Mourning Barbara: The Bush Way of Death

George W. Bush finally explained himself this morning on Fox Business News. What more perfect venue could there be for a bereaved plutocrat for whom capitalistic life must go on regardless of the fact that his mother Barbara is not yet decently buried?

The day after Mrs. Bush's death at the ripe old age of 92, a tearless, stoically jovial George told Maria Bartiromo that as Babs lay moribund she joked to the doctor, "You want to know why George is the way he is? Because I drank and smoked when I was pregnant with him!"

Calling Doctor Freud. Spoiled son blames Mom for his personality disorder, which as far as we know first manifested itself in the 1950s when he stuffed firecrackers up the rectums of frogs just to watch them blow up. Could the frat boy draft dodger who went on to send lesser mortals to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq be a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome?

The glowing New York Times review does not go there. It's too soon. It is especially too soon to speak ill of the war criminal sons of newly-dead ruling class matriarchs. Instead, we are regaled in article after article about Barbara Bush's iconic "saltiness" vying with her down-to-earth grandmotherly persona, and how she kept George and the rest of clan laughing their asses off right up to her final dying breath. And beyond. Because as far as Dubya is concerned, there's no such thing as tear-stained laughter. Leave that maudlin stuff to his daughters grieving over their "Gammy." In his septuagenarian world of grief, there's just the usual unseemly preppie guffawing. We saw this in action at a 2016 memorial service for the slain Dallas police officers, when George showed his sorrow by giggling and swaying back and forth in a kind of goofy dance.

Dubya couldn't go on TV soon enough to tell his heartwarming anecdote about his life in utero. To be fair, the interview had already been scheduled long before Mrs. Bush decided to forgo further treatment for her failing heart and lungs. And he will also nevertheless persist in hosting his annual "leadership forum" to be held today at his presidential shrine in Dallas (Mom will be interred on the grounds of the first President Bush's shrine on Saturday). The Times reported approvingly, 

“My mother would say, ‘Make darn sure you participate fully in the leadership forum,’” he said. “In other words, ‘Don’t sit around and feel sorry for me or yourself, more importantly, but move on with life.’ And that’s what we’re doing.”

Nothing, not even the death of a mother, will ever get in the way of End Stage Capitalism as practiced by America's great ruling class dynasties.

The honored guest at this year's confab will be Priscilla Chan, wife of embattled Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. She'll be talking about school privatization and machine learning for plutocratic fun and profit.

 “We’re thrilled that Priscilla Chan will lend her visionary expertise to a conversation around how our children learn and the future of how we educate students in this country,” said Ken Hersh, President and CEO of the Bush Center. “Education is core to our mission at the Bush Institute, and we share The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s belief that every child should have the opportunity to recognize their full potential. I look forward to an important conversation around how parents, educators, organizations, and communities can contribute to learning environments that meet the needs of all children.”

If nothing else, her discourse is sure to beat the grief-addled Dubya's plaintive "the question must be asked: is our children learning?" back when he was pushing his repressive No Child Left Behind initiative for plutocratic fun and profit. Chan reportedly will also talk about "access to" affordable housing - as opposed to, say, the actual building of affordable housing for the poor financed by the tax dollars of the wealthy, or an actual increase in federally subsidized rent assistance programs.

It's so heartwarming that Bush's oil tycoon pal Hersh can also get past Barbara Bush's death and gush that every child should get just enough education to "recognize" their potential, as opposed to oil tycoons like himself getting fairly taxed to make sure that poor children can realize their full potential and avoid going to their own deathbeds saddled with onerous college and medical debt.

Also appearing at the non-cancelled Leadership Forum will be former Federal Reserve Chairman and Brookings fellow Ben Bernanke: New York Times op-ed contributor and American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks; Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace. Closing the festivities will be America's richest oligarch, Jeff Bezos, founder of the Amazon oligopoly and owner of the Washington Post.

Sadly, both the Forum and the Funeral will be closed to the public. Because privatized plutocratic life must always go on, and George W. is absolutely convinced that Mom is fondly looking down on the whole charade from her own privileged perch in heaven. To paraphrase Babs herself, she was privileged to begin with, so this is all working out very well for her whole family and their close circle of friends. It will work out so well for them, in fact, that they'll even save themselves the expense of an extra-long trip on their private Lear jets to attend her funeral in Houston.

