We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programs...

... To bring you Professor Hillary Clinton's clarion call for an official mass deprogramming of MAGA cultists.

What she would actually RE-program these Trump voters into being or thinking is carefully left unsaid.  But it's easy to imagine them as characters in "A Clockwork Orange" remake. Hillary would open up their eyes with her magical steel retractors, forcing them to watch endless televised Trump rallies interspersed with even more disgusting images of blood and gore. The deplorable lumpens would then find themselves vomitng every time they accidentally caught a glimpse of Trump on TV. The only way to settle their stomachs would be to make a beeline for the voting booth to re-elect the kindly grandpa similacrum known as Joe Biden.

 Third party candidates? Don't even ask. The alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, such as universal healthcare, debt-free education, an end to wars of aggression, stable housing and nutrition must also be surgically cleansed from the brains of every disaffected subject.

If Hillary had chosen to be honest in this interview, she would have proclaimed that it takes a cult to fight a cult. Actually, it takes the parent cult of the Duopoly to expel the bastard child cult. Trump is essentially the spawn of a rampantly promiscuous capitalism; a spawn too tastelessly open about the fascist tendencies long an integral part of the U.S. hegemon.

 Simply think, on this Indigenous People's Day of all days, of the European settler-colonists who began exterminating native populations and enslaving African people whole centuries before sanctimoniously declaring that "all men are created equal."

 Only when the unfortunate Trump byproduct is expelled, Clinton confides to CNN pundit Christiane Amanpour, can the desired make-up session between the bickering Democrats and Republicans finally go full steam ahead for the ultimate and perpetual orgiastic pleasure of the lords and ladies of Capital. Of course Hillary didn't put it that way. The oligarchic orgasm is now defined as "democracy."

 Like many a romantic before her, Hillary still labors under the delusion that it was bipartisanship and not the New Deal and the Great Society social programs that made America, America. 

Listening closely to this interview, you find that Clinton initially only singles out the elected MAGA Republicans of Congress as the insane actors in dire need of her mental cleansing. But then she swiftly pivots to the mass of powerless voters as also worthy of treatment in her asylum.  These voters, according to Clinton, were attracted to Trump by virtue of such pre-existing maladies as xenophobia, misogyny and racism. The false hope he gave to many of them, even previous Obama voters, for relief of their pre-existing economic precarity - has no cure in her neoliberal playbook. Other than shock therapy, maybe.

The fact that she herself had countered Trump's fake populist appeal by lecturing to the voters in 2016, rather than  meeting them where they lived, both geographically and existentially, seems not to have dawned upon her.

This glaring omission naturally segues to the next concerned query by  Amampour : what about those awful third party challengers? Aren't you afraid? She thus hastily absolves Hillary from examining or reprogramming her own brain, to ignore that her own lack of personal charm and political skills were  prime reasons for her defeat by Trump. It was, of course, also the fault of the Green Party's Jill Stein. 

Hillary imagines, therefore, that votes will also be "stolen" from Joe Biden - by some of the very same deplorables who lack the intellectual heft to dive deep into all his alleged accomplishments.

But just in case that kind of shaming won't work on the hordes of thick-headed lumpen, she ends the segment in hoping they still have enough of a vestigial fear center left in their rotting brains to at least stagger to the polls in favor of her own her preferred master-cult.

Reinvented Grifters Unite!

Former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick might seem to have a fatal journalistic attraction to powerful femmes fatales. In her previous career-life, she'd scored the coveted, decade-long, full-time Hillary Clinton beat at the Times, which she later parlayed into a book (Chasing Hillary), which she is now parlaying into a cable/streaming series.

She now could also be said to be chasing after convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes - were it not for the fact that it was Holmes herself who appears to have chased Chozick and lured her into her own sticky web.  The lengthy ensuing article, published on Sunday in (where else) the New York Times, has been almost universally panned as a fawning puff piece about a notorious woman who stole billions of dollars from investors, and even worse, endangered the lives of countless patients with her bogus blood-testing machine. Holmes is trying to avoid prison through endless appeals and reinventing herself as a mom, as an animal-lover who once spent 16 hours looking for her lost dog in a bramble-infested forest, and a sexual abuse survivor who does volunteer rape crisis counseling from home.

With the Holmes piece as with the book about the Hillary Clinton campaign, Chozick's shtick is to cast herself a a major, if not the main, character. 

 In the Hillary book, she couldn't get close to the candidate no matter how much she wheedled and annoyed and begged. In the Holmes saga, on the other hand, Chozick implies that she barely escaped with her life - or at least with her journalistic integrity intact.

In the first chapter of Chasing Hillary, we were introduced to a star-struck ingenue standing up and cheering for Clinton before recovering and remembering that she was supposed to be an objective reporter on assignment for her college paper. 

