The Smell of Astroturf in the Morning

I'm sure I'm not the only one getting carpet-bombed with impeachment emails from one Democratic Party offshoot after another, asking for money, phone calls to Congress, and my participation in a protest march demanding the ouster of Donald J. Trump from the White House.

MoveOn, the group originally formed in 1996 to corral voters for Democrats by urging them to "move on" from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is now seeking "crisis" donations to pay for professional organizers to travel to battleground states to corral voters to demand the impeachment of Trump.

I got one email this morning from a Brent J. Cohen, executive director of "Generation Progress". It was addressed to "Joe," the same pseudonym I used when I signed up several years ago to handsy Joe Biden's "It's On Us" campaign to combat campus sexual assaults.

In case you're wondering why I didn't use my real name, it's because, suspicious person that I am, the use of multiple names to sign up for these various enterprises is how I keep track of who's sharing my email address with whom. So I immediately assumed that "Generation Progress" is simply one of the many names given to the Democratic Veal Pen network, names invented to make people believe that they're being bombarded by myriad independent groups instead of by one gigantic, corporate party-affiliated, mother of all bunker busting missiles.

Not that they try that hard to disguise themselves, mind you. For one thing, they use their real names. For another thing, the fonts and designs they use on their various websites are eerily similar to one another. 

(Hillary Clinton's PAC)

Let me quote from the Brent Cohen "Generation Progress" email that landed in my inbox this morning.

"We the people should be a reality, not just a quote," the pitch begins. "Tell Congress that Trump compromises our morals and values. It's past time to remove him from office." --

Joe-- Democracy is one of the most fundamental American values. Our democracy isn't, and never has been, perfect, but we aspire to reach a place where 'We the People' is a reality and not just a quote. Right now, Donald Trump is attacking our democracy. By pressuring the president of Ukraine to intervene in American elections and on his behalf, Trump has taken his attacks to a new level. This is an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense. It's vital that Congress hears from you on this: tell them it is time to take action." 

Cohen helpfully provides a link my congress-critter's email address and phone number. But I have to say, I find it really hard to get all fired up about democratic morals and values and UkraineGate when the congressional intelligence committee hearings on the scandal are all being undemocratically held behind closed doors.  All we're getting are third-hand dribs and drabs of whatever damning revelations the secret tribunal feeds to the cooperative establishment media to then regurgitate to us. We don't get to watch the testimony live and unfiltered on TV the way we did in the Watergate impeachment hearings back in the 70s.

Probably realizing the irony of his democratic pleading, Cohen proceeds to quickly gloss over the secondary reasons to demand Trump's impeachment: his racism and xenophobia, his incitements to violence, his scoffing at the climate crisis, his refusal to take action on gun violence.

No public impeachment hearings are scheduled for those particular crises and affronts to democracy, but if you want to, you can keep them in the back of your mind when you call Congress to demand that Trump be impeached and removed from office. Because it is only with your help and your complicity that the Democrats can sweep these annoying issues right under the rug as they carefully limit their inquiries to UkraineGate. In so doing, they advance the electoral fortunes of Joe Biden and other low-polling centrists who can bat clean-up in case his campaign collapses.

 Cohen signs off his email "in solidarity" to give you the further false impression that not only is he on your side, he's every bit as progressive and community-minded as the striking teachers of Chicago or the Yellow Vests of France.

It is, of course, a scam.

Not only is Cohen, a former Obama White House fellow and adviser, the "executive director" of Generation Progress,  but Generation Progress itself is just a division of the powerful, corporation-funded Clintonian think tank known as the Center For American Progress. Cohen's specific job is to corral young people into the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Between his White House gig, where he helped start Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" privatized initiative to get young black men off the streets and out of jail (while ignoring young black women) and close the "opportunity gap," Cohen has been a fellow at the D.C. Policy Center, a "non-partisan think tank working for a strong and vibrant District of Columbia." Its advisory staff includes a senior partner of the ethically challenged McKinsey consulting firm and the chief financial officer of the Emerson Collective, a secretive venture capital organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the former Goldman Sachs trader and the billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The Board of Directors actually running the D.C. Policy Center mainly come from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, along with sports and entertainment venture capital, the Sun Trust oil company foundation, and the Exelon energy company.

