Nothing New Under the Corporate Media Sun

Even though Bernie Sanders now has little to no chance of getting the Democratic nomination, the media are not letting up on him. The fact that he is still campaigning and still railing against the malefactors of great wealth has the malefactors screaming for him to stop, just stop already and be quiet or go away and leave them alone unless it's to help "unify" their private, closed Party.

The latest incident that has them clutching their pearls in elite hysteria was his appearance last week on The Rachel Maddow Show, where he had the effrontery to criticize the corporate-owned media.

Though he speaks truth to power about the shallow, sporting-event, identity politics-driven nature of the coverage, his solution -- for a Democratic Party-financed TV network to counter Fox News propaganda -- had me scratching my head. I sadly suspect that his particular "revolution" is now devolving into a public relations battle between the two big business parties. Why not go whole hog and call for a resurgence of an independent socialist press that is not beholden to advertisers at all? He could have plugged Jacobin, Counterpunch or any of the several genuinely leftist outlets. 

I suppose I quibble. But personally, I wouldn't want Debbie Wasserman Schultz's lunch-hooks anywhere near a new progressive version of Fox.

 MSNBC, for years the unofficial house organ of the DNC and the Obama administration, only recently pivoted to general election coverage. Comcast is not stupid. The "overlords," as Maddow calls them, know a good Donald Trump deal when they see it. There is more advertising value in airing an empty Trump podium or an empty Trump suit for minutes or hours at a time than there is in discussing "issues" or covering a Bernie Sanders rally. 

Since Bernie is still out there, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman continues to falsely equate reactionary Trump supporters with "Bernie Bros," who allegedly are sending harassing Tweets to both himself and the Two Nates (Cohn and Silver) -- the duo who so successfully predicted a near-zero chance for a Trump nomination.

Krugman just can't seem to quit his angry white Bernie straw-dudes, even though the Left actually does include women, older people, and black and brown citizens to boot. The scary socialist trolls are as big on "empirical denial" of "center-left" facts as conservatives!

Although it’s a bit worse when some of those supporters are actual campaign surrogates. Of course, campaigns can’t be held responsible for everything their supporters say, all, we can ask whether Sanders himself is inclined to dismiss inconvenient facts. Well, as you know, I think the answer is yes, on issues ranging from economic projections to the sources of Clinton primary victories.

 I was therefore primed to notice when Sanders declared that Democrats need their own version of Fox News. What does he mean, exactly? Should the proposed network engage in similar factual distortions and outright falsehoods, except this time in the service of progressive goals?

 By the way, it wouldn’t work. Fox caters to an audience of angry old white men; the angry young white guys who would want a left-wing version of this message are fewer in number, have less purchasing power, and anyway don’t get their news from TV. But that’s a side point.

I broke down and wrote a response, because it seems that despite my avowed boycott, I just can't quit the habit of occasionally calling out the Conscience of a Neoliberal:

 Krugman is right. Some on the left, whom he persists in denigrating as "Bernie Bros", are indeed in empirical denial. They have trouble accepting the fact that wealth rules the world, and that the corporate-owned media do not represent the public interest.. They believe in a utopia of debt-free public education, health care for all, a decent job at a decent wage, a secure retirement, a more or less permanent roof over their heads. How silly of the desperate ones to want change today or tomorrow instead of 50 years from now, if even then. How anti-pragmatic of them not to get with the program, and join in the team effort of lambasting Trump and cheerleading Clinton to the finish line.

Why won't they listen to Krugman and former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell, who has already warned them not to make a fuss at the convention of party bigwigs?

What this is really about is a resurgence of socialist ideas, with or without Bernie Sanders. Back in the waning days of the last Gilded Age, vested wealthy interests were terrified of an anti-capitalist muckraker named Upton Sinclair. Getting the Bernie treatment in the NYT and elsewhere is nothing new. Sinclair even went so far as to measure the column inches devoted to plutocrats as opposed to humanitarians to prove his point.

Read "The Brass Check," his exposé of corporate journalism, and you will see that nothing much has changed, except that the media are much more consolidated.

The "facts" still have a well-known money bias.

My comment was inspired by Chapter XXII of Sinclair's book, which begins:

The thesis of this book is that our newspapers do not represent public interests but private interests; they do not represent humanity but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth. And suppose that you wished to make a test of this thesis, a test of the most rigid scientific - what would you do? You would put up two men, one representing property, the other representing humanity. You would endeavor rigidly to exclude all other factors; you would find one man who represented property to the exclusion of humanity, and you would find another man who represented humanity to the exclusion of property. You would put these two men before the public, having them do the same thing, so far as humanly possible, and then you would keep a record of the newspaper results.

Sinclair, never famous for personal modesty, compared his humanitarian self ("besides Jack London, the most widely known of living American writers throughout the world") to Vincent Astor, whose only claims to fame were first that he was born; second, that he lived on an estate; third, that he married money, and fourth, that he inherited $65 million -- at the time, beating the all-time record for inherited wealth. Sinclair continued,

And now for the action of the two men. It appears that the New York Times, a great organ of world capitalism, in its effort to camouflage its true functions, had resorted to the ancient device of charity, used by the Christian Church ever since it sold out to the Emperor Constantine. Early in December of each year, the Times publishes a list which it calls "One Hundred Neediest Cases" and collects money for these hundred families in distress. The Times never goes into the question of the social system which produces these harrowing cases, nor does it allow anyone else to go into this question; what it does is to present the hundred victims of the system with enough money to preserve them until the following December, so that they may never again enter into competition for mention in the list, and have their miseries exploited by the Times.

