From Plymouth Rock To Standing Rock

It's that most exceptionally American time of the year, when we bow our heads in thanks, celebrating the birth legend of the great United States imperium. It's time to get all nostalgic about the myth of the libertarian pilgrims who fled British persecution only to co-opt, evict and exterminate the aboriginal people in the name of God and greed and freedom.

Even if you choose to ignore the historical propaganda, and use the day as an excuse to get together with friends and family, this whole Thanksgiving bounty thing is kind of hard to take if you live in Flint, Michigan, and your water is still poisoned by lead. While our president was on his grandiloquent farewell tour of the world last week, singing the praises of American democracy, it took a lawsuit and a federal judge to order the government to deliver more bottled water to Flint residents by a December 16th deadline. Democracy apparently doe not involve the president ordering the Army Corps of Engineers into Flint to begin immediate emergency work to replace the corroded water delivery system.

In the true spirit of the hegemonic holiday, government officials are actually appealing this very modest and humane judicial order, saying that it would be just too hard to deliver life-sustaining water door to door. If residents are too old, too sick, too language-deprived, too transportation-deprived, or too intellectually deprived to get themselves to a bottled water distribution center or to install a cheap ineffectual plastic filter on their faucets, then too bad for them. From the Detroit News:  

State officials argued the court order would require a “Herculean effort” equivalent to a large-scale military operation and cost the state at least $10.45 million a month, or $125 million annually. For more than a year, Flint’s residents have been advised against drinking their tap water without a filter due to dangerously high lead levels.

In a 37-page opinion, Lawson ordered home delivery of four cases of water per resident each week unless state and city officials can verify each resident has a properly installed and maintained faucet water filter.
The delivery order “increases the scope of the state’s emergency response to an unnecessary and insurmountable degree, particularly in light of the injunction’s time constraints,” attorneys wrote.

America's forced colonization and re-colonization by deregulated puritanical plunderers high on crack capitalism continues unabated. Thanks to the 2008 financial collapse that they orchestrated, grim reapers in suits are seizing distressed property for a song and then baiting inviting the distressed multitudes to partake of their leavings. (Drinking water is extra, however, and not only in Flint. If you can't pay your privatized water bill, you'll just have to swallow your stuffing crumbs dry.)

Water is only free when it is blasted out of a military cannon at the indigenous Americans and environmentalists currently protesting an oil pipeline in sub-freezing North Dakota. 

Just in time for Thanksgiving, law enforcers acting in the service of a few greedy oil company millionaires have escalated their attacks on unarmed citizens attempting to block construction of the polluting project. Police injured another 160 people over the weekend with the surplus military grade weaponry provided to them by the Obama administration. They used rubber bullets, percussion grenades, and tear gas, as well as highly pressured water which freezes skin upon contact. One woman was so seriously hurt that she might lose an arm. The Guardian reported:

Sophia Wilansky, an environmental activist from New York, was hospitalized in Minneapolis where surgeons are attempting to repair a severe injury to her left arm that destroyed arteries, nerves, muscle, soft tissue and bone, according to her father. She remains at risk of amputation, and if the arm is salvaged, it will probably have very limited functionality.
Wayne Wilansky, her father, contends that the injury was caused by an exploding concussion grenade thrown by law enforcement, who also deployed teargas, rubber bullets and a water cannon on protesters during a tense standoff on a bridge Sunday night.
But North Dakota law enforcement officers have aggressively countered Wilansky’s account, releasing multiple statements accusing protesters of setting off an explosion.

( Whether it's in Michigan or in North Dakota, or wherever powerful sadists roam free and unaccountable, have you noticed how the technique of victim-blaming is always at the top of their list of talking points?)

The nearly completed pipeline is meant to transport crude oil across the ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, and residents fear that the project will contaminate their drinking water. They're trying, to no avail thus far, to get the Obama administration to deny the Dakota Access company permits to extend the pipeline across the Missouri River. 

In a powerful editorial published today, the New York Times noted that this kind of cruel oppression against indigenous Americans has been going on for centuries. And corporate police state and media efforts to portray the protesters in a bad light is having the exact opposite effect:  

The department’s video was meant to portray the protesters as dangerous troublemakers, but the photos and videos in news reports suggest a more familiar story — an imbalance of power, where law enforcement fiercely defends property rights against protesters’ claims of environmental protection and the rights of indigenous people. American Indians have seen this sort of drama unfold for centuries — native demands meeting brute force against a backdrop of folly — in this case, the pursuit of fossil fuels at a time of sagging oil demand and global climatic peril.

The Army Corps of Engineers has called for more study and input from the tribe before it decides on whether to grant a permit. The pipeline company has asked a federal judge to give it the right to proceed with its plan to lay pipe under the river. There is no firm timeline for either decision.

Obama, meanwhile, cluckily pardoned one last Thanksgiving turkey as he basked in his twilight glow of record high public approval ratings. Cynically ignoring Flint and Standing Rock and the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history, he employed the slimy political tactic of red herring-with-wattles:

Tomorrow is one of the best days of the year to be an American. It’s a day to count our blessings, spend time with the ones we love, and enjoy some good food and some great company. But it’s also one of the worst days of the year to be a turkey. They don’t have it so good.

It could always be worse, proles. Put yourselves in the place of a Butterball, and you'll swear that your Flint drinking water is champagne, and that police blasts from a water cannon are a spa treatment.

