In the annual State of the Union address, Biden came out swinging from the get-go against Putin and Trump -- whom he called "my predecessor" without mentioning him by name -- and on behalf of Ukraine, as he sought to win over undecided voters ahead of November’s election.

The March 7 address to a joint session of Congress this year carried greater significance for the 81-year-old Biden as he faces a tough reelection in November, mostly likely against Trump. The president, who is dogged by questions about his physical and mental fitness for the job, showed a more feisty side during his hourlong speech, drawing a sharp contrast between himself and Trump on a host of key foreign and domestic issues.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

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Biden denounced Trump for recent remarks about NATO, the U.S.-led defense alliance that will mark its 75th anniversary this year, and compared him unfavorably to former Republican President Ronald Reagan.

"Bowing down to a Russian leader, it is outrageous, dangerous, and unacceptable," Biden said, referring to Trump, as he recalled how Reagan -- who is fondly remembered by older Republicans -- stood up to the Kremlin during the Cold War.

At a campaign rally last month, Trump said that while serving in office he warned a NATO ally he "would encourage" Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to alliance members who are "delinquent" in meeting defense-spending goals.

The remark raised fears that Trump could try to pull the United States out of NATO should he win the election in November.

Biden described NATO as "stronger than ever" as he recognized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in the audience. Earlier in the day, Sweden officially became the 32nd member of NATO, ending 200 years of nonalignment. Sweden applied to join the defense alliance after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Finland became a NATO member last year.

Biden called on Congress to pass a Ukraine aid bill to help the country fend off a two-year-old Russian invasion. He warned that should Russia win, Putin will not stop at Ukraine's border with NATO.

A group of right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives have for months been holding up a bill that would allocate some $60 billion in critical military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as it defends its territory from Russian invaders.

The gridlock in Washington has starved Ukrainian forces of U.S. ammunition and weapons, allowing Russia to regain the initiative in the war. Russia last month seized the eastern city of Avdiyivka, its first victory in more than a year.

"Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself," Biden said.

"My message to President Putin...is simple. We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down," Biden said.

Trump, who has expressed admiration for Putin, has questioned U.S. aid to Ukraine, though he recently supported the idea of loans to the country.

Biden also criticized Trump for the former president's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, saying those efforts had posed a grave threat to democracy at home.

"You can't love your country only when you win," he said, referring not just to Trump but Republicans in Congress who back the former president's claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

Biden "really strove to distinguish his policies from those of Donald Trump," said Kathryn Stoner, a political-science professor at Stanford University and director of its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

By referencing Reagan, Biden was seeking "to appeal to moderate Republicans and independents to remind them that this is what your party was -- standing up to Russia," she told RFE/RL.

The State of the Union address may be the biggest opportunity Biden has to reach American voters before the election. More than 27 million people watched Biden’s speech last year, equivalent to about 17 percent of eligible voters.

Biden's address this year carries greater importance as he faces reelection in November, most likely against Trump. The speech may be the biggest opportunity he has to reach American voters before the election.

Trump won 14 of 15 primary races on March 5, all but wrapping up the Republican nomination for president. Biden beat Trump in 2020 but faces a tough reelection bid amid low ratings.

A Pew Research poll published in January showed that just 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden's job performance, while 65 percent disapprove. Biden's job-approval rating has remained below 40 percent over the past two years as Americans feel the pinch of high inflation and interest rates.

Biden, the oldest U.S. president in history, has been dogged by worries over his age. Two thirds of voters say he is too old to effectively serve another term, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.

Last month, a special counsel report raised questions about his memory, intensifying concerns over his mental capacity to run the country for four more years.

As a result, Biden's physical performance during the address was under close watch. Biden was animated during the speech and avoided any major gaffes.

"I thought he sounded really strong, very determined and very clear," Stoner said.

Instead of avoiding the subject of his age, Biden took it head on, saying the issue facing our nation "isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are."

He warned Trump was trying to take the country back to a darker period.

"Some other people my age see a different story: an American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution," Biden said, referring to the 77-year-old Trump.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

My mom has shared with me that the first words that I said out loud, I screamed. I screamed before I talked, and my own personal earliest memories of speech and language were singing. I remember learning how to read and singing the books out loud, treating every book that I read as a libretto and making up melodies to sing whatever I was reading out loud. That feels like the origin story, any text is fair game to animate with song.

That’s so beautiful. Do you still sing books?

Yeah, if I’m reading something that inspires me, it revolves in my head as a melody. And sometimes I’ll turn it into a song, and borrow a line or cite a line in a song. More often than not, it feels almost like a pneumonic device. I definitely sing books to my twin babies. I hear melodies even just in spoken language, and I think we learn the intimation and inflection, that’s all part of communication and some languages have that more than others.

