MediTrump For All

Since Donald Trump's idea of "insurance for everybody" doesn't entail a true government-sponsored single payer health care system, we're racking our brains trying to figure out what he could really mean.

The racking is probably futile. Because whenever you're promised that the "final strokes" are being put on a fantastic mystery product to be unveiled any day now, you should pretty much assume you're about to be scammed, if not whipped. And since Donald Trump's whole life has been one big exercise in hucksterism, you should pretty much also leave out the pretty much.

Still, masochist that I am, I'm torturing my brain trying to figure out what Trump could possibly have up his magician's sleeve for his U.S. citizen-subjects. Since the first requirement for any Trump plan is that it be short and sweet, preferably reducible to a promise and a slogan or a soundbite, here's some speculative Dystopia to get all racked up about:

Every American consumer-citizen will receive in the mail, within 30 days of the inauguration, a pre-approved personal I.D. card bearing the benign smirking image of Donald J. Trump. Just looking at his face should make you feel great again. But just in case it doesn't, you will enjoy the immediate freedom to use your TrumpCare card in a variety of (about two) different ways.

Every hotel, resort, and real estate holding bearing the Trump name will be outfitted with a walk-in clinic. There, you can present your card for a discount on check-ups and eyeglasses and prescriptions whose lower prices the new president will negotiate personally. If all goes as planned, you'll be able to enjoy even greater savings once your meds no longer have to undergo double-blind studies and stringent testing by a soon-to-be purged Food and Drug Administration.

And don't worry if there aren't any Trump properties with Trump clinics near you yet. His sons and heirs will use public money to construct them. They will concurrently orchestrate fire sales, forced buyouts and hostile takeovers of existing properties and medical practices in the interest of your great-again health care. If Trump builds it, you will most definitely come. Because annual checkups will be mandatory. Since all 17 U.S. "intelligence" agencies are now privy to your personal information, the United States of Trump will be duly informed if you don't take advantage of his benevolence in a very timely way.

But to be fair, and to help Trump avoid any appearance of a monopoly or impropriety or a conflict of interest, you will also enjoy the option of using your Trumpcard to score a discount as a medical tourist to any off-shored health care of your choosing. This is America, after all, and the illusion of choice and freedom must be maintained at all costs.  Donald's kids are already finalizing deals with the airlines and the cruise ship lines to get TrumpClubMed started. 

 Nazi Germany's Strength Through Joy program of healthy holiday-making for workers might be the perfect propaganda model for them, as well as the perfect scam. Under that populist initiative, regular Germans were supposed to go on discounted international state-sponsored cruises -- with the added health benefit of feeling ever so much better once they were safely and securely back in the Fatherland. What the Nazis didn't tell the Volk was that those taking advantage of Hitler's travel beneficence would be disproportionately middle class, white collar workers and government flunkies. Most working people just couldn't afford all that joyful strength.

Therefore, Hitler decided to placate the poor and construct a seaside prototype of a Trump hotel complex, which he trumpeted as "the biggest resort on earth." Unfortunately, the massive construction, designed to cram in 20,000 vacationers at a time like so many sardines was never completed. By the time they'd been power for five years, the Nazis were doing Strength Through War.

So that was then. And Trump, like Adolf before him, keeps insisting that he is a man of peace despite his professed desire to blow up any pathetic Iranian craft coming anywhere near our beautiful destroyers. So for all we know, Donald Trump may be joyfully envisioning a MediTrump Consortium of Hospitals performing both Trump-brand knee and hip replacements for workers now forced to put off retirement until 75, as well as Trump-brand total body part replacements for wounded veterans. Notwithstanding the recent court-ordered demise of Trump University in a secret settlement, also stay tuned for the Trump Medical School chain, with student loans for budding doctors issued through the First National Bank of Trump, formerly known as the U.S. Treasury Department. Graduates will have the choice of working off their loans at unpaid internships lasting ten years before going on to public-private practice at an approved Trump Clinic.

Since Democrats holding their anti-Trump rallies have been gleefully goading Trump to come up with a better health insurance plan than Obamacare, they will certainly end up getting punked. Because when the "something better" in their neoliberal world does not, and never will, include Medicare for All, we are bound to get presented with something much, much worse.

Ironically, just like Barack Obama before him, Donald Trump actually was for single payer government insurance before he was against it. But you know what they always say: We must not let the perfect be the enemy of what's good for the oligarchy.

All On the Same Fascist Team

The swiftness with which Barack Obama and the rest of the media-political complex are normalizing the Trump succession and welcoming this depraved man into their cozy inner circle is indicative of one inconvenient truth. This is already a fascist country, and it has been at least since the early 1950s, when the right wing started attacking the New Deal, the surveillance/war state became the fourth branch of government, and Richard Nixon's racist Southern Strategy paved the way for the reactionary New Democrat movement led by Bill Clinton.

