The Shy Assassins

The killers who maintain and act upon the White House Kill List are afraid that they might be killed if their identities ever become known. Therefore, lawyers for the Obama administration have requested that the individuals associated with drone strikes against Muslims be outfitted with the legal equivalent of a KKK hood for their own protection.

Of course, they don't flaunt their depraved cowardice in quite that way. They've magnanimously dropped their previous claim of "attorney-client privilege," for instance. I suppose that granting Obama and other government officials "client" status was a bit much, even for them. At the very least, it implied a little bit of guilty knowledge. And in this new age of populist outrage, the last word they want applied to themselves is privilege.

But far from checking their privilege, they're doubling down on it and calling it National Security.

The administration had been fighting a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which demanded that it release to the public details about its secretive Predator and Reaper drone attacks. But seeing the writing on the wall -- a federal judge was about to issue a decision directing the White House to comply -- Obama's lawyers are now offering a redacted version of his drone playbook.

Yes, they actually do call his hit list a "playbook."  Obama must fiddle with his Kill List the same way he fiddles with his March Madness basketball brackets. (Actually, he uses baseball cards for his Terror Tuesday sessions, but let's not quibble: it's almost college hoops season.) He and his wonkish bookies pretend that their drone targets are just like expendable athletes. When human beings can be reduced to numbers and statistics and charts and odds, killing them doesn't feel odd at all. It's all just an intellectual game.

Oops! Better Redact That Name, Mister Prez

As Politico's Josh Gerstein explains:

Last month, Manhattan based U.S. District Court Judge Colleen MacMahon issued an order requiring the Justice Department to produce the PPG document (sometimes called the Playbook), as well as two others, for in-camera review by her.

In a letter to the judge Friday, government lawyers said officials had long been debating making an edited version of the policy public and they have now decided to do so.

"Before receiving the Court’s February 25, 2016 Order, the Government was engaged in extensive discussions regarding the possibility of discretionarily releasing portions of the PPG. Lengthy, high-level,inter-agency coordination was necessary to ensure that the sensitive national security classification equities contained in that document remain protected. Following those deliberations, the Government has determined to waive privilege," Justice Department attorneys wrote.

Translation: They've never had any intention of sharing details of their assassinations with the public, but they must pretend to have been agonizing over the issue for months and years. They are worried about their own security and perpetual billions of dollars in profits for military contractors. For bullshit purposes only, greed and death are always euphemised as "national security."

The government has dropped its claims of attorney-client privilege and deliberative process privilege with respect to the drone-related memo — claims MacMahon signaled in her order that she was inclined to reject. Instead, the administration is claiming protection for portions of the memo under an exemption for classified information and another for intelligence sources and methods.

Translation: the redacted memo will probably resemble the 2010 memo which the government was forced to release when the ACLU brought suit over the Anwar al-Awlaki assassination. The attempted justification for the murder of a U.S. citizen by a politician (Obama) was written  by White House lawyer David Barron before his convenient and swift confirmation as a U.S. District Court judge. Barron is now said to be on Obama's short list to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

In the latest court case, an anonymous White House official too shy to be named told Politico that important lives would be directly at risk if all the details in Obama's Playbook ever came to light. "The Government is committed to protecting properly classified national security information, as well as law enforcement information, where disclosure could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual," he huffed.

Apparently, the lives and physical safety of the stateless human beings residing in "tribal areas" are not to be reasonably protected, let alone given even the slightest passing thought.

The Politico article concludes:

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said Friday he hoped the decision to release the so-called playbook on drones indicated a new willingness to allow more public scrutiny of the program.

"The release of the Presidential Policy Guidance is long overdue, and we are gratified that the administration has agreed with us that much of it should finally be made public" Jaffer said. "We hope that the administration’s decision to release this critical document reflects a broader commitment to make the lethal drone program more transparent. In that spirit, the administration should also release the legal memos that are the foundation for the program, basic information about those killed in past drone strikes, and detailed investigative files relating to strikes that killed bystanders.”

All credit to the ACLU where due, of course. But why prematurely praise the administration for the transparency it has historically lacked? I suggest that we just skip the aspirational accolades for now. Moreover, there is no demand from the ACLU that the "lethal drone program" actually be stopped entirely, given all the blowback from victims' friends and families that Obama's White House now seems to acknowledge.  

As Glenn Greenwald noted in an Intercept piece this week, all the media outrage centered on Donald Trump's vow to keep torturing people, and hunting down and killing the relatives of suspected terrorists is a pretty sick joke:

Here we see the elite class agreeing to pretend that Trump is advocating views that are inherently disqualifying when — thanks to those doing the denouncing — those views are actually quite mainstream, even popular, among both the American political class and its population. Torture was the official American policy for years. It went way beyond waterboarding. One Republican president ordered it and his Democratic successor immunized it from all forms of accountability, ensuring that not a single official would be prosecuted for authorizing even the most extreme techniques, ones that killed people — or even allowed to be sued by their victims.

If Donald Trump becomes president, official opacity will go right out the window. He won't be able to resist boasting about every single person whom he orders killed or tortured. Every drone strike will become the occasion for a chest-thumping press conference.

It's not Trump's agenda than has the Establishment quivering. It's his lack of a filter. When former CIA Chief Michael Hayden promised that the military would never follow an "illegal" order from a President Trump, he was only kidding. What he really meant is that the military would never allow Trump to expose the criminality that has been an operating principle of the deep state ever since its inception more than 200 years ago. 

