America's Lousy Unreality Show

"Would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us!"--Robert Burns, To A Louse 

Judging from two recent national polls, Americans do not see the United States as the rest of the world sees it. 

"People around the world see U.S. power and influence as a major threat to their country," reveals a Pew Research Center report issued last month.

But a nearly simultaneously-released Gallup poll shows that half the American population is happier about the country's standing in the world than they've been at any time in the past 13 years. They think the world hasn't loved America this much since 2001, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11, and again in 2003 when the whole world supposedly stood up and cheered when Bush Junior invaded Iraq. Remember, this poll measured not reality, only belief systems. Americans tend to believe what they see on cable TV and read in the establishment press.

America is like the snooty church lady in the Burns poem who is blissfully unaware of the louse crawling through her hair to brazenly perch atop her fancy bonnet. Or, just as likely, she is well aware of the louse, but is proudly and perversely glad that its creepy presence is frightening and disgusting everyone around her. Merely pretending to be blissfully unaware of her vermin problem, she can then act all shocked and dismayed when her lousy bombs of liberating democracy are not greeted with the proper fawning admiration and gratitude.

Don't, in fact, these dueling polls and dueling literary interpretations reflect the combination of ignorance and arrogance which has always made America so exceptional? Because contrary to what our liberal corporate media would have us believe, Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed America's global reputation. He has made it worse, of course, but U.S. "global standing" has never been anything to brag about.

According to the Pew report,

A median of 45% across the surveyed nations see U.S. power and influence as a major threat, up from 38% in the same countries during Trump’s first year as president in 2017 and 25% in 2013, during the administration of Barack Obama. The long-term increase in the share of people who see American power as a threat has occurred alongside declines in the shares of people who say they have confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing regarding world affairs and who have a favorable view of the United States.

America took big reputational hits during the Obama administration when Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency's global collection of phone records and emails, along with the United States' eavesdropping campaigns against the leaders of such friendly countries as Germany and Brazil. His drone assassination program also failed to engender a feeling of global love and respect.

Ironically, and somewhat shockingly, the NSA has just announced that it is discontinuing the massive data collection program secretly begun by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. Either "No Such Agency" is stuffed to the gills with data that it doesn't know what to do with, or it tacitly acknowledges its redundancy, given that such private entities as Amazon, Google and Facebook have taken over data collection and surveillance as the full and equal partners of the Deep State.

But back to the Gallup poll. The breakdown of results purporting to find that more than half of the US citizens polled are happy with the country's global reputation also reveals that a major subset of these allegedly satisfied people are self-described Republicans. That only a third of respondents were satisfied with US standing only a year ago, and with eight out of 10 Republicans now hoisting up the total "satisfaction" percentage so much, also parallels the creeping-up of Trump's own domestic poll numbers.

Respondents believe that although world leaders as individuals don't respect Trump, they're convinced that these leaders' subjects view "America" favorably. They either didn't consult the Pew poll, or they are too entranced by Trump's self-glorification and frequent claims of "winning" to notice the louse on his own orange bonnet:

• The belief that leaders of other countries respect the U.S. president dove from 45% in Obama's final year to 29% last year, and has not recovered at all.
• The percentage of Americans satisfied with the nation's position in the world dipped slightly from 36% in 2016 to 32% in 2017, but then surged to 45% this year -- the highest in 13 years.
• A majority of Americans in 2016 (54%) believed the world rated the U.S. favorably. The percentage with that view fell to a near-record low of 42% last year, then bounced back to 55% this year.

If it's any consolation, the percentage of Republican respondents who think that world leaders respect Trump is still much lower than the percentage of Democratic respondents who thought that world leaders respected Obama.  

Nevertheless, we can't just blame Republicans for all the cluelessness. Even Democrats are not noticing the louse on the red, white and blue bonnet as acutely as they probably should, with more than a third of them still convinced that despite Trump, the rest of the world thinks highly of the United States: 

Last year's decline in this measure to 42% reflected sharply lower percentages of Democrats and independents believing the world viewed the country favorably. This included a fall from 68% to 32% among Democrats and from 55% to 41% of independents. Though Democrats' attitudes this year, at 36% favorable, are fairly similar to their views last year, 50% of independents now think the U.S. rates favorably, and Republicans have gone from 39% in 2016 to 54% last year and 80% now. 