So if Hillary actually was demoted to a mostly offstage character in Chasing Hillary, it was her own damned fault. She barely even acknowledged poor Amy Chozick,, who gave up 10 whole years of her life to cover Clinton's two campaigns. So the repetitious bulk of the book, which I confess I never finished, revolved around Chozick's tiresome interactions with Hillary's male campaign staff, whom Chozick called "The Guys" - along with the mostly male traveling press corps. The campaign operatives spent their entire time thwarting her relentless, plucky quest of a one-on-one interview with the candidate, not to mention myriad other snide ways of leaving her out of the loop. Chasing Hillary did not sound like very much fun, In fact it sounded like sheer torture, but chock full of what fawning reviewers called "rollicking" escapades.

 Amy slogged on and persisted, even freezing her eggs until such time that Hillary would finally be crowned president and our journalistic ingenue could finally squeeze in getting her eggs fertilized and giving birth before, she implied, chasing Madam Prez straight into the White House, or at least into the White House briefing room for the spinning of official lies.

Sadly, it did not turn out that way.  But nevertheless Amy Chozick persisted even more, eventually quitting the Times for sunny California and reinventing herself as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer.

For the past several years, in fact, she's been co-producing, co-writng  and developing an HBO/Max series based upon Chasing Hillary. If it's anything like the book, it will be equal parts depressing and rollicking good fun, as four female campaign reporters canoodle and bond. (you'll be forgiven for hoping  that the Hollywood writers' strike lasts forever.)

So during an apparent lull in production, Chozick took on a side-gig that might have been called Chasing Elizabeth Holmes were it not the opposite, that it was Elizabeth Holmes who did the seductive chasing and luring. It would become Chozick's job to publicize the convicted fraudster's own attempted reinvention as a mother, an animal-lover, a volunteer rape counselor and just an all-around normal glamorous rich lady. She is just like us, right down to breastfeeding a newborn infant that she grotesquely named Invicta, and posing in ripped jeans in her luxury home and cuddling with her handsome young hunk of a partner and sweet babies on a Pacific beach at sunset.

According to Chozick's lengthy article, published in the Sunday edition of -where else - the New York Times - the old Elizabeth, who defrauded investors out of billions of dollars for a blood-testing invention that did not exist, and endangered the lives of countless patients through bogus diagnostics, a New Liz has emerged from the ashes right on the cusp of having to report to a minimum security prison for up to 11 whole years.

Chozick's piece, as expected, engendered quite the backlash, both from Times readers and media critics.

But wait. In defense of Amy, surprising even my own cynical self, her article isn't quite the puff piece that it's being criticized for. In fact, if you read between the lines, it's quite the indictment. This journalistic cream-puff is loaded with enough sly verbal arsenic to slow-kill an elephant.

Take the opening paragraphs:

Elizabeth Holmes blends in with the other moms here, in a bucket hat and sunglasses, her newborn strapped to her chest and swathed in a Baby Yoda nursing blanket. We walk past a family of caged orangutans and talk about how Ms. Holmes is preparing to go to prison for one of the most notorious cases of corporate fraud in recent history.

In case you’re wondering, Ms. Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her defunct blood-testing start-up Theranos.

“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Ms. Holmes said as we stopped to look at a hissing anaconda.

My own published comment diverged somewhat from those of  well over a thousand outraged readers:  

The juxtaposition of the "hissing anaconda" in the zoo with Holmes' Poor Idealistic Me act sets the tone for the entire piece. Even when she is tenderly strapping her preternaturally calm infants in their car seats, the snake imagery slithers through the reader's mind. Excellent writing about a very manipulative and creepy subject. Entrepreneur that she is, I can easily envision Holmes taking her talents to her gig at the low-security prison. (That is, if she ever does go to prison.) A reality series complete with tender family visits is a definite must. "Invicta Cries For Convicta" could be the theme of one episode. To relieve the stress, the action can regularly shift to Dad with the non-Dad gym body as he copes alone and lonely in a nearby luxury rental home. Then we can watch Liz lead a counseling session with fellow sex crime victims, who will be allowed strictly supporting roles in the drama. Before we know it, she'll get a fan club, members of which will clamor mightily for her early release. Liz the showrunner is already plotting a redemption story for the ages. At least the author of this article admits that she was used. She is honest about being mesmerized by her subject. My own takeaway? Elizabeth Holmes is even more dangerous than we knew. She is not done with us yet. Unless, of course, we decide to be done with her.

Despite all the surface fluff and puff of her piece, it is through fluff and puff overkill that Chozick presents the real Elizabeth Holmes. At the very end, the reporter forsakes the Nirvana of eating berries and walking on the beach for days on end with her seductive subject and her impresario of a partner, admitting that she feared asking tough questions because Holmes was always using her breastfeeding 11-day-old baby as a helpless human shield.

Left unspoken: what kind of mother would invite a reporter from the New York Times to become a veritable part of her family as soon as the second stay-out-of-jail baby was born? We know about postpartum depression. But postpartum grifting? That's a new one.

So, no, I don't think Amy Chozick deserves all the bad press she's been getting for this particular effort. Rather than telling the world what kind of grifter Holmes is, she craftily shows us, in that disingenuous style of hers. I am normally not a fan of that kind of writing, where the reporter inserts herself in the middle of a story. But this time I think it worked.

The last time I'd felt kind of bad for Amy Chozick was when readers piled on her just before at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, after I'd criticized her in one of my Times comments for breathlessly seeking out Donald Trump, of all people, to pontificate  on the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal. She wrote back to me in the comments to defend herself. You can read about that here if you're interested. 

Full disclosure: the main reason I felt bad at the time was that Chozick assumed my critique of the Times coverage meant that I was a Hillary fan rushing to her defense. This is the same kind of attitude the Times had toward critical lefty readers whom they dismissed as "Bernie Bros."

But enough of inserting myself into this blogpost, LOL.

Speaking of grifters reinventing themselves, meanwhile, Hillary also has a new career, as a professor at Columbia University. That Ivy League institution just lately hosted alumnus Barack Obama as the perfect guy to lecture budding journalists about press freedoms -  which, in his syllabus, is the freedom to censor both yourself and others. 

So many grifters, so little time.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Girl Soldiers with AR-15s

Just in time for the Halloween pre-Christmas marketing blitz comes word that at long last, women will gain parity as plastic toy soldiers.

This consumer season's first feel-good story is built around little Vivian Lord of Arkansas, who several years ago began precociously writing indignant letters to  toy companies, wondering why the little soldiers in the plastic bags are always men. She didn't want any guy soldiers painted pink pandering to her, either. She wanted plastic women with guns to look like real women! 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Want

As the New York Times narrates A Very Special Christmas Wish, right jolly old toy-maker Steve Imel of Scranton had been hearing similar complaints for years -- from real-life female soldiers who regretted never having been able to properly and realistically play war games when they were tots.

One retired Navy fleet commander named Ortloff proclaimed herself really bummed that she couldn't give her three-year-old granddaughter realistic female action figures with rifles and helmets and jackboots to play with under the Christmas tree.

The problem was, Imel said, that getting into the girl plastic soldiers biz would be way too expensive and not very profitable. So while sympathetic to Vivian, he just couldn't satisfy her heart's desire. 

And so the years passed, and poor little Vivian remained stuck playing with her olive-drab plastic guys with guns.

But then came The Miracle.  

It wasn't really Vivian herself who finally convinced Imel to change his mind and invest in plastic girl soldier power. It was the all-powerful defense industry-sponsored corporate news media that co-opted Vivian, using her to make Imel an offer he couldn't refuse.

The Times reports:

It started with local outlets in Little Rock, after one reporter had seen a copy of Vivian’s letter that Ms. Lord had posted on Facebook. In one story, Ms. Lord mentioned her exchange with Mr. Imel.
CNN and a veterans publication published stories online. Soon, Mr. Imel was getting calls to do interviews on national television networks like CBS.
Mr. Imel said he then realized he had made a “huge mistake” in putting off complaints like Vivian’s and Ms. Ortloff’s.
“All hell broke loose with the media,” he said, “and I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath since.”

Well, they do say war is hell. 

Sadly, the toys will not be ready in time for this Christmas. But where there's endless war, there's always hope. And, of course, sugarplum dreams. And crowdfunding. And publicity. And marketing. And more interviews with the future girl soldiers of America. And military recruiting drives all wrapped up in cozy holiday cheer. 

Mr. Imel said the first group of toys was likely to have 24 figures in five positions: a soldier standing and holding a handgun and binoculars; standing and shooting a rifle; kneeling and shooting a rifle; lying on the ground with a rifle; and kneeling and firing a bazooka.

There's no word yet on whether the girl toy soldiers will also come equipped with rape kits in their old kit bags. They'll need them, because in the past two years alone, there's been a 50 percent increase in sexual assaults on military women by military men.

Although making up only 20 percent of the military, women are targets of 63 percent of assaults, with the youngest and the lowest-ranking women most at risk. One out of every 16 military women reported being groped, raped or otherwise sexually assaulted within the last year, reports the New York Times in a different article published in April.

That War, Incorporated is so aggressively marketing military play-time even to preschool girls makes perfect sense in light of the drastically decreased enlistment rates among young people.  The Pentagon is desperate for warm bodies. And since the Pentagon is desperate, its partners in the media will act as its public relations agents and do everything in their power to promote death and injury and post-traumatic stress disorder - even if they have to sell it to children as a women's rights issue.

As William Arkin reported in The Guardian last April:

And things are going to get worse. This year, for the first time ever, Americans born after 11 September 2001 will be able to enlist in the armed forces. It’s a sobering reminder both of how long we’ve been at war but also how distant those very wars have become from America’s youth. And yet official military polling shows that fewer and fewer young Americans consider the military as a career or as a transitional step – only some 12.5% – the lowest number in a decade.
The 12.5% is bracing, but based on a complex math that balances losses from deaths and injuries, retirements, attrition and discharges, the army and Marine Corps only needs about 100,000 recruits to maintain current force levels. That’s just 2.4% of the 4.2 million Americans who will celebrate their 18th birthday this year. And yet the military is looking at its third or fourth year in a row where it will struggle to even find these numbers.

No wonder the media-political establishment is smearing Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an Army medic deployed to Iraq who is still an active member of the Hawaii National Guard with the rank of major. She used her national stage time at the Democratic Party presidential debate last week to blast the Duopoly and the media for selling the regime-change wars which are so lucrative for the ruling class.

 And then she was duly slandered by the #Queen of the Warmongers herself (Hillary Clinton) as a traitorous Russian asset for daring to speak the truth that war is nothing but a big, fat, wasteful hell on earth.

Clinton, speaking on the podcast which first aired on Thursday, did not name Gabbard, but her comments appeared aimed at the Hawaii congresswoman.
When asked if the former secretary of state was referring to Gabbard, Clinton’s spokesman said: “If the nesting doll fits.”

Something tells me that Tulsi will not be used as one of the models for the girl plastic soldiers franchise/recruiting drive. 

Maybe they can do likenesses of patriots Chelsea Clinton and Meghan McCain instead. Little girls can pretend that those tiny excess hunks of molded plastic sticking out from Chelsea's and Meghan's designer jackboots are bone spurs. Then they can make believe that Chelsea and Meghan and Hillary go on The View to slime Tulsi Gabbard from the elite sisterhood/armchair warrior safety of the ABC-Disney TV studios.

If the dynastic nest egg fits....

Astroturfing Impeachment

With slightly more than half of those polled now favoring the impeachment of Donald Trump, it behooves the liberal ruling establishment to corral them and carefully set the boundaries for protesting this president's myriad high crimes and misdemeanors.

There thus will be no emphasis on his massive plunder of the public purse via his unprecedented tax giveaway to the oligarchs. The plight of imprisoned refugees and migrants and the thousands of kidnapped and trafficked children will be all but ignored. His assaults on the environment will take a back seat, as will his frequent incitements to violence against minorities and vulnerable groups. His relentless shredding of the social safety net will proceed apace. There must be no protests against the US troop build-up in Saudi Arabia and of course, no resistance to the US-assisted genocide in Yemen begun under the previous Democratic administration.

If you hate Trump for all these reasons and more, you are nevertheless urged to direct all your precious energies into aiding the ruling class's internecine battle over which corporations and oligarchs will get to plunder Ukraine. You will be urged to defend the neoliberal Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden, from the corruption charges being leveled against him by Trump. No matter that you believe that Biden is, in fact, corrupt. The outrage you must develop on behalf of the "good" oligarchic faction is that a far more corrupt individual is leading the charge against Biden and his family.

To facilitate the proper channeling of your anger against Trump, rather than at the system which spawned him, the Democratic Party is "scrambling" to get a "grassroots" impeachment movement underway.

The first propaganda step is describing the organizers of the movement as "outsiders" - when, in fact, they are consummate insiders who get most of their dark funding from corporations and billionaires. As narrated by Politico's Maggie Severns, these "outside" groups have been sadly marginalized by party bigwigs for years. But thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, their impeachment day has finally come.

The flowers withering on the vine have gotten a magical dose of Miracle-Gro!

This organizational hub has sprouted in D.C., commissioning polling, sponsoring ads and trying to guide the energy in the party toward a message and result the public will support, while counteracting a blistering, expensive anti-impeachment campaign from Trump and the Republican National Committee.

It sure sounds like a spontaneous, bottom-up, grassroots uprising to me. It sounds almost as good as that time last year when thousands of progressive activists simply sprouted up with professional signs bemoaning the ouster of neoconfederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the feared ouster of Robert Mueller - whose status then sadly plummeted from Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad when he finally released his wishy-washy report and stumbled his way through congressional testimony.

As Politico's marketing of Astroturfed Impeachment Inc. continues, we finally get our first clue about the real money and power behind this campaign: 

At the center of the emerging movement are several progressive groups that boast big memberships, including Indivisible and MoveOn.org, that have quickly been joined by an array of other groups spanning the Democratic Party. Outside strategists including Zac Petkanas, former director of rapid response for Hillary Clinton, have started aiding the effort.

“It’s going to be very intense. It’s all hands-on-deck for grassroots folks and everybody in DC,” said Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director at the grassroots organization Indivisible.

Almost every email I get from Hillary Clinton includes a fundraising appeal for Indivisible, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of her defeat. Its sole purpose is to "resist Trump" by supporting Democratic candidates. You folks send the money to Hillary, and then she forwards it to the Indivisible folks. It sounds suspiciously like a variation of the scheme she devised during her second failed presidential campaign: she ostensibly raised money for a bunch of local Democratic Parties to help their local candidates. The local parties then funneled a big chunk of this money right back to her for use in her own campaign. It was a nifty way to skirt campaign finance laws, which limit the amount of money that each donor can contribute to any one particular candidate. Another word for what Hillary did is money-laundering. But thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, it was rendered perfectly legal.

So everybody join together and fight Trumpian corruption! And be sure use the "progressive" label every chance you get, in order to give credence and a semblance of authenticity to the astroturfed effort.

Indivisible, as New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel has revealed, now gets most of its multi-millions of dollars in annual funding from Democracy Alliance, a consortium of liberal plutocrats who gather at fancy parties to decide which Democratic candidates will best represent their interests. Vogel exposed them strategizing over how to successfully make their "Never Bernie" agenda a reality.

The original funding source of the Indivisible "grassroots" effort was the Tides Foundation. According to Source Watch,

The Tides Foundation, founded in 1976, has provided more than $300 million in funding for what it calls "positive social change ... We define 'progressive' as creating a positive impact on people's lives in ways that honor and promote human rights, justice, and a healthy, sustainable environment."

The seed money for the Tides Foundation, in turn, had come from a Reynolds Tobacco heiress. It has since (cough) wafted to a vast interconnected network of organizations and philanthrocapitalist foundations. 

The co-chairman of Tides, as listed on its website, is Columbia University dean Jason Wingard. "Dr. Wingard served as the chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank, where he led the strategy and implementation of thought leadership and management development solutions for the firm’s global workforce and clients. Previously, he served as vice dean of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he led Executive Education and oversaw one of the world’s largest providers of leadership development for corporate managers and executives. He also served as senior vice president of Regional Markets at ePals, Inc. and president & CEO of the ePals Foundation."

Whenever you hear a plutocrat described as a "thought leader," you should probably run for the hills. Capitalistic thoughts have this worrying tendency to privilege themselves while sermonizing to the less well-off - when they're not exploiting them, that is.

The other co-chair is Steve Zuckerman, described on the website as "Managing Director of Self-Help’s California operations and President of Self-Help Federal Credit Union. Self-Help is a leading nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) founded in 1980 and now manages almost $2 billion in assets and 42 credit union branches with more than 100,000 members. Self-Help has provided nearly $6.5 billion in financing to roughly 87,000 families, businesses and nonprofits. Previously, Steve spent almost 15 years with McCown De Leeuw & Co (MDC), a private investment firm based in Menlo Park, CA that focused on middle market management buyouts. Throughout his career, Steve has served on numerous nonprofit boards in the areas of economic justice and youth development. In addition to Self-Help related boards, he currently serves on the national governing board of Positive Coaching Alliance and the New Market Tax Credit advisory board of Opportunity Fund."

How to translate that convoluted bio? Since I'm in a good mood, I'll give Steve the benefit of the doubt and assume he generously he parlayed a tax-deductible portion of his vulture capitalist enterprise's obscene profits into loaning money (micro-lending) to the less well-off - so that one day, if they're extremely lucky, be able to buy the bootstraps to pull themselves up by. The market god only helps those who help themselves, which is why they put the Self Help label on it.

And how about that Opportunity Fund that Steve brags about? That was a gift given to tax-averse plutocrats and the investment class by Donald Trump himself as part of his tax reform/corporate welfare package. Although Opportunity Funds are supposed to benefit some 52 million struggling people living in distressed communities, it is doing the exact opposite. No wonder the liberal thought leaders from Tides and Democracy Alliance aren't emphasizing impeachment based upon theft from the public purse. They actually benefit from Trump's policies themselves.

While it's impossible to ascertain the identities of all the current donors to Tides, the 1,775 organizations receiving dark Tides money run the gamut. They include the elite private Brearley School (annual tuition $49,680), Duke University, M.I.T., Media Matters for America, the hawkish liberal think tank Center for New American Security... and surprise, surprise: the anti-Bernie Working Families Party!

Those Democracy Alliance/Tides/Indivisible liberal plutocrats, like most plutocrats, usually get whatever they want in the way of government policy. And right now, they seem to think they'll get most of what they want from the WFP-endorsed Elizabeth Warren. (If it's any consolation to Bernie and his supporters, the WFP also endorsed ethics-challenged New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive anti-corruption candidate Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on Corruption In America!)

