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. 

The Kavanaugh Capers

I have to admit that I got momentarily hopeful during Brett Kavanaugh's meltdown before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday afternoon.

Despite his denials, it was supremely obvious that this middle-aged preppie had watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against him that morning. He had noticed, right along with the rest of the country, that the Republican men on the committee were sniveling cowards who abrogated their own sworn duties to a female sex crimes prosecutor in a vain attempt to hide their historical misogyny from the world. 

Therefore, in a desperate attempt to save his professional life, he dropped the noblesse humility routine and unleashed the ugly aggression he had more or less kept hidden from the world for his entire life. Between copious gulps of water to hide the self-pitying tear-water gushing unbidden from his beady little eyes, he waxed bathetic about his obsessive-compulsive, calendar-keeping father being the role model of minutiae for any red-blooded American preppie who worked his tail off competing in violent sports and hanging out at the country club. He blubbered about being the only child of a woman jurist whose idea of family mealtime conversations was badgering her husband and son in practice sessions for courtroom inquisitions. The Kavanaugh kitchen table apparently did double duty as a witness box.

No wonder Kavanaugh kept sobbing and slugging the water through his angry tears. His throat must have dried up just thinking about the torture of his upper middle class home life - torture that he may have relieved by drinking to excess and assaulting young women and girls before he finally graduated to writing the legal justifications for torture as a well-credentialed pathocrat in the Bush administration. He finally matured just enough to sublimate his sadism.

Until, for possibly the first time in his adult life, he was called to account.

Kavanaugh's unhinged, paranoid opening statement should have been enough to condemn him. Who wants a cornered wild animal on the Supreme Court? Even the most die-hard Republicans might have taken pause, given that one of their own was making a Donald Trump ultra-right campaign rally look almost like a sober academic exercise in comparison.

Very naively, I expected that the very first words out of lead Democrat Dianne Feinstein's mouth would be to ask him whether he'd been drinking alcohol that afternoon, or if he was taking any psychotropic medications, or if he had ever sought or received mental health counseling or substance abuse treatment. Demanding that he count backward from 100 or name the first president would also not have been beyond the pale, in light of his public tantrum with its own microcosmic mix of mood swings between anger, despair, megalomania, and paranoia.  Instead, she appeared merely stunned and mindlessly persisted with her own rehearsed line of softballs.

Oh well, I thought, the woman is in her eighties. She's probably tired. But then, one after the other, the Democratic "opposition" of trained legal eagles fell like a house of cards. One after another, they asked the same lame question about why Kavanaugh wouldn't independently request an FBI investigation into the latest allegations.

It didn't take long for both the feral Republicans on the panel and their nominee to sniff the terminally anemic Democratic blood. After only a few minutes they even dispensed with their female sex crimes prosecutor proxy and started not so much asking questions as ranting their opposition to the Democrats. (They actually did make a valid point in speculating which Democrat had  leaked Dr. Blasey Ford's name to the media without her consent.)

As for Kavanaugh, his own tears quickly dried as he went into full prosecutorial mode against his own pretend-prosecutors. If they dared question him about his drinking habits, he hectored them about their own drinking habits. And they sat there, and they took it. He was the raging locomotive, and they were the decrepit piles of automotive rust stuck on the tracks.

Lest he be seen as a Mama's boy for conferring too often with his own attorney, a woman named Beth Wilkinson who is married to current CNN contributor and former NBC star David Gregory, Kavanaugh took breaks from the proceedings at regular intervals. (compared to only one taken by Dr. Blasey Ford that morning.)  To be fair, though, he could also have a weak bladder from drinking all that water, or whatever it was.

The bad parts: Kavanaugh will probably be confirmed, once GOP "moderates" Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins can safely vote No with the help of perhaps a few Democratic wingnuts like Joe Manchin giving him the thumbs up. Kavanaugh will then proceed to take more legal revenge against women, and children, and men, than he normally would have without having been accused of sex crimes.  

Strangely enough, though, there is plenty of good stuff coming out of this hearing.

--Most important of all, Dr. Blasey Ford is inspiring many more women to speak up about - and out against - their own predators. It has been a catharsis. Even if her own attacker is confirmed, her testimony will not have been in vain. Predators in all walks of life and from all social classes have been put on notice like never before.

--For anyone who still thought the Democrats were the champions of the little guy, and gal, they were disabused of their faith from watching the sad liberal performance at Thursday's hearing. Not only was it not the "grilling" that was advertised, the Democrats may as well have donned their butlers' uniforms and presented Kavanaugh with a tray full of gourmet soft-serve custard. They are so used to serving money and power they couldn't help being their normal, collegial, deferential selves to his snarling face. They will save their faux vitriol for the TV cameras and their fundraising emails.  This debacle should cost them plenty in both money and votes, hastening the demise of a hopelessly weak and corrupt party which has become nothing but the slightly liberal appendage of this country's de facto totalitarian system of one-party rule of, by, and for corporations and billionaires.

