Cornel West Dismantles The "Diversity" Of Biden's Cabinet

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTLWBCTbzww&ab_channel=TheRationalNational

Trump may be SELLING Pardons for Bribes; looking to Pardon Rudy Giuliani and his Family

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGKnrBjyVpQ&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis

Bill Barr: no EVIDENCE of Fraud, ABANDONS Donald Trump

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3JwxF0k9VY&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis

Wolff Responds: The Stark Crisis Emerging in the Trump-Biden Transition

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcazI0LFndQ&ab_channel=RichardDWolff

WE CAN’T VOTE ‘EM OUT

By Lee Camp, Consortium News.

December 1, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/we-cant-vote-em-out/



We Can Make All Sorts Of Noise And Even Scare ’Em, But The A-Holes Are Here To Stay.

It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive.

But we can’t vote out the assholes.

Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful. (They are “parashits,” if you will. Copyright pending.)

I’m not arguing Trump’s goons aren’t awful. I’m just saying that if you even take a momentary peak at the people Biden is already putting in power for his transition and his future cabinet, they’re still more assholes.
War Hawks In Charge Of Peace

He’s putting war hawks in charge of creating peace, fossil-fuel puppets in charge of fixing the environment, propaganda enthusiasts in charge of the media and cops in charge of fixing a brutal white supremacist police system. I’m pretty sure he’s getting ready to put Rudy Giuliani in charge of election integrity, and a dead skunk who formerly worked for Dow Chemical as the head of the EPA.

We can’t vote out the assholes.

We already know that Biden’s first national security briefing included two board members of the massive defense contractor Raytheon. Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes said in a CNBC interview a couple months ago that it would be “ridiculous” to think military spending will be cut under Biden. But it doesn’t stop there.

We now know Biden’s pick for defense secretary is Michele Flournoy and his selection for secretary of state is Tony Blinken. As The Grayzone has reported, these two have played central roles in all the wars waged by Democratic presidents all the way back to Bill Clinton.

But to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, it makes sense that one would want a defense secretary with a standard American war criminal past because otherwise they wouldn’t know their way around the Pentagon.

You don’t want to get a new guy (or gal) in there as head of our murder machine, and he’s bumbling around muttering, “What lever do I pull to blow up a village in Somalia? I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention during the introductory tour. I thought I launched a drone bomb in Libya this morning, and it turned out to be just the button for the coffee machine. But the cappuccino was great. I will say that.”

We can’t vote out the assholes.
The Environment

Let’s move on to the environment. How are Biden/Harris doing on that front? Well, in an interview, the most famous environmental activist ever played by Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich, already railed against Biden’s EPA transition team selection, Michael McCabe, a former DuPont consultant.

As his climate change envoy Biden chose that great climate activist — that warrior for the trees and birds — John Kerry. …Ummm, we literally have a few years until the point of no return and Biden thinks the guy who helped negotiate the completely meaningless Paris Climate Agreement is going to do a goddamn thing? I have a sneaking suspicion Biden only picked Kerry because he looks like a horse and therefore might be better equipped to explain to the animals why we’re killing them all.

The head of Biden’s transition for the U.S. Agency for Global Media is Richard Stengel who called himself the “chief propagandist” at the State Department and said the American government doesn’t use propaganda against our own people enough. That’s like putting Pikachu as the starting center of your NBA team — it’s not a recipe for success.

Then there’s Janet Yellen to run the Treasury — someone we know is a team player when it comes to capitalism’s destruction of the globe.

Is everyone starting to get the point? We can’t vote out the assholes.
Other Countries, Not Us

Other countries can. Other countries have the option to vote ‘em out. They just did it in Bolivia, despite the security forces arrayed against them. They voted out the U.S.-backed fascist coup. They did it for the most part in Mexico by electing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is largely progressive. They do it fairly often in other countries. But not in America. Can’t happen. Both sides of our fake two-party system are owned by the “business community” (AKA assholes).

Our system is owned by the frauds and the scam artists, the trolls and gremlins, the con-men and hacks, the swindlers and hucksters, cheaters, scammers, fraudsters, and big fat flimflammers! Oh man, how I hate a flimflammer. They know that no matter which of the corporate parties wins each election — they still win. And we’re seeing it yet again.

