Quadrennial Follies: Pandemic Edition

I've been offline for a second entire week this month, due to a combination of a tropical storm, neglected infrastructure and the typically shoddy customer service from the Spectrum monopoly.  So I apologize for the radio silence and for my inability to moderate and publish the handful of reader comments that were lost in the ether for the past seven days.

Not that I was totally disconnected from the world of manufactured opinion, consent and news, mind you. I still was able to get NPR (National Public Radio), so I learned on the morning after the big event that Joe Biden had chosen Kamala Harris to be his running mate.

After listening to NPR for days on end, I remember why I'd stopped tuning into it a decade ago.

With its combination of Trump disgust and associated Russophobia brought to the level of barely contained hopeless and helpless hysteria, sponsored by more craft beer microbreweries, sustainable gourmet food emporiums, artisanal coffee roasters, Ivy League tutoring services and more pretentious New-Agey stuff than I ever knew existed in upstate New York and adjacent New England, it was, in fact, a virtual teaser for this week's Democratic National Convention. With very few exceptions - notably,an excellent "Fresh Air" interview with human rights activist Sister Helen Prejean - I found NPR to be just as off-putting in its own smarmy way as any drivel belched out by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

During one call-in segment on the locally-produced "Round Table" breakfast show, a woman describing herself as the manager of an upstate New York trailer park described her tenants as "lovely people" who, despite their hard-knock lives, are still true believers in Donald Trump. Why oh why do "these people" always vote against their own interests? And why oh why do they resent the well-meaning and earnest and fact-based NPR crowd so much?

"Racism" was the unanimous verdict of the panelists, who proceeded to lambaste Trump's stereotypical misogynistic characterization of Kamala Harris as "nasty." One panelist had a thesaurus magically to hand and proceeded to properly enunciate all the synonyms for "nasty." Another panelist decried the media's disrespectfully sexist habit of referring to the candidate only by her first name. This is so unfair, she said, because they call him Biden rather than just plain Joe, and they always call him Trump instead of Don. There were also the requisite quotes from Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

God help me, but I found myself commiserating with the elite-hating trailer park folk as my own bile rose in response to the limousine liberalism of the NPR experts.

The emphasis on identity politics serves, of course, to shield Harris from such legitimate critiques as her prosecution of the poor parents of truant children and her use of prisoners as unpaid or barely paid firefighters. her prosecution of low level drug offenders and her refusal to prosecute Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin or his California bank for foreclosure fraud.

Mass liberal hatred of Trump fills the vacuum of the Democratic Party's having no agenda of its own to make people's lives better. "Remote" describes both its convention broadcast method and its relationship to the non-wealthy.

Desperate Housewives actress Eva Langoria glamorously and seamlessly took over last night where NPR left off, acting as the hostess of the Democratic Party's quadrennial national convention. I very naively thought that absent incessant chants of "USA! USA! USA" brayed out by delegates decked out in their garish hats after every sentence by every politician with a speaking role, the event would be more palatable.

How wrong I was. This convention is not a celebration. It offers no hope. It should actually be called Quadranimus, because it is nothing but four years of elite #Resistance and moneyed hate and fake despair and rancid concern-trolling all rolled up into four days.

I should have taken a drink every time that Bernie Sanders uttered the word "unprecedented" and Michelle Obama used the word "folks," and when each of them mentioned "shtruggle." If I had, I would be having one heck of a hangover right about now.

While the Democratic Party has been moving inexorably to the right over the last four or five decades, the 2020 convention was the first time they've totally come out of the closet. Former Republican governor and presidential candidate John Kasich, awkwardly playing the role of Dorothy, was filmed literally standing at a fork in a road. Some brainless talking scarecrow had apparently whispered in his ear and instructed him to take the route all the way to Oz and to Joe  A trio of Republican women (former New Jersey Gov.Christy Todd Whitman and CEO Meg Whitman and Staten Island GOP machine politician Susan Molinaro) were granted more speaking time than progressive dynamo Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Those GOP mavens admittedly were hard acts to follow, but Bernie Sanders did his very best, lauding Joe Biden's gracious gesture of lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 as another magical fork in the road to the Emerald City of true guaranteed single payer health care. This tortured detour is certainly better than Trump defunding the Post Office so that your Amazon package arrives in two weeks rather than within the promised two days. Isn't it? Isn't it? 

The situation is so dire that Nancy Pelosi is going one step beyond praying for the low-status victims of the Covid-19 crisis currently being co-opted by the Dems for their Quadranimus show, and is actually calling her members back to Washington to block Trump's wholesale destruction of the US Postal Service for his own crass political purposes. In order for Pelosi and the Democrats to return to power, voters must not only be shamed and terrified into picking Biden, but they must also have the option of using the mail to do so. This is especially true for those vulnerable uninsured voters who are being told by Bernie Sanders that they must survive until the age of 60 to get a slim chance of access to guaranteed government-run coverage before they die of their untreated diseases. Because it seems that even the much-ballyhooed public option promised by good old honest, decent, empathetic Joe Biden has already been quietly tossed down the memory hole.  

Barack Obama, meanwhile, emerged from his taciturn turn at his sprawling Martha's Vineyard estate to offer some "unusually sharp criticism" of Trump's attempted destruction of the Post Office and its resulting vote suppression.

“What we’ve seen, in a way that is unique to modern political history, is a president who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,Obama said on Cadence13’s Campaign HQ podcast in a discussion with his former campaign manager David Plouffe. “What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.’”

“That’s sort of unheard of, right?” he added. “And we also have not had an election in the midst of a pandemic that is still deadly and killing a lot of people, and we still don’t know the long-term side effects of contracting the illness.”

But back in 2009, his first year in the White House, Obama was singing a very different tune. In true Republican fashion, he defended his own abandoned promise of a health insurance public option by likening it to the "inefficiency" of the US Postal Service. He made the preposterous claim that in order for a thing to be efficient, it must be privatized, competitive and profit-seeking. Since the taxpayer does not fund United Health or Blue Cross, Obama suggested, then why should the public fund the postal service?