Before long, Obama will passive-aggressively hand off the ultimate decisions on Standing Rock and Flint to his successor. Donald Trump, you might remember, wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. The new president is as unabashedly all-American as they come. Oh, and he just happens to have some of his own plundered money invested in the Dakota Access Pipeline, whose owners also conveniently donated to his campaign. 

Terrorism as the profiteers' weapon of choice is a grand American tradition that started the minute Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. Glorious greed is the whole basis of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. It's as bald and ugly as an obese plucked turkey.

  From Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States":

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.

 The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

 The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.

 A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narraganset Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots. As Governor Winthrop wrote: "They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampum for damages, etc. and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force." 

The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: "The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully... -"

And so it went. Pequot crops were slashed and burned, Pequot people died of European diseases if they didn't starve first, and their homes were razed to the ground, just like in blighted urban areas and foreclosed Rust Belt towns in the re-colonized States of the Homeland. The original assault against the native population was so intense and so thorough that in the end, perhaps a couple dozen inhabitants out of an original population of many thousands remained in any given locale. 

So let's contemplate how it felt, and how it still does feel for so many of us, to actually be on the receiving end of the imperialism that made this country so special.

But since I'm such a sucker for alternative history:

Wednesday (playing "Pocahontas")): Wait!

 Amanda: (a modern lady-who-lunches in the audience) What?

  Wednesday: We cannot break bread with you.

  Amanda: (playing Sarah, a pilgrim lady-who-lunches) Huh? Becky, what's going on?

  Becky: [whispered] Wednesday!

  Wednesday: You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."

  Amanda: Gary, she's changing the words.

  Wednesday: And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground. 

*** 

Here's wishing all my readers a very peaceful holiday weekend and a heartfelt thank you for your continuing interest and support. 

Dementia '16

The election of Donald Trump was not entirely a positive act of political free will. Leaving aside the fact that barely a quarter of eligible Americans voted for him, his victory had less to do with optimism that things will change, and more to do with a profound sense of despair that they ever can. The Electoral College victory also speaks to the passive-aggressive despair and disgust of the estimated half of eligible voters who chose to boycott the election between two of the most unpopular ruling class candidates in modern history.

  The election of Donald Trump might even be considered an outbreak of mass murder-suicide. The working class refugees who entered his hell abandoned all hope a long time ago. Maybe they figured they might as well take everybody down with them and check out quickly, rather than linger on, hooked up to the drip-drip-drip of the torturous neoliberal therapy prescribed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

For far too many of us, having hope and staying on the sunny side of life has become too damned exhausting. Pollyanna has been told in no uncertain terms to go take a hike. Why delay the inevitable? Bring on the noise, bring on the Trump.

Political theorist and media critic Franco "Bifo" Berardi writes pithily about the parallel right-wing depressive populism emerging in Europe:

Europe is a country of old people groping desperately for their lives, not out of love, but for property. A country of old people needing young nurses from the Philippines, Moldavia and Morocco; old idiots tormented by despising the agility of those young people, people who have suffered so much at our hands that they don't fear any more suffering, and don't care about the punishment of European law. Senile dementia (loss of memory, irrational fear of the unknown) is spreading in every generational stratum of European society, mentally frail and socially tired. Young voters who vote for rightest nationalist parties are no less obtuse than the frightened elderly, just as unable to think or find a way out of their conformism.

Berardi is not optimistic about how Trumpism and its global variants will play out. Everywhere we look, there are real and threatened pogroms, mass violence, inter-ethnic civil wars, unending global wars. Neoliberal pundits moan about divisiveness, but they seem unwilling or unable to ascribe it to the deadly, soul-destroying effects of plundering hyper-capitalism and the most extreme, demented wealth inequality in world history. The latest Oxfam report has 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the global population.

What Berardi calls "the ideology of unbounded growth and the cult of aggressive competition" must be replaced by a cultural revolution in basic human values. The brutalistic acquisition of money and property as ends in themselves, to which even the hopeless should aspire, has to give way to a program of sharing and solidarity.

It's not enough to shriek our outrage at Trump's daily outrages. It's not enough to vow that we will simply "fight back" against his personal brand of corruption, greed, racism and xenophobia. We have to acknowledge the fact that he himself is not the disease, but rather the symptom, or excrescence, of the disease. He ranks nowhere near those top 62 billionaires. But if he "succeeds" in his dystopian vision of the US presidency as the ultimate public-private partnership, he could well end up outdoing Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, the Waltons, and yes... even Vladimir Putin himself.

So, do you think it's therefore mentally healthy to put our faith in the sudden concern-trolling efforts of the deposed Democratic Party to vanquish Donald Trump? As the past eight years of the Obama administration have all too sadly shown, corporatism with a happy liberal face certainly did not prevent the rise of Trumpism. To the contrary, Obama's party has enabled and encouraged Donald Trump. He was their Pied Piper candidate. And just like in the fairy tale, now they think that they can avoid paying him.

The buzz that Barack Obama and his corporate backers and flunkies will use his post-presidency to form some sort of Democratic  government-in-exile, a resistance movement of wealthy identity-politics freedom fighters, would be laughable were it not so cynically dangerous.

 As political philosopher Simone Weil observed, political parties exist for four main reasons: to win power, to retain power, to raise a ton of money, and to attract new members.

