We Have Officially Entered the Twilight Zone

When all else fails, you can always count on Blooperpower USA to revive its stupid, cruel and ineffective War on Drugs - that is, the relentless war against poor and dark-skinned people both at home and abroad. The war on drugs is especially necessary when the poor and dark skinned targets live in a country with valuable natural resources coveted by the US corporations which actually  own and control Blooperpower.

The latest drug war surge is also meant to divert our attention from the sad truth that what is still insanely called the world's sole remaining superpower is so lacking in even the most basic drugs and other medical equipment to combat the virus that we are forced to import face masks and other material from China and Russia. 

In a vain, pathetic attempt to save orange face, and divert attention from the ongoing economic and social collapse of the richest country on earth, Donald Trump aims to start another war or three. And appropriately enough, he announced his plans on April Fools Day.

Before he could utter even one of his endless lies, before he could praise himself and tout the latest pitiful half-measures to combat the pandemic, he announced on Wednesday that he is sending the US military to the shores of Venezuela to combat an alleged epidemic of drug trafficking.

No matter that it's Colombia, not Venezuela, that is and always has been the major drug trafficker in the region. If drugs are trafficked by a right-wing CIA-backed "partner" of the United States, it's fine and dandy with the leaders of both our corrupt political parties. But if drugs are trafficked from a socialist country, it is not okay. No matter that calling, with no evidence, President Nicolas Maduro a drug kingpin and putting a $5 million bounty on his head is only the latest gambit to plunder Venezuela of its oil on behalf of Exxon-Mobil and other major polluters. No matter that the plundering of its oil is not even cost-effective. since Saudi Arabia is already glutting the world market with its own cheap oil.

What matters is the war of late stage capitalism against any form of socialism, wherever it exists in the world and wherever it threatens the Overlords of Blooperpower, who never let pesky reality - say, like  the crew of one of the US Navy's biggest vessels coming down with the virus - ever get in the way of their greed. Trump, who couldn't even be bothered to evacuate these sick or exposed sailors, must think that fleets of warships steer themselves.

Just as corporate CEOs place profits and economic growth above the well-being of the working class, so too has the Pentagon placed the safety of its valuable high tech arsenal of weapons on the stricken aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt above the the health of the sick and endangered sailors on board.

Sounding a lot like the Wall Street executives calling for Americans to return to work even if they risk getting sick, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modley insisted that evacuation is not an option. "This ship has weapons on it, it has munitions on it, it has expensive aircraft, and it has a nuclear power plant. It requires a certain number of people on that ship to maintain the safety and security of the ship."

And with the safety and security of the fossil fuel industry being one of the utmost priorities of Blooperpower, the regime change coup and possible US invasion of Venezuela proceeds apace, no matter the pressing needs at home.

The A.P. reports:

The deployment is one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power and bring him to the U.S. to face drug charges. It involves assets like Navy warships, AWACS surveillance aircraft and on-ground special forces seldom seen before in the region.

Even as American corporations and private equity vultures are licking their chops at the prospect of exploiting the pandemic and looting the multi-trillion dollar slush fund disguised as a pandemic relief package, Trump hilariously blustered on behalf of himself and his whole cabal of mobster cronies:

“As governments and nations focus on the coronavirus there is a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists and other malign actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain. We must not let that happen."

Of course, with the American military apparatus outright refusing to practice even basic social distancing to protect the troops from the virus, one might well ask whether the troops will even stay healthy enough to overthrow the Maduro government on behalf of the overlords of predatory capitalism.

Only top military brass are working from the safety and security of their own homes and videoconferencing over which global site they'll spread their lethal virus of oligarchy to next.

Wouldn't it be something if the troops emulated the wildcat strikers of Amazon and Instacart and refused to follow orders?

What if they gave a war and nobody came for the understandable reason that nobody was healthy enough or alive enough to fight it?

One thing's for sure. Everything will change.  As Rod Serling used to say, "You are traveling to another dimension, not only of sight and sound but of mind."

The only uncertainty is whether we'll keep descending into chaos and confusion and barbarism, or whether this pandemic journey will culminate in "a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination."

If we imagine a better wondrous land emerging from the complete overthrow of corporate rule, we might yet  live in a country where nobody ever goes bankrupt when they get sick, and everybody has a decent secure roof over their heads, and where endless wars for profit and oil are reduced to nothing but a bad, vague memory.

Keep up the fight, but above all, please stay safe that we may live to fight the bastards for many days, months and years to come.

Everybody Is An Exile

Like many of you, I am seesawing between mild concern to barely suppressed panic during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an over-60 person with a few chronic health issues, including intermittent asthma, I am among the millions at increased risk of death if I get sick. So I am self-isolating, and hoping for the best. 

My son and daughter-in-law both have careers that bring them in intimate daily contact with distressed and/or sick people. I especially fear for their safety, because it is just about inevitable that they will be exposed to the virus. Then, best case scenario, they'll have to self-quarantine.

 What is truly scary is that those whose careers are in health and public safety will be out of commission in ever increasing numbers. People increasingly will be completely on their own.

The response at the highest levels of government itself has been nothing short of sickening. The Federal Reserve was lighting-quick to pump a trillion and a half dollars into Wall Street without so much as a "but how you gonna pay for it?" The US Senate, for its part, left town without voting on Nancy Pelosi's dismal House bill offering such a pittance to regular people that it amounts to a slap in the face. Most workers will not in fact qualify for paid sick leave. 

