Inspiration Blues

A commenter on this blog challenged me this morning to talk about something positive or learned for a change. 

I don't know about the "learned" part, but I think the New York Times comment I wrote last night on Paul Krugman's latest ode to the wonderful Democratic Party was pretty damned positive. 

Pushing his own glass half-full scenario in the midst of the government shutdown, he lavished great praise upon Gavin Newsom, the new and untested governor of California, and applauded all-blue New Jersey's strict enforcement of the Obamacare rule that everybody must buy private, for-profit health insurance, or face tax penalties. The result of this mass extortion is that the extortion is more broad-based, and premiums have come down.

 But even better, one of the bluest of all blue states (Washington) now has a public option supplement to the private insurance cartel, thus absolving the still-thriving cartel from using more of its record profits to treat the sickest of the sick, instead passing on such costs to the taxpaying public while cartel CEOs pocket the difference in stock buy-back schemes. 

And on the other liberal coast, New York City Mayor Bill di Blasio even wants to build more affordable housing in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the Universe and provide more access to medical care!

Therefore, there was no need for Krugman to even mention the Los Angeles teachers' strike, the housing crisis, and the continued and growing public demand for non-profit Medicare For All. Because Democrats sure know how to govern, unlike those nasty old Republicans.

My published response to Krugman's column: 

Why no shout-out to the striking L.A. teachers exerting such effective pressure on the new governor and other Democrats? Without the resurgent labor movement, it'd be business as usual, even in the bluest of blue locales. Forty children per classroom is a shame in such a rich state, home to many a Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaire and mogul.

 Bill di Blasio isn't making new proposals for better health care and low-income housing just out of the goodness of his heart. It's taken citizens with the courage to confront him at his gym workouts, cell phone cameras at the ready, over the shameful conditions in the city's public housing projects as well as the homeless crisis. Although he's made strides in the construction of more "affordable" housing, NYC's homeless numbers are still at near-record highs.

The homeless also just happen to have their own Coalition.

 If Dems are moving left and finally beginning to abandon austerity, it's because the public is forcing them to.

Regarding health care: individual states implementing public options is no substitute for a federally administered single payer system. The House majority thus far is only paying lip service to Medicare For All, with the chairwoman of the relevant subcommittee, Anna Eshoo, just announcing that she might not have time to hold hearings after all. She represents Silicon Valley, home of many a tech billionaire.

 So a Women's March group plans to storm Congress on Friday to demand Single Payer.

We have miles to go before we sleep.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the DNC has disassociated itself from the Women's March for more reasons than just the alleged anti-Semitism of one or two of its founders. Protesters are branching off from the original Democratic-centric/centrist intent of the enterprise, independently evolving far beyond simply "resisting" Trump and the Republicans. Good.)

Commentariat Central: Obituary Edition

I wrote three New York Times comments this week: two of them to mark the deaths of a couple of long-time fellow commenters, and the third to critique yet another beating of a dead horse by dismal economics pundit Paul Krugman. To give Krugman credit, he boldly buried his fellow dishonest economists without mentioning even one of them by his or her actual name. How can I put this delicately? Krugman himself has been moribund for quite some time now, vacillating in his biweekly columns between easy-peasy GOP-bashing and defending Obamacare to the death.

But back to the true obits.

Larry Eisenberg, legendary resident poet and limericist of the Times commentariat, died on Christmas night at the age of 99. He was such an institution that he rated a prominently displayed full obituary written by another of the Paper of Record's institutions, chief necrologist Margalit Fox. (Since Fox actually left the Times earlier this year, she did not, as some readers surmised, physically return to the building to write Eisenberg's obit. Such things are kept in the can for years, if not decades, before a famous person actually dies.)

It was a classic of the form, with the appropriate blackly humorous headline: Larry Eisenberg, 99, Is Dead; His Limericks Were Very Well Read. Fox writes:

 His first ( of 13,000 Times comments), from July 14, 2008, was in response to an Op-Ed article by Barack Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency.

 In the article, which outlined his proposal for the Iraq campaign, Mr. Obama called for the gradual withdrawal of United States combat troops there, a plan that would leave only “a residual force” to “perform limited missions.”

Dr. Eisenberg, a self-described ardent liberal, was having none of this. As he wrote in reply:

A “residual force,” Mr. O.?

With “limited missions,” ah, so,

Precipitous? Nay!

It’s a sure way to stay.

Your plan sounds like “in statu quo”!

In the years that followed, limericks burst forth from Dr. Eisenberg on a welter of subjects.

A couple of years ago, I noticed that Larry's comments had disappeared. A couple of us wondered if perhaps he'd become incapacitated or even died. Another frequent contributor, Rima Regas, tracked him down. He wrote me back a very nice personal email, thanking me for my concern, and explained that he had quit making submissions because the Times moderators had started rejecting them. (Rima kept up an email correspondence with him until just a few days before his death in hospice.) Larry complained to former editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal (an Eisenberg fan) and got reinstated. It just goes to show you that even famous unpaid resident poets who rate full obituaries can get censored by the Gray Lady if their thoughts are deemed to be too "edgy."

So anyway, here's my published comment on Larry's obit:

 There once was a poet named Larry
 Whose comments made Times readers merry
 In spite of Trump news
 In spite of Trump's views
 His wit made the world seem less scary.

 So though sad that Limerick Larry
 Bows out in a Times obituary,
 His verses live on.
 The memories so fond
 As he journeys on Charon's old ferry.

 *****

 My deepest condolences to Larry's children. Your dad was a true mensch!

Do check out the other comments from his fans. Some of the limericks and poems and other essays written in his honor are well worth a read.