That should help answer Bernie's question. Plutocrats don't want you to know about their game, because what they don't want you know could hurt them, very badly. Sinclair self-published his book in 1919, ten years before the oligarchic greed he decried crashed the entire economy. Later, it was the activist pressure of the socialist movement that actually ushered in FDR's New Deal. If they'd had the likes of Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman and their neoliberal free-market ilk around to lecture the proles and propagandize for the wealthy, who knows? We might never have gotten a national jobs program, publicly funded infrastructure, and Social Security.

The Times still does its annual charity drive as it serially glorifies the extremely wealthy all the year round. Just check out the real estate section on any given day, to see what kind of digs $10 million will buy you. 

 Were it not for real estate magnate Donald Trump's billions, do you really think he could have gleaned all his free front-page publicity from the Times and other outlets? You don't need a scientific study to prove that Trump has gotten more coverage than the Pope, Bernie Sanders and millions of actual poor people combined -- or anyone who can't afford the price of a subscription, let alone the price of a display ad.

Upton Sinclair finished his New York Times take-down with the following humorous anecdote. When he wrote an open letter to Vincent Astor in 1914, asking him to justify his lavish lifestyle when millions of his fellow citizens were starving, only one of the many city papers in circulation at that time published it. That was the New York Call, a small socialist paper. The Gray Lady turned up her nose at such a thing. An attack on capitalism? No way!

Then Astor got wind of the letter, and he answered it. Or, as Sinclair theorized, a shrewd family lawyer or a secretary probably answered it. Astor's reply was offered to every major newspaper, and every major newspaper published it. Most of them, including the Times, splashed it on their front page, with Astor's picture. They wrote glowing accompanying editorials about the magnanimous indignation of the young multimillionaire who deigned to defend himself against those nasty socialist attacks. Astor complained that Sinclair's ideas were "fallacious and impracticable," and that help for the needy would come over time, without the need for radical change. Besides, he sniffed, he'd spoken to experts, and was informed by experts that "the condition of laboring people has greatly improved over the last several generations."

Sound familiar? Upton Sinclair was a Bernie Bro.

And less than two decades later, the whole economic system came crashing down because of oligarchic greed and the media's enablement of it.

I have a feeling we won't have to wait 20 years for the next big "event." For one thing, the earth itself, drowning and burning and melting as it is, just never learned how to get with the incremental, pragmatic program. 

Mother Earth is an impatient Bernie Bro. Pass it on. 

Obama's Bruised Ego Trip

Barack Obama actually seems to be jealous of Bernie Sanders. What cool, suave president wouldn't feel a bit miffed when his rock star status is suddenly usurped by a democratic socialist senator two decades his senior?  No matter that Obama's corporate party has now apparently successfully quashed the Sanders candidacy in order for the Clinton succession to proceed apace. Barack Obama is acting like a sore winner.

It started with a New York Times magazine puff piece of a vehicle through which Obama expresses his disappointment with all the ungrateful folks out there in America who are not sufficiently appreciative of the booming economy he has wrought. And that ingratitude, he says, is not the fault of any of his craptastic policies rewarding Wall Street and punishing Main Street. He magnanimously theorizes that the ingratitude is the result of his team's insufficient bragging in the wake of each and every one of their miraculous  accomplishments. He didn't toot his own horn loudly enough. Misplaced modesty was his enemy, even with the establishment of his own in-house marketing and propaganda shop.

Presidential Style: The Legacy Tour Collection

 
“We were moving so fast early on that we couldn’t take victory laps. We couldn’t explain everything we were doing. I mean, one day we’re saving the banks; the next day we’re saving the auto industry; the next day we’re trying to see whether we can have some impact on the housing market," he whined to Wall Street pitchman Andrew Ross Sorkin -- who made sure to tell us in the opening paragraphs that he got a coveted ride on Air Force One and several Oval Office invites in exchange for the favorable myth-making. Even more dramatically West-Wingish was the revelation that  the Secret Service was pissed off because  the blooming Obama-Sorkin bromance was interfering with the official schedule.

Jogging Our Memories: Tales of a Lonely Lapper

Obama -- described by Sorkin as "justifiably exasperated" by the vast public ignorance of his awesomeness -- brought down the deficit, fer cryin out loud! The unemployment rate went down with the creation of millions of new low-wage, part-time, temporary service sector jobs. He appointed the Cat Food Commission to make it appear that the rich would "share the sacrifice" with the poor. He gave us nationalized Romneycare, leading to some medical coverage for a small but ethically digestible number of  previously uninsured people.

The Times piece is only the opening salvo in the endless Obama Legacy Tour. The president has been actively lobbying friendly reporters to help him put himself back on center stage, from which he has been unceremoniously nudged stage-right by the presidential horse race. Still, it will be hard for the sloppy seconds to outdo Sorkin, whose journalistic prowess is so majestic that he actually broke through the Obama blood-brain barrier like a mind-reading shunt.

 Obama is animated by a sense that, looking at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in much better shape than the public appreciates, especially when measured against the depths of the financial crisis and the possibility — now rarely even considered — that things could have been much, much worse.

So pay no attention to your own senses. If an "animated" Obama senses from afar that your life is better than you think it is, then it naturally follows that you are naught but an inconsiderate inanimate object. Or, as Obama put it to Sorkin, we are "disoriented." And since we don't know our asses from a hole in the wall, it is perhaps understandable that we fail to sufficiently appreciate his "delicate balancing act."

