Debate & Switch... Ad Infinitum

Democracy is dead. Short live the oligarchy.

As our two favorite despised plutocrats met for Round Two of their Neoliberal Death Match Sunday, you didn't really expect the show to be about anyone else but themselves, did you?

 Oh, sure, Hillary for the millionth time delved into that time 30 years ago when she liked children well enough to actually have taken a short-lived job devoted only to them. She stressed over and over again that those who work hard with their "god-given potential" are not in her basket of deplorables. Nor are Muslim American citizens who patriotically spy on their fellow Muslim Americans in order to keep the domestic blowback arising directly from American military aggression against Muslims abroad in check.

  And between his own chronic sniffs and snuffles, Donald emitted scowling, sullen concern for "the African-Americans, the Latinos, the Hispanics" in a sort of amplified dog-whistle that he totally doesn't relate to anybody outside his own race and class. And that was about it for the empathy.

The debate results seemed to be a wash, despite many ominous predictions in the mass media that Trump would implode and die right on the stage, if not physically assault Hillary. He nearly had a Lloyd Bentsen moment, after Hillary delivered a creative history lesson equating backroom neoliberal sausage-making with Lincoln's prosecution of the Civil War. He cleverly observed that Clinton was certainly no honest Abe. (You might remember that famous debate moment when Bentsen told goofy Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy.) But the fact that Trump was still reeling from that damaging sexual assault fantasy tape kind of took the bite out of his riposte.

 I am very sad to report that Donald's worst lie of the night was when he shockingly accused Hillary of being for Single Payer health care. Neither she nor the moderators bothered to burst that balloon with a fact-check. They were probably too busy thinking about crotches and the sexual predations of rich and powerful and privileged men.

And when asked at the end of the debate to name one good thing about each other, Hillary allowed that despite the awful Trump gene pool in which they are immersed, his own kids have turned out almost miraculously well. They might be grifters like their Dad, but at least they don't go around snatching at people's crotches while they're raking in their millions and cheating investors. And Donald graciously admitted that Hillary was a fighter, which almost brought a hint of a smile to her pursed lips, if not a sparkle to her glazed eyes. She obviously can't wait to establish a no-fly zone in Syria and get that direct war with Russia started.

And it won't be a minute too soon. She blamed Russia for everything from the Wikileaked emails showing she has never given up her neoliberal agenda (unfettered free trade, Bowles-Simpson safety net cuts, privatization of the public sphere), to messing with the election and secretly backing Donald Trump.

But America is great, she said several times, because America is good. See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run. See Spot Run, Jane. I see Spot run, Dick. Hear Donald Sniff. See Hillary Cringe.

Nobody won. In fact, everybody lost, except for the corporate sponsors. And the media. The Hill emailed me the first breathtaking headline of the night: "Clinton, Trump Don't Shake Hands!" Cooties, not Crotches!

 According to the Times, it was "bitter" right up until the bitter end. There were "remarkably tawdry accusations of groping and abuse," enthusiastically sniffed the Gray Lady. The Paper of Record has been acting as though it just discovered the secret porn stash in Daddy's closet, and doesn't know whether to be disgusted or turned on. It's obviously a bit of both.

***

Before I forget, here are my published comments on three of Sunday's Times op-eds.

Maureen Dowd managed to write a whole column about Trump going to the dogs without mentioning Hillary even one time. I think that must be a record for this election season.

My response:

The feckless fleet of GOP ships is leaving the sinking rat.

That should fool nobody. Forget about telling Trump to resign, they should all hand in their resignations.

The reactionaries clutching their pearls because Trump wants to grab female crotches are the same perverts who want to force vaginal ultrasound wands into women seeking abortions. The GOPers now demanding that the female folk be treated with respect punish women every chance they get. They refuse to pass a law requiring equal pay for equal work. They refuse to take the epidemic of rape in the military seriously. They sadistically deny expanded Medicaid health coverage to women in red states. They force poor women off the welfare rolls into low-pay, no-benefit jobs at the same time that they refuse to subsidize universal preschool and child care and affordable housing and food assistance and higher education.

Trump is only the latest, most glaring example of the institutional pathology which passes for GOP governing strategy.

It takes a loathsome, painful, unavoidable symptom to alert benumbed voters to the disease that lurks beneath. Is it too late to excise one single Trumpian metastasis and declare America cured?

Probably. There are plenty more predators lurking, and plenty more media outlets and and lobbyists and corporations and SuperPacs to give them all the air and sustenance they need.

There are unabashed hogzillas like Trump, and then there's the whole passel of pigs posing as prigs.

***

Frank Bruni whines about Hillary's Poisoned Prize.  Even when she wins, she'll lose, because Washington is broken and the country is hopelessly divided and gridlock caused Donald Trump and if gridlock won't go away, neither will Trump. (And you thought the debate was remarkably tawdry? I mean, sniff!)

My response:

This is a very misleading column, steeped in the usual inside-the-Beltway corporate centrism. Mr. Bruni cannot actually believe that the rise of Trump has been caused by congressional partisan gridlock, a simple failure of two bickering sides to make nice and compromise.

Trump has been paradoxically and deliberately enabled by the same media-political complex that is now feigning outrage in a feeble pretense at reining him in. Just as he has personally profited from the pathocratic system that has replaced our democracy, so too are the ruling class racketeers profiting mightily off one of their own. They are co-dependent parasites, and we everyday Americans are their food.

