The Democrats Are Parodies of Themselves

House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn has actually had the chutzpah to complain that his party's attempted co-optation of one of the biggest public uprisings of all time is being "hijacked" by the protesters themselves.

How dare these people who are getting killed and beaten up and terrorized by out-of-control police forces presume to demand that their oppressors be stripped of their money and their power out of some misguided wish to live in peace?

Demands for divesting even small towns of their military hardware are a "distraction," added Rep Karen Bass of California.

Plus, if the Dems recklessly do right by the citizens, what will the Republicans say and do? (What will the neighbors think?) The opinion of the bad neighbors on the other side of the shared fence is a top priority if the Dems have any hope of redecorating their chambers with new "moderate" seats this fall.

So Congressional Democrats did the only thing they know how to do whenever they're confronted with some actual democracy. First, they blamed Trump and their  Republican colleagues. Then they staged one those perennial stunts which substitutes for policy in the public interest. They donned traditional Kente cloths  and took a knee for precisely 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that it took for their hired police state knee to suffocate the life out of George Floyd. The sound of hundreds of creaking joints and the even creakier neoliberal rhetoric of "reform" as a cure for corruption reverberated throughout the media echo chamber.

It was a reminder that there will be no true reform of state-sanctioned brutality on their watch. They may have thought they were showing solidarity with George Floyd and other victims of the police state. But their arthritic knees only served to remind us who is controlling the knees, fists, grenade launchers, tear gas and bullets of the police.  They may also have thought they were displaying their pro-science cred during Covid-19 by social-distancing and wearing masks. But they were only flaunting how distanced they truly are from the masses of people, most of whom don't even have a couple of hundred bucks saved up for a household emergency. Their masked faces only reminded us that they are bandits and marauders who steal from the poor and give, give, and give to their oligarchic donors.

The sight of Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) grimacing in pain as though he were struggling to get off a toilet also reminds us how mentally constipated the whole lot of them are. 

They yack on and on about the need for "big structural change," as though centuries of institutional racism and class oppression sprang up all by themselves. They are loath to admit that they are the chief architects and developers and designers and agents and enablers of the Structure.

Donald Trump, the convenient villain of the theatrics, played his own part to perfection, accusing the corporate tools in the Democratic Party of radical leftism and thus giving them cover for their aggrieved stunt. The trouble is,  hardly anybody believes their reality show is even tenuously tethered to reality.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, however, is not playing his own assigned role with the glib finesse of a Barack Obama. As much as he panders to the "movement," he just cannot lie and disown the police state this late in his misbegotten career. He will continue throwing unaccountable billions at Cop World if he is re-elected. There will be no dismantling of police forces under his watch. He and Trump are on the same ideological page regarding state-sanctioned brutality, much as Obama admitted that he was the same page as Mitt Romney in 2012, regarding austerity and the "need" to cut Social Security and other public programs at the behest of Wall Street.

Because the worldwide protest movement is multiracial and multi-generational, the governing class's clinging to identity politics as a substitute for justice is more easily seen for what it is - a con. Leaders of both establishment parties can no longer fall back on the "divide and conquer" techniques traditionally used to keep us in line. Trump can't engender fears of a "race war," because we're all in this together. Liberal CEOs and corporations can no longer proclaim "solidarity" with the victims of the uniformed weaponized oppression that they've always relied upon to protect themselves and their own looted property and their gated mansions. Amazon's Jeff Bezos cannot get away with standing with black people, not after he just fired the black organizer of a walkout at his Staten Island facility, where underpaid workers were denied paid sick or family leave for Covid-19.

What really terrifies them is the prospect of a general labor strike in tandem with the anti-police demonstrations.

A new poll commissioned by Just Capital reveals that only 25 percent of Americans think that capitalism is good for society. Few people are anxious to return to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Most people are angry at the billionaires and corporations who haven't done right by their workers in the middle of this social, economic and health crisis.

Only one out of nine publicly traded corporations temporarily increased worker salaries during the crisis, while seven out of every ten CEOs maintained their obscene salaries, which on average are about 300 times that of the average American worker. The 10 percent of workers whose pay was raised during the first months of the pandemic have largely seen their salaries return to pre- Covid levels.

And the Stock Market continues to climb.

As the New York Times put it: "Investors shrugged."

