Palace Intrigues

The punditocracy's second-favorite topic this week (after Trumpmania) is whether Joe Biden will run, and if he runs, whether he'll pick Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Also, rumors are flying that, not so very much behind the scenes, President Obama is doing everything in his power to mess with the Hillary Clinton candidacy. (After all, it is his FBI -- not the GOP -- that has picked campaign season as the optimal time to begin combing through all her emails. As if Obama didn't know that for the whole time that she was Secretary of State she was using a private account.) 

Machiavelli Muses

  Most of this is speculation, of course, and way beyond my investigatory capabilities as a blogger from the sticks. But one speculation is easily debunkable, and that is the possible endorsement of Biden by Elizabeth Warren. Unless she has totally gone over to the dark side, this is not going to happen. The truth is that not so very long ago, he was her Public Enemy #1.

It's all there in a 2003 book she wrote with her daughter Amelia, called The Two Income Trap.

Before she founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, before Obama threw her under the bus, before she became a politician and a powerful senator, Warren was that rare bird, a Harvard economics professor with a side gig as a consumer advocate. It was her task to go after the credit card industry predators ruining the lives of struggling middle class families -- particularly those headed by single mothers -- and arm-twist congress-critters into keeping the bankruptcy laws working in favor of the families being crushed by usurious debt. She discovered that in the previous 20 years, the number of women filing petitions for bankruptcy had gone up by 662 percent.

"Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in a financial collapse," she wrote in the preface to her book. She found that bankruptcy was becoming the biggest cause of family change: more than death, divorce, heart attacks, cancer, graduations and other disruptions.

She called it the "two income trap" because no longer can a even a married woman go to work to help out in hard times and make extra money for non-essentials, no longer can a mother stay home when a child, spouse or elderly parent gets sick, without fear of financial collapse. Now they were in the workforce just to barely break even. And when finances collapse, it's mainly the women who bear the brunt and take the blame and the responsibility, Warren wrote. 

Long before the 2008 financial collapse, home foreclosures were skyrocketing.

And Senator Joe Biden represented Delaware, the Credit Card Industry Capital of the World. The bankers who were his political donors wanted to make it harder for people to discharge their debts via personal bankruptcy.

Biden, who'd been trumpeting himself as a champion of women's rights in his capacity as sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, was anything but when it came to championing their economic rights. He was also co-sponsor of bank-friendly reform legislation that has made it difficult if not impossible for families struggling with credit card and medical debt to declare bankruptcy and start afresh.

"And in a statistic with special significance for Senator Biden," Elizabeth Warren wrote, "more women will be victimized by predatory lenders than will seek protection from an abusive husband or boyfriend."

"Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening," she added while scoffing at his campaign literature featuring glossy photos of himself with National Organization of Women (NOW) officials.

That other self-professed champion of women, Hillary Clinton, also voted with Biden and the Republicans in favor of the banks and against debt-ridden mothers, in 2001. This was a total flip-flop from her previous stated position. As Warren wrote, "The bill was the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton  could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble."

Sweet Nothings... Joe and Hillary

I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warren met Biden at his Naval Observatory digs this past weekend. Her agreeing to become his running mate on a possible Democratic ticket would be as grotesque as her quitting the Senate to become a lobbyist for Citigroup.

Not going to happen. I predict she either stays neutral, or if she endorses anybody, it will be Bernie Sanders, who has joined in her proposal to break up the big banks by introducing legislation to do just that. If Hillary wins the nomination, Warren will be forced to make a token appearance at the convention -- and that should be the sum of her curbed enthusiasm.

Sanders, by the way, just got the endorsement of Cornel West. This should help put a dent into the punditocratic meme that Bernie and black people don't get along.

Lying Through Their Fangs

Only a day after President Obama huffily and falsely accused Elizabeth Warren of lying (for what he called purely selfish and political reasons) about the democracy-gutting measures in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he was exposed for allegedly telling a pretty gruesome lie of his own.

According to Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama essentially ordered the execution of Osama bin Laden while he was a prisoner of the Pakistanis. Bin Laden wasn't holed up in a heavily weaponized and guarded secret bunker, plotting the next al Qaeda attack. He was alone, helpless, feeble and unarmed, and Navy Seals were allowed  to simply traipse on in and blow him to bits with the full complicity of Pakistani security state authorities. The American taxpayers paid for the killing privilege with a bribe/reward of millions of dollars. Oh, and our military didn't bury him at sea in a respectful Muslim ceremony as the White House later claimed. They unceremoniously dumped his mangled body parts from a helicopter as it flew over an inaccessible Afghan mountain range. 

