Only The Shadow Knows

And he ain't saying, because his Iowa app for the reporting of caucus results mysteriously collapsed on Monday night.

"Shadow" is the name of the app designed by a couple of former Hillary Clinton campaign tech operatives to allegedly "streamline" precinct reporting of the Monday night vote tallies. The only problem is, it failed miserably. Whether it failed by ineptitude or by design doesn't really matter.

 The lack of results, the final announcement of which could be deliberately withheld not by hours but by whole weeks, serves the ultimate purpose of the oligarch-led Democratic Party: It has denied Bernie Sanders his victory speech and it has tried to water down his momentum.

We might have seen this coming after the Des Moines Register abruptly cancelled the release of its pre-caucus polling over the weekend, because one lone pollster allegedly forgot to mention Pete Buttigieg's name to some of the people she called.

The lame excuse offered by the Democratic machine, of "inconsistencies" in the reporting process, is obviously code for "the results showing Bernie to be the blowout winner are inconsistent with the values and desires of the plutocrats who own the place." 

The excuse seems to be backfiring spectacularly, especially as it comes right on the heels of the Democrats' deliberately inept and watered-down impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. It brings back unpleasant memories of the "hanging chad" debacle that allowed the Supreme Court to undemocratically appoint George W. Bush president in 2000. It is also reminiscent of the Obamacare enrollment catastrophe, remnants of which persist to this very day.

I had predicted last week that a computer hack or meltdown preventing voting and/or ballot counting at the national nominating convention might be one party excuse for denying Sanders the nomination. In the interests of "national security" and the defeat of the TrumPutin menace, a hasty superdelegate ballot could then be conducted against a background of manufactured panic to anoint a nominee. Party unity would then become the new definition of patriotism. 

Little did we know that the Democratic machine would get started with their subterfuge so early.

More troubling news is that the Shadow app was launched by ACRONYM, a party-affiliated tech firm which also works for Pete Buttigieg's campaign and which now conveniently disavows any connection with Shadow. Maybe there's an enterprising Wendy out there who can sew it back onto Peter Pan.

 This connection is rendered all the more troubling by Buttigieg's hasty declaration of outright victory on Monday night. Does Buttigieg know what The Shadow knows?

 His connection to the Clinton/Obama-controlled machine is further cemented by his connection to the  Alliance For Democracy, a shadowy consortium of party leaders and wealthy donors.

Many of the Alliance For Democracy's liberal plutocratic members were recently named to  leadership positions in the Democratic National Committee, ostensibly to help effect a brokered nominating convention in Milwaukee this summer.

As the New York Times reported last April:

The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz. The gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center-left wing of the party, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California; Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader; former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., himself a presidential candidate; and the president of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden.

You might remember Schwartz as the oligarch who was embroiled in a bit of a scandal for selling missile technology to China at the same time he was bankrolling the Clintons, who then occupied the White House. He was later exonerated of any wrongdoing by Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno. He is currently a major funder of the centrist, pro-austerity Democratic think tank, Third Way, and also chairs the Rothkopf Group. Its founder, David Rothkopf, is a lobbyist representing the despotic United Arab Emirates and who frequently appears on MSNBC and CNN to tout US-Saudi relations without disclosing his own shadowy affiliations.

It's a tangled web. Follow the money if you can, since it's mostly dark money. Stay on the lookout for the same familiar faces sitting on the same corporate boards and think tanks and corporate cable panels who spout the identical bellicose talking points with the same blatant hypocrisy. They are all too easy to spot.

Meanwhile, internal polling by the Sanders campaign shows him, as expected, to be the de facto blowout winner of the Iowa caucuses. The New York Times and other corporate media outlets have since obligingly removed all traces of his voting lead from their home-pages and relevant apps. 

That's the thing about neoliberal technocrats. They always try to fix what isn't broken. And when they succeed in ruining people's lives and trampling all over their basic human rights - including the right to vote - they never blame themselves. They always blame the latest inexplicable technology glitch or foreign interference. Passive-aggressive is too kind a word for these sociopaths.

This is especially true when they pose as anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc. crime fighters, when all this is really about is an internecine oligarchic mob war, with democracy as the collateral damage.

Ask not what evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women). Simply marvel at the fact that it doesn't much bother lurking any more. It's proudly right out there in the open. It's right in your face.

Nobody could ever have predicted..... don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good... mistakes were made... go screw yourselves.

It's Their Party and They'll Cry If They Want To

They don't call it the Big Tent for nothing. But with the clowder of pedigreed fat cats straining its gilded threads to bursting from within, and the hordes of Bernie Bros of all genders clamoring from without, is it any wonder that the hosts of the Democratic Party are in full-fledged panic mode?

It's such an epidemic of paranoia, it's impossible to call out all the elite victims by name. It would also be unfairly piling on - because do they really need my or anyone else's help to point out how morally diseased they are? They're doing a fine job all by themselves.

Every time they open their mouths, aggrieved Hillary Clinton-fashion, and utter such rote complaints as "Bernie is getting away with murder and there's nobody to stop him!" or "Bernie is Trump!" the more people are finally kicking the habit of skulking like pitiful strays around the Big Gilded Tent, and the more they begin to flee to Bernieville. The hungry and the desperate have been hanging around the gentry gates for far too long, waiting for the occasional pat on the head or the random rancid leftover. They're finally giving up in disgust.

The Gilded Tent dwellers are noticing. And they are very, very offended. But rather than try and entice the downtrodden back with more wholesome and  egalitarian offerings, they're kicking them in the ribs with renewed abandon and wondering why they're so damned ungrateful for this attention. 

The Democratic Party elites think all they really need is a more effective abuser-in-chief candidate with which to herd a nation full of starving cats as they themselves continue to recline on their cushions of luxury.

