The New Meaning of Labor Day

Granted, the holiday set aside on the first Monday in September to honor American workers was always the weaker twin of the more radical May Day international celebrations. And it is also ironic, given that May Day itself was inspired by Chicago's Haymarket Massacre, in which agitators for the eight hour day, among other niceties. died for their progressive sins.

Look around at most major news sites today and you will find nary a word about working people and labor rights and the employment picture. That is because the true meaning of Labor Day in the eyes of the corporate media is that it marks the final stretch of the Presidential Horse-race.

Even Bernie Sanders, who walked the picket line with union workers in Iowa last year to mark the festivities, will be toeing the line today for Hillary Clinton. Of course, since his campaign speech will be delivered to the AFL-CIO's confab in New Hampshire, it will no doubt contain a lot of laborious rhetoric.

And let's be fair. Labor Day is the one day of the year that all politicians, even some Republicans, pay lip service to working stiffs. It's the homestretch. They've got a lot of work to do before they buckle down for the real job of rewarding the constituents and the corporations who gave them the most money.

None of today's New York Times op-eds honors the real workers of America, including the activists who achieved so much success in the Fight for Fifteen movement this year.

Paul Krugman instead complained that the media is treating Hillary Clinton unfairly, what with all the smears and innuendo they're directing toward her shady family foundation. Just because she met with some donors at the State Department who gave big bucks to her charity doesn't mean she's crooked. As far as Krugman is concerned, she's wearing the mantle of Saint Mother Teresa. Plus, she is not Trump, who Krugman says threatens to be George W. Bush to her Al Gore, if we malcontents aren't careful and just dutifully shut down the criticism. This poor multimillionaire candidate is getting Gored, for Gore's sake!

And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an “A” rating — better than the American Red Cross.

Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation “raises questions.”

But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, “no.”

Since Krugman is not a journalist, but a pundit, he is seemingly under no obligation to write fact-based columns. He is under no obligation to conduct actual research into the workings and money flows of the Clinton Foundation. Yet,

 So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

I couldn't resist. Here is my much-maligned published comment:

 You know who's really getting gored? The working class.

I guess the "conscience of a liberal" can't address the plight of the precariously employed, the poorly paid, and the chronically jobless on this Labor Day. The fortunes of an embattled politician are at stake!

And talk about innuendo. It seems like only yesterday that the pundit who now lectures the media on its ethics was smearing Bernie Sanders and his supporters as deluded, quixotic naifs who were selfishly demanding such impossible dreams as universal health care and a tuition-free public higher education.

Thanks to progressives, Clinton was forced to take a position on the minimum wage and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the corporate war on workers which now appears moribund.

Yes, HRC is getting smeared on ridiculous things, like the "shadow" cast over her candidacy by Anthony Weiner. The mainstream press is not only inept, it appears mightily bored.

But questions about her foundation are legitimate. Yes, it does good around the world. Apologists like to point out there's never been evidence of pay-to-play. But as New York congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on "Corruption in America," explains, a quid pro quo isn't necessary. Wealthy donors and potentates pay for political access, which usually pays handsome dividends over time.

 All the Clintons should divest themselves. And then we must get the obscene money out of politics by overturning Citizens United.

Now, to be fair, not all the members of the ruling establishment have ignored the true meaning of Labor Day. President Obama himself used it as the topic of his weekly address, recorded before he was so ignobly forced to deplane in China from the cloaca of Air Force One, minus the red carpet.

Of course, he only talked about American workers, not the suicide risks in China who make the Apple products that enrich Steve Jobs's widow, who in turn hosted a $200,000-a-person fundraiser for Hillary Clinton to ensure that those Apple jobs will never come to our shores and pay workers anything close to a living wage.

Obama actually started out his chat quite liberally: 

For generations, every time the economy changed, hardworking Americans marched and organized and joined unions to demand not simply a bigger paycheck for themselves, but better conditions and more security for the folks working next to them, too.  Their efforts are why we can enjoy things like the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, and a minimum wage.  Their efforts are why we can depend on health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and retirement plans. 
All of that progress is stamped with the union label.  All of that progress was fueled with a simple belief:  that our economy works better when it works for everybody.