What does your creative practice look like right now and how has your relationship to creativity changed, as you change? I’m particularly thinking of your recent plunge into motherhood, if you’re up for talking about it!

I don’t think I can ever not talk about motherhood ever again. I wish that I had access to some compartmentalization, but that’s totally over for me. I currently feel that I am in the process of completely rebuilding my creative process, that I let it go very fallow while I was pregnant, and the first year of the babies’ lives. I brought a couple of projects to fruition during that time, but the creative spark part of the life cycle had already happened, so I was just tying the bow on those and making sure they saw the light of day. In terms of new sparks of creativity, I think it was Marilyn Robinson who has the line in her book, Gilead, “He participated in being without remainder,” and I feel like that’s where I’ve been in the last two years. The pregnancy was such a physical challenge, I became total animal, I had no spirit life, I had no remainder after just being the animal that I was, growing the two animals that I was growing. After being basically a vegetarian for many years, I wanted steak for breakfast, I had to make so many accommodations, and I was so physically uncomfortable that that was it for those nine months. And then for the first year of their life, with two newborns, that took every bit of my creativity and my physicality.

They had their first birthday in January, and we have an extraordinary child care worker helping us a few days a week. Eric is taking on a bit more during the day with the babies, so I’m having this opportunity to remember what came before or what is now. It’s daunting and exciting, I feel like I’m having tea with an old friend. Eric and I share a studio space that was his old apartment in Pasadena before we became a family together. The living room is his zone, and the bedroom is mine. Over the last few weeks, I’ve started getting my studio space together, it was just piles before that, piles of forgotten tools.

Does it feel like you’re picking up where you left off, or more like rebirth, fully fresh?

It feels pretty fresh. I think I’ve been avoiding—I know which folders have the old lyrics and the old ideas and I’ve intentionally not been opening those quite yet. I’ve never used this space as my studio before, I always had my studio at home for the last many years. So now it’s a brand new space, and it’s out of the house, so there’s a lot that feels fresh and new.

As you’re setting up your space, what energetic or physical conditions are conducive to your creative flow?

I am thinking about that a lot and I’m not sure yet. Right now I’m really drawn to ultra organization, which seems antithetical to creative flow, but for some reason, it’s what I need right now. I think it’s probably in contrast to the chaos of living with two toddlers. One thing that comes with me in my bag every day to the studio is my handheld label maker. I’m like, I’m going to bring order to this space. I think I tend to act in contrast to whatever space I’m in. I don’t headbutt the space that I’m in, but wherever I am I look for it’s opposite when I’m working. I have this feeling that once my environment feels ultra ordered and organized, that I’ll be able to feel like I can create chaos and loosen within that space. I’m currently making the clarity, and I’m really looking forward to making my own mess instead of cleaning up two toddler’s messes.

Where do you seek inspiration?

Books, poetry primarily. If I have enough books in my space and I can just flip to any page and find something I didn’t know I was looking for, that’s usually a happy start for me. Listening to music as well, but sometimes when I’m in a deep writing mode, I can’t have a lot of input musically, it scrambles the line a bit for me. Generally, I love music for accompanying me throughout my day or when I need to move emotion somewhere in my body. If I can feel that something’s quite stuck then listening to music can release or move that emotion. But for writing music, I need to not have that input. Where else, creative inspiration? A long walk where I can just observe and meander a bit.

You just mentioned using music as a way to move emotion through the body. Do you see music as a tool for healing? Can you talk a bit about the ways that music heals?

The very simple answer is yes. Even just knowing that singing, through its stimulation of the vagus nerve, literally helps move grief from the body. When I started using music as a tool for healing for myself, I had no idea that that’s what I was doing, I just was magnetized to it. And I was so young, I was 14 when that began for me and there’s no way I would’ve known that that’s what I was doing. For me, it absolutely has that ability and I think in my earlier years of making music, I felt almost ashamed of that ability, that it was often mocked or poked fun at in music, at least the music circles that I was in. Like university programs, and also as a touring musician in the 2000s. A harder shell was required to survive there, so I felt a lot of secrecy and shame about what I knew to be true about music’s ability, and that it did have a different palette of value than just entertainment. I always knew that, and I was always incorporating that into my shows, into my writing, into my albums, but I didn’t feel safe enough to talk about or show that directly. Now, after 20 years of making music professionally, it’s undeniable. Time and time again, I’ve experienced that transformative quality of music, and I’ve seen it happen for other people so many times that it’s such a fact to me now that I have a hard time imagining a time in my life where I was trying to not disclose that fact.

It is vulnerable to admit that something you’re doing can be so powerful, so transformative!

