Commentariat Central: Bernie Edition

One of my New Year's resolutions is to comment more frequently on New York Times articles than I have been doing in recent months. This vow, of course, is contingent upon at least partially overcoming the nausea and rise in blood pressure that accompany reading the articles prior to responding to them. This is particularly true of the op-eds. For the sake of my own sanity and health, I long ago gave up perusing the silliness of Gail Collins and the banality of David Brooks. Brooks and Paul Krugman, his erstwhile nemesis, actually sound banally alike as #Resistance, Inc. fighters in the Age of Trump.

Here is my first Times comment of 2020, in response to another article about Bernie Sanders by Sydney Ember, co-written with Thomas Kaplan. The underlying theme of their piece is that since Bernie's record fund-raising haul from small donors is eclipsed by Donald Trump's bank account, Bernie might not be electable, despite the small-dollar donations from "loyal supporters who are faithful to him despite his setbacks."

The piece is less openly derogatory than Ember's previous anti-Bernie articles, but that is likely to change as the first primaries draw nearer. Knowing that the public is on to their bias, Ember and other mainstream journalists appear at this delicate moment to be very carefully covering their asses.

My published response:

The wording in the side-by-side headlines about Sanders and Yang's fundraising totals is a perfect example of how to subtly slant a story and cast doubt on a popular candidate.

Whereas "Yang raised $16.5 million, His Campaign Says" we are told that "Sanders Says He Raised $34.5 million."

 The subtle implication is that one is fact and the other is just a claim. Bernie "says" he raised the money and Yang definitely did, with the journalistic ploy of sourcing his campaign for the info, as a kind of afterthought. And then, as other commenters have rightly noted, the article goes on to ridiculously compare Sanders's stash to that of an incumbent president who is running unopposed. Cast the doubt and cast it as wide and as shallowly as what passes for journalistic ethics permits. 

It will be a lot of fun deconstructing the anti-Bernie rhetoric coming from the establishment media from here on in. Right now it's as subtle as they can make it, but as the plutocratic panic over his rise becomes ever more palpable, watch out for the subtlety to go out the window and for the more blatant smears to begin afresh. To Bernie's own great credit, he is not shy about calling the media out this time around. Last time, he was way too nice.

Now, if we could only get him to stop prefacing his Biden critiques with "Joe is a good friend of mine"...

My other two Times comments are actually from last month, in response to a couple of Paul Krugman's op-eds, both of which caused the nausea and angst that are the necessary impetuses (impeti?) for me to take to the keyboard in a desperate attempt to at least temporarily relieve my symptoms.

Krugman's more recent column, titled "The Legacy of Destructive Austerity," rather ridiculously posits that the corporacracy's punishing deficit obsession agenda disappeared in 2015 and that it was mainly a Republican effort to stop Democrats (who from 2009 through 2011 controlled the presidency and Congress)  from doing what they really, really wanted to do.

Specifically, debt fears were used as an excuse to cut spending on social programs, and also as an excuse for hobbling the ambitions of center-left governments. Here in the United States, Republicans went through the entire Obama era claiming to be deeply concerned about budget deficits, forcing the country into years of spending cuts that slowed economic recovery. The moment Donald Trump moved into the White House, all those supposed concerns vanished, vindicating those of us who argued from the beginning that Republicans who posed as deficit hawks were phonies.

Note the passive voice in the first paragraph, subtly absolving the true-believing deficit hawks in the Obama administration of culpability. Krugman feels so vindicated now that it's been proven beyond all doubt that the Republicans were only pretending to be austerians all along. What he unethically fails to acknowledge is that the Democratic leadership still are true-believing, wealth-serving, bought-and-paid for deficit hawks.

My published comment:

Paul Krugman doesn't mention that the Austerity Project was a totally bipartisan affair, what with President Obama himself convening the aptly-named Catfood Commission to cut the deficit as the economy was crashing. Congress did not force him to do this.

  Far from ending in 2015, austerity still rules, with the so-called opposition party addressing an epidemic of homelessness, sickness and premature deaths from despair by tinkering around the edges of catastrophe. The House leadership grudgingly agreed to control costs for only a handful of outrageously priced drugs while refusing to address the surprise hospital bills being sent out in droves by the private equity vultures who increasingly run our deeply sick health care system.

Last spring, Speaker Pelosi was once again a guest of honor at the late billionaire Pete Peterson's annual austerity conference. Complaining that Trump was taking all the media attention away from the "agenda," she said: "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

 And thus does the oligarchy sing the same tired old refrain about why people (a/k/a "purists") have to suffer: "But how you gonna pay for that?"

They could start by withholding the trillion-odd dollars they keep gifting Trump every single year for our endless wars.

The other December column to which I responded had Krugman trying to absolve himself from his own destructive anti-Bernie rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, in which diehard austerian Hillary Clinton had fiendishly vowed that Medicare For All would "never, ever come to pass" under her leadership.

His column was a thinly-disguised campaign commercial for the faltering Elizabeth Warren, who is currently suffering the slings and arrows of billionaires from the right and progressives from the left as a result of her efforts to please all of the people all of the time.

Ridiculously once again, Krugman points to allegedly low unemployment numbers as proof that there was never any "skills gap" to blame for the nation's joblessness. He doesn't acknowledge that most of the jobs created since the 2008 financial collapse are of the low-wage, temporary and precarious variety. What counts is that he has been proven right, and the deficit hawks and the inflationistas were wrong, as were the oligarchs who blamed the unemployed for their own plights. These oligarchs have an inordinate influence on policy and are coming after Warren.

