Normalizing Greed In the Age of Trump

The New York Times has a piece up on private equity mogul Steve Schwarzman's latest hedonistic birthday party. Andrew Ross Sorkin, scribe to the leisure class, marvels that ever since Donald Trump stampeded into the public sphere and began sucking up all the media oxygen, there hasn't been the usual outpouring of public disgust at conspicuous displays of consumption. Sorkin credits the alleged ennui to that master of excess himself, our newly elected president. 

Donald J. Trump has suddenly made the world of performance greed safe for the rest of the plutocracy. Or, so the plutocrats and their media sycophants are aiming to convince both themselves and us, the newly-awakened protesting rabble.

As I've written before, Trump is both a blessing and a curse to the neoliberal order, which has turbocharged wealth inequality and more than doubled the number of billionaires since the 2008 financial collapse. The economic "recovery," such as it is, has allowed the new oligarchy to suck up more than 90% of the gains, while condemning the bottom 90% of the population to an ever more precarious existence in what has become hideously known as "the sharing economy."

At the same time that Trump makes the ruling class's hair curl with his serial truth-telling about how corrupt the system is, and how the corrupt system has made him and them what they are today, his antics conveniently deflect attention from the pathologies of such heretofore loathed financial villains as Steve Schwarzman. 

The man just can't contain his excessiveness. This flaw might have mattered back in 2009, when progressive (cough) hero Barack Obama arrived in the White House to vanquish the greedsters by protecting their bonuses and extending their Bush-era tax cuts while imposing austerity on the rest of us and helping to foment the rise of the Tea Party and later, Trump himself.

So according to the latest neoliberal narrative, run-of-the-mill conspicuous consumption shouldn't matter as much to us, now that we have Donald Trump and his gene pool to kick around. Who really cares anymore that Schwarzman once spent $3,000 for a dinner of imported stone crabs with an old crab like The Donald presented to the masses for their sneering pleasure?

The fact that Schwarzman damaged his horrible image even further by hilariously casting himself as a victim of Nazi-style atrocities because of the toothless Dodd-Frank legislation also pales in comparison to the spectacle of President Trump charging admission to attend his Florida White House weekend bashes with heads of state.

So it's all the more awesome, enthuses Sorkin from his perch at the Times's wealth-serving DealBook section, that protests against Trump, the whole Trump and nothing but the Trump might also signal that other rich people are safe, that the public just doesn't care about generalized wealth inequality any more:

Mr. Trump’s election and the nominations of his cabinet of billionaires may draw ire from his critics, but the people who elected him — who draw largely from the middle and lower classes — appear nonplused by his, and other people’s, showy displays of wealth. Indeed, judging by various polls, much of the country aspires to live like Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Trump.

While Mr. Trump himself did not attend the party, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, did. So did others from the administration, including Elaine L. Chao, the transportation secretary; Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; and Wilbur Ross, the nominee for commerce secretary. Other guests included everyone from the prominent financier Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the fashion designer Donatella Versace to Susan George, executive director of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund in New York.

But let's not give too much credit to Donald Trump for improving Schwarzman's reputation enough to make his greed and excess more palatable to the consuming public -- who according to Sorkin's polls, aspire to luxury as greedily as Trump, rather than, say, modestly aspiring to a job with a living wage, a secure retirement and a safe roof over one's head. Knowing how the polls commissioned by the ruling class work, I would hazard a guess that the only choice given to people was who'd they rather be: Ivanka, or a bag lady?

  In any event, the public relations campaign to normalize and even celebrate the greed of the oligarch class had already reached something of a milestone a little over a year ago. The anti-Melania, First Lady Michelle Obama herself, appeared at a gala Washington event for the express purpose of heaping outlandish praise upon Schwarzman and a whole cabal of blood-sucking private equity rentiers. All that these tax-avoiding tycoons had to do in return was to make a meaningless pledge to hire more veterans of the endless wars which have brought them such endless profits.

"Kill and make a killing" trumped (sorry) the tired old Gordon Gekko motto "Greed is Good" way back when Donald Trump was still considered nothing but a media clown candidate.

Michelle Obama did her friendly fascism part of normalizing war profiteers and wealth extractors simply by lending her carefully manufactured "Mom in Chief" brand to their plunder. According to the press release put out by Schwarzman's Blackstone Group, the actual hiring of veterans was never an integral part of the public relations package. The initiative was pure, platitudinous "camo-washing."

