Stop Calling Corporate Democrats "Moderates"

To hear the establishment media tell it, you're an extremist if you want guaranteed health care for all, affordable housing, free higher education, a living wage, and even, god forbid, peace on earth. You're a "moderate" if you're a corrupt Democratic politician who demands more pain for the masses  and more power for the runaway capitalist/donor class whose endless pursuit of pleasure and riches is directly fueled by the pain and sweat-labor of others. 

If you're a Blue Dog or a New Dem, and your idea of representative politics is passing legislation that takes from the poor and gives to the rich, then you're a reasonable "centrist." But if your name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar, and you often vocalize your desire to take from the rich and give to the poor, then you don't speak reasonably. Instead, you "huff" out your extreme agenda in a crazily indignant manner.

"Huffed" is exactly how New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis has framed a statement by AOC in the Paper of Record's latest in a long string of blatant propaganda pieces extolling the virtues of the right-wing reactionary Democrats, whose latest name for themselves is "The Problem Solvers' Caucus." These corporate shills' attempt to hide their true oligarchic agenda from the electorate, while scaring suffering voters and gaslighting the party's ever-more-popular left flank is beginning to reek of desperation.

They seem to believe that the more times they utter or write the word "moderate" to describe the rank endemic corruption in the Democratic Party, the more likely it is their message will cow voters, an increasing number (at least 40 percent) of whom are beginning to accept the reality that socialism in some form is the only possible antidote to the capitalism that is literally killing us.

"For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power," the Times confidently proclaims.

And in case that headline didn't slam you hard enough, Hirschfeld-Davis's lead announces it again:

For all the talk of a Tea Party of the left, the true power in the House revealed its face last week — the Mighty Moderates.
The failure of House liberals to attach strict conditions to billions of dollars in emergency border aid requested by President Trump highlighted the outsize power of about two dozen centrist Democrats, mainly from Republican-leaning districts, who are asserting themselves to pull the chamber to the right.

Notice the contradictions in just that one paragraph. Although the word "moderate" connotes calmness, it also now takes on a militant mightiness. Calling these politicians moderates is like calling wars of aggression peace marches. And how can one be a "centrist" while at the same time making no secret of the fact that the true aim is to pull the House to the right? I'm just surprised that they aren't also calling themselves "muscular." After all, some of the new members have come to Congress directly from careers in the armed forces and the "intelligence community." That was the Democratic leadership's whole plan to "resist" Trump: attack him from the right by joining forces with the war and surveillance sectors.

The supplemental aim of this "news story" in the Times is to absolve House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of any personal responsibility for the debacle of last week's shameful Democratic collusion with Trump's sadistic treatment of migrants and refugees. The Paper of Record attempts to rehab her image by placing her in the supposedly powerless liberal camp. Although she herself is a corporate centrist to the core, as evidenced by her frequent public accolades to the recently deceased anti-New Deal billionaire Pete Peterson, and her outspoken disdain for single payer health care, and her passive-aggressive failure to bring up drug price control legislation, Nancy Pelosi has obligingly been cast as a progressive warrior queen who tries her mightiest to suppress the Mighty Moderates. Never mind that these right-wingers were heavily bankrolled by Madame Speaker's own corrupt Democratic Congressional Campaign Commitee (DCCC) in order to suppress any upstart progressive challengers... such as, for instance, AOC.  

Pelosi's excuse is that because these heavily bankrolled "moderates" are credited with flipping the House from red to blue, she must now kowtow to their every whim if she and her party expect to maintain their hold on to power. This Article of Truthiness is given an extra boost of verisimulitude by the Times when Hirschfeld-Davis uses as her "expert" source one Laura Hall of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, quoted as saying:

“If you’re Speaker Pelosi or another member of the Democratic leadership, you have to always be thinking about those members whose seats went from red to blue and helped to flip the House.”

The Times does not inform its readers that BPC is in its own turn heavily bankrolled by the for-profit health care industry and therefore is adamantly opposed to Medicare For All and other policies for the greater public good. Its Board of Directors includes insurance company CEOs, private equity honchos  and Silicon Valley moguls. One director, David T. Blair, founded firms with such anodyne names as Accountable Health Solutions and Catalyst Health Solutions and Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) to help disguise the fact that at their extreme cores they are lobbying firms. Their poorly hidden purpose is to ensure that Medicare For All fails and that profiteers continue to get rich from the pain of others. Former First Lady Michelle Obama even lent her name to the endeavor, under cover of caring about and combating the nation's alleged childhood obesity epidemic. (You can read more about all the writhing corporate tentacles sucking the life out of what's still left of America's health here.) 

As an aside, Cory Booker, who is running for president on a co-opted Medicare For All platform, is nonetheless still listed is one of PHA's advisors. He is famous for, among other things, once having killed a bill that would have allowed drug reimportations from Canada. He is very sorry for that boo-boo now, but his name and his smiling face are still very prominently displayed on the PHA website. Of course, it could always be one of those Russian troll farms at work again, interfering in our Democracy.

But never mind about the underlying corruption and the corporatism, because the Official Media Narrative has it that things are getting mightily yet moderately ugly in the Lower House. And it's mostly all the fault of upstarts like AOC, who are "playing right into the hands of gleeful Republicans" by openly blasting the party's collusion with Trump and his sadistic immigration policies.