Krugman concludes:

Which brings me back to the 2020 campaign. You may disagree with progressive ideas coming from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, which is fine. But the news media owes the public a serious discussion of these ideas, not dismissal shaped by a combination of reflexive "centrist bias" and the conscious or unconscious assumption that any policy rich people dislike must be irresponsible.

 And when candidates talk about the excessive influence of the wealthy, that subject also deserves serious discussion, not the cheap shots we've been seeing lately. I know that this kind of discussion makes many journalists uncomfortable. That's exactly why we need to have it.

I just could not help myself. Those high-falutin' hypocritical words were exactly why I typed out this response:

An amazing thing is happening in Punditville. Some of the same outlets that only last week were engaging in a virtual Bernie Blackout are suddenly taking the opposite tack, admitting that hey, this guy might just clinch this nomination, especially since he looks to win Iowa and New Hampshire. leads in California, and even has a decent shot in South Carolina, whose millennial Black voters favor him overwhelmingly. Biden's current national lead is still based largely on name recognition rather than any fondness for his retro center-right policies.

 Cheap shots by this liberal columnist in 2016, such as "Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro!" because his policy proposals for the greater public good were supposedly outweighed by nonspecific "serious character and values issues" are now conveniently buried under the rug. Given a choice between Trump and a winning Bernie-Liz ticket, it behooves even establishment types to acknowledge that the rich are losing this class war of ideas, that the oligarch-owned and controlled media are rapidly losing credibility for reasons that have nothing at all to do with Trump's own deranged critiques of "fake news."

Not, of course, that I'm complaining about mainstream journos suddenly gushing about the newly spry and funny Bernie so soon after gleefully pouncing on the heart attack to concern-troll the message that his candidacy was over. They don't want to be blamed if they once again trash Bernie so hard that they hand Trump another term.

This is different, of course, from what I suspect is their subliminal desire to actually hand Trump another term. They don't want to contend with a Sanders nomination or presidency because they would then be forced to expose themselves as wealth-serving careerists. They can champion progressive policy initiatives or they can keep their jobs. But they would not be able to do both. It would be far easier for them and more lucrative for their employers  to have Trump to kick around for another four years, to keep Russiagate propaganda on life support, and thus keep their hypocrisy more or less hidden from public view.

As I mentioned in my first Times comment, deconstructing the plutocratic propaganda promises to be very fulfilling, almost as fulfilling as the $14 increase I just got in my Social Security check.

Washington Post Says Anger Is So Yesterday

Now that Joe Biden is, by growing corporate media consensus, heading for both the cognitive and political sunset of his life despite his current lead in polls, it's time for them to elevate Elizabeth Warren, the better to denigrate Bernie Sanders.

It's time once again to call the Tone Police.

Since the "Bernie Bro" trope has outlived both its utility and credibility in light of the fact that women and minorities are supporting Sanders in ever greater numbers, the corporate media must find a new trope. Actually, it's only an update on the 2016 trope that had Sanders suffering from a chronic anger management problem.

The manufactured dilemma contrived by the Washington Post is that since Donald Trump has already cornered the market on anger, staying mad at social and economic injustice makes Bernie sound just too Trump-like for the sensitive sensibilities of even past Bernie supporters, a handful of whom the Post carefully cherry-picked to quote in its latest anti-Bernie propaganda piece.

Anger is just so damned exhausting and so futile, says the Post, that these Bernie fans might as well support Elizabeth Warren. Although she, too, broadcasts anger at her campaign rallies, her version is supposedly softer and less "cantankerous and rowdy" than Bernie's. Reporter Hailey Fuchs writes:(bolds are mine)

In 2016, Sanders and his supporters shared a visceral anger at the nation’s economic and political systems, which they contended had been corrupted by wealthy capitalists. Hillary Clinton proved the perfect foe for an anti-establishment campaign then. But with a sitting president who has also used anger to galvanize his base and claims to represent the antithesis of the Washington elite, some now find that aggressive messaging unappealing.

 The overall dynamics also have shifted. During the 2016 presidential cycle, the independent senator stood alone in his — oftentimes cantankerous and rowdy — fight for a single-payer health-care system, tuition-free four-year public college and a $15 minimum wage. Several presidential hopefuls have fully embraced his once-radical ideas without adopting his boisterous tone.

Naturally, the Post article is accompanied by the usual unflattering photo of Sanders, mouth wide open in a grimace, finger pointed threateningly at all the sensitive sensibilities in the audience.

He and his angry supporters are not only mad, the Post says, they might even be ill-informed, since they merely "contend" that capitalism corrupts politics. Hailey Fuchs, a recent graduate of Yale with an impressive triple major in ethics, economics and politics, apparently has never read the numerous studies which conclusively prove that capitalism absolutely does corrupt politics. Take, as just one example, Martin Gilens's "Affluence and Influence" study showing that deep-pocketed donors invariably get whatever they want, in the way of tax breaks for themselves and cuts in social programs for everyone else, from the politicians who "we" are invited to vote for every two and four years. Fuchs is therefore being a bit unethical, to put it charitably, when she insinuates that Sanders supporters are using their guts (viscera) rather than their thinking brains in "contending" that such corruption exists in all levels of government. Then again, she is no doubt interested in continuing her career at a paper owned by the richest man in the universe.

So while Elizabeth Warren can and does sound every bit as angry as Bernie Sanders at her own campaign rallies, she has also been quietly courting Democratic Party insiders and its undemocratic super-delegates to reassure them that deep down, she is on their side. This tactic is apparently working, because the Washington Post, the New York Times and other consolidated media behemoths are not so quietly boosting her candidacy. Why wouldn't they? She is said to appeal to the highly educated bourgeoisie, while Bernie is totally down with the down and outs, a/k/a the working class and the poor.

