Trumpiversary Follies

Democrats swept the state houses of Virginia and New Jersey Tuesday while scoring dozens of victories in smaller races. This, according to mainstream liberal pundits, is both a slap in the face to Donald Trump and all the proof you'll ever need that the "monied burbs" that Barack Obama once owned have now returned to their pre-Trumpian state of sanity.

Self-congratulations are echoing throughout the Land of the Upper Ten Percent.

"Whoever said that identity politics is dead is brain-dead" they crow in unison. Now, they enthuse, let's get down to the hard work of wooing back the rest of the wealthy conservative turncoats to join us in common cause with all that the Democratic Party has to offer: transgender bathroom rights, ladders of opportunity, an ostentatious display of exotic diversity, and hatred of all things Russia and Donald Trump.

Oh, and forget about angry voters - especially non-credentialed angry white male voters. If you're mad as hell at anything except the permissible Donald Trump, you obviously are not college-educated and moderate enough for the New Democratic Party. As chronically overwrought New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes about his party's favorite deplorably nasty straw men:

We can’t warp liberalism into some sort of big-tent utopia where the lion can lie down with the lamb. We should stop trying to placate those who chafe at the very values that liberalism espouses. We don’t bend; we become a beacon.

We slough off this silly, racial romance dream of chasing chimerical, oppressed, forgotten, aggrieved, angry white men. Stop trying to convince us that their American dream is now a pipe dream. Stop trying to tell us that they alone should be the focus of our pity and the subject of our weeping.

 At this rate, Donald Trump might not even reach it to the Terrible Twos stage.  Only one year into his presidency, and still barely able to toddle and babble, he's already been sent to the Naughty Chair. Meanwhile, the hapless parental figures in the Democratic pundit class can't seem to make up their minds whether to brag, or to keep complaining about their defeat at the hands of a tantrum-throwing bully.

Katha Pollitt manages to outdo Charles Blow in the hand-wringing, hair-tearing follies department as she describes how her previously serene life has changed in the past year.

But the main difference is that I hate people now. Well, not all people, of course. Just people who voted for Trump. People who do their own “research” on the Internet and discover there that President Obama is a Muslim and Michelle Obama is a man. People who use the n-word and can’t even spell it right, because—have you noticed?—Trump supporters can’t spell. Well-off people who only care about lowering their taxes. People who said they couldn’t vote for Hillary because of her emails. Excuse me, sir or madam, can you explain to me what an email server even is? People who didn’t believe Trump would bring back coal or build the wall or Make America Great Again, but just wanted to blow things up. Congratulations! We are all living in the minefield you have made....

Actually, Trump voters are not the only people I hate. I also hate Jill Stein voters and Gary Johnson voters and Bernie deadenders with their ridiculous delegates math and people with consciences so delicate they could not bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary so they didn’t vote at all. I hate everyone who thought there was no “real” difference between the candidates because Hillary was a neoliberal and a faux feminist and Trump was not so bad. I hate people who spent the whole election season bashing Hillary in books and articles and Facebook posts and tweets, and then painfully, reluctantly dragged themselves out to vote for her, as if their one little, last-minute ballot cancelled out all the discouraging and dissuading they’d spent six months inflicting on people. I especially hate everyone who thought that electing a reactionary monster would be okay because it would—or could, or might, who can tell?—bring on the revolution. Looking at you, Susan Sarandon and Slavoj Zizek! You are idiots and my heart seethes with wrath against you.

So much for "It's the Economic Inequality, Stupid!" as a "woke" Democratic rallying cry. It's all about the #Resistance of the affluent professional class against the Basket of Deplorables. It's all about keeping elite anti-democratic resentment alive as a substitute for social and economic justice for all. The New York Times gushed,

The American suburbs appear to be in revolt against President Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection on Tuesday and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office.

From the tax-obsessed suburbs of New York City to high-tech neighborhoods outside Seattle to the sprawling, polyglot developments of Fairfax and Prince William County, Va., voters shunned Republicans up and down the ballot in off-year elections. Leaders in both parties said the elections were an unmistakable alarm bell for Republicans ahead of the 2018 campaign, when the party’s grip on the House of Representatives may hinge on the socially moderate, multiethnic communities near major cities....

 The Democrats’ gains signaled deep alienation from the Republican Party among the sort of upscale moderates who were once central to their coalition.

Democrats not only swept Virginia’s statewide races but neared a majority in the House of Delegates, a legislative chamber that was gerrymandered to make the Republican majority virtually unassailable. They seized county executive offices in Westchester and Nassau Counties, N.Y., and carried bellwether mayoral elections in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Manchester, N.H., all races that appeared to favor Republicans only months ago.

 The self-congratulators have somehow failed to notice that not all Democrats who won office this week are representative of the Monied Burbs. Many are actually of the socialist variety, or at least of the democratic-socialist variety. Not a few of the winning candidates were  even shunned by the same Democratic National Committee fundraising apparatus now patting itself on the back for winning back a handful of the hundreds of state seats lost to Republicans during the eight years of Obama.

In all, at least 15 Democratic Socialists were victorious nationwide on Election Day. This represents a 75 percent increase in seats won by members of Democratic Socialists of America in just the past year. One of them, Lee Carter, won his Virginia state legislative seat in the monied burb of Manassas. Something tells me he didn't run on a platform of tax breaks for the rich, with just a smidgen of trickle-down for transgendered residents and the requisite narrow number of minorities who've shown more than your average bootstrapping ability.

