Manchin and Sinema have put themselves in a hole of personal and political corruption so deep that voting for the Build Back Better bill is now the only way to dig themselves out of it

 

The continuing noise and gaslighting by Republicans and the far-right media to paint the Biden administration as “incompetent” and pushing a “socialist” agenda must be placed in its proper context, which the “mainstream” media is failing to do. This noise must be contrasted with the moral and ethical corruption of the previous administration, whose defenders must shout as loud as possible to drown out the voices of reason and truth. Most of us know how frustrating it is to deal with just one person who loudly and sarcastically talks over anything they don’t want to hear, but this country must deal with this by the thousands, and probably millions.

As if Democrats don’t have their hands full already with the willfully ignorant and blind, they must also deal with the turncoats in their ranks. We are talking of course about Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin who, The New York Times is reporting, are being paid-off by the millions to do the bidding of those opposed to helping working people. The Times reports that “the stream of cash to the campaigns of Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin from outside normal Democratic channels stands out because many of the donors have little history with them. The financial support is also notable for closely tied it has been to their power over a single piece of legislation, the fact of which continues to rest largely with the two senators because their party cannot afford to lose either of their votes in the evenly divided Senate.”

While Sinema has been “lauded” by the business establishment and billionaires as being their “lead blocker” in opposing minimum tax rates on corporations which pay little or no federal taxes, and on billionaires who do the same, Manchin has, according to the Times, been a beneficiary of the likes of Kenneth Langone, a Republican megadoner who “effusively praised” Manchin for “showing guts and courage” and vowing to “throw one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.” The Times also mentioned that billionaire Stanley Hubbard, who has given money to Sinema and Manchin, has been exclaiming that they are “good people” who the Democratic Party needs “more of.”

Well, excuse me, but are not all those “good people” as you call them supposed to be in the Republican Party? Are not Democrats supposed to represent people who are not greedy billionaire bastards like you who only think in terms of money and how much more of it they can pocket by not paying taxes and keeping wages low? What good is the Democratic Party if it isn't opposed to this? Somebody has to be.

But the truth is perhaps rather more “complicated.” Sinema and Manchin can alternatively be accused of the most craven kind of cowardice. Instead of showing personal fortitude and a vision for the future of this country, they genuflect and beg for mercy before those who throw the most money around—implying that if they don’t do their bidding, the money will instead be used to paint them as something that truly frightens the rich: "socialists," something that lawmakers who have the good of the people and the long-term survival of the country in the forefront of their ideological principles are called to "frighten" uninformed people. 

One should recall FDR’s famous Madison Square Garden speech in 1936, when he proclaimed he “welcomed” the hatred of those who Sinema and Manchin (and Republicans in general) bow to:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs; and we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

But Sinema and Manchin may be more guilty of something much worse than being merely craven before the organized money mob, as The Guardian points out: personal and political corruption of the most sordid kind. Neither one them are up for election until 2024, yet they are acting as if they have a gun to their heads now which makes no sense save for personal corruption. Combined they have already received at least $6 million in campaign funds from right-wing sources this year alone, an amount that should be a cause of concern. As the Guardian notes, these sums from right-wing PACs and donors “linked to the finance and pharmaceutical industries (and in Manchin’s case, fossil fuel industries in which he has a personal financial stake), have raised ethical concerns over whether Manchin and Sinema are being unduly influenced.”

Well, of course they are. According to Kyle Herrig of the government corruption watchdog group Accountable US, “What else but industry money could explain the manufactured excuses for resisting Build Back Better considering it remains extremely popular, is fully paid for, and would cut costs and taxes for everyday people in Arizona and West Virginia? Corporate interests and billionaires have done very well even during the pandemic.”

But Sinema and Manchin are choosing to ignore this chance to help “regular families and seniors get ahead for a change,” says Herrig. Why do they choose to “squander it over complaints from a handful of rich interests that exploit tax loopholes and ships jobs overseas”—let alone send their money to tax havens not just overseas, but to a state that has established a banking system that allows the rich from all over the world to conceal money for the purpose of tax avoidance—South Dakota, as the Pandora Papers revealed?

The legal definition of “corruption” is, according to that recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court, “An act done with the intent to give some advantage inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others. It includes bribery, but is more comprehensive, because an act may be corruptly done, though the advantage to be derived from it be not offered by another.”

The question is has Sinema and Manchin acted in a manner that appears “inconsistent” with their duty to their constituency (meaning working people and Democratic voters), that what they are doing is opposed to the rights of said constituents, that it was done through the agency of bribery, and is corruptly done to be advantageous to them personally and those individuals doing the bribing.

These are serious questions. One thing that is clear is that Manchin and Sinema have dug themselves a hole so deep that voting for the Build Back Better bill is now the only way for them to “prove” that they are not guilty of massive corruption, personally and politically.

Packers beat same old Matthew Stafford

 

On Sunday the Packers overcame touchdown passes of 79 and 54 yards from Matthew Stafford by the usual method, forcing turnovers and building a 19-point lead in the fourth quarter to outlast the Rams 36-28. Although Rodgers was suffering a pinkie-toe injury, the cold weather in Green Bay may have numbed the pain somewhat as he threw for 307 yards. Stafford was playing with injuries himself, mainly stuff like soreness and sprains, but it didn’t prevent him from throwing the ball down the field. As a Lion, Stafford averaged over 284 yards passing a game against the Packers, and in this game he threw for 302. But he also threw 21 interceptions in those games and added a pick-six today, and a sack-fumble at the Rams’ six-yard-line that led to another easy Packer touchdown.

That this game was even as “close” as it seemed was surprising giving that the Packers were 20 seconds shy of having a time-of-possession exactly double that of the Rams. The Packers had 13 possessions to do something, but were forced to punt five times; still, they kept getting their chances, since the Rams' longest drive only lasted 2:53, and they had five possessions that lasted less than a minute. Stafford again looked productive in brief stretches, but outside the long TD passes, Stafford threw for just 163 yards on 36 pass attempts, and the Rams’ running “attack” was mostly nonexistent. Rodgers, on the other hand, threw mostly short passes as the running game didn’t produce until the Packers started to pull away in the second half.

For the second straight week, the Packer defense was “off,” but we can probably say that in the prior five games the Packers were not exactly facing quarterbacks at the top of their game. Today’s game could have turned out differently if Stafford was not playing with injury, and to its credit the defense forcing his two turnovers leading immediately to Packer touchdowns were the deciding factors of the game.

Next week is the Packers’ bye week, and we shall see if Rodgers’ toe can sufficiently heal for the final stretch. Calling it "Covid Toe" is not exactly inaccurate, since Rodgers probably would not have suffered it had he not tested positive and "worked out" at home instead of at the team facilities. Two weeks from now is another home game, against the Bears (which should be a gimme), and then on the road against the Ravens (which shouldn’t).

While the criminal justice system spends billions incarcerating blacks and Latinos for drug use, recent Ohio opioids court verdict suggests the beginning of hundreds of billions in payments to white addict "victims"

 

You know, the media and the population at large has a lot of nerve to criticize Joe Biden and Democrats generally when you have a Republican Party that caters to the like of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has introduced a bill to award a murderer (regardless of what a jury ruled) a Congressional gold medal, and at some point to be indicted sex pervert, Matt Gaetz, offering Kyle Rittenhouse an internship. Of course the Democrats have their own problem children, such as Sen. Joe Manchin, who  is back to making threats again, this time insisting that Keystone XL pipeline be given the green light or he won't consider voting for the Build Back Better spending plan.

Manchin claims that the sand oil going through it makes this country more “energy independent,” or whatever. As pointed out before, the Keystone project—like Line 5 and 6—are Canadian projects in which Canada sees all the positive financial benefit, and the U.S. shoulders all the negative environmental impact. But Manchin has also been “strangely” insistent that the only thing he thinks absolutely must be in the BBB spending bill is funding for opioid addiction. There are two facts that need to be stressed here:

1.   1. Opioid addiction is a huge problem in West Virginia.

2.   2. The state is 93 percent white.

Which brings us to the curious case in Ohio, where three retail outlets which fill doctors’ prescriptions for opioids—Walgreens, Walmart and CVS—were found “liable” for “fueling” the opioid “crisis.” The three chains denounced the verdict, stating that they did what they were legally imposed to do—fill out doctors’ prescription for the drugs, which they could not refuse to fill. Furthermore, it was not their duty to make assumptions or determinations about their uses by patients of legally proscribed drugs.