Now on to the second Times commenter death, that of right-wing gadfly Richard Luettgen. He rated a somewhat less prominent tribute from a Times censor moderator, mainly on the basis of his having published a whopping 30,000 comments over the years. His demise was not noticed until several weeks after the fact, although the Times apparently "wondered" whatever had become of him. News came in the form of another reader comment on a Bret Stephens column trashing Elizabeth Warren.

"He (Luettgen) was not known for holding back," diplomatically wrote moderator Nancy Wartik.

The Times’s comment moderators are a tight-knit group, affectionately familiar with our frequent commenters and appreciative of those who contribute thoughtfully, like Mr. Luettgen. Commenters, too, have developed virtual relationships within our community....

“That’s tragic,” “rtj” of Massachusetts responded to the news of Mr. Luettgen’s death. “He had a sense of humor that’s rare around these parts.”

Another reader, “Nick,” wrote: “I almost never agreed with him, but appreciated his contribution to the discussion. He provided a lot of grist for the mill.”

Others have been offering their condolences to his family.

The ripples also spread through our department.

 One of the things I really respected about Richard,” said Bassey Etim, our Community Editor, “is that he would email me when we took down some rude replies to his comments and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing, put that back up.’ He was not afraid of mixing it up.”

I personally never chose to "mix it up" with Luettgen, despite his best efforts to troll me (in that funny erudite way of his, of course.) 

 The final - and I believe the only - remarks I ever wrote to or about Richard Luettgen, whose comments, frankly, I had stopped reading:

 I was sorry to learn of Richard's death in spite of the fact that he once responded to one of my comments by suggesting that my doctor up my dose of Valium. As others have noted, he was something of an imp. To be fair, he also once complimented me on my writing ability, which was nice coming from such a verbally gifted contributor as Richard L. 

It was also pretty shocking to learn he had penned some 30,000 comments during his career at the Times. It leads me to wonder whether his constant defense of Trump had caused a rise in blood pressure, leading to the stroke that apparently was the cause of his death. Myself, I comment more sparingly these days and only when I find something new and different to say, other than that Trump is horrible. My heart pounds and my head throbs whenever I see or hear him. He is the main reason I cancelled cable TV. This man indeed endangers the health of both his defenders and his detractors, not to mention collaterally damaging global humanity as a whole.

 Condolences to Richard's family.

 And for those who miss erudite commentary from the right, do check out the "American Conservative" website if you haven't already done so. I find myself agreeing with maybe a third to a half of their articles, especially the anti-war and anti-surveillance ones by Andrew Bacevich and others.

 Here's to a peaceful and healthy New Year to moderating staff and commenters.

***

Last and least, on to the only paid pundit in this mix: Paul Krugman.

Ironic that his subhead reads "On professionals who sold their integrity and got nothing in return," in light of the fact that he sold out to the corporate Dems when he peevishly trashed Bernie Sanders and Medicare For All during the 2016  primary season. Of course, he and we got saddled with Donald Trump in return. But that's not "nothing", because Krugman is still employed by the Times as one of America's most respected public intellectuals. The rest of us are just purists and whiners.

An excerpt from his latest effort:

 The bad faith that dominates conservative politics at every level is infecting right-leaning economists, too.

This is sad, but it’s also pathetic. For even as once-respected economists abase themselves in the face of Trumpism, the G.O.P. is making it ever clearer that their services aren’t wanted, that only hacks need apply.

What you need to know when talking about economics and politics is that there are three kinds of economist in modern America: liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists and professional conservative economists.

He doesn't mention the fourth kind of economist in America: the Marxist variety, most prominently exemplified by the extremely well-credentialed and informative Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson. (See Wolff's website, Democracy At Work for a cogent, and quite entertaining, series of his posts and video lectures, along with Hudson's site, also on the list.)

Krugman, as I mentioned above, is either too polite or too cowardly to mention the actual names of any of his colleagues in the Club You Ain't In, least of all that of dead fellow Nobel Bank Prize winner Milton Friedman, founder of the Mont Pelerin Society and the acknowledged granddaddy of neoliberalism.

So I did in my published response:

Milton Friedman and his zombie descendants wouldn't know a good faith economic argument if it hit them in the face. Their neoliberal ideology - that the market can solve all problems, and that cutthroat competition trumps cooperation - has been internalized in the hive-mind of most of global humanity over the past half-century.

  It's so ingrained that even when the financial system crashed in 2008, it not only survived, it's grown stronger. The miscreants got pay hikes and bonuses and bailouts. This has only inspired them to flaunt their corruption for all to see.

 It's the plutonomy, stupid. As Sen. Dick Durbin ruefully observed a decade ago, after the smirking Wall Street culprits were hauled before Congress for their slap on the wrist: "They frankly own the place."

In 1995, Citigroup wrote a secret memo for their ultra-rich clients laying out this de facto plutonomy, claiming that obscene wealth inequality is not a matter of morality, but of cold hard math. They cynically quipped that "a rising tide lifts all yachts."

 "Perhaps one reason that societies allow plutonomy, is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Pluto-participant. Why kill it off, if you can join it? In a sense this is the embodiment of the 'American dream'”. 

 To paraphrase George Carlin, you have to be asleep to believe in the American Dream. And it looks like a lot of people are finally beginning to wake up, thanks to the human alarm clock named Donald Trump.

Commentariat Central: Fear and Despair Edition

The closer we get to the Most Important Elections Ever in History, the more the Duopoly is ramping up the fear factor. The end of the world is nigh, not so much because of the ongoing climate catastrophe, but because neither of the two corporate political parties we're stuck with thinks that more than a billion dollars in campaign contributions is enough.

A glance through your inbox gives you the impression that every day is a deadline of doom. The money-raking professionals are getting more brazen, going from begging to demanding, informing you that your payment is past due and that you only have until midnight tonight to fork it over.