The abuse is continuing with renewed gusto, evidenced by the Democratic Party's 2020  committee lists of party invitees, gatekeepers and bouncers. Jonathan Swift himself could not have come up with a more hilarious satire, using some of the most reviled names in the history of the modern American oligarchy. Journalist Kevin Gosztola has the rundown of the names here.

We should probably take a little solace from the fact that, unlike in 2016, the party bosses are more open and honest about their pre-rigging of the nominating process and openly boasting that the Party of the People is ruled by wealth and corporate power brokers. They're offering us a jumbo tainted can of Nine Lives and kicking us in the ribs with their diamond-toed jackboots even as they serve it. They really don't care whether we stick around to get sickened and abused. They don't even seem to care whether their faux-nemesis, Donald Trump, gets another term. His continued presence would only continue to enrich them, personally.

To that end, they are engaging in the sham impeachment trial over in the Senate in a passive-aggressive attempt to elicit public sympathy for their corrupt front-runner, Joe Biden. I say passive-aggressive, because they are also effectively throwing him under the bus by making impeachment all about his son Hunter's lucrative gig at Burisma, the Ukraine gas company, at the same time that Biden was running Ukraine foreign policy. Monday's testimony, in fact, was one long Republican attack ad against Biden in particular and the Democrats in general. 

You know you're in trouble when neocon villain John Bolton is designated the Democratic Party's latest action hero.The New York Times actually frames his tell-all book as "Bolton Has the Goods." It's reached the point where we should be happy if one of the world's most notorious war-mongering bad guys makes another bad guy look worse.

Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating. And his decision to tell these stories publicly nearly certainly waives any claims of executive privilege Mr. Trump might try to assert over their communications.

Translation: Bolton is no pink pussy hat, so you gotta believe him.

 Pick a side, any side. Heads they win, tails you lose.

In a sane, just world, Bernie Sanders would win the presidential nomination. But since it is not a sane, just world, look for worse Democratic Party machinations in the coming months, with the paranoid punditry enhanced by primary voter registration purges as the electoral season enters its final stages.

Then steel yourselves for a contested convention, regardless of the delegate count and regardless of Bernie's national popularity.

When a physically and mentally ailing FDR was running for the fourth time in 1944, it was widely acknowledged that he would not outlive his term. The vice presidency thus became the crux of the contest. Democratic machine bosses didn't want the progressive incumbent, Henry A. Wallace, to be the successor. The popular Wallace that July was polling at more than 60 percent nationally while the elite machine choice, Harry Truman, was at a dismal nine percent. 

As Wallace's biographers John Culver and John Hyde recount in their book American Dreamer, just as he was about to be renominated by raucous acclaim at the Chicago convention, Boss Bob Hannegan ordered his minions to fling open the doors, allowing hundreds of people into the already packed arena. A city worker was dispatched with an ax in order to cut power cables. if necessary. Liberal Florida Senator Claude Pepper had his own microphone cut off and path blocked just as he was about to take the stage and formally place Wallace's name in nomination.

The convention was abruptly ordered adjourned on grounds of the fire hazard which the bosses themselves had deliberately created by overcrowding the building. From American Dreamer:

Overnight the bosses worked feverishly to secure Truman's nomination. Ambassadorships were offered. Postmaster positions were handed out. Cold cash exchanged hands... (On the following night when the convention reopened) Chicago policemen strictly limited admission to the stadium. Thousands of Wallace supporters were denied entrance and those who made it were scattered hither and yon.... 'Some of them were so far apart they had to signal each other with flashlights,' said a radio newsman. Large portions of the galleries were left altogether empty."

After nine grueling hours and a procession of "favorite son" nominations, Wallace won by a too-slim hundred or so votes on the first ballot. But during the second ballot, as was foreordained, delegates began falling like dominoes in favor of Truman.

Look for a similar scenario in Milwaukee this summer. Since technology has advanced far beyond hand-held axes to cut off electricity, we might look for a mysterious computer crash to impede the voting. Or maybe a terror threat will adjourn the proceedings until they can reconvene for sausage making in a closed room in the interests of public safety and "national security."  The bribery and backroom dealings will still be at their usual retrograde levels, as will the massive police presence.

The stacking of the 2020 Democratic Party leadership with oligarchs and lobbyists and warmongers and centrist think tankers (and a few token pro-business union bosses) is only the beginning. Now, as in 1944, a brokered convention looks all but inevitable. Bernie Sanders could win, or appear to be winning, on a first ballot and still be denied the nomination on the superdelegate-heavy second. The bribery as well as the nominating committee is already a done deal.

So forewarned is forearmed. This is going to be very, very ugly.

Maybe DNC Chair Tom Perez can enhance the mood and score another coup for the McCarthyite Democrats by getting John Bolton a prime-time speaking spot at the convention. It would be a great way to boost the party's neoconservative war-happy cred and swell its coffers with even more weapons and oil industry support. Since the tainted cat food of the past four transpartisan decades of neoliberal austerity doesn't attract stray voters any more, the bosses might as well add the seductive stench of blood to their mass-marketing of fear.

Poor People Are Not "Cases"

But that doesn't stop the New York Times from archaically referring to them as such, as evidenced by its 108th annual holiday charity campaign still known as the Neediest Cases Fund.

Until the 1970s, the initiative was called The Hundred Neediest Cases, with all the stories of individual heartbreak and hard luck dumped into one special edition of the newspaper in a feast of what can only be called poverty porn. In subsequent years,  in an effort to be more respectful to the needy in light of the rising political right wing's demonization of the poor and welfare programs, the charity drive began spreading out its articles from November through January every year. And rather than administering the fund itself, the Times began farming out the selection process to various religious and secular social service agencies in the city.

Despite a surface attempt at enlightened sensitivity, the paper still refers to recipients as "cases" rather than as human beings. This term connotes both pathology and criminality, as in a case of tuberculosis or a court case - or at best, equates a human being with an academic exercise.

Attitudes toward the poor have not, in fact, changed, Here's what the great muckraker Upton Sinclair had to say about the Times's Neediest Cases a hundred years ago, during our previous Gilded Age of obscene wealth inequality:

The Times never goes into the question about the social system which produces these harrowing cases, nor does it allow anyone else to go into this question: what it does is to present a hundred victims of the system with enough money to preserve them until the following December, so that they may again enter into competition for mention in the list, and have their miseries exploited by the Times.

Of course, recipients of the fund did not and still do not receive anywhere near what they need to sustain themselves for another year. They don't receive any direct cash aid at all, in fact.  Upton Sinclair certainly didn't foresee the Neoliberal Project and philanthrocapitalism and tax dodges and corporate branding factoring in to the Neediest Cases fund the way they insidiously factor in to the newspaper's initiative today. Although individual and corporate donors are no longer listed by name, they very much remain integral characters in the newspaper's flashy profiles of its "needy cases."

For example, a piece ostensibly about a struggling single mother with three teenage daughters morphs into a plug for corporate giant Procter and Gamble's "End Period Poverty" program of donating pads and tampons to a measly 20 food banks in the United States. Another story , about the Jazzy Jumpers, a double dutch jump-roping team based in a Brooklyn housing project, points out that these deserving youths have appeared in TV commercials for Google and Madewell. The team was awarded $32,000 to pay for uniforms, coaching and tour expenses.

One common theme in the neoliberally-defined poverty industry is getting people off minimum wage jobs and food stamps - if not out of unhealthy overcrowded extended family living situations - into subsidized internships and STEM programs of study. One young woman received a $300 grant from the Neediest fund to "dress for success" while she networks. in hopes of one day landing a job in cybersecurity at the NSA. Her onerous $3,000 student debt from a year of community college, however, is still on her.

Other stories chronicle the Neediest Cases who have made it their life's work to "give back" to the same programs that once helped them. A mother of a child with autism was given a low-wage teaching assistant job at the preschool while she still shares a two-bedroom apartment with her daughter, her sister, her parents and two nephews. The Neediest Cases fund thus gave her a $200 Visa (plug!) gift card with which to buy her child sneakers and boots. Priceless! In exchange for this reward, the mom and child posed rather awkwardly for several stylized color New York Times photos.

In another heart-rending "case" described by the Times, there's a grandfather with kidney failure and heart trouble, a mom with high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes, and a bullied learning-disabled daughter all living in a rat-infested apartment with no working bathroom sink. However, since enrolling in a mentoring program and getting a $550 laptop computer from one of the paper's outsourced social service agencies, this lucky winner proclaims herself grateful for the opportunity to browse on the Internet in search of other opportunities.

As the Times's Neediest Cases drive goes into its third month, readers have donated a little over $3 million for struggling people living in the Income Disparity Capital of the country. This isn't very much at all, considering that there are now 112 billionaires living in New York City, up from 109 a year ago. One out of every seven billionaires calls the Big Apple home.

Nothing much has changed in the century since Upton Sinclair wrote his critique of the Neediest Cases initiative. On the same Sunday in 1919 that featured the hundred people in need of help, he noticed another article:

Young Mr. Vincent Astor was erecting his country estate at a cost of one million dollars. This building was for the use of Astor and his friends; it had no place for the public. It was devoted to tennis and swimming and gymnastics; it had no place for literature. music, art, science, or religion - it was a typical product of the private property regime. 

Astor, of course, would be a multibillionaire today and his estate would have risen in value to the hundreds of millions. The difference is that today's oligarchs have much more of a direct influence on politics than they did in the first age of the Robber Barons.

Juxtaposed with the Times's self-congratulatory, feel-good, lushly illustrated Neediest Cases series in 2019 is the saga of billionaire Democratic donor Craig Hill,trapped in his Swarovski crystal-infested wine cave in Napa Valley, California. He is incensed that he has been singled out by Elizabeth Warren as one of the corrupt political system's Greediest Cases -  just because he gave a lavish fundraiser for wealth-serving centrist presidential contender Pete Buttigieg. 

This poor mogul must feel every bit as exploited as the Times's "cases."

"I'm just a pawn here," he groused to the Times, which noted that he has given more than $2 million to such needy candidates as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. That's about two-thirds the amount raised thus far this season by the Times Neediest Cases drive. 

Something tells me that our priorities are as seriously screwed up as they ever were in the Land of the Free Market.

Cranky Dem Governors Kvetch At Crabfest

They aren't cranky because a fascistic president just put a target on a congresswoman's back, or because children are still being held in concentration camps at the southern border, or because the planet is alternately burning up and flooding, or that 30 million Americans still have no health insurance.

They're cranky because they think their party is turning a little too far to the left for the ease and comfort of the very tiny handful of very important people that the Democratic Party now represents.

They're so cranky it's a wonder they didn't choke on all the seafood delights they constantly gnawed upon as they kvetched to each other, to their wealthy donors, and to a select group of corporate media representatives at their annual retreat last weekend.

At least they were sweating due to their own anxiety, and not from the record heat wave engulfing much of the US. That's because the location of their luxury junket was Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where fresh breezes off the Atlantic vied with the human windbags gathered together to liberally ignore the fact that millions of their alleged constituents are suffering constant, gnawing anxiety over how they're going to make next month's rent payment and how they're going to put another meal on the table.

As reported by the New York Times' Jonathan Martin, one of the corporate journos lucky enough to score an invitation to the elite Crabfest,

A group of governors are alarmed that their party’s presidential candidates are embracing policies they see as unrealistic and politically risky. And they are especially concerned about proposals that would eliminate private health insurance.
“I don’t think that’s good policy or good politics,” said Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Raimondo is a former venture capitalist who sold one of her own investment funds to the Rhode Island state pension plan before she entered politics and from which she continues to personally profit. Despite the fund's poor performance, the state's public employees are unable to divest from it, because the owners (comprised mainly of the governor's friends and family) refuse to give their permission. Doing so might make them very anxious. As an insurance policy, it wouldn't be good politics as pertains to their own financial health.