Obama also took the obligatory jab at Bernie Sanders, whom he accused of speaking of the economy as though it were a mere "abstraction." Although the Sanders plan has only been to break up the largest banks, which own dangerously consolidated assets larger than the GDPs of most countries, Obama falsely accused him of wanting to destroy the entire economy.

“But there is no doubt that the financial system is substantially more stable,” he said. “It is true that we have not dismantled the financial system, and in that sense, Bernie Sanders’s critique is correct” — a reference to the Vermont senator and presidential aspirant who regularly calls to break up America’s biggest banks. “But one of the things that I’ve consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It’s not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences.”

Then again, if you admit that our "economy" has been stealthily replaced by a plutonomy serving the interests only of the very wealthiest, Obama was probably right in acknowledging that Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and the rapacious global corporate and military plunder they enable are just about all that's propping Exceptional America up these days. There would be consequences of a breakup, which after a little initial upheaval, would probably result in a more equitable democratic system. 

Meanwhile, Obama is trying to win back some of the youth vote usurped by Sanders. The most secretive administration in history, led by a president who has been described by James Risen as "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation," suddenly reached out this week to a group of student journalists visiting the White House.

But rather than urging them to afflict the comfortable and demand accountability from government officials, he admonished them to tell their peers to simply vote for more politicians like him (and presumably, Hillary.)

Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis was dutifully awed by and envious of Obama's awesome engaging with mere student reporters, given that the professional press corps are so into "access" and given that they are so rarely given it.

So Davis stuck with the stenographic semantic playbook of the Legacy Tour:

But it was a student who asked about how to restore Americans’ faith in democracy who provoked the most animated (h/t Andrew Ross Sorkin) response from the president, a former community organizer who campaigned on “hope and change” and has recently lamented his inability to change politics for the better.

After a long discourse on what is broken in politics — gerrymandered districts, a flood of undisclosed campaign contributions and negative advertisements — Mr. Obama cited the low turnout numbers in American elections, especially by young people.

“You can’t just complain; you’ve got to vote,” Mr. Obama said. “Don’t let people tell you that what you do doesn’t matter. Don’t give away your power.

Obama ignored the huge, record turnouts at the polls by young Bernie Sanders supporters, both at his campaign rallies and at independent-friendly caucuses and primaries. So I assume that the president's subliminal message to his audience is to resist joining the Bernie Or Bust campaign, or heaven forfend, aid a resurgence of the Occupy movement which was the fuel for the Bernie phenomenon in the first place. Obama wouldn't want to have to call out the troops again so late in his career. It took forever to purge those pepper-spraying cop pics from the Internet.

Don't complain, don't agitate, don't speak out, don't investigate. Just use all your power sparingly: vote. Preferably for Hillary Clinton. And who knows? Maybe a few of you lucky budding journalists will even get the chance to be embedded in one of her inevitable wars. 

No Longer Feeling the Bern

Unless we all join together in a new anti-war movement and demand an end to global American aggression, there can be no political revolution and no real improvement in our lives here at home. 

In a televised town hall appearance last night on MSNBC, self-described Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders doubled down on both his support for President Obama's drone assassination program and for the U.S.'s  continued military escalations in the Middle East. Sanders called the presidential "kill list" perfectly legal, constitutional and necessary. He gave his stamp of approval to Obama's pivot from "no American boots on the ground" in Syria to ordering an additional 250 pairs of them to aid and abet Al Qaeda-linked "rebels" in the fight against ISIS.

Asked by Chris Hayes if he would continue Obama's drone strikes, which to date have killed thousands of innocent civilians ("collateral damage"), Sanders replied: "Look. Terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves."

 He added that as long as the extra-judicial executions ordered by politicians and bureaucrats are done in the current "legal, constitutional way" -- as defined by a couple of government lawyers-for-hire --he sees no problem with it.

Regarding this week's new deployment of hundreds more Special Ops troops to Syria, Sanders toed the company line to a fault. These human killing machines are merely acting as "advisers" to "Muslim troops," he insisted.

Sanders also supports the continued, open-ended deployment of 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. He was not asked about, nor did he address, the White House whitewash of the terroristic American bombing of a charity hospital last fall in Kunduz, resulting in the deaths of nearly 50 medical professionals and patients.

Nor did he speak out against the horrific new "rules of engagement" (secretly in effect since last fall) which allow for more civilian casualties in the air wars on Syria and Iraq and wherever else in the world a bomb falls. The Pentagon has quietly revised its standards for how many children can be ethically obliterated in the name of American exceptionalism.

USA Today reports that the generals have devised a handy little sliding scale with which to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility when they decide to bomb people to smithereens. Human beings in war zones are even ascribed a numerical value: "A strike with the potential to wound or  kill several civilians would be permitted if it prevented ISIL fighters from causing further harm."

The newspaper quotes one general celebrating the Obama administration's belated public pivot to hawkishness, likening it to Lyndon Johnson's no holds barred bombing offensives in Vietnam -- where those special advisers also initially only "helped" the South Vietnamese as the "best and the brightest" mission-crept their way into a bloodbath of epic proportions.

So, Bernie Sanders going on TV and spouting the same old platitudes in order to help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" about the latest unfettered war is the last straw for me. I am feeling something, all right. I feel like I've been burned. My feelings, of course, are nothing compared to what millions of people "over there" are experiencing as their homes and their bodies get burned to crisps by our leaders' bombs and drones.

As the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh remarked the other day about the de facto American invasion of Syria, "Nobody ever seems to object too much when we put more people on the ground."