 Michael Bloomberg, the godzillionaire former mayor who thus far this campaign season has shoveled at least $18 million to the copacetic Democratic Party, spoke for the entire oligarchic police state when he bragged while obliterating the Occupy movement in 2011: "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

Meanwhile, Democrats in costume performing clumsy dance moves have introduced the usual"sweeping legislation" to reform the domestic occupying forces. This means that they will strive mightily to sweep the abuses right under the rug via the Bidenesque solution of "community policing" as code for continued militarization. We'll have to wait and see how the irate citizenry reacts to his own particular bragging about how he let law enforcement write his 1994 Crime Bill, much as the predatory health insurance industry was allowed to write the Affordable Care Act.

To avoid the defunding of corrupt and violent departments, the legislation calls for databases of police misconduct, the better to track it with.

 But without defining "last resort," it would also allow cops to use deadly force only as a last resort. Therefore, if a reckless officer thinks that somebody is looking at him funny and then shoots him, the codified Doctrine of the Last Resort will become the go-to defense in the unlikely event he or she faces criminal prosecution.

The national uptick in frightening "no-knock" SWAT raids, increasingly with the aid of dangerous flash grenades, tear gas and  battering rams affixed to tanks would be tamped down a smidgen by only banning such assaults at the federal level. States would somehow be "incentivized" to do the same.

One nifty proposal, put forth by Nancy Pelosi, is to redirect money to school policing and mental health, as though the two concepts were joined at the hip.

The legislative package also includes a federal ban on lynching. How much bolder and more sweeping could it possibly get?

People will be so impressed, they'll be rioting in the streets with joy after they tell their bosses to take their expired hazard pay and shove it.

The Violence of the Elites

While the ruling establishment cries that its beloved country is falling apart, what with police officers shooting citizens, an Army veteran shooting police officers, and people taking to the streets in protest across the nation, the leader of the free world still has his own capitalistic priorities very much in order.

Dallas or no Dallas, police brutality or no police brutality, crisis or no crisis, there was no way in hell that President Obama was going to cut his war-mongering trip to Europe one day shorter than he already had to.

Belying the New York Times' headline that he is "brooding over the interminable wars of his presidency," a very ebullient Obama boarded a state-of-the-art naval destroyer in the sunny Mediterranean to inspect the troops and gloat over American exceptionalism. No matter that people were being tragically and graphically gunned down stateside on live TV. As Mark Landler drily reports:

“That’s pretty impressive,” Mr. Obama said to Petty Officer Second Class Garrett Nelson, after the sailor told his commander-in-chief about the accuracy of a five-inch, 54-caliber gun mounted on the ship’s foredeck. “That’s better than I do at skeet shooting.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers fought to keep this stop on his five-day trip to Spain and Poland, even after he decided to cut the trip by a day and return home on Sunday to deal with the deadly shootings in Dallas. Sightseeing in Seville, as the president had planned to do, was easy to skip; surveying the military hardware in Rota was not.

You see, there is state-sanctioned violence for profit, and then there is the unsanctioned violence that doesn't make nearly enough money for the very rich and the very powerful. (OK, except for the gun manufacturers and their NRA lobbyists.) Before returning home to "deal with" Dallas, Obama had to complete some very important deal-making in Europe on behalf of military contractors and manufacturers. A thousand more permanent troops in Poland, the retention of more than 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the addition of 500 more pairs of "boots on the ground" in Iraq are just the parts they're bothering to tell us about.The fact that an Afghanistan war vet shot an Iraq war vet in Dallas - bringing the war back home - seemingly didn't even enter into their thought processes.

Henry Giroux describes the pathological idiocy perfectly:

In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction.

(snip)

 What we are observing is not simply the overt face of a militarized police culture, the lack of community policing, deeply entrenched anti-democratic tendencies, or the toxic consequences of a culture of violence that saturates every day life. We are in a new historical era, one that is marked a culture of lawlessness, extreme violence, and disposability, fueled, in part, by a culture of fear, a war on terror, and a deeply overt racist culture that is unapologetic in its disciplinary and exclusionary practices. This deep seated racism is reinforced by a culture of cruelty that is the modus operandi of neoliberal capitalism–a cage culture, a culture of combat, a hyper masculine culture that views killing those most vulnerable as sport, entertainment, and policy.