I think it's his folksy usage of the word "folks" that should warn us where he's going with all this historical happy-talk. He is taking us straight to Brave Neoliberal Land for the newer, improved meaning of Labor Day:

That’s the spirit that’s made the progress of these past seven and a half years possible.  We’ve rescued our economy from another depression, cut our unemployment rate in half, and unleashed the longest string total job growth on record.  And we’ve focused on making sure that the gains of a growing economy don’t just flow to a few at the top, but to everybody. 

Yes, people. The radical labor rights movement fought to have Wall Street bankers bailed out, for General Motors to be rescued in exchange for new workers getting hired at lower wages in a divide-and-conquer two-tiered assembly line setup, and for the wages all across the land to decline even as the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown to historic levels in the Age of Obama. He says he focused on the gains of the economy not all flowing to the top. He's right. As a matter of fact, only 91% of the gains since the 2008 crash have flowed to the top One Percent. Everybody else got the crumbs.  Hey, at least most people aren't actually starving. If you still have a refrigerator and a flat screen, how can you possibly call yourself poor?

It’s why we took action to help millions of workers finally collect the overtime pay they’ve earned.  It’s why I issued a call to raise the minimum wage, and when Congress ignored that call, 18 states and the District of Columbia, plus another 51 cities and counties went ahead and gave their workers a raise.  It’s why the very first bill I signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; why we gave paid sick days to federal contractors; why we’ve fought for worker safety and the right to organize. 
And we’ve made good progress.  For a few years after the recession, the top one percent did capture almost all income gains.  But that share has been cut by almost half.  Last year, income for everybody else grew at the fastest pace since the 1990s.  And another 20 million Americans know the financial security of health insurance.

To be fair, Obama did finally extend overtime protections to millions of workers this year. But only after severe pressure and shaming from progressive activists. You see, it's an election year, and the Democrats have to do a few nice things to prove they care and deserve our votes. And this is precisely why the president casually squeezes the inconvenient truth about income disparity in this particular paragraph, rather than in the previous one. It's best practices to always save the bad news until after you've told the proles your little bit of good news. And did you notice how quickly he glossed over Obamacare? It is not doing too well. Plus, any financial security in the mix certainly does not belong to the health care "consumer." It belongs to insurance company executives and investors getting fabulously rich off mandated premiums and government welfare.

Obama can get away with his glossing over actual facts, because as William Dornhoff points out, most people have no idea of how extreme the wealth disparity truly is. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to very rich people, whom we have been taught got that way by virtue of hard labor and "risk-taking." It may be shocking, but the lowest two quintiles of the American population possess only .03 percent of total United States wealth. 

Obama smoothly sails on nonetheless:

I’ll be the first to say we’ve got more work to do in the years ahead.  Now, I know we’re in the heat of a more raucous political season than usual.  But we can’t get so distracted by the latest bluster that we lose sight of the policies that will actually help working families get ahead.  Because the truth is, that’s what’s caused some of the frustration that’s roiling our politics right now – too many working folks still feel left behind by an economy that’s constantly changing.

Now he is in full neoliberal propaganda mode. The common refrain in a society where capitalism has replaced democracy is "we've got more work to do in the years ahead." In other words, don't count on your lives improving while you're still alive. And meanwhile, elect Hillary Clinton. She has policies on a website, and all Donald Trump has is bluster. But Obama feels your pain if you still "feel" left behind by an economy that is constantly changing, all by itself, because there is no alternative and you can't change the weather. Greed and global plunder are like Hurricane Hermine in that regard. Very mean. So batten down the hatches, and hope for the best against those "economic headwinds."

The slickness continues:

 So as a country, we’ve got some choices to make.  Do we want to be a country where the typical woman working full-time earns 79 cents for every dollar a man makes – or one where they earn equal pay for equal work?  Do we want a future where inequality rises as union membership keeps falling – or one where wages are rising for everybody and workers have a say in their prospects?  Are we a people who just talk about family values while remaining the only developed nation that doesn’t offer its workers paid maternity leave – or are we a people who actually value families, and make paid family leave an economic priority for working parents?

By merely asking rhetorical questions, Obama means to imply that he actually cares about the answers. He tries to separate himself from the very same neoliberal policies which himself he has both kept in place and crafted anew. By asking if we want paid maternity leave, he pre-empts the demand for living wages, universal health care, tuition-free and debt-free higher public education, a government sponsored jobs program, and affordable housing. Paid family leave is the least of a working parent's worries. Not having enough money in the bank for a car repair and not having enough food on the table are more pressing concerns. But Obama will not go there.

