#Republican oligarchs and corporations are killing us

[ellaeved]

Make plans, talk to people

in light of Trump's inauguration speech declaring multiple national emergencies that require him to take god-knows-what executive actions immediately, I'd like to remember this chapter of "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder:

[socialjusticeinamerica]

🖕

[rejectingrepublicans]

And then Socialist Jesus said let there be fear amongst the Republican oligarchy.

[republicansaretheproblem]

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[darkmaga-returns]

By Chris Hedges ScheerPost

In the end, the election was about despair.

Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs.

Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable.

Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power. 

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires.

These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse.

But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next. 

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system.

Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating.

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.

It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base — 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel.

[obsidianmichi]

I'm going to point out that the Right and the MSM are hammering on Biden being old is their only talking point. Why?

BECAUSE AFTER FOUR YEARS THAT'S ALL THEY HAVE.

The party that brought you the Alzheimer President and still worships him today is upset about one very healthy old man being old and cognizant. Nothing else they've tried sticks, even Israel and Palestine hasn't managed to stick. The Right is desperate for Biden to drop out. They want the Left to commit political suicide. They want a redux on 2016. They want you to be depressed. They want you to stay home instead of using your vote to enact change.

Biden is the most progressive president we have had since FDR, and the rising tide of congressional democrats are also pulling left. Federal institutions like the NLRB have transformed from toothless into powerful advocates for worker's rights. Democrats have dominated the last two elections. SCOTUS rulings and Roe have resulted in a massive unprecedented leftward voting swing largely in spite of expected trends and polling to the contrary. Did you know that the 2022 midterms had historic democrat turnout? Did you know a Republican candidate almost lost a Kentucky special election this year in a district that went 20+ for Trump? COVID did a number on the boomer voting bloc, and millennials aren't growing more conservative as they get older. The rules have changed.

Don't buy into the bullshit. Trump has been bankrupting the Republican Party to pay his legal bills. Many Republican state parties are bankrupt from their own corruption and they can't turn to the national party for funding. Republican small dollar donors are exhausted from years of being over tapped. All the republicans have are their oligarchs. Their leadership is inexperienced and has been kicking out their experienced players for Trump loyalists. They have no ground game to get out the vote and no means to fund it outside the smaller PACs. Despite every presentation of strength and bluster, they are weak. Their candidates are weak. Trump can't string a coherent sentence together, much less do it without outrageous lies. Trump is a convicted felon. He's a court adjudicated rapist. He failed on every count during his presidency. He enacted the Muslim ban. He pulled the US from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal. Trump claimed the success of the Obama economy, which he wrecked through mismanagement. He's the reason your taxes are higher. His inaction on COVID killed millions of Americans. He tried to steal the 2020 election and attempted a coup. Listen to him talk, he sounds like he's lost his mind. His campaign is struggling to book venues, and the only people showing up for him are largely the ones who follow him from state to state. His approval ratings are in the toilet. The debates were much worse for him with independents than they were for Biden. Most of the MSM are leveraging everything they can to convince you the opposite is true.

This is not about Biden being old. This is about Biden's government being a threat to our ruling corporate class. This is about Trump being weak, and about making sure democrats and independents stay home.

If you've ever dreamed of a mass democratic tide to make significant change and push back against the conservatives in their strongholds now is the time.

That said, the MAGA NC candidate for governor is openly running on stripping voting rights from women and killing liberals. The head of the Heritage Foundation is making terrorist threats. SCOTUS is ruling the president (but only a Republican president) is a king. If they win, you can expect to see every major gain in the last forty to sixty years rolled back to the time when rivers were on fire from pollution, homosexual relationships were outlawed, company towns existed, divorce was nearly impossible, and school segregation was the de facto norm. Republicans also know now is the time.

You need to choose right now whether purity or reality is more important to you. The reality will come for you whether you're pure or not. Both candidates are not the same. Whoever becomes president will fundamentally alter your lives over the next four years and the lives of those you love. It will decide whether Palestine has any chance at a two state solution. It will directly affect the fate of both Ukraine and Taiwan. The election 2024 may even be the last real election in the US.

There are more of us than there are of them, but we'll only win if you choose to show up.

if i see one more article, post, or news anchor talking about how joe biden is old, i'm putting my fist through a window. i feel like i've gone through the fucking looking glass.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

i can't fucking stand this. i'm not hearing it this time, we are not repeating 2016. refusing to vote is not an act of protest, it is an act of complacency, and our most vulnerable will suffer for your negligence. vote like your life depends on it, because for some of us, it really fucking does.

