Obama's Magical Thumb

Just as Barack Obama once bragged that he was the only thing standing between the criminal financial class and millions of angry "pitchforks," he's now posing as the only thing standing between  panic-stricken oligarchs and Bernie Sanders. Or so says the group-think media narrative in a rather blatant test of liberal loyalties. You can worship Obama, or you can agitate for a new New Deal, but you cannot possibly do both. Because that would be disloyal to Obama, beloved elder statesman and most admired man on earth according to a Gallup poll of about a thousand people.

As we have come to expect from the historically fawning media coverage of Obama, there's a lot of doublespeak involved in this narrative, which has the former president publicly vowing to support any Democratic nominee, but privately vowing to put a stop to Bernie if he threatens to run away with the nomination and thus prevents the brokered convention that could very well usher in the artificially reanimated corpse of Hillary Clinton.

There's even been some talk of Michelle Obama coming in to save the Neoliberal Project from Bernie Sanders. But if this were the case, she wouldn't be traveling to Singapore this month to schmooze with The Growth Faculty, a group of wealthy tax-avoiding American expatriates and multinational CEOs. To be fair, she won't actually be physically mingling with her fellow plutocrats at a pre-speech cocktail party. But she is charging as much as $3,000 a head, not only for front-row seating, but for a value-added separate red-carpeted VIP entrance reserved for the most well-heeled of the well-heeled. It's an expensive privilege to see Michelle Obama in the flesh, but it's even more of a privilege to be seen as being able to afford Michelle Obama. The ticket holders will be treated just like celebrities at the Oscars, waving to envious gawking onlookers behind the ropes, who cannot afford the high price of admission. Michelle Obama makes Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sachs speeches look like pep talks to the Podunk Rotary Club.

Hubby Barack is also headed to Singapore, where one out of every six residents is a millionaire. But he will not be sharing the stage with Michelle. Why do two for the price of one when the affluent audience can very well afford the high price of two separate Obama-ramas? But he does manage to outshine Michelle by not only offering a pen and a notebook and the red carpet treatment for attendees, he's also giving away a special souvenir lanyard and a wine-soaked three course lunch (which he will sadly not attend.)

Notice the Carefully Hidden Thumb

This is the same Obama who just told another group of stateside plutocratic fans fearful of a Sanders or Elizabeth Warren presidency that "when you listen to the average voter — even ones who aren’t stalwart Democrats, but who are more independent or are low-information voters — they don’t feel that things are working well, but they’re also nervous about changes that might take away what little they have."

So if he wants to convince the average, barely making it, low-information (read: stupid) voter that other average stupid voters don't want to tear down the the oligarchic system that he, Barack Obama, worked so hard to perfect during his eight years in office, he'd better hurry home from Singapore for a non-stop condescending lecture tour right where the Lowlife Low-Info rabble lives. That's because Bernie Sanders is once again topping many polls.

Obama's mission, if he chooses to accept it, will be to hammer home the "electability" trope that Democratic Party fortunes are more important than the existential crises of climate, health care, housing, unbridled militarism, excessive surveillance and incarceration, low wages and crushing household debt, His mission might be even more effective if he stops by Flint, Michigan to take another ghoulishly disdainful sip of lead-contaminated water to prove to the Low-Info crowd that lead is harmless. Too abrupt of a change to a cleaner system might make them nervous. They don't want to lose the contaminated water that they already have.

Aggression is not in the Democratic Party's job description. Just remember Obama's blase reaction to Trump's election in 2016, soothing that Trump and the Dems are all on the same team, fighting within the safe 40 yard line. He was absolutely correct. The oligarchs will be safe, no matter who is president. Except, of course, if Bernie Sanders becomes president.

In the last 40 years, playing defense in the center of the field has been the D Team's only strategy. Tactics have included "defending" Social Security from Republican predation by raising the retirement age. There was Obama's noble but rebuffed offer to scale back cost of living increases for retirees, surviving parents and children and the disabled. Besides snipping social programs, the D Team can also be relied upon to protect abortion rights by not fighting all that hard in the Senate to prevent anti-abortion judges from advancing to the Supreme Court.

Notwithstanding that by any fact-based metric (including the loss of a thousand Democratic seats during his tenure), Obama was a failed president, he is still marketed as possessing a magical thumb with which to push down on a voter scale and influence the primary election outcome. Notwithstanding that this same magical thumb pressed very hard on the Hillary scale in 2016 and actually gave the election to Donald Trump, the Magical Thumb cliche remains a favorite of the Media/Political Complex.