And what if you don't? I really hate to tell them this, but the democracy repo man came and went decades ago.

So they'll try to scare you silly anyway. Always near the top of their bag of tricks to get you to fork over the cash before voting is the warning that "they're coming after your Social Security and Medicare!"  

Democrats say this of Republicans, and Republicans say this of Democrats (and also about "illegals" and welfare cheats.)

As is his convenient wont, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman limits his own critique of the continuing attack on the New Deal and Great Society programs to the Republican Party and to the deplorable Republican voters who get all their information from Fox News. That he again fails to mention that it takes two corrupt bodies to tango comes as no surprise, although I do happen to agree with him that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blatantly announcing his attack plan before the midterms was pretty shocking.

My published comment:

The timing of McConnell's threat surprised me too. The only explanation is that he so secure in his iron grip on both Kentucky voters and the Senate that he's willing to play "bad cop" for the duration.

The first step in this stale old routine is to gaslight and terrorize the sick, the old, and the poor. Demonizing people and calling them fraudsters works wonders in the divide-and-conquer department.

The Dems, as they have done before, might react to his snarling cruelty by offering to snip and slash here and there to save what is little is still left of our social programs.

Trump might even achieve the "Grand Bargain" with Congress that Obama and Boehner could not, thanks to the Tea Party faction insisting that the cuts weren't cruel enough.

He could accept slightly less sadistic cuts in exchange for the building of his nasty wall. Who knows? I wouldn't put any subterfuge past any of them. This is, after all, government of, by and for the oligarchs, who really comprise one political party unto themselves, the Pathocratic Party. Their unbridled greed to possess everything and to control everybody has reached truly pathogenic proportions.

 They need to go, and we need to make them go.

So let's tell the Democrats in no uncertain terms that we will agree to no more of their "pay-go" rules, aka robbing from the poor and working class to keep our social insurance on life support.

Stop the trillion-dollar wars if you want to tame the deficit. And soak the rich.

Now we come to Times columnist Michelle Goldberg's piece addressing the despair of women in the Age of Trump.  Her solution?  Get involved working for the Democratic Party, and do it for free! Or at the very least, chat with some party activists to cheer yourselves up. (That this advice column is directed at affluent women not having to work at multiple low-paid gigs is punctuated by the accompanying feel-good photo showing a Democratic candidate hugging an unpaid campaign worker in a room full of white people.) 

Goldberg writes:

There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organizing rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll....

 Now, part of the job of a good politician is projecting optimism. But again and again over the horrible months of Trump’s reign, I’ve found that spending time with the women who are working their hearts out against him is at least a temporary cure for despair. So if you, too, are scared, or furious, or despondent, find a Democrat close to you and go canvass for her (or him). “It’s the best way to feel good about the world and connect with people,” (Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen)Whitmer said.

Heaven forbid that you should storm your local social services office, go on a wildcat strike, or join Cindy Sheehan in the anti-war Women's March on the Pentagon on Oct.20-21!  If you're nervous or depressed from spending too much time stressing over Trump all by your lonesome, then put all your energies into joining others in fixating obsessively on Trump, and forgetting all about the toxic neoliberal system that created him. If you're affluent, you will benefit mentally under a more rhetorically tasteful Democratic majority and thereby save yourself all those trips to the therapist.

My comment, trying to gently change the subject from the "liberal women are emotional wrecks and victims of Trump" trope, with its artificially narrow emphasis on gender/reproductive rights, to the wider economic justice/class struggles that are so ignored by the liberal elites during this campaign season:  

The more that Donald Trump denigrates women, the more obvious it becomes that he is terrified of women the same way that a middle school pre-adolescent boy is afraid of girls. His rallies are fascist iterations of the Little Rascals' He-Man Woman-Haters Club.

We should treat Trump with all the derision we can muster. He is a weakling at his core.

We must treat the establishment which spawned him with equal derision as a balance to our well-placed fear. We should also recognize that this is essentially a class war. The Republicans under Mitch McConnell have made no secret of the fact that the next big item on their agenda is to slash Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security. The citizens who depend the most on these programs are women and children.

Trump's tweets calling women names might sting and cause outrage. But the economic attacks on women's pocketbooks and pantries literally endanger our lives, if we are not so lucky to reside in the top 10% of income earners.

Rather than merely demand protection for the increasingly whittled-down social insurance programs we contribute to all our working lives, we must insist upon their enhancement. The Democrats have to do more than pay lip service to diversity and gender rights. We have to ensure not only equality of opportunity, but basic fairness of economic outcomes.

Repeat after me, ladies: Conservative men are afraid of you. Use the power that has been within you all this time. Make them even more afraid of you.

Ten Years After the Lehman Collapse

How a decade flies by when you're Richie Rich, and your class has sucked up a full 94% of all the household wealth "lost" in the financial crisis which began with the death of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008.

To hear liberal pundit Paul Krugman revise history by ignoring the endemic corruption of the global financial system, and to foist the blame for the continuing social and economic meltdown almost entirely on Republican obstructionism is to continue sliding down an Orwellian memory hole.   

Why did the response to a depressed economy fall short? We can debate endlessly whether the Obama administration could have gotten a bigger, more sustained stimulus through Congress; what’s clear is that some officials failed to see the need for stronger policies. When Christina Romer, the administration’s top economist, argued for more stimulus, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, dismissed it as “sugar.”

Beyond that, efforts to fight unemployment had to deal with a bizarre Beltway consensus that despite high unemployment and record low interest rates, debt, not jobs, was the real problem.

But the most important reason the great slump went on so long was scorched-earth Republican opposition to anything and everything that might have helped offset the fallout from the housing bust.