And sadly, that also appears to be the case with Bernie Sanders.  Now that he has virtually no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, he could have seized the moment last night to condemn war instead of embracing it. I'd been willing to pragmatically give him a bit of a pass on his historic lack of pacifism, in hopes that he might be elected and then pressured to ease out of the bellicose mindset. No more.

So enough with the hand-wringing over Hillary the Hawk and Ted Cruz's dastardly desire to carpet-bomb Syrians to death. President Peace Prize is already doing just fine in that department, and even the Empress-in-Waiting's Democratic primary challenger is effectively helping to grease the skids for her seamless transition to power. She'll just be the latest salesperson for Permawar. She'll just be a little more vocal than her smarmy male cohort in her unabashed enjoyment of it.

The invasion of Libya is probably just an election away. Obama, employing his usual lawyerly parsing, doesn't think such a move is necessary right at the moment, since it might send "the wrong signal" to that country's officials and citizens. He apparently doesn't believe that millions of refugees and hundreds of drowned children are not already enough of a signal.  

And as Trevor Timm writes in The Guardian, 

Libya is now engulfed in chaos and the number of Isis members is skyrocketing, largely thanks to the US and allies bombing the country and overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi five years ago. There are already drones flying over the country and special forces have already been in and out in the past year to conduct special forces missions. You can picture administration members soon arguing: we must invade the country to save it from the last time we bombed it."

Bernie Sanders will not be mounting any third party challenge, he says, because he doesn't want to end up like Ralph Nader. To me, there are worse things than ending up like Ralph Nader. What's worse is being complicit in mass killing.

And anyhow, Ralph Nader ending up like Ralph Nader continues to be a very good thing. He's spearheading (h/t "annenigma") what he calls an "historic civic mobilization" beginning with a four-day strategy session to be held next month at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Participants will receive professional training in how to effect revolution from the ground up, in their own communities.

The third day (May 25) of the Breaking Through Power convention will be exclusively dedicated "to the enhancing of peace over the waging of war."

"Revitalizing the people to assert their sovereignty under our Constitution is critical to the kind of government, economy, environment and culture that will fulfill human potential and respect posterity," Nader says. "The participating citizens will be asked to support the creation of several new organizations. One will be a Secretariat to facilitate action to stop illegal wars and their quagmires (e.g. the wars on Iraq and Libya and their brutal aftermaths)" by some of the same retired military and diplomatic officials and other activists who so stridently protested during the Bush administration before dissent was quieted in the belief and hope that peace would finally be given a chance under the Obama administration. 

I'm feeling the Ralph.

Reality Bites

As expected and as preordained, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have "won" the closed primary election in New York State. The marathon presidential horse race is now entering its final lap. 

But even with the long shots now painfully limping up the backstretch as Donald and Hillary stampede toward the finish line, the profiteers of the game are suddenly bellowing "Whoa, Nelly!" 

Not so fast. 

The show must go on. If they call the race too soon, the rubes will stop placing their bets. The crowds will dwindle, the cameras and the bookies will disappear. The cable channels will have nothing to yammer about while they're sitting around hoping for the next big terror attack or mass shooting. So, the media and the partisans are all getting together today and urging Bernie Sanders and John Kasich to stay in the race till the last advertising dollar rolls in. Those two candidates might be nags compared to the thoroughbred front-runners, but they're still worth mega media bucks right up to the day when the glue factory guy finally shows up.

Even though the contest is fixed and the challengers hobbled before they even got started, this is still the best democracy money can buy in the best of all possible countries. The New York Times, which helped to fix the race in the first place with all that free advertising for Hillary and Donald, has decreed it.

After months of alternately castigating and ignoring Sanders, the Times editorial board has come out with a sanctimonious screed urging him not to quit the race just yet. Since all that Hillary has got going for her is the victim card, she still needs grumpy Bernie to pester her in order to get more sympathy votes from people for whom identity trumps policy. Without the mythical Bernie Bro terriers nipping at her heels as she canters around the track toward the finish line, where would she be? Alone on the trail, that's where, in all her empty pantsuit glory, without so much as a single pearl to clutch. But with Bernie occasionally getting a second wind and threatening to overtake her, she can keep up appearances as Fighter For You with even odds in her run for the poses.

The owners and the trainers and the groomers desperately need Bernie to stick around and eventually morph from gelding into sheepdog, the better to herd the millions of young people so energized by his message into the strict confines of the Democratic veal pen. The guy already is an underdog as well as a nag, but people do love their underdogs.  And the profiteers love the people who love their underdogs, because the people have parted with millions of their dollars to keep this whole underdog thing going. Every time Bernie loses, he makes money! Just think of where all that money could eventually wind up. Ka-ching goes the beat of the DNC's alleged heart.

Therefore in the interest of big money, the Times must now pretend to love an underdog, too.  Run, Bernie, Run! they screech in their most liberal, D-Flat Minor tones: 

Mr. Sanders has always stood more for a vision than for reality, especially with a Republican-led Congress. As he and Mrs. Clinton tore into each other in last week’s debate in Brooklyn, some Democrats worried that the nasty fracas would hurt the party. Others want Mr. Sanders to get out and let Mrs. Clinton focus on the Trump threat.

 Mr. Sanders’s presence has made this an immeasurably more substantive race, in which both candidates’ policies have been better vetted, and as a result, better delineated. That’s the best preparation for the general election. Yes, Mrs. Clinton’s lead is nearly insurmountable, but it should be voters who erase the “nearly.”

Are they magnanimous, or what?

