Bring on the Noise, Bring on the Contempt

Frank Bruni's Sunday New York Times column went right to the heart of what probably peeves the Establishment the most about Donald Trump. It's his utter lack of style and his dark vision. They still haven't recovered from his utterance of the word "carnage" on such a lofty occasion. In their world, the blood and gore of the forever wars and the opioid epidemic and rising death rates are realities which must not be named during official ceremonies touting American exceptionalism. We haven't been allowed to see the returning body bags at Joint Base Andrews for the past decade and a half for a very good reason. It might make us anti-war.

 All politicians are narcissists, Bruni went on, but at least they have the decency to put on a public display of humility on solemn occasions. And they never fail to pay homage to members of their own bipartisan political cohort. In his own inaugural address, though, Trump not only committed the mortal sin of not groveling to these people, he shockingly blamed them for all the human misery in America. It was especially irksome to Bruni that Trump didn't drool all over Hillary Clinton during his victory speech.

Bruni finishes his column with a centrist cri de coeur:

A humbler man would doubt himself, extend an olive branch to his enemies, contemplate a middle ground. But then a humbler man wouldn’t have come down that escalator at Trump Tower and proceed to say what Trump said and do what he did. As I watched him flourish, I watched humility die. On Friday, our 45th president said its last rites.

Of course, Bruni failed to mention the other 'umble VIPs sitting on the stage directly behind Trump. So in my published Times comment, I did the honors: 

 Of course Trump's populism is a fraud. Just look at all the oligarchs sitting on the stage behind him - his cabinet and billionaire donors. He rushed to shake Sheldon Adelson's hand right after the obligatory wallowing in his own gene pool.

His speech was such a big lie that it must have made the ghost of Goebbels writhe in envious ecstasy. "We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon," Trump lied.

He didn't dare speak the truth and blame American multinationals, the Forbes 400... and of course, himself. The top .01% - of which he is such a greedy, loudmouthed part - is what sucked up more than 90% of all the wealth regained since the 2008 meltdown.

And there was billionaire Betsy DeVos, right in the front row, fresh from vowing to ravage public education funding during her Senate confirmation hearing. And there was Trump, outlandishly braying “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs."

Just days earlier, he'd praised oil magnate Rex Tillerson for just such thievery: "He's led this charmed life. He goes into a country, take the oil, goes into another country. It’s tough dealing with these politicians, right? He’s going to be so incredible, and I’m very proud of him."

The one silver lining is that unlike most sociopaths, Trump is a very bad liar. Truth will out, in spite of his spiteful self.

Trump is getting a lot of credit from both the left and the right for immediately  jamming the stake into the Trans-Pacific Partnership's predatory heart. But as Public Citizen's Laurie Wallach warns, whether this means that Trump will actually create any new jobs as a result is still up in the air. And his own cabinet of tycoons will be right there alongside him, doing their damnedest to ensure that their economic class will come out on top regardless. Trump, unlike his predecessors, seems to have gone out of his way not to pick sycophantic yes-men.

Wallach writes:

If President Trump intends to replace our failed trade policy, a first step must be to end negotiations now underway for more deals based on the damaging NAFTA/TPP model so its notable that today’s announcement did not end talks to establish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the Trade in Services Agreement and the U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty – all of which would replicate and expand the TPP/NAFTA model Trump says he is ending.

President Trump also repeatedly has said he would launch NAFTA renegotiations immediately and withdraw from NAFTA if he cannot make it “a lot better” for working people. NAFTA renegotiation could be an opportunity to create a new trade model that benefits more people, but if done wrong, it could increase job offshoring, push down wages and expand the protections NAFTA provides to the corporate interests that shaped the original deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has craftily moved to the left of the previous administration by inviting union bosses as well as rank-and-file members into the Oval Office for a macho chit-chat. Could there be a smidgen of sincerity in his professed concern for the working stiff? Or, as his slick friend Bill Clinton did before him, is he merely triangulating? No matter what is lurking in his mind, nobody can deny that he is doing an admirable job of keeping everybody guessing and keeping everybody off-balance.

Trump is slyly getting in front of the corporate Democrats by publicly embracing and flattering organized labor (token Clinton supporters) before the party gets a chance to regroup and make another stab at seducing organized labor. It's kind of a mirror image of what Barack Obama admitted doing after his 2010 mid-term "shellacking" by Republicans. He tried to get out in front of Republicans by going whole hog for austerity for the struggling working class while extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He put an immediate and cruel freeze on federal wages.  For his part, Trump just performed his own triangulating, plutocrat-serving austere duty by imposing a new federal hiring freeze. (private worker pitted against public worker.) Both men gallantly exempted the military from this gratuitous pain for the sake of pain. Armed forces must always be at the ready to protect wealthy interests, which are bipartisan by their very control-freakish nature.

For someone with no traditional political experience, Trump is actually showing himself to be a skilled politician. While the media blares headlines about his incompetence and his penchant for lying for the sheer enjoyment of it, Trump gleans ever more popular support by exposing the media as a cadre of self-serving, thin-skinned careerists who just can't quit his twittering animal magnetism despite their tender sensibilities. They still haven't quite managed to modify their job description from power access-seekers to afflicters and critics of power in all its myriad forms.