The only difference is that Trump's brand of fascism doesn't have the traditional filter, which has enabled glib politicians from Reagan to Obama to put a friendly face on things for purposes of fooling some of the people most of the time, or most of the people some of the time. For too long, we've been conned into believing that this is a representative democracy.

If there is one positive thing to be said about the Trump presidency, it is that the con is dead. If the wool hasn't already been removed from 330 million pairs of American eyes, it will be soon enough.

Barack Obama was able to welcome Donald Trump so easily to the White House on Thursday because the nasty words spewed in this election had all been mainly for show. Obama even admitted that he and Donald are essentially on the same side, that governance is a sporting event, an "intramural scrimmage" between two cohesive factions of the same duopolistic team.

Grotesquely ignoring and insulting the thousands of protesters now marching in the streets, many of them Latinos and African-Americans and Muslims who are now more afraid than ever for their very lives, Obama launched into the same conciliatory pandering that's been his style ever since he won office in 2008 with a super-majority in both houses of Congress. He once again sickeningly caved in the service of the oligarchy by remarking that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. "America," of course, is code for the ruling class.

And that's why I'm confident that this incredible journey that we're on as Americans will go on.  And I am looking forward to doing everything that I can to make sure that the next President is successful in that.  I have said before, I think of this job as being a relay runner -- you take the baton, you run your best race, and hopefully, by the time you hand it off you're a little further ahead, you've made a little progress.  And I can say that we've done that, and I want to make sure that handoff is well-executed, because ultimately we're all on the same team.

The New York Times, which only the other day was lashing out at Donald Trump's ugly rhetoric, has already done a near-180 since his victory. The paper of record, which also functions as the propaganda mouthpiece of whomever is in charge at any given time, enthused that Obama and Trump, if not exactly enveloped in an instant bromance, at least succeeded in breaking the ice on their first blind date. Their mutual, man-spreading admiration society spoke volumes.

  Everybody was ever so civil about the whole transition-of-power thing. Michelle and Melania had a dainty tea for two. Trump took in the view of the Washington Monument and unsurprisingly gushed out his admiration for the nation's great phallic symbol.

Barack Obama, of course, was well-prepared for the emergence of Donald Trump. That is because he personally helped orchestrate the emergence of Donald Trump.

He saw him coming more than a decade ago, and even then, he welcomed him with open arms. 

It would have benefited neither him nor the Citigroup bankers with whom he was collaborating to actually prevent Donald Trump. Why would they? They knew full well that the working class destruction caused by wage-suppressing global trade deals and the weaponized corporate coups known as CIA regime changes and all-out wars would give rise to social unrest and mass hardship on a global scale.

Back when Barack Obama was still the callow junior senator from Illinois, he was guest of honor at a new Wall Street-funded offshoot of the Brookings Institution, dubbed the Hamilton Project.  Effusively praising corporate globalization, offshoring, deregulation, profits for the few and austerity for the many, he casually remarked that millions of people would be victimized in the process.

In words that make Hillary Clinton's own paid speeches to Wall Street seem mild in comparison, Obama warned his enthusiastic plutocratic hosts of the inevitable populist backlash to their greed. He did not, however, warn them to cease and desist. He only suggested that they prepare themselves for looming social upheavals. And he assured them, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted to be an integral part, parcel and beneficiary of their neoliberal Hamilton Project and the continuing destruction of the working class. In the event of any populist backlash occurring or a strongman arising during his own hoped-for presidency, he would always have their backs.

It was Obama's de facto audition to star as the Democratic presidential nominee. His hosts simply wanted a guarantee that the politician with the golden voice who'd so inspired the nation at the 2004 party convention was still totally on board with their greed program.

Obama's appearance at the inauguration of the Hamilton Project took place two and a half years before the 2008 financial meltdown, and more than a decade before the election of Donald J. Trump. And he was nothing if not prescient, telling the bankers:

 Just remember, as we move forward, that there are real consequences to the work we are doing doing here. There are people in places like Decatur, Illinois and Galesburg, Illinois who have seen their jobs eliminated. They have lost their health care. They have lost their retirement security. They don't have a clear sense of how their children will succeed in the same way they succeeded. They believe that this may be the first generation in which their children will do worse than they do. Some of that, then, will end up manifesting itself in the sort of nativist sentiment, protectionism and anti-immigration sentiment that we are debating here in Washington. So there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. This is not a bloodless process.

People will get bloodied, people will lose their jobs, people will see their wages stagnate, people will suffer and die prematurely -- but as long as Wall Street keeps its avaricious eyes on the prize, the "real consequence" of what turned out to be right wing Trumpism will have been ultimately worth it, both to Barack and all his new buddies:

I think that as long as all of us retain the sense of passion about the ultimate outcome that we want, a stronger more prosperous America than we are passing on to our children, then I think we will do well in this process. I am glad to be a part of it.