Landler of the Times, meanwhile, provides us with the near-parodic preferred narrative that the elites do want disseminated:

 Throughout this trip, Mr. Obama has confronted the reality that the United States is engaged in military operations around the world. At a NATO summit meeting in Warsaw, he announced that American troops would lead a battalion stationed in Poland to deter an aggressive Russia. The destroyer in Rota is a pillar of a missile-defense program that Mr. Obama has stuck with despite the tensions it raises with Moscow.

This illustrates the typical unaccountability of the "deciders." Obama traipses over to Europe and is shockingly confronted by the military bases and high tech weaponry that suddenly sprang up all by themselves without any elite intervention whatsoever. And of course, the aggression is conveniently couched in terms of "defense," despite the fact that Russia is not currently making any moves to take over the world. But it might want to, someday, so Obama has accordingly and provocatively announced a trillion-dollar upgrade of the American nuclear weapons arsenal. But there will be no government jobs program for the chronically unemployed, no government single payer health care system, and no new taxes on the coddled rich.  

And alleged US enemies, including Russia and Iran, are taking notice that the land of the free doesn't exactly practice what it preaches. There are hysterical untrained traffic cops ordered to fill their cities' coffers from ticketing poor motorists driving decades-old vehicles with broken taillights, and then there are the militarized shock troops playing with all the leftover and surplus gear that the Pentagon always throws away in favor of newer, prettier, more lethal toys.

This is the already legendary picture being seen round the world today, confirming the race and class-oppressive oligarchical system that still insists upon calling itself American democracy:

(Jonathan Bachman, Reuters)

But golly gee, says Obama, isn't it just terrible that too many people in the Homeland "feel like" they're getting picked on by trigger-happy, under-trained cops. Isn't it awful that guns are getting into the hands of the mentally ill, for whom no government-subsidized treatment is forthcoming. But he'll make room in the busy schedule to head on down to open-carry Texas to lecture the Black Lives Matter movement some more. 

Then he'll go directly to Congress and demand an immediate multibillion-dollar aid package for cash-strapped cities, including funds for psychological police recruit vetting, hiring and intensive training.Then he'll put the kibosh on those private equity vultures getting their claws on public pension funds and otherwise exploiting and injuring American municipalities. (Only kidding: he will do no such thing.)

As Conor Friedersdorf observed in The Atlantic, Obama actually hews pretty closely to the conservative rhetoric of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas whenever he talks about racism. And Obama is rarely criticized by liberals when he frequently espouses "political correctness" and compromise with one's oppressors as a substitute for direct social action.

But back to Landler of the Times, ironically forging ahead with the government-manufactured "news analysis" presented as straight reporting:

Small wonder, then, that Mr. Obama was in a reflective mood on Saturday when a reporter asked him at a NATO news conference about the nature of war in the 21st century — and, specifically, how he felt about the likelihood that he would be the first two-term president to have presided over a nation at war for every day of his presidency.

Speaking with striking candor for a public setting, Mr. Obama said: “As commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world, I spend a lot of time brooding over these issues. And I’m not satisfied that we’ve got it perfect yet.” But he added, “I can say, honestly, it’s better than it was when I came into office.”

This is Obama in his contrived media role as pensive philosopher king. Let us celebrate the fact that he was so strikingly candid in front of a group of sycophantic reporters and a small personal army of security guards. He ever so 'umbly admitted that he is not perfect, although he is a lot more perfect than any of his predecessors. Especially George W. Bush, who continues to live in the lap of luxury in the same city that saw so much violence last week. Obama, of course, had refused to prosecute him and his neocon pals for invading Iraq on false pretenses and killing millions of people and torturing who knows how many. Nonetheless, he will never hesitate to lecture both the cops on the street and the protesters on how to get along together for the sake of American exceptionalism. When he vowed that "justice will be done" in Dallas, he unfortunately was not referring to the former president.

On the contrary: Bush will join Obama as an honored guest at Tuesday's interfaith service honoring the slain police officers. 

Landler again:

 Mr. Obama characterized his approach to war as a hybrid: committing limited numbers of American troops to conflict-ridden countries, but working with those countries to develop their own armies and police. He drew attention to an announcement at the Warsaw meeting that NATO would begin training Iraqi troops inside the country. (The alliance had already been training them in neighboring Jordan.)

