Plutapocalypse Now

Could Friday's catastrophic collapse of a too-big-to-exist construction crane in the Big Finance Data Hub of lower Manhattan be a precursor to the collapse of the too-awful-to-believe presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton? After all, both disasters are rooted in the greed and corruption of the American plutocracy.

Just one day before the 600-foot-tall apparatus teetered and fell, killing one person and injuring several, it had been certified as safe as the pre-iceberg Titanic... as safe as the cumbersome machine straining to hoist another Clinton back to the heights of power. But sometimes all it takes is one fresh gust of wind to topple even the strongest-appearing edifice.

Today, all that remains of the New York accident is a bleak caravan of crushed luxury cars, broken glass, construction debris, gas and water main leaks, and pockmarked high-rises stretching for more than two city blocks. The gentrified landscape of the Wealth Inequality Capital of America was transformed into a post-apocalyptic movie in the space of a New York minute. It will take days, even weeks, for deconstruction crews to complete the painstaking job of separating the wreckage into removable pieces.

(credit: Roberto Alvarez)

From the New York Post:

 Officials have yet to explain why exactly the crane capsized, but one expert explained that a 565-foot boom is devilishly tricky to lower.“It will take hundreds of tons just to counterbalance that boom, and if you do it too quickly, it could be thrown off balance,” said James Pritchett, president of Crane Experts International, which investigates such mishaps. The crane’s operator, Kevin Reilly, 56, has a record of three DWI arrests, all from the 1980s. He was questioned by cops after the collapse and submitted to a Breathalyzer test, blowing a clean .000, law-enforcement sources said.

Locals said the crane’s looming presence had been making them nervous all week.

The irony -- that the collapsed crane was erected to install new infrastructure on the roof of the iconic Western Union building for the specific purpose of speeding up energy-hungry casino capitalism --  should not be lost on us. The whole point of putting monster-generators on the roof instead of in the basement or at ground-level was to avoid inconveniencing the residents of the tony neighborhood, as well as to avoid interrupting the high frequency trading orgy of the surrounding brokerage houses.

The irony is that high-speed trades are just the kind of fraudulent activity that Bernie Sanders railed against during his debate with Hillary Clinton the night before the accident. Sanders wants to institute a tax on the high-speed traders of Wall Street in order to pay for free tuition at public colleges. Hillary just wants the grifters to snort a gram or two less, and call it a reformation.

The doomed crane had been lowering 62,000-pound generators onto the steel-reinforced roof above the 24th floor of the landmark Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street, when squall warnings prompted crews to attempt lowering it to the ground for the duration. They lost control, and the edifice crashed, of its own top-heavy volition, to the streets below.

Since the city's existing power grid is not sufficient to power the servers, switches and storage units necessary for the turbo-charged capitalistic ambitions of a company called DataGryd, the owner has had to install his own private infrastructure. The original plans for underground installation were pre-empted by flooding fears in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. So, considerate guy that he is, CEO Peter Feldman seized upon the unique idea of going Up, Up and Up in order to avoid inconveniencing the high speed trader-tenants already making money hand over fist in both the building itself and in the surrounding neighborhood. Such high-speed trading is, apparently, extremely noise sensitive. "We had to modernize and future-proof the building. We had to turn the building inside out to do it," he told an interviewer in 2014. "But now we can meet future market demand."

Or maybe not. The sound of Feldman's collapsing crane has been compared to the sound of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11. Oops. But since Hillary Clinton is representing New Hampshire instead of New York this week, she is not rushing to the scene to comfort her Financial District constituents, as she bragged about doing in one of early debates. To the contrary, she took their money and ran... for the presidency.  

Meanwhile, the monster "crawler cranes" of the type that collapsed on Friday are a new and ubiquitous feature of real estate-booming, class-disparate New York City. People have compared them to the science fiction creatures known as the Transformers. Whenever one of these steel monsters appears in the neighborhood, whenever the wind kicks up, people get very, very nervous. 

Faux-progressive Mayor Bill De Blasio, just back in town after stumping for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, was sanguine about the latest catastrophe. Only one person was killed, he bragged. (The victim was a Harvard grad/math whiz employed at the high-speed firm responsible for more than half of all the rigged stock trading in the United States.) And anyway, this wasn't a case of blatant neglect, since Feldman's contractor was in the process of lowering the crane when it collapsed. Stuff happens. In capitalism as in war, you have to expect some collateral damage. "This is a totally different matter," De Blasio insisted, while Comptroller and former Public Advocate Scott Stringer accused overworked building inspectors of "sleeping on the job."  

Machine operators and political operators alike, it appears, have yet to learn the laws of physics.  

Things fall apart, things go ka-boom, whenever there is too much power and weight at the very top. Any toddler playing with her first set of building blocks quickly learns that you need a strong foundation to keep your tower from collapsing. 

NASA also came out a few years ago with a handy guide, called HANDY, to explain just how inequality inevitably leads to societal and economic collapse. It ain't rocket science.  Neither is the fact that corruption is the direct result of politicians taking money from plutocrats. No entitled candidate is immune. Not even fake Transformer Hillary Clinton. 

As a matter of fact, it was the deregulation-happy Clinton administration which has allowed high frequency trading (HFT) firms in the neighborhood of Friday's crane collapse to grow and flourish in the first place. As mentioned above, the one fatality of the collapse was employed as a "flashboy" or "mathlete" in the firm which has perfected the practice. President Obama has always strongly opposed taxing these outfits, as have the Wall Street contributors to both political parties. Clinton herself only very narrowly wants to reform HFTs, to the extent of barring "false orders" -- cancelling a trade the split second after it is ordered. Tax-free HFT itself would be kept in place under her administration. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, wants to rehab Wall Street by making it pay for gambling with other people's money.

 Capitalism on crack is devilishly tricky to detox, but detox it we must. Cure it of its addiction, or let it rest in peace before it kills the rest of us.

Stop the poison of the plutocracy. Feel the Bern.

The Bickersons Do New Hampshire

 **Updated below.

Thanks to corporate media goading, the marathon reality show known as the New Hampshire Primaries threatens to devolve into a high school junk food fight.

On the Democratic side, the pressing exam question du jour is "Who's a progressive?" On the Republican side, there are no questions. There are only class clowns, and serious questions are not, and never were, in the script. 

Last night, CNN's Anderson Cooper, fresh off his depraved New Year's Eve "comedy" gig with Kathy Griffin, pressed Bernie Sanders on his loyalty to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Sanders fumbled badly, first denying writing the blurb with his name on it for Bill Press's critique-from-the-left of Obama. Then he fumbled again, by pleading that Obama has had some progressive moments, despite all evidence to the contrary. Then he blew it big-time by suddenly pivoting from proud socialism and insisting: "Of course I am a Democrat."

Somebody just shoot me. If Bernie keeps this up, he's going to start losing the support of the nation's youth, who are really the ones instigating the new socialist wave in this country. As I have been saying all along, the Occupy movement never did die. Bernie himself seems to be shocked to find himself riding on the crest of this tsunami. Even some hardcore socialists and Greens have backed down from their initial attacks, which accused him of "sheep-dogging" new voters into the Democratic fold. With Bernie or without Bernie, socialism is the default position of the under-30 crowd now bearing the brunt of decades of harsh Clintonian neoliberal policies.

The only thing that saved Sanders's hide at last night's town hall, in fact, was another breathtaking gaffe by Hillary Clinton. (By the way, if Bernie says "I like and respect Secretary Clinton" one more awful time, I'll throw my copy of Howard Zinn at him. He should loathe and fear her, just like any self-respecting human for whom a modicum of survival is a top priority).

But back to the gaffe. When Cooper asked her if she'd made "a bad error in judgment" in accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three private speeches, she flippantly retorted: "That's what they offered!" (A bribe by any other name should smell as sweet.)

She went on to whine that since every other secretary of state has cashed in upon leaving office, why not her? And anyway, she burbled, she didn't know she was running until she formally announced last spring... despite the Ready for Hillary PAC and the pre-endorsements from nearly every establishment elite with a public office or a checkbook, and the fact that the New York Times had already established a full-time Hillary Desk by 2013, shortly after she left the State Department in order to "explore" her future career plans.

But back to Sanders. I think he's goofed by calling her a "moderate" who has no right to the progressive moniker - which then led to the inevitable demands for him to define his terms, and differentiate progressivism from liberalism. 

He should simply and correctly call her a conservative, a right-winger, a neoliberal, or even a neocon, given her bellicosity. He should contrast the two wings of the Democratic Party and educate his younger audience on how Hill and Bill spearheaded the move to the right back in the 90s with their Democratic Leadership Council (now known as the New Democrat Coalition), aka the Third Way, aka the second wave of the Reagan Revolution. He should be noting that these centrists have long co-opted the word "progressive." The most glaring example is the Clintons' own corporate-funded Center for American Progress think tank, founded by her campaign manager and former Obama Chief of Staff, lobbyist John Podesta.

Another Clintonista-riddled centrist think tank is the Progressive Policy Institute, whose economic "studies" helped propel Bill Clinton to the presidency, pass NAFTA, and repeal Glass-Steagall.  Most recently, the PPI wrote a plutocrat-soothing report which falsely claims that inequality has not risen since the 2008 crisis.

According to SourceWatch, the  PPI has been funded by such corporations as Eli Lilly, AT&T, the Koch Brothers' Georgia-Pacific Foundation, Ameritech, Chevron, and BP. Bernie should really bring up the Clintons' hidden ties to the always-popular Kochs while he's at it. There are so many more Hillary-affiliated villains out there to pick on besides Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs.

Bernie and Hillary will be back at it tonight, in a face-to-face MSNBC debate co-moderated by Rachel Maddow and Truckle Chodd. I'll have the popcorn and the dog-eared Howard Zinn ready.

My advice to Sanders is to ignore the polls on Obama's continuing popularity and not be afraid to "distance" himself from a president who not only also took money from Wall Street, he also actively sheltered Wall Street crooks from prosecution.  You can't criticize Hillary Clinton without also criticizing Barack Obama.

Sanders should call Obama out directly for cravenly calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership one of the most "progressive" pillars of his entire tenure. He shouldn't be afraid to mention that Obama has upgraded slave-trading Malaysia's human rights status just so that rich multinationals can exploit even more people and grow even richer.  Ralph Nader can even helpfully supply Sanders with 10 reasons why there is nothing even remotely progressive about Obama's attempted corporate coup. It's not enough to simply accuse Clinton of "flip-flopping" on it after championing it 45 separate times.

There is nothing even remotely moderate about Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders should not stoop to honor her with that distinction. In Clinton World, progress is about as healthy as a metastatic cancer.If the Clintons have proven nothing else, it's that they will stop at nothing in their ruthless and immoderate quest for power.

** Update, 2/5. I have to say, it was a great debate, and although Bernie lost a few opportunities to verbally destroy Hillary, he got in plenty of jabs to render her relatively helpless. The withering look on her face as he railed against Wall Street fraud without needing to mention her by name was worth the price of admission.  I didn't have to toss my dog-eared Howard Zinn at the TV, after all.

She obviously bested him on foreign policy factoids, given her four long wasted years of frequent-flying, bloodthirsty imperialistic experience. What can I say: the guy is not that into becoming Commander in Chief of the world's largest, most bloated military ever. Maybe if Bernie is elected, the war machine will just start to wither away through lack of interest. And the world, for once, will be safe from American democracy. (OK, so I'm getting way too ahead of myself and starting to sing John Lennon in my head.)

If you missed the debate and read about it in the New York Times, you probably got the mistaken impression that it was Hillary Triumphans all the way. Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy took her aggrieved retort about being "smeared," and made it the lede and highlight of their slanted coverage.

My published comment: 

I think I must have been watching a different debate from the one described here by Martin and Healy. The "bitterness and rancor" angle is highly overblown. Long before candidates entered the second half of the debate, the tone became almost too civil on both sides. I think they both realized they were being set up for a semantic food fight. And thanks to the subsequent relative dearth of "gotchas" by the moderators, I was able to learn a lot more about their positions. They actually spoke in complete, uninterrupted paragraphs. What a refreshing change from the boilerplate soundbites we've come to expect from the GOP's fascist clowns.

  If you happened to miss the debate and were relying solely upon this article for a recap, you were sadly misled. Clinton did not launch a harshest of all harsh attacks on Sanders. If anything, she disingenuously overreacted to his correct observation that Wall Street has an outsize influence on politicians and his call to do away with the legalized bribery of Citizens United.

Yet the opening paragraph of this piece would have you believe that Clinton destroyed Sanders in one fell swoop. Huh?

This is the Times doing what it does best: diminishing/attacking Bernie Sanders through the same insinuation and innuendo that Clinton ascribed to her opponent. It's a terminal case of journalistic OCD, and apparently highly resistant to the usual therapy of fairness and accuracy.

For a clear picture, simply watch the debate or read the transcript.
 

What's the Matter With Iowa

I've been informed by such establishment outlets as the New York Times that Iowa is actually deciding the presidential election of 2016. If Trump wins this teensy-weensy caucus, he wins the GOP nomination. If Sanders loses Iowa, he loses the entire nation. Game over, people. Your votes, as ever, will not really count.

This is what they want you to think, of course. Iowa is just the convenient excuse for the ruling elite to get what they want. And let's face it, what they want is the downfall of democracy. By making it as hard as possible for "folks" to attend the caucuses, they ensure that very few people will have the energy, money, transportation and time to participate in the selection process. The "grassroots democracy" of the Iowa caucuses is overgrown with choking weeds. The only beneficiaries of this endless spectacle are the TV networks and the SuperPacs raking in the dough from the contrived, horse-race frenzy of it all.

Marty Kaplan of The Jewish Journal is right on the money (the really big money) when he writes:

What a dangerous distraction the Iowa spectacle has been from the dysfunction and unfairness of democracy as we now know it. No, worse, what a cynical celebration of it. Pitifully few Americans vote, and shockingly few of them are young or poor or people of color, yet we give wildly disproportionate influence to the white rural voters of one small state whose priorities, like subsidies for corn-based ethanol, are nationally marginal, and whose disposable time for caucus-going is unimaginable to parents working multiple shifts at multiple jobs.

At the same time, what a bonanza it’s been for the state’s TV and radio stations, which have raked in tens of millions of dollars in attack ads, and what a bordello it’s been for the billionaires and special interests who’ve anonymously funded those air wars.

What a misbegotten surrogate for civic seriousness this interminable campaign has become, with news networks getting in bed with parties to co-sponsor debates, selling national ad time for those debates at Super Bowl rates and polluting public discourse with bloviating “strategists” and accountability-free predictions.

And the excellent Paul Street, who knows whereof he speaks because he actually lives in Iowa, damns the state's caucuses as a classist slap in the face to democracy. People are expected to drop everything just after dinner to cast their votes. Shift-workers are denied the chance to have their voices heard. Aged and disabled people are expected to venture out in the ice and snow. Struggling parents have to find a few spare dollars for child care. 

  Many of these folks would seem to be precisely the sort of working class people one might expect to gain from the enactment of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ progressive domestic social agenda, including a significant increase in the federal minimum wage and single-payer (Medicare for All) health insurance. But most early evening workers can’t participate in the Iowa presidential Caucus pitting Sanders against the corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton next Monday night. There’s no federal or statewide Election Day law requiring employers to let those workers participate in the “beloved Iowa political ritual.” The prime-time workers who want to Caucus have to ask for special permission (so their bosses can find replacements) and give up lost wages to go sit and stand through hours of political deliberation.

Street goes to  describe what amounts to a classroom session from hell, in which boring professorial types run the show and have undue influence on the outcome of the D-Party "vote." Anybody who's ever been trapped in a company boardroom for the putative purpose of airing employee grievances knows just how this psychological warfare works. They'll wear you down, and wear you down, until your eyes bleed and you'll do anything, anything at all, to just escape and go home.

Amazingly enough, Street says, the Republican Iowa caucuses are actually more human-friendly than the Democratic variety. You simply write your choice down on a paper ballot and you're done. Voters with short attention spans are just what the right-wing doctor ordered.

Is it any wonder that the participation rate for the Iowa caucuses is only a measly 16 percent? This makes the recent, worst turnout-in-modern history Congressional midterm elections look like an overwhelming plebiscite in comparison, with a whopping one-quarter to one-half of eligible voters bothering to show up in a burst of enthusiasm.

 I'm treating Iowa the same way that the Oz Gatekeeper advised Dorothy to pay no attention to the little man operating the controls behind the curtain. The show is corny, and the directors are doing their unlevel best to rig the outcome. They'll try to convince us that what happens in Iowa won't stay in Iowa. Subsidized ethanol will escape the Heartland to melt the icy climes of New Hampshire before it chemically pivots to solidify the "Black Firewall" of South Carolina,  and then creeps its greasy way back west to Nevada. 

Unless, of course, Bernie Sanders ekes out a victory over Hillary Clinton. If that comes to pass, we'll be told that Iowa doesn't matter after all. What counts are the Super Delegates.

 So I, for one, plan to spend this evening watching the third installment of The X-Files. If the truth is anywhere out there, it's certainly not going to be coming from the prattle of CNN's Panel of Experts, or the New York Times' cracked-corn team of Live Bloggers.

Scully: "Any thoughts as to why anybody would be growing corn in the middle of the desert?"

Chips, Dips, Chains And Whips

Take heart, all you 29 million uninsured Americans out there! Even though Hillary Clinton wants to condemn you to misery and a possible early death through her strident vow that Bernie Sanders's single payer health plan "will never, ever come to pass," Barack Obama wants you to know that he still has your back.  

Rather than Medicare for All, he's offering Computer Science for All, as a kind of booby prize. A chip in every classroom and in every body will not only help the lack of medicine go down. It'll make Silicon Valley as rich as Croesus and Predatory Insurance and Big Pharma all put together.

While Hillary was shamelessly dragging the mother of a brain cancer patient up onto her campaign stage as a prop to spread the lie that Bernie Sanders would rip out her daughter's chemo line on Day One of his presidency, Obama is using the waning days of his own presidency to try and convince us that all we need to survive (besides Obamacare, of course) are a few more skills to make our lives as servants in the oligarchy seem cool. 

If we have to live in a Dystopia where we periodically enter the health care lottery for a slim chance to win at actually living, Obama will at least try to make us feel better. Welcome to the Brave New World of Techno-optimism, folks!

From his weekly address to Da People:

 Hi everybody.  As I said in my State of the Union address, we live in a time of extraordinary change – change that’s affecting the way we live and the way we work. New technology replaces any job where work can be automated.  Workers need more skills to get ahead.  These changes aren’t new, and they’re only going to accelerate.  So the question we have to ask ourselves is, “How can we make sure everyone has a fair shot at success in this new economy"?

(Translation: These changes are  fueled by job-destroying, corporation-enriching, democracy-killing policies that I like to call free trade deals, You know, like NAFTA --  which my pal and designated successor Hillary Clinton championed back in the day. Oh, and the TTP which she only pretends to hate because she has to fool enough people to beat Bernie.The Neoliberal Project -- the free market supplanting representative government, and dictating social and economic policies --  is nothing new. It got its second wave in the 90s when the first Clinton Regime continued the Reagan Revolution. So, we of the power elite sit around and rhetorically ask ourselves how we can make sure that enough people will actually believe what we say. We are so disingenuous that we don't even care how the phrases "fair shot at success" and the "skills gap" are being greeted with howls of derision from millions of struggling people and Bernie-supporters out there.  We do have the barest glimmer of an idea that people are fully aware of how corrupt we elected officials truly are. We can't admit this, though, because if we did, plutocratic heads might explode.)

  So back to my propaganda script: 

The answer to that question starts with education. That’s why my Administration has encouraged states to raise standards.  We’ve cut the digital divide in our classrooms in half.  We’ve worked with Congress to pass a bipartisan bill to set the expectation that every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a good job.  And thanks to the hard work of students, teachers, and parents across the country, our high school graduation rate is at an all-time high. 

 Through our discredited Race to the Top program, we had the excuse to close hundreds of "poor-performing" schools. Rather than allocate funds to alleviate pupil hunger, parental unemployment and other social ills, we saved money by shutting schools down and transferring the kids to for-profit charters to help private equity vultures get even richer. Better to put some high-tech crap from the Gates Foundation in classrooms (big donor to Hillary's slush fund, by the way!) than keep those unionized teachers around. And the two tightly clenched cheeks of Bipartisan Consensus actually passed an ass-pirational bill telling those poor kids and parents that "we" expect a lot more hard work from them. 

But enough of the cold-hearted truth. Propaganda's my name, propaganda's my game. My baritone spiels are nothing if not "euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."  (h/t Aldous Huxley.)

 Now, we have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future – which means not just being able to work with computers, but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy.  Today’s auto mechanics aren’t just sliding under cars to change the oil; they’re working on machines that run on as many as 100 million lines of code.  That’s 100 times more than the Space Shuttle.  Nurses are analyzing data and managing electronic health records.  Machinists are writing computer programs.  And workers of all kinds need to be able to figure out how to break a big problem into smaller pieces and identify the right steps to solve it.

OK, now we're getting into some super-cool, fun Huxley territory. Humans won't really become redundant: they will simply become the migrant labor at the robot farms. High school grads will become minimum-wage rocket scientists! Forget nurses spending tender loving direct care time with sick people. They'll be too busy uploading data so that Predatory Insurance can bill them quicker and get paid faster. They'll be too wrapped up in writing code to call any emergency Codes. Every minute of every working day will be a zero-sum slog. Your entire life will be shattered into many little puzzle pieces that you will then be expected to put back together again. And if you can't take the pressure, there's plenty more where you came from.  So stay in school, and make Bill Gates richer while I drone on:

In the new economy, computer science isn’t an optional skill – it’s a basic skill, right along with the three “Rs.”  Nine out of ten parents want it taught at their children’s schools.  Yet right now, only about a quarter of our K through 12 schools offer computer science.  Twenty-two states don’t even allow it to count toward a diploma.

In Brave New World, there will be no time for literature, creative writing, history, ethics and probably Recess. Every diploma will have a Computer Chip embedded in it to follow you for the rest of your life. As Aldous Huxley wrote, "Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." So let's prove Bernie wrong with my magical computer chips, my little chipmunks!

 So I’ve got a plan to help make sure all our kids get an opportunity to learn computer science, especially girls and minorities.  It’s called Computer Science For All.  And it means just what it says – giving every student in America an early start at learning the skills they’ll need to get ahead in the new economy.

Your kids are our kids, but my kids are my kids. Computer rights are human rights, and human rights are computer rights. This is the part where I endorse Hillary, and mention girls and minorities, because polls show she's starting to lose women and blacks. As long as some crappy neoliberal initiative has the words "for all" in it, you can forget that Medicare for All is never, ever, never in a zillion years ever gonna happen. Not ever! Thirty million uninsured people are just collateral damage. But maybe they can think they're getting ahead in the New Economy with a few technical skills and Bill Gates software. To quote Aldous again, "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”  

First, I’m asking Congress to provide funding over the next three years so that our elementary, middle, and high schools can provide opportunities to learn computer science for all students.

(I hope -- LOL -- that this will be just the fig leaf I need to cram through the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership. Democrats can ease their consciences if we tepidly promise to offer a few computer classes to folks whose livelihoods we aim to destroy by this corporate coup.) 

 Second, starting this year, we’re leveraging existing resources at the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to train more great teachers for these courses.

(This is a weasel-worded way to say I will "appropriate" funding from other social programs to train low-paid, non-unionized teachers to both market and use Bill Gates's products more efficiently.)

 And third, I’ll be pulling together governors, mayors, business leaders, and tech entrepreneurs to join the growing bipartisan movement around this cause.  Americans of all kinds – from the Spanish teacher in Queens who added programming to her classes to the young woman in New Orleans who worked with her Police Chief to learn code and share more data with the community – are getting involved to help young people learn these skills.  And just today, states like Delaware and Hawaii, companies like Google and SalesForce, and organizations like Code.org have made commitments to help more of our kids learn these skills.

(One Privatization Utopia in just one little paragraph, with just the right smidgen of Police State surveillance thrown in for good measure. This is not a project, people: it's a Movement! It's a Tempest! Oh Brave New World, that has such people in't!) 

 That’s what this is all about – each of us doing our part to make sure all our young people can compete in a high-tech, global economy.  They’re the ones who will make sure America keeps growing, keeps innovating, and keeps leading the world in the years ahead.  And they’re the reason I’ve never been more confident about our future.

 Keeping the cancer of global capitalism growing, one little malignant cell at a time. Endless growth at any cost, no matter the ultimate death of the planet from an overload of innovative pollution.

***

Despite his protestations that he is not endorsing Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama's  weekly radio address actually does amount to a campaign speech for her.  As Chris Lehmann writes, Clinton is relying heavily on this same kind of "techno-optimism" to convince people to vote for her over Bernie Sanders. Thus the wording "Computer Science for All", instead of Computers for Kids or something similar. They really seem to think that as long as their rhetoric sounds inclusive, they can fool at least some of the people some of the time.

Lehmann notes that Alec Ross, Obama's tech adviser during his victorious race against Hillary in 2008,  immediately went to work for her in the State Department:

 Everywhere Ross looks across the radically transformed world of digital commerce, the benign logic of market triumphalism wins the day. When Terry Gou—the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, the vast Chinese electronics sweatshop that doubles as an incubator for worker suicides—plans to eliminate the headache of supervising an unstable human workforce by replacing it with “the first fully automated plant” in manufacturing history, why, he’s simply “responding to pure market forces”: i.e., an increase in Chinese wages that cuts into Foxconn’s ridiculously broad profit margins. And you and I might see the so-called sharing economy as a means to casualize service workers into nonunion, benefit-free gigs that transfer economic value on a massive scale to a rentier class of Silicon Valley app marketers. But bouncy New Economy cheerleaders like Ross see “a way of making a market out of anything, and a microentrepreneur out of anyone.

 When confronted with the spiraling of income inequality in the digital age, Ross, like countless other prophets of better living through software, sagely counsels that “rapid progress often comes with greater instability.” Sure, the “wealthy generally benefit over the short term,” but remember, kids: “Innovations have the potential to become cheaper over time and spread throughout the greater population.”

Yeah, kids.... as fraught as your lives have become with an Obamacare Bronze Plan or No Plan, and no hope, never, ever, never of Medicare for All.

If this post has scared the living daylights out of you, as well as making you mad as hell, there is a very simple solution.  

Simply Feel the Bern, and help fan the flames of the revolution against the neoliberal scourge.  Capitalism is way overdue for some deep-tissue cauterization.

There is better living through Medicare for All. Because our lives are not cheap. Our lives are not theirs to program and atomize.

(credit: Taylor Jones, Cagle Cartoons)

Bernie-Bashing Backfires Badly

As quickly as the pundit posse of the neoliberal establishment took up their leaky pens, as furiously as they began typing en masse with their limp little fingers, they have just as suddenly decided to hold their fire. (Oops. I think I was indulging in a little wishful thinking there. Because all those wascally wacky "no, we can't" wonks are back in full force after giving their exhausted little typing fingers a much needed respite as they coordinated their anti-Bernie Sanders talking points.)

Their audiences have not been buying what they're selling. Economics pundit Paul Krugman of the New York Times is even is reduced to whining that he's being called "evil" for denigrating Bernie Sanders supporters as "happy dreamers." (He provided no proof of the actual existence of any evil-accusers, however.) 

Meanwhile, the anti-universal health care diatribes of Democratic Wonker Ezra Klein of Vox have been compared to those 90s right-wing Thelma and Louise ads from the Clinton era. Matt Yglesias has been castigated as a hypocrite for defending single payer health care during the first Obama campaign, but now belittling it during the first Sanders campaign. Etc, etc, etc. By far the worst of the worst of the Bernie- Bashers is centrist pundit Jonathan Chait. Gawker calls his "case against Sanders" not only dishonest, but dumb. Chait's latest gambit is to claim Sanders has no political experience, despite his long record of service in municipal, state, and national government.

  That is only the backlash against the pundits, who operate with relative freedom. Surrogates for Hillary Clinton have definitely been put in their places. Chelsea Clinton has already gotten the Barbara Bush muzzle treatment, banished to private fundraisers among friendly members of her own social class. Attack dog-in-chief David Brock of Media Matters was chained and choke-collared  by the campaign when he demanded Bernie's health records and accused him of not caring about black people.

Hillary Clinton herself has suddenly let up on her own direct attacks. This isn't because of any sense of human decency, but because focus groups were not reacting kindly to either her unfair Bernie-bashing, or her running on the fumes of the Obama administration as a way to pander to black voters.

The most powerful Bernie-Basher still left standing is President Obama, who really only succeeded in denigrating the progressive base, rather than the candidate himself, when he called Sanders a "bright, shiny object" -- as though voters are a bunch of shallow rubes instead of thoughtful citizens hungry for some basic human dignity in their lives. His smarmy paternalism and adherence to the status quo of unfettered capitalism could not have been made starker.

 I suspect that Obama was just as ticked off about Bernie's Senate hold on the White House nomination of a Big Pharma shill to head the Food and Drug Administration as he was about Hillary's slide in the polls.

Obama might also have been reacting to last week's withering speech by his other nemesis in the Senate: Elizabeth Warren.

Warren as much as endorsed Bernie, and blasted both Clinton and Obama: (h/t Gaius Publius.) 

Hillary Clinton has thus been duly forced ("shamed" would imply an actual moral compass) into postponing a couple of Wall Street money-grubbing events scheduled for today. Her tryst with the billionaires will just have to wait.  So in that respect, the Sanders-Warren wing has already won. It is beginning to nudge the big money out of the political process. It's already making the pursuit of greed uncomfortable for both corrupt politicians and the wealthy donor class. 

And as for Bernie's scheduled Oval Office meeting with Big Guy himself today, what is Obama going to do? Threaten to cut off Bernie's DNC funding? Threaten to not join him on the stump if he doesn't cede the nomination to Clinton, or tone down the populist rhetoric?

If Bernie Sanders has proven anything, he's proven that he can't be bought.

And really: can you picture Barack and Michelle joining Bernie and Jane Sanders on the campaign trail? I kind of doubt that the Obamas are going to be calling for a political revolution, and the break-up of the banks, and universal health care any time soon. They've got their own future careers and "initiatives" to worry about.

But back to that outbreak of Bernie-Bashing by media insiders last week, as well as its apparent hasty and probably only temporary retreat. How did Krugman, Chait, Klein and the rest belch out nearly identical anti-Sanders polemics all at the same time? Political philosopher Philip Mirowski has a great explanation about how this process of agnotology works in his book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste":

"It ventures far beyond the discrediting of this or that individual; it seeks to destabilize the things we were predisposed to take for granted, and insinuate a sharply targeted narrative explanation as one of those default presumptions, 

"This does not appear to the public as overt strident propaganda; rather it presents itself as liberating, expanding the cloistered space of sanctioned explanation in an era of wrangling and indecision. There are two steps to this procedure: one is the effort to pump excess noise into the public discussion of appropriate frames within which to approach the controversy; the second is to provide the echoic preferred target narrative as coming from many different sanctioned sources at once; ubiquity helps pave the way for inevitability. To make this work, one must do both: amplify the impression of indecision and doubt on the part of the elect, while sharpening the preferred narrative as making a demand upon our attention. Doubt is their product, but eventual manufactured consensus is their profit."

What Chait, Krugman, Yglesias, Klein and the affinity fraudsters of the Neoliberal Thought Collective have just attempted to accomplish for the Democratic Party is to destabilize and shoot down the growing public consensus that health care is a human right, and that the free market is harmful to our collective well-being. That they acted in unison, writing essentially the same words to denigrate both Sanders and his supporters, is proof of the inherent motivation of the establishment: to lower the expectations of progressives and supporters of Bernie Sanders. The neoliberal pundits' "excess noise" and fear-mongering about high taxes being worse than high payments to insurance companies came out all at once, in one very highly orchestrated, cacophonous neoliberal bellow.

The only trouble is, they have failed miserably to convince. They didn't get their reward of "manufactured consent." They have failed to gaslight us, just as Charles Boyer ultimately failed to convince Ingrid Bergman that she was the crazy one.

Single Payer is Way Too Expensive, My Darling

Their expected profits have turned into a monumental loss of their credibility and damage to their reputations. 

They counted on the stupidity and party tribalism of the masses, and all they got was ridicule. They were sorely disappointed.

***

On that theme, here are a couple of my recent New York Times comments.

The first was on the blog-post by Krugman (linked above) in which he hilariously used Obama's endorsement of Clinton and insult to Bernie supporters to bolster the agnotological point of his thought collective buddies. He pretended to be absolutely stunned -- even paranoid -- at the criticism he's been getting, going so far as to churlishly accuse his critics of calling him "evil." (Actually, he is merely banal. And not as cute as Charles Boyer.)

My response:

Krugman again attacks the straw man who insists that anybody not in the bag for Bernie is a monster and pure evil. I think that the pejorative term being bandied about is "Bernie Bro."* Although rumored to be roaming the landscrape, the existence of this Chimera has yet to be proven. No photographs are known to exist.

The Bernie Bro of Plutocratic Nightmares

 Also, the term Pragmatic Progressive, or "pragprog," is an oxymoron. (this is a reference to the meme of Clinton as a "progressive who gets things done".) The word is commonly used to describe an extreme centrist (socially  liberal, economically free-market conservative, usually wealthy). It first became fashionable to be a PragProg back in the day when Obama was playing his mythical game of 11-dimensional chess with his Grandiose Bargaining pawns of austerity and safety net cuts.

Anybody wanting universal health care is an airhead these days, according to the PragProgs. People wanting to survive and get paid $15 an hour are considered radical.

Frankly, I am getting sick of hearing about all the battles that Hillary has fought, how battle-scarred Hillary is, etc. I keep getting this picture of Saint Sebastian in drag. Oh, those arrows of outrageous multi-millionaire fortune.

Saint Hillary of the Scared, Scarred and Sacred Heart

 This is not about the hurt feelings of pundits and wonks -- much to their chagrin, apparently.

How about showing some concern about the 99%, who are not only scarred, but still bleeding copiously from their many wounds? (wage stagnation, underemployment, poverty.)

That is what should be making you furious. That is the true evil. 

***

In his "Hillary Clinton Stumbles" column published on Monday, Charles Blow implicitly chides his media colleagues, and directly blasts the candidate herself, for the recent mindless frenzy of Sandernista sucker-punching. Although he, too, casts doubt upon the Sanders agenda, he at least stays comparatively civil in his criticism of it. He doesn't lie like other liberal pundits and accuse Bernie of wanting to rip away health care from millions of people.

My comment:

 When Hillary was asked on camera if she'd release the transcripts of speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, she just laughed sarcastically. The millions of dollars she's taken from banks, insurance companies and the private prison industry simply expose her new=found populism as a cynical campaign tactic in the mildewed playbook of triangulation and corruption.

People aren't stupid. People are mad as hell, and justifiably so. People are attracted to Bernie Sanders not because they believe he'll bring change overnight, but because they know he's the real deal. Simply being honest and sincere is enough of a winning ticket in this crazy election year.

Bernie Sanders now deservedly owns the national bully pulpit, and we aim to keep him and people like him there, regardless of how this election turns out. He's a master of the Art of the Possible. He brings into high relief the ongoing failure of the political imagination. Don't count out a landslide victory - with more progressives riding into Congress on his coattails -- just yet.

Charles Blow, by the way, is to be applauded for not joining his media colleagues in the ongoing vicious attacks on both Sanders and his "pie-in-the sky" supporters. Mr. Blow's observation that Hillary Clinton is now hypocritically wrapping herself in the mantle of Obama (her erstwhile nemesis) is right on target.

Who cares if Hillary thinks she's battle-tested? We're sick of war, and that includes the class war.

*Update: I spoke too soon about the neolibs temporarily holding their fire. Because Krugman is back on the attack, this time attacking.... Bernie Bros! (I guess he didn't read my comment to him last time, about how Bernie Bros are figments of the Clinton camp's imagination.) In any event, Krugman again wails about the punditocracy being unfairly attacked by rabid proponents of health care for all, rather than railing about the desperate 30 million people not getting any health care at all. He really is starting to sound unhinged. Here's my latest riposte to him, to which I added the link to Warren's speech at the end. (I really don't know how much longer I can keep this up):

I made fun of the term "Bernie Bro" over the weekend in a comment on this blog. It's a stupid pejorative being used by lazy thinkers to describe people who support the policies of Sanders. "Bernie Bros," as the name implies, are a group of oafish sexist pigs out to defeat Hillary for the sole reason that she is a woman.

Bernie Bros do not exist. If there are any soundbites or film of these boors heckling Hillary at her campaign events, I haven't heard or seen them.

Therefore, it is very sad to see Krugman joining in this infantile smear campaign. Since I support Bernie myself, does that make me a Bernie Ho? Do tell.

Painting us all with the same broad brush is a sign of desperation.

Contrary to Establishment belief, we don't want single payer health care now, now, NOW!!!!! If you actually listened to Sanders, you would have heard him say that the best way to accomplish our goals is to elect him, elect more progressives, give him the bully pulpit for two presidential years, and then hopefully vote in a Democratic majority in the 2018 midterms to start transitioning to single payer. Sure, this might not work. But just giving up and not even trying would be plain suicidal for the vast majority of us. Of course, to hear the neoliberal thought collective tell it, our demand for not only a decent life, but for bare-bones survival, is a radical pipe-dream.

 

Straining Credulity

Save the nation. Join the movement:

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

 
Rattled by the spectre of the oligarchy getting taken over by the democratic rabble, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is seriously considering putting his billions into an independent run for the presidency. 

He planted his lead balloon into Saturday's obliging New York Times, followed immediately by a hysterical blog-post by pundit Paul Krugman, who warns us that if we persist in nominating Bernie Sanders like a bunch of airheads, this will usher in Bloomberg, which will then get us President Donald Trump. So forget all about democracy, proles! At least, that's what I interpreted Krugman's inchoate fear-mongering to mean.   

You'll be happy to learn that "Bloomberg Nation" already has an inspiring  campaign slogan designed to fire up the masses before they're transformed into ashes: "The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get."  

"It's time for ACTION," cleverly blurts out the website blurb. "Bloomberg Nation is a grassroots movement dedicated to making our nation bloom."

Something like this, maybe:

It attractively continues, "We need your help. Volunteer your time and services. Help us get 10MM people to endorse Bloomberg for president and create viral media."

Bloomberg, the world's 10th richest godzillionaire, apparently cannot or will not actually pay people to knock on doors for him. He wants, and expects, the freedom to which he is entitled. He is just, as the Times puts it, "galled" about Trump's mumbles and Hillary's stumbles. "His aides have sketched out a version of a campaign plan that would have the former mayor, a low-key and cerebral personality, give a series of detailed policy speeches backed by an intense television advertising campaign. The ads would introduce him to voters around the country as a technocratic problem-solver and self-made businessman who understands the economy and who built a bipartisan administration in New York."

Alternate slogan, riffing off Jeb Bush: "Right for Bile to Rise."

It'll be interesting to see whether the corporate-sponsored presidential debate committee will bend its rules and allow the unpopular Bloomberg to buy his way into the general election debates, regardless of how low his poll numbers are. If that is the case, then they should also open up the forum to the Green Party's Jill Stein, who you might remember was summarily arrested and handcuffed when she had the gall to try to join Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for their infamous Binders Full of Women debate in 2012.

It'll also be interesting to see how the Black Lives Matter movement responds to Mayor Stop & Frisk, who infamously said: "We disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little."  

At least the Shrillionaire Mayor isn't yet boasting, like Donald Trump, that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."