As you can see, Krugman almost, but not quite, chides the Obama administration by merely hinting at how enthusiastically the Democrats embraced an austerity regimen for the little people and boosted prosperity for the wealthy, not least by the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. Instead, he harps upon the GOP "blackmail" of Barack Obama, as if Obama himself weren't a true believer in neoliberal ideology (the market replacing representative democracy.) Then again, it wouldn't do for the most influential liberal pundit in America to put a damper on Obama's own ongoing revisionist campaign tour, in which he absolves himself of any and all culpability for the ongoing disaster affecting most people in this country.

Krugman then pivots to the GOP hypocrisy evidenced by the most recent round of tax cuts for the rich and the new conventional wisdom that deficits don't matter when Republicans are in control. He forgets to mention that the Democratic leadership is already vowing to re-implement the austerian "pay-go" rules if and when they retake power in November. This means that social programs benefiting ordinary people will have to be paid for by slashing other social programs benefiting ordinary people. The trillion-dollar wars which are truly bankrupting this country both morally and financially will go on as usual.

My published response to Krugman, who completely ignored the crime and corruption which caused, and continues to cause, so much misery:

 It's true that the GOP impeded the recovery. But they couldn't have stopped the Obama administration from prosecuting financial criminals and ensuring that bailouts went to Main Street as well as Wall Street.

Instead, CNBC's Rick Santelli dog-whistled the blame at "irresponsible" mortgagors (read: the poor and minorities) rather than on bipartisan deregulation. That rant gave rise to the Tea Party, and eventually, to Trump.

It was during the Clinton administration that Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Brooksley Born warned about toxic derivatives, and her SOS was duly shot down by Dep. Treasury Sec. Larry Summers, who accused her of fomenting financial crisis. How wrong he turned out to be, but expert that he is, he went on to become one of Obama's chief advisers.

For as Wikileaks has shown, Obama's cabinet was vetted by Citigroup. Geithner has since gone on to make big bucks in private equity, and Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's seat at white collar defense powerhouse Covington & Burling was kept nice and warm for him.

 Although the White House boasted in 2012 that it had criminally prosecuted 530 financiers since the collapse, a subsequent investigation by the DOJ's Inspector General revealed the real number to be only 107, with real restitution to the public less than $100 million, and not the boastful billion.

This is all a matter of public record. Maybe the Democrats will start winning elections once they start switching their allegiances to Regular Joe and Jane.

(as an aside, I really have to compliment the recent work of Times comment-moderators in removing all the nasty replies accusing me of being a Trump supporter, and worse, for my pointing out inconvenient and well-documented facts!)

The 2014 I.G. audit I referenced in my comment has to do with the Obama Justice Department's abject failure to investigate and prosecute mortgage fraud cases, and then blatantly lying to the public about it. It found that the absolute lowest priority of the FBI was in cracking down on fraud scams against homeowners and mortgagors. Despite Obama's ostentatious signing in 2009 of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) there was precious little enforcement or recovery. 

According to the I.G. report, this was despite what Krugman called a cynical obstructionist Congress appropriating "significant" funding ($196 million) to the Justice Department, through 2011, for the prosecution of mortgage fraud and other white collar crimes via the hiring of additional FBI agents and adding to the existing mortgage fraud tax force.

In a 2012 press conference, Eric Holder, along with officials from Housing and Urban Development and Treasury, outright lied about the number of cases brought under the so-called Distressed Homeowners Initiative. Remember, the fudging of the facts was the conclusion of Holder's own internal watchdog and not some lousy cabal of Republican obstructionists!

Meanwhile, as an elite soldier in the anti-Trump Resistance, Holder recently schmoozed to Ministry of Truth outlet CNN that he thinks he "has what it takes to be president" because  "(We need) somebody who has the vision for the job, somebody who has got the necessary experience, somebody who has the capacity, physical as well as mental. Somebody who also has the ability to inspire people, to make people believe government can be the force for good and make people believe in this thing we call America. (They) have to be able to move people, to bring up together in ways this President has clearly not done."

Translation: he has what it takes, because his white collar criminal friends have taken what everybody else once had. Holder has the proven ability to inspire more crooks to believe that government will be a force for their own good, ensuring that the very wealthy will continue to rely on socialism for themselves and penury and prosecution for everybody else. Trump has been woefully unable to pull the wool over ordinary people's eyes. The guy is pure, fake polyester. Plus, he is an incapable fat slob, while Eric is genuine silky-smooth, toned, and smart. He has a proven track record of moving people... right out of their homes.  

Actually, I'd love to see Eric on a stage with former NYC Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is also planning a presidential run on the Democratic ticket. After they finish gushing all over each other, they can argue about who's the tougher guy: Holder, who protected the banksters and evicted the poor, or Bloomberg, who is so nasty that even the nasty and corrupt New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, thought he was going too far when he mandated that food stamp applicants be fingerprinted.

Paine v. Establishment Pains-In-Asses

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could just as well have been writing about why the liberal hand-wringing "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual. What is really needed is not just a so-called Blue Wave in the congressional midterms, but a global revolution against the whole rotten global tyranny of finance capitalism. No matter that Paine was talking about the revolution against Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than true corrupt despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

The "revolution" and freedom we're supposedly celebrating today was actually one group of rich men - the "Founders" - disentangling themselves from another group of rich men in Great Britain. Their aversion to taxes and their embrace of the institution of slavery, which was already well on the way to abolition in the British Empire, was at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would not be granted to enslaved people in America for nearly a century. And it was only granted on paper, and only for a little while, until the Jim Crow laws superseded both the "aspirational" Declaration and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The pursuit of happiness for the owners of capital has always been contingent upon their freedom to oppress, enslave and even kill those they consider disposable. America has been at war, at one place or another, for a grand grotesque total of 223 years since the Declaration was signed in 1776. So Paine was right when he wrote:

"To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to nations, would be to take from such government the most lucrative of its branches."

and

"Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government."

