger, to order millions of her subjects to survive - with a stiff upper lip, of course - on $7.25 an hour. 

Joe Biden himself is such a stiff that he would never dream of demanding to know, along with millions of outraged minimum wage reform proponents, who just died and made her Queen.

Born-again self-proclaimed progressive, cosmetic/gender diversity booster, and good Catholic that he is, Biden has actually gone way beyond royalty deference and effectively elevated Elizabeth MacDonough to the status of Pope. Thanks to a Vatican ruling by one of the previous popes in Rome who declared himself infallible, every subsequent pope is deemed to be infallible. The Pope has a direct line to and from God himself. Nobody must ever question what the Pope says, no matter how bizarre or how cruel. When, for example, the Pope forbids Catholic women to use birth control and outlaws remarriage after divorce, and bans abortion even in cases of rape or incest, there are no grounds for appeal. 

Catholics don't like it much, but what can they do besides leaving the church or opening themselves up to excommunication? Biden says he doesn't like Queen-Pope Elizabeth's decision either, but he views it as so infallible that he dare not try to reverse it. 

For their own part, senior Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have also followed suit and pragmatically abandoned all hope for fear of entering the hell of party and donor retribution. Senators Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders renounced their own workaround bill, which would have penalized major corporations for failure to pay employees at least $15 an hour, for the very plausible reason that major corporations would easily have found their own workarounds to the odious requirement of paying workers a decent wage. 

Therefore, with Biden's abject surrender to Elizabeth of the Senate, not even the Supreme Court can be prevailed upon to overrule the Parliamentarian and declare her de facto unitary powers to be unconstitutional. Not that the Court ever would, of course, entertain such a thing. The reactionary majority would likely reimpose slavery if they could, guided by their own cynical reliance on the glorified pantheon of slave-holding "originalist" writers of the Constitution. This infallible document is either to be literally interpreted as a Bible, or conveniently ignored whenever the bottom line of capitalism is threatened, or twisted into a subversive parody of itself when, for example, assault rifle profiteers and sociopaths can legally define themselves as well-ordered militias.

Joe Biden, reactionary originalist stiff that he also is, claims that his hands are tied on the parliamentary minimum wage defeat. His overruling or firing of Pope-Queen Elizabeth would be a mortal sin, punishable by condemnation by his financial backers, who also own and control the Democratic Party.

So, although theoretically his hands are not tied - because both Catholic dogma and his own electoral mandate do acknowledge the concept of free will - Joe Biden is afraid of catching hell from the oligarchs he serves, the pantheon of demi-gods presiding at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable who adamantly oppose a $15 minimum wage - which, by the way, should not be confused with a living wage, now estimated to be about $24 an hour at the bare survival minimum.

He did promise these movers and shakers that "nothing would fundamentally change" when he became the figurehead president. The infallibility of capitalism will never be challenged by him, loyal courtier that he is.

As he goes about the business of having no power, it turns out that even with his hands tied, he is still capable of dropping bombs on Syria without the approval of anybody, not even the Pope-Queen herself. Congress, however, theoretically does have the power to stop the bomb-dropping. But once again, the rule of adhering maniacally to the Constitution whenever it's convenient and blandly ignoring it whenever it's not, especially applies when it comes to the unitary executive's power to wage war and kill people whenever the mood hits him, or whenever the de facto kings in the profit-driven "defense" industry (the Pentagon) order him to.

Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, meanwhile, soothes that Biden will spend the next few days... or weeks (or months, or years) figuring out "the best path forward."  Whenever people are being denied nice things, politicians can always fall back on evoking the Bible. Joe Biden, even with his hands tied by a tangle of silly string of his own making, is made to sound as though he is a saint, forever and always seeking the way, the truth and the light.

While Joe Biden is bound, the rest of us gag.

The Mangling Munching Manchin Machine

(Say three times fast)

Just like clockwork, the Democrats are out in coordinated force, blaming sexism and xenophobia as the core occult reasons for the opposition to party operative Neera Tanden's confirmation to the Biden cabinet.

