The Smell of Astroturf in the Morning

I'm sure I'm not the only one getting carpet-bombed with impeachment emails from one Democratic Party offshoot after another, asking for money, phone calls to Congress, and my participation in a protest march demanding the ouster of Donald J. Trump from the White House.

MoveOn, the group originally formed in 1996 to corral voters for Democrats by urging them to "move on" from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is now seeking "crisis" donations to pay for professional organizers to travel to battleground states to corral voters to demand the impeachment of Trump.

I got one email this morning from a Brent J. Cohen, executive director of "Generation Progress". It was addressed to "Joe," the same pseudonym I used when I signed up several years ago to handsy Joe Biden's "It's On Us" campaign to combat campus sexual assaults.

In case you're wondering why I didn't use my real name, it's because, suspicious person that I am, the use of multiple names to sign up for these various enterprises is how I keep track of who's sharing my email address with whom. So I immediately assumed that "Generation Progress" is simply one of the many names given to the Democratic Veal Pen network, names invented to make people believe that they're being bombarded by myriad independent groups instead of by one gigantic, corporate party-affiliated, mother of all bunker busting missiles.

Not that they try that hard to disguise themselves, mind you. For one thing, they use their real names. For another thing, the fonts and designs they use on their various websites are eerily similar to one another. 

(Hillary Clinton's PAC)

Let me quote from the Brent Cohen "Generation Progress" email that landed in my inbox this morning.

"We the people should be a reality, not just a quote," the pitch begins. "Tell Congress that Trump compromises our morals and values. It's past time to remove him from office." --

Joe-- Democracy is one of the most fundamental American values. Our democracy isn't, and never has been, perfect, but we aspire to reach a place where 'We the People' is a reality and not just a quote. Right now, Donald Trump is attacking our democracy. By pressuring the president of Ukraine to intervene in American elections and on his behalf, Trump has taken his attacks to a new level. This is an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense. It's vital that Congress hears from you on this: tell them it is time to take action." 

Cohen helpfully provides a link my congress-critter's email address and phone number. But I have to say, I find it really hard to get all fired up about democratic morals and values and UkraineGate when the congressional intelligence committee hearings on the scandal are all being undemocratically held behind closed doors.  All we're getting are third-hand dribs and drabs of whatever damning revelations the secret tribunal feeds to the cooperative establishment media to then regurgitate to us. We don't get to watch the testimony live and unfiltered on TV the way we did in the Watergate impeachment hearings back in the 70s.

Probably realizing the irony of his democratic pleading, Cohen proceeds to quickly gloss over the secondary reasons to demand Trump's impeachment: his racism and xenophobia, his incitements to violence, his scoffing at the climate crisis, his refusal to take action on gun violence.

No public impeachment hearings are scheduled for those particular crises and affronts to democracy, but if you want to, you can keep them in the back of your mind when you call Congress to demand that Trump be impeached and removed from office. Because it is only with your help and your complicity that the Democrats can sweep these annoying issues right under the rug as they carefully limit their inquiries to UkraineGate. In so doing, they advance the electoral fortunes of Joe Biden and other low-polling centrists who can bat clean-up in case his campaign collapses.

 Cohen signs off his email "in solidarity" to give you the further false impression that not only is he on your side, he's every bit as progressive and community-minded as the striking teachers of Chicago or the Yellow Vests of France.

It is, of course, a scam.

Not only is Cohen, a former Obama White House fellow and adviser, the "executive director" of Generation Progress,  but Generation Progress itself is just a division of the powerful, corporation-funded Clintonian think tank known as the Center For American Progress. Cohen's specific job is to corral young people into the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Between his White House gig, where he helped start Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" privatized initiative to get young black men off the streets and out of jail (while ignoring young black women) and close the "opportunity gap," Cohen has been a fellow at the D.C. Policy Center, a "non-partisan think tank working for a strong and vibrant District of Columbia." Its advisory staff includes a senior partner of the ethically challenged McKinsey consulting firm and the chief financial officer of the Emerson Collective, a secretive venture capital organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the former Goldman Sachs trader and the billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The Board of Directors actually running the D.C. Policy Center mainly come from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, along with sports and entertainment venture capital, the Sun Trust oil company foundation, and the Exelon energy company.

