Springtime For Donald and USA

(Optional soundtrack here)

Trump is getting sprung from impeachment charges, and the shadow-seeing groundhog is predicting an early spring. The only question is whether the second death of the Russiagate Narrative will be permanent. Or whether, like the Bill Murray "Groundhog Day" movie, it will keep repeating itself like a zombie with bad acid reflux disease.

What definitely does keep finding new life is the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Right before the eleventh anniversary of the Staten Island groundhog's brave attack on Mayor Mike Bloomberg's wagging index finger, the oligarch-heavy Democratic National Committee has graciously allowed him to buy his way into a spot on this month's debate stage. The DNC ditched its previous requirement of a minimum number of independent contributions from individual donors in deference to Bloomberg, who is spending hundreds of millions of his own money to not only buy the presidency but apparently to buy the entire Democratic party. Not to mention the world.

Now, this might quaintly be considered a scandal were it not for Trump already having set all sorts of consequence-free precedents for future presidents. But since Trump Impeachment Failure Grief rules the day for the Democrats, and Trump Impeachment Vindication Glory rules the day for the Republicans, the Bloomberg news is largely staying underground.

 And groundhogs keep getting tortured.

Unless you're completely off the grid, no amount of burrowing can protect you from seeing Mike Bloomberg, day in and day out, on your various screens. He's even starring in Super Bowl ads, vying with the beer and the chips and the luxury cars.

Not having cable, the only view I've had of Bloomberg this past week was a weird clip of him shaking a dog's nose (instead of, say, his paw) at a New Hampshire campaign stop. To put it mildly, this man does not play well with animals. As Jimmy Dore observes, he also unconscionably wears expensive cuff links while snout-grabbing.

The problem is that Bloomberg simply has no patience with lesser creatures of any species, including his own.

As the New York Times reported on his infamous 2011 run-in with "Staten Island Chuck,"

One can argue that Mr. Bloomburg sort of asked for it. As cameras rolled and the crowed took in an event, a local imitation of the Punxsutwawney Phil traition, Chuck at first refused to come out. Children chanted his name to no avail. Mr. Bloomberg seemed to realize that the reclusive rodent was spoiling the show.

He tried to lure Chuck out of his cottage with an ear of corn, but Chuck shrewdly grabbed the corn and dragged it inside to enjoy. The mayor tried again, twice, but then, seemingly out of patience, he grabbed Chuck by the belly with both hands before he could hide again and held him in the air for everyone to see.

Although the actual revenge of Chuckie was not caught on film,  Mayor Mike was later spotted sporting a bandage on his habitual scolding finger. To prevent future injuries to his august person, he had a cruel plunger installed in Chuck's cage to forcibly eject the critter on subsequent Groundhog Days.

Nevertheless Bloomberg was still bearing a Hillary Clinton-style grudge on Groundhog Day two whole years later: "I love the plunger. That was so much better than having to reach in and let the little sonofabitch bite you," Bloomberg remarked.

We have to fight our enemies over there so they don't bite us over here. The way Bloomberg ran the city like his private fiefdom and ordered that, statistically, every single brown and black man be stopped and frisked by police is a preview of what a totalitarian Bloomberg World Empire might look like if he adds the presidency to his list of accomplishments.

Compared to Trump, Bloomberg would be welcomed with open arms by both the establishment and "moderate" voters who watch a lot of TV. After all, Bloomberg had merely ordered food stamp applicants to be fingerprinted. Trump is actually kicking at least a million people off their food stamps.

The debate between our two major political parties is not whether to abolish cruelty. It's how much cruelty they're willing to impose.


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

Here are a few of my recent New York Times comments.

The first one is in response to Maureen Dowd's column on the shock and grief of Democrats after the totally expected outcome of the Senate impeachment trial.

Dowd writes:

Democrats are warning Republicans that they will be judged harshly by history. But in the meantime, the triumphant Republicans get to make history. And a lot of the history that Republicans have made is frightening: the endless, futile wars, the obliviousness to climate change, the stamp on the judiciary.

The thing I found shocking about the sham impeachment, besides limiting the charge to Trump's sleazy bribery attempt related to the proxy war in Ukraine, is that witnesses were barred from testifying. It was like watching a whole series of bloviating district attorneys and Perry Masons deliver their opening statements only to have the jury abruptly retire to deliberate in its burrow and issue its verdict based upon zero physical evidence and human witnesses. I'd always thought we had a two-tiered justice system: one for the poor who go to jail because they can't afford a lawyer, and one for the rich with whole teams of lawyers defending them at trial and whole slews of celebrity character witnesses.