As evidenced by the large number of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan, this community policing approach has worked out about as well over there as it has over here. As evidenced by the quagmire of Vietnam, helping other countries by sending in "advisers" is only one of the first steps of mission-creep and open-ended war. And ka-ching goes the beat of late-stage capitalism's malignant heart.

 “What I’ve been trying to do is to create an architecture, a structure — and it’s not there yet,” the president said. The difficulties of working with unreliable partners is “probably going to be something that we have to continue to grapple with for years to come.”

Ah, the semantics of war and death. Call it a building project, perhaps worthy of the Pritzker Prize. But also warn that the constant building is going to cause inevitable collapses and collateral human damage. Those non-union construction workers and corrupt inspectors make a plutocrat's life a living hell. But there's still enormous profit to be made with all that endless "grappling" with the consequences of your own shoddy policies and standards.

 Mr. Obama said chronic, low-level counterterrorism campaigns could have a debilitating effect on society. “This different kind of low-grade threat, one that’s not an existential threat but can do real damage and real harm to our societies, and creates the kind of fear that can cause division and political reactions — we have to do that better,” he said.

This is the same guy who recently accused Donald Trump of being an irresponsible fear-monger. Of course, Obama is as much as admitting that his own "limited" drone assassination program causes fear, division and political reactions. He has to do better in order to get people to accept their own dooms.

For Mr. Obama, who was a lawyer, the shadowy legal status of this hybrid form of warfare is another heavy burden. That, he said, helped explain why the White House issued a report two weeks ago disclosing estimates of the civilian casualties from drone strikes.

“What I’m trying to do there is to institutionalize a system where we begin to hold ourselves accountable for this different kind of national security threat and these different kinds of operations,” he said.

It only took him seven years to begin to pretend to hold himself accountable for Murder, Inc. Therefore, he is hastening to "institutionalize" his renegade killing policy for the sole craven purpose of absolving himself from any personal responsibility.

Landler hilariously concludes, 

Mr. Obama also looked on the bright side. There are fewer wars today between states, he said, and no wars between great powers. That is a testament to institutions like NATO, he said, and a reason that Russia’s revanchism was such a big concern at the summit meeting.

As Mr. Obama enters the final six months of his presidency, his approach to war clearly remains a work in progress. But he insisted that — whether it was drone strikes, the surveillance programs of the National Security Agency, the long effort to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay or the training of soldiers of other countries — he had tried to bring 21st-century warfare out of the shadows.

Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, stay on the sunny side of life... and death.

Now, it's on to Dallas to lecture those pesky Black Lives Matter folks. 

 

***

The New York Times ran a rather smarmy editorial on Sunday, politely requesting that Obama be a tad more accountable about his drones of death. Compared to  more than 1300 reader responses to Maureen Dowd's Sunday column on how Hillary Clinton has "contaminated" Obama and his minions with her email scandal, the drone editorial only gathered 111 comments. Faraway death and destruction just aren't as riveting as political intrigue and the fortunes of the elites, I suppose.

Here are my published comments to the drone editorial (the second one is actually a reply to a reply):

For all that Americans care that politicians and bureaucrats have given themselves the hideous right to summarily execute people, it's not likely that the administration is sweating this one out.

Polls show that a majority of us are fine with the assassination program. In one A.P. poll, only 13% of respondents declared themselves strongly opposed. Nearly half said it's O.K. to unleash Hellfire missiles from the aptly named Predator and Reaper drones even when there's a chance that innocents will also die in the process.

Let's face it: what we Americans don't know, (and what we aren't allowed by our government to see in all its bloodiness) definitely will hurt us. Those unnamed and unknown drone victims have family and friends. They leave behind orphans who might understandably become radicalized enough to join ISIS and other groups which never would have existed in the first place without American aggression.

We must acknowledge that our own government is a terrorist state in the eyes of those "other people" who are afraid to even send their kids to school, what with the drones constantly buzzing above their heads. We must acknowledge that our government is not "keeping us safe" by killing hundreds (or thousands) of people for no other reason than that they can.

State-sanctioned murder is state-sanctioned murder, whether it's accomplished by trigger-happy untrained cops on our own streets, or by remote-control unaccountable technocrats in remote "tribal areas."

And the follow-up to a reader asserting that I am well-meaning but naive about the realities of war:

 Richard,

1. Despite the fact that Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses, as evidenced most recently by that exhaustive British report, you automatically assume that Americans are the "good guys."

