They broke the Democratic agenda into two parts, one that corporations liked better, and one that the citizens liked better, with the promise that both parts had to pass, together.

Then, because corporations have to always win and never lose, and citizens have to always lose and never win, we pared the citizen's bill down to almost nothing.

And now, we will pass the corporations' bill nearly unchanged, plus the husk of the citizens' bill.

Just making sure that I'm perceiving this correctly, and that corporate America wins again and disciplines us citizens to expect nothing from government.

Joe Biden's infrastructure plans seemed so simple. Why not, it seemed to say, spend some of our tax dollars making our country and our lives better, instead of just flushing them away by giving them to people who are already rich or corporations that deal death?

But . . . the corporations who have bought the government obviously did not like that. They can't have the American people less desperate, less stressed, less over-worked. Americans must not, under any circumstances, learn that their tax dollars can be used to make their lives better. It's just not done. Not in America.

And so, we've had two avatars of this corporate mind set kill/main/wound/slow-walk the whole thing. But it's obvious to me that the rest of the corporate world is A-OK with this result, or else the other Democrats would actually object in real and strenuous ways to what was happening.

So . . . because corporations can't let Americans benefit from their government, they are ok with a small group of Democrats (and all Republicans) killing this effort. They are ok with Biden's agenda and approval rating going down the toilet. They are ok with Republicans possibly gaining back control of the house, the senate, the Whitehouse, probably to destroy democracy in this country.

My question is - Biden and the people around him are mostly creatures of Washington. They know, or should know, what is possible in the current state of corporate capture of the government. So, why did they let this embarrassment happen? Who didn't get the memo? Was it Joe Biden himself who miscalculated and thought that our corporate masters would let Americans actually get some benefit, some crumbs, from our amazing productivity and wealth? And why didn't he know better?

It's weird - it's like Zappa's quote about pulling back the curtain to reveal the brick wall behind it, except the surprised people seem to be the Biden administration. I would have thought they were cynical enough for this job, but maybe I was wrong?

In any case, we can breathe a sigh of relief that we won't have to have eye, or dental, or hearing care when we get older. Wouldn't want to cut into any corporate profits, after all, and we the citizens need to be taught that with every lesson.

Biden or his surrogates should be LOUDLY badmouthing them up and down America - they are keeping us Americans from actually getting something back for our tax dollars. They are harming us. They are anti-American. They are corporate stooges. By the end of it, they should be so lucky as to be ALLOWED to vote for the bill given the public shellacking they would be taking . . .

in my dreams. In a functioning democracy.

As is obvious, we built exactly nothing there, especially in the decade since our actual purpose for invading, "to get Bin Laden", was completed. Biden had the courage to end this money-sucking fraud, that would have had the same outcome (or possibly worse) no matter when it ended.

Afghanistan is ungovernable, and we are now the 4th or 5th occupying force to find that out, and this was predictable. All I hear about is crying on the BBC and on the news about this "disaster" but this was a con being run on our tax coffers by the military industrial complex, it was always a disaster, and it is better to have it finally ended.

I wish Trump, Obama, or Bush would have had the guts to end it years earlier.