Yeah. And it starts for me just with the act of singing, which is something I do throughout my day and that has accompanied me my whole life. Singing is my primary comfort and my primary feeling of home. And it’s also been a community builder for me throughout my life, and it’s brought me into love relationships and friendships. Music has been the thing that has brought almost every experience of meaning for me. It’s a pretty strong gravity.

That’s so evident in the way that you talk about music. Given your deep and personal connection to the music that you create, how do you hold what is sacred in that for you close while also sharing it with others? How to protect what needs to be protected and while also sharing?

Oh, it’s such a good question and I’m still figuring it out. There have been times where I know that I’ve shared too much, and then I need to hide for two weeks, but that hasn’t happened in a while. I know my boundaries a bit better now. I do have one physical space that I don’t share with anybody, and it’s amazing because I don’t think I had discovered it yet when you lived at the house. There was this old side entrance to the house that had been closed and locked up and through a renovation, there was a little window on it, and I couldn’t quite see what was in there and I thought, someday I have to get a locksmith and open that door and see what’s in there. Then, finally I did it, and it was this tiny room, maybe three feet wide and six feet long. Really small but definitely big enough for a small desk. And there’s a little window on the door and one chair, there was room for that. I very promptly fixed it up and turned it into a meditation space that only I go into, no one else is allowed in there. There’s something about having that physical space that I know no one else can go into, it’s this privacy, it’s a space where I can go to meditate or to think my most private thoughts. That hat has felt like a very important protective force field of my interior life.

Do you enjoy performing your music in front of people, is connecting with an audience something that is important to you?

I craved it more when I was younger, but not so much anymore. It’s the kind of thing that’s pretty hard for me to gear up to do if I haven’t done it in a while. But then when I’m there, I feel it’s wonderful to connect in this way. I love being in the cave and just exploring creatively and I think I always preferred this part of the life cycle of making an album or creating music in the studio, coming up with ideas and songs. And then everything that happens after that, the recording of the music, the making of the album art, finding ways to put out the music, and then to tour the music, that’s all labor in service to this initial spark that I found in the studio. Those parts always felt more like labor to me, but something that felt worthwhile to do a service to this thing that I had excavated that I really wanted to share. But the fact that I have this motherhood, an excuse to stay in the cave for a little while, what a treat.

As you get back into your practice and set up your studio, move into a new chapter, what does seeking support from your creative community look like?

I think community feels fragmented for me in some ways and some of that was returning to LA after being in Toronto for eight and a half years, where that felt like a very solid community, that we were all part of one organism within that community. LA feels like many, many organisms and I had imagined that in time, there would be something comparable to what I had experienced in Toronto, and there is not. I have many wonderful friends and artists that I know and am in contact with but it’s different. The figurative forest is super different here, every tree is different. But I’ve found, without even seeking it, that there have been these little pockets of community. There’s been a new friend who has had people over to their backyard under this beautiful, giant old growth avocado tree. They had this question, who is the mother of Abraham, biblical Abraham, why don’t we know her name? This is the mother of three of the major religions in the world, what’s the deal? Why is she in secrecy? And so they’ve gone on this odyssey to find Abraham’s mother, and so they’ve gathered people under this tree to talk about this. Why has this gone undercover? And to try and sing Abraham’s mother’s name, and it’s this very experimental coven.

That sounds like such a special way to gather.

I know, it’s pretty wild. And so that’s become a form of community in that it’s a group of people that see each other regularly with a shared intention. And then yeah, I think the babies are also bringing some of that sense of community into my life, which is so nice.

Do you have any parting words of wisdom?

I know we all know this, but it’s pretty easy to forget right now how big of a thing we all just lived through together. And everyone’s just running to get back to something that’s gone and I’m finding myself just aghast how quickly we’re all trying to return to something that I really feel is gone. It’s transformed, it’s turned into something else. So I want us all to be patient with each other and really, really gentle and helpful to each other right now, because it’s confusing, it’s disorienting.

I’m glad that you had so many questions about community and support and healing and holding all of these things in the balance, because it’s no joke. Motherhood is no joke, a creative life is no joke, anything where you are asking of yourself to continually change and transform and be in dialogue with the process of transformation, and to be in the process of listening to what’s happening around you while you’re broadcasting and outputting. And that’s a really tall order and it’s getting taller I think. The more we can do that in community, and the more we can be present for each other’s moments of broadcast and moments of listening, the better off we’ll be.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maya Inglis.

The post “Not Big on Abortion:” Joe Biden Pretends to be in the Vanguard of the Struggle Against Forced Motherhood appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

The post Supreme Court’s Selective Reading of US History Ignored 19th-Century Women’s Support for ‘Voluntary Motherhood’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lauren Thompson.

Image by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition.