To the contrary: Carter was ignored by the centrist Democratic machine because he espouses Medicare for All and openly opposed construction of a gas  pipeline through residential neighborhoods which was supported by "moderate" state Democrats. In keeping with the party's red-baiting agenda, they trashed him as a "Stalinist."  Nevertheless, he beat the arch-conservative GOP incumbent by eight points.

The mainstream media is celebrating newly-elected Knoxville (Tennessee) City Council member Seema Singh Perez mainly on grounds of her gender and ethnic diversity while even the local newspaper skated past the equally important fact that she is a socialist.

Up in rural Cheektowaga, New York, where Trump yard signs dotted the landscape only a year ago, Democratic Socialist Brian Nowak won a seat on the Town Council. And in deep-red Pleasant Hill, Iowa, which is about as far away from the monied burbs as you can get,  Democratic Socialist Ross Grooters won his own municipal board seat. The list goes on and on.

There haven't been this many socialist victories in the United States since the Eugene Debs era. But you wouldn't know it from reading the wealth-serving New York Times and other mainstream outlets.

Neoliberalism will not go down without a fight. So stayed tuned as billions of dollars' worth of oligarch-funded political speech go soggily circling down the drain. Money still burbles in the burbs, of course, but not quite as loudly as the New York Times seems to think it does.

***

I almost forgot about this. Back on Monday, when polls showed that Virginia looked very dicey for the centrist gubernatorial candidate, and centrist Dems were in a frenzy of hand-wringing over the Donna Brazile revelations, the aforementioned Charles Blow attempted to somewhat distance himself from the party by writing that a little extra-party discourse might not be such a bad thing after all. Because whether from within or without the party, what's more important to desperate people than #RussiaGate and impeaching Trump? Certainly not economic and social justice for the bottom 90 percent. It's all about winning power and holding on to it at any cost.

He wrote, "Liberalism has leapt over the Democratic Party. Liberalism has its eye on a new beginning, while the mainstream party is stuck looking backward and bickering. The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic Party, or at least its future."

Hmm... I guess he means the New New Democrats as distinguished from the Clintons' failed New Democrat coalition of "Third Way" neoliberals.

My published response: 

Wow, already a whole year since Trump "won" thanks to the miracle of the archaic Electoral College. Time has both flown by and oozed like rancid molasses. Every time I see his face on TV I feel like I'm watching a surreal pastiche of 1984 and Groundhog Day.

CNN broke into its coverage of the latest mass shooting Sunday in order to air his grotesque boilerplate jive from Japan. At two points. the transmission feed froze. The first image caught him in a snarling rictus, but with his words flowing on in distorted slow-mo. The second time, his mouth just gaped open with nothing coming out of it at all. Bingo!

And is it me, or do massacres seem to be occurring more frequently since Trump blustered his way into the highest office in the land? Before he came along, I like to think that people who leaned in that direction had at least partially internalized social taboos against acting out their violent fantasies. Now, not so much. Trump has made it safe to be a fascist again.

And this brings me to the Democrats. It's really getting kind of stale, blaming everything on RussiaRussiaRussia, especially because it was the $5 billion in free coverage gifted to Trump by the US media that made it impossible for anyone to avoid him. As Les Moonves chortled, "Trump may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!"

And lighting a fire under the DNC's withered posterior may not feel good to the party elders, but it can and it must and it will be damned good for America.

How To Buy An Impeachment

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that the very rich usually get what they want from elected politicians.

And so if a hedge fund billionaire wants Donald Trump to be impeached, he'll  spend whatever it takes to make his dream come true. Just ask Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, who's already forked over $10 million for TV ads to inform the already converted that Trump needs to go. He's spending another 10 mil or so on social media ad buys, or at least 10 times what the Russians allegedly invested in order to magically propel Impeachy Don directly into the White House. And if you only count the $10,000 that Russian troll farms spent on Facebook ads, the total Steyer ad buy would amount to a whopping 20 times of that foreign expenditure.

Still, his impeachment campaign doesn't come anywhere close to the $5 billion worth of free TV coverage  which Trump got from the mainstream media during his endless campaign, nor the $2 billion in estimated cash raised by the Clinton machine.

But thanks to the power of even lesser - but still obscenely excessive - cash, Steyer is also getting plenty of free press to boost his ad campaign investment, most recently in a prominently-placed column by the New York Times' new hire, Michelle Goldberg. It's so awesome what tens of millions of dollars will do to "control the narrative" with little to no independent reporting even needed from the stenographer in question.

All Michelle Goldberg had to do to write her column was to elicit a little confirmation bias from other Democratic operatives and "thought leaders" who operate in Steyer's cash-rich political milieu. These experts are here to urge the cash-needy Congressional Democrats to get off their hands for a change, and hold out those hands for all the great ideas and policies and outcomes that progressive billionaires have to offer them. They should then absolutely embrace their donors impeachment.

Why wait for Robert Mueller to complete his criminal investigation into the Trump Empire's wheelings and dealings? Goldberg scrolled down the Times's speed-dial list to find out:

But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump. “If the president went on vacation in Madagascar for six months, that’s not a crime, but that’s impeachable.”