Forbes's Eric Seidle explains the scam:

The pension was scheduled to exit Raimondo’s fund in 2016 but the firm, supposedly exercising its discretion under a secret agreement the state supposedly signed, unilaterally extended the life of the investment in 2017 and again in 2018....
The very fact that an investment, shrouded in secrecy and foisted on the state pension by the now-Governor, has continued to lose money for the pension and pay money to Raimondo for the past thirteen years—with no end in sight—should demand enhanced disclosure and public scrutiny, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Gina Raimondo had "reformed" the state's public pension plan during her first term by farming more of it out to Wall Street and eliminating cost of living increases, warning that the plan would go bankrupt without such changes. She accomplished this feat while keeping her own personal interest in the scheme a secret from the public.

So Raimondo, far from being anxious about her own state's judicial and legislative oversight branches ever holding her to account for self-dealing and corruption, crabbily lectured her assorted Nantucket cronies that "we can't become the party of the checklist" and that instead, the Democratic presidential candidates must adhere to the economic needs of "everyday Americans" -- meaning, presumably, Americans who make at a minimum a thousand dollars every single day and who write the checks to the politicians.

She also took a thinly-veiled swipe at the influential "Squad" of progressive congresswomen with popular social media profiles who are calling for Medicare For All, an end to cruel immigration enforcement practices and a Green New Deal.

“A month or two before my primary I was getting crushed on social media,” Ms. Raimondo said, recalling the challenge she had from the left last year. “My friends were calling me, saying, ‘Gina you’re going down’ and then we won by 20 points.”

It's not just Trump fans who vote against their own economic interests. When people can be manipulated by the fear-mongering propaganda of shady elite rulers, they become complicit in their own destruction.

The human frogs that politicians like Gina Raimondo stick in the slowly simmering pot never know what's hitting them until it's way too late. Unlike the lobsters that she and her gubernatorial cohort scarfed down by the pound in Nantucket last weekend, we become so stunned that we don't even have time to scream. 

So until and unless we ourselves stop internalizing the dangerous neoliberal dogma that "there is no alternative" to cutthroat capitalism, there will be no change and no real improvement in our lives.

We have to instead capitalize on the current paranoia and anxiety of the ruling class and make them choke on their own excess. Self-awareness of our own complicity in their cruel game is key, and the necessary first step. Then comes solidarity with our fellow frogs. And then comes the will to finally organize ourselves enough to jump out of the pot, en masse, and take over the whole feast.

Ribbit.

The Turn of the Pelosi Screw

Much like the paranoid governess in the Henry James novella, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be melting down faster with every passing summer day.

I probably shouldn't even delicately ascribe her recent bizarre verbal attacks upon "The Squad" of four newly elected progressive women to run-of-the-mill derangement. Because since reading the Maureen Dowd column in Sunday's New York Times and other accounts, in which Pelosi characterizes both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump as harmless "glasses of water" I keep getting a mental picture of Pelosi as the Wicked Witch of the West, melting down into a sorry puddle after getting deservedly doused with that same glass of water.

Actually, the putrid puddle image that I can't get out of my head vies with the equally ugly picture that the Dowd column conjured up: the stiletto heel of Pelosi's expensively shod (Manolo purple pump, retail $995) right foot stomping on and grinding progressive policies into a pulp, while her weaker left appendage flirtatiously but ineffectually plays footsie with Donald Trump and the Republicans under the table.

That Pelosi is more attuned to the Republican side of the Duopoly, and that she despises progressive Democrats with every fiber of her being is also becoming more painfully obvious by the day. In fact, she is beginning to sound a lot like the authoritarian Trump himself, with her strident demands to her caucus for loyalty to party over loyalty to constituents and country.

As a carefully leaked, anonymously sourced piece in Politico described it,

Speaker Nancy Pelosi chided progressives in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, calling on them to address their intraparty grievances privately rather than blasting their centrist colleagues on Twitter. Pelos's comments, which were described as stern, came during the first full caucus meeting since a major blowup over emergency border funding last month between progressive and moderate lawmakers as well as a recent spat with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her freshman allies.
"So, again, you got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it," Pelosi told Democrats, according to a source in the room. "But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK."

Harrumph. This from the same politician who went to the New York Times and complained so peevishly and publicly about The Squad, and thought it would be O.K. and that her progressive targets would not in their own turn react publicly and very negatively to her clumsy gaslighting attempt.

Of course, this whole "Ballad of the Cat-fight Cafe" narrative was from the very beginning the joint project of the corporate Democratic Party and the Times. All Dowd had to do was pick up and expand upon the contrived propaganda narrative ("The Mighty Moderates Vs. AOC")  written the previous week by her colleague Julie Hirschfeld Davis, a piece which I critiqued here. This anti-progressive narrative was in its own turn a companion piece to the longer-running blockbuster series called "The Ruling Class Vs. Bernie Sanders," which is now on temporary hiatus thanks to his slight fall in the polls. But as soon as he becomes a clear threat or when he openly attacks Joe Biden, the Times will be back on the offensive. For the time being, it's the dangerously popular AOC who serves as the convenient proxy in the Class War of the rich vs. the rest of us.

But now there's a glitch in their offensive. AOC noticed and vocalized the inconvenient fact that the "Squad" which Pelosi denigrates is all comprised of women of color, and they have received death threats. The "race card" is being played in the Mighty Moderates vs. AOC game, and the Democrats and the corporate media are beginning to panic. There is a clear and present danger that the identity politics which the liberal class has long used as a diversionary tactic is in danger of collapse from the now racially charged intraparty angst. Without identity politics to divert attention from the corporate Democrats' lack of attention to the economic woes of the electorate, they have nothing.