And as his administration has proven, and Trump's administration is bound to horrifically prove, once pseudo-populists backed by establishment parties gain power, campaign promises for governance in the public interest quickly go by the wayside.  So are we really so terminally demented that we will continue to believe in Barack Obama's relentless propaganda even as we disavow Trump's?

Just look at the top consigliere of Obama's reanimated personality cult of a "political movement."

Multimillionaire David Plouffe cashed in on his own Obama service to become the public relations guru for Uber when its own Trump-like CEO was caught being a misogynist and tax evader. Once Plouffe performed some good liberal damage control in the mass media, he was immediately promoted to board member and legal adviser of the multinational corporation.  It's now his job to keep a happy face on the so-called "ride-sharing" multinational venture, which brags about allowing desperate victims of neoliberalism to become their own cab companies -- at least until the actual company unleashes its demented fleet of self-driving cars.

The business model of Uber actually has much in common with Donald Trump's business model.  Like Donald, Inc. Uber avoids paying the standard transportation licensing fees and liability insurance and other taxes which historically have allowed municipalities to build and maintain their roads, bridges and other infrastructure. This business model leaves ordinary people holding the bag so that Plouffe and Trump and the various plutocratic investors can laugh all the way to the bank.

Uber is just one of the latest clever exploitative ways to socialize the risks and privatize the gains.

Meanwhile, here's some of what Pollyanna Obama told his pal Plouffe and a phone audience of "volunteers" in an Organizing for Action (OFA) conference call last week: 

So stay close to each other.  Generate ideas.  Take some time to reflect and let’s brainstorm in terms of how you're going to work together to move forward.  Understand that I'm going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen.  But that's not so far off.  It's basically six, eight weeks away.  And I will have some time for vacation, but you're going to see me early next year, and we're going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do. 

In the meantime, make sure that you stay involved locally.  Find organizations that are speaking to your passions.  Continue to be engaged with OFA around issues that -- or just information and networking and ideas-sharing that can be done.  And if you do those things, I promise you that next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you, and the clouds are going to start parting and the sun is going to come back out, and we're going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we've been doing all these years before.

Among the amazing sunny stuff which he enlisted unpaid Obamabots to do for him was to market the job-destroying, wage-suppressing, environment-killing corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership to their unsuspecting friends and neighbors. I listened in on an OFA conference call on that topic last year. You can read a rough, scary transcript of the demented conversation here.

 And they say that Trump voters are delusional? There's plenty of authoritarianism and propaganda to go around. It is truly bipartisan in its utter brutality.  Luckily, the xenophobic Trumpian propaganda on the TPP ended up prevailing over the lovey-dovey Obamian propaganda on the TPP, and the deal is as good as dead. 

For now, anyway. The undead always seem to have this strange way of waking up just when you least expect it.

Speaking of which, Obama told his biographer, The New Yorker's David Remnick, that one of his main post-presidential goals is to create clones of himself and Michelle. I kid you not:

I’ll be fifty-five when I leave”—he knocked on a wooden end table—“assuming that I get a couple more decades of good health, at least, then I think both Michelle and I are interested in creating platforms that train, empower, network, boost the next generation of leadership. And I think that, whatever shape my Presidential center takes, I’m less interested in a building and campaign posters and Michelle’s dresses, although I think it’s fair to say that Michelle’s dresses will be the biggest draw by a huge margin. But what we’ll be most interested in is programming that helps the next Michelle Obama or the next Barack Obama, who right now is sitting out there and has no idea how to make their ideals live, isn’t quite sure what to do—to give them resources and ways to think about social change.”

If he were a true progressive, he would have called for better public education with higher pay for unionized teachers and curricula to hone critical thinking skills. He would have called for a global wealth tax on billionaires, a guaranteed federal housing policy, Medicare for All, and a guaranteed living wage or income to help all those budding public servants, and all the families of those budding public servants. Because if the next Barack and the next Michelle are cold and hungry and depressed, being unsure about what to do will be the least of their worries. As Bifo Berardi says, they first have to find a way out of neoliberal conformism and un-thought.

If Obama simply aims to groom his de-mented acolytes by steering them toward just the right FIRE sector funding for malleable politicians, and continues to propagandize about the social benefits of capitalism on crack, I won't be at all surprised.

And if people (and I mainly refer to the churnalists of the consolidated media) continue to give credence to the neoliberal Obama brand, then I have a driverless Uber car careening over a rickety bridge reinforced by cheap Chinese steel to sell them. It's built by $10-an-hour, non-union, no-benefit workers whose pensions were looted a long time ago by the same Wall Street investors cashing in on their sweat and tears and blood all over again. Their bridge spans a polluted river all the way to the twin deregulated empires of Kochtopia and Trumpistan.

Welcome to the new, improved New Abnormal.

 The corporate media, now engaged in their own self-pitying frenzy of victimhood-by-Trump, advise liberals to weep for the cameras, listen to soothing music, wear chic safety pins to show silent smarmy solidarity with the Vulnerables, and of course, shop. And then all hail the conquering public relations hero Barack Obama. And while you're waiting for his second coming, ponder the published reports that, as a self-anointed speaker to our passions, Chelsea Clinton is being groomed for Congress.

We have a choice. Run for the hills and wallow in terminal depression. Or resist, rebel, and retool. Give sanity a chance. Re-mentia, not de-mentia.

Donald the Dread

This might sound perverse, but as part of my post-Trump therapy I've been reading a biography of Ivan the Terrible.