Of course, the Politico article trying to drum up support for a limited impeachment inquiry doesn't tell you anything about the layers of incestuous muck enveloping and enriching all these veal pen organizations and their secretive donor networks. If it did, then "folks" might not get enthused, and the "progressive" organizations would have an even harder time trying to corral them into caring more about Ukrainegate than they care about paying the rent and putting food on the table and getting health care when they're sick and uninsured.

Listed affiliates of the Indivisible group include the ubiquitous Working Families Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the Democratic Socialists of America.

I have a suggestion. If Indivisible wants to be really authentic, it should change its name to Invisible. After all, Halloween is nigh and it's not only the wads of donor money that are getting darker.

Trick or treat! Or, in the corrupted, subverted, anti-democratic version of the holiday: heads they win, tails you lose.

Unless, of course, you can cut your way through their four-ply toilet paper-festooned gated communities and foundations with lots of extra batteries to load into your truth-exposing flashlights.

**************

Update, 10/14: I've revised this article by removing all references to a group called Influence Watch. This is actually an oppo-research project funded by the Capital Research Center, which itself is funded by such public-spirited corporations as Exxon-Mobil. In other words, an astroturf organization is exposing astroturf organizations it doesn't like!

 I was initially fooled, because Influence Watch imitates the style and layout of the reputable Source Watch, and has a nearly identical mission statement. I have independently verified Influence Watch's critical reporting on the Tides Foundation, and have even added information about the Tides board. The upshot: you certainly don't need right-wing oppo research to expose some of these Democratic veal pen organizations and the sources of their funding. It's even worse than what Influence Watch reported, as a matter of fact, because their research doesn't mention the direct role of private equity and Wall Street in choosing and financing the recipients of the Tides "charity."

It's a tangled web for sure.

Hillary 3.0

Hillary Clinton is not running for president. But she may very well be sauntering for president.

Still the same politician who told Goldman Sachs bankers during a paid speech that she has "a public position and a private position," she denies publicly that she is running for the highest office in the land while at the same time vowing to "stay relevant" and letting it be known that sure, she still wants to be president. And if we are to believe Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Hillary is pretty bemused that people literally take her at her "I'm not running" word.

The plethora of Democrats announcing their own candidacies well over a year before the first primaries are to be held was, I suspect, supposed to dilute the field enough to make Bernie Sanders irrelevant, especially when given that such corporate contenders as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have eagerly adopted Medicare For All and other liberal policy proposals which were deemed too radical when Sanders first challenged Clinton with them for the 2016 nomination. 

Perhaps the private, as opposed to the public, plan was for these candidates to siphon off enough votes from Sanders to necessitate a brokered convention in 2020. Since the super-delegates are still allowed their weighted votes should the first ballot fail to nominate anyone, it is entirely feasible that Hillary Clinton could be nominated by undemocratic acclaim, without ever having had to physically hit the trail for a third time. After all, everybody already knows who she is, despite that pesky public-private positioning. And sauntering rather than running also protects her from any more pesky scrutiny.

Of course, the corporate media would love a Clinton-Trump do-over. Think of the ratings and the ad revenue and the guarantee of No Medicare For All Not Ever. And the Democratic Party elders would do just about anything to destroy Bernie Sanders, even if it means a second term for Trump. They are perfectly content to raise money off their roles as #Resistance Fighters. Nothing sells like perpetual umbrage in high places.

So employing the old standard Clintonoid parsing ploy, Hillary no doubt feels perfectly sincere when she says she's not running. She is not running right now, because for one thing, and for some reason known only to her own private self, she is said to be waiting for the Mueller report to be released before deciding. She may never run at all in the traditional sense. Because she received those storied three million more actual votes than Trump did in 2016, she is already The Elect. She's a special case. She always has been.

The common, but already failing, conventional media wisdom had been that Bernie fans would enthusiastically embrace one of the current crop of poseurs, because they're younger, more physically appealing and "diverse" than he is. But since he raised record-breaking amounts in small donations on the first official day of his campaign, the media has quickly advanced to full Bernie destruction mode. The most common trope, despite the fact that it has no basis in fact, is that Sanders doesn't appeal to black voters. One recent example of this genre appears in The Guardian, where Theodore R Johnson warns readers that Bernie's outreach to blacks, even if he reaches out to them all day and every day, "will not be enough."

The alleged reason?

These tips-of-the-hat to black Americans’ disparate experience are unlikely to move the electorate into his coalition in any significant way for a few reasons. First, history has fostered a political pragmatism within the black electorate that tends to prefer moderate Democratic candidates who have a track record of deep and persistent engagement. Because of the centrality of the civil rights question, black voters most often support presidential candidates they trust with protecting the gains made to date. This trust is earned over time or through a shared lived experience. This is why establishment candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and why black candidates like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, have the inside track with this bloc. Sanders has yet to show he can break through.