Of course, the scary angry "Bernie-tone" that the Post claims is so suddenly upsetting to both his current and former supporters is pure propaganda, if not genuinely fake news. 

The people who are really scared of Sanders are the ruling elites. They're terrified of the righteous - and global - anger of the Sunrise Movement, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Yellow Vests. So the Washington Post buries the true lead, and actual truth, 13 paragraphs deep into the article: 

It’s not as though [Warren is] content to thunder against the evildoers like an Old Testament prophet. That’s much more his mode,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. “Sanders sees [his campaign] as a revolutionary mass movement to upset the established order. While Senator Warren is obviously very dissatisfied with the status quo, she describes her campaign in very different terms and terms that I think are less scary.”

Sanders isn't scary to oppressed people and poor people. He's scary to rich people and the centrist Democrats, neoliberal think tanks, party operatives and consultants who serve them. They have sunk so low as to join with the GOP in pathologizing  the anger of the very people they have victimized with four decades of cruel neoliberal austerity policies. 

In the interests of surface fairness and balance, the Post smarmily concludes its latest Bernie hit piece by tempering its propaganda with quotes from people who can relate to Bernie's anger. Here's the problem, though: the inconvenient fact remains that, just like every other human being, he's aged three years since 2016 - and that is suddenly giving them pause. He is, sadly, also not black or a woman. To convey this desired scary message, Hailey Fuchs searched for the perfect squeamish Sanders supporter. She hit the desired jackpot with this doozy: 

But the Sanders supporter is concerned that her candidate will fall short of the nomination once again. She worries that his age — 77 — will be used against him, and that other voters may be drawn to a candidate who offers the appeal of diversity.
(Jennifer) Convery was not quite sure how Sanders could expand his voting bloc.
“He reaches out as much as anybody else as much as he can. He’s not going to change who he is and how he is, so he can’t make himself younger or black or a woman, so I don’t know,” she said. “What do you do? You’re not going to change your points.”

Gosh, if only Bernie wasn't so damned white and kvetchy, his fair-weather friends would feel ever so much better. It's not that they care about identities as such, it's that other people care. If other people care, it's because the Post tells us that unless we, too, start to care about cosmetic appeal and "electability," we'll get four more years of Trump. So squelch that anger, all you tired, poor, huddled masses of America!  

If only there were more righteous anger in the United States. Except for the vibrant youth movements battling for a green new deal, America's electorate are not yet taking to the streets, as they are in Hong Kong, France, Haiti, and elsewhere on the planet. Is it because we have enough streaming services, social media accounts, drugs, booze to keep us placidly hiding our quiet desperation? More likely, it's because most people are already finding day-to-day survival enough of a challenge and often have to work second or third jobs just to make ends barely meet.

As Oscar Wilde wrote more than a century ago in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, it is actually abnormal for economically struggling people not to feel intense rage at an oppressive system which insists that we should be grateful for whatever crumbs fall from the rich man's table while heeding the hackneyed  advice to "keep calm and carry on" - even as the Democratic party elites do their utmost to ignore the ongoing climate catastrophe by refusing even to discuss it at a presidential debate. 

It's worth quoting Wilde at length (and assume that he uses "man" in the generic sense - not that he cared a whit about political correctness, of course) and applying his critique to the trite and tiresome lectures of the Washington Post and the rest of the oligarchy-controlled media:

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practice thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal... No, a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest.

"As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinary stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.

"However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. 

 "That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation."

Oligarchic propaganda sheets like the Washington Post want to scare people stupid. Candidates like Bernie Sanders, with his ambitious new climate plan, want to scare people out of the toxic, capitalism-imposed stupor of what some critics are calling the Necrocene, or the Age of Death.

The bright side is that seriously broke, seriously depressed, and seriously exhausted people probably have neither the money nor the energy to breach the paywalls of the major cable and print outlets to be tainted overly much by the corporate propaganda. So maybe there's hope for "civilization" yet.

Bernie's Student Debt Jubilee

Bernie Sanders is announcing legislation of truly Biblical proportions: the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of United States student debt.

The bill, with the co-sponsorship of Democratic Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, would wipe the slate clean for each of the nation's 45 million student borrowers, both rich and poor, and would be paid for with a Wall Street transaction tax. As such, it goes much further than Elizabeth Warren's plan, which would means-test student debt and forgive a smaller total amount of $640 billion. The wealthy, defined as households making more than $250,000, would stay on the hook for their education loans.

In one fell swoop, therefore, Sanders's bill destroys the argument that it's unfair for the wealthy to bear the entire burden of loan forgiveness. It also renders moot their standard demand that the less well-off must always "have skin in the game" so as to avoid the dreaded moral hazard of free ridership. If the children of the wealthy also become entitled to a free higher education, then the proverbial Playing Field might truly be leveled. No student will have a leg up or a head start just by virtue of how much money the parents have, either for tuition or for "bribing" institutions of higher learning to admit their children in the first place.

Everybody would be privileged. The much-ballyhooed meritocracy might finally develop some relation to reality. Every student will legally and morally accomplish what Donald Trump has boastfully admitted on more than one occasion: that he became successful because he is one of the few privileged owners of wealth connected enough to figure out how to manipulate debt to his own advantage.

If he rails against student debt forgiveness during the presidential campaign, he'll sound like even more of a hypocrite than he already is. 

 Why do I say that the Sanders plan is Biblical? Because the forgiveness of debt goes back to the dawn of civilization. Most famously, a prophet named Nehemiah, a Babylonian Jew and the appointed governor of his native Judea, became very testy in a very Bernie-like way when he noticed that whole generations of his people were living in permanent debt bondage because of the greed of wealthy landowners. "Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers. and said unto them, 'Ye exact usury, every one his brother.' And I set a great assembly against them," he wrote in the Book of Nehemiah.

