Don't Bother, They're Here

 (Optional soothing musical accompaniment.)

Isn't it rich? As the corporate press engages in a frenzy of hand-wringing over the potential Trump regime that they're doing their utmost to create, they're losing sight of the Big Picture.

  Because whether it's draped in the American flag or whether it's nesting inside Trump's comb-over like a plague of lice, fascism is already here. We're already living under a corporate police state: government of, by, and for the oligarchs. This status quo is just making it all that much easier for Donald Trump to rise to power and glory, for Donald Trump to rise in the polls every time he rebukes the standards of political correctness and milks the resentment of the masses. Every time he instigates a campaign rally beating of a protester, or makes fun of a disabled journalist, the cameras are there and the talking heads have something exciting to talk about.

If we had a true democracy, or even a modicum of representative government run by public officials kept honest by an adversarial press, the Donald Trump Experience never would have survived its audition. Trump is only filling a vacuum, serving the corrupt status quo in the imperial end-times.

With his own uniquely usual flair, meanwhile, President Barack Obama is leading the most secretive administration in modern history. He accomplishes this feat by appearing to be accessible and calm and earnest and above-board. After all, a day doesn't go by when the man isn't on TV, whether it's pardoning a turkey with the kids, or holding a news conference on Permawar, or schmoozing with comedians on talk shows. He can't even let next week's 50th anniversary of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" go by without interrupting the festivities to do a really cool imitation of the obfuscatory adult-speak in the show. He has no intention of losing his timing this late in his career. (I was so looking forward to the telecast until I saw the teaser of Barack and Michelle co-opting all the fun with their scary, sincere hokiness.)

Just as George W. Bush paved the way for Obama, Obama is only making it easier for a President Trump.

And yet....

In a rare burst of investigative adversarial journalism, the New York Times today exposes the authoritarian, defensive mindset ingrained within the smiley-face Obama administration. We all knew that this White House has been, as Times journalist James Risen points out, "the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation." But now his colleague Eric Lichtblau informs us that Obama is even clamping down on his own government watchdogs. He not only "stopped opening doors," he slammed them shut, locked them, and then threw away the key:

The Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras.

The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force.

The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of at least 20 investigations across the government that have been slowed, stymied or sometimes closed because of a long-simmering dispute between the Obama administration and its own watchdogs over the shrinking access of inspectors general to confidential records, according to records and interviews.

A New York University professor calls Obama's crackdown on government watchdogs "the most aggressive assault on the inspector general program since the beginning," -- a defanging so complete that their jobs might as well be abolished.

Lichtblau goes on to report that an investigation of the Commerce Department's  records on (probably tepid or non-existent) international trade enforcement actions was summarily shut down because such disclosures would have violated the "proprietary rights" of businesses. Altogether, the article reveals, the Obama administration has restricted access of investigators to the records of 70 different government agencies. The lone exception has been at the Justice Department, which held sway over the Drug Enforcement Agency. That case revolves around the deaths of four Honduran civilians, including one child, in a botched raid. Additionally, DEA agents reportedly shot down civilian planes, a clear violation of international law.

Meanwhile, writes Lichtblau, the government watchdogs have been forced to take their complaints to Congress in hopes of getting them to stage a bipartisan intervention.

And meanwhile, pundits like Timothy Egan and Paul Krugman are staging a freak-out over Donald Trump and the other right-wing clowns. Send 'em in, because otherwise the faux-liberals would have nothing to talk or write about. Heaven forbid that they ever take on the corruption within their own party.

If Trump is elected, he wouldn't be able to contain himself. The man cannot keep his foul mouth shut. He wouldn't be able to resist bragging every time his Brownshirts shoot down a plane and or drone a wedding party to death or bomb a hospital on purpose. He'd bring some much-needed transparency right back into the fascist White House.

My published response to the Lichtblau piece:

When a coalition of open government advocates awarded President Obama its Transparency Award in 2011 to mark Sunshine Law Week, the press was barred from covering the event. When the media tried to get a transcript of his remarks, there was none available.

Some cynics surmised at the time that the award was meant to be "aspirational," just like the Nobel Peace Prize. We now know how ironic both of these honorifics have turned out to be.

Orwellian doesn't even begin to describe the paranoia and secrecy of this administration. It out-Bushes Bush, even out-Nixons Nixon.

Around the time of the Transparency Award secret ceremony, the A.P. obtained emails showing that Homeland Security workers were accusing senior Obama officials of "meddling" with release of files requested under the FOIA. Morale in that agency and other government agencies has been going down each successive year of his administration. This might also have something to do with Obama's "insider threat" directive, which requires government workers to spy on each other.

