The Art of the Anti-Trump Dog Whistle

What do Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth have in common (besides, that is, being the carefully manufactured celebrity public images which mask and protect the private pursuit of power and wealth by neoliberal capitalism at the public's expense)?

They have perfected the fine art of pissing all over Donald Trump without ever having to unzip their lips and soil themselves by mentioning his name. That would just be too, too untoward.

Obama gave what's being praised (by the corporate media) as a momentous put-down of The Donald at a speech he had to travel all the way to South Africa to give, ostensibly in honor of the late Nelson Mandela. 

Lilibet was even more circumspect. As she stiff upper-lipped her way through the odious chore of meeting and greeting Trump last week, she wore a giant brooch given to her by Barack and Michelle Obama. She couldn't have stabbed Trump in the ass more effectively if she'd unpinned the magical amulet and stabbed him in the ass with it. She is the Merriest Wife of Windsor evah, or at least in the past half-millennium.

You go, Girl!  

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She Is Not Amused

It's a tiny secret anti-Trump club of elites out there, folks, and you ain't in it. All you regular people can do is experience your daily Five Minutes of Hate in online comment boards when you're not feeling the vicarious outrage along with such Russophobic cable news stars as Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper.

The coded anti-Trump snootiness possibly reached an apogee of hilariousness in the pages of The Guardian:

 Casual royal observers such as myself barely noticed the Queen’s fashion choices during Trump’s visit, because we were too busy cringing at Trump’s behaviour around her. Whether you give a fig about the royals or not – and I come very much from the “no fig” end of the spectrum – watching Trump galumph around in front of her, get in her way and generally act as if she wasn’t even there was, just on a human level, throw-up-on-your-own-shoes nauseating. She’s a 92-year-old woman, show her some respect, you giant Oompa-Loompa! But, of course, expecting thoughtfulness from a man who, earlier this year, was photographed holding an umbrella over his own precious head leaving his young son exposed to the elements, brings to mind words such as “blood” and “stone”.

 And the Queen, wisely, appeared to expect none either, because it turns out she was sending us all coded messages via the medium of her brooches. Yes, her brooches – read on and bow down in awe, James Bond. Twitter user @SamuraiKnitter has pointed out that on the first day of the Trump visit, the Queen wore a simple green brooch that was given to her by the Obamas to signify their friendship. On the second day, she wore a brooch given to her by Canada, a country with which Trump is less than pleased at the moment (also, it was in the shape of a snowflake, a classic Trump term for people who disagree with him.) And, for the last day, she chose a brooch she wore to the funeral of her father, so not one associated with happiness and joy. Queen’s brooches: 3. Trump: 0.

Barack Obama sported no royal jewelry with which to broadcast his own elite disdain for the Human Dorito, but he still retains his silver tongue and his vocabulary of gold. And thus he broached the topic. Unlike other mere liberal mortals, currently frothing at the mouth in an inchoate group frenzy of Treasonous Traitor Terror Tirades, though, Obama was able to add to the epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome by seeming to tamp it down with his calm, cool, dispassionate, "coded" rhetoric.

Trump's Tweets: 0. Obama's Speech: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

You'd think he was a computer geek with all the praise he's getting from the media about his "coded" message to Those In The Know, a message they imagine totally bypassed the thick skulls out there in Deploraville, who wouldn't know the meaning of "ascendant strongman politics" and nuance if their asses depended on it. As the New York Times reported,

Mr. Obama seemed to to take direct aim at Mr. Trump over his administration’s policies and his propensity for exaggerations and falsehoods. He said he was stunned how the notion of objective truth was now up for debate and how politicians make up facts and stand by baseless claims even after they are proved wrong.

“We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more,” he said. “Look, let me say: Politicians have always lied, but it used to be that if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘Ah, man.’”

Unlike Trump, Obama has a refined sense of humor. When he was caught out in his epic "if you like your health plan, you can keep it" lie about the Affordable Care Act, for example,   his aides were able to importune the Obama-friendly media into treating it like a huge joke, with the uninsured and underinsured public as the giant punchline. And with stunning book, speech and Netflix deals worth least $100 million in his first post-presidential year alone, Obama has very much to be amused about when he's not giving his very serious (with many a knowing grin) coded speeches.

The Art of Coded Trump-Pissing, Complete With Urinal-Inspired Podium

Those smugly In The Know just can't resist juxtaposing Obama's legendary arcane brilliance with Trump's latest Tweet, in which he not only misspelled "colusion" but he so deranged that he thinks he is immune from the Trump Derangement Syndrome bug going around. He is so deranged that he is even, as Politico reports, "walking back his walk-back on Russia interference."   

President Donald Trump on Wednesday returned to a defiant posture, insisting his deeply controversial meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin will prove to be a great success “in the long run” and complaining that his critics are suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
One day after issuing a rare mea culpa — in which Trump claimed he meant to say there’s no reason to believe it “wouldn’t” have been Russia that meddled in the U.S. election — Trump appeared to be walking back his walk-back.

“While the NATO meeting in Brussels was an acknowledged triumph, with billions of dollars more being put up by member countries at a faster pace, the meeting with Russia may prove to be, in the long run, an even greater success. Many positive things will come out of that meeting” Trump tweeted.

Since I recently cancelled my ripoff cable TV service, I was late watching the TrumPutin Armageddon press conference that has Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and the New York Times writhing in such conniption fits of outrage. And you know what? I didn't find the con at all out of the ordinary. Leaders of state preen for the cameras and fawn all over one another - check. Corporate media ask questions about the Golden Showers Dossier and other click-baity things, and said leaders react with disdain. Check.