So while Sanders calls his own plan to end whole lifetimes of punitive student debt peonage a "revolutionary" one, it's really an idea that is very firmly tethered to history, especially pre-democratic history. And it is also quite modest, in an FDR-style liberally democratic sort of way, given that Nehemiah's Law of Jubilee stipulated that all debts owing from the powerless to the ruling class automatically be cancelled every seven years. It was the only way to keep civilization chugging along.

As anthropologist David Graeber chronicles in the book "Debt: the First 5,000 Years" the obliteration of debt has become the result in just about every major peasant revolt in recorded history.  

And since our current oligarchic system is one of the most extremely unequal in all of recorded history, the inherent unfairness of the feudalistic American student debt crisis has become more apparent by the day, with stories abounding of retirees in their 60s and 70s having their Social Security checks garnished to satisfy their student loans, and even dying in penury, still mired in decades' worth of crushing student debt.

Since debt is premised upon two equal parties entering into a contract, the trillion-dollar financial systems which demand the lifelong servitude of powerless student borrowers are exposed not only as unequal and immoral, but criminal. Such contracts should now rightly be viewed as fraudulent and such loans as predatory. 

As Graeber points out in his book, the Old Testament debt jubilees were ordained expressly to keep the promise of the Promised Land to formerly enslaved Jews. Wouldn't Bernie's own plan similarly keep the promise of the American Dream alive for perpetually indebted college graduates? After all, higher education is marketed as a ticket to a better life, not as a ticket straight to the hell of precarious, low-wage employment in a gig economy.

Graeber writes, "Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation - the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land."

So another consequence of Bernie's permanent Student Debt Jubilee, coupled with legislation for tuition-free courses of study at public institutions, might be that students will begin to study what they're good at and what interests them and what might make the world a better place, rather than what courses might make them the most money and enable them to pay off their student loans. In other words, art and literature, education and the social sciences might begin to vie with business and finance curricula in popularity. Institutions of higher learning might discover that it no longer behooves them to be endowed and dictated to by Wall Street, think tanks and transnational corporations. Those forgiven their debts will not, like Trump and his oligarchic cohort, have cheated the system. As co-equal beneficiaries of free higher education, they also would be less likely to then turn around and cheat their own employees and bilk their investors and pit one group of powerless people against another group of powerless people. 

Resentment and fear might go out the window, right along with the punishing debt.

A Debt Jubilee would not only be good for the country's economic health - think of the boost to the system if 45 million graduates suddenly have more money to spend on things like houses! - but our mental and moral and environmental health as well.

The Discreet Charm of the Never-Bernies

How can wealthy liberals, anxious to protect their fortunes and their heirs from the predations of the poor, destroy Bernie Sanders without being seen as destroying Bernie Sanders? That is the delicate question.

The current tactic is the playing of the hypocrisy card. With revelations (by Sanders himself) that he is now a millionaire, thanks to his book sales, his fellow millionaires and not a few actual billionaires point to this fact as being "problematic."

It is especially "thorny" because Sanders is acting so damned "prickly" about it whenever the topic of his new membership in the One Percent Club is brought up - say, about every 10 minutes in the video chat rooms known as cable news shows and in the pages of such elite gossip rags as the New York Times.

"Good-natured" ribbing from late night pseudo-comedians is an integral part of this new front in the  destruction crusade, with the New York Times breathlessly reporting on Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel observed that Bernie appears to have spent none of his fortune on personal grooming or couture.

The same article quotes Stephen Colbert, fresh off his London junket fawning over Michelle Obama in the latest leg of her book tour, as drawling:

“Yesterday Bernie Sanders released 10 years of his tax returns. Finally, now we can get the answers to all of our Bernie-related financial controversies. Like whether he writes off mothballs as a business expense or a snack.”

The Times is once again doing what it arguably does better than any other corporate media outlet: it is engaging in a personal destruction crusade in such an arch, knowing, nuanced way that it does not seem to be engaging in any personal destruction crusade at all. 

The problem which the Gray Lady and her corporate media cohort now face is that Bernie has gone mainstream, and most important of all in their world, he has more cash on hand than any of his Democratic rivals. It's certainly a long way from the good old days of 2016, when all the Times had to do, personal destruction-wise, was to alternately ignore Bernie and deride him. It's even a long way from last year and early this year, when the propaganda tropes that he is not liked by women and black people went nowhere fast, given that public polls have shown the exact opposite to be true.

So now it's on to how Bernie Sanders is causing such great angst among the altruistic liberal rich that they might even be inconvenienced by a dreaded Brokered Convention next year.

Times reporter Jonathan Martin engaged in some good old fashioned shoe leather reporting as he pounded the pavement on both coasts to plumb the plutocratic depths of the "Stop Bernie" movement 

Parachuting down to Flyover Country for a day or an hour is, let's face it, nothing but lazy stenography. The rich love to read about themselves and not about some deplorable out of work factory laborer, even if the literature is not always as flattering to them as they might like. It was the rich, the class which could afford to buy books in the 19th century, who helped make Thackeray's satiric Vanity Fair, for example, the enduring bestseller that it came to be. And what 21st century PBS fan wouldn't kill to live in the snooty Downton Abbey?

Anyway, satiric critical portrayals of the venal rich sometimes have a way of turning such conniving grasping characters as Becky Sharp into admirable heroines whenever the corporate entertainment world gets hold of them. When Vanity Fair was made into a TV movie in 2004, for example, Reese Witherspoon magically transformed her into a plucky, adorable, rags-to-riches ingenue. Did I mention that Witherspoon had also recently played a celebrity softball-pitcher at one of those spunky, rags-to-riches Michelle Obama book tour appearances, where front row seats go for thousands of dollars a pop?