--Kavanaugh was probably right about one thing. He will never be able to resume what he creepily described as his life's crowning achievement and pleasure: coaching girls' basketball. Along with getting lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, Preppie Boy will also have to spend the rest of his life on the virtual Sex Crimes Registry. He will likely be marginalized by his peers in the court. All his opinions - if he is even allowed to write a couple - will be tainted with corruption, both personal and institutional. Perhaps he will even succeed where Clarence Thomas failed, becoming the impetus for Supreme Court term limits.

For that to happen, though, we must first ensure that there are at least two ruling political parties in this country. That sounds like a low bar, for sure, and it certainly must be accompanied by the removal of bribery money from politics. 

A pivot to anything even remotely resembling representative democracy will be a long slog, to put it mildly. But the more people who are finally waking up to their own justified anger, the better. The wake-up calls have been coming in loud and clear lately, despite the best efforts of the political-media complex to alternately keep us entertained and scared witless by the twin specters of Trump and "Russian meddling in our totally free and fair elections."

Thanks, Kavanaugh. Thanks, Senate. You are virtual alarm bells ringing in the heads of the moribund. You should be very, very afraid.

Democratic Pandering Is a Warm Puppy

The Democratic Party can't promise you nice things like a debt-free education, guaranteed job and income, or single payer health care. But thanks to one of its billionaire donors, it can at least offer you a therapy dog to hug and pet and alleviate your misery while they herd you to the voting booth for the November midterms.

A voter drive called "Pups to the Polls" is aimed at college students in eleven "battleground states" throughout the country. The young people returning to campus are greeted by professional dogs who will allow themselves to be cuddled while their political handlers do the actual herding.

The A.P. reports,  

NextGen America, formed by billionaire activist Tom Steyer, hopes to be a game changer. Steyer is investing more than $30 million in what's believed to be the largest voter engagement effort of its kind in US history.

 The push to register and get pledges from college students to vote is focusing on states such as Wisconsin, Virginia, California and North Carolina with competitive races for Congress, US Senate and other offices...

"We want them to know they need to show up and when they do, we will win," said NextGen's Wisconsin director George Olufosoye. "We want them to know they have power."

Empowerment is no further away than the nearest warm puppy, they croon as they accuse those deplorable Trump voters of not living in "the reality-based community." 

Come to think of it, the warm puppy gimmick is really nothing but the kinder, gentler cousin of the classic Peanuts football con:

I mean, just pay attention to the salesman from NextGen (which actually sounds more like a new drug or an iPod than the name of a voter drive organization). We need them to show up so we can win. In other words, ask not what the elites can do for the proles, but what the proles can do for the elites. The Democratic Party is not even offering them a bare bone, or heaven forbid, letting them take the puppies home with them.

Now, to be fair, it's not that the Democrats are offering absolutely nothing to voters other than frenzied hatred for Donald Trump and irrational fear of Russia. As a matter of fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is magnanimously co-sponsoring a bill with Martin Heinrich (D-NM) which would direct government economists to measure  how much "growth" the alleged middle class is enjoying.  Not that they'll do anything to rectify wealth inequality, mind you, but at least they'll recognize its existence in order to show voters how much they care.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sugarcoats the proposed legislation:

This is a really good idea...

There was a time when asking who benefits from economic growth didn’t seem urgent, because income was rising steadily for just about everyone. Since the 1970s, however, the link between overall growth and individual incomes seems to have been broken for many Americans. On one side, wages have stagnated for many; adjusted for inflation, the median male worker earns less now than he did in 1979. On the other side, some have seen their incomes grow much faster than the income of the nation as a whole. Thus C.E.O.s at the largest companies now make 270 times as much as the average worker, up from 27 times as much in 1980.

Notice the soft-pedaling: the link between profits for the owners and income for the workers "seems to have been broken" rather than the gap already scientifically proven to have been growing ever wider with every passing year. Wages have stagnated for what Krugman dismisses as an ephemeral "many" rather than the actual vast 90% majority, while "some" are getting richer by the minute.

But Krugman has a facile explanation. You see, decades' worth of rigorous research proving beyond a a shadow of a doubt that we have devolved into an oligarchy won't hold a candle to the actual government doing its own redundant studies. For some reason, Krugman thinks that "people" will pay more attention to government economists than they do to private or academic economists, ignoring the fact that like every other elite group of experts, the economics profession uses the Washington revolving door with abandon.

 But there’s a big difference between estimates produced by independent economists and regular reports from the U.S. government, both because the government has the resources to do the job more easily, and because people (and politicians) will pay more attention. That’s why the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank, has been campaigning for something like the Schumer-Heinrich bill.

Krugman doesn't mention that the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is actually a rebranded subsidiary of John Podesta's Clintonoid think tank, the Center for American Progress, or that Heather Boushey, its director, was also the chief economist of Hillary Clinton's ill-fated presidential transition team, or that it actually wrote most of the Schumer-Heinrich bill.

He doesn't mention that the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is funded by subprime mortgage billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and that it is staffed by some of the same economic experts who helped create the subprime mortgage crisis and financial collapse of 2007-2008. 

The Sandlers, like many liberal oligarchs, have whitewashed their ill-gotten gains and given away a lot of their money to such worthy organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as providing the seed money to launch the independent media enterprise ProPublica. The Schumer-Heinrich legislation is therefore very much the spawn of neoliberal philanthrocapitalism, which has effectively supplanted representative democracy as the driving force of social and economic policies.

Boushey, unsurprisingly, is full of praise for the Democratic minority agreeing to study a humanitarian crisis to death rather than actually doing anything about it. It is not in the interests of the Sandlers and the rest of the ruling class to do anything about it:

We commend Sens. Schumer and Heinrich for introducing this legislation. This is an important first step toward understanding how today’s economy is or is not working for most U.S. families.
It is not enough to know how rapidly the economy is growing. Americans want and need to know how the economy is performing for people like them. Evidence shows that broad-based economic growth is key to building a strong economy, and that starts with collecting the data that allow policymakers to understand how the economy is performing for all Americans.

Yes indeed, the majority of Americans who don't have enough money in the bank to pay for a $500 emergency car repair are just dying to find out precisely how the economy is not working for them.  We will feel so full and replete with this knowledge, so stuffed with facts and figures, that we will forget all about eating.

Here is my published Times comment to the Krugman stenography:

Schumer has certainly picked a convenient time to "measure" just how badly people are getting shafted. It is all too typical: pre-election season, Wall Street-beholden politician feigns interest, introduces a bill to merely study the problem until it either dies in committee or is whittled down to nothingness by the corporate lobbyists. All he needs to do is pick up any newspaper or even search Google to learn that Jeff Bezos makes the median Amazon salary every nine seconds. or put another way, raked in $6 billion in just nine seconds. That was in April 2016, so it's probably even worse now.

 We don't need another stinkin' study by some group of economists to know that wealth inequality is the worst it's been since the last deregulated Gilded Age - which by the way, came to a temporary screeching halt when FDR came to power and legislation like Glass-Steagall was enacted.

 So I'll believe Chuck Schumer is concerned on the day he introduces legislation reinstating Glass-Steagall, and gives full-throated support to Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, which would give more power back to workers, rather than dividing the spoils of growth among CEOs and shareholders.

Meanwhile, Trump is suddenly concerned about the deficit, and just decreed that federal workers will get no pay raises. Would he be Trump if he didn't create yet another scapegoat from the depths of human anguish in this country? It's the corruption, stupid, and it goes way beyond Trump.

So this is your choice, voters. Hug a puppy or read a study. Or if you want to go really big and bold, do both. Empower yourselves!

I haven't yet researched Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, which sounds good on the surface despite the oxymoronic title. Capitalism by definition is not accountable, its only purpose being to plunder, grow, plunder, hoard, plunder some more, suck dry and ad infinitum. But the gist of her bill dictates that corporations be forced to sign a government contract giving workers 40% membership on corporate boards of directors and be forced to share the profits instead of hoarding them or doling them out to a handful of wealthy investors.

The Warren bill doesn't take into account that major corporations are transnational or at least multinational and therefore are not under the control of any one government. They swear no patriotic allegiance whatsoever. How would this legislation, even if it did miraculously pass a corrupt Congress, ever be enforced?

Since corporations own the place, i.e. the entire planet, then social democracy must be both legislated and enforced on a global scale if it is to work for everybody.

So we need to not only hug puppies, we need to bring them out on the streets with us and howl in unison, and afflict the comfortable like there's no tomorrow. Believing that the same people who screwed us will now save us is like Charlie Brown believing that Lucy has suddenly turned nice. 

Put the Politeness Back in Predation

The political/media complex were making another spectacle of scratching their groupthink heads today. In one of those periodic discussions about why people are getting so damned irate and uncivil, they're appalled that "it" has now even escalated to the point of anti-VIP violence in a bipartisan baseball field. It's the tone, it's the divisiveness, it's the un-American way! The pat solution, once again, is for the millionaires of Congress to learn to get along. And then we proles would automatically follow our leaders' high moral example, and we could all get along too.

What they don't admit is that the Uniparty absolutely does already get along when it comes to funding the wars, rewarding the wealthy, and preying upon the vulnerable. The dreaded Gridlock they love to bitch about is mainly a scam for them to get donations and lobbying cash.

Meanwhile, there was this inconvenient spanner in their propaganda works from the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson:

Even as Wells Fargo was reeling from a major scandal in its consumer bank last year, officials in the company’s mortgage business were putting through unauthorized changes to home loans held by customers in bankruptcy, a new class action and other lawsuits contend.

The changes, which surprised the customers, typically lowered their monthly loan payments, which would seem to benefit borrowers, particularly those in bankruptcy. But deep in the details was this fact: Wells Fargo’s changes would extend the terms of borrowers’ loans by decades, meaning they would have monthly payments for far longer and would ultimately owe the bank much more.

Just in case you were still wondering why Congress and the Security State are also so united and so hell-bent on fingering Donald Trump for "collusion with Russia to meddle in our elections," it's to deflect attention from the series of fresh hells they're creating for ordinary people at a near-constant clip. Politicians from both sides of the Uniparty have bent over backwards to protect Wells Fargo and other TBTFs. Because without the tycoons to fund their campaigns and write their laws, where would they be in the intervals not devoted to calling for unity and civility and solidarity among thieves? If they were to go after Trump for his real crimes and misdemeanors  - garden variety fraud and larceny going back for whole generations - then they would also have to implicate themselves. The unpleasant truth would definitely out.

Trump has been taking advantage of this protection racket for years. He and the political establishment have been partying hearty in a decades-long orgy of mutual greed. Their lobbyists write the tax and bankruptcy laws benefiting only the wealthy. Nobody has any qualms about preying on the most vulnerable people. As Jared Kushner bragged recently about his slumlord enterprise, the poor and the struggling and the bankrupt are considered a very lucrative "asset class" for the Predatory Industrial Complex.

The poor always have to pay their debts to the rich. It's the law. It's legal. It's desirable. It's painful, but there is no alternative. If you think otherwise, then you're a unicorn fetishist, or even worse, a Bernie Bro or a Deplorable. And you are definitely a convenient scapegoat.

In its latest guilt-by-association attack on the left, the New York Times tried to counterbalance the fact-based article by Morgenson with yet another smear job (h/t Jay-Ottawa) on Bernie Sanders supporters. Progressives allegedly face a day of reckoning because Wednesday's assault on the VIP ballers was committed by a former Sanders volunteer.

Nina Turner, the prominent Bernie campaign surrogate, quickly and unfortunately caved under this accusation, obsequiously telling the Times' Yamiche Alcindor: "Both sides need to look in the mirror. We have to decide what kind of language we are going to use in our political discourse."

So calm the hell down and look over there, TV audiences of America!  Stand politely united as we catch the Trump family canoodling with the Russian ambassador and the same Russian oligarchs who robbed their own country blind before they were permitted by the American ruling class to quasi-legally launder billions in stolen loot in American luxury real estate -- with much assistance from the TBTF banks. Donald Trump might well be considered a TBTF bank in his own right. He knows how to play the leverage game to the bombastic hilt. If his head ever rolled for the right, fact-based reasons, then so would a lot of other heads. This must not be permitted to happen.

And it probably explains why Senate Democratic leaders are acting so curiously sanguine about their GOP colleagues destroying Medicaid in a secret rampage of sadism. As long as the Republicans are agreeing to play along with their RussiaGate charade, it simply makes no sense for Democrats to "fight back against" the AHCA when they'd only succeed in delaying a vote by a couple of weeks anyway. This nefarious wheeling and dealing is criminal collusion - euphemised by them as collegiality and solidarity and unity - at the very highest levels.

And still, they pretend to marvel that ordinary people are becoming so irate and so uncivil. They still pretend to wonder why they get the occasional death threat on their Facebook pages.

Pretending is what they do. How else could they ever live with themselves?
 

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Ethics

 *Updated below.

Why wait until Donald Trump is sworn in for the oligarchic free-for-all to get started with a vengeance?

House Republicans met under cover of darkness at the end of the Christmas break to gut the independent body tasked with overseeing their ethics or lack of same. People are shocked, shocked I tell you. Because corrupt politicians usually don't brag so openly about how they pulled one over on their constituents.

It was momentarily heartening, therefore, to read the New York Times headline announcing that President-elect Trump "rebuked" the GOP politicians over their "bid to gut ethics office." Maybe he's at least semi-serious about draining the swamp after all.

But not so fast. If you had time to actually read the article past the headline, your newly hopeful heart would have plummeted like a turbo-charged rock straight to the bottom of the Washington muck.

In a pair of postings on Twitter, Mr. Trump called the Office of Congressional Ethics “unfair,” but he said focusing on it now was a case of misplaced priorities. He appended the hashtag “DTS,” an apparent allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington.

Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it

 Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 2h2 hours ago

........may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS

2,703 replies 4,174 retweets 15,028 likes

 The Times article, written by Eric Lipton and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, goes on to insist that Trump's alleged "rebuke" marks a major public break between Trump and the rank-and-file Republicans. The unannounced secretive move to effectively euthanize the independent ethics watchdog apparently caught even Donald Trump by surprise. And Donald Trump does not like to be caught by surprise. The congress critters were apparently "emboldened" to legalize their own corruption by the election of Trump, who has wasted no time signalling that his will be among the most corrupt administrations in American history.

You can't really accuse House Republicans of any actual creative genius here, either. After all, if the too-big-to-fail and jail banksters have been given the green light to police themselves, both in-house and under the protection of their revolving door government positions in the current administration, why shouldn't the lower legislative body openly and enthusiastically follow the same set of rules?

You'd think they were operating outside the de facto oligarchic norm or something, pulling a stunt like this.

 Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) had convinced his cohort that the Office of Congressional Ethics, set up in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct against lawmakers, should be run by the House Ethics Committee. Like vampires, Republicans voted to suck the blood out of oversight after sundown on Monday, without even bothering with the niceties of a seductive (public) debate beforehand.

As in other good public programs destroyed under the euphemism of "reform," Goodlatte said his proposal “builds upon and strengthens the existing Office of Congressional Ethics by maintaining its primary area of focus of accepting and reviewing complaints from the public and referring them, if appropriate, to the Committee on Ethics.” 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi then complained: “Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions. Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

Notice that Pelosi carefully restricted her moral outrage to the "new" Republican congress. Because it might have been too challenging for her to remember the fate of the Stock Act, passed in 2011 to combat insider trading by members like Nancy Pelosi. She and her husband had profited handsomely when, right on the eve of the "surprise" 2008 financial meltdown, they bought Visa stock at rock-bottom prices and then made a cool $100,000 on the resale, literally overnight.  She was absolutely mum when Congress later gutted a key provision of the Stock Act outlawing insider trading by family members of congress critters. Pelosi's husband and other congressional spouses, siblings and spawn can still commit insider trading perfectly legally and with utter immunity and impunity.

But I digress. Here's my published comment on the New York Times piece giving undeserved immunity to Trump in its misleading headline:

 Trump's so-called rebuke of House Republicans is like the annoyed flick of one wet noodle.

He's not miffed that the gutting of the official ethics oversight body under cover of darkness is undemocratic and corrupt on its face. He's miffed because he thinks that the gutting of Obamacare, the ripping of health coverage away from millions of people should take top priority. He's miffed because such a ham-handed power grab by a group of miscreants will shine too harsh of a public spotlight on his more pressing need for rewriting the tax code in favor of the plutocrats who already have way, way too much.

So thanks, Goodlatte and company, for transparently putting your corruption right out there in the open for all to see, and also for, unintentionally or not, dumping some quick-sand in the way of Trump's authoritarian march to a full-fledged oligarchy.

Most people are no longer amenable to being fooled even some of the time.

An informed populace is tyranny's worst enemy.

*Update:  It seems that Goodlatte and Co. have seen the error of the timing of their ways, and have at least temporarily reversed course on their official ethics-gutting. Their evisceration of the safety net may now proceed apace... or so the bastards think.

Poison Pills

 (Optional soundtrack)

Much to my chagrin, not one trick-or-treater showed up at my door this Halloween. This was despite all my welcoming decorations and the strains of spooky holiday music wafting from my humble abode.

 I've therefore had no choice but to binge these past few days on a bowl full of "fun-size" Kit-Kats. Still, the jittery chocolate hangover I'm suffering is pure bliss compared to my election hangover.

One antidote that's worked calming wonders for me so far is news that Donna Brazile will never again show her face on CNN for money. The media will never be the same. They loved their girl. Now that she's gone, whatever will they do to fill all that deadly dull air time? Never again will she have to "persecuted" by the media for feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign. Brazile, of course, is just one of the way too many partisan hacks posting as journalists on TV. When I symbolically condemned these talking heads to post-election jars of formaldehyde the other day as a Halloween gift to the tortured, I still wasn't aware that Donna had already been condemned without me. I have to admit, it was pure holiday magic.

Because perhaps even worse than her big offense of cheating was the way, in one of the leaked Podesta emails, that she'd flippantly denigrated a voting citizen as a nameless "woman with a rash" whose debate question on lead poisoning was one of the two (that we know about so far) which she leaked to the Clinton campaign. Brazile made it sound as though the woman was hoarding a stash of illegal poison instead of being sickened, over time, by the water of Flint, Michigan. "Her family has lead poison," Brazile inartfully explained to Hillary's campaign manager.

 Brazile told Podesta March 5 to expect a question from a resident of Flint, Mich., about the city’s water crisis, writing in an email, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”
At the Flint debate the next day, CNN moderator Anderson Cooper introduced Flint resident Lee-Anne Walters, who said the city’s water had poisoned her family. She asked what the candidates would do about the issue. (Walters told Fox News on Tuesday that she still has a rash from the tainted water.)

More disgusting than CNN's belated disgust at Brazile's behavior is that executives kept the news of her ouster on the QT for two weeks before finally admitting, on Halloween, that she had in fact been fired.

Even more disgusting than that, though, was Hillary's cold-blooded refusal to even decently answer the "rash woman's" question in the first place.

From the transcript of the Democratic forum starring Bernie Sanders and Clinton:

COOPER: I want to go to Lee-Anne Walters. This is Lee-Anne Walters. She was one of the first people to report problems with the water in Flint. One of her twin boys stopped growing. Her daughter lost her hair.

She says she’s undecided, and has a question for both of you to answer, but we’ll start with Senator Sanders. Ms. Walters?

QUESTION: After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines.

(APPLAUSE)

 SANDERS: I will make a personal promise to you that the EPA and the EPA director that I appoint will make sure that every water system in the United States of America is tested, and that the people of those communities know the quality of the water that they are drinking, and that we are gonna have a plan to rebuild water systems in this country that are unsafe for drinking.

CLINTON: Well, I agree completely. I want to go further though. I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies.

So, I want to do exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere.

Bernie was plenty vague himself, but notice that Hillary outright refused to promise to get the lead out quickly in an effort to save lives, today. She only committed to discussions, within five years, to put together a plan to solve the humanitarian catastrophe. She wouldn't even commit to commit during her first term in office. This is what Hillary means by incrementalism. She as much as accused Ms. Walters of being too much of a purist by expecting pure water for her family any time soon.

Lee-Anne Walters, who told the media after the March debate that Hillary's cold non-answer had made her feel like "throwing up in my mouth" was absolutely livid when she discovered this week that her question had been pre-submitted to Clinton.  "She should be disqualified," Ms. Walters said.

***

Maureen Dowd has an illuminating piece in the New York Times magazine about the incestuous New York social world of the Trumps and the Clintons -- which, for purposes of neoliberal efficiency and best practices, I prefer to call Clump.

Once upon a time, the clans were members of the Mutual Admiration Society, but for purposes every bit as toxic and murky as Flint's water: 

The friendship, on both sides, was a transaction. Not personal, as they say in the “The Godfather” — just business. Trump’s life in New York was all about promoting the brand and making money for the family business. It was the same for the Clintons. A former Clinton White House official puts it more bluntly: “This was a classic Clinton go-where-the-money-is move.”

“They all played the same game in the same town with the same thing in mind,” says Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who was invited to Trump’s third wedding and served prison time for tax fraud and other felony charges. “Better your relationships and build the business. It’s all about money and getting ahead and hedging your bets and playing the angles.”

While Trump openly brags about canoodling with the Clintons and boasts how their socialite daughters are still the very best of friends, Hillary's operatives strive mightily and unsuccessfully to downgrade the clans' historical relationship as much ado about nothing. (For some reason, Dowd dished about the Mar-A-Lago wedding and the golf outings, but omitted their slimy joint jaunts on convicted billionaire pedophile Jeff Epstein's Lolita Express. She also left out the society page hoopla about Chelsea's friendship with fellow society matron Mrs. David Koch, which I wrote about under the title "Kochclintopia Inc" last year.)

Here's my published response to Maureen Dowd's piece:

Good article on how the elite take care of their own, whether or not they really "like" one other. If we learned nothing else from the WikiLeaks/Podesta emails, it's that money really does talk and that such values as peer loyalty and honesty and governance in the public interest went out the window awhile ago, if it ever even existed at all.

For the Clinton people to try to "play down" Chelsea's friendship with Ivanka is laughable. They apparently missed her recent appearance on "The View" when she gushed: "We were friends long before this election and we'll be friends long after this election. Our friendship didn't start with politics and it certainly is not going to end because of politics. I have tremendous respect for Ivanka."

There are plenty of photos of Chelsea and Ivanka hugging and kissing and gazing upon one another with the same kind of glittering, vacuous adoration that Hillary aimed at Donald at his $ociety wedding.

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/news/a17627/chelsea-clinto...

 I thought it was really strange that (at the last debate) Hillary kept smiling serenely and with much apparent enjoyment as Donald lobbed insult after insult at her. But then it dawned on me. They know it's all in the game. Only, the plenty of tears that will fall will not be theirs, but ours.

Money's gotta talk. Grifters gotta grift.

It's All In the Game (2nd optional soundtrack)

Clinton, the Media, and Money

No more Mrs. Nice Candidate.

Hillary Clinton was rapidly losing ground to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. She was sticking to her depressing impression of the banally evil Margaret Thatcher, who thrived before she died on a strict diet of lecturing the downtrodden that "there is no alternative"" to predatory capitalism.

Now, I realize that I'll be accused of anti-corporate feminism by musing about the art of the cackle, but here goes anyway....

This week, in light of her tanking poll numbers and recent primary defeats, she's imitating a more wickedly flamboyant Margaret. As in, "I'll Get You, My Pretty!" Hamilton playing the dual roles of Almira Gulch and the Witch of the West. She is out for Bernie blood with an over-acted vengeance.  There is nothing like answering a question about your opponent with a bout of forced derisive laughter to win the hearts and minds of the same young audience you are demeaning.

 Her handlers are betting that Hillary will have more than enough time to quick-change into Glinda of Oz by the time the sands of the hour-glass settle and she can make quick work of Bernie Sanders through a barrage of insults and innuendo. They imagine that they can castigate the millions of millennials who support Bernie, but then magically herd them into Clinton's hot air balloon for her quick voyage back to the White House.

And she is making no bones about the fact that she can't take the Bern for one minute longer. Enough is enough, my pretties, of pretending that this is still a democracy and that your protests will make a lick of difference in the grand neoliberal scheme of things. So it's off with the expensive kid gloves for the big reveal of the boxing gloves that lie beneath, hand-tailored to fit even the most ham-fisted politician.

Now that the contest has finally reached the wealth inequality and consolidated media epicenter of the universe (New York), Hillary Clinton is calling in all her chits from her partners in the neoliberal disinformation biz, a/k/a The Great White Way.

Before the final tally of her Wisconsin defeat was even in, the Clinton machine was circulating the "damaging" transcript of Bernie Sanders's editorial board meeting with the tabloid Daily News. Campaign publicists even helpfully highlighted the bits in which Bernie allegedly goofed in saying (correctly, it turns out) that the Treasury Department, under the president's direction, has the authority to break up the big banks. Tweet the faux-gaffes to your family and friends and then send us a buck, the Clintonoids begged.
 
The Daily News, which also published an inflammatory front page accusing Bernie Sanders of throwing the Sandy Hook Massacre families under the bus, is owned by right wing billionaire neocon "thought leader" Mort Zuckerman. He and the Clintons have socialized together both in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where Hillary penned her "Hard Choices" memoir in isolated plutocratic splendor between fund-raising gigs with the rich and famous.

  If there is one thing that Hillary does extremely well, it is bringing extremely rich and famous people together for fun and profit. And that includes rich media moguls like Zuckerman, who donated generously to her family foundation before siccing his editorial henchmen against Bernie Sanders in a board meeting that sounded more like a semantic waterboarding. 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the ensuing corporate media brouhaha over the Daily News transcript "absolutely bonkers." He writes,

In an exchange with the New York Daily News editorial board a few days ago, Bernie said he didn’t know if the Fed had authority to break up the big banks but the President does have such authority under the Dodd-Frank Act.

This drew an onslaught of criticism from the media: "Bernie Sanders Admits He Isn't Sure How to Break Up Big Banks," read Vanity Fair's headline. "This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders," said The Washington Post. "How Much Does Bernie Sanders Know About Policy?" asked The Atlantic. The Clinton campaign even said in a fundraising email "on his signature issue of breaking up the banks, he's unable to answer basic questions about how he'd go about doing it, and even seems uncertain whether a president does or doesn't already have that authority under existing law."

The criticism is bonkers. Bernie was absolutely correct when he said the President has the authority to break up the big banks under Dodd-Frank. He's repeatedly specified exactly how he'd use that Dodd-Frank authority to do so. His critics are confusing the Dodd-Frank Act with the Federal Reserve. Whether the Fed has the authority on its own to break up the biggest banks is irrelevant.

Clearly, Bernie has the Democratic establishment worried enough to try to twist his words into pretzels.

What do you think?

 No need to actually think this one through. Just follow the money.

In the next several weeks, the consolidated corporate media -- funded by the same banks, pharmaceutical giants, defense contractors and oil companies which fund Hillary Clinton -- will be like a troupe of flying monkeys, in full unified attack mode against Bernie Sanders and his message of a revolution against corruption and the worst inequality since the Gilded Age.

Politico last year published a list of corporate media gifts to the Clintons. At the very top is Carlos Slim, chief shareholder of the New York Times Company, who forked over at least $5 million.  Also in the multimillion-dollar range are James Murdoch of Fox News Corp; Newsmax, a conservative media group based in Florida; and Thomson Reuters.

Other donors are conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife; Abigail Disney; Howard Stringer, formerly a CEO at CBS and SONY; Bloomberg LP; Discovery Communications; George Stephanopoulos of ABC-/Disney; Time-Warner; AOL; HBO; Hollywood Foreign Press Association; Knight Foundation; Public Radio International; Turner Broadcasting; Comcast; NBC Universal; PBS; Politico owner Robert Albritton; AOL Huffington Post Media Group; the Hearst Corporation; PBS News Anchor Judy Woodruff; and the Washington Post Company.

Follow the money. The corporate media and democracy are antithetical to one another. As far as they are concerned, elections are a spectator sport in which you, the citizen, may participate once every two, four or six years by selecting one of the candidates they have chosen especially for you. Since they didn't choose Bernie Sanders, they are trying to destroy him.

And all indications -- half mile-long lines at Sanders rallies, his improving poll numbers -- simply reveal that the corporate media just aren't very good at what they do. They are abysmally failing at what Noam Chomsky has called the manufacture of consent. 

Guess what? The manufacturing has hereby been outsourced from the media conglomerate propaganda machine into millions of independent working minds and rebellious, fed up spirits.

As Auntie Em retorted to Almira Gulch in the very populist Oz classic: "Just because you own half the county doesn't mean you have the power to run the rest of us!"

Immunity, Impunity, Plutocracy

(optional soundtrack)

The very rich and the very incorporated have long been able to rob, plunder and despoil with de facto impunity. Now, however, the billionaire Koch Brothers and their Republican puppets want to ensure that their flouting of the law will get the rubber stamp of de jure impunity.

The Kochs and their think tank, the Heritage Foundation, are being unfairly praised for spearheading bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation. The decriminalization of low level drug use among the poor and minorities is just the fig leaf they need. Their real aim is to ensure that white collar crime at the very highest levels  may be committed with impunity from now until the cows come home... or more likely, until they are barbecued alive on the polluted killing fields of Koch-sponsored climate change.

That the corruption allowing for the de facto impunity of the rich is well nigh complete is evidenced by the revelation that Obama administration officials have been secretly negotiating the criminal justice reform bill --  not with Congress, but directly with Koch Industries. From The Washington Post: 

Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden huddled Thursday with White House counsel Neil Eggleston and the president's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to discuss the prospects for criminal justice legislation, which has made recent advances but may run aground because of an impasse over a proposal that would change the burden of proof for some corporate crimes.
One measure that passed the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support— the Criminal Code Improvement Act — would require prosecutors in cases as wide-ranging as food tainting and corporate pollution to prove that defendants “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” otherwise known as “mens rea.” President Obama and several congressional Democrats have warned the change could derail legislation that otherwise enjoys significant support from both parties.

In other words, ignorance of the law and of the consequences of criminal behavior would be an excuse.... but only for the very rich and the very incorporated. Not that any BP officials are actually going to prison for the lethal Deepwater Horizon disaster, not that any Wall Street CEOs are actually being prosecuted for the worst financial disaster in modern history, not that any General Motors bigwigs have been indicted for dozens of defective ignition switch deaths. These people simply want the guarantee of immunity and impunity to be ironclad, engraved into law.  All they'd have to do for a get out of jail free card is to plead stupidity.

Because they've grown a little fatter, they've grown a little meaner, and they need that Christmas angel of impunity on their shoulders.

For you and me, ignorance of the law would still be no excuse. An unpaid traffic ticket could still land us in debtors' prison.

The rich want unequal protection under the law. They want to change the Constitution, not just bribe politicians and judges to ignore the Constitution.

And all that Obama and "several" Democrats can do is warn that this death blow to what is left of democracy "could" derail the reform package? I mean, the phony Christmas deadline these officials use every year as an excuse to ram through legislation that hurts citizens and rewards the rich is one thing. That the legalization of plutocratic crime and dismantling of the Bill of Rights is even being contemplated is a whole new kettle of very rotten fish.

Jarrett admits to a very cozy relationship with the Kochs' lawyer, exchanging several emails a week with him to secretly discuss the legislation. (Can't wait for those emails to made public decades from now, when the statute of limitations has safely run out. Or until Wikileaks provides them.)  Right now, the official cover story is that Jarrett is prevailing, getting the Kochs to change their minds about granting premature immunity to rich people and polluters like them as a prerequisite to getting the justice reform bill passed. After all, the chances of them ever being punished for their misdeeds are already near zero. If anything, they are rewarded for their misdeeds, in the form of waivers, tax breaks, and admission to the inner sanctum of the White House itself.

Meanwhile, it is a given that the Koch lawyers are also secretly huddling with Republican congress critters, making them an offer they can't refuse even as they give themselves and the White House cover. Will the White Plutocrats' Impunity Bill squeak through at the 11th hour, just in the time for their holiday vacations to Aspen and Hawaii? Or, do we call up our congress critters and say "Hell, NO!"

 As Karen Faulk wrote in In the Wake of Neoliberalism, a chronicle of the social justice movement that sprang up in the 1990s after Argentina's Dirty Wars, "corruption in the public sphere and the impunity that guarantees it are part and parcel of the neoliberal state."

Argentinians took to the streets to protest the cover-ups of psychological and physical violence, directly relating them to the ensuing economic and social violence made manifest by the rampant criminality of the oligarchs and the impunity granted them by corrupt public officials. Citizens not only didn't accept the official story that "we tortured some folks," they rightly and directly correlated the whitewashes of the Dirty Wars with the injustices later wreaked upon the populace by free market neoliberalism.

Something similar is now going on with the Black Lives Matter movement protests. These young activists understand that the impunity of the rich is tantamount to the denial of human rights for the poor. They are reacting to the myriad ravages of neoliberalism: physical and psychological, economic and judicial.

The United States version of the Argentinian "disappeared" have names like Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald. Elsewhere on the planet, they are largely nameless, and they number in the millions. They are the detritus of war and colonialism. They are the collateral damage of the Neoliberal Project.

And meanwhile, the White House secretly and cynically negotiates with the abhorrent Koch Brothers as our cold, lean lives hang in the balance.

Plutocratic impunity has got to go. We need a little justice, right this very minute.