Trump would be well advised to bring his own private goon squad to the White House to protect him against the Special Ops and the craven cowards who are currently scrambling to get their own names and deeds redacted from the Presidential Playlist.

Playing the Fear Card

Fresh off her shallow victories in Southern states which no Democrat could ever hope to win in a general election, the Empress-in-Waiting is contemptuously pivoting away from the Bernie Sanders threat (which she has a very hard time countering, simply on grounds of his ethics, and her lack thereof). She is choosing to largely ignore her flush-with-cash, still strong social democrat opponent. She is passing Go on her monopoly board and taking the fight directly to Donald Trump's Boardwalk.

Metal Queen Amidala, Monopoly Star Wars Collectors Edition

Trump is Hillary's dream opponent. Never mind that he has a pretty good chance of beating her in the general, and a not-so-good chance of beating Bernie. He is a made-to-order identity politics enemy for her. If Bernie is the chick magnet currently attracting the majority of the young female votes Hillary thinks she's entitled to, then Trump represents the opposite, repellent pole.

The sooner that Trump can pivot from attacking Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and begin making crude sexist remarks about Hillary, the sooner (she hopes) she can triangulate, the sooner that swarms of XX chromosomes will start circling her wagon in solidarity. Whatever liberal appeal that the Clintons are able to boast about has been historically and mainly grounded in the many unfounded right-wing attacks against them.

Hillary is anxious to get past the very real threat of democratic socialism, and right into the nitty gritty of Republican misogyny. She is anxious to contrast her socially responsible, pro-market neoliberalism with Trump's fascism and crude bathroom jokes. She is anxious to transform her public persona from the global femme fatale who makes a mess out of everything she touches, to the damsel in distress who nonetheless bravely fights back against the Trumpian goon squad. Despite her strength, she still needs our help! Cry for her, America!

If we won't vote for her because we don't like her, really like her, then maybe we'll vote for her simply because we're scared to death of Donald Trump. Maybe we'll be so shocked and appalled at Trump's brand of organized crime, we'll forget about Hillary's speeches to Goldman Sachs and the little calling cards she is rumored to distribute to all her donors.

Despite the fact that less than a third of the delegates have been selected in the Democratic primaries, despite the fact that she faces more debate confrontations with Bernie Sanders in the coming days, Hillary -- with much media help --  is again prematurely crowning herself the Democratic nominee. Pick your daily meme out of the corporate media hat: "her path is wide -- Bernie's is narrow." She has the "Firewall" and the super-delegates -- The New York Times and other suspects have reduced The Bern to a misshapen snowman token melting down somewhere on low-rent Vermont Avenue in the Great Whitey White North.

 

And definitely, feel the guilt. If you can't or won't feel the guilt, a new brand of Hillary Lit has been created just for you. These screeds, often written in true confessions mode, are by and about women who have suddenly seen the light about their addiction to Bernie. They are bravely kicking the Sanders habit, checking themselves into neoliberal rehab, and getting clean for Hillary. If they can do it, you can do it. Put the Us back in Uterus!  See here, for a choice example of the genre, and do check in at Salon, The Guardian and Daily Kos on any given day for the latest advice and tips in Bernie recovery self-help.

And then there are those self-professed die-hard Bernie supporters prematurely urging us to pivot to Hillary in the event that Bernie doesn't win the nomination. We are supposed to pick the Goldwater Girl lest we get another Nixon Guy. Remember McGovern like you Remember The Maine. The New York Times has published a letter to the editor with that message, and is taking the rare step of inviting reader comments to reader commentary. Because if the pundits can't convince us (and they can't), maybe our peers can. In a very polite and gentle manner, of course. 

Another stale trope is a lot meaner: if you don't support Hillary, then it automatically follows that you are an inhumane closet Trumpian. Every time you so much as mention her emails or her secret speeches at Goldman Sachs, Tinkerbell dies and another zombie Trump voter is created. Plus, you are a Hater. At the very worst, you are a purist Hater addicted to pure Bernie smack.

On that note, I got another email from Hillary today, asking for-- what else?-- protection money. But unlike her previous fundraising missives, bitching that Bernie is raising more money than she is, she is now running on defense against Donald Trump.

Friend: (unlike Bernie, she hasn't even bothered to learn my actual name.)

I don't want to live in President Donald Trump's America any more than you do.

I'm proud of what we accomplished on Super Tuesday, but I'm under no illusion this race is even close to over.

Say you're ready to win this nomination, win the White House, and keep Trump out. Chip in $1 right now.

She's at that delicate point in primary season where she doesn't want to alienate Bernie supporters by criticizing Bernie too harshly. So she's playing the Trump fear card against us. She is appealing to fear, because her pro-corporation policies themselves have no appeal whatsoever. Better to suffer in dribs and drabs under a Clinton restoration than to die quickly under a Trump regime. 

I don't even need to borrow a Monopoly token to symbolize Trump. He already has one. Allowing us to pretend to actually be him as we desperately plod, compete, gamble or cheat our way through the game of life is at the very heart of his own political and popular appeal. Only the Establishment is surprised that global financialized capitalism has provoked such a blue collar backlash in the paradoxical person of a billionaire demagogue.

Insert Your Own Face & Inherit $200 Million From Daddy

Proud To Be a Goldwater Girl in Blackface

Here's the lady currently running on the promise of becoming the nation's third black president: (h/t US Uncut) 

She admitted in 1996 (the same year as her "super-predator" speech castigating black kids) that her beliefs are deep-rooted in conservatism. She chillingly lamented that the current GOP was "too reactionary" for her, as though the rabidly racist free market ideologue Barry Goldwater himself was not the epitome of right wing extremism.

 Therefore, when she now brags that she is a "progressive who can get things done," I take her to mean that she will be concocting the most gluttonous recipe contained in the Twilight Zone cookbook called To Serve Man. 

We are the things who will become well done, should Hillary Clinton win the election and begin an immediate culinary collaboration with Paul Ryan. He is the Ayn Rand fan and House Speaker whose life's ambition is not just to cut the social safety net to shreds --  it's to take those shreds and use them as fuel for humanity's barbecue grill. And unlike Rod Serling's space aliens, he won't even fatten up his victims first. To the contrary: Congress already has cut billions of dollars from the food stamp program, with more cuts (via new work requirements) on the way.

"Call me," Bill Clinton was ominously heard to whisper to then-House budget director Ryan a few years ago, after one of those horrible annual Kill the Poor seminars hosted by billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson. Ryan had been running into roadblocks over his efforts to privatize Medicare. "How do we get this done" was the subject of their conversation, literally conducted in the shadows:

"You (meaning the Democrats) gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing (Medicare cuts) moving," Ryan hissed to Clinton.

Ryan at this very moment must be absolutely salivating over the prospect of triangulating with the Clintons the same way they once so successfully triangulated with Newt Gingrich over welfare reform. If that Machiavellian twosome could collude with the GOP to send millions of poor and minority people into lives of abject poverty and incarceration 20 years ago, you can only imagine what a feast for the plutocrats a Clinton restoration would be. Medicare and Social Security will be on the chopping block once again, despite all of Hillary Clinton's expedient campaign promises to leave them intact.

The problem with Donald Trump is that he is a bullying demagogue. As Hillary herself has scornfully observed, he "does not play well with others." And that includes Paul Ryan, who has made no effort to disguise his own loathing for Trump. It's hard to collude with a guy who wears his fascism on his sleeve.

 Hillary, for her part, skillfully hides her own fascism behind the mask of identity politics. She is a consummate player, not to mention a multimillionaire chef who is not above gorging herself on her own neoliberal cuisine. 

Getting Things Done: A Clinton Family Thanksgiving

Up With Outrage!

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

 That's the message we're getting today from the mainstream media in the wake of Bernie Sanders's terrible, horrible, most epic defeat ever in the history of political history. It is the sad duty of the Punditocracy to gleefully inform us that Bernie has been smashed into South Carolina roadkill by the unstoppable Hillary Clinton juggernaut. And just on the off-chance that he's still barely twitching, there's always Super Duper Terror Tuesday. That is when Hillary's metaphorical drones are poised to finish the job with the old one-two punch, aka the double-tap. They hope to finally render Bernie and his swarms of crazy unicorns into naught but a warm fuzzy pink mist of a memory.

But not so fast! We haven't reached the lowest circle of hell just yet. We're still breathing and intact, despite that vaunted Firewall.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of what is essentially a rigged primary process orchestrated by a corrupt party machinery, there is nothing that says the revolution cannot continue. I've said right from the get-go that we mustn't put all our eggs into one Bernie Basket. Let's face it: political parties, especially the Democratic Party, have historically been where popular movements go to die. 

Dejection is the enemy. So is cynicism. The powers-that-be are extremely and inordinately anxious to curb our enthusiasm. And since widespread enthusiasm and trust in a Hillary Clinton presidency is not yet in the offing, despite her very best efforts to portray herself as Wartime Granny Populist, they'll use the fear card to get our votes. Elect the Lesser Evil if you want to survive Benito Trump: that is the not-so-subliminal message of the Clintonian neoliberal thought collective.

And that brings me to Henry A. Giroux, prolific author and public intellectual. In a Truthout interview coinciding with the publication of his latest book, America's Addiction to Terrorism, Giroux says:

We no longer live in an age of long-term possibilities. The certainties of a long-term job, a better future and hope have disappeared in the age of what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity. We now occupy an era of precarity, uncertainty and insecurity. Yet, these conditions do not constitute some inevitable historical evolution. They are politically and socially constructed and just as they were made by human beings, they can be unmade. I think it is precisely this concern about imagining a future that is not a repeat of the present that offers an inroad into addressing the current crisis of historical and political agency at work in the United States. I'm concerned with how you mobilize existential despair away from a paralyzing cynicism and depoliticizing dynamic into a sense of political outrage that can be marshaled into collective action. Trauma is not a psychic phenomenon alone, but can also be a steppingstone to mobilization.

Henry Giroux (who is not endorsing any particular candidate) lists three essential methods by which we can overcome the existential despair that is the byproduct (and pretty much the intended purpose) of neoliberalism: 

There are three pre-requirements for being able to think in utopian terms - that is, in terms that are capable of producing a militant form of hope that not only imagines a better society but also inspires collective action based on such desires. First, a utopian imaginary must embrace history as a resource, willing to engage its "dangerous" memories and to use it as a resource for challenging those discourses that have frozen the present. Second, educators, artists, intellectuals, workers, young people and others must find a way to construct not only a discourse of merciless critique but also a discourse of possibility. Thirdly, politics has to be reinvented so as to recognize that power is now global and that politics is still tied to nation-states.

There's a lot more to the interview. Read the whole thing, and you will probably not only feel better, you'll feel energized and inspired. Better yet, you'll feel the outrage. It's the perfect antidote to the gloom and doom of the New York Times and Politico and the entirety of the corporate owned media/political complex, which would like nothing better than for us all to lay down and curl into the fetal position on the yellow line in the middle of the neoliberal highway to hell.

We must not give in to despair, no matter the outcome of any one election or endless series of elections. Onward and upward!

For your further viewing pleasure and energization:

Flipped-Out Flappers

 (Optional soundtrack)

I've been trying to ignore the saga of Paul Krugman and the Four Wonks of the Apocalypse (or as Bill Black hilariously calls them, The Gang of Four.) To briefly recap this epic of wonkishly Wagnerian proportions, the Fab Four wrote a letter earlier this month to an economist (not affiliated with or even backing the Bernie Sanders candidacy) who'd predicted mega-growth if Bernie's New Deal of a stimulus package ever got passed. They debunked the math without even bothering to supply their own counter-math. Krugman jumped right in, and the resulting  opera of a wonkish Whine Journey was just this side of the Republicans accusing each other of wetting their pants.

Well, Krugman seems to finally have gotten tired of the whole Gotterdammerung. His blogpost today makes a feeble attempt to mend fences with his disgruntled readership and a valiant attempt to salvage his own damaged reputation. He writes, that yes indeed, there is still a case to be made for public  investment. Can't we all just get along and agree that infrastructure spending is good and austerity is bad? He even supplies some of his famous charts. But then he can't resist the subtle jab at the Bernie Bro Mean Unicorn Squad, and makes his lede a passive-aggressive little bitch-fest of Heathers proportions. (Heathers, imho, is one of best cinematic satires of mean girl-dom ever made. It is not often aired any more on commercial TV, because it shows a kid with a gun blowing up a school at the end. And then kids really did start shooting up schools).

 Krugman gets his unicorn-jab in early:

  One of the annoying aspects of the Sanders/Friedman flap was the assumption of many Sanders supporters that anyone who doesn’t accept extravagant economic projections is against a big program of public investment. Actually, it was destructive as well as annoying; aside from being an insult to progressive economists who believe in infrastructure but also believe in arithmetic, it created at least the possibility that other people would take the crash-and-burn of a particular piece of analysis as evidence that the whole case for spending more is wrong.

My published response:

One of the most annoying aspects of the "Sanders/Friedman flap" is that PK is memorializing it as the Sanders/Friedman flap.

Right from the get-go, it was a smear-by-proxy campaign against Bernie Sanders, launched by four Clinton-supporting neoliberal economists. It got a whole lot of traction thanks to PK's influence. It became a news story in itself: The Wonks vs the unicorn-loving rubes out here in the boondocks. It so reeked of the class war that the wonks never even saw fit to supply us with a crash course in remedial wonkery to lift us out of our abysmal ignorance, not to mention our mass psychosis. Actually, in following this whole desperate saga, I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole when Krugman began complaining that it was the scolding wonks who were the victims -- heaven forbid that the victims should be the 30 million Americans who still lack health insurance.

 Forget about the Wonks of the Flapping Gums Flap. What we need is a major flap about the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history, a 20-25% child poverty rate, and the corruption of our politics by big money.

So it is a relief that PK declares himself so, like, totally over his totally manufactured flap, and is doing what he does best: championing stimulus, and debunking the deficit hawkery of the austerians.

P.S. If FDR had had to deal with such wonkery, we probably never would have gotten the New Deal. Ditto for LBJ's Great Society.

It's not the math. It's the humanity, stupid.

 Bernie Bro Unicorn Fights Back

Hillary Clinton's Racism

The forcible removal of a female Black Lives Matter protester from a Hillary Clinton fundraiser this week, and the shocking, forcible removal of a female black student from a classroom last October, differ only in the level of state-sanctioned physical power employed.

Each incident occurred in South Carolina. Each incident was an example of white supremacy at its most blatant. Each incident was designed to belittle the alleged culprit and to put her in her place. Each incident was a power play with the express objective of emotionally scarring the target and protecting the designated authority figure. 

While the expulsion of Ashley Williams from Hillary's high-end fundraiser was accomplished relatively gently, due to the venue and a sensitive audience of the rich, powerful and white, the other incident was effected violently in a high school classroom peopled mainly by poor students of color. The fundraiser ejection occurred in a milieu whose inhabitants are used to being coddled and given an outsize voice. No expensive furniture was overturned or otherwise damaged. The school ejection occurred in a milieu which is authoritarian and oppressive by its very nature, where docility and silence are expected from the audience, where both the plastic furniture and the bodies are expendable. 

When Ashley Williams interrupted Clinton, demanding that she apologize for having once called black youths "superpredators," all it took for the security detail to spring into action was Hillary's own reaction to the protester. When Hillary made it abundantly clear to her armed guards that she was miffed and uncomfortable, her questioner was escorted out (despite having paid the $500 price of access to the candidate). The audience immediately sided not with the evictee, but with the most powerful woman in the room. They all breathed a sigh of relief, showing class and racial solidarity with the powerful woman who was there to listen to their express concerns. "Okay, back to the issues," barked Clinton. Or should I say, "dog-whistled Clinton?"

When the South Carolina student refused to stop talking on her cell phone last October, the school cop upended her desk and body-slammed her to the floor before dragging her out of the room. That audience did not cheer or sigh in relief. Not at all. They were in shocked disbelief. One of them later would later share cell phone video of the incident with the whole world.

Racism in schools and the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline has long been a reality accepted by most people with eyes, ears and brains. Racism at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, however, was more than a little eyebrow-raising, given that the candidate is running as a champion of black people, and is even said to possess a magical Firewall in states and counties with majority black populations.

The whole impetus of the fundraiser protest was an old speech that the then-First Lady gave while lobbying for the infamous crime bill which has sent record numbers of black people to prison over the last two decades. The video of the confrontation is now going as"viral" as the previous South Carolina incident, and right on the eve of the South Carolina primary. Hillary Clinton is still expected to win it handily. This is due to the special bond that she and Bill have always enjoyed with black voters (or more accurately, the special bond they have elicited from the black political establishment.) It will be interesting to see whether the final tally reveals any breakdown between older and younger black voters. It will be interesting to see whether voters declare their emancipation from the Clinton Protection Racket and the younger generation goes for Bernie Sanders's inclusive platform of social, economic and racial justice.

Hillary and Bill have always been dog-whistling, if not outright, racists. Before Bill, as primary presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, executed a brain-damaged black man named Ricky Ray Rector in order to give himself an electoral boost with the law-and-order crowd of Reagan Democrats, before he played golf at a segregated country club and then claimed it wasn't really segregated because it employed black people as waiters and caddies, before his rebuke of Sistah Souljah over rap lyrics, Bill used convict slave labor at the governor's mansion. He allowed the Confederate flag to fly high above the state capitol.

And Hillary was just fine with that, despite her current boasts of "fighting for" the rights of black children under her erstwhile mentor, Marion Wright Edelman. (As has been widely reported, the Edelmans broke with the Clintons 20 years ago, when the First Couple championed passage of welfare "reform," and sent millions of mothers and children into outright poverty at the stroke of a triangulating pen.)

I wrote about Hillary's adventures with her black slave convicts in a previous post, quoting directly from her own book, "It Takes a Village". She wrote her neoliberal polemic on the care and treatment of children at about the same time that she made her "super-predator" speech. It dog-whistles its racism right on the front cover, which shows  three white children standing nearly at a level with the great lady herself. The much shorter, token black child in the picture has the entire bottom part of his or her face cut off.  It's impossible to tell the race or ethnicity of the fifth child.

Clinton's opinions on child-rearing and behavior are based partly upon her personal experience directing the unpaid labor of her black prisoners. Although she was careful to repudiate "The Bell Curve" eugenics theory of race and intelligence then in vogue, she didn't entirely rule out biology-as-destiny as a factor in black crime, either. She did what the Clintons have always done best. She triangulated. She professed surface sympathy for black youths at the same time that she blamed them and their parents for their own behavior. Never did she blame wealth inequality or white racism. "It Takes a Village" was, in fact, a not very subtle dog-whistle to liberal white racists.

A 1995 pop psychology book by Daniel Goleman called "Emotional Intelligence" provided the intellectual basis for her theories on young black offenders who "need to be brought to heel." Their problem, she theorized, is that they are unable to integrate their rational brains with their emotional brains.

The power of emotion is equally dangerous if it is not harnessed to reason. People who cannot control their emotions are often prone to impulsive overreaction. They may be quick to perceive threats and slights even when none are intended, and to respond with violence. They are in Goleman's phrase, "emotional illiterates." Many of the gang members interviewed as part of a recent study released by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the illegal use of firearms fit this profile. More than one in three said they believe it is acceptable to shoot someone who "disses" them -- shows them disrespect.

So many dog-whistles in just one little paragraph. Leave aside that Clinton quotes the uber-racist Janet Reno's alleged study --  Clinton absolutely does equate gang members with vicious dogs which must be brought to heel. I imagine that one out of every three pit bulls also tends to overreact when its personal space is violated. What Hillary is essentially claiming is that black youths are biologically violent, due  both to their untrained emotional brains, and their underdeveloped rational brains.

She then liberally allows that early experience also plays a role in the neurobiological basis for black youth crime.

Some experts speculate that the brains of emotional illiterates are hard-wired early on by stressful experiences that inhibit these mechanisms and leave people prey to "emotional hijacking" ever after. Most of us don't habitually react with impulsive violence, but most of us "blow our tops" from time to time.

This paragraph is another dog-whistle: blame the epidemic of black youth crime on Reagan's welfare queens. The Clintons' solution? Reduce the welfare rolls by 60 percent by the time they leave office and force poor mothers to virtually abandon their infants. This abandonment will supposedly save the children from all that bad mothering and mental abuse and brain pathology. Hillary lectures on:

Most people learn how to avoid emotional hijackings from the time they are infants. If they have supportive and caring adults around them, they pick up the social cues that enable them to develop self-discipline and empathy.

Hillary's glib solution to the alleged epidemic of bad black mothering and her goal to "bring civility our streets" is to teach children empathy in the classroom. Even when black people become adults, she boasted, it's never too late for white people to teach them how to behave, whether it be in the workplace or in the prison. She should know. She was a virtual schoolmarm to her own Arkansan black slave convicts back in the day:

The structure imposed by the responsibilities of work and the enlightened assistance of concerned people in the prison system and at the governor's mansion helped those onetime murderers I knew in Arkansas to achieve a greater understanding and control over their feelings and behavior.

Hillary Clinton makes right-wing New York Times columnist and "black culture" concern-trolling expert Ross Douthat seem like a raging progressive.

I'll say it again. Once a Goldwater Girl, always a Goldwater Girl. It's ironic that a woman professing to be such an expert on "emotional intelligence" resides in a plutocratic bubble so largely devoid of it that she sees no problem in accepting millions of dollars from the same banks that have evicted thousands of black and poor subprime mortgagors from their homes while also engaging in a long-standing policy of racist real estate red-lining.

In any event, the emotional intelligence theory also has its own dark side. The teaching of it can actually enable some bad people to hide their own natures more effectively. One of the main talents of psychopaths is to project a glib, slick set of of emotions that they don't inherently possess. If emotional intelligence can be acquired, it can also be used to fool people. I suppose we should be grateful that Hillary has not yet mastered this "I feel your pain" art as well as her husband. Most people do not trust her, and with very good reason.

If the pundits are right, the next presidential contest will be between two unabashed racists. That one of them has a flimsy, damaged filter, and the other (Trump) has no filter at all, is moot. If either one of them is elected, unabashed fascism will remain a feature, not a bug, in the Feudal States of America.

Hillary Clinton is again trying to do damage control, issuing a written apology for her super-predator comments. "I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today," she told The Washington Post. She didn't say anything about retracting claims made in her first memoir, however. Maybe somebody will read it, and confront her on her characterization of black youths as "emotional illiterates."

Ms. Williams is still awaiting an apology from Clinton, both for her racist remarks "pathologizing black youth as these criminal, animal people" and for having her evicted from a function which she had paid to attend. 

Dispatches From Nevada, Part 2

(This concludes the chronicle of the nurse-practitioner from Northern California who volunteered as a precinct captain in Saturday's Nevada Democratic caucus.)

By E. O'Meara

Saturday morning, I drove to the Washoe County Democratic Headquarters for a 7 a.m. meeting in which I was to get instructions on what kinds of suspicious activity to look out for at the caucus. But when I arrived, the building appeared empty and the door was locked. I stood around outside for 45 minutes until a young woman arrived (with a key). She knew nothing about my meeting, explaining that she was there as an HRC volunteer. I thought at first that those initials stood for a human rights group, until it dawned on me that they stood for Hillary Rodham Clinton.But as it turned out, the woman was also member of a human rights group that had endorsed Hillary!

Everybody in my training session was from California. When I'd gone to my initial caucus meeting on Presidents Day, I was told they only had about 60% of the precinct captains they needed from Nevada, and so had to seek out-of-state volunteers.

We all got a 35-page "NVDEMS Temporary Precinct Chair Caucus Day Guide." Our instructor had only one hour to get through two or three hours' worth of material as she outlined, with the aid of Power Point, all the steps and procedures we were to take.

At the end of this crash course, one HRC volunteer was visibly upset. "I have a degree and have had a successful career," she complained. "But this is too much to learn! What are the consequences if we don't do it right?"

"Focus on the math," the instructor soothed. "The math is the most important thing to get right."

The HRC people were assigned to Hug High School, and left by bus. Ten of us out-of-staters remained behind, including one self-described lawyer-engineer, who proceeded to perseverate for at least five minutes on repetitive math questions. (The math was in the guide and also on an enlarged worksheet for easy reference.)

The office Dems were waiting to get calls from precincts that needed help. Seven of the remainders were assigned as temporary chairs to three different locations. I joined two others on a trip to Shaw Middle School in Sparks, where 30 precincts would be caucusing. While we were waiting to get on the bus, the large screen TV in Dem HQ was tuned in to the Scalia funeral on MSNBC. So it was a relief to finally get out of there around 10:15 a.m.

We'd had been advised at our training session that it was OK to wear candidate buttons but "in your face" apparel such as shirts were forbidden. Stickers and signs also were not allowed. Still, there were multiple Clinton lawn signs right near the entrance of the school. People inside were wearing printed "Precinct Captain" T-shirts: purple for Sanders and blue for Clinton. Most shirts had buttons and stickers on them as well. I had on my black "Bernie for President" shirt underneath a vest and jacket -- and I kept it under wraps like a good student.

We met the site coordinator, who gave each of us a packet for temporary precinct captains.

Two of us went to a Spanish classroom, in which five precincts would be represented. I thought it was appropriate to get a classroom with a "Dreamers" poster on the wall outside.

Around 11:30, we got things started by selecting a permanent chair for each precinct. I went to check the entrance and noted that volunteers were using laptops and personal smartphones to sign people in. The line of caucus-goers was out the door, and the parking lot was overflowing. 

It was nearly noon when three other temporary precinct captains arrived in our room, probably having done double duty signing voters in. Two more were last-minute volunteers who needed an immediate crash course about various procedures. In our room, eleven caucus-goers showed up for five precincts in order to claim one delegate per precinct, broken down as follows: 4:3; 3:1; 1:0. These groups did not have to calculate viability (majority rules when there is one delegate up for grabs.)

One of the caucus-goers said she felt uncomfortable about being forced to make her choice in public, because her precinct consisted of her small street in an isolated area. She was fearful about potential harassment from her neighbors.

In two of the caucus groups, nobody wanted to be a delegate. My own assigned precinct had zero turnout! So who knows how that delegate will be assigned, if at all?

Meanwhile, at a Reno elementary school with three-precinct coverage, my girlfriend Karli was in a group that was 4-4 with a ninth delegate up for grabs. They almost broke out the deck of cards (no coin toss in Nevada!) but a recount gave the last delegate to Sanders.

Our precincts were done before 1 p.m. and we submitted our results by either calling them in or texting them.

Fear and Loathing, 2016

What better setting for the triumph of the casino capitalism that Hillary Clinton represents than an actual Las Vegas casino? What better venue than Caesar's Palace for the political enforcer known as Harry Reid to ensure the survival of the oligarchy for one more election cycle?

"Saturday may well be the day," caustically wrote Nevada journalist Jon Ralston, "that altered the course of the Democratic presidential race, when Hillary Clinton blunted Bernie Sanders’ campaign, when she was forced to work as hard as she ever has for a week (with a little help from a lot of friends) and slingshotted her with new momentum into South Carolina and then Super Tuesday. Nevada may indeed prove to be the day that saved Hillary Clinton’s campaign."

 Like Roman slaves let out for a brief Saturday airing, in full view of their masters, Nevada gambling and hospitality workers were herded into the caucuses. They cast their votes, not behind the usual private curtains, but in the full view of their employers and union bosses and blinding TV lights. It was a true Circus Maximus vibe, complete with hordes of salivating media predators pawing for release behind their cages as the mobs entered and exited through carefully placed vomitoria.  

America's Voting Booth

 
Even unabashed Hillary supporter, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, wondered aloud whether the caucus-goers were feeling any pressure to vote a certain way. TV correspondents, who seemed to outnumber actual citizens in some locales, complained that attendees were loathe to discuss whom they might be voting for. Some workers appeared fearful about backing a candidate not acceptable to their bosses.

Elsewhere in the state, though, wage slaves were not given an extended lunch break to do Reid's bidding. Only an estimated 17% of registered Democrats turned out to caucus. Many people, as reader E. O'Meara noted in a post from Reno last week, could not get the time off from work to vote. They only were granted a one or two hour window of opportunity to make their voices heard. That seems to have been a feature of the process, not a bug. 

That the Empress in Waiting barely squeaked out a "victory" by five percentage points over an underdog Democratic Socialist behind by double digits only a few weeks ago is testament to the emptiness of her campaign message of "Same Old Shit".

She is so imperious, so tone-deaf, that she couldn't even resist dinging the younger voters she will need to win the general election should she machinate and lie and triangulate and pander her way to the Democratic nomination. Echoing the loathsome Tweeting Clinton bundler I profiled in my previous post, Hillary went into full hectoring mode.

If you've been evicted, poisoned by filthy water, can't afford your medicine and get beaten by cops because of the color of your skin, don't expect any single payer health care or free public college tuition or a break-up of those really yuge casinos known as Wall Street banks. Hillary will give you just what Obama and Bill and Bush and Reagan have always given you: imaginary ladders of opportunity by which to hoist yourself up by your own bootstraps.

There will be no FDR-style Works Progress Administration or Job Corps. There will, however, be more trickle-down austerity -- or as Hillary put it in her neoliberal pep talk, "unleashing the innovation of our entrepreneurs and small businesses." Translated into plain English, this means more feeding at the public trough by private corporations, and tax breaks for such small business enterprises as yacht and luxury vacation home rentals.

And she had a very special tough-love message for America's lost generation, whose members now overwhelmingly identify as socialist:

But, I want you to think about this.

It can't be just about what we're going to give to you, it has to be what we're going to build together. Your generation is the most tolerant, and connected our country has ever seen. In the days ahead we will propose new ways for more Americans to get involved in national service and give back to our communities because everyone of us has a role to play in building the future we want.

I can't wait to hear her new proposals. They will probably involve no actual salary. Because unlike humanist Bernie Sanders, Clinton does not even pay her own young campaign workers. So I imagine that a Hillary Youth Movement would be modeled after Obama's Organizing for Action astroturf machine, which largely involves enlisting volunteers to propagandize for such job-destroying corporate initiatives as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And given Hillary's own hawkishness, she'll no doubt want to continue Michelle Obama's militaristic Joining Forces campaign, the brainchild of the Center for a New American Security think tank founded and staffed by "interventionist" Clinton Democrats, Wall Street investors, and defense contractors. 

Give back and give often. Give again and again for the good of the plutocracy, and Hillary will make you feel like you're really part of something as you struggle to survive.

Do I even need to tell you that after her very marginal victory in Nevada, her Editorial Enforcers are out in full force today, once again declaring that their candidate is Inevitable?  In a break from tradition and a slap in the face to democracy, the New York Times is already running Bernie's obituary on the front page. Even though, last I checked, he is not only still breathing, he's tied with her in (elected) delegates and is still ahead in some national polls.

Hillary kind of reminds me of Caesar Augustus's influential wife, Livia Drusilla. If you've ever read Robert Graves' I, Claudius or seen the BBC version, you know exactly who I'm talking about. In case you missed it, the series is still running on Hulu.

The big difference is that in Roman times, scheming political wives would poison or otherwise destroy their rivals in order to ensure the succession of their own sons. Livia, though, broke the glass ceiling of Caesar's Palace and became empress in her own right. Who needs sons, when you yourself can become the sun around which the planets of the corrupt ruling class and the sycophantic press can mindlessly revolve?

It's the 21st American century, thank goodness. So who needs to kill one's rivals, when you have the New York Times to do your character assassination for you?

 Of course, you still need heirs. And it's always a yuge campaign selling point to tell the masses how much you love being a Grandma. Livia was a doting Grandma, too. Her grandson was named Caligula.  

The Donors of Clinton World

 Part One of a continuing series.

"Dear Millenials" (sic), read the Tweet,"you, are entitled to nothing. You deserve nothing. And nothing is ever, ever free. #WorkForIt"

This Gingrich-like threat comes not from the GOP.  Rather, it was Tweeted out by Democratic campaign bundler Allan Berliant in conjunction with a closed-door fundraiser he hosted for Hillary Clinton last week. The Empress-in-Waiting was too busy campaigning to attend in person, but she sent the ever reliable Bill in as a sloppy second. Here's a selfie that Berliant posted of his private party. He calls it "Hangin With Bill."

 Misery You Can Believe In: No Free Lunch, No Free Tuition

Berliant himself has worked very hard for his money, having married into it. He got his start in nutrition and non-union labor working for Tyson Foods, the Arkansas-based factory farm corporation which helped bankroll the Clintons' initial rise to power back in the heyday of the Reagan Revolution. Berliant left the company around the same time that Bill and Hill left the White House. He then started a new, Cincinnati-based firm called BestEXPress. Originally limited to the simple marketing of name brand junk food, it has since expanded into "manufacturing" its own culinary products, with mass-produced frozen pizza for school cafeterias its homegrown appetizing specialty. But its main function remains searching out the most advertised packaged food on the market, repackaging it, and then selling it at a markup to time-strapped consumers as a brand-new product. Berliant works very hard shopping for high-nitrite Oscar Mayer bologna, Tyson mystery meat, and high-fat Pillsbury Doughboy rolls to sell to all those lazy "Millenials." (He obviously didn't work too hard in school actually learning how to spell. It's Millennials, Berliant! Three Els and two Ens. If you're going to insult and castigate an entire generation of people, the least you can do is spell their cohort correctly and learn proper comma etiquette!)

Let, Them Eat Pizza With a Side of Pancakes. Rrrrich!

In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer published in 2001, Berliant talked about his company's ethos: Convenience, Convenience, Convenience.

  “The industry flat out has not been meeting the needs of a changing consumer world. Companies have put out low-quality low-end products. We bring higher-quality products and the comfort of brand to consumers. With the brands come an expectation of quality.”

 While the unhealthy food is designed to appeal mostly to those lazy kids he seems to so despise, adults scrambling from one crappy part-time job to the next can find that a Berliant ready-to-eat meal is as close as the neighborhood 7-11 or gas station vending machine. They can eat and gain comfort from brand names all in one meal-bolt. Prepackaged breakfast, lunch and dinner is a billion-dollar-a-year business. Sales are ballooning as fast as the waistlines of low-wage workers, stressed out on both cortisol and empty calories. 

  I imagine that if Hillary Clinton is elected to the White House, all of Michelle Obama's good work on healthy eating might be in danger of going right down the tubes. That is, if the research by Gilens and Page is correct, if it's true that political donors tend to get whatever they want. Perhaps Hillary, as a "pragmatic progressive" will split the difference and put pizza and vending machines back in lunchrooms as long as the kids are willing to work hard and clean the cafeteria and the bathrooms after they eat. It will certainly save on unionized janitorial overhead. Plus, it will bring back fond memories of the time when Bill triangulated with that daddy of all millennial-haters, Newt Gingrich, to end welfare as we know it. 

One of the places where Bill sent those welfare moms was his old sponsor, Tyson Foods. The women were "sanctioned" -- the Clintonoid euphemism for threatened cut-off of their benefits -- to go to work at this low-wage food factory and other "Direct Job Placement" centers in order to trim the welfare rolls. As Hillary bragged in her memoir, the "trimming" involved slashing mothers from public assistance at a rate of 60 percent. Poor women with very young children were, and are, "lifted out of poverty" by facing the choice between working and starving.

As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in his blistering anti-Clinton polemic, "No One Left to Lie To," (published before he tragically went over to the dark side of neoconservativism)

Supplied by the state with a fearful, docile labor force, the workhouse masters are relatively untroubled by unions, or by any back-talk from the staff. Those who have thus been "trimmed" from the welfare rolls have done no more than disappear into a twilight zone of casual employment, uninsured illness, intermittent education for their children, and unsafe or temporary accommodation. Only thus - by their disappearance from society - can they be counted as a "success story" by ambitious governors, and used to qualify tightfisted states for "caseload-reduction credits" from the federal government. 

The chairman of Tyson, Hitchens wrote, was so thrilled with all the new cheap labor afforded by Clinton's Welfare "Reform" that he transformed his man-cave into a facsimile of the Oval Office, with even the doorknobs shaped in ovals to resemble chicken eggs.

As Tyson alum and loyal Hillary Clinton bundler Allan Berliant puts it to the youth of America: "You are entitled to nothing. You deserve nothing.  And nothing is ever, ever free. Work For It!"

Nothing will ever, ever change in Clinton World, no matter how populist and progressive Hillary Clinton makes herself out to be. 

She is marketing herself the same way that Berliant markets his junk food. She collects ideas and borrows sentences from the Bernie Sanders campaign, repackages them up into slick infomercials, and then passes them off as her own creation. 

Even her smile looks flash-frozen.

Workin It: Berliant and Clinton At a Fundraiser Last Summer.
Guests Were Invited to Pay $2,700 for Their Own Photo With Hillary