Hey, how about those “radical Left” Democrats? Have you heard about one of their big ideas on how to buck historical odds and win the mid-term elections this year? They’re counting on the Christian fascist Supreme Court to end women’s half-century constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives. What a gambit! What audacity!

Why have the leading liberal, Democratic Party-affiliated pro-choice groups Planned Parenthood and NARAL surrendered in advance to the death of Roe v. Wade, announcing the rise of a “post-Roe era” without mass resistance in the streets and public squares? Why haven’t they followed the lead of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) by joining in rallies, marches, and direct actions under the banner of “Post-Roe? Hell No!”? Why have they refused to undertake giant popular mobilizations and direct actions on the model of successful abortion rights activism in Latin America? Why don’t they join RU4AR in donning the green bandana, the symbol of women’s and abortion rights protest in Argentina, Mexico, and Columbia?

More

The post Forced Motherhood as Democratic Electoral Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Image Source: This image is copyrighted by the BBC – Fair Use

Remarkable bird, id’nit, squire? Lovely plumage!

– Michael Palin in the Monty Python “Dead Parrot Sketch,” December 7, 1969

I shoulda quit you, baby, long time ago
…If I had’a followed, my first mind
I’d a been gone, since my second time…

And I wouldn’t have been here, down on the killin’ floor

– Chester Burnett, aka “Howling Wolf,” 1964

“If you don’t like how things are being done in this country,” a great American gaslighting narrative runs, “it’s your own damn fault because you’ve got the vote. This is a democracy,” the mindf*#k says, “and voting is how majorities get heard in a democracy. When you have the vote, you have the power. If the people don’t like what government is doing, they can vote to change policy.”

“E’s Not Pining, E’s Passed On!”

This patriotic lecture always reminds of the old Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch, featuring John Cleese as a dissatisfied customer and Michael Palin as a pet shop owner:

Cleese: I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Palin: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue…What’s, uh…What’s wrong with it?

Cleese: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ‘E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

Palin: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting.

Cleese: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

Palin: No he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

Cleese: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

Palin: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

Cleese: All right then, if he’s restin’, I’ll wake him up! (shouting at the cage) ‘Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I’ve got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show…

(Palin hits the cage)

Palin: There, he moved!

Cleese: No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!

Palin: I never!!

Cleese: Yes, you did!

Palin: I never, never did anything…

Cleese: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) ‘ELLO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!

(Takes parrot out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)

Cleese: Now that’s what I call a dead parrot.

Palin: No, no…..No, ‘e’s stunned!

Cleese: STUNNED?!?

Palin: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin’ up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.

Cleese: Um…now look…now look, mate, I’ve definitely ‘ad enough of this. That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not ‘alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

Palin: Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for the fjords.

Cleese: PININ’ for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got ‘im home?

Palin: The Norwegian Blue prefers keepin’ on it’s back! Remarkable bird, id’nit, squire? Lovely plumage!

Cleese: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

Palin: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

Cleese: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it! ‘E’s bleedin’ demised!

Palin: No! ‘E’s pining!

Cleese: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

“The Wishes of Ordinary Americans Have Little or No Impact”

American “democracy” isn’t just stunned. It’s not resting. It’s not pining for the fiords or the hills of ancient Saxony. It didn’t just move. It’s a stiff. It’s bereft of life.

Don’t be fooled by “the plumage.”

Four in every five US Americans thinks serious gun control legislation should be passed. A vast majority think health insurance should be de-commodified and a made a human right in the US. Most Americans by far support progressive taxation and meaningful government action to reduce economic inequality, reduce the disproportionate influence of money on politics, and meaningfully tackle the runaway climate crisis.

So what? Who cares? None of these opinions and much more that the majority believes determines policy in the US. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book Democracy in America?:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout…[so that] the general public has been virtually powerless…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”

Nothing that has taken place in the last five years remotely challenges that judgement. Quite the opposite.

It isn’t just on the political economy issues that Gilens and Page emphasized that the great American “democracy” defies its holy words of democracy with icy deeds of autocracy. Soon – by July 5th at the latest – we will likely see the absurdly right-wing US Supreme Court, which stands for to the Monty Python-esque starboard side of US public opinion, blatantly defy super-majority public support for women’s abortion rights (in Jackson v. Dobbs) and (in New York Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen) gun control.

Down on the Constitutional Killing Floors

And it isn’t just because of the political-economic power of concentrated wealth that US-American democracy is a dead parrot. A key finding in the autopsy is the lethal influence of many-sided corporate and financial power. Another part is the undemocratic, minority rule nature of the US constitutional set-up, which drastically overrepresents the nation’s most revanchist and reactionary, fascist, racist, fundamentalist, gun-worshipping and woman-hating sections. The critical slaying forces here include the following:

+ an undemocratic Electoral College system that renders millions of popular presidential votes irrelevant while focusing presidential elections on a small handful of contested states while grossly inflating the electoral power of the nation’s most reactionary regions and states. The loser of the popular vote has been installed via the Electoral College in two of the last six presidential elections – George W. Bush in 2000 (with some openly Orwellian help from the Supreme Court in 2001) and Donald Trump in 2016), with disastrous consequence for the composition of the absurdly powerful US Supreme Court (see below) among other things.

+ strictly time-staggered elections for federal legislative offices and the presidency.

+ an unnecessarily bicameral legislature with an exceptionally powerful upper chamber – the US Senate.

+ a grossly undemocratic and right-leaning Senate apportionment regime that grants each state two representatives (Senators) regardless of population size (If liberal and progressive, multiracial and multi-ethnic California, home to 39,237,836, had the same populace-to Senator ratio as super white, rural, and far-right Wyoming [pop. 578,803, less than 5% of the total population of Los Angeles], it would have 135 US Senators. If the New York City borough of Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, it would have none 9 U.S. Senators.).

+ remarkable freedom for individual states to undemocratically manipulate representation in the more democratically apportioned branch of Congress, the US House of Representatives, and indeed to determine the composition of Electoral College slates in defiance of the popular vote.

+ federalism and states’ rights whereby fifty states possess remarkable autonomous power to make highly relevant policy in defiance of majority national public opinion with their own separate executive, legislative and judicial branches.

+ the awesome autocratic, God-like power of judicial review granted to a presidentially and lifetime appointed and Senate-vetted Simon Says Supreme Court technically/constitutionally free to violate majority opinion on any matter at all.

Let’s look at the Senate’s recent and ongoing conduct. Think of the Congress as a slaughterhouse and the Senate as the aristocratic killing floor of popular, majority-backed supported legislation. The following measures are among a massive slew of stillborn legislation passed by the US House and killed either directly or passively in the absurdly right-wing US Senate: the Build Back Better Act (combining infrastructure spending with social and climate reform), two key voting rights bills (the For the People Act and the John Lewis Act), five anti-discrimination bills (the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the American Dream and Promise Act, the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act), a bill to grant statehood status to Washington DC (which has a bigger population than two US states), numerous environmental measures, two gun control measures (the Bipartisan Background Checks Act and the Enhanced Background Checks Act), a workplace violence prevention bill, a bill to essentially re-legalize and re-empower union organizing (the Protect the Right to Organize Act), police reform (the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act) and…the list goes on and on.

The absurdly malapportioned Senate naturally failed to convict the fascist maniac Trump after the House impeached him for trying to “legally” and then violently cancel the 2020 presidential election and overthrow the government. As a result, the maniac remains free like Hitler after the Beer Hall Putsch to rally his demented shock troops and base for future lethal assaults on what’s left of American bourgeois democracy.

Meanwhile, as a great majority of US citizens favor significant gun reform including an assault- weapons ban in the wake of the nation’s latest insane uptick in its ongoing epidemic of mass shootings, it is understood that even mild and conservative adjustments in the nation’s gun laws will be shot down in the NRA-captive Republifascist Senate.

(Did I say killing floor? As of this writing on the morning of Monday, June 6, 2022, there have been 33 mass shootings in the US since the AR-15 grade school slaughter that killed 19 students and 2 teachers murdered on May 21, 2022.)

A largely doomed US House gun safety package likely to pass this week would merely “raise the age of purchasing semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, create new requirements for storing guns in a home with children, prevent gun trafficking, require all firearms to be traceable and close the loophole on bump stocks, devices that increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons, among other things.” Republicans, The Virginia Mercury reports, have “raised repeated objections to the bill, blaming mental health problems and a lack of ‘family values’ as the reasons for the recent mass shootings. They criticized Democrats for rushing to pass legislation.”

The dull and centrist Democratic Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) is left to sadly announce that he is “heartbroken to see more lives cut short by gun violence—and I’m determined to act. How,” Kaine asks, “could the Senate—a body that calls itself the greatest deliberative body in the world—see tragedy after tragedy and decide the right answer is ‘we’re going to do nothing’?”

How? By virtue among other things of the nation’s absurdly venerated Constitution, which, as Daniel Lazare noted four years ago, makes it mathematically possible to “cobble together a [Republican] Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote” — just over a sixth of the popular vote form the most right wing white, paranoid, and gun-mad parts of the nation.

