Biden Just Can't Hide His Neoliberalism

 I know it's considered a faux pas in polite media and Democratic circles to criticize Joe Biden, but a close reading of his latest speech, touting his proposed infrastructure bill, does reveal more than a few troubling "tells."

The first, as outlined by modern monetary theorist Stephanie Kelton in a New York Times op-ed, is Biden's obsession with "pay-fors" and his continued harping on debts and deficits. His nearly $2 trillion in "infrastructure" spending would likely be spread out over an unnecessarily long period of time, and it's not nearly enough to cure what ails us. It focuses not so much on specific needs and specific solutions, but on costs. If the money, as it is wont to do, winds up in the usual hands of privateers and consultants, it will not circulate through the economy. A lot of it will be hoarded. 

"It’s honest, it’s fair, it’s fiscally responsible and it pays for what we need and reduces the debt over the long haul," Biden bragged this week, in a distinct echo of the centrist rhetoric of the Pete Peterson Foundation and other austerian think tanks bankrolled  by the oligarchy. True, these ruling class narrative-builders now largely agree that deficits don't matter quite so much as they once did, given the emergency of the pandemic and social unrest and the resulting imminent threat to capitalism itself. But once the immediate crisis is over, and the aid money likely privatized to the fullest extent possible, then debts and deficits will begin to matter again, and with a vengeance.

 Rather than just borrow money at zero or subzero interest rates, rather than minting a trillion-dollar coin or two or ten as allowed by the Constitution, Biden would instead tax incomes above $400,000, raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent (far too modest) and, in a nod to economist Thomas Piketty, impose a global wealth tax to discourage the use of offshore tax shelters. He does not mention anything about his own home state of Delaware being a tax shelter in its own right, thanks in large part to his own bank-friendly congressional legislation. Lobbyists are no doubt devising loopholes even as we speak. 

Biden's plans admittedly do sound downright progressive. But with Bad Cop Senator Joe Manchin formally announcing his opposition to ending the filibuster, and Pope-Queen Elizabeth MacDonough ( a/k/a the Senate parliamentarian) bringing up the rear to nix passage of reconciliation bills requiring only a 51-vote majority, Biden can propose anything he wants and rest assured that most of his proposals benefiting the ordinary people he claims to champion will remain just that - proposals.

So for all the populist rhetoric stuffed in his infrastructure speech the other day, there remained a number of disturbing neoliberal buzzwords and talking points besides "deficit" and "pay-for" that should make our hackles rise.

Examples:

But it also is a blueprint for infrastructure needed for tomorrow, not just yesterday, tomorrow. For American jobs, for American competitiveness.

That's the lead paragraph, signaling right off the bat that Biden is more concerned with US hegemony and cutthroat competition than he is with the well-being of "folks." The race to win the Superpower battle against China is the underlying theme of his entire speech. Our high-speed rail has to be better than their high-speed rail. It just has to be. In order to regain the respect of the rest of the world, we have to restore our place as Number One. Otherwise,  the rest of the world will not do our bidding and bend the knee, like in the good old days.

Next, he enthuses about the transcontinental railroad and interstate highway system. The former, completed largely by the near-slave labor of Chinese immigrants and the use of Chinese-invented dynamite, had the core goal of attracting - oftentimes duping - white settlers to the heartland to help exterminate the Indians and enrich the robber barons. The latter was a Cold War project to make it easier to evacuate after a nuclear war with Russia and to sell more cars and polluting gas.  Biden signals that cutthroat neoliberalism is by no means dead with these words:

We need to start seeing infrastructure through its effect on the lives of working people in America. What is the foundation today that they need to carve out their place in the middle class to make it.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Arm yourselves instead with your knives and prepare to fight the next battle in the Hobbesian war of All Against All. Solidarity, my ass.

Now, to his credit, Biden does get in a subtle dig at the man he rather dismissively calls "Barack" and his infamous phony sip of Flint water which so cruelly substituted for a presidential public health disaster declaration and a massive federal aid package, including free health care, for the people of Flint:

Ask a teacher or a childcare worker if having clean drinking water, non contaminated drinking water in our schools, in our childcare centers, is part of that foundation. When we know that the lead in our pipes slows a child’s development when they drink that water.

Then again, nor does Biden himself declare a public health emergency in Flint, where lead not only will remain in the bodies of children for their entire lives, but whose own future children will likely be born damaged as a result of the contamination that was deliberately allowed to happen by a whole slew of elected officials. This points to the deliberate lack of specificity in the infrastructure proposal. Come on, man!