May they all rest in the peace and knowledge of their own exalted rectitude.

Hellbent Persistence: The Chelsea Clinton Story

Second in annoyance only to Donald Trump's Tweets are the persistent stories about how Chelsea Clinton is being "groomed" for public office. Every time I read one of these ubiquitous pieces, I can't help but wonder: who, exactly, is doing all this mysterious grooming?

Mom? Dad? The DNC? MSNBC? The Hamilton Project? The Center for American Progress? The articles never say, exactly. So I have no choice but to let my imagination run wild.

What immediately comes to mind, totally unbidden of course, are the libertines of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. These depraved characters have the persistent habit of assaulting, in a variety of ways, the young people whom they've kidnapped and imprisoned in a remote luxury resort castle. The violations commence only after a very rigorous grooming regimen in which the victims are transformed into compliant and trusting objects who never exhibit even a whimper of protest, let alone display any emotions or original thoughts. The grooming has a profound deadening effect upon them.

That De Sade's predators hailed from the highest echelons of the church, the nobility, and academia would prove all too realistically prescient. But that's a blog post for another day.  

So anyway, once I manage to get those horrid sadistic images out of my head, the next thing that occurs to me is what an insult it is to use the word "grooming" about an already hyper-educated and impeccably put together woman like Chelsea Clinton. How much more grooming can one living picture of perfection even stand?

The publicists planting all these stories about her solo debut on the public stage are, I assume, getting paid top dollar by Clinton World. So isn't it a bit degrading to keep using this "being groomed" trope about Chelsea, as though she were a dog or a horse? Not only is the phrase demeaning, it robs her of her own agency. It implies that she needs lots and lots of expert help to maintain her position in life. And we all know that Chelsea only got where she is today by virtue of her own grit, talent and persistence.

She's even written a new book about these unique qualities, directly plagiarizing channeling Elizabeth Warren's recent tirade against racist Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions before his confirmation. After obeying Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's order to stop persisting and shut up, Warren had bravely continued her speech outside the Senate Chamber, via Facebook. She persisted in reciting a letter written by Coretta Scott King and as a result, her feminist brand skyrocketed to new levels, most notably within the elite Pussy Hat Brigade. Chelsea has recently become a branded soldier of The Movement herself. This is evidenced by her recent spate of #ResistanceInc tweets directed at Donald Trump and her publicizing of her toddler daughter's debutante stint:

 Notice that Chelsea didn't quite get to the level of "no drones, no bombs, no wars."

Chelsea's mom even got into the act, tweeting about Warren, the woman she'd only recently spurned as a running mate: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted. So must we all."

And thus was a whole Persisterhood industry spawned. What - you thought this was democratic socialism? There are She Persisted energy bars, and She Persisted fashions, and even a She Persisted online store with products designed for the "woman warriors in your life." If you are a persistentrepreneur looking for product placement, there are experts to help you market your stuff. They will even send you a monthly inspirational story to help you get marching all the way to the bank.

A Movement Can't Go Ka-Ching If It Ain't Got No Bling

So what better time for Chelsea Clinton to rush out another book, and call it (surprise) She Persisted?

Given that she's probably only had a few weeks to cobble this tome together, with little to no time for original academic research or multiple revisions or relentless editing, Chelsea's publishers are marketing it direct-to-children - or what she adorably calls "tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world."

Expose the nursery school set to neoliberal Clintonism while they're still too young to resist. Groom them early, groom them often. 

According to the helpful plug planted in the New York Times:

The book will share the stories of 13 historical women who relentlessly pursued their goals in the face of opposition, including Harriet Tubman, Nellie Bly, Maria Tallchief and Oprah Winfrey.

Now hold it right there, and I'm not talking about the gratuitous addition of billionaire Oprah Winfrey. I'm talking about the need of Chelsea's publicist for a copy editor of her own. These women are historic, not historical. The word historical applies to all women and to all the humans and events of the past. They existed, therefore they were. Historic, on the other hand, correctly connotes that these people were unique or highly influential in their fields. Plus, since Oprah is not even dead yet, it is highly insulting to call her historical.

  So somebody needs a little grammar-grooming here, no? And puh-leeze -- shouldn't these lucky 13 ladies be termed Herstoric? If it can't be politically correct, then what hysterical good is it?