In her op-ed barely disguised as a straight news story, Hirschfeld-Davis can also barely contain her own centrist agenda:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whose rock-starlike popularity on the left has given her a louder than usual microphone for a first-term lawmaker, accused the moderates of being the new Tea Party.Their tactics, she huffed, are “just horrifying.”

AOC did not assert her opinion in the polite and collegial way her party elders have always relied upon to mask their organization's own innate ugliness. Instead, she "huffed."

From the Free Online Dictionary:

v.intr.1. To puff; blow.2. To make noisy, empty threats; bluster.3. To react indignantly; take offense.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of a volatile chemical or substance as a means of becoming intoxicated.v.tr.1. To cause to puff up; inflate.2. To treat with insolence; bully.3. To anger; annoy.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of (a volatile chemical, for example) as a means of becoming intoxicated.

"Moderate," on the other hand, embraces a whole slew of positive and calming qualities whether the word be noun, verb, or adjective.

adj., n., v. -at•ed, -at•ing. adj.1. kept or keeping within reasonable limits; not extreme, excessive, or intense: a moderate price.2. of medium quantity, extent, or amount: a moderate income.3. mediocre or fair: moderate talent.4. calm or mild, as of the weather.5. of or pertaining to moderates, as in politics or religion.n.6. a person who is moderate in opinion or opposed to extreme views and actions, as in politics.v.t.7. to reduce the excessiveness of; make less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous: to moderate one's criticism.8. to preside over or at (a public forum, meeting, discussion, etc.).v.i.9. to become less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous.10. to act as moderator; preside.

The term "moderate" as applied by the establishment media to the corrupt corporate shills of the type residing in the Republican wing of the Democratic Party is therefore a complete mask. So is its synonym, "centrist."

As Tariq Ali points out in his book, aptly titled "The Extreme Centre: A Warning," it is the "moderate" neoliberal who has been the cause of the most radical social and economic inequality in modern history, if not all recorded history. These Mighty Militant Moderates in service to the rich began rising with a vengeance as soon as the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain went crashing down.

Capitalism, intoxicated by its victory and unchallenged from any quarter, no longer felt the need to protect its left flank by conceding any more reforms. Even a marginal distribution of wealth to reduce inequalities was off the agenda.

Under these conditions, social democracy became redundant. All it could offer its traditional supporters was fear, or vacuous ideological formulae, whose principle function was to conceal the poverty of any real progressive ideas: 'third way,' 'conflict-free politics,' 'beyond left and right.' The net result of this was either an electoral shift towards the far right...or an increasing alienation from politics and entire democratic process.

Regardless of political party and regardless of individual country in the transnational corporate world, as Ali wrote two years before Brexit and the election of Trump, we the citizens of the physical world are increasingly trammeled by 

An authoritarianism that places capital above the needs of citizens and upholds a corporate power rubber-stamped by elected parliaments. The new politicians of Europe and America mark a break with virtually every form of traditional politics. The new technology has made ruling by clique or committee much easier. They are immured in exclusive bunkers accessible only to bankers and businessmen, service media folk, their own advisors and sycophants of various types. They live in a half-real, half-fake world of money, statistics and focus groups. Their contact with real people, outside election periods, is minimal. Their public face is largely mediated via the mendacious propaganda of the TV networks.  

This is why the Powers That Be have decreed that election periods never have a period at the end of them. The spectacle of controlled elections is the only frayed thread left dangling in our political system.

Without this frayed thread, people tend to start smashing things, like the wonderful citizens of Hong Kong are doing right now.

So look, over there, folks back here in the Land of the Free! The horse-race is on, and our elected officials are calling each other nasty names, so pick your favorite team. The Times and other media sycophants will always be there to tell you all the takeaways and the five or ten essential things you absolutely, positively need to know today.

Hillary 3.0

Hillary Clinton is not running for president. But she may very well be sauntering for president.

Still the same politician who told Goldman Sachs bankers during a paid speech that she has "a public position and a private position," she denies publicly that she is running for the highest office in the land while at the same time vowing to "stay relevant" and letting it be known that sure, she still wants to be president. And if we are to believe Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Hillary is pretty bemused that people literally take her at her "I'm not running" word.

The plethora of Democrats announcing their own candidacies well over a year before the first primaries are to be held was, I suspect, supposed to dilute the field enough to make Bernie Sanders irrelevant, especially when given that such corporate contenders as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have eagerly adopted Medicare For All and other liberal policy proposals which were deemed too radical when Sanders first challenged Clinton with them for the 2016 nomination. 

Perhaps the private, as opposed to the public, plan was for these candidates to siphon off enough votes from Sanders to necessitate a brokered convention in 2020. Since the super-delegates are still allowed their weighted votes should the first ballot fail to nominate anyone, it is entirely feasible that Hillary Clinton could be nominated by undemocratic acclaim, without ever having had to physically hit the trail for a third time. After all, everybody already knows who she is, despite that pesky public-private positioning. And sauntering rather than running also protects her from any more pesky scrutiny.

Of course, the corporate media would love a Clinton-Trump do-over. Think of the ratings and the ad revenue and the guarantee of No Medicare For All Not Ever. And the Democratic Party elders would do just about anything to destroy Bernie Sanders, even if it means a second term for Trump. They are perfectly content to raise money off their roles as #Resistance Fighters. Nothing sells like perpetual umbrage in high places.