That Obama ultimately kept his promise to the plutocracy is all the more grotesque, given the Wall Street meltdown and mass hardships and unemployment and foreclosures that "we" allegedly never saw coming. He kept his promise by refusing to prosecute the oligarchs who made the whole mess and rewarding them with a bailout --  because these were the psychopathic friends who'd rammed through deregulation and bankrolled his own rise to power.

In that now-infamous private Oval Office speech he gave to cowed and cowering banksters in 2009, Obama boasted that he was the only thing protecting them from the pitchfork-wielding rabble. Nobody would lose a bonus. Nobody would go to prison. He more than kept the promise he'd made to the Hamilton Project three years earlier as his own price of admission to the highest office in the land.

It was during the same inaugural Hamilton Project meeting at the Brookings  Institution that Obama had also promised to couple corporate global coups with the continued Democratic unraveling of the New Deal, begun by the Clintons during their administration. Obama euphemized the privatization of the Social Security long desired by Wall Street as "too many of us (Democrats) defending programs as they were written in 1938."

"People often ask me how I keep my idealism," he cynically bragged to his potential backers.

He vowed that working class jobs would be destroyed, and that the working class would then have to endure reduced retirement incomes and other punishments, all in the service of the plutonomy. If the oligarchs succeeded, then Barack Obama would succeed right along with them.

It was only the Monica Lewinsky scandal that had prevented Bill Clinton from at least partially privatizing Social Security in his second term. And it was only the Tea Party that prevented Obama from finalizing his own "Grand Bargain" of Medicare and Social Security cuts with House Speaker John Boehner during his first term. When that planned assault on the working class failed, Obama humorously groused that Boehner had "left him at the altar."

Ironically, Donald Trump's election is what could preclude any further "bipartisan" cuts to the safety net by deposed empress Hillary Clinton and Speaker Paul Ryan. Democrats are always more prone to raise a ruckus when the presidential cutter and slasher is not a member of their own party. And perhaps luckily for us, Trump is not as gifted at talking from both sides of his mouth as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan before him. When and if Trump tries anything dodgy with Medicare and Social Security, he simply won't have the requisite verbal and intellectual skills to fool people into thinking that starvation is actually good for them.

Ultimately, even Obama's legendary glibness and personal popularity have not been enough to protect his legacy through a Clinton restoration. Try as he might, he couldn't delay the "not-bloodless process" until after he was safely out of office, long enough to start raking in the big bucks for his own family foundation slush fund and for the building of an obscene billion-dollar library shrine to himself in Chicago. He won't have the requisite political influence, because he won't have the Clintons as his White House partners. His personal neoliberal Hamilton project may be on the skids, if not a complete wreck. Potential donors, currently in a frenzy of swallowing their liberal pride for purposes of that smooth, successful transition to a more unfriendly fascism, might end up pragmatically deciding that it would behoove them to grovel before the new president instead. 

Maybe Obama can get a gig where he'll feel more at home.The Hamilton Project at Brookings might be an ideal, permanent and lucrative fit, especially since he plans to stay in Washington so that younger daughter Sasha can continue her pricey private high school career without being rudely upended like so many thousands of her evicted American peers.

After all, the Silicon Valley billionaire (Peter Thiel) reportedly heading Donald Trump's transition team also sits on the oligarchic advisory board of the Hamilton Project, as do former Obama Treasury Secretary and current vulture capitalist Timothy Geithner, Obama Catfood Commissioners Laura D'Andrea Tyson and Alice Rivlin, and billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg  and her Clintonoid mentors Larry Summers and Robert Rubin.

It's a small world in a small-minded intramural town. When they succeed, they all succeed.

So keep on marching, Citizens. But please don't restrict yourselves to Trump Tower. Be sure to include K Street, and the Brookings Institution, and Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup in your busy itineraries. Donald Trump is only the ruling establishment's latest, most hideous placeholder.

"I am upset with those who prefer to remain spectators until it may be too late. I am shocked by those who seem to believe - in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's words of 1940 - that 'there is no fighting the wave of the future' and all you can do is 'leap with it.' I am appalled by those who stiffly maintain that nothing can be done until things get worse or the system can be changed." -- Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism.

Kindergarten Fascists of the GOP

The mob of regressives is taking its schoolyard bullying routine to a whole new scary level.

Not for nothing has the newest chanted refrain at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland become "Lock her up! Lock her up!"

They're obviously thinking back fondly to the only school setting in which many of them excelled: Recess.

