There's Something About Deval Patrick... and Liz Warren

If, as Cornel West once so pithily observed,"Barack Obama is Wall Street's black mascot," then Deval Patrick is Wall Street's black mascot on steroids, crack and crystal meth.

So why is the former Massachusetts governor suddenly and belatedly entering the Democratic presidential primaries?

Let us contemplate the scenario in an admittedly speculative manner.

First a little background. As Michael Hudson lays out in "The Monster," an excellent investigation into the subprime mortgage crime spree that contributed to the complete collapse of the financial system in 2008, Deval Patrick was the lead civil rights attorney in the Bill Clinton Justice Department in 1996 when he inked a $4 million sweetheart deal with Roland Arnall, whom he had threatened to sue for using his Long Beach, California mortgage shop to target black home buyers with predatory loans. 

Patrick, as Hudson recounts, lamely explained the slap on the wrist by saying: "We recognize that lenders understand the industry in ways that we (government lawyers) don't."

Patrick also didn't balk when, after allowing Arnall to redirect $1 million of the settlement toward consumer education, the culprit picked his own consumer nonprofits and thus "parlayed an embarrassment for his company into an association that helped promote his image as a straight shooting reformer."

After his meaningless promise to behave himself, Arnall then ballooned his small-time loan racket into the monstrous Ameriquest financial empire, continuing to target black, brown, white, old, young, low income, even unemployed people with home loans whose payments ballooned to near-usurious rates after a couple of years. 

To further help Arnall salvage his rightly damaged reputation after he went national with his scheme and came under renewed investigation by several state attorneys general, Deval Patrick joined the holding company of the all-white Ameriquest board of directors as a way to reassure minority borrowers, as well as government regulators and the Wall Street investors in the bait and switch loan deals, which were sliced and diced to "spread the risk" and avoid accountability, that Arnall was totally on the up and up.

He wasn't. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. Wall Street crashed. But not before Deval Patrick had written a glowing letter to Congress on Arnall's behalf, to help legislators overcome their sickly inhibitions against confirming this GOP mega-donor as George W. Bush's ambassador to The Netherlands. Arnall finally got the post after he agreed to dismantle Ameriquest and pay a pittance to the customers he'd defrauded.

Deval Patrick, instead of embarking on his own quest for the highest office in the land, should have been prosecuted himself for aiding and abetting a fraud,  or at the very least shamed into an early retirement. In hopes of leading the country one day, he instead followed in the Bain Capital footsteps of Mitt Romney and won the Massachusetts governorship - although unlike Romney, the Bain gig came after the "public" service, not before.

How does Elizabeth Warren enter into this? Well, it's quite the coincidence that Patrick announced his quest only one week after Warren shockingly said she'd consider him for her cabinet if she is elected president.

"If I could talk about people who aren't politicians, I talk about my former governor, Deval Patrick, who is a pretty terrific guy. I talk about some of the people I've met who are presidents of [historically black colleges and universities], especially those who are deeply engaged in education," she told CNN.

So, with little chance that he'll make the debates or appeal much to the general public, it looks like Patrick's  main goal is to get a lot of public visibility as he angles for an administration job as attorney general, treasury secretary or maybe even the vice presidency. Patrick could also be in talks with the
mysteriously ascendant centrist Pete Buttigieg, who has had his own problems appealing to black voters.  Vanilla Pete needs all the black cover help he can get, given his failure to address police racism even in his own small city of South Bend, Indiana. And then there is the little matter of Buttigieg lying about the non-existent endorsements of some important black South Carolinians, who are making no bones about how ticked off they are for being used in such a slimy way. 

Deval Patrick already has a proven track record of giving aid and comfort to dishonest people, and getting richly rewarded for doing so. A Buttigieg-Patrick ticket would be just the ticket to smooth over all those pesky racial problems. Or so they cynically might think.

Warren's own positive statements about Deval Patrick, meanwhile, make me wonder if she really is as smart and wonkish and plan-intensive as she markets herself to be. Or even worse, smart as she undoubtedly is, her praise of him makes me suspect that she is just plain cynical. If she didn't know about Patrick's sordid past and his neoliberal mindset when she touted him on CNN, then she hasn't done even basic research. And if she did know, then she's just another con artist in populist sheepdog clothing. 

And how about the bizarre way that she recently bristled at a very anodyne question from Amy Goodman at an environmental forum about the racism inherent in two largely white states (Iowa and New Hampshire) holding the first caucus and primary election, respectively? Warren's retort that she is "just a player in this game" was not only quite telling, it's more than a little disturbing, and it points very strongly in the cynicism direction.

I've been reluctant to criticize Warren too harshly, despite her technocratic piecemeal solutions to overwhelming existential crises and her applauding Trump at the State of the Union when he vowed to keep socialism out of the United States. She talks the class war talk, and that should count for a little something even if she doesn't mean it. She at least is making the billionaires nervous. And she did, after all, fight against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, unafraid to criticize the Obama administration for its lack of transparency over the brazen corporate takeover of the world that the TPP "trade deal" actually was.

Sad to say, I'm no longer even a tepid fan. Her Deval Patrick testimonial was the ultimate deal-breaker.

Again, though, why Deval, and why now? Besides the fact that the Obama crowd have long been urging him to run, this might also be their not so subtle signal to Joe Biden that he is toast. The impeachment inquiry is dragging both him and the Party down, and it will drag them down even further if Mitch McConnell feeds his inner Machiavelli on steroids, crack and crystal meth and decides to hold a formal impeachment trial after all.

