First As Tragedy, Then As Chris Matthews

The paranoia of the plutocrats is morphing from farce to insanity at the speed of the Coronavirus. Loath to share their wealth with the rest of us, they are nevertheless magnanimous enough to share with the rest of us their abject terror of the unthinkable prospect of ordinary people having better lives under a Bernie Sanders administration.

"Fear the Bern" is their imaginative theme.

We're supposed to magically forget, of course, that "ordinary people" and "the rest of us" are the exact same entity. The spidery elites are thus cordially inviting us, the Lower Slobbovians of the Bottom 90 Percent, in to their luxury parlors, just long enough to become the victims of a new strain of Stockholm Syndrome. We are asked to transfer their abject fear of the mass of people into an abject fear of our own selves. They euphemize this disease of victims identifying with their oppressors as "party unity."

It's gone beyond the more or less subtle "manufacturing of consent" as explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. This is the forcing of their raw pathological sewage into the mass communication feeding tube attached to too many of our brains.  After all, since they've already primed us to become true-believing anti-Trump resistance fighters in the service of the FBI, the CIA, Wall Street, Hollywood and the trillion-dollar military monster, they might as well also prime us to ditch the creeping menace of Bernie's FDR-style liberalism and the dangerous hope of better lives for ourselves.

Leading the surge in the media's unabashed psychological warfare campaign against the American voter, MSNBC personality Chris Matthews insinuated that a Bernie Sanders presidency would even usher in mass public executions. Here's his reverse Joe McCarthy somersault with one and a half spittle-inflected twists:

Chris Matthews is, of course, doing nothing less than embracing his own inner Trump, engaging in the fascistic tactic of psychological projection. The socialists were the targets of the HUAC and McCarthyite 50s Cold War domestic purges and persecutions - not its executioners. Former, current and suspected lefties were the victims of a coordinated right-wing bipartisan campaign to destroy labor unions and the social welfare programs of FDR's New Deal. With this diminished Left now threatening to come back to life, Cold War McCarthyism also is coming back to life bigger and better than ever. 

The big tell in Matthews' diatribe is that these supposed socialist executions -  cheered, if not directly ordered, by a President Bernie Robespierre Sanders - would take place in Central Park, the gentrified back-yard of many a luxury penthouse and corporate boardroom. What Chris Matthews and his cohort are really afraid of is not getting literally shot, but of being parted with the tiniest smidgen of their obscene wealth. "Castro and the Reds" is code for the bottom 90 Percent of Lower Slobbovia having the unmitigated gall to demand universal health care, guaranteed affordable housing and a debt-free education.

Ordinary people wanting better lives for themselves and their families, friends, neighbors and co-workers are even described as a "cult" by Matthews' MSNBC colleague,Democratic consultant and Clinton campaign operative James Carville. He raved last week that he is "scared to death" that a Sanders victory would transform the party into a "cult that alienates large swaths of America."

Since teachers top the professions which donate to the Sanders campaign, Carville's description of Bernie supporters as a "cult" is an oblique smear of teachers themselves. It used to be that it was only the Republicans who so vociferously attacked public education.

These liberal paranoid plutocrats can do psychological projection every bit as ruthlessly as the reactionary president whom they only pretend to despise. The truth is that it's the oligarch-owned Democratic Party - not the Sanders campaign - which has worked so hard and so adeptly to alienate such huge swaths of the American electorate that millions of these swaths stayed home rather than submit any longer to the Neoliberal Gospel Cult  - led by the decidedly uncharismatic Hillary Clinton. It was the party leadership under Barack Obama that lost nearly a thousand seats in ten years.

The class war against the bottom 90 percent is being fought by two competing oligarchic political factions: the Republicans (de facto Trumpians) and the Democrats (soon to be renamed the Bloombergians). These factions are utterly united in their desire to defeat Bernie Sanders and to smother the lives and hopes and dreams of the electorate.

Lacking any human decency or morality or any intellectual heft to speak of, the elites' desperate bipartisan tactic is the manufacture of consent via the manufacture of fear. It's the creation and enhancement of hatred between and among the increasingly desperate factions of the working class and the outright down-and-outs. 

Fear and hate are the traditional weapons that elites have always used to keep the "swaths" of humanity under control. You really have to hand it to Donald Trump, though. He has successfully lowered the bar on how these twin assault weapons are utilized to Limbo stick proportions. The weaponized propaganda no longer needs to be well-polished. They simply fire wildly in all directions in hopes that at least some of their dummy bullets maintain enough smart black-ops magic to keep us under their spell.

Since that seems to be happening with less and less frequency, the special media psy-ops teams are going totally bonkers. They're flailing with their fists and their inchoate verbal spittle is reducing their manufactured narrative into one great big sodden mess.

The only thing we have to fear is the prospect of even a few of our fellow citizens taking these farcical experts even remotely seriously.

James Carville: Beatings Will Continue, So Join Us!

Gray Lady Clutches Neoliberal Pearls

Falsely equating right-wing populism with left-wing populism, The New York Times editorial board just delivered another in a long series of clumsy backhanded swipes at the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. 

It's happening to Barack Obama's America. It's happening to Lech Walesa's Poland. It's happening all over the democratic free world. The disdainful rabble are simply not properly groveling at the feet of constitutions and kowtowing to the naturally unequal miserable order of things. Therefore, we should be just as afraid of Bernie Sanders as we are of Donald Trump.

Of course the Times doesn't put its red-baiting in such gauche terms as that. They are daintily circumspect in their neoliberal propaganda: 

Populist leaders, whether of the far right or the far left, have made major advances across Europe and in the United States, drawing on a widespread sense of alienation, discontent with ruling elites and anti-globalization and anti-immigration views.

In nearly every case, whatever their specific agendas, populist leaders claim to represent the will of “the people,” and therefore believe they are empowered to ride roughshod over any person, institution or law that gets in their way. That kind of thinking led to the terrible dictatorships of the 20th century, a fact that becomes more relevant by the day.

Never mind that there is nothing even remotely "far-left" about populist Democratic leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They are merely pro-capitalist liberal politicians with the effrontery to defend the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society and occasionally make greedy plutocrats feel uncomfortable. But to hear the Gray Lady whine it, Sanders and Warren are absolutely drunk on power, riding roughshod over anybody allegedly getting in their way.

The Times editorialists were probably overreacting to recent remarks by Bernie Sanders in which he's criticized the party's clinging to identity politics at the expense of the working class, which apparently is expected to stay trapped in its deplorable basket.

“I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country, and exploiting his workers, it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot whether he’s black or white or Latino," Bernie had the audacity to say.

The Times doesn't name the alleged victims of this alleged lefty American populism, because they know that casting billionaires as oppressed victims would sound downright silly. So they merely mention, in casual passing, the dangerous socialism that they consider just as much a threat to their cosseted world as Donald Trump's own gleeful exposure of class divisions, malign wealth and crony capitalism.

This red-baiting is all about the discredited Clintonoid wing of the party wishing to remain powerful and relevant against all odds and against all sanity. Since the working class didn't come out for Hillary Clinton on November 8th, she and her media propagandists are coming out with a vengeance against the working class. The Democratic Party will be reformed over their dead bodies.

Now that the so-called Faithless Hamilton Electors have failed to subvert the Electoral College system and now that Vladimir Putin's alleged hacking of the Democratic Party is old news, centrists are scrambling to attack new scapegoats from the right. So why not stay closer to home this time?

It helps immensely that James Bennet, the recently hired chief of the Times editorial board, himself has roots that burrow deep into Clinton soil. As reported by the World Socialist Web Site, he is the brother of neoliberal "New Democrat" senator Michael Bennet of Colorado and the son of Douglas Bennet, a long-time political operative who served in several Democratic administrations, including that of Bill Clinton.

According to Politico, the Times began courting Bennet last spring, just as Bernie Mania was reaching a fever pitch and posing a threat to Hillary Clinton. Bennet reportedly took the offer on a promise that he will eventually succeed Dean Baquet as executive editor.

I'm personally agnostic about the current battle over the chairmanship of the decidedly un-democratic party.  Keith Ellison is the choice of the Bernie Sanders progressives, and Labor Secretary Tom Perez is the choice of the Obama/Clinton Wall Street faction. Since only about 400 party officials are allowed to vote for the leader, the rabble are reduced to signing petitions through various veal pen offshoots like MoveOn. For a party so suddenly averse to the Electoral College, the Democrats certainly have no intention of opening up their own corporate ballot process to the disrespectful proles skulking outside the Big Gilded Tent.

And they certainly have no qualms about smearing Keith Ellison in the most blatant racial and Islamophobic terms. He once said something nice about Louis Farrakhan in his youth. He endorsed Bernie Sanders. The horror.

Barack Obama, for his part, damned Ellison with faint praise at his press conference last week, merely calling him a "friend," while waxing rhapsodic over the "wicked smart" Perez. It's no coincidence that of all the Democratic labor secretaries in recent memory, Perez has become famous for reaching out to the business community. No way has he restricted his wicked smartness to the working folks who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.

The Times ran a glowing article about this rising star last spring, praising Perez's ideological toothlessness right in the headline. Finally, we have a labor watchdog who is "not all bite!" The occasion of the puff piece was a visit by Perez to an overpriced New York City restaurant, where tipping had just been outlawed in favor of a slight (taxable) wage hike and (taxable) benefits for employees. The patrons forking out an average of $100 for a modest luncheon were pleasantly surprised at the very slight price hikes in the menu, which thanks to the newly-banned 20 percent gratuity, actually makes eating out cheaper for them.

Perez was only too happy to praise the restaurant for its "social responsibility" in raising its pathetic wages and sparing its workers the onerous responsibility of sharing and declaring their tips.

He is talking about “conscious capitalism” and “inclusive capitalism.” He is singling out “high road” employers. He is promoting B Corps, companies that adhere to lofty social and environmental standards. In doing so, he hopes he can persuade less enlightened corporations to change.

“The employers who do best are employers who reject these false choices,” Mr. Perez said. “It’s not a zero-sum world where you either take care of your workers or you take care of your shareholders. You can do good and do well, too.”

Truer, more wicked neoliberal words were probably never spoken. No wonder the rich Democratic donors are clamoring for him as party leader. They clothe him in the usual identity politics and bathetic back-story, supplying just the right liberal reason to elevate him. Since he is the son of Dominican immigrants and worked his way through Harvard by collecting trash, the working class rabble should have no logical reason to complain. Plus, as the Times helpfully explains, the working class can no longer speak for itself anyway. (The Paper of Record carefully doesn't mention that it was anti-union neoliberal policies that helped destroy the labor movement in the first place.)

Blackmail 2016

 (*Updated below)

The Democratic Party is sounding a lot like the House Un-American Activities Committee these days.

HUAC was the star chamber convened in the late 1930s for the ostensible purpose of rooting out Communists and other subversives in government, the media, and the entertainment industry. It was finally disbanded in 1975 in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

HUAC's main underlying agenda, however, was the dismantling of the New Deal. If proponents got smeared along the way, too bad. They were the collateral damage of the right wing counterrevolution.The public was supposed to be scared witless into taking money away from social programs and plunking billions, and later trillions, into Superpower's global agenda of regime change and corporate hegemony. The Red Menace was the manufactured terrorism of the day, and the effectiveness of its propaganda lasted until the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Fast forward to 2016. The New Deal is still barely hanging on, with FDR's social programs either long gone, whittled down, or under constant threat of dismemberment.  And then along comes Bernie Sanders, exposing the bipartisan right wing for what it truly is: The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Republicans are the main torturers and sadists. The Democrats are the grisly lab assistants who will occasionally sneak up to the cages to give the victims an anesthetizing choice morsel or two to make their trip to the vivisection table more befuddled.

The audience was never supposed to know about the subplot. After all, they are merely the audience and not the actors. And if millions of people did have an inkling, they had nobody to represent their interests and nobody to amplify their voices. Until Bernie came along, giving Hillary Clinton a run for her corporate, anti-New Deal money.

Clinton, who merely vows to "protect" Medicare and Social Security from GOP depredation, has a long sordid history when it comes to the New Deal. Specifically, she was the impetus behind the 1996 destruction of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children and transforming it to the cruel Temporary Aid to Needy Families. The result has been the doubling of extreme poverty after the Clinton deregulation bubble finally burst from the excesses of its own greed.

Sanders, meanwhile, wants to actually expand Social Security as well as increase Medicare benefits to all citizens, regardless of age, health and financial status. He wants to lessen the power of behemoth financial institutions by reinstating the Clinton-demolished Glass-Steagall Act.  His proposals, taken as a whole, would actually go beyond the New Deal reforms.
 
 Thus the Democratic bosses of Psy-Ops "There is No Alternative" Theater are all in a tizzy, because the denouement of the movie -- the vindication and the  coronation of their neoliberal heroine -- is coming up in only two months. The star is in danger of being upstaged at her own premiere. Instead of throngs of cheering, adoring fans lining the red (ooh, scary!) carpet, she might be faced with throngs of protesters.

So the Party and its mouthpieces are going all HUAC on Bernie and the Sandernistas. It's a coordinated media campaign which sounds, ironically enough, as if it comes straight out of Pravda. Either Bernie and his supporters take the loyalty oath to the Empress-in-Waiting right now, or the election of Donald Trump and the rise of a fascist state will be totally on them. The inherent corruption and weakness of Hillary herself will have nothing at all to do with it. When Clinton backers accuse Sanders of not being a "real Democrat," the dog-whistling subtext is that he is not a real American. It's just a more subtle variation on the anti-Obama "birther" theme rhapsodized to perfection by Donald Trump himself.


  "Party unity" is suddenly trumping (sorry!) the interests and rights of the body politic. Protest at your own peril, people! And anyhow, resistance is futile.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

To his credit, Sanders is not caving to the Party psy-ops offensive, which has included a nonstop barrage of ad hominem attacks by such Democratic luminaries as Paul Krugman and Barney Frank. He's apparently morphed from progressive saint to violence-enabling demagogue overnight, breaching some invisible red line into traitorous anti-American territory. "Even progressives are criticizing him now after he's shown a harder edge!" shrills Politico. Flying chairs and flying broomsticks abound in Liberal Land.

But without even one speck of flying spittle in evidence on the Sunday talk show circuit, Bernie calmly noted that if Hillary Clinton hopes to ever rise above her "lesser evil" status, then it is actually on her - not us - to change her tune.

“I have every confidence that if Hillary Clinton is prepared to stand up to the greed of corporate America and Wall Street; is prepared to be really strong on the issue of climate change; support, as I do, a tax on carbon; is prepared to say that the United States of America should join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people, paid family and medical leave; is prepared to say that the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality today in America, where almost all new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent. If she is strong on those issues, yeah, I think she will win and win by a large vote,” Sanders said.“But if she is not, she's going to have her problems.”

Corey Robin (author of the book The Reactionary Mind) has written a short but brilliant critique of the ongoing inverted totalitarianism posing as a free and democratic electoral process. Admonitions to liberals and leftists to cease and desist from all legitimate criticism of Hillary lest it empower Trump are actually steeped in the Leninist dogma. To wit, "The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party."

Wow. Robin then points to the recent smear headline in the New York Times as a prime example of the authoritarianism attempting to choke out civic dissent:

“Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch."

Haul him before the ghost chamber of HUAC - pronto! 

Robin also likens the Democratic establishment's attempt to suppress dissent against Hillary Clinton to the late unlamented Antonin Scalia's justification for handing that other rigged presidential election to George W. Bush. "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush]," he wrote in that infamous decision.

Double wow.

The Clintonites are smack dab in the extreme center. Their anointed candidate might be a skunk adorning a solid yellow line, but Her Supreme Zombie-ness must and will lurch all the way to the finish line. 

Meanwhile, the hordes of trolls are all tangled up in the Internets. There are Trump supporters playing sexist Sanders supporters, Clinton supporters playing "recovering" ex-Sanders supporters. and bona fide Clinton supporters just into shaming and blaming desperate people into abject submission to their fate. A red-baiting troll responded to my own latest Times comment by saying that my "credentials" are not in order, and must be examined. The anonymous poster didn't say who exactly should investigate my bona fides, keeping me in much suspense. (Mind you, the Times comment threads are supposedly strictly moderated, so the censors are obviously okay with scaremongering McCarthyesque rhetoric.)

Of course, the Clintonoids disavow their own part in the rampant trollery, despite a PAC called "Correct the Record" which supposedly pays trolls to attack her critics online. 

Now comes Raw Story's "exposé" of a nefarious Trump plot to "divide the Democratic party" via a nasty online comment offensive. Perhaps, however, we should question whether the Trump trolls playing Democratic trolls aren't really Clinton trolls in the first place. After all, one of the silliest  talking-point accusations of the Clinton trolls is that Bernie supporters are really Republicans in disguise. "Have you now, or have you ever been, a member of any party that does not unquestioningly support Commandant Hillary?"

***

Maureen Dowd took a break from her "Tete-a-Tetes With Trump" series to castigate Hillary Clinton for her delay in defeating Bernie Sanders. Not that Dowd had anything nice to say about Sanders, of course. In true arch "Style Section" fashion, she wrote:

Everyone just laughed when Sanders, a cranky loner from Vermont with a nondescript Senate record, decided to challenge Queen Hillary. Clinton and her aides intoned — wink, wink — that it would be healthy to have a primary fight with Sanders and Martin O’Malley.

But Bernie became the surprise belle of his side’s revolutionary ball. And now he has gotten a taste of it and he likes it and he won’t let it go. He’s bedeviling the daylight out of Hillary.

(snip)

 The Bernie bro violence — chair throwing, sexist name-calling and feral threats — at the Nevada state party convention last weekend was denounced as “a scary situation” by his Senate colleague Barbara Boxer.Sanders condemned the violence while stoking the outrage, urging the Democratic Party to “open the doors, let the people in.” He flashed a bit of Trump, so sure in his belief that the system is rigged that he fed off the nasty energy.

My published comment:

Rather than examine the legitimate reasons why Hillary can't vanquish Bernie Sanders, Dowd finds it easier to reduce him to a grouchy cartoon character in order to make her point that Clinton is one of the most ineffectual presidential candidates in history.

Rather than examine why the "Berniebros" raised such a ruckus at the Nevada convention, it's easier to go with the MSM flow and airily dismiss them as a bunch of rude dudes. In keeping with the prescribed narrative, it must be all about the hurt feelings of multimillionaire Barbara Boxer and the angst of White House insiders too cowardly to be named.

No mention that the youth unemployment rate in Nevada reached Great Depression levels in the years after the crash, and that the state has had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

 People are irate because the jobs haven't come back and the wages are stagnant. Most Americans report not having an extra $1,000 saved up for a household emergency.

Women aren't "swooning" over Bernie. We don't vote with our XX chromosomes based upon the charisma of the candidate. Many of us like Sanders because of his proposals: universal health care, debt-free college, and getting the corrupt oligarchic money out of our politics once and for all.

All the voters need to be heard, regardless of his slim-to-none chance for the nomination. Contrary to the propaganda, he is not in it for himself. He never has been.

Trump v. Clinton is not an election. It's emotional blackmail.

 ***

Update, 5/24

Well, well, well. The embattled Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic politburo blinked first. Was it the specter of her primary challenger, Tim Canova, raising some seriously big bucks and publicity off the Sanders surge that convinced them to give him an "unprecedented" one-third of the party's platform committee delegates? Partially. But I think it's really Hillary's tanking poll numbers that propelled such a magnanimous (and desperate) gesture on their part. Clinton will have to continue to pretend to pivot leftward for awhile longer, at least until after the convention, to broadcast the illusion of "party unity."

And by the way, the inclusion of such party "outsiders" as leftist firebrand Cornel West and Palestinian rights activist James Zogby at this corporate-sponsored convention is great news, despite the fact that party platforms usually turn out to be nothing but public relations window dressing.

The much-maligned "rudeness" of the Sandernistas is already reaping some rewards and concessions. The next step is how, where, and when the surge of progressivism will continue, outside and past the presidential nomination and election processes.