I'm telling you all this just to give you a general idea of where these professional impeachment advocates are coming from, who is financing them, and who will ultimately benefit from your unpaid phone-banking and marching efforts and other volunteer activities to remove Trump from office. 

Hint: it won't primarily be you.

Notice that Cohen and all the others importuning and gaslighting you under a pretense of "democracy restoration" are all employed by a tight little network of oligarchs, with the same names and world-destroying corporations popping up over and over again on the Boards of Directors of supposedly liberal philanthropic organizations.

Notice that these people don't ever offer you anything tangible, such as affordable housing or a debt-free education, in return for your controlled activism. They merely offer a return to what they call a moralistic, normative way of keeping you down and out. They simply want the status quo ante, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They want to keep the lethal, neoliberal, market-based project that spawned Trump alive and kicking.

The propaganda that they're promulgating in the establishment media conglomerate is also quite shameless, with pundits cheer-leading astroturfed impeachment marches and protests as though they were coming up with the ideas all on their own, rather than rewriting press releases from the Democratic Party machine, or desultorily riffling through their Rolodex of reliable think tank sources to get the scoop.

"Want Trump to go? Take to the streets" urged "woke" centrist New York Times columnist David Leonhardt last week, pretending that there is no such thing as astroturfed movements where Democratic corporatists are concerned: 

The impeachment inquiry has reached the stage when it needs an outside game. We all know where the inside game is likely to lead: House Democrats will impeach Trump; Senate Republicans will acquit him; and he will claim vindication. But Trump’s presidency has become too dire for Americans to accept that outcome without trying to change it.... 

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.

Leonhardt pretends that there is no organized oligarchy bankrolling this protest movement. He insanely casts the billionaire-run duopoly as too weak and therefore in great need of our warm bodies to give it legitimacy. He approvingly writes that the plutocrat-driven "Indivisible" group that I wrote about last week is some sort of legitimate grassroots undertaking.

The comment that I submitted on his column, in which I exposed the financial power behind the impeachment drive, was rejected. Maybe it was my alternative suggestion calling for a nationwide strike against the whole rotten capitalistic system that doomed it to the ether.

His Times colleague, columnist Michelle Goldberg, then ever so coincidentally came up with own utterly independent idea for "taking to the streets" to impeach Trump.

"1, 2, 3, 4 Trump Can't Rule Us Any More" is the clever slogan that she and her sources dreamed up for the plebs to shout as they march in sedate, civil, plutocracy-sanctioned mobs, sublimely safe from any police tear gas or mass arrests.

She professes herself baffled that Americans aren't rising up against Trump the same way, for example, that Chileans are rising up against high subway fares and austerity. She carefully doesn't suggest that Americans also rise up against the 40 years of neoliberal austerity that led enough desperate people to vote for a phony populist in the first place. That is not part of the plutocracy-sanctioned impeachment narrative.

Instead, Goldberg gaslights American couch potatoes:

So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse. This presidency began with the biggest protest in American history, and its first two years were marked by a series of high-profile demonstrations. But three years in, even as the conviction that Trump threatens the Republic unites stolid military heroes and socialist feminists, demonstrations against the administration have faded. Lyndon Johnson was famously tormented by protest chants that could be heard through the walls of the White House. Why isn’t Trump?

Um... I consider myself a socialist feminist, but there is no way in hell that I will ever unite with such "stolid military heroes" as Trump critic James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has gleefully gloated about the sadistic pleasure he got killing Iraqi civilians. Goldberg, of course, is simply trying to legitimize the right-wing reactionary partnership of the Democratic Party with the Pentagon/CIA de facto fourth branch of government.

Goldberg also conveniently doesn't mention that LBJ-era antiwar protests erupted when we still had the draft. Now that only non-elites sign up for the military, often out of economic desperation, our forever wars are out of sight and out of mind for most of the US population.