Keeping Bernie, Liz and the four other senators running for president imprisoned in Senate chambers during such a trial would put a real damper on their campaign trail activities right before, if not during, the first primaries or even beyond. If the Republicans subpoena both Joe and Hunter Biden, and maybe even Obama himself as hostile witnesses for the Trump defense, they will give Buttigieg, the tainted Deval Patrick and the extremely tainted Mike Bloomberg all that much extra rope with which to hang themselves before Trump eats them for breakfast in the general election. 

And if Warren, Sanders and the four others use their impeachment camera time to breathe even one syllable about the election, you can rest assured that the Trumpies will gleefully pounce and accuse them of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits political campaigning in official government places and in official government capacities.

Who knows? We may finally get the Spectacle and the ratings that the corporate media are counting on.

Or maybe not, if the Powers That Be decree that nothing must ever distract the public from the continued marketing of the Cold (But Getting Dangerously Warmer) War on Russia that the Ukraine-centered impeachment inquiry is now broadcasting to such abysmal public enthusiasm.

Biden Plagiarizes Both Obama and Trump

Well, maybe plagiarism is too harsh a word to hurl at the old reprobate copycat, whose own stated goal is to keep serving the fat cats and defending their right to crush everybody else into oblivion. But his much-maligned Medium post, in which he accused Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren of "my way or the highway"elitism, absolutely was ripped right out of Barack Obama's anti-progressive playbook.

It was only last week that Obama briefly emerged from his luxe retirement to once again chide the serfs who refuse to suffer the American system of neo-feudalism gladly, who call their lords and masters nasty names on Twitter rather than reaching across the class divide to find common cause with the very people who are making their lives nasty, brutish and short. Contrary to Biden's oafish attack on Warren, however, Obama's sermonizing about the dangers of "cancel culture" was almost universally praised by the mainstream media as being a "breath of fresh air" in this divisive Age of Trump.

Headlining the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, where plans for his presidential center and golf course on public parkland have run into legal challenges from neighborhood activists who are crying foul because of gentrification and rising rents and the damage to the environment that his project is already causing, the former president expressed his displeasure with a gaslighting attack upon citizen activism in general:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

As Obama had previously admonished those protesting the location of his Center, occasional appearances by Chance the Rapper should alleviate all their concerns about his refusal to sign a community benefits agreement to offset the rising rents of gentrification and the destruction of their public park. After all, if the former president could once be generous enough to call misanthropic former House Speaker, sadistic Ayn Rand fanboy and less refined victim-blamer Paul Ryan "a good man, a family man," why can't the lesser people also put away their "wokeness" and stop making so many unreasonable demands for a better, more equitable life for themselves and their communities? 

Why be an independent activist when the Obamas are touting their planned shrine as "a catalyst for activism and social change" without offering any information about how this would actually happen?

Enter Joe Biden, who is now being eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren in many polls. He's also being eclipsed by Bernie Sanders. But, thanks to the relentless media blackout of Sanders, Biden can keep on pretending with the rest of them that Bernie doesn't even exist. He therefore limits his umbrage to Warren, who has rightly accused him running in "the wrong primary" because of his opposition to Medicare For All and soaking the rich to help the less well-off.

Biden therefore summoned up his inner deflective Obama: 

But at another level these kinds of attacks are a serious problem. They reflect an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics. If someone doesn’t agree with you — it’s not just that you disagree — that person must be a coward or corrupt or a small thinker.Some call it the “my way or the highway” approach to politics. But it’s worse than that. It’s condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view.It’s representative of an elitism that working and middle class people do not share: “We know best; you know nothing”. “If you were only as smart as I am you would agree with me.”

Accusing the victims of your own cruel, nasty policies of being nasty and scary is a common tactic of right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Joe Biden hurling the "elitist" epithet at Warren not only ignores his own life-long service to, and enrichment by, the Elite, it allows him to portray himself as just a regular working-class guy. Not only has he ripped a smarmy page right out of the scolding Obama playbook, he's going one step further. He is essentially plagiarizing  Donald Trump, stealing the successful fascistic technique of reversing the dichotomy between perpetrator and victim.

Just as Biden, the elitist in anti-intellectual blue collar clothing, uses Warren as proxy for the estimated 84 million uninsured and underinsured Americans and their advocates, selfish and unreasonable extremists for demanding single payer health insurance as a basic human right, Trump, the phony populist, for his own part scapegoats the victims of racism as being the direct causes of racism. When, for example, he was confronted last year by a Black reporter about his white nationalist rhetoric, he retorted: "That is such a racist question!"  

Just as Trump brags about his nonexistent high poll numbers among African-Americans, Biden brags that "millions of Democrats" are, just like him, dead-set against their fellow human beings being afforded a healthy, secure life. Both Biden and Trump deploy the ultra-right weapon of transforming groups of people who have traditionally been the targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. They play divide and conquer with a vengeance.

A series of debates between these two senile servants of the oligarchy would constitute a gruesome mind meld of epic proportions. Obama will rue the day that he ever kvetched about "cancel culture" if he ever gets to witness Trump and Biden canceling each other out on live corporate TV.

Dreadicare For All Elites Who Don't Want It

Second only to the astroturfed impeachment marches threatening to spread like chemical wildfire in the well-off parts of Blue America is the overwhelming anxiety over ascendant candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Members of the neoliberal pundit class are gnashing their collective teeth about Warren's imminent unveiling of her detailed Medicare For All/Some/Who Knows Plan. Will she or won't she advocate for a true single payer program like the one introduced by Bernie Sanders?

The conventional wisdom among the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is that if she does, she's toast. And if she's toast, then Trump wins another term. So be afraid. Be very afraid, all you One Percenters who know full well that your scare tactics are bullshit, given that most Democratic and independent voters,  and even a sizable percentage of Republicans from Trump's own base, favor Medicare For All. It's only when the pollsters and the gaslighting pundits put the fear of losing their employer-based coverage and the prospect of the Great Unknown into their heads that many respondents will then say "well... maybe on second thought I'm not as gung-ho as I thought I was."