No, I am not steeling myself for the dark days when the American Tsar (Caesar) and his corporate coalition of Oprichniki flay his political opponents alive before poking holes in the icy Potomac to dispose of their dismembered bodies. (especially since it's been the Hottest Year on Record for each of the last several hot years.) And I really doubt that Trump will personally murder one of his own sons and drink his blood for dessert. (although, once Obama hands over his unrevised Drone Kill List playbook to Trump, never say never. A taste for blood is said to be an acquired one)

But there are disturbing similarities between the dead autocrat and the would-be living autocrat.

Both are clinical paranoiacs, alternately attracted to and repelled by their various advisers --  who always run the risk of banishment or worse whenever their thin-skinned leader inevitably suffers one of those twittering fits of pique.

 So, to all the liberal pundits out there, clutching their pearls and biting their nails over every Trump appointment or rumored appointment:  Just wait a short attention-spanned Trumpian minute. Where Chris Christie went, so too may eventually go Steve Bannon and the rest of Trump's mutant coalition of alt-right racists, Ayn Rand ideologues and demented military men.

I learned from my reading that just like Donald, Ivan was a beauty contest junkie/owner/operator. He chose each of his suspiciously short-lived wives from "bride-shows." After his minions scoured the Russian countryside in search of babes to be brought back to Moscow, he ordered the terrified women stripped naked for his inspection. Just like Donald, he had his own rating system.  Among his diplomatic skills was the demand that the wife of the Swedish king be awarded to him as the price of a truce between the two realms.  (She voluntarily opted for prison.)

Toward the end of his sadistic reign, Ivan even made some moves (from afar, through her trade reps) on Elizabeth I of England. When she politely rebuffed him, he pressed her for the hand of one of her younger relatives. The trade rep suggested a young niece named Mary. Horrified, the canny but diplomatic Elizabeth sent word to Ivan that Mary was sadly not only not a Perfect Ten, she was scarred by smallpox. This was a lie, but it was more than enough to scare Ivan away forever. 

Like Ivan, Donald is a kleptocrat. Ivan the Terrible looted the rich as well as the peasants. Donald the Dread has been looting ordinary American taxpayers as well as wealthy investors for decades, via his status as a tax-dodging indebted billionaire real estate speculator holding all his bankers hostage. If he fails, they all fail. And that is probably what Barack Obama meant when he said that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. America, of course, is code for the oligarchy.

Like Ivan before him, Donald Trump is a feared man, but even his base of voters and the powerful men and women now groveling at his gilded feet for a job in his administration don't actually love, or even like him.

Finally, the bland smiley politician-face is in neither man's limited repertoire of expressions.

 

I suspect that before too long, Donald's only true believers will be his wife and his children. Ivan's only true believers were the occasional wife and the rare surviving child.

At least, unlike in Ivan's 16th century Russia, we do have a Constitution and alleged checks and balances in the form of a Congress and a court system. All that Ivan's subjects had to protect them was a corrupt Church and a simpering monk or two to keep him under control at extremely rare intervals. Despite his atrocities, he believed in God and quoted the Bible. He simply thought that a stint in Hell didn't apply to him, the anointed one.

Donald is more into the modern capitalist worship of Mammon, and rarely if ever utters the standard platitude "God Bless America." He is the only god he needs. It will be interesting to see whether he continues the presidential tradition of the Prayer Breakfast, the annual gala for global bigwigs to do their wheeling and dealing and looting in the name of the lord. He might just end up sending his theocratic veep Mike Pence in his stead.

So, although Sinclair Lewis's warning that "It" (fascism minus the anesthetizing liberal sheen) does indeed appear to be happening here, "It" will not likely happen overnight. We might just succeed in barely hanging on by our fingernails as we hope that once Trump wears out his welcome, he won't be succeeded by another Wall Street Democrat.

And that brings me to  Paul Krugman's premature Elegy for Medicare, published in today's New York Times. As I have written previously, because it will not be the Clintons triangulating merrily and stealthily with the Republicans in the latest round of safety net slashings, those battered, semi-delusional Democrats might actually screw up the gumption (along with their base) to "fight back" against Trump and his own mad monk, that simpering Ayn Rand fanboy named Paul Ryan.

But who's counting on the corporate Democrats, or Krugman's feeble boast that pundits like him are the only antidote to Republican lies? The same columnist who so sneeringly sniped against Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All proposals now purports to be an ardent defender of Medicare for the Few. Krugman sprays out his cheap, sickly-sweet room freshener to vie with Trump's own rancid skunk cabbage patch for just the right neoliberal share of the mass asphyxia.

My published comment:

The Howard Zinn aphorism "what matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but who is marching outside the White House" has never been truer or more urgent.

In the face of the almost unbelievable eagerness of the political leadership to "work with" Donald the Dread, it is imperative for the three-quarters of the electorate who DID NOT vote for him to make our voices heard.

It's heartening that a coalition of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street activists staged a sit-down in Minority Leader-elect Chuck Schumer's office this week. And that thousands of high school students are leaving their places of learning and closing down highways to protest looming deportations and threats to climate change agreements. Young people are learning the most valuable lesson possible: they're learning that they have power and agency.

It's up to all of us to strike fear into the alleged hearts of those in Congress with a sudden psychopathic hankering to do business with a psychopath. If they won't protect Medicare and Social Security and other safety net programs out of a sense of altruism and duty, then perhaps they'll do the right thing out of fear of losing their cushy seats.