If you're going to use an establishment Democrat as the main supplementary source of your piece, you must also plug his book while letting him deny that he is plugging his book and also letting him deny that his book is even about Trump. This makes your column seem very plausible, and nowhere close to the Russian propaganda spreading its tentacles into our hearts and minds on a daily basis. It also artificially limits the "terror" that US citizens feel, restricted to only Trump and Russia as the roots of all evil.

  "And the best way to show Trump that people are serious about impeaching him is to put the message on television," sagely concludes Michelle Goldberg.

My published response:

Before they think about impeachment, Congress should take the keys to the nuclear code right out of his little hands. They should stop spending 70% of their time raising money, and start passing emergency legislation which rescinds the unitary executive powers instigated by Dick Cheney. They should repeal the Patriot Act at the earliest opportunity, strengthen shield laws for reporters, and rescind the blanket authorization for military force they give to presidents every single year, with virtually no serious debate.

The same congress critters who clutch their pearls over every last Trumpian faux pas just handed his perpetual war machine three quarters of a trillion dollars to play around with.

Senior Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham both admitted in recent days that they had no idea we had nearly a thousand troops in Niger, and at least six thousand in other African countries. Huh?

So methinks that Donald Trump isn't the only guy who isn't up to the job. The way the Pentagon and the CIA and corporations run roughshod over the legislative branch, you'd think they were only a millionaire social club whose job is to go on TV and complain helplessly when they aren't begging us to elect them to just two more years, six more years, a lifetime's worth of years.
 And while Mr. Steyer's heart might be in the right place, he exemplifies the dangerously outsize power that billionaires now have in running the country.

And then there's Mike Pence. God help us all.

Oafs At the Funeral

No bereaved person can avoid the inevitable encounter with a condoler who is congenitally incapable of sympathy. There will always be oafs at the funeral, people who blurt out something really horrible instead of murmuring something suitably comforting.

Myeshia Johnson, the newly widowed spouse of Green Beret La David T. Johnson, got an oaf for the ages when, as she rode to the airport to greet her husband's body, President Trump called and gruffly told her that her "guy" probably "knew what he was signing up for... but it still probably hurts."

At my own young husband's wake three decades ago, one mourner chirped, "Don't worry, you'll get over it sooner than you think and get married again," while a contrarian noted "You'd better not get married again, Karen. After all, the first one left you and the second one died on you!" 

There were many more condolences of that clumsy and insensitive, but well-meaning, sort. But since none of them came from the president of the United States, they didn't make the front-page news as the latest chapter in Political Distraction Theater.

The Emily Posts of political etiquette in the Age of Trump are universally incensed that he so sorely lacks the fake empathy skills of his predecessors. Other presidents have actually stuck to their boilerplate scripts and recited not only the names, but the entire life stories of dead soldiers as if they'd known them intimately their entire lives. They even developed such acting skills as the quavering voice and the tear-filled eye.

 Donald Trump doesn't believe in either crocodile tears or in sticking to scripts. So when he probably meant to tell Myeshia Johnson that "despite the dangers he knew were lurking everywhere, your husband was very brave to protect our country and preserve our freedoms by making the ultimate sacrifice," he came out instead with the equivalent of "War is hell. Shit happens."

The bereaved were rendered sadder by the fact that Trump didn't even remember to say Sgt. Johnson's name in his condolence call. And they'll be rendered sadder still by the fact that political and media critics are making this story more about Trump's poor social skills than they are about Johnson and his surviving family members. In its own front page story, headlined as an "imbroglio," the New York Times itself didn't get around to mentioning Johnson's name until the third paragraph (after putting Trump in the first graf, and John McCain in the second.) It didn't acknowledge Myeshia Johnson by name until the seventh paragraph.

What I suspect is really bothering the political establishment more than Trump's crude words is that his crude words will discourage young people from volunteering for military service. The commander in chief just committed the ultimate faux pas of admitting that people in uniform are nothing but human meat in buffer zones between the poor citizens of resource-rich countries and the US-based corporations which want to plunder those rich resources. Rather than tell recruits that the military is a great place to get job training, college tuition and other lifetime benefits, Trump just brayed out that you have a very good chance of getting killed if you join up. Presidents are supposed to celebrate and mourn and gloss over deaths, not throw a shadow over the rosy patriotic glow of it all.

And of course, Trump had also brought the latest criticism upon himself when, days before his clumsy phone call, he'd boastfully compared the frequency of his own personal condolence calls to those of his predecessors.

This latest Trump outrage, this slap in the face to everything that is stylish and sacred, also distracts attention from why the United States has troops in Niger and other parts of Africa in the first place. 

As Phillip Carter, of the liberal think tank Center for a New American Security, writes in Slate,

  Thirteen days after their deaths, we lack any real explanation for why and how Army Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, Sgt. La David T. Johnson, and Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright died in combat on Oct. 4. In a wide-ranging press conference, senior Pentagon officials said they were in Niger to train and advise the country’s security forces, which have partnered with the U.S. to root out al-Qaida-linked elements in Africa. The efforts in Niger appear broadly linked to the global U.S. counterterrorism campaign, which began after 9/11, an effort that now continues to expand and grind on under an  amorphous blend of legal authorities.

