The Big Business of Fear

 The Paper of Record is running yet another big front page advertisement for the highly competitive private cybersecurity industry, whose stock prices seem to rise every time the Media Industrial Complex announces a new foreign threat.

The New York Times's latest scare piece, written by a crack team of two lead reporters and three contributing staffers, has the FBI and National Intelligence directors using information provided to them by several of these private security firms. The businesses sounded the alarm that Iran and Russia both are "hacking" publicly available voter registration rolls. Iran then supposedly sent spoof emails from "The Proud Boys" to some voters in Alaska and Florida. Vote for Trump, or else! was the threatening message allegedly traced by one Silicon Valley firm to a server in Estonia.

Russia is not doing anything specific or new at this precise moment, but they have "inspired" Iran, the article claims. So why not give them a gratuitous mention?

I don't know why they even bother. I've been getting extortion emails direct from the Trump campaign all week long, warning me that since I have not donated any money to re-elect The Donald, they have officially placed my name on the dreaded Joe Biden Supporter list for all to see. The only way I can get taken off the blacklist is to fork over some cash to Trump.

I also get a lot of emails from the Democrats slugged "Final Notice" in hopes of scaring me into opening them because they so resemble those terrifying cut-off messages from the power or cable company.

But I digress. My main beef with the latest Times fear-mongering is that they buried the unintentionally hilarious lead deep within their thinly-disguised advertisement for Security, Inc. They quote Senator Angus King (I-Maine) as saying:

“This may be the beginning of a more concerted operation. They don’t have to do anything; they just have to make people think they are doing something.” (my bold.)

"They" were intended to mean our alleged foreign enemies.  But it could also be easily interpreted to mean that the public-private partnership which is making tons of money manufacturing and marketing all this fear on a regular basis are the ones who have to make people believe in their endless streams of bullshit.

You probably notice that the Times always tries to feebly cover its ass when writing the propaganda on behalf of the Security-Industrial complex. They put the Big Lie in the headline and in the first few paragraphs, knowing that many if not most readers will not proceed beyond this point.  Then they get on with the disclaimers and the waffling. Such as:

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, either of which could affect the outcome of voting that has already begun across the United States. The officials also did not claim that either nation hacked into voter registration systems — leaving open the possibility that the data was available to anyone who knew where to look.

The voting rolls throughout the country are with very few exceptions widely available, either online or in physical public office space. How else could our home-grown political candidates know where to send their own fear-mongering flyers about their opponents into people's homes? 

The main qualms that the Times seems to have in spreading the latest fearsome propaganda is that it threatens to directly benefit Trump's own propaganda: that the election results will be rigged against him. That puts Rachel Maddow, the prima donna of the pro-Democratic #Russiagate propaganda franchise into a real quandary. Even Democrats and their wealthy donors invest heavily into these private security firms and profit mightily from them.

So she had Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on her show Wednesday, right after the "authorities" made the latest Big Reveal to assure the liberal audience that despite all Trump's lies about election rigging, his administration is telling the absolute truth when it blames Iran and Russia!

“From the briefing, I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure,” he smarmily told Maddow, according to the Times article.

Although the FBI and Trump's national intelligence director made the announcement of the "threat," the Times then reassures its readers in a rather oblique way that since it was a handful of private companies which provided the information to the government agencies tasked to protect the citizenry, it's all legit. 

Proofpoint is casually mentioned, almost in passing, as the source of information that the fake "Proud Boys" emails emanated from a server in Estonia (which, unlike the secret public voter rolls, apparently cannot be used as a proxy by any average Joe or Jane who goes to an Internet proxy site for purposes of hiding one's identity.) 

Visit Proofpoint's glitzy website and the first thing you learn is that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month! It includes a quarterly Threat Report to incentivize customers and investors, along with publishing its own Threat Blog. Gary Steele, the company's founder and CEO, lists his main credential as being a "thought leader" who is regularly featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Fox Business and other media outlets with a concentration on business rather than on national security and foreign affairs. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.