These are the kinds of choices in front of us.  And if we’re going to restore the sense that hard work is rewarded with a fair shot to get ahead, we’re going to have to follow the lead of all those who came before us.  That means standing up not just for ourselves, but for the father clocking into the plant, the sales clerk working long and unpredictable hours, or the mother riding the bus to work across town, even on Labor Day – folks who work as hard as we do.  And it means exercising our rights to speak up in the workplace, to join a union, and above all, to vote.

That was the big tell. Obama is not addressing working stiffs in this speech. He is addressing well-to-do liberals who should be concerned about working stiffs. Those folks work just as hard as "we" do - we managers, doctors, lawyers, lobbyists, real estate executives and the like. "We" must care about The Help riding on the bus to clean our homes as hard as "we" clean up in billable hours and writing smarmy op-eds for the mainstream media.

And don't ever forget: in Neoliberal World, the paramount duty of the citizen is not to join the picket line or to occupy a public space in protest of racism and class inequality, but to vote for the person who can best serve the interests of the wealthy. If working folks are very smart and very lucky, Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump, and a few meager drops of her golden beneficence might just even reach the lower levels. Someday. Maybe. If we vote our little hearts out.

Abject surrender to these artificially limited and mandated choices can be so seductive, but the only thing we really have to fear is fear-mongering platitudes.

We've got a lot of work to do.

Normalizing Corruption

If there is one consolation to be had from the looming election of Hillary Clinton, it's that she'll not so much strut into the White House as she will drag herself across the White House lawn as a mortally wounded animal.

 The constant drip-drip-drip of slimy revelations in the waning weeks of Neoliberal Death Match 2016 will ensure that many, if not most, of her neoliberal and neoconservative objectives will be stymied by one Congressional star chamber after the other -- from the day she takes the oath of office.

So weakened is she as a candidate and as a leader, that her much-vaunted bipartisan cooperative skills and wonkishness will go by the wayside. Impeachment is probably a foregone conclusion. Her electoral chances are still better than they deserve to be, thanks first to the anti-Bernie Sanders machinations of the Democratic Party and now to the imploding Donald Trump. Her chances of outlasting one term? Not so much. This is regardless of whether or not she is ever formally impeached. She will be more punching bag than president. Palace intrigues both large and small will rule the news cycles.

Just as Bill Clinton's mission to privatize Social Security was thwarted by the Monica Lewinsky affair (thanks, Monica!) so too will the financial skullduggery of the Clintons' family foundation prove to be the undoing of their political dynasty. Luckily for us, Hillary Clinton simply does not possess the preternatural ability of Barack Obama to put the screws to the public as he still fools at least half the people into believing he has their best interests at heart.

This would all be so depressing were it not for the entertainment value of watching the liberal media twist themselves into pretzels trying to defend the indefensible. They are as much as admitting that since political corruption is the new normal and Washington could not exist but for its incestuous muck, it is patently unfair to single out the Clintons for their own serial chicanery.

Shooting the messenger is their defensive weapon of choice. Rather than pay attention to the content of the leaked emails showing there is virtually no line between the State Department and the Clintons' money-laundering "global initiative," her defenders are attacking the Associated Press, Julian Assange, the conservative legal eagles of Judicial Watch, Clinton donor Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin. 

Ruth Marcus, centrist columnist of the Washington Post, takes great umbrage at reports that Hillary's many meetings with many donors to her private charity during her stint as Secretary of State constitute the appearance of criminal influence-peddling. "Obliging a donor is not necessarily criminal," the headline sniffs.

In the first paragraph, Marcus falsely implies that were it not for Donald Trump taking great umbrage at Clintonian wheeling and dealing, nobody else would actually be giving a crap about Hillary's normal, healthy activities:

Doug Band, the Bill Clinton aide and then-foundation official, asked Hillary Clinton’s State Department aides for occasional help on behalf of folks who had written checks to the foundation or associated entities: a meeting with a crown prince here (“good friend of ours,” Band noted), a favor for a Lebanese Nigerian businessman there (“key guy . . . to us,” Band observed).
But for the most part, the Band missives produced . . . nothing. The crown prince of Bahrain got his meeting, but there’s every reason to think that would have happened anyway.

A couple of billionaires are reduced to "just plain folks" whose friendship with the Clintons has absolutely nothing to do with their bank accounts. The crown prince of Bahrain would have gotten a weapons deal from Hillary whether he bribed her or not, whether he tear-gasses his own citizens or he doesn't.

