Never Let a Serious Manufactured Crisis Go To Waste

While Trump is sending in the military, under cover of humanitarianism, to quell any incipient native unrest on Puerto Rico, his good-thinking critics in Congress are obsessively adhering to their own McCarthyite agenda.

The latest episode in RussiaGate has congress critters criticizing Twitter for, of all things, not taking the whole Cold War resurgence propaganda campaign seriously enough.

Senator Mark Warner, far from grousing to TV cameras that Puerto Rico is being criminally ignored by the White House, and that American citizens are being allowed to die for no good reason other than cruelty and greed, groused that he was very disappointed that Twitter had furnished his witch-hunting intelligence committee with only 200 accounts possibly linked to fake news trolls operating out of the Kremlin.

Never mind that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have in his own pocket the names of 200 subversives acting for Russia right within the US government, people were shocked and awed enough that McCarthy didn't even have to produce his nonexistent list. Times have changed, though, and if you can't come up with at least a million Russian operatives who sneakily forced American voters to pick Trump over Hillary, then your whole hysterical plot is in danger of completely falling apart. From the New York Times:

The company’s  presentation “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.”

Translation: Has Twitter now, or has it ever been, an associate of Vladimir Putin or a member the Russian Federation?

Adam Schiff went on CNN Thursday to vaguely not answer any questions about what actual evidence he might have in his own pocket regarding Twitter malfeasance. He said that his House Intelligence Committee has "only scratched the surface" of the alleged massive meddling by Russia in our democracy. He's only had almost a year to scratch, and congressional fingernails grow more slowly than we might like. And then he was caught flat-footed when, as almost an afterthought, Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Puerto Rico catastrophe. Schiff, looking perplexed, said he "thinks" that Congress might be voting on a long-term relief bill next week... or maybe it's the week after that. He's not sure, because that's not his department. But he certainly seems sure that RussiaGate is far, far more important than thousands or even millions of American citizens sickening and dying right before our eyes on national TV.

From the front-page Times article, which is handily placed above the old news that American citizens are being callously allowed by their own government to sicken and die:

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, would not answer questions about the briefing on Thursday, and his spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Warner said that he and Mr. Burr would hold a news conference as soon as next week to update the public on their investigation and try to draw attention to the continuing threat by foreign entities to the American political system.

It will be very hard to draw the attention of Americans who are faced,every single day of their lives, with such mundane threats as climate change catastrophes, lack of jobs and health care, institutionalized racism and police brutality, and rents that are too damned high. The propagandists of the Democratic/Neocon Alliance have taken on the very daunting task of making us believe in magic. Just as Trump is sending in the troops to Puerto Rico to stifle the dissent as they hand out the water bottles, our government is sending in the shock troops, trying to stifle dissent by tacitly accusing more and more people of treason. If you dare to complain about your lot in life, or to call out social and economic injustices, then you are unpatriotic and probably a dupe of the Russians. So it's best for everybody to shut up, and let American leaders get on with their gaslighting.

The modern congressional witch-hunters are very poor propagandists if they think that gullible Americans will be shocked that somebody in Russia spent a paltry $100,000 on some fake ads which proceeded, all by themselves, to magically propel Donald Trump to victory. Since this is chump change compared to the billion dollars that Hillary Clinton raised and spent on her own failed bid, it must mean that a crappy hundred thou has more clout than a billion smackeroos. This is what Mark Warner and Adam Schiff actually expect us, knowledge-impaired dupes that we are, to believe as they strive valiantly to reduce our quivering jelly brains into one great big puddle of fear and docility.

Perhaps they can get a friendly state attorney general to sue Twitter and take this all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, even the tiniest smattering of "possibly foreign" cheap fake ads is a subversive violation of the great Citizens United ruling, which equates money with speech. The very survival of all-American greed and capitalism is at stake.

Commentariat Central: Red Scare, Healthscare

Facebook and its billionaire leaders are the latest casualties of the Russia Fake News scare campaign. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg now admits that a relatively small portion of the millions of political ads on his social media platform have been financed and placed by Russian operatives. Congress is investigating, and the corporate media is pearl-clutching. It's great distracting publicity to help hide the all-American stuff, like the enhanced military aggression and the domestic kleptomania (as in the epic Equifax breach) going on right under our noses.

The ever-reliable Washington Post is doing its part to ramp up Red Scare Redux by publishing a "scoop" which has Barack Obama trying to rehabilitate his erstwhile "soft on Russia" reputation. The planted narrative is that the former president secretly took Zuckerberg aside last year to sternly and explicitly warn him that the Kremlin was infecting the Silicon Valley Empire, and by extension, America itself. The Facebook wunderkind then stubbornly sat on his little techie hands for months before reluctantly coming clean and admitting that he and his band of geniuses had been asleep at the switch.

He's taking one for the Military/Industrial Complex team. He can afford to.