 "I mean, if you think about it," he said, "UPS and FedEx are doin' just fine.  It's the post office that's always havin' problems."  (Yeah, he was at one of those folksy, g-droppin' town halls).

Obama failed to mention that the Post Office wasn't doin' so good in large part because Congress had bipartisanly passed a bill requiring the USPS to fund its pension and health plans 75 years into the future - in other words, to pay for the benefits of future postal workers who haven't even been born. 

The destruction wasn't started by Donald Trump. He has simply revved it up to Mach speed and boasted about it more, while fully exposing the anti-labor machinations operating in both parties for the last 40 or 50 years.

Crouching Cuomo, Hidden Biden

Is the unified Biden-endorsing Democratic leadership already finessing plans to replace Uncle Joe with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo?

An email slugged "Official Democratic Poll" asking voters nationwide to share their feelings about Cuomo landed in my inbox yesterday:

"In these uncertain times where we're depending on our mayors and governors to save our lives, Andrew Cuomo has shown incredible leadership. He's doing what Trump isn't."

 Of course, the official tracking poll devised by the Stop Republicans.Org data team is essentially fund-raising spam  It's just another name for the Progressive Turnout Project, which is just another name for Progressive Takeover. It's a Chicago-based party veal pen run by a trio of former Obama and congressional campaign operatives. In order to participate in the "poll" attesting that you admire Cuomo and can't stand Donald Trump, you must first give them your money.

The phony poll could also serve double duty, though, to gauge Democratic voter support for a Cuomo run. Uncle Joe, the presumptive nominee, is carefully never even mentioned in the email.

The increasingly fragile-sounding and reclusive Biden certainly must be giving Team Obama some second thoughts. Under the guise of party unity, the manufactured positive Cuomo media coverage and name-dropping could also be the sound of them sharpening the same set of long knives they used to plunge into Bernie Sanders on that infamous South Carolina night only a few months ago.

Then again, they could simply be using Cuomo as a proxy or a magnet, drawing in more voters disenchanted with Biden, who now also faces credible sexual assault charges that he is probably too senile to even respond to personally. In contrast, we are supposed to be irresistibly drawn to a brand of authoritarian thuggery (Cuomo) that sounds a lot more erudite than Trump's ravings.

For the centrist wing of the party, Cuomo is actually too good to be true. He accomplished the single-handed feat of striking Bernie's name from the New York primary ballot before the June voting was ultimately canceled due to the coronavirus. This underhanded ploy served the dual purpose of avoiding the embarrassment of Bernie coming too close to Biden and also discouraging disappointed Sanders voters from showing up at all to cast their ballots for the progressive candidates also running for local and state offices.

Besides outright replacement of Biden, or simply using Cuomo as cover for their zombie candidate in the basement, the third possibility is that the Democrats are not so much interested in winning as they are in raising tons of money as they pretend to "resist Trump." In their cores, they love Trump. He makes their own corruption smell sweet by comparison as they give him most of what he wants. Both parties, after all, serve the same oligarchic masters.

This email push-poll spam is a new tactic for the PTP. It's set up exactly like the Republican email "polls" testing how much you love Trump and hate socialist Dems like Nancy Pelosi, who are so Marxist that they're in bed with Wall Street.

Alex Morgan, the "progressive" group's field director, told The Hill last year that his PAC's $46 million budget would be used to open 66 field offices and hire  1100 workers to knock on the doors of the 7.1 million people who did not come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“We don’t waste money on TV ads, direct mail, or anything else that’s just white noise to most voters," he bragged before sending out his own blast of white noise emails this week."We can't rely on the high energy we saw in 2018 to carry over to 2020 unless we start engaging with voters now.... if we wait until September to counter Trump with field efforts, we're toast."

“We focus our efforts on what works best — multiple in-depth conversations with voters who are disillusioned with politics as usual. Democrats haven't been doing a good job of speaking to them on an intrinsic level beyond broad party platitudes, and Progressive Turnout Project is aiming to change that.”

Then Covid-19 happened. Depth conversations between voters and political canvassers would morph right into conversational death traps. So brace yourselves for what will very likely be an unprecedented and relentless onslaught of political emails engaging you on such substantive topics as The Incredible Cuomo and Be Very Afraid of Trump. The hordes of operatives must have some way to spend their hundreds of millions of dollars to extract even more hundreds of millions of dollars from you in order to live the pre-pandemic lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. 

Since even former Bernie Sanders campaign operatives have to eat, they've started their own PAC to "rally progressives" around Hidin' Biden, who "has shown a willingness to move in a more progressive direction" by deigning to allow Sanders  a bit of input in the creation of a pandemic task force operating out of Joe's basement bunker.

As proof of the progressive direction that Joe is heading, his busy little fingers typed out their own mass email Tuesday:

Hey there, I'm Joe Biden and I'm writing to you about a truly special moment in our campaign.
This afternoon, Secretary Clinton announced she's endorsing  us.  I'm so proud to have her support.

The letter is nothing but a slavish testimonial to Hillary, and how they used to have breakfast together at his vice presidential mansion when they were both in town, and how he learned how powerful she was when he didn't run for president himself. Her candidacy was so wonderful and so historic that this email reads like a de facto endorsement of a Clinton restoration. So when I clicked on the source of the encomium, it shockingly turns out it was not sent from Biden Basement Central at all, but from Onward Together - Hillary's own super pac!

His probing fingers probably didn't even write the email themselves. If they had, Joe would've inserted at least one "Here's the deal" or "I'm the guy" or "C'mon, man!"