 Marcus pretends to assume that for corruption to actually occur, a bag full of money must change hands, an actual favor must be proven to occur immediately following a meeting. The way corruption really works is that donors buy access to the official, who over time gives out the favors in such a piecemeal or delayed fashion that nobody is ever the wiser. Especially "journalists" like Ruth Marcus, who also seem to care more about gaining access to the powerful than they do in holding them to account.

If only Hillary were a smarter politician, moans Marcus, then she would have known enough not to meet with her donors at the State Department. It's not the corruption that matters, because everyone is corrupt. It's the stupid lack of care in hiding the corruption from WikiLeaks and the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, over at the Clinton-centric Huffington Post, they're slugging the A.P. story on the meetings as a "witch-hunt" against Hillary - even though the HuffPo article, written by Michael Calderone, does not actually use such McCarthyite language. He merely notes that the A.P. sent out a "misleading Tweet" which made it appear that nearly half of all Clinton's State Department meetings were with her private donors - when, in fact, only half the private citizens with whom she met were also her private donors.

So, it's all good. Especially since the private donors were pushing nothing but noble causes.

The Clinton camp is also complaining that the A.P. didn't mention that among the private donors with whom she met were the noble Hollywood star, Ben Affleck, and the late Elie Wiesel. "Scandal!" sarcastically Tweeted communications flack Brian Fallon, who went on to misleadingly assert that Donald Trump is a Russian plant.

The Clinton camp seems to have forgotten that it was the A.P. which prematurely announced her nomination on the eve of the California state primary in June, effectively discouraging Bernie Sanders supporters from going to the polls and artificially increasing her victory margin to the double digits. 

Heads she wins, tails the voters lose.

Although widely criticized by the media for her refusal to hold formal press conferences, Hillary is nevertheless given a platform by the media whenever she snaps her fingers. She called in to CNN's Anderson Cooper Wednesday night to pull a Donald Trump, and complain about the media. Hiding behind the protection of her phone, where nobody could see her face or examine her body language, she insisted that the A.P. story was "a lot of smoke and no fire."

More likely she'd been smoking her own skunk and didn't want the viewers to see the bloodshot eyes competing with the bloodstained hands. 

It wasn't fair, Hill whined to Andy, to exclude the thousands of meetings with very serious important people that she herself chose to exclude from public view before WikiLeaks took it upon itself to share them with the public. They could at least have been more fair about holding her publicly accountable, she paradoxically groused from behind the safe screen of her phone. 

When Cooper complained about her chronic press unavailability, she snapped, "Well, Anderson, I'm talking to you right now!"

And then she went on to bitterly complain about Donald Trump's own overly-constant press availability.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange is promising to release more documents potentially embarrassing or damaging to Hillary Clinton. 

Drip, defend, complain, deflect, repeat. Take frequent selfies with the nobles of the Donor Class. Share widely on social media, and call it Democracy.

 

Everybody Must Get Stoned

 All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out -- I.F. Stone

Hillary's Hideous Honesty

 You can take the woman out of the authoritarian New York Times, but you can't take the authoritarian New York Times out of the woman.

Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor ever to be hired and fired by the Paper of Record, has a new gig writing a bi-weekly column on politics for the centrist Guardian. That is neoliberal code for writing a bi-weekly press release for Hillary Clinton.

In Monday's offering, Abramson touts Hillary's "shocking honesty". Clinton's problem is not corruption, Abramson claims. Her problem is a lack of transparency about her own innate decency. Plus, Hillary is a victim of sexism. Jill should know. 

Meanwhile, the smarmy Hillaphilia practically jumps off the page at you:

The yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money (including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees, foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies, scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.

The connection between money and action is often fuzzy. Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

See my previous post about a quid pro quo not being a necessity for influence peddling and corruption to occur. Jill Abramson has obviously never delved into Zephyr Teachout's masterful Corruption in America.

But just for the sake of honesty, let's take Abramson at her word. Although she doesn't use it as an example, Hillary's painful honesty about endemic American corruption and brutality shines through loud and clear in the following State Department cable, released by Wikileaks in December 2009:

"Saudia Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and other support groups." -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who then went on to complain that the Saudis only act against terrorists when their own country is threatened. 

