The Grotesque Meanness of Exceptional USA

Now that they've passed the all important milestone of announcing that yes, Virginia, there will indeed be deep cuts in their own social welfare legislation to satisfy their needy corporate owners, the Democrats are regaling us with much hand-wringing over just how miserable they can make us without coming off like the mean jerks that many of them are.

The current narrative has them babbling over whether 'tis better for their re-election chances to give some of the people the least possible amount of bare-bones relief most of the time, or whether 'tis better to give all of the people slightly more bare bones relief for the shortest time possible.  

To means-test new social programs or not to means-test them? That is the manufactured question.

Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrats' current chief of the Bad Cop police, is all for means-testing stuff like universal subsidized pre-school, lest the One Exceptional Nation turn into an "entitlement society" for everyone who is not already filthy rich by virtue (or vice) of being the entitled scion of a coal mining dynasty who in turn sired a pharmaceutical baroness who nearly sextupled the price of life-saving EpiPens that prevent susceptible people from succumbing to anaphylactic shock if they're exposed to something as innocuous as a peanut  or a strawberry.

To counter that pathological Manchean meanness, House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is mulling a scheme which would give most people - even high earners - subsidized child care and direct cash aid, and dental care when they get old. To placate Manchin and other professional greedsters, though, these and other "sweeping" universal relief programs would only last for a couple of years, or at least until after the 2022 midterms. Because even if (when) the Republicans take back Congress, the Democratic calculus goes, it will be hard for even permanent de facto President Mitch McConnell to yank these goodies away from constituents. The programs will be so popular, even with diehard Trump loyalists. that the pitchforks will be out for the GOP rather than for the designated Marxist Commies of the corporate DNC. Or at least that's the hope.

Both parties have traditionally been loath to just give people money with no strings attached, money which doesn't go through a middleman like a corporate employer airily promising to create new jobs in return for tax-free sweetheart deals involving public land in "opportunity zones", or the property developer who pockets millions of dollars in public money to build luxury housing for the rich while setting aside a few "affordable" units and inviting thousands of poor people to compete for a slim chance to win a lease on one of them.

The halcyon days of stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, and cost-free medical care for Covid are long over. All that direct cash aid lifted people out of poverty, big-time. All that guaranteed housing security and freedom from wage slavery at precarious jobs lifted a weight off people they barely knew they'd been suffocating under until it was gone.  

This peace of mind and happiness on such a grand scale simply will not do. The State of Exception that was the Covid pandemic has been declared officially over, despite the fact that it is far from over. If it isn't quite over, the elites of the ruling class scold, it's all the fault of the willfully unvaccinated spreading their germs and their Trumpian ideologies to the righteous liberals who had so responsibly gotten their own jabs many months ago. No matter that a good percentage of people who have not been vaccinated are uninsured and live in poor or rural areas and have not enjoyed he privilege of "accessing" any kind of health care at all for themselves for entire decades, and who therefore don't trust the medical-industrial complex all that much. No matter that many, if not most, of the unvaccinated do not have paid time off to deal with the side effects of the shots. Why else would low-paid workers wait until the last possible minute to finally get vaccinated - that is, when they were threatened with the loss of those jobs?

Capitalism's response to Covid is not only a shameful public health scandal in the richest country on the planet, it has devolved into a closed political and culture war feedback loop of Maskers vs Anti-Maskers, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed - with the central battlefield becoming the already-embattled and newly reopened public school system.

If America did not already have a public school system, you can rest assured that Congress would be fighting over means-testing all the potential pupils. But since America already does have a public school system, they've had to settle for dismantling and/or defunding it. 

Public education is largely though not exclusively funded through property taxation, ensuring that rich neighborhoods have the best schools. Meanwhile, private equity vultures and other investors place bets on "charter schools" in poorer neighborhoods and treat kids like regimented cattle futures. The word "public" has become increasingly selective and exclusionary.

Meanness is baked right in to the DNA of the ruling elites. But to deflect our attention from this universal truth, these same ruling elites are in a veritable sanctimonious frenzy of pitting people against one another. It's a Hobbesian war of all against all on crack and steroids. So it's no surprise that a Korean series called Squid Game is the most popular thing on Netflix right now. You can never get enough bare survival drama, especially if you're at least flush with enough spare cash to be able to afford to watch other people compete to simply live other day from within the comfort of your own home.