(An interesting aside: Craig Timberg, one of the three reporters who wrote this story, was also the conduit for the nasty and anonymous "PropOrNot" smear campaign which blacklisted several left-leaning websites last year.)

The same media which has long elevated Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg to godlike status because of their self-serving philanthrocapitalism and their awesome intellects and and their high-finance  political clout are ganging up and knocking them right back down again. Pundits acting in the interests of Russophobia have suddenly discovered that Facebook is pretty much a pyramid scheme whose shocking essential aim is to suck money from its billions of worldwide members as it callously monetizes social relationships. When you've been named as a Russian dupe, all bets are suddenly off, and the media/political Protection Racket is no longer willing to protect and celebrate your outsize capitalistic greed.

Overnight, you have become a dangerous secret agent, the latest scapegoat in the "Clinton Wuz Robbed" blame campaign.

Sheryl Sandberg, celebrated protegee of Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and reputedly Hillary's pick to lead the Treasury Department in the event of a Clinton Restoration, has agreed to keep a closer watch on things in the interests of the Democratic Party/Neocon Republican alliance. She has promised to guard the country from any further Putin damage, in the form of "divisive" racist and xenophobic ads aimed at the subset of racist and xenophobic Facebook clientele."It's on us," she said in yet another variation of the Mistakes Were Made Concerto in D Minor.

Mark Zuckerberg, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warns, is a Dr. Frankenstein who has already created one Trump monster and who therefore must be stopped before he does even more damage:

 The idea of Mark Zuckerberg running for president was always sort of scary.

But now it’s really scary, given what we’ve discovered about the power of his little invention to warp democracy.

All these years, the 33-year-old founder of Facebook has been dismissive of the idea that social media and A.I. could be used for global domination — or even that they should be regulated....

 Days after Donald Trump pulled out his disorienting win, Zuckerberg told a tech conference that the contention that fake news had influenced the election was “a pretty crazy idea,” showing a “profound lack of empathy” toward Trump voters.

But all the while, the company was piling up the rubles and turning a blind eye as the Kremlin’s cyber hit men weaponized anti-Hillary bots on Facebook to sway the U.S. election. Russian agents also used Facebook and Twitter trolls, less successfully, to try to upend the French election.

Evidence? Who needs any stinkin' evidence to write a Russophobic newspaper column these days? French intelligence officials announced months ago that they found no evidence of Kremlin hacking in that country's recent election. Still, these corporate-sponsored legends always have a strange Goebbelsian way of infiltrating the great public hive-mind. The trick is in the relentless repetition.

Dowd's professed horror has not, however, gone so far as to remove her standard end-of-column blurb which urges readers to  "Join me on Facebook."

Now, with my recent sad history of getting my Times comments scrubbed on account of harshness, and because I am not a Facebook fan anyway, I was able to choose my words more carefully with the following published submission:

 I signed up for Facebook several years ago when the NYT made it a (wisely short-lived) requirement for verified commentary.

I gave FB the bare minimum personal info: my name and gender. And I never went back.

I know this might seem radical, but how about a mass FB boycott? Surely, there must be other ways to share gossip and baby photos. Since they're only interested in making money off us, and money is the only language that they seem to understand, maybe they'll really start perking up their cute little digital ears if their masses of human food suddenly disappear off their plates.

Quitting will be very hard, because FB (and Twitter) is a real physical addiction. Studies show that for every "like," or new follower, or re-tweet, your brain gets a nice little jolt of dopamine.

And besides the awful prospect of getting a President Zuckerberg, there's also the danger of the anti-fake news crusade careening off into some really reactionary Joe McCarthy territory. Google has already adjusted its search engine algorithm to suppress legitimate left-leaning sites as well as Nazi groups.

A shadowy group called "PropOrNot" lists some 200 purported Russia-influenced sites. Trouble is, along with the rabid hate blogs, they also included such well-regarded progressive sites as TruthOut and Truthdig as "possible" conduits of Kremlin agit-prop.

So just who gets to decide what's real, and what's fake?

We have to stay vigilant, against both fakery and against censorship.

***

Now, moving on from Russophobia to Single Payer Health Care phobia, a/k/a Healthscare.

Just as the Democrats and the "moderate" Republicans have joined forces to fight the TrumPutin Monster, so have they, in the interests of the Market God, colluded to do battle against both the Trumpcare and Berniecare health plans currently before Congress.

Just as the original Red Scare ostensibly aimed at Russia and the Communist Party of the USA really was a proxy fight against trade unionism and FDR's New Deal, so too is the current anti-Bernie "Socialist" Sanders campaign a fight against the popular resurgence of FDR's New Deal. No matter that Commie Pinkos no longer exist; because the right-wing oligarch Putin was an original KGB creation of the Commie Pinko system, American leaders must strive to co-opt manufactured Fear of the Other into a renewed public allegiance to American corporatism. Everybody has to be the bootstrapping entrepreneur of his or her own life. That's how it's supposed to work. No matter to them that it doesn't work at all, not for the vast majority of us.