  Now there is a third, for presidents, where the verdict is preordained and the proceedings are  pre-coordinated by the defense with the presiding judge.

 In the case of Trump's impeachment, I think that both the corrupt defense and the hapless prosecution got exactly what they wanted.

My published Times comment:

It was an inverted Stalin show trial, the ultimate purge being of the rule of law rather than of the lawbreaker-in-chief. Trump's own purge of everything decent will continue unabated.

What damage will he do in the last year of his first term? He won't just stop at cutting food stamps and health care and polluting the air and water at home and dropping his bombs abroad. When hundreds of American troops in Iraq suffer "collateral damage," this malignant narcissist downplays their traumatic brain injuries as "headaches,"

Just as the show trial was getting underway, the Davos plutocrats rolled out the red carpet, basking in all the benefits accruing from his tax cuts and gutting of protective regulations in service to unfettered capitalism. As long as their own heads don't ache and as long as their own kids don't have to die for a dying empire, why would they care about the fate of the earth?

As far as "history" not treating the GOP kindly is concerned - what history? At the rate that the assault on public health and education is going and the climate is heating up, the population will be too dumbed down, desperate, sick, strung out or dead to care that once upon a time, the Republicans showed their true garish colors.

To add insult to injury, the Don has been cordially invited by Nancy Pelosi to deliver the State of the Union to pompously preach "unity" to people suffering from their own various stages of chronic traumatic Trump injury.

Fingers crossed for a November purge at the ballot box.

(Make that a Bernie purge of the whole duopoly.)

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

Of course, the Establishment fears this potential bottom-up purge of everything they hold so dear. Therefore, they're collecting their plungers and doing the opposite of the Staten Island Chuck ejection technique. They're trying their very hardest to force the Bernie surge back into the depths where they don't have to look at it any more.

Timothy Egan joins this cadre of Never-Bernie plumbers with a column wittily entitled Bernie Sanders Can't Win.

He casts Sanders supporters not as people wanting a better life for themselves and their fellow citizens but as an angry mob out to spill plutocratic blood. And anyway, America has never been a socialist country!

That’s the thing about class loathing: It feels good, a moral high with its own endorphins, but is ultimately self-defeating. A Bernie Sanders rally is a hit from the same pipe: Screw those greedy billionaire bastards!

 The next month presents the last chance for serious scrutiny of Sanders, who is leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire. After that, Republicans will rip the bark off him. When they’re done, you will not recognize the aging, mouth-frothing, business-destroying commie from Ben and Jerry’s dystopian dairy. Demagogy is what Republicans do best. And Sanders is ripe for caricature.

Egan then lists all these potential GOP smears, beginning with Bernie's long-ago trip to Russia and his wife Jane's failed Vermont college venture - not to smear Bernie himself, of course, but to smarmily warn you that a vote for Bernie is a vote for Trump.

My published response:

True, this has never been a socialist country, but it was the strong socialist movement that pushed the FDR administration to enact the New Deal. Remember, for example, the Wobblies?

No politician ever enacts programs for the public good out of the goodness of his or her heart. It takes pressure from below, which is why Bernie's campaign motto is "Not Me. Us." He has no illusions that he'll be able to snap his fingers and hypnotize Congress into passing Medicare For All. It will take relentless pressure from voters. It will take scaring some of the old Senate dinosaurs out of their complacency, and mounting primary challenge after primary challenge to them if they persist in working for the corporate lobbyists instead of the people who cast the votes.

 Bernie - and by extension, his supporters - are being attacked by both Republicans and centrist Democrats with varying degrees of venom, malice, innuendo and concern-trolling. Egan provides a litany of such past Bernie "scandals" as his Moscow honeymoon - before sanctimoniously scoffing at them. This is a typical centrist ploy: attack the candidate obliquely by repeating right-wing talking points. Then condescendingly pat us on the head and acknowledge that at least Bernie is changing the "conversation." Personally, I find cant like this more offensive than Trump foaming at the mouth against the socialist menace at his Nuremberg-style rallies.

  Neoliberalism is dead, and it's the centrists who can't win.

As to Egan's accusation that we're out for plutocratic blood, I will cop to immensely enjoying the story of the lowly groundhog drawing Bloombergian blood and the too-fleeting blow it struck to Bloomberg's monumental ego.

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

Last but least, Paul Krugman has at least temporarily abandoned his own vicious anti-Bernie attacks to passive-aggressively claim that nothing will change even if Bernie does win the presidency. In fact, he says, since Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are well-nigh interchangeable, everybody should just relax and embrace "party unity" - because you're never going to get everything you want anyway. Despite presenting zero evidence to back up his claim, Krugman insists that Biden has actually moved left in the past few months.

Here's Krugman talking his propaganda strategy to MSNBC's Joy Reid:

 It seems to me that Krugman is attempting to effectuate a little voter suppression here. If all Democrats will govern alike, maybe some potential Iowa caucus-goers will just stay home after listening to that reassuring Krugmanesque smarminess.

My response to his column:

It sounds as though Mr. Krugman has resigned himself to Sanders being the nominee. Or perhaps it's the realization that every time a prominent pundit or PAC attacks Bernie and gaslights progressives, another torrent of small donor dollars floods his already ample campaign coffers.

  To say that Biden and Sanders would accomplish the same things is a stretch. For starters, Biden has never been just "swept along" by the last 40 years of neoliberal austerity. He was one of the architects of the Democratic Leadership Council, now known as the New Democrats, and also one of its original presidential recruits.

He might currently be playing a liberal on TV, but his shtick still is trying to find common ground between what's left of the New Deal and reactionary Republicanism. His first assigned task as VP was to "eliminate waste, fraud and abuse" in government programs. Right in the middle of the financial meltdown! 

From the DLC Manifesto: "We will seek out and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse. We will provide the resources to prosecute those taking advantage of government benefits to which they are not entitled, whether wealthy tax evaders, illegal monopolies or participants in welfare fraud." 
The centrist trope broadcast by Biden is that the poor are just as culpable as the rich. But ask yourself how many wealthy criminals have gone to jail while the US prison population has exploded under Biden's championship of the Crime Bill.
The Democratic choice matters. Big time.

Bloombergville Redux

Months before the Occupy movement sprang up in 2011 and its first major encampment made New York City's Zuccotti Park a household word, there were sidewalk sleepovers known as Bloombergvilles. The longest of these anti-austerity protests, in front of City Hall, lasted for three weeks before police broke it up and arrested 13 of the participants.

Inspired by the Depression-era Hooverville shantytowns erected by the destitute and homeless, the pre-Occupy Bloombergvilles were set up to irritate the city's multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose watch the Big Apple had become Income Disparity Capital of the Universe. The big Wall Street banks got the bailout while the rest of us got the bum's rush as well as the bill for both their reward and our punishment. As Bloomberg's own personal wealth was in the process of tripling to more than $53.4 billion, making him the eighth richest person in America, wages of workers stagnated and more jobs disappeared. Social programs were cut nationally and locally. Bloomberg even ordered that the city's food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as if they were criminals, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally put the kibosh on that cruelty.

Bite Me

It goes on and on. Bloomberg in 2011 had very Trumpily appointed as schools chancellor his own version of Betsy DeVos, a crony named Cathie Black, despite the fact that she had no education experience. Her liberal take on school overcrowding was to wonder out loud why poor minority women didn't use birth control. Unlike DeVos, though, Black didn't last too long on the job. Maybe it was the disclosure that Bloomberg had also had to hire a separate person to actually do Black's job for her.

 The very legitimacy of democratic institutions had become a critical issue of contention and mass outrage long before Donald Trump ever stumbled onto the scene to cast a lot of unwanted light on the corruption long endemic in our neoliberal society, in which government and corporations are for all intents and purposes the very same entity.

Then, as now, you would never have known that people were taking to the streets if you got all your news from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Six months before the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge Occupy (first by ridiculing it and later by covering it as legitimate news once the police beatings began) there was a "Day of Rage" march on Wall Street by a diverse group of thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists, retirees, doctors, nurses - in other words, a cross-section of humanity forging a new solidarity which cuts across income and racial and "identity politics" lines.

Young student debt slaves are forming coalitions with the homeless, the recently unemployed or underemployed professionals of the middle class, trade unionists and others with the common experience of having suffered injustice and who are united in outrage. This building of cross-class coalitions is something relatively new. The "helping professions" have all been in the forefront because their ability to do their jobs has been so adversely affected by the budget cuts of the neoliberal project. Likewise, people who had heretofore been permanently relegated to victimhood, such as the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill have taken on activist roles in protest movements as well. Tenant unions have sprung up as associations of eviction victims united in fighting landlords, more apt of a name than ever in these times of neo-feudalism.