So in the spirit of Hillary, please join Joe in the Battle For the Soul of Our Nation. Liberals are urged to tune in to the suspense of which lady will win his vice presidential beauty contest even as they lambaste Trump over his treatment of women.  Each and every one of these liberal #MeToo champions is still in it to win it despite Tara Reade, and Anita Hill before her. In fact, like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, he is using and hiding behind powerful women to defend him. Stacey Abrams, high on the list of vice presidential picks, points to the New York Times's smear piece against Tara Reade as evidence of his innocence. It's the same thing as Dick Cheney pointing to the Times articles spoon-fed by the Bushies to reporter Judith Miller as "proof" that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

It's also all too sickeningly reminiscent of the Democratic Party's shoddy treatment of Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton scandal. You might remember that Gloria Steinem acted the same part that Stacey Abrams is now playing for Biden.

"I'm not here to ask you for money," Biden's fingers meanwhile reassure recipients in his closing policy argument. "I know first I have to earn it. So I'm asking you to think about what is at stake, give me a chance, and join my campaign."

Whereupon he only asks for money once you press the link he has so thoughtfully provided as a way to keep his word and to immediately earn your trust.

Love and Greed In the Time of Coronavirus

The tipping point finally arrived on Wednesday. It was the day most people realized that the coronavirus pandemic is not a minor, "this too shall pass" inconvenience, or the kind of economic downturn amenable to the usual massive government bailouts of the rich and the comfortable, and punishments for everyone else.

This time is different. It was only a couple of days ago that the rich were still smugly kvelling that yes indeed, they are different from you and me. That famous observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald and its retort, allegedly by Ernest Hemingway - "yes, they have more money!" - have not been viewed by the Ruling Class Racketeers as either a withering critique or joke. It was both a compliment and a badge of honor.

Even as the new plague was overspreading a woefully unprepared globe, Wall Street erupted with glee last week when Joe Biden crushed Bernie Sanders in Democratic primary elections. On the day after Super Tuesday, predatory insurance companies gained $48 billion in "market value."

Today, that same stock market effectively crashed as Donald Trump unilaterally banned airline travel from Europe to the United States.

If that wasn't bad enough, Hollywood megastar and Democratic Party donor Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife had contracted the coronavirus. Although one may assume that they have excellent private health insurance and a whole team of round the clock doctors and nurses catering to their every health care need, the news that the rich's bodies are not so different from yours and mine - that they are made up of the same immune systems, flesh and bone and tissue - is vying with news of rationed ventilators in Italy and toilet paper shortages everywhere.

The plague suddenly has gotten very real. Everything is being cancelled, from the basketball playoffs to the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, which actually threatens to be de-gentrified as the wealthy flee to their country homes and their yachts, much as the nobility fled the cities during the plagues of the Middle Ages.

To call these ripple or even domino effects is a bit bland. Wait until the Amazon fulfillment centers can no longer fulfill. Not only because their underpaid and overworked and uninsured workers get sick, but because the merchandise is no longer being delivered, let alone manufactured.

Maybe then they'll finally start calling it a plague.

As Albert Camus wrote in his famous novel of the same name (La Peste):

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise....

"When a war breaks out, people say 'it's too stupid, it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack for getting its way, as we should see if we were not so much wrapped up in ourselves."

The current plague will either be the end of globalized neoliberal capitalism, or it will be the toxic engine turning our carceral/surveillance oligarchic system into a full-fledged global totalitarian police state.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's solution to the catastrophe - besides building both virtual and physical walls to keep the enemy immigrants and germs out - is to bail out his own hotel chain and to offer low interest loans to businesses. He also aims to stealthily destroy the Social Security trust fund by imposing a "temporary" payroll tax holiday.

For their own part, the congressional Democrats are offering insufficient increases in nutrition programs, mandatory sick days and expanded Medicare  for coronavirus, but not for other medical conditions. Think of the deliberately complicated paperwork and stress on an already over-stressed health care system. Think of the deliberate shortage of government bureaucrats necessary to handle the paperwork. "We meant well" will be repeated by the minute.

 To put the paltriness and the downright cynicism in perspective, the $250 million in additional funds they propose for Meals on Wheels tor the vulnerable elderly is less than half the amount that Michael Bloomberg just spent on his aborted presidential run.

Bernie Sanders has one last chance to make a moral case for his agenda when he debates Joe Biden in Arizona in D.C. this weekend. If we don't acknowledge that we're all in this together, we might as well start placing bets on what will kill us first: the coronavirus, or pathological neoliberal capitalism.

******

On to New York Times comments.

Paul Krugman is calling for a permanent stimulus package. Unfortunately, since he aimed his post at what he calls "a very wonky audience" and not normal people, it did not get the prominent placement in the regular opinion section or the audience it deserved. Perhaps if it had contained the requisite Bernie-bashing to accompany its dig at Joe Biden, it would have fared better in the product placement department. This one was a bit of an off-brand outlier, published when the Times was still publishing coronavirus updates next to a weirdly cheerful BP-ish avatar. He writes:

OK, if you’re still with me: I hereby propose that the next U.S. president and Congress move to permanently spend an additional 2 percent of GDP on public investment, broadly defined (infrastructure, for sure, but also things like R&D and child development) — and not pay for it.

Of course, Krugman waited until Bernie had been safely trounced by Biden to espouse what sounds awfully close to the anti-austerian Modern Monetary Theory championed by Sanders's economic adviser Stephanie Kelton and others, and which Krugman has previously derided.

My published comment:

If you're a normal human being reading this post, it makes perfect sense even if you don't understand the wonky charts and math. The message of a more humane and rational way of doing things still comes through.

 Trouble is, the politicians running the place are not normal human beings in that their fealty to the donor class of plutocrats has literally removed them from reality. The only norms they seem to care about are the rhetorical ones that Trump violates each and every day. It's that he is just so darned vulgar about trampling over the poor and working class.

 Never mind just him and a possible President Joe not welcoming Paul Krugman's suggestion for a permanent stimulus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the spirit of her guru, the late billionaire austerian Pete Peterson when she successfully restored the "PayGo" rule last year. Only three of her Democratic members (including AOC) dissented from the requirement that all new deficit spending be offset by cuts to other programs. Exceptions would be made for emergencies like pandemics but of course then everything goes back to abnormal as soon as is inhumanely possible.

  You'd think, wouldn't you, that all the critics of single payer health care would finally realize that allowing 80 million people to remain underinsured or lack any coverage all is not only cruel to them but injurious to the economy. The louder the centrists shriek "but how you gonna pay for that" at presidential debates, the more abnormal they sound.

And here's my response to Krugman's subsequent column, on Trump's refusal to acknowledge that a pandemic even exists - all of a piece with the whole history of right-wing denialism. (Of course, the Democrats at least have the grace to admit when a problem exists before not solving it, for which we should be eternally grateful!) His column was written before Trump finally went on TV Wednesday night to struggle through a tortured teleprompter rendering of "if we think it, it will leave."

My published comment:

Not that I wish anybody ill, but you do have to acknowledge the serendipity of Trump being exposed by N degrees of separation to the coronavirus at CPAC. If that's not the height of irony in this age of willful reactionary ignorance, I don't know what is.

 It turns out that Republicans are a lot more fact-based than they want to admit, once they start quarantining their own depraved cowardly selves out of an abundance of self-protective caution and everybody else be damned.

Today it's Ted Cruz in Texas. Dare we hope that tomorrow it might be Trump in Mar-a-Lago? While he's resting up and luxuriating in a tubful of gallons of black market hand sanitizer, he might even be convinced (lulled? terrorized?) to sign legislation sending stimulus checks to every man, woman and child in America - if only as a blatant Hail Mary pass to stimulate his fevered base's enthusiasm for his increasingly fragile reelection campaign.

 But seriously, I can also foresee him cancelling the election entirely due to the state of emergency that he himself has exacerbated by dint of his own criminal narcissism. His pal Rudy Giuliani almost succeeded in cancelling the mayoral election after the 9/11 panic, after all.

As far as the "market" and investor anxiety over the plutonomy is concerned, pardon me if I don't feel as sympathetic as I probably should. If Wall Street finally stops profiting off pollution, wars, and the misery and preventable premature deaths of others - I say tough cookies.

A Distraction Inside a Diversion Within a Deflection

I almost feel sorry for CNN, the most mistrusted name in news. As you've probably heard, one of its debate moderators belligerently asked Bernie Sanders why he had told Elizabeth Warren that a woman could never win the presidency rather than if he had told her this.

This tacky episode of desperately obvious collusion between the war industry-financed cable giant and the faltering campaign of Elizabeth Warren puts CNN in a real quandary as Donald Trump's impeachment trial opens in the Senate. How will its reporters juggle the onerous task of breathlessly hyping the drama of Ukrainegate while simultaneously hyping their contrived family feud between Sanders and Warren? Do they break from the testimony to do panel discussions on Warren and Sanders giving each other the side-eye? Do they cover the boring speeches by the "impeachment managers" or do they air Donald Trump bloviating about witch hunts and unfairness on the White House lawn or at another one of his Nuremberg-style rallies? What if another hell of a continent-engulfing fire breaks out just as the climate-denying senators are fretting about the scandal of delayed weapons appropriations in the new Cold War? What if Trump murders another foreign leader right in the middle of his trial while Adam Schiff is discussing foreign terrorism and improving America's reputation?  It's a real dilemma, not just for CNN, but for the whole media borg. 

In normally balanced times of abnormality, we're used to seeing a permanent split screen, images divided between the requisite two manufactured narratives and leading actors. But with the petty partisan politics of impeachment vying for attention with the petty partisan politics of the Warren-Sanders kerfuffle vying with the petty partisan politics of Everyday Trump vying with whatever mass shootings and climate catastrophes are happening in the world, our invisible TV pixels might devolve into visible pixels requiring a magnifying glass to see. Just the chyrons alone, vying for desperate attention on the top, bottom and both sides of the screen, might require the purchase of a whole separate screen to keep us properly informed. Maybe they should start selling smarter TVs with pre-split multiple screens that are bigger than a house... that is, to the lucky few who still live in houses, which are increasingly being used as hiding places for laundered oligarchic loot rather than as actual dwelling places for human beings.

Thus far I've only been able to find a gadget that breaks up your already-small screen into six separate compartments for your enhanced viewing confusion. To be fair, it is not marketed for use by just one viewer, but to multiple family members or housemates who fight over what to watch on their one TV and who can now supposedly get along in blissful cacophonous peace and harmony

Is it me, or are we finally entering the terminal stage of our great national psychosis in unreal real time, what with all these manufactured and unnatural events competing for our ever more divided and shortened attention spans?

But enough of these depressing dystopian musings! Let's talk just a bit more about that way too obvious conspiracy between Elizabeth Warren and CNN to destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. As others have written, this is all for the benefit of Joe Biden, or perhaps for the benefit of Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg. Playing the sexism card against Bernie rather than against Gropey Sniffy Joe is Warren's tacit way of admitting she has no chance to be the nominee. Her task is to prove to Biden and the corrupt Democratic establishment that when they go low, she goes lower. She is a team player and a worthy candidate for the vice presidency or at least for a top-level cabinet position.

If Warren had been truly, sincerely disturbed by Sanders's alleged sexist remark at that private dinner more than a year ago, wouldn't she have spoken up in the immediate aftermath in order to warn progressives and feminists where this guy's head was really at?

Her belated accusation reeks of the Hail Mary pass. Faced with her imminent defeat, she has desperately pivoted from "I've got a plan for that"  to embracing the same old head fake of stale identity politics. She portrays herself - and by extension, all of womanhood -  as the quintessential victim. Of course, the best and the brightest of the victimized will nevertheless  "fight back" against the male sex as a substitute for fighting back against the patriarchal capitalism which afflicts every living thing on earth: men, women, children, flora and fauna.