So young fogey Times pundit Ross Douthat thinks, right along with his neoliberal colleague Paul Krugman, that we should just leave well enough (the profit-intensive Obamacare Kludge) alone: 

But sometimes, when a party has spent most of a year producing health care bills that excite almost nobody and that even the senators voting for them can’t effectively defend, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about our national priorities.

 This goes for both parties: not only the stepping-on-rakes Republicans, but the suddenly single-payer-dreaming Democrats. If Obamacare repeal is really dead for the year 2017, both left and right have a chance to shake their minds free of the health care debate and ask themselves: What are the biggest threats to the American Dream right now, to our unity and prosperity, our happiness and civic health?

While Krugman has lamely suggested that Congress pass a Universal Pre-K package as a worthy enough crumb to substitute for universal health coverage, Douthat is a lot bolder in his own smarminess:

There are better options for both parties. Republicans could get off the repeal-and-replace merry-go-round and actually try to govern on a version of the Trump agenda: With one hand, cut corporate taxes and slash regulations to spur growth; with the other, spend on infrastructure to boost blue-collar work, cut payroll taxes and increase the child tax credit, and push to reduce low-skilled immigration. Pay for some of it with caps on tax breaks, let paying for the rest wait for another day.

 Democrats, meanwhile, could let single-payer dreams wait (or just die) and think instead about spending that supports work and family directly. They could look at proposals for a larger earned-income tax credit, a family allowance, and let the “job guarantee” and “guaranteed basic income” factions fight things out. If they want to go big in 2020, they could run on wage subsidies and public works, not another disruptive health care vision.

   My published response:

Who woulda thunk it? Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman have essentially written the same column. To wit: "both sides" are just so annoyingly extreme. The Rabid Right wants poor people to just die quickly, while the Unicorny Left wants everybody to live to the ripest possible old age. Therefore, both sides are equally insane.

If 2020 does turn out to be a health care election, I say bring it on. Not that we have a true representative democracy or anything, but nearly 60 percent of us are totally on board with Medicare for All. That includes eight out of every 10 Democrats and four or five out of every 10 Republicans. So it's not only the D candidates who should worry about a dreaded "litmus test."

The ACA was originally a Republican plan, with the usual Republican ideology. It's not all-inclusive, and was never meant to be. It's based on competition, profit, shopping, and the demand that everybody have some "skin in the game." This comes in the form of outrageous premiums and co-pays, with the object being not to overuse one's insurance policy. The best thing about the ACA is its Medicaid expansion. 

 The Medicare for All plan just introduced in the Senate would even cover dentistry. Does Ross know that one reason poor young men can't get jobs is because of the poor state of their teeth? Just think what a great boost to the economy some basic preventive dental care would create.

If you want to have a healthy economy, the first thing you need is healthy people.

All the News That's Fit To Suppress

You might think that a Washington protest rally with only about two dozen participants wouldn't get much media attention. But since Saturday's event was organized by an anti-Trump, anti-Russian astroturf operation called March for Truth, funded by a group of plutocrats, "intelligence community" alumni, neocon war hawks, and centrist Democratic Party operatives, you would be thinking very incorrectly indeed.

Because of the importance of the big-money backers of Resistance, Inc., the New York Times plugged the "march" on its Facebook page before giving the small-ball event some truly big league coverage in the A-section pages of its Sunday edition. For without relentless publicity, how are we, the rag-tag citizens of America, supposed to remember that Russian Meddling in Our Democracy™ is the crisis of the century?

And with the Times' cooperative failure to reveal the names of the big players behind the scenes, the Powers That Be can cling to the illusion that they still actually have the power to mold public opinion, redirecting our angst from quotidian economic concerns to ginning up a patriotic fever for war against Russia. It's not for nothing that the newspaper also unceremoniously dumped both the public editor and the whole public editor desk last week. Accountability is so yesterday.

So we never learn from reading the fawning Times piece by Nathalie Nieves that one of the main organizers of #March For Truth is a writer and "activist" named Andrea Chalupa, who recently Tweeted, with no proof, that "WikiLeaks is a proven front for the Russian government."  Her sister, Alexandra, has been exposed as the probable developer of the discredited McCarthyite website PropOrNot, which published a blacklist of some 200 independent news organizations scurrilously accused of being "unwitting" agents for Vladimir Putin and stooges for Donald J. Trump.

Indeed, the Times has engaged in a virtual coverup of the #March for Truth astroturf group's provenance. Nieves' article mostly consists of interviews with a handful of "just plain folks" who were ostensibly demanding the truth about TrumPutin complicity. (Nieves has to grudgingly admit, however, that most of the couple-dozen participants had really shown to protest against other things, like Trump's war on the environment) Still, she valiantly offers that such cool celebrities as Debra Messing have given money to "the cause" - thereby tacitly legitimizing the effort with that all-important Hollywood gloss.