From The Hill:

Former President Obama has emerged as a key player in the Democratic presidential primary race.
He hasn’t put his thumb on the scale for any one candidate in particular. But in two different speeches this month, he has made clear that presidential hopefuls would be wise to avoid moving too far to the left if they hope to win back the White House in 2020.

And The American Prospect:

Obama has determined to put his thumb on the primary scale, and he couches his critique in the language of electability, in what voters really want. Practically every Democrat in America wants to eject Donald Trump from the White House, and ask 100 of them and you get 101 theories of how to make that happen. But without doubting Obama’s sincerity that a moderate politics and only a moderate politics can spell victory next November, I can’t help but notice the audiences for his targeted attacks on progressive policy: wealthy donors in the most rarefied, winner-take-all enclaves of America, whether in Washington last week or San Francisco on Thursday.

The National Review:

“Look, everybody knows — I think everybody knows, we didn’t only serve together, but our families are close. We became very close personal friends . . . I didn’t want it to look like he was putting his thumb on the scale here. And that, you know, I’m gonna do this based on who I am, not by the president going out and trying to say, ‘This is the guy you should be with,’” Biden said during an interview on The View in April.

Newsweek:

The former adviser (Valerie Jarrett) said she was "not going to put my thumb on the scale. Because at this time when Barack Obama was running in 2007, he was down by 30 points and Hilary Clinton was the inevitable candidate,

Now, lest the Low Info Hordes of America feel that their own short brutish thumbs are being neglected in all this elite pressing upon the scales, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has a more egalitarian take on the Doped-Up Horserace. As reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal:

He also appealed directly to Nevadans, saying that the voters of this state wield considerable political power due to its early caucus.
“You have a thumb on the scale,” Buttigieg said. “Please use it well. Please tell your friends. The biggest decider in whether somebody gets involved who wasn’t already is not whether somebody like me asks them, it’s whether somebody they know asks them.”

Who needs a brain when all you need is a magical thumb that you can call your very own - once, of course, you heed the centrist wisdom of Mayor Pete and only press responsibly. Your thumbs are so much more than the texting appendages of your smartphone.

And who needs pollsters and Nate Silver's analyses and predictions when you can opt to use your thumbs the magical Shakespearean witchery way and intone "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" whenever you hear Obama sermonize, or read a scare-mongering article about powerful thumbs on scales making a mockery of what is still left of our democracy.

Obama's over-hyped thumbs should be the least of our worries. Despite all the media propaganda, his thumbs are no more powerful than anybody else's. Remember all the good his mighty magical thumb did Hillary Clinton, and how she and her team were themselves all thumbs in their contrivance of the failed #Russiagate scandal to explain how Obama's thumb turned out to be nothing but a useless arthritic pinkie finger.

As Obama and the rest of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party preen and posture, loom and lecture, let's remember that all Obama is really doing is thumbing his nose at us. As the First Witch in Macbeth so sagely predicted,

Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:

Though his bark cannot be lost

Yet it shall be tempest-tost.

Flight of Witches by Arthur Rackham

There's Something About Deval Patrick... and Liz Warren

If, as Cornel West once so pithily observed,"Barack Obama is Wall Street's black mascot," then Deval Patrick is Wall Street's black mascot on steroids, crack and crystal meth.

So why is the former Massachusetts governor suddenly and belatedly entering the Democratic presidential primaries?

Let us contemplate the scenario in an admittedly speculative manner.

First a little background. As Michael Hudson lays out in "The Monster," an excellent investigation into the subprime mortgage crime spree that contributed to the complete collapse of the financial system in 2008, Deval Patrick was the lead civil rights attorney in the Bill Clinton Justice Department in 1996 when he inked a $4 million sweetheart deal with Roland Arnall, whom he had threatened to sue for using his Long Beach, California mortgage shop to target black home buyers with predatory loans. 

Patrick, as Hudson recounts, lamely explained the slap on the wrist by saying: "We recognize that lenders understand the industry in ways that we (government lawyers) don't."

Patrick also didn't balk when, after allowing Arnall to redirect $1 million of the settlement toward consumer education, the culprit picked his own consumer nonprofits and thus "parlayed an embarrassment for his company into an association that helped promote his image as a straight shooting reformer."

After his meaningless promise to behave himself, Arnall then ballooned his small-time loan racket into the monstrous Ameriquest financial empire, continuing to target black, brown, white, old, young, low income, even unemployed people with home loans whose payments ballooned to near-usurious rates after a couple of years. 