I'm telling you all this just to give you a general idea of where these professional impeachment advocates are coming from, who is financing them, and who will ultimately benefit from your unpaid phone-banking and marching efforts and other volunteer activities to remove Trump from office. 

Hint: it won't primarily be you.

Notice that Cohen and all the others importuning and gaslighting you under a pretense of "democracy restoration" are all employed by a tight little network of oligarchs, with the same names and world-destroying corporations popping up over and over again on the Boards of Directors of supposedly liberal philanthropic organizations.

Notice that these people don't ever offer you anything tangible, such as affordable housing or a debt-free education, in return for your controlled activism. They merely offer a return to what they call a moralistic, normative way of keeping you down and out. They simply want the status quo ante, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They want to keep the lethal, neoliberal, market-based project that spawned Trump alive and kicking.

The propaganda that they're promulgating in the establishment media conglomerate is also quite shameless, with pundits cheer-leading astroturfed impeachment marches and protests as though they were coming up with the ideas all on their own, rather than rewriting press releases from the Democratic Party machine, or desultorily riffling through their Rolodex of reliable think tank sources to get the scoop.

"Want Trump to go? Take to the streets" urged "woke" centrist New York Times columnist David Leonhardt last week, pretending that there is no such thing as astroturfed movements where Democratic corporatists are concerned: 

The impeachment inquiry has reached the stage when it needs an outside game. We all know where the inside game is likely to lead: House Democrats will impeach Trump; Senate Republicans will acquit him; and he will claim vindication. But Trump’s presidency has become too dire for Americans to accept that outcome without trying to change it.... 

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.

Leonhardt pretends that there is no organized oligarchy bankrolling this protest movement. He insanely casts the billionaire-run duopoly as too weak and therefore in great need of our warm bodies to give it legitimacy. He approvingly writes that the plutocrat-driven "Indivisible" group that I wrote about last week is some sort of legitimate grassroots undertaking.

The comment that I submitted on his column, in which I exposed the financial power behind the impeachment drive, was rejected. Maybe it was my alternative suggestion calling for a nationwide strike against the whole rotten capitalistic system that doomed it to the ether.

His Times colleague, columnist Michelle Goldberg, then ever so coincidentally came up with own utterly independent idea for "taking to the streets" to impeach Trump.

"1, 2, 3, 4 Trump Can't Rule Us Any More" is the clever slogan that she and her sources dreamed up for the plebs to shout as they march in sedate, civil, plutocracy-sanctioned mobs, sublimely safe from any police tear gas or mass arrests.

She professes herself baffled that Americans aren't rising up against Trump the same way, for example, that Chileans are rising up against high subway fares and austerity. She carefully doesn't suggest that Americans also rise up against the 40 years of neoliberal austerity that led enough desperate people to vote for a phony populist in the first place. That is not part of the plutocracy-sanctioned impeachment narrative.

Instead, Goldberg gaslights American couch potatoes:

So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse. This presidency began with the biggest protest in American history, and its first two years were marked by a series of high-profile demonstrations. But three years in, even as the conviction that Trump threatens the Republic unites stolid military heroes and socialist feminists, demonstrations against the administration have faded. Lyndon Johnson was famously tormented by protest chants that could be heard through the walls of the White House. Why isn’t Trump?

Um... I consider myself a socialist feminist, but there is no way in hell that I will ever unite with such "stolid military heroes" as Trump critic James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has gleefully gloated about the sadistic pleasure he got killing Iraqi civilians. Goldberg, of course, is simply trying to legitimize the right-wing reactionary partnership of the Democratic Party with the Pentagon/CIA de facto fourth branch of government.

Goldberg also conveniently doesn't mention that LBJ-era antiwar protests erupted when we still had the draft. Now that only non-elites sign up for the military, often out of economic desperation, our forever wars are out of sight and out of mind for most of the US population.

The military-industrial complex which Goldberg so hideously valorizes and humanizes has been striving to help Americans overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against war for decades by creating one imaginary outside enemy after another. After the debacle of Vietnam and the fall of the USSR, it became "Muslim terrorists." And with the Mideast now in shambles courtesy of American Exceptionalism, it's right back to Russophobia again and the smearing of antiwar dissidents as "Kremlin assets."

As nauseating as Trump is, the toxicity of liberal McCarthyism and the corporatized jingoistic anti-Trump resistance movement is downright stifling.