The New York Times goes on to uncritically quote John Hultquist of the firm FireEye in an attempt to further bolster the credibility of Russian and Iranian election interference. "Their focus is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation," he said, before going on to promote his company's big free ad in the Times on Twitter.

FireEye, for its own  part, does not at all prey upon existing fears through its own employee recruitment pitch:

 At FireEye, we fight evil  by bringing together frontline human expertise, nation state-grade threat intelligence and innovative technology – creating a unique innovation cycle that allows us to provide the most effective cyber defense platform for our customers.

As an innovator, thought leader and trusted advisor, you'll relentlessly protect our customers from the impact and consequences of cyber attacks.

Are you ready to join us on our mission?

According to his bio, before spinning through the revolving doors to a career in the rapidly expanding private security industry, Hultquist was a "senior US intelligence analyst" who was "involved in counterinsurgency operations in the US Army."

Don't just take FireEye's word for it, though. In an effort to triple-verify its propaganda message, the Times next turns to the competing Trustwave, which went the extra mile and discovered that those free, publicly available voter rolls were also being offered for sale on the Dark Web! Whether any rube of an adversary was dumb enough to buy information that is there for the legal taking, the Times does not say. But the company's global vice president, Mark Whitehead, told the paper that he had immediately and patriotically notified the FBI of the attempted scam.

“The consumer and voter databases that we discovered hackers are currently selling significantly lowers the barrier to entry for nation-states to execute sophisticated phishing, disinformation and intimidation campaigns,” Mr. Whitehead said.

Trustwave's own team of "ethical hackers" calls itself SpiderLabs. 

As a master's degree graduate of the NSA/Homeland Security "Cyber Defense University," you'd think that Whitehead could easily have accessed the government's very own existing database of every email on the planet, stored in a massive Utah desert warehouse, to get the same information for absolutely free, without the need for spidery ethical hackers spinning their sticky public relations webs for fun and big, big returns to investors.

What is with the fancy two-word names of all these private security companies, anyway? Double the titles, double the fear, double the profits. 

The Woke-Washed and the Vote-Washed

 Neoliberal capitalism never dies, much less fades away. It just keeps right on reinventing itself and gaining strength, even as the world collapses around it.

With millions of Americans in increasingly dire straits due to the federal government's failure to provide even a modicum of renewed relief in one of the worst pandemics in human history, you'll be happy to learn that Facebook is here to help. Its billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg just ostentatiously forked over another $100 million to help keep the polls open next month,  ensuring the "safety and efficiency" of ballot-casting.

He also has recently financed a study which concludes that the way for corporations to help disabled, sick, overweight, elderly, gay, transgender, and racially marginalized people is to use more of them in their advertisements. The more that an oppressed population group can be used in commercials, the higher the profits will be for corporations like Facebook, which are absolutely loath to pay taxes that would help fund social programs and Covid relief for the people who need help the most.

Neoliberal "woke-washing" has, of course, gained a whole new head of steam since the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a novel way of keeping capitalism-spawned systemic racism and record economic inequality - and the resulting social unrest - under strict control, so that the rich can get even richer as they pretend to care. The public relations message is this: it's not a living wage, guaranteed health care, food and housing that people need. It's recognition. It's either seeing others who look like you on TV and in social media ads, or it's getting the chance to appear in one of these commercials yourself to sell stuff that makes rich people and corporations even richer.

But lest you get too far ahead of yourselves, remember that your very first acting job is to vote, to elect the politicians who will help the rich get richer. Vote-shaming marketing campaigns are fine. But the Facebook CEO is going that extra mile in directly funding the election of politicians who will do Facebook's bidding. Woke-washing and vote-washing have joined forces as the most important weapons in the Zuckerberg arsenal, to defend him both against future antitrust suits and to combat the widespread criticism of Facebook's political ads and other nefarious marketing, surveillance and propaganda operations. 