Trump is beyond redemption. This is a guy who once cut off his own sick nephew's health insurance when Fred Trump neglected to provide for it in his will.

It was only bad publicity that eventually changed his mind.

So let's make Trump and his Ayn Rand co-conspirators an offer they can't refuse.

And here's the excellent riposte from Meredith-NYC:

 Lack of affordable health insurance still afflicts millions, as premiums rise, or insurance co’s pull out. Families deprived of bread winners to illness, or who have to pay for their elders' soaring medical costs, can lose what security they’ve managed to build up in our Darwinian economic system.

But Krugman is still not giving us info on many other countries, where citizens of all ages, working or not, pay their taxes for and use their medical services —at much less expense than ACA. US Medicare and the supplemental still cost hefty monthly premiums.

He avoids discussing America’s basic flaw---health care as a maximum profit center. And contrast this with govts abroad who negotiate insurance costs, or are single payer. Even their rw parties don’t aim to destroy this. Backward America needs these role models publicized by the media, to demand reform.

A friend in his 30s complains of having to read through dozens of pages of documents to choose his insurance enrollment. And it’s complicated legalese---what does he have to pay for basic catastrophic coverage if he gets hit by a bus? And if he’s traveling and needs emergency care, how does he know a nearby hospital is in his network? He can’t know. So if he’s hit by a bus out of town, he may also be hit by tens of thousands in expenses as well.

Yes, bash Trumpf, but how can Americans demand standards common in the rest of the civilized world, if our liberals with a conscience don’t even use this in their arguments?

Some Propagandists Are More Equal Than Others

President Obama momentarily forgot his conciliatory overtures to President-elect Trump the other day as he grasped at yet another straw man to blame for the ignominious defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Not only did the Real Media fall down on their assigned job of propagandizing Hillary or Bust, complained Obama, but something called "Fake News" has arisen from the Internet swamp and gobbled up all our brains. This sad state of affairs has even taken the self-burnished luster right off his own final propaganda tour of the globe.

As a stalwart example of Real Media in the service of the powerful, the New York Times was its usual commiserating self as it reported on Obama's joint press conference Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

But instead of basking in the glow of his valedictory tour of Europe, Mr. Obama used the moment to make a passionate and pointed attack on bogus news stories disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms, twice calling such false reports a threat to democracy in his hourlong news conference.

(snip)

 “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” Mr. Obama said. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”

Thank goodness that Obama's own packaged reporting on the Athens leg of his grandiose tour was so outstanding. His press office sent out the equivalent of millions of pretty "wish you were here" postcards of him touring Greek ruins and antiquities. Recipients of his travel diary were gratifyingly shielded from unpleasant scenes of 7,000 desperate and angry Greek citizens being tear-gassed and beaten in the streets mere blocks from his heavily fortified seaside hotel. The people were democratically protesting both American militarism and the austerity measures inflicted upon them by the global banking elite, which Obama has so ably represented and protected during his eight years in office.

Obama knows very well what, and whom, to protect.

So here's what he wants you to watch on TV and read about on the Internet:

The Well-Packaged President

 “And so when you visit a site like this not only are you getting a better understanding of Greece and Western culture but you’re also sending a signal of the continuity that exists between what happened here, the speeches of Pericles, and what happened with our Founding Fathers.

“And it’s a very important role for the President of the United States to send a signal to the world that their culture, their traditions, their heritage, their monuments, are something of value, and are precious, and that we have learned from them." 

 Despite all the noise from the Real Media, its Nate Silver-ized signalling of probabilities and statistics failed abysmally during the recent election. But never mind all that. Obama will keep sending out his own magical signals in hopes of beating alt-Fake News in the brain-gobbling sweepstakes.

And here's the part of the presidential visit that your virtue-signalling Tour Guide to Democracy studiously ignored, and what he'd prefer you to miss as well. Monuments and statues and ancient literature co-opted in the service of self-serving American propaganda are apparently more valuable and precious to Obama than hungry and desperate modern-day human bodies:

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama’s visit to Greece on Tuesday was met by angry protesters held back by riot police firing tear gas. About 7,000 people marched through central Athens while Obama attended a banquet at the presidential mansion just a few miles away. Hooded protesters and members of the Communist Party held up signs reading “We don’t need protectors,” “Yankees go home” and “Unwanted,” while some demonstrators tried to break through police cordons to get to the U.S. embassy. The protest saw violent clashes, with some demonstrators throwing petrol bombs at police. While Obama met with Greek leaders to express support for the debt-stricken country, the protesters appeared to be angry about the timing of the visit. Obama, the first U.S. president to visit Athens since Bill Clinton in 1999, was in town just two days before the anniversary of a 1973 revolt that helped oust a military junta backed by the U.S.

And from Obama's rarified alternate universe of approved bogus news:

 Above, Beyond, and Away From It All

a

 "Because what that does then is send a strong signal around the world that we view ourselves as part of a broader humanity and a community of nations that can work together to solve problems and lift up what’s best in humanity.”

 And the last signalling word from the Real World:

Nick Kristof Versus the Poor People

Barely two weeks after New York Times columnist and helicopter humanitarian Nicholas Kristof blasted the poor for smoking too much pot and having too many TVs, one of his targets had the gall to sneak into his unlocked Philadelphia hotel room on Saturday morning. Kristof had neglected to completely shut the door when he went down to the lobby to get some coffee.

