The Wee Hive Mind of the Ruling Class

Virginia voters last week denied former Clinton operative and ex-governor Terry McAuliffe  a second non-consecutive term. He'd apparently thought that lecturing Virginia parents that they have no say in school curricula, coupled with fear-mongering about all the Trumps under the bed, would cancel out his unappealing persona and platform, which included no economic benefits for struggling people.

The meaning (takeaway) of this rather predictable electoral outcome, according to the usual cabal of centrist scolds, is that "we" need a lot more austerian Terry McAuliffes in the nation's statehouses and in the hallowed, hollow halls of Congress. This illogical conclusion reinforces an essential truth about the media-political complex. They are either knowingly or unknowingly detached from reality. They see what they are paid to see.

A second essential truth to always bear in mind is that whenever they use the pronouns "we" and "us," they are not referring to you and me and the 330 million other citizens of this country. They mean the obscenely wealthy individuals and corporations running the joint, as well as the top nine or 10 percent of earners (the Professional-Managerial Class, or the PCM, aka the Clerisy) whose main function is to give service, succor and cover to the Upper One Percent in hopes of one day reaching the lofty One Percent themselves, while they simultaneously presume to interpret "reality" and enforce "norms" for the mere schlubs they aim to control. The bottom 90 or so percent of us, whose wealth just keeps getting sucked dry by the oligarchs and the PCM, are being set up as the lazy selfish scapegoats who must pay the price for all the capitalistic sins of the world. 

For example, as an instantly-notorious unsigned New York Times editorial published last week put it, the problem with progressives who want nice things like generous family leave, guaranteed medical care, subsidized housing and other luxuries, is that they are just too "coddled." This is quite the about-face for the Paper of Record, which only a few months ago was lauding Joe Biden's then-$3+ trillion Build Back Better package as the most sweeping social program since FDR. Well, Franklin Delano Biden, always the cutout hybrid between a sheepdog and a paper tiger for purposes of his election, has been duly cast back into the stubborn embers of neoliberalism. The real deals, according to the Times, are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are the actual heart and soul of the Democratic Party. That, of course, would be true if the Democratic Party actually had a heart and a soul.

Despite the fact that a vast majority of Not-We's support single payer health care, a living wage and student loan forgiveness, the Times, without one shred of evidence, claimed that most Americans hail from the center or center-right and oppose better living conditions for both themselves and their neighbors. Besides repeating the old canard that the taxes of hardworking Americans is the only way to make other (read: undeserving) people's lives better, the Grey Lady proved she was imbibing some really high-priced corporate powder when she snorted:

Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination — and the presidency — because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday’s drubbing. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

Never mind that as a former CIA operative whose agency has fomented plenty of global chaos in the 75 regime-changing, dirty tricks-playing years of its existence, Spanberger and her cohort believe that some brands of chaos are more preferable than other kinds of chaos, like the mental, physical and emotional chaos you experience by being unable to afford a visit to the doctor when you get sick.

Nothing defines just who the designated "we" are better than the aptly named COP 26  U.N. confab in Glasgow.  Although it stands for Conference of the Parties, the real function of this ostensible attempt to reverse and ameliorate global climate change and catastrophe has been to erect a preening, scolding venue for the same ruling and owning class experts, whose thousands of tonnes of carbon spewed in flying to the event in their private jets, and whose endless wars and relentless resource extractions are the prime cause of the planetary emergency in the first place. They have lectured their fellow oligarchs only if they happen to be from Russia, China and other places that "we" don't much like. They did party a lot, of course, and acted like the authoritarian "good cops" that they are by putting the onus on their victims. They are the drug pushers who blame the world's addiction to fossil fuels on the addicts that they themselves created through the magic of advertising, and whom they now try to shame to death.

Former President Barack Obama, fresh from cutting down hundreds of trees and destroying the iconic Women's Garden in Chicago's Jackson Park to make room for a $500 million monument to himself, flew in to Scotland by private jet to tell the world's young people that if they want to survive, they're just going to have to rev up their activism.  Far be it for Obama to tell the polluting corporations who funded his campaigns and who continue pay him for speaking gigs and other media ventures to cut out their criminal behavior. 

He was too busy rubbing their noses in his own B.S., insulting the Scots by calling it the Emerald Isle and and then quoting the English bard Shakespeare instead of revered national poet Robert Burns. Like many in his class, Obama has the preternatural ability to make his ignorance seem like genius.

Thank god that more and more people aren't buying into the Narrative any more. Just as general strikes forced FDR's New Deal legislation into existence during the last Great Depression, so too are general strikes going to force a change now, especially with Covid now reaching endemic status and inflation making a comeback. Both events have their roots in the beginning of neoliberalism and globalism, a melding of public and private interests (public expense for private profit) nearly 50 years ago. 

The question is what form this inevitable change will take. If the Dems have their way, it will be a return to Trumpism or something even worse. Just think of the surge in MSNBC and CNN's now-moribund ratings and Times subscriptions if they can only create that magical glow of Trump once again!

So now might be the time for the Squad to quit the Democratic Party altogether - that is, if they hope to remain relevant to the "Not-Wee" majority. Because we are the We who matter, and we are still the many. The rich are not quite as influential as they imagine themselves to be, given the careless Thought(less) Leaders that they are. They are mere mortals who do not equal the vast sum of their hoarded wealth.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal!

-- Robert Burns, from To A Mouse.

The Kode of the Kavanaugh Klique

It's too bad that the New York Times royally botched coverage of what is supposed to be a well-researched and nuanced new book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, written by two of its own reporters. Because in choosing to highlight a previously unreported and unknown episode that had Kavanaugh's Yale frat brothers shoving his penis into a girl's hands at a drunken dorm party, the paper went the exact opposite of nuance, and veered into full tabloid territory.

Only after more than a day's worth of outraged calls for Kavanaugh's impeachment by the Times-reading public and anxious Democratic candidates did the paper finally append an online correction to the piece, acknowledging that the second woman allegedly abused by Kavanaugh at Yale University has no memory of it and refused to be interviewed for the book.

 The one alleged eyewitness serving as the authors' second-hand source is one Max Stier, who is lauded by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, among others, for being a bipartisan Rhodes Scholar and a Washington insider with an impeccable set of credentials. Thus does the minima-culpa "explainer" piece written by Times Deputy Editorial Page editor James Dao simply double down on the specious claim that since Stier's account has been "corroborated" by others, including members of Congress, it's fit to print. In Times World, apparently, corroboration is defined as at least two important people confirming to the Times that yes, they had indeed heard that story first-hand from Stier. As such, even though Max Stier himself refuses to repeat his account to the Times, it is not grounds for the paper refusing to publish what amounts to second-hand gossip.

Dao wrote:

During the authors’ investigation, they learned that a classmate, Max Stier, witnessed the event and later reported it to senators and to the F.B.I. The authors corroborated his story with two government officials, who said they found it credible. Based on that corroboration, we felt mentioning the claim as one part of a broader essay was warranted.

This is very much related to the Times and other corporate media outlets regularly writing evidence-free #Russiagate and war-mongering propaganda pieces based purely upon the "high confidence" of well-placed government sources who must always remain anonymous because of the sensitivities of the matter.

But the printing of gossip wasn't even the worst part of the Kavanaugh story. In promoting its "blockbuster" article on Twitter on Saturday evening, somebody* on the Times Opinion Page actually blurted out this gem:

"Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun. But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn't belong at Yale in the first place."

(Just to be clear, the alleged victim who has no recall of the previously unreported incident and refused to be interviewed for the book is not Deborah Ramirez, who is the main focus of the Times essay.)

So even before the offensive promotional Tweet and the apology for the Tweet, the feeble semi-retraction, and the pitiful disclaimer/explainer by James Dao, another problem with the essay is its implication that as a good, virginal, sheltered working class Catholic girl, Ramirez was more traumatized by Kavanaugh's behavior than a more experienced and worldly and non-religious young woman would have been. That subtext, in my view, became the whole basis for the Times's original promotional Tweet: that a non-virgin, or your typical sophisticated Ivy League gal, would have found having a penis thrust in her face to be stupid, harmless fun, and she would have taken it in her stride. 

In other words, if Brett Kavanaugh had only adhered to the Kode of the Klique and restricted his frat boy antics to jaded young women of his own high social class, then everything would have been hunky-dory. So while the essay treats Ramirez sympathetically and respectfully, and is not at all kind to Yale "culture," the promotional Tweet had a distinctly snobbish, classist, even sexist, undertone to it. It didn't quite blame the victim for feeling offended, but it came close enough. It also implicitly slut-shamed more well-off young women who "fit in" better at abusive elite institutions. The subliminal message is that their money and possessions and position protect them from all harm and hurt feelings and constitute the basis of their self-esteem. 

But that's not how Dao sees it. Rather than directly addressing the classism and sexism of the tweet, he simply puts forth the usual boilerplate excuse of how, since some sort of undisclosed rigid "process" wasn't followed, the tweet was not up to the Times's usual standards of excellence. They will be reviewing this unexpected process failure very carefully to determine how they can do better in the future. Process failures seem to be the rule rather than the exception lately, as in the Times' retraction of a recent headline that had Donald Trump vowing to fight racism, right after the El Paso gun massacre committed by a fan of Donald Trump. 

So despite the Times's obvious cherry-picking of the "scoop" of the previously unknown story of a second female Yale victim, I still get the sense that the book itself is probably well worth a read, that it is an in-depth sociological examination of what made Brett Kavanaugh who he is, and how his upbringing and class status and connections have catapulted him all the way to the Supreme Court.

The criticism by some of my fellow Times readers of my own early comment, which called for Supreme Court term limits, was based entirely upon my failure to get with the desired narrative program and immediately jump on the Kavanaugh Impeachment bandwagon. 

Here's how I responded to writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's high school pal and alleged witness to the attack on Christine Blasey Ford, wrote a revealing book called "Wasted" in which he describes the insular, privileged, and alcohol-saturated world of the Georgetown preppies, their parents and even their Jesuit instructors. It's a highly conservative world, and a very misogynistic one.

 Even rich girls in the D.C. suburbs were subjected to the "pranks" perpetrated by these boys. including one group calling themselves the Inquisitors. Every weekend they'd don religious garb and trash the expensive home of a girl whose family, they'd ascertained, would be out of town. When finally caught, they were not prosecuted, but the Jesuits cooperated with the police and made the culprits do community service in a local soup kitchen. When they reneged and faked a written report on their charitable works, about a dozen of them were barred from graduation ceremonies.

Judge's parents then fondly and proudly dubbed them the Twelve Disciples.

 Kavanaugh is a permanent member of this club. The patriarchy that preys together, stays together.

His disturbing presence on our highest court should be the impetus for term limits. Without them, we could get rid of Trump tomorrow, but his horrible legacy would persist for many decades to come. The court should be staffed by revolving teams of jurists from lower courts. This will help prevent its further dangerous politicization, especially under predatory presidents like Trump.

The book "Wasted" has nothing in it about how the girls in this exalted social circle felt about being "harmlessly" pranked by having their homes destroyed. Tellingly, though,he affectionately describes the well-off victims as the Klique's "little sisters" who were such good sports they never bore them a grudge. One of the vandalized properties, Judge claims, was owned by a senator (whom he respectfully doesn't name, along with protecting the identities of everyone else in the book except himself and his parents) You get the distinct impression that the rich are very carefully taught, from earliest childhood, to keep each other's secrets. Because you never know when this unwritten Kode of Silence will come in handy, and if the drunken guys who once trashed your house (or worse) might be in a position to help you advance someday. Because their parents know your parents, and at the rarefied top of the power elite mountain, everybody is connected to everybody else. It's a small, small world.

The rich are different from you and me. It's not just that they have unlimited money. It's that friendships and ethics don't seem to matter to them as much as the life-long transactional relationships they cultivate for purely Machiavellian reasons.

*Update: Robin Pogrebin, the book's co-author, finally copped to writing the offensive tweet herself, after initially having denied doing so. As a jaded New Yorker and Yale classmate of Brett Kavanaugh she, personally, would have reacted differently to having a penis thrust in her face. Therefore, "people" took her tweet the wrong way.  Come to think of it, I think I'll skip her book. My experience has always been that if people can so glibly lie about one thing, they lie about other things. Plus, I am already sick of this story. 

George H.W. Bush Has Entered the Void

And has almost - almost! - replaced Donald Trump and his scandals as the number one topic of discussion among the corporate media resistance fighters. You see, although Trump's publicists put out the obligatory statement mourning the Passing of Poppy, media outlets are scrambling to broadcast the time when Trump mocked this beloved elder statesman. See here and here to get the handwringing drift of the manufactured outrage.

Thank goodness Trump didn't mock Bush's wartime exploits as he did John McCain's. Otherwise he might have been barred from attending another star-studded funeral. The Bush affair promises to be even more clubby than normal, because the midterms have also recently entered the Void, and all the Duopolists have been unleashed to revel in a veritable frenzy of plutocratic bonhomie.

The gist of the liberal class's Poppy obituaries are in the vein of "I didn't always agree with his politics, but boy, what a great and totally classy human being!" Even the unflattering comparisons of Bush Jr. with his poor beleaguered father that were standard fare during the reign of the son are a thing of the past, now that Dubya has been fully rehabilitated by the freedom fighters of the Democratic Party and their military-surveillance complex partners. They don't even care that Bush the Younger recently stumped for reactionary Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who got his own political start stumping for Junior and giving torture his legal rubber stamp.

The accolades for Bush the Elder already rival those for John McCain for mawkish bipartisanship. There will surely be yet another achingly tender and funny moment between Junior and Michelle Obama at the funeral. What will the headline event be this time? A hokey dance routine, like the one they performed at a memorial for slain Dallas police officers? The sentimental sharing of a cough drop. like at the McCain extravaganza? Brace yourselves for a chill up the spine or a lurch in the stomach, depending upon your class status, your political party, or your healthy independent ability to detect phoniness whenever you see it. 

Meanwhile, insert the boilerplate hagiography here:

Luckily for most hagiographers, the death of the 94-year-old Bush has been expected for so long that the obituaries were written well in advance of the event. A reverent book-length obituary by Jon Meacham, complete with a jacket blurb written by Poppy himself, was published way back in 2015. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. long a favorite journalist of the elder Bush, then wrote fawning review of the fawning biography, urging the former president to "not go gentle, man, into that good night," while expressing her awed gratitude that he'd finally broken from tradition and criticized the architects of his son's misbegotten Iraq invasion - if not the son himself - as "iron asses."

And H.W. staunchly held on for three more years. Whether he went gently or whether he went aggressively is not yet known.* Nor is it known whether, like his late wife Barbara and his late colleague McCain, he had nobly decided to end extraordinary medical treatment as a gesture of aristocratic heroism.

Like so many other crass people, I wrote my own premature Bush eulogy years ago. This was in response to the aforementioned Dowd pre-mortem:

I think I'll give Meacham's bio a pass. That the publisher's blurb brags that he was granted unique access to all Poppy's and Bar's diaries as well as to their august doddering selves should be your first clue to run for the hills. Your second clue is that Poppy is openly shilling for what smells like a shameless hagiography*. 

The fact is that a corrupt scion like W can only grow out of a corrupt family tree. An oil-rich Skull and Bones river oozes right through the thought-free realm that shelters this whole misbegotten dynasty.
Unmentioned in the cheap Freudian analyses about obscenely rich fathers and sons is the fact that Poppy himself never could have clawed his way to the top without the help of the Ford administration's Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Although Poppy followed the grand Bush family tradition of being woefully underqualified, they orchestrated his appointment to head the CIA as a cynical means of pushing back against the Church Committee. Once there, Poppy accomplished such feats as destroying all the records of the CIA's hideous mind control experiments. He helped the Neocon cabal give birth to their whole criminal enterprise 40 years ago. They enriched the military-industrial complex by falsely hyping Soviet threats, just as they would later falsely hype the Iraq threat.

They always were asses, iron or otherwise.

Intelligence failure is built right into the Bush DNA.

They deserve neither biographies nor therapy. They deserve indictments.

(addendum) Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets, posits that the Meacham bio is a huge cover-up. That most people will neither buy it nor read it matters not. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. Baker offers exhaustive evidence in his own book that, far from being the mild-mannered virtuous statesman of legend, Bush the Elder has been up to his eyeballs in intrigue and corruption and dirty political tricks his entire life. It was Poppy, for example, who gave Karl Rove his first big break. Baker even suggests a Bush-as-CIA spook connection, through various degrees of separation, with the Kennedy assassination. Yikes. Needless to say, his book was almost universally trashed by the establishment media when it was published, via that tried and true technique called "gaslighting the author." (See: Seymour Hersh.)

And for Poppy's direct role in delaying the release of the Iran hostages, through illegal deal-making with the culprits, to swing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, read the late Robert Parry's Trick Or Treason. (His Consortium News site is also republishing some of his investigative pieces related to Bush Sr.)

  These conveniently forgotten episodes in American presidential history make candidate Donald Trump's flubbed bribery scheme to build a luxury hotel in Moscow look downright benign.

* Update. He went gently. Peter Baker of the New York Times, whom I hereby nominate for a Pulitzer in the category of shameless hagiography, has the blow-by-blow. Poppy apparently started going downhill right after former Secretary of State James Baker took him out for oysters on the half shell two weeks ago. Baker was also present at the end, when he tenderly rubbed his friend's feet to the accompaniment of a live professional opera singer.