So far anyway, Trump is doing the colorful in-your-face Huey Long routine with all the camera-ready panache at his never-ending disposal. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his scathing polemic against a slightly more refined Huey clone named Bill Clinton, "Kingfish had a primal understanding of the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most 'in touch' with popular; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently 'elitist.'"

It's an interesting reality show we're watching. Don't they get that "alternate reality" is already a popular genre on TV? Don't they get that people are really into escaping their lives these days?

It's telling that despite the millions of ordinary people who joined the anti-Trump marches and protests this weekend, the media chose to give outsize coverage to the wealthy camera-ready celebrities taking part. Only time will tell whether this becomes a real movement and a permanent struggle and doesn't devolve into a Democratic Party veal pen brand named Resistance, Incorporated.

What gives me hope that it won't is that it is a worldwide movement, with simultaneous protests erupting wherever right-wing extremism is rearing its ugly head. Just as all politics is local, so is all politics getting to be increasingly global. Forget the neo-fascist "America First" xenophobia spewed by Trump. The sooner we embrace the fact that we are all citizens of one world who must unite to survive, the better.

Financial globalization and wars and forced migrations and climate change and years of imposed austerity are combining to bite end-stage capitalism in the ass. And this is scaring the very serious important people at Davos, the IMF, the World Bank and wherever plutocratic thought leaders gather to ponder their navels.

Take another "style"-type piece in this week's New York Times, about how Trump is ruining civil discourse. The  "tone police" are walking the beat with a vengeance and sadly wearing out their Birkenstocks in the process. Georgetown University philosophy professor Karen Stohr urges liberals to immunize themselves against that nasty Trump bug that's been going around. She doesn't say so in her op-ed, but I suspect that she got inundated by many thousands of ladies loudly screaming the F-word while wearing their pink pussy hats at all the weekend rallies.

Stohr preaches with all the virtue-signalling passion that a credentialed expert can muster:

The better strategy for those who are already disempowered is to reject contempt on its face. Returning contempt for contempt legitimizes its presence in the public sphere. The only ones who benefit from this legitimacy are the people powerful enough to use contempt to draw the boundaries of the political community as they see fit. Socially vulnerable people cannot win the battle for respect by using contempt as a way to demand it. In an environment where contempt is an acceptable language of communication, those who already lack social power stand to lose the most by being its targets. The only real defense against contempt is the consistent, strong and loud insistence that each one of us be regarded as a full participant in our shared political life, entitled to hold all others accountable for how we are treated.

My published response:

 There are varieties of contemptuous experience just as there are varieties of religious experience. Getting down in the gutter with Trump to trade insults is just one of the more primitive ones.

As Molly Ivins pointed out, words are the only weapons that the powerless have against the powerful. Trump shows his contempt by punching down. We must show ours by punching up.

Of course, it's smarter to be more contemptuous of Trump's agenda than of his dyed comb-over and mannerisms. Stooping to his low level of mocking (of physical appearance, to name just one) only adds to his own persecution complex and that of the bigots who, in my opinion, comprise just one subset of those who voted for him.

I've heard a lot of people say that they voted for him not because of his depravity but in spite of it. All they wanted was to upend the system. And they have a point. Were it not for the rise of Trump, millions of protesting people would have stayed home this weekend. So maybe we should thank his misguided fans for, intentionally or not, lighting the fuse that brought us out of the doldrums of passive consumerism into a resurgence of active, bottom-up democracy. People joining together in solidarity is the last thing in the world the ruling class duopoly wants. The elites prefer to keep us isolated, marginalized and electronically entertained. They prefer that we remain oblivious to our own innate power. They deserve our contempt in all the creative varieties at our disposal.

Assimilate In the O-Borg

Mere Mortals of the World, Unite!

For all you citizen-consumers already waxing nostalgic for the enlightened Obama years, please don't despair.

Because even before landing in Palm Springs for a well-deserved time of peace and quiet after his eight non-stop years of war, soaring high above all the vicious carnage-stopping unleashed by Donald Trump, Barack sent out an email blast to his most loyal constituents. It was his very First Contact as a Private Citizen! He wants them to define their priorities -- and of course, to send a generous donation to Obama.Org.

The stellar product he is selling is a neoliberal, market-based citizenship initiative.  Vaunted literary man that he is, Obama writes:

The Obama Foundation is a living, working start-up for citizenship — an ongoing project for us to shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century. The Foundation is based on the South Side of Chicago, and we will have projects all over the city, the country, and the world.

To help us get started, we would love to hear from you. Send us your ideas, your hopes, your dreams about what we can achieve together. Tell us about the people who inspire you and the organizations whose work you admire.

This will be your Foundation just as much as it is ours.

Full disclosure: I signed up for his post-presidency endeavor just when the fund-raising for his foundation was first getting started, simply to keep sardonic tabs on things. I'd become absolutely intrigued when I read about all the careful post-presidency planning going on at the White House well over a year before he left office. I wanted to be a part of the franchise!

It's because the real purpose of Obama's start-up for citizenship is kick-starting the spread of the Obama Legend. As the New York Times described the private planning in the public People's House:

In their conversations with Mr. Obama and his advisers, people from Silicon Valley and Hollywood are pressing for a heavy reliance on cutting-edge technology in the library that would help spread the story of Mr. Obama’s presidency across the globe. Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.