2. The drone strikes in question are being conducted in countries with whom the US is not at war. The whole definition of war has become so loose as to become meaningless. The world is now a battlefield, and all the people in it are potential targets based upon some magic formula. I believe that the term that CIA Director John Brennan used is the "disposition matrix." The "casualties of war," are dehumanized through an Orwellian sci-fi term dreamed up by an unelected bureaucrat.

3. The White House report, written by NSA Director James ("we don't collect your emails") Clapper, is suspect on its face. The numbers don't match with the body counts of other independent (and reputable) organizations. His glib explanation for the lack of details is that it would be just too hard for the USA to helicopter down and pretend to be forensic pathologists. They don't know, and they don't want to know. And they get away with it, because most American citizens don't much care either. It's telling, for example, that the big brouhaha over Hillary's emails rarely mentions that she herself signed off on a few drone strikes using her unsecured system. It's the medium that concerns people, not the lethal message.

And finally, I fully realize that I am in a distinct pacifistic minority.

The Hard War Against Disposable Youth

This is shocking but not really surprising: Baltimore teenagers appear to have been deliberately set up by government officials and cops on Monday for purposes of accelerating the school-to-prison pipeline, transforming it into a virtual downhill luge event of Olympic Malthusian proportions.

The ruling cartel seized upon a rumor of a "purge" of the police department by roving street gangs in the wake of Freddie Gray's funeral, and got the bright idea of closing the schools early and cancelling the public transportation that is the only way home for many of the kids. Instead of being greeted by school buses, students were greeted by a phalanx of cops in riot gear.

And what a surprise when the kids reacted by fighting back and breaking stuff. It's been a made-for-cable TV spectacle to make the rest of the world forget that a man had died in police custody for the crime of making eye contact with cops and then having the audacity to run away from them. It made the rest of the world forget that city and state officials have stalled on releasing an autopsy report, lest it foment further unrest. Lest it make them look bad.

Baltimore is only the latest, and so far the largest, front in the ongoing "hard war against disposable youth," as explained by writer and social critic Henry Giroux of McMaster University. Just days before the latest outbreak of state-instigated urban violence in Maryland, Henry had sent me a link to a recent CBC radio interview and SPUR talk he gave in Toronto. Listen to the whole thing in the context of Baltimore, and everything becomes disturbingly crystal-clear.

There is both a soft war and hard war against youth. The soft war, waged by the free market and the advertising industry, is an insidious way to infantilize young people, teaching them to become consumers instead of socially responsible citizens.

The hard war is a means of trapping them in the Youth Criminal Control Complex -- "a site of terminal exclusion" --  when they are deemed by cruel design to have become "failed consumers." This is not hyperbole. Every year, 500,000 young people are imprisoned, out of the 2.5 million who are arrested. By the time they reach the age of 23, one-third of Americans are arrested for a crime.

Using the tried and true neoliberal tradition of never letting a crisis go to waste, Maryland Gov. Larry "Law & Order" Hogan promptly suspended Habeas Corpus in the name of protecting the public from the public. More than 200 protesters arrested for disorderly conduct and other relatively minor offenses are being held on high bail that they can't possibly meet. One youth charged with theft, rioting and disorderly conduct is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. Others, including first time offenders and even journalists, remain jailed because they are unable to pay a cash bond of $100,000. This, while the police officers temporarily suspended from duty while the death of Freddie Gray is being investigated, remain free while drawing their paychecks.

Once the Republican governor eventually rescinds his emergency order, the backlog of defendants awaiting bail hearings and arraignment will be a feature, not a bug, of how punishment is meted out to poor people.

"The plight of the outcast has expanded to include a whole generation," Giroux observes in the CBC program. 

And the race to the bottom (or off the rails) of the Malthusian Luge Run is proceeding at breakneck speed, with the US going for the gold for highest death rates and most rampant child poverty in the civilized world. Eduardo Porter lays out the grisly details:

American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young.

Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way.

It's not just globalization and horrific trade deals like NAFTA and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership and its grotesque cousin, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It's the fact that "government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together."

 Reactionary right-wing moralizing from the likes of Charles Murray and David Brooks notwithstanding, America is not a welfare state. At least, it's not a welfare state for its people. It is, however, a full-fledged corporate nanny state giving non-stop succor to the plutocracy, multinational businesses, and the permawar industry.