[arcticdementor]

When Machiavelli wrote, “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt …,” he was pointing to the truth that knowing what one is up against is a powerful incentive for dealing with it intelligently. Genesis tells us that only in Moses’ time did the Egyptians make clear how harsh was the alternative to the Exodus by deciding to kill their longtime slaves’ baby boys.

Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

What forces can and can’t this oligarchy bring to bear? We have a hint from Time magazine’s Feb. 4, 2021, valedictory of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” by leaders of business, labor, and the media, in cooperation with the Democratic Party, that “got states to change voting systems and laws” for the 2020 presidential election in contravention of black-letter constitutional law. Rulings by judges in Michigan and Virginia that changes to those states’ absentee ballot laws were blatantly illegal matters not one whit.

Why not? Because the coalition of masters controls the levers of the state and the press. As Time reveals, they “helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” Because these elites realized that “engaging with toxic content only made it worse,” they decided on “removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.” Instead of answering facts and arguments with which they disagreed, they would ignore their substance and smear whoever voiced them.

The boldness and novelty of these as well as of unmentioned tactics delivered the desired electoral result, and power heretofore unimaginable: Americans in 2021 are being fired or “canceled” from society for whatever anyone connected with the oligarchy finds objectionable—even for asking for evidence of the oligarchy’s assertions. Yet Time tells us that because the process of defeating Donald Trump’s voters angered them further, these oligarchs worry that they gained only “a respite.” Hence the united oligarchy must seek, as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, permanent “national political dominance.”

Though that dominance seems at hand, the general population’s compliance with it is not. That is because isolating and alienating anybody, let alone half the country, is the proverbial two-edged sword. Anytime you isolate and alienate someone else, you do the same to yourself. The boundaries that the oligarchs have drawn, are drawing, separate them from the American people’s vast majority, whose consciousness of powerlessness and defenselessness clarifies their choice between utter subjection and doing whatever it might take to exit a system that no longer seems to allow for the prospect of republican self-government.

…

By this century’s second decade, the oligarchs who occupy the commanding heights of American life had ceased trying to persuade. Self-government has declined as corporations have wielded public powers with private discretion. America’s ruling class—bipartisan, public and private—grew to disdain the rest of America’s religiosity, patriotism, and tastes. But until our own time, most Americans either had not noticed their loss of status as citizens or assumed that they could vote to regain it. But the rulers inspired no confidence and ruled by pulling rank.

…

Hate-as-identity was key to the ruling class’s victory in the 2020 election. For the elites, indulging sentiments of moral superiority, promoting hate, and rubbing “deplorable” faces in the dirt is a means to secure and mobilize supporters, which itself is incidental to securing the material benefits of power. For those who deliver the votes, indulging hate is affirmation of identity.

Ruling people by insulting and harming them is problematic, and not reversible. The use that the oligarchy made of the COVID epidemic added to insult and injury, as well as to its power, in a manner previously unimaginable. Boldly dismissing without argument the fact that viral infections cannot be stopped from running their course once they have taken root in a population, they asserted that acquiescing to indefinite cessation of social and economic activities they deemed to be nonessential would stop the disease’s progression. The ensuing lockdowns, mask mandates, and other measures made life for most Americans worse in every way. But these strictures also crippled the sectors of American society independent of and resistant to the oligarchy—religious institutions and small businesses. They isolated people and limited what they could hear from and say to each other, leaving them prey to one-way propaganda narratives backed by nightly threats of mob violence.

Correctly, however, the American oligarchy, which resides these days in the Democratic Party, feared that the weaponized, mutually validating narratives with which it had bombarded the population could not guarantee that the American people would vote differently in 2020 than they did in 2016, widespread public dislike for Donald Trump notwithstanding. Not a few suspected that the COVID heavy-handedness had increased resentment among people who had learned to be suspicious of pollsters, reporters, and opinion-samplers.

Ordinary credulity was never enough for swallowing the narrative that universal vote by mail, coupled with drop boxes for ballots and ballot harvesting by self-proclaimed civic groups, plus the reduction or elimination of verification of signatures, would do anything other than transfer electoral power from those who cast votes to those who count them—that is, to the oligarchy and its party. Even so, the ruling class’s victory depended on tens of thousands of votes out of 156 million, in some of the most corrupt counties in the land. In Pennsylvania, the vast majority of all mailed ballots were for Biden. The oligarchy sealed the victory as brazenly as they gained it: by meeting demands for transparency with ad hominem accusations backed by threats of social ostracism and enforced by control, which itself was attained in part by issuing naked threats backed by legislative and bureaucratic power—all over partisan, monopoly digital platforms which eventually participated in censorship.