They envision over-achieving Hillary Clinton on the playground in her crisply ironed gingham pantsuit. Somebody (Newt? Toad? Donald?) suggests that she join in their game of London Bridge Is Falling Down. Wanting desperately to be tested, vetted and accepted on their skewed-right playing field, the Goldwater Girl in liberal clothing accepts the challenge.

  Their human arch comes swinging down and traps her. Take the keys and lock her up, lock her up....but then the tune abruptly stops. The play-school reactionaries leave out the "My Fair Lady" ending because it reminds them too much of a Broadway musical, and they're a bunch of homophobes.

So to augment the cries of lock her up, lock her up, one particularly dim Trump toady named Al Baldasaro suggested ending the song by convicting Hillary of treason and executing her by firing squad. The Secret Service hall monitors were duly notified and are said to be investigating the subtle little threat.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi helped keep the primordial "Lock Her Up" chant going strong last night at the extended thought-free recess known as the Republican National Convention. You might remember Pam as the hall of justice monitor who promised not to squeal on thieving Donald Trump in exchange for some of his lunch money. And since she, too, studiously avoided the My Fair Lady ending, you also might remember the "sick irony" of her sympathizing with the LGBT victims of the Orlando massacre after fighting against gay rights for the past dozen years.

School misery was on full display in a few other of its endlessly creative forms on Wednesday.

Ivanka Trump was apparently so traumatized by her own school experience that she spent recess time huddled in a janitor's closet, making daily phone calls to Daddy. Thank goodness the bullying that he himself had perfected in military school didn't apply to his own daughter, because he always deigned to accept her calls. His kindness apparently did not extend to calling the school to demand why his kid was locking herself in a closet during recess in the first place.. or asking why the custodial closet was even equipped with a phone. It's very odd - Donald certainly wasn't forking over $35,000+ in private school tuition for his child to attend Dotheboys Hall.

 Or was he?

And then there was the rare playground spectacle of Bully vs. Bully.

Ted Cruz got on the see-saw with Donald Trump. As soon as Donnie was high in the air, crowing in all his narcissistic glory, Ted jumped off his end and let Trump crash right to the ground. All Donnie could do was shake his fist helplessly as the still-traumatized Ivanka sent eye-daggers in Ted's general direction. The hall monitors hastily escorted Heidi Cruz from the playground for her own safety, as various toadies taunted "Goldman Sachs!" in her wake.

Later, a partially recovered Trump clumsily air-kissed his new toady (Mike Pence) right in the middle of his forehead. He perhaps hallucinated a little girl with a little curl lurking there and acting horrid, and then his misogyny got the better of him.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is effectively turning all the bullying to her own advantage. Since people are picking on her at the rate of about once every nanosecond, and since she and her team send out a GoFundMe email blast for every last insult, she is raking in the victimhood bucks at a truly astounding rate.

I got an email from Chelsea Clinton just this morning, going her former BFF Ivanka one better when it comes to parents and schools. Donald only talked to his daughter by phone in a janitor's closet, while Hillary was both a workaholic  and a helicopter parent for the ages. Far from being a GOP caricature, Chelsea wrote,

 My mom is compassionate, kind, and hardworking -- when I was growing up, it seemed like she could do anything. She’d spend all day in court litigating on behalf of children and families, then come home and ask me over dinner what I learned in school, what my favorite part of my day was, and what I hoped would happen tomorrow. And then she would sit with me while I did my homework or practiced the piano or worked on my science project.

Chelsea seemingly was never allowed to goof off, misbehave, play, or even be alone in her room to just think, either then or now. Thus did this very very good 36-year-old woman dutifully beg me to send a buck to her ever-present Mom as a sign of my gratitude.

And then there was the email a few hours later from Clinton's Deputy Communications Director, Christina Reynolds. It was temptingly slugged "Lucifer."

It seems that crackpot theocrat Ben Carson has accused Hillary of being the devil incarnate. To prove that I am exercised enough to disown exorcism as well as to renounce The Donald and all his works, I was asked to send a buck to Hillary. In return, I will receive a "free" sticker. 

Because as Christina so aptly observed: "This is not a normal contest, and no one is playing by normal rules."

 Back When BFFs Still Played by Normal Ruling Class Rules (Kiss, Kiss)

Spring Ahead

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead tonight, so that one more hour of your time can be extracted in the name of capitalism. But don't worry. It usually happens while you're asleep. You won't even feel a thing. Unless, of course, you get into a car accident on the way to one of your precarious jobs because you or a fellow motorist is exhausted as well as broke, hungry, and road-raged.

***

Speaking of rage, did you catch the Benito Trump Cancelled Rally last night? I watched it unfold on MSNBC as the ridiculous Chris Matthews did the play-by-play. He is shocked, shocked that Fascism has come to America right under his very elite nose. He is clueless, clueless that nonstop coverage of Trumpism and the presidential horse-race spectacle by his and other networks have led citizens to believe that politics is an infotainment sporting event sponsored by the WWF. He pretends to not understand that the corruption extends not only to his profession but to his own family circle. His guests and fellow-commentators are heavy contributors to wife Kathleen's multimillion-dollar congressional bid, one of the most expensive in lower House history.