Anyway, I digress.

Martin's faux-satiric characterization of Bernie Sanders fans as "an unwavering base" of "fervent supporters" who endanger party unity had the desired effect of eliciting nearly 3,000 outraged responses from readers who are still smarting from the newspaper's cavalier treatment, three years ago, of both themselves and their candidate. These responses seem designed to be an "I told you so" cathartic moment for the nervous rich, proving once and for all to the sensitive elite class that Bernie Sanders supporters are, in fact, a fervent and unwavering mob... and so veddy, veddy unreasonable and dangerous.

Secondarily, Martin's surface-snide portrayal of the rich donor class as selfish pearl-clutchers and canape-gorgers who are  terrified of Bernie's "avowed socialism" seems designed to plant the very tiniest seed of doubt into the minds of progressive readers. Never mind that Bernie is no socialist, but rather a de facto FDR Democrat who sees nothing wrong with wars or the arrest of Julian Assange or with a better-regulated capitalistic system in general. If you can only plant that seed in these early days, it might even sprout and thrive by the time any actual voting takes place a little under a year from now.

Comparing Sanders with Trump is still tops on the "Stop Bernie From Eating the Oligarchy!" agenda. Martin posits that Bernie is just as paranoid as Trump, probably because Bernie (rightly) believes that the Democratic Party and its media sycophants are aiming for his personal destruction.

The main weapon, therefore, that centrist corporatists plan to wield against Sanders is Trump himself. Even the Sanders campaign acknowledges that beating Trump is their top priority, before passage of a single payer health care bill and other policies can even be seriously discussed. The wealthy backers of the party are taking solace in the fact that, just as he did in 2016, Sanders has vowed to support the eventual nominee. Which, if they have anything to say about it, will not be Bernie Sanders. It is only his promise to be an avowed player that permits him to stay in the game. Thus, his calculated silence on the Julian Assange arrest. He is silent even though it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the corporate Democrats were really out to get him in 2016.

So, there's this important nugget in the Times's cautionary tale:

“Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”
Or, as former (my bold) Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

If the anguished wealthy liberal donor class needs a slogan, here's a suggestion for them: 

Never Bernie! Never Trump! Always the Plutocracy - Always!

When you finally wake up the golden drops of their beneficence trickling down upon you after they nominate one of their own in a super-delegate-rigged second ballot, they tacitly confide to the Times, you'll realize just how abjectly grateful to them that you truly are, and should have been all along.

The False Choice Between Gender Justice and Economic Justice

It's indicative of how rattled the ruling class must be feeling that they're revving up their anti-Bernie Sanders slime machine before he's even announced that he's running for president.

Suddenly outraged that female staffers often get hit on and harassed during political campaigns (of all the quiet, sober, and virtuous venues!) the forces of neoliberal corporatism are conveniently co-opting the #MeToo movement to serve their own greedy ends. 

It was only two years ago that Hillary Clinton surrogate and feminist Gloria Steinem sniffed that female Bernie supporters just wanted "to go where the boys are." It was an unsubtle way of saying they were sluts on the prowl for hookups. Their desire for social and economic justice was just a cover for their horniness. Steinem soon apologized, but the anti-progressive smear stuck, right along with the "Bernie Bro" meme.

But how the tide has turned since 2016! These very same boy-chasers have suddenly been recast in the media as virtuous maidens whose naive and misguided desire for social and economic justice came back to bite them, if not saddled them with lifelong cases of PTSD.

This is how women have been typecast throughout history: they're either viragos or virgins, man-eating predators or victims of men - and never the twain shall meet.

The subliminal message contained in the recent news exposés revealing bad behavior by some male Sanders staffers toward female staffers and volunteers is this: Be very careful what you wish for, girls! If you persist in supporting Bernie's "radical" agenda of universal health care, debt-free college and other nice things, then you will at least be an enabler of misogyny, if not its direct victim. If you are a woman who persists in demanding high taxes on the obscenely rich, you are a traitor to your own gender. And if you recklessly volunteer for Bernie Sanders during his second go-round, you're really asking for it and you will probably deserve whatever you get.

You have been warned. 

In other words, the #MeToo concern-trolling campaign against Bernie Sanders is paradoxically as right-wing, as reactionary, and as sexist as they come.

It's better and safer, the subliminal messages in the Politico and New York Times articles are, to vote for a centrist politician with good hair and no Brooklyn accent - say, hunky telegenic Beto O'Rourke -  who voices unctuous respect and concern for women while at the same time denying them single payer health insurance, a living wage, free education, subsidized maternity leave and day care, and affordable housing.

In case you still don't get it, take a gander at the photo the New York Times selected for its own concern-trolling hit piece. Bernie, his wispy white hair literally standing on end, appears to recoil in disgust from a female hand extending her emasculating microphone in his general direction.

So, ladies, the next time you feel sick and get a hankering for Medicare For All, just think of a Bernie Bro groping a woman in a bar and you'll start feeling better for standing up for gender equality - even if it's for the ultimate benefit of the oligarchy and not you, personally. Simply raise your face to the sky and imagine the golden drops of beneficence sprinkling down upon you.

The anti-Bernie concern trolls will repeat this message loudly and often. You can't - you just can't - be both a supporter of Bernie Sanders and his agenda and also be a supporter of gender rights. In supporting him and his platform, you are giving aid and comfort to rapists and gropers and maybe even asking to be directly attacked by a Bernie Bro.