Whereupon she wasted no time in completing the sale of billions of dollars' worth of lethal weapons to Saudi Arabia, which has since openly and honestly used  them them to slaughter innocent civilians in the United States' proxy war against Yemen. Whether any arms were also spirited by the Saudis to such fundamentalist terror groups as ISIS is still unknown.

Hillary's deal with the Saudis was not a secret backroom accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination. It was totally, boastfully transparent.  Although both Hillary and her boss, Obama, were safely out of town enjoying the winter holidays while the actual papers were being signed, her Neocon minion Victoria Nuland held a totally open and honest press briefing about the sale. During one foggy Christmas Week, Santa and a whole retinue of his right jolly old elves came to Foggy Bottom to have their say.

The bureaucrats doing the honors, and the reporters basking in the honors, sounded absolutely merry and giddy. Whether they were drunk on booze or whether they were simply drunk on power/access to power is anyone's guess. From the transcript: 

NULAND: Good afternoon, everybody. Before we do our regular daily briefing, we have a special briefing today on U.S. arms sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. With us today, we have Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro, and we have Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller.

So without further ado, Assistant Secretary Shapiro.

QUESTION: Can we attribute the on-time nature of this briefing to the fact that someone from the Pentagon is here? (Laughter.)

MS. NULAND: Absolutely. We have military discipline – (laughter).

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHAPIRO: Well, thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. And as Toria mentioned, I’m joined by Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dr. Jim Miller.

As you may recall, in October 2010, I officially announced the Administration’s plan to sell to Saudi Arabia a significant defense package that would include advanced F-15 fighter aircraft and helicopters. We are pleased to announce that over this past weekend, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a letter of offer and acceptance for the sale of up to 84 advanced F-15SA fighter aircraft. It also includes upgrades to its current fleet of 70 F-15 aircraft, as well as munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics.

This sale is worth $29.4 billion. These F-15SA aircraft, manufactured by the Boeing company, will be among the most sophisticated and capable aircraft in the world. This agreement serves to reinforce the strong and enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. It demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a strong Saudi defense capability as a key component to regional security.

Miller went on to claim that the sale would "advance U.S. interests" (read: bloat the obscene profits of Boeing, chief beneficiary of the Export-Import Bank boosted by Clinton and decried by her rival Bernie Sanders.)

 It would, Miller continued, "send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the Gulf and the broader Middle East." (read: better watch out, Yemeni wedding parties and Doctors Without Borders hospitals and mothers and children who have the nerve to exist in the buffer zone between the Saudis and countries like Syria and Iraq and Iran and Libya.)

Although he glossed over Hillary's brutally honest, yet secret, assessment that Saudi Arabia is the major financier of terror in that region, Miller himself was brutally honest in admitting that the arms sale was all about the brutal greed of everybody concerned:

 It will enhance Saudi Arabia’s ability to deter and defend against external threats to its sovereignty. It will advance interoperability between the air forces of our two countries through joint training and exercises. And lastly, this agreement will positively impact the U.S. economy and further advance the President’s commitment to create jobs by increasing exports. According to industry experts, this agreement will support more than 50,000 American jobs. It will engage 600 suppliers in 44 states and provide $3.5 billion in annual economic impact to the U.S. economy. This will support jobs not only in the aerospace sector but also in our manufacturing base and support chain, which are all crucial for sustaining our national defense.

War is only hell for the grunts who get killed and maimed fighting it. It is pure heaven for the tax-exempt "job creators" and investors who make tons of money from megatons of death and destruction every single minute of every single day. 

And in Hillaryland, every day is Christmas.

In the spirit of sincere honesty preceding her run for the presidency, husband Bill forthrightly admitted that Saudi bigwigs had returned the favoritism and gifted the Clinton Foundation with millions of dollars in "charitable" donations. The Clintons have transparently decided to keep the money from an aider and abettor of terrorism just because they are so above-board and deserving of our trust.

Ethics? They don't need any stinking ethics when they are absolutely shameless in their honesty.

It's the Corruption, Stupid

Given that Bernie Sanders has won five out of the last six Democratic primaries (and possibly lost in Arizona because of massive voter suppression) rumors of his political demise have been rather exaggerated. He even won by huge margins in Hawaii, the home state of Hillary-supporter Barack Obama.