The Bloombergville/Occupy movement was the beginning, in America at least, of the refugees from the middle class finding common cause with more historically oppressed groups of people. It was a slap in the face to the Divide and Conquer regimen which created enough of a norm-busting vacuum for Donald Trump to be ushered into power, courtesy of the arcane Electoral College and the dismal campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Pre-Occupy March 2011 March On Wall Street

The only media outlets bothering to cover this huge Bloomberg-era march and rally were Al Jazeera and the Amsterdam News.

So, for me anyway, nothing brings back memories of the heady, halcyon days of those civic uprisings than the possible/likely/all but certain entry of the despised Bloomberg, a virtual parody of smug class privilege, into the Democratic presidential primary race. Nothing spells irony better than Bloomberg's plaintive reason for running for the presidency in the first place: to restore the "norms" that the elites feebly claim were so suddenly and tragically lost during the reign of Donald Trump, along with the "legitimacy" of our democratic institutions.

Politics has been in legitimacy crisis mode for decades. Long before Trump, there was deep distrust of citizens for their government, a reality which Trump and other right wing "populist" leaders have co-opted brilliantly.

 Political parties are not allies of the citizens. And since the political system depends on the mass loyalty of citizens, it reacts to this negativity by clamping down, via censorship, policing, mass surveillance. As Barack Obama made plain in his annoying lecture on "wokeness" last week, deferential citizens are viewed as better citizens than critical citizens. He wanted to deflect from the scary truth that conflict is absolutely essential for the development of democratic rights.

It was Bloomberg (who was offered and turned down the World Bank presidency by Obama) himself who had directly crushed legitimate democratic protest when he spearheaded the orchestrated nationwide police crackdowns on the Occupy camps in December, 2011. (To be fair, he got a little help from the Democratic veal pen of organizers, such as MoveOn, which had attempted to co-opt the movement by starting its own get-out-the-vote "99% Spring" astroturf imitation,  which mysteriously disappeared around the time that the camps were destroyed.)

Bloomberg's threatened entry into the race is all about saving the oligarchy at the continued expense of the rest of us. His candidacy is living proof that we do indeed live under neo-feudalism,  and that our quadrennial participation in presidential politics is a privilege granted to us, and not a right. Specifically, his entry into the race is meant as a warning and a rebuke to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its popular candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

His entry into the race is above all a sign of desperation by the oligarchs that there is the tiniest possibility that they may actually be parted from a smidgen of their obscene wealth sooner rather than later.

From Barack Obama last week chiding the victims of his austerity policies to tone down their indignant rhetoric, to mega-banker Jamie Dimon complaining on TV that the "success" his predatory cohort is being disrespected, to Jeffrey Epstein pal Bill Gates threatening to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee. the Ruling Class is wallowing in a virtual orgy of overblown sensitivity. They are so corrupt that any vestigial insight into the ugly fact of their own corruption and criminality has long disappeared. whittled away by both their ill-gotten gains and the fawning coverage they get from their corporate press courtiers.

Bloomberg even owns his own media empire, a feat he had accomplished long before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

No wonder all the usual suspects are welcoming this godzillionaire ex-mayor to the party with open arms, despite there being no chance that he'll win the nomination, let alone even make it on to the debate stage. Bloomberg has all the debate stage he wants in the way of free publicity. 

One positive point: the Stop and Frisk former mayor who made extreme racial profiling by cops a core part of his agenda, makes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who failed to rein in police misconduct and to address racism in his own little town, look like the rube he is. He's also pulling the rug right out from under fellow centrist Joe Biden, increasingly viewed as a liability by the Owning Class because of his chronic "gaffes" and obvious mental decline. 

Bloomberg's self-funding billions will buy him all the air time and space he demands with which and from which to hurl class venom at the lesser people under the guise of hurling venom at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He is the leader of his own party, the Oligarch Party. His MAGA motto is to Make America Gentrified, Always. His task is to promote the narrative that 1) Bernie and Liz are making our Trickle-Down Tyrants so nervous that they can't even pee their golden drops of beneficence on us without getting a nasty groin-ache; and 2) the serfs of the Heartland are so bummed and so terrified by the prospect of guaranteed health care and debt-free college that they will vote for Trump again out of a dearth of centrism.

Bloomberg has heeded the call of fellow financier Steve Rattner, who is granted regular New York Times opinion page space despite his tacit admission to robbing public pension funds in a sleazy kickback scheme. Like most members of his class, he avoided criminal indictment and prosecution by "settling" with New York and agreeing to pay a fine. Like most members of his criminal class, he no doubt later claimed the fine as an income tax deduction.