Abandoning her brand as the populist champion of working class solidarity, Warren is now wholeheartedly embracing the centrist cult of neoliberal individualism. She is a good loyal friend to capitalism. It was always a contradiction for her to claim to be "a capitalist to my bones" from one side of the mouth and to assert that "I'm with Bernie!" with the other. The truth is now out there. Whether her calculated choice succeeds in damaging Sanders and rewarding Biden - and, ultimately, Trump - remains to be seen.

Warren, meanwhile, is using the solemnity of the impeachment to dissociate her own self from the kerfuffle she has caused. But CNN is having none of it, scoffing at the widespread criticism of its anti-Bernie bias and complaining that Warren refused further comment as she was entering the Senate chamber. CNN's Chris Cilizza vows that his network is not giving up the story about Warren's fight without a fight! Because a story is a story and it won't be the end of the story.

Capitalism hates class solidarity - unless, of course, it is plutocratic class solidarity.

 And it certainly does love those lonely individual downtrodden fighters who can beat all the odds and serve as shining examples of grit and fortitude to the rest of us poor slobs. Capitalism loves it when the teeming masses vicariously identify with such downtrodden elites as Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Meghan Markle... or conversely, with the beleaguered persona of Donald Trump. The more effectively we can be taught to disassociate from our own lives, root for their fortunes and disdain the "haters" who do not, then the less likely it is that we will ever join forces in solidarity with our similarly atomized brothers and sisters.

Capitalism doesn't care a whit about the sincerity of the downtrodden elites that it chooses to market and showcase. It certainly doesn't care whether or not its current star attraction, Donald Trump, is re-elected. In fact, the oligarchs are banking on his re-election, given how this master showman would in all likelihood defeat Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg.

Bernie Sanders is their designated enemy. But what really scares them and sends them to their loot-stuffed fainting couches is an informed, angry and motivated populace.

United we stand. Divided by a confusing infinity of split TV screens and manufactured controversies, we fall. 

Bernie-Bashing Backlash Bonanza

To say that Elizabeth Warren's accusation of sexism against Bernie Sanders doesn't pass the smell test is the understatement of the year. Even total nostril blockage would not quench the stench of her allegation that he told her at a private dinner that a woman could never win the presidency. What he likely said was that Donald Trump would act like the sexist pig that he is toward any woman candidate.

Likely, given that Bernie has always stood up for women and Elizabeth does have this disturbing history of, ahem, exaggerating stuff, bending the truth, or even making things up.

What really reeks is the desperation in Warren's faltering campaign. It joins in lockstep stinkiness with the desperation of the oligarch-controlled media borg. Right on the eve of the last "debate" prior to the Iowa caucuses, CNN chose to run an anonymously-sourced story about the private dinner setting of his alleged remark, a conversation which Warren initially vowed would remain private, thus only adding to the intrigue. After several hours, she issued a statement confirming the unconfirmed CNN hit job, which was broadcast with glee by the New York Times and the whole crew of usual media suspects.

The themes of sexism and the threat to "party unity" will no doubt be the dramatic manufactured focal points of the "debate." The game show emcees ("moderators") will keep both their nostrils and their ears carefully stuffed with cotton balls as they corral the candidates into the desired tag team whose goal is to stamp Bernie into the ground. Never having had to develop the ability to actually think on the job, their careerist journalistic brains were themselves replaced by wads of cotton stuffing quite a while ago. Their minds have the handy dual function of absorbing the ooze of the plutocratic agenda while at the same time acting as protective barriers against any outside democratic contamination.

Poor Joe Biden will probably not join in the bashing with any great gusto, given his own history of sexism combined with that nasty hair-sniffing habit that the media has long since forgotten in its zeal to protect him from the Ukrainegate-based Trumpian slime machine.

Hopefully Sanders is primed and ready for the buckets of slime that are only beginning to be hurled his way. Hopefully he won't preface his defense with "Elizabeth is a good friend of mine, and she can absolutely win this thing!" 

Because judging from the backlash against Warren, the ears, noses, throats and brains of his base of supporters are absolutely clear and cottonball-free. #RefundWarren, a Twitter campaign demanding that she return donations from her small-dollar supporters, is taking off like a blast of turbo-charged nasal spray. (Notwithstanding the concern-trolling mainstream media package warnings to progressives about about the dangerous pro-Trump "rebound effects" of their righteous indignation)

Stay tuned. The ratings for the contrived slug-fest gleefully marketed by the New York Times as "Mom and Dad Are Fighting!" promise to be better than initially expected.

==========

New York Times columnist and MSNBC personality Michelle Goldberg cloyingly advises liberals to move past the contrived Bernie/Liz battle, which originally started with Warren's accusation that he was "attacking her" via campaign workers pointing to the fact that she has well-heeled support. Goldberg sniffs that this stuff is too silly to even talk about -  before she then proceeds to spend her whole column talking about it. Her essay is essentially a thinly disguised call for Bernie to quit the race because, apparently, Warren is the only candidate who can provide that all-important "party unity"  that the Democratic establishment is so concerned about.

Midway through her piece, she casually mentions that since her husband advises the Warren campaign, she was really, really hesitant about even writing her column endorsing Warren. But needs must, when "party unity" trumps relief for the sick, the jobless, the underpaid, the desperate.

It's still all about the upper middle class pathological grief over Hillary Clinton's defeat:

Attacking another candidates’ supporters rather than her record is kind of obnoxious, but as far as political combat goes, it was pretty mild. The reason it caused a small uproar is that in much of the Democratic Party, there’s tremendous resentment of Sanders left over from 2016. Many believe he weakened Hillary Clinton by dragging out the primary — at one point even threatening acontested convention — and then only halfheartedly rallying his fans behind her when it was over. Warren alluded to this anger in a fund-raising email keyed to the Politico article that said, “We can’t afford to repeat the factionalism of the 2016 primary.”

"Many believe" is the same kind of unsourced weasel-wording smear tactic as the all-purpose "some say."

My published response to Goldberg:

How does the Sanders campaign pointing out Warren's poll-verified voting demographic amount to "attacking" her?

