The Other F Word

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we are all f***ed. The question is whether Trump-style fascism is shafting us, or whether neoliberal capitalism is doing the job.

As Henry Giroux posits, it's both: a deadly hybrid combined into a humanity-destroying racist, sexist, xenophobic greedzilla of doom. Or, as Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford views it, it's the modern Democratic and Republican parties acting as two bickering factions of the same fascist regime.

I've been reading a lot of books about fascism lately in preparation for a blog post, only to discover that I've amassed enough material to write another book about it. And I'm still not done. And I still have more questions than I do answers.

What I can say is that there are two main categories of books about fascism. The first set includes scholarly volumes of history, psychology, sociology and politics, written long before Donald Trump ever arrived on the scene.  The second set belongs to the new genre of alarm-bell fascism, which either is arriving fully formed on our shores in the person of Donald Trump all dressed up as Hitler, or is still only kind of scary-ghosty, with Donald Trump secretly wearing his swastika armband high enough on his fleshy arm so nobody can see it, even when he's playing golf.

The best example of this genre has been on the bestseller list for months. It's called Fascism: A Warning" and its author is Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. You might remember her as the Clinton official who told CBS that the price of half a million Iraqi children dying of starvation as a result of US economic sanctions had been "worth it." She doesn't delve, in her version of fascism, into one of its main tenets being expansion of the nation into the far corners of the earth. But that's not her point. Her point is falsely equating Donald Trump-style fascism with Hugo Chavez-style socialism and trumpeting the need to vote Clintonite Democrats back into power before Russia takes over and the New World Order goes kaput. You see, "liberal interventionism" killing is not the same thing as conservative imperialistic killing.

And now that the midterm elections are nearly upon us, the liberal media itself is getting into the Albrightean act with a vengeance. If you won't accept that we're either living under Nazi rule or about to, you're part of the problem. Be very, very afraid. And get out there and vote as though your lives depended on it!

The Huffington Post got into the act over the weekend with a banner scare headline announcing that a white supremacist hate group had invaded New York City. This was slightly misleading, given that at most, about a dozen alt-right "Proud Boys" beat up an antifa protester outside a Republican club which had just featured an alt-right dude as its featured speaker. The HuffPo has since removed the scare-mongering headline of its piece.

Another example of the genre is a video editorial posted in the New York Times on Monday. The star of this show, which is preceded by a Democratic Party campaign ad, is a Yale philosopher and fascism expert named Jason Stanley. He provides us with plenty of easy evidence showing that Donald Trump talks the fascist talk and walks the fascist walk: his ultra-nationalistic, racist and xenophobic rhetoric combined with the relentless repetition of Goebbels-style lies and the well-televised Nuremberg-style campaign rallies for his hordes of besotted fans and greedy cable infotainment outlets. After the good professor explains to us that too often, politicians resort to calling one another fascists as an all-purpose insult, his talk becomes replete with graphics showing Trump  dressed up as Hitler, and lots of video of the real Hitler, and even a clip of a Madison Square Garden Bund rally from the 30s.  

After spending his allotted few minutes explaining why fascism is so awful, and that we should be very afraid of both it and Trump, he runs out of time before he can explain just how this ideology can gain national power in the first place, and what we can do about it other than simply running out to vote for the allegedly lesser evil Democrats.

My published comment:

While Jason Stanley correctly describes the techniques of fascists like Trump, he ignores the situations which permit fascism to rear its ugly head in the first place.

The previous major outbreak occurred in the aftermath of World War I and the worldwide depression. Combined with pre-existing anti-Semitism and the weakness and corruption of liberal democracy and the mutual hatred of both the right-wingers and the "liberals" for communists, it allowed Hitler to step into the vacuum.

Despite the Depression, fascism didn't similarly catch on in the US as a mass movement because first, the war had been fought across the ocean, and second, FDR enacted the New Deal under pressure from a then-vibrant left wing, aka socialists. The Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden soon became a thing of the past.

Fast forward to Trump. Decades of neoliberal capitalism have created severe wealth inequality, with most Americans not even having $200 saved up for a household emergency. Only the poor and working class fight in our endless wars. Politicians from both parties are beholden to the rich.

So yes, we should be very, very afraid of fascism while acknowledging that a form of it -- corporatism - has been suborning democracy for quite some time now. We cannot expect to defeat Trump and the GOP without transforming our government into a force for good for all the people, not just for a handful of oligarchs.

Otherwise, the next fascist leader will make Trump look downright benign.

So far, anyway, Donald Trump is simply an aspiring fascist leader, spending most of his time tweeting and flailing about in the Oval Office as the derogatory leaks from his staff are nearly a daily occurrence. At best, he is only a semi-successful fascist leader. He commands no mass movement. He has not shut down any TV stations or newspapers nor thrown any reporters in prison, despite his dangerous rhetoric about them being enemies of the people. That big military parade in his honor has been called off indefinitely.

