The Myth of the Decent President

It's OK to be disgusted by the Democratic Party. It's also OK to be mad at "It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism," the just-published book by Bernie Sanders.

Even though Bernie is more than adept at writing an impassioned stemwinder of a screed, railing against the evils of corporate greed and bemoaning the outsized influence that oligarchs now wield in the erstwhile party of working and poor people, he not only largely gives individual Democrats a pass, he mostly avoids even mentioning their names. Sanders euphemizes Barack Obama, for instance, as the "Status Quo" which in a purely passive voice convinced centrist Democrats like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to leave the 2020 primary race (while Sanders was still leading in the polls) and close ranks around Joe Biden.... Bernie's "very good friend."

So it's the title of Sanders's book that is so misleading, not to mention his introductory claim that the older he gets, the more radical he gets. But radically what, you may well ask yourself as you turn the pages. It's like reading a bowdlerized, Censorship-Industrial Complex version of The Communist Manifesto, in which Karl Marx divides his time and his chapters between urging the workers of the world to unite, and canoodling in the House of Lords, where he is ever so grateful to be barely tolerated by the In-Crowd.

You can't call for a socialist revolution and celebrate the politicians who serve capitalists at the same time and in the same breath. You just can't.  When Bernie demands of Democrats to decide "which side are you on?" he can't even seem to answer his own question.

 Sanders confesses that Biden was only able to beat Donald Trump in 2020  because Bernie himself had convinced enough of his disaffected supporters that Uncle Joe would be the reincarnation of FDR, if they would only show up to vote for him. After all, Bernie had already strong-armed Uncle Joe into making such grudging concessions as lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, outlawing private, for-profit prisons and immigrant detention centers, and creating a government-run public health care insurance option.

Granted, the ink on the new Sanders tome was barely dry when Biden made his utterly predictable return to his right-wing roots this year with the installation of a private equity mogul as his chief of staff, aided and abetted by a duo of husband-wife corporate lobbyists. And not only is Biden continuing Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies, his creation of a climate change task force to placate progressives during his campaign has now morphed into allowing oil company drilling on federal Alaska land and in the Gulf of Mexico. And as far as FDR's safety net is concerned, Biden and his party have been absolutely mute as tens of millions of people are losing their Medicaid coverage and having their food stamp stipends drastically reduced. This is because politicians in both parties have made a conscious choice to ignore a still-raging pandemic.

These realities make reading Bernie's book, with its frequent praise of Biden as a "decent man" all the more poignant, if not downright cringeworthy.

This long-running media myth of Joe Biden's alleged innate decency making up for his "gaffes" and hypocrisy and corruption is getting more bizarre by the day, in fact - especially given the president's rank bellicosity as regards both the proxy war with Russia and his undisguised belligerence toward China.

Come to think of it, America's warmongers have usually been "decent" men, faithful to their wives and devoted to their families and pets and polite to their colleagues as they've gone about the business of displacing, maiming and killing people all over the world with their invasions, their bullets, their bombs, and their economic sanctions. It's no surprise, therefore, that other than blasting America's obscene military budget to make the point that this money could be better used for the health care of our own citizens, Bernie Sanders does not engage in any antiwar rhetoric in his book. The proxy war in Ukraine? What's that?

The biggest enemy in the book is, of course, Donald Trump.

 Trump is not a decent man. He is a slap in the face to all that is proper and moralistic among his fellow thieves and plutocrats. Why else would the Democratic machine and its prosecutors choose to indict him for a payoff to a porn star rather than, say, for inciting a riot in the Capitol and openly trying to bribe and extort various officials into overturning the 2020 election?

"It;s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism" zigzags uncomfortably and discordantly between the fight for social and economic justice and an obsequious homage to the very figures in the American political system who have thwarted social and economic justice for decades. For example:

"Yet while Joe was a good deal more conservative than I was on domestic and foreign policy issues, I liked him personally. He was a decent man, down-to-earth, family-oriented, warm and good humored. He talked a lot about his working class roots, which I appreciated, as I did his enthusiasm for organized labor."