And not for nothing is the economic war on the poor and working class being waged in tandem with the war on women newly surged by the grotesque cabal of black-robed Puritan fundamentalists on the Supreme Court. The Texas abortion ban is nothing if not an anti-Enlightenment evolutionary throwback.

So what better time than Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) and the season of Halloween than to acknowledge that the eternal Witch Hunt has always been an integral weapon in the class war of the rich against the rest of us?

As Marxist critic and feminist Silvia Federici observes, 

What has remained unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations in the New World, the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world...

The African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America, and the massacred native population of North America become the kin of the sixteenth and seventeenth century European witches who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact.

To extrapolate from Federici's thesis, then, what's the difference between "the woman burned at the stake for raising her pitchfork against the tax collector," and the women of Texas now being denied their reproductive rights by the paid moralizers of the oligarchy?

These right wing functionaries and pathocrats could not care less about the "right to life". What they do care about is controlling the bodies, minds and spirits of the dispossessed. Whether it's by forcing a woman to carry an unwanted and largely unaffordable pregnancy to term, and then refusing government help to the family while forcing women back to low-paid jobs right in the middle of a pandemic, it's all the same old story of oppression. 

Even the "good" rulers of the Democratic Party punish the poor of all genders by forcing them to jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops and to abjectly grovel for every last morsel of grudging relief. The poor must be controlled, punished and surveilled, whether it be from a place of liberal kindness or conservative callousness. If programs like government-subsidized child care were guaranteed for both the rich and the poor, there could be no shame, no punishment and no continued surveillance. And there would, perhaps, not be as much resentment among people and silo-ing of political interest groups trucking in outrage. Solidarity might actually stand a chance!

As the New York Times has just reported, the United States spends only $500 per year per toddler for nursery care, compared to an average of $14,000 in other advanced countries. America is indeed the One Exceptional Nation. If the ruling elites bearing their meager time-limited gifts can't make us sweat and ruthlessly compete against one another as we kiss their rings, then what possible good is their largesse?

To take just one recent example of their stingily charitable mindset, the federal government's multibillion dollar Emergency Rental Assistance Program was designed not so much as a tenant relief program as it was a landlord bailout program. In most states, all back rent awarded goes not to the tenant but directly to the landlord, who is not even legally required to accept the funds. In New York state alone, two thirds of the funds provisionally approved after lengthy delays are not yet disbursed, simply because landlords are not cooperating. They apparently relish the physical power they have over tenants, by way of evictions and extreme rent increases, more than they value getting their past-due rent money into their bank accounts.

As Bryce Covert writes in The New Republic:

Having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will face eviction. It can be difficult to make rent and support a family, especially for women of color, who on average are paid less than white women, and single mothers living on one paycheck. Landlords—eager for an excuse to rid themselves of tenants whose children might cause noise complaints or property damage, or for whom lead hazards have to be abated or child services called—are often all too happy to begin eviction proceedings.

When you consider that the vast majority of tenants who are behind in their rent, both in New York and nationally, are single women with children, the simultaneous imposition of draconian anti-abortion laws makes the essential witch-hunt aspect of neoliberal capitalism all that more grotesque.

Gargoyles of the Oligarchy: High Relief For Me, But Not For Thee

The Eternal Triangle of the Duopolistic Mind

 It would have been unseemly, even for the feckless Democrats, for their strongest-ever Progressive caucus in the history of Progress to cave immediately to the designated useful idiots of the Oligarchy. Their Pyrrhic victory against the so-called Centrists is just the latest diversionary skirmish in the proxy class war game currently being played out in Congress.  

The latest episode had a whopping nine rascally centrist corporatists demanding a vote on their corporation-friendly trillion-dollar infrastructure bill before taking up the larger bill which gives a modicum of relief to just plain Folks. Everybody expected the caucus of more than a hundred progressives to cave to the right wingers, like they always do. But lo and behold - they stood strong, even against the all-powerful Nancy Pelosi who, the official narrative has it, suffered the unheard-of embarrassment of having to cancel the infrastructure vote for lack of support.

