2 March—After President Joe Biden’s stirring, if not terribly reassuring, harangue about Ukraine that opened last night’s State of the Union address, his de rigueur speech sank into a same-old-same-old rehash of his party’s notorious Build Back Better pipedream agenda, but broken down into its constituent parts, hoping to distract opposition to the bad stuff and attract support for the good stuff. Which is which is a matter of opinion.

Joe called on the Senate (i.e. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) to “pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans can know who is funding our elections.” Trouble is, in addition to doing an end-run around the First Amendment by what the self-serving proponents call campaign finance reform, these poorly conceived travesties, while purporting to discourage election sabotage, would actually and most certainly encourage election fraud.

Campaign finance reform, of course, is all about money. So is everything else Joe Biden went on and on about last night, including how the good guys would make Vladimir Putrid be damned and cry, “Hold, enough!” (Shakespeare’s words, by the way, not Biden’s, but Joe didn’t plagiarize them this time, or even use them.) “Even Switzerland,” Joe proclaimed, is joining the sanction team, alluding to that little country’s purely venal strategic neutrality.

Of course Joe Biden and his friends are going to tax only the filthy rich and corporations. Joe didn’t use that invidious term, to be sure. And the $400,000 threshold below which nobody would pay “an additional penny in new taxes” isn’t particularly high these days.

But far more disturbing is his plan to “make sure corporations [as well as] the wealthiest Americans start paying their fair share. Sure, it sounds great. But it reveals an ignorance of reality or at least the refusal to consider the function and reality of capitalism.

Everybody but Joe Biden and his pals seems to know that corporations don’t really pay taxes, they merely collect taxes for governments. Every stage in the mercantile process (obviously) adds to the price paid by the lowest member on the seemingly predatory capitalist totem pole, the poor consumer.

Taxes are merely part of the cost of doing business. Thus, the lowly consumers at the bottom of the food chain end up paying for everything the government squeezes out of corporations no matter how you look at it.

So when Joe Biden promises that individuals with incomes under the $400,000 threshold won’t pay an additional penny in new taxes, he’s full of it . . .