Yes, Biden would soon prove to be so enthusiastic about organized labor that he enforced a strikebreaking contract for railroad workers that denied them their own decent life with enough time off to be even minimally devoted to their own families.

Nevertheless, Bernie persists:

When Joe served as President Barack Obama's vice president, he invited me several times to the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence in Washington. He took an interest in my 2016 presidential campaign and while he remained neutral in the competition between Hillary Clinton and myself, he was not shy about offering insights and advice. That drew us closer, as did the fact that my wife, Jane, and Joe's wife Jill developed a friendship as Senate spouses."

Why am I getting a flashback of Sally Field's "you like me, you really like me!" Oscar acceptance speech?

Sanders goes on to fondly reminisce about soaking up all the Biden flattery when Bernie livestreamed his official endorsement of Uncle Joe.

Joe accepted the endorsement warmly, saying "You don't get enough credit, Bernie, for being the voice that forces us to take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we've done enough. And we haven't... I'm going to need you, not just to win the campaign, but to govern." 

Sanders proclaimed himself satisfied that Biden then appointed various task forces to explore his progressive agenda. Medicare For All was off the table. So was full student debt forgiveness. Baby steps are better than Trump, though. 

Fast forward a couple of years, and Biden has installed a former Bain Capital vulture to rule the West Wing. He took a hard look in the mirror and apparently decided he hasn't done enough to immiserate already desperate people, those people who are not members in good standing of the Democratic voting base - that is, the top 20 percent of income earners.

If Bernie Sanders ever retires from the Senate, perhaps he can write a sequel called Fooled Me Once, Fooled Me Twice. Maybe he can even pick a side.

Once In Love With Bernie....

 The reputation and standing of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party is more important to him than his delegates' First Amendment rights to free speech. Therefore, in hopes of avoiding another outbreak of democratic protest against another rigging of another primary election, the Sanders campaign is demanding that his hundreds of delegates sign a pledge to never, ever publicly "attack" presumptive nominee Joe Biden or any other party bigwig. They must also never disparage mainstream journalists, consultants, cable news shows and party spokespeople.

As a delegate who worked his or her heart out for Bernie, anything you say, or any independent thought that you publicly express, is as good as coming from the mouth of Bernie himself. As such, according to the warning salvo:

 “Before tweeting or posting from your personal social media accounts,ask yourself these questions: If this appeared on the front page of The New York Times, would it compromise Bernie Sanders’s message, credibility, or reputation? Could it potentially risk your standing as a delegate? When re-tweeting or sharing information from others, are you applying necessary skepticism?”

His team is also asking that each delegate sign a nondisclosure agreement, lest any revolution that is not a slogan be televised, live-streamed, shared on social media,  written on comment boards and Internet chat rooms in any way, shape, or form. Refusal to promise to keep your mouth shut will pre-empt your participation in the convention.  If you break the agreement by, for instance, merely talking to a reporter or tweeting a renegade thought while at the convention, you will be kicked out. You may not take candid photos backstage or at "closed press events."

These admonitions presuppose that there will be an actual physical convention as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on and Joe Biden has yet to emerge from his basement bunker.  

If you do go to the live or virtual convention and breach the agreement that you signed, you must immediately surrender to the proper authorities and fess up. To wit:

"If you believe you have made a substantive mistake, alert staff on the Delegates Team to determine a course of action. Deleting something does not make it go away. Do not take action before consulting the Delegates Team."

And you must also promise to snitch on your fellow Bernie delegates if you discover them exercising their First Amendment rights without prior approval. At the same time, you must promise not to retaliate against anyone - say, a Biden delegate - who chooses to exercise his or her own First Amendment rights by acting confrontational or rude. You must turn the other cheek and remain silent, as is your right whenever you're arrested and handcuffed.

Although he has suspended his campaign, Sanders remains on the ballot in remaining primary states in the belief that the more muzzled, cowed delegates that he can amass, the more leverage he will exert over Biden and the corporate wing of the party. Actually, with few progressives even raising an eyebrow over the most massive congressional transfer of wealth to the already wealthy under the CARES Act, is there any other wing but the right-wing, corporate one?