Three days before Bloomberg filed the paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic primary, Rattner complained in the Times that even worse than Medicare For All and the threat to private insurance predators are Warren's regulatory reforms and taxes, which would greatly threaten his class's ability to rob, cheat, steal and pollute:

Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.

 Oh, the humanity. Notwithstanding that Warren cringe-worthily said that among the Black leaders she'd consider for her cabinet were Bain Capital's Deval Patrick and Melody Barnes, late of the Obama administration and revolving doors to JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton, at least she's making them momentarily uncomfortable, albeit probably unnecessarily so if she wins the nomination. They count Bernie out at their own peril.

Since normal tycoons, meanwhile, are so not used to defending themselves in public, it will now fall to Bloomberg to seamlessly continue what Barack Obama started last week by way of gaslighting the underdog and reassuringly dog-whistling endless class supremacy to the traditional movers and shakers of The Realm who have so richly rewarded Obama since he left office.

And just to be on the safe side, the Oily Garchs will protect their bullshit narrative by ostentatiously moving Wall Street's mythical bull sculpture to a place of greater safety. Just last month, a protester doused it with fake blood. And the month before that, another ne'er-do-well violently bashed it with a toy metal banjo. This symbol of the Overlords was not only punked, it was plinked. And that is so rude, seeing as how the Overlords paid homage to women's rights -  not by passing wage parity legislation -  but by commissioning a Fearless Girl statue to face down the Charging Bull.

No word if Bull will be reunited with Girl, who also had to be fearfully removed from the site due to safety concerns.

Maybe Bloomberg and the other belly-aching, plutocrapping Thought Leaders can get together before the first terrifying Democratic primaries and strain to come up with a solution to the pressing dilemma of where they can run, where they can hide.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Smart Plutocrats, Dumb Trumpocrats

Don't you hate it when the rich and powerful can't all just get along? 

The plutes have really been blowing it lately. Their standard operating procedure of pitting the hoi polloi against each other in a never-ending orgy of divide-and-conquer, while at the same time craftily plundering the same hoi polloi of every last dollar and drop of sweat-labor they possess, is showing signs of some serious wear and tear.

 Having been carefully trained to fear and respect - if not love - the plutocrats, and to strive, as a top-secret Citigroup manifesto once put it, to become "pluto-participants" in the enterprise, the hoi polloi are getting wise to the con. The propaganda center can no longer hold. Strikes and protests and riots are breaking out all over the place: in Los Angeles, in Mexico, in France, to name just three in the last week alone.

The plutocrats, in the process of losing their propaganda war if not their actual class war on anybody with no money, appear to be losing their minds at about the same rate that the hoi polloi are losing their patience.

Unable any longer to keep their bickering and their palace intrigues behind closed gilded doors, the ruling class is desperately trying to salvage dwindling hoi polloi compliance and good will by at least letting us gawk at their sordid end-of-empire show as it plays out in real time.

Entertain yourselves from the nosebleed seats as the royal battle between the stupid, crass plutocrats (Trumpocrats) and the smart, sensitive plutocrats plays out. Root for your favorite stars. Stay tuned for the coming attractions in Horse Race 2020 if you ever find yourself unaccountably losing enthusiasm for the thrilling main event.

The lead actors now playing the Stupids for our entertainment misery are President Donald Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur "Mr. Burns" Ross. They've far, far exceeded all expectations in their roles as gross cartoon villains in the first exciting installment of Shutdown USA. These two human malignancies had craftily advised the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors working without pay for the better part of a month to simply take out a loan - just in case those form letters the White House thoughtfully provided, begging for mercy from landlords, mortgage companies and other creditors, didn't do the trick.

Enter the lead actress, intrepid multimillionaire centrist Nancy Pelosi, to save the day for the Smart Plutocrat Team. In the latest episode's exciting climax, Madam Speaker boldly forces Trump to cave and to call a temporary truce, ending the shutdown. She is being widely praised by the fawning corporate media reviewers as a feminist bad-ass in heels. Not only does she deny Trump his Wall, but perhaps even more painful to him personally, she denies him his coveted prime time spot as star of the annual State of the Union gala.