If you think this is too cute by half already, wait a minute, because we're not done yet. According to the Times puff piece, you'll have to hold your breath until She Persisted reaches bookstores on May 30 for "a cameo that is yet to be announced." 

I'm not exactly sure, but I think that what Chelsea teasingly means is a bonus chapter featuring one of the most relentlessly persistent people around. You'll have to buy the ticket before the big reveal, though; did you really think she'd be giving this book away? Hah! It'll set you back $17.99 for all 32 pages of it.

Anybody want to take a wild, wild guess as to the identity of Secret Cameo? Hint: her own last book was titled Stronger Together. Published in September last year, its first week sales were so awful, it should have set off an immediate persistent cacophony of alarm bells.

In a truly democratic country, the political life of this Mystery Cameo person  would be considered historical - as in The Blessed Past. But now that she is reportedly being groomed to become the next mayor of the Income Inequality Capital of the World, I think we can safely say that it when it comes to this family, the chutzpah alone is of truly historic and earth-shattering proportions. It's been consequential, to say the least.

It's Surreal: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Ruling Class Worrywarts

When Larry Summers says he's worried about Donald Trump, you can bet the banks he helped deregulate back in the 90s that his concern has nothing to do with how regular people will fare under the plutocrat-heavy Trump administration.

On the contrary. Larry Summers is scared that Trump will destroy capitalism itself. That much-ballyhooed Carrier deal brokered by the president-elect, which will save about 700 Indiana factory jobs from being outsourced to Mexico, is a slap in the face to the economy as rich people have known it, loved it, and profited by it.

Without a hint of irony, Summers writes in a Washington Post op-ed:

I have always thought of American capitalism as dominantly rule and law based. Courts enforce contracts and property rights in ways that are largely independent of just who it is who is before them. Taxes are calculable on the basis of an arithmetic algorithm. Companies and governments buy from the cheapest bidder. Regulation follows previously promulgated rules. In the economic arena, the state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enforce contract and property rights and to enforce previously promulgated laws.

Never mind that the laws of capitalism were written for the sole benefit of corporations and CEOs and trust fund kids. Never mind that no-bid contracts have been an operating principle of unaccountable government spending for decades, if not centuries. Never mind that the repeal of the Depression-era  Glass-Steagall Act, which Summers helped orchestrate during the Clinton administration, was in essence itself a repudiation of the controlled capitalism which Summers now purports to adore. Summers also worked with Citigroup's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan to deregulate the derivatives market. Later, he successfully thwarted an adequate stimulus package during his stint in the Obama administration.

Summers has never in his life fought for American workers or against the offshoring of jobs by multinational corporations searching for ever cheaper and exploitable human labor. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Carrier deal would give him agita. It would give him agita even if it were not steeped in crony capitalist motivations.

Summers' beef is that Trump aims to turn the "lawful" plunder and privatization model right on its ear and make us into a full-fledged Banana Republic, just like in (gasp!) Putin's Russia.

And since the Democrats are still blaming everyone but Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump's victory, Summers also takes the obligatory dig at Bernie Sanders, whom Summers claims "misses the point" by complaining that not all the Carrier jobs were saved from Mexico outsourcing.

And now comes the coup de grâce. Summers blames Democracy itself:

 Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people. They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders. I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

Translation: with Trump around, the rich may end up being unable to loot from the poor as legally and responsibly as they always have in the past. And it's all the fault of those poor people, who turn out to be not only stupid, but abusive and power-mad. Didn't they ever learn that consumerism is their only responsibility? Didn't they ever learn that "democracy" and voting rights are only the bait and switch tactics designed to disguise the awful truth that Capitalism rules?

The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who has been on his own interminable roll of blaming everything from white racists and the FBI and Wikileaks to Putin and "fake news" sites for Hillary's defeat, thinks his colleague Larry is really on to something. Krugman is so upset about the positive media coverage of the Carrier deal that he even seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is not only still the president, but that Obama has assured the nation that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. 

Krugman writes:

It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, we’re looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic (sic) and for freedom.

The most pressing concern he has is for the freedoms of the law-abiding robber barons. It seems as though the petty sniping by Wall Street Democrats at the HRC sniper-haters will go on for the foreseeable future. Party elites and pundits are throwing the same kind of temper tantrum that they accuse Trump of indulging in.

