Health Care Kabuki

Since hell hath no fury like a president vindicated, Donald Trump has again gone on the attack against Obamacare. This time, though, Trump is doing an end run around Congress and is using another recent Texas court decision to try and overturn the law. 

The fake resistance Vichy Democrats, meanwhile, are doing their own oligarch-pleasing part by introducing a bill to merely "shore up" Obamacare and keep the private insurance predators in business. Single Payer is off the table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made sure of that, just as she has made sure that impeachment is off the table.

Trump isn't even bothering suggesting a replacement for Obamacare this go-round. He wants, or at least pretends to want, to destroy the whole thing in one fell judicial swoop. He is using the tried-and-true Goebbels method of viciously going on the offense as a way to play cowardly defense. For despite all his boasts of "exoneration!" Trump is not out of the woods yet.  Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III has reportedly farmed out acres of new evidence to states attorney general and US attorneys which tie him and his extended family to bank fraud, tax fraud, and real estate fraud, to name just three treats on the criminal smorgasbord. Never mind that these are the same local prosecution shops that have let the Trump empire get away with its sleaze for whole decades, absent making secret deals and paying the occasional civil fine. This time could be different, especially when there are political names to be made for any number of hungry headline-seeking prosecutors.

Now, here's where Trump's crusade to destroy Obamacare could hit a snag. As Vicky Ward lays out in her new book, "Kushner, Inc." the president's son-in-law Jared has a big financial stake in keeping Obamacare alive and kicking. His brother Josh's online health insurance company, currently valued at close to $3 billion, could be destroyed right along with the Affordable Care Act. Jared was adamantly opposed to the first attempt at repealing the law, for very good reason. Ward writes:

Josh had co-founded the online health insurer, Oscar, which was predicated on Obamacare: it could be purchased on the state exchanges that the Affordable Care Act had created.... If the new (repeal) legislation rolled back Obamacare, it could be financially catastrophic. Someone close to the brothers pointed out to me that "no other asset (in the Kushner family) comes close (to Oscar)." 

Trump's former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, a Democratic alumnus of Goldman Sachs, also opposed repealing Obamacare. Ward adds that at one point, Jared even brought in Obama health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, to consult on saving the law and by extension, saving the family's financial skin.

It all became moot when the late John McCain cast the deciding GOP vote that saved the law.

I wonder if Ivanka might now whisper in Daddy's ear that, as pleasurable as it is to scare and sicken millions of people by ripping their health insurance out from under them, it might be smarter to keep the family peace, and most important of all, keep the windfall profits flowing to the family, all thanks to Obamacare. The Oscar company's bronze plan requires subscribers to pay an $18,000 deductible before they receive any benefits at all, making it as legally corrupt as most neoliberal schemes designed to extract money from the desperate and put it in plutocratic pockets for the greater pragmatic good.

It's quite the dilemma for Trump. He will have to choose between pleasing his base, and pleasing his kids and the insurance companies. What variety of greed and graft shall he pick? Stay tuned.

It's possible and even probable that Trump's latest authoritarian gambit is just another head fake to distract the country from his own cowering fears and continuing legal woes. It could even be a way of thanking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for squelching impeachment talk, for slapping his main rival Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All plan, and for fighting her very hardest to further enrich the health care marketplace which has been so good to Trump's in-laws and other wealthy investors.

The corporate Democrats' bill, after all, greatly expands federal subsidies to the insurance cartel, which is already flush with record windfall profits.

About Those "Grassroots" Pro-Mueller Rallies

To read and listen to all the media reports, Thursday night's nationwide protests against Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and in support of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's Russiagate probe arose almost spontaneously.

From CBS News:

Protests have sprung up across the country Thursday night calling for the protection of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia. Several hundred had gathered in New York's Times Square and other places like Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, North Carolina, Tennessee and Philadelphia.
In New York, demonstrators could be heard chanting "Hands off Mueller" and "Nobody is above the law" as they marched downtown. The Associated Press reported some held signs like "Truth Must Triumph" and "Repeal, Replace Trump."
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois joined several protesters in Chicago's Federal Plaza, AP reported.
Organizers of the protest said the naming of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was a "deliberate attempt to obstruct the special counsel's investigation," according to AP.
Thursday's show of disapproval came a day after President Trump asked Jeff Sessions to resign as the nation's top law enforcement official. He was then replaced by Whitaker, Sessions' chief of staff, who has been critical of Mueller's investigation.

Whenever an elected politician joins a "spontaneous" grassroots uprising, your bullshit detector should immediately escalate into the red zone.

What the corporate media carefully doesn't tell you about the protests' organizers should disabuse you of any notion that these protests simply "sprang up" out of any mass outrage over the discredited Russiagate probe, which has been going on for almost two years and has resulted in just a handful of indictments against Russian troll farm workers and the usual sleazy mix of money launderers and low-level political operatives.

Polls show that most people don't put the alleged Trump-Putin "collusion" to swing the 2016 election away from Hillary Clinton even close to top of their list of concerns and fears. Politico even recently warned all those Russophobes out there to tamp down their enthusiasm for any earth-shattering revelations or indictments from Mueller's office. And even if Mueller has or will uncover Trumpian malfeasance, his findings may never even be made public.

Therefore, the concern and the fear must be manufactured and packaged and marketed in order to get the citizenry ready for an otherwise issue-free Democratic Party presidential campaign season. It's slick, but it's also painfully obvious. 

I mean, what harried citizen would have the wherewithal to spontaneously construct a glitzy neon sign showing support for Iraq War cheerleader Robert Mueller, of all people? Summoning the proles to "save" this plutocrat is almost as bad as Trump summoning the proles to his neofascist rallies.

All you have to do to discover the powerful individuals and organizations and the scads of money behind these spontaneous grassroots protests is to visit the NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website and look for the fine print hidden beneath all the hype. Buried deep within the astroturf is a whole treasure trove of former and current Democratic Party politicians and consultants, alumni from the Clinton and Obama administrations, representatives of the permanent Security-Military State, and a healthy smattering of billionaire venture capitalists and hedge fund honchos.

Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of well-meaning participants in Thursday night's rallies were manipulated into serving power just as creepily as Trump's fans have been manipulated into serving power. The corporate media covering the rallies deliberately suppressed this vital information from its readers and viewers.