 Sgts. Black, Johnson, Johnson, and Wright died while accompanying Nigerien forces on a patrol near the border with Mali. Similar patrols had been conducted some 30 times previously without incident. And yet, on Oct. 4, al-Qaida-linked militants ambushed the American Green Berets and their Nigerien teammates. The ambush—and American fatalities—punctured the lie that American troops were simply in Niger for a training mission, just as American casualties have done for decades of similar missions in Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Training and advising missions frequently include combat, too; the enemy gets an important vote on deciding when and where they make the switch. Insisting otherwise insults those who conduct these missions, and the memories of those who die during them.

Since Trump became president and elevated the military to even the highest echelons of his civilian cabinet, ground troops have been granted unprecedented leeway all around the world. The Guardian quotes one unnamed former official as saying "Decisions about when and what to engage have been devolved right down to unit level. Any soldier knows that if you give guys on the ground more independence, then they will be that much more aggressive and will take more risks.”

Trump has given his "guys" all the freedom in the world to protect the freedoms of the global oligarchy. If they didn't know what they were getting into then, they probably are getting a nasty reality check right about now, thanks to his unabashed oafishness.
 

Trump To Puerto Rico: Drop Dead

 **9/28 Updated below.

OK, so maybe that's a little harsh. But more likely, it's not harsh enough, given that Donald Trump's administration is actually in the business of hastening death - be it by attempting to yank health care from millions, reducing public housing assistance, destroying environmental protections, scoffing at banking regulations, and of course, waging endless wars and expanding drone strike assassinations to wherever on the globe "terrorist" Muslims live, breathe and drive. (not counting, of course, his good oil-rich friends in Saudi Arabia.)

Trump took a break from his racist tirades against professional football players, and has finally gotten around to hurling his white supremacist racism against Puerto Rico.  Following the All-American austerity Bible of foisting "personal responsibility" upon the poor for the benefit of the predatory billionaire class, the president, in a triple whammy of a Tweet, dutifully blames the American citizens of this island commonwealth for their own plight:

"Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble....

It's (sic) old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated, with billions of dollars....

owed to Wall Street and the banks, which, sadly must be dealt with. Food, water and medicine are top priorities - and doing well #Fema."

As bad as this sounds, it's really nothing worse than how United States leaders have treated Puerto Rico for the past 120 years of its unwanted status as a de facto United States colony plundered by banksters, sugar barons and drug-makers. At least Trump is not ordering the Air National Guard to bomb our fellow American citizens, as Harry Truman did back in 1950, for having the audacity to seek their independence from Uncle Sam. 

It was not until many decades later that the FBI, under a Freedom of Information Act demand, released files which revealed that about 100,000 Americans residing on that island had been systematically harassed, and often jailed and tortured and experimented on and killed, for participating in the nationalist movement. Naturally, US officials used the same tried and untrue and permanent excuse of "Russian meddling" to justify their own atrocities.

So in the long run, Donald Trump's clumsy bloviating against Puerto Rico might even have the silver lining of causing mainland Americans who hadn't even realized that this island is part of the United States to join forces against him, and to demand an immediate government response to a "natural" humanitarian catastrophe caused, in large part, by man-made climate change.

As the New York Times reports, 

A new poll of 2,200 adults by Morning Consult found that only 54 percent of Americans know that people born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, are U.S. citizens. (Because Puerto Rico is not a state, they do not vote in presidential elections, but they send one nonvoting representative to Congress.) This finding varied significantly by age and education. Only 37 percent of people ages 18 to 29 know people born in Puerto Rico are citizens, compared with 64 percent of those 65 or older. Similarly, 47 percent of Americans without a college degree know Puerto Ricans are Americans, compared with 72 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 66 percent of those with a postgraduate education.

Inaccurate beliefs on this question matter, because Americans often support cuts to foreign aid when asked to evaluate spending priorities. In our poll, support for additional aid was strongly associated with knowledge of the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. More than 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support aid, compared with only 4 in 10 of those who do not.

Unlike the presidents before him, Trump is not even remotely trying to cover up the historical, institutional and corporate racism inherent in America's ongoing "War Against All Puerto Ricans." 

This disdain had heretofore been carefully hidden under the usual benevolent "white man's burden" kinds of platitudes. At least, unlike Teddy Roosevelt, Trump isn't ordering that only English be taught in this Spanish-speaking territory's schools.

A longtime protectionist ban (the Jones Act) on any non-US shipping to or from the island remains in place, meaning that emergency humanitarian aid from South America, Central America and Cuba, and all unaffected, or less-affected Caribbean locales, is still ridiculously outlawed, at great human cost. The Trump administration has denied a request for a waiver which would allow, among other things, swift lifesaving foreign shipments of gasoline to power the generators of Puerto Rico's sweltering hospitals.

That's outrageous, to put it very mildly. (**see update) But where was all the liberal outrage in 2015/16, when officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (unelected American governing bodies) foisted a Greece-like austerity regimen upon Puerto Rico when it defaulted on a $58 million predatory loan repayment? The Obama White House was certainly very quick to nix the kind of bailout it had only recently gifted to the Wall Street banks which had plundered Puerto Rico in the first place.