It happens year after year after year after year — like that Bill Murray movie where he’s repeating Groundhog Day over and over, and he even kills the groundhog to see if that will stop Groundhog Day from happening, but it doesn’t. Groundhog Day still doesn’t stop. I think the movie was called “The Day That Happened A Lot.”

We can’t vote the assholes out.
Still In Power

That’s why I say it doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. Maybe you read this two weeks from now — in which case you’re viewing it on a phone while sprinting away from the zombies that have been transformed by Covid-19 and are now exacting revenge for the way they were treated during the election with their insatiable man-eating tactics. (Don’t forget to douse them with kerosene and light them after you hit ‘em with the shovel because otherwise they’ll come back. They’ll come back, and they’ll remember you.)

I have to admit, I’m cheering for the postal employees. But don’t take that personally. It’s just because I’m pissed about the 2006 bill that the Democrats and Republicans joined together on to destroy the U.S. Postal Service, and I want to see a kindly 70 year-old mustachioed man in blue shorts exact his revenge. (It’s tough to say whether you can still call a grandpa “kindly” when he’s chomping into your carotid artery, but still.)

Point being, if we truly want to change this system, then we can’t spend four years bickering about what will happen one day when it will always be the same result. We need to spend those four years building the systems that make the assholes obsolete, that make the system seem old and meaningless.

We need to build the alternatives that make the ruling elite, the oligarchs at the top, look like fucking VHS tapes. Really, we need to make it so that people look at Joe Biden’s garbage pro-war and pro-Wall Street cabinet and go, “What the hell were you ever used for? I don’t know how you fit into the system these days. We need an adapter or something.”

Side note — Why is it that everyone over roughly 30 or 35 still has a small stack of VHS tapes or DVDs somewhere in our house or apartment? What the hell are we preparing for? Do we all think that after 20 years of never watching one VHS or DVD that the night will come when we say, “Let’s spend the next six hours watching scratchy versions of ‘Ghost,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ and ‘The Firm’?”

Even if that did happen — even if hackers in the United Arab Emirates developed a new internet virus that shut down all television and streaming services and we blew the dust off the old collection — after about 30 minutes of deciding what to watch, we would then realize we don’t have a way to play goddamn DVDs anymore!

We’re all going to be holding up the disk grumbling, “What do you do with this again? Do we plug it into an iPod and hook that to the microwave? I can’t seem to recall.” No, we’re never going to watch those again.

And yet, we’ll keep that little stack of VHS & DVDs there until we die. Just in case. You never know. Maybe the dollar will collapse and VHS tapes will be the new form of currency, and you’ll be able to buy a helicopter ride out of the country with a single copy of “The Breakfast Club.” Who knows. It could happen.

Point being — We can’t vote out the assholes.

Because we can’t vote them out, the U.S. is less democratic than many other countries in the world. So let’s stop talking about nothing but the presidential election and start building a better future that makes this one look like that old pile of VHS tapes.

Lawmakers Unify To Give Corporate Donors A License To Kill You

In the holiday spirit of bipartisan unity, a group of Democratic & GOP lawmakers join together to try to shield their corporate donors from lawsuits when they kill more workers.

David Sirota and Julia Rock
Dec 1






In early October, Harvard researchers sounded an alarm: They released a report showing a pattern of coronavirus deaths surging soon after workers filed requests for workplace safety assistance from the U.S. Labor Department. The takeaway was clear: Workers are desperately begging the government to help protect them from a deadly pandemic, the government has been unresponsive, and lots of workers have subsequently died preventable deaths.

Today, a little more than a month after the study came out, the federal government is finally responding: A bipartisan group of Senate and House lawmakers have announced legislation to shield corporations from lawsuits when their lax safety standards kill more workers.

In practice, the legislation, which is being tucked into a larger COVID relief package, is a holiday-season gift for corporate donors: It would strip frontline workers of their last remaining legal tool to protect themselves in the workplace — at the same time the unemployment system is designed to financially punish those workers if they refuse to return to unsafe workplaces during the pandemic.