To further help Arnall salvage his rightly damaged reputation after he went national with his scheme and came under renewed investigation by several state attorneys general, Deval Patrick joined the holding company of the all-white Ameriquest board of directors as a way to reassure minority borrowers, as well as government regulators and the Wall Street investors in the bait and switch loan deals, which were sliced and diced to "spread the risk" and avoid accountability, that Arnall was totally on the up and up.

He wasn't. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. Wall Street crashed. But not before Deval Patrick had written a glowing letter to Congress on Arnall's behalf, to help legislators overcome their sickly inhibitions against confirming this GOP mega-donor as George W. Bush's ambassador to The Netherlands. Arnall finally got the post after he agreed to dismantle Ameriquest and pay a pittance to the customers he'd defrauded.

Deval Patrick, instead of embarking on his own quest for the highest office in the land, should have been prosecuted himself for aiding and abetting a fraud,  or at the very least shamed into an early retirement. In hopes of leading the country one day, he instead followed in the Bain Capital footsteps of Mitt Romney and won the Massachusetts governorship - although unlike Romney, the Bain gig came after the "public" service, not before.

How does Elizabeth Warren enter into this? Well, it's quite the coincidence that Patrick announced his quest only one week after Warren shockingly said she'd consider him for her cabinet if she is elected president.

"If I could talk about people who aren't politicians, I talk about my former governor, Deval Patrick, who is a pretty terrific guy. I talk about some of the people I've met who are presidents of [historically black colleges and universities], especially those who are deeply engaged in education," she told CNN.

So, with little chance that he'll make the debates or appeal much to the general public, it looks like Patrick's  main goal is to get a lot of public visibility as he angles for an administration job as attorney general, treasury secretary or maybe even the vice presidency. Patrick could also be in talks with the
mysteriously ascendant centrist Pete Buttigieg, who has had his own problems appealing to black voters.  Vanilla Pete needs all the black cover help he can get, given his failure to address police racism even in his own small city of South Bend, Indiana. And then there is the little matter of Buttigieg lying about the non-existent endorsements of some important black South Carolinians, who are making no bones about how ticked off they are for being used in such a slimy way. 

Deval Patrick already has a proven track record of giving aid and comfort to dishonest people, and getting richly rewarded for doing so. A Buttigieg-Patrick ticket would be just the ticket to smooth over all those pesky racial problems. Or so they cynically might think.

Warren's own positive statements about Deval Patrick, meanwhile, make me wonder if she really is as smart and wonkish and plan-intensive as she markets herself to be. Or even worse, smart as she undoubtedly is, her praise of him makes me suspect that she is just plain cynical. If she didn't know about Patrick's sordid past and his neoliberal mindset when she touted him on CNN, then she hasn't done even basic research. And if she did know, then she's just another con artist in populist sheepdog clothing. 

And how about the bizarre way that she recently bristled at a very anodyne question from Amy Goodman at an environmental forum about the racism inherent in two largely white states (Iowa and New Hampshire) holding the first caucus and primary election, respectively? Warren's retort that she is "just a player in this game" was not only quite telling, it's more than a little disturbing, and it points very strongly in the cynicism direction.

I've been reluctant to criticize Warren too harshly, despite her technocratic piecemeal solutions to overwhelming existential crises and her applauding Trump at the State of the Union when he vowed to keep socialism out of the United States. She talks the class war talk, and that should count for a little something even if she doesn't mean it. She at least is making the billionaires nervous. And she did, after all, fight against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, unafraid to criticize the Obama administration for its lack of transparency over the brazen corporate takeover of the world that the TPP "trade deal" actually was.

Sad to say, I'm no longer even a tepid fan. Her Deval Patrick testimonial was the ultimate deal-breaker.

Again, though, why Deval, and why now? Besides the fact that the Obama crowd have long been urging him to run, this might also be their not so subtle signal to Joe Biden that he is toast. The impeachment inquiry is dragging both him and the Party down, and it will drag them down even further if Mitch McConnell feeds his inner Machiavelli on steroids, crack and crystal meth and decides to hold a formal impeachment trial after all.

Keeping Bernie, Liz and the four other senators running for president imprisoned in Senate chambers during such a trial would put a real damper on their campaign trail activities right before, if not during, the first primaries or even beyond. If the Republicans subpoena both Joe and Hunter Biden, and maybe even Obama himself as hostile witnesses for the Trump defense, they will give Buttigieg, the tainted Deval Patrick and the extremely tainted Mike Bloomberg all that much extra rope with which to hang themselves before Trump eats them for breakfast in the general election. 

And if Warren, Sanders and the four others use their impeachment camera time to breathe even one syllable about the election, you can rest assured that the Trumpies will gleefully pounce and accuse them of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits political campaigning in official government places and in official government capacities.

Who knows? We may finally get the Spectacle and the ratings that the corporate media are counting on.

Or maybe not, if the Powers That Be decree that nothing must ever distract the public from the continued marketing of the Cold (But Getting Dangerously Warmer) War on Russia that the Ukraine-centered impeachment inquiry is now broadcasting to such abysmal public enthusiasm.

Cranky Dem Governors Kvetch At Crabfest

They aren't cranky because a fascistic president just put a target on a congresswoman's back, or because children are still being held in concentration camps at the southern border, or because the planet is alternately burning up and flooding, or that 30 million Americans still have no health insurance.

They're cranky because they think their party is turning a little too far to the left for the ease and comfort of the very tiny handful of very important people that the Democratic Party now represents.

They're so cranky it's a wonder they didn't choke on all the seafood delights they constantly gnawed upon as they kvetched to each other, to their wealthy donors, and to a select group of corporate media representatives at their annual retreat last weekend.

At least they were sweating due to their own anxiety, and not from the record heat wave engulfing much of the US. That's because the location of their luxury junket was Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where fresh breezes off the Atlantic vied with the human windbags gathered together to liberally ignore the fact that millions of their alleged constituents are suffering constant, gnawing anxiety over how they're going to make next month's rent payment and how they're going to put another meal on the table.

As reported by the New York Times' Jonathan Martin, one of the corporate journos lucky enough to score an invitation to the elite Crabfest,

A group of governors are alarmed that their party’s presidential candidates are embracing policies they see as unrealistic and politically risky. And they are especially concerned about proposals that would eliminate private health insurance.
“I don’t think that’s good policy or good politics,” said Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Raimondo is a former venture capitalist who sold one of her own investment funds to the Rhode Island state pension plan before she entered politics and from which she continues to personally profit. Despite the fund's poor performance, the state's public employees are unable to divest from it, because the owners (comprised mainly of the governor's friends and family) refuse to give their permission. Doing so might make them very anxious. As an insurance policy, it wouldn't be good politics as pertains to their own financial health.

Forbes's Eric Seidle explains the scam:

The pension was scheduled to exit Raimondo’s fund in 2016 but the firm, supposedly exercising its discretion under a secret agreement the state supposedly signed, unilaterally extended the life of the investment in 2017 and again in 2018....
The very fact that an investment, shrouded in secrecy and foisted on the state pension by the now-Governor, has continued to lose money for the pension and pay money to Raimondo for the past thirteen years—with no end in sight—should demand enhanced disclosure and public scrutiny, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Gina Raimondo had "reformed" the state's public pension plan during her first term by farming more of it out to Wall Street and eliminating cost of living increases, warning that the plan would go bankrupt without such changes. She accomplished this feat while keeping her own personal interest in the scheme a secret from the public.

So Raimondo, far from being anxious about her own state's judicial and legislative oversight branches ever holding her to account for self-dealing and corruption, crabbily lectured her assorted Nantucket cronies that "we can't become the party of the checklist" and that instead, the Democratic presidential candidates must adhere to the economic needs of "everyday Americans" -- meaning, presumably, Americans who make at a minimum a thousand dollars every single day and who write the checks to the politicians.

She also took a thinly-veiled swipe at the influential "Squad" of progressive congresswomen with popular social media profiles who are calling for Medicare For All, an end to cruel immigration enforcement practices and a Green New Deal.

“A month or two before my primary I was getting crushed on social media,” Ms. Raimondo said, recalling the challenge she had from the left last year. “My friends were calling me, saying, ‘Gina you’re going down’ and then we won by 20 points.”

It's not just Trump fans who vote against their own economic interests. When people can be manipulated by the fear-mongering propaganda of shady elite rulers, they become complicit in their own destruction.

The human frogs that politicians like Gina Raimondo stick in the slowly simmering pot never know what's hitting them until it's way too late. Unlike the lobsters that she and her gubernatorial cohort scarfed down by the pound in Nantucket last weekend, we become so stunned that we don't even have time to scream. 

So until and unless we ourselves stop internalizing the dangerous neoliberal dogma that "there is no alternative" to cutthroat capitalism, there will be no change and no real improvement in our lives.

We have to instead capitalize on the current paranoia and anxiety of the ruling class and make them choke on their own excess. Self-awareness of our own complicity in their cruel game is key, and the necessary first step. Then comes solidarity with our fellow frogs. And then comes the will to finally organize ourselves enough to jump out of the pot, en masse, and take over the whole feast.

Ribbit.