It looks even worse for Madam Speaker and her "lieutenants." To prove his own devotion to the Game of Bipartisan Footsie in service to the rich, Donald Trump himself has gallantly come to Nancy Pelosi's defense in a cynical attempt to justify the GOP's own racist attacks on AOC and the other three women. "I'll tell you something about Nancy Pelosi that you know better than I do. She is not a racist!" he told the media as he made preparations to rip apart up to 2,000 more immigrant families via ICE deportation raids this weekend.

So the personality politics-driven Family Feud Franchise which the Times itself instigated at the behest of Pelosi and the Democratic leadership is backfiring right in their faces. But rather than admit their own complicity, the same media outlets that over-hyped the Narrative all week are now criticizing their own story without taking responsibility for it. It apparently sprang fully formed from the ether without any assistance from them at all. 

The TrumPelosi Minuet

As the Atlantic now reports, the whole Pelosi-AOC Catfight Narrative was pretty much a fraud from the get-go, because the Democrats have always been united, and so enough with the Narrative already. It is certainly not the Media's fault, writes David A. Graham:

There’s no reason to blame the media for simply reporting shots that the two sides are taking at each other. Insofar as there’s a “Democrats in disarray” narrative in place, it’s because the Democrats are shouting at one another from the rooftops.
Yet the rhetorical sparring does obscure a broader Democratic unity. The border-funding vote aside, there’s barely any daylight between Democrats on matters actually before the House. The Squad has broken with Pelosi on just two votes so far, according to ProPublica’s tracker. The gap between the party’s moderate and left wings is relatively small, too. Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, have parted ways on just 13 percent of votes; Omar and Representative Max Rose, who’s more pragmatic than ideological, on 7 percent of votes.

They're trying to put the toothpaste that they themselves just squeezed out in big fat globs back into the tube.

They're trying to mop up the toxic Pelosi puddle and and wring it back into the glass and call it pure sparkling water.

But it's still sludge. And there's still a sharp, mean, nasty designer stiletto heel lurking just beneath the surface, ready to stomp and screw even mildly progressive policy ideas at a moment's notice.

Meanwhile, all that Nancy Pelosi can tell the two thousand terrorized immigrant families who are the targets of Trump's upcoming deportation sweep is to simply not answer their doors when the ICE troops come politely knocking, crowbars and guns at the ready.

She sounds like Nancy Reagan telling people to Just Say No to drugs at the very same time that her husband's CIA was filling poor neighborhoods with crack cocaine and millions of people started getting swept up and jailed in the Duopoly's racist war on drugs.

Meanwhile, the corporate media mostly ignored the large immigrant protest at Joe Biden's Philadelphia campaign headquarters on Wednesday, the very same day Pelosi was warning her caucus to shut up. Six people were arrested for staging a sit-in and demanding that the former vice president apologize for the Obama administration's record deportations of 3 million immigrants. Biden has thus far preferred not to, remaining behind locked doors at some undisclosed location.

How does the screw turn? Let us count the ways.

So forget about locking our doors. We need to show up at their doors, right where they hide and they cower, starting in the hallowed halls of Congress, and wherever centrist candidates set up shop.

**Update, 7/13: The protesters caught up with Biden in New Hampshire on Friday afternoon, when he discovered to his great chagrin that uttering the word "Barack" doesn't necessarily elicit cheers of adulation and/or moans of nostalgia. Literally stuck between the protesters and a river (also containing kayaking protesters) Biden had no choice but to mutter sorry for deporting millions of innocent people, not sorry for deporting a relative handful of people with felony records. The confrontation pointed to one of the few positive aspects of this interminable campaign season - it has greatly extended the period of time in which regular people are allowed to afflict the office-seeking powerful and comfortable.

Smart Adult Cruelty

The news that hunger-striking imprisoned migrants in Texas are now being force-fed, in clear violation of international human rights statutes against torture, is being greeted with a collective yawn from the adults in the Bipartisan Caucus For Sadistic Sanity.

It's not about the physical torture, you see. That is something that everyday Americans are not allowed to see on their TVs. Force-feeding is a really disturbing thing to witness, according to Human Rights Watch:

Force-feeding – which involves pushing a feeding tube down a patient’s nose – can be very painful and is inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Medical ethics and human rights norms generally prohibit the force feeding of detainees who are competent and capable of rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food. A relative of two men being force-fed with nasal tubes by ICE told the AP the men are having persistent nose bleeds and vomiting several times a day.

Even Human Rights Watch is so squeamish that it initially refers to imprisoned migrants as "patients." 

 Meanwhile, the controversy that is truly roiling the media-political complex is the cruel semantics of the Trumpian wall-talk, and how they can overcome it. The obvious profitable solution to the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over Trump's demand for a wall is simply to use the word "smart" when describing how to punish, track, harass, terrorize, torture, cage and deport brown-skinned people fleeing for their lives from some of the same countries the US has destabilized over decades of regime change and economic plunder. What adult in the room doesn't love technology?

His threats of an emergency declaration to force the military to construct a physical barrier notwithstanding, even Donald Trump is now reportedly eager to jump on the Smart Xenophobe bandwagon in order to save face after his various concrete and steel wall proposals all crumbled into dust last week with the temporary reopening of the government. As The Hill reports:

Tech companies are increasingly bullish on building a "smart wall," which would incorporate new technologies to beef up security on the southern border.
Many firms see a potential windfall with both Democrats and Republicans floating the idea of tech improvements as an alternative to President Trump's call for a steel barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats have said they would back as much as $5.7 billion for a smart wall. Trump himself discussed the idea when announcing the deal to end the recent government shutdown.