We must look to the#March For Truth website for supplemental facts. (To give Nieves credit, she provided a link) All you really need is a Google and a dream to figure out what the Times doesn't bother telling you.

Perhaps what is most revealing about this astroturf movement is the involvement of so many Hillary Clinton donors and operatives, including the Chalupa sisters just mentioned. This involvement gives further credence to the largely ignored tidbit in the book "Shattered" that #RussiaGate was, in fact, the brainchild of the failed Clinton campaign itself. 

Some of the "partners" listed on the #March for Truth website:

Town Hall Project: founded by former Iowa Clinton campaign field organizer Jimmy Dahman. To its credit, this site and its app have enabled people to easily find the congressional town hall nearest them to agitate for all manner of progressive things, including single payer health insurance. To his own discredit, though, Dahman is choosing to emphasize Russophobia rather than the fact-based fear of getting sick while uninsured or underinsured. 

 "Across the country, constituents have flooded town halls to let their representatives know that they want impartial investigations into Russian interference in our elections," Dahman rather falsely brags on the March For Truth website.

Pantsuit Nation: a Hillary Clinton Facebook-originated fan group, whose founder, Libby Chamberlain, is now being harshly criticized for personally cashing in on the first person hard-luck stories of poor and minority women she collated. Therefore, Pantsuit Nation has expanded its tarnished brand into some lucrative Russia-blaming to help keep the dream alive.

Swing Left: founded by Ethan Todras-Whitehall (writer/teacher), Joshua Krafchin (marketer and entrepreneur) and Miriam Stone (brand strategist) They appear to be an honest trio of citizens just looking for congressional redistricting who now find themselves "veal-penned" into the RussiaGate franchise. This is ironic, given that the DNC had studiously ignored them, and the pro-Clinton Daily Kos had even once accused them of being Russian agents. The name Krafchin had apparently made the Russophobic hairs on the back of Democratic Party necks stand up. But now that Swing Left has been patriotically vetted, it's all good.

The Opposition - this is just another news aggregation site for anti-Trump stories. Since no actual names are listed on this blog, inquiring minds want to know: is it Hillary prop, or not?

  Stand Up America -  Founded and bankrolled by failed multimillionaire centrist carpetbagger Sean Eldridge and directed by Jessica Adair, who most recently served as Hillary Clinton's Women's Vote director in Nevada. DJ Koessler, head of Clinton's digital ops in Brooklyn HQ, is the digital director. Sean Quinn, digital strategist, formerly worked for Anne Lewis Strategies, a Democratic Party fundraising firm, whose own director previously worked in the Bill Clinton White House. This #March sponsor is so incestuous that it deserves its own diagram on Muckety.

Rise To Run:  this is one of several mystery sponsors of March of Truthiness that are so dark and so shadowy that they don't even have anonymous websites, let alone listing any human beings on them. Somebody had better check to make sure this isn't a KGB plant.

Stand Up Republic - Founded by Evan McMullin, former clandestine ops officer at the CIA and later a Goldman Sachs banker before he ran for president as an independent conservative. Co-director is Mindy Kaling (nee Finn), who worked on the Bush and Romney campaigns. Their fervid, jingoistic statement on joining the Russophobic Resistance Fighters is a real keeper:

"Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn founded Stand Up Republic to help Americans stand up in defense of the fundamental principles that have made this country the true home of liberty and a source of hope for many around the world. Stand Up Republic will build and organize a grassroots movement in defense of liberty, equality, and truth in America. Our priorities will be to uphold the Constitution and defend the democratic norms and institutions upon which the protection of our basic rights depend.

We invite all Americans committed to these timeless truths to join us today in this hallowed cause."

Party Majority - This sponsor of #March for Truth is definitely not interested in campaign finance reform. We must, they say, take full advantage of campaign finance law as it exists, not as "we" might hope it to be. Grassroots SuperPac ia not an oxymoron! But even so, this sponsor of Truthiness lies by omission in refusing to list even one single name of a person or an address on its website. Dark is Light. Ignorance is Strength. Money is money.

Rock the Vote -- "We're smart. We're passionate. We're badass. We get the job done."

 This group says its duty to democracy is to line up "cultural leaders," celebrity endorsements and fundraising concerts. Look how well that worked out for Clinton in Cleveland at the Beyoncé gala.

Rock the Vote is run by former Chicago Democratic ward heeler Carolyn DeWitt, who has previously arranged DNC convention entertainment, groomed Democratic surrogates for media appearances, and coordinated messaging between the Democratic Party and Barack Obama's Organizing for America staffers. It was founded and bankrolled by Virgin Records mogul Jeff Ayeroff.