But he's getting there. His imprisonment of migrant children in holding pens and tent cities is a step up from the Obama administration's draconian deportation crusade and  "family detention centers," which at least kept mothers and kids together and therefore were not subject to widespread criticism by liberal pundits and the Democratic Party faithful. The fascistic tendencies of Obama and his predecessors were of the sort called "friendly fascism" or what the late Sheldon Wolin termed "inverted totalitarianism." 

And of course, if you are a black person in America, you have indeed been living under de facto fascism for probably your whole life. Three out of every 10 black males are imprisoned at least once during their lifetimes. Three people, mostly black, are killed by law enforcement in the United States every single day. Michael Bloomberg, the "moderate" mayor of New York City who is now contemplating a challenge to Trump on the Democratic ticket, instituted a policy of Stop and Frisk directed against all black men. This thuggish practice finally got overturned by the courts, just as many of Donald Trump's own anti-immigrant and racist policies have been.

And, since under the Obama administration the longstanding law known as Posse Comitatus was overturned by Executive Order, we've all been living under technically fascistic authoritarian rule for the past eight or nine years, whether we've been blissfully unaware of it or not. If enough of us ever take to the streets in unsanctioned mass protests, the military now has the authority to turn against its own rebellious citizens by whatever means necessary. It is even deemed technically legal for our government to assassinate us by remote-control predator drone, should the rights of the ruling class to ownership and control of everything become seriously threatened.

So insofar as Trump is a fascist, he inherited the fascism, and has remade it into his own brand.

Meanwhile, the term "fascism" is so hard to define precisely because it is inherently self-contradictory. It is both radical and reactionary. It picks and chooses among several "isms," discarding its beliefs and policies willy-nilly, and does the same thing with its leaders and supporters, as the need arises. Its main requirement is a constant state of crisis, whether real or manufactured, alongside maintaining a permanent mythic core leading to a new revolution growing out of the old order. (Make America Great Again. Drain the Swamp.)

As Roger Griffin writes in "The Nature of Fascism," 

On susceptible people, it has the almost magical power to transmute black despair  into manic optimism and thus enable a party that promotes this vision to win a substantial mass following. It promises to replace gerontocracy, mediocrity and national weakness with youth, heroism and national greatness and put into government outstanding personalities instead of non-entities. If the times are ripe, the vague or contradictory implications of the policies proposed to realize such nebulous goals do not diminish their attraction because it is precisely that mythic power that matters, not their feasibility or human implications.

Hope and change, We are the ones we've been waiting for. Yes, we can! America is already great, because America is good. We are the One Indispensable Nation. 

(Griffin doesn't consider Trump to be a bona fide fascist, by the way, simply because he has not met the strict requirement of ordering or even advocating for the overthrow of democratic institutions. But does he really have to, when staffing them with incompetents and corporate infiltrators does the job just as well, if not better?)

Arthur Koestler writes in The Ghost in the Machine that our human brains have not kept pace with science and technology, which have at least partly replaced religious belief in modern civilization. Thus has come the rise of ultranationalism, because people still desperately need something to believe in, especially when economic times are hard.

In the case of fascism, its core myth of the regenerated national community led by a revolutionary elite calls a priori for an act of identification, a neurologically based mischanneling of the human drive for self-transcendance. This engenders a paranoid, dualistic mindset conducive to boundless idealism and fanatical devotion toward the embyonic new nation, coupled with ruthless violence directed at its alleged enemies.

In Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm noted of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes that although many people were able to take advantage of the freedom engendered by industrial progress, others felt increasingly unmoored and thus turned to authoritarian leadership to avoid an all-pervasive loneliness.

For the past half-century, we have been living under the regime of neoliberalism, or corporatism, where all lives are defined or dominated by market forces, and in which we are judged primarily on our ability to earn and consume. When people lose these abilities, as they have in vast numbers since the 2008 financial collapse and the transfer of 94% of all that "lost" household wealth to the moneyed elite, they become depressed, confused, and insecure. Millions of them have turned to Donald Trump, who alone among the other presidential candidates at least addressed the unfairness and corruption, albeit only for his own nefarious and self-interested purposes.

Roger Griffin lists four pre-conditions for the rise of fascistic leadership:

1. the presence either of native currents of ultra-nationalism, or of fascist role models to build on.

2. Adequate political space in a "modern" society is undergoing a structural crisis, for example, after an economic collapse and costly war.

3. An inadequate consensus on liberal values. Fascism can only break out of the lunatic right when society is struck by a crisis. Even then, the  seizure of actual power is doubtful.