Of course, this argument is complete nonsense. It's the latest variation on a tired old theme. The most glaring parallel example is centrists who regularly accuse critics of Hillary Clinton and the CIA of being Donald Trump fans and Russians - rather than waste their time and risk losing an argument by engaging critics in actual debates and discussions on  policy issues and philosophy. Even legitimate, fact-based criticism of the corporation-captured Democratic Party, they say, is a vote for the Republicans. Bury your heads in the sand before it's too late!

As Susan Sontag noted in her introduction to Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, leftist critics of Stalin's totalitarian regime were accused for decades by Communist Party members of being closet fascists. She wrote:

In the early twenty-first century, we have moved on to other illusions - other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.

There have always been people to argue that the truth is sometimes inexpedient, counterproductive - a luxury. (This is known as thinking practically, or politically.) And, on the other side, the well-intentioned are understandably reluctant to jettison commitments, views and institutions in which much idealism has been invested.

Situations do arise in which truth and justice may seem incompatible. And there may be even more resistance to perceiving the truth than there is to acknowledging the claims of justice. It seems all too easy for people not to recognize the truth, especially when it may mean having to break with, or be rejected by, a community that supplies a valued part of their identity.

Like all propaganda, the Bernie Sanders "scandal" and ensuing manufactured outrage are couched in terms of tribalism and binary discourse largely devoid of nuance and introspection. Two camps have instantly formed: those who think that Bernie Sanders is an insensitive sexist pig by association, if not by actual deed, and those who think that he is getting unfairly smeared by the press and a few disgruntled women looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.

Why not take a more nuanced approach? I think it is possible to simultaneously be a feminist and call out the corporate media for co-opting the #MeToo movement and using it a cudgel against Sanders and the implementation of a new New Deal. I don't think, as Susan Sontag posited, that the corporate media are particularly humane or well-intentioned in their coverage of the experiences of some of Bernie's female staffers and volunteers.

At the same time, while we should be aware of the propaganda and resist being indoctrinated by the oligarchic agenda - which is the destruction of Sanders and more importantly, the destruction of his platform - we should not discount the harassment that women experienced and still do experience in the male-dominated political world. 

The Sanders campaign's women staffers now telling their stories to the over-eager media were ignored at the time. But are they being heeded now for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons? Are they being victimized all over again, only to be discarded by the ruling class propagandists once their stories no longer serve a "higher" purpose?

It's possible and desirable to simultaneously applaud Bernie's ideas and accomplishments, such as his shaming of Jeff Bezos into increasing hourly wages for his Amazon workers, and to also criticize his tepid cringe-worthy response on CNN to the sexual harassment allegations:

“I am not going to sit here and tell you that we did everything right, in terms of human resources, in terms of addressing the needs that I’m hearing from now, that women felt disrespected, that there was sexual harassment, that was not dealt with as effectively as possible” 

I hate it when powerful people subtly denigrate complainants for "feeling" that they are being disrespected or victimized, as though their problem is essentially an emotional one of their own making. This remark had echoes of neoliberal Democrats like Barack Obama, who often schmooze about the millions of jobless and evicted people who "feel like" they've been left behind or cheated. Bernie is always so upfront and righteously outraged about who the financial culprits are, so why not be just as upfront and outraged about the sexist pigs and even predators in his outfit? No organization, not even his, is immune from human pigs. Why not display that trademark Bernie anger and acknowledge that many women, even in his organization, were and still are being disrespected or victimized?

There are all kinds of social and economic and gender and racial injustice in this world. It's not one or the other that should take precedence. It's all of the above. 

Above all, it's a class war, the assault of hypercapitalism on regular people.

While a new New Deal, and a 70, 80 or 90 percent marginal tax rate on obscene wealth would do a lot toward rectifying record extreme inequality and all kinds of injustice, we should also acknowledge that this class war has had an outsize detrimental effect on women, children, the old, and black and brown people. 

Bernie Sanders believes, rightly, that democratic socialist, or social democratic economic policies will benefit all members of society. But just because the neoliberal establishment has made identity politics its be-all and end-all as a means of, and justification for, keeping everything for itself doesn't mean that one's identity and unique individual problems should be completely ignored by critics of the neoliberal agenda.

That's Bernie's Achilles heel, and the consolidated corrupt co-opting media are nipping at it and ripping at it with all the instinctive glee of a pack of inbred rat terriers.

Bernie Is Stuck Between Bullshit and a Pile of Doo-Doo

What's a politician to do when, after joining the Joe McCarthy wing of the Democratic Party and criticizing Donald Trump for his Russiagate denialism, he is then himself accused of not condemning the alleged cyber-infiltration of his own campaign by Russian bots and trolls?

If your name is Bernie Sanders, the last thing in the world you do is finally come clean, admit the error of  your ways, and declare your independence from the whole phony Narrative of Russian meddling in our "democracy." Sanders, who had thrown in his lot behind the original instigator of Russiagate - Hillary Clinton - is the latest victim of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who gratuitously smeared both him and Jill Stein in his "indictment" last week of three Russian companies and thirteen of their grossly underpaid Internet meat puppets. 

Sanders's pathetic response to this smear was to take a page right out of Hillary Clinton's playbook, and blame Hillary Clinton herself for not doing enough to stop the Russian "attack" on the United States.

Sanders either didn't know, or has chosen to ignore, the fact that Russiagate is not only about weakening and punishing Donald Trump, but also about weakening and punishing - and censoring - what still remains of the contemporary American Left. And that includes Bernie Sanders, still considered the dangerous front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders is only the latest in a long line of American leftists throughout our history to be targeted by the right-wing plutocracy for the sin of not being able to prove a negative. The centrist Washington gossip rag, Politico, gleefully joins the latest attack via its pro-Clinton reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere:

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.
The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign — but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.