This instillation of fear and doubt is, of course, the gist of the grand plan to kill M4A before it ever gets a fact-based hearing. Tax-averse multimillionaire moderators of the so-called Democratic debates always preface their questions with the specter of middle class tax increases, giving left-leaning candidates thirty seconds to respond before the buzzer goes off and the moderators invite a low-ranking corporate centrist to chime in with the industry-approved rebuttal.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a big fan of Warren's based upon their mutual exalted wonkishness, is very worried that she won't be able to keep up her evasive bullshit on M4A very much longer.

Like many policy wonks, I’ll be waiting with bated breath; this could be a make or break moment for her campaign, and possibly for the 2020 election.

Phony talking point #1: all this reckless M4A rhetoric will hand the election right to Trump. 

Single payer has a lot to recommend it.... but we're not starting from scratch... More than half of Americans are covered by private health insurance, mainly through employers.

Industry-approved talking point #2: In theory and on paper, we love, love, love Single Payer. But the people we really need to care about right now are the vulnerable well-paid professionals in our base, whom for propaganda purposes only, we shall now squeamishly dump in with the teeming masses of low-paid workers forced to fork over a chunk of their paychecks for the company insurance plan, which is usually inefficient and limited at best, and pure exploitative junk at worst.

 Most people probably would end up better off under single-payer, but convincing them of that would be a hard sell; polls show much less support for Medicare for all than for a “public option” plan in which people could retain private insurance if they chose to.

Misleading Talking Point #3: It's not that we wonks are against single payer in principal. It's that the Deplorables are so gosh-darn stupid. And we wonks simply don't have either the time or the inclination to try to educate these rubes on all the money they'd save under M4A. Besides, our target audience is restricted to our fellow wonks and to the already well-insured upper middle class readership who can afford a subscription to the New York Times. 

Which brings me to the third point: In reality, single-payer won’t happen any time soon. Even if Democrats win in a landslide in 2020, taking control of the Senate as well as the White House, it’s very unlikely that they will have the votes to eliminate private insurance.Warren, who has made policy seriousness a key part of her political persona — “Warren has a plan for that” — surely knows all of this. And early this year she seemed to recognize the problems with a purist single-payer approach, saying that she was open to different paths toward universal coverage.
Since then, however, she seems to have gone all in for the elimination of private insurance.

Annoying Talking Point #4: People who want to have a healthy life and not die or go bankrupt if they get sick are "purists" who belong to some weird kind of Bernie Bro Cult. They're making impossible, annoying demands on the Elite Class... which has no such worries, thank you veddy much. Now get lost, you bunch of sickos! Because "our side" winning back power is more important than you are.

The plan in the works will presumably try to dispel that fog, but doing so will be tricky. An independent estimate from the Urban Institute (which is, for what it’s worth, left-leaning) suggests that a highly comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, similar to what Sanders is proposing, would substantially increase overall health spending, although a more modest plan wouldn’t.

Krugman creates some fog of his own by failing to mention that the Urban Institute is funded by such M4A-averse corporations as private health insurer CIGNA and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. So you should probably take their scary cost estimates with a huge hunk of LSD-laced salt.

Chairing the Urban Institute's Board of plutocrats is Jamie Gorelick, who is also kept busy acting as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's personal lawyer. She defended them, among other grifty things, against nepotism accusations when they first joined the Trump administration. Jared's brother also has a vested interest in killing M4A because he happens to own his own multibillion-dollar health insurance company founded right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

 Other directors of the Urban Institute are N. Gregory Mankiw, who led George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and who infamously advocated privatizing Social Security and cutting benefits; former Obama "Catfood" Commissioner and billionaire austerian Erskine Bowles; Diana Farrell, CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute; and Facebook executive Marne L. Levine.

So if Krugman is actually calling the Urban Institute "left-leaning" with a crew like that calling the shots, then the Democratic Party has moved even farther right than I thought.

No wonder he's rhetorically wringing his hands over "capitalist to my bones" Elizabeth Warren's mild threat to the ruling class. If she doesn't watch out and mind her wonkish Ps and Qs and "escape the Medicare trap," she might very well turn into Susan Sarandon or heaven forbid, even a dreaded "unwitting Russian asset."

My published New York Times response:

The real question is whether the estimated 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured can escape premature death, life-long disability through negligence of their medical conditions, or bankruptcy - with the subsequent inability to get a job, rent an apartment or take out a car loan.

 Elizabeth Warren will do what she has to do. So will the congress critters in thrall to the insurance and hospital and pharmaceutical lobbies. So along with taking to the streets to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump, we're also going to need to take to the streets to demand what in every other advanced country on earth is a basic human right. Sure, M4A would cost a bundle and it has to be paid for. But it would cost a heckuva lot less than what we're currently paying to predatory insurance companies, for criminally overpriced drugs, and for obscenely padded hospital bills.

 If people are anxious about losing their employment-based coverage, it's largely because both politicians and pundits don't hammer home the essential fact that any increases in taxes will be at most half of what they now pay for premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Furthermore, employment based coverage is getting more precarious, with employers reducing or discontinuing coverage due to higher costs. Think of the bargaining power that workers will get if their bosses no longer can claim that their health benefits are a huge chunk of their salaries. Sounds like a plan to me. It also sounds extremely humane.

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Warren's Social Security Reform Not As "Scrappy" As Bernie's

Just in time for the third Democratic debate in Fossil Fuel Boomtown USA (Houston, TX) Elizabeth Warren has unveiled a plan that would increase the monthly Social Security benefit by $200 for every recipient by "asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program."

