Commentariat Central: Part Two

This is how desperate the Democratic establishment is getting: One of Bernie Sanders's campaign officials recently circulated a clip of Joe Biden seeming to make nice with that notorious Ayn Rand fanboy, former House Speaker Paul Ryan.  The subject was Social Security. Since Biden used the coded language of  Social Security "reform," rather than calling for outright cuts, the clip is being widely - and wildly - construed as Bernie "smearing" Biden.

Granted, the clip was taken out of context. But compared to the buckets of mud they're slinging at Bernie, it was but the gentle flicking of a few grains of sand at a corrupt politician who isn't getting anywhere near the media criticism he so richly deserves. The kid glove treatment is largely due to Donald Trump's own smearing of Biden and the Biden-centric Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate.

Paul Krugman is among the righteously incensed about the latest manufactured scandal, and he demands in his latest column that Sanders apologize to Biden, "abjectly" and pronto (I believe Sanders might even have already caved to this demand by the time the column appeared, but I could be wrong.)

Krugman effectively says it's worse to be falsely accused of saying nice things about Paul Ryan than it is to have spent your entire political career, as Biden did, in making the lives of millions of people nasty, brutish and short. 

Biden did make a misstep in his counterattack, mislabeling the misrepresented video clip as “doctored,” but that doesn’t mean he’s not still due an abject apology. Instead, however, the Sanders campaign has doubled down. Rather than admitting that it smeared a rival, the campaign is going around claiming that Biden has a long record of trying to cut Social Security. There is, unfortunately, some truth in that claim — but it doesn’t excuse either the original lie or the refusal to admit error.

Unfortunate that Biden has tried to cut Social Security, or unfortunate that the Sanders team refuses to retreat from its fact-based claims? It seems to really hurt Krugman that although the tactics might have been wrong, the essential truth of the matter is not.

My response to Krugman's specious claim that poor goofy old Joe was simply "swept along" by the overpowering austerity craze afflicting the Washington establishment:

Joe Biden didn't simply go along with the "consensus." As a founding member of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, he was one of the architects of the consensus to cut Medicare, Social Security and other New Deal/Great Society programs. 

  The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens." Instead they would distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity. 

As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star, Biden, and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the GOP in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century. 

And Bernie comes along and 'unfairly' links him to Paul Ryan?  
Come on, man.

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

Krugman's previous column was even worse, because he used children as the weapon with which to attack Sanders. His twisted logic is that because Bernie's signature campaign issue is Medicare For All, he thereby is willfully ignoring the way America treats "our children."

Most readers didn't seem to get that particular Bernie smear, because he nonchalantly tacked it on at the very end of his piece after spending numerous paragraphs doing what he does best: shooting diseased Republican fish in a polluted barrel. Krugman actually sounds a bit like Paul Ryan himself, with his open sneering at desperate people (rainbow and unicorn-chasers) who can't afford basic health care. He writes:

So we should be talking a lot more about helping America's children. Why aren't we?
At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare For All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that could greatly improve American lives, and are far more likely to become law. But it's not too late to refocus.

My published response, along with some follow-up comments in response to other readers:

Well, if you're going to accuse Sanders of sexism, you might as well accuse him of child neglect while you're at it.

 The whole premise of this column is fallacious. To wit: since Bernie is for Medicare For All, it naturally follows that he doesn't care about kids.

The fact is, M4A would help moms, dads and kids. If parents can't afford to see a doctor when they get sick, their kids suffer as well. If parents spend thousands of dollars on co-pays, premiums and deductibles, there's less money to feed, clothe and educate the kids. How can you say that calling for M4A is neglecting kids when it would provide them with a good start and quality of life for both them and their parents?

 Times are so hard and good paying jobs are so few that adults can no longer afford to have babies, let alone afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in most areas of the country.

Warren's plan is good, but the catch is that the states would administer the programs and disburse the funds. Bain Capital, for instance, already runs a billion dollar-plus chain of day care centers. With more federal money possibly on the horizon should Warren's plan pass. look for Goldman Sachs and Evercore and KKR Little Tots Schools to pop up all over this land, raking in the cash while parents slave away at precarious low wage jobs with no health insurance.

 This is not an "either/or" thing. If we spend a trillion bucks a year on war, we can afford to take care of our people.... cradle to grave.

My follow-up comment to a reader echoing the establishment talking point that Medicare For All unfairly takes attention away from women's issues and reproductive rights:

True, Sanders doesn't do pigeonholing of issues as wonkishly as some might prefer.

Despite all the media claims. he also doesn't harp on M4A to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, he has stated many times that climate change is the critical issue of our time, with myriad repercussions on the economy and health. This usually gets drowned out by the media concern trolls demanding "But how you gonna pay for Medicare For All?!"

 Poor and minority women are disproportionately adversely affected by both climate change and our highly restrictive health care marketplace, particularly in states which have barred the ACA's Medicaid expansion.

M4A by definition IS reproductive health care. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long included abortion rights and birth control in their definition of reproductive health care. They also don't pigeonhole women's medical issues into a separate category that becomes ripe for ideological and moral arguments and misogyny by the right wing.

 As a single mom facing my own share of child care issues and emergencies through the years, we absolutely do need relief. But it needs to be simple, guaranteed and universal relief, administered at the nonprofit, public, federal level and designed to be as repeal- proof as we can make it.

And my reply to another reader who really liked Krugman's column and was bemused by my reaction to it:

Krugman took a perfectly good column advocating for children and managed to turn it into a smear of Bernie. He comes right out and says that Sanders "bears part of the blame" for "us" not talking about our children.