My published response to Krugman: 

So, Larry Summers is more worried about Trump ruining capitalism than he is about unfettered capitalism destroying the lives and livelihoods of working people.

Trump is performing the con abnormally. Therefore, grouses Summers (one of the three guys who "saved the world" by destroying it through deregulation), we have a fatal inversion. Instead of politicians passing laws to appease the corporations, we now have corporations appeasing a grossly incompetent anti-politician interested only in his own fortunes.

The Precursors and Enablers of Donald J. Trump

Trump is only a symptom - really, the excrescence - of the neoliberalism and resulting record wealth inequality which has been spawning right-wing populism all over the world.

Summers is worried that Trumpian crony capitalism is bad for the economy. But whose economy? It seems to me that he is really talking about the plutonomy: ownership of a financialized system which mainly benefits the 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population. Trump wants to be a member of that Club.

The working class - white, brown and black - doesn't factor in to the equation, other than elite worry-warts blaming them for not voting for the right candidate.

The bright spot is that even before he's sworn in (assuming he doesn't forget to show up to deliver a bizarre stream-of-consciousness inaugural riff) Trump voters are already expressing buyers' remorse. Apparently, some thought that their giant middle finger to the establishment was only symbolic.

Speaking of buyers' remorse, there's a neologism that should join "post-truth" in that annual list of verbal novelties put out by Lake Superior University. And that is "Trumpgrets."

Raw Story has the scoop on the whole gamut of raw emotions emanating from desperate people who couldn't care less if the plutocrats robbing them blind do it based on an Ivy League education and corner office, or if they do it out of unabashed ignorance and greed while wearing a red baseball cap.

But be warned: you have to be willing to laugh at and feel superior to all the remorseful Trump voters out there. In other words, you have to be a clueless liberal for whom the word "solidarity" is still missing from your intolerant vocabulary.

"Berxit" Begins

No, that isn't a typo. I'll be writing more about Brexit (a/k/a "The Failed Neoliberal Project Comes Home to Roost") in a later post.

This is about a different exodus.  Bernie Sanders made "Berxit" all but official this morning, telling MSNBC that he'll definitely be voting for Hillary Clinton this November.

But be heartened, Bernie-or-Busters. Just as it will take Prime Minister David Cameron a little while longer to finally skulk off in abject defeat, so too will Berxit be a gradual process. Just as Cameron doesn't want to upset the Market God by bolting from Number 10 too precipitously, before his successor is officially named, so too does Bernie not want to completely alienate his own supporters before his big prime-time consolation speech at the Philadelphia convention late next month.

These things must always be eased into delicately. Sanders has been giving none-too-subtle hints of his coming endorsement of Clinton, announcing just the other week that Priority Number One in his "revolution" will be "joining with" Clinton to defeat Donald Trump. How much more nuance can we stand?

That "joining" has now gingerly advanced into voting. The voting will soon evolve into endorsement and an official nomination ceremony. The nomination will morph into a honeymoon of Internet fund-raising, and TV ads, and campaigning for - or perhaps even with - Hillary on the stump. It's not so much a revolution, it's a transition toward lowered expectations.

I don't know about you, but I much prefer my band-aids to be ripped off in one quick tear. All of this incremental teasing the adhesive off of the scab that Sanders is playing at just prolongs and intensifies the agony.

You see, just because he is voting for Hillary. Bernie still doesn't want you to think that he's abandoned you, let alone dropped out of the presidential race. He delivered yet another barn-burner of a speech to supporters on Thursday, ticking off each and every progressive policy demand for inclusion in the Democratic platform. He titled it "Where Do We Go From Here?" in apparent homage to the last book written by Martin Luther King Jr before he was assassinated. King, too, tempered his own radicalism by urging pragmatism to the "militant" Black Power movement leaders. Change doesn't happen overnight, he said, nor does it happen with any one politician's election. And violence never gets you anywhere. Of course, King was writing in the days of the Great Society and the civil rights legislation born of his own brilliant activism. Neoliberalism -- control of societies and economies by unelected oligarchies and banks -- was still a distant nightmare back in the 60s.