The richest oligarchs and the biggest corporations (read: the political donor class) have been carefully exempted from having to compensate their sick workers and family caregivers. Jeff Bezos will not have to spend one dime of his vast obscene fortune to do right by his Amazon employees.

Just as the banks were deemed too big to fail when the financial system crashed in 2008, corporations are being deemed too big to be humane while enjoying their own human rights under the Citizens United ruling and their socialism-for- the rich handouts.

Meanwhile, the corporate media are covering the government's free virus testing concession as a major victory. But something so radical as actual free medical treatment for sick people?? Not so much. 

But cheer up, proles, because some Internet cable companies have magnanimously pledged not to cut people off from service for 60 days when they lose their income and can't pay the bill .Oh, and Walmart and other retailers have generously offered their parking lots as testing venues. Transportation is on you. Sickness is no excuse not to have skin in the game and abandon your personal responsibility.

So here's the existential dilemma. How are normal people supposed to join together in solidarity and protest when we must isolate ourselves in order to barely keep on existing? As it stands, the Internet is a lifeline absolutely necessary for children to learn and friends and families to communicate. Forget about 60 days of guaranteed service and late fee waivers. The Internet should be permanently declared a public utility, owned and controlled by the public. It shouldn't cost anything.

Predatory capitalism dies so, so hard. 

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

If you watched Donald Trump's grotesque press conference in the Rose Garden yesterday, and you were already feeling queasy, his performance amid a supporting cast of loathsome disaster profiteers from the retail and drug companies was enough to make you reach for the barf bowl. As proof that late stage capitalism is at its very core profoundly stupid as well as banally evil, the way that the assembled tycoons and sycophants glad-handed each other shows they truly believe that their wealth makes them impervious to what strikes terror into the hearts of mere mortals.

The way that Creepy Veepy Mike Pence paid homage to Trump  and licked his shoes made me fear that he'll come down with hoof and mouth disease along with the Coronavirus that Trump has been exposed to on more than one occasion.

Here's the New York Times comment I wrote on Maureen Dowd's column, "Plagued By the President":

Trump might brag about being untested, but the fact remains that he has been tested and found pitifully and severely wanting - no more so than during this past week.

 If Trump could carry a tune as well as he carries polluted water for his oligarchic cronies, he would have burst into song at the press con which conned nobody, not even the sycophants and Trump rat packers with the dollar signs glittering in their eyes. The aging obese Sinatra wannabe effectively wheezed out "call me irresponsible, call me unreliable, throw in undependable too."

Do his foolish alibis bore us? Uh-huh.

 Do we think he's not too clever, but still adores us? Yes to the first, hell no to the second. He bores us and scares us to death at the same time.

It's undeniably true that he's irresponsibly mad. Not about you, though. He is just plain mad. Not the criminally insane kind, because then we'd have to forgive him for he knows not what he does. It would take until the end of time for all the millions of people he has harmed and continues to harm with his vile words and cruel policies to read out their victim impact statements.

 The bejeweled prosperity gospel charlatans and their GOP cohort peddle their snake oil and lay their hands on Trump and tell us to pray away the plague the same way they told the LGBT community to pray away the gay, But judging from his ever deeper bronzed facial hue, Trump seems to have been self-isolating in the White House tanning bed. Maybe he's trying to burn away the germ.

A Distraction Inside a Diversion Within a Deflection

I almost feel sorry for CNN, the most mistrusted name in news. As you've probably heard, one of its debate moderators belligerently asked Bernie Sanders why he had told Elizabeth Warren that a woman could never win the presidency rather than if he had told her this.

This tacky episode of desperately obvious collusion between the war industry-financed cable giant and the faltering campaign of Elizabeth Warren puts CNN in a real quandary as Donald Trump's impeachment trial opens in the Senate. How will its reporters juggle the onerous task of breathlessly hyping the drama of Ukrainegate while simultaneously hyping their contrived family feud between Sanders and Warren? Do they break from the testimony to do panel discussions on Warren and Sanders giving each other the side-eye? Do they cover the boring speeches by the "impeachment managers" or do they air Donald Trump bloviating about witch hunts and unfairness on the White House lawn or at another one of his Nuremberg-style rallies? What if another hell of a continent-engulfing fire breaks out just as the climate-denying senators are fretting about the scandal of delayed weapons appropriations in the new Cold War? What if Trump murders another foreign leader right in the middle of his trial while Adam Schiff is discussing foreign terrorism and improving America's reputation?  It's a real dilemma, not just for CNN, but for the whole media borg. 

In normally balanced times of abnormality, we're used to seeing a permanent split screen, images divided between the requisite two manufactured narratives and leading actors. But with the petty partisan politics of impeachment vying for attention with the petty partisan politics of the Warren-Sanders kerfuffle vying with the petty partisan politics of Everyday Trump vying with whatever mass shootings and climate catastrophes are happening in the world, our invisible TV pixels might devolve into visible pixels requiring a magnifying glass to see. Just the chyrons alone, vying for desperate attention on the top, bottom and both sides of the screen, might require the purchase of a whole separate screen to keep us properly informed. Maybe they should start selling smarter TVs with pre-split multiple screens that are bigger than a house... that is, to the lucky few who still live in houses, which are increasingly being used as hiding places for laundered oligarchic loot rather than as actual dwelling places for human beings.