As much as acknowledging that the United States is a full-fledged oligarchy, albeit one that still requires the occasional rubber stamp of legitimacy from the unwashed masses, Zuckerberg writes:

“Voting is the foundation of democracy. It's how we express our voice and make sure our country is heading in the direction we want. Priscilla and I remain determined to ensure that every state and local election jurisdiction has the resources they need so Americans can vote.”

To help nudge the country in the direction that he wants, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan had already sent $250 million  to Chicago's Center For Tech and Civic Life, before upping the ante by another hundred mil last week. This organization's board of directors is a bipartisan mix of private equity moguls, former campaign operatives, McKinsey consultants and neoliberal think tank leaders. Its executive director, Tiana Epps-Johnson, founded the Center and financed it with the help of a generous Obama Foundation "fellow" grant. She said she will use the $350 million donated by Zuckerberg to disburse Covid protective gear and extra hazard pay and hire temporary workers - aid which the Trump administration refuses to provide to help ensure that more voters show up and local elections can run more smoothly.

Joe Biden, vice president under philanthrocapitalist and media mogul Barack Obama, has been a vocal critic of Facebook. The keyword here, of course, is vocal. Because as much as they deign to remind us every four years that "we" have a voice, it's still their money that talks.

Okay, so now that you've mailed in your ballot, already voted in person or at least made a plan to vote, you can finally lean back and relax by going online to be pressed to Buy Stuff. Even if you are poor, you still can feel a little better watching people who look like you trying to sell you Stuff that you can't afford. And if you can't afford Stuff because you have no job, no savings and can't even make the rent, an acting gig in a new slew of Woke-Washing diversity commercials might just be in your future.

Facebook recently commissioned the Geena Davis Institute to conduct a survey whose results claim that 70 percent of respondents want to see more diversity in online advertising. (Geena Davis is a Hollywood actress who started the Institute after her own acting jobs dried up due to systemic ageism in the film industry. Among her corporate endeavors is the annual film festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, bankrolled by the hometown Walton billionaires of Walmart.)

The Institute's Facebook study revealed, among other shocking things, that "even though 19 percent of Americans have some sort of cognitive, emotional or physical disability, only 1.1 percent of (advertisement) characters did." 

I doubt that the mass despair engendered by Covid alone, and the government's criminal neglect of same. could possibly have factored in to these results, given that a CDC study recently revealed that a not-insignificant percentage of the US population is now so depressed as to be suicidal.

But be that as it may, for according to the Facebook press release just published in Adweek:

It’s everyone’s responsibility to speak up about bias and stereotypes. All brands have an opportunity to step up, not only through increased presence of underrepresented groups, but through portrayals that are more authentic and empowering.

And it also may lead to better business results. In a Facebook analysis, we found that campaigns with more diverse representation had a 90% likelihood to be more effective at driving ad recall compared to campaigns with single traditional representation.

Thanks to Facebook's largesse, the Geena Davis Institute study coordinator is able to conclude:

I’ve observed that not only is eliminating harmful bias in advertising the right and responsible thing to do, it can lead to better results. I’ve even seen studies showing that creative with more diverse representation can boost stock price. As a general rule, I believe what’s good for our society is good for brands!

She got it a little backwards. Because the first tenet of neoliberalism is that when something is good for brands, only then can it be deemed to benefit "society." Societal good is a marginalized person being displayed and noticed for the ultimate profit of the user. A marginalized person is mainly being valued as a commodity and a marketing tool.

Just as Madison Avenue once used only young sexy women to sell everything from cars to mouthwash, so too can the ad industry now use marginalized or "exotic" people to sell any number of products. The Institute tells Facebook exactly what the ethics-challenged Zuckerberg paid them to suggest:

 Get specific in your briefs, scripts and casting documents—include gender, race and sexual orientation. Consider using an intersectional lens even if (and especially when) it’s not related to the brand or the message of the campaign. (my bold.)