The oligarchy’s power over American institutions public and private, however, does not change the fact that it rests on near universal voluntary compliance. The irrevocable alienation of and from at least half of Americans has canceled much of the oligarchs’ moral legitimacy and left them obliged to rule by further alienating and punishing—to rule a house that they divided against itself. Hence, the unprecedented power it gathered will prove less significant than the manner in which it did the gathering.

…

The deplorables plainly stand no chance of dismantling the new American system. Corporate executives, not legislatures, governors, or presidents are the ones who decide what happens to the trillions of dollars created jointly by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. They are the ones who regulate speech and attitudes, who for the most part decide who rises and who does not. And they are the part of the oligarchy most insulated from republican institutions.

…

In our time, millions of people have grown up or been educated no longer to want or be able to live as citizens of what had been the American republic. Partisans in mind, heart, and habit, their support of the oligarchy’s partisan rule has left the United States with two peoples of opposing character, aspirations, and tastes within its national borders. The government bureaucracies are led by persons selected and habituated against the deplorables. The same can be said of the educational establishment and corporate boardrooms. What sort of dictatorial power would it take to purge them? Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst. That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.

Some sort of mostly peaceful exodus is within our powers to achieve. A very bad imitation of Mr. Smith was able to convince 75 million to rise against dangers that were still largely theoretical in 2016. Better imitators can lead many more to act against present ones, and to live within institutions of their own making. We can withdraw our compliance, go our own way, and build anew.

…

Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.

…

What to do about the media’s banning or restricting the circulation of ideas with which it disagrees, including the distribution of books and movies, is a major issue of national politics. Without shame, medically unqualified “fact checkers” censor the writings of physicians on medical matters, while defining their own beliefs about gender and race as “science.” Letting such pretenses stand also ratifies the negation of the First Amendment. Overcoming them requires ending the exercise of what amount to governmental powers, indeed of police powers, by nongovernmental persons and entities.

Not so long ago, government power was the only threat to the First Amendment. But oligarchy’s essence is precisely the blurring and blending of public and private power in a partisan manner. Hence, media malpractice must be dealt with as part of a bigger political problem, namely expanding the Bill of Rights’ coverage to ostensibly private entities.

What is to be done about private companies that subject employees to training aimed at convincing them that there is something wrong with being white—or at least pretending to convince them? Or that they must abide by the oligarchy’s preferences? To be sure, state governments may outlaw such training within their borders, as part of their general police power. But big employers may object to such laws as contrary to their own freedom of speech, while asserting that the employees’ attendance at those sessions is voluntary. Even if courts back them up, governors and mayors don’t have to listen and can impose their penalties. Public figures, or brave employees, can organize many if not most employees to stay away and to explain just how wrong it is to racially stereotype. Management can’t fire them all. Yet republican self-government can return to at least some Americans only if and when a bloc of major states puts itself in the position of dictating what will and will not happen within their borders.

…

Until recently, graduation from highly selective colleges seemed to certify their graduates as better for having been admitted, and doubly so for having learned more than students at lesser schools. But for a generation, the Ivy League, Stanford, and others have made a point of admitting many students with lower scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rather than students with higher ones. In general, and with the exception of physics, chemistry, and pure math, the more highly rated the college, the less work it expects from its students. And since learning is inherently proportionate to studying, graduates of these academic peaks often know less than kids out of Podunk State. Yet they give their students something of supposedly greater practical value than knowledge: prestige, pretentiousness, and access to enviable careers.

Which leads one to ask why the nation’s most powerful consulting groups, private equity firms, and big banks hire Ivy League types and pay them so much. They are not necessarily all that bright or knowledgeable. Why then are they so valuable? Not because of what they know, but who they are: junior members of the oligarchy, identically chosen, trained, and confirmed to defend its interests, to communicate its priorities, and preserve its hierarchy. How come the public-private oligarchy was able to use the COVID challenge to crush independent business, thus transferring massive wealth to itself? Because its various parts are staffed by interconnected people who, whatever their differences, instinctively trump the Smiths’ priorities with those of their own class.

…

The oligarchy’s cancellation of most ordinary people out of its desired America leaves the latter with the choice between helotry and exodus. But since submission to inconstant, inept masters is impossible, common sense suggests counter-canceling: limiting involvement with the oligarchy to minimizing its interference on individuals who don’t share its aims and preferences.