As far as the "unrest" at the Trump arena went, it was pretty tame compared to, say, Ferguson and Baltimore. For one thing, police presence was very scanty -- too many white kids. Rahm Emanuel didn't send out the troops because he didn't want a repeat of 1968, when the Democrats ended up losing to Nixon.  So the Trumpenproletariat and the protesters were asked to leave. And aside from a few made-for-TV scuffles, they did. From what I saw,  most of the kids seemed more interested in taking selfies than rioting and beating each other up.

 If you were there and able to get close enough to snap a pic of a black guy and a white guy screaming at each other, then you made the producers of what passes for participatory politics very happy indeed. The media/political complex relishes the "divisiveness" of the lower orders as they flatter themselves that  "bipartisanship" is the highest virtue known to humanity.

***

Speaking of selfies, did you happen to catch Barack Obama at the SXSW conference? Just as the scuffles were breaking out in Chicago, our prescient president was warning us to not to "fetishize our smart phones." As long as the government can already "rifle through your underwear," he said,  you are very silly to keep defending the privacy of your electronic devices. You are all child molesters or terrorists until proven otherwise.... not that they'll ever bother proving otherwise.

From the New York Times:  

“If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?” Mr. Obama said. “How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”

If the government has no way into a smartphone, he added, “then everyone is walking around with a Swiss bank account in your pocket.”

And Chris Matthews thinks that Trump is the only charismatic face of totalitarianism?

***

Speaking of terrifying cluelessness, Hillary Clinton has again attempted to revise history, this time claiming that the Reagans were warriors against the HIV epidemic back in the 80s, -- when, in fact, the Gruesome Homophobic Twosome went out of their way to ignore it. In later admitting her mistake, Hillary said she'd confused AIDS with Alzheimers, the latter of which Nancy publicized only because it affected her directly. I suppose we should forgive Hillary, though. When  Nancy was First Lady of the Land, Hillary was First Lady of Arkansas and probably too busy supervising her prison convict slave help to pay much attention to an epidemic affecting gay men.

Or. she might have experienced a Reagan moment and thought she was a contestant on Jeopardy rather than having a friendly funeral chat with Mrs. Alan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell) on MSNBC. "I'll take 'Diseases That Begin With A' for $675,000, Alex!"

Hillary always brags that she's been tested. Is she sure about that?

Whether it's President Trump or President Clinton, we can expect another long slog of psychopathology and stupidity on top of the ingrained insanity.

Hopefully it will be neither. The words and actions of these candidates just yesterday alone is all the more reason to vote for Bernie Sanders. At his own rally on Friday he called for inclusiveness among the classes and the races and the generations.

Unlike Obama before him, he didn't smarmily call for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, between red and blue states, among establishment elites. He called for solidarity among people.

That is not at all sending a giant thrill up Chris Matthews' leg. It is, however, sending a giant chill up the spineless spine of the Closet Fascist Collective, for whom dividing and conquering the electorate is not only their main governing strategy, it is the only governing strategy that they still have left.

Keeping Fear Alive is their only motto.

Trump Happens

Sinclair Lewis warned us about this character 80 years ago.

The resemblance between the quasi-fictional postmodern demagogue named Donald Trump and the fictional Depression-era demagogue named Buzz Windrip is so uncanny as to make me wonder whether Trump hasn't used It Can't Happen Here as a handy guide to how to win the presidency during hard economic times.

See if you can guess which of the two candidates spun out the following word salads: (answers are below) 

"I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly holler right out we've got to change our country. The Executive has got to have a freer hand and to be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a bunch of shyster lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates..., But these economic changes are only a means to an end and that end must be fundamentally the same principles of liberty, equality and justice that were advocated by the founding fathers of this grand land back in 1776."

***

"I will build a Great Wall -- and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me -- and I'll build them very, very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words."

***
"My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength -- though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us -- we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should all be very glad."

***

"I shall not be content until this country can produce every single thing we need. even cocoa, coffee and rubber, and so we keep all our dollars at home."

***

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. they're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

***
"Usually I'm pretty mild, in fact many of my friends are kind enough to call it 'folksy'... but I hope none of the gentlemen who have honored me with their enmity think for one single minute that when I run into a gross public evil or a persistent enough detractor I can't get up on my hind legs and make a sound like a two-tailed grizzly in April.... I have always succeeded in licking them, so that my indignation at these homicidal kleptomaniacs is not personal by entirely on behalf of the general public."