The Turn of the Pelosi Screw

Much like the paranoid governess in the Henry James novella, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be melting down faster with every passing summer day.

I probably shouldn't even delicately ascribe her recent bizarre verbal attacks upon "The Squad" of four newly elected progressive women to run-of-the-mill derangement. Because since reading the Maureen Dowd column in Sunday's New York Times and other accounts, in which Pelosi characterizes both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump as harmless "glasses of water" I keep getting a mental picture of Pelosi as the Wicked Witch of the West, melting down into a sorry puddle after getting deservedly doused with that same glass of water.

Actually, the putrid puddle image that I can't get out of my head vies with the equally ugly picture that the Dowd column conjured up: the stiletto heel of Pelosi's expensively shod (Manolo purple pump, retail $995) right foot stomping on and grinding progressive policies into a pulp, while her weaker left appendage flirtatiously but ineffectually plays footsie with Donald Trump and the Republicans under the table.

That Pelosi is more attuned to the Republican side of the Duopoly, and that she despises progressive Democrats with every fiber of her being is also becoming more painfully obvious by the day. In fact, she is beginning to sound a lot like the authoritarian Trump himself, with her strident demands to her caucus for loyalty to party over loyalty to constituents and country.

As a carefully leaked, anonymously sourced piece in Politico described it,

Speaker Nancy Pelosi chided progressives in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, calling on them to address their intraparty grievances privately rather than blasting their centrist colleagues on Twitter. Pelos's comments, which were described as stern, came during the first full caucus meeting since a major blowup over emergency border funding last month between progressive and moderate lawmakers as well as a recent spat with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her freshman allies.
"So, again, you got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it," Pelosi told Democrats, according to a source in the room. "But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK."

Harrumph. This from the same politician who went to the New York Times and complained so peevishly and publicly about The Squad, and thought it would be O.K. and that her progressive targets would not in their own turn react publicly and very negatively to her clumsy gaslighting attempt.

Of course, this whole "Ballad of the Cat-fight Cafe" narrative was from the very beginning the joint project of the corporate Democratic Party and the Times. All Dowd had to do was pick up and expand upon the contrived propaganda narrative ("The Mighty Moderates Vs. AOC")  written the previous week by her colleague Julie Hirschfeld Davis, a piece which I critiqued here. This anti-progressive narrative was in its own turn a companion piece to the longer-running blockbuster series called "The Ruling Class Vs. Bernie Sanders," which is now on temporary hiatus thanks to his slight fall in the polls. But as soon as he becomes a clear threat or when he openly attacks Joe Biden, the Times will be back on the offensive. For the time being, it's the dangerously popular AOC who serves as the convenient proxy in the Class War of the rich vs. the rest of us.

But now there's a glitch in their offensive. AOC noticed and vocalized the inconvenient fact that the "Squad" which Pelosi denigrates is all comprised of women of color, and they have received death threats. The "race card" is being played in the Mighty Moderates vs. AOC game, and the Democrats and the corporate media are beginning to panic. There is a clear and present danger that the identity politics which the liberal class has long used as a diversionary tactic is in danger of collapse from the now racially charged intraparty angst. Without identity politics to divert attention from the corporate Democrats' lack of attention to the economic woes of the electorate, they have nothing.

It looks even worse for Madam Speaker and her "lieutenants." To prove his own devotion to the Game of Bipartisan Footsie in service to the rich, Donald Trump himself has gallantly come to Nancy Pelosi's defense in a cynical attempt to justify the GOP's own racist attacks on AOC and the other three women. "I'll tell you something about Nancy Pelosi that you know better than I do. She is not a racist!" he told the media as he made preparations to rip apart up to 2,000 more immigrant families via ICE deportation raids this weekend.

So the personality politics-driven Family Feud Franchise which the Times itself instigated at the behest of Pelosi and the Democratic leadership is backfiring right in their faces. But rather than admit their own complicity, the same media outlets that over-hyped the Narrative all week are now criticizing their own story without taking responsibility for it. It apparently sprang fully formed from the ether without any assistance from them at all. 

The TrumPelosi Minuet

As the Atlantic now reports, the whole Pelosi-AOC Catfight Narrative was pretty much a fraud from the get-go, because the Democrats have always been united, and so enough with the Narrative already. It is certainly not the Media's fault, writes David A. Graham:

There’s no reason to blame the media for simply reporting shots that the two sides are taking at each other. Insofar as there’s a “Democrats in disarray” narrative in place, it’s because the Democrats are shouting at one another from the rooftops.
Yet the rhetorical sparring does obscure a broader Democratic unity. The border-funding vote aside, there’s barely any daylight between Democrats on matters actually before the House. The Squad has broken with Pelosi on just two votes so far, according to ProPublica’s tracker. The gap between the party’s moderate and left wings is relatively small, too. Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, have parted ways on just 13 percent of votes; Omar and Representative Max Rose, who’s more pragmatic than ideological, on 7 percent of votes.