I was, like, oh man, where is the beef? Where's the charred Mar-a-Lago sirloin? Where's the Strogonoff with sour cream and mushrooms? It was painfully obvious that these media personalities were so pumped before the fact of The Summit From Hell that they had their disgusted talking points all lined up to recite for the cameras the minute that Trump and Putin left the stage

But lo and behold. It is now two whole days since the Summit, and the capitalistic world is still spinning.  Amazon Prime deliveries are still running right on schedule. The pay is still too damned low and the rent is still too damned high. The United States still has between 800 and a thousand military bases all around the world, and Russia still has a very scary grand total of Nine. NATO still exists. So does NAFTA, despite all of Trump's deranged trade war rhetoric.

You know what is really bothering me? I'm discovering that I am developing more sympathy and empathy for Trump voters (dare I say even for Trump himself?) than I am able to even remotely identify with the hysterical McCarthyite liberals of the Democratic Party, who seem to be yearning for World War III by actually attacking the Trump regime from the right. No wonder James Comey is urging everybody to vote Democratic. They've got Intelligence on their side, and I don't mean in a good way.  

Sad. And scary as hell.

New Litmus Test For Patriotism: Loyalty To the Police State

Treason is in the air. If you hate everything that Trump stands for, but still agree with him that #Russiagate is a fraud*, then it naturally follows that you are just as much a traitor as he allegedly is. 

Hysteria is in the air. Trump betrayed the United States by meeting with Vladimir Putin, who did attack us, is attacking us, and will continue to attack us. If you don't believe it, then you weren't paying attention when actor, Hillary Clinton supporter and #MeToo critic Morgan Freeman made the big announcement last year. He informed the nation that we are at war with Russia, and he urged Congress and the Intelligence agencies to act. And they listened. Because Morgan Freeman is so much better at playing President than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is such a lousy actor, in fact, that he  committed the cardinal sin of presidents. He actually criticized what is hideously euphemized by its media enablers as the Intelligence Community. He has made this critique before, of course,  mainly on Twitter, but on Monday he did it with Vlad the Impaler standing right there at his side. 

Elite heads proceeded to explode.

 James Clapper, the former NSA chief who lied to Congress about spying on everybody, and John Brennan, the former CIA chief who couldn't even get confirmed in Obama's first term because he helped implement Bush's torture program, are under attack by the Treasonous Traitorous Trump (see the New York Times's Charles Blow, who got the whole treasonous media ball rolling with his pre-TrumPutin Summit column.)

Since the punishment in the United State for high treason is death, look for the next phase in the media hysteria to be a debate over how to execute Donald Trump. The more passionate pundits will probably opt for bringing back the electric chair, while the liberal humanitarian interventionists will suggest nitrogen gas.

Of course I'm kidding. They don't really want to put Trump on trial for high treason. They don't want to gift him with such a ratings bonanza, especially since his martyrdom would include a stirring speech with the theme "I regret that I only have one life to give for My Company."

 They just want to weaken him a bit while spreading their scare stories and raising donor money for the mid-terms. They'd prefer he lose a second term to a centrist Democrat, aka moderate Republican, who will be loyal to the unaccountable rogue police state and spy agencies whose own main function is enabling corporate global plunder and protecting the oligarchs against the restive global rabble. The elite media-political complex wants somebody who will stay mum on all the meddling in foreign elections which the United States has done, is doing, and will continue to do until the American Empire collapses under the weight of its own hubris and greed.

Trump is acting too much like an outside critic of Empire and not enough like its discreet marketer. His idea of the presidency is being the star of his own reality show. To impress one another and portray themselves as righteous to the rest of the world, therefore, our elite Thought Leaders must pretend to despise him, despite the mammoth tax cuts he recently gifted to the wealthiest among them. They want the rest of the world to forget the record hundreds of billions of dollars they just gifted right back to Trump's own war machine by a very compliant and corrupt Congress.

This recent Russophobic hysteria is very much an internal war between the two political right wing factions of the ruling class: the Dollarcrats and the Reprivatans. Since the latter abhor regular people by rewarding the private interests of capital at every opportunity, they should just remove the "public" part of their moniker and exhibit a little honesty for a change.  Ditto for the Dems. The people, or Demos, have become too utterly subservient to the big money gilding the Big Tent into a virtual gated community to have their name co-opted any longer.

Totalitarianism is alive and well in the Land of the Free. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA have usurped what used to be the purview of the independent press and have become an all-powerful and highly weaponized fourth branch of government. 

Why else would a Congress pretending to despise Trump just confirm a known torturer, "Bloody Gina" Haspel, to head the CIA at Donald Trump's own specific and very personal behest? They love Trump, but they just can't admit it in public.

* Update. Never mind. Trump has officially caved. He is not willing to die, not even for his brand, his dynasty, or his company:

=======================================

I can barely stand any more to look at the propaganda tool of the "Deep State" which the New York Times has unabashedly (rather than heretofore stealthily) become - but I have nonetheless submitted a few more comments in recent days. Readers who express even the slightest skepticism in the comment threads about the inherent goodness and honesty of the Police/Surveillance State are becoming fewer and farther between. Propaganda absolutely does work, even upon the minds of otherwise very intelligent people.

Maureen Dowd, who used to write such fun and shallow pieces on Trump's antics, is now deadly serious about the Great Orange Evil and his puppet master Vlad. Ever the name-dropper, she shares that she and some other celebrity pundits once had dinner with Putin at the 21 Club and were so put off by his icy cold stare and his sanguine attitude toward a Russian submarine disaster that they lost their appetite for all that fine service and overpriced food. 

  So not to be outdone by the hysteria and overwrought angst of her corporate media cohort, Dowd has finally seen the careerist light. She bloviates:

Trump hugging Putin even as Putin stabs at our democracy is an incomprehensible mystery.

Flummoxed and craven Republicans scramble to go along with a president who has turned the traditional heroes and villains of the G.O.P. topsy-turvy, berating our European allies, NATO, the N.F.L., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and canoodling with the mendacious and scheming Russians.

On the eve of the Helsinki summit, which Trump has arranged as a very intime pas de deux, it is still befuddling and alarming to watch him kowtow to Putin.

When you are as disloyal to football as you are to the police state and the permanent war machine, any lingering doubts about your patriotism will get flushed right down the toilet. 