Intersectionality pays! If a transgender person is selling a Chevy, be sure to mention their identity bona fides along with the misleading mileage stats so that the audience may feel more smugly tolerant as they shop for the latest gas-guzzler.

Advertisers can even combine woke-washing and vote-washing with good old fashioned green-washing.  For example, if a physically challenged actor is shilling for Exxon-Mobil, the theme of the script can be that even disabled people have the god-given right to be an Energy Voter and breathe in the sublime air of freshly fracked gas. The subliminal message to viewers? You cannot possibly champion disabled people and support the Green New Deal at the same time. You should wash all that angry knowledge about the oil industry's criminal role in climate change right out of your brain.

The possibilities for malign oligarchic intersectionality are as stratospheric as Mark Zuckerberg's vast tax-proof wealth, and as deep as the poisoned oceans, and as unrestrained as the greedy reach of capitalism itself.

The Show Must Go On

 It's hard to believe that in just a few short weeks (if the polls are right)  Donald Trump will officially become a lame duck president. I'm already envisioning the ebullient crowds chanting, as they did outside the Bush White House when Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008: "Na Na Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye."

But I am also envisioning ultra-right militias showing up to do battle with the ephemeral Marxist/Antifa/Biden forces that supposedly are taking away all their freedoms.

The ugliness threatens to far outweigh the joy and relief that the long national nightmare of Trumpism is over. Because it won't be over. Even before he was elected thanks to the archaic Electoral College and the economic inequality of neoliberal capitalistic rule, Trumpism was always simmering just below the surface. Reversing the flood will be no easy task, and it will take a lot more than a corporate Democratic president's few token sandbags to do it.

Lame Duck Donald, if he wasn't joking at one of his recent Covid-spreading campaign rallies about fleeing the country to avoid prison, could start acting more like a high-flying reanimated Pterodactyl. He won't be going down without a fight, even if this fight doesn't include the highly prophesied legal challenges to the election result.

 Out of revenge, he would refuse to sign even a bare-bones stimulus bill that does not personally and directly benefit himself and his clan and grant him and them immunity from prosecution for all past, present and future crimes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no doubt correct when she claims that all he cares about, right this very minute, is his name on $1200 stimulus checks to help his re-election chances.

Post-defeat, President Duck a L'Orange will be so busy stuffing his own carcass with Treasury loot that he'll make the Clintons' alleged absconding with White House furniture and memorabilia as they left office in 2000 look even pettier than it did at the time.

The mischief that this man can still do and the violence that he will still be able to foment from his continuing position of power are incalculable. The boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it might even be put to the ultimate test. Would the Republicans, even assuming that they'd still barely control the Senate in January under a Biden presidency, finally help remove him from office in November or December in the interest of the survival of their own corrupt party? Because if he does lose, and loses badly, the country might not even be able to wait a few more months for his final departure.

Of course, with no pandemic relief in sight, a lame duck Congress could single-handily transform America into a virtual abattoir as Joe Biden bides his time till Inauguration Day. Who needs a sane, functional president with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel in virtual control of both the public purse and the Republican Party? Having distanced himself from the White House after the bipartisan CARES package for the plutocracy gave him and his class everything they wanted and more, McConnell has no incentive at all to cooperate with any president, whether Democrat or Republican.

Even if Trump is ultimately tried and convicted of a crime, he will get his own reality show. "Celebrity Apprentice" will morph into "Celebrity Ex-President" or maybe "Orange Is the New Orange" filmed in a luxe Club Fed, where Trump in a jumpsuit can promote QAnon conspiracy theories to his heart's content. Stay tuned for a cable bidding war to end all bidding wars to determine where Trump decides to take his talents after he leaves Washington.

Meanwhile, whoever said that divisiveness and partisan "gridlock" are preventing our elected representatives from doing anything for the public good should ponder this grisly image:

That's maskless ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein giving a "full body hug" last week to maskless Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham after the Duopoly, at the behest of polluting Dark Money, successfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination for a full body vote. They were congratulating themselves on the awesome civility with which they stabbed the body politic right in the back. Or maybe it was the skill with which they attached the silencer to the assault rifle aimed at America, allowing one more right-wing jurist to avoid answering even the most basic and pressing existential questions, including whether she "believes" in the capitalism-engendered climate change destroying all forms of life on Earth.