And yet the White House continues to brag about how transparent it is, when in fact opacity was built in from Day 1. Obama had promised, for example, to broadcast the health law negotiations on C-Span. Once elected, he then proceeded to give away the store to the insurance and drug lobbies behind closed doors, while still promising to fight for a "public option" in his public remarks.

Secretive, Orwellian.... and deeply, deeply corrupt.

Don't you love farce? No, you say?

Well, maybe next year. And I'm not talking about Hillary or Trump.

Replace the Bliss of Obama with the Bern of Bernie, and now we're talking business. Democracy might be salvageable after all.
 

Griftopolis, Part Two

Like two luxury ships of state, the Clintons and the Obamas will pass in the night. Or more accurately, they plan to spin past each other at the speed of blight through that proverbial revolving door between public-private and private-public life.

As told to one of his favorite stenographers, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Barack Obama has now found such a strong voice on race that he will parlay its dulcet tones straight into a post-presidential "initiative" (neoliberal code for any scam pretending to help the hammock-trapped poor) which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Clintons' own slush fund charity, itself unsurprisingly dubbed the Clinton Global Initiative.

Obama and Baker Share Tender Moment at WH Correspondents' Dinner

Baker displays an uncanny knack of his own for maudlin presidential mind-reading:

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

All you need is love. Love is all you need.

But wait. It gets worse:

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

Notice the passive voice. Obama didn't bail out the Wall Street banksters and throw underwater mortgagors under the bus. He was consumed by the economy. He didn't escalate the war in Afghanistan, bomb Libya into terminal instability, or assassinate thousands of people with drones. He was eaten alive by the war monster. He didn't reject universal single payer medical coverage, selling out the American people behind closed doors to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. He was gobbled up by health care. It was all beyond his control. Now he is ready to cross, if not race, across the Race Bridge. And it's not the Selma Bridge he crossed earlier this spring for a photo-op. It's the bridge from Wall Street-on-the-Potomac to Wall Street itself.

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

"Unrest" is the popular neoliberal buzzword for the citizen revolt against both racism and the oppressive economic policies that fuel it. Obama's post-presidency is staked by $80 million that can only metastasize to Clintonoid proportions.

I've criticized My Brother's Keeper before. Since its propaganda stems from Obama's own autobiography as a fatherless son, it specifically leaves out women and girls, and positively drips with noblesse oblige and the gospel of Bootstrapism.

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies (my bold) address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

 Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

There apparently will be no direct cash aid to the Bro's. It needs must recycle through corporations and politicians before (maybe) finally trickling down. See my published Times comment at the end of this post. But first, some hilarity (Hillarity):

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. (Peter Baker makes sure to brag that as an insider with unique access to power, he got a cushy ride on AF One) But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

They are very well aware of Obama's commitment to transparency. His administration has been widely and rightly called the most secretive in recent memory. Josh, earnestly and with tongue planted firmly in cheek, confirmed that the plutocratic grifter class has nothing to fear from Big Guy. He is utterly committed to them and their interests. That is why, in the same breath that Obama denied a direct role in the donations, he will be spiritually present when the money changes hands.

There's more to Baker's article, including the obligatory juxtaposition of Ted Cruz (R-Paranoia) which is designed to deflect possible criticism of Obama's motivations right into a stampede of tribal support from "the base." The only criticism permitted an airing (besides the smarmy, dainty tiptoeing into the Clintonoid sleaze arena)  is the crazy criticism from the Right, the better to transform Obama into a victim-hero for the ages.

Here is my published comment on Baker's piece:

Venture philanthropists have been out in full force ever since the 2008 meltdown, drumming up self-serving publicity as they pretend to alleviate the very economic misery they helped to create in the first place. Do-gooderism by corporations and billionaires is designed to deflect our attention from the fact that they have demanded -- and gotten -- the cruel austerian policies that cut food stamps, closed schools, ended long-term unemployment benefits and depressed wages.

So now it's time for some reputation-salvaging, as what Peter Buffett has called the Charitable-Industrial Complex deigns to bestow a few pennies from their corporate welfare slush funds upon the victims of 30 years of Reaganomics.

It is no coincidence that some of the same businesses donating money to My Brother's Keeper are also pushing hard (either directly or through their lobbyists) for passage of the job-destroying, poverty-creating Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And what a travesty that News Corp, which has made demonization of the poor and demonization of the first black president its raison d'etre, is now welcomed into the philanthro-capitalist fold with open arms. How nice that they're using the spoils of racism to now pretend to fight racism.

Charity is fine, but it's no substitute for good public policy. We need a wealth tax and a stronger safety net, not "promise zones" and the occasional handout from a tycoon in a board room.

We used to have a democracy. Now we have Downton Abbey.

One final thought. Since Bill Clinton was dubbed the first black president, is it PC to call Obama the first black Clinton?