Meanwhile, the poobahs of the media-political complex persist in calling an abused urban population with a youth unemployment rate of over 80% a bunch of "thugs." It's made to order divide-and-conquer propaganda for the One Percent. Pit the poor whites and the poor browns and blacks against one another so that plutocratic power can remain entrenched. It worked for Tricky Dick Nixon and his Silent Majority, and it's working again. Archie Bunker lives, even in the elite educated reader comments section of the New York Times. Instead of police brutality and crushing poverty, we hear the same old themes of black-on-black crime and drug use that are the remnants of a slavery society. The Civil War never really ended.

 It's been only a few generations since the phony truce was signed between a couple of generals.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is announcing a presidential challenge (unfortunately within the cloying confines of the Democratic Party) to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, that self-styled Boudica of the hard-soft wars, gave a rousing speech for social justice. But she has also just hired Charlie Baker, whose lobby shop helped orchestrate billionaire austerian Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt." That's the astroturf campaign against the already too-thin social safety net. Besides acting as her new chief administrative officer, says the New York Times, Baker will also coordinate slush funding for other Democratic candidates.

The truly damaging burning and looting -- and partisan rooting, and own-horn tooting -- continues unabated at the very highest levels. 

The corporate media celebrate the concern-trolling elites at the same time that they force our glazed eyes toward the shell of a chain drugstore within the shell of a city neighborhood that itself has been smoldering and collapsing for decades. Visuals of destruction are engineered for blame-the-victim purposes. How dare the lower classes destroy a monolith of commerce erected just for them by their betters? 

It's no accident that CNN was prominently looping film of a Newt Gingrich-inspired volunteer janitorial crew cleaning up the mess at "their" store as though it is a worker-owned cooperative and CVS isn't hoarding its insurance check. These are the "respectable" poor people told to be patient while the leaders engage in another National Conversation. 

Meanwhile, for all those at the bottom, still resisting and calling out respectability for the sham it is, here's Bob Marley:

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too
 Could not recognize the faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.

Thug Is the New Black

"Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who in a very senseless way are trying to tear down what so many have fought for." -- Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.(D)

"The lawless gangs of thugs roaming the streets -- we're not going to tolerate that." and "“I assured him (President Obama) we weren’t going to stand by and allow our city of Baltimore to be taken over by thugs.” -- Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.(R)

"Thug" is, of course, a racist dog-whistle term, used with impunity across the political spectrum as the PC substitute for nigger. That a black Democratic mayor should also use it at a press conference about the ongoing rebellion sparked by the fatal spinal cord severing suffered by Freddie Gray while in police custody really should come as no surprise. Rawlings-Blake is a corporate Democrat in the vein of Barack Obama (whose own personal dog-whistle term of choice is the more discreet "knuckleheads").* Her current function includes reassuring white people that she has got this covered. Black heads will roll. She will watch the same TV thug-footage which she purports to despise (for its anti-Chamber of Commerce character) in order to bring charges against people who cut holes in fire hoses and threw rocks at cops.

The Thug Word got a ton of record-shattering use last year when it was applied to Stanford alumnus/Seattle Seahawks football player Richard Sherman after a post-game tirade conducted in the presence of a single white female sideline reporter. According to a Deadspin analysis, "thug" was uttered by shocked and offended TV pundits a grand total of 625 times in the 24 hours following Sherman's rant.

 The word "thug" has been used so many times by the same sort of people about the same sort of thing that it's no longer even accurate to call it code—it's really more of a shorthand. It means a black guy who makes white folks a little more uncomfortable than they prefer. On Sunday night, Richard Sherman made a lot of people uncomfortable. Then on Monday, people said thug on TV more often than on any other day in the past three years.

The Deadspin analysis revealed that the Thug Word was used mainly by local affiliates, and that the previous most widespread repetition of the word in national media had been when Secretary of State John Kerry used it to berate Bashar al-Assad, aka the Butcher of Damascus.

I am guessing that the Baltimore protests and unrest will probably surpass both football player rants and foreign despotic atrocities to become the new champion Thug Word magnet, attracting use of the pejorative from across the entire media-political complex. I'm still trying to locate CNN transcripts in order to count how many times Wolf Blitzer, Don Lemon, Tom Fuentes and Jeffrey Toobin uttered the Thug Word as they sputtered their amazement that unemployed or underpaid black people would dare loot the CVS pharmacy and steal diapers and soda. Where were the cops? Blitzer inadvertently broadcast the real purpose of urban police forces, which (besides abusing the population) is the defense of free market capitalism and rent-seekers.