Granted, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is full of noxious hot air when he points to the "incivility" of Tanden's thousands of vitriolic deleted tweets, aimed both at Republicans and progressive Democrats in the Bernie Sanders wing, as his reason for not voting for her to lead the Office of Management and Budget.  In tandem with that nonsense, he apparently believes that it is the very height of civility to deny his own constituents, living in one of the poorest areas of the country, a rise in the minimum wage to 15 lousy bucks.

So while Republicans (and Manchin) are crying their crocodile tears and claiming they are victims of Tanden's Mean Girl Syndrome (because they only want unity!), the Democrats are perfectly willing to forgo legitimate criticism of her corruption in order to defend her. When you have identity politics to fall back on, the sky is the absolute limit when it comes to glossing over such inconvenient facts as Tanden's call to attack Libya to get at its oil, her past efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare, her red-baiting of any and all critics of neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton, her leadership of a Democratic slush fund disguised as a think tank (Center For American Progress, or CAP) , her acceptance of corporate bribes from billionaires and corporations to run said slush-tank, her physical assault of a former employee, and her destruction of a blog run out of CAP offices once employees began to unionize.

This is the woman that Joe Biden cynically proposes to control the purse strings of our country and to manage our lives in the process. It is a scary scenario, to put it mildly.

So it is all the more disheartening when even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leap on the Identity Politics bandwagon in order to defend the bullying Tanden against that traitorous bullying misogynistic villain Joe Manchin. AOC actually helps to ridiculously lump Tanden in with two other more liberal endangered Biden nominees, Hispanic Xavier Becerra and Native American Deb Haaland, as a way to further paper over Tanden's despicable career.

We are supposed to believe that just because Indian-American Neera Tanden once survived on food stamps and lived in public housing, she will suddenly divert from career script and champion poor people. In an absolute subversion of the mantra of Martin Luther King Jr., we are asked to judge Tanden based solely upon the color of her skin and the configuration of her XX chromosomes, rather than upon the content of her truly rotten character.

The glossy veneer barely disguising all kinds of corruption and the record inequality which is carefully engineered and maintained by the political class and its partners in consolidated media is a very flimsy substitute for legislation in the public interest, run by true public servants rather than by the career-climbing servants of the oligarchy.

Witness, just as the latest example of this performance art, Monday night's candlelight vigil spectacular starring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to mark the 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19. Media reviewers have glowingly called their tasteful tableau such a powerful and refreshing step up from Donald Trump's own criminal callousness.

Because there's nothing like a shiny solemn candlelight vigil to substitute for a single payer health care system, regular Covid relief checks, and student debt forgiveness, right? 

Because things that help ordinary people are treated by the permanent ruling class as veritable plagues against free market capitalism. The body politic, to our leaders, is itself nothing but a Mean Girl calling them nasty names and hurting their feelings, when all they want is Unity and Civility. Harrumph!

Mangling Joe Manchin, meanwhile, dutifully plays his own designated role as the bad cop/useful idiot who prevents the noble and empathetic Joe Biden from completing his incremental agenda. Not formally defecting to the Republican side of the duopoly is simply a clever bargaining chip on Manchin's part, of course. He can dangle the threat of defection over their heads for the duration of his tenure, in the process giving his co-conspirators all the cover they need to implement their occult austerian agenda as they hide beneath their candle-lit masks of beneficence.

Just as the Tea Party Republicans once thwarted Barack Obama's hideous "Grand Bargain" with former House Speaker John Boehner to cut Medicare and Social Security, so too are right-wingers thwarting Neera Tanden's big career move to chief crook and budget-slasher. Sometimes you just have to pick your crooks and decide which bad guys you want to root for, to give you the slightest serendipitous bit of respite from the munching maw of neoliberalism.

Mangling Manchin may end up accomplishing some good in spite of his horrid old self. Then again, he could make a deal with Biden, who might agree to trash his minimum wage promise in exchange for Manchin changing his mind on Tanden.

As the New York Times frames the saga in its own extended mangled metaphor of an article, the White House is still "giving her confirmation a shot" while Tanden herself is "committed to rolling up her sleeves." Ouch.