As The New Yorker's Jane Mayer reports, the White House and Fox News are no longer bothering to hide the fact that they are essentially the same corporate entity. Propaganda works, and it works well. When Trump brayed at a campaign rally that "I love the poorly educated," he wasn't kidding, given that 80 percent of his base now believes that the whole world respects America. And that more than a third of Democrats still think the same way is also probably the result of their own steady consumption of pro-war reporting by the corporate media, most recently the liberal clamoring for "humanitarian intervention" in Venezuela. It also helps when Russia has been marketed as the "enemy outside" sowing domestic discord and meddling in our democracy for these past two years. 

Besides investigating creepy-crawly Trump corruption, we really should be pushing for a Marshall Plan to rescue public education in this country -- and that includes building more schools and public libraries and paying teachers at the same high levels that other highly trained professionals receive. Perhaps we can insert such a plan into the Green New Deal as an emergency declaration to salvage America's critical thinking skills at the same time we try to save our planet.

Impudent and arrogant American Exceptionalism is not only a lousy doctrine, it is a global killer. The only thing the rest of the world dreads more than the power and terror of the U.S. hegemon is the climate catastrophe which the U.S. hegemon alternately ignores and intensifies. 

Make America think again.

It Ain't Over

Despite beating all the odds and upsetting Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Bernie Sanders is still being pressured to leave the race. Why? Because those oh-so-accurate polls tell us that Bernie is behind in two state contests to be held next week. Plus, it is just too exhausting for the Empress in Waiting to keep up the populist pretense for very much longer. Have you looked at her lately? The woman looks very tired, and she is growing increasingly hoarse.

"The sooner I can become your nominee," she rasped at a rally right before her ignominious defeat, "the more I could begin to turn my attention to the Republicans."

So the establishment media's morning-after coverage of Bernie's unexpected trouncing of Hillary is a lot like Donald Trump's own post-victory speech/press con last night. It's a gigantic infomercial trying to sell us a bucket of branded mystery meat.

Here, for example, is what the New York Times sniffed right after Bernie's blowout: 

Hillary Clinton is leading Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in Florida and Ohio, according to polls released on Wednesday that show him looking vulnerable going into next week’s primary contests.

Losses in Ohio and Florida, where there are a combined 405 delegates at stake on March 15, could deal a significant blow to Mr. Sanders’s campaign and increase pressure on him to consider dropping out of the race.

A survey from Quinnipiac University shows Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, dwarfing Mr. Sanders in Florida, with Democratic voters backing her by a margin of 62 percent to 32 percent.

Of course, some polls had Clinton beating Sanders by more than 20 points in Michigan, a fact which is not even mentioned in the article. Narrow journalistic  minds are focused on the "narrow path forward for Bernie" narrative like a pit bull's jaws clenched around a tender ankle.  If the pundits have proven anything, it's that they know how to mindlessly persevere for the plutocratic cause.

If regular people have proven anything, it's that they ignore opinion-molding polls and pundits.

They look around their communities and see the shuttered factories. They look at their bank accounts and see a big fat Zero. They open up the kitchen tap and see brown smelly water. They go to their mailboxes and find a utility shut-off notice. They open their doors to greet the landlord bearing eviction papers.

If they are among the lucky Americans who still have cable TV or internet access, they saw the Sunday debate where Hillary Clinton falsely accused Bernie Sanders of voting against the auto bailout. They heard her refuse to hand over the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches. They heard her say they might get new pipes for their drinking water in about five years.

If they saw Bernie Sanders appearing flustered at times, or were aware of his much-ballyhooed "ghetto-gate" remarks and gun gaffes, they obviously didn't care.

According to Michigan exit polls, he is gaining slow but steady support among black voters, who also look around and see closed factories and crumbling schools. Much to the chagrin of the Clintonoid Firewall Brigade, black people are not monolithic. People of all races and ethnicities are united in their knowledge of, and anger over, the job-offshoring trade deals that Hillary Clinton has always supported.  They notice that the auto bailout benefited the owners and punished the workers, and that General Motors, becoming aware of the affects that Flint's tainted corrosive water was having on their products, simply pulled up stakes and left without so much as blowing the whistle to their customers and neighbors.

Tellingly, Hillary lost big in Dearborn, home to many Muslim families. Voters notice that American wars have killed many Muslims. They notice the refugee crisis spawned by these wars. They notice that hundreds of Muslims have drowned trying to escape from Libya and other sites of her military adventurism. They notice that her sales of lethal weapons to Middle Eastern autocrats have enabled the mass slaughters of innocent Muslims. They noticed that Bernie Sanders aired commercials in Arabic.

The persevering pundits showed their own bigotry when they professed shock and awe that a Brooklyn Jew could get the Muslim vote. Oh, snap, said the pit bull.

Bernie Sanders has ecumenical appeal.  Who woulda thunk it? 

People simply don't like or trust Hillary Clinton. And the more the media-political complex props her up, the more they seem to telegraph their desire for a President Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been raking in the bucks for them, and would continue to do so if elected. This celebrity huckster is eminently available to journalists for whom access to the powerful has long trumped actual reporting and pursuing truth in the public interest.

Propaganda On Steroids

Silly, sleepy me.

Until I read all about it in today's New York Times, I'd been totally, unforgivably oblivious to having just lived through a monumental event called "The Liberal Spring."

In the space of just one week, a tsunami from "the left" has apparently changed the entire ideological landscape of America!

Jonathan Martin explains it all to ignoramuses like me:

A cascade of events suggests that 2015 could be remembered as a Liberal Spring: the moment when deeply divisive and consuming questions of race, sexuality and broadened access to health care were settled in quick succession, and social tolerance was cemented as a cornerstone of American public life.

Happy days are here again! The skies above are clear again! We can sing a song of cheer again! We all have guaranteed health care for life,  gender and sexual equality is here to stay, and institutional racism has disappeared as quick as you can tear down a Confederate flag.

And lest we be deemed ungrateful, we must give all the credit for our unexpected salvation to Obama Triumphans.  He is being widely portrayed in the corporate media as a latter-day Joshua. The president miraculously escaped from the Egypt of Lameduckville to finish leading the refugees of America into the neoliberal promised land of brand-name milk and honey. All it took was one off-key but sonorous rendition of We Shall Overcome to further cement mass delusion as a cornerstone of public life.

The Times piece continues,

Yet what appears, in headlines and celebrations across the country, to represent an unalloyed victory for Democrats, in which lawmakers and judges alike seemed to give in to the leftward shift of public opinion, may contain an opening for the Republican Party to move beyond losing battles and seemingly lost causes.

OK, now that we got spring out of the way, we can get into the nitty-gritty of what the permanent ruling class really wants. And that is the GOP repudiating the Tea Party in order to get back to its big business roots. As fast as pro-market forces once tore down the Berlin Wall, as fast as Obama tore down the walls of racism, John Boehner is purging Congressional committees of those anti-trade, anti-government, anti-corporate welfare ideologues. Newly empowered by their partnership with Obama's Wall Street Democrats, the Wall Street Republicans aim to make the world safe for plutocracy.

But even as conservatives appear under siege, some Republicans predict that this moment will be remembered as an effective wiping of the slate before the nation begins focusing in earnest on the presidential race.

 As important as some of these issues may be to the most conservative elements of the party’s base and in the primaries ahead, few Republican leaders want to contest the 2016 elections on social or cultural grounds, where polls suggest that they are sharply out of step with the American public.

Polls, shmolls. More than measuring public opinion, polls actually serve to influence it. Witness the recent Pew Poll purporting to show widespread domestic and international support for the anti-democracy job-destroying Trans-Pacific Partnership. What reasonable person doesn't support free trade? Never mind that the respondents were not allowed to actually see what is in the classified TPP  Nor did the pollsters bother to inform the people whom they called about the various leaked portions of the agreements.
 
As G. William Domhoff further elucidates in Who Rules America?:

Polls also can be used to suggest that a public opinion exists on issues for which there is none. This does not mean people do not have general opinions, but that they often make it up as they go along when responding to specific questions about policy preferences. If questions about affirmative action or oil drilling are framed in one way, they yield one answer, but framed in another way, they yield a different answer, especially for those without knowledge or firm opinions.

Obama the Joshua-Josher and his plutopals know full well that ordinary people would never support the replacement of  local and national justice courts with fascist Investor State Dispute Tribunals. They know that people would never agree to become personally financially liable for the "lost" corporate profits of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Therefore they keep the whole deal secret while at the same time cynically ordering rigged polls which falsely show public support for programs that are precisely antithetical to the public interest.

The Pew polls are funded by the Pew Charitable Trust,  a think tank originally funded and still largely controlled by the conservative heirs of the Sun Oil Company. They're also in the astroturf business, hiring advocates to appear on TV and before congressional committees, poll results clutched tightly in their hands as evidence of public support for filthy rich interests.

Now, back to the latest Times propaganda effort in the service of the plutocracy:

“Every once in a while, we bring down the curtain on the politics of a prior era,” said David Frum, the conservative writer. “The stage is now cleared for the next generation of issues. And Republicans can say, ‘Whether you’re gay, black or a recent migrant to our country, we are going to welcome you as a fully cherished member of our coalition.’ ”

The critical question is whether the Republican Party will embrace such a message in order to seize what many party officials see as an opening to turn the election toward economic and national security issues.

It's almost enough to make you root for the Tea Party. What the Establishment really fears is the extra-partisan, left-right coalition against the TPP and other corporate coups, along with widespread transpartisan, populist disgust with mass surveillance, the bloated Pentagon and Wall Street crime. What the Establishment really loves is Obama-style bipartisanship in the service of those who run the place and who matter only to themselves. Remember that it was the Tea Party "crazies" who put the kibosh on the Boehner-Obama Grand Bargain of Social Security and Medicare cuts.

The reason that marriage equality has sailed through in record time has just as much to do with gay rights being a non-issue for the hyper-rich as it does with popular demand. Either marriage equality doesn't affect the interests of the Power Elite, or it has affected them personally enough to make them devote their money and their influence to getting it done. If millionaires and billionaires aren't gay themselves, they statistically have a family member, friend or business associate who belongs to the LGBT community. Granting marriage equality in all 50 states, regardless of class, has the double advantage of being no skin off their uplifted noses and a deflective public relations ploy. The granting and mass celebration of "diversity" by the Imperium gives the Imperium a false patina of morality as a cosmetic healing of class divides is broadcast by media conglomerates. Rich gays and poor gays join together to march in parades. Even lowly cannon fodder has been granted marriage equality. (although sex crimes in the military have now reached epidemic proportions, due in part to Obama's strange refusal to take prosecution of them out of the corrupt chain of command. But, hooray anyway.)

So on with Extreme Centrism, as told by the New York Times for the benefit of #WealthyLivesMatter:

While acknowledging that the country has become more tolerant and, in some ways, culturally liberal, many Republicans contend that America is still receptive to a more conservative approach on economics and national security. After all, the same week that highlighted the ascent of cultural liberalism also illustrated the limitations of economic populism, as organized labor was unable to block a measure giving President Obama expansive trade authority.

"America," aka the rich, is more open to a "conservative approach", aka austerity for the masses. It is in the interest of both wings of the Big Business Party to marginalize organized labor, which, despite the fact that it's been marginalized for nearly half a century, still occasionally manages to be a pesky thorn in the side of the GOP-New Democrat partnership. Therefore, if the presidential debates can be restricted to scaring the voters to death over phony foreign terror threats while deflecting our attention from the real economic and social threat of a global oligarchy gone wild, it won't much matter to the ruling class whether Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush gets "elected". The oligarchy will not only have won, it will be able to claim with a straight, stuffed face that it was a legitimate populist victory.

(Needless to say, despite his growing popularity with the actual populace, Bernie Sanders' name did not appear one single time in today's Power Elite-dictated, fair & balanced front page Times "news analysis.")