I’d be interested to hear your own take on the movie Don as I’ll probably never see it (I read a review title that said “The Joker is the movie we deserve right now, but not what we need” and decided that it might be best for me to avoid it, lol), but am somewhat fascinated by the slew of analyses about it.

Here’s another writer, Leslie Lee, who seems to be in the same camp as Michael Moore:

Neoliberalism Is the True Villain of ‘Joker’

After 11 years of inundating cineplexes with status-quo defending super cops and soldiers, Hollywood has finally given us a blockbuster movie with a protagonist willing to fight for common people against the economic system oppressing them. He just happens to be a comic book villain.

The film follows Arthur as he tries and fails to smile through his fight against mental illness, poverty, loneliness and severe depression. He is utterly powerless to slow down the decay of his mental state and at one point even considers committing a crime in hopes of being recommitted to Arkham State Hospital.

Arthur’s only moments of happiness come from entertaining children and watching television with his mother—specifically a late-night show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), a nod to Rupert Pupkin’s idol Jerry Langford in “The King of Comedy” (1982). When the machinery of capitalism strips Arthur of even those modest pleasures (along with his access to therapy and medication), the movie reveals its true nature—not as a prestige drama but a pulpy revenge thriller.

The true political implications of “Joker” center on Bruce Wayne’s father and the film’s antagonist, Thomas Wayne. Whereas the comic book character is a generous philanthropist, the Wayne of “Joker” is recast as a Mitt Romney-like figure who uses his immense and unearned riches to push his way into politics. His sneering disdain for those who haven’t “made something of themselves,” with its faint echoes of the then-Republican candidate for president’s 47% remarks, severs the film from the Batman lore. No longer is wealth a tool for Gotham’s benefactors to help the less fortunate but a means to a sinister, real-world end—the power to control, dominate, mock, abuse and scorn those who don’t have it.

Arthur looks in wonder at a new world he has created in which people are no longer invisible because they’re ill, no longer crushed because they are poor, no longer forced to smile through the violence they suffer. They are no longer powerless.

Although Arthur Fleck declares he is not political, it’s impossible to view the film as anything other than a condemnation of the austerity and immiseration ushered in by corporations like Wayne Enterprises with the aid of politicians like Ronald Reagan. The film makes clear that when people are only as valued as their ability to produce profit, they will invariably fight back.

I was very troubled when I heard, years after he was elected, about Obama’s connection to The Hamilton Project. I think we all know better now, can better recognize clues about candidates for which their elevation would result in ‘business rule as usual’ (per how Paul Street’s article at truthdig referred to the results of Obama’s time as president).

Thanks in no small part to Obama’s chillingly fake-progressive presidency, fully 95 percent of new national income generated during his first term went to the nation’s top 0.1 percent.

One of the many early clues to the coming neoliberal nature of Obama’s presidency came when he affiliated himself from the start with The Hamilton Project (THP), a key neoliberal Washington, D.C., think tank. THP was founded with Goldman Sachs funding inside the venerable centrist and Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution in spring 2006. Its creator was no less august a figure in the country’s ruling class than Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs CEO who served as Bill Clinton’s top senior economic policy adviser and treasury secretary. A legendary Democratic Party “kingmaker” who is often half-jokingly called “the wizard behind the curtain” of Democratic economic policy, Rubin is the veritable godfather of late 20th century and current U.S. neoliberalism. He is co-chair of “Wall Street’s Think Tank,” the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which formulates America’s grand imperial strategy in accord with the globalist “open door” ambitions of the nation’s leading finance-led multinational investment firms and corporations. Under Rubin’s influence, and in accord with the “Rubinomics” trilogy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, Clinton joined with corporate Democrats and Republicans to: enact the great job-killing and anti-labor North American Free Trade Agreement, slash government spending, eliminate restrictions on interstate banking, repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (which had separated commercial from investment banking), and prevent the regulation of toxic “over-the-counter” financial derivatives with the so-called Commodity Futures Modernization Act. All this helped distribute wealth and power upward and prepare the ground for the financial collapse of 2008.

Taibbi seems credible on Russia/Ukraine matters. Not sure what to think of these whistleblowers. Maybe because of how dramatically different the media’s treatment of them is compared to other whistleblowers.

Huh, my reply to you yesterday didn’t ‘take’.

But thank you orl! That sounds like a lot of work!!

You’re making me want to take out my old 45s….my stash has too many without covers too but, considering I bought my first 45 when I was seven (The Osmonds ‘Down By The Lazy River’ haha) I guess that’s to be expected, so…what let’s see what we’ve got….

I just played a Roy Orbinson 45, ‘You Got It’ and got sad, so I then played Kool & the Gang’s ‘Celebration’ as a pick-me-up, lol.

What have you got? 😉 GOOD LUCK!

p.s. I’m realizing that a lot of mine have the word love in them. Love is the thing, craving it, looking for it, happy to find it, trying to hold on to it, feeling the loss of it. My 80’s stuff takes a bit of a different turn though.