 True, Krugman doesn't get together with his fellow pundits to plot strategy, but they do feed off one another's discourse. You can see the same talking points all across the A to B spectrum of centrist neoliberal narrative. One common trope is "you can't have this or that program because then Ivanka and her spawn would only take advantage of it."

We should have guaranteed universal programs for everybody, both rich and poor. Warren's child care plan is certainly better than nothing, but parents would have to jump through many bureaucratic hoops to get approved, the govt would not build new centers or train and pay providers -- and the biggest catch of all, as I mentioned before, is that it's voucherized. Red states, especially, would find ways to re-allocate the money for other programs or just use it to reward cronies and private equity vultures. We saw this with Clinton's welfare reform package. The job training money that went along with kicking people off the rolls went to subsidizing businesses. Moms got zilch and the poverty rate skyrocketed in the ensuing decades.

Warren's plan is capitalist to the bone, which is not so much of a good thing when the whole point of capitalism is to extract resources and dispossess people.

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

This week's adventure in commenting-land concludes with Maureen Dowd's observation that Trump's misogyny is infiltrating the Senate impeachment trial by way of his two attorneys, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz -who themselves have been joined at the pervert hip by defending Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar should stop "whingeing" and start acting as tough as Nancy Pelosi.

Why even bother joining in this kind of simplistic, identity-politics shallowness? 

So I tried tor a little more perspective in my published response:

The devolution may not even be televised. Whenever King Donald looks vulnerable, his courtiers have the power to kick the cameras and the reporters right out of the room. This archaic rule makes the Starr Chamber description all the more apt.

 It's gotten to the point where even the National Archives is censoring photos of Women's March anti-Trump signs,

Since Trump has been getting away with high crimes and misdemeanors his entire adult life, nobody's gonna stop him now. His rise to infamy coincided with the dawn of neoliberal austerity during the New York City debt crisis in the 70s, ushering in a second gilded age of obscene wealth inequality. The corrupt Empire State political machine allowed him to commit real estate and tax fraud with impunity, in the hopes that his flamboyance would attract even more speculators to the Big Apple.

  Trump always thrived at the direct expense of the poor and working class. He got his welfare, and the unions gave up their pensions to save NYC from bankruptcy. He helped turn it into the wealth disparity capital of the country.

The media rarely challenged Trump, and if they did, it was with a grudging admiration. He's always been a ratings bonanza.

 Dershowitz and Starr, both of whom should have been disbarred long ago, are more fiendish proof that this is a full fledged oligarchy.

In a subversive nod to Nathan Hale. Trump is essentially saying: "I only regret I had but one Roy Cohn to give to my country!"

Bernie-Bashing Backlash Bonanza

To say that Elizabeth Warren's accusation of sexism against Bernie Sanders doesn't pass the smell test is the understatement of the year. Even total nostril blockage would not quench the stench of her allegation that he told her at a private dinner that a woman could never win the presidency. What he likely said was that Donald Trump would act like the sexist pig that he is toward any woman candidate.

Likely, given that Bernie has always stood up for women and Elizabeth does have this disturbing history of, ahem, exaggerating stuff, bending the truth, or even making things up.

What really reeks is the desperation in Warren's faltering campaign. It joins in lockstep stinkiness with the desperation of the oligarch-controlled media borg. Right on the eve of the last "debate" prior to the Iowa caucuses, CNN chose to run an anonymously-sourced story about the private dinner setting of his alleged remark, a conversation which Warren initially vowed would remain private, thus only adding to the intrigue. After several hours, she issued a statement confirming the unconfirmed CNN hit job, which was broadcast with glee by the New York Times and the whole crew of usual media suspects.

The themes of sexism and the threat to "party unity" will no doubt be the dramatic manufactured focal points of the "debate." The game show emcees ("moderators") will keep both their nostrils and their ears carefully stuffed with cotton balls as they corral the candidates into the desired tag team whose goal is to stamp Bernie into the ground. Never having had to develop the ability to actually think on the job, their careerist journalistic brains were themselves replaced by wads of cotton stuffing quite a while ago. Their minds have the handy dual function of absorbing the ooze of the plutocratic agenda while at the same time acting as protective barriers against any outside democratic contamination.

Poor Joe Biden will probably not join in the bashing with any great gusto, given his own history of sexism combined with that nasty hair-sniffing habit that the media has long since forgotten in its zeal to protect him from the Ukrainegate-based Trumpian slime machine.

Hopefully Sanders is primed and ready for the buckets of slime that are only beginning to be hurled his way. Hopefully he won't preface his defense with "Elizabeth is a good friend of mine, and she can absolutely win this thing!" 

Because judging from the backlash against Warren, the ears, noses, throats and brains of his base of supporters are absolutely clear and cottonball-free. #RefundWarren, a Twitter campaign demanding that she return donations from her small-dollar supporters, is taking off like a blast of turbo-charged nasal spray. (Notwithstanding the concern-trolling mainstream media package warnings to progressives about about the dangerous pro-Trump "rebound effects" of their righteous indignation)

Stay tuned. The ratings for the contrived slug-fest gleefully marketed by the New York Times as "Mom and Dad Are Fighting!" promise to be better than initially expected.

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New York Times columnist and MSNBC personality Michelle Goldberg cloyingly advises liberals to move past the contrived Bernie/Liz battle, which originally started with Warren's accusation that he was "attacking her" via campaign workers pointing to the fact that she has well-heeled support. Goldberg sniffs that this stuff is too silly to even talk about -  before she then proceeds to spend her whole column talking about it. Her essay is essentially a thinly disguised call for Bernie to quit the race because, apparently, Warren is the only candidate who can provide that all-important "party unity"  that the Democratic establishment is so concerned about.