But never fear. When Kristof returned and confronted the burglar holding the still-sleeping Mrs. Kristof's purse, he threatened to throw his hot coffee right at the culprit. When the man dropped the purse and fled the premises, our intrepid columnist immediately gave chase while his wife called security.

Kristof didn't even need to think twice. After all, he was in the City of Brotherly Love for a meeting of the American Philosophical Society.

I chase after him, hot on his heels.

“I’ll stab you with a knife if you keep coming,” he shouts at me. I don’t see a knife but I stay a couple of paces behind him just in case. At the second floor, he exits the stairwell. It’s the restaurant level, and he barrels through a screen into the restaurant, sending it crashing to the floor. I chase after him and shout at a horrified waitress to call security. We rush past her and now he takes the main grand staircase into the lobby. At this point, with other people nearby and not wanting him to escape out the main door, I jump him. There’s a tussle, and I pin him in a full nelson. (This is less heroic than it sounds, because he’s scrawny; I only tackle thieves who are smaller than me.)

It's the same way that he only tackles greedy TV owners who are poorer than he.

Last month, it wasn't a homeless man who threatened Kristof, but the stereotypical pit bull terrier in an unkempt front yard in Arkansas, where he had helicoptered down to take a concerned look at how deadbeat mothers neglect their children. Our intrepid columnist was absolutely aghast at the living conditions of Emanuel, the 13-year-old boy living there.

Emanuel has three televisions in his room, two of them gargantuan large-screen models. But there is no food in the house. As for the TVs, at least one doesn’t work, and the electricity was supposed to be cut off for nonpayment on the day I visited his house here in Pine Bluff: Emanuel’s mother deployed her pit bull terrier in the yard in hopes of deterring the utility man. (This seemed to work.)

The home, filthy and chaotic with a broken front door, reeks of marijuana. The televisions and Emanuel’s bed add an aspirational middle-class touch, but they were bought on credit and are at risk of being repossessed. The kitchen is stacked with dirty dishes, and not much else.

(snip)

 What many Americans don’t understand about poverty is that it’s perhaps less about a lack of money than about not seeing any path out. More than 80 percent of American households living below the poverty line have air-conditioning, so in material terms they’re incomparably better off than poor families in India or Congo. In other ways their lives can be worse.

And that was it for that column. Kristof offered no policy prescriptions for, say, an increase in the unconscionably paltry monthly food stamp stipends for poor families. The problem is that not enough of us understand the plight of poor Americans the same way that Helicopter Nick does. And why should we even bother? Kristof reassures his liberal readership that the lives of the poor could always be worse.

Now, back to his thrill-packed weekend hotel adventure. He breathlessly broadcast the details out to the world which he covers like a plastic garment bag -- before, apparently, he'd even had a chance to drink his weaponized coffee:

I’m shouting that he’s a thief, others are screaming, things are flying around, and the members of the American Philosophical Society step out in the lobby to see the fight and figure out what’s going on. A hotel bellman rushes over and assists, and then another, and we restrain him until the police show up. The man is furious and threatening me. Then we all go to the police station to make a statement; he turns out to be homeless and unarmed. I somehow messed up my thumb in the fight but am otherwise just fine; Sheryl and I are both relieved and thankful for the well wishes. Here’s a local news report on it.

Two main takeaways. First, thank goodness he didn’t have a gun. Second, always, always, always, lock your hotel room door, even if you’re only going to be gone a couple of minutes.

My published response: 

 This column reminded me of the slapstick hotel scene in Mel Brooks's "High Anxiety" -- right down to the ironic backdrop of the American Philosophical Society confab.

So, now that we know Nick is a super-hero who can tackle skinny, homeless purse-snatchers, maybe he can devote some future columns to the problem of homelessness itself. How about (despite the sudden elite need to make nice with Trumpy) advocating for a federal guaranteed housing policy? And I don't mean homeless shelters that are more dangerous than the streets, or temporary fleabag hotel rooms. I mean a clean, permanent apartment for anybody needing one. We could even start with Trump Tower, now that Trump has found himself some new digs.

Was the burglar lurking in Kristof's fashionable hotel because he was starving, having had his food stamp stipend cut off in that recent bipartisan move to help the poor get out of their lazy hammocks of luxury? Or was he in search of some quick cash for an opioid fix? Kristof apparently didn't ask, given his throbbing thumb trauma.

But thankfully he doesn't forget the obligatory media Takeaways. The lessons of this whole ordeal in the Age of Anxiety for Well-Off But Very, Very Nervous Philosophers is to be grateful that not all desperadoes have guns, and always lock your doors. You just never know when the collateral damage of our trickle-down society is lurking just outside to steal your money and knock your security as well as your thumbs right out of joint.

It could always have been worse. The columnist-philosopher could have asked the bellhop who'd helped him tackle the homeless guy to bring him up a copy of the Times.  And then, when Kristof was washing off that horrible homeless smell in a hot shower, the annoyed bellhop could have re-enacted the High Anxiety re-enactment of Psycho and attacked him with his own column. 

But thankfully for weekly global destinations and for helicopter journalism, Kristof is safe -- if not quite sound.

Because now that Trump is a done deal despite Nick Kristof's best scare-mongering efforts over the past year or so, our intrepid poor-fighter is now willing to admit that he actually might find common ground with the man he once found so abominable.