The oligarchy’s cancellation of ordinary working people—of those who actively participate in forms of organized religion, and are otherwise attached to the common norms and values that prevailed in America and shaped the civilization in and by which most of us live—signals an alienation deeper than that between citizens of different but friendly nations. Asking how this cultural chasm has come to be detracts from the hard task of understanding its depth and making the best of it. Like married couples who have lost or given up what had united them, trying to work through irreconcilable differences only drives Americans’ domestic quarrels toward more violence.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[rejectingrepublicans]

[republicansaretheproblem]

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[taperwolf]

In looking at political issues, it's always valuable to ask the fundamental question of all human endeavours; Cui bono? Who benefits?

This is particularly useful in examining Republican politics of the last four decades, which seems bent on dismantling small-d democratic institutions, the safety net, and trust in democracy as a form of government. They've expended great effort in gerrymandering and voter suppression, all in order to rule as a party without majority support — and what have they done with that power? Imperialising the presidency and refusing to legislate. Stocking the courts with judges who claim to be able to divine the authorial intent of eighteenth-century slaveholders — and to use that mantic insight to rule that bakers can refuse to serve gay people.

Who benefits?

The president undermines faith in absentee voting by pretending it's something different when called "vote by mail", while directing his unconfirmed postmaster to dismantle the post office and, explicitly, to slow down ballots. He appoints cronies and family members to high positions for which they're vastly unqualified, and overrules the security agencies when they're denied security clearances for being obvious risks and threats — all making politics feel even slimier, like something no self-respecting person should involve themselves in.

Who benefits?

It's even applicable here, too. There's supposedly left-leaning people on Tumblr and Twitter and everywhere else, declaring that voting for the lesser of two evils is a bad thing, that they want to send a message by voting third party or not voting at all, that democracy is dead and we really need a revolution, not an election.

Who benefits? Because it's certainly not progressives who win when people sympathetic to their causes sit on the sidelines. It's not the disabled who win when the Social Security fund is being drained by Trump's payroll tax holiday, when the Justice Department is fighting in the courts to strip insurance coverage from millions of people. It's not minorities who win when the president coddles right-wing, white nationalist militias. It's not the people broadly who win when the CDC is disabled and muzzled while Covid-19 kills 200,000 Americans.

The people who benefit from the destruction of the government and of democracy are those who have always benefitted in those circumstances — dictators, oligarchs, and corporations, always willing to dance when that old tune gets played.

Please. Just pay attention.

[scottguy]

The last thing Republicans want the public to know is that good government works and helps people with their problems.

The right prefers the lie that government is all just absolutely pointless "red tape", buearacratic laziness and business killing rules. That's the government that sounds worth "making small enough to drown in a bathtub" as one right-winger once said.

But most of us are glad "the government" won't let you lie about your product on the label.

We like that because of "government" factories can no longer dump unlimited toxins into communities (because it cuts into corporate profits a bit to safely dispose of pollution).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s MANY entire rivers in America were toxic from unregulated factory waste. Before the FDA, you could label anything as "food" and sell it.

We take for granted now that those things don't happen, but they did.

Every regulation, every rule or law in America was paid for by the blood from injuries or deaths caused by corporate greed that law was written to prevent.

That's the world Republicans and their oligarch supporters want to take us back to with Project 2025. They want to be able to work people 12 hours a day without overtime at starvation wages. They want to go back to dumping toxins on land and in rivers. They want to go back to when seniors died sick and poor without Social Security or Medicare.

Our politicians have let the wealthy class grow out of control with non-stop tax cuts for the rich for 40 years. It has destroyed equity in our society. It has destroyed democracy.

Now we know the rich have been lying to us the whole time.

The rich feel that all their money and gives them the right (or at least the power) to do whatever the hell they want to American citizens.

But remember there are MORE of us than there are of them.

So beware... when you see political attack against liberals and progressives it's just the rich desperate to keep ripping you off and trying to stop you from voting for someone who will stop THEM.

The uber wealthy are desperate to prevent anyone from requiring them to act like decent human beings.

Sadly, for oligarchs, who feel SO ENTITLED by their wealth (all stolen from us though low wages and over pricing) that they require STRONG LAWS to thwart their blatantly greedy, selfish, short-sighted and inhumane actions.

All Republican prognostication is a joke.

Still waiting for the man/dog marriages we were promised

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 12 Mar 2020 (No health care for part-time TSA screeners, Akil Augustine on Radicalized, Wendell Potter rebuts Joe Biden, best Covid-19 explainer, Boeing's self-inflicted wounds, EU Right to Repair, virtual classrooms)

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Pluralistic: 12 Mar 2020

TSA boss doubles down on taking away health care from part-time screeners: They're touching your junk with diseased hands.

Akil Augustine on Radicalized: My book's Canada Reads champion lays out the case for Radicalized.

A former top Cigna exec rebuts Joe Biden's healthcare FUD: Wendell Potter is the prodigal corporate villain.

Ars Technica's Covid-19 explainer is the best resource on the pandemic: Beth Mole has outdone herself.

Boeing is even worse at financial engineering than they are at aircraft engineering: The $43B they incinerated through stock buybacks would sure come in handy about now.

Senate Republicans kill emergency sick leave during pandemic: Sick leave is cheaper than pandemics, but pandemics generate cost-plus contracts for the donor class.

The EU's new Right to Repair rules finally come for electronics: Snoods cocked at Apple and other US Big Tech monopolists.

How to run a virtual classroom: Masterclass from the 14-year-old Stanford Online High School.

This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

TSA boss doubles down on taking away health care from part-time screeners (permalink)

TSA agents handles the personal belongings and touch the bodies of millions of fliers. Part time agents don't get health-insurance. If they think they might have Covid-19, they might not be able to afford to seek care.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/politics/tsa-health-care-part-time/index.html

TSA chief David Pekoske told Congress that the Trump administration's decision to take away health-care from part time TSA employees was a good one: "I have no intention of restoring health care coverage for part-time workers. I think that was a good decision."

About 100 TSA agents have been sent home after it was believed they came into contact with Covid-19. The TSA will not try to track down passengers who also might have come into contact with sick people.

Akil Augustine on Radicalized (permalink)

My book Radicalized is a finalist for the Canada Reads national book prize. Each of the five finalists is defended by a Canadian celeb: my champion is the amazing and articulate Akil Augustine.

Akil just appeared on the @CBC's Canada Reads podcast to give us a preview of his defense, which he will field during several nights of nationally televised debates next week.

http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1708600899815/

He did an OUTSTANDING job! Here's the MP3:

https://cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_CNDAREADS_P/media/cndareads-3NLwEPaV-20200309.mp3

A former top Cigna exec rebuts Joe Biden's healthcare FUD (permalink)

In a recent and important essay, Maria Farrell wrote about the road-to-Damascus conversions that ex-techies are having in which they recant the damaging product design work they did and begin to campaign against their former employers.

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

Farrell noted that these techies had missed an important step in their transformation from venal attention mercenaries to noble attention freedom-fighters: they had yet to hit bottom, to truly repent their earlier sins.

They skipped like stones over the waters of privilege, and never sank, unlike so many of their victims.

Contrast those journeys with that of Wendell Potter, the former Cigna exec turned whistleblower, who has devoted decades of his life to revealing dirty tricks and lies. Potter campaigns tirelessly – and shrewdly – for Medicare for All, and is always at pains to point out that the anti-M4A talking points his adversaries parrots were all developed by him, when he was on the wrong side of history.

Take this thread, rebutting Joe Biden's FUD about M4A, delivered in the midst of a pandemic that has been worsened by the 77 million un- and underinsured people who can't get care or screening and disproportionately work in food-service and cleaning.

https://twitter.com/wendellpotter/status/1237438497218105344

As Potter points out, Biden's assertion that M4A costs $35T is just a lie. Once you factor in the savings of not paying for private healthcare, M4A SAVES at least $450B/year.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext

Biden's plan to cap premiums on a public option at 8.5% of your income is more than double what M4A would cost you. The corporate plans Biden lionizes shackle good workers to bad employers, and put millions at risk of having their care arbitrarily withdrawn or limited. And, of course, private care doesn't cover much. Surprise bills, deductibles, co-pays, out-of-pockets… Our plan – a blue-chip employer's top-of-the-line Cigna plan – costs us $24K/year.

We're rationing our family's health care because in addition to the $20K/year we're paying out of pocket, Cigna refused to cover a pain procedure that my doc – the most-cited pain doc working in California, who runs a major university pain clinic – says I would benefit from. That procedure might let me get a good night's sleep for the first time in 15 years and allow me to live a more normal, pain-free life. But because Cigna won't cover it, it would cost $55K, which we do not have. So I'm foregoing it.

