When Elitivists Attack

Elitivism, def: A cross between social justice activism and plutocratic self-interest; in other words, an oxymoron for the ages.To the best of my knowledge, this neologism was first coined by Sardonicky way back in 2017 to describe the wealthy Hillary Clinton supporters who abandoned their brunches and displayed their mass "aghastitude" at the election of Donald Trump by taking to the streets in Women's Marches, wearing their pink pussy hats and outdoing themselves in outraged Tweets.

They and their supporters effectively diverted attention away from why Trump had beaten Clinton and the centrist Democratic establishment  in the first place. They eschewed self-examination and simply sold the narrative that The Donald had sprung fully formed from a fetid womb full of Deplorables. They also diverted attention from genuine movements for racial, social and economic justice, in many cases subsuming grassroots activists and agitators into their own elitist ranks. They got wall to wall media coverage of their elitivism, especially when they dutifully parroted Hillary's "we wuz robbed" Russiagate narrative, which accused Trump of being a Kremlin plant.

 Sudden concern and spontaneous protests for Muslim refugees at the airports and kids in cages at the border and support for Trump's embattled first attorney general and championship of the Trump-tortured torturing CIA, FBI and Pentagon became all the elitivistic rage. Medicare For All? Not so much, because let's face it  - their plates were piled way too high with all that rancid Trump-meat to chomp down upon before vomiting it all out, over and over and over again - before feasting upon it anew like the gourmet banquet it really was for them. 

Once 2020 finally rolled around, the trendy Pussy Hat Posse sadly was no more, largely because of group in-fighting over who would be in charge of it.  But nevertheless, the Elitivists persisted. They and their fellow travelers at the Tippy Top of liberal wealth evolved into a discreet dark money club calling itself the 1630 Fund. As just reported by Politico, which got ahold of its most recent IRS filing, it channeled nearly half a billion dollars in cash and securities into various Democratic Party front groups or fictional "pop-up" outfits for purposes of defeating Trump - while simultaneously and discreetly thwarting Bernie Sanders and his renegade "socialistic" policies.

The 1630 fund is controlled by Arabella Advisors, whose founder and CEO is "serial entrepreneur" Eric Kessler. Coincidentally enough, Kessler is a former Clinton White House appointee who later also controlled the finances of the Clinton Global Initiative.

According to its official IRS disclosure statement, typed out neatly and modestly in ALL CAPS, 

1630 is a FUND SEEKING TO PROMOTE CIVIL RIGHTS, SOCIAL ACTION, AND ADVOCACY. ADVOCACY SUPPORTS A BROAD ARRAY OF PROJECTS AND GRANTEES, INCLUDING THOSE WORKING TO ENSURE VOTING ACCESS AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION BY SUPPORTING ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE; GROUPS ADVOCATING FOR PAY EQUITY, PAID FAMILY LEAVE, AND FAIR TAX POLICY; FIGHTING FOR ACCESS TO HEALTH. FUND FOR CAPACITY BUILDING. CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS; AND ADVOCATING FOR COMMON SENSE GUN REFORM. 

I placed the neoliberal buzzwords in bold, just in case you missed their delicate subtlety. Particularly noticeable is the substitution of "access to health" for single payer health care. Also, "pay equity" is not the same thing as increasing the minimum wage. 

This 1630 mission statement is a perfect echo of Joe Biden's own campaign promise to his big-money donors, many of whom no doubt donated to the 1630 Fund, that "nothing will fundamentally change." The wealthy financiers of political campaigns invariably get whatever they want. So what if the vast majority of the citizenry wants Medicare For All? The wealthy donor class does not want it. 

And it's certainly no accident that minimal paid family leave is still a survivor among the ruins of Biden's Build Back Better cardboard edifice. Why else, to give just one elitivistic example, would DNC-adjacent multimillionaire Meghan Markle, operating under her decidedly anti-democratic title of Duchess of Sussex, be so relentlessly agitating for its passage in a whirlwind media tour?

(My take: both men and women in the service economy are quitting their jobs in droves, so the relative pittance of only four weeks paid time off and subsidized nursery care being offered by the oligarchs will inspire them to keep working in the cause of profits for the few.)

Meanwhile, scrolling through the IRS form of the myriad grantees of the 1630 Fund and attempting to discern their provenance or whether they ever even existed at all would be a full time job. 

There are, however, the usual tell-tale clues. One group, "Consumers For Affordable Health Care" in Chicago, ironically received $10,000 in the "social justice" and "civil rights" categories. Remember, proles: when they insist that health care is a human right, it is limited to shopping till you drop for overpriced insurance product that covers nothing. My internet search for this alleged organization yielded no results whatsoever. There is, however, a group by the same name based in Maine. 

Speaking of Chicago,  you can rest assured that the grantee called Higher Ground Production Labs LLC does indeed exist. A subsidiary of Obama, Inc., it netted a whopping $415,530 from the 1630 Fund for its own work in "civil rights advocacy," which includes the very profitable  Pod Save America podcast.  Its Board of Directors includes corporate executives from the likes of the relentlessly needy Facebook Empire and the Wall Street Nation of megabanks.

Just the titles alone of many of these grantees tell you everything you need to know about them: Future Now Fund, Justice Forward Virginia, Leading Colorado Forward, MoveOn.org (of course), NextGen Climate Action, SWPA Moving Forward, Future Forward, Future Forward Action Fund. and the inevitable Future Now Movement. And we can't leave out those constant "progressive" adjectives. I suppose we should at least be grateful that there is no Fine Folks Fighting For the Future of Folks in this roiling, cloying, incestuous money-churning maelstrom.

It has actually reached the point that the word "progressive" has been rendered meaningless, so long ago was it co-opted by the elitivists as a smokescreen made of the desensitizing fumes of pure heroin propaganda.

"Progress," wrote Albert Camus in the 1940s,"paradoxically can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves." 

This whole futurism thing is no longer the "winner" it was when Barack Obama sloganized it as a panacea to cruel austerity. The real activists, such as those rightfully deriding the recent COPs Confab in Glasgow, know full well that there will likely be no healthy future for them. Not that the elected officials of the globe care. The ink was barely dry on the latest aspirational climate "accord" before the Biden administration approved another round of oil and gas-drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

Any official who can rudely cut off a dying activist's plea for Medicare For All by belligerently retorting : "I'm not for it!" while insisting that he is chock full of empathy for his plight because he, too, has suffered grief, can also ignore and advance the death of an entire planet. Biden's flattery of Ady Barkan as an "inspiration" during a campaign stunt got him everywhere, not least because Barkan's own "lesser evil" endorsement of Status Quo Joe gave cover to other, less-celebrated activists to essentially abandon the Sanders agenda as the only way to defeat Trump.

Barkan duly received a paltry $300 "capacity-building" grant from 1630 for his own PAC last year - which is mostly funded by nurses' unions and the recurring hefty donations from Megan Hull, the daughter of a finance mogul and philanthrocapitalist who lost to Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate primary in 2004. Biden, for his part, broke his promise to Barkan of a public insurance option just as fast as he was indecently able to. He rests his conscience by countering every plea for social justice by one-upping the issue and telling the story of his own family tragedies. That is apparently how he is able to sleep at night. That, and going to Mass.

 In a Times article published during the campaign, Biden was praised for showing such performative empathy to a dying man, who despite excellent insurance and the generous support of donors to his PAC, faces a real possibility of dying a bankrupt. If Ady Barkan, of all the tragic figures, can accept Biden, then shame on us if we could not and would not. Or so the attempted gaslighting went.

In the meantime, many a Democratic veal pen espousing one narrow cause or another is hitching its wagon to Barkan's star power. In New York (h/t Jay-Ottawa), there was a special online showing last week of a movie featuring Barkan, a hook to entice people to donate to their individual causes and/or join them on a bus trip to Washington to "greet" returning members of Congress  and politely ask them to fight for the last vestiges of the Build Back Better legislation. One of them is called Hand In Hand, the Domestic Employers' Network. You got that right - it's an elitivistic Democratic Party offshoot composed of women who are well-off enough to afford nannies and housekeepers. They are broadcasting the message that since they care about The Help, then so should you. Because the top 10 percent and the working poor are all in this together, of course!

Julia Solow, organizing head of the New York chapter and adherent to Barkan's Be a Hero PAC, has been a frequent guest on Radio Free Kingston, which is owned by Peter Buffett, son of billionaire Warren Buffett. Actually, the younger Buffett has effectively purchased the entire Hudson Valley city of Kingston in a burst of gentrifying  philanthrocapitalistic enthusiasm. He is now a gentleman farmer who pays his own Help very well, and attracts a lot of luxury cars to this "revitalized" community, where the eviction rate in the pre-pandemic, pre-moratorium year of 2019 rose by a full third because of drastically higher, unaffordable rents.

So you see, it's not just the 1630 Fund which has bought - actually, usurped - our country and our entire world and is remaking them in its own image under the fig leaf of community activism - and all the while combating one brand of fake news with another brand of fake news. 

The modern-day oligarchs are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. They are succeeding unto death, both ours - and eventually, despite all the concierge health care and space colonization that their money can buy - even theirs.

When Journalism Becomes Corrupt Boosterism

Forget about Joe Biden's promise to restore The Soul of America - whatever the heck that even is. How about restoring the heart, soul and purpose of journalism, a/k/a The Fourth Estate?

Granted, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" was always more or less the aspirational motto of American journalism.  As Edward Bernays noted nearly a century ago in his seminal Propaganda, at least one quarter of all the front page articles in the New York Times were unabashed corporate or government propaganda. Still, the line between the news pages and opinion pages was almost always taken seriously, If you wanted to sneak a point of view into a straight news story, then you had to go about it stealthily, through the discreet use of innuendo, or the occasional omission of a salient fact.

Not so in the Age of Trump, when reporters double as #Resistance Fighters in the interests of careerist justice. And with only eight weeks to go in this sad, scary and ridiculously close presidential contest between a carnival barker of a mob boss and a mediocre career politician teetering on the edge of dementia, the line between reporting and punditry has been erased right off the journalistic ethics map.

It is no longer enough to dispassionately expose Trump's serial crime spree. It is incumbent upon the increasingly consolidated corporate media to also become the unabashed boosters of the #resistant Democratic Party, which itself might be better described as a coalition of corporate and military/security state interests whose sole agenda is the return to the same neoliberal status quo which produced Trump in the first place.

Fox News, which for decades had been the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican Party, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of criticizing its erstwhile biggest fan, Donald Trump, himself now reduced to manically re-tweeting various right-wing websites and dark web conspiracy groups.

The turn of the "liberal" media to outright party boosterism took off like a shot last week with the obviously orchestrated Atlantic scoop that Trump had been overheard, a couple of years ago, disrespecting the military by calling dead soldiers "losers" and "suckers". The only shocking thing about this belated reportage is the amount of time it took for four anonymous sources to become shocked and appalled enough to spill the beans to The Atlantic, or alternatively, for the magazine itself to become shocked and appalled enough to finally publish them. It's as though they were hoarding the Big Reveal, that Trump is a clear and present danger to national security, for the sole purpose of winning an election. 

The owner of The Atlantic just happens to be billionaire Democratic mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective think tank is headed by former Obama Education Secretary and school privateer Arne Duncan. Her editor and the author of the Trump story is neoconservative pundit Jeffrey Goldberg, who proved his own boosterism bona fides years ago by cheerleading George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq. If you point out these facts, or if you notice that within hours of the article's publication, the Democratic Party was already running slick TV ads expressing shock and outrage about Trump's remarks, or that Joe Biden already had a major speech written on the subject, complete with the inevitable comparison between Trump's spurious bone spurs and the noble military service of the late Beau Biden, then you are in danger of being exposed either as a Russian operative or loony conspiracy theorist.

 You are not, however, in any danger of being exposed as a closet Republican. That is because the Democratic Party has embraced with open arms such "moderate" Republicans as unindicted former Michigan governor and Flint water-poisoner Rick Snyder while relegating Bernie Sanders supporters ("purists") to the dust with a whole chorus line of high-kicking designer jackboots.

You are hereby on strict notice. With only eight weeks to go in The Race, ask not what Joe Biden can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for the Biden-Soul of Your Country.

That's a tall order for sure, especially if you've lost your job and your health insurance and you might be kicked out of your rented digs once all those eviction moratoriums conveniently expire right after the election.

So why not forget about your own fear and trepidation as you are being pressured to declare publicly that yes, you will hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden. Wallow instead in the high-minded fear and trepidation that your financial and intellectual superiors are also wallowing in. They are, deep within their credentialed souls of America, veddy veddy afraid. They're just like you!

"Our Democracy Is Deeply Imperiled," is the top news story in Wednesday's Guardian, and it is tailor-made to get you gripping your nose in a frenzy of highly motivated fear, relying as it does on the "ominous forebodings" of five "leading figures in the non-partisan (my bold) world of democracy reform and civil rights."

Notwithstanding that with the exception of the head of the NAACP, which does not endorse candidates, The Guardian's "non-partisan" sources all have close or even direct  ties to the Democratic Party. Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, is a former Obama administration official. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice is a former Bill Clinton speechwriter. K. Sabeel Rahman, currently CEO of the Demos think tank, hails from the oligarch-funded New America Foundation, which is led by former Clinton State Department official Anne- Marie Slaughter.

And then there's Deirdre Schifeling, the founder and director of "Democracy For All 2021."

"A few years ago," credulously writes Guardian chief US correspondent Ed Pilkington, "she came to the realization that there was a growing disconnect between the will of the American people and their political representation in federal and state governments."

Would it be indelicate or even treasonous of me to surmise that Schifeling arrived at her Eureka moment as miraculously late as The Atlantic came to its own shocked realization that Trump doesn't care about dead soldiers - because her paycheck depends upon her not realizing that this reality existed even when Joe Biden was vice president?

Democracy For All is a project of the dark money SuperPAC called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which also paid the PR firm of Anita Dunn, Biden's deputy campaign director, the whopping sum of $3,2 million for its own "consulting work" in 2018.

This is chump change next to the $140 million furnished by Sixteen Thirty's anonymous donors to other "left-leaning" organizations and political campaigns in that mid-term election year, which ushered in a hyped-up "Blue Wave" of centrist Dems, many of whom hail from the military and the CIA.

As Politico reported about Sixteen Thirty last November:

The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million. That single donation was more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected. Most of the group's funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require "social welfare"-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors.
The group's 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit, according to experts, who pointed to the Koch network and the Crossroads network as rare right-leaning groups that posted bigger yearly fundraising totals at the height of their powers.

This is the kind of operation that The Guardian's Ed Pilkington actually casts as being in "the world of democracy reform and civil rights." It kind of makes you think that their definition of democracy reform is simply getting rid of it, and that civil rights are plutocratic rights, and plutocratic rights are civil rights.

Not for nothing, moreover, are the Democrats moaning about "fake news" and Russian interference in said democracy. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported recently, Sixteen Thirty also funds numerous party-aligned news sites which dishonestly pose as local independent journalism outlets.

Democracy For All 2021, which depends entirely upon dark oligarchic money for its very existence, nonetheless brags on its website, without a hint of irony, that it wants to "ensure transparency for all political spending."

It's no surprise that Democracy For All's idea of an anti-Trump health care platform is restricted to reproductive rights. Forget about polls showing that the majority of Americans support Medicare For All. Because 70 percent of Americans also support the be-all and end-all of Roe v Wade! 

If you demand both, then you're apparently asking for way too much. You have to pragmatically pick the battles that are so carefully selected for you by the credentialed Knowledge Class.

Pilkington explains:

Yet Schifeling found herself spending more and more of her time defending Planned Parenthood against the aggressive attacks of a small minority of extremist anti-abortion politicians. Despite the settled nature of the law, and the clear progressive bent of public opinion, women were finding it increasingly difficult in practice to secure their reproductive rights.

 She reached a reluctant and unhappy conclusion: “Our government is not able to represent the will of the people.”

Since then, Schifeling and her peers have been looking at the causes of this dysfunction and searching for solutions.

Schifeling has not yet come to the reluctant realization that affording guaranteed single payer health care to all citizens in the middle of a pandemic is among the obvious solutions for this dysfunction. We wouldn't want Democracy For All (Wealthy Socially Liberal People) to explode, or for their lifestyles to fundamentally change, would we?

It's their constant searching that really counts, right along the complicity of the churnalists operating right out there in the open as oligarchy-boosters. 

They don't call it the Media-Political Complex for nothing.

Links/Open Thread

Not Everyone Hates Citizens United, particularly local TV stations, pithily writes Michael Socolow in Slate:

For local broadcast channels and their it-bleeds-it-leads newscasts, the Supreme Court might as well be that mythic relative who leaves you an unexpected fortune in his will. The cascade of political money to your local channel began for real in 2012. That year, according to the Pew Research Center, local television stations received $3.1 billion in political advertising revenue. That was 48 percent more than was spent just two years earlier (before Citizens United) and represented more than double the amount raked in during the previous presidential election in 2008.

Read the whole thing. In case you were still wondering why you keep getting that queasy feeling whenever you unwittingly morph from Judge Judy berating the poor and marginalized into local news berating the poor and the marginalized, Socolow lays it all out for you.  My own local news fare lurches between lambasting "progressive" Mayor De Blasio for his un-tough on crime demeanor, to ads for charter schools produced by anonymous dark hedge fund money, to big bank lobbies honoring recently re-elected NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo (whose administration is currently under investigation for alleged corruption) for his support for Wall Street. These local propaganda mills make the national network news conglomerates actually seem journalistically responsible, even with their feel-good animal videos and their hideous Viagra and Big Oil ads. Cancelling my cable is looking more and more like a treat to be savored, rather than a deprivation in my infotainment diet. Plus, all those books that must be read before one dies are piling up on my nightstand.

*

Where were you when you discovered your own personal political and moral conscience? Was it a book, a friend, a teacher who opened your eyes? Henry Giroux tells his own personal story in a heartfelt Truthout essay about his simultaneous embrace and transcendence of his working class roots. He recounts the epiphany that the dreck that the ruling class sells us day in and day out is not only harmful to our health, it is pure poison:

 The struggle to redefine my sense of agency was about more than a perpetual struggle between matters of intelligence, competency and low self-esteem; it was about reclaiming a sense of history, opening the door to dangerous memories, and taking risks that enabled a new and more radical sense of identity and what it meant to be in the world from a position of strength. I found signposts of such resistance in my youth in Black music, stories about union struggles, the warm solidarity of my peers, and later in the powerful display of public intellectuals whose lectures I attended at Brown University. The people who moved me at those lectures were not academics reading papers I barely understood, or intellectuals who seemed frozen emotionally, spewing out a kind of jargon reserved for the already initiated, smug in their insularity and remoteness.

 ***

Speaking of stories on union and class struggles, one of the great influencers of my own youth was the folk music group The Weavers. Ronnie Gilbert, the female voice of that quartet, died this week at the age of 88. From Rolling Stone:

The Weavers' first concerts were often free performances at union meetings and on picket lines. In 1949, about to break up, they were offered a two week residency at the Village Vanguard in New York City that proved so successful they stayed for six months. The stint earned the Weavers a deal with Decca Records, which led to television and radio appearances, and extensive touring.
Amidst their success, the group maintained their progressive and leftist politics, which drew the eye and ire of those in the anti-communist movement of the 1950s. In 1951, the Weavers were investigated by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which sought to probe potentially subversive citizen threats, and soon they were blacklisted from performing and recording.

The daughter of Russian/Ukrainian immigrants and labor activists, Gilbert was inspired in her own youth by the voice of Paul Robeson. Her activism was her music. And luckily for us, she also wrote an autobiography before she died, to be published posthumously this fall. While you're waiting, here's a link to one of my own Weavers favorites -- Which Side Are You On?

***

Which side is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on? Well, we know it is not the crazy Republicans. Nor is it the crazy leftists, whoever they may be. They certainly do not exist within the moneyed realm of the ironically named Democratic Party. To his credit, unlike other pundits, Krugman rarely delves into the river of false equivalency in his columns. But he really stuck a big toe into it in yesterday's effort, cutesily titled Fighting the Derp. For the uninitiated unhip readers out there, Krugman helpfully explains that "derp" is a South Park cartoon neologism defined as repeating the same lies over and over and over again to give them legitimacy and currency. In other words, "derp" is another way to describe Goebbels-style propaganda.

Here's the "both sides do it" part of the column that really pissed me off:

Thus, if you’re a conservative opposed to a stronger safety net, you should be extra skeptical about claims that health reform is about to crash and burn, especially coming from people who made the same prediction last year and the year before (Obamacare derp runs almost as deep as inflation derp).

But if you’re a liberal who believes that we should reduce inequality, you should similarly be cautious about studies purporting to show that inequality is responsible for many of our economic ills, from slow growth to financial instability. Those studies might be correct — the fact is that there’s less derp on America’s left than there is on the right — but you nonetheless need to fight the temptation to let political convenience dictate your beliefs.

My published response:

  "Liberals" are admonished to also be careful of studies purporting to show that income inequality is responsible for many of our economic ills. And then PK neglects to mention any alleged lefty studies.

Is he referring to Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz's work on inequality, which shows that the wealth gap, deliberately manufactured by financial deregulation and political malfeasance, is indeed responsible for a tepid economy and slow recovery due to stagnant wages? Or is he referring to Barack Obama, who's been acting more like a Reaganesque supply-sider lately with his shilling for the Trans-Pacific Partnership "trickle-down" power grab by the ultra-rich?

I'll do my civic duty and read Stiglitz and others, like Bill Black and Michael Hudson, who rightly point to blatant corruption and rule by the plutocracy as a prime cause of economic inequality. I'll put my faith in my fellow citizens, 61% of whom believe, according to a recent NYT poll, that this inequality is getting worse. We believe, along with Sens. Warren and Sanders, that the whole economic system is rigged against us. I'll also put my faith in the most recent OECD figures showing that the US ranks near dead last in all Western measures of social and economic health.

There may be a derp problem, but the real problem is that of the insatiable greed of the pathocrats and the influence of their unlimited dark money in what is still quaintly called a democracy.

To be fair, Krugman did follow up his column with a blogpost/chart purporting to debunk a causal relationship between inequality and a bad economy. He first conveniently tossed out the widely used and respected Gini co-efficient measurements of wealth inequality because they apparently do not fit with his own theory. His argument was rather too technical for a layperson like me, but do read the comments. People with obvious economic backgrounds and expertise were not impressed.

***

 As an antidote to Krugman wishy-washiness, be sure to read Thomas Piketty's review of a truly radical economist's prescription to heal the scourge of historic and global wealth inequality. And then get a hold of the book (Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson) if you can. I got so excited that I plunked down an outrageous 16-plus bucks to download it from Amazon, but it's been well worth it so far. He addresses mere laypersons! In just the first few pages he tears apart the neoliberal metaphors that I love to hate -- level playing fields and ladders of opportunity! -- and gets right into how politicians and pundits avoid talking about how people often stumble and fall on those level playing fields and how "we" avoid talking about actual equal outcomes.

Piketty writes,

He also argues for guaranteed public-sector jobs at a minimum wage for the unemployed, and democratization of access to property ownership via an innovative national savings system, with guaranteed returns for the depositors. There will be inheritance for all, achieved by a capital endowment at age eighteen, financed by a more robust estate tax; an end to the English poll tax—a flat-rate tax for local governments—and the effective abandonment of Thatcherism. The effect is exhilarating. Witty, elegant, profound, this book should be read: it brings us the finest blend of what political economy and British progressivism have to offer.

In other words, Atkinson is even more radical than Bernie Sanders. And the fact that he concentrates on Britain should not at all dissuade us from translating his Rx to our own shores. After all, it's a global economy. The City of London and Wall Street are one and the same entity. Obama's consigliere Jim Messina just helped re-elect austerian David Cameron to another term as prime minister.

But as Atkinson cheerily writes in his intro: "The world faces great problems but collectively we are not helpless in the face of forces outside our control. The future is very much in our hands."

Like I said, quite the antidote to learned helplessness, one of the many neoliberal toxins being poured down our political gullets to induce the chronic condition known as Panglossitis. Things could always be worse in this best of all possible worlds, of course. But why not demand better? The only thing holding us back is the propaganda of the fear-mongers.

Give up that dark money-driven cable infotainment and embrace your inner Henry Giroux and Ronnie Gilbert. Life is too short not to.