The Clown Show Winds Down

The current occupant of the White House was known for his book The Art of the Deal long before the corporate press elevated him to be a contender for the presidency. I remembered this factoid as news reached me yesterday that, posturing aside, he did after all sign the gargantuan military spending bill connected with the insultingly paltry pandemic relief payment of $600 for the people. Also extending unemployment insurance and a freeze on evictions in the first winter of covid.

Clearly the threat to veto the bill until Congress amended the payment to $2000 was a bargaining chip in a deal that paid off somehow. 

We may or may not ever know what was exchanged in that transaction.

As our days fill with pardons of war criminals who slaughtered children and other civilians, plus white collar criminals, 2020 draws to a close.

Those observing with clarity point out that the current occupant of the White House was essentially the same as all the other occupants: beholden to the death machine of the US militarized economy, and unconcerned to keep the promises they rode to election.

The incoming administration will be no different.

Ending subsidies to fossil fuel extraction profiteers was a promise during the primaries that Democrats used to lure idealistic youth climate activists, but quickly abandoned to kick off the general election season.

Forgiving student debt (that he had a key role in fashioning as a yoke built to last a lifetime) was another grandiose promise now being reduced to ashes.

Or maybe dangling $2000 was meant to ensure the current president's legacy remains strong among the struggling workers who still think he went to Washington DC to drain the swamp?

Here was his final "swamp draining" budget proposal.

70 million people voted for the clownish Twitter personality the second time around because the reality of their lives is deadly peril from threats more sure than succumbing to covid.

Covid is now the leading cause of death in the US, and will be for the near future even as vaccines roll out for Congress but not for most of us. 

Facing the dangers of a virus or of your job without health care has a huge impact on one's ability to survive, but the corporate-sponsored House of Representatives won't even consider a performative vote on Medicare for All much less legislation to enact universal health care. 

What show will ensue after the pageantry of the new president's inauguration subsides? 

Will the manufacturing of consent rest on the White House dogs who are vastly more telegenic than their elderly, addled master?

I'm betting it's the good-looking, intelligent Vice President who will end up carrying this administration's public relations efforts. As she is a woman and bi-racial, she is guaranteed to draw the vitriol of white supremacists losing their grasp on earning a living. (You know, the ones who voted for leaders that literally went golfing and skiing on Christmas without responding to the fact that a bomb was detonated in downtown Nashville.)

The show must go on! But most have tired of clownish "governing" and many in the younger generations actually find clowns terrifying.

Me? I'm older, and I find the incoming cabinet more terrifying than any clown. Ticking boxes for identity politics while elevating the executives of the very corporations who have murdered and impoverished working people is cynical. 

Yes, selecting Deb Haaland as the first Native Secretary of the Interior is wonderful and may she uphold indigenous wisdom in the Democratic Party (it's hard to even type those words). I was also glad to see an actual educator, Miguel Cardona,  nominated to head up the DOE. 

Speaking of the art of deals, how about a former small town mayor who parleyed stepping down after a modest primary showing into a nomination for Secretary of Transportation. But he's openly gay! That will be a great comfort to liberals in the owning class who bemoan climate crisis while supporting elected officials who consistently fail to invest in a robust public transportation system to address climate like other countries have.

And you can't blame the clownish performance of the defeated president for any of that.

Revised 12/30/20: Correcting my misunderstanding that the current occupant of the White House's veto of the military spending bill (aka NDAA) remains in place until a vote in Congress to overrride occurs. The pandemic stimulus/relief bill was signed, and the $2000 counteroffer by the deal artiste was also found to contain provisions for contesting certification of the electoral college victory of his opponent.

Conservatives Hopping Mad About Foreign Aid Bundled With Pandemic Relief Bill

Congressional "leaders" McConnell and Pelosi have net worth of $34 million and $110+ million, respectively.

Twitter is awash today with conservatives railing against the huge outlays on foreign aid found in the funding bill bundled with the pandemic "relief" bill.  

Some of the hashtags are kind of fun, like #VetoThePorkulus.

But, it's hard to tell if conservatives and other US taxpayers realize how foreign aid works as corporate welfare, mostly benefitting weapons and "security" manufacturers. Some in Congress clearly get this and don't go along to get along. From last year but just as applicable today:

Giving our military industrial complex another $733B windfall doesn't bring #13thDistrictStrong closer to economic opportunities we need. We deserve better than to come second to for-profit defense spending that doesn't make our nation any safer. I voted no on #HR2740. pic.twitter.com/e89PbcELnX

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) June 19, 2019

Let's say Israel, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, gets $500 million in "aid" this time around. Here's how that vast sum breaks down in the bill the president is expected to sign:

2 SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act

3 under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and

4 ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-

5 Wide’’, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative

6 Programs: Provided, That of this amount, $73,000,000

7 shall be for the Secretary of Defense to provide to the Gov-

8 ernment of Israel for the procurement of the Iron Dome

9 defense system to counter short-range rocket threats, sub-

10 ject to the U.S.-Israel Iron Dome Procurement Agree-

11 ment, as amended; $177,000,000 shall be for the Short

12 Range Ballistic Missile Defense (SRBMD) program, in-

13 cluding cruise missile defense research and development

14 under the SRBMD program, of which $50,000,000 shall

15 be for co-production activities of SRBMD systems in the

16 United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense re-

17 quirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regulations,

18 and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production

19 agreement for SRBMD, as amended; $77,000,000 shall

20 be for an upper-tier component to the Israeli Missile De-

21 fense Architecture, of which $77,000,000 shall be for co-

22 production activities of Arrow 3 Upper Tier systems in

23 the United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense

24 requirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regula-

25 tions, and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production

The bottom line is that Israel and many other countries are told they can order weapon systems and the US taxpayer will pick up the tab. A jobs program for the US, no? Well, no, not if the weapons systems are actually manufactured in Israel. But that's a special feature of our special relationship with Israel. Not the case in "aid" to Sudan, Egypt, Ukraine, Pakistan and the others.

To tweet that #CongressIsBroken in response to business as usual begs the question, Did you not think it was broken before? 

Because none of this is new. Or maybe people are still clinging to the notion that the job of Congress is to represent the people. This may be true on paper but the facts are completely different in 2020. 

Congress represents its corporate campaign donors, the fat cats who will enrich them in a multitude of ways if they remain loyal servants.

Corporate media work overtime to make sure that this fealty to wealth seems inevitable. It's not, but it is extremely profitable for media. Big ad buys translate to vast amounts of "earned" media that favors the wealthy candidate over the ordinary citizen seeking to represent the people by serving in Congress.

Many corrupt systems that seemed inevitable came crashing down because they weren't sustainable. Our current system is not sustainable in the face of a public heath crisis and climate emergency bearing down on us all.

The $600 stimulus check pic.twitter.com/92JKHsD30m

— the little fag that could (@joobyboiiiiiii) December 18, 2020

May the $600 slap in the face prove to be the system's undoing.

Insatiable Greed And A $600 Slap In The Face

Fascism got a bad name in the 20th century because of the mass genocide of the Holocaust, plus the rapacious colonialism (redundant, I know) of the Japanese imperial project. For decades since, teenagers have snarled "fascist" at parents enforcing curfew in reference to the violent policing that accompanied the rise of a white supremacist party in Germany.

But it was Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, that actually had it right: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

In other words, the precise system of government we have in the United States today.

Over the last several decades we have watched as corporate power captured, not only our legislative and executive branches of national government, but the judiciary as well. 

The predictable outcome of our descent into fascism is the passage and enforcement of laws designed to benefit our corporate overlords at the expense of the literally starving and homeless people.

During any crisis of the last several decades, the already wealthy have prospered while the already impoverished have perished before our very eyes with little to no government intervention. I think Hurricane Katrina is when I first realized that the federal government would stand idly by, fat with our tax dollars, while the poor drowned and starved. FEMA like so many other federal agencies was designed to enrich corporations while the matriarch of the Bush clan toured refugees being housed in a sports stadium and pronounced on network television, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them."

The fact that so many of the "underprivileged" were Black was undoubtedly a factor in their abandonment by government of, by, and for the wealthy. Kanye West increased his fame when he said live on network television at the time: "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." 

So, failure to attend to the common good is nothing new. But it is accelerating mightily under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other wealthy countries have managed the health crisis by recognizing that staying home is containment, and subsidizing people to stay home -- including staying housed -- is good health policy.

But the US Congress is in session this weekend struggling over whether to pass a relief bill that would provide $600 one time payments after sending a measly $1200 once months ago. (Note: I know at least one Black working mother who never even received that payment.)

Currently 1/3 of people in the U.S. report they are struggling to meet basic expenses such as rent, food, and utilities.

The uptick in memes and slogans advocating violent revolution is significant in my social media feeds.

A sampling includes this one with one of the planet's rapacious billionaires as poster boy:

Also:

But more specifically, Congress is in the crosshairs. Sample tweets:

$600 and whatever you can carry from your local Congressional representative’s second home

— Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) December 18, 2020

 

The U.S. government gave over 40,000 millionaires an average of 1.7 million each in Covid Aid

This is our tax dollars they gave
to millionaires

AND wanna give middle class
& poor families only $600 in stimulus checks?

This is supposed 2 cover
8 months of back rent & mortgages?

— Kirk Acevedo🇺🇸 (@kirkacevedo) December 17, 2020

I also saw but cannot now find one that said, "The next stimulus is hidden inside in your member of Congress like a piñata."

Meanwhile reformers are insisting on a floor vote in the House on the wildly popular Medicare for All that our elected representatives will not even consider.

Fascists, drunk on power, always think the future is theirs. I think they're wrong about that.