Thus far I've only been able to find a gadget that breaks up your already-small screen into six separate compartments for your enhanced viewing confusion. To be fair, it is not marketed for use by just one viewer, but to multiple family members or housemates who fight over what to watch on their one TV and who can now supposedly get along in blissful cacophonous peace and harmony

Is it me, or are we finally entering the terminal stage of our great national psychosis in unreal real time, what with all these manufactured and unnatural events competing for our ever more divided and shortened attention spans?

But enough of these depressing dystopian musings! Let's talk just a bit more about that way too obvious conspiracy between Elizabeth Warren and CNN to destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. As others have written, this is all for the benefit of Joe Biden, or perhaps for the benefit of Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg. Playing the sexism card against Bernie rather than against Gropey Sniffy Joe is Warren's tacit way of admitting she has no chance to be the nominee. Her task is to prove to Biden and the corrupt Democratic establishment that when they go low, she goes lower. She is a team player and a worthy candidate for the vice presidency or at least for a top-level cabinet position.

If Warren had been truly, sincerely disturbed by Sanders's alleged sexist remark at that private dinner more than a year ago, wouldn't she have spoken up in the immediate aftermath in order to warn progressives and feminists where this guy's head was really at?

Her belated accusation reeks of the Hail Mary pass. Faced with her imminent defeat, she has desperately pivoted from "I've got a plan for that"  to embracing the same old head fake of stale identity politics. She portrays herself - and by extension, all of womanhood -  as the quintessential victim. Of course, the best and the brightest of the victimized will nevertheless  "fight back" against the male sex as a substitute for fighting back against the patriarchal capitalism which afflicts every living thing on earth: men, women, children, flora and fauna.

Abandoning her brand as the populist champion of working class solidarity, Warren is now wholeheartedly embracing the centrist cult of neoliberal individualism. She is a good loyal friend to capitalism. It was always a contradiction for her to claim to be "a capitalist to my bones" from one side of the mouth and to assert that "I'm with Bernie!" with the other. The truth is now out there. Whether her calculated choice succeeds in damaging Sanders and rewarding Biden - and, ultimately, Trump - remains to be seen.

Warren, meanwhile, is using the solemnity of the impeachment to dissociate her own self from the kerfuffle she has caused. But CNN is having none of it, scoffing at the widespread criticism of its anti-Bernie bias and complaining that Warren refused further comment as she was entering the Senate chamber. CNN's Chris Cilizza vows that his network is not giving up the story about Warren's fight without a fight! Because a story is a story and it won't be the end of the story.

Capitalism hates class solidarity - unless, of course, it is plutocratic class solidarity.

 And it certainly does love those lonely individual downtrodden fighters who can beat all the odds and serve as shining examples of grit and fortitude to the rest of us poor slobs. Capitalism loves it when the teeming masses vicariously identify with such downtrodden elites as Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Meghan Markle... or conversely, with the beleaguered persona of Donald Trump. The more effectively we can be taught to disassociate from our own lives, root for their fortunes and disdain the "haters" who do not, then the less likely it is that we will ever join forces in solidarity with our similarly atomized brothers and sisters.

Capitalism doesn't care a whit about the sincerity of the downtrodden elites that it chooses to market and showcase. It certainly doesn't care whether or not its current star attraction, Donald Trump, is re-elected. In fact, the oligarchs are banking on his re-election, given how this master showman would in all likelihood defeat Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg.

Bernie Sanders is their designated enemy. But what really scares them and sends them to their loot-stuffed fainting couches is an informed, angry and motivated populace.

United we stand. Divided by a confusing infinity of split TV screens and manufactured controversies, we fall. 

The Total Devastation of Trump's Fake Hurricane Map

Maybe it's because the human mind can absorb only so much death and destruction and misery. Maybe it's because the consolidated media borg doesn't enjoy the same access to the Bahamas as it does to the White House and the halls of Congress. Maybe it's because their oil and gas and war industry sponsors would rather they talk about anything but Hurricane Dorian being the most glaring symptom to date of the heated-up planet.

Therefore, the scandal of Donald Trump's apparent doctoring of a map in order to "prove" his false statement last week that Alabama was in the storm's original tracking cone has actually vied for precedence with the actual storm, especially once Dorian had finally left the islands but had not yet begun its slow march up the Atlantic coast of the United States.

If there's one thing that the 24-hour news cycle abhors besides lack of insider accessibility, it's slowness. After awhile, a stalled-out hurricane and before-and- after aerial shots get boring. Anything that doesn't adhere to the spirit of capitalism and horse-race politics, anything that doesn't move at the speed of death is a yawn. People stop clicking unless they can see stuff up close and personal.

The world might be coming to an end, but the media will obsess over Trump's every oafish affront to reality to their last dying breaths. Nothing he does is too petty or too silly to turn them away, not even the tragedy of the Bahamas. Anything, anything to avoid the reality of the world outside of Washington, D.C. Some particularly bored enterprising journalists even went so far as to detect the tell-tale black Sharpie pen on the Resolute Desk and to helpfully circle it for our contrived outrage.

Dorian is not just your ordinary Category Five storm, you see. It's been officially dubbed a "political hurricane" by NPR, whose own storm coverage rotates around Trump focusing only on his base. If a story about disaster on an epic scale doesn't have a presidential campaign angle, then it might as well not even exist. The only eye that counts is Trump's beady little blue eye. The only wall that counts is not the eyewall of the hurricane, but his vanity border wall and his diversion of billions of Pentagon dollars from more deserving construction projects, such as the rebuilding of hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico.