***
"So I've watched the politicians, I've dealt with them all my life, if you can't make a good deal with a politician then there's something wrong with you. You're certainly not very good. And that's what we have representing us. They will never make America great again. They don't even have a chance. They're controlled fully, they're controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, by the special interests, fully."

***
"An honest propagandist for any cause, that is one who honestly studies and figures out the best way of putting over his message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks, it just confuses them, to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people."

***
"One of the earliest things I would do, probably before I even got in, and I wouldn't even use, you know I have you know the best negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones. You get a lot of them. They are not good. They get the good stories, because the newspapers get buffaloed, but they're not good. But I know the negotiators in the world,  and I put them one for each country. Believe me folks, we will do very well very very well."
***

(Answers: Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Trump. The quotes from Windrip are from "his" bestselling book, Zero Hour: Over the Top.) 

Sinclair Lewis wrote his cautionary dystopian satire as Hitler and Mussolini were increasing their power in Europe, and FDR, still in his first term, was beginning to implement New Deal policies to combat crushing 25 percent unemployment. The novel has Windrip wresting the Democratic nomination away from Roosevelt because the incumbent president and other candidates were "far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist."

Sound familiar?

Windrip offers a hodgepodge of a platform, capped by a promise of a guaranteed yearly income of $5,000 to white citizens only. He calls for a nationalization of the banks by the new "Corpo" party, and lower taxes for only those plutocrats who swear fealty to Windrip and his regime Just as Trump loudly dog-whistles persecution of Mexicans, Windrip openly calls for the persecution of blacks and Jews -- because, as Lewis trenchantly noted, "nothing elevates a dispossessed farmer or factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, that he can look down upon."

Windrip also calls for an end to labor unions and putting women back in the home where they belong. He vows unlimited financial support for police, the military and veterans.

Sound familiar yet?

Windrip, like Trump, is so extreme and so gruesome and so hilarious that none of the establishment press takes him seriously as they chronicle his every word, as they are drawn to his every public appearance like flies to a jar of rancid honey. And that includes Doremus Jessup, the newspaper editor hero of the novel, who counsels his readers that "this comic tyranny cannot endure.... It can't happen here."

The one thing that most perplexed him that there could be a dictator with some of the earthy sense of humor of Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward.... Windrip could be ever so funny about solemn jaw-dropping opponents. Did that, puzzled Doremus, make him more or less dangerous?

Sound even a teensy bit familiar? How many of us have chuckled appreciatively as Donald Trump skewers the denizens of the GOP Clown Car and exposes the inbred corruption of the entire political system that the rest of them don't dare address for fear of evoking the wrath of their plutocratic sugar daddies? Trump makes us temporarily forget our woes by allowing us into the inner sanctum of his billionaire brain, letting us rise to the level of his own incompetence. He has made stupidity cool again. He's made the world safe for xenophobia.

But back to Sinclair Lewis's warning. Buzz Windrip's first order of business, upon taking the oath of office, is to declare martial law and temporarily suspend habeas corpus because of some unnamed outside threat and to preserve "national security." His storm troopers, dubbed the Minute Men, proceed to place recalcitrant Congress members and other critics into protective custody. Poor people are beaten by police for the crime of being poor. The unemployed are herded into labor camps. And once their new sub-minimum wage jobs force the gainfully, privately employed themselves into forced labor camps, the cycle continues. Concentration camp torture sessions under the guidance of licensed physicians are the order of the day for dissidents and independent journalists and political prisoners.

Just like Windrip, Donald Trump appeals to the basest instincts of the masses, with his toxic combination of stand-up comedy, racial dog-whistling, zombie economics, jingoism,  and paranoia. So far anyway, there has been no line he hasn't been able to cross without a "yuge" uptick in his favorable ratings. Even when some Boston thugs beat up and urinated over a homeless Latino man last week, even after Trump approvingly called them "passionate followers of mine," the cheers from the right wing and the astounded coverage from the pseudo-left media continues unabated.

This is not funny. This is, frankly, getting downright scary.

The fascism, or corporism, that Sinclair Lewis warned about, has actually been with us for a long time now. Trump just trumpets it more brayingly. Trump and his progenitor Buzz are "just something nasty that's been vomited up," as wealth inequality, a permanent state of war and mass surveillance, and racist police brutality "continue to ferment like ptomaine" in our national gut.

Under the Obama administration there has been an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers and journalists, an ever-escalating drone assassination program, a record number of deportations, a complete blurring of lines between government and big business, increased incarceration of black and brown people, burgeoning poverty, and an over-stressed, underpaid, precarious labor force.

While the liberal class gasps in phony outrage over the Republicans' use of the odious term "anchor babies," it largely ignores the Obama administration's own cruel and inhuman imprisonment of babies, children and mothers in America's privatized migrant detention centers. A federal judge has recently issued a scathing critique of the Department of Homeland Security for keeping innocent refugees from Central American violence locked up like animals and denied due process of law. To the howls of indignation from the Obama regime over "national security," she has ordered those gulags emptied within two months.