Unlike the very similar bill reintroduced by Bernie Sanders earlier this year, Warren doesn't flat-out suggest entirely scrapping the current $132,900 cap on taxable earnings. But just like Bernie's legislation, her sweeping, smart and totally original brand-spanking new bold plan also calls for separate taxation of select investments to augment the payroll tax system. 

Interestingly enough, Warren did not join with four other Democratic senators - current presidential contenders Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, along with Jeff Merkley and former contender Kirsten Gillibrand - in co-sponsoring Bernie's original Social Security expansion bill in 2017.

Hmm.

 But back to the gist of it all: as Bernie has been talking about for many decades and as Warren has begun talking about as the 2020 horse race heats up, the very restrictive cap now in place means that the ultra-rich essentially finish paying off an entire year of Social Security taxes on January 1st, contributing exactly the same amount to the program as someone who earns $132,900 a year. Wealth is by no means taxed at the same rate as work. It's not even close.

Put another way, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates pay the exact same amount in Social Security taxes as a middle class single or two-income couple living in a modest home in the suburbs. If oligarchic empires were subject to full progressive taxation, the nation's retirement program could conceivably flourish into perpetuity. 

So, unlike Bernie's bill, whose progressive taxation of plutocratic wealth would guarantee the solvency of the Social Security trust fund for the next 50 years, Warren's more modest proposal would extend it for less than half that span, or for 20 years. 

Therefore, her claim that she is proposing the "biggest and most progressive increases in Social Security in nearly half a century" is a bit overblown, and not just because it copies the Sanders bill without crediting it. Her language is a lot less class-conscious than his is. Instead of demanding that the wealthy pay more, she is politely "asking" them to, as though they actually have the choice to refuse. Her suggestion that plutocrats contribute more is also far less than what ordinary people might consider a "fair share."  This is especially true since this requested, allegedly fair share serves to protect the long-term interests and the rattled psychic security of the rich in this age of rising civil discontent. Her tax reforms to benefit regular people are really no skin off rich financial noses at all. Best of all, the convoluted tax figures which she puts forth, unlike a true permanent scrapping of the cap, would be very much subject to back-room tinkering and bipartisan sausage-making and horse-trading, with maximum input from the minimally affected donor class and their teams of hungry lobbyists. The poor, of course, have no lobby.

In her own much more liberal way, Warren echoes the mantra of her former boss, Barack Obama, uttered reassuringly to the Wall Street bankers who ruined the economy. She is the latest thing standing between the squeamish, tax-averse wealthy and what Obama denigrated as the "pitchforks." Oh, and she also wants to seduce older Joe Biden fans into her camp as she brings up his own myriad disgusting efforts to cut Social Security.

It's interesting to note, meanwhile, that even as she claims to support Bernie's Medicare For All legislation without yet putting forth her own original detailed plan, one of Warren's rationales for modestly increasing monthly retirement benefits is to help struggling seniors meet their rising medical and drug costs. She writes in her Medium post:

In 2019, the average Social Security beneficiary received $1,354 a month, or $16,248 a year. For someone who worked their entire adult life at an average wage and retired this year at the age of 66, Social Security will replace just 41% of what they used to make. That’s well short of the 70% many financial advisers recommend for a decent retirement — one that allows you to keep living in your home, go to a doctor when you’re sick, and get the prescription drugs you need.

She makes it a point to sell her plan as a stopgap measure just "in case we don't adopt Medicare For All." (wink, nod to the neoliberal Clinton operatives she is reportedly canoodling with these days.) And just to emphasize, Sanders's M4A legislation would abolish the 20 percent co-pays that are financially breaking so many struggling older people covered under regular Medicare.

And in pointing out that Congress hasn't increased Social Security benefits in 50 years, her suggested $200-a-month increase, adjusted for inflation and the rising cost of living, is actually a pittance. To her credit, she does call for revising cost of living calculations to ensure that monthly benefits keep pace with the costs of barely staying alive. It's certainly a lot better than Barack Obama's failed attempt to reduce benefits through a chained CPI formula.

So don't get me wrong. There's plenty to like in Warren's plan, not least of which is in the inclusion of unpaid stay-at-home mothers and other caregivers in the earnings tables, thus boosting their future Social Security benefits. 

But here's the catch (there's always a catch):

My plan will give credit toward the Social Security average lifetime earnings calculation to people who provide 80 hours a month of unpaid care to a child under the age of 6, a dependent with a disability (including a veteran family member), or an elderly relative. For every month of caregiving that meets these requirements, the caregiver will be credited for Social Security purposes with a month of income equal to the monthly average of that year’s median annual wage. People can receive an unlimited amount of caregiving credits and can claim these credits retroactively if they have done this kind of caregiving work in the last five years. By giving caregivers credits equal to the median wage that year, this credit will provide a particular boost in benefits to lower-income workers.

Given that caring full-time for a newborn, a toddler, a preschooler, or a sick or elderly relative means being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, this reimbursement formula seems far from generous or fair. It's giving part-time status to a full-time job whose "median wage" includes mandatory unpaid double overtime.

 Say you're a single mother in her 40s, 50s or 60s who struggled financially ten or 20 or 30 years ago and has a spotty paid work history and no retirement savings as a result. You're out of luck under Warren's plan. You would have had to squeeze all that approved care-giving into the last five years to qualify for better retirement benefits. And even if you had, you'd still have to jump through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops in order to qualify for "credits." What busy parent or caregiver has ever bothered to keep a written record of his or her hours?