  At the same time that the big banks were underwriting subprime mortgages on the mainland and turning ("securitizing") them into fraudulent toxic financial instruments, they were going on an orgiastic Puerto Rican bond-buying spree, and foisting the paper on colluding hedge funds. When that all went kaput, the neoliberal solution was to reduce the federally mandated minimum wage for select groups of Puerto Rican Americans, to close public schools and fire teachers, to cut pension funds, to freeze the wages of public employees, to raise college tuition, to reduce Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians (causing a mass exodus of doctors from the island to the mainland), and to cut food stamp stipends.

As World Bank economist Anne Krueger wrote at the time, cutting the too-generous-for-Puerto Ricans minimum wage of $7.25 makes perfect sense,  "because higher labor costs force Puerto Rican businesses to raise prices, making the island more expensive for tourists than neighboring Caribbean nations."

In other words, the dark-skinned Puerto Ricans should sacrifice and get paid less money to buy fewer expensive groceries so as to dissuade wealthy, cost-conscious (and white) tourists from vacationing instead in Jamaica or the Bahamas, where the dark-hued servants earn even smaller pittances. Moreover, Krueger went on, the $7.25 minimum wage also discourages multinationals from locating their businesses in Puerto Rico. After all, the big pharmaceutical companies have already left in a snit for much friendlier wage-slave countries.  This exodus, in turn, had the awful effect of "causing more workers to opt for collecting welfare over working." So let's cut their welfare assistance even more, to get them out of their hammocks of dependency and send them to work at a special introductory rate as low as $4.25 an hour.

Paul Krugman, resident New York Times liberal columnist and self-limited critic of only the GOP side of institutional white supremacy and austerity, dutifully approved:

  A recent report commissioned by the commonwealth’s government argues that its economy is hurt by sharing the U.S. minimum wage, which raises costs, and also by federal benefits that encourage adults to drop out of the work force. In principle these complaints could be right. In particular, even economists who support a higher U.S. minimum wage, myself included, generally agree that it could be a problem if set too high relative to productivity — and Puerto Rican productivity is far below mainland levels.

 Trump, in his own brash and insensitive way, is merely repeating what the poobahs of the Neoliberal Thought Collective have been dictating to the world for decades: it's the poor who must bear every burden and who must be blamed when they're not "productive" enough to fix the problems caused by the rich. Trump simply lacks the necessary finesse, the concern-trolling obfuscation, the colorblind beneficence of the modern colonial mindset as displayed by the Kruegers and the Krugmans and the Obamas of the world.

In spite of his own ignorant self, Donald Trump is turning out to be a damned good educator. 

  Therefore, may his ugly campaign of divide-and-conquer have the unintended consequence of actually uniting more people in both the pursuit of knowledge and in class/race solidarity.

*Update: Responding to criticism, Trump said he'll visit the island next Tuesday, scope it out, and continuously praise the strength and resiliency (neoliberal code for "you're so screwed") of the great Puerto Rican people. "It's very, very tough because it's an island... sitting in the middle of an ocean, and it's a big ocean, a really really big ocean," he insightfully prattled.

Meanwhile, CNN has amped up its coverage of the Puerto Rico catastrophe, with pundit Nia Malika Henderson even voicing the hope that since Trump watches a lot of cable news, perhaps he'll stop congratulating himself on the "great ratings" for his lackluster response long enough to allow his brain to soak up some of the awful human suffering going on outside his own self-involved little world.

We'll see. People are literally running out of time.

**Update 9/28: After initially refusing to waive the Jones Act lest the profits of the American shipping industry be reduced, Trump, through his Homeland Security secretary, reversed course and waived it after mounting pressure from the Puerto Rican governor and members of Congress, as well as from Defense Secretary James Mattis, who cited "national security" rather than humanitarianism as the prime reason. The war department obviously fears an outbreak of civic dissent on the island. This waiver will allow international disaster aid to flow to Puerto Rico. The most necessary commodities are water and fuel.

Meanwhile, long-term disaster assistance is still on hold, although Wall Street banks and hedge funds have "charitably" offered to strangle Puerto Ricans with even more debt in order to repair their destroyed electrical grid. Whatever happened to the quaint notion of the  Army Corps of Engineers performing this task as an ordinary public service? Maybe they're all tied up building infrastructure elsewhere, such as Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.

And here's the cruel catch (isn't there always a cruel catch?) The Jones Act waiver is cruelly limited to only 10 days. This means that emergency shipments from foreign countries will have precious little, if any, time to load up supplies and get to their destination. Trump obviously doesn't want his faux-concern for suffering Puerto Ricans to overcome his very real concern for American shipping magnates. This waiver is nothing but a one-way ticket to hell.

I hereby double down on my original title, Trump to Puerto Rico: Drop Dead!  

Power To the McCarthyite People

Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power has countered Donald Trump's unhinged performance at the international confab this week with a very unhinged proposal of her own.

Taking a page from the paranoid Trump playbook, this liberal interventionist of the Obama administration penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the construction of a huge, amazing, beautiful wall like the world has never seen before. This wall would consist of stringent monitoring and censorship of whatever independent thought on the Internet that she and some shadow cohort deem to be "fake news" - a/k/a subversive. Suppression is needed, Power writes, because any and all criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex is obviously coming straight out of Russia. Vladimir Putin is secretly feasting upon what she calls "a ripe subset of the population."

While television remains the main source of news for most Americans, viewers today tend to select a network in line with their political preferences. Even more significantly, The Pew Research Center has found that two-thirds of Americans are getting at least some of their news through social media.