They're trying to put the toothpaste that they themselves just squeezed out in big fat globs back into the tube.

They're trying to mop up the toxic Pelosi puddle and and wring it back into the glass and call it pure sparkling water.

But it's still sludge. And there's still a sharp, mean, nasty designer stiletto heel lurking just beneath the surface, ready to stomp and screw even mildly progressive policy ideas at a moment's notice.

Meanwhile, all that Nancy Pelosi can tell the two thousand terrorized immigrant families who are the targets of Trump's upcoming deportation sweep is to simply not answer their doors when the ICE troops come politely knocking, crowbars and guns at the ready.

She sounds like Nancy Reagan telling people to Just Say No to drugs at the very same time that her husband's CIA was filling poor neighborhoods with crack cocaine and millions of people started getting swept up and jailed in the Duopoly's racist war on drugs.

Meanwhile, the corporate media mostly ignored the large immigrant protest at Joe Biden's Philadelphia campaign headquarters on Wednesday, the very same day Pelosi was warning her caucus to shut up. Six people were arrested for staging a sit-in and demanding that the former vice president apologize for the Obama administration's record deportations of 3 million immigrants. Biden has thus far preferred not to, remaining behind locked doors at some undisclosed location.

How does the screw turn? Let us count the ways.

So forget about locking our doors. We need to show up at their doors, right where they hide and they cower, starting in the hallowed halls of Congress, and wherever centrist candidates set up shop.

**Update, 7/13: The protesters caught up with Biden in New Hampshire on Friday afternoon, when he discovered to his great chagrin that uttering the word "Barack" doesn't necessarily elicit cheers of adulation and/or moans of nostalgia. Literally stuck between the protesters and a river (also containing kayaking protesters) Biden had no choice but to mutter sorry for deporting millions of innocent people, not sorry for deporting a relative handful of people with felony records. The confrontation pointed to one of the few positive aspects of this interminable campaign season - it has greatly extended the period of time in which regular people are allowed to afflict the office-seeking powerful and comfortable.

Vice Is Nice, But Licker Is Quicker

Before you get too happy about the news that the two-tiered American justice system is finally (maybe) holding wrist-slapped billionaire predator Jeffrey Epstein to legal account, please face reality first.

It's still a two-tiered system, where the rich get off and the poor get screwed.

Take the case of Lenise Lloyd Martin III, 36 and unemployed, who thought he could make a few bucks by joining the latest fad of posting a Facebook video of oneself licking a carton of ice cream in a store and then putting it back inside the freezer compartment. No matter that Martin was just desperately trying to cash in on the whole postmodern Fake News Franchise, and that he then honestly purchased the carton of ice cream, even producing the receipt to prove it.

The sheriff of Assumption County, Louisiana assumed the worst anyway, and he arrested The Licker, mainly to issue a stern  warning to all the other incipient Lickers lurking in the supermarkets of America. Big Brother is watching you, and he's not the benign fraternal duo known Ben and Jerry of Vermont, either. Not even close.

This is especially true if you, like Martin, go grocery shopping while black. The young white woman who started the whole fad simply got a tongue-lashing from the authorities. Martin got thrown in jail.

The public health menaces who are attacking the nation's ice cream supply are real Sicko Lickos, as Rupert Murdoch's New York Post puts it, and they must be stopped before we all die. It seems never to have occurred to the professionally disgusted media and law enforcement personnel in need of a new enemy to hate and a new fear to monger that the ice cream makers should simply add those hard-to-remove plastic collars around the lids to prevent undue licking and the need to throw out hundreds of potentially tainted containers 

The cops were especially miffed because when confronted, Martin actually had the gall to claim that he hadn't done anything wrong by licking before buying. In fact, he was very cavalier about his heinous crime, said Lonny Cavalier, the sheriff's spokesman. He acted so downright disrespectful and dangerous that he's been rotting in jail since the Fourth of July - four more days than flight risk Jeffrey Epstein has been rotting in jail for running a massive child sex trafficking pyramid scheme for the past dozen or so years in the full brazen view of the entire two-tiered complicit criminal justice system and the plutocrats who own it. 