Bernie Sanders just seems to be having a clumsy time evolving from his role as a presidential candidate who raised millions of dollars and won millions of votes into the perceived role of non-affiliated radical movement leader, following in the footsteps of Dr. King.

Although King, too, had urged his often-disappointed followers to run for public office, he had never sought or held office himself. He was never co-opted by the Democratic Party. And not only didn't he ever vow personal political fealty to Lyndon Johnson, he spoke out vociferously against Johnson's militarism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War.

Bernie is not speaking out against war. Although a vague critic of "regime change" and CIA dirty tricks, he actively supports President Obama's drone assassination program and has voted for billions of dollars in military appropriations in his capacity as senator. Posing as an outsider his entire political life, he is nonetheless a consummate insider -- despite what his colleagues and the mainstream media like to pretend. He's voted with Democrats more than 90 percent of the time.

  Yet the pundits are still complaining about Bernie's continued "failure to concede". 

What does Bernie even want? is their tired, constant and agonized refrain. For every day that he stays in the race, he's only hurting Hillary and boosting Trump, for crying out loud!

Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times delivered the latest appeal (published only hours before Bernie went on Morning Joe to all but smother Hillary with kisses), urging him to stop it already with the wishy-washiness. A girl can't wait forever for the engagement ring, especially if she is "less adept at campaigning." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Hillary from Rosenthal, but still:

Bernie Sanders is making his exit from the Democratic primary campaign in such slow motion that it’s starting to feel like he might still be in the race at Christmas.

Rosenthal then pivots to the standard media Bernie-diss of comparing him unfavorably to civil rights icon John Lewis, a "real" revolutionary who continued the struggle this week by staging a sit-down strike against gun violence (and paradoxically supporting the continuation of the anti-democratic No Fly List while he was at it.) Lewis still has the scars on his head to prove his bona fides. All Bernie has is a head of wispy white (white! white!) hair. This is identity politics run amok, served up by the Times to obfuscate the class war of the feral rich against the rest of us.

"The chilling scene in the House was just a taste of what Sanders followers will risk if they do not throw their undeniable enthusiasm behind Clinton and other Democratic candidates, and the G.O.P. holds Congress and wins the White House in November," Rosenthal scolded.

Bernie just can't win, no matter how valiantly he tries to passive-aggressively throw both himself and his supporters under the neoliberal bus. The pundits will probably still be asking him what the hell he wants 20 years from now. If there is, in fact, such a thing as 20 years from now in a United States of America.

Even in the wake of the mass outrage and disgust and despair evidenced by the Brexit vote and the rise of Trumpism on this side of the pond, they just don't seem to get it. They're still unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in the creation of the worst social and economic inequality in modern history. 

Brexit, Berxit: The leaders of the free world are still stuck in the desolate room which Jean Paul Sartre described so brutally in No Exit. Nobody's willing to acknowledge the reasons for their own damnation, other than to say "mistakes were made." Even when salvation in the form an open door is offered to them, they refuse to leave, preferring instead the safe misery of each other's own dead company. "Hell,"wrote Sartre, "is other people."  

  Our planet is alternately frying and drowning from a lethal overdose of capitalism, yet the smartest people in the room still waste precious time kvetching about a rapidly cooling Bern.

Their own insecurity is showing. Panglossian denial of the awful reality no longer suffices.

He's So Vain

 (optional soundtrack.)

Poor Barack Obama. He went to all that trouble to break up the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement during one hippie-punching, pepper-spraying police state week back in the fall of 2011. And now it's all come back to bite him in the ass.

 The elders of the Democratic Party thought that they'd accomplished, if not the death of OWS, at least its co-optation. After all, Obama handily won re-election the following year. But mirabile dictu!  Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for 15 and other activist groups have sneaked right back in to occupy the Democratic Party itself. The national conversation has been hijacked by an FDR liberal named Bernie Sanders, who might end up not only succeeding Obama, but dealing the coup de grace to the entire Neoliberal Project of the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonoid Third Way.

Democracy is rearing its ugly head again, and Obama is reportedly very, very nervous about this whole revolution thing. Even with his legendary genius IQ -- augmented lavishly by the Deep State brains of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI  -- he never saw Bernie Sanders coming.

Empress-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton's gross corruption and incompetence has let him down, big-time. He is probably kicking himself for so ever cutely attempting to co-opt her as his Secretary of State, thereby keeping a dangerous political enemy close. Without that patronage fillip, she would only have been a First Lady, an unaccomplished Senator, and a failed 2008 presidential candidate. Without Obama's own arrogant willful blindness to her private Internet account and her use of public office to enrich her family slush fund, she might have even been fired halfway through her frequent flier marathon as his ineffectual Good Will Ambassador.

Obama has only himself to blame for the rise of Bernie Sanders and socialism as the default position of a whole lost generation of over-educated, underpaid, deeply indebted young people who have never known a day when this country has not been at war. And for that accomplishment alone, I think he should be allowed to keep his Nobel Peace Prize.

Since it would now appear unseemly to either actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, bring in Joe Biden, or directly criticize Bernie Sanders, Obama must look to other reliable sources to get his message of displeasure out. So he has turned to his exclusive cadre of journalists and opinion-writers to be his off-the-record conduits of the Obama Story he wants the public to hear.

Over the weekend, Carl Bernstein (both a White House insider and Hillary Clinton biographer) went on CNN to announce how very, very upset the president is about the ongoing bitter Democratic primary. It's hurting Obama's precious legacy. If Bernie Sanders beats Hillary, that legacy might go up in flames. Obama's corporate coup (the TPP) might be dust. His market-based health insurance kludge might morph into a single payer Medicare for All plan. Wall Street and corporate felons might actually be prosecuted instead of being granted the tax breaks and cabinet and government advisory positions to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, said Bernstein, the White House wants all the people to realize how absolutely imperative it is that Hillary Clinton be elected to succeed Barack Obama:

 
 Obama wants to broadcast the fear-mongering message that Sanders's socialism is out of touch with mainstream America -- despite the fact that millennial voters themselves overwhelmingly identify as socialist. As Bernstein tells it on CNN, Hillary's problem is not that she accepted money from Goldman Sachs and other banks: it's that she doesn't know how to feign proper humility before the public.

 The Washington insider wisdom is that Bernie isn't electable, and Hillary isn't delectable.

In other words, she can't do the "I feel your pain" head-fake as well as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

So, cue right-of-center David Brooks, not only an esteemed member of Obama's inner circle of off-the-record pundits, but often described as the center-right president's particular favorite columnist.

Brooks wrote an elegiac piece titled "I Miss Barack Obama" in today's New York Times. The accompanying photo shows Obama wand'ring lonely as a cloud to the Oval Office, embowered in a princely burst of flowering foliage in lieu of the more obvious crown of laurels. 

  Brooks channels presidential angst in all its froth and narcissism. Barack's greatest fear is not for the dire fates of ordinary people. It's that all his genius will be for naught, given Hillary's tanking numbers, the Republican clown car, and the specter of Bernie Sanders succeeding him.

Brooks mawkishly allows that while he often has had to pretend to disagree with Obama for partisan tribal purposes, the current occupant of the White House stands head and shoulders above mere mortals.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

There are no mass media-reported scandals because the Obama regime has been rightly described as the most secretive in modern history. We know few details of his drone assassination program, for example, or his own closed-door fundraisers, or what went on behind the scenes of the orchestrated crackdown on Occupy, or the suppression of the 9/11 report section dealing with the Saudi royal family's role in the attacks, or the suppression of the CIA torture report. And those are just the scandals that come immediately to my mind. (For a full accounting of his first term, please see the "Obama Scandals List" on my Blog Roll.)

Meanwhile, Brooks manages to destroy his own homage by displaying some unintentional colorblind racism, fawning over the Obamas as one of those "respectable" black families. Barack and Michelle have displayed "superior integrity," Brooks gushes. "You'd be happy to have them in your community." (Apparently they would be that rare black couple who would not lower Brooks's property values if they moved next door to him.)

Brooks would not like Bernie Sanders to live within a thousand miles of him, because he is "so blinded by his values that reality doesn't seem to penetrate his mind." He would rip health care away from thousands (SanderScare) and even worse, rip the wings right off the insurance raptors!  Obama, on the other hand, knows his proper place in the grand white supremacy scheme of things.  He also doesn't "wallow in the pornography of pessimism."

Obama always presents a rapturous, G-rated Pollyannish picture about how great America is, how much the economy is improving, how much he loves peace even as he rains down his bombs and orchestrates his secret coups. Because if he told the truth to people -- the truth that their lives and prospects suck because of the unfettered capitalism he enables -- then the people might just stage a revolution.

Oh, wait.

Links/Open Thread

Wall Street Powers Higher on Greece Hopes: because The Market is a sadist.

Greek crisis worse than the Great Depression: Plutocrats of the World, unite!

Tsipras Just Destroyed Greece: It seems that the popular referendum against neoliberalism was just a head fake, and that the Syriza leader never really expected hoi polloi to reject austerity. Perhaps the lefties over at the World Socialist Website were right about Tsipras being an Obama clone all along. I hear tell that the Masters of the Universe might even give him a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes, using the leftover confetti from today's World Cup festivities. Only kidding, of course. But at the very least, he can probably expect a commiserating congratulatory phone call from Obama, whose own bank-protecting economic policies he says he greatly admires. If, that is, the Troika doesn't pull a fast one and reject an austerity offer even better than the last one. The lunatics have definitely taken over the capitalistic asylum.

I nominate the people of Greece for the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite their own hardships they are welcoming refugees with open arms, feeding and clothing them and sharing their dwindling medical supplies. Over here in the USA, meanwhile, the corporate media give Donald Trump unlimited air time to vomit out his xenophobia, while the Obama administration has quietly imprisoned Central American women and children in privatized border internment camps. As Hillary Clinton has so hawkishly proclaimed, we have "to send them a message" that this land is not their land.

Down with the Confederate Flag, that odious symbol of racial oppression and slavery.

But, up with actual slavery: President Obama plans to deny the existence of human trafficking in Malaysia in order to grease the skids for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As long as slave-owners promise to tone it down a tad, maybe even abolish it by the next century, Obama can live with it. I somehow doubt that Michelle Obama will be holding up another one of her "Bring Back Our Girls" signs in solidarity with the kidnapped victims being smuggled through Malaysia. The Market could not bear it.

If the ruling class can declare victory over racism by simply taking down a flag, how easy it then becomes to declare victory over slavery the wide world over by a simple stroke of the pen. Orwellian possibilities for blanket deniability in the name of profits for The Market are legion, and they are endless. 

As Pope Francis saliently observes, unbridled capitalism is "the dung of the devil."

And he also took a swipe at Obama's "free trade" deals and the finance cartel's assault on the Greek people while he was at it:

The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers
and the poor," he said.

The Sham Within the Fraud

In a sane and equitable democratic system, Rachel Dolezal probably never would have made the cut in the Great Frauds in the History of Snake Oil. But since this is an insane hyper-capitalistic country running on the fumes of consumerism and identity politics, Rachel is the hot trending topic this week. The spectacle of a white woman passing as black is not unique in our history, but you wouldn't know it from all the mass media hysteria surrounding this story. 

Whether she is psychologically troubled or cynically opportunistic or altruistically sincere, Rachel Dolezal has done anybody who ever sucked at the teat of Hollywood and Madison Avenue and the media-political complex an enormous favor. She has, wittingly or not, exposed the fraud that is the essence of what one writer calls "neoliberal antiracism."

As Jodi Melamed of Marquette University explains in Represent and Destroy, it is precisely the official civil rights statutes on the American books as well as the mass media's shallow embrace of "diversity" and multiculturalism -- along with corporate-funded academia's complicit production of an elite black managerial-political class -- that paradoxically gives cover to the global racist predations of the American Imperium. The American political system was able to "capture" the energy of 60s and 70s social movements and then cynically put it to work for capitalism and international conquest.

The "outing" of Rachel Dolezal is only the latest consequence of the sham that is American racial equality. Insofar that it minimally exists, the plutocratic embrace of diversity is exposed more and more as a public relations gimmick: a means, writes Melamed, "to secure US interests, not an end in itself."

This profit motive of neoliberal inclusiveness was perfectly satirized in the Mad Men finale, in which the predatory psychopath Don Draper suddenly gets religion and teaches the whole world to sing in perfect multicultural harmony... while slurping bottles of Coke. Because it's the "real thing," and even black and brown people (or more precisely, their money) are entitled to "snow-white turtle doves."

The Rachel controversy is weirdly reminiscent of the marketing campaign of Coke. Pundits are now arguing about whether trans-racialism is as real a thing as trans-genderism. Which brand is more genuine: Coke or Pepsi? Caitlyn Jenner's photo-shopped Vanity Fair cover, or Rachel's enhanced pigmentation?

Of course, this identity politics controversy conveniently distracts us from paying any more attention to the ugly racist reality of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its embrace of the Malaysian slave trade, or noticing that ugly trans-fat will soon be banned by the most Transparent Administration Ever (TM). So I cynically wonder: are the big factory food conglomerates therefore already salivating to sue us in a secret investor state dispute tribunal somewhere in order to claw back millions in alleged lost profits for being denied the right to poison us with their fatty glop? 

Did I mention that Coca-Cola (along with the Grocery Manufacturers lobby) is one of the 600 or so multinationals secretly dictating the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Did I even have to?

Since the oligarchs have "officially" stopped racism over here by allowing a rainbow coalition to buy their various products and propaganda, they pretend that they have the moral authority to impose their will, their bubbly drinks, their corporate tribunals, their power and their poisons to marginalized people all over the borderless One World. When liberals raised on Coke commercials and To Kill a Mockingbird elected our first black president, what more perfect opportunity for the ruling class racketeers to really, totally let loose with the hegemony and the wars and Wall Street-friendly policies that liberals would normally oppose? Barack Obama has been their perfect fig leaf salesman and enabler. As Melamed eloquently writes,

It should not be possible to be antiracist without being against oppression. Yet race-liberal hegemony has been so effective that today in the United States everyone is antiracist, and yet oppression is banal and ubiquitous. We live with it, accepting the idea of racializing no-go zones and new vulnerabilities to premature death for disposable classes; we eat it, consuming bananas harvested by dispossessed Indians in Honduras who work under the threat of gunfire and grapes picked by migrant laborers who are hunted by the same people who enjoy the literal fruits of their labor; we pay for it, supporting militias in Iraq that stake their territorial claims on women's bodies; we study it, publishing research showing that human trafficking (slavery) is more pervasive than ever and that under the current system, blacks will never gain wealth equality with whites -- findings that receive scant hearing and generate less uproar.

And just as Rachel Dolezal has blown the shallow cosmetic cover off self-righteous white American liberalism, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has blown the cover right off American "post-racialism." While our ruling class trumpets its domestic inclusiveness and diversity even as it wages wars against the world's dispossessed, the de facto domestic oppression made manifest by mass black incarceration and police brutality in Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island is being laid bare for all the world to see. The moral legitimacy of American militarism and economic global leadership is displaying some unmistakable and long-hidden lethal cracks. The extreme center cannot hold. The insipid "We Are the World" neoliberal theme song is sounding more dissonant with each new war, each new corporate power grab, each new police shooting.

No wonder that Barack Obama viciously called black dissenters in Baltimore a bunch of "thugs" even as he wails about the temporary thwarting of his imperialistic pivot to Asia as encompassed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The spiritual power gained by the ruling class from his election is beginning to wane as he reaches the end of his tenure and an upstart social democrat named Bernie Sanders is exposing the dynastic Bush-Clinton Neoliberal Death Match in uncomfortably high relief.

Rachel Dolezal, meanwhile, has helped to further expose the cosmetic fraud of racial identity politics as sold to and by the liberal class. (Or more accurately, the corporate media are exposing it through their over-the-top coverage of Rachel Dolezal) The only thing that possibly made self-proclaimed liberals in the Age of Obama more uncomfortable was when socially acceptable and safe black TV dad Bill Cosby was exposed as a serial rapist. Because anti-racists have largely relied on media portrayals of successful African-Americans to give them aid and comfort, even as the lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of black and brown people have grown more precarious. It is the very elevation of a very tiny handful of successful blacks that allows us to stigmatize and pathologize huge swathes of what reactionaries are so fond of calling "black culture."

Rachel Dolezal was the perfect stereotype of what the white supremacist system calls an African-American success story: smart, educated, hard-working, safely bound up in corporate academia and party politics, exquisitely coiffed and dressed, and articulate. She was the very model of an acceptable assimilated black feminist. Until she wasn't.  

In the space of a nanosecond she went from Clair Huxtable to Lindsay Lohan. She was not the "real thing." And the neoliberal class is not amused as the whole world watches the precarious edifice crumble.