After the election, around 84 percent of Americans polled by Pew described themselves as at least somewhat confident in their ability to discern real news from fake. This confidence may be misplaced. (my bold.)

People not fortunate enough to be a member of Samantha Power's Class of Expert Thinkers are too stupid to distinguish proper, American, market-based neoliberal propaganda from other types of propaganda. Therefore she wants to take us back to a mythical time when all good citizens and true strictly adhered to mainstream media. She wants consumers to settle for whatever political discourse the corporate media chooses to slice, dice, marinate, cook up and boil down in a limited smorgasbord of pre-approved information.

We Americans are getting way too fat on way too much unregulated content. And Samantha Power wants our diets to be fair, balanced, vapid, and docility-provoking.

Here's the fake, untrue, paranoid and misleading paragraph in her op-ed that really got me chuckling:

During the Cold War, most Americans received their news and information via mediated platforms. Reporters and editors serving in the role of professional gatekeepers had almost full control over what appeared in the media. A foreign adversary seeking to reach American audiences did not have great options for bypassing these umpires, and Russian dezinformatsia rarely penetrated.

As a former "professional gatekeeper" on both newspapers and radio during the waning days of the Cold War and its aftermath, neither my job description nor that of my editors ever involved watching the wires and news releases coming across our desks for evidence of rampant infestations of dezinformatsia. Our main challenge was in mucking out whole boatloads of domestic political manure, which propagated in mountainous piles of real American press releases and flowed in endless streams of homegrown gobbledygook warning real Americans about such dangers as the Black Panthers lurking on every rooftop, and the Commie plot to sneak fluoride into our drinking water supply.

Revisionist History, Henry Kissinger-Style

  It's odd that, as such a credentialed stickler for academic rigor and especially as a former human rights journalist, Power also fails to mention that before, during,and throughout the Cold War, American newspapers, local radio stations and other independent media were thriving, proliferating and disseminating an almost unbelievable variety of opinion and news on a wide variety of topics. Even the smallest cities published both a morning and afternoon newspaper, and hosted a whole slew of radio stations which broadcast a veritable feast of locally produced spot news and discussion programs.

Maybe Henry Kissinger, that fawning Joe McCarthy critic (he could have done more to fight Communism!) and architect of not a few crimes against humanity himself, got her to revise her worldview when he picked her for a prize which he humbly named after himself.

Sure, the poobahs have always complained, loudly and vociferously, about content they don't like, and they've often threatened (and filed) libel suits. But rarely have they seriously demanded that a publication or a station be shut down, as they are now calling for such outlets as RT to be shut down. They took the First Amendment very literally "in those good old days".

It was with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated broadcasting in the public interest, when local news stations began to be subsumed into such consolidated megaliths as Clear Channel Communications, original home base of hate-monger Rush Limbaugh, among others. Local news went the way of the rotary phone, If there isn't Limbaugh to listen to for hours upon hours every day, there's always the canned feedback of the same top ten hits to keep you bland from Bangor to San Diego.

As John Light writes for the Bill Moyers blog, there are "857 channels, and there's nothing on." 

And it's getting worse during the Trump era. The planned takeover by the right-wing Sinclair family of the Tribune Company will result in one company controlling the local TV news beamed out to 70% of American households.

The waning days of the Cold War were also the waning days of the daily local newspaper. Vulture investors swooped down with a vengeance during the 70s recession, bought up all the financially struggling periodicals they could, downsized them, loaded them up with the debt, and then shuttered them for good at a windfall profit for themselves. If a newspaper was reasonably profitable, it stayed open under new cost-cutting management. I'd suggest that if Samantha Power was so worried about "foreign interference" in our media,  she would have first pointed her finger at Australian mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought up a whole bunch of US newspapers and broadcast stations, including the last newspaper I ever worked for. As the soon-to-be de facto head of the Republican "Fox News" Party, he proceeded to close all our satellite bureaus and to fire most of the staff. We pre-existing reporters were not only too liberal and muck-rakish, Murdoch also thought that our modest but livable wages were way too high. Also, too many news stories were unfairly interfering with all those garish front page ads for booze and used cars.

So, Earth to Samantha: Russia has nothing to do with the demise of quality print and broadcast media, or the alleged dumbing down of Americans. Corporate greed on a global scale has done that. And the corporations, particularly those which profit mightily from the American war and surveillance state, want to ensure that only their important messages get through to us.

RussiaRussiaRussiaFearFearFearWarWarWarBuyBuyBuyMedicateMedicateMedicate.

The excellent Moon of Alabama blog has a detail-rich, evidence-based  deconstruction of Powers's op-ed, which among its other blatant whoppers, maintains that the Soviets unconscionably infiltrated Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. The Russians wanted Walter Mondale to win, so thank goodness we dodged that lethal bullet and Reagan went on to successfully entrench the neoliberal mantra - private competition and profit at great public cost - into people's ripe little minds. This, from a top adviser in the Obama administration! I can only surmise that Samantha must have just watched The Manchurian Candidate on TV to get her so inspired and so befuddled.