Among the protests' funders is Stand Up America, an astroturf propaganda mill started by Facebook billionaire Sean Eldridge, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 in my district after purchasing a mansion for that express purpose.  His top issue is not health care, civil rights or gun control. It is protecting Robert Mueller's investigation and by extension, vindicating Hillary Clinton and maybe even setting her up for a third run -- or as she seems to prefer, a coronation by acclamation at the 2020 party convention when the Superdelegates take over after an orchestrated first ballot failure.

So naturally, the Clinton fan club called Pantsuit Nation is also one of the main organizers of the spontaneous protests. It describes its main mission as "story-telling."

Libby Chamberlain created Pantsuit Nation as a “secret” Facebook group in late October 2016, inviting about thirty friends to wear pantsuits to the polls on Election Day. The group's emphasis on “going high” and a commitment to creating a troll-free space in which Clinton supporters could enthusiastically support their candidate struck a nerve. In the span of twenty-four hours, the group exploded to 24,000 members (new members can only be added by friends already within the group). Within a few weeks, group membership exceeded 3 million people. Our current membership is over 3.8 million people around the world.

Wow. "Exploding" sounds so much more spontaneous than "springing up", don't you think? There's nothing like spontaneous combustion to set all that plastic astroturf on fire and create a lot of smoke in the process.

And how grassroots can it possibly be without billionaire venture capitalist Tom Steyer's NextGen outfit in the mix? Maybe he can extend his get-out-the-youth-vote and impeachment franchise into petting zoos and puppies to keep the spontaneous protesters warm, if not fired up, on the next big march or rally.

One thing you can't help but notice as you click and scroll through all the grassroots "partners" is how eerily similar their websites appear, right down to the fonts and the layouts and the mission statements. As a matter of fact, many of them are renamed clones of one another, with the same consultants and directors. This broadcasts the message that there are many, many more spontaneous groups than really exist.

One such group,dubbed Every Voice, appears to be nothing but a re-tweeting platform and clickbait email aggregator whose Board of Directors all hail from the other organizations listed on the main NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website, including the Sierra Club and Democracy Matters. Those busy folks from the Democratic Consultant Class sure do get around, don't they? As a matter of fact, NIATL itself is the spontaneous creation of  MoveOn.Org, one of the Democratic Party's major clicktivist veal pens whose original purpose was to urge liberals to "move on" from the Lewinsky scandal.  It's a tangled web, for sure.

If it's a more diverse feel-good solidarity that you crave, then do check out the Truman National Security Project partner of the grassroots uprisings. I mean, any group named after the president who atom-bombed Hiroshima just to send a hegemonic message to the world and who later approved the unaccountable regime- changing CIA has got to have law and order on its side, right? Included on the board of directors is Hunter Biden, son of Joe, whose Ukrainian oligarchic connections are in direct capitalistic competition with Russia. Unlike Trump, though, he and Dad are apparently far, far above the law. Joining him is Steve Israel, late of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whose job is to advance centrist candidates and to bury progressive ones. 

If you joined Thursday night's marches, you might even think that its backers are also fighting Trump's mendacious campaign against Medicare for All, because a group calling itself Health Care Voter helped pay for some of those glitzy pro-FBI/Mueller signs. Fugeddaboutit. It's nothing but a campaign commercial boosting centrist Democrats whose aim is merely to "protect" the profit-driven Affordable Care Act from GOP assaults. 

Then there's a site called Rapid Resist, whose director, Yoni Landau, hails from Bill Clinton's White House Office of Management and Budget and whose assistant, Jacinth Yohi, has overseen digital operations for Democratic candidates when not engaged in "community-building" at Google and Uber, where the de facto salary for its gig drivers is less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

That's only a small sampling of the interconnected anti-Trump partnership of Democratic consultants, donors and other operatives who orchestrated Thursday's grassroots uprising. Read them and click through them until your eyes glaze over from all that spontaneous and very lucrative redundancy. 

Meanwhile, some cynics are even suggesting that liberal activists start a GoFundMe page for the ousted Jeff Sessions, whose last desperate act before being kicked out of office was ordering a halt to federal consent decrees to curb police brutality and other law enforcement abuses of the poor, the black, and the brown. Of course, these decrees have traditionally been nothing but unenforced slaps on the wrist and warnings to offending police agencies in such poverty-stricken cities as Cleveland. 

Still, Sessions managed to dig in the racist knife even further, by ordering that political operatives - not career nonpartisan lawyers from the Justice Department - will now have the power to "discipline" police agencies. Additionally, such decrees will have sunset clauses, meaning that the offending departments can simply run out the clock and do nothing to reform themselves as they continue to act with impunity toward an increasingly vulnerable and disposable population. 

Bitter Little Blue Pills

Are you still feeling positively giddy and drunk on your Blue Wave cocktails on this Midterminal Morning After? Or are you already hung over and in dire need of a jolt of reality-based caffeine?

To borrow some of the cool media parlance currently in vogue, let's unpack the hidden meaning of the outcomes by taking a deep dive in a search of multiple takeaways of all the myriad things you need to know this morning.

On second thought, let's not. I am too hung over from reading the multiple media accounts of The Results to think as clearly as I would like.

Just a few muddled preliminary thoughts then:

--Many of the Democrats who lost their Senate seats were de facto Republicans who might have been punished by voters for pandering too much to Trump and for not being progressive enough. Here's looking at you, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly. I have absolutely no facts to back up this supposition, but it's pleasant to think about anyway.

--On that note, although Florida's Democratic gubernatorial contender, Andrew Gillum, narrowly lost, Floridians still voted to re-enfranchise more than a million of the state's convicted felons, most of whom are black or brown people once brutally imprisoned on minor drug charges or other nonviolent crimes. If that isn't progressive, I don't know what is.

--Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Kochtopia) is finally gone. That is a mammoth blue wave in and of itself.

-- As far as the Dems controlling the lower house of Congress is concerned, I've already covered it in some previous posts. The new committee chairs will engage in a frenzy of subpoena-issuing to Trump's corrupt cabinet. Executive privilege will be invoked. Referrals will be made to the Trump-led Justice Department. Lather, rinse, repeat. The neoliberal Octogenarian Troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn will make deals with the nasty Republicans in the interests of National Unity. The smattering of newly-elected "diverse" progressives will make fiery speeches on the House floor in an effort to get the cynical electorate herded back into compliance for Campaign 2020. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump will seesaw from cooperation to bickering and back again to keep everybody off-balance and guessing and tuned in to the never-ending reality show that substitutes for representative democracy.