But more about Obama.Org - the good news is that there is no written requirement that you actually send Obama any cash money in order to pour out all your hopey dreaminess to him. Therefore, to do my part for the Trump Resistance Movement, I suggested to Obama that he use the majority of his time agitating not just to protect Obamacare, but to expand it with a real single payer, Medicare for All program. I told him that the groups I most admire are Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and National Nurses United and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) I am sure that he will take my suggestion and nominations under very serious consideration, even though they were accompanied by a contribution of exactly Zero Dollars. 

After all, now that he no longer has the Republican Congress to thwart his every hope and dream and initiative, he will finally enjoy the freedom to be the progressive he has always been at his deepest core. Right? So I would strongly encourage you to join me and mightily blast out your own inspirational priorities on the form he has so thoughtfully provided for his wealthy donors you.

What with the stellar board of directors he has assimilated in the O-Borg I think we can be very confident that the former president will finally gin up the courage to go after Wall Street malfeasance and be a true champion of public labor unions.

But as his Democratic apologists always chide us unicorn-lovers, you can't expect him to bring a knife to a gunfight. Therefore, he has loaded down his Org Board with a panoply of mostly male hedge fund honchos, charter school advocates, investment bankers, corporate CEOs, private equity moguls -- and just a couple of NGO women of color to give his endeavor just that right identitarian tone. And to give it just the right egalitarian tone, he's actually made a Poorman the president of his foundation. J. Kevin Poorman, that is. Poorman is already a very busy guy, what with acting as CEO of the real estate empire of Obama's billionaire Commerce Secretary and sugar mommy, Miss MoneyPenny Pritzker.

And if all you earth-bound Obama fans are fretting that Barack might be going into predator drone withdrawal out there in Palm Springs, please take heart. Another Orgboard member is his good golfing buddy Robert Wolf, formerly of UBS. Wolf now runs an enterprise called Measure-Drone. Coincidentally, Wolf got exclusive FAA approval to run the country's largest private drone fleet just one year before his good buddy left office. His new hires coincidentally also include veterans of Obama's Kill List drone ops. So, this skid-greasing should give Wolf plenty of time to continue his other gig as a paid contributor to Fox News and the neoliberal Fox Business Channel.

All in all, some pretty good deals for the guy whose bank avoided criminal prosecution for helping wealthy Americans dodge taxes at the same time that the Obama Justice Department ensured that the whistle-blower of the fraud got sentenced to 40 months in prison.

To show his appreciation to his good buddy, perhaps Robert Wolf can even elevate the runner-up entry in Obama's architectural shrine contest to first place. It would certainly be very good advertising for his new business. And it fits right in with the original Star Trek/Wikipedia definition of Borg: "a collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones in a hive mind called 'the Collective' or 'the Hive'. The Borg use a process called assimilation to force other species into the Collective by injecting microscopic machines called nanoprobes, as well as with surgically adding cybernetic parts. The Borg are driven by a need for 'perfection', and assimilate other races to further that goal."

What, and whom,and where do we sign up to resist first? So much bipartisan crony capitalism, so little time.

Donald J. Trump is no anomaly. He is simply the most vocal, disgusting, in-your-face, TV-ready villainous manifestation of the corrupt global plutonomy in all of American history.

But never mind all that. Because the big buzzing controversy that the corporate media hive is choosing to nanoprobe today is all about the bickering over who got the bigger inaugural crowds - Dear Leader Trump, or Dear Leader Obama?

  We are dying to be informed, day in and day out, that Trump is a corporate media-certified and enabled big fat liar about even the stupidest things. People are literally dying out here.  

 "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."-- Star Trek, First Contact.

Swearing (In) Day

Happy Inauguration Day. Or, as the wags inform us, welcome to the Worst Day in Infamy Since Pearl Harbor.  Swear your hearts out at the Swearing-In as Teflon Don desecrates Honest Abe's Bible with his short nuclear-itchy fingers.

That swearing is good for you has long been one of the indispensable truths of folk wisdom. And according to yet another earth-shattering study, dropping the F-bomb on a regular basis also proves that you are an honest butthead as well as a damned healthy one.

Despite all the elite angst over Donald Trump's lack of respect for "norms," and his propensity to loosen his tongue and uncontrollably tap out his tweets, one group of scientists shockingly concludes that at least he is way more honest than your average slimy politician speaking with glib forked tongue.

Then again, say another group of scientists, his habitual use of foul language is also an indication of the "dark triad of personality traits" --  psychopathy,  narcissism and Machiavellianism.

Therefore, he has the best of both theories: he is an honest, healthy and dangerous sonuvabitch all wrapped up into one package. It's the winning political triad in this age of terminal capitalism and societal collapse.

Trump exhibits two specific levels of danger: one is directed toward the ruling class, and the other is directed toward the rest of us. His danger to the ruling class is healthy for the rest of us, and his danger to the rest of us is healthy for the ruling class. This has proven to be very successful political strategy for him,  as he effectively cancels out his two constituencies and rewards himself and his family empire with what promises to be a record windfall.

Here's just one recent example of the extreme danger that Honest Don presents to the ruling class. From his pre-inaugural speech to a group of Washington bigwigs this week:

"Rex Tillerson—and these lights are bright, but he’s around here someplace. Where’s our Rex? Wow. What a job. And, Renda, thank you very much. Thanks, Rex. I think it’s tougher than he thought. Again, he’s led this charmed life. He goes into a country, takes the oil, goes into another country. It’s tough dealing with these politicians, right? He’s going to be so incredible, and I’m very proud of him."

Trump is brutally honest in publicly admitting that the Secretary of State-designate is a rich asshole and unabashed plunderer who invades other countries and steals their natural resources by bribing corrupt leaders. In one fell swoop, Honest Don has let the cat out of the bag about the true purpose of American diplomacy. And that purpose is greasing the skids for multinational corporations. Rather than do the usual presidential theater of praising American exceptionalism for bringing peace and joy and democracy to the rest of the suffering world, Trump only brays that greed is good. He has just exposed the oligarchy in all its pathological greediness and ignominy. He has sent a warning to the rest of the world at the same time that he has made a full and honest confession to all the victims of the world. Sleepers awake, and let the protests begin!

And then there's the flip side, the danger that Donald Trump presents to the rest of us. This danger is not so much exhibited in his words, but in his deeds. And his only deeds thus far have been the cabinet appointments of people who can only be described as economic terrorists. Through the nominations of such miscreants as Tom Price, Betsy DeVos and Steve Mnuchin, Trump telegraphs his utter disdain for the health and welfare and education of the public and the environment and the world at large. He symbolically rubs our noses in the biggest steaming pile of oligarchic shit ever excreted in American history. (Writing that feels so beneficial to my health!)

And so for as long as he lasts in office, he will continue just being his own honest, psychopathic self. We'll cheer in spite of ourselves whenever he embarrasses and exposes his own rich cohort, and we'll hate him when his rich cohort inevitably robs all of us.

But now that millions of people are finally taking to the streets in unified protests, Honest Don might end up being a gift to democracy in spite of his own spiteful self. Stay tuned. And don't forget to swear up a storm as you try to maintain both your physical and mental health!

Exonerate Ethel Rosenberg

* 1/20, updated below.

What with the Russian flu raging within corporate journalistic circles, you probably haven't heard too much lately about the movement to clear Ethel Rosenberg's name.

Ethel and her husband Julius were executed by the United States government on June 19, 1953, three years after their conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage. Contrary to myth, they were neither charged nor convicted of treason or even actual espionage; conspiracy was considered easier to prove by zealous prosecutors. Although Julius did pass on certain documents to the Soviets (not, as legend also still has it, secrets of the atomic bomb) Ethel herself was never part of any spy ring. She was, however, an avowed Communist just when the Cold War was heating up. The government used her as leverage in an attempt to get Julius to crumble and confess and name names. She remained staunchly silent until the very end, when she was electrocuted in Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York shortly after her husband.  

The Rosenbergs left behind two orphaned sons, Michael and Robert, just six and ten years old at the time of their parents' executions. 

Not only was Ethel Rosenberg not a spy, her conviction was based on false testimony of witnesses including her own brother, who finally recanted decades later as he neared death. Prosecuting the case was future Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn - who ironically enough, later became a mentor to Donald Trump. Ironic, given how Trump is now himself being accused of Russian stoogedom by Democratic leaders and their partners in the corporate media.

The Red Scare was so intense that Harry Truman passed on commuting the sentence despite overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial overreach presented to him. He, President Eisenhower and even the presiding judge went so far as to directly blame Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for the Korean War. Eisenhower also turned down numerous petitions for clemency and refused to stay their executions. And on the day that both were strapped into the electric chair, his aides actually had to dissuade him from hitting the links to play his favorite sport. Optics were a "thing" even back in the Red Scare 50s.

Robert Meeropol (formerly Rosenberg -- the names of the two boys were changed by their adoptive parents to protect their privacy) has appealed to President Obama to exonerate his mother. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others also joined the cause when results of an investigation by Seton Hall University Law School, released just last month, show just how depraved the government's actions were in bringing her to trial. A long-suppressed FBI memo from June 1950 categorically states that evidence against Ethel was insufficient to bring any charges against her. She was merely a pawn.

US government propaganda disseminated throughout the mainstream media over the several years that the "crime of the century" case played out ensured that the American public was sanguine about putting the Rosenbergs to death. When carefully polled, the vast majority proclaimed themselves fully behind the official callousness. By then, the Rosenbergs had been convicted not only of conspiracy -- in the court of public opinion they were considered guilty of outright treason. Plus, it really helped that most people liked Ike and his carefully crafted avuncular image very, very much.

(As a very young child, I myself was convinced for quite some time that Eisenhower was my grandpa. How could he not be, with that kindly smiling Kansas face looking and talking directly at me from the TV set?)

  But as Lori Clune outlines in her book Executing the Rosenbergs, this was not the case elsewhere. Worldwide, massive and sometimes violent protests against US government persecution of the couple were carefully kept out of American media accounts.

 The State Department kept deliberately hidden a cache of international press reports, appeals for mercy from foreign dignitaries, and cables from panicked American diplomats seeking guidance on the case.  Clune accidentally came upon clues to their existence during the course of her unrelated investigation into high-profile security cases involving Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The massive dossier of over 900 State Department documents she uncovered proves that, despite continuing propaganda to the contrary from our current leaders in the media-political complex, damage to America's reputation abroad hardly started with the election of Donald Trump. "American Psychosis" was also the unanimous official diagnosis from much of the rest of the world during our first Cold War more than 65 years ago.