It is so essential to remain vigilant as we're relentlessly regaled by these never-ending vigils, produced so carefully for our relief and stupefaction.

Facebook Follies: Underhanded Down Under

 by Valerie Long Tweedie

What is going on between Australia and Facebook?

As you already probably know, news is very expensive to produce. Research, investigative journalism, and foreign bureaus with "feet on the ground" are expensive to fund. The main source of revenue for newspapers and news outlets is advertising, which has been declining since people have been getting more and more of their news on-line. News organizations that have gone on-line attract advertisers by keeping track of how many people go to their sites for news. But this is not enough.

Sadly, lots of small, local news outlets have had to go out of business and even the bigger ones are having to lay off journalists and other staff. This means the Fourth Estate and an independent media, which is the watchdog of our democracy, is in peril.

Facebook and Google, because they are the biggest beneficiaries of Australians linking news via their sites (FB made .7 BILLION last year off of Australians via advertising revenue but only paid a paltry 2.4% tax), have been asked to negotiate in good faith with the media companies to help offset some of their costs. Google, has done this. Facebook has been very belligerent about it from the start and threatened to cut all of Australia off of the FB platform.

What Facebook actually did on February 18 was block all news links not only coming out of Australia but also all international sources. So someone like me who links to U.S. sites in my FB comments has had all my links blocked. However, what they did that was really egregious was, in their efforts to take on the Australian government in a power play, they became very punitive. They cut off a lot of platforms like the Department of Health - right before we start our vaccine rollout on Monday.

 Why is this important? Because after years of encouraging organisations to use Facebook to distribute important information to the public (from which FB benefits through the gathering of information on all of us and then targeting advertising back to us - for a profit), they cut off a vital source of information on where to go for vaccines and links to places to sign up for vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. They have also blocked sites where people can go to get help if they are being abused or suspect children are being abused. They have blocked weather platforms in the middle of the summer - which means bushfire season in Australia - again, alerts to where fires are and how to avoid them. Cottage business-people like Sally, who has a tiny home hairdressing salon, or the woman who makes Thai food out of her kitchen and takes orders for dinner or community organisations like the local little league groups have all been abruptly cut off.

After giving away a product for "free" - which people have all signed onto - many probably not realising just how much personal information FB has been gathering on them and selling on for a profit - Facebook has suddenly cut them off. Why? Because Facebook wants its users to pressure the government to stop trying to make them contribute to the news media sources they benefit from.

So why should most FB users care if they are only sharing shallow content memes, recipes and pictures of their dogs? Because others are using FB and Google to access and share information in this highly technical world that is often very hard for many people to navigate. We should all care that a company that is acting very monopolistic is flexing its muscle against a very reasonable request from a sovereign nation simply because it doesn't want to share a little bit of the vast wealth it is getting from the citizens of that very sovereign nation.

Right now, Australia is a test case on two fronts. China is flexing its muscle against us - and turning back our products like fresh lobster and lumber at the Chinese ports - because our government has had questions about the origins of Covid 19, spoken out against the corporation Huawei and most importantly, because the Australian government has spoken against China's incursion into the South China Sea region. In the same way, Australia is a test case for how a powerful multinational tech company like Facebook can influence a sovereign country's laws and policies. The reason FB is fighting so hard is because this highly profitable corporation doesn't want other countries with equally stretched media outlets to follow suit. In essence, it doesn't want the gravy train to end. But it isn't just Facebook. Other powerful tech corporations are watching the power game and will also follow suit - as will many multinationals - if Australia blinks. This is why this fight is so important to all of us who want fair and democratic countries.

The question is do we want a democratic government (as imperfect as it is) with politicians we can vote in and out of office making the rules and laws for our country? Or do we want giant for-profit corporations making the rules and laws?

Note: Many of you who read this will ask, "Why is she on Facebook anyway?" I admit, my links to relevant news articles seem out of sync with what most "friends" are posting. These people do seem shallow and naïve in their belief that all will be well if they keep an upbeat attitude.

But how are we to educate others about the important issues if they only get their news from Fox or CNN or Facebook? They can and are being completely cocooned in their echo chambers of friends who are like them. Sometimes I want to give up and quit. And then someone makes a comment that they like what I am posting and that it is informative. I don't think I am changing the world. In fact, I know most people probably see my posts and scroll by. But we who know better, know these are perilous times and if we can reach only one person each, we can together make a difference. When I first found Sardonicky, I was very naïve about politics. I thought the NYT was a great source of accurate information and that my government was pretty much protecting my middle class interests. Over time and because of Karen's essays (and comments in the NYT) and many of the seasoned commenters on this site, I learned what was really happening in the world. The truth is heavy and hard for most people to hear and accepting the truth is a slow process.

Now, having said all that against Facebook. The reality is the Liberal government (The Republicans of Australia) is caving into pressure from the big corporate media in Australia - think Rupert Murdoch. Google has made a deal to pay for content but only with the big players. - Which means the little players are left to struggle along as always. The other issue is just because the big media players are getting millions a year (Murdoch's corporations are getting 30 million a year), there is no guarantee that this money is going to go to journalism. So the fight for truth and justice via the media might be a red herring.

I still come down on the side of thinking we need to limit the power of Facebook. The corporation claims that cutting off non-new platforms like weather, vaccine sites and little ma and pa sites was just a glitch and will be rectified. But this corporation has been threatening to do this for months, and has had months to plan its execution.

I suspect that every step has been calculated.

****

(Valerie Long Tweedie is a teacher living in Adelaide.)

Joe Biden Is As Depraved As Ever

So a president creepily calls an eight-year-old girl whom he just met "Baby," and then further demeans her by ordering her to stop worrying her pretty little head about ever catching Covid, and other children ever catching Covid, or even about her parents and other children's parents ever catching Covid. 

You're forgiven if you thought that I was talking about Donald Trump.

But since it was Joe Biden's exhibition of creepiness and mendacity and sexist disdain, delivered in that over-familiar grandfatherly way of his, the whole world is feeling ever so much better now. Or so the gushing corporate media informs us.

Video of Biden's comforting bald-faced lies to young Leyla Salas at a CNN town hall Tuesday night quickly garnered thousands of "likes" and countless glowing media reviews.   

Her mother Jessica addressed Biden:  "As we’ve been talking about coronavirus, which is very real and scary and it’s especially scary for children who may or may not understand. My children Leyla, 8, here and my son Mateo 7 at home often ask if they will catch COVID and if they do will they die. They are watching as others get the vaccine, and they would like to know when will kids be able to get the vaccine.”

Biden telegraphed the aggressive lie he was about to tell the child by prefacing it with the usual condescending flattery beloved of hucksters and politicians from time immemorial: "Leyla, beautiful name!"

With that obligatory gaslighting out of the way, Grandpa Joe got away with a whole series of whoppers.

“We haven’t even done tests on children as to whether or not certain vaccines work or not or what is needed. You’re the safest group of people in the whole world, number one. Number two, you’re not likely to be able to get exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy. And it’s not likely that mommy and daddy will be able to spread it to you either. So, I wouldn’t worry about it baby, I promise you. But I know it’s kind of worrisome.”

My own two-year-old granddaughter recently caught Covid from her Daddy, who caught it at work because his job does not allow him to work from home. The spreading of this virus occurs in thousands if not millions of other families every single day.

The whole point of Biden's act of shameless lying to a little child is to get the schools reopened so that Mommy and Daddy can get back to work and won't have to rely on paltry government relief checks while they inconvenience their bosses with their chronic absences from work. For the leader of a party which so prides itself on its devotion to "facts" and "science," Biden is certainly not living up to the standards of what the liberal class  calls the "reality-based community." Of course, when liberals criticize Trump and the Republicans for their own ignorance and stupidity, they're also willfully ignoring the truth that Trump and the Republicans are mainly feigning their own ignorance and stupidity as a sick way to impress a voting base that they, in turn, condescendingly assume are stupid and ignorant.

It's a vicious cycle and a closed feedback loop. The relentless performance of ignorance and stupidity at the very highest levels of the media-political complex does (unlike their wealth) have the effect of trickling down on the audience. This result is desirable for them, not so much for us. Think, for example, if Biden's reassuring lies make children and the adults who love them now think that they're so impervious that they don't have to wear masks any more.

Biden, a much more seasoned politician than Donald Trump could ever hope to be, is able to hide his disdain for people by flattery, cajolery and "harmless" teasing. He topped off his shameless lies to Leyla by joking, "Oh, you're getting old. You're in second grade!"

This avuncular joshing only serves to trivialize the girl's extremely rational and fact-based concerns. Maybe somebody can tell Biden that children have a pretty good sense of when they're being lied to and don't much care for good-natured and insincere teasing from adults that they don't know. There's something creepy about strangers feigning intimacy with your kids. I know it always made my maternal hackles rise. I suppose Leyla and her mom could be somewhat grateful that at least social distancing etiquette precluded Biden from grabbing their shoulders or - god forbid - sniffing their hair at the CNN town hall.

Biden's depraved idea that kids, working parents and teachers are somehow miraculously immune from Covid also was broadcast at his last debate with Trump, when in calling for schools to re-open, he preposterously said: "And by the way, all you teachers out there — not that many of you are going to die, so don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Come on."

This cavalier remark, coming as it did within the hailstorm of Trump's own preposterous lies, garnered zero pushback in the corporate media. It is apparently acceptable to Joe Biden that a certain percentage of educators do die from Covid in the interests of capitalism. This is the same kind of depraved thinking that makes a certain amount of civilian fatalities (euphemised as "collateral damage") acceptable in our endless wars of aggression.

Looking back over the transcript of that final debate with Trump, I'm reminded that Biden also framed the Black Lives Matter movement in a truly bizarre way, claiming that wealthy Black people get stopped by police as often as poor Black people do, and therefore we should not demonize any wealthy people.

"It's about having the ability to be free from violence as you're accumulating wealth," he actually said. It's not, apparently, about having the right to be free from violence as you're walking down the street and not making any money out of simply living.

That twisted, market-based neoliberal logic also was manifested at this week's CNN town hall with Biden's strange rationale for not forgiving $50,000 in student debt through executive action. Falsely claiming that he doesn't have that authority (although he does, he says, have the right to cancel $10,000 of a person's debt) he then went on to warn that Ivy League grads would only unfairly bilk the government on loan forgiveness largesse and thus steal funds from Pre-K programs.

 It's the same old, same old kind of means-testing rationale that dooms social programs for people who need help. Conservative politicians erect strawmen, such as Reagan's famous Cadillac welfare queen, to justify cuts to programs. This argument is also currently being made to reduce the amount of Covid relief, for fear that too many wealthy undeserving people and other cheats will score government aid.

It's a variation of "the whole class must be punished" if the culprit does not come forward. And since the culprit in our neoliberal oligarchic system is alternately an outright figment of the fevered reactionary imagination or the reigning principal of the school himself, the punishment and the beatings of the powerless by the powerful will continue. Until, perhaps, the powerless revolt.

Another example of Biden's twisted reasoning for not giving people nice things in order for them to even survive in a time of unprecedented crisis is his refusal to order single payer health care for the treatment of pandemic victims.

During the primary campaign, even in the face of polls showing at least 80 percent Democratic support for Medicare For All, Biden doubled down on his own opposition. That Italy was then reeling from a Covid outbreak and its hospitals were overwhelmed was all the proof Biden needed to conclude that Italy's single payer system does not work. He actually correlated universal health care and guaranteed coverage with the actual disease. He insisted that Italy's humane payment system had an adverse effect on the pandemic.

How is this fallacious nonsense any different from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blaming liberal wind turbines for his state's devastating winter weather crisis and humanitarian catastrophe?

Unlike Joe Biden, I am not a medical expert who, by the wave of a magic wand and shameless lying to a child, can make Covid go away. So I will not speculate whether he suffers from clinical dementia.  But judging from his half-century as a right-wing politician relentlessly trying (and often succeeding at it) to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan himself, I think it's safe to say that this man is as depraved as they come.