Bernie Sanders might have lost the battle, but the war is yet to come. He and Elizabeth Warren and soon-to-be elected down-ticket progressives (such as, I hope, Zephyr Teachout of New York) will be leading the charge. It's not the gridlock, which mysteriously disappears whenever there's a war to be fought or a bankster to be rewarded or a secretive spy agency to be funded. Because nothing unites the political and media servants of the plutocracy like the almighty dollar.

Bruni is right, though, that the ugliness won't go away with the Clinton restoration. Trump will be a constant cable TV guest, maybe even start his own media empire. He'll laugh all the the way to the banks he leverages, thanks to the laws and tax codes his lawyers have dictated to that terrible, horrible, dysfunctional Congress.

***

Times Public Relations Flack Public Editor Liz Spayd answers reader complaints that the paper didn't go after Donald Trump soon enough and hard enough. She split the difference, asserting that the coverage was a tad late -- but tough, very tough... and powerful. Give the Gray Lady a little credit, readers, because at least the old gal finally broke down and wrote "fuck" and "pussy" and the presses didn't explode. Spayd forgets to acknowledge that David Cay Johnston did much of the legwork years ago. The Times really hates to be seen playing catch-up.

My comment:

Trump has been such an integral part of New York's tabloid gossip /entertainment/high society scene for so many decades that, as Ms. Spayd acknowledges, The Times simply gave him a pass when he first started what initially was a pseudo-campaign. This entertainer certainly saved the pundits from doing much investigatory work. Writers, most notoriously Maureen Dowd, spent valuable column space just letting him go on and on and on for months and months and months. We were immediately clued in that Donnie was, if not a friend of Maureen, at least a highly accessible source. At least one of the interviews took place in an intimate dinner setting at Trump Tower. Very insider-y, especially the part where she gushed about all the little people peering in at them with awe and wonder.

Now she's finally taking him to task, once he cinched the nomination. Too, too late.

David Cay Johnston is the reporter who truly wrote the book on this character. Trump never could have gotten where he is today without the complicity of the media-political complex. New Jersey state officials, for example, gave him the green light to turn Atlantic City into another Boardwalk Empire. Trump became his own bank: too big to fail and too big to jail.

And thanks to the serial Trumpian outrageousness taking almost permanent possession of the top of the digital home page, there simply wasn't enough space to cover Bernie Sanders in any but the most condescending of terms. What a shame. Couldn't be helped.

Commentariat Central: Mewling Neocons Edition

Here's a quartet of recent New York Times comments by yours truly:

Maureen Dowd, Girl Talk At Trump Tower, Oct. 1.

Synopsis: Dowd casts Trump and his buddies as 13-year-old girls prematurely saddled with menopausal hormones, and thereby outdoes Trump himself in insulting females of all ages:

Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.

Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.

Cool, but watch out for the usual Clintonoid non sequitur. Never mind the teeny-boppers and the withered old witch-hags. Because like a bad case of teen acne, here come those "bimbo eruptions" again:

As former Clinton consigliere George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir: “She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies.”

Usually women candidates have the so-called virtue advantage, but Hillary does not because of her reputation for being shifty.

Cue the Meow Mix cat food commercial. My published response:

We come not to neuter Trump, but to spay him.

Forget the standard nip and tuck in the nether regions for this misogynist who spews his vitriol as freely as a tomcat sprays his whatever from his wherever. Trump needs the full invasive procedure, without the anesthesia. If he couldn't be bothered to do debate prep, then why should we bother with surgical prep? Let's take Trump at his word and show him that he can, indeed, be treated as unfairly as he currently only imagines he is.

Unfortunately, because Maureen is compelled to yet again drag Hillary Clinton into her Trump operating theater, we never quite see the end of the procedure. I suppose the rationale is, when writing a catty piece about male cattiness, a catty polemicist simply cannot resist.

To Maureen, Hillary is pure catnip. What starts out as kneading the keyboard quickly pivots into the unsheathing of the claws. Trump licks his wounds just like an embarrassed but unharmed gib caught falling off his luxury perch. Enter Hillary, once more portrayed as the coldest,cattiest creature of them all, what with her purrfect plotting against the "bimbo eruptions."

Maureen has effectively neutered her own anti-GOP, anti-sexist argument. It's one more example of false equivalency. Trump and his catty clowder of chowderheads are bad in their way, Hillary is bad in hers. Who's the lesser evil, and who's the evil lesser?

Enough of this cheap reality show supplanting democracy.

We are citizens. Hear us yowl!

***

 Paul Krugman, Trump's Fellow Travelers, Oct. 3.

Synopsis: No, Krugman isn't red-baiting Trump from the right again. But it's close. In this pro-Hillary go-round, the Conscience of a Liberal chides Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for not joining a fickle fleet of Republican ships deserting the sinking rat. He again blames the mainstream media for the unbelievable closeness of the race. He again ignores the job-destroying and and wage suppressing globalization and the corporate coups known as free trade. He again ignores the class war and income disparity and a crappy Democratic candidate. He instead holds up war criminal Paul Wolfowitz as a model intellectual conservative profile in political courage for deserting the sinking rat. I knew that Krugman had sunk low, what with all his catty Bernie-bashing this year. But this was a brand new low. Even for him.

My published response:

Krugman writes that "you have to give people like, say, Paul Wolfowitz some credit for political courage."

No, you don't. As one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, he should actually be hauled into an international court to answer a whole litany of charges, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Endorsing the better presidential candidate should absolve him of nothing. It's actually scary that he is supporting Clinton, because it's a sign that he might wield influence. He has, after all, served both Democrats and Republicans since the 1970s.