If we are to believe Seymour Hersh, Obama lied about the less-than-courageous details of the assassination of bin Laden for purely political reasons. He needed to glorify himself for his upcoming re-election campaign. He need to portray himself as a hero who grappled with the moral dilemma of putting our troops in harm's way on a mission from hell.

Hersh's version of the bin Laden execution is like a scenario that would have Obama sending Special Ops assassins into the secure prison cell of Boston marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, and then telling the world that he was killed while he was on the lam after a daring escape. It's like storming Gitmo to blow away all those dangerous emaciated terrorists hooked up to their forced feeding tubes, and then claiming they'd taken over their own island prison. 

So his Mothers Day insult to Elizabeth Warren-- that "she is a politician, just like everybody" -- is rendered all the more loathsomely ironic. Because, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh's account, Barack Obama himself is a singularly loathsome politician for the ages. And a damned good liar, because Hersh's blockbuster account is getting little to no play in the mainstream media. Both The New Yorker and the Washington Post had also passed on another Hersh blockbuster from last year, exposing the White House's lies on the Syria Sarin attacks.

And so the gaslighting of Hersh continues, with the White House-friendly Vox helpfully pointing out that he is old and decrepit, that his sourcing is thin and anonymous, and that he is unable to supply incontrovertible photographic proof of the bin Laden killing/coverup conspiracy, as he did with his Abu Ghraib torture scoop. In other words, he didn't act like a New York Times propaganda flack. Instead of using anonymous sources to aggrandize government liars, Hersh used anonymous sources to bring government liars down a peg. Hersh and Elizabeth Warren are only the latest victims of what might be called the Cornel West Treatment.

The mainstream media are no longer in the business of speaking truth to power, or admitting that they've been dupes of mendacious politicians.

***

Speaking of truthiness, Paul Krugman is at it again. He manages to defend Dodd-Frank and Elizabeth Warren against the predations of Republicans and Wall Street vampires while giving the corporate Democrats their usual free pass. And of course, he blithely ignores the fact that Obama spent part of his Mothers Day weekend publicly shaming Elizabeth Warren and shilling for the Wall Street vampires.

My published comment: (I'm tweaking this a bit due to typos/clumsy grammar in the original)

Vampire bankers can't undo Dodd-Frank in the bad publicity-inducing light of day, so they're going the darkness route, otherwise known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Elizabeth Warren is striking fear into their venal little hearts because she has pointed out, rightly, that this trade deal could effectively gut Dodd-Frank reforms without our even knowing it. Congress is allowed to see this, but the Obama administration has already threatened to prosecute our reps should they reveal the classified details to their constituents.

Vampires love darkness and secrecy because showing their ugly fangs might endanger feasting on their human meal. The meal might run away or revolt.

The TPP's leaked portions show that investor state tribunals would grant "market access protections" to transnationals, and could theoretically rule that Dodd-Frank's protections against risky derivatives unfairly restrict the global banking cartels' ability to suck even more lifeblood from our economy. This has been strongly denied by Obama and Trade Rep. Michael Froman, who got a multimillion dollar bonus from Citigroup upon spinning through the revolving doors to act in somebody's best interests.

But they refuse to hand over the evidence -- and meanwhile, Obama can ostentatiously veto more blatant GOP efforts to kill Dodd-Frank and smarmily call Elizabeth Warren a liar for bravely speaking truth to pathocratic power.

She is a human stake through the financial vampire's heart. We are lucky to have her.

Invasion of the Hillzabeth

(updated below)

I'd promised myself that I would limit my posts on Hillary to only one per week, lest I become as addicted to the effervescence as the mainstream press seems to be. With a full year and half to go before election day, I didn't want to suffer acute Clinton burnout on top of my chronic Clinton burnout. Even Hillary seems to be getting tired of herself. She is not so much running for president as she is sauntering for president.

But I couldn't resist her campaign's latest gimmick -- which is to claim that Elizabeth Warren is not really Elizabeth Warren, and that Hillary Clinton is not really Hillary Clinton. It's some kind of weird rip-off of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The plot is convoluted, so bear with me:

There never was an Elizabeth Warren, or at least not the Elizabeth Warren we think we know and love. The real Elizabeth Warren is Hillary Clinton. The fake Elizabeth, hogging attention in the Senate, crept right into Hillary's mind one night. She sucked out Hillary's passionate populism like a vampire sucks blood, claiming it as her own. What a bitch.

And all that's left of poor Hillary is a robotic wraith*. She wanders the plutocratic landscape, devoid of all emotion and humanity.

In case you're confused (I know that I am) I will let the New York Times explain it better. Amy Chozick, who has the enviable assignment of being the permanent Hillary beat reporter, headlines her story "Campaign Casts Hillary Clinton as the Populist It Insists She Has Always Been."

Like I said, this is shades of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As that cult classic movie begins, a boy insists that his mother isn't his mother, and a woman thinks her husband isn't her husband. and so forth. It turns out the townsfolk are getting subsumed, while they sleep, by giant alien outer-space pods who morph into exact facsimiles of the person they replace.  At first, people who insist that their relatives aren't who they say they are get written off as nuts. Until the movie progresses, that is, and everybody turns into a progressive pod-zombie. The few remaining holdouts gradually succumb to sleep through sheer exhaustion. It's just a movie, though. Neoliberal Death Match 2016 is all too real.

The Futile Fight Against Hillary Fatigue

Back to the Times article:

But now, the former secretary of state must persuade voters that she is the right messenger for the cause of inequality, not simply seizing on it out of political expedience.

Nothing stings members of her inner circle more than the suggestion that their candidate is late to these issues. Mrs. Clinton was the original Elizabeth Warren, her advisers say, a populist fighter who for decades has been an advocate for families and children; only now have the party and primary voters caught up.

“I don’t know why we have this semicollective amnesia about her past positions,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and Mrs. Clinton’s policy director in 2008. “She’s following no one on these issues.”

Neera Tanden can gas-light we doubters all she wants, but there are some inconvenient truths about Humanish Hillary. Just like the pod people, she is both new and a con -- a Neocon. She is more hawkish than Obama. 

And although she speaks often about women and families, her words have not been followed by similar actions: quite the opposite, in fact. As a board member for Walmart while she was first lady of Arkansas, she remained silent as the Walton family fought unions and a minimum wage. And Alice Walton, who along with her fellow heirs owns as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, has already given $25,000 to the Ready for Hillary PAC  -- relative chump change which nonetheless is more than the annual salary of the average  female Walmart employee.

Hillary was instrumental in Bill Clinton's collusion with Republicans that cut off direct cash aid to poor mothers and children. And she bragged about it in her  first memoir. "By the time Bill and I left the White House," she gushed, "welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent!"

Well, she did say she was dead broke when she left, so I assume that she wanted the still-poor welfare moms to achieve parity with her in order to show solidarity with their champion. Don't even get me started on her championship of NAFTA, which saw the exodus of millions of jobs, including the jobs held by working women.

There's so much more, which I will get to often in the next endless year and a half. But meanwhile, Team Clinton is trying to rewrite fact as fantasy, omitting the scary special effects. According to the revisionary history, Hillary was a left-wing firebrand in the White House, until the State Department gig forced her to act boring and conservative and hawkish and non-Warrenish. From the Times again:

This perception comes because she wasn’t involved in the discussion for so long,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, said of Mrs. Clinton. Because, she added, in the White House “she had this reputation as being the very left-wing, liberal, Elizabeth Warren type.”

Anita Dunn must be living in a fog. According to DeSmogBlog, Dunn is a lobbyist who's gotten rich from, among other things, working for the tar sands and fracked oil industries as well as doing public relations for the railroads hosting those exploding oil bomb terror trains. She's spun through the Washington revolving doors so many times that she is no longer recognizable as a pod person. She's a blur.

A 16-page dossier called "Hillary Clinton: A Lifetime Champion of Income Opportunity" reads like a hokey Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the one where the filthy rich guy has the epiphany -- not to agree to pay more taxes, of course, but to marry the struggling single mom, and make us all feel vicariously good for about five minutes.

Elizabeth Warren, sniffed an aide, is only a "footnote" in the Book of Hillary. According to the Book, the too-big-to-fail banks do not even exist. They are replaced by commodities known as children -- who are too small to fail, assuming of course that they work hard and play by the rules. Then they can morph into investments like pork belly futures. Or pod-people. It is cute beyond words.

 I have no more words.

*Update, 4/23: Make that a radioactive robotic wraith. While some of us were sleeping, the New York Times published what would, in a sane world devoid of pod people, be the coup de grace for the Hillary campaign. Read the whole thing. The Clintons make Frank and Clare Underwood look like Ward and June Cleaver. Unfortunately, Democrats are viewing this meticulously researched and damning piece as just more one Hillary-hating attack by the Worse Evil Party. It has gotten so zombie-ish in the Land of the Free that you may now call yourself "pragmatic" for blindly accepting felonious behavior by your favorite candidates.

Of course, we've been governed by an organized crime ring for quite a while now. It's called the permanent ruling class.