She despises the lefties, what's left of them, just as much as Joe McCarthy did back in the good old late 40s and early 50s. She wants America to hate again just as eagerly as Donald Trump does. But the special thing that centrist Democrats want us to hate, besides Russia, is a brand-new horrible something called divisiveness:

 In the United States, the vulnerability to foreign influence is exacerbated by divisions within the political establishment. During the Cold War, the larger struggle against communism created a mainstream consensus about what America stood for and against. Today, our society appears to be defined by a particularly vicious form of “partyism” affecting Democrats and Republicans alike. This divisive environment can make the media more susceptible to repeating and amplifying falsehoods.

More nonsense from a self-described historian. All you have to do is watch the Vietnam War documentary currently airing on PBS to remember that Lyndon Johnson demanded that the anti-war raging protests on American streets and on college campuses be exposed as a Kremlin plot. He was very sorry when even J. Edgar Hoover himself couldn't shut down the dissent and come up with evidence of Russian meddling. The war and its critics ended up destroying his presidency.

 The granddaddy of propaganda, Edward Bernays, noted 90 years ago that   divisiveness has always been as all-American as fear itself. The difference nowadays, as I noted above, is the stunning lack of diversity in our consolidated establishment media, now comprised of only six or eight major corporations. In 1928, when Bernays wrote, there were 22,128 specialty periodicals, with most of them enjoying circulations above 100,000 readers.

The diversity of these publications is evident at a glance. Yet they only faintly suggest the multitude of cleavages which exist in our society, and along which flow information and opinion carrying authority to the individual groups....

"Life" satirically expresses the idea in the reply which it represents an American as giving to the Britisher who praises this country for having no upper and lower classes or castes:

"Yeah, all we have is the Four Hundred, the White-Collar Men, Bootleggers, Wall Street Barons, Criminals, the D.A.R., the K.K.K., the Colonial Dames, the Masons, Kiwanis and Rotarians, the K. of C., the Elks, the Censors, the Cognoscenti, the Morons, Heroes like Lindy, the W.C.T.U., Politicians, Menckenites, the Booboisie, Immigrants, Broadcasters, and - the Rich and Poor."

So therefore, methinks that Samantha Power doth protest too much.

For a member of a political party which prides itself so much on "diversity," she certainly seems insanely intent upon limiting America's diverse citizenry to the preferences of one very small core of wealthy donors and Neocon warmongers.

And it was absolutely no surprise to me that the compliant New York Times chose not to allow reader comments to Samantha Powers's special pleading for even more censorship of dissenting, independent voices.

This country is ripe for revolution, or maybe it's already just a ripening corpse, but whatever it is, it's obviously consolidated all the Powers That Be into one massive blob of pulsating delusions.

Blob-o-Mania: Samantha Power Receiving Kissinger Diplomacy Prize


... And now streaming for your nostalgic Orwellian viewing pleasure over an acceptable Internet site, or if you're a real American, through your smart modern two-way TV set:

Trump Takes a Dump

Sorely lacking both cajones and intellectual stamina, Donald Trump had to cower behind a hurricane to embrace a bigot after his own heart.

Only when safely esconced in his Camp David retreat on a Friday night - when every professional scold worth his or her oversize paycheck was off the air  - did Trump officially pardon former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

We knew this was coming. The president said as much at his Phoenix rally this week, complaining that he couldn't make his grandiose announcement just yet because "they" had put the kibosh on it. He presumably meant the military junta and the Wall Street executives who are undemocratically running the country in his permanent mental and moral absence.

  So Trump not only dumped on Latinos during the traditional Friday night news dump beloved of all presidents before him, he actually increased the chances that the people running the show wouldn't much notice or even care. That's because the show this weekend is all about another vicious monster, named Harvey, making his landfall in Texas. Still, Trump couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to dig his dull knife in further and twist it by passive-aggressively allowing the immigrant checkpoints on evacuation routes to remain open. This decision both slowed down evacuations for everybody, and ensured that at least some "illegals" would stay behind in harm's way. The only choice offered to the undocumented was between drowning, and being arrested and deported.

The checkpoints will close only when actual highways close. Checkpoints will remain open on all roads not in the direct path of the storm, officials said.

Trump and Arpaio and all their loyal fans must be so proud of themselves. Hopefully, they won't drown in their own tears of joy or worse yet, choke on their spasms of maniacal wind.

Arpaio gained national notoriety by racially targeting people of Hispanic descent and building one of the most inhumane county jails in modern history. He housed inmates in tents in the broiling heat, served them rotten inedible food and humiliated men by forcing them to wear pink underwear. After years of getting away with it, he finally was convicted of criminal contempt last month for his refusal to obey a court order to stop his racial profiling. He had not yet been sentenced when Trump gleefully pardoned him.

But Trump still wasn't done dumping. He also chose the looming hurricane as the most optimal time to officially ban transgender people from joining the military.

He will, however, still allow undocumented immigrants to fight and die for the American imperium as the only fast track to citizenship yet available to them. Trump would never allow his xenophobic principles to stand in the way of endless profits for the perpetual war machine.

Of course, if these immigrant soldiers are unlucky enough to suffer a traumatic brain injury or PTSD during their tours of duty, and subsequently get into trouble with the law when they return home, they can still be deported in a New York minute.

Furthermore, the Pentagon announced plans last month to administer "enhanced screenings" and monitoring to more than 4,000 naturalized troops upon their returns home in order to ensure that they have not become "radicalized" during their military training and service.