Many criticized the behavior of the judge in the case, including the Wall Street Journal:

The combination of avaricious lawyers, a consolidated case system and a rogue judge is highlighting again the need for Congress and the courts to crack down on legal abuse. Cleveland-based federal Judge. Dan Aaron Polster opened proceedings in October in a trial in which two Ohio counties are seeking to hold pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens and Walmart liable for the opioid epidemic. The counties say pharmacies ignored red flags when they filled opioid prescriptions and caused a “public nuisance.”  

The WSJ notes that the Ohio trial is the first of 3,000 targeting anyone involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain to “extort distributors and retailers,” including Johnson & Johnson and others this past summer to the tune of $26 billion. “The Ohio suits are in what’s known as multidistrict litigation, a means of sandbagging industry into high-dollar settlements…Too often, the process becomes a club to beat corporations into sweeping settlements without a trial.”

The WSJ singles out Polster, who “is wielding the club in the pharmacy litigation. Since landing this MDL in late 2017, he has pressured defendants to settle in the name of doing ‘something meaningful to abate the crisis…We don’t need a lot of briefs and we don’t need trials’ he has argued.’ That bias has informed the judge’s decisions throughout the case,” according to the WSJ. Further, “The plaintiff’s claim is based on a bizarre notion of liability. The companies are accused of filling legal prescriptions for a legal substance for real patients from licensed doctors.” They are alleged to have known that “they were filling out too many prescriptions, and should have been skeptical of even legal prescriptions about some undefined ‘red line.’”

The WSJ rightly points out that pharmacists have no way of knowing where that mythical “red line” is, and in most states “they must fill prescriptions under penalty of law if the doctor has a valid license and is registered with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. State medical and pharmacy boards have threatened to discipline pharmacists who refused to fill or watered down opioid prescriptions. Some pharmacists who refused have been sued by doctors for defamation and by patients for discrimination.”

Polster, who has refused to recuse himself despite his evident bias, has allowed plaintiffs attorneys to make the outrageous argument that “pharmacists cannot hide behind state law and should have investigated doctor’s prescriptions,” and has pressed companies “at every turn to settle. In an outburst earlier this year, he threatened the companies with bankruptcy if they go to trial.” He has allowed plaintiffs attorneys to present “big numbers” as “proof” rather than be forced to show “evidence of specific prescriptions that were improperly filled.”

The WSJ suggests that Polster’s behavior is merely an effort to “go out big” before he retires. While the editorial admits that the opioid epidemic is a “scourge,” it has “multiple causes and is not justification for abusing the court system.”

What about those “multiple” causes? We have to remember that opioids are derived from the opium poppy plant, which of course is the source of heroin. The John Hopkins Medicine website makes little distinction between heroin and prescription opioids, since both technically do the same thing: “Block pain signals between the brain and the body…to treat moderate to severe pain. In addition to controlling pain, opioids can make some people feel relaxed, happy or ‘high,’ and can be addictive.”

The principle difference between what is referred to as “opioids” and heroin is that one can be legally prescribed, and the other is illegal. Otherwise, there is no real difference, like the difference between “medical marijuana” and marijuana sold on the street. Legal opioids are technically differentiated from heroin by the fact that the FDA approves it in the form that it is provided in (such as pills) and can only be prescribed by a doctor.

Legal opioids are also differentiated from other opioids like heroin because you can go to jail for using the latter. And that leads us to the question of why, for example, the 93 percent white population of states like West Virginia are “victims” who require our sympathy and billions of dollars in restitution, while a heroin user in Chicago is demonized and can face years in prison if they are black or Hispanic. After all, white people who use legal opioids can make choices too. If they choose to abuse opioids and become addicted to it, that is still their “choice.” If anyone is “liable” it is the doctors who prescribe opioids, and they are at the mercy of patients who complain about “the pain” for real or imagined reasons (meaning lie about it), and willingly become “addicted,” and now are told they are “victims” and can be “compensated” for it.

Although all demographics can become addicted to opioids (for example, low-income people and minorities who can’t afford major medical procedures), the “face” of opioid addiction is white, and since white people don’t do anything “illegal,” they must be “victims.” In a 2018 study by two PhDs, Julie Netherland and Helen Hansen, entitled “The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness ‘Dirty Doctors,’ and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse,” they noted the contrasted

media coverage of white non-medical opioid users with that of black and brown heroin users that show how divergent representations lead to different public and policy responses. A content analysis of 100 popular press articles from 2001 and 2011 in which half describe heroin users and half describe prescription opioid users revealed a consistent contrast between criminalized urban black and Latino heroin injectors with sympathetic portrayals of suburban white prescription opioid users. Media coverage of the suburban and rural opioid “epidemic” of the 2000s helped draw a symbolic, and then legal, distinction between (urban) heroin addiction and (suburban and rural) prescription opioid addiction that is reminiscent of the legal distinction of crack cocaine and powder cocaine of the 1980s and 90s (the former more likely to be used by blacks, the latter by whites). This distinction reinforces the racialized deployment of the War on Drugs and is sustained by the lack of explicit discussion of race in the service of “color blind ideology.”