Not that the Democratic leadership is as concerned about making regular Puerto Ricans' lives better as it is about the clear and present danger of Trump's threats to "national security." After all, Puerto Rico has become prime disaster capitalism real estate in the wake of Maria, with salivating plutocrats counting on all that government reconstruction money to help create another exclusive and secure paradise for themselves. 

There has certainly been no mainstream coverage this week about the US military being the most voracious consumer of polluting fossil fuels on Planet Earth, the burning of which causes global warming, which in turn spawns more powerful hurricanes like Dorian, which in turn create more short-term investment opportunities for the voracious uber-rich.

It's safer, and certainly a lot more fun, for the corporate media borg to ignore the roasting globe and instead to gleefully exult about Trump getting roasted for his weather map flimflam:

The illustration, shown in a video released by the White House Wednesday afternoon, instantly caught the attention of many, including late-night hosts, who ridiculed the president for once again appearing to distort facts. By early Thursday, “#sharpiegate” and other similar hashtags were still trending on Twitter.
“He’s not even trying to hide the lies anymore,” ABC host Jimmy Kimmel said. “Not only do we have fake news, we now have fake weather, too.”

Now, to it's credit, CNN did hold a climate change "town hall" for the Democratic presidential contenders on Wednesday. The candidates all did their earnest utmost to become Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez clones-for-a-day as they promised trillions of dollars to combat climate change. This televised spectacle was held to make up for the fact that the Democratic National Committee has refused to include climate change as an official debate topic. In light of the devastation of Dorian, therefore, the party elders actually vie with Trump himself in the feigned cluelessness and cynicism departments. Of course, the party had also reneged on its pledge to refuse any more donations from the fossil fuel industry only two months after agreeing to ban them.

 Chairman Tom Perez probably signed the initial divestment pledge with a Sharpie pen retrofitted with disappearing ink.

Stop Calling Corporate Democrats "Moderates"

To hear the establishment media tell it, you're an extremist if you want guaranteed health care for all, affordable housing, free higher education, a living wage, and even, god forbid, peace on earth. You're a "moderate" if you're a corrupt Democratic politician who demands more pain for the masses  and more power for the runaway capitalist/donor class whose endless pursuit of pleasure and riches is directly fueled by the pain and sweat-labor of others. 

If you're a Blue Dog or a New Dem, and your idea of representative politics is passing legislation that takes from the poor and gives to the rich, then you're a reasonable "centrist." But if your name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar, and you often vocalize your desire to take from the rich and give to the poor, then you don't speak reasonably. Instead, you "huff" out your extreme agenda in a crazily indignant manner.

"Huffed" is exactly how New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis has framed a statement by AOC in the Paper of Record's latest in a long string of blatant propaganda pieces extolling the virtues of the right-wing reactionary Democrats, whose latest name for themselves is "The Problem Solvers' Caucus." These corporate shills' attempt to hide their true oligarchic agenda from the electorate, while scaring suffering voters and gaslighting the party's ever-more-popular left flank is beginning to reek of desperation.

They seem to believe that the more times they utter or write the word "moderate" to describe the rank endemic corruption in the Democratic Party, the more likely it is their message will cow voters, an increasing number (at least 40 percent) of whom are beginning to accept the reality that socialism in some form is the only possible antidote to the capitalism that is literally killing us.

"For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power," the Times confidently proclaims.

And in case that headline didn't slam you hard enough, Hirschfeld-Davis's lead announces it again:

For all the talk of a Tea Party of the left, the true power in the House revealed its face last week — the Mighty Moderates.
The failure of House liberals to attach strict conditions to billions of dollars in emergency border aid requested by President Trump highlighted the outsize power of about two dozen centrist Democrats, mainly from Republican-leaning districts, who are asserting themselves to pull the chamber to the right.

Notice the contradictions in just that one paragraph. Although the word "moderate" connotes calmness, it also now takes on a militant mightiness. Calling these politicians moderates is like calling wars of aggression peace marches. And how can one be a "centrist" while at the same time making no secret of the fact that the true aim is to pull the House to the right? I'm just surprised that they aren't also calling themselves "muscular." After all, some of the new members have come to Congress directly from careers in the armed forces and the "intelligence community." That was the Democratic leadership's whole plan to "resist" Trump: attack him from the right by joining forces with the war and surveillance sectors.

The supplemental aim of this "news story" in the Times is to absolve House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of any personal responsibility for the debacle of last week's shameful Democratic collusion with Trump's sadistic treatment of migrants and refugees. The Paper of Record attempts to rehab her image by placing her in the supposedly powerless liberal camp. Although she herself is a corporate centrist to the core, as evidenced by her frequent public accolades to the recently deceased anti-New Deal billionaire Pete Peterson, and her outspoken disdain for single payer health care, and her passive-aggressive failure to bring up drug price control legislation, Nancy Pelosi has obligingly been cast as a progressive warrior queen who tries her mightiest to suppress the Mighty Moderates. Never mind that these right-wingers were heavily bankrolled by Madame Speaker's own corrupt Democratic Congressional Campaign Commitee (DCCC) in order to suppress any upstart progressive challengers... such as, for instance, AOC.  

