But time is running out! If you don't fork over your cash by midnight on December 31st, you will lose the golden opportunity to deduct your gift from your state and federal income taxes. Your failure to contribute to the Doomsday fund drive by the deadline might even make you an enabler of the Apocalypse.
Resistance is futile to the Democratic Party's insane mantra that money in the hands of discredited experts is the true meaning of social justice. And well it should be, given that party operatives and pundits are still resisting looking in their own mirrors and seeing themselves instead of the visages of Putin and Comey and Old Whitey Trash. They're still doubling down on the message that since they allegedly suck less than Republicans, they can be our only saviors.
Ask not what the Democratic Party and its various propaganda offshoots can actually do to change your lives for the better -- by, say, advocating for Medicare for All, or supporting strong public labor unions. Ask instead how you can help enrich the same careerists who just shoved a failed presidential candidate down our throats like she was Good N Plenty candy. And it turned out that she was actually Ipecac, the very emetic that vomited up Donald Trump and the most extreme right-wing administration in United States history.
Neera Tanden, the Clinton operative who runs the Democratic Party-affiliated Center for American Progress, has been emailing me every day this week. Despite generous funding from Wall Street and multinational corporations, you'd think that her think tank was tanking from lack of cash.
Here's her latest apocalyptic appeal, sandwiched appropriately between the ubiquitous come-ons from Kohl's and Harry & David:
Dear Karen:If you are a rational person who can show solidarity with a corporate political party by daring to believe in climate change, then show it with your wallet. Help pay the salaries and protect the jobs of the elites so that they can continue their important work of sending out a steady stream of fund-raising emails to the people they still persist in believing actually still believe their spiels.
This December, I’m reaching out to CAP supporters like you to highlight the threat our planet faces from Donald Trump’s policies. We owe it to future generations to stand up against the climate change deniers who are filling Trump’s future cabinet. If you share our belief that climate change is a real and imminent threat, please make a tax-deductible donation to CAP today.
We cannot stand by as Trump puts the profits of fossil fuel executives above the health and safety of our communities. Please donate today to help us push back against Trump’s policies and protect our planet from peril.
Thank you,
Neera Tanden
Above all, pay no attention to the global polluters and greedy plutocrats who help Neera and her staff maintain the high-rent lifestyles to which they have become accustomed: Walmart, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, G.E., Pearson, Citigroup, AT & T, and Blackstone, to name just a few. Pay no attention to the inconvenient truth that many of these same anti-social corporations are either directly working with Donald Trump, or already profiting mightily from his trickle-down largesse.
I also got an email from Robert Reich today. The former Clinton labor secretary seemed to be under the impression that I am a member of the wealthy donor class. It's very depressing, being told that inclusion in the Donald Trump Resistance Movement hinges upon your ability to send money. It hinges upon the elitist supposition that your most immediate worry is not where your next meal is coming from, but how much you can get away with writing off on your tax return in 2017.
But the most depressing aspect of Reich's appeal was the optimistic theory that donating money to Common Cause will miraculously help make Donald Trump honest and "accountable."
Americans deserve a president who is accountable only to us -- not to their own financial interests. But if Donald Trump and his family don’t entirely divest from his businesses and set up a blind trust, his administration will be compromised from Day 1.Pressuring Donald Trump to not be a greedy crooked bastard is a little like closing the barn door after a dozen rabid stallions have not only escaped, but have run roughshod over the entire countryside for decades. As Trump might say, that is just sad. Common Cause should maybe think about renaming itself Elite Cause.
And then there's the standard and artificially narrow identity politics aspect to the professional Trump Resistance Movement. Feminism in our neoliberal age is largely restricted to "abortion rights" and the outrageous social injustice of successful women not making as much money as their peers. We're supposed to feel indignation that a Hollywood actress is only getting $50 million a picture as opposed to a guy's $100 million. We're not supposed to think about the Walmart cashier forced to apply for food stamps and Medicaid because one malevolent family owning as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the US population is too cheap and depraved to pay a living wage to their employees.
On that note is the appeal from NYCitywoman.com that perkily arrived in my inbox today. In an attachment, I was told that as a bearer of the XX chromosome, I should become an Activista who must "act up" against Trump. Especially for us gals who came of age in the good ole protesting 60s, it's finally time to get back out there and
This past presidential election has a silver lining: It’s turning progressives into hellbent supporters of human rights, voting rights, climate rights, refugee rights, minorities’ rights, women’s rights, and senior rights. Here’s how readers of NYCitywomen.com can participate—and win 2016 tax deductions if you hurry.It would help immensely if the writer of the article could get the name of the actual publication straight. It's NYC wo-man, not wo-men. One man, one womb. But anyhow, some of the ways that "progressive" womb-en can help are to sedately march (the day after the Inauguration), support NATO with all your heart, and "fight back" against "fake news" by subscribing to "legacy publications" like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Instead of offering to actually share your physical home with a female refugee, why not cut a check to the Red Cross? Cut other checks to Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee while you're at it. (Now, to be fair, NYCitywomen also suggests optional giving to Doctors Without Borders and the ACLU. And if you can summon up the additional energy to click on to a petition at CREDO, then so much the better)
At least we should be grateful that NYCwoman isn't following the unabashedly crass route of the Facebook group calling itself "Pantsuit Nation." Its founder is being rightly blasted for trying to profit personally from the individual trials and tribulations of women who supported Hillary Clinton. As former Pantsuit member Karin Klein writes in a scathing Los Angeles Times op-ed, she thought she was signing up for a real protest and resistance movement, made up of millions of women of all races, classes and educational backgrounds:
But the movement never happened.The activism amounted to such meager efforts as appeals for donations of used clothing so that homeless women could apply for jobs. And then, after Hillary's defeat, came the coup de grace: the group's founder is asking that homeless and jobless women give her permission to republish their personal posts in a book she's writing. It turns out it's not protest, it's a PAC. Naturally, there's been no suggestion of any reimbursement to contributors, not even the offer of a shopping spree at the Salvation Army. Therefore, I suspect that Arianna Huffington may well have been the business model for Pantsuit Nation. Arianna, after all, got notoriously wealthy off the unpaid labor of bloggers before she quit managing her website in order to make more money instructing paid elite professionals how to balance sleeping well with careerism. Co-opting the success of Bernie Sanders's "Our Revolution," she annoyingly calls her own project "the Sleep Revolution."
Instead, there were stories. At first, eye-opening, gut-wrenching tales of the abuse and discrimination that people had suffered for being dark-skinned or female — most of the members are women — or “different” in some way. Then the wind shifted direction, and the group was flooded with heroic tales in which Pantsuit members, generally white, encountered someone involved in an outrageous act of hatred, usually against a person of color, and were the only ones in the store, the park, the workplace, wherever, to do anything about it.
Not surprisingly. her vapid endeavor has received glowing reviews from her own elite cohort: from the blog of Neera Tanden's think tank, from Democratic mega-donor Anna Wintour's Vogue, and from the queen of individual responsibility herself, Oprah Winfrey.
After all, if you expect to summon up enough energy to Resist Donald Trump, you need your beauty sleep more than you need a good-paying job, medical insurance, and a roof over your head.
And should you become weary of working for free or almost for free, you can always climb the rickety neoliberal ladder of opportunity by getting yourself crowd-funded -- just like the experts do. It's how the Huffington Post pays many of its own reporters these days.
The professional resistance movement against Donald Trump is only the latest manifestation of what the late social critic Christopher Lasch called "The Revolt of the Elites." Phenomenally rich and privileged intellectuals, media personalities and celebrities are again co-opting protest and turning it to their own ends. It's this very merging of entertainment and politics that created Trump (and Reagan before him) in the first place.
Lasch presciently described what the corporate media are only now purporting to discover - an alternate reality, a/k/a "Post-Truth":
Washington becomes a parody of Tinseltown; executives take to the airwaves, creating overnight the semblance of political movements; movie stars become political pundits, even presidents; reality and the simulation of reality become more and more difficult to distinguish....
The "community" of the best and brightest is a community of contemporaries, in the double sense that its members think of themselves as agelessly youthful and that the mark of this youthfulness is precisely their ability to stay on top of the latest trends.So here's a thought. Let's start a resistance movement against the professional resisters.
Tell them all to go fund themselves.