Then there was the sight of Joe Manchin being heckled on his houseboat by a crew of kayakers and Kyrsten Sinema being chased into an Arizona bathroom stall by immigrant activists, and you could almost taste the progressive victory. If you didn't feel even the tiniest bit of smug schadenfreude viewing all this zany political theater, then you're even more cynical than I am.

But then Bernie Sanders went on Sunday TV to inject a tiny dose of pragmatic reality into the euphoric bubble. Only hours after railing that the $3.5 trillion (Build Back Better) social welfare package was already a compromise of its original $6 trillion form, Bernie did what the Democratic Party leadership always does best. He proceeded to compromise with himself. 

"Three and a half trillion should be a minimum, but I accept that there's gonna have to be a give and take," Sanders told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

President "Joe is a good friend of mine" Biden, it turns out, had already decreed that although Joe Manchin's figure of $1.5 trillion was way too low, Biden can live with a package as low as $1.9 trillion. Once the haggling is all done, maybe they can pass it with a $1.65 trillion price tag, to be reluctantly oozed out over such a long period of time that it will end up costing the rich absolutely nothing in the way of taxes as people starve and the world burns all around them and their fireproof saferooms and mega-yachts.

The New York Times hilariously characterized Biden's posturing as "siding with the progressives" who had boldly "flexed their muscles".

You Go, Progressives!

What's the rush, anyway? The longer that the soap opera can be drawn out, the more revenue will be forthcoming from the corporate sponsors, and the more the scaffolding under Rosie the Riveter can be sabotaged by everybody from Bernie to the corporatists of the Problem Solvers' Caucus.

 As long, for example, as there's even the faintest threat that older people will have their dental care paid for by the government beginning maybe five years from now, the lobbyists of the American Dental Association will pour millions in pocket change into the campaign coffers of cheaply bought-off senators and congress-critters. The more that corporate-owned pundits can pit old people with crumbling teeth against young kids having to learn in crumbling schools, the better it will be for the rich. Anything to take the minds of the restive public off the rich. But just in case, we will be carefully taught to hate only the bad rich and the foreign rich, such as in the recent blockbuster news about Putin and his offshore tax haven mistress and the king of Jordan and his stealthy purchase of almost an entire California neighborhood.

Biden and his good-cop henchman Bernie are simply doing their version of the old Clintonian triangulation tango. But instead of playing Republicans and Democrats off each other to punish the poor and reward the rich, they're pitting  intraparty "centrists" and "progressives" against each other. This is the current de facto duopoly. Negotiating with the GOP is a tough sell, given that it's now acceptable to call them fascists and enablers of an attempted coup.  So, unless the Dems can "compromise" among themselves, Trump will win again. Keeping the Trump-hate alive as they screw you over under heavy anesthesia and demand what little spare change you still have in your pocket is also an integral part of the plan.

Given that Halloween is becoming even more popular than Christmas, when Congress traditionally rams though its budgets and secret corporate giveaways, Crypt-keeper Nancy Pelosi has appropriately rescheduled the infrastructure vote for October 31st. I predict a booming market for Kyrsten Sinema fright wigs and public service announcements from the American Dental Association, warning little kids that selfish old people, not candy, will make the teeth rot right out of their heads.

The Horses' Asses of the Apocalypse

 It took a valiant effort, but Joe Biden managed to use practically every cliché in the book to try and explain away the horror of Haitian refugees getting whipped and prodded like cattle by the Horsemen of the Homeland Apocalypse (aka, the Border Patrol.)

 After assuring a reporter that he takes "full responsibility" for the cruel treatment of the migrants, Biden quickly cast the blame upon everyone and anyone but himself. He even seemed to blame the actual victims when he garbled: "To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over and people being strapped. It was outrageous. I promise those people will pay.”

He is already seeing to it that one subset of "those people" will pay immediately, without so much as a court hearing on their asylum requests, by being shackled and herded onto gleaming airplanes, to be unceremoniously dumped into their ravaged native land, regardless of the fact that many have not lived in their native land for years and have no home to go back to.

Or, "those people" could mean the Homeland cowboys, who were legislated into being after 9/11 with the great enthusiasm and a very hearty thumbs-up from then-Senator Joe Biden himself. The president is now trying to pretend they are a bunch of outlaws who are not operating under the direct and explicit orders of the United States government. Biden is just sorry that they got caught doing the jobs that they were hired and trained to do, and acting like they were enjoying themselves.