Forget the “sausage-making” analogy for US policy. Go back to the beginning of the meatpacking production process. “The body that calls itself the greatest deliberative body in the world” is in fact an authoritarian, rotten-borough killing floor dedicated now in the Trump era to the white-nationalist murder of what’s left of American bourgeois democracy. Think of the House of Representatives (almost certain to be retaken by the Republifascist Party this coming fall) as Michael Palin nudging the dead parrot’s cage and telling John Cleese “look, it moved!”

With a far-right swing majority constitutionally appointed by a president who ascended to the White House after losing the popular vote and approved by an absurdly malapportioned Senate, the Supreme Court is another great democracy killing floor. It is in place not merely to veto potential, well, doomed contemporary liberal and progressive legislation coming up from the briefly Democratic House but to veto longstanding liberal and progressive legislation and human and social rights. Provisionally backed by the entire far-right 5-4 majority created by three Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell appointments, right-wing Justice Sam Alito’s draft decision overturning Roe v Wade and thereby re-imposing the bondage of forced motherhood is an assault on all liberal and progressive legal precedent in the nation’s history. As lead CounterPuncher Jeffrey St. Clair has brilliantly noted:

“Overturning Roe is just the first thread pulled in what will be a much greater unraveling, which will take place over the next decade Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which wipes away a fundamental right to bodily autonomy and sets the groundwork for abolishing dozens of other personal rights… We’re seeing a deeply reactionary ideological agenda come to fruition and the Alito Court (I guess we should call it that now) is going to be the wrecking ball that smashes any legal impediments to its completion. The fact that it has taken place even as the rightwing has repeatedly lost the popular vote in national elections shows how broken our political system is…Alito’s draft opinion declares that like the right to an abortion, the right to marry a person of a different race (Loving v. Virginia), the right to contraception (Griswald v. Connecticut), and the right not to be forcibly sterilized (Skinner v. Oklahoma) and the right to gay marriage (Obergfell v. Hodges), are all ‘phony rights’ that lack ‘any claim to being deeply rooted in history’…With lifetime appointments and no ethical standards, the Court holds itself accountable to no one, not Congress, the executive or even its own lax set of rules. With a super-majority of ideological clones that may exist for a decade or more, the current court is poised to become the most authoritarian branch of government. Soon it will be working in tandem with a rightwing Congress, at which point history itself will begin to run in fast-reverse, the only avenue of resistance left to us being public ridicule and humiliation of its members and open defiance to its decisions.”

As St. Clair points out, the Democrats failed numerous previous opportunities to codify Roe v. Wade – abortion rights – as national law: “But they didn’t want to in large measure because the threat of Roe being overturned was a huge fundraising machine for them and one of the few reasons to vote for otherwise awful candidates” run by “this pathetic bunch of neoliberal losers…” Very true, though we must not let the insane constitutional order off the hook. The plutocratic campaign finance mechanisms that do so much to turn the Dems into a big sad club of corporate imperialist clowns have been given full carte blanche by the God-like Court in two key decisions (Buckley v. Valeo 1976 and Citizens United 2010). Big money runs elections cuz constitutional Simon Supremes Say. And the Supremes are free to invalidate federal legislation, including a codified abortion rights bill, in the name of judicial review.

“The People,” Who “Secretly Sigh for a More Equal Distribution,” Must “Be Taught…They are unable to Govern Themselves”

As my previous subtitle suggests, all of this autocratic madness bears the living imprint of the nation’s 18th Century Founders – the militantly propertarian, racist, and sexist slaveowners, gentry, and merchant capitalists for whom democracy and popular sovereignty were the ultimate nightmares. Their still-revered national charter from the days of Louis XVI was brilliantly crafted precisely to make sure that the power of the propertyless and property-poor majority would be checked and balanced at every turn in accord with the needs and prerogatives of those deemed most qualified to make policy: the propertied elite and its loyal publicists and politicos.

It’s darky amusing that pointing this out is considered controversial by right-wing scolds who lecture us on the need to “study the Founders.” Study them indeed! Drawn from the elite propertied segments in the new nation, most of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic 1948 text, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It: “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.”

Protection of “property” (meaning the people who owned large amounts of it) was “the main object of government” for all but one of the U.S. Constitution’s framers (James Wilson), as constitutional historian Jennifer Nedelsky has noted. The non-affluent, non-propertied and slightly propertied popular majority was for the framers what Nedelsky calls “a problem to be contained.”

Democracy – the rule of the majority – was the last thing the nation’s holy Founders wanted to see break out in their new republic. Anyone who doubts this should read The Federalist Papers, written by the leading advocates of the U.S. Constitution to garner support for their preferred form of national government in 1787 and 1788. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that democracies were “spectacles of turbulence … incompatible with … the rights of property.” Democratic governments gave rise, Madison felt, to “factious leaders” who could “kindle a flame” among dangerous masses for “wicked projects” like “abolition of debts” and “an equal division of property. … Extend the [geographic] sphere [of the U.S. republic],” Madison wrote, and it becomes “more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and act in union with each other.”

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison backed an upper U.S. legislative assembly (the Senate) of elite property holders meant to check a coming “increase of population” certain to “increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings” [emphasis added]. “These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former.”

In Federalist No. 35, the future first U.S. secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, argued that the common people found their proper political representatives among the small class of wealthy merchant capitalists. “The idea of an actual representation of all classes of people by persons of each class,” Hamilton wrote, “is altogether visionary.” The “weight and superior acquirements of the merchants render them more equal” than the “other classes,” Hamilton proclaimed. Someone tell that ridiculous musically challenged identity-inverter Lin-Manuel Miranda!

In Hofstader’s 1948 account, the New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea behind the Founders’ curious notion of what they liked to call “popular government.” “Let it stand as a principle,” Belknap wrote to an associate, “that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught…that they are unable to govern themselves.”

Madison, Hamilton, Jay, – think of them and their ruling class ilk as highly skilled knifemen on the pre-Thermidorian killing and cutting floors of the US fake-democratic slaughterhouse.

We should of walked off their “constitutional” killing floors a long time ago.

The Founding Fathers are deeply complicit in the attempted return of forced motherhood. We shoulda quit them a long time ago.

An Eagle Egg that Never Hatched, a Gift Horse, and Parrots That Can’t Stop Gaslighting

Perhaps readers still with me with have already sensed the central through deliberate flaw in my Monty Python analogy. The deceased bird in the Dead Parrot Sketch is a full-grown parrot: it was once alive and grew to maturity. Not so the bird of American democracy. It was an eagle egg that never quite hatched – and was never supposed to. That was the point of America’s distinctive “bourgeois revolution,” which was driven in no small part by North American ruling class anger at the limits England was putting on the new “democracy’s” freedom to slaughter Native Americans and expand Black chattel slavery.

The astonishing durability of the aristo-republican and propertarian charter that emerged from that “revolution” (or national proto-capitalist break-off and slaveowners’ secession from England) shows that the modern corporate era and world-imperial US ruling class has known an historical gift horse when it sees one. Among the United States’ claims to “exceptionalism” it can include failure to make a new Constitution – the blueprint for what the bumbling neoliberal idiot Joe Biden moronically calls “a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world for more than 240 years” – across its entire life. It’s a very rare and dubious accomplishment.

Another amazingly durable phenomenon: the willingness of a vast army of 21^st century American politicos, pundits, and reporters to continue shrilly chattering like trained parrots on how the American capitalist-imperialist oligarchy and autocracy is “the world’s greatest democracy.” That’s gaslighting on an epic scale.

Lovely plumage on the Norwegian Blue, eh?

Savio Says: One Monday Down, Four to Go, Shut This System Dow if They Overturn Roe

Yes, there have been great popular and democratic accomplishments in the US “national experience.” They were not achieved mainly via the ballot, however. Name the modern social reform that merits applause and defense in American history: the outlawing of child labor, the minimum wage, union organizing rights, workers’ compensation, legal desegregation, Social Security, environmental and consumer protections, right to an abortion. None of these things were gained simply by voting. They were won through mass popular resistance and disruption: strikes, marches, sit-ins, sit-downs, occupations, work stoppages, social movements and movement cultures beneath and beyond the quadrennial big money major party candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as “politics” – the only politics that matters. The franchise itself – the right to vote – was through mass popular disturbance. The abolition of slavery and the achievement of Black citizenship was won only through an epic Civil War in which Black masses took up arms against their owners.

Would a decent human vote to keep degenerate lunatics and fascists like Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump out of the world’s most dangerous job? Sure, for two minutes, but with the understanding that what matters far more is what you after those two minutes[1]. That is American and indeed world history 101. It’s not just about who’s sitting in the White House, the Courts, the legislatures, and the suites. It’s about who’s sitting in the public squares, the town halls, the workplaces and the streets. If you want to stop the autocratic re-enslavement of woman and girls in this so-called democracy, for example, you should get militant and, yes, revolutionary right now, not later – right now, before and not after the coming decision. It’s a Mario Savio moment:

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Go with what Savio and the CIO packinghouse union said, not with what the Simon Supremes Say. Shut down the killing floors. Stop the kill and cutting rooms, and the whole plant goes down. Which brings me to a slogan just I cooked up after learning that the Supreme Court (which rules on Mondays and who has until July 5^th to hand down its current decisions) did not yet reverse Rose v. Wade this morning (Monday, June 6, 2002): One Monday down, four to go, shut this system down if they overturn Roe![1]

Maybe it should be “shut this company,” I mean “this country” (my bad!) “down if they overturn Roe.”