--We ordinary slobs have still got our work cut out for us, despite what the New York Times is breathlessly over-hyping as the End of One-Party Rule, equating the blue wave panacea for electoral dysfunction with that other over-hyped little blue pill for erectile dysfunction. Who are they trying to kid? 

It'll be the same as it ever was. And just in case you don't understand that fighting and resisting Trump is not the same thing as making people's lives better, the Times gnaws off the bottle cap of bitter blue pills for you to swallow:  

But after eight years in the minority, Democrats hoping to reclaim the White House in 2020 will also have to prove they are interested in governing — and temper the liberal ambitions of the party’s most ardent left-wingers....

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who now hopes to be its next speaker, pledged to “work for solutions that bring us together, because we have all had enough of division.”

Get the picture? When the Democratic leaders say they're willing to work with Trump, they mean that they will enthusiastically join his mendacious fight against Single Payer health care. This is despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the electorate are in favor of it. The Democrats' worst enemy was never really Trump. It's always been the Left. So now that you have done your civic duty and voted and provided them with the fig leaf they've so desperately craved to legitimize their power, you are hereby expected to shut up and let the ruling class racketeers just all get along with one another as they always have done. Sew up your mouths and stop sowing such divisions (with much help from social media security state censors) while they sew up their deals.

 The one solution that has always brought them together is the appropriation of untold trillions of dollars to the profitable and privatized and unified and unaccountable corporate war and surveillance and incarceration apparatus. But since the viewers at home must still be kept entertained and engaged, there will also be plenty of anti-Trump theater on offer between the stealthy appropriations and backroom deals. The price of admission is high, and the tickets will not be refundable unless enough people make enough of a noise about how badly they've been cheated.

Neocon Democrats Already Blaming Russia For Shutdown Mess

If When the Democrats are pressured into striking a deal with the bad guys to keep the government chugging along for awhile longer, they want you to know it was all the Russians' fault. David Leonhardt (see previous post) will be so disappointed when he finds out that that his scolding had little to do with "the big cave."

The Democratic veal pen now known as HuffPo has collaborated with the new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy, to spread the word that the criticism of hapless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is emanating not just from American constituents, but from Kremlin "bots" using the hashtag #SchumerShutdown on social media.

Despite all the best algorithmic and human censorship efforts of Twitter, Google and Facebook, Russian-trolled anti-Schumer messages are "blowing up" the Internet. You see, The Alliance has devised its own copyrighted "Gizmo" measuring tool to prove it! The attack on Wall Street stooge Schumer is getting so bad it's even surpassed the nefarious #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. The Alliance would have you believe that no actual Americans ever had the intellectual wherewithal to be curious about much of anything before the Russians went on the Internet and infiltrated all their brains. You'd think that the all-American right-wing propaganda mill known as Fox News was just sitting around and twiddling its pudgy little thumbs.

HuffPo reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:

#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.

Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

HuffPo certainly did not see fit to inform its readers that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (which it approvingly describes as a "bipartisan" outfit led by former national security officials) is top-heavy with discredited extremist Bush-era neocons who thought it was a dandy idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond to make the world safe for greedy oil companies and bankers and "defense" contractors.

As a matter of fact, the head honcho of the Alliance is Michael Chertoff, Bush's Homeland Security director. The paranoia-for-profit industry has been very good to him, his private security firm having raked in big bucks from its no-contract Orwellian RapiScan machines used at airports all over the world to humiliate travelers on the pretext of thwarting terrorism. Chertoff has a nice supplemental gig working alongside Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, at the Covington and Burling white shoe law firm in Washington, D.C.

Also serving on the Alliance board are neocon columnist Bill Kristol; former acting CIA Director Mike Morell; CNN fear-monger, Harvard professor and former congressman Mike Rogers; Jamie Fly, foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio; and Clinton campaign operative and Obama administration official Jake Sullivan.

Glenn Greenwald called this power hub of Democratic-Neocon propagandists  "one of the most consequential but under-discussed changes in the American political landscape."

He wrote last summer:

The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics — accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc. — are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.
The union of Democrats and neocons is far more than a temporary marriage of convenience designed to bring down a common enemy. As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.

One bright note: from what I can tell, the nationwide women's marches over the weekend were not centered on Russia fear-mongering despite the best co-opting efforts of the Democratic Party. They were not even exclusively centered on "resisting" Trump, but rather on women running for office in the interests of social and economic justice, and people joining together in solidarity across class, race and gender lines.  

They'd better watch out, or next time the politicians (even the trolling Trump) and police might not be so friendly about the protests which they now find so convenient to encourage. They still seem to have no doubts that the marches are anything more than a get-out-the-vote effort for the establishment party.

Gray Lady Wants You To Cool the "Race-talk"

How can you tell when the ruling elites have sunk into a moral cesspit? When the Paper of Record, acting on behalf of the Democratic Party, warns liberal politicians and pundits not to talk about Donald Trump's or anybody else's racism past a certain, self-serving point.

You see, it's not about doing or saying what's right. It's about doing or saying whatever it takes for your political party to win.  Calling out the evil of racism apparently has a sell-by date, especially in a campaign year.

Of course, the New York Times posits it a bit more delicately than that, as it coyly headlines David Leonhardt's column Is All This Talk of Racism Bad for Democrats?

The short answer is "Yes, You Idiot!", but since this is liberalism talking, there are the usual "pragmatic" excuses for ignoring both the historical and contemporary racism in this country. It's all about clawing back power by any means necessary. You see, although the Democrats thought they they could win in 2016 by harping about the Trumpian sexism targeting Hillary Clinton, similar talk of Trumpian racism should be off-limits as we approach the 2018 midterms. Identity politics is largely a matter of the class and status of the identity symbol they're talking about and elevating on any given day.

(As just one recent example of this basic truth, the recently-announced Senate candidacy of transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning has elicited howls of outrage from corporate Democrats. She is simply not the "right" kind of identity politics symbol for them, because she exposed their war crimes and otherwise embarrassed the ruling elites when she furnished their self-serving correspondence to Wikileaks.)

For his own pragmatic part, meanwhile, Donald Trump certainly wants 2018 to be all about race, the better to whip up the estimated third of the electorate which still supports him. He needs them to continue believing that even the lowest white man is superior to the highest black man, That was, and is, a winning strategy for him. He wants Democrats to continue accusing him of racism.

Therefore, it follows that the Democrats should fight this strategy by ignoring racism itself.  After all, this is the reality-based community, in which facts have a well-known liberal bias.