Johnson doesn't acknowledge the polls that show Bernie is leading in every identity parameter except, by a very slim margin, race. As Vox reports,

An analysis of recent polls from November of 2018 to March 2019 shows Sanders is more popular with people of color than white people, and women like Sanders as much as men do, if not more. He leads every other possible 2020 contender with Latino voters and lags behind only Joe Biden — who hasn’t announced a bid yet — with African-American voters. Sanders’ polling numbers with black voters are double that of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), according to a March Morning Consult poll.

He only lags, and not by much, and mainly among older, more conservative black voters. 

At the end of the Guardian piece, readers are informed that author Theodore R Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center For Justice. Yeah, civil rights credibility! What we aren't told is that he is a retired U.S. Navy official and also a recent fellow at New America, a neoliberal pro-war think tank led by former Clinton State Department adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter and staffed with alumnae of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His journalistic side-career writing for various corporate media outlets included one typical February 2018 piece for Slate.

Since it appeared a year before Bernie-Bashing 2.0 officially got underway, Johnson instead used his propaganda skills to insinuate that black voters were too doped up on Russian "blini and vodka" to propel Hillary to victory in 2016. Russia's alleged spellbinding of the American black electorate has been a common propaganda trope used by Clintonoid forces to try and explain why black voters didn't come out for her in 2016. It's really quite the racial scapegoat, not to mention stereotype, because it denies black people their own agency and assumes that they're a monolithic bloc who lack critical thinking skills.

As a matter of "fact," Johnson claimed, in a throwback to J. Edgar Hoover, Russia has been messing with and hypnotizing black people's heads since the 1960s Civil Rights era:

Russia used the U.S. history of racial oppression and its persistent challenges with systemic racism to manipulate (or at least attempt to manipulate) Americans’ electoral choices. And this wasn’t a simple add-on tactic to a larger influence operation. Rather, it’s in keeping with several decades of Russian efforts to use the United States’ treatment of its black citizens as a counterpoint to the American narrative of freedom and equality. The major difference today is that social media marketing allows Russia to do with efficiency and scale what it could never do with Cold War–era print and radio propaganda.

In other words, Johnson is a paid propagandist for both the corporate Democratic Party and its affiliates in the military-industrial complex. But I think you had that all figured out the minute you finished slogging through his sleazy Guardian piece.  

Norman Solomon wrote a great article about all the anti-Bernie propaganda that's been churning out there in an already-furious boil. He thinks that it's not the Party itself we have to worry about so much as it is the Party-aligned media. I think that it's both, and that we won't see much direct official Party sleaze in action until the first primaries. Then the DNC jaws will publicly clamp down in earnest if Bernie wins and makes it all the way to the convention.

Meanwhile, Hillary saunters.

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.

Decoding the Umpteenth Rising of Hillary

What better time for Hillary Clinton to cash in with the rest of the Democratic Doomsday Cartel than right before the congressional and statehouse elections?

Straight Outta The Atlantic

Fresh off her sticker-selling Internet campaign for the little people,  Clinton has now penned a self-righteous "op-ed" in The Atlantic aimed at members of her own class. The first tell is that she uses the pronoun "we" and not "you" when she offers her litany of dangers to "democracy", or should I say, the oligarchy. And lest you get the mistaken impression that she is entirely altruistic in her concern, there is this tiny-print nugget at the end of the piece: 

This essay was adapted from the afterword of the paperback edition of What Happened, which will be published on September 18.

As Ralphie groused about the Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin Ovaltine scam in A Christmas Story, "It's nothing but a lousy commercial!"

 This isn't to say that lousy commercialism is anything new or unexpected. There's always a profit motive in modern politics. Making money is what the recent mass outpouring of angst about Trump by the permanent Ruling Class essentially is. What they call the public good is really the private good of the rich and the well-connected. Trump sells, and not only for his own greedy benefit.

So it matters not that Hillary Clinton's essay is the epitome of self-serving hypocrisy and that each of her anti-Trump talking points apply just as aptly to her and her husband, and that her invective is a de facto boomerang. She doesn't care if everybody in the bottom 90% knows she is a bundle of lies. There are the "irredeemable" bottom-dwellers in her Basket of Deplorables whom she despises openly. And then there are those obsequients who are simply too afraid of Trump to criticize Democrats. These groups can effectively cancel each other out, as far as she and her cohort are concerned. And what's left of the Left? Sniff. She endorsed corrupt right-wing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive Cynthia Nixon. That "special place in hell for women who don't support other women" dreamed up by Madeline Albright only ever applied to Bernie Sanders supporters.