Got that, Bernie? Since Donald Trump denies that the Russians helped him, and you now deny that the Russians helped you, then you are really no better than Trump. You might even secretly support Trump. Hell, you probably are Trump. At the very least, you are un-American, which is the same thing.

In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe.
“The real question to be asked is what was the Clinton campaign [doing about Russian interference]? They had more information about this than we did,” Sanders said in the interview with Vermont Public Radio.
After being contacted by POLITICO about the interview, Sanders issued a lengthy statement calling the Russian involvement a “direct assault on the free democratic systems that stand in contrast to the autocratic, nationalistic kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin and his backers in the Russian oligarchy” which “deserves unconditional condemnation.”

When it comes to enhancing and amplifying the Russiagate narrative, mainstream journalism has given up all pretense at objectivity. If you deny that Russians infiltrated your brain and your operation, you are being "self-serving."

The more that you deny something, the more guilty you are deemed to be. Off with your head!

  Bernie is certainly not helping himself by buying into the Narrative at the same time that he denies culpability. He is fully on board with it, his only quibble being his own lack of involvement and personal benefit. He cravenly declares himself a true believer in the Mueller Dogma, and is now reduced to begging his inquisitors for mercy. He'll even name names, most prominently the name of Hillary Clinton herself!  He's willing to testify that his campaign warned the Clinton campaign way back in September 2016 of Russian infiltration. What more do they want - that he drape himself in the American flag and carry an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan around with him whenever he delivers one of his anti-billionaire diatribes?

After correctly observing that Mueller's cut-and-paste revelations about a Russian oligarch's troll farm were really nothing new, Bernie "was adamant that he did not benefit from Russian bots," according to the Politico article, while acknowledging that said bots were there to turn his supporters against Hillary and not to specifically bolster his own campaign.

As Dovere pontificated, this pathetic defense will not and cannot stand:

Sanders has repeatedly condemned President Donald Trump for not acknowledging the Russian attack on the 2016 election alleged in the Mueller indictment and being investigated by congressional committees. But he has refused to say that his campaign benefited from the activities. (my bold)

I have here in my pocket a list of 200 names.... Have you now, or have you ever been, an Internet subscriber who benefited from reading Tweets from bots and trolls? Has a Russian ever visited or written a comment on your website? Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Sanders said the key point was that he was campaigning hard for Clinton after losing the nomination to her, and “at this point we were working with them.”
Sanders has faced questions since Friday about why he has not more strongly condemned the Russian actions that benefited his campaign. On Wednesday, liberal writer Joan Walsh of The Nation tweeted in response to Sanders’ comments about Clinton: “Seriously, this could be the end of Sanders 2020. Someone who cares about him ought to tell him how badly he stepped in it today.”

If Bernie Sanders thought that the Democratic establishment would forgive and forget, if not openly embrace him, for ultimately ditching his base of supporters and groveling to Hillary Clinton, he is bound feel confused and betrayed. It's so sad when the ditcher becomes the ditchee. Oftentimes, the betrayed one is reduced to lashing out at the very person for whom he sacrificed everything. Joan Walsh is right that he's stepped into a pile of doo-doo, but she is wrong about the consistency and the quality of it. His mistake is not that he is blaming Hillary. His mistake is that he has wallowed with the corrupt duopoly in the Russophobic bullshit for so long that he just can't find a face-saving way out of it.

So despite the utter unfairness of the establishment's treatment of Bernie, I find it impossible to feel sorry for him or come to his defense. He's a washout, not for the lack of patriotism that the corporate media are impugning, but for his utter lack of courage and principles in failing to repudiate the latest Big Lie.

A Paine-ful Weekend At Bernie's

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could have been writing about why the "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual when what's really needed is a global revolution against the whole rotten global financial system. No matter that Paine was talking about Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than a despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

In this interim between the 4th of July and Bastille Day, with Hamburg burning as the G-20 oligarchs party and plunder, what better time to renew our acquaintance with that great global radical, Thomas Paine? He helped foment revolution in the American colonies, and in France and (unsuccessfully) in his native England, where he was thoroughly despised by the aristocracy. His particular nemesis was the anti-revolutionary conservative Edmund Burke. Were he alive today, I can almost guarantee that Burke would be writing scolding opinion pieces for the New York Times. It's probably no accident that the newspaper's star conservative columnist is diehard Burke fan David Brooks.

Since Trump and his fellow plunderer-parasites both here and abroad are indeed too abominably filthy to be cleansed, nothing short of a complete revolution will do, as evidenced by the brave people facing water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and other military police hardware in Germany.

Take the health care crisis here at home. Despite the overwhelming clamor for universal, government-run medical insurance from the vast majority of the American populace, response from the higher-ups has ranged from horrified, to dismissive, to tepid.

Bernie Sanders's prescription was just suddenly downgraded to the same piecemeal "reform" of our for-profit, market based insurance system as originally suggested by the Obama White House. So compared to what Thomas Paine demanded in The Rights of Man, it's quite the cynical travesty.

Bernie: "Everyone knows that the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect. Our job now is to improve it, not destroy it. Further, instead of throwing 22 million Americans off of health care, we must move to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee healthcare to all people as a right not a privilege through a Medicare-​for-​​a​ll, single​-​payer system."

Tom: "When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it."

 Just as Barack Obama did before him, Sanders - now the most popular politician in America - is wasting the moment and submitting to the vested interests before he even gets started. He's putting off introduction of his long-promised Medicare for All legislation and instead meekly suggesting a Medicare buy-in option for 55-and-overs, as well as a public "option" so as not to unduly discompose the predatory plunderers of the private insurance cartel. 