As the New York Times reported in an article buried deep beneath a virtual avalanche of Epstein coverage,

Mr. Martin was charged with criminal mischief for tampering with a product before he had purchased it, and with “unlawful posting of criminal activity for notoriety and publicity,” a rarely-used Louisiana law that makes distributing a video of oneself breaking the law punishable as an additional crime.

 Mr. Martin will spend at least four nights in jail awaiting his bail hearing. In Louisiana, the authorities have 72 hours to bring suspects before a judge, but because of the July 4 holiday, the clock did not start ticking until Monday. The earliest that he will be able to post bail is Wednesday.

Franz Borghardt, a defense lawyer, said that the authorities appeared to be trying to make an example out of Mr. Martin in an effort to put a stop to the flurry of ice cream licking incidents.
“This is a highly aggressive arrest based on a seldom-used statute that is constitutionally questionable,” Mr. Borghardt said.

In other Constitution news, a federal court has just ruled that Donald Trump acted very cavalierly and illegally when he blocked millions of critics from his Twitter account. But unlike his pal Jeff Epstein, he is still very much immune from legal accountability. Just ask his other pal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Even a constitutional amendment making it a crime not to do one's official congressional duty and impeach a criminal president probably would not sway her. After all, nobody paid much attention to that other constitutional amendment which banned liquor back in the day. And why would they? Ignoring the law made a lot of organized criminals very rich during the Depression, just as ignoring the law makes organized criminals very rich today. Congress itself is a virtual Speakeasy, operating in broad daylight. It's not a crime when drunk-on-power oligarchs do it.

Or at least, not usually. Every once in awhile, the Powerful Club does sacrifice one of its own, to give the restive populace the idea that nobody is above the law, not even Jeff Epstein. 

But ask yourselves this: would Bill Clinton pal Epstein have been arrested if Hillary Clinton were the one sitting in the Oval Office today and if Donald Trump's corrupt labor secretary hadn't been the one who'd given Epstein his original slap on the wrist?

And another thing: having been rightly castigated for their abject failure to protect the caged children in the southern border's concentration camps, the Democrats are desperate for another virtue-signaling hook by which to "resist" Trump. With Epstein's belated indictment, politicians and pundits are falling all over themselves as they scramble to defend the scores of sex-trafficked young girls whose continuing victimization by Epstein had been an open secret for years. It gives them a much-needed break from pretending to care about the imprisoned and abused refugees. 

And just in case championing Epstein's victims isn't enough, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are taking the brave stance of inviting the champion US women's soccer team to drop by their Speakeasy for a splashy photo-op. If they couldn't put any distance between themselves and Trump on their mutual persecution of the imprisoned immigrant children, they can at least brag about what good sports they are about sports. In lieu of introducing any actual legislation mandating equal pay for equal work and a living wage for all women and for all people, they're making a bit of a self-serving stink about how professional women athletes should make at least as many millions of dollars as their male counterparts do. Those fashion spreads in Vogue and those lucrative product endorsement deals just don't cut it.

You go, girls! And stay away from the ice cream, unless it's the Opulence Sundae  kind with the real gold leaf embellishments and the side of caviar that you pay $1,000 for. That's about $100 per lick, at least. The freedom to consume in freedom is the greatest freedom that the Neoliberal World has ever invented for those precious few who can afford it.

Meanwhile, enough with the political bickering. Let's all join together and celebrate more bipartisan cuts to the food stamp program as we celebrate Jeffrey Epstein's great legal reckoning. We will feel replete just knowing that the Ruling Class is on our side, as is God.

A More Diverse Oligarchy

The corporations that effectively own the place don't need to be taxed or prosecuted in order to alleviate wealth inequality and stop corruption. 

They simply need to install a few more women and black and brown people at the top, and all will be status quo glorious for the oligarchy and continuously bad for the majority of people. Look at how well (until Russophobia, Inc. anyway) that's worked out for Facebook and its chief operating officer, billionaire Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg. Having a woman in charge of the massive theft of personal data from users while she sells corporate feminism to minimum wage workers is just what the ruling class needs to pretend that we still have a democracy.

With that bullshit in mind, Maxine Waters, the incoming Democratic chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, vows to hold corporations' feet to the fire and force them to disclose how many women and black and brown people they have placed in their top executive positions. This will absolve the Democrats of not doing anything so drastic as investigating corporate malfeasance and rectifying our worsening wealth inequality. It will make the public forget that they have no intention of reversing Trump's massive tax give-away to the rich.

The viewing public, they figure, will be further placated when said corporations play their own parts of pretending to be seriously rattled by this bold new plan. According to Politico,

Some firms are panicking at the prospect of new public scrutiny, according to lobbyists, who say that while companies won’t openly fight Democrats' moves to promote diversity, many are uneasy about the prospect of government getting directly involved in their hiring decisions.