Pelosi's excuse is that because these heavily bankrolled "moderates" are credited with flipping the House from red to blue, she must now kowtow to their every whim if she and her party expect to maintain their hold on to power. This Article of Truthiness is given an extra boost of verisimulitude by the Times when Hirschfeld-Davis uses as her "expert" source one Laura Hall of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, quoted as saying:

“If you’re Speaker Pelosi or another member of the Democratic leadership, you have to always be thinking about those members whose seats went from red to blue and helped to flip the House.”

The Times does not inform its readers that BPC is in its own turn heavily bankrolled by the for-profit health care industry and therefore is adamantly opposed to Medicare For All and other policies for the greater public good. Its Board of Directors includes insurance company CEOs, private equity honchos  and Silicon Valley moguls. One director, David T. Blair, founded firms with such anodyne names as Accountable Health Solutions and Catalyst Health Solutions and Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) to help disguise the fact that at their extreme cores they are lobbying firms. Their poorly hidden purpose is to ensure that Medicare For All fails and that profiteers continue to get rich from the pain of others. Former First Lady Michelle Obama even lent her name to the endeavor, under cover of caring about and combating the nation's alleged childhood obesity epidemic. (You can read more about all the writhing corporate tentacles sucking the life out of what's still left of America's health here.) 

As an aside, Cory Booker, who is running for president on a co-opted Medicare For All platform, is nonetheless still listed is one of PHA's advisors. He is famous for, among other things, once having killed a bill that would have allowed drug reimportations from Canada. He is very sorry for that boo-boo now, but his name and his smiling face are still very prominently displayed on the PHA website. Of course, it could always be one of those Russian troll farms at work again, interfering in our Democracy.

But never mind about the underlying corruption and the corporatism, because the Official Media Narrative has it that things are getting mightily yet moderately ugly in the Lower House. And it's mostly all the fault of upstarts like AOC, who are "playing right into the hands of gleeful Republicans" by openly blasting the party's collusion with Trump and his sadistic immigration policies.

In her op-ed barely disguised as a straight news story, Hirschfeld-Davis can also barely contain her own centrist agenda:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whose rock-starlike popularity on the left has given her a louder than usual microphone for a first-term lawmaker, accused the moderates of being the new Tea Party.Their tactics, she huffed, are “just horrifying.”

AOC did not assert her opinion in the polite and collegial way her party elders have always relied upon to mask their organization's own innate ugliness. Instead, she "huffed."

From the Free Online Dictionary:

v.intr.1. To puff; blow.2. To make noisy, empty threats; bluster.3. To react indignantly; take offense.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of a volatile chemical or substance as a means of becoming intoxicated.v.tr.1. To cause to puff up; inflate.2. To treat with insolence; bully.3. To anger; annoy.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of (a volatile chemical, for example) as a means of becoming intoxicated.

"Moderate," on the other hand, embraces a whole slew of positive and calming qualities whether the word be noun, verb, or adjective.

adj., n., v. -at•ed, -at•ing. adj.1. kept or keeping within reasonable limits; not extreme, excessive, or intense: a moderate price.2. of medium quantity, extent, or amount: a moderate income.3. mediocre or fair: moderate talent.4. calm or mild, as of the weather.5. of or pertaining to moderates, as in politics or religion.n.6. a person who is moderate in opinion or opposed to extreme views and actions, as in politics.v.t.7. to reduce the excessiveness of; make less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous: to moderate one's criticism.8. to preside over or at (a public forum, meeting, discussion, etc.).v.i.9. to become less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous.10. to act as moderator; preside.

The term "moderate" as applied by the establishment media to the corrupt corporate shills of the type residing in the Republican wing of the Democratic Party is therefore a complete mask. So is its synonym, "centrist."

As Tariq Ali points out in his book, aptly titled "The Extreme Centre: A Warning," it is the "moderate" neoliberal who has been the cause of the most radical social and economic inequality in modern history, if not all recorded history. These Mighty Militant Moderates in service to the rich began rising with a vengeance as soon as the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain went crashing down.

Capitalism, intoxicated by its victory and unchallenged from any quarter, no longer felt the need to protect its left flank by conceding any more reforms. Even a marginal distribution of wealth to reduce inequalities was off the agenda.

Under these conditions, social democracy became redundant. All it could offer its traditional supporters was fear, or vacuous ideological formulae, whose principle function was to conceal the poverty of any real progressive ideas: 'third way,' 'conflict-free politics,' 'beyond left and right.' The net result of this was either an electoral shift towards the far right...or an increasing alienation from politics and entire democratic process.

Regardless of political party and regardless of individual country in the transnational corporate world, as Ali wrote two years before Brexit and the election of Trump, we the citizens of the physical world are increasingly trammeled by 

An authoritarianism that places capital above the needs of citizens and upholds a corporate power rubber-stamped by elected parliaments. The new politicians of Europe and America mark a break with virtually every form of traditional politics. The new technology has made ruling by clique or committee much easier. They are immured in exclusive bunkers accessible only to bankers and businessmen, service media folk, their own advisors and sycophants of various types. They live in a half-real, half-fake world of money, statistics and focus groups. Their contact with real people, outside election periods, is minimal. Their public face is largely mediated via the mendacious propaganda of the TV networks.  