  What about the times that try the souls of the tens of millions of citizens who either totally lack health insurance coverage, or can't afford the premiums and deductibles of what covers only a portion of their medical costs? They'll still have to die or go bankrupt if they get sick under the existing Obamacare law, which Democrats see as the be-all and end-all of the current debate.

As health care advocates Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese point out,

 We are already spending enough on health care in the US to provide comprehensive health care to everyone. We have a bill that lays out the framework for a National Improved Medicare for All healthcare system: HR 676. A majority of Democrats in the House have signed on to it as co-sponsors.
So, why are they trying to convince us to accept a public option or a Medicare buy-in? It’s because they are corrupted by money – campaign contributions that they receive from the corporations that profit from the current system. You may say, well Bernie doesn’t take corporate money, so why would he go along with this charade? It may be because he has greater allegiance to the Democratic Party than he has to the supporters of Medicare for All, his base. He may fear losing positions on committees or his new position of leadership within the party.

 We have to be clear and uncompromising in our demand for National Improved Medicare for All NOW! We can’t put this fight off any longer because those in power will always try to knock us off course. The people and their families who are suffering under the current healthcare (non)system can’t wait any longer.

 If Bernie Sanders really believes that health care is a human right, then why does he accept that millions of people are being denied this right today, right this very minute? Until such time as he deems it safe to "compromise" with the predatory plunderers who'd just as soon see us all dead, people will continue suffering and dying prematurely. The gradual granting of health care rights which he espouses is as if Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation had "pragmatically" given relief to only half the country's black people or if his Great Society had "realistically" given Medicare and Medicaid insurance to half the country's elderly and poor people.

Either health care is a right, or it isn't. Whatever happened to justice delayed is justice denied?

As Thomas Paine retorted to Edmond Burke's treatise against the French Revolution: "Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there is no such thing as rights anywhere, and that he had none himself; for who is there in the world but man?"

The mass psychic revolution for universal health care in the United States is already a done deal. Bernie Sanders can either accept this fait accompli, or he might as well join the Democratic Party's latest bumper sticker campaign of "We Suck Less."

As it stands now, Bernie is nothing if not an adherent of what Paine called the "caterpillar principle." Since all courts and courtiers are alike, they all consume similar policies and narratives which have little or nothing to do with people and nations. "While they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution.They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

Far from voicing any solidarity with the anti-capitalist demonstrators in Hamburg, Bernie Sanders acted every inchworm the caterpillar courier in tweeting to Trump and his fellow oligarchs what their three top priorities should be at the G-20 summit:

1) Growing global economic inequality. The G20 has a major role to play in making sure the benefits of growth benefit all humanity.

(This is boilerplate neoliberal tripe. Talk about, but don't question whether this "growth" is healthy or cancerous. All of humanity sounds so much vaguer and grander than, say, mentioning the refugees and victims of endless wars of American and transnational corporate aggression.)

  2) North Korea. Trump should use the G20 to develop a consensus. Real leadership is bringing parties together to de-escalate tensions.

(Bernie fails to mention the forbidden word: peace. In his prescription pad, real leaders need not actually stop arms production and sales and reduce military spending to help pay for health care, but rather tamp down the "tensions" a wee tad in order to keep the defense contractors in business without obliterating the entire planet in the process. He needs those F-35s to stay in Vermont. Perhaps he didn't feel the need to chide Trump on climate change amelioration given that the president is already a world pariah in that regard.)

3) Russia’s meddling in our election. When Trump meets with Putin he must make clear interference is unacceptable & must never happen again.

(He not only swallows the Democratic Party's specious RussiaGate claims whole, he eagerly disseminates the propaganda to his followers. He is part of the lie.)

 

 In effect, Bernie deflects attention from our health crisis at the same time he pays mild lip service to it in the form of "fighting back against" one president and only one side of our corrupt Duopoly. Meanwhile, the more hardcore naysayers desperately try to do their own parts. They insist that a swift transformation to a single payer system is impossible, because most sane people would object to a tax increase. But their "math" doesn't bear out their paranoia. As economist Robert H. Frank lays out in (of all places) the New York Times, a Medicare for All arrangement would actually save us all a ton of money:

By analogy, suppose that your state’s government took over road maintenance from the county governments within it, in the process reducing total maintenance costs by 30 percent. Your state taxes would obviously have to go up under this arrangement.

But if roads would be as well maintained as before, would that be a reason to oppose the move? Clearly not, since the resulting cost savings would reduce your county taxes by more than your state taxes went up. Likewise, it makes no sense to oppose single-payer on the grounds that it would require additional tax revenue. In each case, the resulting gains in efficiency would leave you with greater effective purchasing power than before.

Since Single Payer covers everybody, the countries which now implement such systems have lower overall costs because most of the people covered are relatively healthy. Contrast that with the United States, where the government restricts public coverage to the most vulnerable and sickest groups: the elderly, the disabled, and veterans of our endless wars. We pay more and we get less. The have-nots are taught to resent the haves, entrenching the oligarchic plunderers even more securely in power. So if everybody enjoyed the same privileges, they'd have no reason to either resent one another or settle for lesser evil candidates.

And if everybody enjoyed the same benefits, it would become next to impossible for reactionary politicians, acting at the behest of corporations and oligarchs, to yank these benefits away from the whole population, united in solidarity to the tune of more than 320 million human bodies.

So let's all be realistic, and demand the impossible. Universal health care is not only a human right, it's plain common sense. Don't let the oligarchs get you down and keep you down. Vive le revolution!