The Veterans Initiative Summit is designed to support the recruitment, hiring, retention, and promotion of American veterans across private equity portfolio companies, and will bring together private equity firms and their portfolio companies to promote the sharing of best practices, to identify gaps and opportunities in veteran hiring processes, and to energize leaders as they continue to focus on these important issues. The two-day summit will be held on October 7^thand 8^th at the Grand Hyatt Washington, located at 1000 H Street NW.

Camo-washing doesn't, of course, mean giving the camels at Steve Schwarzman's latest Asia-themed birthday bash a spa treatment. Rather, it is a term coined by journalist Dave Dayen to describe the gifting of public money via either tax credits or direct grants or sweetheart prosecutorial deals to any too big to fail private corporation willing to give lip service to "the troops" and thereby drumming up both commercial and public support for all the tycoons in the Military-Industrial Complex Family.

Depending on what day of the week it is, the bad corporate actors of America are getting either a pat on the back or a slap on the wrist.

  And in October 2015, Michelle Obama was only too happy to give them all a big fat sloppy kiss on whatever cheek you might care to imagine. She thanked them for deflecting public attention away from the unemployed and very suicide-prone veterans of endless wars and from the Obama administration's own adamant refusal to push for an FDR-style government jobs program for them. Instead, Michelle Obama led the cloyingly-named and defense/private equity-funded "Joining Forces" camo-washing crusade.

She not only helped to normalize Trump-style greed, she put a patriotic sheen on it. And she made pathological violence in all its myriad forms so charmingly hilarious in the process:

I mean, private equity is one of the most competitive industries in this country; probably the closest thing you can come to hand-to-hand combat on a daily basis.  (Laughter.)  But Steve and Blackstone and all of you are doing this because you know that something bigger is at stake.  And you also know that while we’ve made important progress, we still have a lot of work to do on behalf of our veterans’ employment.
Now, it’s true that over the past four years, the unemployment rate for 9/11 veterans has dropped from the 12 percent in 2011 to 7.2 percent in 2014.  And since May of this year, it’s been around 5 percent.  That is a significant accomplishment, and it didn’t just happen by itself.  (Applause.)  It happened because folks like you stepped up, learned about what our vets and military spouses have to offer, and then you worked hard to set goals, and recruit and hire them.

I mention that Michelle's image was a very carefully manufactured brand only because her successors - Melania and Ivanka Trump - are coming under such outraged media fire for their own, not-dissimilar branding of their public positions. Establishment churnalists have no qualms about trashing their brand, even to the extent of one of their clique getting a mere slap on the wrist from bosses at New York Times for calling Melania a "hooker" at a public-private society event.

Michelle, you might remember, had her own branding problem in the early days of her husband's administration. It came in the person of her attention-addicted, social-climbing social secretary friend, one Desiree Rogers.

Rogers soon got the proverbial boot for acting too much like Ivanka Trump in public, preening for the cameras in her designer clothing and jewelry, and boastfully exposing the Obama mystique for what it truly was: nothing more than an advertising campaign. From the New York Times: 

Ms. Rogers had appeared in another glossy magazine, posing in a White House garden in a borrowed $3,495 silk pleated dress and $110,000 diamond earrings. But if the image was jarring in a time of recession, Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.

“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”

(snip)

  The White House eventually clamped down on her public profile. She was ordered to stop attending splashy events and showing up in fancy clothes on magazine covers. When Michelle Obama learned one day that Ms. Rogers was on a train heading to New York to attend an MTV dinner, the first lady told her longtime friend to cancel, associates said.

In other words, there has been a precedent for White House branding, Trump-style. Desiree Rogers might have lasted much longer in the White House were it not for those Trumpian reality show party-crashers known as the Salahis.

When the Obamas did their own excessive thing in the People's House, they at least made the effort to commit it far, far away from the People's view. It was during the recession after all, and rich and powerful leaders were forced to inconspicuously consume for reasons of optics. News and photos of the Obamas' secret and opulent 2009 Tim Burton-produced hedonistic Halloween party didn't come to light until nearly two years after the fact.

The party, which also served as a private focus group screening of the still-unreleased movie Alice in Wonderland, featured the stars of the film, including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. A smattering of military families invited for camo-washing purposes were served refreshments that included vials of fake blood. And they say the Trumps have no taste! 

In her book about "The Obamas," Jodi Kantor wrote that "White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged."