Only days before the hungry homeless guy wandered into his luxury hotel room and tried to steal some cash in lieu of the flat-screen TV or contents of the hospitality fridge, Kristof lectured his liberal readers,

When a former Ku Klux Klan leader like David Duke is giddily celebrating a political triumph for his values, how can we not ache for our own selves.Yet, like it or not, we  Americans have a new president-elect, and it’s time to buck up. I’ve seen past elections that were regarded as the end of the world — including, in many Democratic circles, the Reagan triumph of 1980 — and the republic survived. This time as well, our institutions are stronger than any one man. We are not Weimar Germany.

It was disgraceful that many Republicans eight years ago tried to make President Obama fail. That’s not the path to emulate. Today, having lost, we owe it to our nation to grit our teeth and give President-elect Trump a chance.

With any luck, Trump will sign all of Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan's anti-poor legislation and get those TVs and marijuana cigarettes out of the filthy homes of the impoverished right quick. Liberals will just have to philosophically buck up, if only for the sake of themselves. And I hear there's already a booming therapy market for those still achingly and frantically looking for scapegoats, such as working class whites.

Let the poor eat the leftovers, tastefully wrapped in the flaky crust of old Sunday New York Times luxury real estate sections, and sanitized for our protection.

All On the Same Fascist Team

The swiftness with which Barack Obama and the rest of the media-political complex are normalizing the Trump succession and welcoming this depraved man into their cozy inner circle is indicative of one inconvenient truth. This is already a fascist country, and it has been at least since the early 1950s, when the right wing started attacking the New Deal, the surveillance/war state became the fourth branch of government, and Richard Nixon's racist Southern Strategy paved the way for the reactionary New Democrat movement led by Bill Clinton.

The only difference is that Trump's brand of fascism doesn't have the traditional filter, which has enabled glib politicians from Reagan to Obama to put a friendly face on things for purposes of fooling some of the people most of the time, or most of the people some of the time. For too long, we've been conned into believing that this is a representative democracy.

If there is one positive thing to be said about the Trump presidency, it is that the con is dead. If the wool hasn't already been removed from 330 million pairs of American eyes, it will be soon enough.

Barack Obama was able to welcome Donald Trump so easily to the White House on Thursday because the nasty words spewed in this election had all been mainly for show. Obama even admitted that he and Donald are essentially on the same side, that governance is a sporting event, an "intramural scrimmage" between two cohesive factions of the same duopolistic team.

Grotesquely ignoring and insulting the thousands of protesters now marching in the streets, many of them Latinos and African-Americans and Muslims who are now more afraid than ever for their very lives, Obama launched into the same conciliatory pandering that's been his style ever since he won office in 2008 with a super-majority in both houses of Congress. He once again sickeningly caved in the service of the oligarchy by remarking that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. "America," of course, is code for the ruling class.

And that's why I'm confident that this incredible journey that we're on as Americans will go on.  And I am looking forward to doing everything that I can to make sure that the next President is successful in that.  I have said before, I think of this job as being a relay runner -- you take the baton, you run your best race, and hopefully, by the time you hand it off you're a little further ahead, you've made a little progress.  And I can say that we've done that, and I want to make sure that handoff is well-executed, because ultimately we're all on the same team.

The New York Times, which only the other day was lashing out at Donald Trump's ugly rhetoric, has already done a near-180 since his victory. The paper of record, which also functions as the propaganda mouthpiece of whomever is in charge at any given time, enthused that Obama and Trump, if not exactly enveloped in an instant bromance, at least succeeded in breaking the ice on their first blind date. Their mutual, man-spreading admiration society spoke volumes.

  Everybody was ever so civil about the whole transition-of-power thing. Michelle and Melania had a dainty tea for two. Trump took in the view of the Washington Monument and unsurprisingly gushed out his admiration for the nation's great phallic symbol.

Barack Obama, of course, was well-prepared for the emergence of Donald Trump. That is because he personally helped orchestrate the emergence of Donald Trump.

He saw him coming more than a decade ago, and even then, he welcomed him with open arms. 

It would have benefited neither him nor the Citigroup bankers with whom he was collaborating to actually prevent Donald Trump. Why would they? They knew full well that the working class destruction caused by wage-suppressing global trade deals and the weaponized corporate coups known as CIA regime changes and all-out wars would give rise to social unrest and mass hardship on a global scale.

Back when Barack Obama was still the callow junior senator from Illinois, he was guest of honor at a new Wall Street-funded offshoot of the Brookings Institution, dubbed the Hamilton Project.  Effusively praising corporate globalization, offshoring, deregulation, profits for the few and austerity for the many, he casually remarked that millions of people would be victimized in the process.

In words that make Hillary Clinton's own paid speeches to Wall Street seem mild in comparison, Obama warned his enthusiastic plutocratic hosts of the inevitable populist backlash to their greed. He did not, however, warn them to cease and desist. He only suggested that they prepare themselves for looming social upheavals. And he assured them, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted to be an integral part, parcel and beneficiary of their neoliberal Hamilton Project and the continuing destruction of the working class. In the event of any populist backlash occurring or a strongman arising during his own hoped-for presidency, he would always have their backs.

It was Obama's de facto audition to star as the Democratic presidential nominee. His hosts simply wanted a guarantee that the politician with the golden voice who'd so inspired the nation at the 2004 party convention was still totally on board with their greed program.