So how shocking that we all woke up on this Summit morning-after, still breathing and the sun still shining, and Amazon Prime still delivering. The nuclear war that the Neocons and the Liberal Interventionists are hankering for will have to wait for another time, especially since the one lone anti-nuke protester at the Summit was summarily ejected from the room by our very honorable patriots, aka police state strongmen.

My (not highly recommended) published response to Dowd:

Trump is a master of spectacle. Since the show's the thing, he doesn't care as long as he's still #1 at the box office and on Twitter. Pathological lying? Meh. As long as he gets the wall-to-wall coverage from our pathologically consolidated media, he's a winner in his own stunted little mind.

A gaslighter for the ages, he saturates the news cycle till it's as flat and stale as yesterday's pancake. Still, the manic over-coverage of the TrumPutin Apocalypse does serve to distract our attention from our own day-to-day problems, such as lack of a living wage, lack of savings, unaffordable rents, unaffordable health care, and so much student debt that people are actually dying before they're able to pay it all back.

So while we blame Russia for hacking our "democracy," the culprits much closer to home can remain free, screwing the body politic with the immunity and impunity to which they've become accustomed.

 Trump is the symptom, not the core problem. The scary thing is that unless our politics is replaced by some actual representative democracy, our future presidents will not only be like Trump, they'll be smarter than Trump.

Meanwhile, the Blimp above Parliament is sadly something we're not allowed to see above US seats of power, given that the moneyed interests running this show have barricaded themselves below their no-fly zones and behind their armed luxury fortresses.

So down with the Ugly, and up with the beauty of social democracy. Oh, and happy Bastille Day!

Now on to Paul Krugman, who thankfully didn't go full Russophobe himself because he already had a column in the can about the nasty Republicans - and again, it's only the nasty Republicans - waging a war on poor people. The newest gimmick in this endless war is declaring that since the war on poverty was such a success, who needs anti-poverty programs any more anyway?  Certainly not the rich. 

Sadly though, neither poor people nor Krugman's own narrow views on poverty are trending topics  on the Times today, thanks to the Bromance Armageddon Hysteria completely hogging the front page. So, fewer readers than normal weighed in with comments on something so mundane as massive record poverty in the richest country on earth. Outrage can only go so far on any given day and on any given topic, after all. 

Anyway, here's my own published submission: 

The "official" way the US defines poverty paints a falsely rosy picture. According to current standards, only individuals earning less than about $11,000 are deemed poor, while a household of four must fall below $24,000 to qualify for the honor. Thus, "only" about 12% of the US population are that badly off.

A more accurate metric is the Supplementary Poverty Measure, which takes into account the rising costs of rent, food, clothing and utilities. In actuality, at least a third of the population, or 110 million people, can be considered poor or nearly poor. They are:

51.9 percent of children under the age of 18
40.7 percent of adults between the ages of 18-64
42.5 percent of elderly
45 percent of women and girls
33.9 percent of Whites.
60.3 percent of Blacks.
65.1 percent of Latinos.
41.1 percent of Asians. 

 This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's Poor People's March on Washington, which he didn't live to lead. But now we have the Poor People's Campaign, which has been staging protests (with many arrests) all over the country as well as a major rally in D.C. a few weeks ago. There has been little to no corporate media coverage of this movement of. by and for the poor.

If you're wondering why that is, the operative word is "corporate."

Trump isn't the only corrupt entity looking a humanitarian crisis in the face and callously pretending it doesn't exist.

https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/demands/

Trump Is Perfectly Normal (*Updated)

Let me qualify that. Donald Trump is every bit as perfectly normal as the pathological soul-destroying capitalism which passes for democracy in our so-called free world.

That's why I find the overreaction (*see update below) to his gaslighting tour of Europe this week to be so amusing. Once again, our renegade president is single-handedly destroying all the advanced Norms of Civilization, which, legend has it, reached their finest hour in the McCarthyite post-World War II years of American Empire. The smell of neoliberal punditry in the morning, mourning Decline and Fall, is both bracing and nauseating.

The earthshaking news is that Trump insulted Theresa May in the pages of a British tabloid (yuck) when she'd so movingly laid out the red carpet for him at Winston Churchill's palatial estate, and he so awkwardly grabbed her hand like an adolescent swain wearing his first tux to his first prom. Fetch the smelling salts, pronto, to alleviate the horror of what the New York Times called this "remarkable breach of protocol!" 

You'd think he'd pulled a Poppy Bush and puked all over her bright red dress or something, when all he was doing was making the world safe for capitalism, but minus the normal feel-good concern-trolling mask of smarmy neoliberal spectacle.

But n-o-o-o-h. He had to insult America's NATO client states right to their faces, demanding that they pay their fair share for continued inclusion in the Military-Industrial Complex welfare state for the very, very rich and the very, very powerful. It's extortion, I tells ya! And the defense contractors of America are laughing all the way to the bank while their media lackeys on CNN and MSNBC are phonily tut-tutting Trump's etiquette breaches in exchange for their seven-figure salaries.

What's being billed as the ultimate coup de grace to the so-called World Order is yet to come, when Trump meets Putin in Finland. What will he "give away" to this vile dictator, who so rudely annexed Crimea and who is so abnormally meddling in Iran and Syria and Eastern Ukraine? If you listen to the servants of the Military-Industrial Complex tell it, tiny Estonia with its thousands of heavily armed US troops protecting it is becoming newly vulnerable to the ghost of Stalin himself, thanks to our Kremlin Stooge-in-Chief. 

 And most distasteful of all, the over-hyped "bromance" of Trump and Putin is having the awful side-effect of eliciting latent anti-gayness in all those lovable liberals for whom celebration of diversity substitutes for actual progressive policies. (see the homophobic... er, I mean iconoclastic, New York Times animated cartoon treatment of the imagined TrumPutin sodomy if you don't believe me.)

"Trump must not capitulate to Putin!" shrills former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice in the latest of her long series of fear-mongering moralistic op-eds selling the concept of Russophobia to explain away all of her own boss's decisions favoring Wall Street over Main Street.

( )... precisely because President Trump is anything but typical — including in that his campaign is under investigation for possibly coordinating with Russia to win the presidency and that he consistently lauds Vladimir V. Putin while denigrating our closest allies — his coming summit with Mr. Putin in Helsinki is a dangerous and counterproductive undertaking. The risks are many and the benefits, if any, are difficult to discern.

It's Donald Rumsfeld's damned known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns all over again. But in keeping with the prescribed Bromance narrative, Rice at least tries to keep it subliminally sexy, if not quite Kama Sutra-ish: 

In normal circumstances, the American president would press Russia on multiple fronts. He would refresh demands that Russia: withdraw from Ukraine and renounce its illegal claim to Crimea; cease backing the murderous Assad regime in Syria and work for a diplomatic outcome that protects the rights and security of all Syrians; stop supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan; halt provocative military actions on NATO’s periphery and harassment of United States personnel in Moscow; extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on nuclear weapons and come clean on its violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty; press the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, to denuclearize completely; cease destructive cyberoperations; and halt interference in America’s electoral processes and domestic politics, or face harsh additional sanctions. There is a rich and full agenda to pursue, if only we had a president who cared to advance American interests.

As a loyal member of the Duopoly, Rice doesn't even have to outline what "American interests" are, because she is not writing for a general audience. Through the ever-reliable Times, she is addressing her own class, aka the Establishment-in-Exile, aka the Flailing Brotherhood/Sisterhood of the Travailing Pants (as in very heavy breathing, not couture) Still, I do have to admit that her arcane prescription for "split-yielding" at the Bromance summit does have some teasing erotic potential.

Meanwhile, where would aphrodisiacal Resistance punditry be without Paul Krugman?

According to his latest column, the United States leadership spectacle was absolutely chock-full of considerate lovers and moral heroes before Trump came along to destroy the myth of great American male-centered greatness. Ignoring Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and all the CIA coups in between, Krugman defends the Pax America myth with all the passionate punditry he can muster:  

The institutions Trump is trying to destroy were all created under U.S. leadership in the aftermath of World War II. Those were years of epic statesmanship — the years of the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, in which America showed its true greatness. For having won the war, we chose not to behave like a conqueror, but instead to build the foundations of lasting peace....

 And what Trump is trying to do is undermine that system, making bullying great again.

My published response:

  Trump is the personification of capitalism run amok.

He fires at whim. He's immune to public shaming.. His pursuit of wealth and power is relentless. He cares for nobody but his immediate gene pool, just as the capitalistic system itself has no regard for anyone other than owners and the investor class.

He's a very stable crook and a master gaslighter. Taunting his prey one minute and fawning over them the next is how he keeps them off-balance before either lunging for the kill or leaving it for later.

This is exactly how bosses, from CEOs all the way down to middle managers, instill fear into workers every day of their precarious lives.

Thanks to both our major parties moving further right in the past 50 years, there are now few legal restraints against either public and private tyrannical behavior or graft. 

 It's no surprise that Trump confuses "the country" with "my company." It's no surprise that the longstanding, pre-existing world order of profits over people has produced such a glut of reactionary global leaders like him.

It's no use griping that Trump is destroying "norms," or pretending that everything was cool before he came along. More than a dozen wars, with millions killed and trillions of dollars wasted since World War II, coupled with the constant assaults on our social programs, have created a virtual Petri dish for all kinds of Trumps to grow and thrive like Blobs.

We need some social democracy, and we need it right now.

A new New Deal or bust.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*Update 7/14: I wrote the above before Friday's indictment of the dozen Russian hackers, announced just as Trump was breaching all kinds of protocol with the queen, not least of which was failing to bow and walking ahead of her while reviewing the guards with the beaver hats.

It's not surprising that #Resistance, Inc. is treating the indictment as a conviction instead of the standard accusation requiring presentation of evidence in a court of law. That is because the accused will never show up for a trial. That is because the Justice Department and Robert Mueller do not expect there ever to actually be a trial, other than the kind performed in the media. Otherwise, they would have indicted Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who, unlike the Russians, is very vulnerable to extradition. 

This is so obviously a political wrench in the works of the Trump-Putin summit it doesn't even bear further analysis. The New York Times is even editorializing on its news homepage that Trump ordered Russia to "hack" the computers of Hillary and the Democrats, and that Russian intelligence became Trumpist lemmings in the space of a New York minute.

It seems to me that if there were true treason at work here, Trump would have been gone by now.

All Mueller would probably have to do to get Trump on felonies is produce his tax returns and bank records to prove any number of sordid financial (not treasonous)  ties to Russian oligarchs. I suspect the problem with that gambit is that it would expose too many other valuable Establishment figures and political donors to be worth the risk. John Podesta's lobbyist brother has already been tainted from the Manafort indictment, after all, so I'm sure there are more where he came from. Trump has gotten where he is today by importuning all kinds of politicians from both establishment parties, along with their bankers, factotums and relatives. 

I can't help wondering whether Hillary Clinton will use the indictments as vindication, proof that Donald Trump is a Russian stooge who stole the election and therefore a rationale for a third time's-the-charm rerun. My suspicions are raised not by her relentless fundraising emails on behalf of various progressive veal pens, but by the planted news stories last week of her and Bill flying coach on not one, but two, occasions. She is telegraphing her born-again down-home populism, folks! 

Happy Bastille Day.

The Milk of Human Cruelty

If you thought the kidnapping and imprisonment of 3,000 children by ICE thugs was cruel and inhuman, then get a load of this: 

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

It gets worse. As the New York Times reports, not only did the American delegation refuse to introduce the resolution, it threatened every single country intending to support it with economic sanctions for failure to privilege the profits of infant formula manufacturers over the health of babies.