This is why the Powers That Be have decreed that election periods never have a period at the end of them. The spectacle of controlled elections is the only frayed thread left dangling in our political system.

Without this frayed thread, people tend to start smashing things, like the wonderful citizens of Hong Kong are doing right now.

So look, over there, folks back here in the Land of the Free! The horse-race is on, and our elected officials are calling each other nasty names, so pick your favorite team. The Times and other media sycophants will always be there to tell you all the takeaways and the five or ten essential things you absolutely, positively need to know today.

The Merchants of Death Hit a Snag

It's hard out there for oligarchs and their pimps when they suddenly try to do the right thing, only to discover that what passes for their souls or moral compasses has been missing in action for decades, if not centuries and epochs.

Last week the hypocrisy became all too painfully evident when the ruling class and their media sycophants announced, after the seating of predator Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, that it is time to stop your kvetching and  move on to the most important event ever in their lifetimes, your lifetimes, in anybody's lifetime in all of human history - the 2018 Midterm Elections.

There is too much divisiveness and backlashing in the populace going on for the comfort of the ruling class. So shut up, and register to vote if you have not done so already.  Their comfort depends upon you as you avail yourself of the last crumb of democracy they have deigned to heap upon your plates.

Michelle Obama is certainly doing her part to Get Out the Vote. She even redundantly redeemed war criminal frat boy George Bush on the Today Show last week. You might remember that it was Bush who'd gotten the whole Kavanaugh ball rolling when he promoted his prized preppie minion to the federal bench from his White House position of writing legal briefs justifying torture and death. He'd even set Kavanaugh up with his own personal secretary and the two eventually married.

So lest Bush be newly tainted by the Brett Mess, Michelle gushed that she and Bush function as "partners in crime" whenever the ex-presidents gather, and as such, "I love him to death."

This paints such a warm fuzzy picture of George Bush loving millions of innocent people to death with his illegal invasion of Iraq, before enjoying his retirement years painting warm fuzzy pictures of maimed veterans. This undeserved comfort was all made possible because Michelle's husband refused to investigate his administration -- which included Brett Kavanaugh -- for its crimes against humanity. 

So everybody get out there and vote!

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the elected #Resistance miraculously got over their token disgust with Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh long enough to quietly fast-track a whole new slew of ultra-right Trump court appointees. Schumer altruistically caved to Trump's blackmail threat to keep Congress in session during campaign season, and thereby prevent our good liberal representatives from raking in all those hundreds of millions in corporate cash during the run-up to the most important event in their lifetimes, our lifetimes and anybody's lifetime in all of human history. 

They nobly sacrificed governing in the public interest just so that you little people could enjoy the privilege of getting swamped with their negative TV commercials and their slick glossy campaign mailers for the entire month of October. So do your civic duty. Stay glued to your TVs and Internet screens and always answer your door whenever one of their unpaid volunteers comes a-knocking. Democrats are an endangered species, suffering as they do from both osteoporotic spines and gonadal insufficiency. Keep them on life support as "they make a serious run" at saving their own hides if not yours.

 And get to the polls on 11/6!

They need you so very much every two and four years, that it's all that their propagandists and sugar daddies can do to maintain the fleeting illusion that you matter more to them than money and power does. 

But wouldn't you know it?  Just when they had you almost convinced that they hate murderous despots like Vladimir Putin, their hypocrisy has become painfully exposed in L'Affaire Jamal Khashoggi.

Little did I, or perhaps most of us, know that even as the New York Times was railing against Donald Trump, Russiagate, and the absolute pressing necessity of voting for Democrats in November in order to keep the fascism at bay, the Paper of Record had been sordidly investing its time, record-breaking subscription revenue and journalistic talent into propping up the murderous and repressive Saudi Arabia dictatorship.

It turns out, though, that even late-stage capitalism on steroids has its limits, its momentary surges of conscience whenever bad publicity threatens. This moral compass was certainly moribund as the debonair crown prince of Saudi Arabia was recently feted by the American ruling class despite his regime's long history of bombing Yemeni civilians and beheading its own dissenting citizens. But when he stooped so low as to order the torture, murder and dismemberment of an important rich professional just like themselves, the Ruling Class Racketeers must at last pretend to act shocked and appalled. After all, this time the victim was a wealthy man who spanned the worlds of diplomacy, mainstream media propaganda and power-broking. He was one of them.

The Times simply cannot avoid owning up to its own complicit role in boosting the Saudi dictatorship, but tries nonetheless to save face by soft-pedaling it as ruefully as it possibly can. After all, even the most important media outlets and personalities and billionaires and corporations were duped by all that money and all that sparkling Saudi royal charm as the crown prince schmoozed them to death. There hasn't been anything like it since the Bernie Madoff debacle exposed the greed and stupidity of the upper echelons when his investment scheme collapsed in 2009.

  Media critic Jim Rutenberg writes,  

Vanity Fair noted at the time that the festivities were not marred by talk of civilian deaths in Yemen from Saudi-led airstrikes; the crown prince’s “anti-corruption” move to imprison scores of Saudi businessmen, including the owners of Saudi television networks and key rivals, at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton; or the five-year prison sentence the Saudi royal court handed the journalist Saleh al-Shehi for criticizing the government.

The embrace between the American establishment and the leader known as M.B.S. was set to continue in Riyadh later this month at a business conference hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed. The sponsors, partners and participants of the conference — known informally as “Davos In The Desert” — included a number of media companies: CNBC, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, CNN and Fox Business Network.