Of course, racism really sucks, "but" as David Leonhardt worries:

 It's  also important to distinguish between the current moment and the remainder of 2018. Calling out Trump as a racist is the right thing to do in the days immediately following comments like his vulgar denigration of Haitians and others last week. It should not become the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2018 strategy.

That centerpiece needs to be a principled populism that causes voters — white, black, Latino and Asian — to think about their economic interests. Trump certainly can be a huge part of the strategy. The president is almost always the central issue in a midterm election. The key is how Democrats talk about him.

Emphasizing the ways he’s hurting the middle class and working class has almost no downside. It turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones.

Well, at least he had the decency to wait till after the Martin Luther King holiday to publish his cautionary screed.

You might agree with Leonhardt - after all, he sounds reasonable and caring and even class-conscious - but read the subtext. He is not suggesting that the Democratic Party actually push policies that will make people's lives better. He is simply suggesting that the candidates talk a good game and get the voters to just "think about" about their economic interests - by making the mid-term campaigns All About Trump. His tax plan and other assaults on everyday Americans are so horrible, who needs an actual plan of one's own? All that Democrats need are better bullshitting skills as they carefully ignore the "shit hole" rhetoric they are currently in a frenzy of co-opting to death. 

In other words, rather than open up the whole can of worms about the American imperialistic origins of "shit hole countries," the Democrats want to dial it back to the same old "We Suck Less" strategy. As Leonhardt enthuses, ignoring Trump's race-baiting in favor of his economic assaults "turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones." 

In other words, those wily Democrats think they can seduce white people into the voting booth by making them worry more about money than they worry about black people, who shall not be mentioned in certain polite bourgeois company. Pander, rinse, repeat, ignore, pander some more. And besides ignoring racism, Dems must studiously avoid all mention of the class war and the politically-manufactured wealth inequality, now at its most extreme level since the last Gilded Age.

Another inside-baseball piece by The Hill's Amie Parnes puts it even more bluntly. The Democrats once again plan to follow the winning 2006 Rahm Emanuel strategy by going after the white suburban voters who propelled Trump to his slim victory one year ago. They will also continue harping on their own witch-hunting, xenophobic agenda of Russia, Russia, Russia:

Emanuel benefited from the political climate of 2006. 

The election was driven by opposition to an unpopular President George W. Bush, who was drowning in headlines about the Iraq war and his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Congressional Republicans—including former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (D-Texas) and Rep. Mark Foley (D-Fla.), were also rocked by scandal in the months leading up to the election.  
Democrats say the political climate is even more poisonous for Republicans now. For one thing, Trump’s White House is shrouded in the Russia investigation. And Republican incumbents “are dropping like flies,” in the words of one Democratic strategist helping to win back the House. 
“They’re imploding,” the Democrat said. “All we need to do is let them unravel while holding firm to our issues.”

 Squelching talk of race and racism under the centrist Democratic bromide "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" also lets them ignore their own right-wing policies of endless war, bombings of dark-skinned people in foreign lands under Obama, deportations of record numbers of dark-skinned people under Obama, the warrantless surveillance of American citizens approved by Obama, the bailouts of Wall Street and corporations at the expense of Main Street under Obama, the privatization of public education and the closings of schools in minority neighborhoods under Obama, as well as the militarized police brutality against black and brown people in these same poor neighborhoods.

The upshot of the Democrats' argument is this: let poor people continue to be victimized under our more beneficent watch while we continue to court our wealthy donors and co-opt the support of the people who must continue to believe they "have nowhere else to go."

Remember, this is not about you and your hard lives. This is all about a preferred slate of oligarchic lackeys gaining back power by pretending to care about you for one magical moment every two, four, or six years.

If they think telling people to shut up about uncomfortable topics is a winning strategy for them as they attempt to control the "narrative," maybe they should rethink their entire careers.

The Bright Side of Despair

The Democrats have been so caught up in the witch-hunts of RussiaGate and selective #Me-Tooism that the blitzkrieg known as The Great Tax Heist of 2017 has them looking more like castrated deer in the headlights than usual. Far from erupting into a state of rebellion over the passage of the bill, they're cowering in a state of mass confusion when they aren't alternately complaining and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

"Just you wait, you nasty Republicans, until 2018 or 2020, or the next century, when people will finally -finally! - wise up to your shenanigans!" is the common refrain echoing from the Democratic leadership and their all-too-complicit co-dependents in the mass media.

In a clueless nod to Stanley Kubrick's satiric masterpiece about bumbling Russophobes in high places, New York magazine chirpily offers "6 Reasons For Progressives To Stop Worrying and Love the GOP Tax Scam."

They are so very heartening that I'm sure you already know them all by heart. All together now:

1. It's so horrible, all that Dems need do is to sit back and relax and a restoration of "power" shall be theirs due to a mass outpouring of ruefully grateful voters. You can literally run as John Q. Generic, and you'll be a shoo-in.

2. When they do take back power, they will immediately expand the welfare state! ( just as Obama did back in 2009 when he had a Democratic super-majority in Congress and still rewarded Wall Street to the detriment of Main Street, and refused to use budget reconciliation as ruthlessly as the GOP has done this year.)

3. Trump raised taxes on everybody and therefore social democracy is inevitable! (um... large chunks of the middle class, unless they reside on the expensive coasts, will not realize they wuz robbed until about 2027, when their tax cuts are due to sunset even as the corporate rates remain permanent.)

 4. It should mollify Democrats' fear of deficits! (as we all know from our study of recent history, Obama's first reaction to the Bush administration's trillion dollars' worth of war debt and tax cuts for the rich was to delay sunsetting the Bush tax cuts for the rich as payment to his own donors, as he offered a tepid stimulus package hiding even more tax cuts and gifts to high finance. He refused to consider Medicare for All,  a guaranteed federal jobs program and living wage legislation, at the same time his Justice Department vigorously exonerated all the Wall Street malefactors. And then he used his supermajority to seat his infamous Deficit Reduction, or Cat Food, Commission.)

5. Blue states will be able to shield their own safety nets from GOP depredations! ( How? by raising state taxes, which have now been deemed non-deductible under Trump's federal codes? by taxing high-speed Wall Street trades, and Hollywood, and Silicon Valley to the hilt and thus do away with all the money that cash-needy Democratic candidates count on?)

6. Republicans probably won't have the votes for spending cuts! (But not to worry - there are always Democrats ready to play. If they were able to help put an end to long-term unemployment insurance benefits while they still had their majority during the Obama years, anything is possible.)

