JANUARY 29, 2021
Roaming Charges: Funny Games
Burial vaults awaiting the Covid dead. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it is alive and therefore has a live and changing face.”
— Franz Kafka
+ The Washington Post ran a sprawling and not especially informative story under the headline “Biden Struggles to Define His ‘Unity’ Pledge to a Divided Nation.” Here’s a definition based on the last forty years of politics in America: Unity is a one-way street ending in a right turn.
+ Fun and Games with Mitch: Mitch McConnell refused to reconvene the Senate before January 19 to allow Trump’s impeachment trial to start while he was still in office. Now McConnell just voted in support of the motion that Trump’s trial is unconstitutional because he’s no long in office.
+ Of course, Biden didn’t want a spectacle of an impeachment trial of Trump before the inauguration and probably doesn’t like the idea of one at all.
+ Most Americans have no idea what a filibuster is and those who presume to know probably believe it is part of the Senate’s constitutional powers, a death chamber where good bills are consigned to die.
+ “Relent”? Mitch won. He got two Democratic senators to defect, publicly humiliate Schumer (not hard), and probably exposed Sinema to a primary challenger (deserved). He had a weak hand, but weaker opponents, setting the tone for the next two years, when GOP will recapture Senate. You need a street fighter like Harry Reid to counter McConnell, not a talking ATM like Schumer…
+ Gloating Mitch is the most insufferable Mitch. The question is: did Schumer get outplayed? Or is this result he wanted all along, while flirting to end the filibuster? Win-win solution for the leadership of both parties, I think. Lose-lose for the rest of us.
+ If the French are “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” what are the Democrats? At least the French drew a (Maginot) line in the sand and dared the Nazis to cross it. It would be nice to know, for historical purposes at least, what the Senate Democrats had actually planned to fight for, before they surrendered the procedural weapons needed to wage the battle before a shot was even fired…
+ The self-induced paralysis of Democratic politicus americanii is nothing new. Indeed, this peculiar behavior was first identified by some of the earliest taxonimists as characteristic of the species and has been a staple of most reliable field guides ever since.
+ To rephrase Voltaire: Si McConnell n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer…
+ Let’s see how Glenn and Tucker have been covering the political machinations on the hill this week. Yes, it’s going as you might have expected…
+ Who will tell them that the corporations have been ensuring “one-party” rule since at least the Eisenhower Administration?
+ In the week since Biden was sworn in, at least 10 people have been killed by police in the US. How long until the next killing sparks nationwide protests and Biden is forced to show his true commitment to the airy rhetoric he preached Tuesday on racial inequities?
+ In the end, there was only one antiwar vote against Blinken, whose fingerprints have been on nearly every US war from Iraq to Yemen, in the Senate. But not by Bernie or Warren or Merkley or Hirono…but Rand Paul. If you’re unwilling to object to the people who instigated wars you claim to have opposed, how can any of us expect you to stand up against wars they will start now that they are enshrined with even more power? Apparently, Bernie has reverted to his default position in the Clinton years, when he endorsed the overthrow of Saddam and the bombing of Serbia.
+ Blinken is not as bombastic like Pompeo Maximus. He’s very smooth, very well-spoken, very collegial, and like Colin Powell, very well equipped to seduce people into wars they might otherwise be inclined to resist.
+ Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s nominee for UN Ambassador, testified that BDS “verges on being anti-Semitic” and said she will stand “against the unfair targeting of Israel” at the UN if confirmed. Many liberals who express rhetorical sympathy for the Palestinian cause (as they understand it) would have condemned these remarks from Nikki Haley, yet will rationalize them from Thomas-Greenfield…
+ Sell short, jump long…
+ A group of multimillionaires in the US senate, including the wife of the CEO of the NYSE itself, used inside information on COVID and god knows what else to dump and buy stocks, but a group of self-proclaimed “autistic retards” on subReddit are being vilified for gaming short-selling hedge funders, who are now mewling for a bailout. Free market, indeed.
+ If Judith Miller reported on Wall Street, her stories would probably read something like this …
+ Wait until the K-Pop girls start playing in this casino…
+ Still, the thing to remember about casinos is that while some big spenders my lose, the house always wins, even if they had to change the rules mid-game to make it happen.
+ $810,000: amount of money Janet Yellin pocketed in speaking fees from Citadel, owner of Robinhood. The Biden White House says she has no plans to recuse herself from federal action around the GameStop stock frenzy. (Yellin signed an ethics agreement that would, if enforced, bar her from participating in any matters involving Citadel or Robinhood for a year.)
+ CNBC talking heads have been prattling all week about the need to keep COVID life-support checks to a mere $1400 and only for families making less than $75K a year. Now they are eager to bailout hedge funds suckered by angry gamers on Reddit….
+ Remember when the neoliberal budget hawks wanted to replace Social Security with mutual funds and have us all day trade for our retirement.
+ Speaking of selling short, the US economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020, the worst contraction since World War II. Even so, since COVID was declared a “national emergency” in March, the net wealth of America’s 614 billionaires grew by a combined $931 billion.
+ At $20,000 per day, you’d have to work seven days a week for 178 years to compile $1.3 billion.
+ In 1965, CEOs made 21 times the average worker’s pay. By 2019, they made 320 times as much as the average worker brought home.
+ The poverty rate increased 2.4 percentage points from June to December 2020 (when it reached 11.8%), nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty since the 1960s. Increases in poverty rate were especially high for Blacks (up 5.4 percentage points, to 23.6%). In all, an additional 8 million Americans are now considered “newly poor”– twice the highest annual increase in poverty in over a half-century.
+ Biden’s offering the economy juice, when clearly it needs meth…
+ How many times can Biden pull a bait-and-switch on his own pledge for $2000 stimulus checks on Day One?
+ Hmmm….
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/roaming-charges-funny-games/
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