Given that we are increasingly becoming a jobless society in a "gig economy," wouldn't it make more sense to phase out the traditional work requirements for Social Security altogether? And no, Social Security should never be replaced with the universal basic income (UBI) proposals so beloved of technocrats and billionaires like Elon Musk. For starters, UBI would eliminate all other programs serving the vulnerable, the old, the young, the sick and the disabled. It would, effectively, be a highly regressive scheme, with the poor essentially subsidizing the middle classes and the affluent because those in need would get less than they do now, even under already meager assistance programs like SNAP (food stamps.)

Chunks of Warren's own technocratic Social Security reform package seem unnecessarily stingy - not to mention confusing and complicated - especially when they're coupled with her worthy suggestions to give full widows' benefits to prematurely retired disabled women, and to restore a deceased parent's survivor benefits to full-time students up to age 22. (Under Ronald Reagan, survivor benefits were cut off when the beneficiary reached age 18 or graduated high school.)   

Bernie demands that avaricious billionaires pay more, and he welcomes their hatred. Warren not only politely asks them to contribute a fair share, she consistently refers to the wealthy as "families," thus gifting them with qualities of nurturing and humanity that many of them don't even remotely possess. She lumps professionals making a tad more than $250,000 in with criminal oligarchs who've looted billions from the body politic. This effectively removes the onus from the oligarchs, besides, perhaps, alienating a few of the wealthy elites currently rooting for her while attracting less well-off Biden supporters who might be convinced to root for her with the dream of an extra two hundred bucks a month wafting through their heads.

 Her new suggested FICA tax rate of 14-odd percent on the entire top two percent, split with one's putative employer, certainly seems meager compared to the 90 percent rate imposed upon the highest earnings in the Eisenhower years. A self-described "capitalist to my bones," Warren is loath to directly address the class war, loath to demonize the obscenely rich, loath to directly call them out by name.

There's just enough wealth redistribution in Warren's plan to make the neoliberal thought collective pretend to howl with outrage at the mere prospect of being parted with even a modest percentage of their wealth. They might even have to fire one of their maids or forgo purchase of their third luxury car next year. 

Bernie is much more to the point. He cuts right to the chase and he names names and he unabashedly evokes the public indignation so absolutely necessary if we are ever to truly change the system rather than just tweak it around the edges.

Bernie Sanders

✔@SenSanders

Donald Trump made $694 million in 2016. That means he stopped paying Social Security taxes 40 minutes into the year.

Meanwhile a middle-class worker paid Social Security taxes the entire year.

I say to Trump: pay your fair share. Let's scrap the cap and expand Social Security.

Kids Over Capitalism

Since presidential contender Elizabeth Warren recently asserted that she is "a capitalist to my bones," it should come as no surprise that her plan for universal child care in the United States is loosely modeled on the market-based kludge known as Obamacare.

Unlike the government-run systems operating in other social democratic countries, Warren's plan is predicated upon direct government payments to for-profit providers who will "partner" with municipalities and states. What the system giveth, the system can always take away if said providers  in any given state don't meet a set of amorphous standards, or can't be found in the first place.

In other words, it's a conservative plan of the type moderate Republicans might have suggested if there were still any moderate Republicans around.

But never say never, because wherever there's a predatory profit motive, there's always a way. Flush with all that excess cash, Wall Street has been getting into the lucrative early child care game with a vengeance in recent years. And they're even flusher with cash this year, thanks to Trump's tax code overhaul. When neoliberals gush that we must "invest" in children as though they were cattle futures, they're not kidding. Bain Capital, for instance, already runs a billion dollar-plus chain of day care centers. With more federal money possibly on the horizon should Warren's plan pass in Congress, look for even more Goldman Sachs and Evercore and BlackRock Little Tots Schools popping up in distressed neighborhoods all over this land. The win-win upshot is that even a Mom slaving at a $10 an hour fast food or retail gig would see her child care woes disappear.

For those parents desirous of in-home care, private equity is transforming this kind of care into a virtual Airbnb opportunity. An outfit called Wondercare purports to train teachers and provides software to help them get "qualified" to care for children. They even help with the rentals of empty homes to turn them into nurseries. All for a hefty cut of the profits, of course, and a big return for investors.

The financial disbursement power under the Warren plan would be granted to the states, many of which have notoriously already turned down federal Medicaid expansion for the sole reason of cruel, right-wing, social Darwinist ideology. So what could possibly go wrong with a universal child care program in a red state like Texas? Cash-strapped locales also have a tendency to "divert" block grant-type funds to other programs.

Granted, Warren's proposal --  even the most well-off of the qualifying parents would be let off the hook for child care expenses above seven percent of their incomes, and poorer families would pay nothing at all -- is certainly better than the big fat nothing-burger of a system we currently have in place in the richest country on earth. My own son and daughter-in-law had their first child last year, and my granddaughter's in-home care by a part-time babysitter amounts to nearly a quarter of their joint annual income, second only to their monthly house payment. (They have adjusted their own full-time work and sleep schedules so that one parent can be home for half the total work week, and they are both chronically exhausted as a result.)  Preschool costs can be almost as much as college tuition in some areas. The waiting time for admission to the one decent and well-staffed and comparatively affordable preschool in my own family's area is not weeks or months -- but years.

So yes, I think that they and most other parents would gladly accept a 25 percent or more reduction in their child care costs, no matter how many bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through to get it. And that, of course, is the catch. You have to have the time and the skills to jump through these hoops, and a lot of people do not for any number of reasons... such as, they're too tired after working three part-time jobs.

And those "providers" whom Warren assumes are waiting in the wings in the thousands to jump through all those bureaucratic hoops and to subject themselves to even more government scrutiny to fill non-existent slots in their programs? Don't even ask. But should private equity billionaires lobby Congress to pass her plan, I am sure that all costs of doing business with government bureaucrats will conveniently be passed on to the consumer, as will the "wealth tax" imposed upon them to pay for the care.