When white people become addicted, it isn’t their fault, but somebody else’s. The study observes that “rather than simple casting out or disparaging white opioid users, we see instead attempts to reclaim and restore (through the medicalization of their drug use) these white bodies. As opioid use grows among middle class suburban whites, we argue that opioids are constructing another kind of White drug user—an innocent victim worthy of empathy and deserving of less punitive policy responses.” Contrast these white “victim” tropes with those of “racially disparate policy responses” in which “although black Americans are no more likely than whites to use illicit drugs, they are 6-10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.”

The U.S. judicial system spends untold billions of dollars incarcerating blacks and Latinos for drug use that helps them “forget” about the pain of injustice of this country, while the WSJ editorial states that we are only seeing the beginning of punitive damages that probably will ultimately number in the hundreds of billions of dollars that will “reward” (mainly white) people who demanded their “legal” opioids to take care of their aches and pains, and having taken too many at one time and demanded more, need someone to blame for their addictions, and the media and the criminal justice system has been all too willing to oblige them. Is this a case of white privilege and entitlement? Anyone who says it isn’t needs to see a psychoanalyst.

The unnamable, unseen and faceless working to help feed your dumb arse

 

I recall a few weeks ago while sitting in a Laundromat, the television was tuned to the local Fox affiliate, Q13. There was a story about the lack of product at the local florist for “special occasions,” because of a shortage of workers to pick flowers, and drivers to transport them. There were two close-up shots of one worker each in the field cutting flowers; they were filmed from behind, so you could not see their faces. Of course this problem doesn’t just involve the flower industry, but the farm and food production industry as well.  An Associate Press story this past July about the farm labor shortage getting worse didn’t give them a “face” either. It did laud efforts by dairy farmers in Pennsylvania to hire high school kids for summer jobs to learn to milk cows, mainly because the kids liked working with animals, we were told; but of course getting them to do grunge work out in the fields was another matter altogether.

We were told that farmers can’t compete with the restaurant and warehouse industry, which “offer things that farmers can’t afford—like a bump in starting salary, a bonus just for applying, less labor intensive responsibilities, and air conditioning.” I have already noted in a post about heat deaths among farm workers during the intense summer heat waves, including in Washington State, where little was done to update regulations to prevent heat-related deaths or injuries among farm workers.

The AP story noted that farmers still have a difficult time hiring and retaining “native” labor; someone who seems a “good fit” is there for one day, and never shows up again. One farmer said “We’ve got this expectation that you can punch a clock and everything goes to sleep at a farm, but it doesn’t work that way.” Some blame the hard work; others “blame a lack of work ethic, and many point to generational shifts.” A Pennsylvania beef farmer named Marty Yahner put it bluntly: “Let’s be brutally honest. Americans don’t want to do manual labor. Not everyone can be a computer programmer. We still need the mechanics and the carpenters and the farmers and the truck drivers. Who the heck is going to run these farms and keep our world fed?”

The story continues: “Some rely on local labor but say they have trouble finding people interested in farm jobs—and who will keep showing up for work. Others rely on foreign workers but have difficulty navigating federal guidelines to bring the employees to their farms.”

Who are these “invisible” people who couldn’t be identified in either the local television news spot or anywhere in the AP story? The ones who one Pennsylvania farmer described as “the best guys. No matter what I tell them to do, they do it with a smile”? It’s those damn “Mexicans”—and a few of them are even U.S. citizens.

This is nothing new; hell, I wrote about it in a 2010 post, in regard to a story that appeared in the Seattle Weekly about the problems at the Emerald Downs horse race track in Auburn:

“The panic over the Mexican groom shortage ushers to the fore a noisy band of hypocrites within America's capitalist machine: unemployed citizens who decry job shortages yet don't have the temerity to start at ladder's bottom…’There are no white people who want to work, and [the Mexican grooms] love their jobs," said trainer Belvoir, who's Caucasian. "White people don't want to work; they just want to bitch and say there are no jobs.’”