Trump ruefully had to admit that walls and moats are medieval, whereas Reaper drones and cameras are modern and efficient and smart. This is especially true since the state of Israel is ready, willing and able to share its own long expertise in controlling the undesirable humans imprisoned in its open-air Palestinian gulag from breaching that border. One such company, Elbit Systems, is eager to line the entire Arizona-Mexico border not with Trump's dumb retrograde wall, but with a virtual barrier of smart modern towers decked out with radar and cameras.

Montana Senator Jon Tester wants to award a contract to a Montana company  for a long, snaking, smart underground wall of fiberoptic cable that would alert the border patrol every time somebody takes a step or even draws a trembling breath. This is not at all the same kind of corrupt bribery scheme as Trump conniving and colluding to build a luxury tower in Moscow. For one thing, it's smart legalized corruption.

The main catch to all this smartness and modernity, according to civil libertarians, is that US citizens will also unavoidably be caught up in the surveillance and the terror. No technology can differentiate upstanding American human citizens in border states from non-US humans, because nationality and race are not biological constructs. 

"Legal" residents of border states, therefore, might not like government drones constantly buzzing above their heads or watching facial recognition technology stations being installed in their backyards, even if it is for the profitable national security of unfettered multinational capitalists.

Smart experts insist it is only what people can actually see that can hurt and scare them and therefore endanger the security and profits of the multinational tech companies. Maybe once the experts can figure out how to make drones and surveillance towers as invisible as their torture chambers they'll have better luck winning over American hearts and minds.

A More Diverse Oligarchy

The corporations that effectively own the place don't need to be taxed or prosecuted in order to alleviate wealth inequality and stop corruption. 

They simply need to install a few more women and black and brown people at the top, and all will be status quo glorious for the oligarchy and continuously bad for the majority of people. Look at how well (until Russophobia, Inc. anyway) that's worked out for Facebook and its chief operating officer, billionaire Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg. Having a woman in charge of the massive theft of personal data from users while she sells corporate feminism to minimum wage workers is just what the ruling class needs to pretend that we still have a democracy.

With that bullshit in mind, Maxine Waters, the incoming Democratic chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, vows to hold corporations' feet to the fire and force them to disclose how many women and black and brown people they have placed in their top executive positions. This will absolve the Democrats of not doing anything so drastic as investigating corporate malfeasance and rectifying our worsening wealth inequality. It will make the public forget that they have no intention of reversing Trump's massive tax give-away to the rich.

The viewing public, they figure, will be further placated when said corporations play their own parts of pretending to be seriously rattled by this bold new plan. According to Politico,

Some firms are panicking at the prospect of new public scrutiny, according to lobbyists, who say that while companies won’t openly fight Democrats' moves to promote diversity, many are uneasy about the prospect of government getting directly involved in their hiring decisions.

The Democrats' pretense of meddling in private corporate affairs for the greater public good will then have the contrived salutory effect of Republicans accusing them of overreach and socialism. Regular people will take sides over which oligarchic cartel they'll be rooting for. Conservatives will accuse snowflake liberals of wanting too many safe spaces, and liberals will accuse conservatives of racism and misogyny. And it is so unfair, because all that the Democrats want is to make CEOs making about 300 times the salary of their average workers feel just a little bit "uncomfortable" before they lap up all that good press about their brave noble decisions to do the right diversionary diverse thing.

 The only real winners will be the neoliberal corporatists, both within and without Congress. They'll be able to continue lecturing poor and dark-hued people that all they need to succeed, like their latest brown female corporate vice president, is to transform themselves into bootstrapping entrepreneurial strivers. Of course, the cynical narrative of trickle-down racial and gender equality is nothing but a big P.R. campaign. It's similar to the manufactured brouhaha over the "Oscars So White" scandal that hit Hollywood before the Harvey Weinstein scandal upstaged it. More black and brown Academy Award winners do not protect impoverished people in Ferguson, Missouri and Flint, Michigan from police brutality and poisoned water. A Latina esconced in the Wells Fargo boardroom does not erase private equity vultures like Blackstone  buying up thousands of foreclosed homes and then renting them back out to the same people who already were evicted from them once for failure to keep up with their predatory subprime loan payments.  

The have-nots and oppressed will just have to remain hopeful and grateful that at least their "stories" are being told on corporate media, and on Netflix and Amazon. They will be recognized, if not directly helped. 

So, as Donald Trump just tweeted out regarding the government shutdown, everybody just lighten up already. The human poop piling up in our national parks because of overflowing toilets is nothing compared to the avalanche of oligarchic crap threatening to bury us alive in this shiny new year.

They don't even try to hide the sleazy collusion from the viewing public any more.

Corporations and industry groups have already sought to make inroads with lawmakers who will highlight the issue on Capitol Hill, according to lawmakers and lobbyists. Some, including Amazon and the Bank Policy Institute, have even recently hired staff from the Congressional Black Caucus to build relationships as Democrats take over.

Um... isn't it illegal, or at least an amoral conflict of interest, for Congressional staffers who are paid by the public to simultaneously work for Amazon and Wall Street? 

I'll give Trump this: he has made it safe for the Duopoly to be openly corrupt. People are so jaded by him that they aren't even bothered by his slightly more refined imitators. No wonder he is so upset, holed up in the White House and demanding billions of dollars for his precious wall. He isn't getting the credit for normalizing political crime that he so richly deserves.

Just look at the Democratic congress critters angling for leadership on the various proposed subcommittees designed to afflict Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Carolyn Maloney of New York says she wants to clamp down on markets and demand answers  from the Securities & Exchange Commission, notwithstanding her receipt of more than a quarter-million bucks in campaign cash in 2017 from some of the same industries and banks she proposes to politely needle, if not actually regulate. Her latest listed top contributors are mega-landlord Blackrock and Goldman Sachs.

Gregory Meeks, also of New York, also wants to chair a subcommittee designed to demand gender and racial diversity within the ranks of the malefactors of great wealth. That way, he can continue collecting the big bucks from Goldman Sachs and other major players from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the ruling class so as to avoid confronting them over the rent scams and mortgage and foreclosure frauds aimed largely at women and minorities.

Meeks said he has started talking to companies, and financial trade associations have begun reaching out to him.

With their checkbooks, I would hope.

"Some companies acknowledge that it's good for business," Meeks said. "I'm not asking them to do anything that's bad for business. This will help them attract more folks to their institutions."

I assume that this includes Meeks's staff and last but least, Meeks himself. They are just plain folks, after all, whose bottom line must hold at all costs to everyone but themselves. Never forget Noam Chomsky's advice that, whenever you hear a politician utter the word "folks," you should run for your life. Meeks sounds almost as grotesque with that quote as the corporate Democrats' new darling, George W. Bush, who once talked about the "terrorist folks" to whom he both sold weapons and killed back when liberals pretended to despise him so much.

What, after all, are the too big to fail/jail banks but financial terrorist folks?

So here's to a happy 2019 to everybody except the corporate Democrats and the insane Republicans who must pretend to loathe them. Heads they win, tails we all lose.

Unless, of course, America foregoes the gruesome, ad-glutted crystal ball drop in Times Square and starts celebrating our winter holidays the healthy French way:

A President Pardons Himself

I'm not talking about Donald Trump's latest tweet.

I'm talking about Bill Clinton's latest interview, which aired on NBC Monday morning.

He was on TV to plug his new book, a "thriller" co-written with James Patterson, when the questions veered off into the Me Too movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Needless to say, Clinton was not too thrilled when past episodes of his sexual predations came back to haunt him.

Borrowing a page from the playbook of long-suffering wife Hillary, who once complained that she and Bill were "dead broke" from legal bills by the time they left the White House, necessitating a new career of extreme money-grubbing just to make ends meet, the former president portrayed himself as the real victim of his tryst with a White House intern.

As such, he's never felt the need to apologize to Lewinsky, whose own public profile and "wokeness" to the lopsided power dynamics of the affair has risen as much as Clinton's has fallen in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein crime spree and other revelations of bad behavior in the highest places. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, plus the accusations of outright sexual assault have, as Hillary parsed it during her latest political campaign, already been "litigated" and are therefore not open to further serious discussion -- MeToo movement, or no MeToo movement.

Even if he were president today, Clinton insisted, the movement would do nothing to change how he viewed the Lewinsky episode.

“I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” he whined in his best legal parsing fashion, bringing back memories of "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." (So much for his jab at Trump and the previously unheard-of phenomenon of "fake news" emanating from the mouths of government officials.)

He said he has never spoken to her let alone apologized to her in the decades following. Why should he? He already took the initiative, made his generic proxy apology once to the whole globe, for crying out loud. This unforced apology apparently inspired him so much that he then went on to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from the Clinton Global Initiative branch of his family foundation. 

In exonerating himself yet again on Monday, Clinton gave the feeblest possible compliment to the MeToo movement, parsing his approval with the disclaimer that he "disagree(s) with some of the decisions that have been made." He didn't say if he was referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's belated decision to charge Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein even after Vance had accepted campaign donations from him, albeit carefully and legally funneled through the disgraced mogul's lawyer.

Vance said he has since returned Weinstein's cash. The Clintons, though, carefully parsing to the end, dodged the issue by claiming all Weinstein's donations to their Initiative and Foundation had already been given away to charity anyway, so they cannot possibly return the money. As far as her political campaign chest goes, since Weinstein was largely a "bundler" of millions of dollars from his fellow oligarchs, she won't be returning that money, either. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, has falsely claimed that since the campaign was over anyway, they couldn't possibly even return Weinstein's own personal donation. (The campaign is over, of course, but as FactCheck.org notes, the excess cash was deftly funneled right into her super-pac, Onward Together.)


***

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has apparently pardoned himself for his own role in giving us Donald Trump by promoting Hillary Clinton, not to mention rewarding Wall Street over Main Street during his eight-year tenure, ensuring that the richest  Americans clawed back 94% of all the trillions of household wealth "lost" in the wake of the 2007-08 financial meltdown.

 The D.C. Bubble is full to bursting about of the latest blame-game book, this one from one of his former flacks, one-time aspirational novelist and national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes. Since I don't have my barf bucket close to hand at the moment, I'll just refer you to one nauseating positive review from the New York Times's resident palace stenographer, and to another much more palatable one from the New York Times's resident style maven.

Long story short: Obama was shaken, if not stirred, by Trump's victory. He confided to his flacks that the ingrates of America were just not ready for his awesomeness. The legend in his own time turns out to have been about ten or twenty years ahead of his time. So it's our bad, Bottom 90% of America.

But just in case you're concerned that Obama is wallowing in a dysfunctional depression like tens of millions of bad and unready Americans, you'll be happy to learn that fresh off inking his reputed $50 million production deal with Netflix, he'll be the headline act at a major Hollywood bash later this month. He will sell intimate access to his cool self for a cool $100,000 a pop. (the flashbulb kind, not the unwanted and odious Clinton/Weinstein kind.)

 “I am very excited to announce that President Barack Obama will be joining DNC Chair Tom Perez in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 28 to headline his first fundraising event for the DNC on the West Coast this year,” said the invite to the $2,700 to $100,000 priced event. “This will be a rare opportunity to spend an evening with President Obama,” the pitch added. “While at the event, President Obama and Chair Perez will discuss the strategy of the Democratic Party for winning elections in 2018 and beyond.”

And the Democratic functionaries still wonder why the party lost a thousand seats during the Obama years, not to mention a huge hunk of the working class vote to Donald Trump's paranoid-style populism. 

Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter took a much-needed break from building Habitat for Humanity houses last week, and visited a North Carolina McDonald's restaurant for an egg biscuit and a "senior" cup of coffee with his wife Rosalynn. And he isn't even running for anything.

He also isn't getting invited to headline Hollywood fundraisers or to appear on the Today show.

Brutalism We Can Believe In

Barack and Michelle Obama parachuted down to Chicago this week to unveil plans for their "family-friendly" $500 million architectural marvel.

This is their idea of family friendliness:

The Obama Center

Gee. Where have we seen this warm, comfy style of architecture before? Oh, now I remember. It's ye olde Aztec temple where all the families used to gather to watch their relatives get sacrificed in order to appease some chronically peevish deities who bore a striking resemblance to our own pantheon of Forbes 400 billionaires.

The Aztec Center

It's not as though people haven't been warned. As the blurb for The Obama Center so seductively purrs: "Greater Designers Design With Mankind in Mind."

And Obama has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing more than To Serve Man for the rest of his life. His library will be so much more than "an ego trip," he gushed. By boasting that it will even include facilities for "family barbecues", he was giving us very fair warning indeed. Why else construct his monolithic edifice with such monstrously awe-inspiring blocks of stone reminiscent of barbaric regimes past? I suppose that once you've enjoyed the power to order thousands of extrajudicial drone killings, it must be very hard to kick the cruelty habit.

"Through participatory and immersive experiences, the Center will tell Barack and Michelle Obama's story," the Obama Center website ominously intones, "while lifting the hood on the mechanics of change and inspiring visitors to spark their own."

I am starting to not like this. I am starting to get scared. There are already too many allusions to drowning and burning in this enterprise for my particular taste. What are we anyway -- hamburgers and weenies to be poked and prodded for doneness when the barbeque hood is lifted? Or are we nothing but failing engines in dire need of the Barack and Michelle lube job special?

Generously forgoing their usual $600,000 joint appearance fee in order to display their "renderings," the Obamas appeared relaxed after a three month series of tropical vacations. According to the New York Times,

 Speaking to several hundred people on the city’s South Side, Mr. Obama, who was tieless and in a jovial mood, said that the center could be “a transformational project for this community.”

“The main thing that Michelle and I contributed was just saying, ‘What is it that we want to see 10 years from now?’” he said, recounting his conversations with the architects who designed the center. “And we don’t want to see some big building that’s dead, and kids are getting dragged to it for a field trip. What we wanted was something that was alive, and that was a hub for the community and for the city and for the country.”

 (snip)

Mr. Obama said he wanted his library to include a children’s play area that would attract families from the neighborhood, and a community garden for schoolchildren. He said he wanted food trucks and some grills so people can barbecue, prompting chuckles from the crowd.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked. “We don’t have any folks who grill here? I thought this was the South Side of Chicago!

The Aztec kings also attracted families to their temples with food and games and music and bling in order to make the sacrificial experience and the repayment of onerous debt to rent-seeking deities a fun time for everybody. The chuckling wealthy donors in Obama's crowd were simply ignoring history as much as Donald Trump (who already has too many numerous shrines to even mention) when they so snobbishly snicker over the basic needs of the masses. Even Obama himself was being deliberately disingenuous, what with pretending that the oligarchs in his audience don't have "people" to do all their cooking for them. 

 Because Mrs. Obama lamented that Jackson Park did not have hills when she was a child growing up in the nearby South Shore neighborhood, Mr. Obama said the presidential center would be outfitted with a sledding hill.

Not that the Obama family will ever have to use a measly old sledding hill, given their annual luxury vacations to Aspen, courtesy of the war-profiteering and drone-manufacturing Crown family, the early financiers of his political career.

 Mr. Obama said he envisioned “a studio where I can invite Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg to do workshops on how to make films,” and “a recording studio where I could invite Chance or Bruce Springsteen, depending on your tastes, to talk about how you could record music that has social commentary and meaning.”

Oh, now I get it. It won't just be a temple, it will also be a Prince-style recording studio and oligarchic party venue all wrapped up into one big monolith. All Barry will have to do is snap his fingers and the mega-celebrities of the world will appear like magic to do his bidding. And every once in awhile, the sledding and barbecuing hoi polloi might even get invited in to gawk and be inspired, and forget that they haven't gotten a real raise in decades and that they will owe hundreds of thousands in student debt until the day they prematurely die. It's no accident that the chairman of the Obama Foundation is Martin Nesbitt, Barry's best friend.  Nesbitt is the founder of the private equity group that purchased the crooked for-profit University of Phoenix, which has profited so mightily off unpayable student debt. Some of the same Wall Street characters who comprised Obama's cabinet have now spun through the revolving doors to feed at the trough of Obama's money-laundering post presidential career.

But forget about your cares and woes and Obama's historical corruption. There's always plenty of mush to consume from his New York Times-assisted public relations campaign:

“What we want this to be is the world’s premier institution for training young people in leadership to make a difference in their countries, in their communities and in the world,” he said.

Not just any institution, but the best, most premier institution on the entire planet. Stop by for a quick training session and be ready to go back to any third world country or neighborhood with some really premier neoliberal propaganda to appease the millions of people worried about where their next meal is coming from.

It's eerie that Obama's mantra of "giving back to the community" is the same dogma employed in the sacrificial rites of the Aztecs. In one ritual, the designated victim was made to intone, right before his or her heart was cut out: "I embrace mankind. I give myself back to the community." 

 So I don't understand why Obama tiptoes around the reality that we actually are the next meal for the global billionaire class of ravenous and malevolent gods. 

***

Spring Fundraiser continues. Any contribution you can afford (via PayPal link above) will be much appreciated. And if your onerous debts and the costs of your basic subsistence preclude you from making a donation at this time, I totally understand. Should you ever come upon an unexpected windfall, though, please know that my PayPal door remains open and welcoming throughout the year!