"They (the documents) show that protests extended from Argentina to Australia, from Iceland to India, and from Switzerland to South Africa," writes Clune. "On a dozen separate occasions the American ambassador to France himself wrote to complain about the government's handling of the Rosenberg case. We may never know why the State Department hid these sources.... Whoever was responsible decided in this case that the need for secrecy trumped any desire for government transparency."

Plus ca change, etc. 

The Rosenberg Fund for Children is running an online petition asking President Obama to formally exonerate Ethel before he leaves office. We should know his decision, or lack thereof, by noon tomorrow at the very latest.

Update:
 

Statement of Robert and Michael Meeropol, sons of Ethel Rosenberg

January 20, 2017
In August 2015, The New York Times published our Op-Ed calling on President Obama to exonerate our mother, Ethel Rosenberg. It was a response to the release of government material a month before, showing the prime trial witness against our mother – her brother David Greenglass – repeatedly and adamantly stated under oath before the Grand Jury that he never spoke to our mother about espionage. That testimony, coupled with the enormous body of other independent evidence, made it clear that the government manipulated witnesses and created a false case against our mother, to put pressure on our father to cooperate in the politically motivated investigation of his actions.
 

The outpouring of support we received from our Times essay spurred us to forge ahead with an exoneration campaign. Its aim was to move the President to publicly declare that our mother’s conviction was unjust and her execution was wrongful, while also educating the public about the dangers of unchecked government power, especially in times of heightened concern about national security. Although we didn’t achieve the first goal, we were extremely successful with the second.
 

Some 60,000 concerned individuals added their names to our petition asking President Obama to act. Artists, activists, public intellectuals and elected officials were among the many, high profile people who supported our effort. A class of eighth graders in West Virginia championed the effort by gathering petition signatures and producing a video aimed at the President, about the parallels they saw between the play The Crucible and Ethel’s case.
 

The exoneration campaign was covered extensively and favorably by many of the most respected and far-reaching media outlets around the U.S. and internationally. These included 60 Minutes, NPR’s Morning Edition and Here and Now, and The Boston Globe.
 

With even Fox News publishing a report highlighting the grave miscarriage of justice in our mother’s case, it’s clear we succeeded in moving the needle on the public’s understanding of how the government wronged our mother, and why, dramatically.
 

We received thousands of moving and poignant communications from people who supported the effort. Many who contacted us have first-hand memories of our parents’ trial and execution. They described how their lives were forever affected by our parents’ case. They also recalled the fear and outrage they felt at that time, and are experiencing once again in our current political climate.
 

From the 90-year-olds who sent us shaky, handwritten letters, to the middle schoolers who posted about the campaign on social media, everyone who supported this effort demonstrated a deep commitment to holding our leaders accountable that we found inspiring. In their final letter to us just hours before their execution, our parents wrote that they, “were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us.”

The campaign to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg has proved our parents correct in their belief that after they were gone, others would continue to resist repression and fight for justice. We consider that a victory.

Freeing Chelsea Manning

Give credit where due and kudos to Barack Obama for doing the right thing by commuting whistle-blower Chelsea Manning's cruel and unusual prison sentence -- even if he did the right thing more out of political calculus than out of any sense of human empathy. 

Maybe some savvy reader can tell me why Chelsea Manning must be imprisoned for four more months: is it really the molasses-like military bureaucracy, or is it because Obama still wants to "send a message" that, just because a president softened up just this once doesn't mean that individuals exposing war crimes and Deep State corruption will be tolerated in the future.

Going over military heads and cutting red tape and freeing her sooner might be a tacit admission that Manning's brutal, excessive punishment -- including being stripped naked and placed in solitary confinement for over a year -- has been tantamount to torture.

 Obama is not about to admit any such thing. So it's four more months behind bars for Chelsea Manning, who had the courage and audacity to release information proving that the military lied about war crimes and deliberately conspired to underestimate the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq War. The only things she "endangered" were the reputations and careers of various culprits both in and out of uniform. Tellingly, the helicopter pilots who gratuitously shot and killed a group of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters for no other reason than sadism were never brought to account. They got off on the usual "fog of war" defense.

It's also tempting to suspect that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's offer to turn himself in to US authorities in the event of Manning's commutation was an offer that Obama simply couldn't refuse. If I were Assange, though, I'd wait until Manning is safely out of sight of the prison gates before leaving the always-tenuous safety of his own de facto prison of the Equador embassy in London.

Obama is deservedly famous for being an introspective, calculating kind of guy. So he probably carefully weighed all the pros and the cons of showing a little mercy to Manning. Another factor in his decision likely was not wanting to have the eventual successful suicide of an imprisoned LGBT community member on his hands. And he knew how bad the "optics"  would have looked had he let Chelsea Manning rot in prison while pardoning James Cartright, the retired general convicted, but never jailed, for lying to the FBI about leaking classified information to the press. Obama probably weighed the feeble dissenting cackles  of war hawks against the raucous, righteous outcry of progressives -- whose votes the Democratic Party desperately needs if it hopes to regain even a small portion of the thousand elected seats that it's lost during the Age of Obama.