Ars Technica's Covid-19 explainer is the best resource on the pandemic (permalink)

I've been reading Beth Mole's outstanding science journalism for many years and I've always admired it, but even by the high standards of a Beth Mole explainer, this soup-to-nuts Covid-19 explainer is just spectacularly good work.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-comprehensive-ars-technica-guide-to-the-coronavirus/

Mole's calm and comprehensive coverage relies on the most reliable sources and turns the results of our best evidence-based studies into a coherent narrative, from the disease's origins to its spread to its symptoms to its resolution.

Just this symptom-by-symptom breakdown was enormously informative and filled in a huge gap that I had previously mentally signposted as "flu-like".

According to data from nearly 56,000 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients in China, the rundown of common symptoms went as follows:

88 percent had a fever

68 percent had a dry cough

38 percent had fatigue

33 percent coughed up phlegm

19 percent had shortness of breath

15 percent had joint or muscle pain

14 percent had a sore throat

14 percent headache

11 percent had chills

5 percent had nausea or vomiting

5 percent had nasal congestion

4 percent had diarrhea

Less than one percent coughed up blood or blood-stained mucus

Less than one percent had watery eyes

The sections on transmission, self-protection, and care during a social distancing lockdown or quarantine are likewise levelheaded, clear and informative.

This is a tab you should just keep open in your browser, IOW. Mole's updating frequently, too.

Boeing is even worse at financial engineering than they are at aircraft engineering (permalink)

Boeing is experiencing a potentially terminal slump. Between losses due to its 737 Max scandal (a self-inflicted injury), and the dropoff in travel during the pandemic, it has had to draw down its entire line of credit and institute a hiring freeze.

https://wolfstreet.com/2020/03/11/boeing-crashes-as-43-billion-in-past-share-buybacks-turn-into-existential-threat

Obviously, Boeing can't be blamed for the pandemic.

But you know what is absolutely the company's fault? Its financial engineering.

Since 2013, Boeing squandered $43 billion on stock buybacks, whose sole purpose was to goose its share-price.

As Wolf Richter writes, Boeing, this "master of financial engineering – instead of aircraft engineering – blew, wasted, and incinerated $43.4 billion on buying back its own shares."

The company just had to borrow $13.825B. Its shares are down 46% since March 2019.

The entire company – a jewel of American industry – might not survive, because it focused on short-term enrichment of shareholders, rather than safe aircraft or financial prudence.

Reality has a well-known anti-capitalist bias, part MMMLVII.

Senate Republicans kill emergency sick leave during pandemic (permalink)

Senate Republicans have killed emergency sick leave legislation, a move that will force millions of low-waged cleaning and food-service workers to choose between homelessness and potentially spreading Covid-19.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-paid-sick-leave-us-republicans-block-senate-bill-new-york-washington-a9395821.htm

The GOP says that paid sick leave will endanger the fragile bottom lines of employers and also that the feds have no money to pay for such a thing – despite finding it easy to blow $2.3 trillion on tax-cuts for the super-rich.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/28/tax-cuts-trump-gop-analysis-430781

They also found $20 BILLION in the senate's sofa cushions to give to the Pentagon, an agency whose auditor found more than a trillion dollars in off-the-books transactions in its financial records.

https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/12/19/pentagon-finally-gets-its-2020-budget-from-congress/

Refusing to help poor Americans stay fed and sheltered isn't just cruel, it's lethally reckless, and it demonstrates the moral hazard of oligarchic capitalism. Subsidizing sick-leave would merely afford survival to millions of Americans, after all.

Whereas the crisis that this will produce – a pandemic that is made worse and longer – will cost billions more, but that money will go to the donor-class, the Beltway Bandits whose cost-plus, no-bid contracts will transfer even more money from the poor to the wealthy.

It's disaster capitalism at its worst. The Senate GOP is dooming you and everyone you love to the risk of disease and death because preventing that risk would help millions of poor people, whereas creating the risk helps a handful of ultrarich people.

The EU's new Right to Repair rules finally come for electronics (permalink)

The EU Commission's latest "Circular Economy Action Plan" has enormous significance for Right to Repair and electronics.

https://ec.europa.eu/environment/circular-economy/pdf/new_circular_economy_action_plan.pdf

In addition to a host of eminently sensible, long overdue measures (bans on single use items and the destruction of unsold goods), there's a renewed emphasis on electronics, through the "Circular Electronics Initiative".

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/european-lawmakers-propose-a-right-to-repair-for-mobiles-and-laptops/

The initiative mandates that components be reusable, repairable, and upgradable, and requires long-term software support to keep IoT devices useful for longer. These mandates – also long overdue – show that the EU is finally willing to ignore the priorities of Apple and other US Big Tech companies in favour of Europeans' rights to the long-term enjoyment of their property and the right not to drown in e-waste).