The legislation comes not only as workers continue to die, but also as roughly 7 to 9 percent of the total COVID death count are “take home” infections traced to employees unwittingly spreading the disease to their families and friends.
A Hostage Situation From A Dystopian Sci-Fi Film

At the behest of corporate lobbyists, the liability shield initiative has spread like a virus in America’s political system: As The Daily Poster first reported, it coursed through state legislatures across the country after New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo responded to a COVID massacre in nursing homes by shielding nursing home executives from lawsuits — after a health care lobby group funneled $1 million into his political machine.

Senate Republicans in Washington then copied Cuomo’s liability shield legislation and pasted it word-for-word into their last COVID stimulus proposal in July.




Unable to pass that federal liability shield legislation on its own, lawmakers from both parties have now come together in a grand show of post-election bipartisan unity to help their corporate donors create a hostage situation that’s something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie: Their proposal predicates long overdue and desperately needed unemployment assistance on the condition that corporations are given a get-out-of-jail free card when their profit-maximizing business practices extinguish the lives of employees.

Support from Democratic lawmakers for the liability shield legislation comes after the same health care lobby group that drafted New York’s law has poured more than $11 million into House and Senate Democratic super PACs.

The party, though, doesn’t seem to want its own voters to know the details of the deal it is cutting with the GOP: In a comically on-the-nose attempt at a bait-and-switch, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin touted the legislation as only financial aid for communities — leaving out the fact that it includes a liability shield for corporations.
Senator Joe Manchin @Sen_JoeManchinToday I'm announcing a bipartisan, bicameral framework for a COVID-19 relief package. This proposal would direct more than $900B to help small biz, healthcare providers, & unemployed Americans who need help now. It’s time to put politics aside & do what’s best for our country.


December 1st 2020100 Retweets484 Likes

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers to spotlight what’s really going on. Last week, she tweeted: “If you want to know why COVID relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to COVID without repercussions.”
A Long-Term Campaign To Disempower Workers

The bipartisan initiative aims to obscure its Dr. Evil-level of depravity by superficially depicting the liability shield as merely temporary. But that seems like a ruse, as indicated by private equity mogul and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah,, who said the federal COVID liability shield provision “provides a temporary suspension of any liability-related lawsuits, state or federal level associated with COVID-19, giving states enough time to put in place their own protections.”

Though full legislative language has not been released, the goal seems clear: to give state legislatures more time to permanently prevent workers from suing employers who endanger them, and to permanently block their families from mounting such lawsuits when the workers die.

Notably, lawmakers announcing the proposal did not point to a spate of frivolous wrongful death lawsuits that corporations have been warning about as a rationale for the liability shield. Instead, as the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense recently noted, “of more than 4,100 COVID-19 related lawsuits filed, only 75 are for wrongful death or injury as a result of getting sick at work. Two-thirds fall into three categories — insurance disputes, prison cases and civil rights cases, including challenging shelter-in-place orders.”

The liability shield legislation is not some standalone cause — it should be understood as the culmination of a much larger, long-term campaign to remove countervailing force and give capital supreme power over labor.

Over the last few decades, the government — through legislation and court rulings — has weakened unions, which have used collective bargaining to protect workers rights; limited class action lawsuits and punitive damages, which are designed to punish corporate misbehavior; and gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is supposed to enforce the weak workplace safety laws still on the books.

Now come liability shields, laundered as a necessary COVID salve, but which are really designed to permanently remove the last remaining deterrent to corporate abuse.

Large employers already knew that a hobbled OSHA would — at most — give them the equivalent of a parking ticket for killing workers. Indeed, the agency has refused to even issue formal safety standards during the outbreak — a posture designed to make it harder to hold corporations accountable for any unsafe practices at all. The situation is now so unregulated and so bleak that in one situation, corporate managers were allegedly betting on the number of COVID deaths that would happen at a meatpacking plant.

With liability shields, those same employers will know that they can get away with all kinds of cost-slashing and corner-cutting that endangers workers and denies them access to basic protective gear.

In other words, corporations will know they can drive the COVID body count ever higher, and they won’t even have to worry about being called into a courtroom to answer for their crimes.

Did Trump Order Iran Assassination?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC1mLxc4BYw&ab_channel=EmpireFiles