My published response:

 The Times gives the game away with its admonition that Sanders has always been more about "vision" than about "reality."

Whose reality?

The "reality" of which the Times speaks is a manufactured set of rules designed to enrich only the already obscenely wealthy. What the Sanders campaign has revealed to millions of people is the power of the Possible. Possibility can forge its own reality. The terms are not mutually exclusive.

Who, besides the plutocracy, says that we cannot have free public college tuition and government-run single payer health care? As democracy has been whittled away by the malign forces of neoliberalism, too many of us have been cowed into believing that there is no other way but the rule of the market god. We are so alienated that we haven't realized how alienated we have become.

 Don't tell us that it's only the nasty old Republicans preventing the humanitarian Democrats from forging a better life for millions of disenfranchised, dispossessed Americans. The whole rotten system has been exposed for all to see, even those who've been willfully blinded.

I don't know if Bernie has a chance of winning the White House or not. What matters is that the consciousness of a nation has been raised, a solidarity is being forged, and we will refuse to be atomized into a state of helplessness any longer. Just as the Clintons gave birth to neoliberalism, so too may the Clintons officiate over its funeral.

Long live possibility.

Whose reality? Our reality.

Sentendo l'ustione*

*Feeling the Bern, Italian-style:

Bernie Sanders had a brief (five-minute) meeting with Pope Francis after all. The Pope couldn't attend the economic conference at which Bernie spoke, because he was otherwise busy comforting Syrian refugees on the Isle of Lesbos, and even ended up rescuing a dozen of them.

I couldn't find video of Bernie's formal address in the Vatican, but a full transcript is here.

This is the part that particularly struck me: 

We need a political analysis as well as a moral and anthropological analysis to understand what has happened since 1991. We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance burst through the legal, political, and moral constraints that had once served to protect the common good. In my country, home of the world’s largest financial markets, globalization was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks, ending decades of legal protections for working people and small businesses. Politicians joined hands with the leading bankers to allow the banks to become “too big to fail.” The result: eight years ago the American economy and much of the world was plunged into the worst economic decline since the 1930s. Working people lost their jobs, their homes and their savings, while the government bailed out the banks.

Sanders is calling for a philosophical and anthropological analysis of greed. He is calling for a scientific inquiry into what makes plutocrats tick. He is going so far beyond the usual political platitudes that turn so many people off during the endless presidential horse-race. What he is calling for is unprecedented in American politics.

And it is a vital necessity. The whole planet is burning and melting. Una senzione di bruciore!

But it's no surprise that our corporate media are concentrating mainly on his meeting with Pope Francis, (would he or wouldn't he?) the cost of his chartered flight to Rome, his entourage, his itinerary, his tax returns.... and last but not least, the massive hand-wringing concern over his abandonment of the campaign trail right in the middle of a fraught primary contest in the wealth inequality capital of the universe: New York City. 

Hillary, meanwhile, was on her own greed trail, heading to California for that George Clooney fundraiser, where a seat at the head table was going for nearly twice what Sanders earns in an entire year. It was even going for about a third more than than one of Hillary's secret quarter-million dollar Goldman Sachs speeches.  Where are the anthropologists to do a study on just that one grotesque pattern of wealth culture alone? Forget Coming of Age in Samoa! We need a passel of Margaret Meads and Ruth Benedicts to settle themselves among the billionaires for some heavy-duty insight into their folkways, customs, status symbols and tribal psychology. How much does it really cost a Hollywood chieftain to score the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James?  What makes these people tick?  Because one thing's for sure: it's their group behavior that's making the rest of the world so damned sick.

(I can't verify this because of all the white noise emanating from the event, but I've heard rumors that the underpaid temporary wait staff added candied Diavolo Sterco to the dessert tray at the Clooney confab.)  

The Dodgers Return to Brooklyn

I'll be honest. My brain started tuning out last night's Democratic debate after about three innings. The first strikeout came when Bernie was asked if he could name one example of Hillary Clinton changing her vote as a result of a corporate donation. He bungled it big-time. He popped a high fly out into right field, where it hovered in the air harmlessly before plunking smack dab into Hillary's placid, waiting mitt.

DANA BASH (CNN moderator) : Senator Sanders, you have consistently criticized Secretary Clinton for accepting money from Wall Street. Can you name one decision that she made as senator that shows that he favored banks because of the money she received? 

SANDERS: Sure. Sure. The obvious decision is when the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of wall street brought this country into the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession -- the Great Depression of the '30s, when millions of people lost their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings, the obvious response to that is that you've got a bunch of fraudulent operators and that they have got to be broken up.

That was my view way back, and I introduced legislation to do that. Now, Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: So the problem response -- the proper response in my view is we should break them up. And that's what my legislation does.

CLINTON: Well, you can tell, Dana, he cannot come up with any example, because there is no example.

 Why didn't he bring up the bankruptcy bill?

When Hillary was first lady, she sided with Elizabeth Warren and got Bill to veto some bank-friendly legislation which would have made it almost impossible for working families to declare personal bankruptcy, largely stemming from medical debt.

When Hillary became New York senator, she did an about-face and in 2001 voted for the bill - immediately after receiving hefty contributions from the same banks and credit card companies which demanded that struggling consumers be kept in onerous debt for the rest of their lives. As Warren wrote in The Two Income Trap:

 "The bill was the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton  could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble."

This was the smoking gun, the quid pro quo that Clinton has always denied exists. It does exist.

Not that political corruption and legalized bribery require a quid pro quo, by any means. Wealthy donors aren't paying for immediate favors. They are investing for the future -- a future of tax exemptions, corporate welfare, and a get out of jail free card with no expiration date.