As the Washington Post reports, his strict rules against free speech are angering some of Bernie's delegates. One of them already broke the rules by leaking the five pages of rules to the newspaper, without obtaining the express prior permission of the Sanders campaign.

So we'll have to wait and see whether Bernie Sanders's confident prediction that "at the end of the day, they'll be voting for Joe Biden" comes to pass.

His streak of authoritarianism probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since earlier this month he didn't even bother showing up to be the one necessary vote to block Senate passage of an expanded Patriot Act,  which allows the FBI to search your internet search history without a warrant. In effect, it allows what Bernie calls "the most dangerous president in history" to legally spy on you for any reason at all.

Bernie Sanders is refusing to comment or even say where he was during the crucial vote, which wielded one more death blow to what is left of our democracy and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe he signed a pledge or non-disclosure agreement.

Wink, Nod, Bump, Grind, Repeat

Let's Hear It For Some Anti-Party Unity

"Well-played, Bernie," simpers Michelle Cottle of the New York Times today as she ever so "gently and gratefully" shoves Sanders into the memory hole that she and her cohort were so feverishly digging for him and for America for the better part of the last year.

Joe Biden is so great and such a savior that even the coronavirus couldn't keep legions of his fans away from the latest batch of Democratic primaries. 

Yes - Michelle Cottle really does come right out and gush that tens or hundreds of thousands of voters unnecessarily exposing themselves to infection is so well worth it so long as it achieves "party unity" and the removal of Donald Trump from office this November.

Cottle further insinuates that the pandemic will only get worse the longer that Sanders "reassesses" his campaign. His supporters must socially distance themselves, pronto, before he kills her. And then Joe Biden will give all of us an avuncular hug... or grope... or if we're really lucky, a long lingering hair-sniff.

 This primary began with a sprawling, at times overwhelming, field of candidates. Campaigns rose and fell and rose again as Democrats agonized over which contender had the best shot at defeating President Trump — their absolute top priority. Once actual voting began, the race quickly boiled down to two clear and competing visions: one of electrifying revolution and one of reassuring restoration.As is often the case in presidential politics, things could have broken a different way based on a thousand different factors. (Just ask Hillary Clinton about that.) But whatever hope Mr. Sanders had of wooing more people into his camp effectively died with the arrival of an apolitical black swan in the form of a pandemic.

When Biden won South Carolina and Barack Obama put his discreet thumb on the magical scales to effect a veritable party convention of centrists to nominate Uncle Joe, the pandemic was still only a blip on the media radar. Those were still the days when Russia was the only existential threat, newly encapsulated by Democratic propagandists in the person of Bernie Sanders. 

That the pandemic has had little to nothing to do with Bernie's defeat is beside the point when it becomes a talking point.

But in order to cover their own asses, all that Michelle Cottle and all the folks at the Times, the Post, and MSDNC have to do is pivot from red-baiting to disease-baiting Bernie Sanders. At the same time, they pretend that Biden's wins actually mean something.

Cottle cynically and cloyingly absolves the media of all blame for Bernie's losses , ridiculously claiming that he can't go on TV as much to make his case because the pandemic is interfering with all the positive coverage he allegedly would have gotten after their coverage of Amy Klobuchar's fifth place victory over Bernie's first place showing in Nevada. Or was it New Hampshire?

The thundering hooves of the mainstream media's horserace coverage are like the pitter-patter of tiny raindrops compared to the pandemic. The election has faded in importance in the space of a nanosecond, but still they persist in obsessively fact-checking Donald Trump, as though his lies were more deadly than the lethal virus.

Who cares about Biden or any of them when the lack of toilet paper is second only to the daily overriding fear of the premature deaths of ourselves and our loved ones?

The corporate media, even as they boast of reporting from the quarantined confines of their luxury basement bunkers, certainly seem to care. They have been too well-programmed with the official petty narratives to abandon them just because of a pesky old plague.

"On Tuesday night, the cable news shows kept interrupting their analyses of the primary results for virus updates," Michelle Cottle disingenuously marvels in her own alleged analysis of the death of Bernie's "brand."