The Trump administration has also tightened the screws on new immigrant recruits by delaying their final orders after sign-up and thus opening them up to deportation proceedings in the interim. According to the Washington Post, about a thousand of these recruits have already seen their visas expire as they await their deployment orders.

Trump is nothing if not a consummate bait-and-switch operator. And the military itself has long been in the business of holding out the carrots of citizenship, education, a steady paycheck and free medical care to its desperate recruits from all lower classes from all countries before wielding any number of their heavy sticks - not least of which is permanent physical disability or death.

Might As Well Face It, They're Addicted to Trump

The New York Times is so obsessed with Donald Trump that it headlines a scary new report about climate change, not as a scary new report about climate change, but as about the clear and present danger which The Donald represents in possibly - possibly! - withholding his official imprimatur.

Frankly, given that any document bearing Trump's signature is suspect on its face, his failure to sign the new report might actually be a very good thing. It will get a lot more attention without his outsize paw-print obliterating the fine print. It'll be a lot like the lists of condemned books and films that the Catholic Church used to display in the vestibules. Before even hitting the holy water font, we'd make a beeline for the latest report. We were that eager to learn what was forbidden us, and then we'd promptly perform our own extended searches in the public library and in newspaper movie listings to gobble up all the forbidden fruit we would not otherwise have known about.

So what is it that Trump allegedly doesn't want us to see? Get out of our way!

Since the media apparently has forgotten how to cover any story without inserting a Donald Trump angle into it somewhere, anywhere, they are nevertheless persisting in doing him the honor of making everything all about him.

"Scientists Fear That Trump Will Dismiss Climate Change Report" blares the Times and most other news agencies today. Therefore, fear not the premature dying of yourselves, your children and the planet. Worry instead that Trump is so magical that his mighty Tweets will a) speed up the process; and b) convince everybody that they are not sweating more than usual during this Summer of Hell.

Who knew that such a doofus could be so powerful as to actually control our thoughts? Methinks the mainstream media doth protest too much, especially seeing as how the actual report has successfully eluded Trump's slimy grasp. So much for the totalitarian suppression of facts under this fascistic regime, which has thus far proven itself mighty inept in the barn door-closing department.

The media is really having a hard time of it now that Trump is vacationing so far away in exotic New Jersey. They're so used to being the supporting actors in his show that performing their anti-Trump soliloquies minus the comforting backdrop of the press briefing room is jarring. They're scrambling to insert Trump into stories which have nothing much to do with him or for that matter, with us. They assume that the American public is as addicted to Trump trivia and drama as they are.

Due to the lack of any real news emanating from Trump's golf club during these dog days of summer, the Times was even impelled to publish a piece in which four - four! - of its critics "weigh in" with snarky suggestions on what he should watch on TV during the next couple of weeks. (Hint: one of the shows centers around the obsessive-compulsive disorder of its protagonist. Pot/kettle much?)

The newspaper has also started publishing a regular feature curating all the late-night show jokes about the Trump show. I read in today's Times that last night one of the hosts quipped about Trump making a peace deal with some golf course gophers. I'm too lazy to go looking for the links link myself, so Google it if you must.

Times columnist David Brooks is so obsessed by Trump that he devoted a full column to how obsessed he is by Trump. At least it's funnier than the gopher story. An excerpt:

Now a lot of people are clearly still addicted to Trump. My Twitter feed is all him. Some people treat the Trump White House as the “Breaking Bad” serial drama they’ve been binge watching for six months. For some of us, Trump-bashing has become educated-class meth. We derive endless satisfaction from feeling morally superior to him — and as Leon Wieseltier put it, affirmation is the new sex.

According to a recent Harvard study (which somehow has also mysteriously escaped the all-powerful Trumpian clutches), the mainstream media devotes almost half of all its space and air time to Trump.

From Poynter:

The report portrays a media that was initially solicitous to Trump, later more critical and, now, distinctly combative. And, all along, he was fascinating and clearly a positive influence on ratings and circulation, especially on the digital side of elite newspapers.
"Our studies of 2016 presidential election coverage found that Trump received more news coverage than rival candidates during virtually every week of the campaign. The reason is clear enough. Trump is a journalist’s dream."
"Reporters are tuned to what’s new and different, better yet if it’s laced with controversy. Trump delivers that type of material by the shovel full. Trump is also good for business. News ratings were slumping until Trump entered the arena. Said one network executive, '[Trump] may not be good for America, but [he’s] damn good for [us].'"
The report serves as a window, too, onto the mentality of journalists — in ways that might ruffle Fox News and other exemplars of conservative conventional wisdom in portraying the "mainstream" press as driven by liberal bias.
"Although journalists are accused of having a liberal bias, their real bias is a preference for the negative."

Trump is so ridiculously easy to cover. All that reporters need to do is set their alarms to beat the competition to the early morning Tweets. Barring that, they can regularly stick their microphones right into his obliging face when they're not passively lapping up all the creamy leaks gushing from anonymous sources both within and without his administration. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the leaks were coming from The Donald himself. He has, after all, been known to impersonate his own publicists. 

If Trump is impeached, indicted or resigns, the media will be deprived of the best drug it ever took and the best drug it ever dealt. The crash and burn will be epic, especially when we all wake up to the early morning mug of the oh-so-sober and oh-so-dangerous Mike Pence.