Oppstn.Org: Cool, edgy cyperspeak for "The Opposition," this is just another mainstream media aggregation site which "curates" anti-Trump articles and then rather dishonestly bylines them all with "By The Opposition." It thus turns out that linked corporate monstrosities like NBC-Comcast magically morph into The Opposition. 

Although he doesn't list his own name on his Oppstn site, Executive Director Jason Uhl does out himself on the #March for Truth sponsor page. A search reveals 16 different Jason Uhls on LinkedIn, none of whom appear to have a journalism background, nor even minimal stenographic credentials.

Meanwhile, Truth March fans are urged to Tweet and Facebook all their friends with quotes from such paragons of democracy as Obama Kill List creator and Bush torture-defender John Brennan:

The Deep State Speaketh

 *2/16 Update Below.

The first Deep State leg of the punishing journey that Senator Chuck Schumer called "six ways from Sunday" is now complete. The Intelligence Community has officially begun its vendetta against Donald J. Trump. 

Not that we should mourn the newly deposed General Mike Flynn, of course. The man was not just a loose cannon in a whole cabinet full of them, he was a human cluster bomb. A ground war with Iran on his watch was never a question of if, but of when. Flynn was practically salivating blood in his hateful haste to kill as many Muslims as possible. So good riddance to him.

 I have just a few thoughts on what could possibly be going on with the Consensuals of the Washington establishment.

1. They just really, viscerally hate Donald Trump's guts, as well as his unfiltered Queens-accented voice speaking uncomfortable truths about the Military Industrial Complex and American imperialism. Above all, they just hate that he is ruining their long-held plans for at least a warming of the cold war with Russia. They don't want all those troops in Norway and Estonia and Poland just going to waste. If there is a true peace with Putin, the American-based oil cartels might have to negotiate nicely with Russia over all that oil lurking in the Bering Sea. And they don't want to share.

2. The Establishment needs a Crisis in order to push through more bipartisan cuts to the social safety net. That crisis is Donald Trump himself. The Democrats, especially, are desperate for a platform to attract voters to their party. Since they are unwilling to suggest such nice things as universal health care, a guaranteed national income or living wage, a federal jobs program, progressive tax rates, a tax on high-speed trades, student loan forgiveness and free public college tuition, they'll go into default mode. They'll conduct multiple investigations into the Trump-Putin connection to redirect our attention into the more desirable realm of fear and trembling. We'll hear day after day that Trump is a traitor. We may never get to see proof in the way of his easily obtainable income tax returns. The Consensuals will never direct their friends in the Intelligence Community to hack into the IRS database, of course, because that would be as illegal as eavesdropping on Mike Flynn's phone calls with the Russkies.

3. The timing of Flynn's fall, on Valentine's Day, is heart-breakingly exquisite. It (perhaps inadvertently) makes us recall mob wars and massacres past. Still, it deflects public attention from the nearly simultaneous confirmation of Robber Baron Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, and the fact that a Democratic administration never prosecuted his fraudclosure scheme when it had the opportunity. It had something to do with campaign contributions.

4. If the Establishment is so concerned about the possible infiltration of Russia into our precious democratic system, why then was Putin pal Rex Tillerson so readily confirmed as Secretary of State? Could it be that the Senate loves Exxon-Mobil more than it hates Trump?

5. If the Obama administration was so fully aware of Trump's dangerous treachery, at least since last summer, why then did it complacently sit on its hands? They are either cynical self-dealers, or just plain stupid and inept.

 I have no way of knowing whether Trump is actually a Russian stooge or a Trojan horse or a traitor. But what is obvious is that mainstream media outlets are acting as Deep State mouthpieces. Reading the New York Times story linking Trump and his minions to Russia, I could almost envision a CIA agent or two dictating the copy to reporters as they typed feverishly away.

As in all previous churnalism which has sought to drum up Russophobia (which they now seek to integrate into #Resistance, Inc.)  the propaganda and the weasel-wording are blatant. The "current and past" government sources are all anonymous.

The Times article, for example, takes a sarcastic off-the-cuff remark about Hillary's emails made by Trump last summer and then clumsily links it to concurrent conversations that some of his associates were having with some unnamed Russians:

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The dismissal of Mike Flynn is all of a piece with the shocking "news" that a bunch of American plutocrats were doing business with a bunch of Russian plutocrats, as if this were a new state of affairs and not the decades-long result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US welcome mat being put out for the new Russian oligarchy to invest in everything from New York luxury real estate to oil pipelines to uranium mines in the American west.

 The Times piece smarmily concludes:

 The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

The Washington establishment doing battle with Satan himself still wouldn't negate the fact that they are using the slimy McCarthyite (and Stalinesque) tactic of guilt by association.

We the people must not be sucked in to this elite war as unwitting co-propagandists. We should be asking them "where's the meat?" at the same time that we relentlessly question why they are so hell-bent on permanent war, unconstitutional surveillance on ordinary citizens as well as powerful generals, and what, exactly, their power struggle has got to do with the rest of us.