But delegate-rich New York, which votes next month, is really the do-or-die state for Bernie. He plans to barnstorm the state as the Brooklyn native versus the Native Stepdaughter, a/k/a  the once and future carpetbagger (Arkansas by way of Illinois and D.C.) and presumed nominee.

If the recent  Democratic primary challenge to incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo by law professor Zephyr Teachout is any indication, Bernie should clean up in upstate regions, but perhaps not do as well in New York City, where Cuomo prevailed and won the primary, despite literally hiding under a stinking cloud of corruption at the time of his re-election.

Teachout, who like Bernie was strong-armed by the Democratic party machine in efforts to damage her candidacy, won by landslides in 20 upstate counties, including that of the state capital, Albany. She ultimately received more than a third of the vote -- which, given Cuomo's incumbency and national standing, was actually a huge blow to him. It put a permanent dent in any plans he might have had for a presidential, even a vice-presidential, run. She was a political neophyte who'd never before run for office.

Like Sanders, she ran on an anti-corruption, anti-centrist platform. Like Hillary Clinton, Cuomo was the inevitability candidate. Like Hillary Clinton, he balked at even debating his challenger. Like Clinton, he enjoyed the bountiful financial support of what Sanders labels "the billionaire class."

Matt Stoller wrote at the time:

Cuomo won for one reason — his opponent had no name ID, and he spent between $11M and $15M on this election. Money in politics is used to talk to voters through mail and TV. Without it, you are mute. Zephr Teachout didn’t do one piece of mail, or a single TV ad. There was a lot of evidence that primary voters, when given a light persuasion message, flipped to Teachout. She got a big chunk of the vote without spending very much at all. But there was no money to deliver such a message. Given a bit more money, or a bit more time, the outcome would have been different. To put it another way, Cuomo paid roughly $48 for every vote he got, where Zephyr paid roughly $2.70. That’s a very big differential, in terms of the power of the messaging. If Zephyr had had a bit more money, she could have easily won.

Oh, and Teachout is now running for the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Chris Gibson, the liberal Republican who himself won re-election in 2014 against a self-financed centrist carpetbagger Democrat from Illinois named Sean Eldridge. Eldridge, of whom I wrote a couple of years ago, was the very model of a plutocratic pol. He was one of the precursors of the reality that is now biting the Establishment right in its well-padded ass: Citizens United or no Citizens United, actual people are still worthy competitors against wads of cash. Just look at poor Jebbie Bush.

Teachout, for her own part, literally wrote the book on political corruption. From David Cole's review of Corruption in America:

As Teachout makes clear, the framers themselves predicted that corruption would be a constant threat. George Mason, for example, warned that “if we do not provide against corruption, our government will soon be at an end.” It was a preoccupation of the founding debates. In James Madison’s notebook from the summer of 1787, “corruption” appears fifty-four times. As Teachout puts it, “corruption, influence, and bribery were discussed more often in the convention than factions, violence, or instability.”

By corruption, the founding era did not mean simply the explicit exchange of cash for a vote, what the Supreme Court in its campaign finance decisions has come to call “quid pro quo corruption.” Teachout notes that the word “corruption” came up hundreds of times in the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debates, yet “only a handful of uses referred to what we might now think of as quid pro quo bribes,” constituting “less than one-half of 1 percent of the times corruption was raised.”

That lack of a quid pro quo necessity is precisely why Hillary Clinton's insistence that her millions of dollars in Wall Street speaking fees will not translate into political favors for Wall Street is so disingenuous. The bankers and oil companies and pharmaceuticals and defense contractors are not looking for immediate gratification. They are very patient greedsters. They know that good things come to them if only they can stand to wait a minute.

And do wait just a minute, plutes! It's not over yet. Gird your asses for some more swift kicks coming your way with much strength and accuracy and anger. There are still 18 states left to vote, with half the delegates still up for grabs. Bernie would need to win 57 percent of these delegates to achieve a majority heading into the convention. Not impossible, although the probability of Hillary winning the nomination is still at a daunting 92 percent.

But a little bird tells me not to believe the odds-makers. They have been so oddly wrong lately. 

Links/Open Thread (Neoliberal Edition)

"Graft is a byword in American life today. It is law where no other law is obeyed. It is underminding the country. Virtue, honor, truth and the law have all vanished from our life."  -- Convicted mobster Al Capone, Liberty Magazine interview, Oct. 17, 1931.

 ***

Puerto Rico needs debt relief (New York Times): A bill allowing the territory's government to restructure its debt in bankruptcy court is currently before Congress, "but has not advanced due to the opposition of some hedge funds." (also see my previous post.)

***

Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson claims that he has lost millions of dollars betting on the successful failure of both Greece and Puerto Rico. (Fortune) He bet big-time on hopes that thirsty jobless Athens residents would be forced to pay for privatized water, and it just didn't happen.  One of his investment arms owns a whopping one-third of all bank deposits in Greece. You know -- the recycled bailout money from the Troika washing machine. The banks are closed and on the brink of insolvency. Last year, he bought over a billion dollars' worth of tax-exempt Puerto Rican bonds, which the government now says it can't pay back. Anybody want to bet on whether Congress sides with millions of struggling people over John Paulson? Actually, it is a safe bet that the big banks are already shorting their customers and hedging their bets on Grexit and regime change, and the downfall of Puerto Rico into a failed colonial state. Heads they win, tails you lose.

***

Chelsea Clinton's hedge fund manager husband also has lost "a ton of money" betting on a Greek "recovery" from more austerity via an abject submission by the Syriza government to the Troika finance capital vampires. ( Business Insider.) But Chelsea is doing her plucky best to stem the bleeding, having recently charged $65,000 for a ten-minute speech, a short Q&A and photo-ops at a publicly-funded university. What a trouper for the neoliberal cause. She didn't even personally pocket her fee, instead tossing the cash into the churning money laundry spin cycle of her family's "charity" -- for altruistic tax-avoidance purposes.

***

Not to be outdone by the global banking mafia's assaults on Greece and Puerto Rico, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced more than 1400 new teacher layoffs and $200 million in public education cuts to pay for tax breaks for the hyper-rich as well as for the Wall Street looting of their pension fund. Teachers, students and parents planned a mass rally in front of City Hall today to demand such alternatives as a luxury tax, financial transaction tax, and tax penalties for employers who pay workers so little that they must go on public assistance. Reaction by the teachers' union to Mayor One Percent's austerity announcement is here:

Not to be outdone by his pal Rahm, President Obama is going to bat for Big Phat Pharma in an even more rapacious way than we knew. According to another draft document from Wikileaks, drug companies stand to squeeze trillions more dollars from the citizens and taxpayers of the 12 nations affected by the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If the agreement is ratified as the draft now stands, manufacturers of cheaper generics would be squeezed out of existence in those countries (including the US, which already pays through the nose for medicines.) Out-of-pocket payments from Medicaid and Medicare subscribers would also be jacked up if the deal goes through. There is absolutely no distance between what the predatory drug manufacturers want, and what the Obama administration is willing to give them, according to a spokesman from Doctors Without Borders.

Obama does have a self-glorifying library shrine to build on public property in cash-strapped Chicago, after all.

Obama's Snafu

 *Updated below.

The giant middle finger that Barack Obama has been giving us these past six years is now dangling at the root, the victim of its own terminal corruption. And yet he and his sycophants persist in downgrading yesterday's crumbling of the "pillar of his presidency" into an annoying little hangnail.

"It's just a procedural snafu," whined Josh Earnest, the aptly named White House press flack of the "stinging defeat" Obama suffered from members of his own party, who shockingly denied him the right to "fast-track" democracy into oblivion via the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

If you want to get Panglossian about it, Snafu (situation normal, all fucked up)  is slightly better than Fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition.) And, let's face it: the Democrats of the Senate did not suddenly go all populist overnight, despite the good work of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in exposing the TPP for the nasty corporate coup that it is. The Dem poobahs (Reid, Schumer, etc.) were pissed because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled a fast one on them, and didn't include the fig leaves (currency manipulation rules, monetary aid for displaced American workers, feeble union protections, and anti-child labor measures) that would otherwise have allowed Democrats to sell out their constituents. These people actually still love the TPP. Most of them don't even care about those odious investor state tribunals replacing sovereign court systems.

What makes the TPP now so Fubar and so toxic for the selfish interests of the oligarchs is that Japan, one of the countries negotiating the deal, is adamantly against any TPP clause forbidding it to manipulate its own currency. Barack Obama is damned if he does go along with Democratic demands, and damned if he doesn't.

Hot damn!

Another reason that the TPP may now be Fubar is that people are finally paying attention to it. And Barack Obama has only himself to blame. He has essentially fingered himself and the neoliberal agenda, for all the world to see.