Now, if you still persist in seeing the light at the end of tunnel as the blinding glare of an oncoming locomotive ready to mow you down, rather than as a beacon of hope, then Frank Bruni of the New York Times has some strange love of his own to offer. Democrats should simply yank the Republicans' "values" talking points right out from under them, and make them their very own! (while still yammering away on Russia and partisan #MeTooism, of course, to show how original and bold they truly are.) They especially should not abandon the Clinton-Obama-Third Way lie that Deficits Matter and therefore give ammunition to the plutonomy's propaganda that social spending cuts which hurt regular people will have to - just have to! - offset the tax windfall for the obscenely rich.

Bruni gushes forth with a noxious blend of market-beholden neoliberalism and war-mongering neoconservatism:

Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility because they don’t pretend that they can afford grand government commitments — whether distant wars or domestic programs — without collecting the revenue for them.

Democrats are the party of patriotism, because they’re doing something infinitely more urgent and substantive than berating football players who kneel during the national anthem. They’re recognizing that a hostile foreign power tried to change the course of an American presidential election. They’re pressing for a full accounting of that. They’re looking for fixes, so that we can know with confidence that we control our own destiny going forward. The president, meanwhile, plays down the threat, and Republicans prop him up.

Democrats are the party of national security. They don’t taunt and get into Twitter wars with the rulers of countries that just might send nuclear warheads our way. They don’t alienate longtime allies by flashing contradictory signals about their commitment to NATO. The leader of the Republican Party does all of that and more, denying the G.O.P. any pretense to stewardship of a stable world order.

Democrats are the law-and-order party. While many Republicans and their media mouthpiece, Fox News, labor to delegitimize the F.B.I. and thus inoculate Trump, Democrats put faith in prosecutors, agents and the system.

Where do I sign up for my admission ticket to the Big Tent? Do I interpret the light at the end of the tunnel hopefully, pragmatically or despairingly?

My (Times censor-proof) published response to Bruni: 

Moving the Democratic Party further right and claiming the moral high ground won't win elections. The dubious virtue of austerity for Main Street helped lose them a thousand seats in the past decade - a decade that saw the largest transfer of household wealth to the top 1% in our country's history.

Sure, blame gerrymandering. But Trump and the GOP will never be defeated if all that Dems can offer is "Incrementalism We Can Believe In." Trillion-dollar wars and world supremacy don't make up for the lack of universal health care and stagnating wages at home.

Even before Trump came along with his reckless tweets, America's "standing" was on the wane. Corporation-friendly trade deals and the global economic crisis caused by finance capital gone wild have destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods besides ours.

A new report co-authored by Thomas Piketty shows that the US is now the most unequal of all Western nations. This deliberately manufactured wealth gap will only intensify, as social and natural and political catastrophes become the new normal.

Our incarceration nation now imprisons one-third of all black men at some point in their lives, and on average, three US citizens are killed by law enforcement every 24 hours. Do you really think glorifying the FBI and the CIA, and scarifying about Russia, will fire up millions of oppressed people to come out and vote Democrat?

The Democrats don't need to be more like Republicans. They need to be more like New Deal Democrats.

Fear & Loathing in Tinseltown-on-Potomac

"I've got two words for you, Harvey. Predator drones. You'll never see it coming."

That's what I imagine Barack Obama schmoozing to Harvey Weinstein as the two alpha males bonded one night over bundles of Hollywood campaign cash at a $34,000-a-plate dinner.  Burnishing each other's brands with money and influence was all well and good. But just imagine the dividends from an actual blending of the two powerhouse firms via a subsidized internship at Weinstein's company for Obama's elder daughter. Just imagine a lucrative niche for Weinstein at Obama's planned $500 million post-presidential shrine and luxury entertainment complex.

They were ruling members of the same extended clan anyway. And despite the "open secret" of Weinstein's decades-long history of sexual predation of women, he probably wasn't about to touch a young woman who arrived for work every day with her own armed Secret Service detail. It would have been akin to incest, and as far as we know, Harvey isn't into that.

Harvey most likely remembered the Kill List president's grotesque remarks to the Jonas Brothers at one of those annual Washington press dinners where media stars and political stars and Hollywood stars become more indistinguishable from one another than usual.

  Yours truly called Weinstein out as a predator on this blog more than two years ago. At around the same time that Wikileaks was dumping a stash of Sony emails to and from Hollywood insiders and Obama insiders, the New York tabloids (but not the New York Times) were salaciously splashing Weinstein's groping of an Italian model all over their front pages.

Those leaked emails revealed just how closely intertwined the Democratic Party and Hollywood truly are.

One of the sleazier reveals was how, in exchange for the millions of dollars the movie mogul gave to the party and to the Obama war chest, First Friend Valerie Jarrett arranged with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates for Weinstein to receive a Harvard medal named after civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois. At the same time, the 2014 emails show, Jarrett also finagled a spot for herself on Gates's fawning PBS series which explores the genetic roots of Hollywood stars. The only problem they encountered in the deal-making was getting somebody important in Hollywood to fly all the way out to Boston to personally bestow the fake award upon Harvey Weinstein.

Sony CEO Michael Lynton refused outright, voicing disgust that Weinstein was actually being honored for anything even remotely resembling human rights. Gates, the master of ceremonies for the event, allowed that he, too, had his "issues" with Weinstein.

Where Harvey was concerned, there was a battle royal between fear and loathing even among the most loyal Democrats. As far as the awards show was concerned, loathing won that particular round, because Jarrett and Gates couldn't get one single A-Lister to stoop so low as to actually call Harvey Weinstein a civil rights icon in exchange for future wads of his cash to the Democrats. They ended up using a mere Harvard student to pay Weinstein off with the medal.

Besides that contrived award, and Michelle Obama selling access to herself for $34,000 to Hollywood high rollers, the Sony emails revealed that Obama's relentless championship of the now-moribund Transpacific Partnership was fueled largely by Hollywood moguls anxious to keep their profits high through strict intellectual property rules to be applicable all over the world. The pact would have given them the right to sue foreign countries where their movies and TV shows and hit songs were being pirated. These suits would be prosecuted in secret courts, and any judgments would be as secret and as final as Weinstein's alleged confidentiality agreements with his victims. Had the TPP passed, it would have been the citizens of largely poor countries, like Indonesia and Vietnam, who would have been paying extortion to the likes of Harvey Weinstein - even if they themselves had never illegally downloaded a copy of one of his films.

As a matter of fact, emails in the Sony cache revealed that Hollywood insiders were so upset about previous Wikileaks documents revealing their own roles in secretly crafting the TPP that they flocked to the Oval Office to plot further public relations strategy with Obama himself.

And then Obama went on national TV to tell the public that an alleged North Korea revenge hack on Sony had been a virtual assault on US national security itself.  Obama's "intelligence community" absolutely did collude with Hollywood in order to "assassinate" Kim Jung Un in a spy spoof, and thus make audiences more amenable to an eventual regime change. And they say that Donald Trump is a reckless provocateur for calling the North Korea dictator "Rocket Man"? I wouldn't be surprised if Trump got his own inspiration for wackily whacking the foreign dictator from watching The Interview.

It took the Obamas five days, with a newly-fired Weinstein safely esconced in a luxury sex addiction therapy resort, to respond to the Hollywood scandal. They carefully crafted their words, saying they were disgusted by the reports about Weinstein. They didn't go so far as to claim disgust at the man himself. They didn't go so far as to return all his campaign donations, or pledge them to charity, as other Democratic politicians have done. They left it at a typically smarmy and meaningless "And we all need to build a culture -- including by empowering our girls and teaching our boys decency and respect -- so we can make such behavior less prevalent in the future."

Maybe they can raise more funds from Hollywood to build a virtue-signaling decency and empowerment wing at their new Chicago inspiration-industrial complex.

Tellingly, it was only the Hillary half of the Clinton duo which tweeted out some belated boilerplate shock and awe, also glaringly minus any cash donation to charity.(Update: on second thought, Hillary says, she will after all give the money to charity, because as she so humbly reminds us, she already gives away 10 percent of her annual income anyway.)

The Sensuous Art of the Political Ma$$age

As Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote concurrently with the release of the Sony emails, there is not only a co-equal partnership between Hollywood and the Democratic Party, Hollywood is an integral part of the military-industrial complex itself. Hollywood makes the surveillance state look sexy, and it makes war crimes seem glamorous. It can even try to make the CIA killing a North Korean dictator look zany and fun.

 Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.

As regards the New York Times and other establishment media suddenly all ganging up on their pal Weinstein after so many decades of giving him a free pass, who knows what their agenda really is? It could simply be the realization that maximum sleaze attracts maximum eyeballs, and they desperatey need maximum clicks to stay in business.  Or maybe Weinstein overstepped his bounds and groped not only the top actresses now fighting their way for a top spot in the accusation publicity sweepstakes, but someone so important that she shall not be named. I don't know, and I don't care. Because this would not be a scandal if it were a $40,000 McDonald's franchise owner groping his whole crew of $9-an-hour wage slaves between hamburger flips and milkshake runs. These scandals happen every hour and every day to the working class women the Obamas wouldn't empower if their new luxe lives depended on it.

I haven't been clicking on all of the sleaze myself, although I couldn't resist Times pundit Ross Douthat's hysterical piece last week about Weinstein and "liberalism's" creation of a whole stinky sty of man-pigs. Apparently, Republican pigs are not as disgusting as Democratic pigs, because Republicans grope women conservatively and Democrats grope them liberally. Everything must boil down to tribal affinity and tribal loyalty. Avoid nuance and depth as if your very careers depended on it.

My published comment:

Predatory behavior has more to do with power than it does with ideology. Creeps can be alt-right, libertarian, liberal, progressive, white, black, brown, or in one case, orange.

The one common denominator in the decades-long, consequence-free careers of serial predators is extreme wealth. It helps if the offender is also a media star or mogul, like Trump and Weinstein. Lack of clout is probably the main reason that Anthony Weiner, their brother in predation, is going to jail, and they're not. Perhaps if he'd been elected mayor of NYC, things would have turned out very differently for him. He would have been owed, big-time.

Weinstein did end up in the tabloids in 2015 when an Italian model accused him of groping her. Naturally, the media cast her as a bimbo with an accent. Provocative pics of her modeling sexy underwear duly accompanied all the articles, which were filed under "gossip" and "entertainment."

The NYPD pretended to care by setting up a "sting" phone call, in which a previously warned Weinstein readily admitted the groping. No charges were filed, because he came clean about the whole "misunderstanding." And then he gave Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.'s campaign a nice $10,000 donation to show how nice he really is.

This is the same DA who, it was just revealed, dropped pending fraud charges against Ivanka and Don Jr.

It's a small world after all - especially when money begetting power begetting more money begetting more power is the oily engine that makes it spin.

Thoughts on Charlottesville

The alt-right hate groups who caused so much terror, death and destruction in Charlottesville over the weekend are horrible enough. And then there's the extreme center's castigation of what they derisively and falsely call their "alt-left" counterparts.

White supremacists shouting anti-black, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic slogans had converged to protest the imminent removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E. Lee on the grounds of the Virginia university founded by slave owner Thomas Jefferson. They were confronted by democratic socialists, anarchists and other social justice groups who'd traveled to the quiet college town to show solidarity and bear witness. 

There has to be a reason that police stood by and let the two groups battle it out in the streets before they finally intervened. It was to give the TV audience watching at home the opportunity to see that "both sides do it." Lookee here, folks, socialists are the same thuggish thing as fascists! So before one young woman got killed and many others injured by a road-raged young neo-Nazi, the violence was dutifully portrayed as a  "clash" between two equally unruly groups. If an alt-right man threw a punch, and a leftist defended him or herself, it was caught on camera so that both could be chided for resorting to violence. Maybe they would just cancel each other out in the eyes of the great moral majority, and go home so that the proper anti-Trump resistance of the Democratic-Neocon alliance could get on with the more seemly outrage and virtue-signalling. 

Although centrist criticism of the leftist counter-protesters has now become suitably muted in light of the fact that one of them - a white female Bernie Sanders supporter, no less - was actually killed, the liberal punditocracy had been saying the exact same things which they are now criticizing the shocking Donald Trump for saying: that "many sides" act egregiously.

Right before Saturday's terror attack, corporate Democratic groups were actually goading young leftists, mocking them as probably too cowardly and basement-bound to ever don a pink pussy hat and join the astroturfed Clintonoid "resistance" movement against Trump. Writes Shuja Haider of Jacobin:

The morning before the rally, Mieke Eoyang, vice president of the National Security Program at centrist think tank Third Way, tweeted, “If the Bernie Bros wanted to make a show of force on behalf of progressive values, Saturday in Charlottesville would be a good time.”
Neera Tanden, president of liberal think tank Center for American Progress, turned disdainfully to her left later that day. “We have actual fascists marching with torches. Maybe everyone on the progressive side could focus on the enemies of progress in front of us,” she tweeted. “We’re ready for you to join us Neera,” one young activist responded. Tanden’s response was to ask him to condemn “those on the alt left who want to join with the fascists.”

If it had been Hillary Clinton supporters who were attacked by a Nazi sympathizer with a vehicular weapon, I think it's a good bet that their biographies would be cause celebre for a massive outpouring of corporate news coverage and fundraising appeals. But the New York Times, to name just one, never even mentioned in its bio-piece about the murdered Heather Heyer that she had been a Sanders supporter. It doesn't fit their prescribed identity politics Narrative. As a matter of fact, in a separate Tweet, Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg remarked that "the hard left seem as hate-filled as the alt-right."

Meanwhile, down at the more staid Netroots Nation's annual convention, which wound up over the weekend, the agenda was The Russian Infiltration of Our Democracy™️. The prescribed resistance at the Atlanta meeting was not against fascism, but against any and all criticisms of the Democratic Party's Russophobic propaganda. If I were a conspiracy buff, I might even suspect that the NSA and the CIA have infiltrated what used to be an independent group of progressive activists and bloggers. From Politico: 

The question of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia looms especially large here. In the hallways and on side panels, activists and organizers are resisting the guidance of party leaders who worry about overplaying the Russia issue at the expense of others that may matter more to voters. The message from the grass roots? We’re not going to stop talking about President Donald Trump and Russia.
“Not only is it a false choice, it’s a really limited choice,” said Democracy for America Executive Director Charles Chamberlain of the common refrain that Democratic candidates and groups ought to focus on issues like health care rather than the investigations. “I get it when people are frustrated when they feel like all they’re hearing is, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia…[but] it actually isn’t a distraction: It’s actually critical for our democracy.”

Chamberlain wasted no time, therefore, sending out an email blast in which he used Donald Trump's remarks about Charlottesville as the perfect fund-raising hook. How quickly Russia is forgotten! Now we should give this Democratic veal pen group money to show how united we are in (artificially narrow) righteous indignation against Trump's failure to call out white supremacists. It is absolutely critical for the Democratic Party to co-opt the same events that it deliberately chose to ignore in favor of Russia, Russia, Russia. (Not least because their backfiring pro-Clinton propaganda has seemingly infected so many "grassroots" minds to the point of no return.)

Hate and righteous anger are being falsely equated by far more sources than just the odious Donald Trump. As usual, the establishment is bursting its seams with its own, glibber versions of the same old platitudinous jingoistic boilerplate. (Love Trumps Hate; This Is Not Who America Is; Let the Healing Begin; Thoughts and Prayers; War Is Peace, etc.)

That being said, the emboldened, no-hoods-needed neo-Nazi movement is absolutely being aided and abetted by Trump's dangerous rhetoric, more bullhorn than the usual right-wing dog whistle. He is simply using the resentments of bigoted young white men the same way he is using the plights of the coal miners and the veterans and the fragmented labor unions: to further cement his own power. An administration composed of Wall Street bankers, bloodthirsty generals and fascist ideologues is his dangerous way of triangulating against traditional institutions, not least of which are the United States Congress and the entire federal court system. The courts have thus far balked at his unconstitutional directives and desires, the Congress not so much. So where there's gridlock, there's at least a little hope left for what is still left of our democracy.

Meanwhile, membership in the Democratic Socialists of America is skyrocketing. As a result, there are already worrying signs of infiltration by establishment Democrats, who'd also tried to co-opt the Occupy movement before the camps were torn apart by Democratic mayors, and the solidarity splintered, and the co-optation rendered moot.

While supporting such measures as universal health care and standing up to Trump-inspired fascism, there is, tellingly, nothing on the DSA website about resisting American wars and imperialism. 

And what is the American military's aiding and abetting of multinationals high on capitalistic crack but fascism? What are the bombings and occupations of faraway countries and their darker-skinned people anything but racism?

*****

Note to readers: I'll be away, so few to no postings in the next two weeks. I'll still be checking in regularly to moderate and publish your comments.

What Good Is the Democratic Party?

What good, for that matter, is any political party?

In this country, we have two major oligarchic political parties, otherwise known as the Duopoly. The Republicans, at this moment led by a thuggish reality TV star posing as a populist, devolved into two separate factions early in the regime of Barack Obama. The first group are "moderate" Republicans who aim to reward the rich under as much platitudinous cover of darkness as they can get away with. The second are renegades of the astroturf variety who do the dirty deeds as flamboyantly and as enthusiastically as possible. 

The first squabbling (moderately sadistic) faction aims to rip just enough government-subsidized health care away from just enough people so as to avoid inordinately hurting the obscene profits of private insurers, drug companies and other health profiteers - not to mention their own re-election chances. The other faction, of the Koch/Libertarian persuasion, wants to rip away all the subsidized health care from patients and predators alike. This is because they don't believe that government should be involved in any level of health care at all.

 Members of the first faction exist to give away the whole public store to the rich, who then, legend has it, will create some trickle-down prosperity for those who are mainly white, and work hard, and show proper admiration for the rich. The second faction are members of the so-called Freedom Caucus. They represent the freedom of the rich to ignore the whole trickle-down B.S. altogether and instead enjoy the All Against All spectacular from the freedom of their private islands. Ultimately, the intraparty GOP squabbling is just about the intensity and methods of the sadism. Judiciously placed leather whips, or waterboarding? Quick annihilation, or deferred pain for purposes of re-electing the Good Cop torturers?

On the Democratic side, meanwhile, are the centrists and the progressives. The centrists, known alternately as conserva-dems, Republican-lites and neoliberal New Democrats, also exist to serve the plutocracy while pretending to care more about the Commons than do their reasonable GOP friends across the aisle.  

Slightly less intense and dogmatic than their moderate Republican colleagues, the centrist Dems began forming their own faction way back in the 70s, just as the New Deal and the Great Society first began coming under attack from the extreme right wing.

To avoid the leaching off of their voters to Richard Nixon's racist "Southern Strategy," they tried to out-Republican the Republicans by also bleating out the  message that government is the problem, not the solution. The problem, of course, is that the poor are too selfish.

The centrist Democrats and the "moderate" Republicans have enjoyed varying degrees of success in their cooperative shreddings of the social safety net and their poor people punishings over the decades. While Bill "The Era of Big Government Is Over" Clinton was able to kick millions of poor women off the welfare rolls and send a record number of their mainly Black mates to prison with the help of a then-more reasonable GOP Congress, Barack Obama's own efforts at a similar "Grand Bargain" went down in defeat. The newly-ascendant Freedom Caucus, which gained power in large part because of Democratic coddling of Wall Street, deemed Obama's proffered cuts to Medicare and Social Security not sufficiently cruel.

Now, with the country fallen into a dystopian spiral in the aftermath of the neoliberal austerity reforms which rewarded the rich and punished the poor, it's now the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that's in the "ascendant," battling the We're Not Trump centrists with demands for universal health coverage, a living wage, free higher education, and enhanced Social Security, among other goals.

Notwithstanding the recent "unity tour" conducted by the leadership of these two Democratic factions (Tom Perez and the corporate DNC on one side and Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution on the other) the crack widened into a chasm this past week with the defeat in Georgia of Jon Ossoff, a centrist funded by the DNC establishment to the tune of more than $50 million.

Rahm "Mayor One Percent" Emanuel, who once out-Trumped Trump when as Obama's chief of staff he called the party's progressive base "fucking retarded" for daring to criticize the neoliberal Obama administration, is now belatedly urging his party to generate voter enthusiasm by voicing some concern for the downtrodden as well as for the upper middle class voters whose main source of anxiety is being personally offended by Trump's personality.

But look what happens when they try to ram milquetoast candidates like Ossoff down our throats. The Democratic establishment's buffed and carefully manicured scolding centrist finger has been rendered into an ossified vestige. It's turning into a parody of Rahm.

And that brings me back to my original question: What good is the Democratic Party? (Since it is a truth, almost universally acknowledged, that the Republican Party's own, more wickedly honest purpose is the total destruction of everybody except the oligarchy it represents, we needn't ask the same question of them.)

"The only legitimate reason for preserving anything is its goodness," wrote the late socialist philosopher Simone Weil. "The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?"

Let's examine the current agenda of the Democrats. Although the Sanders faction did eventually force the inclusion of some of the most progressive goals in party history into its latest official platform, there is no Democratic leader calling for an end to wars and American imperialism. If endless war and the slaughter and displacement of millions of innocent people are not pure evil, I don't know what is.

So, should the championing of bathroom rights, and limited, subsidized, market-based, and profit-intensive health care for about 20 million out of 50 million uninsured people outweigh or mitigate the evils of pollution-based climate change, joblessness, poverty, mass incarceration, deportations and chronic hunger? Precisely how much death and human collateral damage can a political party orchestrate, fund, or be complicit with, and yet still call itself a force for good rather than a criminal gang?

Since, as Simone Weil notes, one of the main functions of a political party is to generate collective passions, Democrats in the Age of Trump are stuck between a rock and a hard place. How do they counter and surpass Trump's method of transforming collective anxiety about surviving in a cold neoliberal world into a collective hatred of The Other? Since the centrist Democrats' pressure campaign of Russophobia doesn't seem to be working - neither winning them any new elections nor ginning up public enthusiasm for another war or two - they're stuck between the rock of pleasing their struggling voting base and the hard place of placating the wealthy donors who don't want to help the struggling voting base beyond the artificial and stingy parameters of voluntary philanthrocapitalism.

Besides generating collective passions and exerting pressure on voters about what these collective priorities and passions should actually be, the ultimate function of any political party is its own growth, without limit.

It's fairly obvious that it's not only the Democrats' centrist finger of neoliberal fate which is atrophying to the point of getting chopped off. It's their whole body of consultants and other experts for whom more Democrats winning more seats outweighs whatever agenda it is that they're trying to sell. It's worth quoting Simone Weil some more in this regard: 

"In principle, a party is an instrument to serve a certain conception of the public interest. This is true even for parties which represent the interests of one particular social group, for there is always a conception of the public interest according to which the public interest and these particular interests should coincide. Yet this conception is extremely vague.... No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he himself belong to one) his own.... A doctrine cannot be a collective product."

Weil observes that even victorious parties exist in a permanent state of impotence, always claiming that they have insufficient power. Just witness the first two years of the Obama administration. Here was a president swept into office on an overwhelming mandate to effect change for the greater public good, punish the thieves of Wall Street, and end the ill-advised Bush wars of imperialistic aggression. Despite having a majority in both houses of Congress for his first two years, he continued Bush's policies, including international aggression, domestic surveillance on citizens, tax breaks for the rich and the coddling of Wall Street.

 And then the Democratic Party and its media flacks had the chutzpah to inform us that it wasn't Obama who failed us. It was we who failed Obama.

They ignore the fact that when progressives did dare challenge Obama's right-wing policies, they were dismissed by a short middle-fingered vulgarian in language that eerily and chillingly presaged Donald Trump's own Tweets.

As Simone Weil so scathingly writes,

 "Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade. Hitler saw very clearly that the aim of propaganda must always be to enslave minds. All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it... Political parties do profess, it is true, to educate those who come to them: supporters, young people, new members. But this is a lie: it is not an education, it is a conditioning, a preparation for the far more rigorous ideological control imposed by the party upon its members."

It's no wonder, therefore, that politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are so despised by party establishments and declared "unelectable" despite their overwhelming popularity. In Bernie's case, the standard criticism is how dare he criticize the Democrats, when he himself is not even a member of the party? Thus do they unwittingly confess, as Weil points out, that "when one joins a political party, one gives up the idea of serving nothing but the public interest and justice."

We need to stop looking for the right political savior in the less offensive political party to save us. We need to all join together and save ourselves. Just as trickle-down prosperity is a cruel myth, so is trickle-down politics.

The water protectors of Standing Rock know this. So do the activists of the Black Lives Matter movement. So do the global climate marchers. So do the people demanding safe public housing. So do the people who were sadistically yanked out of their wheelchairs by police and dragged away for daring to protest the sadism fermenting in the Capitol Dome of Doom.

If we can't shame politicians and their parties into doing the right thing, we can instill fear into them. We can interrupt their town halls, we can inundate them with our phone calls, we can mock them with our satire, we can withhold our votes and our campaign contributions, we can resign our party memberships and disown Groupthink, we can even boycott their rigged elections with our independent campaigns and write-in candidates. Why settle for trickle-down, when there's a whole geyser of human strength and resolve ready, willing and able to explode right back at them?

There's plenty of goodness to go around. You just won't find it in the Uniparty, or what Christopher Hitchens aptly described as "two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derriere."