Biden therefore announced that the Department of Homeland Security will be investigating itself and leveling "consequences" upon person or persons or scapegoats unknown. Some 20-year-old kids will be no doubt be perp-walked, much as the US Army grunts like Lindy England were, when all on their own under orders, they tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, it seems like only last month when Biden promised "consequences" for the deaths of US troops in Afghanistan, and his  military minions promptly launched a Reaper drone attack against an innocent Afghan family, the designated "those people."  A mistake was made, but only because the US government got caught. Collateral damage happens. War is foggy, you see.

The worst thing about the atrocious treatment of the Haitian refugees for Biden, though, is that the photographic evidence of systemic US cruelty - rather than the cruelty itself - is an embarrassment to him personally. It makes him look bad, especially when the images were released just as he was belligerently touting American peace, love, democracy and freedom to the rest of the world at the United Nations' annual summit this week.

“It’s an embarrassment. It’s beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world or sends the wrong message at home," he fumed, ending his spiel with the obligatory "It's not who we are!"

It's hard to emphasize enough just how craven and downright psychopathic this statement is. Biden is saying right out loud that he is more concerned with the optics of the situation than he is with the suffering of the potentially thousands of desperate human beings that he is deporting without so much as a court hearing. His spin doctor, Jen Psaki, had been equally callous the day before when she glibly announced that in the immediate future, Homeland cowboys will not be deployed in open spaces where they can be seen and photographed whipping people. Homeland Security has traditionally mounted their horses to go after migrants in areas with tall grass, where  crueltyis less likely to witnessed and documented. More discreet methods of detention and expulsion will be used for the Haitian asylum seekers, so as to avoid upsetting Joe Biden and his party and his donors.

Not that his erstwhile defenders and enablers were all that enchanted with Status Quo Joe before the refugees began arriving in Del Rio, Texas. The tide of elite opinion had already begun to turn against him when he ended their extremely lucrative two decade-long adventure in Afghanistan. His saber-rattling against China, meanwhile, is making the oligarchs nervous because of all the lucrative business deals and investments that they have there.

It's gotten so bad for Biden, in fact, that even the long media embargo on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal is finally beginning to be lifted. Joe Biden's own Justice Department also has implicated his national security adviser, the former Clinton campaign operative Jake Sullivan, in the criminal indictment of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman and by extension, the entire #Russiagate franchise scam.

Perhaps worst of all for Biden, mainstream media outlets, including the Paper of Record, are even beginning to compare him to Donald Trump. 

Naturally, this orchestrated weakening of Joe Biden by the elites dovetails perfectly with their orchestrated weakening of his Build Back Better legislation, which they despise because it threatens to give people a pathetic modicum of relief from their elite-orchestrated hardships. Not for nothing has the establishment media long overpraised Biden's underdone agenda as a "sweeping" progressive undertaking, the likes of which have not been seen since the New Deal. They were hyping it with a frenzy, inspiring the desired paranoia in the wealthy pathocratic class. Now they're in the next phase, lowering our expectations and preparing the ground for the final collapse. 

To make the letdown complete, they've not forgotten to add the traditional Debt Ceiling manufactured crisis and countdown to Shutdown Armageddon to the orchestrated mix. They're reckoning that once again, people will be so abjectly grateful to their leaders for reaching a compromise at the last possible minute, ensuring that at least the woefully inadequate Social Security checks will still be going out, that they'll forget all about all the broken promises.

Meanwhile, we'll always have their clichés to tide us over. As reported by The Hill about the legislative negotiations:

A senior Democratic aide said the revenue framework will serve as a template for negotiations with moderate Democrats on the size and scope of the bill. (Nancy) Pelosi called it a "giant step forward."

Some rank and file Democrats complained they have absolutely no idea what this language even means for the "larger process." But recognizing the "mounting pressure to show movement," The Hill continues, "Biden stepped up and held meetings with moderates and progressives from both parties."

What, you expected him to step up and mount a horse and start whipping them into shape and finally doing right by the people who elected him, and them?