Bernie was great at the sarcasm and the yelling, but not so great at digging up facts and answering questions directly. He often spoke over the moderators as Hillary just calmly stood there, grim smirk on her face, only occasionally needing to mar her calm demeanor with her trademark derisive cackle.

Both of them are artful dodgers of questions, because both of them are seasoned politicians. Both of them also looked like I feel: tired, cranky, and old. How can't they stand each other? Let us count the ways.

Hillary got knuckle-balled and beaned badly on those Wall Street speeches. She still offers no good explanation for not releasing them because even she, slick fielder that she is, can't come up with one good fake reason for not releasing them. For example, she could have said she lost them the same way she mysteriously misplaced those Rose Law Firm docs all those years ago.

Bernie twisted her into a soggy pretzel over whether she would or would not raise the cap on Social Security FICA contributions. He also did a good job exposing her bloodthirsty Neocon foreign policy (even Obama opposes her suggestion of a no-fly zone over Syria.)

 Bernie was supposed to release his 2014 tax returns today, because Jane apparently has finally found the time to log onto TurboTax. He still can't locate earlier returns, though. Like most of us shlubs, I suspect he probably lost his only tattered coffee-stained copies in the circular file.

With Clinton's spit balls and Bernie's unforced errors, the popcorn is beginning to taste a tad stale. But I'll root root root for the Brooklyn homeboy anyhow. If we don't win, what a shame. Then again, if Hillary is allowed to steal home because of a rigged electoral game, she can't very well call it a championship season either. Heads she wins, tails we all lose. The tickets to the Neoliberal Hall of Fame are way out of our price range.

The Everywoman Look (a Mary Poppins Original)

Thoughts?

Krugman Backlash

It's when even the Clinton-leaning Huffington Post publishes a listicle called The Internet's 10 Best Responses to Paul Krugman's Hit Piece: 'Sanders Over the Edge,'  that you realize just how badly and deservedly the Times columnist's professional reputation has been damaged.

In case you've forgotten that nasty column published on Friday -- described by some critics as "Peak Krugman" -- the Nobel Bank Prize winner went on a demented tear, calling both Bernie and his supporters petulant, angry, purist, cultish, insubstantial, and vague. He also displayed a shocking ignorance of how banks work, which is probably why that group of Swedish bankers gave him a million or so bucks in the first place: to keep the ignorance flowing.

Naturally, the responses elicited by the column were just what the Clintonistas wanted: total outrage. I believe that this technique is called "gaslighting." See? Krugman and the other surrogates told you that Bernie Bros are off-the-wall paranoid! Tsk, tsk, tsk. You know, they never actually said Bernie is unqualified to be president: they just planted that headline so that he'd counterattack, just like they wanted him to. Of course they don't want him to drop out while they're busy blaming him for every shooting death in America! Now, let's everybody calm down and be civil about it.

Topping the HuffPo list is this withering critique:

And when you're done watching, be sure to check out #5.

Clinton, the Media, and Money

No more Mrs. Nice Candidate.

Hillary Clinton was rapidly losing ground to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. She was sticking to her depressing impression of the banally evil Margaret Thatcher, who thrived before she died on a strict diet of lecturing the downtrodden that "there is no alternative"" to predatory capitalism.

Now, I realize that I'll be accused of anti-corporate feminism by musing about the art of the cackle, but here goes anyway....

This week, in light of her tanking poll numbers and recent primary defeats, she's imitating a more wickedly flamboyant Margaret. As in, "I'll Get You, My Pretty!" Hamilton playing the dual roles of Almira Gulch and the Witch of the West. She is out for Bernie blood with an over-acted vengeance.  There is nothing like answering a question about your opponent with a bout of forced derisive laughter to win the hearts and minds of the same young audience you are demeaning.

 Her handlers are betting that Hillary will have more than enough time to quick-change into Glinda of Oz by the time the sands of the hour-glass settle and she can make quick work of Bernie Sanders through a barrage of insults and innuendo. They imagine that they can castigate the millions of millennials who support Bernie, but then magically herd them into Clinton's hot air balloon for her quick voyage back to the White House.

And she is making no bones about the fact that she can't take the Bern for one minute longer. Enough is enough, my pretties, of pretending that this is still a democracy and that your protests will make a lick of difference in the grand neoliberal scheme of things. So it's off with the expensive kid gloves for the big reveal of the boxing gloves that lie beneath, hand-tailored to fit even the most ham-fisted politician.

Now that the contest has finally reached the wealth inequality and consolidated media epicenter of the universe (New York), Hillary Clinton is calling in all her chits from her partners in the neoliberal disinformation biz, a/k/a The Great White Way.

Before the final tally of her Wisconsin defeat was even in, the Clinton machine was circulating the "damaging" transcript of Bernie Sanders's editorial board meeting with the tabloid Daily News. Campaign publicists even helpfully highlighted the bits in which Bernie allegedly goofed in saying (correctly, it turns out) that the Treasury Department, under the president's direction, has the authority to break up the big banks. Tweet the faux-gaffes to your family and friends and then send us a buck, the Clintonoids begged.
 
The Daily News, which also published an inflammatory front page accusing Bernie Sanders of throwing the Sandy Hook Massacre families under the bus, is owned by right wing billionaire neocon "thought leader" Mort Zuckerman. He and the Clintons have socialized together both in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where Hillary penned her "Hard Choices" memoir in isolated plutocratic splendor between fund-raising gigs with the rich and famous.