My published response to her clueless condescension:

And well-played, New York Times, for the relentless campaign of red-baiting and fear-mongering and marketing of the sexist "Bernie Bro" trope that helped to give us Joe Biden.

Bernie or no Bernie, the revolution from neoliberal predatory capitalism to social democracy is already underway, courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic. Shrill cries from centrists of "but how you gonna pay for that?" are already turning into distant memories.

  The cry for "party unity" is also sounding more grotesque by the minute, given that what we really need is human unity on a scale not seen since who knows when. Biden's latest victories are pyrrhic ones, especially in light of the Democrats refusing to cancel Tuesday's primaries and willfully herding vulnerable older people in large crowds into polling places. Since Biden's victory was all but guaranteed anyway by superdelegates regardless of the once-feared Sanders plurality, the continuing marketing of illusory participatory democracy is both stupid and cruel 

History, if we do have a history, will remember Bernie as a kind man who stuck to his principles and simultaneously and tragically lacked the necessary cutthroat political skills to call out Biden's right-wing career until it was far too late. That is my main beef with Bernie. He put comity over taking the gloves off on behalf of his millions of supporters.

  Lesson learned. Revolution never comes from within a presidential campaign or from elected officials.

On that note, the enforced isolation of the pandemic has not had the desired or expected effect of people crying on their couches as they hope against hope for Biden Party Unity as the panacea against both disease and against Trump.

New York's Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance, to which I have belonged for the past year, just succeeded in enforcing a statewide moratorium on evictions. That's not good enough, though, so we are now clamoring for a moratorium on all mortgage, rent and utility payments for the duration of the catastrophe. Looming rent strikes and other boycotts of capitalism are what's scaring both sorry sides of our political duopoly into issuing stimulus checks for every American. It's not because they love us. They're perfectly OK if we die, but they're also desperate to win elections and hold on to power.

They will soon get the message that their one or two thousand bucks aren't going to cut it.

I see us going the way of Britain, for hundreds of years one of the most class-based and imperialistic countries on the planet, answering  its physical, emotional and economic post-World War II trauma with the National Health Service.

The unicorns and puppies once so derided by neoliberal naysayers and corporate shills are already dancing in the detritus of this horrific viral pandemic. Medicare For All is coming for those of us lucky enough to survive the last gasp of neoliberlal capitalism.

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders. 

But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.

First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left. 

A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption."  Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general. 

In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.

  There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition."  His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press.  The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.

 To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past. 

It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.

So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump. 

It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.

Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S.  over the weekend:

I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!

In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.

He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.

I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.

It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."

My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.

Full-0f-Woe Super Wednesday

Look on the bright side, fellow progressives and socialists. Because as far as Joe Biden is concerned, his slew of primary wins hasn't even happened yet. He thinks that they will happen tomorrow, or on what he adorably dubbed Super Thursday. 

Wednesday's children and Sandernistas might be full of woe today, but just wait until tomorrow. Because while the fortune-telling nursery rhyme predicts that Thursday's child has far to go, Biden will only keep demonstrating how disturbingly far gone he truly is.

Godzillionaire Mike Bloomberg has dropped out. But as of this writing, Elizabeth Warren was still in, despite coming in third in her own home state of Massachusetts. Her top-secret Super PAC might soon make her an offer she can't refuse, however, and stop writing the checks that are keeping her campaign on life support. My prediction is that she will drop out and repeat what she did in 2016: refuse to endorse Bernie.

I hope I'm wrong, because in refusing to endorse Bernie she will be destroying her progressive brand and burying what is still left of her political career.

I think the original Democratic Party game plan was to keep Liz in the race all the way to the convention, just to siphon votes away from Sanders. I highly doubt that Barack Obama included her with the other candidates he obviously called after Biden's South Carolina win to make them the charm-offensive offers they couldn't refuse. She can't stand Biden, in particular his authorship of the bankruptcy bill favoring credit card companies and banks and punishing regular people, particularly women.

As Biden continues making what are still too kindly being called "gaffes," the media will get over its Super Tuesday group orgasm soon enough. At least Ronald Reagan had his rote acting skills to mask his own dementia most of the time. 

As far as the "shock" of Biden's wins is concerned, remember that until a few weeks ago, he was the front-runner for the better part of a year. He would have to literally stop campaigning and giving interviews from here to the convention to pull off a Reaganesque head-fake. His failure to even campaign in the states he won has itself been a winning strategy up to now. This is largely because the field was so thinly spread. And likely because enough voters were so spooked by the media's relentless fear-mongering and red-baiting that they pulled the lever for someone they think they know.

Now that it's just him and Bernie, Biden can no longer hide while he runs. For its own part, the Democratic Party is so bankrupt that it has made Joe its sacrificial lamb at the altar of the Trump Temple, just to keep an FDR-style liberal like Sanders out of the White House. 

When you think about it, this is really a form of elder abuse by the party leadership. It doesn't matter that Biden's vice president would be the real heir or heiress apparent for 2024 and probably already running things the minute Uncle Joe stumbles through the Oath of Office, should he miraculously beat Trump.

If the rumors are true and Biden names Stacey Abrams his running mate before the nomination, then Sanders will be free to follow suit and prematurely join forces with a firebrand like Nina Turner. 

Thankfully, Bernie did not mention that "Joe is a good friend of mine" in a speech to supporters on Tuesday night. But he did seem compelled to add that "Joe is a decent guy" before noting his vote for the Iraq War, his support for job-destroying trade deals and his career-long crusade to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's decency, then I don't know what Bernie's definition of pathological cruelty is.

Stay tuned.

$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.

The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.

MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.

For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.

I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.

But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.

Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.

***************

I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.

Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.

Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

My published response:

 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.

 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.

I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 

As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.

  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.

************** 


Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."
This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.

As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.

My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")

 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.

Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 

As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.

But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.

The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.

***************

Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:

Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."

The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.

 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.

Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."

 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.

There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.

 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

Lloyd Blankfein Stumps For Bernie Sanders

In a canny burst of reverse psychology, the Wall Street banking mogul who helped crash the entire global financial system in 2008 today refreshingly declared that a President Bernie Sanders "would ruin our economy."

Since 94% of all the American household wealth "lost" in the crash is now in the hands of the oligarchy, it is safe to assume that what former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein really fears is that a Sanders presidency would put a damper on his winner-take-all economy - or what Citigroup had secretly dubbed the "plutonomy."

Blankfein tweeted;

If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.

Whether he knows it or not, Blankfein just bleated out a campaign commercial for Bernie. He implicitly signaled his fealty to Donald Trump, who also regularly and falsely claims that the phony opposition party doesn't care about "our military," But Blankfein is obviously referring to Bernie's own refusal to vote for the latest obscene $750 billion Pentagon budget, the successful bipartisan passage of which is bloating Goldman Sachs's own war-connected profits to the monstrous proportions to which it has become accustomed.

Blankfein's peevish McCarthyite tweet actually seems tailor-made to spur even more record, small-dollar donations to Bernie, who won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday despite the best efforts of the corporate media to fool the country into thinking that second runner-up Amy Klobuchar was the break-out heroine of the night. The core media narrative is that since Bernie did not win by the same astronomically huge 40-point margin by which he trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016, it not only doesn't count, it is testament to the "chaos and divisiveness"  that Sanders brings to the Democratic Party establishment. As if that were a bad thing!

As far as the reviled "razor-thin" margin by which Sanders beat Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire  is concerned, we should be honest and admit that Bernie is indeed having a tough time luring in old white conservative people too set in their ways and too attached to Medicare For Only Themselves to abandon the rejuvenating young fogey soul-brother they've found in Mayor Pete.

None of the coverage denigrating Bernie's victory that I watched last night mentioned tthat more young people voted for him than voted than for all the other primary candidates combined. He got more than half the entire youth vote of 18 to 29 year olds, while the 38-year-old Buttigieg received only 22 percent of this demographic.

Bernie's slim margin of victory is based simply upon the much higher number of older voters turning out on primary day. As Vox reports,

One caveat: Older people are simply a bigger part of the electorate. In New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, people 45 and older made up 63 percent of voters, according to the exit polls. People aged 18 to 29 made up just 14 percent.
Historically, this has also been true nationally:Young voters are less likely to turn out. In 2016, less than half of voters aged 18 to 29 went to the polls, while a majority in all other age groups voted, according to the US Census Bureau.

And since older people are more apt than younger people to read the New York Times, and the Washington Post and stay riveted to CNN and MSNBC  they thus might be more prone to internalize the mainstream "narrative," and make the manufactured - and rankly xenophobic -  paranoia of Blankfein and others their very own.

Maybe Prince Harry, who reportedly is making a "billion dollar handshake" with Goldman Sachs, can help. He and wife Meghan already appeared at the JP Morgan Chase Investment Summit in Miami over the weekend to share their mental health expertise with some of the same billionaires and pathocrats who plundered the economy in 2008 and who are now so very, very nervous that their turbo-charged free rides and their mammoth runaway government welfare benefits and their padded portfolios might be in store for the Bernie Brake Pad Special. They're certainly in dire need of a muffler job. And the way their entitled complaining keeps backfiring on them, they might even be headed for the junkyard reserved for totaled luxury limos.

Blankfein and his fellow paranoid plutes should just relax and stay hunkered down in their eight car garages and stop with the class war antics and refrain from raising Bernie's profile so much with their negative attention. Because Sanders is not threatening a communist revolution or an overthrow of capitalism, or a 90 percent wealth tax, or total world peace, or anything remotely close. He is no more radical than FDR, whose ultimate aim was to save predatory capitalism from itself.

It's Their Party and They'll Cry If They Want To

They don't call it the Big Tent for nothing. But with the clowder of pedigreed fat cats straining its gilded threads to bursting from within, and the hordes of Bernie Bros of all genders clamoring from without, is it any wonder that the hosts of the Democratic Party are in full-fledged panic mode?

It's such an epidemic of paranoia, it's impossible to call out all the elite victims by name. It would also be unfairly piling on - because do they really need my or anyone else's help to point out how morally diseased they are? They're doing a fine job all by themselves.

Every time they open their mouths, aggrieved Hillary Clinton-fashion, and utter such rote complaints as "Bernie is getting away with murder and there's nobody to stop him!" or "Bernie is Trump!" the more people are finally kicking the habit of skulking like pitiful strays around the Big Gilded Tent, and the more they begin to flee to Bernieville. The hungry and the desperate have been hanging around the gentry gates for far too long, waiting for the occasional pat on the head or the random rancid leftover. They're finally giving up in disgust.

The Gilded Tent dwellers are noticing. And they are very, very offended. But rather than try and entice the downtrodden back with more wholesome and  egalitarian offerings, they're kicking them in the ribs with renewed abandon and wondering why they're so damned ungrateful for this attention. 

The Democratic Party elites think all they really need is a more effective abuser-in-chief candidate with which to herd a nation full of starving cats as they themselves continue to recline on their cushions of luxury.

The abuse is continuing with renewed gusto, evidenced by the Democratic Party's 2020  committee lists of party invitees, gatekeepers and bouncers. Jonathan Swift himself could not have come up with a more hilarious satire, using some of the most reviled names in the history of the modern American oligarchy. Journalist Kevin Gosztola has the rundown of the names here.

We should probably take a little solace from the fact that, unlike in 2016, the party bosses are more open and honest about their pre-rigging of the nominating process and openly boasting that the Party of the People is ruled by wealth and corporate power brokers. They're offering us a jumbo tainted can of Nine Lives and kicking us in the ribs with their diamond-toed jackboots even as they serve it. They really don't care whether we stick around to get sickened and abused. They don't even seem to care whether their faux-nemesis, Donald Trump, gets another term. His continued presence would only continue to enrich them, personally.

To that end, they are engaging in the sham impeachment trial over in the Senate in a passive-aggressive attempt to elicit public sympathy for their corrupt front-runner, Joe Biden. I say passive-aggressive, because they are also effectively throwing him under the bus by making impeachment all about his son Hunter's lucrative gig at Burisma, the Ukraine gas company, at the same time that Biden was running Ukraine foreign policy. Monday's testimony, in fact, was one long Republican attack ad against Biden in particular and the Democrats in general. 