So the hypocrisy of condemning Trump over his imprisonment of migrant children when Hillary just two years ago called for sending refugee kids back where they came from to send a stern message to their irresponsible parents is easily ignored. Instead, she concentrates on the "monstrosity" of Trump lying about deaths of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, rather than concentrating on how private equity vultures and members of her own party have long been agitating for the neoliberal austerity regimen which was immiserating residents of the Commonwealth long before Trump gleefully threw paper towels at them.

 If you're feeling nauseous right about now, but hate the chalky taste of Pepto Bismol, then give Clinton's commercial a read. It'll feel like sticking your finger down your throat to make yourself vomit. But if that prospect sounds too intense, I'll put on my Secret Decoder ring to transmit the gist of it:

Trump does so many despicable, deplorable things and tells so many loathsome lies she can't keep track of everything, although she did keep track of that one time he told 125 lies in 120 minutes. John Adams certainly never called Thomas Jefferson "Crooked Thomas" during that presidential race. And she can certainly relate, because Jefferson owned slaves and Hillary also oversaw prison slave labor during her time as Arkansas First Lady. You wouldn't ever catch her trying to upend the Status Quo! Not then, and not now and not ever.

Even though there is no evidence that Russia installed Trump in office, she will continue to treat this as her own personal truth. Trump is doing nothing to protect us against an unproven threat!

Trump is going after journalists. Although he hasn't shut down the corporate-owned media conglomerate, he would if he could. Hillary certainly never would, because as much as she hates the media, she never called them fake or insulted them. She had staff for that. She merely hid from them as much as she could on The Trail, in between those times that she used them to air her grievances against their unfairness toward her and Bill.

What's more, the Obama administration was also going after journalists with a record vengeance. And as newly-released documents reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a secret opinion in 2015 which casts US journalists as foreign agents and therefore fodder for surveillance under the draconian FISA Act.

Let me depart for a moment from the synopsis and insert this direct quote from the Atlantic infomercial:

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

In other words, if people can't or won't swallow corporate propaganda whole, the Ruling Class suffers. Ordinary people lose the respect for corporate-controlled government that the oligarchs need to thrive and prosper. If the consent of the governed can no longer be manufactured by the self-serving Masters of the Universe, and the "narrative" cannot be narrowly proscribed, the aristocracy of the Secret Circle will find it increasingly hard to function under this renegade bomb-thrower of a president.

Now on with the sardonic interpretation of Hillary's message:

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, which is not comparable to Hillary's erasure of the State Department emails from her own secret server in her private basement. He is profiting from the presidency, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Bill and Hill raked in from the presidency and continue to rake in through their money-laundering influence-peddling charity are too noble to even be mentioned. Even though Trump is totally in it for his private gain, her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, where she admitted that her public position is different from her private position, were stolen by Wikileaks and shouldn't be heeded. Kill the messenger and blame the Russians instead, even if you have to do it 125 times in 120 minutes, or at least in the space of an hour of Rachel Maddow. (Catch Hillary on Rachel tonight, by the way!)

Trump undermines the unity which normally makes bipartisanship for the rich such a great propaganda scam. When Hillary says Democracy is rowdy by nature, what she really means is that there are always these petty fake squabbles among the movers and shakers of the Ruling Class to keep us alternately entertained and numbed. As they tried to convey to the lesser people during the Great John McCain Funeral Spectacular, when George Bush shared his candy with Michelle Obama during a pre-arranged camera pan:

We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

In the good old affectionate days, the Clintons were actually good transactional buddies with the Trumps. They even attended Donald and Melania's wedding. And normally, those "free debates" are carefully orchestrated by a corporation instead of by the quaint League of Women Voters, and pesky third and fourth party candidates are barred from appearing. And most recently, of course, the Bernie Sanders challenge was effectively quashed by purges of primary voting rolls and a severely truncated primary debate schedule. Although Hillary bought her way into control of the Democratic Party, this was not corrupt or authoritarian.

So now that it's that magical time of year when they allow people to vote and where corporate control of candidates does not apply in every single case, the aristocracy must fear-monger for all that it's worth. And it's worth a lot.

Therefore, Hillary will call for reform in the form of the same piecemeal solutions which catapulted her to a de facto victory on both coasts in 2016. Get the money out of politics, but not for her. Expand national service programs so that the lesser people, at little to no pay, can pretend they're making a difference and that this is really a democracy - when what they're really doing is protecting the status quo of extreme, obscene and unequal wealth. Let's have automatic voting registration too. And then making choosing between pre-vetted corporate candidates mandatory under law!

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

Accept your lot, proles. At least you are allowed to live in the same geographical space as your betters, so shut up already about Medicare For All and free higher education. Because the most pressing concern is that "we" (the very rich) stay better off. That's how fake Democracy works.

The End.

Or is it? 

This woman is not going away. They say the third time's a charm, so who's to say it can't also be a third chance for the charmless?

Pass the Ovaltine with a chaser of Pepto.