Their struggle is not our struggle. Their prize is not our prize. Not by a long shot.

Update, 2/16: The Democratic Party's veal pen organizations are already asking for money for #TheResistance based primarily on the Trump administration's alleged Russia connection. The goal is for impeachment; social and economic justice issues are taking a back seat. In other words, we are supposed to put all our cash and our hopes into Congressional investigations rather than taking matters into our own hands by getting out on the streets. After all, the Consensuals don't want us to get too much of a taste for direct action, lest we start demanding pie in the sky like single payer, universal health coverage. And the worst part is that the Democratic Party wants us to align ourselves with the unaccountable right-wing Deep State to achieve "progressive" goals.
 
Concomitant with the New York Times "scoop" referenced above, these appeals began flying in to my inbox.

MoveOn.Org --  "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

That's what we all need to ask—and what Congress must investigate—in the wake of revelations that Trump knew for weeks about Michael Flynn's secret and likely illegal conversations with Russian officials.

People's Action (describes itself as a consortium of "grassroots" organizing groups headquartered in Chicago) --  "Until an investigation is completed, Trump's mandate is suspect.... We will not let a potentially illegitimate president cut Medicare, privatize Social Security, repeal the Affordable Care Act and deport millions of our neighbors without a fight.

(The wording of this is clumsy, if not itself a bit suspect. So, it would be O.K. with them for a "legitimate" president to cut the social safety net and deport millions of our neighbors, as Obama has already done?)

Color of Change --  "While Trump is lying about millions of voter fraud cases, the real threat to our democracy is  Putin's involvement in our election and Russia's illicit ties to Trump and his administration. But even more threatening is Congress' refusal to do anything about it. Black people have fought to make our democracy real and we won't stand for any threats, foreign or domestic, to our ability to participate in free and fair elections."

A further indication that Democratic Party leaders are scared that the rabble will go beyond its appointed duties and attack them as well as Republicans at town halls is Chuck Schumer's appeal for help from Bernie Sanders. It is now Sanders's duty to make all the activists sit down and shut up.

According to the Washington Post, the Wall Street-friendly senator was shaken when protesters had the gall to demonstrate outside his own private residence recently. What gives? This was supposed to be a resistance against Trump and nothing but Trump, and now the agitators are converging on blue states. Oh, the horror.

They basically explained to Bernie, it looks like you could be the person that could calm down and make sure their energy and all this enthusiasm is directed in all the right proper channels,” (West Virginia Senator Joe) Manchin said. “Bernie has a voice, and if [protesters] want to be active, then direct them to where the problem may be or where they anticipate a problem.”

While Sanders is staying mum on the request, he has not, thus far, formally requested that his supporters stay mum about anything.

Hillary Clinton: L'État, C'est Moi

Hillary Clinton is not accepting her defeat at the hammy hands of former friend and kleptocrat Donald Trump graciously.

The Empress-in-Exile is placing all the blame for her loss on the FBI and on Russia and on the media. Speaking on Thursday night to the same wealthy donors who'd brayed their appreciation of her dissing the working class as a "basket of deplorables" a few months ago, she brazenly announced that she, Hillary Clinton, is the United States personified.

 As reported by Amy Chozick of the New York Times: 

“Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Mrs. Clinton said.

They were her first public remarks since widespread reports that the Russian government was behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and Mr. Podesta, with the goal of influencing the election.

“Make no mistake, as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign,” Mrs. Clinton told the group, which collectively poured roughly $1 billion into her effort. “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation."

She said Russia's alleged theft and delivery of the emails to Wikileaks was a direct result of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "personal beef" with her over her criticism of his own rigging of parliamentary elections in 2011. She conveniently forgot to mention the meddling of her own State Department in Ukraine's "color revolution" along with her threat to impose a no-fly zone in Syria -- which is the same thing as declaring direct war on Russia.

Now that the Washington Post and the New York Times and the six media conglomerates which control 90% of all the information broadcast to the public have engaged on a concerted campaign to blame Russia for Donald Trump's victory, and the public seems to buying into Red Scare Redux, Hillary Clinton obviously now feels free to come out of the closet herself, joining the blame game personally and directly.

An attack on Hillary is an attack on the United States. Therefore, the implicit message is that in order to save the honor of the Empress-in-Exile, we must declare war on Russia.

 And they say Donald Trump is a narcissist?

Entitlement dies so hard. Plutocratic donors need to be soothed into thinking that their class war and the worst wealth inequality in modern history had nothing to do with Hillary's failure to win the hearts, minds and votes of deplorables of all ages, skin colors, ethnicities and genders. Meanwhile, some of her donors are themselves fair-weather friends, having gone to pre-parties at Trump Tower before attending Hillary's holiday gala in the Plaza Hotel, smack dab in the middle of the income disparity capital of the universe.