Postscript: “As Things are Now”

I can already see readers’ eyes rolling over my use of the word “if.” Yes, the reversal of Roe seems more than a little likely. Still, the threat of truly mass resistance, which needs to be demonstrated before the actual decision, might change calculations in the minds of right-wing Court members who have real concerns about their institutional legitimacy. (I’d like to think they could care less about the disruption of business as usual, but my guess is they don’t with a Democrat in the White House the small democratic majorities in Congress. They likely believe that mass disruption would help their party in the mid-terms.) In any event, a decision reversing Roe – whose survival is supported by at least two-thirds of the US population – will spark mass outpourings and needs to be seized upon by non-armchair progressives, and leftists as a deeply instructive event illustrating not just the obvious awfulness of the now fascist Republican Party but (a) the longtime neoliberal nothingness and right-wing complicity of the neoliberal Democrats and, I think even more importantly, (b) the utterly bankrupt, autocratic, and minority rule nature of the ridiculous Biden’s “system of governance that has been the envy of the world for over 240 years.”

Effective post-decision education and organizing along these lines should start before and not after the ruling on Jackson v. Dobbs. The ubiquitous liberal and even left mindset of “oh, the people will come out if the right wing does something as outrageous as that” must be retired. Americans must get it through their heads: the rightmost of the nation’s two viable and capitalist political organizations has gone fascist and is playing for keeps. It’s going to do one outrageous thing after another from now own. Waiting until it steals basic rights and elections before taking to the streets and public squares is a fools’ game. It’s an excuse for surrender – for doing nothing in the present moment under the cover of a promised future action that comes too late.

Also worth noting: the chances that the Democrats will buck history and use horrible Supreme Court decisions on abortion and gun rights to keep Congress are extremely low. Inflation is both combining with and fueling Biden’s extremely low approval rating and the very high percentage of Americans who say that “the country is on the wrong track” to almost guarantee a Republifascist takeover of the legislative branch in November.

One of the Democrats’ key functions in the class rule system it upholds is to keep the masses off the streets and to channel the people’s political aspirations and hopes into the coffin-like confines of the bourgeois ballot box. That is the Democrats’ key assignment in the ruling class’s internal division of labor. Watch them and their allied “pro-choice” groups (led by Planned Parenthood and NARAL) do everything they can to “sheepdog” popular anger into the doomed venue of major party big money candidate-centered electoral politics if and after Roe is butchered on the high Court killing floor. The Women’s March and Indivisible sorts will bring out their pink hats (adding some Ukrainian war flags perhaps) to “One [or maybe two] and Done” mass protests meant not to challenge the insane dominant order but to turn everything into a big conservative Get Out the Vote effort for the inauthentic opposition party of Hollow Resistance. For a different sort of real people’s movement politics beneath and beyond the “killing confines” of ruling class electoral politics, sign up NOW with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights.

In the meantime, some words of wisdom from the left historian and journalist Thomas, reflect among other things on my own prior and voluminous effort to move people off worship of “our” toxic constitutional plumage:

‘One would think with so many issues now being corralled into the “intractable” category because of the very forces you often cite — the constitution and the entire political map so tilted as to be irrecoverably undemocratic (even by the standards the Democrats themselves use) — there would come a reckoning in which millions of erstwhile Democrats see their idea of the good life as impossible with the system as it is. And these are not explicitly “class” issues (though many of them actually are “class” issues); they are everyday life issues (not getting shot at a grocery store or your kid getting murdered at school, or the right to control your own body, etc.); everyday life issues that are now being made impossible by the current political dispensation. And the Democrats have no solution because it goes to the core of who they are (a la Jamie Raskin). They talk about passing legislation “codifying” Roe v. Wade. Well, SCOTUS has the authority to declare the legislation unconstitutional. Only way Roe v. Wade could be truly “codified” is with an amendment to the constitution, as was the case with the Civil Rights Amendments of the Civil War era. As things are now, an amendment is impossible (for the reasons you frequently cite), and of course the only way the Civil rights Amendments were ratified was with civil war.’

Civil war it may be.

Note

+1. Howard Zinn in March of 2008, as electoral Obamania swept the land, polluting the minds even of self-declared leftists (e.g. “Marxist Obamanist” Carl Davidson) with risible neoliberal delusion: “Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.” There are 2,102,400 minutes in four non-leap years. Let’s generously say that voting takes you 60 minutes including transportation and fixing your special Election Day hair and make-up. 60 divided by 2,102,400 = 0.00002853881. That’s a pretty minor participation in “our” supposed “democracy.” And that’s without even getting into the choices on the ballot and how policy gets made and so on.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.