After the work visas of the missing Mexican grooms were mysteriously delayed, there was a three-month “window of opportunity” for the “natives” to respond to advertisements offering work as grooms. Two-count-them-two people made initial inquiries, and were not heard from again. The Mexicans “loved their work,” but the natives looked askance when they found out that part of the job required such “blue collar” tasks as shoveling horse leavings. “Americans” just don’t do that kind of work. It’s only fit for “Mexicans”—except that “real” Americans like to complain when they (Mexicans) are doing it.

Of course the reason why farmers are having so much more trouble finding this kind of help than in years past—even prior to the pandemic—can be laid at the feet of the nativist, racist polices made more "openly" by Donald Trump and his henchmen, particularly the Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller. The Trump administration’s "adjusted" regulations (which apparently have not been changed by the Biden administration) in regard to temporary H-2A work visas made the cost of bringing in Mexican farm labor near prohibitive for many farmers—and thus ignorantly exacerbating the “problem” of undocumented immigrant labor if farmers can get away with it.

Under the H-2A program, farmers are required to hire “American” first, and failing that face unnecessarily exorbitant costs to bring in “foreign” labor, as if Mexican workers can truly be labeled as more “foreign” than, say, Canadians. The Trump-imposed program requires that farm workers, whether “native” or immigrant, must be paid the same wage, regardless of experience level. This means that some farmers are loath to hire “entry-level” workers (like high school kids) with no experience in the fields and are liable to soon quit  at the required minimum wage of $14.05 when other industries (like warehouse and fast-food restaurants) can pay entry-level workers much lower wages. Yet even at those “elevated” wages, there is still the problem of hiring and retaining “native” labor for farm work.

Legal, housing and transportation costs (immigrant labor is required to be bused in) mandated by the H-2A program are only in place to make it more onerous for farmers to hire seasonal (let alone all-year) immigrant labor because of racist attitudes toward these workers. Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill to change the H-2A program to make it easier for farmers to bring in immigrant labor and for longer periods—including a path to citizenship for long term workers. But of course that went nowhere in the U.S. Senate.

Immigrants make up 73 percent of the farm worker labor force, according to the USDA. They are here because (besides the shortage of willing “native” labor) there is a limit to mechanization, since Americans demand “blemish free” fruits and vegetables than can only be picked by hand.  Depending on the numbers you choose to count (including the undocumented), there is up to 3 million immigrant farm laborers who this country never sees or feels any gratitude toward, save to expectorate their ignorant, bigoted bile toward.

The problem of “invisibility” of course goes far beyond simply farm fields, but in the media as well. The "invisibility" of Hispanics on “mainstream” network and cable television—whether on entertainment programming, news or even commercials—is impossible to ignore if that is what you are looking to see. Now, Disney is releasing a new animated film this Thanksgiving weekend called Encanto (which means “charm” in Spanish) which is probably an effort to allay criticism for it’s lack of Hispanic presence in its productions. It’s plot is predictably bizarre for this kind of fare; a candle for some reason has given a house and each member of the family who lives there some magic powers, and then one day the house somehow becomes demonized and the only one who can save the day is the only  member of the family—female, of course—who doesn’t have any “gift."

Naturally, there are some things not quite right; the setting is in Colombia, yet the dress of the characters are plainly modeled on the stereotypical “Mexican.” A large percentage of the members of this family are “Afro,” which of course would not be typical given that racial and "ethnic" prejudices in Latin America are no different than they are in the U.S. 

 

 

I can only conjecture that the makers of this film decided that they had to set this film somewhere that was recognizably Hispanic, but still had a large enough black population to justify putting black faces in this film; it seems that Colombia, whose Spanish rulers imported African slaves, was chosen as the setting because it thus has a much higher percentage of black residents than Mexico does. I doubt, somehow, that this will attract a black audience to this film. This movie also appears to be female-centric, which isn’t surprising since Hispanic women are seen as “less scary” than Hispanic men.

In any case, whether or not this film makes Hispanics less “invisible” is another matter altogether. Skin color and clothing aside, if this film was entitled “Charm” and all the characters were white, black or Asian you wouldn’t detect anything “Hispanic” about it. They are just “like us,” right? We will see how the box office does to determine how non-Hispanic moviegoers react to a film with characters that don’t look like “real” or “honorary” Americans—even though they talk and act “American.”