Notwithstanding that the phrase "moderates and progressives from both parties" is not only a disinformation embarrassment but an act of journalistic malpractice, let's remember that whips and chains are reserved only for the most desperate members of the human race. The elites have their frameworks and their templates and their arcane processes to propel them in their ever more gigantic steps forward to power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Oh Say, Can You AOC?

Lots of people professed to be shocked, shocked when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of all the democratic socialist celebs, so jarringly appeared amongst the bright stars and broads in stripes at this week's opulent Met Gala. 

But why shouldn't she be there? The theme of this year's exclusive charity fashion event was, after all, "American Independence." And nothing says independence like wearing a white designer gown with bloody red letters spelling "Tax the Rich" all over the back of it. It would have been so tacky and off-putting to guests who'd paid $35,000 a ticket if she'd plastered the slogan like a banner on the front of the dress where they'd actually have to look at it while schmoozing with her.

The font was eerily similar to the notorious "I Don't Care, Do U?" message worn on the back of Melania Trump's jacket during her trip to the border to visit immigrant prisons. 

 

 Maybe you would have preferred that AOC show her working class bona fides by wearing her old bartending duds, just to entrap the guests into ordering her to fetch them another drink. And worse, if she'd accessorized it with an Abolish ICE insignia, they'd only complain that their drinks were too warm, and demand a refund on their tickets.

Although AOC had a masked male lackey so gallantly holding up the streaming train of her gown as she made her grand entrance past people protesting neo-feudalism behind police ramparts, she had already pre-emptively lashed out at what she called her "haters" by tweeting that she and the gown's Black immigrant designer were about to "kick open the doors of the Met." She'd only meant to be figurative, of course, even strategically quoting Marshall McLuhan for the woefully non-savvy hordes of haters out there: "The medium is the message."

But the message-bomb that was meant to burst in the rarefied air at the Met Gala turned out to be kind of a dud, once word leaked out that designer Aurora James is actually a native of Toronto, Canada and is the girlfriend of wealthy Seagrams heir Benjamin Bronfman.

AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used. She used Met Gala founder and storied Vogue editor Anna Wintour to help elevate her brand and her progressive platform.  Wintour is a major political power player and one of the Democratic  Party's most successful bundlers and fundraising event hostesses, having raised millions of dollars for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But she has also faced significant criticism from even her own staff for excluding black and brown people from her publishing and fashion empire.

As a New York Times critique published a year ago told it:

As Ms. Wintour ascended, Vogue’s publication of “hurtful or intolerant” content rarely resulted in lasting negative attention for her. But Black journalists who have worked with Ms. Wintour, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they had not gotten over their experiences at a magazine whose workplace mirrored its exclusive pages.

Under Ms. Wintour, 18 people said, Vogue welcomed a certain type of employee — someone who is thin and white, typically from a wealthy family and educated at elite schools. Of the 18, 11 people said that, in their view, Ms. Wintour should no longer be in charge of Vogue and should give up her post as Condé Nast’s editorial leader.

“Fashion is bitchy,” one former Black staff member said. “It’s hard. This is the way it’s supposed to be. But at Vogue, when we’d evaluate a shoot or a look, we’d say ‘That’s Vogue,’ or, ‘That’s not Vogue,’ and what that really meant was ‘thin, rich and white.’ How do you work in that environment?”

Fast forward to the Met Gala one year later, and AOC, who is Puerto Rican, was personally invited by Wintour herself, in an epic feat of woke-washing, to sit at the main table, helping to burnish her own neo-diversified brand. The splashy but rear-facing "Tax the Rich" message was, of course, safely hidden from the sensitive view of the very rich, very white, and very thin Anna Wintour. If AOC knows that she herself was used as a mere ass-covering accessory, as were the rest of the minority models, movie stars and designers at the event, then she didn't let on.

Meanwhile, if she doesn't challenge Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his New York senate seat in a primary, she will be among the first in line to succeed him when he retires. And from there, she will no doubt make a run for the presidency. To achieve her goals, she is going to need Anna Wintour. AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.

We'll just have to wait and see whether she and her Squad entourage follow through on their threat to kill the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill currently in front of the House unless the already watered-down $3.5 trillion social welfare bill passes first with the unanimous Democratic support that it needs.

The latest offer on the negotiating table  to "centrists" is to delay Medicare dental coverage for the elderly until 2028. What, after all, are a few million more lost geriatric teeth, oral infections and associated morbidity and mortality in the grand scheme of things? It may be the American twilight's last gleaming, but at least if the rich get taxed the cajoling AOC way, we'll have some gleaming choppers or shiny dentures to look forward to - if we can only hang on for a few more years in fires, floods, heat waves and hurricanes.

 As sick as we are and as sickened as we might feel, let's be healthily skeptical of AOC and of course, of every other politician who claims to feel our pain. Despite her melodramatic kvetching about "I and my body (being) relentlessly policed from all corners,"  criticism of the powerful by the powerless is not hatred at all. It's an attempt both at self-preservation and the preservation of society as a whole. It's actually a form of love.

Meanwhile, I say let AOC pursue her transactional career in political performance art. Don't let the shallow spectacle get you down. 

A Nine-Eleven State of Mind (lessness)

The official mantra being intoned ad infinitum throughout the world today is "Never forget."

But notwithstanding the surface appearance of soul-searching with all the maudlin remembrances by the mainstream media in the wake of the "official" end to the Afghanistan War, there's still quite a bit of selective memory at work to help keep the mythology of "we were attacked for no reason other than they hate us for our freedoms" alive. The common 20th anniversary critique still hinges mainly on the overreaction to the attack by our leaders, and not what caused the attacks in the first place: the abandonment by the CIA of its Al Qaeda creation and its valuable asset in the proxy war against the then-USSR - a disgruntled Saudi ex-royal named Osama bin Laden.

As you probably heard, the CIA has embarked on a marketing campaign to display its softer side through the magic of Woke-Washing. As long as they hire more women and ethnic groups to prove their diversity cred while not actually diverging from their core mission of relentless regime changes, dirty wars and other rogue activities, then it's all good.

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, therefore, dutifully bashed the "toxic masculinity" and machismo of the Bush and Trump administrations as the root cause for post-9/11 insanity and war, while also owning that such female hawks as Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton were enablers of same. But Hillary was mentioned only insofar that as a senator, she had voted with the Bushies to invade Iraq. Left unmentioned by Dowd was her later outsize role, as Obama's secretary of state, in the war of aggression against Libya and its oil.

Dowd actually characterized the media-hyped nutritious sandwich filling that was Barack Obama a "respite" from GOP male supremacy.

My response to the Times:

The "respite" that was the Obama presidency is a matter of style rather than substance. Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations revealed in 2016 that his administration had dropped an average of 72 bombs a day, for a grand total of 26,171 in just that one year alone. Obama also vastly improved upon Bush's deadly record by expanding the secretive Special Ops campaigns to more than 70 percent of the entire globe, or 138 separate countries. So is it righteous to give Obama a pass for a "respite" just because he was the model of adult discretion and didn't wear his macho bellicosity on his sleeve like the oafish Bush and Trump? I think not, but telling the truth might destroy the carefully marketed mythology. Maureen Dowd does have a point about women leaders not being more peace-loving and kind than men. Who can ever forget Madeline Albright enthusing that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children during Clinton-era sanctions were "worth it?" And then there was Hillary Clinton laughingly bragging that "we came, we saw, he died" upon receiving news that Libyan president Gaddafi had just been sodomized to death with a bayonet. Libya, by the way, has become a modern slavery marketplace since Clinton played a major role in the "humanitarian intervention." The official "forever war" in Afghanistan may be over as far as US boots on the ground are concerned. Try telling that to the seven Afghan children killed by a US Reaper drone strike just the other week.

9/11/21:The Usual Suspects Perform

It could have been worse. George W. could have shown up and shared another piece of candy with Michelle while Bruce Springsteen crooned and strummed to the crowd in an act of anesthetized and sanitized remembrance.

The Gaslighting New York Times

At the same time that the Biden Administration and the slim congressional majority are studiously doing nothing to keep millions of people from being kicked off their unemployment benefits, kicked out of their homes, protected from predatory Covid hospital billing even as the Delta variant has created a surge in cases and deaths, the New York Times cynically assures us in a front page headline that "From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand the Social Safety Net."

They seemingly forgot to insert the word "holes" after "safety net."

Millions of people, many with no insurance, will be forced to go back to their miserable minimum wage jobs just to barely survive. But we should take heart knowing that Bernie Sanders is out there in Iowa, fighting his lonesome heart out to expand Medicare coverage to dental, hearing and vision benefits for the lucky few. Mothers facing eviction. frantic about their unvaccinated kids returning to school and day care only to be quarantined once the inevitable virus outbreak occurs, should be grateful that at least they'll continue to get their temporary $300 tax credits to tide them over, regardless of having no safety or stability in their actual housing situations.

This mere promise of a few relative crumbs in the face of overwhelming mass misery depends, of course, upon the whims of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and his moll Kyrsten Sinema of New Mexico as they threaten to side with the Republicans against this looming scourge of socialistic humanism. It also hinges upon such powerful lobbies aa the American Dental Association, which will fight tooth and nail against older people keeping their teeth by way of "onerous" Medicare coverage for their mouths. Besides, with the emergency increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits also expiring in many states, to coincide with the forced return to school and work, people simply won't have any more time to waste on chewing nutritious food. (The Biden administration's modest increase in permanent SNAP benefits, to an average of $157 per eligible person per month beginning in October, still will not offset the expiring benefits for many recipients, which were raised to maximum levels under the Families First Act of 2020.)

If you really must persist in wasting your time worrying about your next meal or getting sick as you're forced back to work, and the kids are forced back to school, here comes the Times's resident centrist economist, David Leonhardt  to tell you that your fears about Covid are not only totally overblown, they are wildly misplaced. Although there are 160,000 new cases and 15,000 deaths from Covid occurring every single day, Leonhardt looks on the bright side.  "Only" one out of every 5,000 vaccinated Americans is testing positive for breakthrough cases on any given day, based upon one sampling conducted in a whopping three whole communities. These studies, by the way, were conducted when most kids were not yet in school. And they only apply to adults.

Leonhardt blithely writes:

In Seattle on an average recent day, about one out of every one million vaccinated residents have been admitted to a hospital with Covid symptoms. That risk is so close to zero that the human mind can’t easily process it. My best attempt is to say that the Covid risks for most vaccinated people are of the same order of magnitude as risks that people unthinkingly accept every day, like riding in a vehicle....

What about children? I’ll dig into that question in a coming newsletter.

Well, meh. Collateral damage in the weak, unproductive and non-voting population can be counted once the service economy is back up and humming and neoliberal capitalism is saved.

I am certainly no epidemiologist or statistician, and the following factoid is admittedly anecdotal, but at the State University in New Paltz where I live, where students had to show proof of vaccination before they were allowed back on campus a couple of weeks ago, there are already 56 active student cases out of 1,626 individuals tested - an increase of 10 cases since last week and a positivity rate of  3.4 percent. Since Aug. 23, there have been 76 infections and 20 recoveries. Three percent of on-campus students have been exempted from vaccination for medical or religious reasons.

The Obama Iconography Tour

 The insipidly iconic Mona Lisa sadly will not be embarking on any more world tours to entertain and inspire the teeming desperate masses of our dying planet. For despite the pleas of French officials anxious to prove their diversity cred, her handlers at the Louvre nixed the idea for good and all in 2018.  La Giaconda, as she is also known, has become so fragile that every time the art medics remove her from her bulletproof glass-encased frame for her annual airing, a new crack extending from the tips of her fingers to the top of her forehead grows just a wee bit wider. She'll never leave home again. There's even been talk of canceling her altogether, given that not only is she falling apart, she is vastly overrated as a work of art. She is above all a marketing product of unfettered capitalism.

No such danger for the more nouveau official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, which the art-marketing world declared to be instant classical icons the very minute they were unveiled at The Smithsonian for good and all in 2018  The Obamas themselves may have developed some cracks in their own carefully curated images as a result of that ill-advised pandemic birthday bash they staged earlier this month at their faux chateau on Martha's Vineyard. But you wouldn't know it from the sold-out opening of the Brooklyn Art Museum leg of their national iconography tour this past weekend. 

 Advance reservations, proof of vaccination and photo I.D.s are all required to stand in awe before the Obama simulacra for no longer than 15 minutes. Tickets are already going fast, according to the Brooklyn Brownstoner, a real estate guide whose core mission is alerting the upwardly mobile to the latest million-dollar bungalow in Crown Heights.

Not for nothing is one of the major financial sponsors of the show a New York real estate developer and gentrifier named Donald A. Capoccia. Other backers include Hollywood director Stephen Spielberg, racehorse  breeder Robert Meyerhoff, and insurance tycoon Tommie Pegues. 

The tour's biggest corporate sponsor is the notorious Bank of America, which reached one particular sweetheart settlement (out of several) with Obama's Justice Department for mortgage and securities fraud that actually gifted it with $2 in government credits for every dollar that it returned to its foreclosed victims. Bankrolling the Portraits Tour is the least that BOA can do for its loyal protector.

In case you can't score the same sort of timed tickets to gawk at and take selfies with the Obama simulacra that the Louvre requires of tourists to gaze upon the Mona Lisa, please don't despair. You can have all the time you need to eyeball facsimiles of the facsimiles of the Obamas in a very special souvenir coffee table book published just for the occasion.

The Smithsonian gift shop ever so subtly pitches the merch to the discerning art lover: 

After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, “No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever.” The Obama Portraits is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks.

Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover.

If you didn't fall for that pitch, then you might be suspected of occult Donald Trump fandom. Worse, if you don't think that Obama starting more wars, dropping more bombs, deporting more migrants and evicting more people from their homes than any other modern president were positive achievements by the Adult In the Room,  then you might as well just stoop to sneakily viewing them right here, for free, in all their glorious lo-def pulchritude: 

Or, if you tastelessly insist upon realism in your art:

Meanwhile, if you're among the millions of renters in Brooklyn and all over America who are in imminent danger of losing your home because the Supreme Court cruelly overturned the national eviction moratorium, don't fret. Because arch-conservative Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett showed that she really does have a heart after all, in favoring Obama and unilaterally denying a bid by environmentalists and neighborhood preservationists to block construction of his massive shrine. (dare to read the fact-based criticism of this vanity project at Jackson Park Watch.)

  Look on the bright side, naysayers! To prove that there's no such thing as the class war, to demonstrate that there really is equality between plutocrats and struggling renters, the Obama Foundation will now be forced to pay rent. They signed an unconscionable lease with the strapped city of Chicago for a staggering $10 yearly rate (not a typo!)  for the next 99 years. Lucky people like you and me, on the other hand, have the freedom to commit to unconscionable leases every single year of our lives.

 And what's with people needing affordable housing and boring public parks anyway? According to the Obama Foundation, what people in the Jackson Park area need most of all is a state-of-the-art recording studio in the neighborhood to inspire, empower, and uplift them. As Obama himself was always wont to say: "Don't be cynical. Stop complaining. Get out there and vote!"

As the cutting-down of as many as 800 shade-providing, pollution-filtering, oxygen-creating, art-inspiring trees in Jackson Park begins, the Obama project explains that all that iconic lumber will be responsibly used to custom-build furniture to fill his own monument.

 The Foundation celebrated the groundbreaking like this:

The project serves as a catalyst for long-overdue investment in and around historic Jackson Park — creating a new destination to move visitors from hope to action, breathing new life into the park, and delivering amenities and economic benefits to the community the Obamas called home."

Notice the past tense. Besides their mansion in Washington, D.C. and their ocean-front chateau on Martha's Vineyard, the Obamas are also constructing a winter vacation compound in Hawaii. They will breathe new life into the South Pacific air even as they help exterminate life in the actual Pacific Ocean. As ProPublica reported last year, Obama friend and Foundation president Martin Nesbitt finagled an expansion of the sea wall to ensure that they get the privacy they crave. This construction will endanger such species as monkfish and sea turtles, and is otherwise banned in Hawaii. Nesbitt, incidentally, is also one of the backers of the current Obama Icon Tour, whose ostensible purpose is to foster good will and art appreciation among Peoples. 

Climate change? When you have a manufactured icon sharing the planet with you, what more could you possibly want? For as long as their shell games are plastered with enough glitter to disguise the gruesomeness, as long as there's oligarchic Superglue both to sniff and to mend the widening cracks in their facades, as long as glib performance art is more valued than human decency, there will always be Obamas.