When the unnamed US delegates' attempt to destroy the resolution (through removal of language touting the benefits of breastfeeding over bottle feeding) failed, they got downright nasty. They effectively tried turning nursing mothers and babies into enemy combatants in Donald Trump's global trade war.

Ecuador, which originally had been slated to introduce the resolution, was the first to get the Tony Soprano treatment. Not only would it lose money, it would lose military assistance from the United States. It was an offer that Ecuador couldn't refuse, and so it immediately caved. Other nations, mostly in Africa, which hosts at least one American military base in each country of that continent, also refused to go against the world's sole remaining Superpower. Ditto for many countries in Latin America. They fell like dominoes under the onslaught of the Orange Scare.

But despair not! Because this story of attempted blackmail and extortion does have a somewhat happy ending:

 In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

 "We’re not trying to be a hero here, but we feel that it is wrong when a big country tries to push around some very small countries, especially on an issue that is really important for the rest of the world,” said the delegate, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said the United States did not directly pressure Moscow to back away from the measure. Nevertheless, the American delegation sought to wear down the other participants through procedural maneuvers in a series of meetings that stretched on for two days, an unexpectedly long period.

In the end, the United States was largely unsuccessful. The final resolution preserved most of the original wording, though American negotiators did get language removed that called on the W.H.O. to provide technical support to member states seeking to halt “inappropriate promotion of foods for infants and young children.”

The United States also insisted that the words “evidence-based” accompany references to long-established initiatives that promote breast-feeding, which critics described as a ploy that could be used to undermine programs that provide parents with feeding advice and support.

Perhaps the Russians stepping in and saving the day is why there hasn't been very much news coverage and media-manufactured outrage about the Trump administration's latest attempt to cull the world of disposable people.

 The outrage is definitely justified. Because by proactively performing the extermination ritual early, as soon after birth as is inhumanely possible, the Trump regime wants nothing less than to prevent kids from ever having the health and the strength to toddle across our precious borders.

So the positive interference by Russia simply does not compute in the corporate media hive-mind. Election-meddling and democracy-destroying and (alleged) Novichok-poisoning Russians acting in a humane manner? If it's not a fluke, then they have to have ulterior motives. They just have to. 

 Besides, the Democrats are way too busy exposing the "right to life" hypocrisy of the Republicans as Trump announces his next anti-abortion Supreme Court justice to fret overly much about global injustices. Even the plight of the imprisoned 3,000 Central American children is beginning to fade from the Official Narrative thanks to the latest conservative judge becoming the greatest threat to democracy this country has ever seen.

Even if he is ever directly confronted over his deranged horror of breast milk, Donald Trump will no doubt do what Donald Trump does best: fly in the face of all fact, and declare the Resolution passage to be a win.* Not only is it a victory against "evidence-based" science which proves that breast milk is rich in antibodies, it is a victory for infant formula manufacturers in particular and the junk food advertising industry in general. Thanks to pressure from Trump, countries which want to warn their citizens about the health dangers of foods laden down with salt and sugar will no longer get technical support and financial resources from W.H.O.

Donald Trump is trying to make the world safe for Nestle, Similac... and Doritos. And, it should be fairly obvious, he wants to quit W.H.O. itself, if not utterly destroy it.

Nestle will continue marketing its powdered infant formula in countries with untreated drinking water. It will continue extracting water for its bottling empire even from areas in the United States which are going dry from climate change. And in perhaps the cruelest extraction of all, it will continue removing potable groundwater from the lead-poisoned Flint, Michigan area. And government officials will continue refusing to supply clean bottled water to the lead-poisoned residents of Flint.

For its own Make America Great Again part, the Trump administration unabashedly would rather see an estimated 800,000 children die every year around the world for lack of breastfeeding than see one dollar lost to unfettered capital. They'd rather that the global corporations already gifted with recent tax cuts to such an obscene state of record corpulence also get to suck up the estimated $300 billion saved in annual health costs through the breastfeeding of babies.

The Trump Collective's war against infant nutrition gives a whole new grotesque meaning to the balloon facsimile of a Baby Trump which is set to float above London this week in protest of his visit. The Baby-in-Chief literally wants to snatch food from the mouths of babes.

Not that the liberal #Resistance isn't also complicit in the relentless "herd-culling" all over the world. The poor are scapegoated for being too many and therefore responsible for their own plights. Overpopulation is regularly tsk-tsked by elites as being the main threat to our endangered planet, while the plunder and predation and pollution by oil companies and other extractors (including the Pentagon) are given a relative free pass. 

The Trump administration is only the latest and clankiest link in the long chain of capitalistic cruelty.

Philosopher Etienne Balibar observed that this institutional cruelty seeks both to "eliminate human beings, and to remove the humanity from human beings."

This dual cruelty is now right out in the open under Trump.

The first type, which Balibar calls ultraobjective cruelty, treats people as things or useless remnants. The second - ultrasubjective cruelty - treats people as evil incarnate, devils or dangerous animals which threaten us and must be eliminated at all costs. The intended targets are simultaneously portrayed as both subhuman and superhuman.

 Racism is at the root of this cruelty, Balibar asserted, and it, too, is manifested in two main ways. First there are the outright murders (an estimated three per day in the US by domestic law enforcement) and the maltreatment of immigrants by the unaccountable ICE police force. Second are the usually invisible social and economic exclusions meted out on a daily basis to groups which have been designated as superfluous: the poor, the young, the old, the darker-hued, the disabled, the sick.

So it's absolutely a straight line from Trump's exclusion of black and brown families from his father's New York City rental empire to his current exclusions, both actual and attempted, of black and brown people from what he's called "shit hole countries". Capitalism under Trump is even trying to exclude people from something so basically life-protecting and universal as human breast milk. 

"So cruelty is not just one form of extreme violence," Balibar said. "It is violence that can oscillate in unmediated fashion, between ultra-naturalistic, anonymous forms and an impulse toward suicide and criminal compulsion."

Trump has fetishized hate and fear to such an extent that he doesn't even seem to care if he destroys whole countries, including his own, in the process. He would rather America died than have it contaminated by nonexistent bogeymen. And with an approval rating hovering around the 40-45% range, he is definitely not alone in his thought processes.

Tellingly, none of the American thugs and blackmailers present at the United Nations conference has been identified by name. The delegates and lobbyists prefer to remain anonymous for the protection of their own cruelty and violence. And the participants who recounted the threats and blackmail to the media also prefer to remain anonymous for fear of further retaliation from the Trump administration.

As the New York Times reported, 

Although lobbyists from the baby food industry attended the meetings in Geneva, health advocates said they saw no direct evidence that they played a role in Washington’s strong-arm tactics. The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Over all, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

* Trump considered the Times revelations about his reps' shilling for powdered formula moguls at the UN health meeting to be confrontational enough to merit his tweeting displeasure:

The failing NY Times Fake News story today about breast feeding must be called out. The U.S. strongly supports breast feeding but we don’t believe women should be denied access to formula. Many women need this option because of malnutrition and poverty.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

What an ignorant doofus. Breastfeeding ability does not correlate with poverty, nor do women need "access to formula" because of alleged malnutrition, although an adequate diet certainly helps. If they can't afford food, how can they possibly afford pricey formula? I suppose what Trump and his oligarchic buddies are aiming for are strong-arm deals with despots in poor countries. It would go something like this: you guys pass a law requiring women to bottle-feed, and we'll help you loot your treasury in exchange for whole shiploads full of the powder substitute we can't sell enough of in the United States. The only women still having babies are affluent enough and educated enough to reject the powdery crap in favor of the healthy natural stuff their own bodies produce.

So since the oligarchs and the media they own can't fool all the people all of the time, they'll settle for fooling some of the most vulnerable and poorest people on earth. Trump's whole career has been based on the marketing of lies for his own gain, so why wouldn't he lie about breastfeeding too?

Pssst... and he really doesn't like women very much. The sight of a breastfeeding mother probably makes him feel very jealous as well as insecure. Leave to Trump to broadcast his misogyny by making women feel insecure and doubtful about their unique ability to nurture another human being.

The brilliant people who'll be flying the Trump baby replica over London this week couldn't have chosen a better time for their stunt. 

Paine v. Establishment Pains-In-Asses

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could just as well have been writing about why the liberal hand-wringing "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual. What is really needed is not just a so-called Blue Wave in the congressional midterms, but a global revolution against the whole rotten global tyranny of finance capitalism. No matter that Paine was talking about the revolution against Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than true corrupt despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

The "revolution" and freedom we're supposedly celebrating today was actually one group of rich men - the "Founders" - disentangling themselves from another group of rich men in Great Britain. Their aversion to taxes and their embrace of the institution of slavery, which was already well on the way to abolition in the British Empire, was at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would not be granted to enslaved people in America for nearly a century. And it was only granted on paper, and only for a little while, until the Jim Crow laws superseded both the "aspirational" Declaration and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The pursuit of happiness for the owners of capital has always been contingent upon their freedom to oppress, enslave and even kill those they consider disposable. America has been at war, at one place or another, for a grand grotesque total of 223 years since the Declaration was signed in 1776. So Paine was right when he wrote:

"To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to nations, would be to take from such government the most lucrative of its branches."

and

"Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government."

All courts and courtiers are alike. They form a common policy (or "narrative") which is separate and detached from the rights of people and nations. It's commonly known in the US as the Duopoly, or the good cop/bad cop two party system, or perhaps even more accurately, the Duplicity.

 Paine wrote, 

 "And while they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution....They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

While we don't have the hereditary succession of a monarchy, we do have an aristocracy. We do have both political and media dynasties, which have more and more consolidated power unto themselves. 

And it's no accident that this American aristocracy, besides its orgy of violent wars both at home and abroad,  has waged a virtual war on public education in recent years. And that is because, as Paine wrote: "The more ignorant the country, the better it is fitted for this species of Government" (of hereditary succession, or what's today euphemized as the "meritocracy" of the elites).

As we celebrate 241 years of freedom, The Duopoly is currently in a virtual storm of overreaction to the "shock" primary election of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated one of the most powerful congressional Democrats in the country. But unlike the establishment's open disdain for Bernie Sanders during his own primary battle against Hillary Clinton in 2016, they're treating Ocasio-Cortez like a comparative rock star. She's young, she's charismatic, she's attractive, and she's Latina. So the pundits are sadly unable to fall back on attacking her as too old, too white, too crabby and too sexist as they did Bernie, despite the fact that her platform is nearly identical to his. They therefore will try to celebritize her into watered-down ineffectiveness. Her "story" will outweigh the policy proposals they find so dangerous to their self-interest.

They're obviously trying to co-opt and monetize her for their own ends, inviting her on all the political talk shows and plastering her picture all over the front pages. It seems to me that they're trying to make the best of a bad (for them) situation, in hopes that her popularity will spur more disaffected young people to pull the lever for Democrats across the board in the November midterms. Once she arrives in Washington, they'll try to relegate her to the sidelines. They will definitely order her, as they do with all her fellow reps, to immediately hit the phones and fund-raise for the Party for at least half of every working day.

A prime example of this attempted co-option is a Tweet sent out Tuesday by one of Barack Obama's closest and most trusted advisers, tamping down the notion that Ocasio-Cortez is even a lefty:

  Valerie Jarrett‏Verified account @ValerieJarrett

Valerie Jarrett Retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Love seeing @Ocasio2018 define herself rather than letting others do it for her. Seems like the right North Star to me

Valerie Jarrett added,

Alexandria Ocasio-CortezVerified account @Ocasio2018

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans.…

8:58 AM - 3 Jul 2018

1,527 Retweets
14,030 Likes

 If you need more proof of the game that is afoot, the corporate media's chief liberal Bernie Bro-basher, Paul Krugman, posted a column on Tuesday very tepidly reversing his negative position on Medicare For All and limply applauding Ocasio-Cortez, insofar that it's unfair to compare her to a Tea Partier as some of those other centrist pundits are so unfairly doing. She is a "reasonable Democratic radical" as opposed to an insanely independent radical like Bernie. In other words, Krugman is falling in Obama/Clinton/Party line, and patting her on the head. He helpfully links to her campaign website, which to his passive-aggressive satisfaction entirely omits any wonkish details of her platform. And then he sneakily equates Medicare for All with the bait-and-switch "public option" being proffered by centrist Democrats posing as progressives for purposes of re-election.

So, about Ocasio-Cortez’s positions: Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare – basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.

Krugman is disingenuous, if not downright duplicitous. My published response:

 Well, this piece from Paul Krugman is certainly an improvement over his nay-saying re Medicare For All around the time that Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton such a run for her Wall Street money.

Even so, there's still that lingering "but where are the details?" little dribble of cold water implicit in his defense of this good and sane and non-radical proposal. So I would suggest that anyone interested in the details visit the Physicians for a National Health Plan website for links to both Medicare For All bills now in Congress, as well as a wealth of other helpful info:

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources

For those who still insist we must retain the austerian "pay-go" method of financing things that will help make people's lives better, Modern Monetary Theory is finally entering the mainstream. More here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern-monetar...

The politicians who have no qualms about mindlessly appropriating more than a trillion dollars to our endless war machine and surveillance state should absolutely be called out on their hypocrisy every time they insist that there is just no money for Single Payer or a federal jobs guarantee, or that we have to rob from the poor to pay for the poor. The politicians who spout such nonsense are in thrall to the big money interests running this show. It's high time that the tycoons of unfettered capitalism get booed off their self-serving propaganda stage.

Chuck Schumer, Comedian

My senator, Chuck Schumer of New York, wants me to call my senator to express my displeasure with Trump's Supreme Court nominee.

The rights of organized labor depend upon my phone call, but even more, the fates of Roe v Wade and the "Affordable" Care Act depend upon me and a couple hundred million other Americans picking up the phone and imagining, if only for one minute, that we still live in a democracy and that our voices count.

Chuck. for some reason probably related to sheer longevity, (he's never had any career but that of a Democratic machine politician) is now the senate minority leader. Proving that longevity doesn't equal strength, he has written an op-ed in the New York Times as much as admitting that his party has thrown in the towel over the Supreme Court. The only pathetic gambit he has left is gaslighting and guilt-tripping liberals:

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has created the most important vacancy on the Supreme Court in our lifetimes. Whoever fills Justice Kennedy’s seat will join an evenly divided court with the ability to affect the laws of the United States and the rights of its citizens for generations. Enormously important issues hang in the balance: the right of workers to organize, the pernicious influence of dark money in politics, the right of Americans to marry who they love, the right to vote.

Perhaps the most consequential issues at stake in this Supreme Court vacancy are affordable health care and a woman’s freedom to make the most sensitive medical decisions about her body. The views of President Trump’s next court nominee on these issues could well determine whether the Senate approves or rejects them.

As a big recipient of Wall Street largesse himself, Schumer can well afford to ignore the fact that the very unlamentable Kennedy is the Supreme who actually wrote the odious majority opinion in the Citizens United case, glibly granting wealth the same rights to speech as flesh and blood humans. And the "affordability" of the political football known as Obamacare is very much up for debate. If anything, the moniker is downright cynical, given that much of this non-surance is too unaffordable to use for way too many people.

 Deep-pocketed conservative special interests are chomping at the bit to take down the health care law. They will sponsor any conceivable litigation against the Affordable Care Act with the potential to reach the Supreme Court. A reliably conservative majority makes it much more likely that one of those attempts succeeds.

Of course, President Trump’s nominee will not admit that they would vote to overturn a woman’s freedom to choose or gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Just like Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Roberts and Samuel Alito before him, the next nominee will obfuscate and hide behind the shopworn judicial dodge, “I will follow settled law.” (But as we have seen in many decisions, including the Janus ruling this past week, settled law is only settled until a majority of the Supreme Court decides it is not.)

Chuck doesn't mention that enough of his Democratic colleagues, not least of whom was then-Senator Joe Biden and his defense of  then-nominee Clarence Thomas over sexual harassment claims, have regularly, albeit "reluctantly" voted to confirm these conservative nominees. They will likely do so again - reluctantly and with the deepest of reservations, of course. Because in the end, the interests of their most important constituents - the very wealthy donor class - are what matter. 

Now, get yourselves ready for Schumer's inevitable dog whistle to his most important constituents:

For Americans who value our rights and the progress our country has made over the last decade, it is no longer enough to wait until November to safeguard the rights and opportunities we enjoy today. The Republican majority in the Senate is razor-thin. One or two votes in the Senate will make the difference between the confirmation and rejection of an ideological nominee. If the Senate rejects an extreme candidate, it would present President Trump the opportunity to instead select a moderate, consensus nominee.

Who has made "progress" over the past decade other than the rich? What opportunities and rights are regular people supposedly enjoying right this very minute? Schumer pretends to care about the evisceration by the court of  collective bargaining rights, but I don't ever remember him championing the rights of striking teachers. The big giveaway in that paragraph is that the feckless Schumer will gladly confirm a more "moderate" candidate of Trump's choosing, someone who will defend private insurance predators and abortion rights but will not necessarily defend the rights of poor and working people to live. He will happily confirm a centrist judge who will allow the wealthy few to continue enjoying their inordinate rights, privileges and progress. Chuck ignores the real extremism: that deaths from despair in the US are increasing solely because of corporate-friendly policies, and that the CEO to worker pay ratio is more than 300 to 1.

To that end, the Senator from Wall Street gives Times readers with phones and email accounts his preferred talking points:

  If you do not want a Supreme Court Justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade and undo the Affordable Care Act, tell your senators they should not vote for a candidate from Mr. Trump’s preordained list. Democrat, Republican, independent, liberal or conservative — we should all want a more representative process for choosing the next Supreme Court justice.

If you want the rights of the poor and working classes to be protected more than you want the Great Insurance Protection Racket Act protected, then don't bother.

My published response to Chuck has been disappeared from the thread twice so far. So while it's still standing, for the time being, here goes:

Well, Mr. Schumer, since you are my senator, there is no need to call you with regard to Trump's Supreme Court pick. We know where you stand on Roe v Wade and the ACA... although I do seem to remember that you threw health care under the bus in 2014.

It was a mistake, you said, to pass it in 2010 when most Americans were struggling to survive in the wake of the Wall Street collapse. You remember - that time Main Street got screwed so that the Big Finance could get even richer off the backs of the rest of us?

Fast forward to 2016 and the merely technical election of Trump - a man who rose to power amid the austerity politics of 1970s New York, with the full complicity of the Democratic machine. And now fast forward to 2018 and you have the gall to write that "we" have to stop Trump - because the New York machine never stopped him when they still had the chance, all those many decades ago. Instead, the state and city gifted him with untold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tax breaks and incentives. That's when the Dems themselves began turning right and favoring the interests of the big banks and business leaders over the rights of the working class. Hospitals and fire stations were closed so that Trump could prosper.

This goes so far, far beyond the appointment any one reactionary unelected Supreme Court justice. But nice self-serving try, Mr. Schumer, pretending that our phone calls to a corrupt Senate have more clout than the corporations running the place.

For the lowdown on how Trump rose to power and fortune in the 1970s with the help of the Democratic machine and the rightward lurch of liberals into the arms of finance capital, and the invention of manufactured crises and ensuing austerity policies nationwide, I highly recommend reading "Fear City" by historian Kim Phillips-Fein.

As noted in the New York Times review of the volume, published last year:

Of course, the definition of liberalism was shifting too. The postwar boom that had enabled the ambitious Great Society programs of the 1960s was over, and so too was the full-throated commitment to progressive bulwarks and principles, to labor unions and an activist government. Many of the men — and they were almost all men — who emerged from the private sector to help steer New York out of the fiscal crisis were Democrats, but not of the Beame vintage. A case in point is the financier often credited with rescuing the city, Felix Rohatyn, the master fixer who helped bring together the banks and unions, while persuading the city’s leaders to reduce their spending and rethink their budgets. Here he is portrayed in a less flattering light, not as ill-intentioned but as the most prominent member of a group of unelected financial executives making critical decisions about the future of the city without any input from or accountability to its citizens.

(Chuck was getting elected to the New York State Assembly at around the same time Donald Trump was making his moves on distressed properties and people in the Big Apple. They've always had a "pragmatic," transactional, deal-making kind of relationship. As Nancy Pelosi once put it, these two guys can speak Noo Yawk to each other. Chuck even thinks that Trump "likes" him despite everything. And that is most likely true, insofar as someone as paranoid and dogmatic as Trump can actually like anybody).

So, as Kim Phillips-Fein recounts in her excellent history, Trump had hired Democratic Governor Hugh Carey's chief fundraiser to lobby New York City's unelected, banker-heavy Urban Development Corporation for the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel. To date, Trump has pocketed well over $350 million in public money from that deal alone. Despite, or really because of, his sleazy bombast, Trump was a valuable commodity to the liberal politicians (in thrall and in onerous debt to the big banks) in office at the time. He continued to be a valuable commodity, because his success encouraged other sharks and investors to come buy and sell property in the near-bankrupt city, thus appeasing the bond-holders and possibly even averting a worldwide bond market collapse, due to the fear and jitters of the investor class. Trump's addiction to publicity and risk was instrumental in making New York a "home away from home" for the global elite. He was a key player in the Democratic Party's rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society, and the transformation of the metropolis into the wealth disparity capital of the US, if not the entire world, that it now is.

In light of the shock victory of democratic socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of The Bronx in last week's Democratic primary, I found this passage in Phillips-Fein's book to be particularly and deliciously ironic:

 Donald Trump and the developers who exploited the city's desperation to build their towers had little interest in the rest of New York. The fact that millions of dollars went to subsidize their building projects instead of restoring public services or promoting recovery in the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the city never registered as a moral concern. Quite the contrary: the mood among the city's new elite in the wake of the fiscal crisis was confident and upbeat.... As the seventies drew to a close, Trump commented to the newspapers that he believed things were looking up for the city -- it was clearly on the road to recovery. 'I'm not talking about the South Bronx,' he elaborated, perhaps unnecessarily. 'I don't know anything about the South Bronx." (quoted in Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump Cuts the Cards, Village Voice, 1/22/79.

Suddenly The Bronx is right back on the map. The corporate Democratic machine is running out of gas, grinding its old rusty gears in feeble protest. And the only voice the Grand Old Guignol Party has left is Donald Trump's own tooting, off-key clown horn. The concept of a "moral economy" is again on the ascendant due to the blatant immorality at the core of the class war.

Maybe, just maybe, things are turning around.  They are revolving. And I don't mean the revolving doors between Washington and corporate America, either. I mean revolving as in revolution.

Never has the directive to "call Congress and make your voice heard" sounded more ridiculous, especially coming from the minority leader of the Senate. I gave up calling him when he answered my questions and views about Single Payer health coverage with the same boilerplate email, saying he is really liberally open to having conversations and debates about how to make the "Affordable" Care Act better.

This is a guy who once called for Homeland Security TSA agents to man all the New York subway platforms and do Rapiscan probes and body searches on terroristic commuters as well as establishing "no ride" lists for trains.

People are out on the streets, displaying some actual solidarity with immigrant and refugee families. The struggle might not be ultimately successful, but at least it's a struggle, after a whole stultifying decade of neoliberal Obamism/Clintonism.