Griftopolis

Why isn't this getting more play?

The leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reining in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.

“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim,” Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman, said in an interview. “I never want to give up, but I’m not under any illusions. People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.”

Politicians like Jeb Bush and Martin O'Malley are raising money without even formally declaring their candidacies, as required by quaint federal election law. "Everybody does it" is the new legalized way of bribery, as the billions changing hands becomes the main story and the measure of a candidate's worth. The corruption is not only complete, it has become a badge of honor among thieves. Gone are the good old days of bag-men and midnight meetings in hotel rooms and, heaven forbid, undercover FBI agents wiring provocateurs for sound in hopes of catching crooked pols in the act.

Wild West, meet The Sopranos.

For all intents and purposes, our country's electoral regulatory watchdog is not only muzzled, it's been effectively euthanized after a valiant 40-year run.  Four decades ago, during Watergate, the nation still had the capacity to be shocked. It searched its soul and saw that it was rotten. The rot has continued to eat away at democracy until it can no longer be said to exist.

Nixon's C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-elect the President) and its sleazy slush fund sound so quaint nowadays. Nixon, were he running today, could expect to garner glowing headlines for his fund-raising prowess. The multibillion-dollar Clinton and Bush machines make him look like St. Francis of Assisi.

Congress might as well make it official and cut off the feeding and funding of the moribund F.E.C. Or they might use the neoliberal method of reanimation and simply privatize it. Coors Light could complain to a corporate electoral tribunal if it was being undercut by Schlitz in the "who'd you rather have a beer with?" billionaire sweepstakes. 

Don't laugh. After all, presidential debates have been privatized and controlled by corporate sponsors for years. The rules clearly state that if the oligarchy doesn't buy a candidate a minimum 15% share of the votes in rigged national polls, then that candidate can be barred from participating. It happened to Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It happened to Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012. Not only was she barred, she was taken to a secret police prison and shackled for the duration of the "free and open" discussion.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote, "the polling business gives the patricians an idea what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed, or shall we say ‘shaped.’ It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite. It also allows for ‘fine calibration’ and for capsules of ‘message’ to be prescribed for various constituencies.”

Also -- forget about the United Nations coming in to monitor our free and fair elections. If the outside world tried that trick, and called the One Indispensable Nation out on its perfidy, the American griftopoly would simply cut off their funding too, before evicting them from the Income Disparity Capital of the World.

Meanwhile, an antidote to insanity:

 

A Pipe Dream

Progressive Nirvana: in which both presidential candidates implode and sink into a morass of corruption just in time for the conventions later this summer, just in time for the Republican Party to die of its own self-inflicted wounds, just in time for Russ Feingold to grab the Democratic nomination by default to battle the Green Party's Jill Stein for the highest office in the land. Moderate liberal vs. European-style socialist.

It's looking bad for Mitt. At best, he evaded paying taxes on at least a quarter-billion in offshore accounts, at worst he lied to the SEC about not being in charge of Bain Capital when other documents during the same era listed him as CEO. Even the right-leaning Politico is intimating the Mittster may have broken a federal law or two. Will Mitt open his acceptance speech in Tampa with the words "I am not a crook" or better yet, "I shall not seek, nor will I accept my party's nomination for a first term as president of the United States"?

It's looking kind of bad for Barry, too, now that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is getting caught up in the Libor scandal. It is pretty obvious that Timmy knew that a massively sleazy version of price-fixing was going on under his N.Y. Fed watch, and that he knew it a long time ago. He was either too weak to stop it, too cowardly to report it, or too complicit to give a damn about it. There are an awful lot of municipalities out there, cash-strapped and crumbling, who wouldn't mind getting some of those stolen trillions in pension plans and such back from the banking mafia. The lawyers are salivating.

Of course, what I consider bad, and what the Plutocracy running things considers bad, are two different things. So what if Mitt lied through his teeth? It shows what a great American he is. It is patriotic to be savvy enough to game the system. And do you really expect Eric Holder to convene a grand jury seeking a Mitt-dictment? Remember, the motto of the Obama Administration is "Forward". If they won't prosecute the Bush war criminals or the Wall Street banksters, they are definitely not going after small-potatoes Mitt. To the contrary. In the interest of bipartisanship, Barry would probably offer him a cabinet position, or at least a seat on the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. It specializes in outsourcing and offshoring and regulation-killing, after all.

And Timmy Geithner? He's leaving anyway. The fact that the unindicted Jon Corzine was able to "lose" millions of investor dollars when his scam went bankrupt and yet is still listed as a top Obama bundler shows us that corruption is not only acceptable-- it's desirable. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the unlimited money in politics is corrupting the corruption.  

Like I said -- pipe dream. Just when you think politics can't make you any sicker, you start feeling nauseous all over again.