Bloombergville Redux

Months before the Occupy movement sprang up in 2011 and its first major encampment made New York City's Zuccotti Park a household word, there were sidewalk sleepovers known as Bloombergvilles. The longest of these anti-austerity protests, in front of City Hall, lasted for three weeks before police broke it up and arrested 13 of the participants.

Inspired by the Depression-era Hooverville shantytowns erected by the destitute and homeless, the pre-Occupy Bloombergvilles were set up to irritate the city's multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose watch the Big Apple had become Income Disparity Capital of the Universe. The big Wall Street banks got the bailout while the rest of us got the bum's rush as well as the bill for both their reward and our punishment. As Bloomberg's own personal wealth was in the process of tripling to more than $53.4 billion, making him the eighth richest person in America, wages of workers stagnated and more jobs disappeared. Social programs were cut nationally and locally. Bloomberg even ordered that the city's food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as if they were criminals, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally put the kibosh on that cruelty.

Bite Me

It goes on and on. Bloomberg in 2011 had very Trumpily appointed as schools chancellor his own version of Betsy DeVos, a crony named Cathie Black, despite the fact that she had no education experience. Her liberal take on school overcrowding was to wonder out loud why poor minority women didn't use birth control. Unlike DeVos, though, Black didn't last too long on the job. Maybe it was the disclosure that Bloomberg had also had to hire a separate person to actually do Black's job for her.

 The very legitimacy of democratic institutions had become a critical issue of contention and mass outrage long before Donald Trump ever stumbled onto the scene to cast a lot of unwanted light on the corruption long endemic in our neoliberal society, in which government and corporations are for all intents and purposes the very same entity.

Then, as now, you would never have known that people were taking to the streets if you got all your news from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Six months before the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge Occupy (first by ridiculing it and later by covering it as legitimate news once the police beatings began) there was a "Day of Rage" march on Wall Street by a diverse group of thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists, retirees, doctors, nurses - in other words, a cross-section of humanity forging a new solidarity which cuts across income and racial and "identity politics" lines.

Young student debt slaves are forming coalitions with the homeless, the recently unemployed or underemployed professionals of the middle class, trade unionists and others with the common experience of having suffered injustice and who are united in outrage. This building of cross-class coalitions is something relatively new. The "helping professions" have all been in the forefront because their ability to do their jobs has been so adversely affected by the budget cuts of the neoliberal project. Likewise, people who had heretofore been permanently relegated to victimhood, such as the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill have taken on activist roles in protest movements as well. Tenant unions have sprung up as associations of eviction victims united in fighting landlords, more apt of a name than ever in these times of neo-feudalism.

The Bloombergville/Occupy movement was the beginning, in America at least, of the refugees from the middle class finding common cause with more historically oppressed groups of people. It was a slap in the face to the Divide and Conquer regimen which created enough of a norm-busting vacuum for Donald Trump to be ushered into power, courtesy of the arcane Electoral College and the dismal campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Pre-Occupy March 2011 March On Wall Street

The only media outlets bothering to cover this huge Bloomberg-era march and rally were Al Jazeera and the Amsterdam News.

So, for me anyway, nothing brings back memories of the heady, halcyon days of those civic uprisings than the possible/likely/all but certain entry of the despised Bloomberg, a virtual parody of smug class privilege, into the Democratic presidential primary race. Nothing spells irony better than Bloomberg's plaintive reason for running for the presidency in the first place: to restore the "norms" that the elites feebly claim were so suddenly and tragically lost during the reign of Donald Trump, along with the "legitimacy" of our democratic institutions.

Politics has been in legitimacy crisis mode for decades. Long before Trump, there was deep distrust of citizens for their government, a reality which Trump and other right wing "populist" leaders have co-opted brilliantly.

 Political parties are not allies of the citizens. And since the political system depends on the mass loyalty of citizens, it reacts to this negativity by clamping down, via censorship, policing, mass surveillance. As Barack Obama made plain in his annoying lecture on "wokeness" last week, deferential citizens are viewed as better citizens than critical citizens. He wanted to deflect from the scary truth that conflict is absolutely essential for the development of democratic rights.

It was Bloomberg (who was offered and turned down the World Bank presidency by Obama) himself who had directly crushed legitimate democratic protest when he spearheaded the orchestrated nationwide police crackdowns on the Occupy camps in December, 2011. (To be fair, he got a little help from the Democratic veal pen of organizers, such as MoveOn, which had attempted to co-opt the movement by starting its own get-out-the-vote "99% Spring" astroturf imitation,  which mysteriously disappeared around the time that the camps were destroyed.)

Bloomberg's threatened entry into the race is all about saving the oligarchy at the continued expense of the rest of us. His candidacy is living proof that we do indeed live under neo-feudalism,  and that our quadrennial participation in presidential politics is a privilege granted to us, and not a right. Specifically, his entry into the race is meant as a warning and a rebuke to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its popular candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

His entry into the race is above all a sign of desperation by the oligarchs that there is the tiniest possibility that they may actually be parted from a smidgen of their obscene wealth sooner rather than later.

From Barack Obama last week chiding the victims of his austerity policies to tone down their indignant rhetoric, to mega-banker Jamie Dimon complaining on TV that the "success" his predatory cohort is being disrespected, to Jeffrey Epstein pal Bill Gates threatening to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee. the Ruling Class is wallowing in a virtual orgy of overblown sensitivity. They are so corrupt that any vestigial insight into the ugly fact of their own corruption and criminality has long disappeared. whittled away by both their ill-gotten gains and the fawning coverage they get from their corporate press courtiers.

Bloomberg even owns his own media empire, a feat he had accomplished long before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

No wonder all the usual suspects are welcoming this godzillionaire ex-mayor to the party with open arms, despite there being no chance that he'll win the nomination, let alone even make it on to the debate stage. Bloomberg has all the debate stage he wants in the way of free publicity. 

One positive point: the Stop and Frisk former mayor who made extreme racial profiling by cops a core part of his agenda, makes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who failed to rein in police misconduct and to address racism in his own little town, look like the rube he is. He's also pulling the rug right out from under fellow centrist Joe Biden, increasingly viewed as a liability by the Owning Class because of his chronic "gaffes" and obvious mental decline. 

Bloomberg's self-funding billions will buy him all the air time and space he demands with which and from which to hurl class venom at the lesser people under the guise of hurling venom at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He is the leader of his own party, the Oligarch Party. His MAGA motto is to Make America Gentrified, Always. His task is to promote the narrative that 1) Bernie and Liz are making our Trickle-Down Tyrants so nervous that they can't even pee their golden drops of beneficence on us without getting a nasty groin-ache; and 2) the serfs of the Heartland are so bummed and so terrified by the prospect of guaranteed health care and debt-free college that they will vote for Trump again out of a dearth of centrism.

Bloomberg has heeded the call of fellow financier Steve Rattner, who is granted regular New York Times opinion page space despite his tacit admission to robbing public pension funds in a sleazy kickback scheme. Like most members of his class, he avoided criminal indictment and prosecution by "settling" with New York and agreeing to pay a fine. Like most members of his criminal class, he no doubt later claimed the fine as an income tax deduction.

Three days before Bloomberg filed the paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic primary, Rattner complained in the Times that even worse than Medicare For All and the threat to private insurance predators are Warren's regulatory reforms and taxes, which would greatly threaten his class's ability to rob, cheat, steal and pollute:

Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.

 Oh, the humanity. Notwithstanding that Warren cringe-worthily said that among the Black leaders she'd consider for her cabinet were Bain Capital's Deval Patrick and Melody Barnes, late of the Obama administration and revolving doors to JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton, at least she's making them momentarily uncomfortable, albeit probably unnecessarily so if she wins the nomination. They count Bernie out at their own peril.

Since normal tycoons, meanwhile, are so not used to defending themselves in public, it will now fall to Bloomberg to seamlessly continue what Barack Obama started last week by way of gaslighting the underdog and reassuringly dog-whistling endless class supremacy to the traditional movers and shakers of The Realm who have so richly rewarded Obama since he left office.

And just to be on the safe side, the Oily Garchs will protect their bullshit narrative by ostentatiously moving Wall Street's mythical bull sculpture to a place of greater safety. Just last month, a protester doused it with fake blood. And the month before that, another ne'er-do-well violently bashed it with a toy metal banjo. This symbol of the Overlords was not only punked, it was plinked. And that is so rude, seeing as how the Overlords paid homage to women's rights -  not by passing wage parity legislation -  but by commissioning a Fearless Girl statue to face down the Charging Bull.

No word if Bull will be reunited with Girl, who also had to be fearfully removed from the site due to safety concerns.

Maybe Bloomberg and the other belly-aching, plutocrapping Thought Leaders can get together before the first terrifying Democratic primaries and strain to come up with a solution to the pressing dilemma of where they can run, where they can hide.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Bring on the Noise, Bring on the Contempt

Frank Bruni's Sunday New York Times column went right to the heart of what probably peeves the Establishment the most about Donald Trump. It's his utter lack of style and his dark vision. They still haven't recovered from his utterance of the word "carnage" on such a lofty occasion. In their world, the blood and gore of the forever wars and the opioid epidemic and rising death rates are realities which must not be named during official ceremonies touting American exceptionalism. We haven't been allowed to see the returning body bags at Joint Base Andrews for the past decade and a half for a very good reason. It might make us anti-war.

 All politicians are narcissists, Bruni went on, but at least they have the decency to put on a public display of humility on solemn occasions. And they never fail to pay homage to members of their own bipartisan political cohort. In his own inaugural address, though, Trump not only committed the mortal sin of not groveling to these people, he shockingly blamed them for all the human misery in America. It was especially irksome to Bruni that Trump didn't drool all over Hillary Clinton during his victory speech.

Bruni finishes his column with a centrist cri de coeur:

A humbler man would doubt himself, extend an olive branch to his enemies, contemplate a middle ground. But then a humbler man wouldn’t have come down that escalator at Trump Tower and proceed to say what Trump said and do what he did. As I watched him flourish, I watched humility die. On Friday, our 45th president said its last rites.

Of course, Bruni failed to mention the other 'umble VIPs sitting on the stage directly behind Trump. So in my published Times comment, I did the honors: 

 Of course Trump's populism is a fraud. Just look at all the oligarchs sitting on the stage behind him - his cabinet and billionaire donors. He rushed to shake Sheldon Adelson's hand right after the obligatory wallowing in his own gene pool.

His speech was such a big lie that it must have made the ghost of Goebbels writhe in envious ecstasy. "We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon," Trump lied.

He didn't dare speak the truth and blame American multinationals, the Forbes 400... and of course, himself. The top .01% - of which he is such a greedy, loudmouthed part - is what sucked up more than 90% of all the wealth regained since the 2008 meltdown.

And there was billionaire Betsy DeVos, right in the front row, fresh from vowing to ravage public education funding during her Senate confirmation hearing. And there was Trump, outlandishly braying “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs."

Just days earlier, he'd praised oil magnate Rex Tillerson for just such thievery: "He's led this charmed life. He goes into a country, take the oil, goes into another country. It’s tough dealing with these politicians, right? He’s going to be so incredible, and I’m very proud of him."

The one silver lining is that unlike most sociopaths, Trump is a very bad liar. Truth will out, in spite of his spiteful self.

Trump is getting a lot of credit from both the left and the right for immediately  jamming the stake into the Trans-Pacific Partnership's predatory heart. But as Public Citizen's Laurie Wallach warns, whether this means that Trump will actually create any new jobs as a result is still up in the air. And his own cabinet of tycoons will be right there alongside him, doing their damnedest to ensure that their economic class will come out on top regardless. Trump, unlike his predecessors, seems to have gone out of his way not to pick sycophantic yes-men.

Wallach writes:

If President Trump intends to replace our failed trade policy, a first step must be to end negotiations now underway for more deals based on the damaging NAFTA/TPP model so its notable that today’s announcement did not end talks to establish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the Trade in Services Agreement and the U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty – all of which would replicate and expand the TPP/NAFTA model Trump says he is ending.

President Trump also repeatedly has said he would launch NAFTA renegotiations immediately and withdraw from NAFTA if he cannot make it “a lot better” for working people. NAFTA renegotiation could be an opportunity to create a new trade model that benefits more people, but if done wrong, it could increase job offshoring, push down wages and expand the protections NAFTA provides to the corporate interests that shaped the original deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has craftily moved to the left of the previous administration by inviting union bosses as well as rank-and-file members into the Oval Office for a macho chit-chat. Could there be a smidgen of sincerity in his professed concern for the working stiff? Or, as his slick friend Bill Clinton did before him, is he merely triangulating? No matter what is lurking in his mind, nobody can deny that he is doing an admirable job of keeping everybody guessing and keeping everybody off-balance.

Trump is slyly getting in front of the corporate Democrats by publicly embracing and flattering organized labor (token Clinton supporters) before the party gets a chance to regroup and make another stab at seducing organized labor. It's kind of a mirror image of what Barack Obama admitted doing after his 2010 mid-term "shellacking" by Republicans. He tried to get out in front of Republicans by going whole hog for austerity for the struggling working class while extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He put an immediate and cruel freeze on federal wages.  For his part, Trump just performed his own triangulating, plutocrat-serving austere duty by imposing a new federal hiring freeze. (private worker pitted against public worker.) Both men gallantly exempted the military from this gratuitous pain for the sake of pain. Armed forces must always be at the ready to protect wealthy interests, which are bipartisan by their very control-freakish nature.

For someone with no traditional political experience, Trump is actually showing himself to be a skilled politician. While the media blares headlines about his incompetence and his penchant for lying for the sheer enjoyment of it, Trump gleans ever more popular support by exposing the media as a cadre of self-serving, thin-skinned careerists who just can't quit his twittering animal magnetism despite their tender sensibilities. They still haven't quite managed to modify their job description from power access-seekers to afflicters and critics of power in all its myriad forms.

So far anyway, Trump is doing the colorful in-your-face Huey Long routine with all the camera-ready panache at his never-ending disposal. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his scathing polemic against a slightly more refined Huey clone named Bill Clinton, "Kingfish had a primal understanding of the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most 'in touch' with popular; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently 'elitist.'"

It's an interesting reality show we're watching. Don't they get that "alternate reality" is already a popular genre on TV? Don't they get that people are really into escaping their lives these days?

It's telling that despite the millions of ordinary people who joined the anti-Trump marches and protests this weekend, the media chose to give outsize coverage to the wealthy camera-ready celebrities taking part. Only time will tell whether this becomes a real movement and a permanent struggle and doesn't devolve into a Democratic Party veal pen brand named Resistance, Incorporated.

What gives me hope that it won't is that it is a worldwide movement, with simultaneous protests erupting wherever right-wing extremism is rearing its ugly head. Just as all politics is local, so is all politics getting to be increasingly global. Forget the neo-fascist "America First" xenophobia spewed by Trump. The sooner we embrace the fact that we are all citizens of one world who must unite to survive, the better.

Financial globalization and wars and forced migrations and climate change and years of imposed austerity are combining to bite end-stage capitalism in the ass. And this is scaring the very serious important people at Davos, the IMF, the World Bank and wherever plutocratic thought leaders gather to ponder their navels.

Take another "style"-type piece in this week's New York Times, about how Trump is ruining civil discourse. The  "tone police" are walking the beat with a vengeance and sadly wearing out their Birkenstocks in the process. Georgetown University philosophy professor Karen Stohr urges liberals to immunize themselves against that nasty Trump bug that's been going around. She doesn't say so in her op-ed, but I suspect that she got inundated by many thousands of ladies loudly screaming the F-word while wearing their pink pussy hats at all the weekend rallies.

Stohr preaches with all the virtue-signalling passion that a credentialed expert can muster:

The better strategy for those who are already disempowered is to reject contempt on its face. Returning contempt for contempt legitimizes its presence in the public sphere. The only ones who benefit from this legitimacy are the people powerful enough to use contempt to draw the boundaries of the political community as they see fit. Socially vulnerable people cannot win the battle for respect by using contempt as a way to demand it. In an environment where contempt is an acceptable language of communication, those who already lack social power stand to lose the most by being its targets. The only real defense against contempt is the consistent, strong and loud insistence that each one of us be regarded as a full participant in our shared political life, entitled to hold all others accountable for how we are treated.

My published response:

 There are varieties of contemptuous experience just as there are varieties of religious experience. Getting down in the gutter with Trump to trade insults is just one of the more primitive ones.

As Molly Ivins pointed out, words are the only weapons that the powerless have against the powerful. Trump shows his contempt by punching down. We must show ours by punching up.

Of course, it's smarter to be more contemptuous of Trump's agenda than of his dyed comb-over and mannerisms. Stooping to his low level of mocking (of physical appearance, to name just one) only adds to his own persecution complex and that of the bigots who, in my opinion, comprise just one subset of those who voted for him.

I've heard a lot of people say that they voted for him not because of his depravity but in spite of it. All they wanted was to upend the system. And they have a point. Were it not for the rise of Trump, millions of protesting people would have stayed home this weekend. So maybe we should thank his misguided fans for, intentionally or not, lighting the fuse that brought us out of the doldrums of passive consumerism into a resurgence of active, bottom-up democracy. People joining together in solidarity is the last thing in the world the ruling class duopoly wants. The elites prefer to keep us isolated, marginalized and electronically entertained. They prefer that we remain oblivious to our own innate power. They deserve our contempt in all the creative varieties at our disposal.

Equivocation You Can Believe In

You may have heard that while our lame duck president has been abroad wining, dining, golfing and making trade and weapons deals with kings, queens and oligarchs, he also took the time to chide the Black Lives Matter movement here at home. Young people having the audacity to show up at campaign fundraisers and rallies to call out the Clintons for their racist rhetoric and the mass incarceration rates they spawned through their crime bill should "stop yelling," admonished Barack Obama.

 No matter that the current president happened to be speaking at a town hall for young Britons, and that he was fresh off a round of golf with the same prime minister who's just been exposed for hoarding a vast portion of his inherited wealth in a tax-free shell company in Panama. There is never an inappropriate time or place when one of the most powerful men in the world gets a hankering to deliver sanctimony to the world's oppressed.

On this side of the pond, American protesters have gotten into shouting matches with both Bill and Hillary Clinton at their campaign events. Over in the U.K, meanwhile, British protesters have been out in the streets, calling for the resignation of David Cameron over the Panama Papers scandal.

Thus did Obama issue his subliminal warning to a whole swath of the transatlantic proletariat: Leave the poor plutocrats alone!

"You can't just keep yelling at them (the Clintons and by implicit extension given the venue, Cameron) and you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," Obama lectured from high atop his pedestal.

There's that word again: purity. It's that straw-man quality of the left that neoliberals find so peculiarly odious. If you have the audacity to demand that the criminal justice system stop abusing and killing and unfairly imprisoning you and your loved ones right now, this very minute, then you are being unreasonably pure. The ongoing threat to your bodies should not be viewed as an existential emergency or as state terrorism run amok. It should be viewed as just another academic topic for polite discussion with your betters.  If you have the gall to loudly demand swift justice and basic human rights, then you are simply being annoying. And just as bad as that annoying purity, Obama went on, is the  cynicism. Aren't you getting the message that the wage-suppressing, job-destroying free trade deals masking global corporate coups are cause for celebration?

Since the recent police killings of unarmed black people in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and elsewhere, Obama has appointed various task forces to study the "issue." He's even invited some BLM activists to the White House for co-optive photo ops. Having been given a temporary "seat at the table," they should have been properly grateful.

 Over in Chicago, site of Obama's future billion-dollar shrine to himself, neoliberal pal Mayor Rahm Emanuel has bared his own pathological pragmatism by refusing to resign after covering up the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager. He is most recently showing how open he is to compromise by also ignoring the recommendations contained in a scathing report which proves that the Chicago Police Department is, indeed, institutionally racist.

The mayor is taking the initiative to eventually start making some of the changes to prevent further police murders, eventually:

CITY’S PLAN Eddie Johnson, the new police superintendent, has held “bridge meetings” with residents in recent days and has pledged to continue those. The Chicago police have also started using “restorative justice” to connect officers with young people of different cultures to discuss race, bias and other issues. “Trust is at the heart of good policing, safe communities, and is the central challenge facing Chicago today,” Mr. Johnson said in the mayor’s statement. “These reforms are a down payment on restoring that trust.”

Meanwhile, over at his Saturday event in London, Obama called for young people  protesting at the Clintons' campaign events, and marching against systemic racism, to "be more open" to compromising with their political leaders, even when their trust ratings are in the tank. He was specifically referring to activists who complained about Hillary Clinton's characterization of black youths as "super predators who must be brought to heel" during passage of the 90s-era crime bill, which has had the effect of incarcerating minority citizens in higher numbers than there were slaves in the mid-19th century.  Michelle Alexander has famously dubbed this practice of imprisoning people for relatively minor offenses The New Jim Crow: a modern variation of actual slavery. 


Jim Crow and mass incarceration are "problems" rather than outrages calling for mass outrage, according to Obama: “Too often what I see is wonderful activism that highlights a problem but then people feel so passionately and are so invested in the purity of their position that they never take that next step and say, ‘How do I sit down and try to actually get something done," he said while standing up and waving his finger, the better to be seen and heard all the way across the wide Atlantic.

Obama did what the rich and powerful always do whenever victims of injustice call them to account. They turn around and make themselves out to be the long-suffering victims. The president declared himself ever so sorely miffed at the "harsh tone" of the activists.

During the years of slavery in the United States, the rich and powerful had also urged patience and compromise from those impatient "purists" demanding an immediate end to the ownership of humans by other humans. The abolition movement was also chided for being too rude and too demanding. Even President Lincoln was initially an advocate for incremental change, gradual freedom for the enslaved... until the Purists convinced him otherwise

William Lloyd Garrison, the firebrand founder of the anti-slavery Liberator newspaper, at first went along with the slow and steady advice of political leaders. But in his opening editorial, he apologized for his previous equivocation:

"I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly ask pardon of my God, my country, and my brethren the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice and absurdity....

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice."

Barack Obama: You can't just keep yelling at them!

W. L Garrison: On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen - but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

Obama: People.... are so invested in the purity of their position that they never take that next step... and sit down.

Garrison: I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

Guess what?  Garrison and the abolition movement stuck a fork in the apathy and they did make the slave-owning plutocrats topple from their pedestals. Lincoln eventually issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but it was the enslaved who effectively freed themselves.

People have always had the power. Now, as then, they are refusing to just sit down, shut up, and wait.