So forget about the Republican vs. Democrat, Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil, electoral match-ups.

What we are really witnessing is an epic battle between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment. 

Playground At a Family-Friendly Housing Unit

Flags of Our Fascist Fathers

 (*Updated below.)

If only Dylann Storm Roof had stayed in school and had less of an ego chronically stoked on pills and Internet hate sites, he might have scored a gun and a badge and a uniform in order to perpetrate his race war. With just a little more training and a little more discipline, he could have learned to be a slightly more circumspect executioner of dark-hued people.

 He could have blended into the official American system of allowable oppression of minorities. He might have developed the patience to wait for socially acceptable, state-sanctioned opportunities to take aim and fire. From his professional peers, he would have learned the fine art of stalking Black fathers with broken taillights. He would have developed the sense to keep his racism professional and nonverbal as he snapped the spine of a Black youth who had the nerve to make eye contact with him on a Baltimore city street. He could have joined a posse of uniforms to shoot bullet after bullet after bullet into the bodies of an unarmed Cleveland couple trapped in their car. And then he would have gotten off, because forensics couldn't discern which cops had actually fired the fatal shots.

Roof didn't blend in. He was a lone wolf. He took his inspiration from George Zimmerman instead of from Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who shot Michael Brown in "self defense." He's certainly making life awkward for dog-whistling politicians, gun culture apologists and the Confederate flag-waving crowd this week. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was so confused that he called the mass slaughter in Mother Emanuel Church "an accident." (Maybe he's still trying to kick his own alleged pill habit.)

It is perfectly fitting that Roof and Michael Slager, the cop who gunned down Walter Scott, are sharing the same cell block as they await their trials for murder. I wonder if they've bonded yet. They are two sides of the same coin. The cop had all the circumspect qualities down pat; he just hadn't banked on a passerby with a cellphone to memorialize his one-man extermination squad.

 Roof is a fringe-dwelling end-product of the same cop/gun culture, violent entertainment industry and Southern racist politics that are alive and well and flying as high and demented as the confederate flag and the militarized police state and the privatized gulag of systemic Black incarceration. Like many an adolescent in the Age of Facebook his privacy is not that important to him.  Besides prescription drugs, he also has an apparent addiction to white supremacist Internet sites, inspiring him to create his own virtual domain. But unlike most other cyber-racists, he didn't hide behind the safety of anonymity. Eventually, virtual reality just wasn't real enough for him, and he acted upon his impulses. Also unlike other lone wolf terrorists, he didn't feel the need to kill himself in a blaze of glory after his mass slaughter of nine innocent people. Maybe it's the power of the Nazi-ish middle name his parents chose for him**: Storm. Maybe nomenclature is destiny.

In a must-read piece in Counterpunch, Henry Giroux quotes a study (titled, appropriately enough, Operation Ghetto Storm) showing that one Black person is extra-judicially executed by a state security officer or a vigilante every single day. More Black people are incarcerated in the US than were enslaved ten years before the Civil War. Yet it's the non-state sanctioned violence of a Dylann Storm Roof or an Adam Lanza that gets most of the attention. And forget about the state-sanctioned violence of American forever-wars. Foreign drone victims are neither named nor cared about -- and that is by official decree as well as through media complicity and public apathy. As Henry Giroux writes, 1984 and Brave New World perfectly complement one another:

In Orwell’s world, individual freedom and privacy were under attack from outside forces. For Huxley, in contrast, freedom and privacy were willingly given up as part of the seductions of a soft authoritarianism, with its vast machinery of manufactured needs, desires, and identities. This new mode of persuasion seduced people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, disposable goods, and new scientific advances in which any viable sense of agency was undermined. The conditions for critical thought dissolved into the limited pleasures instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking itself. Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression whereas Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions, diversions, and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and sensational performance for public display.

So, will FBI Director James Comey continue to claim that Roof's crime is neither political nor terroristic? With his web-page now on full public display, with his manifesto claiming inspiration from a group whose membership has included elected officials, it's going to be mighty hard to blame the latest massacre solely on lax gun laws and mental illness. He's a product of the instant gratification culture of violence -- topped with a huge dollop of pervasive cyber-racism -- that Giroux describes. Roof apparently spent hours holed up in his lonely room when he wasn't taking grotesque gun-pointing selfies along with his burning of the flag near Civil War memorials.