And above all, there's his own precious legacy for Obama to worry about. Something good has to counterbalance the fact that he is the only president in history who has been at war every single day of his tenure. As he flits off to the golf course and the hundreds of millions of dollars in book deals and speaking fees, he doesn't want to be simply remembered for never closing Gitmo and for dropping 26,171 bombs on Planet Earth in just the past year alone.

The president's admittedly good deed of commuting Manning's draconian 35-year sentence is still a comparatively feeble gesture, given that it was his administration that ensured in the first place that she would get sentenced to 10 times the incarceration of any other person ever convicted of leaking classified information. It doesn't take away from the fact that the Obama administration prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined.

But thanks, President Obama. The rarer the humanitarian gesture, the more precious it is.

MediTrump For All

Since Donald Trump's idea of "insurance for everybody" doesn't entail a true government-sponsored single payer health care system, we're racking our brains trying to figure out what he could really mean.

The racking is probably futile. Because whenever you're promised that the "final strokes" are being put on a fantastic mystery product to be unveiled any day now, you should pretty much assume you're about to be scammed, if not whipped. And since Donald Trump's whole life has been one big exercise in hucksterism, you should pretty much also leave out the pretty much.

Still, masochist that I am, I'm torturing my brain trying to figure out what Trump could possibly have up his magician's sleeve for his U.S. citizen-subjects. Since the first requirement for any Trump plan is that it be short and sweet, preferably reducible to a promise and a slogan or a soundbite, here's some speculative Dystopia to get all racked up about:

Every American consumer-citizen will receive in the mail, within 30 days of the inauguration, a pre-approved personal I.D. card bearing the benign smirking image of Donald J. Trump. Just looking at his face should make you feel great again. But just in case it doesn't, you will enjoy the immediate freedom to use your TrumpCare card in a variety of (about two) different ways.

Every hotel, resort, and real estate holding bearing the Trump name will be outfitted with a walk-in clinic. There, you can present your card for a discount on check-ups and eyeglasses and prescriptions whose lower prices the new president will negotiate personally. If all goes as planned, you'll be able to enjoy even greater savings once your meds no longer have to undergo double-blind studies and stringent testing by a soon-to-be purged Food and Drug Administration.

And don't worry if there aren't any Trump properties with Trump clinics near you yet. His sons and heirs will use public money to construct them. They will concurrently orchestrate fire sales, forced buyouts and hostile takeovers of existing properties and medical practices in the interest of your great-again health care. If Trump builds it, you will most definitely come. Because annual checkups will be mandatory. Since all 17 U.S. "intelligence" agencies are now privy to your personal information, the United States of Trump will be duly informed if you don't take advantage of his benevolence in a very timely way.

But to be fair, and to help Trump avoid any appearance of a monopoly or impropriety or a conflict of interest, you will also enjoy the option of using your Trumpcard to score a discount as a medical tourist to any off-shored health care of your choosing. This is America, after all, and the illusion of choice and freedom must be maintained at all costs.  Donald's kids are already finalizing deals with the airlines and the cruise ship lines to get TrumpClubMed started. 

 Nazi Germany's Strength Through Joy program of healthy holiday-making for workers might be the perfect propaganda model for them, as well as the perfect scam. Under that populist initiative, regular Germans were supposed to go on discounted international state-sponsored cruises -- with the added health benefit of feeling ever so much better once they were safely and securely back in the Fatherland. What the Nazis didn't tell the Volk was that those taking advantage of Hitler's travel beneficence would be disproportionately middle class, white collar workers and government flunkies. Most working people just couldn't afford all that joyful strength.

Therefore, Hitler decided to placate the poor and construct a seaside prototype of a Trump hotel complex, which he trumpeted as "the biggest resort on earth." Unfortunately, the massive construction, designed to cram in 20,000 vacationers at a time like so many sardines was never completed. By the time they'd been power for five years, the Nazis were doing Strength Through War.

So that was then. And Trump, like Adolf before him, keeps insisting that he is a man of peace despite his professed desire to blow up any pathetic Iranian craft coming anywhere near our beautiful destroyers. So for all we know, Donald Trump may be joyfully envisioning a MediTrump Consortium of Hospitals performing both Trump-brand knee and hip replacements for workers now forced to put off retirement until 75, as well as Trump-brand total body part replacements for wounded veterans. Notwithstanding the recent court-ordered demise of Trump University in a secret settlement, also stay tuned for the Trump Medical School chain, with student loans for budding doctors issued through the First National Bank of Trump, formerly known as the U.S. Treasury Department. Graduates will have the choice of working off their loans at unpaid internships lasting ten years before going on to public-private practice at an approved Trump Clinic.

Since Democrats holding their anti-Trump rallies have been gleefully goading Trump to come up with a better health insurance plan than Obamacare, they will certainly end up getting punked. Because when the "something better" in their neoliberal world does not, and never will, include Medicare for All, we are bound to get presented with something much, much worse.

Ironically, just like Barack Obama before him, Donald Trump actually was for single payer government insurance before he was against it. But you know what they always say: We must not let the perfect be the enemy of what's good for the oligarchy.

From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of... Norway?

You read that right - the United States Marines have just landed in the historic city of Trondheim, the former capital during the wild and crazy Viking era.

photo credit, Ned Alley, NTB Norway

For the first time since Hitler assaulted much of Europe in World War II, the American military is setting up a "rotational" base in the Scandinavian nation as a sign of chest-thumping strength against an allegedly threatening Russia. Not even during the Communist era of Cold War expansionism did Norway, always a fiercely independent social democratic country, ever invite any foreign military power to help it defend itself against a potential enemy. As a matter of fact, the Norwegian government signed an agreement with the Soviet Union immediately after World War II promising, after it joined NATO, that it would never allow foreign troops to be permanently stationed on its own soil.

 The Marine contingent of some 300 troops flew in on Monday from comparatively steamy Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, and will learn how to shoot guns on skis, among other sporty winter war games.

The New York Times reports that regular Norwegian citizens, while a bit nonplussed at the sight of Marines in jungle camouflage trudging through the January snow, are more than a little paranoid these days. First, there was the annexation of Crimea and the unrest in Eastern Ukraine. And everybody's been glued to a wildly popular Norwegian TV series called Okkupert, a dystopian futuristic political thriller in which the country is occupied by Russia. Very coincidentally, there have also been imaginary sightings of  Russian submarines off the western coast, their periscopes popping up from the frigid waves like slimy Loch Ness Monsters.

  And then came the ultimate fright: the election in the United States of Donald J. Trump. Propaganda depicting him as a Kremlin stooge apparently travels very fast, and very far, apparently respecting no national paranoid boundaries.

As per usual, whenever militarism and authoritarianism rear their ugly heads, it's been the lefties who are putting up the biggest stink about the Marine okkupation. From the Times:

Morten Harper, a leftist member of the local assembly that governs the area housing the military base, said the Marines’ arrival was ensnaring Norway into the United States’ “power struggle” with Russia.

“We see an ever more tense foreign policy situation,” he said. “If there ever was to be a major conflict between the great powers in the future, this makes us a more likely bomb target.”

Norway's defense minister soothed critics by promising that the Marines are only there for a trial period of six months and can be asked to leave at any time in what she termed an "open-ended" agreement. Now, where have we heard that reassuring story before?

Although  plans for the Norwegian deployment have apparently been underway "for some time," according to the 350-year-old regional newspaper Adresievessen, the transformation of the Norwegian Home Guards into an American Marine base was never even presented to the local citizens for informational purposes, let alone considered a matter for public debate. Many people were thus reportedly taken aback by the sight of 300 heavily armed soldiers struggling through the snow, dragging their suitcases. Some of them were still dressed in lightweight fatigues highly unsuitable, to say the least, for the harsh weather conditions of this sub-Arctic region in January. Talk about a new cold war!

Still, the local newspaper editorialized that while "it's frightening that Trump will be the boss of these soldiers," residents should rest assured that a few hundred Marines aren't tantamount to the beginning of World War III.

Maj. Gen. Niel Nelson, according to RT, was similarly nonchalant. "We've been going to Norway for 25 years," he groused. "So I don't really know what all the hype is all about."

He's undoubtedly right: the hype is a little late. As reported by the Norway Local, the US military already has completed the digging of deep tunnels into the Norway mountains for the storage of its tanks and other armaments. The American incursion has been an open secret.

Meanwhile, American media are not reporting on protests against the US military by Norwegian citizens. According to one local newspaper, residents were confronting the Marines directly, handing out fliers "to say a definite no" to what they consider a stealth occupation. (this article is available in English via Google translator.)
 
"I do not want our children and grandchildren to grow up with the same fear and the threat of bombs and war, we have lived with," said peace activist Jens Frøseth.

Foto: Håvard Haugseth Jensen

None of the scanty news reports I've seen about Monday's Marine landing mentions that there are vast deposits of oil lurking beneath the icy Barents Sea, with some estimates amounting to fully one-third of the earth's remaining reserves. And the country's Arctic territory is warming up at an ever-quickening pace, becoming ever more accessible to plunder and predation. Norway already is the eighth largest crude oil exporter in the world. So somebody's got to protect the multinational oil cartel which doesn't/mustn't/shouldn't include Russia. Right?

As a matter of fact, only the plot of the TV series Okkupert (I believe it's available for streaming in the US) revolves around oil. But in a twist, the Russians have joined forces with the European Union to invade Norway, a non-EU country, and the (Trumpian) United States has withdrawn from NATO. And wouldn't you just know it, the leftist Norwegian Green Party is kind of the bad guy in the story, having just come to power and stopped the production of oil, enraging the whole gas-guzzling world. The propaganda stage would thus seem to have been set for the true-life Marines by the magic of make-believe. Isn't it always the way?

So as ever, whenever you have questions about what the Military-Industrial Complex is up to any given day, in any given location, simply follow the money. Skål, and Ka-Ching!

Friendly USMC Publicity Photo Furnished to the Local Norwegian Newspaper

Obama's B.S. On Insufficient B.S. - Conclusion

Much as I dread it, I feel it is my duty to follow up and complete last week's piece on President Obama's regrets over his faulty propaganda skills. So here's my analysis of the rest of the 60 Minutes puff piece interview which aired on Sunday night.  (As a testament to the ever more fascistic job description of our nation's chief executive, the title of the show refers to him not as the president, but as the militaristic commander-in-chief.)

The program starts out with all the heart-rending pathos that a corporate media powerhouse can muster: a nine-year-old clip of adorable little Malia Obama kvetching about Candidate Daddy's limited culinary skills and personal sloppiness. See - he was just like us then, and at his core, he's still just like us now!

Fast forward to some revelatory highlights in his Big Exit Interview. It turns out that despite regrets over his deficient propaganda skills, he can still scapegoat with the best of them:

And I will confess that, I didn’t fully appreciate the ways in which individual senators or members of Congress now are pushed to the extremes by their voter bases. I did not expect, particularly in the midst of crisis, just how severe that partisanship would be.

Obama doesn't blame the money in politics unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. He doesn't blame the psychopaths of finance capital or the billionaire Koch Brothers for the extremism. He blames those danged voters clinging to their guns and religion. The poor frazzled congress critters are pushed to their sadistic extremes, not by their own corruption and greed, fueled by the corporate lobbyists who set the agenda and write the laws. They're pushed to extremes by the powerless, ignorant regular people back home in the sticks who persist in voting against their own interests. Yes, Obama can scapegoat and punch down with the best of them. And thus does he follow up his regrets over his failed propaganda with still more failing propaganda. (Jeeze, am I beginning to sound like Trump, or what? Sad!)

And now, since this is CBS, whose CEO last year bragged how totally awesome Donald Trump has been for its profits, Steve Kroft forgets about stuff that might be important to regular people in the sticks. He immediately pivots right to Donald Trump's tweets and the Meryl Streep imbroglio:

Kroft:  He said Meryl Street is an overrated Hillary flunky.  I mean, what's going on?

Obama: You know, you’re going to have to talk to him. But here’s what I-- here’s what I think. First of all, I think everybody has to acknowledge don’t underestimate the guy, because he’s going to be 45th president of the United States. The one thing I’ve said to him directly, and I would advise my Republican friends in Congress and supporters around the country, is just make sure that, as we go forward certain norms, certain institutional traditions don’t get eroded, because there’s a reason they’re in place.

Rather than press Obama to define these norms and traditions (are they the CIA? the American hegemony? the continued comfort of the ruling class?)  and since he couldn't get Obama to bite on the moldy Meryl Streep imbroglio cheese, Kroft helpfully normalizes Trump by pointing out at least one thing that both presidents do have in common: their manly love for the elite Institution of Golf.

And since politics is at its capitalistic essence a rich man's sport, he asks Obama if he ever wished he had a Mulligan. (Trigger warning to readers: the following segments are rather severely condensed/translated in the interests of space, time and deconstruction--so please do refer to the original CBS transcript and video, linked above, for the official version of the spurious officiousness.)

Obama: Golf analogy -- well, yeah, Healthcare. gov. It didn't work for awhile, so we lost a little momentum. Management below par... or make that far above par, caught in the bunker, sinking in the decorative pond, and not making the cut.

Kroft: Oh, okay, whatever. Now on to foreign policy. (Here, Kroft plays a 15-month-old clip of himself bullying Obama about why he wasn't starting more wars, which was definitely hurting his image among hungry war profiteers. The whole world views an America in retreat, goddammit! What about war on Syria? The Saudis, the Israelis, the Republicans all view you as weak, weak, weak!)

Kroft: Now it's 2016. Two words: red line. You didn't have to say that.

 Obama: Well, yeah --

Kroft: I don't want to make a big deal about it. But red line, red line, red line, red line, red line. You didn't have to say it. But you said red line, red line, red line.

Obama: Yeah, but --

Kroft: Red line, red line, red line, red line, red line.

Obama: I -- but that -- 

Kroft: Would you take it back?

Obama: Well, I but --

Now that he's established that he will always put on a muscular show of bullying elected officials who don't completely grovel before the interests of the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street investors, Kroft gets in a few mild digs over Obama's belated passive-aggressive repudiation of illegal Israeli settlements.

 And finally it's time for the frothy dessert portion of the interview that we've all been waiting for:

Kroft:  What's it like living in the White House with all those perks?

Obama: Michelle pretty much couldn't stand it. Bubbles and all. But she thrived at it.

Kroft: So is the marriage OK? Inquiring prurient minds wanna know.

Obama: As far as I know. Heh, heh, heh.

Kroft: So you gonna do the ivory tower equivalent of puttering around the garden?

Obama: Sleep and puttering.

Kroft: Not going to Wall Street and make a lot of money?

Obama: I'll be investing in different capacities.

Kroft: How will we remember you ten years from now?

Obama: You know, I don't think you know now. Known unknowables and all. But known knowns are our energy future and setting the bar for the notion is that it's possible to provide health care for people. Increments you can believe in.

And you know, you gotta develop a thick skin this job. Not many people know that we even have to buy our own toilet paper in the White House. We pay for everything except the plane and the bodyguards and the walkie-talkies.

And with this whole Russian hacking thing, it is just incredible that some people (a/k/a Trump) actually think that Putin has more credibility that our own Deep State does.

Kroft: So how much White House swag you gonna take with you? You like your new crib?

Obama: It's a nice enough home. It's temporary. You know, it's not crazy big but at least there's enough room for a treadmill and some workout equipment in the basement.

And so ends Obama's Last Interview. As you can see, he is indeed just like the rest of us, wondering where to cram all the furniture when he's forced to move and downsize after a job loss and eviction.

But lest you be too concerned about his future cramped living quarters, his definition of "not crazy big" is 8,200 square feet, eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms. He's going to need one extra room just to store all that toilet paper.