As a founding member of the odious neocon think tank Center for a New American Security, he urged Bill Clinton to ignore the UN Security Council and get rid of Saddam Hussein. He authored a document called the "Defense Planning Guidance" while working for Dick Cheney. It says the US can take unilateral military action whenever it feels like it.

 He is neither a "conservative" nor an "intellectual." Hillary should reject his endorsement forthwith. He's as dangerous as Trump, if not more so. His tortured thinking has led to the deaths of thousands of American troops and the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent Iraqis.

Trump is only the latest, most glaring symptom of the American pathocracy.

So yes, let's defeat him. And once Clinton is elected, let her know in no uncertain terms that we won't tolerate neocons anywhere near the White House, ever again. End the wars.

 

***

Paul Krugman, The King of False Equivalence, Oct. 4 

Synopsis: PK again gives favored whipping boy Paul Ryan another (ugh!) 50 lashes with his wet neoliberal noodle:

Ugh. Ryan is not, repeat not, a serious, honest man of principle who has tainted his brand by supporting Donald Trump. He has been an obvious fraud all along, at least to anyone who can do budget arithmetic. His budget proposals invariably contain three elements:

1. Huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
2. Savage cuts in aid to the poor.
3. Mystery meat – claims that he will raise trillions by closing unspecified tax loopholes and save trillions cutting unspecified discretionary spending.

My comment:

 Paul Ryan couldn't survive in politics without Democratic complicity. The DCCC has never backed progressive challengers in his purple district, which Obama actually won in 2008. Why do you suppose that is?

Ryan might be a fraud, but he's a useful fraud. He's personable and he's young and he's telegenic. While he may devote his whole life to punishing poor families, he loves his own family so very, very much. Even the president has praised him for being a fine, upstanding family man.

When the GOP lost its "safe" NY-26 seat in a special 2011 election, Bill Clinton approached Ryan at the annual Pete Peterson Catfood Confab for Elite Greedsters to offer some friendly advice on "reforming" Medicare in a less extreme way than had originally proposed by Ryan. An open mic picked up their conversation:

Clinton: "I'm glad we won this race in New York. But I hope Democrats don't use it as an excuse to do nothing."

 Ryan: "My guess is it's gonna sink into paralysis, is what's gonna happen. And you know the math. I mean, It's just -- out there. But you gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving."

Bill promised to give Paul a buzz.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/paul-ryan-and-bill-clinton-chat-backstag...

My guess is there's gonna be some friendly triangulation among Bill and Paul and the Dems in the not-too-distant future. After all, Hillary has promised to put Bill in charge of "fixing the economy."

Fasten your seat belts.

***

Nicholas Kristof, A Blot on Obama's Legacy, Oct. 6 

Synopsis: The title of this column has now been changed to "I Am Very Afraid I Will Die Tonight." - no doubt because the original doesn't fit with the concerted mainstream media Obama-burnishing campaign, now underway with a vengeance. 

Before you get all excited and think that Kristof's column is about Obama's abysmal domestic record, his coddling of Wall Street banksters, or his push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or is a broadside against the president's pathological drone policy, think again. Kristof is upset because Obama hasn't yet declared World War III by way of a "humanitarian" escalation of the war in Syria. He actually uses a child who Tweets to him in English to sell a new war to the American public.

As far as I'm concerned, the president's refusal to bomb Syria in 2013, once he'd determined that Assad did not, in fact, kill his own people with Sarin gas, was actually a rare profile in courage for him. And even though I am certainly no fan of Obama, I think that I will actually miss him once Hillary moves in and wastes no time displaying her Bush-like neocon qualities from behind the safety of her security detail and a fawning, war-hungry press corps.

My comment:

Kristof has got it exactly backwards. Obama's reticence to start a full-scale war in Syria is not a blot on his legacy, but rather a mark of rare statesmanship amidst all the war-mongering hysteria being fomented by the media-military complex.

When will we ever learn, Kristof ironically asks from behind the safety of his computer screen, as he disingenuously fails to remark upon lessons apparently unlearned from the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. How will little Bana, whom Kristof shamelessly uses as a prop in his liberal interventionist propaganda piece, benefit if Obama does his bidding to bomb bomb bomb Syria as an act of aggression toward Russia? Perhaps the columnist missed the Senate testimony of Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford last month, in which he warned that a no-fly zone would be tantamount to declaring war on both Syria and Russia.

Hillary Clinton is all for a no-fly zone. So be patient, Mr. Kristof - the real blot on the landscape may be yet to come.

 Too bad Obama can't get a third term like the Clintons.

Coming Soon: A Hybrid Neocon Third Term

Commentariat Central: Exploding Heads Edition

As per reader request, here's another in my semi-regular series of New York Times comment dumps (my published responses follow synopses/quotes from each op-ed).

Charles Blow, Donald Trump, Grand Wizard of Birtherism, 9/17>

Charles easily surpasses the smarmy born-again indignados of the corporate media's anti-Trump brigade of Profiles in Courage who've become brave in great numbers only because there is great protection in crowds.

This man is so low that he’s subterranean.

Donald Trump said Friday: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.”

That was a lie. There is no evidence Hillary Clinton and her campaign either started or took part in the efforts to question the location of Barack Obama’s birth.

He continued: “I finished it.”

My published response:

 Yes, Trump's birther campaign was and is based upon a lie. But to say that nobody in Clinton World ever took part in any efforts to question the president's birthplace is also less than truthful.