Then there was this heartbreaking nugget:

Ask our wounded warriors and military families. To my Republican colleagues in congress, should we modernize VA hospitals, update them?

Not one word about defunding the for-profit and increasingly outsourced and privatized United States military or ending the wars that produce all the wounded warriors. And of course, not one word about the lack of health care for people in foreign lands who are the targets and collateral damage of American imperialism.

Like his former boss, meanwhile, Biden is all fired up and ready to go:

 Over 500,000 charging stations on the highways we are going to build to accommodate electric vehicles, so we can own the future. Construction workers and engineers building modern hospitals and homes for American families. Healthcare workers, steel workers, folks who were I work in the cutting edge labs.

Notwithstanding that garbled last sentence, this is an eerie flashback to Obama's own Win the Future campaign slogan. Notice that neoliberal rhetoric is never about the here and now, it is always about making life better in the ephemeral someday for regular people. "Owning the future" does not put food on the table today, despite the Democrats' temporary increase in food stamp benefits, which now pay for maybe two weeks' worth of groceries instead of the previous one week.

The speech now descends into a series of garbled sentences that nonetheless impart some unintentional truth. The underground spring of neoliberalism and rank militarism hidden just beneath Biden's heap of rich neo-populist soil begins to bubble with a xenophobic vengeance right up to the surface:

It’s not part of my speech, but I promise you, you’re all going to be reporting over the next six to eight months how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future. Attempting to own the future. The technology, quantum computing, investing significant amounts of money in dealing with cancer and Alzheimer’s. That’s the infrastructure of a nation.

Biden's definition of infrastructure repair is all about one group of predatory capitalists competing against another group of predatory capitalists. China might win instead of Elon Musk and Bill Gates! And meanwhile, please stop with the hate crimes against Asians, which have nothing at all to do with our leaders' own disgustingly bellicose rhetoric.

It gets worse:

So America can lead the world that is as it’s historically done. That’s why I brought back scientists into the White House.

Not to make people's lives better, although it could be a fringe benefit. The purpose of science is to treat disease at a profit and to improve technology and transportation so that American capitalism can win.

Almost fifteen minutes into his speech, Biden really begins to go off the high-speed rails, at an almost reckless rate of belligerence.

We need to think. Look, do we think the rest of the world is waiting around? We’re not going to make those kinds of investments the rest of world’s saying. Take a look. Do you think China is waiting around to invest in this digital infrastructure or in research and development? I promise you they are not waiting. But they’re counting on American democracy to be too slow, too limited, and too divided to keep pace.

Before you know it, China may even start imitating Russia and placing cheesy Facebook ads in order to sow division among Americans. Biden thinks that the average desperate American family also wants nothing more than the opportunity to traverse the whole width of America at a high rate of belligerent speed. It's road rage change you can believe in.

Now, about how we're gonna pay for it. Biden wants to tax the rich and increase taxes on corporations -  not to punish deserving jerks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, of course, but rather to bring some feel-good parity between rapacious billionaires and the barely-making-it. This is a standard neoliberal talking point, a throwback to Obama's "Share the Sacrifice" sermons admonishing the foreclosed and evicted to find common ground with those doing the foreclosing and the evicting. Because we're all in this together!

 Not fleece them. (the corporations)  28%. If you’re a mom and dad, a cop, firefighter, police officer, et cetera you’re paying close to that in your income tax.

Biden seems to think that cops and police officers are two different jobs. Speaking of which, his much-ballyhooed executive order for mild gun control will apparently not be accompanied by an order recalling all that deadly military hardware and assault weaponry from even small-town police departments under the "community policing" initiatives he spearheaded as vice president.

The divisions of the moment shouldn’t stop us from doing the right thing for the future.

Or as Stephen Colbert lampooned the neoliberal concept of futurism back when he was still funny: "A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow."

Biden's concluding microburst of bombast would put Donald Trump himself to shame:

Tell the kids, the young people that work for me, I told my kids, when I go on college campuses, they’re going to see more change in the next 10 years then we’ve seen the last 50 years. We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds, supersonics speeds. Be able to figuratively, if we decided to do it traverse the world in about an hour, traveled 21,000 miles an hour. So much has changed. We have got to lead it.

This may sound like your grandpa on crack. But God love him and bless the troops, at least he fired (as opposed to firing up) the young people who worked for him because they admitted to past pot use. Because if you're too mellowed out on weed, how can you ever imagine circumnavigating the globe at centrifugal force? 

Thar the Movie Mogul Blows! Thar the Landlord Breaches!

You will no doubt be impressed to learn that Yours Truly (actually, the plight of Yours Truly) is the subject of the latest "Ask Real Estate" feature in the New York Times. Before going further, it would probably be simplest and less redundant to first read the Times column, and especially the reader comments so far, and most especially the top-rated reader comment, plus a follow-up, from "Sardonickyblog."  

Cartoon Version of Me (credit Nadia Pillon, NY Times)

To synopsize: besides fighting for a then-scarce dose of the Covid vaccine, I have also recently been doing battle with the management of my apartment building. This is something of a proxy, or two-front, battle also involving what is known locally as "Hollywood East," which invaded our small bucolic complex late last month without so much as a by-your-leave, in order to make a Major Motion Picture.

Called "The Whale," the film is about a gay guy trapped in his apartment because grief over the death of his partner has caused him to eat himself up to a morbidly obese 600 pounds. For a script seemingly devoted to checking several identity politics boxes, you'd think they'd at least be woke enough to find a title that isn't quite so insulting to the differently-weighted.

Then again, the actual play upon which the script is based was written during those insensitive, dark-ages coma years that plagued the country for centuries

If you've read my Times comment, you'll appreciate the black humor of a movie about a 600-pound guy trapped in his apartment actually resulting in real-life people, like my daughter and me, becoming trapped in our apartments.

You'll also appreciate the arch hilarity of a multimillion-dollar production posting "off-limits" signs on tables laden with Doritos and other salty and sugary processed snacks at various spots around the complex during the film shoot. I never did find out whether this forbidden junk food bonanza was supposed to be catering for the crew, or whether it was props for the 600-pound lead character. (I looked out my window in vain for Brendan Fraser in a fat suit, but since his character is housebound, he was perhaps stuck in his apartment on the interior sound stage several miles south of the outdoor location scenes.)

Zoom In to See the Neon Pink Off-Limits Sign (photos by Kat Garcia)

 My letter to the New York Times, meanwhile, was edited to omit the part where I questioned my landlord's breach of tenants' rights to the "quiet enjoyment" of our digs, known as the implied warranty of habitability. As a matter of fact, the only sources Ronda Kaysen quoted were from the movie industry. There was not one landlord-tenant attorney or tenant advocacy expert in the bunch. 

Then again, this is the Sunday New York Times real estate section. It is usually replete with stuff like how hard it is to score an apartment on the Upper West Side for under two million bucks, and myriad other housing agonies of the rich and well-connected.

 So I was pretty surprised that they ran my own letter. It was probably the Hollywood angle. We are so immersed in an unhealthy celebrity culture in this country, that sometimes overwrought #Oscars So White stories actually seem to compete with the continuing mass social murder of Black and Brown people who are sickening and dying in such unconscionable disproportionate numbers during the Covid pandemic.

Anyway, the gist of the Times's advice to me was to suck it up while still being a "squeaky wheel." Since movie production companies are so flush with cash, insider experts said, I should have just shaken them down for a cut of the action. This did not happen, mainly because a few days before shooting began, before the giant crane blocked my view, before our front door was blocked by a cameraman, before blinding klieg lights flooded our living room past midnight, a very personable location manager had flat-out lied to my daughter about where they would be on the property, assuring her we would not be inconvenienced.

Besides, I don't think it was my place or my job to schmooze or cajole the movie crew, since the owner(s) of the apartment building are the ones who signed the location contract and pocketed probably thousands of dollars, without even consulting or reimbursing us, the tenants who pay the rent. When I twice asked the off-site property management company for a rent abatement, they simply ignored me. Maybe I would go away!

In fact, as the passive-aggressive mass "notification" email to tenants from 360 Property Management makes all too abundantly clear, there would be no compensation for renters. In fact, we should feel as blessed and excited as they do about "our community" being in a movie. And why wouldn't they be excited, since they double-dipped, collecting full rent from the tenants while they pocketed a hefty location fee from the producers? This is on top of a 25 percent rent increase imposed by the landlord in the last two years. Gentrification has been further exacerbated this past year by wealthy pandemic refugees from New York City either renting or buying at hugely inflated prices the already-limited housing stock in this upstate locale.  The extraction of maximum value from property certainly exceeds the rights of mere mortals. This feudalistic mindset certainly restores the term "landlord" to its original meaning!

So for me, this was the straw that broke the camel's back:

 Good afternoon everyone!   

I know that many of you have heard that there will be a film crew on site in the upcoming week.   

Please see the attached Letter from the production crew of the feature film The Whale. 

We appreciate your understanding during the dates of March 23-26th as they film.  

The most significant impact will be on the day of March 25th when they are asking that you move your vehicles from the South paved lot to any of the other visitor spaces or on the north side of the building.  The crew will have a couple of vehicles on site that are period appropriate for the time period during which the story takes place. ( I believe the 1980's ) 

For your information,  we are also sharing the film crew covid protocols.    

It's exciting that our home community will be in a feature film .... thank you for your understanding!  

<WH_Residents Letter Bella Terra.pdf>

<the whale new a24 health and safety protocols v7 012921.pdf>

So right now I'm tilting at the joint windmills of Entertainment Finance Capital and the reincarnation of Old Man Trump. This is despite Plutarch warning two centuries ago that "what thing whatsoever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's mouth, be it beast, bird, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch."

So call me crazy or call me Ishmael for all I care, but on Monday I gathered all the pertinent documents and ignored emails to management that I could find, and filed a probably very quixotic complaint with the New York state attorney general's office.  I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether I have a case for landlord harassment, fraud, breach of contract, constructive eviction, unlawful imprisonment, all of the above, or none of the above.

But complaining sure feels a whole lot better than helplessly blubbering.

Tilting At Vaccine Windmills

 Sorry about the lack of posts lately, but I've been fighting a few battles on, so to speak, the home front.

Main battle: Like many of you, I'd been scrambling to score the Covid vaccine. In New York state, where I live, the quest for the shots has been something right out of Kafka. Our local county officials brag day after day about the scores of sites (mainly chain drugstores) which are administering the vaccine. Day after day, they enthusiastically and helpfully list all the sites. Hope springs eternal, day after day, that this could finally be your lucky day in the lottery of bare survival. I spent countless hours over the past month obsessively clicking on every single one of these sites and links - only to be informed that I'd have to install an app on my phone to even get access to an application for an appointment. But never mind, because they are currently not taking any appointments anyway. 

It's classic bait and switch, on a grander scale than I have ever experienced in my life. It's  also excessively, gaslightingly cruel. It is especially sadistic in my state, given that New York has already creepily begun issuing "vaccine passports" for the lucky few. It even got me wondering if I was doing something wrong in my failure to get access to get an appointment to get vaccinated.

But it turns out that my quixotic quest for the Elixir has been the rule rather than the exception for the majority of people, in my state and in many other areas of the country. It is the epitome and most recent glaring symptom of the Failed State in which we live.

But miracle of miracles! In neighboring Orange County, the chief executive had taken to posting scarce appointment availabilities on his own personal website in the dead of night when crashes caused by desperate people are less likely.

  My son, who happens to work in the dead of night, pounced and made appointments for both me and my daughter at a "pod" only one hour's drive away from our home.

Long story short:  Steeling myself for another nightmare straight out of Kafka, I armed myself to the teeth with more forms of I.D. than even the Department of Motor Vehicles requires, fully prepared to beg right on my creaking knees for bureaucrats to find me valid enough to pass the final exam of deservedness.

So you can only imagine how stunned we were on Friday to be ushered like VIPs into a comparative Disney theme park at a local senior center. Scores of happy workers greeted us effusively. One of them even wore a Lion King shirt! We were immediately seated at a table and answered a few nonintrusive perfunctory questions before rolling up our sleeves and getting inoculated. 

We were offered bottled water by dozens of smiling people while we were seated in an observation area for the requisite 15 minutes.  The experience not only stunned me right out of my habitual cynicism, it restored my faith in humanity itself.

For those of you who still waiting, still struggling to score your own shots,  let me tell you that the feeling of doom and dread that departs from your psyche the minute you receive that first dose of elixir is an elixir in and of itself. On the downside, getting the shot does leave you with something akin to survivor guilt, knowing that so many people are still having problems getting theirs.

I have to quit now, because my arm still hurts like a bitch when I exert it. It's a great feeling, she said shamefacedly.

One windmill down, only about a few thousand left to go.  So stay tuned while I wait for all the ebullience to subside and for my cynicism to healthily return. Meanwhile, please feel free to leave a comment on your own quests to become meritocratic winners in the Golden Arm Sweepstakes, or for that matter, anything else that's on your minds.

Happy Easter!

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purge of the Stoners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rescue: The Major and the Minor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bite Me

America Has a Pope-Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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