All courts and courtiers are alike. They form a common policy (or "narrative") which is separate and detached from the rights of people and nations. It's commonly known in the US as the Duopoly, or the good cop/bad cop two party system, or perhaps even more accurately, the Duplicity.

 Paine wrote, 

 "And while they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution....They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

While we don't have the hereditary succession of a monarchy, we do have an aristocracy. We do have both political and media dynasties, which have more and more consolidated power unto themselves. 

And it's no accident that this American aristocracy, besides its orgy of violent wars both at home and abroad,  has waged a virtual war on public education in recent years. And that is because, as Paine wrote: "The more ignorant the country, the better it is fitted for this species of Government" (of hereditary succession, or what's today euphemized as the "meritocracy" of the elites).

As we celebrate 241 years of freedom, The Duopoly is currently in a virtual storm of overreaction to the "shock" primary election of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated one of the most powerful congressional Democrats in the country. But unlike the establishment's open disdain for Bernie Sanders during his own primary battle against Hillary Clinton in 2016, they're treating Ocasio-Cortez like a comparative rock star. She's young, she's charismatic, she's attractive, and she's Latina. So the pundits are sadly unable to fall back on attacking her as too old, too white, too crabby and too sexist as they did Bernie, despite the fact that her platform is nearly identical to his. They therefore will try to celebritize her into watered-down ineffectiveness. Her "story" will outweigh the policy proposals they find so dangerous to their self-interest.

They're obviously trying to co-opt and monetize her for their own ends, inviting her on all the political talk shows and plastering her picture all over the front pages. It seems to me that they're trying to make the best of a bad (for them) situation, in hopes that her popularity will spur more disaffected young people to pull the lever for Democrats across the board in the November midterms. Once she arrives in Washington, they'll try to relegate her to the sidelines. They will definitely order her, as they do with all her fellow reps, to immediately hit the phones and fund-raise for the Party for at least half of every working day.

A prime example of this attempted co-option is a Tweet sent out Tuesday by one of Barack Obama's closest and most trusted advisers, tamping down the notion that Ocasio-Cortez is even a lefty:

  Valerie Jarrett‏Verified account @ValerieJarrett

Valerie Jarrett Retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Love seeing @Ocasio2018 define herself rather than letting others do it for her. Seems like the right North Star to me

Valerie Jarrett added,

Alexandria Ocasio-CortezVerified account @Ocasio2018

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans.…

8:58 AM - 3 Jul 2018

1,527 Retweets
14,030 Likes

 If you need more proof of the game that is afoot, the corporate media's chief liberal Bernie Bro-basher, Paul Krugman, posted a column on Tuesday very tepidly reversing his negative position on Medicare For All and limply applauding Ocasio-Cortez, insofar that it's unfair to compare her to a Tea Partier as some of those other centrist pundits are so unfairly doing. She is a "reasonable Democratic radical" as opposed to an insanely independent radical like Bernie. In other words, Krugman is falling in Obama/Clinton/Party line, and patting her on the head. He helpfully links to her campaign website, which to his passive-aggressive satisfaction entirely omits any wonkish details of her platform. And then he sneakily equates Medicare for All with the bait-and-switch "public option" being proffered by centrist Democrats posing as progressives for purposes of re-election.

So, about Ocasio-Cortez’s positions: Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare – basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.

Krugman is disingenuous, if not downright duplicitous. My published response:

 Well, this piece from Paul Krugman is certainly an improvement over his nay-saying re Medicare For All around the time that Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton such a run for her Wall Street money.

Even so, there's still that lingering "but where are the details?" little dribble of cold water implicit in his defense of this good and sane and non-radical proposal. So I would suggest that anyone interested in the details visit the Physicians for a National Health Plan website for links to both Medicare For All bills now in Congress, as well as a wealth of other helpful info:

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources

For those who still insist we must retain the austerian "pay-go" method of financing things that will help make people's lives better, Modern Monetary Theory is finally entering the mainstream. More here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern-monetar...

The politicians who have no qualms about mindlessly appropriating more than a trillion dollars to our endless war machine and surveillance state should absolutely be called out on their hypocrisy every time they insist that there is just no money for Single Payer or a federal jobs guarantee, or that we have to rob from the poor to pay for the poor. The politicians who spout such nonsense are in thrall to the big money interests running this show. It's high time that the tycoons of unfettered capitalism get booed off their self-serving propaganda stage.

When Sneering Pundits Attack

Pundit Paul Krugman, who used much of his 2016 New York Times column space to sneer at Bernie Sanders and even pettily punch down on his supporters, has conveniently pivoted back to concern-trolling progressive mode just in time for the 2018 midterms. 

He now directs his ire at what he calls "The Big Sneer"- other pundits (whom he doesn't bother naming) who are allegedly complaining that Democrats (also unnamed) running for office don't have enough "new ideas." This is both sexist and silly, according to Krugman.

After a whole Democratic primary campaign season spent sneering at single payer health care and debt-free higher education as "pie-in-the-sky" utopian pipe dreams, Krugman complains that it's not fair for somebody like Paul Ryan to be lauded by the media, while the righteous Democrats are chronically sneered upon for being so dull and dreary:

I’m not saying that politicians shouldn’t be open to new thinking and evidence about policy. But a political party isn’t like Apple, which needs to keep coming up with glitzier products to stay ahead of Android. There are huge problems with U.S. policy on many fronts, but very few of these problems come from lack of good new ideas. They come, instead, from failure to act on what we already know – and, for the most part, have known for a long time.

Since Krugman has never been one to sneer at himself, he does not name himself as the most prominent expert who took the good idea of Medicare For All and sneered all over it in his quest to ensure that Bernie would never beat Hillary in the rigged Democratic Party primaries.