The Democrats' pretense of meddling in private corporate affairs for the greater public good will then have the contrived salutory effect of Republicans accusing them of overreach and socialism. Regular people will take sides over which oligarchic cartel they'll be rooting for. Conservatives will accuse snowflake liberals of wanting too many safe spaces, and liberals will accuse conservatives of racism and misogyny. And it is so unfair, because all that the Democrats want is to make CEOs making about 300 times the salary of their average workers feel just a little bit "uncomfortable" before they lap up all that good press about their brave noble decisions to do the right diversionary diverse thing.

 The only real winners will be the neoliberal corporatists, both within and without Congress. They'll be able to continue lecturing poor and dark-hued people that all they need to succeed, like their latest brown female corporate vice president, is to transform themselves into bootstrapping entrepreneurial strivers. Of course, the cynical narrative of trickle-down racial and gender equality is nothing but a big P.R. campaign. It's similar to the manufactured brouhaha over the "Oscars So White" scandal that hit Hollywood before the Harvey Weinstein scandal upstaged it. More black and brown Academy Award winners do not protect impoverished people in Ferguson, Missouri and Flint, Michigan from police brutality and poisoned water. A Latina esconced in the Wells Fargo boardroom does not erase private equity vultures like Blackstone  buying up thousands of foreclosed homes and then renting them back out to the same people who already were evicted from them once for failure to keep up with their predatory subprime loan payments.  

The have-nots and oppressed will just have to remain hopeful and grateful that at least their "stories" are being told on corporate media, and on Netflix and Amazon. They will be recognized, if not directly helped. 

So, as Donald Trump just tweeted out regarding the government shutdown, everybody just lighten up already. The human poop piling up in our national parks because of overflowing toilets is nothing compared to the avalanche of oligarchic crap threatening to bury us alive in this shiny new year.

They don't even try to hide the sleazy collusion from the viewing public any more.

Corporations and industry groups have already sought to make inroads with lawmakers who will highlight the issue on Capitol Hill, according to lawmakers and lobbyists. Some, including Amazon and the Bank Policy Institute, have even recently hired staff from the Congressional Black Caucus to build relationships as Democrats take over.

Um... isn't it illegal, or at least an amoral conflict of interest, for Congressional staffers who are paid by the public to simultaneously work for Amazon and Wall Street? 

I'll give Trump this: he has made it safe for the Duopoly to be openly corrupt. People are so jaded by him that they aren't even bothered by his slightly more refined imitators. No wonder he is so upset, holed up in the White House and demanding billions of dollars for his precious wall. He isn't getting the credit for normalizing political crime that he so richly deserves.

Just look at the Democratic congress critters angling for leadership on the various proposed subcommittees designed to afflict Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Carolyn Maloney of New York says she wants to clamp down on markets and demand answers  from the Securities & Exchange Commission, notwithstanding her receipt of more than a quarter-million bucks in campaign cash in 2017 from some of the same industries and banks she proposes to politely needle, if not actually regulate. Her latest listed top contributors are mega-landlord Blackrock and Goldman Sachs.

Gregory Meeks, also of New York, also wants to chair a subcommittee designed to demand gender and racial diversity within the ranks of the malefactors of great wealth. That way, he can continue collecting the big bucks from Goldman Sachs and other major players from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the ruling class so as to avoid confronting them over the rent scams and mortgage and foreclosure frauds aimed largely at women and minorities.

Meeks said he has started talking to companies, and financial trade associations have begun reaching out to him.

With their checkbooks, I would hope.

"Some companies acknowledge that it's good for business," Meeks said. "I'm not asking them to do anything that's bad for business. This will help them attract more folks to their institutions."

I assume that this includes Meeks's staff and last but least, Meeks himself. They are just plain folks, after all, whose bottom line must hold at all costs to everyone but themselves. Never forget Noam Chomsky's advice that, whenever you hear a politician utter the word "folks," you should run for your life. Meeks sounds almost as grotesque with that quote as the corporate Democrats' new darling, George W. Bush, who once talked about the "terrorist folks" to whom he both sold weapons and killed back when liberals pretended to despise him so much.

What, after all, are the too big to fail/jail banks but financial terrorist folks?

So here's to a happy 2019 to everybody except the corporate Democrats and the insane Republicans who must pretend to loathe them. Heads they win, tails we all lose.

Unless, of course, America foregoes the gruesome, ad-glutted crystal ball drop in Times Square and starts celebrating our winter holidays the healthy French way: