A Distraction Inside a Diversion Within a Deflection

I almost feel sorry for CNN, the most mistrusted name in news. As you've probably heard, one of its debate moderators belligerently asked Bernie Sanders why he had told Elizabeth Warren that a woman could never win the presidency rather than if he had told her this.

This tacky episode of desperately obvious collusion between the war industry-financed cable giant and the faltering campaign of Elizabeth Warren puts CNN in a real quandary as Donald Trump's impeachment trial opens in the Senate. How will its reporters juggle the onerous task of breathlessly hyping the drama of Ukrainegate while simultaneously hyping their contrived family feud between Sanders and Warren? Do they break from the testimony to do panel discussions on Warren and Sanders giving each other the side-eye? Do they cover the boring speeches by the "impeachment managers" or do they air Donald Trump bloviating about witch hunts and unfairness on the White House lawn or at another one of his Nuremberg-style rallies? What if another hell of a continent-engulfing fire breaks out just as the climate-denying senators are fretting about the scandal of delayed weapons appropriations in the new Cold War? What if Trump murders another foreign leader right in the middle of his trial while Adam Schiff is discussing foreign terrorism and improving America's reputation?  It's a real dilemma, not just for CNN, but for the whole media borg. 

In normally balanced times of abnormality, we're used to seeing a permanent split screen, images divided between the requisite two manufactured narratives and leading actors. But with the petty partisan politics of impeachment vying for attention with the petty partisan politics of the Warren-Sanders kerfuffle vying with the petty partisan politics of Everyday Trump vying with whatever mass shootings and climate catastrophes are happening in the world, our invisible TV pixels might devolve into visible pixels requiring a magnifying glass to see. Just the chyrons alone, vying for desperate attention on the top, bottom and both sides of the screen, might require the purchase of a whole separate screen to keep us properly informed. Maybe they should start selling smarter TVs with pre-split multiple screens that are bigger than a house... that is, to the lucky few who still live in houses, which are increasingly being used as hiding places for laundered oligarchic loot rather than as actual dwelling places for human beings.

Thus far I've only been able to find a gadget that breaks up your already-small screen into six separate compartments for your enhanced viewing confusion. To be fair, it is not marketed for use by just one viewer, but to multiple family members or housemates who fight over what to watch on their one TV and who can now supposedly get along in blissful cacophonous peace and harmony

Is it me, or are we finally entering the terminal stage of our great national psychosis in unreal real time, what with all these manufactured and unnatural events competing for our ever more divided and shortened attention spans?

But enough of these depressing dystopian musings! Let's talk just a bit more about that way too obvious conspiracy between Elizabeth Warren and CNN to destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. As others have written, this is all for the benefit of Joe Biden, or perhaps for the benefit of Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg. Playing the sexism card against Bernie rather than against Gropey Sniffy Joe is Warren's tacit way of admitting she has no chance to be the nominee. Her task is to prove to Biden and the corrupt Democratic establishment that when they go low, she goes lower. She is a team player and a worthy candidate for the vice presidency or at least for a top-level cabinet position.

If Warren had been truly, sincerely disturbed by Sanders's alleged sexist remark at that private dinner more than a year ago, wouldn't she have spoken up in the immediate aftermath in order to warn progressives and feminists where this guy's head was really at?

Her belated accusation reeks of the Hail Mary pass. Faced with her imminent defeat, she has desperately pivoted from "I've got a plan for that"  to embracing the same old head fake of stale identity politics. She portrays herself - and by extension, all of womanhood -  as the quintessential victim. Of course, the best and the brightest of the victimized will nevertheless  "fight back" against the male sex as a substitute for fighting back against the patriarchal capitalism which afflicts every living thing on earth: men, women, children, flora and fauna.

Abandoning her brand as the populist champion of working class solidarity, Warren is now wholeheartedly embracing the centrist cult of neoliberal individualism. She is a good loyal friend to capitalism. It was always a contradiction for her to claim to be "a capitalist to my bones" from one side of the mouth and to assert that "I'm with Bernie!" with the other. The truth is now out there. Whether her calculated choice succeeds in damaging Sanders and rewarding Biden - and, ultimately, Trump - remains to be seen.

Warren, meanwhile, is using the solemnity of the impeachment to dissociate her own self from the kerfuffle she has caused. But CNN is having none of it, scoffing at the widespread criticism of its anti-Bernie bias and complaining that Warren refused further comment as she was entering the Senate chamber. CNN's Chris Cilizza vows that his network is not giving up the story about Warren's fight without a fight! Because a story is a story and it won't be the end of the story.

Capitalism hates class solidarity - unless, of course, it is plutocratic class solidarity.

 And it certainly does love those lonely individual downtrodden fighters who can beat all the odds and serve as shining examples of grit and fortitude to the rest of us poor slobs. Capitalism loves it when the teeming masses vicariously identify with such downtrodden elites as Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Meghan Markle... or conversely, with the beleaguered persona of Donald Trump. The more effectively we can be taught to disassociate from our own lives, root for their fortunes and disdain the "haters" who do not, then the less likely it is that we will ever join forces in solidarity with our similarly atomized brothers and sisters.

Capitalism doesn't care a whit about the sincerity of the downtrodden elites that it chooses to market and showcase. It certainly doesn't care whether or not its current star attraction, Donald Trump, is re-elected. In fact, the oligarchs are banking on his re-election, given how this master showman would in all likelihood defeat Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg.

Bernie Sanders is their designated enemy. But what really scares them and sends them to their loot-stuffed fainting couches is an informed, angry and motivated populace.

United we stand. Divided by a confusing infinity of split TV screens and manufactured controversies, we fall. 

Untruths and Consequences

Give Donald Trump a little credit. He is succeeding where Barack Obama failed: he has single-handedly reanimated this country's moribund antiwar movement, inspiring spontaneous weekend street protests against imminent war in at least 80 American cities.

Thanks to Trump, the assassinated Quassam Soleimani is now a household name. Tbanks to Trump, politicians on both sides of the War Party aisle are scrambling to either defend the indefensible drone attack against a foreign leader visiting another foreign country (Iraq) at the express invitation of that country, or to complain they weren't properly kept in the assassination loop as is their god-given right as co-equal warmongers.

Besides joining the anti-war protest or strike nearest you, now is also the perfect time  to dust off your copy of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"to help you parse both the pro-war propaganda and the pretend anti-war propaganda.

The pro-war propaganda is especially prevalent in the reactionary tabloid press. The New York Post, for example, published a graphic photo of Soleimani's severed hand on its front page with the descriptor "Dead Ringer" to explain how his ring helped identify him. Whether this kind of coverage unites Trump's fan base into the desired frenzy of Islamaphobic solidarity remains to be seen - especially given that it's the children of his fan base who will be importuned into fighting Trump's war.

The more staid establishment media are much more nuanced and subtle, or at least they're making a half-hearted attempt at nuance and subtlety. It must be really hard out there for the liberal interventionists and pundits who previously had never met a war they didn't like. They find themselves in the unaccustomed position of suddenly hating United States-sponsored murder and terrorism only because they hate Trump so much. If only he weren't our current murderer and terrorist-in-chief! War was so much easier to sell when the discreet and eloquent Barack Obama and the genial, goofy, dry-drunk George Bush were in nominal charge.

Obama, especially, was able to project a modicum of sanity and balance in public as he acted out his inner Trump, holding his weekly Terror Tuesday assassination club meetings and dropping his bombs on eight different countries throughout his "no drama" presidency. He played by the rules. He adhered to the norms. The media rarely challenged him. He mastered the fine art of political-speak to defend the indefensible. Per George Orwell:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

And as Janet Malcolm more recently explained this delicate deadly rhetorical balance in her critique of the access-hungry complicit media, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.

Just because Trump is a bombastic liar doesn't mean that his phony anti-war concern-troll critics are telling the truth themselves.

Take Susan Rice, national security maven in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now a Netflix board member and contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. After helping to orchestrate the ill-planned, disastrous regime-change war in Libya highlighted by the gruesome murder of Moammar Qadaffi, Rice now has the chutzpah to chide Trump for his own recklessness.

The Big Lie in Rice's sanctimonious Times column is that longstanding US-sponsored Middle East chaos didn't start until Trump came along to ruin all their hard diplomatic work:

How did we get here? What are the consequences of these targeted killings? Can we avoid a worse-case scenario?

 The escalatory cycle began in May 2018, when President Trump recklessly ignored the advice of his national security team and the opposition of our allies in unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal- despite Iran's full adherence to its terms and its efficacy in rolling back from a nuclear program. Since then, the Trump administration has had no coherent strategy to constrain Iran's nuclear program or to counter other aspects of its nefarious behavior.

After getting the obligatory Orwellian rhetorical question-begging out of the way, Rice doesn't even call war with Iran a potential worldwide disaster, but only a "worse-case" scenario. She does, however, add the common, group-thinking, passive-aggressive caveat that Suleimani was a "terrorist" because he led the military of another country that is not allied with or beholden to the United States. 

In deciding to eliminate General Suleimani, Mr. Trump and his team argue they were acting in self-defense to thwart imminent attacks on Americans in Iraq and the region. That may be true, as General Suleimani was a ruthless murderer and terrorist with much American blood on his hands. Unfortunately, it's hard to place confidence in the representations of an administration that lies almost daily about matters large and small and even, in this critical instance, failed to brief, much less consult, bipartisan leaders in Congress.

In other words, if you're going to assassinate somebody, you must have a proven track rcord of skillful, confidence-inspiring obfuscation. After all, it has taken two whole decades and three whole administrations for the serial lies about the Afghanistan war to finally come to public light.

Meanwhile, Rice doesn't bother explaining whose blood Suleimani had on his hands, other than it was pure red-blooded American blood. It would never do to admit that the ruthless killing was done to ruthless killers and/or invading armies and/or corporate colonizers.

Trump not only lies in real time and is caught lying in real time, he avoids the usual platitudes about spreading democracy and human rights throughout the world by way of massive death and destruction. He brays the truth about the real purpose of these wars: land-grabbing for oligarchic fun and profit.

And he is so nasty and humorless about it. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at least, was gracious enough to laugh and lighten things up a bit with a friendly complicit network TV reporter after Qaddafi was sodomized to death by a bayonet:

Meanwhile, the Media-Political Complex wrings its hands over Iran's resulting threats to the thousands of aggressive land-grabbers and mercenaries ("American interests") who will now be less safe in the vast, resource-rich geographical spaces which they have so nobly invaded and colonized in the name of free market capitalism.

The literal ring of military bases surrounding Iran actually might get a dent or two put into it!

My published response to Susan Rice's arrogant little New York Times sermon:

The stage for catastrophe was set nearly two decades ago with the invasion of Iraq, a war which the author of this op-ed did not oppose. She joined in the fear mongering propaganda over the non-existent WMDs, even joining with the Bushies in claiming that the invasion did not need permission of the U.N. Security Council.

And then there was Ms. Rice's pivotal role, with Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, in the Obama administration's ill-fated Libya "humanitarian" intervention - which remains to this day a humanitarian catastrophe.

 Those in power never learn that America's aggressive meddling has never had one single happy ending. If Trump is reckless and acts with impunity, it is through the unitary executive powers bequeathed to him by his predecessors. And absent a few principled representatives like Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, Congress has oceans of blood on its hands for just having gifted Trump more billions for war. They even awarded him his very own Space Force, even as the House voted to impeach him over his sleazy Ukraine extortion scheme. Given his insane attempt to start World War III with the assassination of one of Iran's highest ranking officials, that incident now seems rather pathetic.

Presidents under siege and/or facing re-election have a tendency to start wars and drop bombs as diversionary tactics. That Trump would react to impeachment like a cornered senile wolverine is no big shock to anybody - except to the experts who never seem to learn.

Impeachment Show As War Propaganda

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff represents Hollywood. And as such, he was initially and very generously bankrolled by the likes of mega-director Steven Spielberg and former Disney honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg. He still enjoys one of the fattest campaign war chests of any member of Congress.

But politics is not by any means his first career choice. Schiff is a failed Hollywood screenwriter who, despite his current job, is still working on another script in hopes of finally making it as big in hometown Tinseltown as he's making it big in Washington. 

The impeachment report that he wrote and just released to glowing mainstream media reviews has all the trappings of the spy thriller which he admits to crafting in his spare time.  I predict that Tom Hanks will be tapped to play the part of the intrepid screenwriter-turned-prosecutor-turned congressman who, with the help of a few unaccountable and unelected patriots of the CIA and the State Department, saved the Permanent War State from Donald Trump's oafish transactional diplomacy and tepid and phony gestures toward world peace.

Schiff himself can do the off-screen sonorous voice-over of himself reading from his jingoistic, overblown Impeachment Report as the opening credits roll on the big screen, or more likely, on the small Netflix screen after the star-studded premiere at Constitution Hall or the Kennedy Center. Hear him now as you read the script:

America remains the beacon of democracy and opportunity for freedom-loving people around the world. From their homes and their jail cells, from their public squares and their refugee camps, from their waking hours till their last breath, individuals fighting for human rights, journalists uncovering and exposing corruption, persecuted minorities struggling to survive and preserve their faith, and countless others around the globe just hoping for a better life look to America. What we do will determine what they see, and whether America remains a nation committed to the rule of law.

Now, if the impeachment movie about the impeachment movie that is currently playing out in real, or actually unreal time, is a documentary rather than a fan-fic of the right-wing Neocon Democratic/CIA/ War Party in a pretend-battle against the ultra-right Neocon Republican/CIA/ War Party, among the images we should see on our screens are:

--The half million homeless people living in America on any given night. The situation is especially dire in Schiff's home state of California, due in large part to the mortgage foreclosures of the last decade, unaffordable rents charged by private equity landlords like Blackstone, job losses, lousy wages and other miseries orchestrated by and for the Oligarchy with the help of the corrupt political duopoly.An average of three homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles County every single day. The death toll is expected to rise to a thousand in 2020. 

--Record numbers of mainly black and brown people locked up in America's for-profit privatized prisons, while white collar criminals like WeWork's Adam Neumann are not only going free, they're collecting billions of dollars in exit packages. And yes, there is already a Hollywood movie about this massive fraud in the works to give us a sense of theatrical justice in lieu of a televised perp walk or another true-life prison documentary.

--Increasing numbers of refugees and migrants arriving at our borders and Europe's to escape the crime and poverty engendered by US-led regime change coups and wars to advance corporate interests - what Adam Schiff and the Impeachers euphemize as "national security." Above all, the refugee crisis is engendered by the Capitalocene Epoch's destruction of the environment through forcing monoculture upon global populations at the very same time they imprison them with debt and austerity through International Monetary Fund loans. Border concentration camps for kids, with imprisoned refugees crying for freedom but mostly crying for their parents would be a top impeachable offense if it weren't so inconveniently bipartisan.

--As Schiff intones the words "to their last breath," we might see footage of Americans dying prematurely in record numbers because they can't afford to see a doctor. We might see child refugees drowning in bodies of water as disparate as the Rio Grande and the Mediterranean Sea in a futile attempt to escape the wars and famines directly caused by the same American foreign policy apparatus that Donald Trump is so seriously offending by using it for his own selfish political purposes.

--Schiff's introductory voice-over would conclude with the victims of America's drone wars. As he bloviates about how "persecuted minorities struggling to survive" look to America for hope, we will see terrorized Yemeni, Pakistani and Afghan children unable to sleep at night as they listen for the tell-tale signs of drone activity above their heads.

They need not wonder whether the removal or defeat of Trump will protect them. With the Obama Justice Department secretly drafting a "rule of law" which allows any president to act as their judge, jury and executioner, with no oversight and no accountability for "collateral damage," nobody is safe. The bodies are not even being counted.

They need not wonder whether America will protect them when Adam Schiff himself was among the Impeachers who just voted to renew the Patriot Act, granting the despised and feared Donald Trump the continuing  power to conduct unfettered mass surveillance. This is on top of most Democrats gifting him with more than $700 billion this year for more drones, bombs and such military hardware as a Hellfire missiles equipped with razor-sharp blades designed to slice people to death. Described as a 100-pound flying switchblade or "The Flying Ginsu." the  CIA and Pentagon developed this horrific weapon in secret, and justify its use by claiming that it spares "innocent civilians." So perhaps the Schiff movie could end with pictures of responsible slicing and dicing of humanity as a way to preserve the faith of the whole world in America's beneficence. After all, if the Guillotine could have been so successfully marketed as a humane death machine during the Reign of Terror, why not a guillotine that actually flies and kills by remote control?

 As a matter of fact, the Trump war machine just deployed another Flying Ginsu near the Turkey- Syria on Monday - the very same day that Adam Schiff released his impeachment recommendations. The razor blade bomb also reportedly was the weapon that took out ISIS leader Abu Khayr Al Masr two years ago.

The Impeachment Movie itself is a Grade Z slasher dud with some truly terrible and trite dialogue. And Adam Schiff and his supporting cast of complicit media and political enablers are reactionary box office poison. 

Personally, I could barely get past that one blood-curdling introductory paragraph of his report, which is nothing more than a propaganda broadside to gin up popular support of more endless wars for profit, the most deadly of which is currently waged by Ukraine proxy between two nuclear powers.  That potential apocalypse makes the Flying Ginsu look like a preschool Nerf sword set. 

But look over there! A corrupt president on one side of the US oligarchy tried to use an American-controlled corrupt foreign leader to investigate a corrupt domestic political rival on the other side of the US oligarchy. It's the only crime or scandal in the world that they're willing to talk about as they struggle to sell their competing narratives to a public that is either riled up out of all reason, or just plain bored.  

They want to deflect your attention from the real horrors, small or large, that afflict you and your fellow human beings every single day. If the corporate media doesn't cover them, they do not even exist.

There's Something About Deval Patrick... and Liz Warren

If, as Cornel West once so pithily observed,"Barack Obama is Wall Street's black mascot," then Deval Patrick is Wall Street's black mascot on steroids, crack and crystal meth.

So why is the former Massachusetts governor suddenly and belatedly entering the Democratic presidential primaries?

Let us contemplate the scenario in an admittedly speculative manner.

First a little background. As Michael Hudson lays out in "The Monster," an excellent investigation into the subprime mortgage crime spree that contributed to the complete collapse of the financial system in 2008, Deval Patrick was the lead civil rights attorney in the Bill Clinton Justice Department in 1996 when he inked a $4 million sweetheart deal with Roland Arnall, whom he had threatened to sue for using his Long Beach, California mortgage shop to target black home buyers with predatory loans. 

Patrick, as Hudson recounts, lamely explained the slap on the wrist by saying: "We recognize that lenders understand the industry in ways that we (government lawyers) don't."

Patrick also didn't balk when, after allowing Arnall to redirect $1 million of the settlement toward consumer education, the culprit picked his own consumer nonprofits and thus "parlayed an embarrassment for his company into an association that helped promote his image as a straight shooting reformer."

After his meaningless promise to behave himself, Arnall then ballooned his small-time loan racket into the monstrous Ameriquest financial empire, continuing to target black, brown, white, old, young, low income, even unemployed people with home loans whose payments ballooned to near-usurious rates after a couple of years. 

To further help Arnall salvage his rightly damaged reputation after he went national with his scheme and came under renewed investigation by several state attorneys general, Deval Patrick joined the holding company of the all-white Ameriquest board of directors as a way to reassure minority borrowers, as well as government regulators and the Wall Street investors in the bait and switch loan deals, which were sliced and diced to "spread the risk" and avoid accountability, that Arnall was totally on the up and up.

He wasn't. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. Wall Street crashed. But not before Deval Patrick had written a glowing letter to Congress on Arnall's behalf, to help legislators overcome their sickly inhibitions against confirming this GOP mega-donor as George W. Bush's ambassador to The Netherlands. Arnall finally got the post after he agreed to dismantle Ameriquest and pay a pittance to the customers he'd defrauded.

Deval Patrick, instead of embarking on his own quest for the highest office in the land, should have been prosecuted himself for aiding and abetting a fraud,  or at the very least shamed into an early retirement. In hopes of leading the country one day, he instead followed in the Bain Capital footsteps of Mitt Romney and won the Massachusetts governorship - although unlike Romney, the Bain gig came after the "public" service, not before.

How does Elizabeth Warren enter into this? Well, it's quite the coincidence that Patrick announced his quest only one week after Warren shockingly said she'd consider him for her cabinet if she is elected president.

"If I could talk about people who aren't politicians, I talk about my former governor, Deval Patrick, who is a pretty terrific guy. I talk about some of the people I've met who are presidents of [historically black colleges and universities], especially those who are deeply engaged in education," she told CNN.

So, with little chance that he'll make the debates or appeal much to the general public, it looks like Patrick's  main goal is to get a lot of public visibility as he angles for an administration job as attorney general, treasury secretary or maybe even the vice presidency. Patrick could also be in talks with the
mysteriously ascendant centrist Pete Buttigieg, who has had his own problems appealing to black voters.  Vanilla Pete needs all the black cover help he can get, given his failure to address police racism even in his own small city of South Bend, Indiana. And then there is the little matter of Buttigieg lying about the non-existent endorsements of some important black South Carolinians, who are making no bones about how ticked off they are for being used in such a slimy way. 

Deval Patrick already has a proven track record of giving aid and comfort to dishonest people, and getting richly rewarded for doing so. A Buttigieg-Patrick ticket would be just the ticket to smooth over all those pesky racial problems. Or so they cynically might think.

Warren's own positive statements about Deval Patrick, meanwhile, make me wonder if she really is as smart and wonkish and plan-intensive as she markets herself to be. Or even worse, smart as she undoubtedly is, her praise of him makes me suspect that she is just plain cynical. If she didn't know about Patrick's sordid past and his neoliberal mindset when she touted him on CNN, then she hasn't done even basic research. And if she did know, then she's just another con artist in populist sheepdog clothing. 

And how about the bizarre way that she recently bristled at a very anodyne question from Amy Goodman at an environmental forum about the racism inherent in two largely white states (Iowa and New Hampshire) holding the first caucus and primary election, respectively? Warren's retort that she is "just a player in this game" was not only quite telling, it's more than a little disturbing, and it points very strongly in the cynicism direction.

I've been reluctant to criticize Warren too harshly, despite her technocratic piecemeal solutions to overwhelming existential crises and her applauding Trump at the State of the Union when he vowed to keep socialism out of the United States. She talks the class war talk, and that should count for a little something even if she doesn't mean it. She at least is making the billionaires nervous. And she did, after all, fight against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, unafraid to criticize the Obama administration for its lack of transparency over the brazen corporate takeover of the world that the TPP "trade deal" actually was.

Sad to say, I'm no longer even a tepid fan. Her Deval Patrick testimonial was the ultimate deal-breaker.

Again, though, why Deval, and why now? Besides the fact that the Obama crowd have long been urging him to run, this might also be their not so subtle signal to Joe Biden that he is toast. The impeachment inquiry is dragging both him and the Party down, and it will drag them down even further if Mitch McConnell feeds his inner Machiavelli on steroids, crack and crystal meth and decides to hold a formal impeachment trial after all.

Keeping Bernie, Liz and the four other senators running for president imprisoned in Senate chambers during such a trial would put a real damper on their campaign trail activities right before, if not during, the first primaries or even beyond. If the Republicans subpoena both Joe and Hunter Biden, and maybe even Obama himself as hostile witnesses for the Trump defense, they will give Buttigieg, the tainted Deval Patrick and the extremely tainted Mike Bloomberg all that much extra rope with which to hang themselves before Trump eats them for breakfast in the general election. 

And if Warren, Sanders and the four others use their impeachment camera time to breathe even one syllable about the election, you can rest assured that the Trumpies will gleefully pounce and accuse them of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits political campaigning in official government places and in official government capacities.

Who knows? We may finally get the Spectacle and the ratings that the corporate media are counting on.

Or maybe not, if the Powers That Be decree that nothing must ever distract the public from the continued marketing of the Cold (But Getting Dangerously Warmer) War on Russia that the Ukraine-centered impeachment inquiry is now broadcasting to such abysmal public enthusiasm.

Impeachment Show Recap

It's not even mainly about impeaching Donald Trump. It's about nostalgic career Cold Warriors selling their perpetual Cold War to a war-weary American public. It's all about drumming up support and enthusiasm for the US war against Russia, currently playing out in Ukraine.

Trump's real but unacknowledged crime is having thrown a rhetorical little cup of water over American exceptionalism. It is for that faux pas - not fraud, not violation of the Emoluments Clause, not cruel immigration policy, not the wanton corporate destruction of the environment via an orgy of deregulation -  that he must be punished. Even though his brazen attempt to importune, bribe, or extort the new president of the US's war proxy-state puppet to investigate both the Bidens and the Clintonian origins of Russiagate quickly fell flat by virtue of its own oafish brazenness, it's the thought that really counts to the Impeachers and their partners of the Permanent Security State.

Trump's attempt to use foreign policy to make a personal political killing didn't even interfere with the US Empire's perpetual mission to rob and kill with impunity. As a matter of fact, Trump ultimately approved a fortune in deadly weapons for the US proxy war, including supplying Ukraine with the Javelin anti-tank hardware that Barack Obama had balked at supplying.

Trump's failed extortion/bribery scheme did, however, momentarily make the Very Important Killers just a tad nervous and embarrassed as they envisioned Vladimir Putin chortling with glee at the expense of the career Cold Warriors.

That's the gist I got from listening to the first day of public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee by Bill Taylor, top US diplomat to Ukraine and George Kent, a top State Department official. Both men went on and on about the "regular channels" that have enabled the US to reign supreme ever since the end of World War II, and the "irregular channels" evidenced by Rudy Giuliani, Trump's latest top legal fixer and shadow diplomat in Kiev. To hear the Cold Warriors kvetch about it, this irregular diplomacy is unprecedented in the annals of the permanent ruling security state. So is a president conducting his foreign policy out of pure political self-interest.

Just off the top of my head, I seem to remember Bill Clinton's bombing of Iraq just to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal, Congressman Charlie Wilson's illegal shadow war against Russia in Afghanistan, even Obama's cold calculated decision to kill Osama bin Laden just months before he had to run for re-election in a very tight race. 

Taylor, who got his first taste of regime change war as an infantry commander in Vietnam (see previous post) summarized the war ethos, "freedom is death and death is freedom" as succinctly as anyone who has  spent the last half-century of his life defending weaponized capitalism. As a former Energy Department adviser, Taylor would never critique America's irregular shadow diplomacy with the murderous Saudi monarchs, no matter how intense the level of corruption in that repressive totalitarian state. The petrodollar is king. And Ukraine has gas fields and pipelines that both Russia and the US want to control.

Taylor (who should get an Oscar for projecting the most deeply serious sonorous voice and best presentation of Gravitas of the show so far) told the Committee: 

"The security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine's defense and the protection of the soldiers I met last week... we are Ukraine's reliable defense partner. It is clearly in our national interest to deter Russian aggression."

National interest is code for the bottom lines of the multinational oil companies and Wall Street. When asked, Taylor could not document one single soldier's death or injury as the result of Trump's pathetic bribery/extortion scheme.  

Meanwhile, both establishment political parties are furiously fund-raising off the Impeachment Show. Billionaire Trump is seeking donations for his legal defense fund - although the way he's been ripping through his roster of crooked lawyers, it may come to him defending himself and, of course, paying himself to do so.

As for the Democrats, when one of their buck-raking emails is slugged "Pelosi Corruption" in a bid for your money to prove that you stand with her in "condemning" Trump, you have to wonder about her mental acumen as well. Or maybe she's just going for comic self-deprecation.  Has there ever been such a seriously hilariously irregular bunch of Looney Tunes?

That's all, folks! 

Biden Plagiarizes Both Obama and Trump

Well, maybe plagiarism is too harsh a word to hurl at the old reprobate copycat, whose own stated goal is to keep serving the fat cats and defending their right to crush everybody else into oblivion. But his much-maligned Medium post, in which he accused Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren of "my way or the highway"elitism, absolutely was ripped right out of Barack Obama's anti-progressive playbook.

It was only last week that Obama briefly emerged from his luxe retirement to once again chide the serfs who refuse to suffer the American system of neo-feudalism gladly, who call their lords and masters nasty names on Twitter rather than reaching across the class divide to find common cause with the very people who are making their lives nasty, brutish and short. Contrary to Biden's oafish attack on Warren, however, Obama's sermonizing about the dangers of "cancel culture" was almost universally praised by the mainstream media as being a "breath of fresh air" in this divisive Age of Trump.

Headlining the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, where plans for his presidential center and golf course on public parkland have run into legal challenges from neighborhood activists who are crying foul because of gentrification and rising rents and the damage to the environment that his project is already causing, the former president expressed his displeasure with a gaslighting attack upon citizen activism in general:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

As Obama had previously admonished those protesting the location of his Center, occasional appearances by Chance the Rapper should alleviate all their concerns about his refusal to sign a community benefits agreement to offset the rising rents of gentrification and the destruction of their public park. After all, if the former president could once be generous enough to call misanthropic former House Speaker, sadistic Ayn Rand fanboy and less refined victim-blamer Paul Ryan "a good man, a family man," why can't the lesser people also put away their "wokeness" and stop making so many unreasonable demands for a better, more equitable life for themselves and their communities? 

Why be an independent activist when the Obamas are touting their planned shrine as "a catalyst for activism and social change" without offering any information about how this would actually happen?

Enter Joe Biden, who is now being eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren in many polls. He's also being eclipsed by Bernie Sanders. But, thanks to the relentless media blackout of Sanders, Biden can keep on pretending with the rest of them that Bernie doesn't even exist. He therefore limits his umbrage to Warren, who has rightly accused him running in "the wrong primary" because of his opposition to Medicare For All and soaking the rich to help the less well-off.

Biden therefore summoned up his inner deflective Obama: 

But at another level these kinds of attacks are a serious problem. They reflect an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics. If someone doesn’t agree with you — it’s not just that you disagree — that person must be a coward or corrupt or a small thinker.Some call it the “my way or the highway” approach to politics. But it’s worse than that. It’s condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view.It’s representative of an elitism that working and middle class people do not share: “We know best; you know nothing”. “If you were only as smart as I am you would agree with me.”

Accusing the victims of your own cruel, nasty policies of being nasty and scary is a common tactic of right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Joe Biden hurling the "elitist" epithet at Warren not only ignores his own life-long service to, and enrichment by, the Elite, it allows him to portray himself as just a regular working-class guy. Not only has he ripped a smarmy page right out of the scolding Obama playbook, he's going one step further. He is essentially plagiarizing  Donald Trump, stealing the successful fascistic technique of reversing the dichotomy between perpetrator and victim.

Just as Biden, the elitist in anti-intellectual blue collar clothing, uses Warren as proxy for the estimated 84 million uninsured and underinsured Americans and their advocates, selfish and unreasonable extremists for demanding single payer health insurance as a basic human right, Trump, the phony populist, for his own part scapegoats the victims of racism as being the direct causes of racism. When, for example, he was confronted last year by a Black reporter about his white nationalist rhetoric, he retorted: "That is such a racist question!"  

Just as Trump brags about his nonexistent high poll numbers among African-Americans, Biden brags that "millions of Democrats" are, just like him, dead-set against their fellow human beings being afforded a healthy, secure life. Both Biden and Trump deploy the ultra-right weapon of transforming groups of people who have traditionally been the targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. They play divide and conquer with a vengeance.

A series of debates between these two senile servants of the oligarchy would constitute a gruesome mind meld of epic proportions. Obama will rue the day that he ever kvetched about "cancel culture" if he ever gets to witness Trump and Biden canceling each other out on live corporate TV.

Astroturfing Impeachment

With slightly more than half of those polled now favoring the impeachment of Donald Trump, it behooves the liberal ruling establishment to corral them and carefully set the boundaries for protesting this president's myriad high crimes and misdemeanors.

There thus will be no emphasis on his massive plunder of the public purse via his unprecedented tax giveaway to the oligarchs. The plight of imprisoned refugees and migrants and the thousands of kidnapped and trafficked children will be all but ignored. His assaults on the environment will take a back seat, as will his frequent incitements to violence against minorities and vulnerable groups. His relentless shredding of the social safety net will proceed apace. There must be no protests against the US troop build-up in Saudi Arabia and of course, no resistance to the US-assisted genocide in Yemen begun under the previous Democratic administration.

If you hate Trump for all these reasons and more, you are nevertheless urged to direct all your precious energies into aiding the ruling class's internecine battle over which corporations and oligarchs will get to plunder Ukraine. You will be urged to defend the neoliberal Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden, from the corruption charges being leveled against him by Trump. No matter that you believe that Biden is, in fact, corrupt. The outrage you must develop on behalf of the "good" oligarchic faction is that a far more corrupt individual is leading the charge against Biden and his family.

To facilitate the proper channeling of your anger against Trump, rather than at the system which spawned him, the Democratic Party is "scrambling" to get a "grassroots" impeachment movement underway.

The first propaganda step is describing the organizers of the movement as "outsiders" - when, in fact, they are consummate insiders who get most of their dark funding from corporations and billionaires. As narrated by Politico's Maggie Severns, these "outside" groups have been sadly marginalized by party bigwigs for years. But thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, their impeachment day has finally come.

The flowers withering on the vine have gotten a magical dose of Miracle-Gro!

This organizational hub has sprouted in D.C., commissioning polling, sponsoring ads and trying to guide the energy in the party toward a message and result the public will support, while counteracting a blistering, expensive anti-impeachment campaign from Trump and the Republican National Committee.

It sure sounds like a spontaneous, bottom-up, grassroots uprising to me. It sounds almost as good as that time last year when thousands of progressive activists simply sprouted up with professional signs bemoaning the ouster of neoconfederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the feared ouster of Robert Mueller - whose status then sadly plummeted from Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad when he finally released his wishy-washy report and stumbled his way through congressional testimony.

As Politico's marketing of Astroturfed Impeachment Inc. continues, we finally get our first clue about the real money and power behind this campaign: 

At the center of the emerging movement are several progressive groups that boast big memberships, including Indivisible and MoveOn.org, that have quickly been joined by an array of other groups spanning the Democratic Party. Outside strategists including Zac Petkanas, former director of rapid response for Hillary Clinton, have started aiding the effort.

“It’s going to be very intense. It’s all hands-on-deck for grassroots folks and everybody in DC,” said Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director at the grassroots organization Indivisible.

Almost every email I get from Hillary Clinton includes a fundraising appeal for Indivisible, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of her defeat. Its sole purpose is to "resist Trump" by supporting Democratic candidates. You folks send the money to Hillary, and then she forwards it to the Indivisible folks. It sounds suspiciously like a variation of the scheme she devised during her second failed presidential campaign: she ostensibly raised money for a bunch of local Democratic Parties to help their local candidates. The local parties then funneled a big chunk of this money right back to her for use in her own campaign. It was a nifty way to skirt campaign finance laws, which limit the amount of money that each donor can contribute to any one particular candidate. Another word for what Hillary did is money-laundering. But thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, it was rendered perfectly legal.

So everybody join together and fight Trumpian corruption! And be sure use the "progressive" label every chance you get, in order to give credence and a semblance of authenticity to the astroturfed effort.

Indivisible, as New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel has revealed, now gets most of its multi-millions of dollars in annual funding from Democracy Alliance, a consortium of liberal plutocrats who gather at fancy parties to decide which Democratic candidates will best represent their interests. Vogel exposed them strategizing over how to successfully make their "Never Bernie" agenda a reality.

The original funding source of the Indivisible "grassroots" effort was the Tides Foundation. According to Source Watch,

The Tides Foundation, founded in 1976, has provided more than $300 million in funding for what it calls "positive social change ... We define 'progressive' as creating a positive impact on people's lives in ways that honor and promote human rights, justice, and a healthy, sustainable environment."

The seed money for the Tides Foundation, in turn, had come from a Reynolds Tobacco heiress. It has since (cough) wafted to a vast interconnected network of organizations and philanthrocapitalist foundations. 

The co-chairman of Tides, as listed on its website, is Columbia University dean Jason Wingard. "Dr. Wingard served as the chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank, where he led the strategy and implementation of thought leadership and management development solutions for the firm’s global workforce and clients. Previously, he served as vice dean of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he led Executive Education and oversaw one of the world’s largest providers of leadership development for corporate managers and executives. He also served as senior vice president of Regional Markets at ePals, Inc. and president & CEO of the ePals Foundation."

Whenever you hear a plutocrat described as a "thought leader," you should probably run for the hills. Capitalistic thoughts have this worrying tendency to privilege themselves while sermonizing to the less well-off - when they're not exploiting them, that is.

The other co-chair is Steve Zuckerman, described on the website as "Managing Director of Self-Help’s California operations and President of Self-Help Federal Credit Union. Self-Help is a leading nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) founded in 1980 and now manages almost $2 billion in assets and 42 credit union branches with more than 100,000 members. Self-Help has provided nearly $6.5 billion in financing to roughly 87,000 families, businesses and nonprofits. Previously, Steve spent almost 15 years with McCown De Leeuw & Co (MDC), a private investment firm based in Menlo Park, CA that focused on middle market management buyouts. Throughout his career, Steve has served on numerous nonprofit boards in the areas of economic justice and youth development. In addition to Self-Help related boards, he currently serves on the national governing board of Positive Coaching Alliance and the New Market Tax Credit advisory board of Opportunity Fund."

How to translate that convoluted bio? Since I'm in a good mood, I'll give Steve the benefit of the doubt and assume he generously he parlayed a tax-deductible portion of his vulture capitalist enterprise's obscene profits into loaning money (micro-lending) to the less well-off - so that one day, if they're extremely lucky, be able to buy the bootstraps to pull themselves up by. The market god only helps those who help themselves, which is why they put the Self Help label on it.

And how about that Opportunity Fund that Steve brags about? That was a gift given to tax-averse plutocrats and the investment class by Donald Trump himself as part of his tax reform/corporate welfare package. Although Opportunity Funds are supposed to benefit some 52 million struggling people living in distressed communities, it is doing the exact opposite. No wonder the liberal thought leaders from Tides and Democracy Alliance aren't emphasizing impeachment based upon theft from the public purse. They actually benefit from Trump's policies themselves.

While it's impossible to ascertain the identities of all the current donors to Tides, the 1,775 organizations receiving dark Tides money run the gamut. They include the elite private Brearley School (annual tuition $49,680), Duke University, M.I.T., Media Matters for America, the hawkish liberal think tank Center for New American Security... and surprise, surprise: the anti-Bernie Working Families Party!

Those Democracy Alliance/Tides/Indivisible liberal plutocrats, like most plutocrats, usually get whatever they want in the way of government policy. And right now, they seem to think they'll get most of what they want from the WFP-endorsed Elizabeth Warren. (If it's any consolation to Bernie and his supporters, the WFP also endorsed ethics-challenged New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive anti-corruption candidate Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on Corruption In America!)

Of course, the Politico article trying to drum up support for a limited impeachment inquiry doesn't tell you anything about the layers of incestuous muck enveloping and enriching all these veal pen organizations and their secretive donor networks. If it did, then "folks" might not get enthused, and the "progressive" organizations would have an even harder time trying to corral them into caring more about Ukrainegate than they care about paying the rent and putting food on the table and getting health care when they're sick and uninsured.

Listed affiliates of the Indivisible group include the ubiquitous Working Families Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the Democratic Socialists of America.

I have a suggestion. If Indivisible wants to be really authentic, it should change its name to Invisible. After all, Halloween is nigh and it's not only the wads of donor money that are getting darker.

Trick or treat! Or, in the corrupted, subverted, anti-democratic version of the holiday: heads they win, tails you lose.

Unless, of course, you can cut your way through their four-ply toilet paper-festooned gated communities and foundations with lots of extra batteries to load into your truth-exposing flashlights.

**************

Update, 10/14: I've revised this article by removing all references to a group called Influence Watch. This is actually an oppo-research project funded by the Capital Research Center, which itself is funded by such public-spirited corporations as Exxon-Mobil. In other words, an astroturf organization is exposing astroturf organizations it doesn't like!

 I was initially fooled, because Influence Watch imitates the style and layout of the reputable Source Watch, and has a nearly identical mission statement. I have independently verified Influence Watch's critical reporting on the Tides Foundation, and have even added information about the Tides board. The upshot: you certainly don't need right-wing oppo research to expose some of these Democratic veal pen organizations and the sources of their funding. It's even worse than what Influence Watch reported, as a matter of fact, because their research doesn't mention the direct role of private equity and Wall Street in choosing and financing the recipients of the Tides "charity."

It's a tangled web for sure.

Bad Fascism vs Less-Bad Fascism

First let's get the in-your-face variety out of the way. Donald Trump led another Nuremberg-style rally Thursday and vowed to bring the troops back home so that they might be deployed "somewhere else" - meaning, presumably, closer to home if not Homeland itself. And even though city cops were barred by their chief from attending the Minneapolis rally, Trump had his own detail of Redshirts on hand to escort protesters from the premises the moment he barked out the order.

Now let's get to the Democratic resistance to this offal-ness. Frontrunner Joe Biden (Fascist-lite) looks more corrupt by the minute, with reports (so far, by only right-leaning media outlets) that not only did he work closely with the CIA "whistleblower" in the White House, this same informant may also have accompanied the former vice president to Ukraine during and after the US-backed coup. Another report, via Rudy Giuliani, claims that Biden received a $900,000 contribution from a Ukraine lobbyist. Biden's campaign is furiously attacking the corporate media for covering all this sleaze, essentially demanding that they cease and desist from practicing journalism in the public interest (not that journalism in the public interest is that much of a thing any more.) Whether these allegations are true, mainly true, somewhat true, or false, mainly false or somewhat false seems moot at this point. Biden is being tainted by them. It's such a shame that this taint is covering up his proven 40-year record of anti-social neoliberal rhetoric and policy. But whoever said life was fair?

Elizabeth Warren, although inching up in the polls and threatening Biden's standing, is nevertheless being hammered from both right and left for "PregnancyGate." The scandal is that although Warren has been saying on the campaign trail that she was fired from a teaching job nearly half a century ago because of pregnancy, earlier video then surfaced of her explaining she'd quit the profession because she lacked the necessary teaching credentials.

Both narratives are likely true. Even if she weren't actually physically fired by her now-deceased principal, she had been due to give birth just as the new school year was starting in September. She knew she wouldn't be allowed to show up for classes either in labor or immediately postpartum, so she preemptively quit before they ever had a chance to fire her. Sure, she fudged the facts, but the essential truth remains that her pregnancy, and all the sexist bigotry then in play, got in the way of her career. She was, for all intents and purposes, barred from employment. So I'd give her a "mostly-to-somewhat true" rating. Her slanted version of events doesn't rise to the gross level of, say, Hillary Clinton's totally false claim that she once dodged sniper fire in Bosnia. Warren was trying to show empathy for women. Clinton was trying to show she was a war hawk to her bones.

But still, I'm torn. Even little bitty lies in the greater service to the truth are fraught, because they tend to turn into greater big fat lies in the service of whatever definition of "truth" is convenient at the time. What do you think?

Also of concern is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's implied threat that he will meddle with Warren's campaign by suppressing her ads and other campaign information as payback for her direct threat to break up his monopolistic social media giant. The pasty-faced little putz was caught on audio vowing to "go to the mat" to insure his continuing status as Master of the Universe. He might even do more damage than Russian troll farms in swinging the election away from Warren and toward, probably, Trump. Or just as bad, toward Hillary Clinton in the brokered convention lots of people are predicting.

Finally, there was Bernie Sanders's heart attack, and to make the blow even worse, the nearly simultaneous death of his daughter-in-law. The corporate press can barely contain its glee, producing an avalanche of "questions are now being raised about his candidacy" and "shadows are being cast on his candidacy" - which is nothing but code that ever so subtly bellows out "Quit, Bernie, Quit!"

My take is that if he wants to stop holding raucous rallies in order to rest and recuperate, then let him, and don't hold it against him. He can easily address the voters by video. Campaign seasons are way too brutally long anyway. If the other candidates in the field had any decency, they'd cut back on their own schedules out of solidarity, and as a way of protesting the made-for-TV spectacle that our politics has become. For those who market "party unity" above all else, then let them put their money where their mouths are for a change.

Speaking of protests, Tulsi Gabbard is threatening to boycott next week's debate over the continued rigging of the process by the Democratic National Committee, along with its rank commercialization into spectacle. If I were her, I'd use the few minutes allotted to her out of the dozen competing voices on the stage to vocally and loudly expose everything she knows about corrupt party machinations and profiteering media bias. Otherwise, the viewers at home might think she's acting out of sour grapes, or that she simply wimped out.

Somebody on that stage should, at the very least, express concern that a new poll reveals that fully 77 percent of Democrats "trust" the same CIA that, among its many other fascistic activities and atrocities, once rescued and then recruited Nazi war criminals to come work for the United States in the Cold War battles against "the Russians."

So my question is what they'll be chanting at next summer's Democratic Convention. Will "USA! USA! USA! be replaced by "CIA! CIA! CIA!"? 

This affinity for the "intelligence community" and "less-bad" fascism no doubt stems from Trump-hatred and not from any true admiration of this unaccountable and often rogue de facto branch of the government. Public opinion can turn on a dime, depending on whatever propaganda is being spooned out to the public at any given time. It was only a few short years ago that the public was on the definite outs with the spooks because of Bush-era torture and the break-in by the CIA of the computers of the senate committees that were investigating the torture.

But wait. Since comic Ellen DeGeneres recently shared a private box with George and Laura Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game, the message the ruling class wants to impart is that since the ruling class mission of Bush rehab has been accomplished, all the fans and maimed Iraq war veterans at home should just relax and enjoy it. If you're a contrarian who took issue with a celebrity schmoozing with a folksy war criminal, then it just proves how petty you are, announced a whole slew of co-celebrities and Democratic donors, strategists and pundits.

David Axelrod‏Verified account @davidaxelrod

What a horrific commentary about our times that @TheEllenShow should even have to explain herself for hanging with President Bush. Good for her!

Ellen, remember, is a treasured member of the same incestuous NBC family which employs Bush's daughter Jenna as a co-host on its infotainment "Today Show." Just like Meghan McCain, Hunter Biden, Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump and virtually all children of politicians and plutocrats, she achieved her position based purely upon her own talents and merits and expertise.

NBC is the same network that for years ignored former Today host Matt Lauer's  sexual abuse of its less-elite female employees, including sweeping an alleged rape under the rug. It's currently reeling from a new Ronan Farrow book alleging that it also suppressed reports of Harvey Weinstein's long history of predation. 

But I guess it could always be worse. NBC could be hosting - and tainting - next week's Democratic debate, which will be jointly controlled by the private media companies CNN and the New York Times. NBC won't get its own turn until November, when the Gong Show field could be winnowed down to a shocking final ten contestants.  

It's a real nail-biter. The lucky viewers at home will have a chance to cast their votes as soon as next winter. If you're in an early primary or caucus state which doesn't require corporate party membership as a prerequisite to participation, your vote might even actually count a little bit.

Isn't capitalist Democracy grand? Isn't Fascism grand when it's a fully-owned subsidiary of capitalist Democracy?