President Obama, after failing himself to sound the false alarm when he still had the chance, pre-election, is also coming around to embracing the Russophobic propaganda. He wants a full report from all 17 clans of the "intelligence community" on his desk by the time he leaves office for the safety of the golf course, the speaking circuit, the memoirs, and the raising of a billion dollars for his shrine to himself.

But even before receiving that alleged report, he is vowing retaliation in order to save the honor of the country, a/k/a Hillary and the Dismal Democrats. As reported by the Times White House mouthpiece about Obama's interview with the NPR White House mouthpiece:

The president discussed the potential for American retaliation with Steve Inskeep of NPR for an interview to air on Friday morning. “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our election,” Mr. Obama said, “we need to take action. And we will — at the time and place of our choosing.”

Could Obama be any more mealy-mouthed? You may or you may not learn of this counter-attack. And you probably won't, given that Obama doesn't want to open up the can of worms about Hillary America's meddling in Ukraine, and the proxy war against Putin in Syria. He certainly doesn't want to be called out as a hypocrite for his own recent brazen meddling in U.K. politics, when he warned Brits right before the Brexit vote that their failure to stay in the Eurozone would result in his shoving them to the back of the queue on trade with America.

Russophobia Made Simple

Uniting a torn electorate of American citizen-consumers against a common enemy, and diverting our attention away from the class war, and disguising the true predatory purpose of the American Deep State: that's hard even in the best of times. And these, the end-times of late capitalism, are some of the hardest and worst of the worst of times.

It's especially hard when the Deep State -- or what is grotesquely called the "intelligence community" -- seems to be cracking up itself. The Clinton/Obama/CIA faction wants the enemy to be Russia, and the Trump/crony capitalist/anti-CIA faction is aiming its own beady sights on China. 

Thanks to the proto-fascist nature of American democracy itself, no candidate with a peace platform has ever been allowed anywhere near the exclusive electoral process. Jill Stein of the pacifist Green Party got some belated corporate press only because of her failed ballot recount campaign in aid of Hillary Clinton.

Just when we thought that the Neoliberal Death Match -- or what is grotesquely called a democratic presidential campaign -- was finally over, the curtain is now rising with a vengeance on Act Two of the Battle of the Oligarchs.

Pouncing on the undeniable fact that Hillary Clinton received 2.7 million more votes than Donald Trump, this whole democracy experiment is being relitigated in the court of public opinion. The arcane Electoral College has become such a "thing" that the Democrats and some GOP'ers are pressuring its members to disregard the votes of the Rust Belt states that barely nudged Trump over the finish line. The electors' mission, if they choose to accept it, is to become conscientious objectors to Trump's war on neoliberal decency.

The implicit message is that Donald Trump is a traitor. And if the electors do their sworn Constitutional duty and vote a traitor into office, then his Putinesque blood will be on their hands. It's the same gaslighting technique that was used on ordinary voters throughout the interminable campaign season. A vote for Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or None of the Above was an act of rank treason and a sure sign that you were a tool of Vladimir Putin.

The fact that the orchestrated campaign to subject the electors to top-secret intelligence briefings in an effort to guilt them into changing their votes is "bipartisan" should be the first clue that denying the presidency to Trump is not so much a matter of the public interest as it is of the corporate private interest. A cabal of Deep State centrist Democrats and Republican Neocons are joining forces in an attempt to, at the very least, wound Trump before his inauguration. They are seething that Hillary Clinton's imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria as an escalation in the war on Putin was thwarted by the very Pied Piper candidate they propped up as an easy target for the hawks.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) and  multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are finding common cause with Republican war hawks John McCain and Lindsay Graham in drumming up a new surge of Russophobia. It helps that Nancy's daughter Christine is herself an appointed elector.

To help sway public opinion toward overturning the vote, the elitist obsession with Russia as the enemy to end all enemies is everywhere you look.

If you're a reasonably sane person, you're probably scared to death that Trump's nomination of the Exxon-Mobil CEO to head the State Department will rev up the already turbo-charged destruction of the planet by fossil fuels. But the Anthropocene epoch and mass extinctions aren't what the New York Times wants you to be afraid of. The Times wants you to be afraid of those damned Russians.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday officially selected Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state. In saying he will nominate Mr. Tillerson, the president-elect is dismissing bipartisan concerns that the globe-trotting leader of an energy giant has a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia.

(snip)

In the past several days, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had warned that Mr. Tillerson would face intense scrutiny over his two-decade relationship with Russia, which awarded him its Order of Friendship in 2013, and with Mr. Putin.

The hearings will also put a focus on Exxon Mobil’s business dealings with Moscow. The company has billions of dollars in oil contracts that can go forward only if the United States lifts sanctions against Russia, and Mr. Tillerson’s stake in Russia’s energy industry could create a very blurry line between his interests as an oilman and his role as America’s leading diplomat.

So it's not that you and I and our children and our grandchildren and all the animals and plants will be dying more quickly if an oil magnate is granted even more power to physically damage us. It's that one faction of obscenely wealthy people doesn't want another faction of obscenely wealthy people to beat them in the greed sweepstakes.

And never mind that the main purpose of the State Department is to grease the skids for and ensure the safety of multinational corporations and the banking mafia wanting to do business abroad. The Times doesn't mention that the State Department acts as the broker for the annual sales of billions of dollars' worth of arms and war materials to such autocratic regimes as Saudi Arabia. State is the international counterpart of the Health and Human Services Administration. It does corporate welfare on a grand, global scale. It makes plunder easier for the plunderers.

The world is already ruled by 62 billionaires who own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. So to tamp down the resulting domestic unrest, our rulers and their propagandists are singling out just one faraway oligarch in hopes of limiting the populist wrath here at home.

Donald Trump, for his part, is bringing the whole sordid pathocratic process out into the open. He is not showing due deference to the Intelligence Community family and to establishment media. And that is making the ruling class very, very nervous. Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell is even hysterically calling the alleged meddling of Russians "the political equivalent of 9/11." (Never mind the CIA's own seven decades of international political meddling and orchestrated coups.)

This bluster and disrespect from an autocratic president-elect makes it so much harder for the ruling class to manufacture public consent. No wonder that they are also freaking out about what we call independent investigatory journalism, and they call "fake news." Their control of "the narrative" is slipping, so they're reduced to conflating scurrilous internet rumor-mill sites with legitimate fact-based and free-thinking journalistic outlets with the chutzpah to be critical of the wrong things.

The New York Times is not, of course, the only site for all the corporate Russophobia that's fit to print. 

Here's a sampling of today's curiously similar headlines, which fear-monger not over climate change and pollution, but over the specter of TrumPutin:

"Moscow's Mule"; "Kremlin Rejoices"; "Bipartisan Alarm Over Ties to Moscow" -- Huffington Post.

"Rex Tillerson: An Appointment that Confirms Putin's Election Win" -- The Guardian

"Donald Trump's pick for secretary of state is a Putin-friendly Exxon CEO" -- Vox

"Graham Wants Tillerson's Russia Ties Front and Center" -- Politico.

"McCain Voices Concerns About Tillerson's Ties to Putin" -- The Hill

****

  It's only when its status as the world's sole Superpower is even mildly threatened that the United States Uniparty takes a stand against a multinational corporation like Exxon.

For when the oil behemoth wants to plunder and bribe in other autocracies, or wherever China has aimed its capitalistic sights, the smoky skies are the limit. The American ruling class usually has no problem with Tillerson and his ilk at all. Take the whole continent of Africa, for instance.

The Obamas and the Bushes met up in Tanzania in 2013 to help spread the oily Exxon goodness around. The wives of the presidents enthusiastically gave identity-politics cover to the extraction of that continent's rich natural reserves by the greedy oil conglomerate. They cast the plunder as the perfect trickle-down "women's opportunity" as they commiserated like desperate housewives over their First Lady status and their silly old hubbies.

The confab of wives was such a resounding P.R. success for the giant polluter that Michelle Obama and George and Laura Bush reunited in Washington the following year for a "Spousal Summit" orchestrated and funded, in large part, by Exxon-Mobil. They wanted to let us know that all the African first ladies were also totally on board with the plunder of their continent. It's all about the freedom of oligarchs to extract and exploit while donating a little medication and genetically modified seed and allowing entrepreneurial womenfolk the chance to learn and to read.... as they gasp for air and struggle to find a source of unpolluted drinking water for themselves and their families.

Under Obama, the American militarization of the continent known as Africom continues apace. How else to protect multinationals like Exxon-Mobil from "militants?" The conglomerate just recently "discovered" another billion barrels of oil off the Nigerian coast. Somebody (the US State Dept, the CIA and the Pentagon) has to protect their tender hides and grasping tentacles. Somebody has to hold them harmless for their serial destruction of soil, water and forests.

President Obama also never had a problem with Exxon-Mobil when it's wanted to destroy the environment in our own backyard, either. Just a few years after the worst oil explosion disaster in history continues to inflict ongoing damage in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama granted Putin-loving Tillerson's company new drilling leases in the Gulf for the proposed extraction of 172 million barrels of oil. 

The Democrats' and some Republicans' opposition to Tillerson as Secretary of State has nothing to do with concern for the environment and the obscene corporate welfare for polluters who dictate government policy. After all, Obama's own energy secretary, Sally Jewell, came through the revolving door from Exxon Mobil when it was still known as Mobil.

This is all about a tiny group of plutocrats grasping and grabbing for their share of the global pie. These bullies don't like to share, even with each other. And forget about the other 99.9% of the population. The rest of us are lucky get a few crumbs of oily political P.R. along with the foul water and the dirty air and the damaged lungs.

But never forget: the only thing we have to fear is Putin himself.