But still, everybody will enjoy that all-important freedom of choice so important to capitalistic enterprise.  As Warren writes in a Medium blog-post announcing her program, with a handy "petition" at the bottom so that you can get on her campaign fund-raising email list:

 Nobody would be required to enroll in this new program. But right now, millions of families can’t take advantage of child care because of its cost — and millions more are draining their paychecks to cover high costs. As a result, under the new program, an independent economic analysis projects that 12 million kids will take advantage of these new high-quality options — nearly double the number that currently receive formal child care outside the home.

The entire cost of this proposal can be covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax. The Ultra-Millionaire Tax asks the wealthiest families in America — those with a net worth of more than $50 million — to pay a small annual tax on their wealth. Experts project that the Ultra-Millionaire Tax will generate $2.75 trillion in new government revenue over the next ten years. That’s about four times more than the entire cost of my Universal Child Care and Early Learning plan.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman fulsomely praises the Warren plan just because it sounds so realistically modest. And comparing apples to oranges, he further gushes that 

Among other things, unlike purist visions of replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” providing child care wouldn’t require imposing big new taxes on the middle class. The sums of money involved are small enough that new taxes on great wealth and high incomes, which are desirable on other grounds, could easily raise sufficient revenue.

What uninsured Purist needs guaranteed health care if she can substitute it with the relief of partially subsidized nursery care? Presumably, reading between the Krugman lines, not even the kids enrolled in the germ factories known as day care centers will ever get sick, and Mom won't ever go bankrupt paying the doctor bills, premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

Anyway, here's my published comment on the Krugman column:

Since there's a serious dearth of child care centers and long waiting lists in many areas of the country, we need a more integrated approach to universal care.

  The federal government must be involved in both building new centers and staffing them with qualified workers. Since child care positions are usually underpaid and largely filled by women, these new jobs must pay a living wage, plus benefits.

We can't rely on a private, for-profit marketplace owned and operated by (mostly male) private equity moguls pocketing a huge chunk of government subsidies for themselves while cutting corners on the kids, the moms, and the female workers. A worker-parent cooperative system might be fairer.

Meanwhile, I hope that Elizabeth Warren will introduce her legislation in the Senate as soon as possible. It's a long overdue step in the right direction.

 And speaking of family values, we should embrace the philosophy of the Swedish universal caregiver system, whose aim is "to make it possible for both men and women to combine parenthood and gainful employment, a new view of the male role, and a radical change in the organization of working life."

Parents need the free time to combine work, leisure and fun, hobbies, community and political activism, and child-rearing.

 Besides radically extending paid child care leave, we should also subsidize voluntary stay-at-home parents and give them Social Security credit parity for their retirement years.

Prioritize kids over capitalism.

Damaged Dem Dames Distract From Climate Change

Two of the corporate Democratic Party's campaign narratives against Donald Trump have boomeranged right back at them this week.

First, their virtue-signaling about inclusive diversity turns out not to be so virtuous after all. Presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, like Julia Alvarez before her, fell smack dab into the identity politics trap when she revealed in a slickly-produced video that she does indeed have some remote aboriginal ancestry, dating back at least 10 generations.

 So not only did she fall into Donald Trump's race-baiting trap, she is, according to many critics, displaying her own colorblind racism by "appropriating" native lineage without informing or asking permission of the Cherokee Nation. And if that weren't bad enough, she is doing it right before the Midterm Elections and messing with her party's chances to win more congressional seats!

Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who later did the same job for David Cameron's conservatives in Great Britain, tweeted out:

  Jim Messina‏Verified account @Messina2012

Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now? Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???

 Democrats cannot disown Elizabeth Warren fast enough. It's not so much her falling for Trump's trolling, it's the inconvenient timing of it, right at the end of their record-breaking season of fundraising. No matter that Warren herself has been a prolific fundraiser for the party. She has been declared non-presidential material.

My view is that her big announcement about her DNA results is more than a little bit passive-aggressive. Warren has been under pressure for years to run for president and for years she has resisted, until very recently. So perhaps her ham-handed video is her way of either deliberately or unconsciously sabotaging her own chances to ensure that she is pre-emptively forced out of the race so as to avoid criticism from refusing to run in the first place. She will be way more effective going after the corrupt financial system in the Senate, in my view. That is, if she even cares to remain in the Senate.

I once half-jokingly predicted (see the Salazar link above) that the Democrats are so into ethnologies and family histories that before long, candidates will be producing their DNA results along with their tax returns. The flaunting of one's genetic biology for the sole purpose of gaining political power is a kind of inverted fascism and hearkens back to the US eugenics craze of the early 20th century, which became the direct inspiration for Nazi race policies.  

So much for the inherent shallowness and cynicism of the Democrats' identity politics. Now we come to the Democrats' shallow, cynical, corporate version of feminism.

We all know, of course, that Hillary Clinton used her own Senate seat as a stepping-stone to her first presidential run, and her first presidential run as a stepping-stone to the State Department, and the State Department as a stepping-stone to her second presidential run, and her second presidential run as a stepping-stone to permanent martyrdom, big bucks in the speakers' and memoir circuits - and who knows, maybe even a third presidential run. Just think of the ratings and the billions of dollars in bucks for everybody concerned: churnalists, strategists, cable TV networks and corporate advertisers with all that hoarded untaxed money to burn.

Although the Democratic Party faithful became incensed during the 2016 campaign whenever Donald Trump's sexual predations were compared to Bill Clinton's sexual predations, and whenever critics noted that Hillary had hypocritically trashed her husband's female conquests and victims while standing by her man, even her erstwhile supporters can no longer ignore or stomach her hypocrisy.