An editor of McClatchy Newspapers, a well-respected mainstream service, reports that one "rogue" Clinton volunteer was fired in the 2008 for spreading the rumor. The machinations of Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal are even more problematic, since he allegedly suggested to the McClatchy editor that Obama had been born in Kenya. The newspaper duly investigated and found the allegation to be false. More here:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article1023...

The Obama administration was so well-aware of Blumenthal's methods that they banned him from the White House and State Dept. job after the 2008 election:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/politics/16emanuel.html?pagewanted=all

The Blumenthal connection is obviously the basis for Trump's mendacious claim that Hillary Clinton "started" the birther movement. Trump took a short-lived whispering campaign and turned it into a full-fledged crusade. He co-opted racism and the Tea Party movement as subsidiaries of his corporate media empire brand. It made him even more fabulously rich and famous than he ever could have gotten by being just another run-of-the mill grifter.

And the media conglomerate of which he is an integral part is only too happy to help and to profit right along with him.

I might have guessed that this fairly bland reality check for the Clinton-supporting Charles Blow would elicit the usual responses from the usual suspects, including the accusation that I am doing the nasty work of the "alt-right" as well as ignoring the fact that I'd credited McClatchy both for doing its journalistic duty of accurately writing history and for debunking Trump.

So I wrote this generic follow-up comment addressed to no one troll in particular: 

 Based upon the comments to my comment thus far, it is painfully apparent that any fact-based criticism of Clinton is undesirable and must be avoided at all costs lest righteous heads explode. Last time I checked, neither McClatchy nor the Times are "alt-right" outfits. Just because right-wing sites pick up and run with certain facts about Clinton doesn't mean these facts should be delegitimized on their face. Nothing I wrote is a distortion of the truth.

Believe it or not, it is possible, even desirable, to both expose and deride Trump and to examine and critique Clinton. Nuance, unfortunately, is one of the casualties of this crazy-time election. Pick a side, close your eyes and ears, and stay blissfully ignorant.

I posted links as a courtesy because we are only allowed 1500 characters in comments. If you don't choose to click them, that's your prerogative.

This in turn elicited another response which took issue with my rhetoric, by mansplaining:

 Karen Garcia -- "it is painfully apparent that any fact-based criticism of Clinton is undesirable and must be avoided at all costs lest righteous heads explode"

Yes, and that is counter-productive. It is really just Trump's method. It undermines an attack on Trump's method.

My counter-response:

 Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your comment, but you seem to imply that colorful metaphors and sarcasm from the Left should be off the table because Trump himself is often sarcastic. Wow.

By the way, "Exploding Head Syndrome" (EHS) is a bona fide medical condition. According to neurologist John Pearce, symptoms include “a sense of explosion in the head, confined to the hours of sleep, which is harmless but very frightening for the sufferer.... Some people also see flashes of light, feel hot, experience chest pains and palpitations, or feel an electrical sensation rising from the lower torso to the head."

Of course, their heads are not actually exploding.

I'd hazard a guess that this syndrome is probably becoming even more prevalent during our fraught election season, given the nightmare that is Donald Trump.

***

Paul Krugman, A Lie Too Far? (blogpost), 9/17:

Krugman is right pleased that the press is following his profiles-in-courage advice and finally calling Trump a big fat loathsome liar in lying about both birtherism and Hillary's nonexistent direct role in its inception:

The Matt Lauer debacle may have helped bring things into focus. And tightening polls probably matter too, not because journalists are being partisan, but because they are now faced with the enormity of what their fact-free jeering of HRC and fawning over DJT might produce.

There are now two questions: will this last, and if it does, has the turn come soon enough? In both cases, nobody knows. But just imagine how different this election would look if we’d had this kind of simple, factual, truly balanced (as opposed to both-sides-do-it) reporting all along.

My response (comparatively well-received by the readership because it contained no tastelessly explosive Clinton criticism):

 I may be wrong, but I suspect that the newfound journalism in the public interest being displayed by the corporate media is a one-off. Some of them seem to be more miffed about being "played" by Trump in the big lead-up to the big non-apology than they are willing to admit that they themselves are complicit supporting players on the big stage of dirty politics.

Furthermore, they are calling Trump a liar based upon a libel committed against President Obama, not for his libel of and his continuing attacks on Hillary Clinton. Unless they now start reporting in the vein of "Trump falsely claimed that Mrs. Clinton robbed a bank...." rather than the usual "Trump asserted that Mrs. Clinton robbed a bank," then I am taking their born-again ethics with a huge grain of salt.

Let's hope that now that they've finally uttered the "lie" word and their careerist worlds didn't come crashing down on top of them, they'll develop more of a taste for it - much as they did when they finally admitted that enhanced interrogation is actually torture.

***

David Brooks, The Uses of Patriotism, 9/16

I've largely abandoned my old hobby of messing with boring old Brooks, but this one was particularly loathsome, not to mention borderline racist. It seems that those young black folk are not giving the American Flag the proper religious reverence:

Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history, so students never learn the facts and tenets of their creed. A globalist mentality teaches students they are citizens of the world rather than citizens of America.

Critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates have arisen, arguing that the American reality is so far from the American creed as to negate the value of the whole thing. The multiculturalist mind-set values racial, gender and ethnic identities and regards national identities as reactionary and exclusive.