 How do we explain this oligarchic merry-go-round, these endless variations on one grotesque theme?

 Let us at least try to count the ways: 

 

Censorship and Narrative Are Incestuous Bedfellows

*Updated below.

I'll admit it. I am a diehard fan of the New York Post. I have been for most of my adult life. Who couldn't be a fan of a tabloid that once famously screamed "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar?"

To be precise, I don't read the Post as much as I scan it. If its scandals and scare headlines do nothing else, they greatly enhance the effects of my first cup of morning coffee. My daily hit of Post is the necessary prelude to seeing what the New York Times is up to. It's also fun to count the hours or days that it takes for the Times to catch up to the Post's scoops on the latest grisly crime or celebrity death.

As I am writing this blog entry at 9 a.m. on Thursday, more than 24 hours have passed since the Post broke the story of Hunter Biden's laptop (fake? hacked? stolen?). And the Times was still not On It. Not that I really expected them to be. No other major publication, as far as I could tell, was touching it at first either.

But what's unsettling is that unlike its fellow Narrators, the Times wasn't even covering the real story - which is that Twitter and Facebook had unilaterally blocked all links to the Post article and had even blocked the accounts of some of the more prominent users promoting it. In the coup de grace, Twitter blocked the entire account of the New York Post itself.

The real story now is not the chronic Hunter Biden mess. The real story is that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have arrogated to themselves the power to control everything we see and hear. That these billionaires also happen to be the incestuous bedfellows of the so-called Deep State/ a/k/a the Permanent Ruling Class, should be even more cause for alarm.

They are flailing and they are scrambling to explain themselves to the American public. They haven't had time to contrive or peddle the usual Kremlin narrative. They have not been able to tie the Delaware computer repairman - who claims he copied Hunter's hard disk after Hunter apparently was so messed up on drugs that he never claimed or even paid for the repairs to his machine - to Vladimir Putin and his election-meddling. discord-sowing, democracy-destroying army of Internet trolls.

And in their rush to censorship, they have given a great gift to Trump. They really are out to get him, and by extension, his supporters.

I'd given the Post article a cursory skim on Wednesday morning. My skepticism was immediately aroused when the name of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared in connection to it. The Post is openly backing Donald Trump's re-election and digging up Biden scandals by the score. Could it nonetheless be true that Hunter Biden is even more of a scammer and influence peddler than we knew, selling access to his father regardless of whether he could actually produce his father in the flesh?  Is it also possible that Joe Biden lied through his teeth when he denied either knowing what Sonny Boy was up to, or that he'd had his own direct part in the grift? Of course it is. But when weighing whether a piece of journalism is trustworthy or not, you must always look at the sourcing and the context. And that especially goes for the Paper of Record (the Times) and its pro-war propaganda quoting unnamed officials.

Long story short: I took the whole thing with a pebble sized grain of salt. I figured that diehard Trump supporters would promote the story, and that diehard non-Trump supporters would scoff at it, or just ignore it. I never figured that the reading public would be denied the chance to even see it in order to draw their own conclusions. I, personally, didn't find the piece compelling enough to either think about or blog about on Wednesday. 

But here I am on Thursday, blogging about it. And wondering whether this censorship had the Democratic Party's hand on it, or whether Joe Biden himself raised enough of a stink about it to get his Facebook/Twitter CEO/ Deep State donors to help stop its spread. Despite polls that show Biden winning in a landslide, you have to wonder what they might have to hide and fear.

You also have to wonder what the Times has to fear by deliberately not informing its readers about the censorship and the slap in the face to the First Amendment. Then again, they are barely covering Julian Assange's extradition hearing and the dangers to press freedom that the Wikileaks prosecution presents.

The Post debacle is a lot harder to suppress, of course.They call the boomeranging, mushrooming effect that its Biden story has elicited the Streisand Effect, after the phenomenon of Barbra Streisand once drawing outsize attention to the location of her luxury estate through her strident complaints about the tabloid press publicizing the location of her luxury estate.

Tonight's dueling presidential Town Halls are another example of the Censorship Industrial Complex hard at work.  When the privately-run Commission on Presidential Debates decided to cancel the second official debate because a Covid-stricken Trump balked at the event being aired remotely, ABC-Disney agreed to host a solo Town Hall for Biden. A since-recovered (or so we're told) Trump then made a sweet deal with his alma mater, NBC, to headline a similar event for him, at the exact same time and on the exact same date. 

This ratings-driven "Battle of the Presidential Network Stars" is, of course, just the latest blatant example of broadcasting against the public interest. MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, who has become fabulously wealthy off the Trump-Hate/Russiagate Narrative franchise (#Resistance, Inc) is helping her network's ratings immensely by pretend-biting the very hand that feeds her. She is even leading the pack of censorious liberals who are urging people to protest! But what this really means is  that millions more will Tune In to watch even more of Maddow's censorious commentary as she leads the post-game NBC panel manufacturing the outrage.

Maybe some enterprising YouTuber can contrive a split screen image of Biden and Trump talking over one another at their dueling town halls. It would essentially be a repeat of their first Wrestlemania debate.

There is simultaneously not enough choice and too much choice.

 With Halloween approaching, there are literally hundreds of other, better horror movies streaming endlessly out of our smart screens to keep us occupied.

And if that doesn't appeal, don't forget that there is always the horror of our uncensored, day-to-day lives to fall back on, to keep us at least tenuously riveted to reality.

*Update: The New York Times has finally weighed in, via an article time-stamped 11.43 a.m., on the censorship. The Gray Lady can't ignore the uncomfortable fact that Twitter had also suspended the account of the Trump campaign for promoting the Post's Biden story. The Times piece uncritically reports that the campaign's promotion of the Post article violated the social media giant's rule against promoting stolen material.  The Paper of Record thus tacitly gives its own stamp of approval to Twitter's claim that, because Hunter Biden's emails were private and allegedly "hacked," evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens contained therein should be and will be suppressed. This specious rationale for censorship is identical to claims that the Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton's chicanery are suspect on their face -  not because they are not true, but because of the means by which they were obtained. The story that the Clinton emails were hacked by "the Russians" has been repeated so often that it is an article of faith, although it has never been proven.

 It's another sad day for journalism.

Guns, Fetuses, and For-Profit Health Insurance

 What could be more important during this dangerous pandemic and its ensuing mass human misery and despair than the topics in the title of this post?

 

Thus far in the Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, this trifecta of partisan wedge issues has reigned supreme. With the showboating and grilling not even reaching the midpoint as of this writing, I suppose we can still hold out hope that one lone legislator comes out and asks Barrett for her initial visceral reaction to meeting Donald Trump in the flesh for the first time. Given that she has coyly refused to commit to recusing herself on his likely legal challenge to Joe Bidens predicted landslide victory, I doubt she'll be giving even the slightest hint of any human reaction. Not even in the unlikely event that a senile Judiciary Committee member veers off script and blurts it right out. As of Tuesday, Dianne Feinstein, 87, was living back in the 1950s, haunted by anecdotal memories of her peers' back-alley abortions. She is afraid that era will come back in the event of a Barrett confirmation, because Roe v Wade is not yet, according to Barrett, a "super precedent" exempt from overturning. Of course, the nominee will not say whether or not she'd vote to overturn it because she reassuringly won't be "queen of the world" with the power to overturn anything until and unless a challenge "winds its way" up to the highest court.

With corporate lawyers and oligarchs controlling all three branches of the US government, I just cannot not get the image of side-winding slithery snakes in suits out of my head.

 I was actually waiting for one of the inquisitors to press Barrett on the unseemliness of holding the first day of this rushed hearing on Columbus Day, a national holiday whose symbolism is integral to the culture wars which artificially separate the Republicans from the Democrats. To hear Trump's GOP tell it, any defacing or tear-downs of statues of the invaders, slave-owners and ethnic cleansers of yore is not to be tolerated. So why were they conducting government business on such a sacred day when all good patriots should be marching to honor Columbus and battling all those Woke Antifa hordes in our midst? Since Columbus was bankrolled by good Catholics and Inquisitors Ferdinand and Isabella,  somebody at least could have asked her if the Columbus Day session had offended her religious sensibilities.

Instead, the Republicans on the panel can't shut up about the Democrats attacking her Catholicism (which they aren't) and the Democrats telling one maudlin story after the other about the lucky people whose lives and bank accounts were saved by the Affordable Care Act. These heartbreaking stories are designed to instill guilt into a woman who has already experienced a whole lifetime of absorbing Catholic guilt, and who uses the so-called Ginsburg rule of never disclosing to the public what she thinks about any issue with which she might be confronted as a Supreme. This convenient unwritten rule gives her and other judicial nominees an easy out that mere mortals can never get away with in a job interview. If past writings and deeds are revealed, the nominees can easily dismiss them as the writings and deeds of a private citizen. We are supposed to believe that once judges don their magical black robes, they magically strip themselves of prejudices, not to mention their very fallible humanity.

Is anybody buying this nonsense?

Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois broke ranks for a bit when he challenged Barrett on a recent dissenting opinion in which she argued that a convicted felon's right to own a gun is a Second Amendment right, whereas the stripping of the voting rights of convicted felons is a matter for individual states to decide. Just as she was holding forth like a twisted pretzel on the rights of states to bar ex-cons from voting, but claiming that a mere fraudster should be entitled to bear arms, C-Span broke away from this important and interesting exchange to cover the pro-forma convening of the (empty) lower House.

The House was not actually meeting to discuss anything so mundane as Covid relief, or how to combat Donald Trump's ominous plans to "monitor" polling places on Election Day. But C-Span had to do its own patriotic duty of filming the solemn pounding of the gavel. And then everybody went to lunch. And then I took the opportunity to write this quick blog post before getting back to the depressing Senate spectacle.

Eric Levitz has an interesting piece at New York magazine which discusses the "Constitutional originalism" embraced by Barrett and her hard-right mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This legal principle is nothing but a smokescreen for conservative hypocrisy. It's impossible, Levitz writes, to fall back on a "strict" reading of the Constitution because its wording was always made deliberately vague.

When justices claim the authority to determine the unequivocal meaning of a phrase at a given point in history, they are not demonstrating judicial humility but supreme arrogance. The farcical nature of the originalist enterprise was made plain in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. Then, Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens each produced their own historical monograph on the Second Amendment’s contemporary meaning, which arrived at antithetical conclusions that just so happened to line up perfectly with each jurist’s ideological tendency. The opinions nevertheless had one thing in common: Both were poorly regarded by actual historians.

Barrett did give one clue during Tuesday morning's session on how she squares her professional legal life with her religious life. After arriving at a decision that might be hurtful to a human being, she testified, she then asks herself how she would feel if, for example, it was her own child bearing the brunt of it. If she concludes that her decision was still a fair one no matter how injurious to this hypothetical child of hers, then her conscience is entirely clear. She has proven to her own satisfaction that she was in the right. She not only examines her conscience, she cross-examines her conscience. And she never has to look back. Second-guessing herself is apparently not part of her repertoire.

This courage of her own convictions is so absolutely and rigidly righteous, it should scare people.

And both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were glowing in their effusive praise of how well-behaved and how quiet  six of her children were, sitting behind her in the audience. (The seventh, a boy with Down Syndrome, was left at home, but was very excited to see Mom on television, she said.)

Somebody should ask her how she feels about Trump's penchant for making fun of disabled people.