Midway through her piece, she casually mentions that since her husband advises the Warren campaign, she was really, really hesitant about even writing her column endorsing Warren. But needs must, when "party unity" trumps relief for the sick, the jobless, the underpaid, the desperate.

It's still all about the upper middle class pathological grief over Hillary Clinton's defeat:

Attacking another candidates’ supporters rather than her record is kind of obnoxious, but as far as political combat goes, it was pretty mild. The reason it caused a small uproar is that in much of the Democratic Party, there’s tremendous resentment of Sanders left over from 2016. Many believe he weakened Hillary Clinton by dragging out the primary — at one point even threatening acontested convention — and then only halfheartedly rallying his fans behind her when it was over. Warren alluded to this anger in a fund-raising email keyed to the Politico article that said, “We can’t afford to repeat the factionalism of the 2016 primary.”

"Many believe" is the same kind of unsourced weasel-wording smear tactic as the all-purpose "some say."

My published response to Goldberg:

How does the Sanders campaign pointing out Warren's poll-verified voting demographic amount to "attacking" her?

If this little kerfuffle is such a little kerfuffle, by amplifying it Michelle Goldberg only adds to the manufactured hysteria, and just in time for the latest episode of the Gong Show, I mean the "debate." If Warren thinks Bernie is "trashing her" simply by pointing out differences in their bases then I hate to think of a President Warren's epic meltdowns when the Republicans start trashing her for real every two minutes.

  By playing the faux-feminist victim card here, she actually disempowers other female politicians. Worse still, she is playing the crumpled Hillary card. Remember how well that pitiful ploy worked out to achieve "party unity" once upon a time? Bernie campaigned for her as soon as she was nominated. Then he was blamed for not having the magical Svengali touch to entice his supporters to actually vote for her.

The long-awaited smear campaign against Bernie has begun in earnest. The only surprising thing is that Warren has chosen to be an integral part of it.

==============================

 Goldberg's colleague Paul Krugman seemingly wrote his own anti-Bernie column before the manufactured kerfuffle over trashing and sexism broke out. Because all his does is drag out the same old narrative about Medicare For All being the terrible thing that's destroying party unity. If you want to overcome "Trump's Plot Against Health Care," then you'd better shut up and vote for somebody who will fight to the death for the restrictive, junky, predatory insurance policy that you might be lucky enough to still actually possess. In the meanwhile, don't get upset about not having guaranteed coverage. Be upset because Trump lied about protecting your pre-existing conditions!

Krugman sounds the dire warning:

Make no mistake: Health care will be on the ballot this November. But not in the way ardent progressives imagine.Democrats running for president have spent a lot of time debating so-called Medicare for all, with some supporters of Bernie Sanders claiming that any politician who doesn’t demand immediate implementation of single-payer health care is a corporate tool, or something. But the reality is that whatever its merits, universal, government-provided health insurance isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

My published retort:

 The only pre-existing condition Trump saved is that of the top 0.1% owning as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

That grotesque reality is precisely why Medicare For All is such a "tough sell." The oligarchs own our political duopoly as well as corporate media conglomerate. They spread the fear and the misinformation that make people feel nervous about losing their precarious, expensive coverage to a more equitable program covering everybody from cradle to grave with no premiums, deductibles, networks, co-pays or surprise bills from private equity vultures.

  One of the leading questions in polls is "do you know that Medicare For All would make your private coverage disappear?" -- the implication being that there looms a coverage gap of epic proportions.

 Paul Krugman does his own "there is no alternative" part by labeling those of us who demand what exists in every other advanced nation "ardent progressives" who just cannot understand that single payer is impossible even with a Democratic majority. That statement says more about the pundits and politicians in thrall to the oligarchs than it does about the "ardent progressives."

In other words, if we don't adhere to the status quo of 84.2 million of our fellow citizens staying uninsured or underinsured, Trump will up the killing ante even more.

 It's like telling the people of Flint they're better off with the toxic water they already have, what with the uncertainty and the fear that new lead-free pipes might cause.

Harking back to the sexism theme now in vogue, I got a chuckle from a simile-averse mansplaining retort from "Michael" of The Bronx. Here's what the "woke" gender-conscious New York Times, which claims that it moderates every single reader comment, saw fit to publish right below my own comment:

@Karen Garcia: A couple of your statements in your letter reveals a tendency to hysteria, with a zeal that makes you prone to believe false narratives and propaganda. First you say that Krugman's incremental (and realistic) approach "says more about the pundits...", and then you mention the Flint toxic water situation. I suggest that you investigate more thoroughly the lead levels in Flint to the lead levels in other communities and nationally, and the history of the problem. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones would be a good resource.

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Epilogue:

Commentariat Central: Bernie Edition

One of my New Year's resolutions is to comment more frequently on New York Times articles than I have been doing in recent months. This vow, of course, is contingent upon at least partially overcoming the nausea and rise in blood pressure that accompany reading the articles prior to responding to them. This is particularly true of the op-eds. For the sake of my own sanity and health, I long ago gave up perusing the silliness of Gail Collins and the banality of David Brooks. Brooks and Paul Krugman, his erstwhile nemesis, actually sound banally alike as #Resistance, Inc. fighters in the Age of Trump.

Here is my first Times comment of 2020, in response to another article about Bernie Sanders by Sydney Ember, co-written with Thomas Kaplan. The underlying theme of their piece is that since Bernie's record fund-raising haul from small donors is eclipsed by Donald Trump's bank account, Bernie might not be electable, despite the small-dollar donations from "loyal supporters who are faithful to him despite his setbacks."

The piece is less openly derogatory than Ember's previous anti-Bernie articles, but that is likely to change as the first primaries draw nearer. Knowing that the public is on to their bias, Ember and other mainstream journalists appear at this delicate moment to be very carefully covering their asses.

My published response:

The wording in the side-by-side headlines about Sanders and Yang's fundraising totals is a perfect example of how to subtly slant a story and cast doubt on a popular candidate.

Whereas "Yang raised $16.5 million, His Campaign Says" we are told that "Sanders Says He Raised $34.5 million."

 The subtle implication is that one is fact and the other is just a claim. Bernie "says" he raised the money and Yang definitely did, with the journalistic ploy of sourcing his campaign for the info, as a kind of afterthought. And then, as other commenters have rightly noted, the article goes on to ridiculously compare Sanders's stash to that of an incumbent president who is running unopposed. Cast the doubt and cast it as wide and as shallowly as what passes for journalistic ethics permits. 

It will be a lot of fun deconstructing the anti-Bernie rhetoric coming from the establishment media from here on in. Right now it's as subtle as they can make it, but as the plutocratic panic over his rise becomes ever more palpable, watch out for the subtlety to go out the window and for the more blatant smears to begin afresh. To Bernie's own great credit, he is not shy about calling the media out this time around. Last time, he was way too nice.

Now, if we could only get him to stop prefacing his Biden critiques with "Joe is a good friend of mine"...

My other two Times comments are actually from last month, in response to a couple of Paul Krugman's op-eds, both of which caused the nausea and angst that are the necessary impetuses (impeti?) for me to take to the keyboard in a desperate attempt to at least temporarily relieve my symptoms.

Krugman's more recent column, titled "The Legacy of Destructive Austerity," rather ridiculously posits that the corporacracy's punishing deficit obsession agenda disappeared in 2015 and that it was mainly a Republican effort to stop Democrats (who from 2009 through 2011 controlled the presidency and Congress)  from doing what they really, really wanted to do.

Specifically, debt fears were used as an excuse to cut spending on social programs, and also as an excuse for hobbling the ambitions of center-left governments. Here in the United States, Republicans went through the entire Obama era claiming to be deeply concerned about budget deficits, forcing the country into years of spending cuts that slowed economic recovery. The moment Donald Trump moved into the White House, all those supposed concerns vanished, vindicating those of us who argued from the beginning that Republicans who posed as deficit hawks were phonies.

Note the passive voice in the first paragraph, subtly absolving the true-believing deficit hawks in the Obama administration of culpability. Krugman feels so vindicated now that it's been proven beyond all doubt that the Republicans were only pretending to be austerians all along. What he unethically fails to acknowledge is that the Democratic leadership still are true-believing, wealth-serving, bought-and-paid for deficit hawks.

My published comment:

Paul Krugman doesn't mention that the Austerity Project was a totally bipartisan affair, what with President Obama himself convening the aptly-named Catfood Commission to cut the deficit as the economy was crashing. Congress did not force him to do this.

  Far from ending in 2015, austerity still rules, with the so-called opposition party addressing an epidemic of homelessness, sickness and premature deaths from despair by tinkering around the edges of catastrophe. The House leadership grudgingly agreed to control costs for only a handful of outrageously priced drugs while refusing to address the surprise hospital bills being sent out in droves by the private equity vultures who increasingly run our deeply sick health care system.

Last spring, Speaker Pelosi was once again a guest of honor at the late billionaire Pete Peterson's annual austerity conference. Complaining that Trump was taking all the media attention away from the "agenda," she said: "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

 And thus does the oligarchy sing the same tired old refrain about why people (a/k/a "purists") have to suffer: "But how you gonna pay for that?"

They could start by withholding the trillion-odd dollars they keep gifting Trump every single year for our endless wars.

The other December column to which I responded had Krugman trying to absolve himself from his own destructive anti-Bernie rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, in which diehard austerian Hillary Clinton had fiendishly vowed that Medicare For All would "never, ever come to pass" under her leadership.

His column was a thinly-disguised campaign commercial for the faltering Elizabeth Warren, who is currently suffering the slings and arrows of billionaires from the right and progressives from the left as a result of her efforts to please all of the people all of the time.

Ridiculously once again, Krugman points to allegedly low unemployment numbers as proof that there was never any "skills gap" to blame for the nation's joblessness. He doesn't acknowledge that most of the jobs created since the 2008 financial collapse are of the low-wage, temporary and precarious variety. What counts is that he has been proven right, and the deficit hawks and the inflationistas were wrong, as were the oligarchs who blamed the unemployed for their own plights. These oligarchs have an inordinate influence on policy and are coming after Warren.

Krugman concludes:

Which brings me back to the 2020 campaign. You may disagree with progressive ideas coming from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, which is fine. But the news media owes the public a serious discussion of these ideas, not dismissal shaped by a combination of reflexive "centrist bias" and the conscious or unconscious assumption that any policy rich people dislike must be irresponsible.

 And when candidates talk about the excessive influence of the wealthy, that subject also deserves serious discussion, not the cheap shots we've been seeing lately. I know that this kind of discussion makes many journalists uncomfortable. That's exactly why we need to have it.

I just could not help myself. Those high-falutin' hypocritical words were exactly why I typed out this response:

An amazing thing is happening in Punditville. Some of the same outlets that only last week were engaging in a virtual Bernie Blackout are suddenly taking the opposite tack, admitting that hey, this guy might just clinch this nomination, especially since he looks to win Iowa and New Hampshire. leads in California, and even has a decent shot in South Carolina, whose millennial Black voters favor him overwhelmingly. Biden's current national lead is still based largely on name recognition rather than any fondness for his retro center-right policies.

 Cheap shots by this liberal columnist in 2016, such as "Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro!" because his policy proposals for the greater public good were supposedly outweighed by nonspecific "serious character and values issues" are now conveniently buried under the rug. Given a choice between Trump and a winning Bernie-Liz ticket, it behooves even establishment types to acknowledge that the rich are losing this class war of ideas, that the oligarch-owned and controlled media are rapidly losing credibility for reasons that have nothing at all to do with Trump's own deranged critiques of "fake news."

Not, of course, that I'm complaining about mainstream journos suddenly gushing about the newly spry and funny Bernie so soon after gleefully pouncing on the heart attack to concern-troll the message that his candidacy was over. They don't want to be blamed if they once again trash Bernie so hard that they hand Trump another term.

This is different, of course, from what I suspect is their subliminal desire to actually hand Trump another term. They don't want to contend with a Sanders nomination or presidency because they would then be forced to expose themselves as wealth-serving careerists. They can champion progressive policy initiatives or they can keep their jobs. But they would not be able to do both. It would be far easier for them and more lucrative for their employers  to have Trump to kick around for another four years, to keep Russiagate propaganda on life support, and thus keep their hypocrisy more or less hidden from public view.

As I mentioned in my first Times comment, deconstructing the plutocratic propaganda promises to be very fulfilling, almost as fulfilling as the $14 increase I just got in my Social Security check.

Plutocratic Panic Is Palpable

They're triple-peeing themselves, and I don't mean in the way that neoliberals have been selling the odious acronym PPP for the past 40 years. Since the "public- private partnerships" which socialize all the costs and privatize all the profits have been duly exposed as scams literally condemning Americans to premature deaths, the plutocratic perps are now resorting to bald-faced lies.

The Paper of Record is only too happy to help. With only seven Democrats on the latest debate stage, Bernie Sanders actually threatened to get noticed and take away precious speaking time from low-polling "moderate" Amy Klobuchar and billionaire Tom Steyer. The Anti-Bernie campaign will thus begin in earnest.

The New York Times' role in destroying Sanders for a second time is beginning with some blatant monkeying-around with public opinion through use of an online marketing tool aptly called SurveyMonkey.

"When Offered Options, Democratic Voters Prefer a Moderate Path" is the since-changed headline of a piece by Ben Casselman, who writes

Only one in four Democratic voters says they would favr eliminating private health insurance and replacing it with a government-run plan — the centerpiece of the “Medicare for all” proposals put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And only one in three favors making public college tuition free for all Americans regardless of income, another idea shared by the two leading progressives in the race.Those results, from a survey conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey, are striking because past polls, including those from The Times, have shown broad-based support for progressive ideas among Democrats. Last month, 81 percent of Democrats said they approved of Medicare for all; in July, 82 percent said they supported making public colleges free for all.

A SurveyMonkey "research scientist" feebly explains away the glaring inconsistency that these same Democratic respondents trust Bernie Sanders more than any other candidate to "handle health care" by claiming that you can be very fond of a politician without ever agreeing with his or her policies. 

Casselman himself sought out other regular folk until he found a few willing to echo corporate Democratic and insurance industry talking points. They agree with Medicare For All in principle, but don't think the time is right to make a change. A political party's fortunes are more important than people's health.

 Meanwhile, the methodology of the survey is iffy at best, with SurveyMonkey explaining:

This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted December 2 through 8, 2019 among a national sample of 4,093 adults. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Data were weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States.

Who did the selecting? Did they cherry-pick among the two million people to find the "moderate" public opinion with which the ruling class so desperately wants to gaslight the public?

Although the Wikipedia entry for SurveyMonkey has been flagged due to suspicions that it is nothing but a paid advertisement and thereby in violation of the site's terms of use, it does contain several disturbing facts, such as the firm's Wall Street and private equity financing and leadership. Another massive infusion of oligarchic cash boosted its market share price by a whopping 60 percent just in the last year. Its board of directors includes the billionaire widow, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, of its first leader. To add the necessary sheen of  gender and racial diversity, tennis star Serena Williams was recently added to the roster of super-capitalists invested in carefully measuring,if not outright creating or even falsifying, public opinion. Not for nothing does the board also include Facebook alumnus David Ebersman, who now runs Lyra Health, a "frictionless" technocratic mental health service provider to the disgruntled and oppressed workers of America.

Employers naturally have a stake in this as they want their employees to stay health, (sic) but the goal is to offer a sort of safe space where users can benefit from years of growth in pattern matching and data to help them figure out where to start. The company said it has raised $45 million in a new financing round including Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital Partners, Crown Ventures, and Casdin Capital. Existing investors that include Greylock Partners, Venrock, and Providence Ventures also participated in the funding round.

 As one satisfied customer gushed in a testimonial on the Lyra website, getting mental health treatment from private equity is just like getting an upgrade to business class!

Judging from some other results of the New York Times-commissioned survey revealing there are millions more "moderates" than even they thought, I wonder whether SurveyMonkey picked some of the respondents from among the happy workplace clients of Lyra. Survey Monkey certainly appears to have picked and chosen its respondents from among the financially comfortable minority rather than from the precarious majority. More than a third of respondents reported being better off financially than they were a year ago, with another 41 percent thinking that they'll be even better off next year. Half the respondents think that the United States will be doing just fine in the next five years. More than a third are so flush with disposable income that they think that now is the perfect time to buy major household items.

 Even more preposterously, more than half proclaim themselves to be extremely concerned about the government budget deficit while a third are "somewhat" concerned about it, resulting in a shocking 80 percent of allegedly typical Americans worried about the deficit while life actually is pretty good for them, personally.

So my money is on the panicked plutocratic cherry-picking rather than on life being a big fat bowl of luscious cherries for concerned liberals having the time, the computers, the internet connections and probably lots of mind-altering drugs to fill out online SurveyMonkey questionnaires commissioned by the New York Times.

Of course, I could be nothing but a conspiracy theorist whose brain has been infiltrated by Putin. I am probably in dire need of some frictionless psychotherapy from the private equity shrinks at Lyra and SurveyMonkey, which are striving mightily to get the huddled masses to see the error of their radical life-sustaining thought processes.

Resistance (as opposed to approved #Resistance, Inc.) may be futile, but I think I'll give it a try anyway. I hope that millions of my fellow immoderates will join me in the new decade.

Spellbound In America: Dali Meets Hitchock

Compassion, Neoliberal Style

By all accounts, homelessness in California is a humanitarian crisis as well as a shameful example of deliberate political inaction. Deaths of those living on the streets are occurring at the rate of three a day and expected to increase even more next year as the result of the paralysis of the political class, beholden as they are to the needs of their ultra-wealthy donors and "not in my back yard" (Nimby) constituents.

The New York Times is on the case - but not by espousing the need for more public housing and affordable rents. Instead, the Paper of Record is running a concern-trolling piece about "compassion fatigue."  It seems that both ordinary Californians and burnt-out social workers are suffering an epidemic of "secondary trauma" just by having to  deal with and look at homeless people.

It all started with a letter from a Chicago reader named Ayanna, who asked the Times:

What detaches a person so far from human suffering/poverty/homelessness that they see people who are stricken with one or all three as a public nuisance?We can’t depend on the altruism of the wealthy to help solve the housing crisis. Housing policies must be equitable, inclusive and be pushed forth with the belief that shelter is a human right.”

But rather than contact local, state and federal officials to press them on why the housing crisis has gotten so out of hand, the Times asked a homelessness researcher from the University of Southern California about why ordinary people aren't more compassionate toward the homeless.

Well, according to Professor Benjamin Henwood, people are just sick and tired of witnessing misery. So if you, too, feel disgusted at the sight of homeless people, you need to be easier on yourself. You can help the homeless and develop empathy simply by taking a little time every day to think about them and try not stigmatize them so much. At the same time you should indulge in a little self-care and learn not to beat yourself up for having such callous feelings about people you see living on the streets.

As Henwood said:

While there’s not a lot of research on how best to address it, there are plenty of best practices that in different ways emphasize being kind to yourself. Of course, there may also be collective compassion fatigue, which can occur when the public is invested in trying to help address homelessness but don’t see the problem getting better.

"Best practices" in the neoliberal buzzword that obfuscates how policies and programs ostensibly designed to help the poor usually end up benefiting the rich investors in privatized programs that used to be under the sole purview of public agencies. Poverty is not a crisis, it is a business.  For example, it might be "best practices" for the wealthy donor class to suggest that slightly more privileged California residents put up homeless people in their backyards for a spell to qualify for a temporary property tax break or small stipend. It would not, however, be "best practiccs" to tax the wealthy in order to build a million subsidized housing units to permanently shelter the chronically unhoused.

So if the problem of homelessness rears its ugly head and offends the eyes of a country full of eyewitnesses, another "best practice" is to ever so subtly put the onus on the homeless people themselves. The Times interview with Henwood continues:

Q -We are often quick to reach into our pockets when disaster hits, like after an earthquake or wildfire, but do you think people are more reluctant to pitch in when it comes to helping the homeless?

 A- Homelessness is instead attributed to poor decision making or the fault of the person experiencing homelessness who we conclude are somehow to blame and not deserving of help or relief.

Notice the use of the passive voice. Henwood doesn't say who, exactly, blames the poor for their own plights. But he does passive-aggressively put the discredited message out there. The planting of a tainted theory with the caveat that it's tainted is still a plant.  Could it be that he doesn't want to bite the hands that fund his research at wealth-soaked USC? If he went so far as to clamor for  a wealth tax to build housing for the homeless, it might damage his research funding as much as it might damage the career trajectory of the Times reporter who limits her own inquiries to middle class attitudes about the homeless as a way to avoid directly addressing this humanitarian catastrophe. As I previously wrote in a piece about godzillionaire Bill Gates's method of helping the poor, our ruling class would rather spend their money studying problems than see any little smidgen of their excess cash going into the pockets of the poor. Therefore, the powerful are very fond of glibly ascribing the poverty caused by private equity and obscene wealth inequality to the drug addiction and mental illness of their targets. 

In other words, it's a way of stereotyping homeless people. Even well-meaning researchers send the message that a person is living on the streets for no other reason than addiction or mental illness. They never address the distinct  possibility that the drugs and the mental problems are the direct results of evictions and job losses caused by the financial meltdown of 2008, with fully 94 percent of all the recovered wealth going directly to the top one percent. They never talk about taxing the rich.

Another common liberal trope is to paint the slightly better off, but still- struggling general public as ignorant bigots, further relieving politicians and their deep pocketed donors of any and all culpability. It's the same trope that allows them to blast Donald Trump for the cruel rhetoric that accompanies his cruel policies as they themselves utter all the right liberal platitudes while doing absolutely nothing to rectify dire situations.

 Another word for this "best practice" is virtue-signaling.

It's the tired old ploy that just allowed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other centrist Democrats to wring their hands over Trump's food stamp cuts - without introducing any legislation to help the up to a million poor people now facing the loss of meals and home heating assistance.

The Times article about compassion fatigue syndrome hopelessly and cynically concludes with this smarmy little bit of stigma-fighting as a substitute for what the rest of the world is doing - striking, marching, rioting - to fight the cruelties of neoliberal capitalism.

What can we do to combat the stigma?

We haven’t studied and don’t know a lot about fighting stigma related to homelessness. In other fields we’ve looked at stigma related to, for example, serious mental illness and found that there are several approaches including disseminating information (e.g. people with serious mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes) and exposing the public to people who have disclosed having a mental illness.

These can be targeted anti-stigma campaigns or part of a much larger media campaign. More recently, there have been media campaigns that appear to be addressing stigma related to homelessness, but it isn’t clear whether the message “anyone can become homeless” impacts stigma since while this may be true, we also know that certain groups, including African-Americans, are more likely to become homeless in the United States.

Commentariat Central: New York Times Fake News Edition

In an appearance this week on the "Useful Idiots" podcast hosted by Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, journalist Chris Hedges nailed it about the trajectory the Paper of Record has taken since Donald Trump's election. "They're morphing into MSNBC in print," he observed.

MSNBC, of course, is not so much in the news business as it is in the plutocratic promotion business and the Russophobic business as marketed by the Democratic Party. Staffed to the rafters with former - and in some cases, current - security and military officials, it preaches hatred of Trump, fear of Putin, and loathing of Bernie Sanders -- all crammed in between commercials for overpriced prescription drugs, wealth management experts, the goodness of oil and gas, the beneficence of for-profit hospital chains, and all manner of antisocial neoliberal claptrap.

The Times, long known for at least a pretense of seriousness and impartiality, has recently branched out into video, including a partnership with Hulu to produce weekly documentaries starring its own reporters, as well as producing its own podcasts. It has, meanwhile, stopped publication of often trenchant political cartoons for the sin of offending too many people.

 When Edward Bernays wrote his seminal volume on propaganda in 1928, he estimated that about one-quarter of all the front page articles in the Times were pure propaganda, the contrived "narratives" coming in about equal portions from government, big business. and the various public relations/lobbying outfits currently euphemized as "think tanks."

With the introduction of Russiagate and now Ukrainegate, the mere one-quarter propaganda content has at the very least doubled, especially since the lockstep opinion columnists now receive pride of place on the digital homepage. ("Where do they find these people?" Hedges marveled on the Useful Idiots podcast.)

Exactly one hundred years ago, about a decade before the Bernays book, muckraker Upton Sinclair had described the Times as "the great organ of world capitalism," writing in The Brass Check:

Our newspapers do not represent public interests but private interests; they do not represent humanity but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth.

The Times not only refused to review Sinclair's book, whose observations and criticisms have held up remarkably well over the past century, it even refused to run paid advertisements for it.

The historic truth of the consolidated media's inherent capitalistic value system has been conveniently muffled by the emergence of Donald Trump and the media's subsequent positioning of itself as "Resistance, Inc." Trump has gifted them with a new opportunity to advance the interests of property in the name of endangered Norms and abused Decency. They relish their roles as the righteous victims of Trump's fascistic "enemies of the people" crusade and as the simultaneous hypocritical enablers of Trump, feverishly covering his every Nuremberg-style rally and republishing his every tweet the minute it emanates from his twitchy thumbs. 

So never mind the brass check. Times columnist Michelle Goldberg was recently given a blank check, or at least a generous expense account, to travel to all the way to Ukraine just to assert that the Democracy which America has always tried so very, very hard to export has been sadly supplanted by the rank corruption that Donald Trump and his mafia minions have been single-handedly forcing down that beleaguered nation's throat.

She didn't personally travel to the Russian border to cover the "proxy war's" skirmishes and battles. She didn't interview ordinary Ukrainians. Instead, she followed the MSNBC echo chamber playbook and interviewed like-minded fellow professionals in trendy Kiev cafes. She even glowingly quoted the discredited neoconservative  Francis "The End of History" Fukayama, who is now trying to rebrand himself as a professional Never-Trump liberal resistance fighter.

According to Goldberg - Bernays and Sinclair notwithstanding - the epidemic of fake news and propaganda is a brand-new, purely TrumPutian phenomenon which only started a few years ago:

Ukrainians are no strangers to post-truth politics. The first time I ever heard the term “fake news” was in 2015, when I learned about the Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake. It was created by a group of journalists to push back against the torrents of Russian disinformation sowing chaos in the country’s politics. At the time, it would have been hard to imagine that the United States would soon join Russia as a source of weaponized untruth in Ukraine....

Pro-Western reformers, the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told me, had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

When you combat alleged fake news with pure propaganda, as Michelle Goldberg does with her column, nothing good can come of it. (It does help, though, that Goldberg's propaganda is so clumsily rendered that it becomes a virtual parody of itself.)

 Not only does she omit any mention of the US-backed Maidan Square coup of 2014, she ignores the entire imperialistic history of the US and its numerous CIA-led regime changes, its aiding and abetting and installation of myriad corrupt and vicious right-wing dictators (Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Armas, etc.) who are compliant with US corporate interests. Did I mention that her other regular gig is paid MSNBC punditry?

My published comment on her Oct. 12th column: 

My own earliest memory of the term "fake news" was when President Obama used it on a trip to Europe in November 2016, shortly after Trump's election. He called it a "threat to democracy."

 In the Athens leg of his trip, the White House shared a "travel diary" with photos of a pensive Obama at the Parthenon and other ruins in the birthplace of Democracy. He wrote:

"We view ourselves as part of a broader humanity and a community of nations that can work together to solve problems and lift up what’s best in humanity.”

 But what neither he nor most US media outlets saw fit to share were photos and footage of riot police lobbing tear gas at some 7,000 Greek citizens who were protesting and demanding "Yankee go home!" just blocks away from the American embassy where he was dining with officials. People were not only protesting the harsh austerity measures imposed by bank-friendly politicians, but the timing of the presidential visit. It occurred on the anniversary of the 1973 revolt that helped oust the military junta backed by the US.

"Fake news" can also be perpetrated by the deliberate omission of salient facts, giving any "narrative" the desired slant. "Exporting Democracy" is greasing the skids for multinational corporate plunder with the weaponized help of what is commonly euphemized as "the intelligence community."

Corruption is baked right into the system. Maybe we can start to root it out at home by overturning the Citizens United ruling that's made most of it perfectly legal.

The Overreach Concern Trolls

If it's not the damned Russians coming to get us, it's those damned Overreachers.

The Overreachers are a brand new breed of bogeymen. They've popped up virtually overnight from the deepest depths of the Democratic Party, taking up residence beneath every punditory bed, jostling for precious space with Putin and his rabid apricot poodle, Donald. It's an uncomfortably tight and alarming squeeze for all the corporate journalists and columnists so desperately trying to keep up with all the ins and outs of Group Think. 

Only the cleverest among them can manage to put Russia and Democratic Party Overreach into the same column or article or cable TV shout-fest. If they can blame Russia for sowing the desires and demands among the electorate to have single payer health care and debt-free education, then they've got themselves a real plot.

Overreach manic-depression is emerging as a real invented disease, thought to be genetically related to Trump Derangement Disorder and Russophobia Syndrome. Symptoms include terror of Medicare For All, with its unthinkable lethal outcome of treating and healing tens of millions more sick people. Also of great worry to Overreach phobics are Bernie Sander's education and medical debt jubilees.What totally sick, anti-capitalist ideas, according to the diagnosticians of the media-political complex. They might even be more deadly than heart disease or diabetes or cancer. 

Overreach, besides being a monstrous malady in itself, can also act as either a hypnotic or a stimulant drug, depending on the pusher or the user. If left-leaning candidates like Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser but no less terrifying extent, Elizabeth Warren don't stop spreading this crack opioid epidemic of Overreach to the rest of the liberal class, and to their fellow candidates and citizens, delicate arms are likely to get jerked right out of their sockets. And then Resisters Inc. won't be able to flail and punch at Donald Trump as virtuously and as daintily as they do now. And then what? Trump might win a second term and then they'll be reduced to typing out their columns and speeches with their toes.

Concerned New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall therefore asks: "How Can Democrats Keep Themselves From Overreaching?" 

 Edsall studiously ignores the voices of actual voters in his piece, turning instead to the usual cast of credentialed experts from corporate-funded think tanks, academia, Party leadership (Clintonite talking head Paul Begala among them) and polling agencies. 

For example, there's this nugget which hilariously conflates progressive activists and the Left with the rich donor class:

The role progressive activists play in setting the Democratic agenda provided Trump with an ideal target, helping him portray the Democratic Party as dominated by a doctrinaire elite. In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute, characterized these progressive activists as:
Much more likely to be rich, highly educated — and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.

This one paragraph insinuates the false, but standard. centrist talking point that Blacks are poorly represented among progressive activists. This trope ignores both the history of the bottom-up civil rights movement and current movements like Black Lives Matter. It ignores the fact that labor movements, by their very nature, are the farthest thing from elitism you could probably ever imagine. The current labor movement, among teachers, nurses and auto workers, is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The subliminal message Edsall imparts in this paragraph that if you're a leftist, you are also racist and probably also an elitist snob. 

Edsall does not disclose that the Agora Institute is bankrolled by the Niarchos shipping dynasty, or that The Atlantic is owned by multi-billionaire investor Laurene Powell Jobs. And although "agora" is the Greek word for the public square, there is no sign of the actual public or any actual demos anywhere to be found among the Institute's aptly named Board of Overseers. Rather, the new oligarchic definition of "public square" is a bastion of neoconservatism and neoliberalism: transnational corporations, private equity vultures, weapons industry think tanks and even representatives of such repressive US client states as the Kingdom of Jordan. Thomas Edsall's climate change denialist and right-wing colleague, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, is also listed as an elite Overseer of the Agora, as are the Board Chairman of Merck Pharmaceuticals, the senior adviser of Henry Kissinger Associates, and Gary Kasparov, founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, whose neoconservative main purpose, besides fomenting Cold War 2.0 against Russia, is overthrowing leftist governments in Latin America under the guise of human rights.

Edsall thus performs the usual centrist trick of using right-wing sources to concern-troll on the alleged behalf of the liberal left. The irony of using this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to criticize an Overreach Monster that exists only in the heads of the war-mongering aristocracy and its publicists seems to be quite lost on him. Then again, he's only reporting what the credentialed experts tell him.

And make no mistake. The plutocrats who get rich off our endless wars are the very same climate-destroying plutocrats who adamantly oppose the health, debt-free education, and financial well-being of everybody else. 

My published response to Edsall:

Have you noticed that those warning of Democratic "overreach" are the centrists and the plutocrats? Begala's party is the one that deregulated Wall Street and the telecoms, rammed through NAFTA and reformed "welfare as we know it" - all contributing to the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history.

 The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the rich, and the rich usually get what they want in the way of policy. Thus they rail against such egalitarian measures as Medicare For All while championing LGBT rights and the inclusion of a few select historically oppressed "identities" in their boardrooms and corner offices. They sell us a more diverse oligarchy as a substitute for true racial, gender and economic justice.

They are loath to even mention such a thing as the class war.

The media, meanwhile, give us wall-to-wall impeachment coverage as it mainly ignores how hard most of our lives are. We're supposed to care about "Ukraine-gate" and not notice that Trump once again is cutting food stamps, and that he just signed an executive order further privatizing Medicare.

 Many Trump voters actually support Medicare For All. So if the Democrats want to win people back, they'll give us at least some of what we want and need instead of saying that nice things are impossible with the country so divided right now. We're supposed to accept the free flow of trillions of dollars to our bloated military, and meanwhile pragmatically agree to just die sooner.

No more.