He hasn't seen anything like this in exceptional America for a long time. People might even be getting revenge against usurious check-cashing depots which have been ripping them off for years! Just as likely, they're availing themselves of bottled water since the city is now joining Detroit in cutting off tap water to residents behind on their bills.

And here's "legal analyst" Jeffrey Toobin helpfully dog-whistling the sexual predator meme  -- specifically, that the rioters are related to a group that once took over a prison and impregnated (white) female guards:

But back to Mayor Rawlings-Blake, who in her other capacity as secretary of the Democratic National Committee, is also a frequent token guest on the Sunday inside-the-Beltway gabfests. In the elite tradition of Chicago's Mayor Rahm "One Percent" Emanuel, she established her neoliberal bona fides early in her term by slashing recreational funding for city youth and increasing funding for the police department.  Twenty-four public recreation centers were closed, and another half-dozen were privatized. From The Militant Negro:

Rawlings-Blake credits her reforms to the city pension for saving $64 million yearly, saving the city from an even worse fiscal crisis. The mayor has made extensive cuts to city social welfare programs, with cuts to funding for prisoner reentry programs and the elimination of the city’s offices of Community Development and Community Relations.  In 2012, to close the budget deficit, the mayor closed 3 fire stations two of them serving Harlem Park/Sandtown-Winchester and Berea/Clifton are among Baltimore’s poorest communities.

So there's the answer to Wolf Blitzer's angst over "Where's the fire trucks? Where's the fire trucks?"

Despite imposing austerity on Baltimore's impoverished citizens, Rawlings-Blake still found the wherewithal to host the city's annual Grand Prix, in which municipal streets are closed and shade trees cut down for the racing pleasure of sports car owners and their multinational corporate backers. The contract for the event was coincidentally awarded to her largest campaign donor. When one city council member questioned her priorities, she promptly cancelled his Ravens box seat season tickets.

And then there's the typical neoliberal push for gentrification of urban areas. Rawlings-Blake awarded a couple of waterside developers $22 million in tax breaks in exchange for a paltry $250,000 contribution to her struggling city.

She also has the dubious distinction of being named the worst mayor in America, or at least having tied with Shrillionaire Mike "Stop & Frisk" Bloomberg in the final vote tally. Like Bloomberg, SRB seems convinced that all that poor cities need to achieve prosperity are gimmicks and developments funded by public money for private profit.

From Boston Streets:

After everything that happened in 2011 (huge losses to the city), SRB and her team worked feverishly to help create a new organization, Race On LLC, and start planning the 2012 Grand Prix. The new organization is led by her largest campaign contributor and made up almost entirely of the same clowns who botched it up the first time. The same people who absolved themselves of their responsibilities are now collecting salaries to do it all over again. With the mayor’s full blessing and encouragement!
This is the true brilliance of SRB’s awfulness. Not only does she aggressively pursue exactly the wrong projects and policies, she employs corrupt and misguided tactics to make sure they happen.

They even derisively call her Mayor Vroom-Vroom.

So there's the answer to Wolf Blitzer's anguished question about why all the speeding cop cars.

Baltimore is Le Mans in the ghetto. The real thugs tearing stuff down are the hyper-capitalists extracting profits from poor people at the speed of blight.

* Update: Knuckleheads is so yesterday. As befits his position as chief representative of Plutocrats, Inc. Barack Obama has now gotten with the dog-whistling program. From The Hill:

President Obama on Tuesday blamed "criminals and thugs" for the violence that erupted in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died in police custody.
“There is no excuse for the kind of violence we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive," Obama said. "They’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement. They are stealing.”
Obama said the violent demonstrations undermined the message of peaceful protesters who made "legitimate" complaints about problems in Baltimore. “One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again and the ... protesters who did it the right way will be lost in the discussion."

More like the propaganda and Al Sharpton are getting lost in the discussion. But anyhoo, now that Obama has made the world safe for Thug-shaming, look for the word to become a gilded super-magnet for color-blind acceptable racist discourse from across the political spectrum -- which in Exceptional America, ranges all the way from A to B.