You know you're in trouble when neocon villain John Bolton is designated the Democratic Party's latest action hero.The New York Times actually frames his tell-all book as "Bolton Has the Goods." It's reached the point where we should be happy if one of the world's most notorious war-mongering bad guys makes another bad guy look worse.

Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating. And his decision to tell these stories publicly nearly certainly waives any claims of executive privilege Mr. Trump might try to assert over their communications.

Translation: Bolton is no pink pussy hat, so you gotta believe him.

 Pick a side, any side. Heads they win, tails you lose.

In a sane, just world, Bernie Sanders would win the presidential nomination. But since it is not a sane, just world, look for worse Democratic Party machinations in the coming months, with the paranoid punditry enhanced by primary voter registration purges as the electoral season enters its final stages.

Then steel yourselves for a contested convention, regardless of the delegate count and regardless of Bernie's national popularity.

When a physically and mentally ailing FDR was running for the fourth time in 1944, it was widely acknowledged that he would not outlive his term. The vice presidency thus became the crux of the contest. Democratic machine bosses didn't want the progressive incumbent, Henry A. Wallace, to be the successor. The popular Wallace that July was polling at more than 60 percent nationally while the elite machine choice, Harry Truman, was at a dismal nine percent. 

As Wallace's biographers John Culver and John Hyde recount in their book American Dreamer, just as he was about to be renominated by raucous acclaim at the Chicago convention, Boss Bob Hannegan ordered his minions to fling open the doors, allowing hundreds of people into the already packed arena. A city worker was dispatched with an ax in order to cut power cables. if necessary. Liberal Florida Senator Claude Pepper had his own microphone cut off and path blocked just as he was about to take the stage and formally place Wallace's name in nomination.

The convention was abruptly ordered adjourned on grounds of the fire hazard which the bosses themselves had deliberately created by overcrowding the building. From American Dreamer:

Overnight the bosses worked feverishly to secure Truman's nomination. Ambassadorships were offered. Postmaster positions were handed out. Cold cash exchanged hands... (On the following night when the convention reopened) Chicago policemen strictly limited admission to the stadium. Thousands of Wallace supporters were denied entrance and those who made it were scattered hither and yon.... 'Some of them were so far apart they had to signal each other with flashlights,' said a radio newsman. Large portions of the galleries were left altogether empty."

After nine grueling hours and a procession of "favorite son" nominations, Wallace won by a too-slim hundred or so votes on the first ballot. But during the second ballot, as was foreordained, delegates began falling like dominoes in favor of Truman.

Look for a similar scenario in Milwaukee this summer. Since technology has advanced far beyond hand-held axes to cut off electricity, we might look for a mysterious computer crash to impede the voting. Or maybe a terror threat will adjourn the proceedings until they can reconvene for sausage making in a closed room in the interests of public safety and "national security."  The bribery and backroom dealings will still be at their usual retrograde levels, as will the massive police presence.

The stacking of the 2020 Democratic Party leadership with oligarchs and lobbyists and warmongers and centrist think tankers (and a few token pro-business union bosses) is only the beginning. Now, as in 1944, a brokered convention looks all but inevitable. Bernie Sanders could win, or appear to be winning, on a first ballot and still be denied the nomination on the superdelegate-heavy second. The bribery as well as the nominating committee is already a done deal.

So forewarned is forearmed. This is going to be very, very ugly.

Maybe DNC Chair Tom Perez can enhance the mood and score another coup for the McCarthyite Democrats by getting John Bolton a prime-time speaking spot at the convention. It would be a great way to boost the party's neoconservative war-happy cred and swell its coffers with even more weapons and oil industry support. Since the tainted cat food of the past four transpartisan decades of neoliberal austerity doesn't attract stray voters any more, the bosses might as well add the seductive stench of blood to their mass-marketing of fear.