So employing the old standard Clintonoid parsing ploy, Hillary no doubt feels perfectly sincere when she says she's not running. She is not running right now, because for one thing, and for some reason known only to her own private self, she is said to be waiting for the Mueller report to be released before deciding. She may never run at all in the traditional sense. Because she received those storied three million more actual votes than Trump did in 2016, she is already The Elect. She's a special case. She always has been.

The common, but already failing, conventional media wisdom had been that Bernie fans would enthusiastically embrace one of the current crop of poseurs, because they're younger, more physically appealing and "diverse" than he is. But since he raised record-breaking amounts in small donations on the first official day of his campaign, the media has quickly advanced to full Bernie destruction mode. The most common trope, despite the fact that it has no basis in fact, is that Sanders doesn't appeal to black voters. One recent example of this genre appears in The Guardian, where Theodore R Johnson warns readers that Bernie's outreach to blacks, even if he reaches out to them all day and every day, "will not be enough."

The alleged reason?

These tips-of-the-hat to black Americans’ disparate experience are unlikely to move the electorate into his coalition in any significant way for a few reasons. First, history has fostered a political pragmatism within the black electorate that tends to prefer moderate Democratic candidates who have a track record of deep and persistent engagement. Because of the centrality of the civil rights question, black voters most often support presidential candidates they trust with protecting the gains made to date. This trust is earned over time or through a shared lived experience. This is why establishment candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and why black candidates like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, have the inside track with this bloc. Sanders has yet to show he can break through.

Johnson doesn't acknowledge the polls that show Bernie is leading in every identity parameter except, by a very slim margin, race. As Vox reports,

An analysis of recent polls from November of 2018 to March 2019 shows Sanders is more popular with people of color than white people, and women like Sanders as much as men do, if not more. He leads every other possible 2020 contender with Latino voters and lags behind only Joe Biden — who hasn’t announced a bid yet — with African-American voters. Sanders’ polling numbers with black voters are double that of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), according to a March Morning Consult poll.

He only lags, and not by much, and mainly among older, more conservative black voters. 

At the end of the Guardian piece, readers are informed that author Theodore R Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center For Justice. Yeah, civil rights credibility! What we aren't told is that he is a retired U.S. Navy official and also a recent fellow at New America, a neoliberal pro-war think tank led by former Clinton State Department adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter and staffed with alumnae of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His journalistic side-career writing for various corporate media outlets included one typical February 2018 piece for Slate.

Since it appeared a year before Bernie-Bashing 2.0 officially got underway, Johnson instead used his propaganda skills to insinuate that black voters were too doped up on Russian "blini and vodka" to propel Hillary to victory in 2016. Russia's alleged spellbinding of the American black electorate has been a common propaganda trope used by Clintonoid forces to try and explain why black voters didn't come out for her in 2016. It's really quite the racial scapegoat, not to mention stereotype, because it denies black people their own agency and assumes that they're a monolithic bloc who lack critical thinking skills.

As a matter of "fact," Johnson claimed, in a throwback to J. Edgar Hoover, Russia has been messing with and hypnotizing black people's heads since the 1960s Civil Rights era:

Russia used the U.S. history of racial oppression and its persistent challenges with systemic racism to manipulate (or at least attempt to manipulate) Americans’ electoral choices. And this wasn’t a simple add-on tactic to a larger influence operation. Rather, it’s in keeping with several decades of Russian efforts to use the United States’ treatment of its black citizens as a counterpoint to the American narrative of freedom and equality. The major difference today is that social media marketing allows Russia to do with efficiency and scale what it could never do with Cold War–era print and radio propaganda.

In other words, Johnson is a paid propagandist for both the corporate Democratic Party and its affiliates in the military-industrial complex. But I think you had that all figured out the minute you finished slogging through his sleazy Guardian piece.  

Norman Solomon wrote a great article about all the anti-Bernie propaganda that's been churning out there in an already-furious boil. He thinks that it's not the Party itself we have to worry about so much as it is the Party-aligned media. I think that it's both, and that we won't see much direct official Party sleaze in action until the first primaries. Then the DNC jaws will publicly clamp down in earnest if Bernie wins and makes it all the way to the convention.

Meanwhile, Hillary saunters.

Inspiration Blues

A commenter on this blog challenged me this morning to talk about something positive or learned for a change. 

I don't know about the "learned" part, but I think the New York Times comment I wrote last night on Paul Krugman's latest ode to the wonderful Democratic Party was pretty damned positive. 

Pushing his own glass half-full scenario in the midst of the government shutdown, he lavished great praise upon Gavin Newsom, the new and untested governor of California, and applauded all-blue New Jersey's strict enforcement of the Obamacare rule that everybody must buy private, for-profit health insurance, or face tax penalties. The result of this mass extortion is that the extortion is more broad-based, and premiums have come down.

 But even better, one of the bluest of all blue states (Washington) now has a public option supplement to the private insurance cartel, thus absolving the still-thriving cartel from using more of its record profits to treat the sickest of the sick, instead passing on such costs to the taxpaying public while cartel CEOs pocket the difference in stock buy-back schemes. 

And on the other liberal coast, New York City Mayor Bill di Blasio even wants to build more affordable housing in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the Universe and provide more access to medical care!

Therefore, there was no need for Krugman to even mention the Los Angeles teachers' strike, the housing crisis, and the continued and growing public demand for non-profit Medicare For All. Because Democrats sure know how to govern, unlike those nasty old Republicans.

My published response to Krugman's column: 

Why no shout-out to the striking L.A. teachers exerting such effective pressure on the new governor and other Democrats? Without the resurgent labor movement, it'd be business as usual, even in the bluest of blue locales. Forty children per classroom is a shame in such a rich state, home to many a Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaire and mogul.

 Bill di Blasio isn't making new proposals for better health care and low-income housing just out of the goodness of his heart. It's taken citizens with the courage to confront him at his gym workouts, cell phone cameras at the ready, over the shameful conditions in the city's public housing projects as well as the homeless crisis. Although he's made strides in the construction of more "affordable" housing, NYC's homeless numbers are still at near-record highs.

The homeless also just happen to have their own Coalition.

 If Dems are moving left and finally beginning to abandon austerity, it's because the public is forcing them to.

Regarding health care: individual states implementing public options is no substitute for a federally administered single payer system. The House majority thus far is only paying lip service to Medicare For All, with the chairwoman of the relevant subcommittee, Anna Eshoo, just announcing that she might not have time to hold hearings after all. She represents Silicon Valley, home of many a tech billionaire.

 So a Women's March group plans to storm Congress on Friday to demand Single Payer.

We have miles to go before we sleep.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the DNC has disassociated itself from the Women's March for more reasons than just the alleged anti-Semitism of one or two of its founders. Protesters are branching off from the original Democratic-centric/centrist intent of the enterprise, independently evolving far beyond simply "resisting" Trump and the Republicans. Good.)

Progressive Plutocrats Ltd

From the Department of Putting Lipstick on a Neoliberal Pig:

An exclusive cartel of wealthy Democratic donors imagine that the way to win back the presidency in 2020 is to back more progressive candidates who can attract the black and brown working class from the Sunbelt and the Southwest. Their abandonment of the deplorable white working class from the Rust Belt who went for Trump leaves a big vacuum that has to be filled. To that end, they held a private strategy session at a luxury Washington D.C. hotel last week. And with only a few token exceptions, the voters whom they hope to attract were themselves barred from the discussions. To make matters even more anti-democratic, journalists were barred from covering the discussions and not invited to partake of the pricey hors d'oevres.

 Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times was escorted out of the exclusive affair after he sneaked in anyway. Vogel has been covering the secretive Plutocratic Progressives for quite some time now, and they apparently aren't fond of him. In his most recent article about the billionaire-run Democracy Alliance and its offshoots, he described how the wealthy donors have quietly been co-opting such erstwhile grassroots organizations as Black Voters Matter, BlackPAC and Color of Change. Although the rabble and reporters were barred from the recent strategy session reception, a few carefully selected minority leaders were graciously allowed a seat at the gourmet table.

Vogel writes:

Since its creation in 2005, the Democracy Alliance has played a significant role in shaping the institutional ecosystem of the political left by steering more than $1.6 billion to recommended liberal and Democratic groups, according to an alliance official.It has helped to fund an array of new nonprofit groups dedicated to taking on Mr. Trump. Its ranks include some of the left’s most prolific donors, such as the billionaire investors George Soros and Tom Steyer. This past week’s meeting drew appearances from several Democratic politicians, including Representatives Adam B. Schiff of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, as well as Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Governor-elect Jared Polis of Colorado, a former Democracy Alliance donor.

 Schiff, who voted for the Iraq War and has also legislatively backed the US-assisted Saudi genocidal war on Yemen, is a member of the right-wing New Democrat Coalition, an offshoot of the Clintons' Democratic Leadership Council, which was instrumental in moving the party to the right as a way to join the arch-conservative and anti-labor Reagan Revolution. He is also at the forefront of the congressional #Russiagate investigation of Donald Trump and as such, is a ubiquitous rising political star on the cable shows.

Polis, the owner of a network of for-profit charter schools and the founder of ProFlowers, is also a member of the conservative New Democrats. As a  congressional representative, he was at the forefront of the Obama administration's punishing neoliberal Race to the Top agenda, which predicates government funding of public schools and teacher retention on the scores of standardized tests administered by private, for-profit corporations. Although he opposed the 2016 Colorado ballot initiative for single payer health care, his winning gubernatorial campaign included mealy-mouthed support for "some kind of universal health system" that would "expand access and reduce costs." In other words, he is not for single payer and not for Medicare For All.

If these guys are positioning themselves in what the New Democratic Alliance considers a big bold new "lefty" roster of candidates, then the Democrats have moved further right than even I had imagined.  

Just because the plutocratic donors of the Democratic Gentry Party see, as the New York Times headline announced, "a leftward path to beating Trump"  this does not mean they are embracing democratic socialism as an actual mode of governance. Far from it. In barring the press from their events, they're even less fond of the First Amendment than they are of the actual bodies of distressed people seeking physical entree to closed receptions guarded by private security forces.

Without a hint of irony, in fact, Tory Gavito of the NDA offshoot "Way to Win" said that "the concentration of young people, poor people and people of color who used to sit on the sidelines because Democrats have not inspired them will upend the map.” (if not the heavily armed gates of the fabulously wealthy themselves.)

Among the donors spotted by Vogel at the closed reception were Susan Pritzker, heiress of the Hyatt hotel chain, where employees have been striking against low wages and poor working conditions, and Leah Hunt, scion of the Texas oil dynasty.

As he pointed out in his Times article, while these billionaires are making a big show of criticizing the neoliberal deficit-hawk Clintonism espoused by Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank and centrist operatives like David Brock, their Democracy Alliance continues to give money to them. Just as Wall Street does, the Progressive Plutocrats are hedging their bets.