  If there is one thing that Hillary does extremely well, it is bringing extremely rich and famous people together for fun and profit. And that includes rich media moguls like Zuckerman, who donated generously to her family foundation before siccing his editorial henchmen against Bernie Sanders in a board meeting that sounded more like a semantic waterboarding. 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the ensuing corporate media brouhaha over the Daily News transcript "absolutely bonkers." He writes,

In an exchange with the New York Daily News editorial board a few days ago, Bernie said he didn’t know if the Fed had authority to break up the big banks but the President does have such authority under the Dodd-Frank Act.

This drew an onslaught of criticism from the media: "Bernie Sanders Admits He Isn't Sure How to Break Up Big Banks," read Vanity Fair's headline. "This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders," said The Washington Post. "How Much Does Bernie Sanders Know About Policy?" asked The Atlantic. The Clinton campaign even said in a fundraising email "on his signature issue of breaking up the banks, he's unable to answer basic questions about how he'd go about doing it, and even seems uncertain whether a president does or doesn't already have that authority under existing law."

The criticism is bonkers. Bernie was absolutely correct when he said the President has the authority to break up the big banks under Dodd-Frank. He's repeatedly specified exactly how he'd use that Dodd-Frank authority to do so. His critics are confusing the Dodd-Frank Act with the Federal Reserve. Whether the Fed has the authority on its own to break up the biggest banks is irrelevant.

Clearly, Bernie has the Democratic establishment worried enough to try to twist his words into pretzels.

What do you think?

 No need to actually think this one through. Just follow the money.

In the next several weeks, the consolidated corporate media -- funded by the same banks, pharmaceutical giants, defense contractors and oil companies which fund Hillary Clinton -- will be like a troupe of flying monkeys, in full unified attack mode against Bernie Sanders and his message of a revolution against corruption and the worst inequality since the Gilded Age.

Politico last year published a list of corporate media gifts to the Clintons. At the very top is Carlos Slim, chief shareholder of the New York Times Company, who forked over at least $5 million.  Also in the multimillion-dollar range are James Murdoch of Fox News Corp; Newsmax, a conservative media group based in Florida; and Thomson Reuters.

Other donors are conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife; Abigail Disney; Howard Stringer, formerly a CEO at CBS and SONY; Bloomberg LP; Discovery Communications; George Stephanopoulos of ABC-/Disney; Time-Warner; AOL; HBO; Hollywood Foreign Press Association; Knight Foundation; Public Radio International; Turner Broadcasting; Comcast; NBC Universal; PBS; Politico owner Robert Albritton; AOL Huffington Post Media Group; the Hearst Corporation; PBS News Anchor Judy Woodruff; and the Washington Post Company.

Follow the money. The corporate media and democracy are antithetical to one another. As far as they are concerned, elections are a spectator sport in which you, the citizen, may participate once every two, four or six years by selecting one of the candidates they have chosen especially for you. Since they didn't choose Bernie Sanders, they are trying to destroy him.

And all indications -- half mile-long lines at Sanders rallies, his improving poll numbers -- simply reveal that the corporate media just aren't very good at what they do. They are abysmally failing at what Noam Chomsky has called the manufacture of consent. 

Guess what? The manufacturing has hereby been outsourced from the media conglomerate propaganda machine into millions of independent working minds and rebellious, fed up spirits.

As Auntie Em retorted to Almira Gulch in the very populist Oz classic: "Just because you own half the county doesn't mean you have the power to run the rest of us!"

Bernie Blowout in Wisconsin

He won Wisconsin by comfortable, if not yuge, double digits.

And lacking its usual video feed of an empty Donald Trump podium, CNN had no choice but to air Bernie Sanders's victory speech (in Laramie, Wyoming) almost in its entirety. For those of you who missed it, here it is. Unscripted and un-TelePromptered, it's a keeper for the ages.

Combined with this week's revelations of the global greedy gazillionaire money stash in Panama (are there any Clinton Foundation donors among the legions of tax-phobic hoarders?), here's hoping that April 2016 will go down as the time when the Neoliberal Project finally began its long-overdue demise, and moribund democracy got its second (or third, or hundredth) wind.

The Times Is the Pits (and the Pendulum)

Edgar Allan Poe, who blended fact and fiction in his dual careers as journalist and horror writer, would have had a field day working at the New York Times.

  For what other reason than fear-mongering would the Times conduct a premature Bernie Sanders burial service right on its most coveted plot? (top left corner of its homepage)

In what macabre liberal pundit Paul Krugman gleefully calls a "premortem," the newspaper has grimly collated several Bernie eulogies from Canned Obituary Central.

However, to avoid any appearance of hackery or complicity, the news ghouls were very careful to use the smarmy passive voice in the headline: "Early Missteps Seen As Drag on Bernie Sanders's Campaign."

The morning after he lost the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders held a painful conference call with his top advisers.

Mr. Sanders expressed deep frustration that he had not built a stronger political operation in the state, and then turned to the worrisome situation at hand.

His strategy for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination was based on sweeping all three early-voting states, and he had fallen short, winning only New Hampshire — to the consternation of his wife, Jane.

Actually, he did build a good operation. And he has ended up winning Nevada after all, a factoid which the Times conveniently doesn't see fit to print. The truth might take all the fun of out its exercise in S & M. It might take the fun out the premature burial festivities. It might even relieve the pain from the editorial torture.

So, although Sanders is gaining ground and "campaigning more effectively," he is still the Walking Dead as far as the media establishment is concerned. The subliminal message in the Times article is this: "Don't even bother to come out for the primaries, Wisconsinites and  New Yorkers and Californians. It's over before it's even over."