He gives no evidence that American history is no longer being taught in "many schools." More likely, he's miffed that history isn't taught as a religion the way that science is sometimes taught as creationist "intelligent" design. My published response:

 Other commenters have aptly pointed out the racist roots of our national anthem. The Founding Fathers stood up for their own freedom, to own other human beings and to expand their territory without regard for the rights of aboriginal populations. Why should Black athletes, or any one else for that matter, stand up to celebrate such an ignominious history?

There are plenty of other ways to display patriotism than singing a song or reciting a pledge. Protest is as all-American as democracy itself. We need a lot more of it.

If David Brooks is scared that "critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates have arisen" to democratically and patriotically criticize the country we live in, that actually gives me hope. The protests and rhetoric of the left are becoming strong enough to drown out and vanquish both neoliberalism and Trumpism.

 Brooks's real squeamishness seems to be that the rising solidarity among people of different backgrounds and ethnicities against economic, social and racial oppression is not of the bland, submissive kind of which the oligarchs running this place would approve.

People are refusing to be co-opted by the stentorian sermons and anti-democratic platitudes that "critics like Brooks" keep dishing out like rancid stew.

He's been preaching Spencerian "every man for himself" drivel since forever, and now he wants to impose solidarity from on high? Give me a break.

***

Paul Krugman, Obama's Trickle-Up Economics, 9/16:

More Obama legacy-burnishing and Clinton-boosting and statistical cherry-picking. The big tell is that Krugman's link to "Census Bureau report" goes not to the report itself, but to a New York Times "Upshot" interpretation of it. Krugman pontificates:

What happened instead after Mr. Obama was re-elected was the best job growth since the 1990s. But family incomes, at least as estimated by the Census, continued to lag. So there was still some statistical basis for the right’s Obama-bashing. Now that statistical basis is gone.

You might ask whether these numbers reflect reality. It’s often claimed that Americans aren’t feeling any economic recovery — and if anyone were to ask Mr. Trump, he would no doubt claim that the Census numbers, like every number he doesn’t like, are cooked.

But be wary of polling on this issue. When Americans are asked how the economy is doing, many of them just repeat what they think they heard on Fox News: By large margins, Republicans say that unemployment is up and the stock market is down under Mr. Obama, the opposite of the truth. On the other hand, when you ask people how well they personally are doing, the Obama years have been marked by large improvements — a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who see themselves as thriving.

My published response (trigger warning: sarcasm ahead!)

 Happy days are here again. So if you insist on feeling blue as you peer into your empty wallet, you've probably been watching too much Fox News.

Yes, median incomes are up and poverty is down. But look closely at the Census figures and you see that although people might be working longer hours, they certainly haven't gotten a raise. Most of the new jobs created have been of the low-wage, service sector variety.

According to the report, the median pay of single women without children jumped 8.7%. This sounds fantastic until you realize that their actual median salary increased to $29,022 from $26,022 in 2014. That's nowhere close to a living wage, especially if most of it has to go toward skyrocketing rent. So if you don't think you've come a long way, baby, by getting 5-10 more hours at Walmart thanks to the beneficence of the clan that owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, then you've probably been watching too much Fox News.

Under "Total Income Dispersion", the report shows that the poorest, lowest quintile received only 3.1% of total income, while the top 20% raked in more than half of it. The top 5% grabbed more than a fifth of the entire pie. Income inequality is not improving, not at all.

Another report out this week found that only 16% of the jobs available to new college grads give them enough purchasing power to buy a home and start a family.

So turn off Fox, all you pessimists, and raise a glass to Dr. Pangloss.

Commentariat Central

Readers, while I struggle to get my columnizing act together for the week, I thought I'd share a few of my recent New York Times missives with you. As always, you are invited to contribute your own comments in the usual space below. No topic is off-limits. Vent, grouse, and be merry.

***

Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Forgetting, 6/20

I'm starting out with one of those insightful op-eds that still get published by the Gray Lady from time to time. Actually, the entire "Stone" philosophy series stands head and shoulders above the punditory likes of David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. They're essays written in conversational form, with a new guest philosopher or academic featured every week.

In the latest edition, Evans interviews Henry Giroux, who writes:

What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of “greatness” that serve to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence against others. Spurrned on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.

My published comment:

 If only every opinion piece in the Times were of this high calibre, what a wonderful world it would be. What hope there might still be for democracy.

Henry Giroux is right that the crux of the matter is education (or lack thereof.) No matter that Donald Trump can't read or speak, when most of his audience, on average, only reads one book per year. (And that book was probably "written" by Trump.)

To the extent that our neoliberal political system is still investing in public schools, it is concentrating on the STEM curricula in order to prepare the wage slaves of the future. History, philosophy and literature are going by the wayside, because the last thing the oligarchy wants is citizens who can actually think. As Henry Giroux says, everything is regimented for optimal human control. It's brutal, and it's violent. And Trump is only the latest symptom of the fascism (or corporatism) that has been an integral part of this country for a very long time.

 Even though it's gotten almost to the point of environmental annihilation, capitalism is incapable of knowing or caring that as an obscene cancerous growth, it too is doomed to die, right along with its host: the body politic.

America is in dire need of a huge -- y-u-u-uge! - dose of intellectual and moral therapy.

Thanks again for a stimulating discussion. It should be part of the American curriculum, the Congressional Record and maybe even stealthily inserted into the telepromptered speeches of Trump and Clinton.

***

Trigger warning: it's mostly downhill from here. So let's get the most odious entry out of the way first: 

Paul Krugman, Is Our Economists Learning? (6/18)

The Conscience of a Liberal starts off with a whimper:

 Bernie is doing his long — very, very, very long — goodbye; Trump appears to be flaming out. So, time to revisit some macroeconomics.

And then Krugman returns to doing what he does best: denouncing those god-awful, dishonest, paid-for austerian economists from the GOP side of the duopoly. Without a hint of self-reflection as he comes off his own marathon of hippie-punching at the Bernie Sanders threat to the Clintonian succession, Krugman bemoans

"...the bad behavior of quite a few professional economists, who invented new doctrines on the fly to justify their opposition to stimulus and desire for austerity even in the face of a depression and zero interest rates."

This, from the same eminence grise who slammed Bernie's ideas for single payer health care and free public college tuition, because he deemed them to be unrealistic pipe dreams in the current austerian political climate, and also because numbers adding up and crunching are more stimulating to experts like him than the idea of bettering people's lives.

My response:

It must be such a relief to revisit one's area of expertise after having spent the last many months leading the elite charge against Sanders and his progressive supporters, those annoying Bernie Bros. The creation of straw men out of thin air must have been absolutely exhausting.

Now it's time to pretend that the orchestrated smear job against people who support progressive ideas like Medicare for All never even happened. Let Bernie tilt at his windmills -- he's no longer a danger to the established order of things. Hillary "clinched" it, we can finally relax.

It's time for "unity", which in corporate Dem-land includes tearing down the usual suspects of supply-side economics and "expansionary" austerity. This is as easy as pie, compared to the difficulty of tearing down Bernie's New Dealish pie-in-the-sky ideas -- like massive government stimulus spending.

I wouldn't even have bothered commenting on this piece, were it not for Krugman's lingering and petulant penchant for leading off with a gratuitous Bernie Sanders dig (his "long - very,very, very long - goodbye") even when the man is already down, out, and squashed flat by the neoliberal bus.

"The Long Goodbye" is also the title of a Raymond Chandler novel, described as "a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance."

So whether he meant to or not, Krugman has basically reminded us that Bernie Sanders is a mensch for the ages.

***

Maureen Dowd, Trump in the Dumps, 6/18.

After months of just letting Trump be Trump in a series of columns in the fun, "style-section" genre, Dowd is finally distancing herself from the GOP presumptive nominee, even going so far as to muse that "now, Trump's own behavior is casting serious doubt on whether he's qualified to be president."

Ya think?

Dowd admits that knowing Trump for 20 years might have blinded her to the danger. You see, she writes, 

Trump told me he could act like the toniest member of high society when he wanted, and he would as soon as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals. He said his narcissism would not hinder him as he morphed into a leader. But he can’t stop lashing out and doesn’t get why that turns people against him. Everything is filtered through his ego. He reacted to Orlando not as a tragedy so much as a chance to brag about “the congrats” he got for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

My published response:

 So, you've finally seen the Trumpian light. Or should I say darkness.

Better late than never, escaping right in the nick of time from the slimy clutches of a man who deigned to absolve you from his misogyny, at least to your face. That glow from all those exclusive interviews and intimate dinners at Trump Towers in full view of hundreds of envious gawkers has paled, apparently. Was it the 70% public disapproval rating that finally got to you, or did your moral compass finally stop spinning in besotted confusion? Was it the gut-wrenching televised spectacle of Donald's rapprochement with Megyn Kelly that caused the epiphany? Or, maybe the last straw was when he banned the elite Washington Post from his entourage.

That must have been too close for comfort.

 Better to be the instigator of the big breakup than find yourself on the receiving end of it, right?

Besides, it has become a "thing" with the recovering elite press corps to see who can blast Donald with the cleverest Tweeted Trump putdowns in any news cycle.

It's telling that you were even momentarily swayed by Trump's bland assurances that he really didn't mean it when he demonized Muslims, Mexicans and disabled people. The pseudo-populism was like the bouquet of roses all abusers give their victims. As long as he's against NAFTA and GOP corruption, he can't be a total psychopath, right?

 And now that he's gone from cool billionaire to the Biggest Loser, Ms. Dowd bolts.

Cue Amy Poehler: Really, Maureen? Really?

***

Maureen Dowd, Girl Squad, 6/11.

I actually thought that this column, published the week before, was pretty damned funny. Dowd imagines the recent creepy veepy-vetting visit paid by Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton. Bitchiness and hilarity ensue. A sample:

Warren sighs. “True, my faithful are peeved at me for not running and for endorsing you instead of Bernie.”

Hillary pours herself some coffee. “I know you’re intrigued by the idea of being my vice president,” she says. “I heard you tell our gal Rachel Maddow that you’re prepared to be commander in chief. But you know I can’t put you on the ticket, don’t you?”

"Because the country isn’t ready for two wonky women for the price of one?” Warren asks dryly.

“No,” Hillary says, biting her biscotti, “I’m not ready. You, the so-called Sheriff of Wall Street, attacked me as the Shill of Wall Street. Why should you get the glass slipper when you were foot-dragging on my glass-shattering moment?”

My response:

Good one, Maureen. But I doubt that the Empress-in-Waiting would actually have poured her own cup of coffee. She has "people" to do that for her.

I was a bit taken aback when Liz gushed that she'd fight her heart out to elect Hillary. Because in her memoir "A Fighting Chance" she was pretty adamant about fighting her heart out for the little guy. So maybe she's as terrified of the Trump monster as everybody else. Or maybe she just took the advice of economic adviser Larry Summers, who once warned her over dinner that if she wanted to be a Washington insider, the cardinal rule is that you never, ever criticize other insiders.

Maybe she's been overcome and assimilated by the Beltway Borg. It happens.

But being an optimist, I like to imagine that the meeting with Madame Secretary went something like this:

"You want me to keep Tweeting The Donald for you, Hillary? Then you swear on a stack of Bibles that you'll loudly condemn corporate trade deals during every public appearance, even when Obama is standing right next to you. You'll shriek out support of my bill restoring Glass-Steagall. You'll completely shut down your 'charity.' Bill will not, I repeat not, be in charge of revitalizing the economy or anything else, and he'll stop giving paid speeches. You won't stuff your cabinet with neocons and plutocrats. And take the vice gig and stuff it. And those are only my opening offers."

I like to imagine that Hillary then kowtowed to Elizabeth, instead of the other way around.

***

Nicholas Kristof, Why I Was Wrong About Welfare Reform, 6/18.

This was an apology for so ignorantly supporting the Clintons' wanton destruction of the cash aid safety net for poor mothers back in those bubble-icious deregulated Roaring 90s:

I was sympathetic to that goal at the time, but I’ve decided that I was wrong. What I’ve found in my reporting over the years is that welfare “reform” is a misnomer and that cash welfare is essentially dead, leaving some families with children utterly destitute.

He sets the empathetic but still tacitly judgmental tone in a profile of a Tulsa grandmother raising her drug-addicted daughter's toddler even as she herself recovers from drug addiction and a criminal history.  Fortunate enough to live in a home she inherited from her own grandmother, she survives on food stamps and church donations of clothing.

So, Kristof unctuously declares, the last thing Grandma needs is some actual cash in her pocket. What she needs is some good old-fashioned Clintonian neoliberalism:

So here’s where I come down. Welfare reform has failed, but the solution is not a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.

That starts with free long-acting birth control for young women who want it (70 percent of pregnancies among young single women are unplanned). Follow that with high-quality early-childhood programs and prekindergarten, drug treatment, parenting coaching and financial literacy training, and a much greater emphasis on jobs programs to usher the poor into the labor force and bring them income.

My comment:

 Kristof describes the plight of the poor most eloquently. And then he offers feeble solutions to what can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe in the most unequal country on earth.

Funny that he never mentions that it was the Clintons who spearheaded "ending welfare as we know it," and that his band-aids for the resulting doubling of the extreme poverty rate come straight from Hillary's campaign playbook.

What's wrong, exactly, with direct cash aid to the poor? Do Kristof and Clinton have that much mistrust in poor mothers' and grandmothers' ability to handle money? Why further demean them by denying them agency and control?

 Hillary's program has Jeremy Bentham-like "control of the poor" written all over it. Instead of getting even an extra $2 a day to spend as they see fit, poor mothers are instead offered parenting skills lessons under the elitist notion that poverty equals ignorance.

And when mothers of infants are forced to go from welfare to low-wage work under threat of losing benefits, Hillary's solution to the psychic damage from lack of maternal bonding in the home is to offer "empathy curricula" in schools.

Women are cut off from aid, such as rental assistance, for failure to appear at any given state-mandated appointment. If they didn't get the notice in the mail because of homelessness, too bad.

Put the coddled rich under the microscope for a change. Stop their direct cash aid from taxpayers. Usher them into a brave, new, humane world.

And a follow-up comment in response to a reader who took umbrage at my critique of the Clintons:

 Kristof passive-aggressively glosses over the bit where President Clinton signed the bill. I used the word "spearheaded" to convey the fact that both Clintons actively lobbied to kick millions of poor people, mainly women, off the welfare rolls. It was on their neoliberal agenda from Day One. It was not something that they did under GOP duress. As a matter of fact, condemning millions of people to lifelong poverty never could have been accomplished by Republicans alone. Clintonian complicity was very much the main ingredient.

 This column smells like another concern-trolling whitewash to me. Ironically, although the bill was euphemized as the "Welfare Reform and Personal Responsibility Act," Hillary herself takes no personal  responsibility for it now that she is running for president as an alleged champion of women and children. In her second memoir, though, she actually boasted that by the time she and Bill left office, the welfare rolls had been trimmed by 60%.

No apologies, no regrets, no reform of the reform to reverse the sadism and to make things right for poor moms and kids, the main victims of the man-made economic "recession."

I'll be writing more about Hillary's moralistic 21st century ideas for poor people in future posts. They deserve more scrutiny.

 There's more than one way to control, even dispose of, excess humanity, just as there are infinite ways to euphemize the policies that bring about the results most beneficial to the plutocrats, for whom too much is just never quite enough.

Commentariat Central

By reader request, here's another one of my irregular New York Times comment dumps. Look out below!

Maureen Dowd, King Kevin vs. Queen Cersei, Nov. 26.

This is an annual holiday tradition for the center-left Dowd, as she relinquishes her entire valuable column space to her ignorant right-wing brother. As we are constantly being informed by Democratic Party-leaning blogs and pundits, no family Thanksgiving dinner is complete without the presence of at least one ignorant right-wing jerk to give us agita. Except mine, of course. My right-wing relatives are either dead and in their graves, or they're permanently banished from my sight. Maureen is game though, and this year Kevin  comments as non-factually as humanly possible on all the presidential candidates.)

My response:

Hey, Kevin!
You seem to be getting your disinformation on Bernie from the Wall Street Journal. You obviously missed the response by economist Gerald Friedman, who's used actual math to prove that HR 676 (Medicare for All) would save $5 trillion over 10 years, because it would get rid of private insurers and also enable lower drug and device prices through the process of negotiation. This is money that would go back into people's pockets until they spend it to stimulate the economy. It would help stop the great carve-out of the middle class! It would be good for businesses, allowing them to invest the ton of money saved from the clutches of a greedy private insurance system back into salaries for a loyal workforce and to expanding their businesses. More here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-friedman/the-wall-street-journal-k_...

Economist Joe Firestone, in his book "Fiscal Myths of the 2016 Campaign" estimates the savings from Medicare for All at as much as $11 trillion over 10 years, when you factor in how it would limit the rise in our current out-of-control health care costs to the level of inflation. His figures are based on the efficiency of Canada's own single payer program.

HR 676 - covering medical, dental, drug therapy, and mental health - is not only humane. It is fiscally responsible.

Health care is a basic human right in every other advanced country.

You don't want America to be unexceptional, do you, Kevin?

Feel the Bern!

*******

Paul Krugman, Inequality and the City, Nov. 30.

In another in a continuing series of increasingly tone-deaf columns, Krugman this go-round summons up his shallow inner Carrie Bradshaw to kvetch how cool and hip, but expensive, New York City is getting to be. But the Mayor is aware of income disparity, by golly, and Krugman himself vows to return to the lesser people's housing difficulties in another column, someday. Today, though, it's all about gentrification being a glass half-full (of Dom Perignon, presumably.)

My comment:

While Mayor de Blasio "understands" that the less well off are being driven out by high rents, and housing policy is a subject that Prof. Krugman says he "has to return to another day," the people affected certainly aren't twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the elites to do something or say something on their behalf.

The Movement for Justice in El Barrio, a grassroots coalition, has been fighting against gentrification and the expulsive forces of global capitalism for years now. And the mayor's plan to build luxury housing in East Harlem would force people out of neighborhoods they've called home for generations.

"Affordable" as defined by the mayor is an income between $46,620 and $62,150 for a family of three. Yet, the median income for a family of three in East Harlem is only $33,600. Since families and small businesses would be driven out by his plan, they're demanding that existing housing and small businesses be left intact.

They've presented a 10-point plan to "prevent El Barrio from becoming a gold mine for large corporations and a paradise for the rich."

So far, their proposal has fallen on deaf official ears. But the protests will continue. The civil rights song "We Shall Not Be Moved" is both a blast from the past, and a blast of fresh air overcoming the stench of an oligarchy gone wild.

*****

David Brooks, The Green Tech Solution, Dec. 1. 

Without mentioning Bill Gates by name, Brooks dutifully echoes the green energy marketing ploy of America's godzillionaire and self-anointed policy guru. (see yesterday's post.) Instead, Brooks pretends to be inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the founding father of American banking and now a resurrected hip-hop musical sensation on Broadway. Brooks says the Republicans are pretend-stoopid for not believing in climate change, when there is so much money to be made in pretend-climate amelioration!

My response:

At the Paris summit, world leaders are spending at least as much time strategizing over wars in Syria and elsewhere as they are over climate change amelioration. While they're all preening for their photo-ops and spouting their platitudes, another group of global bigwigs is gathering in Brussels to plot the secretive Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP).

According to documents obtained by the Guardian, climate change cover-up artist Exxon Mobil has been given "unique access" to the sessions. The company is providing input on how to circumvent/repeal US law, establish ties with cooperative US government officials, and hoodwink the public and environmental groups so as to grease the skids for the now-banned export of US fossil fuels to Europe.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/26/ttip-talks-eu-alleged...

 Should the TTIP pass, the ensuing liberalization of oil and gas trade would dramatically spike global emissions and feed Big Oil's profits to even more grotesque proportions. Some of these profits, as we well know, go into the campaign coffers of the American congress critters who do industry's bidding and vote against legislation and treaties attempting to halt climate change.

He wasn't a founding father, but I'll go with Abraham Lincoln:

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity."

*****

Parul Sehgal, The Profound Emptiness of 'Resilience,' Dec. 1. I loved this magazine piece about neoliberal buzzwords and class/racial privilege. Readers know that I have long mocked President Obama's obsession with this exact dog-whistling propaganda phraseology in order to justify war, austerity, the New Economy, and crapification in general. Thanks to the hard work, sacrifice, grit and determination of the American people, we are able to oppress a whole nation full of docile sheep and greatly reward and expand an unprecedented oligarchic ruling class to make America Great Again has been the subliminal theme-song of many a campaign speech and Saturday address by Big Guy.


My comment:

This was a joy to read, because Resilience and its mawkish cousin, Grit, have been my pet peeves for years.

They are neoliberal-speak for "Get used to it, plebs, because you are so, so screwed."

Last week it was moralizing pundit David Brooks who applauded survivors of war and terror as having that certain resilience that enables them to bounce back stronger than ever. If perchance you can't bounce back, then there must be something wrong with you.

Last year, President Obama announced a $1 billion National Disaster Resilience Competition. May the best Apocalypse with the most smiley-face emojis win!

And from his second Inaugural:

is generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. (Applause.) An economic recovery has begun. (Applause.) America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together. (Applause.)"

Whenever I feel that dread Resilience gremlin approaching, I immediately seize it before it gets the chance to attack me.

Resilience is the civic passivity that lulls us into voting for a pre-vetted candidate every four years while pretending that we still live in a democracy.

Embrace your rage, and live to tell the tale.