Now, to be fair to Krugman, he doesn't actually go so far as to belatedly espouse Medicare For All, which he dutifully sneered at as "a distraction" when Hillary came out against it on the campaign trail. Rather, he now carefully opines that "access" to universal health care is a good idea, with only a non-progressive president and Congress standing in its way. He doesn't mention that even the uninsured and underinsured already have ways to "access" their local emergency rooms  - by taking an ambulance, an Uber, or even crawling there on their hands and knees if they have to, to display that all-American grit, determination, resilience and entrepreneurship.

"Access" is not the same thing as actual care. "Access" isn't getting health care without the fear of going bankrupt and getting even sicker from the relentless worry about how the heck you're ever going to pay the mortgage or rent on top of that mountain of medical bills.

And, to be even fairer to Krugman, he isn't actually calling for an end to the endless obfuscatory delay-tactic discussions of how "we" are ever going to pay for all the good ideas that have been floating around since at least the time of FDR. "Details" do still matter, especially when they're thrashed about in think tanks and universities by credentialed experts. Because despite his claim that Democrats shouldn't be constantly hounded to come up with "new ideas," one never knows what new ideas will burst forth while pounding into dust the details of the good ideas in the think tanks.

 And thus does Krugman effectively destroy his own argument for "keeping it simple, stupid!"  Meanwhile, though, there still has to be a sneering Strawman upon which to divert all our sneers:

So why the demand for new ideas? Partly it’s because pundits are bored with conventional policy discussion – and/or don’t want to be bothered learning enough to understand actually existing policy issues, preferring sparkly new stuff they can praise simply for its newness. Partly it’s just an excuse for sneering at Democrats, which as I understand it is required by the pundit code.

In case you were wondering why Krugman's historic and relentless and punditory sneering at Bernie and his supporters doesn't actually count as sneering, repeat after me: Bernie Is Not a Democrat, Bernie Is Not a Democrat, Bernie Is Not a Democrat. So of course he doesn't really count as either a sincere human being or a politician  --  and neither should you, if you're a lefty or an independent.  

Since Krugman doesn't bother delving into who actually finances this "pundit code," I mentioned it in my published comment:

When media pundits urge Democratic politicians to "go big, go bold and go new," what they're really prescribing is more austerity for the masses and more riches for the billionaires and corporations who keep them on the air and in print.

This embrace of plutocratic values - "ending welfare as we know it," the deregulation of Big Finance and the telecoms, the offshoring of jobs and manufacturing via "free" trade deals, and the "tough on crime" policies resulting in mass incarceration - is how the "New Democrats" first grabbed power in the 90s. Despite the aftershocks of these neoliberal policies and the loss of a thousand legislative seats in the past decade alone, the party elders and their media stenographers want more of the same. This championship of the status quo is actually their perverted definition of "new."

It doesn't help their message that the most famous New Democrats are now hitting their 70s and 80s. The pundits and the oligarchic donor class running this show are desperate for younger, more charismatic "rising stars" to sell us the same old "Incrementalism You Can Believe In."

Of course Medicare for All is a great idea, and would be much more cost-effective than our current privatized system. But they don't want to admit this because ordinary people having too many nice things might give Mr. Market a nervous breakdown.

Until we force finance capital and the government to get a divorce, and overturn Citizens United, nothing is going to change.

Commentariat Central

As per reader request, I'm reprinting some of the recent comments I wrote on New York Times op-eds and articles that I haven't incorporated into regular posts.

Today, Maureen Dowd parodies Donald Trump's reading of "The Snake" at last week's CPAC orgy. In case you didn't know, CPAC is not the mask-gizmo worn by sufferers of sleep apnea. It's the modern version of a KKK rally with no masks needed to hide the bald-faced hate and lies.

So anyway, as a little background, Dowd ran in the same celebrity circles as Trump for decades. And it was only natural that when he started to pretend to run for president, she let him invade her column space to just let him rip. Now, like the rest of the media pack who gave him a limitless microphone for the pure shock and entertainment value of it all, she's falling all over herself to bring this lunatic down.

Since Dowd wrote her latest piece in the form of a poem, I wrote my response as a riff on The Spider and the Fly:

In memory of a Maureen Dowd column -- Introducing Donald Trump, Diplomat -- published on August 15, 2015, when, theoretically, it might still have been possible to stop Donald Trump in his tracks.

(and with my sincerest apologies to Mary Howitt)

"Won't you come up to Trump Tower?" said the spider to the scribe.
"Misogyny's on offer, and you're welcome to imbibe."

 Since access, not affliction, was the famous pundit's wish
She said "of course" and then she let the slimy monster dish.

"Rosie is a bully, I could smack her in the nose!" --
What better banter could there be for Maureen's brilliant prose?

And Megyn Kelly bleeding from her "wherever?"
Nobody ever did decree that click-bait need be clever.

"I win, Maureen, I always win," and he pounded on the table.
And duly did our scribe transcribe, quick as she was able.

Then she dared to ask him if he was a bully
And made no comment when he boasted, "Fully"

Because if journos are nice to Trump, not nasty
Their access to his loathsome self will be so ever-lasty.

Now, FF to Trump in Twenty Eighteen
And Dowd has turned righteous, scathing, and mean.

Better late than never, I guess
To try and clean up this unholy mess.

 But oh what a tangled web we sew
When first we practice stenographic Journ-o.

***

I know I've been hard on the Times lately for all its hysterical Russophobic schlock, but they still do some pretty good investigation journalism as well, especially on local news.

The only surprising thing about the latest blockbuster which exposes New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's corrupt pay-to-play administration is that it is virtually buried beneath all the Russophobic schlock on the homepage.

