Great Expectorations

Judging from all the electronically amplified throat-clearing that marred an otherwise boring acceptance speech, Hillary Clinton seemed to be choking on her own platitudes.

I couldn't help envisioning a scene from the great new Netflix series, Stranger Things, which I've been binge-watching all week as an antidote to the real horror of the Democratic National Convention. Right before tuning in to the robotic Chelsea introducing the robotic Hillary on Thursday night, I'd nearly gagged at the sight of a young boy coughing out a slimy eel-like creature into his bathroom sink. And so, at the sound of her first throat spasm, I braced myself in anticipation that Hillary, too, would be expectorating something even nastier than her hoarse-throated ode to great American exceptionalism.

 I almost felt sorry for her early on, when she as much as admitted that she'd been an abused child. Dorothy Rodham, her wonderful late saint of a mother, had once heartlessly kicked her out the door to confront a group of neighborhood bullies all by her little pre-school self. I wonder why Hillary didn't also mention the anecdote in Carl Bernstein's biography, which had her alcoholic father throwing the toothpaste out the window if somebody left the cap off, and then making the kids go out to hunt for it in the dark. Daddy went ballistic on the frequent occasions when his wife and kids failed to live up to his impossibly great expectations.

But as with everything else in the radical centrism of Clinton World, I suppose there has to be balance in the bathos. Hillary had nothing but glowing words for her dear old bootstrapping John Bircher of a dad on Thursday night.

And there has to be balance, as the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, in manipulating populism in the service of elitism. Thus did Hillary give a condescending verbal pat on the snow-white head of Bernie Sanders, looking  bored and grumpy in his seat as his wife Jane gave him frequent therapeutic pats on the back.

Clearing her throat ironically and ostentatiously, Hillary crooned out to her erstwhile nemesis:

Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion. That’s the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America.

Populism, meet the Neoliberal Project. Calling humanity-crushing corporate coups like the Trans-Pacific Partnership  (ostentatiously allowed to survive in the party platform) "progressive" is a feeble but common way to fool people into thinking that job offshoring and subsequent wage suppression throughout the world is actually good for them.

And then the gunk really flowed forth. It was a multi-colored, multi-textured oratorical mess that must have been festering all her political life:

We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight terrorism.

There’s a lot of work to do.

Too many people haven’t had a pay raise since the crash.

There’s too much inequality.

Too little social mobility.

Too much paralysis in Washington.

Too many threats at home and abroad.

But just look at the strengths we bring to meet these challenges.

This is highly unskilled obfuscation. Does Hillary's ghostwriter really think that by verbally juxtaposing domestic social problems with military might, people will then all join together in one big patriotic blob? Fight terrorism with hard work while acknowledging desperation and inequality and too many threats, be afraid, and then blame it all on the "paralysis in Washington" so beloved by the extreme centrists and the same multinational lobbyists who recycled a very small portion of their own corporate welfare to fund the spectacularly orchestrated Clinton Coronation.

It was no big surprise that after many of us gagged on Hillary's expectorations, she herself reportedly went on to party late into the night at a private shindig hosted by Lady Gaga, the rock star queen of the identity politics which barely holds the morally bankrupt Democratic Party together.

Before serenading Clinton, Gaga had given another exclusive concert in neighboring Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in America. It benefited not the poor, but one of Hillary's Superpacs.

But back to the speech. Hillary's noxious juxtaposing continues, as she counters Donald Trump with her own inclusive neoliberal army of caring professionals solidly aligned with both the victims and the perpetrators of state-sanctioned economic and physical violence:

Troops on the front lines.

Police officers and fire fighters who run toward danger.

Doctors and nurses who care for us.

Teachers who change lives.

Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem.

Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe.

"Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem" is neoliberal code for Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste. (See: New Orleans/charter school takeover, Haiti/post-earthquake wage suppression, and just about any place where mostly man-made disaster strikes.)

But wait. Her acceptance speech may have started out as a few dry throat clearings, but Hillary's hacking is getting juicier by the minute: 

Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power.

Two hundred and forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.

Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers.

Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.

And you know how the community responded?

Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.

Her speechwriter here skillfully combines democratic ideals with police state oppression. Of course no one person has all the power in America. It's a team effort of revolving door professionals from what's called the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "Washington Consensus" -- or what political theorist Perry Anderson calls the consilium of the Security Elite: 

"It extends across the bureaucracy and the academy to foundations, think tanks, and the media. In this milieu, with its emplacements in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School of Harvard, the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton, the Nitze School at Johns Hopkins, the Naval War College, Georgetown, Brookings, the Carnegie Foundation, the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Agency and the CIA, positions are interchangeable, individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think tanks and government offices, in general regardless of the party in control of the administration."

And the militarized police forces protect this elite team effort both at home and abroad. Only witness the snipers on the rooftops at Hillary's convention, protecting her and her whole consilium cohort against the proletarian rabble as the rich partied in and around the Wells Fargo arena this past week.

But back to the regal phlegm. Hillary now pivots to the "personal" in order to re-introduce herself to a public which has gifted her a sad approval rating of barely 30 percent.

I’ve been your first lady. Served 8 years as a Senator from the great sate of New York.

I ran for President and lost.

Then I represented all of you as secretary of State.

But my job titles only tell you what I’ve done.

They don’t tell you why.

The truth is, through all these years of public service, the “service” part has always come easier to me than the “public” part.

I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.

As CounterPunch's Jeffrey St. Clair quips in his brutally hilarious series on the convention: "HRC says the 'service part' always came more naturally to her than the “public part”. Well, that explains the private email server…"

Hillary went on to reprise her promise to "be president for the struggling, the striving and the successful," which is code for caring just as much about billionaires as she does for meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications and elbowing their fellows in the ribs for a chance at a promotion or a corner office. She barely paid lip service to the crushingly impoverished. The P word - poverty - did in fact make the final cut in Hillary's coronation speech, with just one little mention. Overdoing it might have harshed the mellow of the USA! USA! USA! fight song echoing from the nosebleed seats, might even have burst a couple of those oversized balloons that a doddering and slack-jawed Bill Clinton just couldn't get enough of tossing around.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Hillarian hucksterism isn't quite done yet:

I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives.

I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.

That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!

That's why, as the New York Times reports, Clinton's wealthy donors were literally coming out of their well-appointed, room-sized closets this week, descending en masse upon Philly's tonier spots. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was quoted as gushing at the Ritz-Carlton: "This is a good place to be — for a lot of reasons.We must have set up five fund-raisers today. This is the bank.”

Hillary was certainly right as she ironically a-hemmed that "our democracy isn't working the way it should."

But never mind all that. It's always sunny in Philadelphia as long as the proles have a hopeful sunny outlook:

I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here.

We have to heal the divides in our country.

Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.

That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes.

So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.

There she goes, echoing President Obama's platitude that dark-skinned people "feel like" their lives are disposable - thus putting the onus on the victims of state-sanctioned racist violence themselves. Anything rather than utter the active words of reality: on average, US law enforcement personnel actually kill one person every 24 hours. That picked-on feeling? It's too often the pain of a last dying breath.

Now here comes that centrist, balanced approach again, putting even more of the onus on the working class and reducing lethal institutionalized social problems down to "rebuilding trust" between cops and communities. Meet the truncheons halfway - extend a helping head. Lift those hands a little higher behind your back to make it easier for them to cuff you:

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day and heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.

We will reform our criminal justice system from end-to-end, and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

We will defend all our rights — civil rights, human rights and voting rights … women’s rights and workers’ rights … LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!

And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.

Reduce social injustice to identity politics. And stand against the meanness and divisiveness of Donald Trump, every time you see him getting a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising from the same media conglomerate which has colluded in the coronation of Hillary herself.

 Thank you and may God bless the United States of America!

(Thank god, it finally ended.)

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

-- e.e. cummings 

One More Miserable Night

There are already plenty of blow-by-blow accounts of the Democratic Convention, so I won't be adding to the shallow pollution in any substantial way. Life is too short, and besides, I find I can only take this mind-numbing spectacle in extremely small doses.  Even abandoning the hopped-up heads on MSDNC and CryptoNationalismNetwork for noncommercial C-Span didn't help. Because what is this convention anyway, but one long freaking commercial for the Neoliberal Project and Permawar?

It's as though the Home Shopping Network had a mind-meld with all the grotesque military recruiting videos ever made and then gave birth to an Academy Awards show that goes 72 hours over schedule. Every speech runs the pea-sized gamut from platitudinal to fear-mongering (fear Trump, not the weaponized capitalism that created him!). Every speaker focuses on identity and biography rather than on issues, every actor proclaims that America is the greatest country on earth.

 I keep waiting for the warning music from the orchestra to cut these people off.

I wait in vain. The music only enables them, as it attempts to create being from nothingness.

Take last night. A bunch of Broadway stars sang "What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love" which hideously segued into Master of War Leon Panetta bragging that Hillary will be able to bomb people to death more responsibly than traitorous Putin fanboy Donald Trump. The cognitive dissonance was relieved only by a group of brave Sanders delegates chanting "No more war, no more drones," while Clinton operatives scrambled to hand out fascistic "America Stronger" signs to the other delegates to drown out the unsanctioned love. (Since the DNC is still refusing to divulge the corporate sponsors of the glitzy convention, I can't wait to find out which defense contractor footed the bill for this particular bit of "muscular" propaganda. Maybe Trump can ask Putin to find out for us.)

I could have sworn I was still in Kleveland.... or Nuremberg.

I finally had to shut off the TV when the Gold Star mother was introducing Obama. The message was that as long as she can get a triple hug from The One, losing a son in a war for oil and treasure is almost bearable. Life gets better. Especially since it was Obama who inspired her to overcome her grief by getting into local politics, just by virtue of his magical hug.

So I am sorry to say that I unpatriotically skipped the president's ode to Hillary and to his own legacy. Maybe I'll parse it at a later date. But probably not. Like I said, life is short, the sun is shining and the birds are tweeting louder than the Tweets canonizing his speech as the greatest speech ever by the Greatest President in the history of time, space and propaganda.

If it's a more scathingly detailed synopsis you crave, then Jeffrey St. Clair over at CounterPunch is your guy. His daily blow-by-blow blow-ups of the botulistic canned festivities are actually very funny reads. And that is quite an amazing accomplishment, given the ingrained torture of the entire grotesque spectacle.

Party on.

Just a Spoonful of Bernie Helps the Hill Pill Go Down

Not.

The rage was everywhere you looked on both the Philly convention floor and out on the steaming streets on Monday. And justifiably so.

Therefore, may quisling Bernie Sanders's pathetic plea for his delegates and fans to behave and not make a mockery of him, personally, fall upon millions of deaf ears. If it's got to be a Bernieless burn, then so be it. A real revolution doesn't begin by falling down insensate and pledging to elect a deeply corrupt politician to (if she is truly as blessed as she constantly says she is) a White House reign that is not cut as short as those of her fellow lying war-mongers, Nixon and Johnson. 

"This is a real world we live in," an abject Sanders told a crowd of booing supporters as he urged mindless public fealty to the Clintonian version of trickle-down capitalism.  This re-endorsement was despite Wikileaks' release of the trove of emails proving that the Democratic Party is a corrupt institution, with  access to money and power for its own ends its only goals. This was despite evidence that party flacks had conspired against Bernie Sanders, personally.

As the saying goes, shit always flows downhill. Bernie took his own generous personal portion and let it flow right down to his millions of fans.

His big speech on Monday night, effusively praising Clinton, left me wondering why he'd wasted all his personal energy in the first place, why he hadn't been loudly and vocally supporting Hillary Clinton all along. His original campaign rhetoric is now lost somewhere in the ozone

 Of course, nobody should have been surprised. Least of all me, who warned from the outset not to put all our eggs into one Bernie Basket, lest the "sheepdogging" role ascribed to him by Black Agenda Report turned out to be all too true. I'd stopped feeling the Bern altogether during one of this spring's interminable town halls, when he blandly supported President Obama's drone assassination program and promised that it would continue under a Sanders presidency.

After that, god forgive me, the sound of his voice sounded like fingers across a blackboard. But yes, I still would have held my nose and voted for him.

 From the start of his campaign, of course, the writing was right there on the blackboard. He'd vowed from the outset to endorse Clinton when and if she seized the nomination. I think what happened then is that the throngs of adoring fans and their millions of small donations went to his head. His true, initial purpose of herding more cattle into the party corral was temporarily lost in a cash deluge of historic proportions and the seductive glare of the stage lights. He played the part of lonely outlaw for so long that even he started believing in his fictional character, especially once he won New Hampshire by double digits.

Meanwhile, there are about a hundred more days to go to Election Day. The manipulators of public consent would like nothing better than for us to put our struggling lives on hold for the duration, to root for a greater or lesser evil.  And then the whole thing will get started again on Inauguration Day 2017, if not before.

So let the revolution continue in the Bernie-Free Zone. At this point, he is only an impediment.

Let's give Jill Stein a look. A protest vote today can always lead to a meaningful vote in the future.

And next time an annoying Hill Pill tells you to grow up or shut up for wanting Medicare for All and a living wage law, congratulate them on their affordable pragmatism and then hit them up for a donation to a medical charity, a food bank, or StrikeDebt.

Fugitive from a Chain Gang

When Joe Biden warned that the GOP wants to put y'all back in chains, he was not kidding. Just check out the oligarchic orgy getting underway in Tampa. So how ironic is it that former Florida Republican Governor "Chain Gang" Charlie Crist defected to Barack Obama yesterday. What a slap to the party that had thrown Crist under the bus for being too gay-rights and pro-choice.  What a huge coup for Obama, who has made centrism and compromise with Republicans his raison d'etre, even a major theme in his re-election campaign.

But about those chains. Crist, who has developed a well-deserved Romneyesque reputation as a flip-flopper, was still bragging as recently as three years ago about his glory days as "Chain Gang Charlie."  Back in the 90s, when he was a freshman state senator, Crist was instrumental in reviving prison chain gangs after they'd been nationally banned in the 1940s for being too inhumane. Crist's rejuvenation of forced prison labor was also largely condemned as racist, not only by the NAACP, but by prison officials and even some conservative Southern editorial boards. According to one contemporary news story, Crist's fetish for penal slavery had its start in the first blush of his youth. While on a family road trip, he'd become inspired by the sight of a gang of prisoners in leg irons.




Chain Gang, South Florida Reception Center, circa 1995

 The draconian punishment became his cause celebre. He made it his business to investigate the coddled lives of Florida prisoners. When the inmates got wind of what the silver-haired reformer was up to, he got so rattled that he conducted subsequent prison visits disguised as Groucho Marx. Vickie Chachere of the Tampa Tribune wrote: "They were saying my name. They were saying, "That's Senator Crist,' " the St. Petersburg Republican would later recall. "It was a little unsettling."

There's no better way to appease a crime-fatigued public than treating them to the sight of shackled men filling potholes and picking up trash off the highways, Crist boasted. Plus, chaining prisoners together in a forced labor detail helps lower the recidivism rate, he claimed. (it doesn't) "It's harder to get any righter than that," he fondly reminisced in 2009.

Crist had a front-row seat to the very first chain gang revival on Nov. 22, 1995, when a group of inmates chopped brush in the Everglades. (And now he will have a front-row seat and a speaking gig at the Democratic National Convention!) From the L.A. Times archives:

 What we want to do is tell people that if you commit a crime in Florida, if you're convicted of committing that crime in Florida, Florida will punish you, you will do your time and it will not be pleasant," Crist said.

At a time of growing public anger over crime, Florida became the third state to bring back the form of forced labor that was eradicated nationwide in the 1940s because it was considered inhumane.

Many likened it to slavery; some still do.

Unlike Alabama, Florida prisoners aren't shackled together. Instead, each prisoner's ankles are chained together and their 20-person work groups are monitored by three guards. Arizona has introduced a similar system.

Chain gangs are being used as punishment for breaking prison rules. Those chosen may be maximum-security inmates, but none will be sex offenders, prior escapees, first-degree murderers or the physically or mentally ill. So far, no women are scheduled for the details.

No sunscreen during 10-hour days under the scorching Florida sun. No bug repellent in the mosquito-infested Everglades.

Just water, baseball caps, gardening gloves and thick leather pants to guard against snake bites.

(snip)

Stan W. Czerniak, assistant secretary for operations at the Department of Corrections, said he was unsure chain gangs would be the deterrent Crist wants and questioned whether they were worth the increased manpower necessary.

Inside the prisons, two guards can oversee up to 144 inmates. On the chain gangs, three guards are needed to supervise a crew of 20 prisoners.

So -- another phony deficit hawk, eh? Paging Paul Ryan. And no women inmates on chain gangs! -- that'll win him the female demographic right there. 

Charlie's Chain Gangs were disbanded after only a year. The only locale that still allows such hard prison labor is in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County, Arizona. And even there, chain gangs are entirely optional on the part of prisoners.

 Chain Gang Charlie has now "evolved" into pretending to realize that his beloved GOP is just as inhumane now as he was back then. Plus, he lost to Marco Rubio in the Senate race. So he has become a centrist kool-aid cult member, singing the praises of his DINO soulmate -- Barack Obama. It doesn't hurt that Obama is a grand compartmentalizer in his own right, able to successfully argue for prison strip-searches for minor offenders, able to pick and choose assassination targets, able to oversee a War on Drugs that sucks up record numbers of minority men into a privatized penal system, able to ignore the humanitarian crisis of unemployment and foreclosure fraud and poverty as long as he pays homage to a "balanced approach" to cutting the social safety net.

From Crist's Tampa op-ed:

I'm confident that President Barack Obama is the right leader for our state and the nation. I applaud and share his vision of a future built by a strong and confident middle class in an economy that gives us the opportunity to reap prosperity through forced hard work and personal responsibility. It is a vision of the future proven right by our history of slavery.

We often remind ourselves to learn the lessons of the past, lest we risk repeating its mistakes. (Hide your true agenda). Yet nearly as often, our short-term memory fails us. (And thank God for the epic short-term memory loss of the American people, given my own history.)

Thirsty for a Little Chained Social Security COLA?