The military-industrial complex which Goldberg so hideously valorizes and humanizes has been striving to help Americans overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against war for decades by creating one imaginary outside enemy after another. After the debacle of Vietnam and the fall of the USSR, it became "Muslim terrorists." And with the Mideast now in shambles courtesy of American Exceptionalism, it's right back to Russophobia again and the smearing of antiwar dissidents as "Kremlin assets."

As nauseating as Trump is, the toxicity of liberal McCarthyism and the corporatized jingoistic anti-Trump resistance movement is downright stifling.

  

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.

True Confessions, TrumPelosi-Style

Donnie just stole all the thunder from the Democratic Party's Ukraine-gate impeachment case. He entered a shock pre-emptive guilty plea right on the White House Lawn before heading off to Florida to sign an executive order allowing private insurance predators to profit even more blatantly from government-funded Medicare than they already do.

Unlike most guilty pleas, though, Trump's admission that he did ask the president of Ukraine get dirt on the Bidens was not entered in the spirit of contrition or with the abject aim of getting off with probation or a plea deal. It was entered in the spirit of Bite Me.

From the gobsmacked Guardian newspaper report:

Trump was asked what he thought Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who Trump was recorded pressuring to investigate the Bidens – should do.

“If they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said when asked what he wanted Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to do.

“I would say President Zelenskiy, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Trump then discussed his trade war with China, before adding:

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in Ukraine.”

He and his minions will keep asking foreign governments to investigate the political origins of the Russiagate story, and to get the Bidens while they're at it.  Trump will continue acting with impunity, triple dog-daring the other side of the Duopoly to just try and stop him. All on national TV. So much for the "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up of the crime" trope. 

It's the exact opposite of Nixon's "I am not a crook" ploy. Trump is boasting "I am a crook. Whaddaya gonna do about, my fellow American crooks, chumps, and swamp creatures?"

Meanwhile, not even his administration's boastful fascistic announcement that it will forcibly take DNA samples from imprisoned migrants and refugees for inclusion in a racist data base is distracting the Democrats from their Sublime Message. Nor is the simultaneous blockbuster report that Trump had ordered refugees and migrants to be shot in the legs if they try to swim alligator and snake-infested moats or to scale electrified razor-topped walls painted just the right dystopian shade of black. 

To show just how solemn she is and how seriously she takes her sworn constitutional duty to consider to impeach Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC-Disney's Good Morning America on Thursday to trade impeachment quips with the hosts and to inform the TV audience that "we have some serious repair and healing to do in our country for what he's done so far."

Just the day before, she'd insisted that she is still eager to chat with the world's most dangerously unhinged criminal leader on long-overdue repairs to the nation's crumbling infrastructure. She's also pushing prescription drug price-tweaking as a feeble substitute for the single payer health care system demanded by the vast majority of Americans. It behooves both right wings of the Duopoly to go through the motions, if for no other purpose than to keep the rabble in line.

Pelosi carefully made no mention of any serious repair or healing for what 40 years of neoliberal austerity, coupled with the record enrichment of the Military-Carceral-Surveillance Complex, have done to our country. To confess this would be to implicate herself. Boasting of criminality is not her style. The closest she comes is her frequent praise for the vicious Ronald Reagan and her appearances at Pete Peterson austerity conferences for the punishment of the poor and the self-glorification of the plutocracy.

But like Trump, Pelosi was also making a bee-line to "battleground state" Florida on Thursday. He was pandering to well-heeled retirees in The Villages, a kind of Disneyland for the right-wing geriatric set.  She was attempting to seriously heal an elite group of well-heeled Venezuelan exiles, and to show continuing support for the cruel economic sanctions leveled (beginning under Obama) against the less well-off citizens of Venezuela. She was and she is fully on board with the Trump administration's attempted overthrow of the socialist Maduro government. As such, she planned to huddle with high-ranking representatives of Juan Guiado's US-backed right-wing opposition to plot their next moves. The violent US-backed coup attempt is hideously euphemized by Florida Rep. Donna Shalala as "a peaceful return to democracy."