So even Donald Trump of all people is making empty threats to the Saudis. He won't stoop so low as to stop selling them billions of dollars worth of the weapons they need to keep killing Yemenis, because that might hurt the livelihoods of the Americans who manufacture these weapons. Let's face it -- the well-being of our nation is grotesquely defined by the stock market, which in its own turn is largely measured by how many people our elected representatives can impoverish, maim and kill. The business of America is death. Their lives and livelihoods depend on it.

Therefore, don't forget to cling to your own health and life long enough rush right out to vote for which team you'd like to do the killing and the weapon-selling for you, either Democrat or Republican. Because when it comes to war and obscene war profits for billionaires, no debate is ever needed. All they need is the fig leaf of your participation in their free and fair elections.

  As Trump told CBS News, which broke momentarily from the mainstream media script of pretending to despise him because of their mutual addictive dependence on lies, cash and weapons:

 "I'll tell you what I don't want to do. I don't want to hurt jobs. I don't want to lose an order like that. And you know what, there are other ways of punishing.
There's a lot at stake. And, maybe especially so because this man was a reporter. There's something, you'll be surprised to hear me say that, there's something really terrible and disgusting about that if that were the case. We're going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment."

He'll keep braying that refrain until November 6th. After that, Khashoggi will most likely go the way of Kavanaugh, down the Orwellian memory hole of public discourse. Money will quietly change hands, deals will be struck in back rooms, the story will be buried in favor of the next nugget of manufactured outrage, and everything will be tempered by the usual feel-good fluff about the doings of the rich and famous.

Meghan and Harry are pregnant! is already doing the diversionary trick on the front pages and breaking news emails.

Now get out there and vote. 

And while you're waiting for your five minutes of democratic fame, do what they did in the future home of the Obamas' $500 million shrine on Saturday. 

 Thousands of people have marched through downtown Chicago to express their displeasure at President Donald Trump and encourage voters to go to the polls for next month’s midterm election.
The march took place Saturday after a rally in Grant Park organized by Women’s March Chicago. The group dubbed the event March to the Polls.
A sea of people took to the streets, chanting “Let’s go vote!” as they walked from Grant Park to Federal Plaza. Some voters cast ballots at nearby early voting sites. Chicago is a Democratic stronghold.

Needless to say, there was none of what the corporate media is wont to describe as egalitarian "clashes" between the marchers and the police. This was a rally and march sanctioned by the powers that be, not by the powerless themselves.

Maybe when all that's left of The November 6th Event are tattered campaign fliers and broken promises, the people will finally take it upon themselves to march on behalf of themselves and their fellow human beings.

One can only hope. And agitate a whole hell of a lot. 

Trump Is Perfectly Normal (*Updated)

Let me qualify that. Donald Trump is every bit as perfectly normal as the pathological soul-destroying capitalism which passes for democracy in our so-called free world.

That's why I find the overreaction (*see update below) to his gaslighting tour of Europe this week to be so amusing. Once again, our renegade president is single-handedly destroying all the advanced Norms of Civilization, which, legend has it, reached their finest hour in the McCarthyite post-World War II years of American Empire. The smell of neoliberal punditry in the morning, mourning Decline and Fall, is both bracing and nauseating.

The earthshaking news is that Trump insulted Theresa May in the pages of a British tabloid (yuck) when she'd so movingly laid out the red carpet for him at Winston Churchill's palatial estate, and he so awkwardly grabbed her hand like an adolescent swain wearing his first tux to his first prom. Fetch the smelling salts, pronto, to alleviate the horror of what the New York Times called this "remarkable breach of protocol!" 

You'd think he'd pulled a Poppy Bush and puked all over her bright red dress or something, when all he was doing was making the world safe for capitalism, but minus the normal feel-good concern-trolling mask of smarmy neoliberal spectacle.

But n-o-o-o-h. He had to insult America's NATO client states right to their faces, demanding that they pay their fair share for continued inclusion in the Military-Industrial Complex welfare state for the very, very rich and the very, very powerful. It's extortion, I tells ya! And the defense contractors of America are laughing all the way to the bank while their media lackeys on CNN and MSNBC are phonily tut-tutting Trump's etiquette breaches in exchange for their seven-figure salaries.

What's being billed as the ultimate coup de grace to the so-called World Order is yet to come, when Trump meets Putin in Finland. What will he "give away" to this vile dictator, who so rudely annexed Crimea and who is so abnormally meddling in Iran and Syria and Eastern Ukraine? If you listen to the servants of the Military-Industrial Complex tell it, tiny Estonia with its thousands of heavily armed US troops protecting it is becoming newly vulnerable to the ghost of Stalin himself, thanks to our Kremlin Stooge-in-Chief. 

 And most distasteful of all, the over-hyped "bromance" of Trump and Putin is having the awful side-effect of eliciting latent anti-gayness in all those lovable liberals for whom celebration of diversity substitutes for actual progressive policies. (see the homophobic... er, I mean iconoclastic, New York Times animated cartoon treatment of the imagined TrumPutin sodomy if you don't believe me.)

"Trump must not capitulate to Putin!" shrills former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice in the latest of her long series of fear-mongering moralistic op-eds selling the concept of Russophobia to explain away all of her own boss's decisions favoring Wall Street over Main Street.

( )... precisely because President Trump is anything but typical — including in that his campaign is under investigation for possibly coordinating with Russia to win the presidency and that he consistently lauds Vladimir V. Putin while denigrating our closest allies — his coming summit with Mr. Putin in Helsinki is a dangerous and counterproductive undertaking. The risks are many and the benefits, if any, are difficult to discern.

It's Donald Rumsfeld's damned known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns all over again. But in keeping with the prescribed Bromance narrative, Rice at least tries to keep it subliminally sexy, if not quite Kama Sutra-ish: 

In normal circumstances, the American president would press Russia on multiple fronts. He would refresh demands that Russia: withdraw from Ukraine and renounce its illegal claim to Crimea; cease backing the murderous Assad regime in Syria and work for a diplomatic outcome that protects the rights and security of all Syrians; stop supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan; halt provocative military actions on NATO’s periphery and harassment of United States personnel in Moscow; extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on nuclear weapons and come clean on its violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty; press the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, to denuclearize completely; cease destructive cyberoperations; and halt interference in America’s electoral processes and domestic politics, or face harsh additional sanctions. There is a rich and full agenda to pursue, if only we had a president who cared to advance American interests.

As a loyal member of the Duopoly, Rice doesn't even have to outline what "American interests" are, because she is not writing for a general audience. Through the ever-reliable Times, she is addressing her own class, aka the Establishment-in-Exile, aka the Flailing Brotherhood/Sisterhood of the Travailing Pants (as in very heavy breathing, not couture) Still, I do have to admit that her arcane prescription for "split-yielding" at the Bromance summit does have some teasing erotic potential.

Meanwhile, where would aphrodisiacal Resistance punditry be without Paul Krugman?

According to his latest column, the United States leadership spectacle was absolutely chock-full of considerate lovers and moral heroes before Trump came along to destroy the myth of great American male-centered greatness. Ignoring Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and all the CIA coups in between, Krugman defends the Pax America myth with all the passionate punditry he can muster:  

The institutions Trump is trying to destroy were all created under U.S. leadership in the aftermath of World War II. Those were years of epic statesmanship — the years of the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, in which America showed its true greatness. For having won the war, we chose not to behave like a conqueror, but instead to build the foundations of lasting peace....

 And what Trump is trying to do is undermine that system, making bullying great again.

My published response:

  Trump is the personification of capitalism run amok.

He fires at whim. He's immune to public shaming.. His pursuit of wealth and power is relentless. He cares for nobody but his immediate gene pool, just as the capitalistic system itself has no regard for anyone other than owners and the investor class.

He's a very stable crook and a master gaslighter. Taunting his prey one minute and fawning over them the next is how he keeps them off-balance before either lunging for the kill or leaving it for later.

This is exactly how bosses, from CEOs all the way down to middle managers, instill fear into workers every day of their precarious lives.

Thanks to both our major parties moving further right in the past 50 years, there are now few legal restraints against either public and private tyrannical behavior or graft. 

 It's no surprise that Trump confuses "the country" with "my company." It's no surprise that the longstanding, pre-existing world order of profits over people has produced such a glut of reactionary global leaders like him.

It's no use griping that Trump is destroying "norms," or pretending that everything was cool before he came along. More than a dozen wars, with millions killed and trillions of dollars wasted since World War II, coupled with the constant assaults on our social programs, have created a virtual Petri dish for all kinds of Trumps to grow and thrive like Blobs.

We need some social democracy, and we need it right now.

A new New Deal or bust.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*Update 7/14: I wrote the above before Friday's indictment of the dozen Russian hackers, announced just as Trump was breaching all kinds of protocol with the queen, not least of which was failing to bow and walking ahead of her while reviewing the guards with the beaver hats.

It's not surprising that #Resistance, Inc. is treating the indictment as a conviction instead of the standard accusation requiring presentation of evidence in a court of law. That is because the accused will never show up for a trial. That is because the Justice Department and Robert Mueller do not expect there ever to actually be a trial, other than the kind performed in the media. Otherwise, they would have indicted Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who, unlike the Russians, is very vulnerable to extradition. 

This is so obviously a political wrench in the works of the Trump-Putin summit it doesn't even bear further analysis. The New York Times is even editorializing on its news homepage that Trump ordered Russia to "hack" the computers of Hillary and the Democrats, and that Russian intelligence became Trumpist lemmings in the space of a New York minute.

It seems to me that if there were true treason at work here, Trump would have been gone by now.

All Mueller would probably have to do to get Trump on felonies is produce his tax returns and bank records to prove any number of sordid financial (not treasonous)  ties to Russian oligarchs. I suspect the problem with that gambit is that it would expose too many other valuable Establishment figures and political donors to be worth the risk. John Podesta's lobbyist brother has already been tainted from the Manafort indictment, after all, so I'm sure there are more where he came from. Trump has gotten where he is today by importuning all kinds of politicians from both establishment parties, along with their bankers, factotums and relatives. 

I can't help wondering whether Hillary Clinton will use the indictments as vindication, proof that Donald Trump is a Russian stooge who stole the election and therefore a rationale for a third time's-the-charm rerun. My suspicions are raised not by her relentless fundraising emails on behalf of various progressive veal pens, but by the planted news stories last week of her and Bill flying coach on not one, but two, occasions. She is telegraphing her born-again down-home populism, folks! 

Happy Bastille Day.