If this little kerfuffle is such a little kerfuffle, by amplifying it Michelle Goldberg only adds to the manufactured hysteria, and just in time for the latest episode of the Gong Show, I mean the "debate." If Warren thinks Bernie is "trashing her" simply by pointing out differences in their bases then I hate to think of a President Warren's epic meltdowns when the Republicans start trashing her for real every two minutes.

  By playing the faux-feminist victim card here, she actually disempowers other female politicians. Worse still, she is playing the crumpled Hillary card. Remember how well that pitiful ploy worked out to achieve "party unity" once upon a time? Bernie campaigned for her as soon as she was nominated. Then he was blamed for not having the magical Svengali touch to entice his supporters to actually vote for her.

The long-awaited smear campaign against Bernie has begun in earnest. The only surprising thing is that Warren has chosen to be an integral part of it.

==============================

 Goldberg's colleague Paul Krugman seemingly wrote his own anti-Bernie column before the manufactured kerfuffle over trashing and sexism broke out. Because all his does is drag out the same old narrative about Medicare For All being the terrible thing that's destroying party unity. If you want to overcome "Trump's Plot Against Health Care," then you'd better shut up and vote for somebody who will fight to the death for the restrictive, junky, predatory insurance policy that you might be lucky enough to still actually possess. In the meanwhile, don't get upset about not having guaranteed coverage. Be upset because Trump lied about protecting your pre-existing conditions!

Krugman sounds the dire warning:

Make no mistake: Health care will be on the ballot this November. But not in the way ardent progressives imagine.Democrats running for president have spent a lot of time debating so-called Medicare for all, with some supporters of Bernie Sanders claiming that any politician who doesn’t demand immediate implementation of single-payer health care is a corporate tool, or something. But the reality is that whatever its merits, universal, government-provided health insurance isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

My published retort:

 The only pre-existing condition Trump saved is that of the top 0.1% owning as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

That grotesque reality is precisely why Medicare For All is such a "tough sell." The oligarchs own our political duopoly as well as corporate media conglomerate. They spread the fear and the misinformation that make people feel nervous about losing their precarious, expensive coverage to a more equitable program covering everybody from cradle to grave with no premiums, deductibles, networks, co-pays or surprise bills from private equity vultures.

  One of the leading questions in polls is "do you know that Medicare For All would make your private coverage disappear?" -- the implication being that there looms a coverage gap of epic proportions.

 Paul Krugman does his own "there is no alternative" part by labeling those of us who demand what exists in every other advanced nation "ardent progressives" who just cannot understand that single payer is impossible even with a Democratic majority. That statement says more about the pundits and politicians in thrall to the oligarchs than it does about the "ardent progressives."

In other words, if we don't adhere to the status quo of 84.2 million of our fellow citizens staying uninsured or underinsured, Trump will up the killing ante even more.

 It's like telling the people of Flint they're better off with the toxic water they already have, what with the uncertainty and the fear that new lead-free pipes might cause.

Harking back to the sexism theme now in vogue, I got a chuckle from a simile-averse mansplaining retort from "Michael" of The Bronx. Here's what the "woke" gender-conscious New York Times, which claims that it moderates every single reader comment, saw fit to publish right below my own comment:

@Karen Garcia: A couple of your statements in your letter reveals a tendency to hysteria, with a zeal that makes you prone to believe false narratives and propaganda. First you say that Krugman's incremental (and realistic) approach "says more about the pundits...", and then you mention the Flint toxic water situation. I suggest that you investigate more thoroughly the lead levels in Flint to the lead levels in other communities and nationally, and the history of the problem. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones would be a good resource.

================================================ 

Epilogue:

People's Summit

The Real News Network is broadcasting a livestream of this weekend's People's Summit. You can watch it here.

Bernie Sanders was scheduled to be the keynote speaker tonight.

Update -- Bernie's entire speech:

 

Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected, de facto victory in the U.K.'s snap election has given added impetus and new optimism to stateside lefties, to say the least. The Guardian reports,

Bernie Sanders was among those to praise Labour’s result, saying it showed “people are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality,” while left-leaning members of Congress said the victory would have major implications for the future of Democrats.

The question of course remains whether the "Democrats"  will also go enthusiastically left, embracing such programs as Medicare for All, or whether they will continue indulging their obsessive-compulsive Russophobic Disorder to their own ultimate detriment.

Party Like It's 2016

The modern Establishment has been weirdly successful in getting Americans to believe that even though we live in an oligarchy, there's still enough democracy left to make sure that every vote counts.

Not this year, though. Two upstart candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are knocking that supposition for one big loop. Citizen-consumers are discovering that our "democratic" system has very sneaky, fail-safe ways of purging unwanted candidates from its private Duopoly. Of course, the outsiders are not being imprisoned or vaporized  as they would be in blatantly totalitarian regimes. In our system  -- which the late Sheldon Wolin  dubbed "inverted totalitarianism" -- the purging is accomplished through more subtle, but still ham-fisted, means.

Methods to the madness are employed by the method actors of the media-political complex.  Six major corporations control 90 percent of all disseminated content, in TV, movies and print. Access to the powerful has become more important than holding the powerful to account. When ownership becomes more consolidated, public accountability slides down the memory hole.

 Then there's the authoritarian infrastructure of the parties themselves. Super-delegates are given weighted votes in order to prevent gains by independent or grassroots candidates. The public-spirited League of Women Voters no longer controls the general election debates. A privately funded and owned commission does that now. The previews of primary town halls and televised bicker-fests are controlled by the parties themselves,  and they're sponsored by the corporate-funded networks. The GOP has held too many, while the Democrats have held too few. But the ads are legion. The ratings are high and the record profits are beyond the wildest dreams of the owners.

 And finally, there is the ever increasing influence of the direct cash "gifts" to the candidates. It now costs more than a billion dollars to run for president. And the ultra-rich who foot the bill, as Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have established, usually get what they want from the candidates they fund. No matter that the majority of us want expanded Social Security and universal health care. Since the rich do not want or need these benefits, the good life is not to be had by anyone but themselves. The richer that people get, the more paranoid they seem to become about some poor person stealing even the tiniest morsel from their dinner plates.