A discussion forum for "invited guests only" was to include such elite Cold War 2.0 concerns as "Russia’s growing military presence in Venezuela" and the spread of uninvited (or bottom-up) citizen protests against US-backed political corruption in Haiti. As reported by Jacobin, 

 Last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The resolution said the body did not recognize the Maduro government, noting it was concerned “about the worsening political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis” and “the breakdown of democratic order and serious human rights violations.” It was part of a gambit to legitimize opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claim to power.The vote was a quid pro quo, according to Gilles.
“The US is supporting Moïse because of the vote against Venezuela,” she noted.
Whether or not the vote is a main reason, it is clear to any Haiti observer that Moïse — who came to power in races where only about 21 percent of the population even bothered voting — has remained in office only because of the support of Washington and its partners.

Unlike Trump, the last thing Pelosi wants is to be seen actually meddling in foreign countries for crass political gain right in the middle of a virtue-signalling impeachment gambit. Ergo, she was barring the media and the public from important parts of her taxpayer-financed junket to Florida. Otherwise, the Quid Pro Quo accusation that the Democrats are hurling at Trump might boomerang right back at them as pertains to the Haiti-Venezuela connection. Ironically, Trump fans were planning to protest her visit on the silly grounds that she is a pro-Maduro democratic socialist rather than the exact opposite.

That's how the two right wings of one bird of prey envisioned by Upton Sinclair stay aloft. For all the mutual ruffling of their feathers, they always give each other protective cover where it counts the most: the talons and the beak. 

Trump brags about his corruption and skips the platitudes. Pelosi embraces the platitudes and hides her corruption.

And both of them paste on the obligatory grotesque grimace whenever the spirit of bellicose bipartisanship in service of Oligarchy demands it.

Democracy, CIA-Style

By artificially narrowing the Trump impeachment inquiry to "Ukraine-gate" under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all but assured that this constitutional remedy for removing a criminal president from office will proceed largely in secret, away from the public eye and away from public accountability.

At the very least, much if not most of the star witness testimony of the unnamed CIA official, who is rather ridiculously being marketed as a "whistle-blower," will not be held in a public forum. This is for the ostensible reason of protecting him from the nefarious machinations of Doctor Evil, a/k/a Donald Trump.

To help effect public compliance with this essential secrecy, the ubiquitous Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff is waxing breathless to the point of asphyxia on the corporate cable shows about all the complicated security protections needed to be put in place in order to keep the Informer's identity anonymous and his physical well-being assured.

Once the script of the CIA official's testimony has been honed and edited to self-serving perfection, this individual may finally make his debut before the cameras incognito, probably with a hood over his head and his voice disguised by some of the cool technology that we so admire in the Hollywood movies about our sexy, daring, cool and selfless Intelligence Community. Whatever props can elicit the maximum cloak-and-dagger excitement for the TV audience, the better that the producers of the Democratic Party-Security State-Media Complex, or Impeachment, Inc. will look.

Meanwhile, we'll have to be satisfied with such tawdry episodes as The Rudy Giuliani Story. In perhaps the most extreme role reversal and plot twist in modern political theater history, the once-lauded Mayor of Nine Eleven has morphed from prosecuting mob bosses to defending them. 

Lest the Impeachers come across as too James Bond-ish, Nancy Pelosi has carefully leaked her own secret list of solemn Impeachment Talking Points for use by the supporting congressional cast as they head for their home districts for a two-week recess to try and convince their constituents that the national security of the elites should be of grave concern to one and all.

Forget hassling your elected representatives about health care and the climate catastrophe and your crushing college debt and your unaffordable housing costs. Because the fates of certain centrist Democrats are more important than your lives. Pelosi and her henchmen are thus embarking on an unabashed Psy-Ops campaign of the type first devised by the CIA itself some 75 years ago in order to convince the world that they were not safe from Russian aggression in the aftermath of World War II. 