A Theory of the Ruling Class: Plus Ca Change, Plus C'Est La Meme Chose

"Nothing exceeds like excess" -- Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.

Chuckles and Checkers With Hillary

To combat an inexorable slide in the polls, Hillary Clinton and her team of marketers are using a two-pronged approach to resuscitating her campaign. To be even more metaphorically specific, they are using a plastic cannula to shove canned air through both nostrils of an oxygen-deprived patient.

The first prong of the Clinton cannula: just days after refusing to apologize for her private email server, she has apologized. By email, of course. Because delivering a Nixonian Checkers speech on live TV is just so yesterday.

 From Hillary Clinton's email blast:

 It's important for you to know a few key facts. My use of a personal email account was aboveboard and allowed under the State Department's rules. Everyone I communicated with in government was aware of it. And nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time.

As this process proceeds, I want to be as transparent as possible. That's why I've provided all of my work emails to the government to be released to the public, and why I'll be testifying in public in front of the Benghazi Committee later next month.

I know this is a complex story. I could have -- and should have -- done a better job answering questions earlier. I'm grateful for your support, and I'm not taking anything for granted.

Compare the tone to candidate Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech of Sept. 23, 1952: 

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that is why I am here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case.

 I am sure that you have read the charges, and you have heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took $18,000 from a group of my supporters.

Now, was that wrong? And let me say that it was wrong. I am saying it, incidentally, that it was wrong, just not illegal, because it isn't a question of whether it was legal or illegal, that isn't enough. The question is, was it morally wrong? I say that it was morally wrong if any of that $18,000 went to Senator Nixon, for my personal use. I say that it was morally wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled.
And I say that it was morally wrong if any of the contributors got special favors for the contributions they made.

The second prong of the Clinton campaign's cannula is to combat accusations that she is too stiff and contrived. Therefore, her spokespeople have formally announced that all future scripts will not only be spontaneous, they will also be compassionate and funny.  Hilarious Hearty Hillary will be coming soon to a political theater near you.

To help sell the image of the kinder, more humorous Hillary, her campaign operatives have enlisted the aid of the corporate media establishment, which trumpeted the announcement in one great, big, spontaneous blast.  

I couldn't figure out whether  New York Times Hillary beat reporter Amy Chozick was being stealthily satiric with her article, or whether she might be suffering from a bad case of Post-traumatic Constant Hillary Coverage Stress Disorder. First, there was this accompanying photo:

 Notice the jaw-clenched dude to her right, obviously a Secret Service agent, who could not look more miserable if he tried. He actually seems to be suffering a bad attack of gas. And then there's the guy right next to him who appears to be asleep on his feet. Are these really the optiminal optics for the re-marketing of Hillary as a combination of Mother Teresa and Joan Rivers?

And then there are the clueless words of the campaign operatives themselves. Chozick writes,

Asked about a moment they regret, Ms. Palmieri paused and then quickly settled on the ope the campaign used to corral reporters at a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire that became a symbol of Mrs. Clinton’s distance from the small-town celebration. A less intrusive rope had also been used to control crowds at other events.

 The Brooklyn headquarters, on the 11th floor of a high-rise, bustled with activity heading into the Labor Day weekend. Young people, sitting on bean bag chairs, worked on their laptops and cellphones. Bags of Hillary-branded snacks, like beet chips, were arrayed in front of a volunteer hall of fame collage.

Less intrusive ropes (invisible tripwires, maybe?) to keep out the masses and snooty Hillary-branded snacks for insiders are excellent selling points for any plutocratic candidate forced to pose as a populist.

Quick on the heels of the rebranding story came yet another piece from Ms. Chozick about an upcoming Hillary TV appearance. The original blurb to the story read: "Mrs. Clinton is expected to appear on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' on Thursday in hopes of reaching female voters who do not consume traditional media."

And therein lies the problem. The Times and the rest of the media-political nexus view us not as readers, thinkers, and engaged citizens, but as mere "consumers" who devour, or sniff, whatever content is placed in front of us. All they think they need is the right ad campaign for all to be right in the Feudal States of America.

It's time that Hillary and the Times got with the times and realized that the days of fooling most of the people even some of the time are long gone. The slow demise of democracy as illustrated by the selling of Hearty Hilarious Hillary is not funny. It is just plain tragic in a pathetic, maudlin kind of way. Kind of like this: