Kitchen Sink #4: "Left-Leaning Economists"

Major Bernie Scandal Alert! Four Democratic economists who served at various times as economic advisers to Presidents Clinton or Obama have written a scathing open letter, accusing another economist not even affiliated with the Sanders campaign of doing math which does not add up to their unspecified specifications.

Gerald Friedman of UMass-Amherst, who recently received progressive accolades for his own scathing takedown of a Wall Street Journal hit piece falsely asserting that Sanders's single payer health care plan would bankrupt the middle class, now finds himself the target of attacks from the neoliberal centrist faction of the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders himself has been declared guilty by association.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in one of a whole series of recent breathless posts damning progressive "unicorns," and other perceived enemies of the Neoliberal Order, is demanding that Sanders immediately disown Friedman -- with whom he has no direct association at all. "Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now," Krugman shrilled. "If his campaign responds instead by lashing out — well, a campaign that treats Alan Krueger, Christy Romer, and Laura Tyson as right-wing enemies is well on its way to making Donald Trump president."

 As I responded in my published comment, this kind of fear-mongering McCarthyesque attack is reminiscent of the media hysteria over the Obama-Jeremiah Wright controversy during the 2008 campaign. As you may recall, Obama dutifully "disowned" Wright after the pastor preached what were deemed by the Establishment to be un-American sermons.

The source of the latest angst is a newer analysis by Friedman, leaked to CNN, which purportedly claims that Medicare for All would boost economic growth by more than five percent. 

The false equivalency engine immediately went into overdrive. The Four Wonks of the Neoliberal Apocalypse took up their pens of outrage, even going so far as to set up their own WordPress blog which they call "letters to sanders." So I guess we can expect more scathe in the future. Here is their first entry, in its entirety:

  Letter from Past CEA Chairs to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman -- Posted on February 17, 2016 by lettertosanders 

Dear Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman,

We are former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For many years, we have worked to make the Democratic Party the party of evidence-based economic policy. When Republicans have proposed large tax cuts for the wealthy and asserted that those tax cuts would pay for themselves, for example, we have shown that the economic facts do not support these fantastical claims. We have applied the same rigor to proposals by Democrats, and worked to ensure that forecasts of the effects of proposed economic policies, from investment in infrastructure, to education and training, to health care reforms, are grounded in economic evidence.  Largely as a result of efforts like these, the Democratic party has rightfully earned a reputation for responsibly estimating the effects of economic policies.

We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.

As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates.

Sincerely,

Alan Krueger, Princeton University

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2011-2013

Austan Goolsbee, University of Chicago Booth School

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2010-2011

Christina Romer, University of California at Berkeley

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2009-2010

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 1993-1995

Mind you, this letter was written immediately after renowned economist Thomas Piketty published an op-ed in praise of Bernie Sanders and his tax-the-rich, New Deal agenda. It follows a grand total of 170 economists who last month wrote their own letter endorsing Sanders's and Elizabeth Warren's plan to break up the big banks. (h/t Meredith.)

 The letter from the Fantastic Four dovetails ever so nicely with a New York Times editorial posing as a news story by Jackie Calmes, whose unabashed slant-fest was obliterated very ably by Doug Henwood, writing for FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.)

Henwood notes that most Bernie-bashing from professional Left-Leaners uses the same formula. Show some initial surface sympathy for his agenda (I always loved Single Payer!) before immediately pivoting to concern-trolling its "impracticality" in the Current Climate, and then finally building up to a crescendo of outright derision and mockery and straw man attacks. The mockery, as practiced by Krugman's Puppies, Rainbows and Unicorn-Hating Coalition, has now achieved true art form, iconic status. Henwood also reminds us that concern-trolling economist Goolsbee is the same duplicitous political operative who once assured the Canadians that Obama didn't "really" plan to overturn NAFTA. Goolsbee, since leaving the Obama administration and writing nasty Open Letters, also advises hedge funds in his spare time.

I wrote two separate responses to both of Krugman's authority-appealing posts on the Four Worried Wonks:

The four worried wonks worked for two centrist administrations. They falsely equate fraudulent GOP trickle-down with righteous FDR-style trickle-up/opening of the floodgates.  Krugman tellingly does not define "winners and losers." Could it be that under a President Sanders, the losers would be the plutocrats and the winners ordinary people now struggling just to survive?

The Four Wonks of the Apocalypse work for a party which has not served the interests of the plebes since the Clintons surged to power on the second wave of Reaganism. This neoliberal "Third Way" is loosely defined as free market conservatism loosely papered over with "social responsibility." 

 The select Democratic Wonk Committee on Bernie-Bashing Paranoia is about the fortunes of the Party, not the fortunes of the people. Why else would the DNC try to limit its primary debates? They were worried that the "conversation" would extend beyond the acceptable arguments between centrists and right-wingers. As Simone Weil wrote, political parties have one main goal: their own continued existence and hold on power. Once they gain power, they tend to forget the basic social contract.

Many of us are simply disgusted with this spate of fear-mongering and concern-trolling. We're all too aware that recent columns by Brooks, Blow, Friedman and Krugman all sound the same. And no, they're not corrupt or looking for jobs. They're simply banal.

The only logical response to these elite "concerns" is a big, fat group Meh.

A big, fat Meh.

And my follow-up to his Worried Wonkopalypse follow-up post, demanding that Bernie disown Friedman, himself, and us..... because if he doesn't fall into line, we'll get ourselves a President Trump:

OK, now I get it. Gerald Friedman is to Bernie Sanders what Rev Jeremiah Wright was to Barack Obama. The concern trolls are demanding A Major Disowning Speech. They want reassurances from Bernie that the teeming masses are not really coming after the sensitive elites with their pitchforks. They want Lloyd Blankfein to get over his crippling pathological fear that millions of bank-evicted unemployed people are lurking just beyond his heavily guarded compound(s.) And all Blankfein ever said was that struggling people shouldn't count on getting Medicare and Social Security while he rakes in a cool billion!

I'm not a wonk myself, so I have no way of knowing whether Friedman's math adds up. But this is just a distraction. Nobody is asking Hillary Clinton how her own math adds up. Campaigns are by their nature aspirational rather than mathematical. Politicians do want people to show up to vote, or so I would assume.

 Bernie Sanders is being held up to an impossible standard.

I stand by my comment in the previous thread. This is all about the Wall Street wing of the Democratic establishment wanting to hold onto power. Lesser Evilism is way past its sell-by date. The days when pundits and plutocrats could manufacture the consent of the masses through fear and smears are gone, baby, gone.

Friedman doesn't work for Sanders. Nor does Sanders refer to the Four Worried Wonks as right-wingers. Nor is he treating them with any disrespect (though god knows they mightily deserve it.)

Update: The Unicorn-Hating Collective is now a news story unto itself. Legions of aggrieved Wonks are joining Krugman (and of course Hillary Clinton herself) in playing the victim card. The Bernie Bashers are getting bashed all over the place by mere plebes. They're getting called out on their insufferable wonkitude, and their feelings are apparently hurt. I mean, the fact that we live in the only country on earth without basic health care for all its citizens is simply a matter of charts and math that the wonks work so tirelessly to invent. The New York Times, as ever, is On It: 

But there may be something broader going on here beyond the specific disagreements about growth assumptions, or cost savings from a single-payer health system, or how to regulate the financial system.

Behind closed doors, among the left-of-center policy types who populate the congressional offices, executive agencies and think tanks of Washington, I’ve seen enough eye rolls when Mr. Sanders’s name comes up to suspect something more tribal is going on.

The wonkosphere vs. Bernie clash is not just a story of center-left versus left-left. It is also a clash between those who have been in the trenches of trying to make public policy for the last seven years versus those who can exist in a kind of theoretical world of imagining what public policy ought to be.

Don't you lowly people realize that Wonks work all night on your behalf? Do you really think that politicians only have to answer to their constituents? Bernie Sanders will never, ever be able to make nice with the Wonk Collective, which realistically admits that lobbyists and bankers are people, too!

The article conveniently forgets to mention that Bernie once suggested Paul Krugman, wonk extraordinaire, to lead the Treasury Department. Methinks those wascally wonks doth protest way too much.

Dispatches From Nevada

Note from Karen:

Reader E. O'Meara of Northern California has been emailing me about her adventures the past several days, canvassing for Bernie Sanders in Reno and training as a leader for this weekend's caucuses. With her permission, I am sharing her journey with Sardonicky readers. Some names, including that of the author, have been changed in order to protect their privacy. The emails have been very lightly edited.
  

February 14:

I am working as a nurse practitioner in my local county jail, which has half its 400 population comprised of immigration detainees. 

My girlfriend/fiancee lives in Reno. There was outreach to Northern California peeps (I live 126 miles from her house) to help with canvassing this weekend, and I volunteered. Two days before coming out we found out Bernie was actually going to be there for a rally prior to the canvassing. There were only a few hundred people who came to the Reno rally (it's good to see that Las Vegas rally was better attended), but the energy was so good it was almost overwhelming to me at times. We saw Bernie and his wife a few minutes after the (four I think) Secret Service men arrived. Bernie was pretty punctual. He spoke for about 12 minutes, didn't say anything new, but he did speak to the Nevada issue of the solar business being busted by the PUC (Public Utility Commission).

The volunteers did a good job of getting everyone who came to canvass into groups. My girlfriend, Karli and I were joined by a very cool retired Indian man (his bumper sticker said "Medicare for None" with the Romney/Ryan name and logo beneath it). We were sent to a very wealthy, very Republican area with lots of space between lots. We were unable to finish all the houses on our lists (I hit about 30 houses) before calling it a day. It was a pretty discouraging experience, canvassing that area.

Three interactions stand out.

The first one was a 74 year old woman who had been identified as a "lean Bernie" Democrat. I asked if she would be going to caucus, and she didn't hesitate to say "No. Bernie's too old".

The second one was at a house where a female voter had been identified as Independent, I think (for sure not Republican!). A ruddy-faced, mustached white male in his late 50's or older answered the door and wouldn't let me speak with the person in question. "I'm not voting for him because he's a socialist!" Okay, but may I speak to so-and-so? "We're not voting for him because he's a socialist!"

At a third house, I asked the man answering the door if he was going to the caucus. "No," he replied. "I'm going skiing."

Since tomorrow is a holiday (and I have it off because I belong to a union!), I am going to a caucus training at the Washoe County Democratic HQ. I will volunteer to work at the caucus next Saturday. I was told they have 600 precincts to oversee, and they won't have too many volunteers. Besides the usual stuff, they also need people to be on the lookout for illegal antics from the other side; they want people to record suspect behavior.

Karli and I went to see the Michael Moore movie ("Where To Invade Next") today. It's not showing in my town theater (such a redneck place it is), but I am taking my kids to see it an hour away this coming Wednesday evening because it is such an important movie. 

(Ed. note: So much for claims from Clintonites that Bernie is a one-note campaigner: The New York Times covered his Reno visit here. A more extensive account of the rally from the Reno Gazette Journal is here. )

Feb. 16:

I went to a caucus training on Monday at the Washoe County Democratic HQ.  I knew nothing about caucuses until this election. My girlfriend didn't even know Nevada had a caucus until this year.

Nevada switched from the primary to the caucus in 2008 with the help of Democrat Harry Reid, since an early Western state was wanted and the demographics in New Hampshire and Iowa weren't representing the party well anymore. The Republicans and Democrats are caucusing on different  dates, the former's being three days after the South Carolina primary. Independents can't participate in the caucus.

http://nvdems.com/caucus/how/

People must be in attendance at a caucus to let their will be known. The window for being allowed to get into the caucus is very small: 11 am to 12 pm for Democrats on Saturday, Feb. 20. The Republican caucus is on Tuesday Feb. 23 in the evening (they have to bring photo ID, but the Dems don't). For the Dems, one must be inside or in line by 12 pm. Anyone arriving after that time doesn't get to participate.

After formalities, people get into groups depending on their chosen candidate. Some people may be undecided, and they get their own group. Using a mathematical formula based on allotted delegates for that precinct, the number of voters present, and the number in the individual groups, "viability" is determined. If a group is not viable, its members may decide to switch to a different group or not be part of one, after members of the other groups have a chance to convince them to go to their side. Once the viable groups have been set, the number of delegates they have won are determined based on a mathematical formula, then chosen from the group to go on to the county convention. (Interestingly, an undecided group can potentially be viable.  It behooves each group to select their allotted number of delegates, because if they don't, the delegates that are then chosen by the Party don't get to go beyond the state convention. (It's county, state, then national)

Why a caucus over a primary? There is no way everyone who wants to participate can. Although a Saturday is preferable to a weekday, people must work. A one-hour window is seriously inferior to the 12-hr window when voting in person, or the days-long window for mail-in ballots. And what about voters who are home-bound? Agoraphobic? Not willing to sacrifice their weekend?

But I think I found out why: parties pay for the caucuses; taxpayers pay for the primaries. Nevada had a $500,000 bill one primary with a low turnout. Also, for whatever reason, the parties had wanted two early primaries and two early caucuses. Both of the primary slots and one caucus slot were already taken.

They need lots of volunteers to help with the 600 precincts in Nevada. We out-of-staters have been asked to show up at HQ at 9 am on caucus day and await instructions on where to go based on needs as they arise.

I'll write again after the Saturday caucus.

Kitchen Sink #3: Bernie is a Pod Person

OK, so this is more of a chipped finger bowl than a kitchen sink, but it does speak to the increasing desperation of the Clinton campaign:

Remember that iconic photo of Bernie Sanders speaking at a CORE rally in Chicago in the 60s? According to Hillary's oppo researchers, that wasn't really Bernie at all. It was only a fellow who looks like Bernie. The real Bernie was probably spooning vanilla Ben and Jerry in a Vermont pot barn somewhere instead of working for civil rights. The Bernie in the photo had to be a character out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You see, say the Clintonoids, Real Bernie was, is, and always will be unashamedly white. He is so white, in fact, that he single-handedly turned Latino-heavy Nevada into a white Sanders planet overnight, forcing Hillary to spend time in another state which her campaign snootily complains is not really a state at all.

She coulda been a contender. She could have been in Palm Beach with Bill this week, schmoozing with the rich and famous at their $32,000-a-plate bribe-fests.

The rumors of Bernie's alien status first gained traction when civil rights icon John Lewis was herded in front of cameras to reveal that he'd never met Sanders in the 60s. Since John Lewis didn't know Sanders, the media concluded, then it obviously follows that Sanders did not and does not care about black people.

 And then Time magazine helpfully ran an article flicking the finger bowl water at Bernie, confirming Clintonland's claim that the guy in the photo wasn't Bernie at all, but some sort of Bernie-lookalike pod-person.

But then it turned out that Danny Lyons, the photographer who shot that scene, is still alive, well and absolutely willing to debunk the latest Clintonoid smear tactic. From U.S. Uncut, quoting Lyons:

“In 1962 and the spring of 1963 I was the student photographer at the University of Chicago, making pictures for the yearbook, the Alumni Magazine, and the student paper, The Maroon. By the summer of 1962, I had taken my camera into the deep South and become the first photographer for SNCC.

“That winter at the University of Chicago, there was a sit-in inside the administration building protesting discrimination against blacks in university owned housing,” Lyons said. “I went to it with a CORE activist and friend. The sit in was in a crowded hallway, blocking the entrance to the office of Dr. George Beadle, the chancellor.

“I took the photograph of Bernie Sanders speaking to his fellow CORE members at that sit-in… Time Magazine is now claiming it is not Bernie in the picture but someone else. It is Bernie, and it is proof of his very early dedication to justice for African Americans. The CORE sit-in that Bernie helped lead was the first civil rights sit-in to take place in the North.

Young Bernie: The Real Deal

Time was then forced to retract its original reporting. It made sure to issue its retraction in very tiny little letters that not many people would notice.

Time is pretty much out of mind, including its own. In December, it announced that Bernie Sanders was the overwhelming winner of its Person of the Year readers' poll. And then it summarily banned Bernie from its list of eight semi-finalists for the honor and settled instead on Angela Merkel, beating out such Time-honored contenders as ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

Of course, Time is only acting in the interests of the corporate media-political complex, Democracy is a very complex and pragmatic thing, you know. It is so complex, in fact, that Super Delegates get weighted votes and (so far, anyway) are giving the very unpopular Hillary Clinton an undemocratic advantage over Bernie Sanders. If the Clintonoids have their way, they will turn the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare right on its head. In their twisted version, the "slow and steady wins the race" happy ending of a President Sanders will be transformed into Cheaters Always Win, and Winners Always Cheat.

The real pod-people are the Clintons. They live in their own pluto-pod bubble, in which $675,000 for three Goldman Sachs speeches is considered a public service accomplishment.

Digging through the Sardonicky archives, meanwhile, I discovered this old photo of young President Bill Clinton, announcing that millions of black mothers would be kicked off the welfare rolls and forced to take crappy low-wage jobs with no child care or retraining subsidies whatsoever:

 

 
(Oops.That's really Donald Sutherland in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The editors sincerely apologize for the error.)

Sweet Justice

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!

Nino No More

Although fowl play is not suspected, I think it's fair to say that Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Nino" Scalia died as he lived: holding innocent living things in contempt before killing them and calling it a luxury vacation. No longer will America have to quail in fright before the juridical jiggery-pokery of this odious little man.

"I am mourning this remarkable man," remarked Barack Obama, taking a moment out of his own bromantic luxury Valentines weekend golf vacation with his old high school posse. "A devout Catholic, he was the proud father of nine children and the grandfather to many loving grandchildren. An avid hunter, he had a passion for opera music, which he shared with his dear friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

"They say you mustn't say nothing but good of the dead. He's dead -- good!" chimed in the ghost of Moms Mabley. 

Not to be outdone, The Washington Post started running live updates on Scalia's continuing death.

Mother Earth declared herself well-pleased with the situation, given that the Supreme Court had been on the verge of declaring null and void the Paris Climate Summit agreements by putting a stay on Obama's Clean Power plan. All the increased smoke and fire and drought and famine will have to remain in Hell for the time being, now that new resident Scalia's deciding pro-Koch vote has been rendered permanently mute. 

The candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, meanwhile, honored Scalia's memory by hurling more opera buffa insults at one another on a kitschy stage festooned with garish pinks and reds to symbolize the group bromance of these manly men. In the muscular bloodthirsty spectacle of our pseudo-democracy, Every Kiss Begins With Kayfabe.

Trump Gives Rubio the Scalia Salute

From Clean for Gene To Learn From Bern

Note from Karen:

Peter Smith, a friend from Buffalo, sent me this piece he wrote for Artvoice, an independent weekly.

 
(Originally published by ArtVoice. Reprinted with permission.)

Can "Clean For Gene" Become "Learn From Bern?"

By Peter Smith

Once upon a time I introduced Senator Gene McCarthy to an audience of students at Dartmouth during the 1968 primary season. The largest auditorium at the College was packed to overflowing – the stage was full of people as well as all the seats and aisles. When “Gene” came on stage the audience exploded.

Fifty years later another insurgent is challenging the establishment of the Democratic Party. In 1968 McCarthy did not win in New Hampshire, but President Johnson decided not to seek another term. In 2016, the question is whether a former first lady will, amazingly, end up without the Dems’ nomination just as LBJ did?

One of the most important unknowables right now is whether young and enthusiastic supporters of the “insurgent” can face a few facts and become a more cohesive political force. “Clean for Gene” was all about asking young men and women in 1968 to shed their counter-culture characteristics and go canvassing in clothes that would not wrong-foot them when they called on regular folks. They did so.

The equivalent today is surely to persuade young supporters of Bernie Sanders to get serious. I have been watching politics for a long time, and I cannot recall ever seeing the number 86 beside a % except in totalitarian countries; but 86 is the percentage of under-25 voters Sanders won in the Iowa caucuses on February First.  Imho that is stunning.

What “getting serious” means is doing something more than “liking” this or that on Facebook, or following a trend on Twitter. A few days ago there was a very important and totally relevant Op-Ed in the New York Times. In it, Tom Friedman gave a young Egyptian the opportunity to share with a wide audience his experience with using social media as a political tool.  

The nub of the matter is that while social media launched the “Arab Spring” and played decisive roles in the overthrow of Mubarek in Egypt and other authoritarian rulers elsewhere in the Middle East, the role of FB and the others in creating a new regime – anywhere – was very limited indeed, if not totally absent. Young Americans, engaged in politics for the first time in their lives in 2016 must learn a lesson from that history if they are to help the revolution Sanders proposes to lead.

The fact that - I am told – Sanders supporters are posting horrendous words about Hillary Clinton has to mean that his young backers have to ”Learn from Bern!”

The first thing is to learn patience. The first thing is to learn consistency. The first thing is to learn civility. The first thing to learn is channeling passion. The first thing to learn is persistence.  A great many “First Things to Learn;” all of them are options. Different people will find some lessons easy, and they can act on their new knowledge immediately. But all of them will need to learn all of them if Bernie’s work is to prosper and succeed.

If he wins the Democratic nomination he will win the presidency. And a large percentage of the 1% will have to figure out how to respond. I am sure I am one of millions who are looking forward to finding out what they make of it all.

***

  (Peter Smith was the director of the arts center at Dartmouth when he introduced Gene McCarthy. Before that, he had been a member of the founding administration at UC Santa Cruz; after Dartmouth, he worked at Columbia University. He has lived in the Buffalo area since 2002.)

Kitchen Sink #2: "BernieSoWhite"

Now that Bernie Sanders has proven his cred with white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, the pundits are dutifully preparing us for his Great Fall in (Black) South Carolina and (Brown) Nevada. It seems that Hillary Clinton owns the African-American and Latino vote because she's been around awhile, and Bernie has had the bad taste to reside in lily-white Vermont for most of his life. Bad Bernie. Bad, bad Bernie.

For the best synopsis of Clintonian racist policies as opposed to Clintonian colorblind rhetoric, don't miss  Michelle ("The New Jim Crow") Alexander's piece in The Nation. It is scathing in its historical completeness.

It is so scathing that over at the pro-Clinton New York Times, columnist Charles Blow attempted to mitigate the damage by denigrating a new faction called the Bernie-splainers. (They appear to be closely related to those annoying Bernie Bros I hear so much about, but have never seen in the flesh, not even in my own lefty rowdy party college town.)

Blow begins: 

I cannot tell you the number of people who have commented to me on social media that they don’t understand this support. “Don’t black folks understand that Bernie best represents their interests?” the argument generally goes. But from there, it can lead to a comparison between Sanders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; to an assertion that Sanders is the Barack Obama that we really wanted and needed; to an exasperated “black people are voting against their interests” stance.

That's right. He cannot, therefore does not, tell us the actual number of white people who wrote him such insulting messages. Not one direct quote among the whole alleged bunch. Blow presents no evidence that any of the Bernie-splainers are presenting Sanders as a kind of Great White Hope to all those ignorant black folk, or have been "talking down" to black people.

Blow goes on to explain that Hillary-style "functional pragmatism" has always worked better for black people. I guess he forgot about Martin Luther King's fierce urgency of now, and his brave stance against incremental change, and his marches through Chicago, Washington and Memphis, and the poor people's encampment that continued as planned after he was murdered.

Then Blow pivots back into the stale establishment talking points about Bernie possessing a "whiff of fancifulness," and how it's always been safer to vote for politicians you know (Clinton) than politicians you don't know (Sanders.) He does not explain that many voters don't know about Sanders precisely because the newspaper which employs him has made it its duty to make sure they don't. 

While I completely get Blow's pique about politicians pandering to different demographics for the sole purpose of garnering votes, I am pretty appalled that he has resorted to the same old straw man (sexist bigoted progressives) argument in order to passive-aggressively boost Hillary's candidacy.

My published comment: (lots of wonderful ones: read them all.)

 You know what irks me? The epidemic of pundit-splaining about Bernie Sanders. Despite the best efforts of the mainstream press to alternately ignore, silence and ridicule him, Bernie isn't going away. And since he isn't going away, the corporate media are moving on to Plan B: pit liberal voters against one another. Gaslight them. Explain to the teeming masses that democracy is really just a theory, and not to be actually practiced outside of voting for approved candidates every two or four years.

We're told to vote by our gender, skin color or ethnicity -- or else risk offending the members of our endangered group. Madeleine Albright warns women about a special place in hell. Paul Krugman tells Bernie-supporters that our "happy dreams" are an invitation to a Trump presidency. And those ephemeral Bernie Bros are lurking in alleys, ready to pounce on American maidenhood.

I participated in a Latino conference call for Bernie a couple of weeks ago. Nevada state Rep. Lucy Flores, who is running for Congress, made the salient point that we are not members of some monolithic voting bloc, ripe for being scared into co-optation.. We vote on the issues. We have our own agency. 

 Don't fall for the same old divide and conquer techniques that keep struggling people down and out, and the plutocracy entrenched in power.

People are realizing that Identity politics is harmful to our health. We're showing a lot more solidarity these days.

And that is scaring the elites to death.

No matter what happens in the primaries, what is imperative is that the revolutionary enthusiasm prevails. No matter what the outcome, the word "socialism" has been fully integrated into the great American lexicon. No matter who wins and who loses, the country is moving in a decidedly leftward, anti-oligarchial direction. Clintonism ran out of steam a long time ago.

I suspect, too, that the recent visit of Pope Francis and his popular message of inclusive social justice and solidarity went a long way in facilitating the rise of Bernie Sanders, who has openly expressed his own admiration for the Pope and Catholic social teaching in the vein of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.

***

Suggestions for further reading:

Rima Regas, regular Times commenter, also runs an excellent blog (listed on my "roll" under Blog # 42). Her latest entries, on Hillary and Israel, and the lack of ethics in media coverage of Bernie Sanders, are must-reads. Her graphic showing the lovable Paul Krugman at an elite Clinton rally is a hoot.   

Black Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon reports that the best outcome of the Democratic primaries would be a permanent split in the party and an end to "the rich man's duopoly." He still believes that Bernie is "sheepdogging" young voters into the Democratic fold, and that he is probably as surprised as anybody that his democratic socialist message is catching fire. Dixon agrees with Blow's observation, adding that even though black people have a long radical political tradition, they historically have not voted for radical candidates in national elections. They vote Democrat mainly to seek protection from the sadistic GOP -- which, let's face it, would just as soon that black people disappear. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, co-opting black churches, colleges, sororities, fraternities and civic groups, resembles nothing so much as a protection racket.

  Most scathing line from Dixon's piece: "The Democrats ooze like pus from every orifice of the Black body politic."

Ouch. 

Some members of what the Black Agenda Report writers have famously called the Black Misleadership Class were out in force today, endorsing Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept's Lee Fang reveals, however, the "Black Caucus Pac" putting their power and their money behind her are not to be confused with the congressional Black Caucus itself. The 20-member Pac is actually composed of about half elected officials and half lobbyists, one of whom works for the largest manufacturer of the highly addictive opioid, OxyContin. Others are representatives from tobacco companies, Walmart and student loan giant Navient. What a great group of people that Hillary should be proud to have on her side. I hope the Bernie people call her out on these endorsements when, say, she brags about wanting to remedy the drug addiction problem in America.

The cigarette lobby infiltrating Clinton World also kind of puts a damper  on the Obama/Biden cancer cure "moonshot" continuing past this year too, should Hillary win the White House. 

Hillary needs to be smoked out, and fast.  

The Kitchen Sink: Episode One In An Infinite Series

To his credit, Bernie Sanders waxed sanguine in last night's victory speech. He fully expects the Clintonoids to throw the kitchen sink at him as well as everything else at their (garbage) disposal. He fully expects the mainstream media to continue treating him (and by extension, his supporters) with utter disdain.

The Kitchen Sink has Nixonian soap scum and rancid grease ringed all around it. It is already becoming a virtual petri dish of dirty tricks.

One recent artifact in the atrocity exhibition shows Hillary Clinton papering over the stonewalling about her paid Wall Street speeches with ever more layers of dishonesty.  Jonathan Turley writes that "an unknown group of Clinton supporters has created a clearly misleading site called Hillaryclintonspeeches that comes up whenever someone tries to search the controversies. What they find is not a site on the speech controversy, but a pro-Clinton site that directs them to glowing reviews of Clinton and campaign websites."

Turley is right. A Google search of "Hillary Wall Street speeches" brings up the phony site right near the top of the results list. Far from addressing the speech controversy, it is essentially an aggregation blog of all things Clinton. The writing itself, while not really terrible, is of decidedly high school newspaper caliber. Flint, Michigan, for example, is glossed over as simply "having a struggle with poor water quality." The latest entry, published post-Sanders rout, offered a robotic, blow-by-blow account of the Clinton Family's Day. First, they took a walk. Then, it snowed. Then, Hillary spoke. Yada yada yada. 

A few days earlier, it reported, Bill had said Bernie was a hermetically sealed hypocrite. 
 
The fan site, with archives dating all the way back to last week, is obviously a production of the Clinton Machine, with the express purpose of diverting attention from the alleged graft and corruption. They don't particularly seem to care about editing, or making their candidate sound especially coherent. The whole idea seems to be that if I can read about what Chelsea ate for breakfast, I will forget all about the fraud and corruption running like a polluted river through the family DNA. 

A clumsily-worded sample from "Hillary Clinton Speeches": 

On Sunday, Hillary sat down with Jake Tapper for an interview during CNN's State of the Union. In an episode that featured interviewed (sic) with candidates from both parties, Tapper asked Clinton about her record and how she deals with the double standard of treatment as a female candidate. She said, "We are still living with a double standard. I know it. Every woman I know knows it, whether you're in the media as a woman, or you're in the professions or business or politics, and I don't know anything other to do than just keep forging through it, and just keep taking the slings and arrows that comes with being a woman in the arena." Clinton was also asked about her trip to Flint, Michigan later Sunday afternoon. 

 Anyway, I signed up for an email subscription just for the hell of it, and received the usual anonymous "do not reply" WordPress confirmation request. But maybe my spies can figure out the source of this amateurish endeavor. My guess would be the Digital War Room of Hillary's Brooklyn HQ.

Judging from the inexpert writing quality, the actual scribes are probably unpaid interns. (First and foremost, she sat down with Jake Tapper. Asked about the double standard, Hillary talked about the double standard. Asked about her trip to Flint, Hillary talked about her trip to Flint, etc. The bloggers have apparently not yet gotten around to learning about punchy ledes and the avoidance of redundancy.)

 I mustn't be too harsh, though. After all, Hillary is too cheap to pay her young interns a salary. She does require a CV, two letters of recommendation, and also solicits Tweets from millennials, asking them to share with her how their crushing student debt makes them feel. Then she picks the lucky, wage-free winners. I'm willing to speculate that if they're really lucky, the Hillaryclintonspeeches bloggers might get partial credit toward their Communications 101 courses. They might learn about the five Ws, and even the H. (who, what, when, where, why and how.)

 Bernie Sanders, for his part, pays his young interns $10.10 an hour. He is the only presidential candidate to do so. I am told that they even write personal replies to people who email Sanders. None of this canned "Friend: Have my back. Send $1!"

 So much for Hillary's claim to care about the debt-saddled, underemployed youth of America. So much for winning their hearts, minds, or votes.

One important difference between the two Democratic candidates:

Hillary puts her mouth where the money is, and Bernie puts his money where his mouth is. Hillary is all about Her. Bernie is all about Us.

....To Be Continued.

He's So Vain

 (optional soundtrack.)

Poor Barack Obama. He went to all that trouble to break up the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement during one hippie-punching, pepper-spraying police state week back in the fall of 2011. And now it's all come back to bite him in the ass.

 The elders of the Democratic Party thought that they'd accomplished, if not the death of OWS, at least its co-optation. After all, Obama handily won re-election the following year. But mirabile dictu!  Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for 15 and other activist groups have sneaked right back in to occupy the Democratic Party itself. The national conversation has been hijacked by an FDR liberal named Bernie Sanders, who might end up not only succeeding Obama, but dealing the coup de grace to the entire Neoliberal Project of the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonoid Third Way.

Democracy is rearing its ugly head again, and Obama is reportedly very, very nervous about this whole revolution thing. Even with his legendary genius IQ -- augmented lavishly by the Deep State brains of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI  -- he never saw Bernie Sanders coming.

Empress-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton's gross corruption and incompetence has let him down, big-time. He is probably kicking himself for so ever cutely attempting to co-opt her as his Secretary of State, thereby keeping a dangerous political enemy close. Without that patronage fillip, she would only have been a First Lady, an unaccomplished Senator, and a failed 2008 presidential candidate. Without Obama's own arrogant willful blindness to her private Internet account and her use of public office to enrich her family slush fund, she might have even been fired halfway through her frequent flier marathon as his ineffectual Good Will Ambassador.

Obama has only himself to blame for the rise of Bernie Sanders and socialism as the default position of a whole lost generation of over-educated, underpaid, deeply indebted young people who have never known a day when this country has not been at war. And for that accomplishment alone, I think he should be allowed to keep his Nobel Peace Prize.

Since it would now appear unseemly to either actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, bring in Joe Biden, or directly criticize Bernie Sanders, Obama must look to other reliable sources to get his message of displeasure out. So he has turned to his exclusive cadre of journalists and opinion-writers to be his off-the-record conduits of the Obama Story he wants the public to hear.

Over the weekend, Carl Bernstein (both a White House insider and Hillary Clinton biographer) went on CNN to announce how very, very upset the president is about the ongoing bitter Democratic primary. It's hurting Obama's precious legacy. If Bernie Sanders beats Hillary, that legacy might go up in flames. Obama's corporate coup (the TPP) might be dust. His market-based health insurance kludge might morph into a single payer Medicare for All plan. Wall Street and corporate felons might actually be prosecuted instead of being granted the tax breaks and cabinet and government advisory positions to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, said Bernstein, the White House wants all the people to realize how absolutely imperative it is that Hillary Clinton be elected to succeed Barack Obama:

 
 Obama wants to broadcast the fear-mongering message that Sanders's socialism is out of touch with mainstream America -- despite the fact that millennial voters themselves overwhelmingly identify as socialist. As Bernstein tells it on CNN, Hillary's problem is not that she accepted money from Goldman Sachs and other banks: it's that she doesn't know how to feign proper humility before the public.

 The Washington insider wisdom is that Bernie isn't electable, and Hillary isn't delectable.

In other words, she can't do the "I feel your pain" head-fake as well as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

So, cue right-of-center David Brooks, not only an esteemed member of Obama's inner circle of off-the-record pundits, but often described as the center-right president's particular favorite columnist.

Brooks wrote an elegiac piece titled "I Miss Barack Obama" in today's New York Times. The accompanying photo shows Obama wand'ring lonely as a cloud to the Oval Office, embowered in a princely burst of flowering foliage in lieu of the more obvious crown of laurels. 

  Brooks channels presidential angst in all its froth and narcissism. Barack's greatest fear is not for the dire fates of ordinary people. It's that all his genius will be for naught, given Hillary's tanking numbers, the Republican clown car, and the specter of Bernie Sanders succeeding him.

Brooks mawkishly allows that while he often has had to pretend to disagree with Obama for partisan tribal purposes, the current occupant of the White House stands head and shoulders above mere mortals.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

There are no mass media-reported scandals because the Obama regime has been rightly described as the most secretive in modern history. We know few details of his drone assassination program, for example, or his own closed-door fundraisers, or what went on behind the scenes of the orchestrated crackdown on Occupy, or the suppression of the 9/11 report section dealing with the Saudi royal family's role in the attacks, or the suppression of the CIA torture report. And those are just the scandals that come immediately to my mind. (For a full accounting of his first term, please see the "Obama Scandals List" on my Blog Roll.)

Meanwhile, Brooks manages to destroy his own homage by displaying some unintentional colorblind racism, fawning over the Obamas as one of those "respectable" black families. Barack and Michelle have displayed "superior integrity," Brooks gushes. "You'd be happy to have them in your community." (Apparently they would be that rare black couple who would not lower Brooks's property values if they moved next door to him.)

Brooks would not like Bernie Sanders to live within a thousand miles of him, because he is "so blinded by his values that reality doesn't seem to penetrate his mind." He would rip health care away from thousands (SanderScare) and even worse, rip the wings right off the insurance raptors!  Obama, on the other hand, knows his proper place in the grand white supremacy scheme of things.  He also doesn't "wallow in the pornography of pessimism."

Obama always presents a rapturous, G-rated Pollyannish picture about how great America is, how much the economy is improving, how much he loves peace even as he rains down his bombs and orchestrates his secret coups. Because if he told the truth to people -- the truth that their lives and prospects suck because of the unfettered capitalism he enables -- then the people might just stage a revolution.

Oh, wait.

Bill Kills

Last night while you were watching a bizarre Superbowl commercial featuring an ultrasound fetus seizing up at the sound of Daddy crunching Doritos, First Dude Wannabe Bill Clinton went full Quentin Tarantino with a bizarre verbal seizure of his own.

Dressed nattily and folksily in a Buffalo plaid shirt, the aging ex-prez outed himself as a pathetic troller of Internet trolls who are (shock!) bashing Wifey based solely upon her XX chromosomes. Of course, the way the New York Times headline described his puerile hissy fit, it was a lot more intellectual: "Bill Clinton Launches Stinging Attack on Bernie Sanders." 

But Bill's tirade against Sanders -- as well as against the supporters whom Hillary hopes to seduce should she win the nomination -- was more like a flailing sledgehammer than the skilled jabs of a boxer or polemicist. 

He told the sad but unverifiable tale of an anonymous "female progressive blogger" who has been personally injured in comments boards by those ubiquitous and largely nonexistent Bernie Bros. He ridiculed Sanders for voting for the Wall Street-friendly Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton himself immediately signed after passive-aggressively sneaking it, at the last minute, into an 11,000-page lame duck omnibus monstrosity. Few legislators had a chance to notice it, let alone study it. Clinton now fails to mention why he signed it instead of vetoing it.

Clinton also went into high dudgeon because it appears that Bernie once slipped up and not only attended a DNC fundraiser, he had the gall to breathe the same air as the lobbyists in attendance. And on and on. If this is the best oppo research that the crack Clinton team can come up with, then Bernie is a shoo-in for both the nomination and the general.

It's almost as though Bill Clinton wants to put his wife's campaign out of its misery by killing it as quickly as possible. Or then again, maybe the whole idea is to deliberately make himself look like such an asshole that people will vote for Hillary out of pity. The anti-Bernie New York Times, for some odd reason, even described his appearance as "poignant." The reporter seemed to half-realize midway through dutifully transcribing Bill's unhinged remarks how truly bizarre they were.

Red-baiting has been proven ineffective. So has the ridiculous shaming of female voters by feminist "icons" Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem.

 Bill Clinton infamously co-opted the Reagan Revolution and turned the Democratic Party to the right by announcing during his first campaign that "the era of big government is over."

And now Bernie Sanders is proving through his own first campaign that the era of corrupt, Clinton-style identity politics is over. 

Trickle-down feminism of the type being espoused by multimillionaires Hillary Clinton, Albright and Steinem is as much a sham as trickle-down economics. Women living on the brink of financial collapse are not up for vicariously enjoying Hillary Clinton's shattering of any glass ceiling.

 We are all too aware of the falling, deadly shards that she has already left in her wake.