Correction: they could stomach her hypocrisy extremely well, provided it was not on full display only weeks away from The Midterm Elections. Her grousing on national TV that Monica Lewinsky was not the victim of her husband's abuse of power, but a fully consenting adult, would be fine with them were it not so allegedly endangering Democratic fortunes. It kind of exposes the party's cynical appropriation of the #MeToo movement, and the party's campaign platform of "Donald Trump is a sexist pig" in all its shallowness and hypocrisy.

Shockingly, the very same liberals who so recently have been bending over backward for Hillary Clinton, and propping up her endless blame-game tour, and making her loss to Trump the prime focus of the Women's March movement, are now telling her to shut up and go away so that the party can "focus."

She has been relegated to that dreaded category of "distraction." I could almost feel very slightly sorry for her.

But, as the New York Times's Michelle Cottle puts it,

In these furious, final days before the midterms, Democratic candidates need to be laser focused on their message to voters. They need to be talking health care and jobs and other issues of intense, personal concern to their electorate. They do not need to be talking about impeachment, or about the results of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA testing. And they definitely do not need to get distracted by unnecessary drama generated by comments from one of the party’s most iconic, and most controversial, figures.

And yet, there was Mrs. Clinton, in an Oct. 9 interview with CNN, sharing her take on the need for Democrats to — as Michelle Obama might have put it — go low with today’s Republicans. As Mrs. Clinton sees it, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

She's a great woman and a great leader, says Cottle, but speaking her mind this close to Election Day is "problematic" for the party, which, she insinuates, would otherwise be dreaming up all kinds of wonderful new programs to benefit ordinary people. 

The Democratic Party sounds like it needs medication for its attention deficit disorder, which in my opinion is simply crass malingering to distract us from the fact that they are beholden to the oligarchy.  

My published response:

 "...this close to Election Day, discussing hot-button issues in national interviews is nothing but problematic for her party...."

Bingo! It's her party and she'll kvetch if she wants to. She has to go on TV to raise her visibility so she and Bill can sell lots of high-priced tickets for their tour. These TV spots, in their own turn, generate even more free press, as in this column. So what if it's bad press? It generates more publicity! And don't forget the ad revenue.

As far as Hillary's "distractions" from Democratic messaging are concerned, most of the campaign rhetoric I've been hearing is of the "we're not Trump" genre. A recent survey by "The Hill" of the ranking House Democrats reveals that their top priority, if they win, will be hauling cabinet officials before their committees. Then, they'll be "shoring up" Obamacare and protecting the weak Dodd-Frank bill. Not one potential committee chair voiced support for Medicare For All. Nor will House Dems put our endangered planet's climate emergency on their to-do list -- because, they say, why even try? "Resistance" has replaced a proactive progressive agenda.

The few times they do talk tough, they end up apologizing for giving the impression that they're inciting violence. Never underestimate their capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of their victories.

Maybe if we ever get the $$$ out of politics, the media- political-oligarchic complex will stop treating elections like soap opera ratings bonanzas.

The Warren/Clinton hand-wringing is, of course, the corporate Democrats' way of saying how much they care about you. This pearl-clutching is in fact a distraction from the real scandal: that the party will do nothing to address the climate change catastrophe should they win back some power.  

While busily distracting us with the Dem dame duo who are doing so much damage to diversity, they're also very quietly damping down hopes for a climate agenda in the upcoming session. They are being very honest about it in the sneakiest way possible so as not to be accused of making promises they can't keep once they're sworn in. Maybe they figure that our immersion in the double boiler of propaganda and planet-death will keep us properly and rigidly fixated on Trump's latest tweet calling another woman a nasty name.

As The Hill reports,

With President Trump in the White House and Republicans favored to keep the Senate next year, climate legislation would face stiff headwinds, and pushing it could spark backlash from the right — both now and after the Nov. 6 midterm elections.
Considering those “constraints,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), Democrats should “focus on the practical and the opportunistic” to make short-term progress while fighting for bolder measures — “the aspirational goals” — over the longer term. 
“It’s going to be, I think, more of an opportunistic strategy, where, in various pieces of legislation, across the board, we’re going to insert measures that address climate change,” said Connolly, a leader in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.

"Aspiration Not Inspiration" might make a catchy campaign slogan for the 2020 horse-race, don't you think? It sure beats "Expiration Not Aspiration," which would be a real downer. It might put a real damper on firing up voters if they honestly just announced that all living things are going to die premature deaths because of their failure to address the climate emergency, as both corporate parties continue raking in all those polluting Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil dollars and continue to exempt the trillion-dollar military machine from even the mild emissions rules that are attached like a flimsy bandage to a suppurating wound.

It's almost as bad as believing that Republican "headwinds" are more powerful that the Category Six hurricanes that climate scientists predict will blow the place apart and dampen the earth to epic flooding proportions sooner rather than later.

Lucy & Ethel on the Campaign Trail

via GIPHY

I have to confess that when I saw Hillary and Liz in their slapsticky-sweet Sisterhood of the Traveling Power Pantsuits show on Monday, I couldn't help thinking about an old episode of I Love Lucy and wishing for a reprise.

You know, the one where BFFs Lucy and Ethel show up at a gala event wearing identical outfits? And how their raucous rendition of the Cole Porter tune "Friendship" gradually devolves into chaotic cat-fighting hilarity? Retro and pre-feminist, to be sure. But even in these modern times, it's still considered a fashion faux pas for two women to be caught wearing the same thing at the same elite affair. Or, as Cosmo put it in a recent spread on sartorial redundancy in high places, awesome and awwwkward at the same time. Shallowness yesterday, shallowness today, shallowness forever.