Obama's appearance at the inauguration of the Hamilton Project took place two and a half years before the 2008 financial meltdown, and more than a decade before the election of Donald J. Trump. And he was nothing if not prescient, telling the bankers:

 Just remember, as we move forward, that there are real consequences to the work we are doing doing here. There are people in places like Decatur, Illinois and Galesburg, Illinois who have seen their jobs eliminated. They have lost their health care. They have lost their retirement security. They don't have a clear sense of how their children will succeed in the same way they succeeded. They believe that this may be the first generation in which their children will do worse than they do. Some of that, then, will end up manifesting itself in the sort of nativist sentiment, protectionism and anti-immigration sentiment that we are debating here in Washington. So there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. This is not a bloodless process.

People will get bloodied, people will lose their jobs, people will see their wages stagnate, people will suffer and die prematurely -- but as long as Wall Street keeps its avaricious eyes on the prize, the "real consequence" of what turned out to be right wing Trumpism will have been ultimately worth it, both to Barack and all his new buddies:

I think that as long as all of us retain the sense of passion about the ultimate outcome that we want, a stronger more prosperous America than we are passing on to our children, then I think we will do well in this process. I am glad to be a part of it.

That Obama ultimately kept his promise to the plutocracy is all the more grotesque, given the Wall Street meltdown and mass hardships and unemployment and foreclosures that "we" allegedly never saw coming. He kept his promise by refusing to prosecute the oligarchs who made the whole mess and rewarding them with a bailout --  because these were the psychopathic friends who'd rammed through deregulation and bankrolled his own rise to power.

In that now-infamous private Oval Office speech he gave to cowed and cowering banksters in 2009, Obama boasted that he was the only thing protecting them from the pitchfork-wielding rabble. Nobody would lose a bonus. Nobody would go to prison. He more than kept the promise he'd made to the Hamilton Project three years earlier as his own price of admission to the highest office in the land.

It was during the same inaugural Hamilton Project meeting at the Brookings  Institution that Obama had also promised to couple corporate global coups with the continued Democratic unraveling of the New Deal, begun by the Clintons during their administration. Obama euphemized the privatization of the Social Security long desired by Wall Street as "too many of us (Democrats) defending programs as they were written in 1938."

"People often ask me how I keep my idealism," he cynically bragged to his potential backers.

He vowed that working class jobs would be destroyed, and that the working class would then have to endure reduced retirement incomes and other punishments, all in the service of the plutonomy. If the oligarchs succeeded, then Barack Obama would succeed right along with them.

It was only the Monica Lewinsky scandal that had prevented Bill Clinton from at least partially privatizing Social Security in his second term. And it was only the Tea Party that prevented Obama from finalizing his own "Grand Bargain" of Medicare and Social Security cuts with House Speaker John Boehner during his first term. When that planned assault on the working class failed, Obama humorously groused that Boehner had "left him at the altar."

Ironically, Donald Trump's election is what could preclude any further "bipartisan" cuts to the safety net by deposed empress Hillary Clinton and Speaker Paul Ryan. Democrats are always more prone to raise a ruckus when the presidential cutter and slasher is not a member of their own party. And perhaps luckily for us, Trump is not as gifted at talking from both sides of his mouth as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan before him. When and if Trump tries anything dodgy with Medicare and Social Security, he simply won't have the requisite verbal and intellectual skills to fool people into thinking that starvation is actually good for them.

Ultimately, even Obama's legendary glibness and personal popularity have not been enough to protect his legacy through a Clinton restoration. Try as he might, he couldn't delay the "not-bloodless process" until after he was safely out of office, long enough to start raking in the big bucks for his own family foundation slush fund and for the building of an obscene billion-dollar library shrine to himself in Chicago. He won't have the requisite political influence, because he won't have the Clintons as his White House partners. His personal neoliberal Hamilton project may be on the skids, if not a complete wreck. Potential donors, currently in a frenzy of swallowing their liberal pride for purposes of that smooth, successful transition to a more unfriendly fascism, might end up pragmatically deciding that it would behoove them to grovel before the new president instead. 

Maybe Obama can get a gig where he'll feel more at home.The Hamilton Project at Brookings might be an ideal, permanent and lucrative fit, especially since he plans to stay in Washington so that younger daughter Sasha can continue her pricey private high school career without being rudely upended like so many thousands of her evicted American peers.

After all, the Silicon Valley billionaire (Peter Thiel) reportedly heading Donald Trump's transition team also sits on the oligarchic advisory board of the Hamilton Project, as do former Obama Treasury Secretary and current vulture capitalist Timothy Geithner, Obama Catfood Commissioners Laura D'Andrea Tyson and Alice Rivlin, and billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg  and her Clintonoid mentors Larry Summers and Robert Rubin.

It's a small world in a small-minded intramural town. When they succeed, they all succeed.

So keep on marching, Citizens. But please don't restrict yourselves to Trump Tower. Be sure to include K Street, and the Brookings Institution, and Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup in your busy itineraries. Donald Trump is only the ruling establishment's latest, most hideous placeholder.

"I am upset with those who prefer to remain spectators until it may be too late. I am shocked by those who seem to believe - in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's words of 1940 - that 'there is no fighting the wave of the future' and all you can do is 'leap with it.' I am appalled by those who stiffly maintain that nothing can be done until things get worse or the system can be changed." -- Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism.