Grand Guignol Sold As Democratic Debate

The gilded, gaudy Phantom of the Opera stage was what immediately set the tone for the comic horror that was to be the second round of the Democratic debates. Then came the ominous sound of thumping military boots echoing throughout the auditorium as a prelude to the National Anthem. And then CNN cut to commercial.

Since I live-streamed the spectacle on a special CNN app which I was forced to download for the privilege of participating from afar in our money-soaked electoral democracy, I am sad to report that I missed the ads. But I did read that they included such regular CNN sponsors as the drug companies and the private health insurance lobbies who set the tone for the moderators' anti-Single Payer questions.

The combination of frenzied theatrical melodrama, jackbooted militarism, and rank corporatism gave the proceedings the distinct whiff of fascism. The only difference between the CNN debates and a Trump rally was that the CNN spectacle did not contain any obvious or overt racism or xenophobia.

You really had to listen very closely to detect it. Joe Biden, for example, bragged that he warmly welcomes any immigrant with a Ph.D who wants to enter our country to enjoy our freedoms. (translation: to help keep our corporate profits great) That statement kind of excludes the Central American compesinos seeking refuge from the US-engendered regime changes and climate catastrophes, and allowed him to elide the fact that he was President Obama's own special emissary to the region,  his mission being to stop the migrants before they even entered Mexico. Trump could not immediately enforce a similar agreement, thanks to his own lack of diplomatic skills.

Besides a jolly-sounding Cory Booker (D-NJ-Private Equity) the only people vociferously challenging Biden on Obama's record deportations and anti-immigrant policies, in fact, were a group of immigrant protesters in the audience.

It's amazing, really, that the protesters got inside the building, because Bernie Sanders supporters had just been physically barred from even entering a CNN-controlled section of the parking lot outside Detroit's Fox Theater.

As Status Coup's Jordan Chariton reported from the scene:

Multiple supporters for Bernie Sanders who were part of the “visibility zone” area—an area designated by CNN for supporters of candidates to stand with their signs and cheer on camera—told Status Coup that efforts were made by both CNN and local police to visually diminish their presence as compared to the supporters of other candidates like Warren. 

 "Four different police officers said we could not go that way, as it was reserved for the other candidates’ supporters,” Sanders supporter Victoria Bowman told Status Coup. “One even used a bullhorn to dissuade us, but we ignored them and carried on. A Bernie campaign person got us past the last battalion of officers intent on blocking us. That campaign person went back out into the streets to bring more Bernie people in, then she was not allowed back into the “cheering section." 

  There were very few Bernie supporters allowed into the lot that was full of Warren, Williamson, and Biden supporters. Their cheers nearly drowned out the voices of Bernie’s supporters. Bowman’s account was confirmed by other supporters who faced similar roadblocks from the police blocking them from entering the cheering section that other candidates’ supporters appeared free to come and go from as they pleased.

So we can add police repression to the theatricality, jingoism and corporate profit motive to make the privatized Democratic Debate franchise fit the classic definition of fascism.

One of the few full-throated rebukes to bipartisan complicity in the long-standing American institutional racist tradition also came from protesters in the audience, who shouted "Fire Pantaleo!" at candidate Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York. Daniel Pantaleo is the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death and who still, under de Blasio's liberal watch, remains on the several job years later despite an official ruling that Garner died of a police-inflicted homicide.

 Much to everyone's surprise, Kamala Harris did not reprise her Act One starring role as Biden foil in the second episode of Debate Thriller Theater. Her previous attack on him over his anti-busing record was apparently just a one-off. Biden's team had done its own homework on Harris's own authoritarian record as California's chief prosecutor, noting that she had failed to bring lawsuits against two heavily segregated school districts in her state.

But the most damage to Harris and her de facto Jim Crow agenda was inflicted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii,who lambasted Kamala for abusing the rights of defendants in her jurisdiction. She perfectly clarified Joe Biden's somewhat garbled counter-attack on Harris's record. Here's how the whole exchange played out:

All Kamala Harris could do was say how proud she was of her hard work in "fixing the criminal justice system." When Tulsi Gabbard demanded that she apologize to all the poor people she has hurt, Harris simply offered her trademark nervous giggle.

Sadly, due to her own low poll numbers and individual donations (update: she has now met the donation threshhold) this was very likely Tulsi's last stand on the presidential debate stage. But she has certainly earned a permanent place on the national political stage as one of the country's last remaining anti-war politicians.

With a faltering Biden barely standing erect and Harris's reputation so damaged, it seems that the last best hope of the corporate wing is Mayor Pete Buttigieg. I can't wait for Bernie and Liz to confront him on, among other things, his attendance at a plutocratic "Stop Bernie!" strategizing fund-raiser earlier this year.

If the Democratic centrists were "agonizing" about Bernie's momentum last spring, they must really be in the thrashing and gnashing final throes of neoliberal misery by now, in the wake of his strong debate performance. As far as Elizabeth Warren is concerned, we'll just have to wait and see whether the corporatists will be as successful in co-opting her as they seemed to think they were only the other day. When you've lost Paul Krugman....

The next pseudo-debate is scheduled for September, and miracle of miracles, it appears that it will be a blessed one-night stand, with fully half of the candidates not expected to meet the rigid party criteria for appearing.

The news personalities playing the emcees will again do their own hideous best to pit the actors against each other and ensure that a gloriously gruesome time is had by all, especially by the corporate sponsors who pay their seven-figure salaries and rake in the profits at the expense of the millions of trapped paying subscriber-voters glued to their screens at home. Because admit it. You just can't look away.

Dem Debate: Punts and Stunts

I plan on writing a wrap-up of the CNN Game Show Extravaganza for tomorrow or Friday at the latest if I get as bogged down as I expect I will.

But meanwhile, how do you describe the desperation of the pundit class after last night's debacle? Let us count the ways, if we have the stamina. Paul Krugman, for example, tweeted that Elizabeth Warren had a "bad night" because she stood up for Medicare For All. What he obviously meant is that she did a bad thing by not lighting into Bernie Sanders the way she was supposed to. Since Krugman is now disowning Liz, I find that I like her better than I did yesterday. 

Then there's the New York Times column by Ross Douthat, who is so desperate that he declared Joe Biden the winner of the first night, even though Joe Biden wasn't even on the stage. My published comment:

I wish they'd stop calling corporate-funded, right-wing Democrats like Delaney "moderates," which connotes reasonableness and inclusiveness. It's as misleading as the congressional "problem-solvers caucus," whose prime agenda is solving the problems of billionaires by eviscerating even the mild Wall Street reforms of Dodd-Frank.

I think what is really scaring the moderates and the anti-progressive mainstream media is that Liz and Bernie made the brilliant tactical decision to join forces on the debate stage, refusing to take CNN's blatantly cheesy bait in hopes of a progressive food fight.

 Biden won insofar that he is probably thanking his lucky stars that he had people like Delaney, Ryan and Hickenlooper acting as his stunt men and stand-ins. It's not going to last.

And by the time Kamala Harris and the increasingly desperate Kirsten Gillibrand get done with him tonight, Joe might well be begging for Bernie and Liz, who obviously care more about the public good than they do their own individual political fortunes.

So here's hoping that their tactical and ideological partnership lasts to the convention and beyond. Sanders-Warren or Warren-Sanders would be a winning ticket. Notice how quiet Trump was during and after the debate? He knows that he's in deep, deep trouble after the knockout punches thrown by Liz and Bernie last night.

So the whole narrative that Bernie and Liz will cancel each other out, leading to a brokered convention with the super-delegates appointing/anointing Pete Buttigieg or Harris (I think/hope Biden will have flamed out long before then) might backfire on the corporate Democrats. In the event of neither Bernie nor Liz achieving a clear majority of primary votes necessary for nomination, would they then be able to award the front-runner his or her delegates? I'm not sure of the legalities here, so maybe somebody can help me out.

But leave it to the Democratic National Committee to come up with some kind of nifty solution that prevents voters from having the final word. The good thing is they'll have to do it full public view. Such a stunt would then hasten the long- overdue demise of the Democratic Party. 

Maureen Dowd Versus The Mob

In the third installment of her summer series "Confessions of the Designated Nancy Pelosi Whisperer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd abandons channeling Madam Speaker's now-backfired attacks on the Squad of four progressive congresswomen of color, and unsheathes her worthy literary claws on the Vast Twittering Left.

The hook for this week's attack was a tweet by NBC News personality Howard Fineman, who boasted about his attendance at one of Dowd's apparently famous Georgetown parties. He affixed a photo of Dowd greeting honored guest Nancy Pelosi and her date for the evening, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Outrage then ensued from all across the political spectrum. Poor Howard Fineman was forced to delete his tweet, in utter shock that his "benign big shot brag" had elicited such "vicious" reactions from the hoi polloi. In the olden days, he implied, people would have been more duly awed by the doings of the high and mighty. The twitter taunts thus only gained in intensity. He and his hostess Maureen Dowd both interpret these negative reactions as pure class envy rather than as legitimate criticism of the cozy, incestuous relationship between government officials and the journalists who are supposed to be holding them to account.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer feasible for Dowd to directly attack the Squad, given that the first two installments of the Pelosi Whisperer franchise had only served to raise their public profiles and elevate their progressive agendas - and worst of all, had provided the perfect opening for Donald Trump to launch his own vicious triangulated racist attacks on them. Poor Maureen was temporarily reduced to dishing out sloppy seconds, such as a statement she retweeted from media mogul David Israel calling the four women "the Squad of Vuvuzelas."

Vuvuzelas are the extremely loud, even deafening, monotonal horns invented and used by the Zulus of southern Africa to summon distant community members, and are now widely used at soccer games and other sporting events. Given the ethnicities of the Squad and the fact that one of them, Ilhan Omar, is a refugee from Somalia, it's an interesting choice of metaphor. 

But back to Maureen Dowd's latest column, in which she expresses wonder that her vivid description of Speaker of the People's House Pelosi wearing $995 pumps, munching on bonbons, and relaxing at her Napa Valley vineyard evoked such sour grapes of wrath from people:

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

 Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The actual bad news is that Dowd has erected a straw man. This version is comprised of the latest group-think narrative trope that progressives are a monolithic bloc whose constant harping on impeachment rather than on Party Unity will only serve to give us another term of Trump. 

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.
The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

Dowd carefully names no names within her horde of stupid puritans. Nor does she mention that the loudest voices for impeachment have not been those of ordinary people, more of whom are leaning toward some form of socialism to solve our problems, but rather the corporate class of journalists on MSNBC and CNN and her own colleagues at the Times. But since the much-ballyhooed testimony of Robert Mueller turned out to be such a dud, scapegoats must be devised by these discredited corporate journalists so fixated on #Russiagate, and they must be devised in a hurry. The corporatists of the incestuous media-political complex are not our natural allies. In fact, they're the exact opposite. 

Hippie-punching and voter shaming are the standard tactics of last resort for these amoral establishment fools, and Dowd is only too happy to join the fray and deflect the blame. When Trump wins another term due to the lack of a populist agenda from the centrist Democrat whom they hope to undemocratically nominate, they will then refrain from blaming themselves and as usual, blame people with no power and no money.

My published comment on Dowd's column: 

The tweet by pundit Howard Fineman bragging about canoodling at Dowd's digs with the very same officials that journalists are supposed to afflict was what roused the ire of both left and right. It had nothing to do with "progressives'" disappointment over Mueller's overhyped (by corporate journalists like Fineman) performance.

This may come as a shock to the Beltway Bubble, but opinions on impeachment vary among progressives. Some are for, some against. But I suppose it's easier for Maureen to call them nasty purists than it is for her to address such core progressive policy proposals as single payer health care or to write about epidemic student debt, the growing climate catastrophe, the unaffordability of housing, the caging of refugees, and the fact that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water.

Nobody out here in Lower Slobovia cares about your Georgetown shindigs or your angst about peevish purists who do not show proper deference to the Knowledge Class and its insulated meritocrats.. Most of us are too worried about paying the bills and what kind of future our children and grandchildren face in a country where representative democracy has devolved into winner take all predatory capitalism.

But keep writing columns like this one, because the more you scold the have-nothings the less they will heed your infinite wisdom, and the more they will spare themselves the tedium of reading the next self-pitying installment.

Kafka Does Christmas In July

#Christmas planning has begun in the East Wing at the @WhiteHouse. I'm looking forward to sharing our final vision for this unique tradition in the coming months.

The ominous phrase "Final vision," juxtaposed as it is with Donald Trump's caging of thousands of migrants and refugees on the Southern border, certainly does bring back memories of past traditions. Just not the pleasant memories and traditions that Melania Trump's public relations shop wanted to distract us with.

But perhaps we should interpret her clumsy Tweet another way. Maybe she's getting started on Christmas way early because she doesn't plan on being in the White House very much longer. Maybe she got caught up in all the media hype telling us that Father of Our Country Robert Mueller's congressional testimony was going to be the final word, the real coup de grace,for her chubby hubby wubby. And then it turned out that not only is Mueller the Deadbeat Dad that so many feared that he was upon seeing his final tepid report. He's a Demented Deadbeat Dad on his last mental legs.

So call Melania delusional and lacking in good taste to your heart's content. Because anybody who still puts any credence in the #Russiagate franchise after Mueller's bumble-wumble testimony on Wednesday should probably also have his or her own head examined.

Was there anything more delusional and Kafkesque and surreal, for example, than the New York Times's headline that blared Mueller's claim that "the Russians" are in our country right now, interfering in our elections, placed right next to a sidebar analysis bemoaning how confused the aging prosecutor has been acting lately?

A Russophobe in good standing might be "halting and hesitant" about remembering what is in his own report, but when it comes to meddling he miraculously recovers from the muddling. He regains Father of Our Country status and mental sharpness as long as he sticks to the corporate propaganda that Hillary Clinton lost the last election not because of her own ineptitude and corruption, but because of a group of underpaid Kremlin Internet trolls.

So I say let Melania have her own visionary deluded fun as we anxiously await the grand final vision of the Trump family leaving the White House forever. It's a big asylum, and thank goodness we ain't in it.

Merry Christmas, and may Kafka's Goddess of Liberty bless us, everyone.

Corporatists Behaving Badly

Let me get this straight. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin have miraculously just come to a silky-smooth bipartisan budget agreement that rips the feathers right off the deficit hawks and kills the Obama-era Sequester and fake debt ceiling crises all in one swoop.

The catch is that the debt ceiling truce is only for two years. So if a Democrat wins the White House and the GOP holds the Senate, it will be back to deficit hawkery as a bipartisan weapon to kill any possible resurgence of the New Deal.

Meanwhile, Trump is happy because the deal protects the war machine and "our veterans" and contains no poison pills that would nauseate rich people. The Democrats will not interfere with his border wall, and the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal funding for abortions will remain. Pelosi is happy because the deal "will enhance our national security and invest in middle class priorities that advance the health, financial security and well-being of the American people."

But Trump being Trump, it is entirely possible that he'll ultimately refuse to sign it no matter how much he praises it today. And Pelosi being Pelosi, she utters not one single word about helping the tens of millions of people now living in abject poverty in the United States. Bare survival priorities, such as food and shelter, are not the same thing as middle class priorities, which might include such things as somewhat more affordable prescription drugs and protecting our right to purchase expensive health insurance on the predatory marketplace.

Before we celebrate, therefore, we need to read the fine print in this proposed budget deal. Because whenever politicians "reach across the aisle" in one of those rare bipartisan moments of good feeling, we ordinary people must steel ourselves for the blows that are sure to come. The very fact that the deal was reached so secretly and so hastily and that it must be voted on before the artificial deadline of the Congressional summer recess, is our first clue that bipartisanship is the exact opposite of social and economic justice. This deal must go through before anybody even has a chance to read it.

That's how many poison pills for struggling people and how many gifts to the oligarchs that this package undoubtedly contains.

Take the issue of the nation's community health centers, which deal or no deal, appeared to be very much on the bipartisan chopping block as recently as last week. These centers, which serve the poor, are therefore conveniently and cynically exempt from Pelosi's "middle class priorities."

The Democratic lawmakers proposing the cuts frame their cruelty in the usual way: in order to be kind and save the poor, they have no choice but to punish and sacrifice the poor, because otherwise the Republican hostage takers will beat the poor into a bloody dead pulp.

As reported by the Washington Post,

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is pushing a bipartisan plan that would provide flat levels of federal funding for hundreds of community health centers nationwide, at about $4 billion for the next four years. A similar plan is advancing in the Senate with the support of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
Lawmakers face a September deadline for the community health centers, after which their funding would begin to expire, likely leading to steep cuts.Pallone said the plan would provide the security of the longest guaranteed funding commitment ever secured by the clinics, averting the September cliff. But flat funding would not keep pace with medical inflation, likely forcing the community health centers to serve about 4 million fewer people annually by 2023 than they do now, said Leighton Ku, professor of health policy at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
That prospect has alarmed liberal lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus. They argue Democrats should use their control of the House to approve increases in funding for the centers, and then hammer out an agreement with Senate Republicans.
“I was, quite honestly, stunned. It’s just absolutely disastrous, and moving in the wrong direction,” said Sanders, a 2020 presidential candidate, in an interview. “We should be substantially increasing funding. I was very, very disappointed by Democratic leadership … We will do everything we can to rectify this.”

We still don't know if the TrumPelosi Manifesto contains the bait and switch method of reducing health care for the poor, or whether it's a side-deal negotiated apart from the budget agreement.

It is also quite telling that Trump waited until right after the budget agreement was announced to reveal plans to kick three million people off their food stamp benefits. In so doing, he gives credence to Pelosi's limited boast of protecting the financial interests of the "middle class" -- or those living above the poverty levels necessary to qualify for government nutrition assistance.

And speaking of bait and switch, the fact that Bernie Sanders is still going strong, and is even finally getting more refreshingly blunt about such corporate tools as Joe Biden, has finally elicited the full-blown hysteria of New York Times pundit Paul Krugman, who'd so far this campaign season kept his storied anti-Bernie powder dry, mainly by studiously ignoring Bernie Sanders.

Not any more. In a transparently bad-faith "both sides do it" column, ironically subtitled "A Bad Faith Debate Over Health Care Coverage," Krugman hilariously equates Biden's mendacity with Bernie's exposure of his mendacity.

But right now, two of the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are having an ugly argument about health care that could hurt the party’s chances. There are real, important differences between the two men’s policy proposals, and it’s fine to point that out. What’s not fine is the name-calling and false assertions. Both men are behaving badly. And for their party’s sake, and their country’s, they need to stop it.

Notwithstanding that Krugman cannot point to one single example of Sanders calling Biden any bad names or lying (because he hasn't) the accusation is simply cover for his main point: he doesn't want Medicare For All to be a platform in the presidential campaign, even though he likes Single Payer "in theory". The column is all of a piece with the centrist, or corporate wing of the party, striving to please its deep-pocketed donors at the expense of everybody else. The message is this: you can get rid of Trump, or you can clamor for things that will make your lives better. But you cannot do both. Supporting Medicare For All is the same thing as giving Trump another term. Therefore, everybody please shut up about your damned health. And that includes the 70-80 percent of you in favor of Medicare For All. You're nothing but a distraction.

Also, now that Pelosi's attempted diminution of the "Squad's" championship of single payer health care has spectacularly backfired, the corporate party and its pundits need a new scapegoat with which to undermine Single Payer, even as they pretend to embrace the dark-hued female members as a means of combating Trump's racism.  Bernie Sanders, an old white guy, fits their bill perfectly. A Democratic legal pundit who hilariously calls herself a "moderate" can even go on MSNBC and complain that he "makes my skin crawl and I don't know why" with no consequence whatsoever.

Here's my published response to Krugman, in which I refused to take his slimy personality-politics bait, but instead tried to address the centrist groupthink propaganda that he so shamelessly parrots:

Whenever you hear universal coverage defined as everyone having "access" to "affordable" health care, beware of the bait and switch.

 Access to care is not the same thing as guaranteed care. Calling a trip to the doctor or emergency room "affordable" is glib to the point of cruelty, given that the majority of Americans don't even have $500 in savings.

The standard talking point that "folks" will never accept a Single Payer program because they are loath to give up their wonderful employer-based plans is also pretty cynical. Employers not only change plans regularly, they are increasingly passing the costs of overpriced plans with less coverage along to their workers.

If people are afraid of Medicare For All, it's mainly because our rulers and their corporate media stenographers, beholden to the insurance cartel and Big Pharma and their Wall Street investors, are making sure they stay very afraid of it. It's obviously not in their job descriptions to educate people and inform them that the taxes for Single Payer will be far, far lower than what they now pay to the predatory health care marketplace, with the continued risk that they can go bankrupt if they get hurt or sick.

 Once Single Payer is passed, and the profit motive goes out of health care, it will be repeal-proof. It will be as popular as Medicare For Some is right now. That's what has the wealthy donor class shaking in their custom-made shoes: the prospect of too many people becoming healthy and less stressed.

Cranky Dem Governors Kvetch At Crabfest

They aren't cranky because a fascistic president just put a target on a congresswoman's back, or because children are still being held in concentration camps at the southern border, or because the planet is alternately burning up and flooding, or that 30 million Americans still have no health insurance.

They're cranky because they think their party is turning a little too far to the left for the ease and comfort of the very tiny handful of very important people that the Democratic Party now represents.

They're so cranky it's a wonder they didn't choke on all the seafood delights they constantly gnawed upon as they kvetched to each other, to their wealthy donors, and to a select group of corporate media representatives at their annual retreat last weekend.

At least they were sweating due to their own anxiety, and not from the record heat wave engulfing much of the US. That's because the location of their luxury junket was Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where fresh breezes off the Atlantic vied with the human windbags gathered together to liberally ignore the fact that millions of their alleged constituents are suffering constant, gnawing anxiety over how they're going to make next month's rent payment and how they're going to put another meal on the table.

As reported by the New York Times' Jonathan Martin, one of the corporate journos lucky enough to score an invitation to the elite Crabfest,

A group of governors are alarmed that their party’s presidential candidates are embracing policies they see as unrealistic and politically risky. And they are especially concerned about proposals that would eliminate private health insurance.
“I don’t think that’s good policy or good politics,” said Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Raimondo is a former venture capitalist who sold one of her own investment funds to the Rhode Island state pension plan before she entered politics and from which she continues to personally profit. Despite the fund's poor performance, the state's public employees are unable to divest from it, because the owners (comprised mainly of the governor's friends and family) refuse to give their permission. Doing so might make them very anxious. As an insurance policy, it wouldn't be good politics as pertains to their own financial health.

Forbes's Eric Seidle explains the scam:

The pension was scheduled to exit Raimondo’s fund in 2016 but the firm, supposedly exercising its discretion under a secret agreement the state supposedly signed, unilaterally extended the life of the investment in 2017 and again in 2018....
The very fact that an investment, shrouded in secrecy and foisted on the state pension by the now-Governor, has continued to lose money for the pension and pay money to Raimondo for the past thirteen years—with no end in sight—should demand enhanced disclosure and public scrutiny, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Gina Raimondo had "reformed" the state's public pension plan during her first term by farming more of it out to Wall Street and eliminating cost of living increases, warning that the plan would go bankrupt without such changes. She accomplished this feat while keeping her own personal interest in the scheme a secret from the public.

So Raimondo, far from being anxious about her own state's judicial and legislative oversight branches ever holding her to account for self-dealing and corruption, crabbily lectured her assorted Nantucket cronies that "we can't become the party of the checklist" and that instead, the Democratic presidential candidates must adhere to the economic needs of "everyday Americans" -- meaning, presumably, Americans who make at a minimum a thousand dollars every single day and who write the checks to the politicians.

She also took a thinly-veiled swipe at the influential "Squad" of progressive congresswomen with popular social media profiles who are calling for Medicare For All, an end to cruel immigration enforcement practices and a Green New Deal.

“A month or two before my primary I was getting crushed on social media,” Ms. Raimondo said, recalling the challenge she had from the left last year. “My friends were calling me, saying, ‘Gina you’re going down’ and then we won by 20 points.”

It's not just Trump fans who vote against their own economic interests. When people can be manipulated by the fear-mongering propaganda of shady elite rulers, they become complicit in their own destruction.

The human frogs that politicians like Gina Raimondo stick in the slowly simmering pot never know what's hitting them until it's way too late. Unlike the lobsters that she and her gubernatorial cohort scarfed down by the pound in Nantucket last weekend, we become so stunned that we don't even have time to scream. 

So until and unless we ourselves stop internalizing the dangerous neoliberal dogma that "there is no alternative" to cutthroat capitalism, there will be no change and no real improvement in our lives.

We have to instead capitalize on the current paranoia and anxiety of the ruling class and make them choke on their own excess. Self-awareness of our own complicity in their cruel game is key, and the necessary first step. Then comes solidarity with our fellow frogs. And then comes the will to finally organize ourselves enough to jump out of the pot, en masse, and take over the whole feast.

Ribbit.

The Narrow Focus of Democrats' Anti-Trump Ire

True to form, House Democratic leaders quickly abandoned their initial clarion call to censure Donald Trump for his continuing series of vile xenophobic attacks on the Squad of four progressive female members. They instead introduced a motion merely to "condemn" his language while failing to condemn either his continued caging of immigrants at the border or his actual and threatened deportation sweeps. (Update: the condemnation passed, largely across party lines, on Tuesday evening.)

The Democratic leadership's condemnation of Trump's racist demagoguery is not to be confused with any opposition to the Status Quo. The whole purpose of their grandstanding resolution is to unify the Party, not to protect refugees from man-made climate change and regime change. 

 And just so everybody is perfectly and absolutely clear about their limited intent, the resolution condemning his language gratuitously doubles right down on the longstanding "colorblind" racist trope which distinguishes the Able-Bodied Deserving Immigrant from the Weak Undeserving Immigrant.

As reported by the New York Times,

Among other things, the resolution declares that the House “believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger,” that “those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations,” and that the House “is committed to keeping America open to those lawfully seeking refuge and asylum from violence and oppression, and those who are willing to work hard to live the American Dream, no matter their race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin.”

There is not one word about those fleeing because record drought and heat have destroyed the subsistence farming they depend on to literally survive. There is not one word about changing the law to include impending starvation as a legitimate reason to seek asylum. Only those who are willing to wait in line for years and then work hard for low wages will be welcomed. Humanitarianism is not part of the equation. Political power is.

The Democrats' resolution all about restoring the tone, the civility, the cosmetic diversity, the jolly bipartisanship and intraparty comity among the members of Congress, most of whom have achieved fabulous wealth, or at least achieved the promise of future fabulous revolving-door wealth. The Times approvingly quotes the Resolution's co-sponsor, New Jersey Democrat and former Obama State Department official Tom Malinowski:

“Let’s focus on these comments that the vast majority of Americans recognize to be divisive and racist, that the vast majority of my Republican colleagues, in their hearts, recognize to be divisive and racist.
“We need to move forward with something that can be unifying, and right now, what we can unite around is that what the president said was wrong, un-American, and dangerous.”

Focus on his words, not his xenophobic deeds, in which the Democrats have been all too shamefully complicit.

The nihilistic Republicans, meanwhile, are seeking to shift their own conversation away from addressing Trump's racist rhetoric to caterwauling about the "socialist" danger posed by the squad of progressive women who are the targets of his wrath: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Trump's hurling of anti-racist invective (if you call me a racist that makes you a racist) right back at his critics is nothing new under the ultra-right sun, of course. His defense of Israel while leveling charges of anti-Semitism against, in particular, Somali refugee Ilhan Omar, is simply the transmutation of the Far Right's own historical anti-Semitism into increasingly mainstream Islamophobia. The Muslim refugees of America's wars, and now the Latino refugees from US-sponsored regime change military coups and climate catastrophe are essentially stateless people. And since the historically stateless Jews are now largely assimilated into American and European life, the Muslims and Latinos are simply the new Jews - or the latest convenient scapegoats.

The growing fascism of Donald Trump's Republican party and the neoliberalism of the Democrats are actually closely aligned. Presidential contender Hillary Clinton, for one, recently and bizarrely blamed immigrants themselves for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States. In a friendly series of November interviews covered by Guardian diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, Clinton said:

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame...
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

It's a somewhat nicer nativistic way than Trump's of telling people to stay in, or go back to, their own countries even if it kills them. She doesn't acknowledge her own role in the growing global humanitarian catastrophes, particularly her dominant role in destroying Libya, whence countless migrants have fled, many of them losing their lives in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. 

But she was only too happy to Tweet this week against Trump's racist attacks on the Squad, and to join with Nancy Pelosi in glibly advising immigrant families to simply not answer their doors when Border Patrol and ICE agents drop by their neighborhoods in one of those deportation sweeps. The focus of her ire is every bit as conveniently narrow as that of her party. It's not the anti-immigrant policies that have been ramped up with a vengeance, with increasing border militarization and imprisonments and mass deportations. It's the anti-immigrant Trumpian rhetoric attached to these cruel policies that evokes her virtue-signaling wrath. The fake anger is carefully transmuted into the platitudinous anti-Trump statements that her party regularly dreams up as a means to mask its own complicity.

The mask is getting mighty thin and mighty transparent.

The ultimate goal of border walls is not only to "make America white again," but to protect the rich world from the poor world, to protect plutocrats from the victims of capitalistic violence, who must be exiled and their humanity diminished so that the rich can assuage their own guilt as well as protect their hoarded wealth. Just as the Squad is the latest convenient scapegoat for Trump and the Republicans, Trump and the Republicans are convenient scapegoats of their Democratic de facto collaborators.

The never-ending scandals and Tweets and outbursts of outrage in high places is the fuel that feeds the spectacle.