The fact that billionaire Trump is (allegedly) self-funding his campaign, and millions of ordinary people really are funding Bernie's is more of a direct challenge to Citizens United than any public interest group could ever have imagined. Money has finally arrived as a major campaign theme for perhaps the first time since bribery was legalized by the Supreme Court. And Big Money is not too happy about all this sunlight. It threatens to disinfect the whole sordid process.

Ballots aren't the only things that are weighted. Even sincere, popular, and legitimately elected politicians are prone to forget the voters once they are safely esconced in office. The corporate-controlled shadow governments of the CIA and the NSA and the Pentagon come knocking at the Oval Office door on Day One, extending their tentacles to give a welcoming squeeze and an offer the new dude cannot possibly refuse. Then there are the armies of lobbyists, euphemized as "consultants." These militarists and operatives are also regular guests on the corporate talk shows, the better to spread the propaganda and the news stories within the extremely narrow parameters which the ruling class allows.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders still presents a threat to the status quo, as the bigwigs strive to limit him, despite a recent slew of wins, to the bit part of the far-out fringe-dweller challenging Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, once so inordinately elevated and showcased by the greedy media at rallies which sometimes resemble violent racial cleansing sites, suddenly finds his own racist self on the receiving end of an attempted purge. First, the elites pretended to be disgusted by the guy as he raked in the bucks for them. Now, they pretend to realize that their spectacle has gone on for way too long. Why? Because  the corporations funding the politics are beginning to withdraw their brands and money from a potentially violent brokered convention. The delegates might even get denied their complimentary cans of Coke.

Trump's own children can't even vote for him in New York's closed primary next week. Anyone who forgot to change his party affiliation before an arbitrary deadline expiring many months ago will not be permitted to vote. This punishes the independents who have elected Bernie Sanders in eight out of the last nine contests, but it will also depress turnout from Trump fans who are not registered Republicans. This scenario especially rewards Hillary Clinton, whose main support in the state comes from older, registered Democrats.

Party elders did forget, though, to bar never-registered young people, who were given more time to pose as members of either party in order to participate in New York's election. So we shall see.

Even in a democracy, political parties were never meant to be democratic. I've written before about French philosopher Simone Weil's call (immediately post-Hitler) to abolish all political parties. Parties exist for purely selfish reasons: to grow without end, to gain new consumers, and to make tons of money.

 Nothing in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights says anything about citizens having to elect representatives from within the confines of parties.

Tellingly, it was the post-French Revolution Reign of Terror that spawned the modern political party system. So is it any surprise that variations on the fear factor are always on the platforms of both Republicans and Democrats? The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on women, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... and guns, guns and more guns -- the controlling of them, the wearing of them, the proliferation of them. Where would American political parties be without violence and paranoia as the glue holding the teetering duopoly together?

The three characteristics of political parties that Simone Weil outlined 70 years ago apply just as well to the modern Democratic and Republican machines:

1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.

2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.

3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit. 

She continued:

Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian - potentially and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so....

No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he belong to one) his own.

People are generally reluctant to acknowledge such a thing. If they were to confess it, they would naively be inclined to attribute their incapacity to their own intellectual limitations, whereas, in fact, the very phrase 'a political party's doctrine' cannot have any meaning.

An individual, even if he spends his entire life writing and pondering problems of ideas, only rarely elaborates a doctrine. A group of people can never do so. A doctrine cannot be a collective product.

Extrapolating from those words of wisdom, it is thus patently dishonest for "party elders" to claim that the current popular outsider candidates are not a Real Republican or a Real Democrat. There is no such thing.

And, given the totalitarian nature of the two-party system in the United States, it really is something of a miracle that two outsider candidates have turned the tables and essentially co-opted them, instead of the other way around.

Maybe there's life in the old Democratic gal yet. Maybe the Duopoly is on the way to the dustbin of history.

Spring Ahead

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead tonight, so that one more hour of your time can be extracted in the name of capitalism. But don't worry. It usually happens while you're asleep. You won't even feel a thing. Unless, of course, you get into a car accident on the way to one of your precarious jobs because you or a fellow motorist is exhausted as well as broke, hungry, and road-raged.

***

Speaking of rage, did you catch the Benito Trump Cancelled Rally last night? I watched it unfold on MSNBC as the ridiculous Chris Matthews did the play-by-play. He is shocked, shocked that Fascism has come to America right under his very elite nose. He is clueless, clueless that nonstop coverage of Trumpism and the presidential horse-race spectacle by his and other networks have led citizens to believe that politics is an infotainment sporting event sponsored by the WWF. He pretends to not understand that the corruption extends not only to his profession but to his own family circle. His guests and fellow-commentators are heavy contributors to wife Kathleen's multimillion-dollar congressional bid, one of the most expensive in lower House history.

As far as the "unrest" at the Trump arena went, it was pretty tame compared to, say, Ferguson and Baltimore. For one thing, police presence was very scanty -- too many white kids. Rahm Emanuel didn't send out the troops because he didn't want a repeat of 1968, when the Democrats ended up losing to Nixon.  So the Trumpenproletariat and the protesters were asked to leave. And aside from a few made-for-TV scuffles, they did. From what I saw,  most of the kids seemed more interested in taking selfies than rioting and beating each other up.

 If you were there and able to get close enough to snap a pic of a black guy and a white guy screaming at each other, then you made the producers of what passes for participatory politics very happy indeed. The media/political complex relishes the "divisiveness" of the lower orders as they flatter themselves that  "bipartisanship" is the highest virtue known to humanity.

***

Speaking of selfies, did you happen to catch Barack Obama at the SXSW conference? Just as the scuffles were breaking out in Chicago, our prescient president was warning us to not to "fetishize our smart phones." As long as the government can already "rifle through your underwear," he said,  you are very silly to keep defending the privacy of your electronic devices. You are all child molesters or terrorists until proven otherwise.... not that they'll ever bother proving otherwise.