It seems that Andy has ignored ethics laws and has accepted millions of  campaign dollars from the wealthy donors he appoints to various state advisory boards - which have the power to make and break anything with a dollar sign attached to it. In other words, it's a permanent closed feedback loop of enrichment for the already obscenely rich, at the public's sole and involuntary expense.

Mr. Cuomo’s donor-appointees span the state’s vast network of boards and authorities. They have served as trustees of both the city and state university systems, on the panel overseeing economic development and on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York City’s subways and buses. Most positions are unpaid, but they hold great power and prestige: Board members can approve multibillion-dollar contracts and multimillion-dollar grants, oversee the distribution of tax breaks, and have broad influence over everything from the state’s highways to local arts projects.

Bribery and corruption have consequences. Another little-reported scandal in New York State involves the pollution of the drinking water supply of Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City. While the state has allowed this small city to temporarily tap into the Catskill Aqueduct, the pumping of "filtered" water from the tainted reservoir will resume next month, even before testing is completed.

My published comment, including a link with all the details:

While Cuomo is raking in the dough from his cronies, he is upset because Newburgh, NY has filed a notice of claim against the state for its lack of urgent response to its contaminated drinking water crisis. He doesn't think it very nice of officials who think that Cuomo's solution of tapping into the Catskill Aqueduct while the toxic Washington Lake reservoir water undergoes testing and more testing is a joke. The state plans to resume pumping "filtered" water from the lake next month. Anybody remember Flint, Michigan?

Cuomo actually said that officials are suing to make a bunch of lawyers rich. and not because people need safe water to drink and bathe in. The contamination, incidentally, comes not from lead, but from runoff of toxic chemicals used in firefighting drills by the military based at nearby Stewart Airport, which is run by the Port Authority, which is staffed by the Cuomo donor named in this excellent article.

Threatening to sue is "not hospitable or collegial or kind of them," Cuomo said last week.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/02/22/cuomo-o...

 Maybe if the inhospitable Newburgh officials started giving big bucks to Cuomo's campaign war chest, he might come around and arrange for some clean water for the ingrates.

Better yet, voters can easily arrange for a one-way ticket right out of Albany - unless prosecutors can get to him first, of course.

***

I hadn't commented on Paul Krugman's schlock for quite awhile, mainly because he always writes the exact same column: "Donald Trump is an evil jerk and all the Republicans are vile." I mean, who knew, right?

But I broke my embargo for his Friday piece because I wanted to get in my two cents on the gun control renaissance sparked by the latest mass shooting.

As usual, Krugman artificially narrows the decline and fall of the American empire to just one faction: those nasty old Republicans. The Democrats, apparently, do not even exist, neither in his column nor in the reality-based world. So, he is at least honest by omission as he writes:

Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — security from crazed gunmen, security from drunken drivers, security from exorbitant medical bills (which every other advanced country treats as a right, and does in fact manage to provide).

In short, you might want to think of our madness over guns as just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Yep, that sounds like Trump’s America.

My published response:

 What gives me hope that the students will succeed where the adults have failed are recent polls showing that half of millennials would rather live under a socialist system than a capitalist one. Sen. Marco Rubio visibly blanching on live TV as a teenager confronted him over his financial ties to the weapons industry possibly signalled the beginning of the end of the stranglehold the predatory oligarchy has over us.

Even if we passed a law tomorrow banning the sales of military-grade weapons to anyone with a pulse, there'd still be at least one gun for every man, woman and child in the US. It would take whole generations for all these weapons to rust out. Granted, by then the entire planet may be on fire or flooded, and guns will be the least of our existential worries.

It will be up to our terrorized but very brave students to find solutions that give peace, sanity and the environment even a smidgen of a chance.

While Trump, an unnatural politician if there ever was one, literally requires crib notes instructing him how to feign humanity, Congress keeps giving him carte blanche to wage our endless wars. He's far from the only pathocrat in the toxic mix. The sickness runs far, far deeper than any one corrupt and inept president.

 It certainly comes as no shock that Trump, having completed his own secondary education at a military academy for troubled youth, believes that schools should dispense with terror-free learning and get on with the weaponized discipline.

More MIsery of the Elites

Paul Krugman's latest is yet another noodle-lashing of those nasty Republicans and their foul donor class whose added tax cuts won't put the slightest dent into their pre-existing conditions of meanness and misery.

The wealthy donors for whom the G.O.P. will apparently do anything, up to and including covering up for possible treason, will get no joy from their tax cuts.

I don’t mean that history will judge them harshly, although it will. I don’t even mean that plutocrats as well as plebeians will eventually suffer if America becomes a lawless, authoritarian regime. I mean that a few hundred thousand dollars extra will do little if anything to make the already wealthy more satisfied with their lives.

You might well ask, who cares? Even if tax cuts would make the rich joyful, this shouldn’t count against the sheer misery Republicans are trying to impose on the tens of millions of people they’re trying to deprive of health care, food stamps, disability benefits and more.

Still, for some reason I find it fascinating that all this misery, plus the possible destruction of constitutional government, may happen without even making the intended beneficiaries happy.

My published response: 

  Making this all about the feral GOP donor class lets the "good rich" off the hook. It isn't a matter of Republicans vs Democrats. It's a matter of the rich versus the rest of us. And it's bipartisan. Why else are "centrist" Democrats, like Wall Street mogul Steve Rattner, so rabidly against Medicare for All? 

As Gilens and Page established in their study of affluence and political influence, even most wealthy Democratic donors are against increased spending for public education and higher taxes to pay for true universal health care. As a result, more often than not, the beholden Congress does the exact opposite of what the voters want and need.

And as Forbes's latest annual wealth list reveals, the 400 richest US billionaires now own as much wealth as the bottom 60% of the population combined. This obscene inequality is making even the ultra-rich so nervous that one UBS banker suggested a "cure" of more public exhibits of plutocratic art, and more investment in sports teams. This noblesse oblige would not, however, extend to actual free admission for the public. Even the despots of the crumbling Roman Empire let their citizens watch the gladiators get killed for free.

So Trump isn't the only clueless tycoon who thinks that his dollars are equivalent to IQ points. Even if he were kicked out tomorrow, there's plenty more where he came from.

It's total war. It's 400 plutocrats' combined net worth of $2.68 trillion against the rest of us. It's the antithesis of democracy.

Distractions In the Time of Cholera

So Donald Trump landed in Puerto Rico, and to everybody's pseudo-shock, immediately discerned that as bad as things might seem to the naked lying eye, they don't hold a candle to the real American disaster known as Katrina. He does have a point, though, because given the delayed federal response and the lack of vehicles and fuel and personnel, they still haven't gotten around to bringing out all the bodies. So far, maybe two dozen people have officially been declared dead, compared to the nearly two thousand who were robbed, by dint of infrastructure neglect, of their lives in New Orleans. And the aftermath of Hurricane Maria promises to be a very long and lethal disaster indeed.

  But as reported by The Hill, a Beltway political gossip organ, the most important scandal today is not that the collapsed electrical grid had deliberately been primed for destruction by the austerity measures imposed from on high by the US government and predatory Wall Street creditors on the say-so of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The real scandal of Trump's stage-managed visit is that he rudely snubbed his latest Twitter nemesis, the female mayor of San Juan, when he proffered his gratuitous thanks to the military and other dignitaries.

 He wouldn't even say her name. Carmen Cruz apparently isn't doing a heckuva job. She is sadly not a Perfect Ten.

So to protect all the guilty, the media emphasis has been duly placed upon how doubly unappealing Donald Trump is whenever his serial misogyny collides with his serial racism. Cue the outrage. And definitely change the subject, which in a just and sane world would be the hidden human suffering of serially ignored people.

In other news which serves to direct all the blame toward Donald Trump, and to deflect it from cruel, longstanding bipartisan US policy decisions adversely affecting the economic and social well-being of Puerto Ricans, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman has created a nice little journalistic side-scandal of his own.

It seems that the good professor and Laureate of a generous bank-issued Nobel prize had falsely claimed that not only is there an outbreak of deadly cholera in Puerto Rico, Trump himself had caused it! (Trump's ramping-up of Barack Obama's terroristic drone wars with the help of the US-weaponized Saudis has indeed caused an actual cholera outbreak in Yemen, but that saga of human suffering has, for the most part, been dutifully ignored by American media.)

On September 30th, Krugman feverishly tweeted:

Cholera. In a US territory. Among US citizens. In the 21st century. Heckuva job, Trumpie.

He later partially retracted this false information by allowing that it was not (yet) confirmed. But it was his days-long delay in actually scrubbing* his original Tweet that is the most troubling aspect of this brouhaha. Even real journalists make factual mistakes on Twitter all the time, and they usually make prompt corrections and apologize when they're called out.

Not Paul Krugman, though.

But he finally did respond publicly today in a terse "explainer" in the Times' deliberately obscure new "Reader Center" section - complete with a fawning  introduction by his editors, who gratuitously mention his academic bona fides in the apparent hope of softening the credibility blow to one of their star columnists. Krugman will not apologize - he will merely be thoughtfully rueful as befits his status:

The Reader Center is a newsroom initiative that is helping The Times build deeper ties with our audience.

In this piece, Paul Krugman, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times and a Nobel laureate, reflects on (my bold) sending an inaccurate tweet about the presence of cholera in Puerto Rico.

"On cholera, in the heat of the moment, I got sloppy. I saw a tweet about cholera from someone I usually take seriously, assumed there was reporting behind it, and tweeted it out. I was wrong, and admitted the error.

That’s a warning about Twitter, and how easy it is to be careless; I will be more careful next time.

What’s important is not to let some exaggeration distract from the terrible reality in Puerto Rico."

As of this writing, I am the only reader to become distracted enough by his distraction from all the distractions to take advantage of these deeper audience ties and actually reply to his pabulum. My published comment:

 "Reader Center" is not a worthy substitute for the now-defunct Public Editor's position. Margaret Sullivan probably would never have allowed Paul Krugman to get away with this flippant pseudo-apology.

He tries to blow the whole thing off with a "let's move on, nothing to see here, folks" excuse for his Tweet, which displayed not so much compassion for Puerto Ricans as it did gratuitous contempt for Trump.

Additionally, he only partially retracted his original Tweet, with a shoulder-shrugging "OK, cholera not confirmed. Conjunctivitis yes; lack of clean water (situation worsening, not improving) makes it a risk. But not certain."

Moreover it took him days to actually scrub* the original Tweet, after it had garnered more that 32,000 "likes" and about 14,000 retweets. In other words it went about as "viral" as an epidemic of dysentery. His choleric correction, on the other hand, got only 1600 likes and 500 retweets.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2017/10/u-professor-emeritus-kr...

 It's telling that Mr. Krugman has only chosen to address this issue after the CDC, PolitiFact, and Princeton called him out on it. When such dicey outlets as Breitbart and Infowars instantly raised the alarm, it apparently was a matter of nasty Fake News sniping about virtuous but "oops" Fake News. No need to delete, let alone deign to reply.

The damage to credibility is already done. Heckuva job, Professor.

 * Correction: I'd assumed, in the heat of the moment, that because PolitiFact's link to Krugman's original false tweet led to nothing, that the professor had probably wisely deleted it. Then I double-checked. I was wrong; it's still posted on his account, and it's more popular than ever. I apologize for the error! (and hopefully the Twitter execs will include it in the cache of fake news that Congress is so intent upon acquiring.)