Watching that Lucy episode when I was a kid in the early 60s, I couldn't for the life of me understand why Lucy and Ethel would throw such a hissy fit over something so stupid as matching apparel. I thought it was stupid mainly because the pouffy dresses with the fake vines cascading down the front like snakes were so damned ugly and unflattering on both of them. But back in the 50s, when the series first aired, fashion was one of the few things then allowed to individually define the repressed, stuck-at-home middle class woman.

 I did learn a very valuable lesson in irony from watching that episode. I learned that it is indeed possible to sing "Friendship, Friendship, It's the Perfect Blendship" even as you subtly elbow your fellow humans out of your way before ripping them to shreds. This tactic was honed to perfection by the Clintons. Just ask Lani Guinier, or Peter and Marion Wright Edelman, or Joycelyn Elders.

So, perhaps Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren dressing nearly identically and doing fist bumps at their first campaign event together was to cover up their historical disagreements and to make a unifying political statement in the form of a cohesive, rather than competing, fashion statement. If there were any subtle Lucy/Ethel elbow-jabs or squeals of pain, they were well-hidden beneath the deafening audience hysteria, the high fives, and the hugs. After all, the campaign theme this week is #$tronger Together. These are two powerful, professional women who have so, so moved on from those medieval times when Ricky Ricardo wouldn't let his wife be in the show, and when Fred Mertz couldn't bear to even talk to his wife without also gruffly mentioning her weight and her age.

Instead of making the Democratic campaign about the issue that most threatens our democracy - the class war - Liz and Hill are reprising the battle of the sexes that was the implicit theme in every single episode of I Love Lucy.

Hill and Liz might not be total ideological soulmates as regards the economy, but they are every bit as facilely united in their disdain for Donald Trump as Lucy and Ethel were in their serial attempts to escape their domestic confines and thwart their chauvinistic spouses in a search for glorious independence. In fact, all Warren and Clinton could kvetch about on Monday was mean old Donald Trump. Donald Trump was the whole obfuscatory theme of their show in the buckle of the Clinton/NAFTA-decimated Rust Belt.

Forget the looming, job-destroying Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Hillary helped to write and which Liz used to loathe, when they can distract voters by making fun of Trump's ridiculous hat and his thin, withered, senile and unmanly skin! Forget Hillary's multi-millions in paid private chitchats with predatory bankers when they can deflect the conversation to Donald Trump's regressive lying, cheating, woman-hating ways!

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup might fraudulently take your home away from you, but Donald would do you even worse. "He'd crush you in the dirt!" yelled Elizabeth Warren to a solidarity chorus of boos and You Go, Girls.

This election - like all elections - is nothing but a TV show (A Special Place in Hell for Women Who Don't Support Other Women: teleplay by warmonger Madeleine Albright). So of course the diva would invite the rising star to be her regular guest player and stand-in, if not her permanent sidekick. After all, this isn't, ahem, meant to be seen as a remake of All About Eve.

 So relax, everybody. All you cash-strapped voters stuck out there in Precariatville need do pack up your troubles, sit back, and root for Hillarity Ricardo and Ethelbeth Mertz. Or is it Hillary Mirth and Lizzy Ricardo? As Hillary herself once scoffed about the who, what, when, why and how of Benghazi: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

What is so vitally important in all our lives is Donald Trump's collection of dorky baseball caps with their "Make America Great Again" logo. Responding to his diss of her as a silly Pocahontas because she once allegedly claimed aboriginal ancestry on a college application, Liz retorted: "You want to see goofy? Look at him in that hat!"

(Don't look over here at Hillary, for goddessake. It might remind you that she is under active FBI investigation for her illegal email arrangements and possibly also for her family's money-laundering charity slush fund.)

 Since Clinton forever seems to be in a self-inflicted Lucy-like jam, Warren will take her hand. In a bit of a Berning mess, Hillary sent out the S.O.S. (But if she does end up in jail, I doubt that Liz would go so far as to post her bail.)  It's friendship, friendship, a perfect blendship... for the TV cameras. Their outfits bleed together so perfectly that at times you think you're seeing a two-headed woman. Even their hairdos are style and color-coordinated.

I must be color-blind, or maybe my TV set is defective, because according to CNN, Liz donned royal blue and for Hillary, it was the very appropriate wearing of the deep purple. Hillary wouldn't want the proles to mistake who's the queen in this show, and who's merely the lady-in-waiting. But I'm sticking with my two heads on one body scenario anyway, because I prefer comedy and horror spoofs to schlocky political stories that serve the status quo.

"Imagine Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office the next time America faces a crisis," Clinton told the crowd, grimly nodding her head up and down in that annoying way that she has of punctuating every sentence. "Imagine him being in charge when your jobs and savings are at stake. Imagine him trying to figure out what to do in case of an emergency."

Imagine Hillary telling the truth and admitting that the real unemployment (U-6) rate in the United States is close to 10% when you factor in the millions who have simply given up looking for work. 

Imagine her acknowledging that a fifth of Americans actually have no savings at all to worry about, while 62% have less than $1,000 stashed away for an emergency expense. Imagine Hillary being even remotely aware of how hard life is for the bottom 90% whom she is supposedly trying to woo.

Imagine Hillary with her trigger-happy finger at the ready at all times to answer any emergency, surrounded by her sycophantic chorus of bloodthirsty neocon pals. Imagine her being in charge of continuing the Neoliberal Project she and Bill started, in which your jobs disappear, your wages plummet, the inequality soars and universal health care is forsaken for the plutocratic profits gleaned by the waging of permanent war.

Fasten your seat belts. Because whether the car is driven by Goofy Don or it's driven by Reckless Hillary, this won't be just another bumpy ride. We must all brace ourselves for the inevitable crash.