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/08/ghost-flights/#eurighttorepair

How to run a virtual classroom (permalink)

For 14 years, Stanford Online High School has been running fully virtual classrooms, with continuous, ongoing improvements in their tech and methods. They've just published a new guide to "the essential steps for preparing to teach online in a short period of time." They're also conducting a series of webinars on the subject.

https://ohs.stanford.edu/how

(I just realized that I've got a decade-old mail rule that autodeletes anything containing the word "webinar" that I probably need to turn off now that the term is being used by people other than hustling spammy grifters)

This day in history (permalink)

#10yrsago Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking copyright https://craphound.com/BPDigitalEconomyBillweeklyminutes.pdf

#5yrsago Portland cops charge homeless woman with theft for charging her phone https://news.streetroots.org/2015/03/06/homeless-phone-charging-thief-wanted-security

#5yrsago How Harper's "anti-terror" bill ends privacy in Canada http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/why-the-anti-terrorism-bill-is-really-an-anti-privacy-bill-bill-c-51s-evisceration-of-government-privacy/

#5yrsago RIP, Terry Pratchett https://web.archive.org/web/20150312202353/http://www.pjsmprints.com/

#1yrago Security researcher reveals grotesque vulnerabilities in "Yelp-for-MAGA" app and its snowflake owner calls in the FBI

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330_-_A_Lever_Without_a_Fulcrum_Is_Just_a_Stick.mp3

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[yesterdayandkarma]

A revised and expanded version of Putin Ain’t Such a Bad Guy (a Draft Colloquy on CIA) by the esteemed and indefatigable poet and political philosopher Carlo Parcelli:

"Once you accept the fact that the CIA blew Jack Kennedy’s head off like a barn door in a cyclone, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know the CIA organized the slaughter of a million Indonesians in 1965 and the assassination of that country’s elected president, Sukarno, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize the CIA supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor leading to the slaughter of a quarter of a million Timorese, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize the CIA has interfered and/or rigged hundreds of democratic elections around the world, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you admit the CIA has overthrown and/or assassinated dozens of democratically elected officials, Putin ain't such a bad guy.

Once you realize the CIA has destabilized Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa resulting in the death of millions at the behest of transnational corporations, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know the CIA ran a secret program funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, to experiment with LSD on US citizens without their knowledge as well as research which included propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion, all on their own people without their knowledge, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know the CIA overthrew the elected president, Mohammed Mossadegh, in a coup in Iran in 1953 to secure that country’s oil and installed the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and funded and trained his murderous secret police, SAVAK, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know the CIA overthrew Arbenz in a coup in Guatemala in 1954 leading to decades of slaughter and oppression, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize the CIA attempted the assassination of Charles de Gaulle – twice, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you grasp that the CIA attempted to murder Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt several times, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you acknowledge the CIA in 1961 assassinated its own creation, the murderous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo because his business interests hreatened US corporate interests and only after thousands had been killed, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you understand the CIA in 1963 overthrew the democratically elected government of Juan Bosch again in the Dominican Republic because he favored modest land reform measures, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize that the CIA backed the tyrannical Somozas in Nicaragua and trained and funded their murderous death squads, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you admit that the CIA backed the despotic Duvalier’s in Haiti and trained and funded their murderous death squads, the Ton Ton Macoute, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you understand that the CIA backed the murderous ARENA party in El Salvador, were involved in the plot to kill 6 Jesuits, nuns and Archbishop Romero with death squads trained and funded by the US, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know that the CIA overthrew the elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti twice, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you know that the CIA used biological warfare in Cuba, forcing the hog population to be slaughtered twice, burned crops and poisoned water supplies causing hardship and starvation, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize that the CIA made dozens of attempts on Fidel Castro’s life and murdered dozens of Cuban officials, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you know that the US abetted the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1973 killing all 73 aboard and protected the perpetrators Juan Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles in Miami for decades, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize that the CIA was behind the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize that the CIA along with Hillary Clinton ran a coup against the elected government of Manuel Zelaya driving him from office, putting drug running oligarchs in power and reinvesting in that country’s abject misery. Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you understand the CIA ran dozens of front organizations used to spy on Americans in illegal violation of their charter, Putin ain’t so bad.