And while Vogel, in the politest Timesian way possible, is exposing them for who they are, his colleague Paul Krugman is spreading their message for them -- without, of course, ever mentioning them by name.

His latest column is worth quoting at length to fully appreciate its underlying Progressive Plutocrats Ltd message:

Even if they’re personally doing well, many voters in lagging regions have a sense of grievance, a feeling that they’re being disrespected by the glittering elites of superstar cities; this sense of grievance all too easily turns into racial antagonism. Conversely, however, the transformation of the G.O.P. into a white nationalist party alienates voters — even white voters — in those big, successful metropolitan areas. So the regional economic divide becomes a political chasm.
Can this chasm be bridged? Honestly, I doubt it.
We can and should do a lot to improve the lives of Americans in lagging regions. We can guarantee access to health care and raise their incomes with wage subsidies and other policies (in fact, the earned-income tax credit, which helps low-wage workers, already disproportionally benefits workers in low-income states).
But restoring these regions’ dynamism is much harder, because it means swimming against a powerful economic tide.

Economic grievance has turned into racial antagonism. Rust Belt voters who lost their jobs to corporate trade deals are not only resentful, they're racist. Therefore it's not worth it for the wealthy liberal oligarchs of the Gentry Party to even bother wooing them back into their Big Gilded Tent. The chasm is just too wide! Therefore, besides the Black and Brown voters of the South and West, the Gentries might also have a shot at wooing the upper class white Republicans from the Coasts by using the wedge issue of Trump, rather than promising to improve people's lives in any meaningful way.

 But still, to show what a good liberal he is, Krugman does deign to offer the Laggards "access to health care"  - which is plutocrat-speak for No Medicare For All, Not Ever, No Way.  And as usual, he doesn't explore the reasons why these regions became so distressed in the first place. If it's not those mysterious Headwinds, it's the Powerful Economic Tide which keeps washing over people with no cruel policy decisions by the ruling class racketeers of the Duopoly having had anything to do with it.

Stuff just happens. Too bad, so sad. And so extremely, sickeningly smug.

My (not well-received) published response to Krugman:

"Guaranteeing access to health care" is not the same thing as guaranteed, universal, single payer health care. And the vast majority of Americans (70%) who now support Medicare for All know it. They even include those "deplorable" Rust Belt voters who refused to come out for Hillary Clinton, despite many having cast their votes for Barack Obama in 2012. Clinton announced on the campaign trail, in no uncertain terms, that single payer "will never, ever come to pass."

Nothing attracts desperate people like telling them they'll just have to "shop around" each year for ever more restrictive, expensive private insurance. And even if they do scrape together the premiums, there's no guarantee that they'll be able to afford the co-pays and deductibles, which can reach thousands of dollars annually. As it is, 63% of us don't even have $250 in savings.

It was George Bush who once snarkily observed: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

Sure, and then you get an exorbitant bill. You can still go bankrupt if you get sick or hurt, even if you do have insurance. And 30 million Americans still don't.

Democrats will have stop sounding like Republicans if they want to win hearts, minds and elections. Marketing wonkish incremental policy proposals didn't work in 2016, and it won't work in 2020. There was a reason that many incumbent Dems lost this month, and it wasn't because they were too progressive or radical.
 

Kings, Queens, and Luxury World Disorder

There's the Cult of Trump, which used to be known as the Republican Party.

There's the "resistance" Gentry Party, which still insists upon calling itself the Democratic Party, despite its having little to do with ordinary people.

And then there's the Empire of Amazon, whose ruler Jeff Bezos is coming ever closer to his goal of conquering and controlling not only the corrupt US duopoly but the whole planet and even outer space. It's no wonder that Wannabe World Dictator Donald Trump can't stand him. Not only is Bezos the richest man in the world, he's rubbing it in by horning in on Trump's old stomping ground, the outer borough of Queens, New York.

While Trump got rich from his father's enterprise of bilking poor tenants in his rundown buildings (when he wasn't refusing to rent to them because of their skin color), Bezos aims to constructively evict them with the placement of one of his "secondary" headquarters in Long Island City. Not only will the residents be expelled sooner rather than later, they'll also be parted from their dwindling funds sooner rather than later, via the estimated $3 billion in public subsidies which the Gentry Party elders have promised him. This includes a pricey new helipad. Because if there is one thing our modern-day oligarchs need, it's the ability to stay above the fray and make a fast getaway in case the dispossessed rabble gets too irate. That, too, will happen sooner rather than later.

Trump is probably kicking himself with bilious envy. It was his monstrous tax giveaway to the obscenely rich, after all, which designated the already-gentrifying Queens neighborhood an "opportunity zone" for investors to set up shop and either enslave or expel the existing denizens as the whim grabs them.

This assault by Bezos is so Trumpily egregious, in fact, that the more progressive upstarts in the Gentry Party are making a stink about it. It certainly doesn't help the Gentries that New York State is now entirely ruled by the Democratic Party and therefore, liberal pols will no longer have the nasty old Republicans to blame if and when Bezos gets his way.

But at least they'll put on a show of resistance to prove to their constituents that they care, even as they feebly explain  that "nobody could ever have predicted" that Amazon had any designs on the Empire State. Just because the Gentries stealthily had offered Bezos incentives in the billions of dollars to please, please, please pick them as the big winners doesn't make the corruption a completely done deal, at least not quite yet.

As CNBC reports:

Local Democrats, with a few high-profile exceptions, swiftly criticized Amazon. They raised concerns about cost of living increases, a potential lack of benefit to local community members and state tax incentives going to a large corporation rather than residents. The response sets up a political clash for Amazon — a company that has had no shortage of battles with officials as it extends its reach across the country and globe.
Democratic Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will represent parts of Queens and the Bronx starting in January, said early Tuesday that her future constituents raised concerns about the Amazon offices. In a series of tweets, she called it "extremely concerning" that Amazon would get tax breaks "when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less."

And that, of course, is why the constituents will pay for a helipad for the world's richest oligarch. He doesn't ride the subways.

Ocasio-Cortez rather tepidly added in a tweet that "we need to focus on good healthcare, living wages, affordable rent" and that "corporations that offer none of those thing should be met w/skepticism" while insisting she is not trying to "pick a fight."

That's a little too kind. The Queens residents of one of the country's largest public housing projects aren't doubtful or skeptical. They're frightened, they're broke, and they're outraged. 

The hearty partiers of the Gentry, meanwhile, point to the derelict conditions of the housing in question, in probable anticipation of the sad need for them to eventually just tear it all down to make room for all that sacrosanct progress in the name of progress. Therefore, the main improvements which the government plans to make are not mold amelioration, or guaranteeing heat and hot water to the tenants.

 It's installing millions of dollars' worth of new surveillance cameras and security lighting.

 The Gentries are refusing to divulge the totality of the Trump-like corrupt wheeling and dealing that has gone into the Bezos bribery scheme. It's none of the public's damned business how they conduct their shady business. But I wouldn't be surprised if one of the incentives was awarding Bezos the no-bid contract to spy on the poor via all that Amazonian surveillance technology as they await their eviction orders from the Panopticon. The oligarchs always try to squeeze every last dime from the indigent before disposing of them, whether the destination be a private prison or the streets... or the morgue.

The lips of the Gentries, most notably those of Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill "Tale of Two Cities" de Blasio, remain stubbornly pursed as regards the power of the purse.

Or, as the New York Times more squeamishly puts it: "It is still unknown what financial incentives city and state officials may have offered Amazon or what, if any concessions, they have extracted from the company to help the neighborhood."

The idea that corporations and billionaires are ever extracted from is really kind of quaint.  But getting the Times to admit this would be like pulling teeth. This is the same establishment mouthpiece that just hosted a Luxury Conference for transnational oligarchs. The Times and its advertisers and corporate partners are so resistant to Trumpian kitsch, which has given such a bad tasteless name to unbridled hedonism, that they had to jet all the way to Hong Kong to bitch and moan among themselves.

The theme of this year's confab was, appropriately enough, The New Luxury World (Dis) Order:

This November, Vanessa Friedman and The New York Times brought together top C.E.O.s, policy makers, entrepreneurs, celebrities and thought leaders at the annual International Luxury Conference in Hong Kong.
In these tumultuous times of rapid political and economic change, unpredictability is constant and competitive forces necessitate taking bold chances. Luxury’s decision makers are facing challenges that continue to transform their industry — from constant technological evolution to a dramatic shift in the retail world, to what’s next for China, India and the West to the pervasive demand for transparency and moral equity.
Through provocative interviews with powerful and influential figures, Friedman and her colleagues explored how luxury companies can win in a world where the only constant is change, and the biggest risk is taking no risk at all.

Thomas Frank already wrote a great book about these awful people. Published in 2012, it's called Pity the Billionaire. And needless to say, the Times gave it a rotten review. If you scathingly and hilariously criticize pathocratic rich people, it simply proves that you are a jealous grouch, wrote the reviewer. And then if you dare criticize the great Barack Obama, who so nobly "gave us health care" and "tough new financial protections for consumers" it makes you even more of an ungrateful envious wretch. Rise of the American Oligarchy? No such-a thing!

And then along came Trump. Along came Bezos. But nobody could ever have predicted....

We will not go gentrified into that good night.

Midterminal Blues

There's already enough churnalism on the midterm elections without my adding to the glut. 

I spent most of the weekend not answering the insistent pounding on my door from unpaid campaign volunteers and ignoring the incessant reverberations on my cellphone from racist robocallers. I wasted precious minutes of my life relegating to the trash folder the never-ending demands for cash flooding my email in-box.

 At least, since I no longer pay for the torture that is cable TV, I was spared the misery of watching what are alleged by cable victims to be some the nastiest political ads in recent memory. 

Nor will I add to the chorus of "voter-shaming" being brayed from political operatives and pundits from far-right, center-right and center-pseudo-left, who chide us that our failure (or more aptly, our refusal) to vote for the pre-vetted candidates of the oligarchy will endanger our very existence as human beings.

Me? I already voted early by mail, as I always do. I chose Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins for governor of New York over the terminally corrupt Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins has never won an election in his whole life, but he actually garners a respectable percentage every time he runs. He even got a fairly friendly write-up in the New York Times. The establishment paper of record usually gives friendly write-ups to politicians it doesn't consider much of a threat to the status quo. That way, they can appear to be fair and balanced to the despised left among their readership.

 Since Democrat Antonio Delgado and Republican John Faso are in a dead heat in my district, I am sad to report that I held my nose and voted for Delgado.... but on the Working Families Party line, not the D line. This is the very first time I have ever voted "strategically," because although I have absolutely no expectation that Delgado would actually do much of anything for "working" (what about the single, the retired, the unemployed and those still in school?) people if he wins, at least he would presumably not fall into the Trump tank and cheer for refugees to get shot or imprisoned at the border. Plus, he only has two years in which to do the bidding of Wall Street. Besides, the next two years in a Democratic majority House of Reps look to to be nothing but non-stop theater and grandstanding about neoliberal values vs fascist values, with a host of Trump cabinet officials getting hauled before committees. The shaming will have the main, if not sole, purpose of embarrassing Trump and boosting Democratic fortunes for the interminable presidential sweepstakes, which begin at precisely midnight tonight.

And that's all I have to say for now about the Midterminals.

Putting Lipstick On a Neoliberal Pig

 This "cure" for the chronic electoral failures of a Democratic Party in thrall to the oligarchy sounds even worse than the disease:  

It seems to me that the Democrats’ story has to be built around the simple idea of investing in middle- and working-class people. Not “spending,” but “investing.” Spending sounds profligate; investing sounds prudent.

This is not to be done for reasons of “fairness.” That’s an absolutely vital point. Liberals reflexively want to make economic arguments about fairness. But this persuades only liberals. People who aren’t liberals — three-quarters of the country — don’t especially care about fairness. They do, however, care about growth. So Democrats need to argue that these investments, not tax cuts for the rich, are the way to spur growth.

 So writes Michael Tomasky, one of America's leading self-described "progressive" pundits, in a recent New York Times op-ed. While pretending to explore the reasons why the Democratic Party keeps losing elections, he completely ignores the needs, wants and problems of its vaunted working class constituency.  He assumes, moreover, that tens of millions of precarious Americans do nothing but sit around all day and worry about economic growth and the national GDP.

These people desperately want to be seen as "investments" rather than as, say, human beings with immediate requirements for food, income, medical care, and shelter. Tomasky views them as mere commodities in dire need of some better messaging.

The problem, according to Tomasky, is that three-quarters of all Americans are conservatives who don't care a fig about their neighbors and about "fairness."

From a pundit whose purported mission in life is to fight Republican lies, this claim could not be further from the truth. It is a Big Lie.

Poll after poll after poll reveals that most Americans are, in fact, liberals and progressives if not downright socialistic. Peter Dreier of The American Prospect compiled a comprehensive overview last year. Tomasky might be surprised to learn that fully 65% of these selfish, ignorant Americans care very deeply about the economic unfairness unleashed by unfettered finance capital, with an equal proportion believing that money and wealth should be distributed more evenly. 

Ninety-six percent of Americans - and that includes most Republicans polled - believe that money in politics is to blame for political dysfunction, with three-quarters despising the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling which equates corporate money with speech. Eighty percent think corporations don't pay their fair share in taxes, with nearly the same percentage believing that wealthy people don't pay their fair share in taxes.  So much for Tomasky's spurious claims that the lesser people -- er, I mean human commodities ripe for investment -- don't care about economic justice.

It gets worse (for the oligarchs running the place, that is.) Two-thirds of Americans want the cap on Social Security taxes lifted so that the wealthy pay a larger, fairer share. Two-thirds, including 42% of self-described Republicans, support labor unions. Three-quarters, including Republicans, want paid parental leave. And at least two-thirds of all Americans support government-sponsored, single payer health care insurance. 

And despite President Trump's fear-mongering about the "immigrant invasion" from Honduras," 68 percent of Americans—including 48 percent of Republicans—believe the country’s openness to people from around the world “is essential to who we are as a nation.” Just 29 percent say that “if America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.”

In light of these results, Tomasky's claim that Americans need any more "convincing" about what they do and should care about sounds increasingly more ridiculous.

So he does what all right-wing Democrats since Bill Clinton have done for the past several decades. He will feel your pain while promising you nothing but a good story:

The story could use a name. The venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, a former Bill Clinton domestic policy adviser, coined “middle-out economics” five years ago. President Obama even used the phrase a few times.

The important thing is the idea. Democrats must persuade America that there’s a better way to expand the economy than the way Republicans have been advocating for decades. Just as inflation and other ills opened the door for critiques of Keynesianism in the 1970s, so have inequality and disinvestment done the same for critiques of supply-side today. Someone just has to make them.

Tomasky must have forgotten that Bernie Sanders has been making this critique for decades, and that it was only because of the deliberate squelching of this message by the Democratic Party and the complicit establishment media that more people did not hear it.

Corporate Democrats are worried for a good reason. People are on to their con, and the party bigwigs are running low on policy proposals. So caught between the rock of attracting more voters with advocacy for Medicare for All and debt-free college, and satisfying the donor class - which is adamantly opposed to programs for the greater good  - they are still opting for the latter.  Meanwhile, they are going on one "soul-searching" propaganda binge after the other.

The "market knows best" ideology of neoliberalism has run roughshod over ordinary people throughout the world, with inequality now so extreme that fully half the entire globe's wealth now rests in less than a dozen billionaire pockets.

  This is now such common knowledge that the centrist Democratic proponents of the Neoliberal Project have no other choice but to acknowledge this hard truth and pretend to want to rectify if while actually making it much worse with their pretty rhetoric and their cynical inaction.

Follow the money. Besides his gig as a "contributing op-ed writer" for the New York Times, Tomasky writes full-time for the liberal Daily Beast - a subsidiary of the international media conglomerate IAC, which is owned by Democratic mega-donor Barry Diller and where Chelsea Clinton sits on the board. IAC not only controls and distributes much of the information we see, hear and read, it also owns the websites of "more than 150 brands and products," including Vimeo and several Internet dating sites.

Tomasky also is the full-time editor of the new-ish Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, whose own board of directors is a veritable who's who of the oligarchy. Under its glossy theme of "government for the public good" -- as shallowly opposed to the GOP's more brutal agenda - this quarterly journal espouses neoliberalism in its newly "progressive" form. You might call it neo-neoliberalism.

It is more than a little self-celebratory. The aforementioned Nick Hanauer, who runs/owns the place, wrote one recent article touting the alleged death of neoliberalism and praising his own "rousing speech" on why "Homo economus must die" upon his receipt of the Humanist of the Year award from MIT.

An excerpt:

Capitalism is the greatest problem-solving social technology ever invented. But knowing that capitalism works is different than knowing why it works. And contrary to economic orthodoxy, it is reciprocity, not selfishness that guides it—indeed—as if by an invisible hand. It is social reciprocity that builds the high levels of trust necessary for large networks of people to cooperate at scale. And it is only through these networks of highly-cooperative specialists that the complexity that defines our modern economy can emerge.

Hanauer, unlike your traditional rapacious Republican capitalist, is a member of the Good Rich Club. He comes not to destroy capitalism in its most brutally egregious Trump-like form. He comes to save it, He comes to put lipstick on an inherently antisocial pig. By equating democratic government with capitalism, the same as neoliberals always have, Hanauer is simply offering up more postmodern feudalism, with just the right dollop of noblesse oblige. (Invisible hands of highly cooperative "specialists" who work ever so nicely together, far from the prying eyes of the actual public.)

 Tomasky hilariously gushes in an accompanying article that his benefactor and de facto boss is the "plutocrat of the common man."

For further "balance," the latest issue of Democracy includes the obligatory homage to Democratic Socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who, we are assured, is really just an FDR-style liberal who has absolutely no intention of overthrowing capitalism. 

There is not one article in Democracy that is anti-war. War and death are the most profitable enterprises in our Democracy, after all.

 Besides a smattering of academics, including Robert Reich, with more or less bona fide credentials, its Board of Directors includes Robert Abernethy, vice chairman of the war-mongering Atlantic Council, which is also at the forefront of the Cold War 2.0 "Russiagate" propaganda campaign and a leader in the permanent Security State's call for censorship of social media and independent news organizations. Like several others on the Democracy board, he is affiliated with the neoliberal Aspen Institute and the Democratic Party's official think tank, Center for American Progress (CAP).

Melody Barnes, another director, is an alumna of CAP and the Obama administration who now works as a Wall Street lobbyist as well as serving on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, the unaccountable private subsidiary of the National Security Agency which was made famous by Ed Snowden's theft of documents demonstrating the oligarchy's mass surveillance of every man, woman and child on the planet. This is what Democracy is all about, after all.

Then there's billionaire William Budinger of the Rodel Foundation, a school "reform" zealot who was among the very first mega-contributors to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The destruction of teachers' unions and public schools have always been very high on his to-do list. Obama's Education Department, lead by charter school advocate Arne Duncan, certainly gave Budinger his money's worth. You might remember that when Obama's campaign offshoot, Organizing for America, made plans to go to Wisconsin to support teachers during the protests against Governor Scott Walker's war on public unions, Obama himself ordered their swift and hasty retreat.  

Anne-Marie Slaughter, liberal war hawk, nicely rounds out the Democracy advisory roster. (You can read the whole list of names here.)

 As Samuel Moyn observes, this Clinton State Department alumna and her cohort of "liberal internationalists have always endorsed a globalization that often ends up serving free markets more than it does political freedom, with economic equality its central omission and biggest casualty. Liberal internationalists have spoken admiringly of “the idea that is America,” in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s phrase, but the reality is that beneath the hype the United States has nearly always placed economic liberty first among its foreign policy priorities. Trump’s economic nationalism will hardly work either, but our main response to it has to be to invent a new form of liberal internationalism rather than fall back on the failed pieties and stale rhetoric that contributed to the ascendancy of Trump and other populists in the first place."

The writers and directors of Democracy can call themselves progressives all they want, but they can't put neoliberal lipstick on a pig without it leaving its telltale stains all over the place.

What if we, the designated pork belly futures of neo-neoliberal America's investment class, just turned up our snouts at the smarmy swill being marketed to us by pundits in service of the oligarchy? Maybe then they'd dispense with the lipstick entirely and simply offer us the whole unadorned pig to cuddle like a baby.   

Oh, wait. They already have!

(Photo credit: HuffPo)

  You might remember hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer as the impeachment guru and presidential contender who's spent millions of his own money bribing college kids to register to vote by staffing college campuses with cute puppies. Now, things have gotten so desperate for the Dems that Steyer is installing entire petting zoos all over the land to help those cynical kids get over their depression and college debt long enough to cast their votes for a Democrat With a Story.

His group, with the cool-sounding name NextGen, is also flattering the youth of America with free rolls of toilet paper. They don't explain why they think toilet paper is such a great bribery tool. Maybe they assume that the only time young people feel crappy is when they're on the can, and they will free-associate a roll of toilet paper with the squeaky clean Democrats who care so much about them. And then they'll get off their butts and vote!

The least that the corporate Dems could do for people is supply us with a free issue of Democracy for our bathroom reading pleasure.  Or better yet, old copies of the New York Times to stuff under our drafty doors in a futile effort to keep warm as winter approaches.