  And she'll spend the next three weeks continuing to show the whole intimidated world what a primitive wimp he is by altruistically offering him billions of dollars for "a smart wall." This means that Democrats will push for more humane, high-tech ways to terrorize and punish migrants and refugees, while Pelosi further shows her chops by tamping down all those pesky rumblings of Medicare For All in her caucus. There are just no billions of extra dollars to spare for "smart" hoi polloi health, apparently. 

Because no way is Nancy Pelosi ever content to just clutch her pearls like the Democratic #Resistance Fighter of yore. She wears them like a studded collar, like the warrior queen and de facto first woman president that she truly is. Elevating her to such regal status allows the corporate media to ignore the fact that massive labor unrest and sick-ins at the nation's airports was a disruption that even the Trumpocrats couldn't ignore.

I know it's hard to surpass Pelosi's brilliant bravura performance, but it seems that there is another eager ruling class racketeer lurking in the wings. So getting second billing in this week's Smart Plutocrat lineup is multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is pondering his own primary run as a Democrat, based primarily upon his claim that he's a smarter CEO than Trump.

Skillfully exposing Trump as the poor negotiator and klutzy psychopath that he is, Bloomberg did him one better and showed that not only is he, Bloomberg, a smarter overlord, he is a plutocrat who can also do noblesse oblige whenever the rare need arises. Not content to merely employ the royal "we" to show that he is not amused, he also employs pop culture references and humor to show that he's down with the hoi polloi.

"The longer we have a pretend CEO who is recklessly running this country, the worse it’s going to be for our economy and for our security. This is really dangerous.... It’s like the government version of a bad horror movie, but instead of Freddy Krueger and the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ we’ve got Donald Trump and the ‘Nightmare at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'"

Trump wonders as he wanders. Bloomberg panders as he ponders. Therefore, we can forgot all about the nightmare of his three-term New York City mayoralty, highlighted by his edict that all food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as though they were criminals. And speaking of bad dreams, his "Stop and Frisk" crusade of city cops terrorizing virtually every single black and brown male existing within his domain lasted for years before a judge finally declared it to be inhumane and unconstitutional. Unlike the oafish Trump, Bloomberg is a smart, competent sadist capable of keeping his cruelty carefully hidden beneath platitudes. He's more like smarmy circumspect innkeeper Norman Bates than boastful slasher Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, you will be happy to know that despite all their unprecedented smartness, Bloomberg and Pelosi already face some more stiff competition. Because otherwise it wouldn't be a true democracy, would it? 

As Hillary Clinton just informed her PAC subscribers in a missive slugged "Let's not be distracted," she, Bill, Chelsea, and 500 of their closest public-private partners will burn untold tens of thousands of gallons of climate-destroying private jet fuel to convene this week in San Juan to discuss all the neoliberal ways that they can make Puerto Rico an even better and smarter de facto colony than it was before Hurricane Maria destroyed it, and Trump insulted its residents by throwing paper towels at them.

Unlike Trump, Hillary doesn't crassly throw stuff. (She also doesn't crassly announce her third presidential candidacy, preferring instead to send out sensitive feelers to gauge the reaction.) She does, as is her wont, always put her own grievances first, even placing herself above suffering Puerto Ricans in making her email pitch. Never mind island mudslides. The Clinton Foundation, she altruistically announces in the very first paragraph of her email, has been the victim of much mud-slinging from the dumb Trumpocrats:

When I ran for president, this top-rated global charity was dragged into a political mud fight. In the two years since, people with an axe to grind have continued to try to undermine its work by attacking them (sic) and making false accusations.

 So combine your outraged solidarity-pity for Hillary and your hatred of Donald Trump with concern for Puerto Ricans  and try, ironical as it might sound, to "resist the vitriol" and stop being so distracted by Trump's dumb oafish antics. Instead, give generously to the Clintons so that they, rather than US government agencies funded by raising taxes on the rich, can help the entire "greater Caribbean" to "build back better" via "practical solutions."

Although she offered few details on exactly what this practicality will entail, and no information at all about the confab's 500 attendees, Hillary Clinton does allow that one of her biggest concerns is the alleged "rising youth crime rate" in Puerto Rico. Her idea of bringing these youths to heel is "access" to mental health care and entrepreneurship training... making Puerto Rico great again and safe again, especially for tourists. 

She made no mention of raising the minimum wage in Puerto Rico, which Congress in its infinitely smart wisdom had reduced to $4.25 an hour for workers below age 24 the year before Maria hit. It was a common-sense austerity measure designed to placate the indebted commonwealth's bond holders, a very smart bunch of plutocrats indeed. Maybe some of them are even smart enough to be among the Clinton Foundation's group of 500 carbon-belching island rescuers.