But to be fair, The Times does have a point when it chides Bernie for not attacking Hillary in the very first debate, when he so gallantly claimed that Americans are "sick and tired of your damned e-mails!" He had been polite to a fault, always careful to criticize the corrupt system rather than the corrupt Clinton machine. And, I suspect they're right when they posit that at the outset, Bernie's main goal had been to spread the social democratic message without seriously expecting to win contests and raise more money than any other presidential candidate in history.

And Cornel West, his surrogate from the Black Left, is right that Sanders should have engaged sooner with Southern black voters.

But the Times is revealing itself as a passive-aggressive propagandist, criticizing Sanders from two separate directions. He's not nearly mean enough. He's way too mean. Reading his political obit reminds me of the Pushmi-Pullyu character from Doctor Doolittle. His critics, their toxic centrism so deeply ingrained, seem to want to have it both ways.

Doctor Krugman the Undertaker, meanwhile, is forging ahead with his own obsessive-compulsive smear campaign against both Bernie and his progressive supporters. He, too, thinks we don't know our brains from our asses. So he pulls and he pushes and achieves diddlysquat for his efforts. 

 As I see it, the Sanders phenomenon always depended on leaving the personal attacks implicit. Sanders supporters have, to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged, been motivated by the perception that Clinton is dishonest, which comes — whether they know it or not — not from her actual behavior but from decades of right-wing smears; but Sanders himself got to play the issue-oriented purist, in effect taking a free ride on other peoples’ character defamation. There was plenty of nastiness from Sanders supporters, but the candidate himself seemed to stay above the fray.

Facts are such troublesome things. It is so much easier to bury someone than to  damn him with even the faintest of praise. Krugman actually sounds like a Grand Inquisitor here, purporting to know the inner workings of the minds of vast numbers of people. Whether we know it or not, our asses-for-brains have been taken over by the Republicans. We are no longer capable of reading books and even thinking for ourselves.

He is sounding more and more like his fake nemesis, David Brooks, all the time. He even indulges in a little liberal colorblind racism with this verbal belch:

But it wasn’t enough, largely because of nonwhite voters. Why have these voters been so pro-Clinton? One reason I haven’t seen laid out, but which I suspect is important, is that  they are more sensitized than most whites to how the disinformation machine works, to how fake scandals get promoted and become part of what “everyone knows.” Not least, they’ve seen the torrent of lies directed at our first African-American president, and have a sense that not everything you hear should be believed.

And now the hidden thoughts of Sanders are coming out in the open, endangering the chances of the Empress of Waiting even when Bernie himself hasn't the faintest chance of survival. Does it get any meaner, more gruesomely political than that?

My published response to Krugman:

I suspect that black and brown people ("non-whites") have a lot more on their plates than honing their sensitivity about the fabled Clinton Disinformation Machine.

Black Agenda Report has run several pieces about the lack of enthusiasm of Blacks for Bernie Sanders. Its leftist writers posit that black voters from the South were settling for Clinton out of sheer terror of what the GOP would do to them. At least Hillary wouldn't go so far as to overturn the Civil Rights Act. She doesn't hold rallies like Trump's, which actually resemble racial cleansing sites more than political rallies. She's a relatively safe bet.

That said, black (or as Krugman euphemizes them, "non-white") voters are not some sort of monolithic block. Northern black voters are supporting Bernie in higher numbers. And that includes Northern black politicians. James Sanders (!) of New York is primarying Hillary supporter Greg Meeks for his seat in Congress, and both Sanderses are giving each other support. So much for Bernie allegedly not caring about down-ticket races.

 Vile as the vast, right wing conspiracy is, the Clintons have always paradoxically thrived on it. It helps to tamp down and delegitimate fact-based criticism of them from the left. That Krugman is now accusing Clinton's progressive critics of enabling the Republicans is the oldest trick in their political grimoire. It's as anti-democratic as the super-delegate system.

The coronation of Hillary is as premature as Bernie's funeral.

 ***

So, contra Krugman and the Times, who is to say where exactly the boundary lies between political life and political death? As Poe wrote in the fictional version of  "The Premature Burial,"

 To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

The coverage of the endless presidential horse race of death by the Times and other corporate media outlets does indeed seem incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

And then Wisconsin happens. (tomorrow) And that unseen mysterious principle known as the Living Electorate sets in motion those magic pinions, those wizard wheels which have so befuddled the pundits this season.

Unlike most of Poe's fiction,"The Premature Burial"  actually does have a happy ending.

The narrator, used to being declared dead due to a condition called catalepsy, (or in modern times, burial deep within the pages of the Paper of Record) lives in constant fear of being interred alive. And then one night, his fears come true. He has been entombed despite taking what he had thought were all the necessary precautions.(telling the truth to anyone who would listen.)

And then he wakes up. He dreamed he was moribund because he was actually aboard a ship, sleeping in a very cramped space quite similar to a coffin.

My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts"—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.

Hopefully, Bernie and his supporters have already given up reading bugaboo Weird Tales of the Times, so full of the charnel apprehensions of Paul Krugman and the whole banal coven of hack writers.

And hopefully, any new "tone" that Bernie acquires will not be of the politically correct variety being urged upon him by Clinton surrogates, whose own campaign talking points seem to be suffering a cataleptic disorder of their very own. And temper? Bernie has never lacked it. You don't bellow about how sick and tired of the corruption you are without possessing a very healthy temper.