There are plenty more smart,  qualified and well-credentialed people just like Amy Coney Barrett waiting in the right wings, ready and willing and able to challenge Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or another conservative neoliberal Democrat in 2024.

If you think, correctly, that Trump is a menace, then just try to imagine a Trump with a high IQ who knows when to keep his or her mouth shut while sowing conscience-free chaos.

Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

Covid and Capitalism On Steroids

 Leave it to Donald Trump to equate his truncated hospital stay with a post-doc residency in infectious diseases. His malignant narcissism, turbocharged with a euphoric regimen of the powerful steroid Dexamethasone, led him to boast he'd learned so much about Covid that he discharged himself from the hospital after only four days. Armed with that false sense of well-being supplied by the drug, he is using his disease as germ warfare, infecting all who come into his path with his toxic spittle and "don't worry be happy" cant. And that includes his own teenage son, assuming that he is not already sick.

Trump was in full S.O.B. (shortness of breath) mode as he went huffing and puffing up to the White House balcony on Monday night for his Mussolini photo op and campaign ad.

 

 He is getting back to work even if it kills him and everybody around him, not to mention the legions of his mask-averse fans who worship him like a god. And not to mention the untold numbers of people who will continue to sicken and die of disease and despair, thanks to his continuing reign of ignorance and terror. 

The White House has been literally transformed into a pest-house.

The heavy-duty steroid that he's on is commonly reserved for those with severe symptoms of Covid-19. I suspect that his compliant physicians dosed him with it not so much for therapeutic purposes, but because it does such a good job of masking symptoms. I have witnessed just what this drug can do when my husband, suffering in the last stages of Multiple Myeloma, was prescribed it.  With only weeks left to live,  this normally responsible and sane man felt so good he decided it would be a great idea to use our house as collateral to purchase a BMW, which he would then race professionally on the world circuit. To say that this drug instills a false and even psychotic sense of well-being is a vast understatement. 

Trump was already psychologically damaged. And he has the nuclear codes. And nobody seems capable of saying No to him. Forget about him not being out of the woods for another week to ten days. The whole world is in more danger than ever with this steroid-addled, ratings-addicted tyrant on the loose.

One commentator compared his balcony scene to Michael Jackson dangling his infant son out of a hotel window. I had also been thinking of Michael Jackson, but more in relation to his likewise being so rich and powerful that he was able to hire a compliant doctor to administer anesthesia to help him sleep. That turned out to be the ultimate in insomnia cures.

Trump, who has reportedly never slept much thanks to imbibing a dozen Diet Cokes a day, just got his own compliant doctors to feed his permanent sub-manic state with a psychosis-inducing stimulant.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported this week, more than $2.3 trillion allocated through the grotesquely named CARES Act was injected into the big bloated coffers of corporations and individual oligarchs that were never required to prove either immediate need or future adverse impact from the pandemic. Nor were they required to promise they would keep their workers on their payrolls.

Contrast this with the bargain Band-Aid and the crumbling tablet of expiring aspirin of the cruelly temporary unemployment supplements and one-time-only $1200 "stimulus" checks tossed out by a bipartisan Congress to the tens of millions of people who are suffering the most.

 It was a massive dose of financial steroids for the rich and the ethically unhealthy, allowing the pandemic itself to rage on and on, and get even worse. 

The Trump presidency is emblematic of our entire terminally diseased capitalistic system, which needs euthanasia much more than it requires any more of the wasted therapy that ends up hurting the whole world.

Don't just take my word for it. Pope Francis has issued a perfectly-timed encyclical, inspired by his namesake saint of Assisi, with the anti-capitalist and anti-war theme of Fraternity and Social Friendship. This paragraph takes direct aim at Trumpism:

The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.

But the Pope doesn't let the neoliberal system of government and the discourse-controlling corporate media which produced Trump off the hook either:

 The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle"-- without using the name-- as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged "spillover" does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at "promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity" and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, "without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist." The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, "we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need."