From the New York Times:  

“If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?” Mr. Obama said. “How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”

If the government has no way into a smartphone, he added, “then everyone is walking around with a Swiss bank account in your pocket.”

And Chris Matthews thinks that Trump is the only charismatic face of totalitarianism?

***

Speaking of terrifying cluelessness, Hillary Clinton has again attempted to revise history, this time claiming that the Reagans were warriors against the HIV epidemic back in the 80s, -- when, in fact, the Gruesome Homophobic Twosome went out of their way to ignore it. In later admitting her mistake, Hillary said she'd confused AIDS with Alzheimers, the latter of which Nancy publicized only because it affected her directly. I suppose we should forgive Hillary, though. When  Nancy was First Lady of the Land, Hillary was First Lady of Arkansas and probably too busy supervising her prison convict slave help to pay much attention to an epidemic affecting gay men.

Or. she might have experienced a Reagan moment and thought she was a contestant on Jeopardy rather than having a friendly funeral chat with Mrs. Alan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell) on MSNBC. "I'll take 'Diseases That Begin With A' for $675,000, Alex!"

Hillary always brags that she's been tested. Is she sure about that?

Whether it's President Trump or President Clinton, we can expect another long slog of psychopathology and stupidity on top of the ingrained insanity.

Hopefully it will be neither. The words and actions of these candidates just yesterday alone is all the more reason to vote for Bernie Sanders. At his own rally on Friday he called for inclusiveness among the classes and the races and the generations.

Unlike Obama before him, he didn't smarmily call for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, between red and blue states, among establishment elites. He called for solidarity among people.

That is not at all sending a giant thrill up Chris Matthews' leg. It is, however, sending a giant chill up the spineless spine of the Closet Fascist Collective, for whom dividing and conquering the electorate is not only their main governing strategy, it is the only governing strategy that they still have left.

Keeping Fear Alive is their only motto.

It Ain't Over

Despite beating all the odds and upsetting Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Bernie Sanders is still being pressured to leave the race. Why? Because those oh-so-accurate polls tell us that Bernie is behind in two state contests to be held next week. Plus, it is just too exhausting for the Empress in Waiting to keep up the populist pretense for very much longer. Have you looked at her lately? The woman looks very tired, and she is growing increasingly hoarse.

"The sooner I can become your nominee," she rasped at a rally right before her ignominious defeat, "the more I could begin to turn my attention to the Republicans."

So the establishment media's morning-after coverage of Bernie's unexpected trouncing of Hillary is a lot like Donald Trump's own post-victory speech/press con last night. It's a gigantic infomercial trying to sell us a bucket of branded mystery meat.

Here, for example, is what the New York Times sniffed right after Bernie's blowout: 

Hillary Clinton is leading Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in Florida and Ohio, according to polls released on Wednesday that show him looking vulnerable going into next week’s primary contests.

Losses in Ohio and Florida, where there are a combined 405 delegates at stake on March 15, could deal a significant blow to Mr. Sanders’s campaign and increase pressure on him to consider dropping out of the race.

A survey from Quinnipiac University shows Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, dwarfing Mr. Sanders in Florida, with Democratic voters backing her by a margin of 62 percent to 32 percent.

Of course, some polls had Clinton beating Sanders by more than 20 points in Michigan, a fact which is not even mentioned in the article. Narrow journalistic  minds are focused on the "narrow path forward for Bernie" narrative like a pit bull's jaws clenched around a tender ankle.  If the pundits have proven anything, it's that they know how to mindlessly persevere for the plutocratic cause.

If regular people have proven anything, it's that they ignore opinion-molding polls and pundits.

They look around their communities and see the shuttered factories. They look at their bank accounts and see a big fat Zero. They open up the kitchen tap and see brown smelly water. They go to their mailboxes and find a utility shut-off notice. They open their doors to greet the landlord bearing eviction papers.

If they are among the lucky Americans who still have cable TV or internet access, they saw the Sunday debate where Hillary Clinton falsely accused Bernie Sanders of voting against the auto bailout. They heard her refuse to hand over the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches. They heard her say they might get new pipes for their drinking water in about five years.

If they saw Bernie Sanders appearing flustered at times, or were aware of his much-ballyhooed "ghetto-gate" remarks and gun gaffes, they obviously didn't care.

According to Michigan exit polls, he is gaining slow but steady support among black voters, who also look around and see closed factories and crumbling schools. Much to the chagrin of the Clintonoid Firewall Brigade, black people are not monolithic. People of all races and ethnicities are united in their knowledge of, and anger over, the job-offshoring trade deals that Hillary Clinton has always supported.  They notice that the auto bailout benefited the owners and punished the workers, and that General Motors, becoming aware of the affects that Flint's tainted corrosive water was having on their products, simply pulled up stakes and left without so much as blowing the whistle to their customers and neighbors.

Tellingly, Hillary lost big in Dearborn, home to many Muslim families. Voters notice that American wars have killed many Muslims. They notice the refugee crisis spawned by these wars. They notice that hundreds of Muslims have drowned trying to escape from Libya and other sites of her military adventurism. They notice that her sales of lethal weapons to Middle Eastern autocrats have enabled the mass slaughters of innocent Muslims. They noticed that Bernie Sanders aired commercials in Arabic.

The persevering pundits showed their own bigotry when they professed shock and awe that a Brooklyn Jew could get the Muslim vote. Oh, snap, said the pit bull.

Bernie Sanders has ecumenical appeal.  Who woulda thunk it? 

People simply don't like or trust Hillary Clinton. And the more the media-political complex props her up, the more they seem to telegraph their desire for a President Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been raking in the bucks for them, and would continue to do so if elected. This celebrity huckster is eminently available to journalists for whom access to the powerful has long trumped actual reporting and pursuing truth in the public interest.