Fighting Dirty vs. Playing It Straight

The main criticism of Bernie Sanders from the left is that he's too nice to survive in this cutthroat, backstabbing world of politics. He gallantly told Hillary Clinton at a 2016 primary debate that Americans are "sick and tired of hearing about your damned emails" and later he let bygones be bygones when it emerged that the Clinton-controlled Democratic machine had, indeed, rigged the process against him. He even appeared at numerous rallies for Clinton after she was crowned the nominee by undemocratic acclaim.

She just repaid that misplaced gallantry by trashing him once again, in what could be the opening salvo of a shadow campaign for a second nomination on a second ballot at a brokered convention.

Bernie needs to get over his dual loyalties in a hurry. He's always seemed to have one foot in the Senate and one foot in the rest of the United States. He is loath to criticize his opponents, even going  so far as to preface even mild criticisms of their often cruel policies with "So and So is a good friend of mine." When he says that Joe Biden is a good friend of his, that is an insult to everybody whom Biden has damaged throughout his overlong neoliberal career. When Sanders says he will even support Michael Bloomberg should he win the nomination, even appearing arm in arm with him on Martin Luther King Day, that is a slap in the face to every black or brown man who was ever rousted by cops on Bloomberg's direct orders, just for the crime of existing. It was an insult to all the desperate people that "Mayor Mike" had ordered fingerprinted when they began applying for food stamps in near record numbers after the 2008 financial collapse.

Since Sanders's campaign slogan is "Not me, us," he needs to define his terms. Too frequently, the "us" seems to include people like Biden. Sanders, by any standard of logic, cannot define Biden as a good friend at the same time that he rails against the billionaires that Biden has faithfully served. He certainly cannot, or should not, vow to support Bloomberg, whose obscene net worth is estimated at more than $50 billion.

At the same time, those urging Sanders to "fight dirty" are also wrong. Playing dirty implies engaging in smears and hit jobs, which are dishonest to the core. Criticizing Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Michael Bloomberg for their policies and history is not "attacking" them. Pointing out their lies is not trashing them. It is playing it straight and honest to say that Biden has always wanted to gut Social Security and that Elizabeth Warren was a life-long Republican who is a wholehearted proponent of American militarism and imperialism.

The Democratic machine is carefully keeping Sanders imprisoned in the Senate for the duration of its sham impeachment trial, which is nothing less than an extended campaign commercial for Biden and a gruesome propaganda  extension of the Russiagate excuse for Hillary Clinton's ignominious loss to Trump. It is an open declaration of the neoconservative bent of the Democratic Party, with Chief Prosecutor Adam Schiff channeling George Bush and actually saying that "we have to fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

This kind of mendacious rhetoric is the very definition of playing dirty. It doesn't matter that the Republicans are a hundred times worse, when both parties come to the staged event with unclean hands.

The artificially restricted impeachment articles also tacitly assert that the president does not have the inherent right to formulate foreign policy. They nakedly assert that foreign policy is the sole purview of the permanent security and military apparatus, made up of the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon. They transparently claim that foreign policy is for the ultimate benefit of weapons manufacturers, oil companies and other extractors and exploiters and evictors.

That Trump was partying and bloviating at Davos, and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in Jerusalem crafting foreign policy even as the Senate trial was getting underway are testament to the corruption and widespread bipartisan complicity in the corruption. Each of these dirty plutocrats knows, or think they know, exactly how this show is going to end.

If Bernie Sanders does indeed win the nomination, and if he does indeed defeat Trump in November, his struggles will only be just beginning. He'd better consider who his friends are, and that for the most part, they do not reside in Washington, D.C. Martha's Vineyard, Hollywood, the Hamptons or Davos, Switzerland.

The CIA and the State Department and the congressional intelligence committees funding them and protecting them will still be exerting utmost control. We'll still be living under an oligarchy for the foreseeable future. 

We'll just have to wait and see whether a President Sanders repeats what Barack Obama did once he won the White House: disband his grassroots movement under very friendly pressure and non-refusable offers.

Now is the time to brace ourselves and to prepare for all kinds of dirty possibilities. As Howard Zinn said, it's not who's occupying the White House that matters, but who is out in the streets.