And make no mistake: "Ukraine-gate" is not only about impeachment, it's about the reanimated Cold War against Russia waged by an ever more militarized United States. With 800 to perhaps one thousand global bases under dire threat by Putin's grand total of nine, the USA is obviously in profound danger from "the Russians" - not least because they posted a few thousand cheesy Facebook ads to swing the election to Donald Trump and to sow domestic discord in the Happiest Place on Earth. That's right: America was a consumer paradise, a virtual Disneyland on steroids before Trump came along to spoil the mood and make American consumerism look bad to the whole free world. If we can only get rid of him and go back to the Status Quo, all will be well.

As it is, Trump is such a profound threat to the world order that even his imposition of more economic sanctions on Russia and his trashing of a nuclear arms accord were not enough for the order-mongers. The fact that he withheld, or is accused of withholding, a fortune in deadly weapons from the US-sponsored Ukrainian fighting forces was the last straw. It was more than the American Security State can be expected to bear.

So think of this artificially narrow impeachment inquiry as a proxy battle in the larger US-backed Ukraine vs. Russia war. The CIA has always acted in behalf of US multinational corporations anxious to plunder the wealth and natural resources of other countries and anxious to overthrow "corrupt" socialist-leaning or worker-friendly regimes. The CIA has always partnered with or installed US-friendly right wing puppets, arming them and training their death squads.

 They view Donald Trump as the Putin surrogate who has had the absolute chutzpah to denigrate corporation-serving NATO forces even as he caved to their Russophobic demands in a futile attempt to show that he can be just as vicious a team player as the rest of the elite American establishment. 

It hasn't worked. He just can't keep his big oafish mouth shut, and his clumsy paranoid tweeting thumbs still, and his self-dealing and corruption under as good control as his fellow elite leaders have historically done. He totally lacks the charm offensive skills so necessary in any chief executive, whether it be of a corporation or of the One Exceptional Nation itself. 

Donald Trump has got to go. He is not a good marketing or propaganda tool for our weaponized Democracy, neither the domestic variety nor the deadlier exported variety.

The Democrats and their "deep state" partners don't want to delve too deeply in Trump's long history of financial chicanery, however. Because as the Mueller investigation so painfully showed, some of their own respectable colleagues also run the risk of becoming collateral damage in such open-ended investigations. Witness the downfall of super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and the criminal trial of former White House attorney Greg Craig, who served under Obama and who was just acquitted of charges stemming from his own self-dealing in behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs.

But lest the corporate Democrats look even more like the hypocrites they are, they're claiming that a handful of valiant "front-line" representatives are in danger of losing their seats and the House of losing its majority if impeachment proceedings are not severely truncated and limited in scope.

"Front-line" is a telling bellicose adjective, describing a cadre of conservative congress critters who supposedly are just as endangered as the anonymous CIA "whistle-blower" due to their wins in solid GOP districts. Two of the most prominent Front-liners are Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who themselves are high-ranking (allegedly former) CIA officials.

Thanks to a highly coordinated week-long corporate media blitz calling for Trump's impeachment,"the polls have changed drastically on this," Pelosi said in a carefully-leaked "private" conference with her members on Sunday. In so saying, she used another common information warfare ploy: transforming a desire of the elite class into a desire of the non-elite class through the magic of propaganda and the measuring of its effectiveness through skewed, selective polling.

But lest the Party appear too gleeful and vindictive, she added:

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution.”

As far as we know, she didn't suggest that congress critters appear at their constituent town halls decked out in religious garb and swinging incense-wafting chasubles, the better to awe-strike people who already are feeling mightily struck down by the worst income inequality of modern times. 

But as the New York Times reports, they will be "clutching talking points cards headlined 'No One is Above the Law.'"

These index cards contain a Holy Trinity of classic psy-ops techniques for the lawmaking preachers to inculcate into their congregations: (my interpretations in parentheses)

• that Trump “engaged in serious wrongdoing betrayed his oath of office and undermined national security;” (security for the ruling establishment and the maintenance of elite rule)

• that the president “pressured a foreign government to target a political opponent,” and what’s more, “tried to cover it up;” (instill fear in the populace by the "othering" technique, or xenophobia.)

• and that Democrats are planning to stick to just the facts in the inquiry as it moves forward. (the facts which fit the desired narrative, but which do not necessarily include facts which don't adhere to the narrowly defined narrative.)

It is an easy-to-understand, digestible narrative, unlike the other inquiries Democrats have been pursuing, including the Russia investigation, hush money payments and Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
“I still believe in story,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California and a close ally of Ms. Pelosi. “There’s clarity to this Ukraine story.”

Centrist Democrats must think that their constituents are real dolts, unable to understand even basic cheating or bribery, yet easily swayed by Cold War rhetoric and the fear and xenophobia that it instills. All people need in lieu of guaranteed health care and food on the table is a good story, especially if it has echoes of James Bond or Austin Powers to keep them diverted and entertained. 

The coincidental fact that the CIA whistle-blower law was just quietly changed to allow reports to be based on second-hand complaints and information should alert us to the inconvenient truth that this secretive, unaccountable "government within a government" has also arrogated to itself the power to remove, in collusion with our elected representatives, any elected representative that the ruling elites of Empire don't like - in this case, Donald Trump.

 Trump is the most criminal person ever elected to our nation's highest office, so you may ask why it should even matter if the CIA is coordinating his removal.

But it does matter, because a disturbing precedent is being set, one that is actually antithetical to the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi claims to so revere. 

What if by some miracle Bernie Sanders overcomes the Democratic Party's meddling and undemocratic machinations and does indeed become our next president?

The CIA, promoted and even initially staffed by some of this country's most eminent intellectual and financial elites from the cosseted world of the Ivy League, the landed aristocracy,Wall Street and prominent mainstream media outlets, will no doubt perform its sworn duty and do everything in its power to remove him from office, on any pretext whatsoever. A coordinated, relentless, disempowering stealth campaign of red-baiting to prevent any resurgence of the New Deal would probably begin within a day of his election.

And it would all be perfectly legal. It was during Christmas week 2016, when nobody was paying much attention, that Barack Obama very modestly, quietly, and un-Trumpily signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which allows the State Department to coordinate its own domestic propaganda programs with other agencies and mainstream media outlets in order to battle so-called foreign disinformation. Such domestic propaganda from government agencies, specifically aimed at US citizens, had previously been banned. 

As Mint Press News reported,

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

 “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, hails from the US Air Force's elite Special Ops division. A veteran of the war on Iraq, he is a currently-serving member of the Air National Guard and was recently deployed to the militarized Texas border "to oversee security." 

California Democrat Lieu, an early proponent of Trump impeachment, also hails from the Air Force, with a current rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve Command. Pelosi appointed him her assistant whip in 2017

It's no big surprise that Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment, Inc. are limiting the scope of their investigations. They don't want to expose themselves as the loyal anti-social and anti-socialist servants of the oligarchy and the Military-Industrial Complex that they always have been.

They are just as much the enemies of democracy as the more boorish Trump.

Cancel NYT Subscriptions-Gate

Chuck Schumer famously warned a newly-elected Donald Trump in 2017 that the CIA "has six ways from Sunday" to get him if he didn't stop bashing the "Intelligence Community."

Fast forward nearly three years. The New York Times, which is pushing Impeachment Now! with a vengeance - virtually its entire digital home-page is plastered with impeachment articles - is itself getting bashed from all sides for "outing" a CIA analyst as the whistle-blower. The scandal is that three anonymous government sources fed the Times enough information to make it pretty easy for the vengeful Trump administration to identify him. Not only was he posted to the White House for a time, he is an expert in US-Ukraine foreign policy. That should narrow it down to - oh, I don't know - one individual or maybe two.

Executive Editor Dean Baquet defended the revelation, lamely explaining that without it, readers might believe Trump's reckless allegation that the whistle-blower's report is nothing but a "political hack job." (As if liberal Times readers would ever take Trump's side in anything, and as if Trump fans would even read the Times in the first place!).

 And besides, as a subsequent article pleads, the Trump White House has known about the whistle-blower complaint for weeks, and the need to protect his identity is now moot.

The whistle-blower was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity, and has since returned to the C.I.A.

 His complaint suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The whistle-blower’s expertise will most likely add to lawmakers’ confidence about the merits of his complaint and tamp down allegations that he might have misunderstood what he learned about Mr. Trump. He did not listen directly to the July call, but some White House colleagues told him that they were concerned they had witnessed “the president abuse his office for personal gain,” according to the complaint.

It should be fairly obvious from reading it that the author of the report is highly literate and extremely well-versed in foreign policy matters as well as the law. That the Times still felt the need to trumpet his credentials simply points to how obsessed the Knowledge Class is with proper credentials. The well-credentialed expert must have his Best and Brightest bona fides broadcast far and wide in order to elicit the proper respect and awe from the befuddled teeming masses.

One possibility is that the CIA, and probably also the Democratic Party, wanted the Times to semi-out the whistleblower, and then pretend to be all upset and aghast about the danger that the newspaper poses to their vulnerable agent. It's another week, another round of threats on Twitter to cancel one's Times subscription. That'll show 'em!

This controlled-leak tactic was employed in the New York Times's 2012 blockbuster scoop revealing the existence of Barack Obama's top-secret Kill List. It actually was a story spoon-fed to the Times with the aim of turning Obama's soft-on-terror image into that of a macho war hawk who nonetheless "agonized" before making his lofty, cerebral decisions about which Muslim "militant" to drone to death next. He was up for re-election in just a few short months. Nobody dreamed of impeaching him for extra-judicially assassinating people.

The Paper of Record is the establishment mouthpiece. It has been known to regularly submit national security articles to the proper authorities for vetting before publication. It has been known to suppress information about the illegal Bush wiretapping program at the specific request of George W. Bush himself, agreeing to delay publication until after he was safely elected. It helpfully broadcast the phony WMD stories to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Paper of Record has also had no qualms about throwing both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange under the bus after it so enthusiastically published slews of articles based upon the Wikileaks cables. Both of these war crime-exposing whistle-blowers are still rotting in jails. Any New York Times concerns about their safety are M.I.A. Democrats and Republicans alike still complain that they, along with the exiled Edward Snowden, should have gone through "proper channels" instead of acting independently and going to the press.

There's a lot more to this impeachment-by-CIA whistle-blower than meets the eye, and a lot more questions that must be asked. Was, for example, the whistle-blower involved in the Obama administration's orchestration of the Ukraine coup in 2014, which overthrew an admittedly corrupt but still democratically elected leader? Is this really mostly about the Democratic Party-Media-CIA Cooperative not wanting their own meddling and corruption exposed?

The very fact that impeachment appears to be restricted to "Ukraine-gate" is highly suspect. Cold War 2.0 and Russophobia are huge money-makers for weapons manufacturers, Wall Street investors and revolving-door politicians.

If it was regular humanity that the Democrats were so concerned about, they'd also impeach Trump on grounds of his cruel imprisonment of refugees in border concentration camps, along with the kidnapping and trafficking of perhaps thousands of migrant children. Instead, Nancy Pelosi handed over billions of dollars to Trump so that he could continue merrily scoffing at the "norms" which they pretend to hold so dear.

+++++++++++++++++

Times columnist Paul Krugman, meanwhile, thinks that impeachment will be good for the Economy - meaning the sacrosanct Market, which, much like Ayn Rand's Atlas, has merely "shrugged" over the Big Impeachment News:

If we had a normal administration, one that, whatever its ideology, was trying to govern the nation well, the distraction and paralysis that comes with an impeachment investigation could have adverse side effects, although even then the historical record is unclear. (Compared with the Trump era, the Nixon administration was a paragon of good government.)

 But this isn’t a normal administration; it has never seemed to care much about governing, and it is actively hostile to civil servants trying to do their jobs. So paralysis is good. The more time Trump appointees spend worrying about potential prosecution rather than planning loyalty purges, the better off all of us, from ordinary citizens to giant corporations, will be.

Impeaching Donald Trump is good for the economy.

Do you get the feeling that Krugman's definition of "ordinary citizens" and "all of us" is anybody who resides in the top 10 or 20 percent of income earners?

My bummer of a published response: 

The plutocrats will keep chugging along no matter what happens to Trump. The Senate confirmation of anti-labor lawyer Eugene Scalia as the new labor secretary is doubtlessly making the Market very happy, what with his long history of defending corporations against workers and fighting regulations that protect the rights and health and safety of workers.

 So impeachment cuts both ways, both distracting the Trumpies and distracting the rest of us as it becomes the latest media spectacle. Even in the unlikely event he is removed from office, the lives of ordinary people will not improve as a result.

 The planet will continue frying, drowning and suffocating. Assault weapons and violence will proliferate and spread. Tens of millions of people will keep going broke and dying prematurely due to the lack of the kind of guaranteed health care enjoyed by every other advanced nation.

Police will continue killing an average of three people every day. Congress will continue funding forever-wars and about 800 military bases around the globe. America will still incarcerate more people than anyplace else on earth.

What our ruling elites call American Exceptionalism should really be called American Deviance.

The Scalia confirmation, quietly voted upon Thursday at the height of Impeachment, Now!, has rightly been called "obscene" by Bernie Sanders. It is also being conveniently buried by the Times and other corporate media giants.

#Russiagate Exhaustion

I got tired just watching Robert Mueller III totter up to the podium on Wednesday to wearily announce that just because he'd found no evidence that Trump is a crook doesn't mean that Trump is not a crook.

Heads, which had barely begun to heal from the initial release of Mueller's written report, exploded anew when the special prosecutor announced he would prefer not to testify before Congress. His report, he said, speaks for itself. He is so, so done with it all.

Ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries summed up his party's dilemma all too well when he groused that "there is a difference between reading the book and seeing the movie on the big screen.”

It seems that Trump isn't the only American who doesn't read.  Polls have revealed for years that most US citizens don't read more than one or two books a year. And despite its best-seller status, "The Mueller Report" is pretty dry reading, even for die-hard readers.

Who has the time, anyway? Even an article in The Week about people not reading much any more was classified as a "speed read" in a probably futile effort to get more people to read it. 

If it's not on a screen, then it doesn't exist. And with so many shows to choose from, the recent bravura C-Span-streamed marathon reading of the report by an ensemble cast of Democrats attracted only a tiny number of eyeballs.

Politics is spectacle. Politicians see voters as a blob of consumers addicted to their various screens. The consent has been manufactured by the corporate media conglomerate, and the learned passivity is complete.

So the longer that our congress critters can keep the Mueller-centered suspense (and the #Russiagate franchise) alive, and the electorate barely awake, the better they think it will be for their ultimate goal, which is limited to winning elections and raising scads of money to do so.

Since Democrats are damned if they do impeach and damned if they don't, they might as well do the right thing as ordained by the Constitution. Otherwise, win or lose, they won't be treated kindly in the history books.

Oh, I forgot. People don't read actual books, not when there are rage-filled twitter feeds and Facebook flummery to keep them amused.

That's why corporate media outlets pounced with glee when Trump wrote one of his typically garbled tweets this morning. "Trump Tweets and Then Retracts, Statement that Russia Helped Him Get Elected" shrilled the New York Times in a particularly egregious example of "gotcha" churnalism.

Here's the original tweet that had media heads exploding in Toldja So! triumph: 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 3h

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

53.4K

7:57 AM - May 30, 2019

It's somewhat surprising that the Times isn't also reporting that Trump falsely claimed that Russia has literally disappeared off the face of the planet for the sole fact that it had nothing to do with getting him elected. But that would have entailed getting their fact-checker to refer to Google Earth in order to determine whether Russia is still there, and then writing a brand new outraged article about Trump's Eleven-Thousandth Lie.

It's exhausting. And it's futile.