  If he hadn't publicly and pettily dissed Elizabeth Warren, falsely and chauvinistically accusing her of greed and mendacity, the gossip-loving mainstream press probably wouldn't have bothered with the TPP story.

 His trip to Offshore Sweatshop Central (Nike) last week didn't help his pro-plutocracy public relations campaign, either. Nor did his simultaneous announcement allowing Shell to drill for oil in the ecologically fragile Arctic. Nor did his onslaught of fund-raising for his half-a-billion-dollar Chicago shrine, and his announcement of a sketchy greed-washing "initiative" that would raise money by and for corporations for the ostensible purpose of trickling down to the same minority poor people that Obama's Wall Street-friendly policies have already thrown under the economic bus.

Even Obama's most diehard fans are at least mildly peeved and disappointed with him at this stage. He has skipped Lame Duck mode entirely, prematurely careering straight into Post-Pre$idency Clintonoid Nirvana.

Despite yesterday's heartening victory, we must not rest on our laurels. These people don't quit, and they don't take No for an answer. But their greedy quest for more, more and more suddenly got a whole bunch of new roadblocks in its way, and their journey is not going to be the walk in the privatized park they thought it would be.

Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.

*** 

Before yesterday's Senate vote, the New York Times published an odious little editorial that urged the parties to go along to get along and bipartisanly compromise on the TPP, including whatever fig leaves are necessary to ram it through. Needless to say, readers were neither amused nor placated. My comment:

How is a compromise possible on a treaty whose terms are being kept from the public? How is this possible when the White House has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges details they are allowed to scan only under the watchful eye of the Security State?

Rather than urge a smarmy bipartisan compromise under cover of darkness, I just wish the N.Y. Times had noted how undemocratic this whole process has been. The only reason we know some of the details we do is because of WikiLeaks.

The clause allowing investor state tribunals to subsume sovereign court systems even contains a sub-clause dictating that it remain a classified secret for at least four years from the date of ratification. That's how bad it is. That's how much the billionaires and corporations dictating the terms of this deal know how bad it is, and how much we would hate it if we were allowed to know about it.

As Margot Kaminski of Yale's Information Society Project wrote in a Times op-ed last month, fast track authorization is "little more than a euphemism for Avoid the public, and benefit the fortunate few."

The citizens of the 11 other countries are standing against the secret TPP as well. They're also worried, and rightly so, that multinational corporations headquartered in the US will quickly ignore any labor protections for their low-wage workers built into the agreement as a fig leaf to ease passage.

Free trade agreements kill -- economically, socially, and literally.


*Update: 

It was all pretty much a head fake. We are now back to full-bore Fubar, and Barack Obama has put his damaged middle finger in a splint, the better to screw you with, my dears. The Washington Post reports that the men in a room have reached their deal and agreed to make the currency manipulation a separate bill, thus ensuring that any final TPP package would be acceptable to Japan. Obama must be so relieved.

 The Democrats apparently also got a grudging concession from Republicans on compensation for the American workers becoming collateral damage in the latest attack in the class war -- if and when the TPP and TTIP make corporations free to further depress wages and exploit those abused workers in already ill-protected countries like Vietnam.

So, after yesterday's Kabuki, the full Senate will start their show over with a Thursday matinee, with multiple melodramatic bravura performers vying for attention and lobbyist dollars in the first act of the Plutocrat Grand Prix Theater. Watch those phony plastic traffic cones begin falling like dominoes.

Just more evidence, in case you still needed any, that the much ballyhooed and bemoaned Congressional gridlock the pundits love to kvetch about only applies to measures that might benefit the little people. I hope you didn't waste any of your time today calling your Group of Ten senators with your premature thanks for their phony stance yesterday. I hope you will continue to bombard them with warnings of what they can expect at the ballot box as they "cave" to giving the center-right president authority to turn the screws in utter secrecy. The first tranche of Democratic quislings includes Carper of Delaware, Cantwell and Murray of Washington, Wyden of Oregon, Nelson of Florida, Warner and Kaine of Virginia, Bennet of Colorado, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Cardin of Maryland. These are all Obama needs to supplement the loyalists in his own Republican Party.

Meanwhile, members of the House are expected to vote on Fast Track as early as next month. Get ready for another stampede of lobbyists to make those hordes of holdouts an offer they can't refuse.