Impeachment Show Preview

I'll be covering the public impeachment inquiry hearings today via the C-Span live-stream, if only to get my own perspective rather than wading through whatever Grand Narrative and overwrought partisan commentary our corporation outlets choose to feed us. I promise to do my utmost to remain fair, mentally balanced and as humorous as this grim, grand setting allows. I even have a pair of sunglasses at the ready just in case all the blazing military medals of the various actors threaten to damage my retinas.

I'll also be doing my belated research on what The Guardian newspaper actually touts as the "marquee cast."  I read the extremely jingoistic Wikipedia entry on witness Bill Taylor, which is so effusive in its adoration that it appears to have been written either by Taylor himself or his P.R. team. Even Wikipedia says it appears to "slanted toward recent events." Among the many interesting things I learned about Taylor was that he often and enthusiastically bellowed the Cherokee war cry "Currahee!" as a 101st Airborne commander in the US war against the Vietnamese people. It gave me an instant picture of the deranged Robert Duvall in "Apocalypse Now" - or maybe it was Slim Pickens whooping his way out of his airplane on a bomb in "Dr. Strangelove." 

The use of Indian names by the US military is a racist practice stemming from the days when the US Cavalry exterminated millions of native people right here in the Homeland. 

So here it is at last, the long awaited day that the public gets its first real glimpse into the workings of the Deep State, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Corporate State Department, or whatever the weaponized oligarchy is calling itself these days.

Speaking of which, below is my published New York Times comment on Paul Krugman's latest. (Did you know that it is now chic and permissible for the farthest fringe left of the centrist punditocracy to bash billionaires? Exciting times all around when it comes to the establishment trying to gin up the class war to get people to the polls, before again pretending that the class war doesn't exist, once the elections are over.)

In response to Krugman's mild take on tycoons in their bubble and his bold statement that no, people aren't waiting for a billionaire savior in the person of Bloomberg or anyone else, I wrote about the rampant political and financial corruption that existed long before Trump and will no doubt exist long after him:

Notice they don't call themselves tycoons any more. Robber barons are out. "Thought leaders" are in.

 I'll never forget several years ago watching Scott Pelley of CBS breathlessly tell viewers (at the height of the austerity craze) that we'd be granted a "rare opportunity" to hear from then-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Blankfein's words of wisdom were to tell us that we shouldn't count on collecting Social Security or getting Medicare when we get old, because our great social insurance programs are "going broke."

 Is it any wonder, then, that the oligarchs are now in such a tizzy about Medicare For All? Bill Gates is so incensed about the prospect of people leading healthier. more secure lives that he threatens to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee.

Gates's idea of helping the poor is to hold a contest for Hollywood types to tell stories that help the poor overcome their "reputation problems" without the help of extra taxes payable by Gates himself.

 Bloomberg once mandated that all food stamp applicants be fingerprinted.

Maybe they were decent people once. But a corrupt political system has this strange way of corrupting the oligarchs who control it.

 Perhaps if millions of people had been saved from foreclosure, and the culprits had gone to jail instead of getting bailouts and deferred prosecution agreements, the oligarchs wouldn't have such grotesque arrogance to match their obscene wealth. They make the Downton Abbey crowd look like Franciscan monks.