Update 1/28: Just as I was finishing up this post last night, billionaire and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz officially announced on 60 Minutes that he is seriously thinking about an independent presidential candidacy, fomenting enough buzz in the media-political complex to preclude their cravings for his overpriced caffeine beverages. 

Schultz, while posing as a smart plutocratic centrist, actually betrays his inner dumb crass authoritarian Trump when he says that he wants "America to win."

This should be interesting if it lasts. If Schultz can buy his way into the corporate-sponsored debates as an independent candidate, then it will be harder for the Duopoly to deny other third, fourth and fifth parties the same privilege. I don't think the police would dare chain Schultz to a chair in a warehouse as they did to the Green Party's Jill Stein when she showed up to debate Obama and Romney in 2012.

Big Scary Money

The wealthy are not only powerful, they can frighten otherwise sensible people into a state of blubbering impotence. Take Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the 12th richest ($20 billion) person in America. How does he get away with his autocratic program of police brutality on Occupiers, stopping and frisking minorities, spying on Muslims both inside and outside city limits, and until recently, making food stamp applicants get fingerprinted as though they were common criminals?

 Not only does he run New York City as his own private fiefdom, he owns a vast media empire -- and he is constantly threatening to expand it. Journalists are afraid to cross him, lest he own them one day -- say, at The New York Times. David Sirota of Salon lays it all out, and suggests we just stop sucking up to the sanctimonious prick.




Money Honey


Easier said than done. Bloomberg  also wields his influence inside the Beltway and inside the White House, where after a long lunch with the president earlier this year, he was reportedly offered the presidency of the World Bank. He turned down the job, because he already owns the World. And his World View happens to revolve around the cult of centrism -- an elite world in which the little people must sacrifice a lot and the plutocrats pay only a little, and where the meltdown of '08 was caused not by Wall Street psychopaths, but by the government making it too easy for greedy people to buy homes they couldn't afford. President Obama gratefully sucks up to this sanctimonious little prick and the rest of the oligarchy by fully embracing Grand Bargainism and pretending that the Deficit is the original sin. He and Bloomberg are on the exact same austerian page in calling for trillions of dollars in cuts to government programs, and raising the retirement and Medicare eligibility ages.

Ordinary people do not care about the deficit, and outright reject the austerity meme. A recent Ipsos poll reveals the majority of Americans (including Democrats, Republicans and independents) want more, not less, government spending in such areas as food safety, veterans' affairs, and medical device and drug safety. The same poll also revealed that most people were not only unaware that federal employees have been subject to a wage freeze for the past two years, but that the president has just extended it indefinitely. The majority believe that the rich should be taxed to pay for government agencies that serve and protect everyone. We're all a bunch of raving socialists.

Meanwhile, the middle class is shrinking. A new report by Pew grimly lays out the facts -- America is in a Lost Decade. I don't think we needed another poll to tell us that. 

And Mayor Bloomberg gets invited to the White House and liberal think tanks even as he gets away with criminalizing hungry people. He would sooner spend millions of dollars investigating them than feeding them.

Money rules. The class war is real. It's them against us, and as Uncle Warren Buffett famously said, they're winning.

Occupy "The Scream"

The huge turnouts for Occupy May Day seem to have stunned the corporate media, which had assumed the movement was dead because they had stopped paying attention to it. Now, they are trying to marginalize OWS even further by calling the day's events a one-off piece of national street theater. Nothing to see here, move along, let's get back to the Rombama Death Match and the Osama Assassination retrospective.

Well, not so fast! Occupy is alive and well and living in the rarefied world of obscenely overpriced art and the obscenely wealthy oligarchs who have nothing else to do with their money than invest it in priceless masterworks, only to hide them away from public view. Today is "Shut Down Sotheby's" Day in New York City to protest against the auction of one of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" paintings. (he painted more than one version.) From the OWS website:




Tonight, at an exclusive 7pm auction, Sotheby's is expected to sell Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream" for $80 million dollars*. Outside, Occupy and labor allies will protest the Upper East Side art auction house in solidarity with 43 locked-out art handlers who have been replaced by Sotheby's with low wage temporary workers with no benefits.
Catering exclusively to the mega-rich (by providing a service that makes them richer and more exclusive,) Sotheby's is perhaps the most quintessentially 1% institution there is. Founded before the industrial era, it was the first company ever listed on the NY Stock Exchange, and today (despite the current "recession") is more profitable than at any other time in its 260-year history. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's workers who make those profits possible are given the shaft. Enough is enough. The 99% will not stand silent as union-busting companies like Sotheby's wage class war against us.
Making it even more interesting is the fact that Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend, former NY Banking Commissioner Diana Taylor, is on the board of Sotheby's. She has actually threatened to quit should Sotheby's CEO accede to the demands of the shut-out Teamsters. "MiDi" has got to be a match made in heaven, given Bloomberg's own disdain for the working class and poor. With a net worth of almost $20 billion, he is adamantly against raising the minimum wage, and insists that food stamp applicants in his fair city get fingerprinted lest they steal crumbs from the maws of the plutocrats. And when it comes to the unemployed and underemployed Occupiers, he is Marie Antoinette in smirky billionaire drag: instead of eating cake, says Hizzoner, they should just go out and become entrepreneurs.

You can see video here of locked-out Sotheby's workers asking Diana Taylor to stand up for them and their families. Her response has all the passion of a bored, pre-guillotine Louis XVI in drag.

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Odd Couples, Then and Now 

And it's not just the Teamsters giving Diana Taylor some righteous indignation. Investors are planning to demand that she and others resign from the Board at the annual shareholder meeting on May 8, for "gross mismanagement" in wasting money to punish middle class workers, and also for the mishandling of James Murdoch's embarrassing position on the Sotheby's board. The auction company has had its share of scandals over the years, and if there's one thing fabulously wealthy oligarchs don't want now, it's even more bad press and class resentment. This is one thin-skinned crowd. They have not had an equal opportunity to develop life's little calluses.

Even the Ivy League has had it with Taylor and her cadre of plutocrats. Dartmouth students have teamed up with the Teamsters, and are demanding their own college board of trustees cut all ties with the auction house, given its blatant class warfare against working families:




Despite grossing over $700 million in 2010, Sotheby's hired the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to attack its workers. More than seven months ago, Sotheby's locked the art handlers out of their jobs, depriving them of their paychecks. On Jan. 1, the art handlers and their families were stripped of their health care coverage. Sotheby's continues to demand that all union positions be phased out and replaced with low wage non-union temporary positions with no benefits.
"Taylor's open hostility to the bargaining process, and refusal to end this awful lockout is an affront to my College's values," said Janet Kim, a Dartmouth junior who participated in Saturday's action. "Dartmouth has always been committed to being a socially responsible institution, but Taylor's actions totally fly in the face of that."
Sotheby's reckless behavior has harmed its shareholders. In a recent filing with financial regulators, the auction house disclosed that it had spent $2.4 million in "extra expenses" associated with the first three months of the lockout. (The entire cost of the art handler's contract is $3.2 million.) The lockout has also caused several organizations, including a group affiliated with Oberlin College, to cancel events originally scheduled to be held at Sotheby's.

"Diana Taylor's refusal to publicly use her influence to try to end this lockout not only speaks volumes about how she feels about America's working families, but it should raise serious questions about her stewardship as a board member," said Jason Ide, President of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents the workers.
I guess it is also no coincidence that Diana Taylor lounges on the board of Brookfield Properties, the quasi-owners of Zuccotti Park, original camp of the Occupy movement. This is another one of those neo-liberal public private partnerships in which taxpayers foot the bills of the ruling class.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that Sotheby's will profit mightily from the sale of "The Scream", an iconic painting that captured the angst and despair and outrage of people buffeted by a cruel authoritarian system over which they have no control.

Munch and other painters in the Expressionist movement wanted to express a new internal, psychological form of reality. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson says the image touches on something primitive within all of us, because we were all once young and helpless like the hairless creature in the picture, wordless and afraid. She says Munch managed to convey something all human beings have felt at some time: "I am overwhelmed. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do and when I try to convey it, in some way, whether I am screaming or expressing some of what nature is screaming at me, other people ignore it."

Why would some master of the universe even want to own this painting, given that it symbolizes the pain of the downtrodden?  Hmm.... Sadism. Control. Evokes fond memories of crashing an entire economy and the hopes and dreams of  an entire generation. Or, alternately: wealthy new owner identifies with the painting because it symbolizes the fact that he is only a multimillionaire and not yet a member of the Forbes 400. It is so unfair that the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined. It's enough to make one Scream.

Update: The Scream has sold for a record-breaking $120 million, the highest ever price paid for a work of art at auction. The bid was done privately, by telephone. No word on the identity of the new owner, who may be in the Forbes 400, after all.