Where was Homeland Security? Where was the NSA? We know where the FBI has been: tracking Muslim youths on the Internet as they "aspire" to join ISIS.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which does track various right-wing extremist hate groups, has some interesting information on the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the group which Roof says inspired him. Anti-immigrant and anti-gay as well as anti-Black, it can trace its lineage back to the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision. It uses a warped interpretation of the Bible and Christianity to opine that "God" is not pleased with the mixing of the races. So the fact that Roof chose to gun down his victims in a Black Christian church probably made perfect sense to him.

Unlike the overt and anonymous racism of KKK members, the CCC has been historically comprised of "respectable" businessmen, journalists, judges, bankers... and politicians. (Senator Trent Lott had a close association with the group.) But since the advent of the Internet, the CCC's rhetoric has grown increasingly blatant and crude, according to the SPLC.  Even so, elected officials (mostly state and local) continue to claim membership, while others give speeches at its various gatherings.

Dylann Storm Roof had the implicit permission of the de facto racist establishment to do what he did. No wonder the judge at his bail hearing urged people to have sympathy for his family.

Sinclair Lewis or Huey Long or somebody warned that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross. Whether it's the Stars and Stripes or whether it's the Confederate version makes not a lick of difference. Fascism is here, and it has been here for a very long time.

(New York Times, Sept. 12, 1938)

*Update, 6/22. According to various published reports, Roof tried to shoot himself in the church but had run out of ammo.

In case you thought that my post, linking civilian white racist terrorists with certain white racist terrorist cops, was hyperbolic and/or unfair, check out this website/chat room for the NYPD. You might think you'd clicked on Stormfront or the CCC by mistake. Same subject matter, same level of hate. (And no, I am not providing links to those other two.)

The New York Times has more on the global white supremacist movement here, as well as a piece by Eric Lichtblau tying presidential candidates to the CCC, or at least to the CCC's money. These politicians always follow the same script: when they're caught being associated with terrorist hate groups, they plead ignorance and promptly return the money. If anything good is going to come out of this latest episode of all-American violence, it's that the dog-whistling racist pols are being outed in all their moral ugliness.

Here are a couple of my own Times comments in today's paper. First, in response to Charles Blow's op-ed calling for official acknowledgment that there is such a thing as race terrorism:

Either the FBI calls Roof a terrorist, or it doesn't get to call anybody a terrorist. It's about time that the so-called Justice Dept. takes a break from arresting Muslim youths who merely "aspire" to join ISIS on the Internet, and start investigating some very real homegrown terrorists here. The horrific church massacre has also got to result in something more meaningful and lasting than just tearing down the Confederate flag (although that would be a nice symbolic start.)

As a disaffected late-adolescent in a time of record wealth inequality and record youth joblessless, Roof was a bomb ready to go off, living as he did on pills, hormones gone wild, and hate. He got his inspiration from white supremacist websites, in particular one run by a well-known group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). While its cosmetically "respectable" members (bankers, editors, executives, and yes, politicians and elected officials) broadcast their racism the usual coded dog-whistle way, the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that its Internet arm has become downright blatant in its call for a war on Blacks, gays and Latino immigrants. A whole new generation of cyber racists is being bred, both on the white supremacist sites and in "mainstream" comment sections. Australia has already made online racist hate speech illegal.

Cyber racists thrive on cowardice and anonymity -- until, like Roof, they don't. Racism is like a drug. Some addicts always need a bigger fix.

Next, my response to Paul Krugman's rather Panglossian ( racism exists, but is waning, it could always be worse, and things are bound to get better... eventually!) Slavery's Long Shadow:

We may have more anti-racist laws on the books, and surveys might show that white attitudes have changed, but Jim Crow is alive and well in the land of the free (defined in GOP-speak as freedom to slash the social safety net to shreds and along with it, millions of "disposable people.")

Black people have taken the brunt of the economic pain since the great 2008 meltdown. They are at least three times as likely to be poor, they earn at least 40% less than whites and their average net worth is about an eighth that of whites. This is true in all the states. In Blue New York, for example, Blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites, and Black infant mortality rates are more than double those of whites.

There are currently more Blacks imprisoned in America than there were enslaved in the decade before the civil war. A study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement reveals that one Black person is killed by a security officer or a vigilante every single day in this country. A less racist nation?

If anything, "we" are a more racist nation. I hope that the "tear down this Confederate flag" community spirit catches fire. I hope that revelations that the same white supremacist hate group which inspired Dylann Roof also funds certain GOP candidates result in more than the usual "national conversation."

Lectures by well-meaning experts to be patient, that things will improve "over time" are wearing pretty thin. The time for change is now. It's getting desperate out there.

** When Roof was arrested, police records indicated a middle name of "Storm." However, as a reader points out, there seems to be no proof on a birth certificate or other document that the moniker is official.  It seems likely that the neo-Nazi sounding appellation was self-bestowed. Therefore, I crossed out that part of my post about the parents giving him that name. There's still so much that we don't know about his upbringing, etc.