One you know The CIA’s man in Uruguay in 1969, Dan Mitrione, ran a torture campaign against the civilian population much like the Phoenix program in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you remember the CIA backed the coup in Chile that led to the death of that country’s president, Salvador Allende, Commander of the Army, Rene Schneider and poet Pablo Neruda and the murder and imprisonment of thousands of Chileans, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you know the CIA’s Phoenix Program resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people including local mayors, intellectuals, school teachers, doctors, farmers etc. as well as Viet Minh patriots, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you recall that the CIA ran heroin out of the Golden Triangle through the Phoenix Program as well as running cocaine out Colombia, Putin ain’t such a bad guy. Once you grasp that the CIA worked with the Nicaraguan Contras and Colombian drug government catel to bring crack cocaine into America and then murdered Gary Webb for having exposed them, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize the CIA ran the heroin out of the Golden triangle that US troops got hooked on in Vietnam and the streets of major American cities, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize the CIA ran a heroin processing operation out of an abandoned Pepsi Cola bottling plant in Vientiane, Laos, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you know, thanks to Seymour Hersh, the CIA ran Operation CHAOS, a domestic surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and civil rights groups in the U.S. in a clear violation of [LOL] US law, Putin ain't so bad.

Once you know the CIA’s people broke into the Watergate to tap the Democratic Party headquarters on behalf of the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you’re aware the CIA wrote a Freedom Fighter’s Manual which was disbursed to the Nicaraguan Contras and included instructions on economic sabotage, propaganda, extortion, bribery, blackmail, interrogation, torture, murder and political assassination, Putin ain't so bad..

Once you understand the CIA ran a guns down, cocaine up operation out of South America during the period of Iran-contra to the present, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize that the CIA is responsible for Islamic fundamentalism having supported the Mujahadeen against the Soviet Union which led to the assassination of the liberal ruler Najibullah, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you recall the CIA blew Orlando Letelier and Toby Moffitt to pieces on a traffic circle in the heart of Washington DC, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you realize that the CIA murdered their own former CIA director, Bill Casey, while he lay ill in his hospital bed the day before he was to testify before congress about CIA crimes, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you note that the CIA drowned another of its former Directors, Bill Colby, because he did testify somewhat candidly before Congress. Once you are aware that the CIA murdered one of John Kennedy’s lovers, Mary Meyer, on the tow path along the C&O Canal in Washington DC to shut her up about CIA crimes, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you learn that the CIA gave Frank Olson LSD without his knowledge or consent and then when he became a ‘security risk’ pushed him out of a 13th story window of the Hotel Statler. Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you know that in 1963 the CIA murdered its own proxies, Diem and his brother, in Vietnam, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize the CIA failed to predict the most important event of the Cold War, the Fall of the Soviet Union, Putin ain’t such a bad guy at all.

Once you know that the CIA worked closely with that homicidal pus bag, Henry Kissinger, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you are aware that the CIA has ‘meddled’ in hundreds of democratic elections around the world, destabilizing, deposing, staging coups and killing elected officials they don’t like, Putin shouldn’t even be on your fuckin’ charts.

Once you realize Uncle Slimey’s CIA has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, drug lords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you know the CIA attempted coups in China from 1949 to early 1960s, Albania 1949-53, East Germany 1950s, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Costa Rica mid-1950s, Syria 1956-7, Egypt 1957, Indonesia 1957-8, British Guiana 1953-64, Putin ain’t so bad.

Once you realize the CIA staged coups in Iraq 1963, North Vietnam 1945-73, Cambodia 1955-70, Laos 1958, 1959 , 1960, Ecuador 1960-63, Congo 1960, France 1965, Brazil 1962-64, Dominican Republic 1963, Cuba 1959 to the present, Bolivia 1964, Indonesia 1965, Ghana 1966, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you accept the CIA staged coups in Chile 1964-73, Greece 1967, Costa Rica 1970-71, Bolivia 1971, Australia 1973-75, Angola 1975, 1980s, Zaire 1975, Portugal 1974-76, Jamaica 1976-80, Seychelles 1979-81, Chad 1981-82, Grenada 1983, South Yemen 1982-84, Suriname 1982-84, Fiji 1987, Libya 1980s, Nicaragua 1981-90, Panama 1989, Bulgaria 1990, Albania 1991, Iraq 1991, Afghanistan 1980s, Somalia 1993, Yugoslavia 1999-2000, Ecuador 2000, Afghanistan 2001, Venezuela 2002, Iraq 2003, Haiti 2004, Somalia 2007 to present, Honduras 2009, Libya 2011, Syria 2012 and Ukraine 2014, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.

Once you understand the above represents only the tiniest fraction of CIA murders and lies, Putin ain’t such a bad guy.