4. Favorable contingency. Chance or "destiny" comes into play. A charismatic leader with a flair for propaganda and self-advertisement and co-option of human psychology, emerges.  The "elective affinity" with fascism is experienced by every individual involved in it, from the leader to the most lukewarm fellow traveler, is the product of unique psychological predispositions which are reducible to tendencies, patterns and types. The "chance" factor also relies on the vagaries of the electoral system.

Taking this list of requirements into account, there is a case to be made for Barack Obama as the charismatic "friendly" proto-fascist, whose cult of personality swept him into power. After all, he did win the "advertiser of the year" award after his first campaign. His sellout of his voting base to corporate interests, ironically juxtaposed with the pre-existing "native currents" of racism in this country, paved the way for the decidedly uncharismatic Donald Trump, whose very loathsomeness is his paradoxical attraction for the cynical as well as for the desperate. He also profited by the "chance contingency" factor of the archaic Electoral College system, winning the office despite massively losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

As a bundle of inconsistencies, he simply represents the vicious, built-in contradictions of fascism which make the term so hard to define. But since he is not a fanatical ideologue, and since we still live do in a putative democracy with three branches of "checks and balances" government, and the Constitution remains more or less intact, Trump is no Hitler.

Maybe Mike Pence can be more successful, especially since he is the one who filled the White House with all those oligarchic enablers, and since he is the one who is a true believer in the subversive Prosperity Gospel and hardcore Christian fundamentalism. Perhaps he will strive to become the leader of a full-blown fascist theocracy. Cue The Handmaid's Tale.

And of course, don't rule Hillary Clinton out just yet, despite her and Bill embarking on the lucrative paid speaking circuit. If Trump has accomplished anything, it is showing that you can still win high office despite shady financial dealings.

As Wikileaks revealed (and as even the New York Times reported) Hillary certainly fills the fascistic requirement of unlimited brute-force national expansionism:

When she became secretary in 2009, she posed a question about China to an Australian leader: “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” In the Goldman transcript, she suggested that she had answered her own question when sparring with the Chinese over its claims in the South China Sea.

“I made the point at one point in the argument that, you know, you can call it whatever you want to call it,” she said. “You don’t have a claim to all of it. I said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all of the Pacific. We liberated it, we defended it. We have as much claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea, and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the Philippines.”

 (my bold.)

So, what is fascism anyway? The answers are still as varied and as confusing as Hillary Clinton's American Sea is wide.

The Merchants of Death Hit a Snag

It's hard out there for oligarchs and their pimps when they suddenly try to do the right thing, only to discover that what passes for their souls or moral compasses has been missing in action for decades, if not centuries and epochs.

Last week the hypocrisy became all too painfully evident when the ruling class and their media sycophants announced, after the seating of predator Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, that it is time to stop your kvetching and  move on to the most important event ever in their lifetimes, your lifetimes, in anybody's lifetime in all of human history - the 2018 Midterm Elections.

There is too much divisiveness and backlashing in the populace going on for the comfort of the ruling class. So shut up, and register to vote if you have not done so already.  Their comfort depends upon you as you avail yourself of the last crumb of democracy they have deigned to heap upon your plates.

Michelle Obama is certainly doing her part to Get Out the Vote. She even redundantly redeemed war criminal frat boy George Bush on the Today Show last week. You might remember that it was Bush who'd gotten the whole Kavanaugh ball rolling when he promoted his prized preppie minion to the federal bench from his White House position of writing legal briefs justifying torture and death. He'd even set Kavanaugh up with his own personal secretary and the two eventually married.

So lest Bush be newly tainted by the Brett Mess, Michelle gushed that she and Bush function as "partners in crime" whenever the ex-presidents gather, and as such, "I love him to death."

This paints such a warm fuzzy picture of George Bush loving millions of innocent people to death with his illegal invasion of Iraq, before enjoying his retirement years painting warm fuzzy pictures of maimed veterans. This undeserved comfort was all made possible because Michelle's husband refused to investigate his administration -- which included Brett Kavanaugh -- for its crimes against humanity. 

So everybody get out there and vote!

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the elected #Resistance miraculously got over their token disgust with Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh long enough to quietly fast-track a whole new slew of ultra-right Trump court appointees. Schumer altruistically caved to Trump's blackmail threat to keep Congress in session during campaign season, and thereby prevent our good liberal representatives from raking in all those hundreds of millions in corporate cash during the run-up to the most important event in their lifetimes, our lifetimes and anybody's lifetime in all of human history. 

They nobly sacrificed governing in the public interest just so that you little people could enjoy the privilege of getting swamped with their negative TV commercials and their slick glossy campaign mailers for the entire month of October. So do your civic duty. Stay glued to your TVs and Internet screens and always answer your door whenever one of their unpaid volunteers comes a-knocking. Democrats are an endangered species, suffering as they do from both osteoporotic spines and gonadal insufficiency. Keep them on life support as "they make a serious run" at saving their own hides if not yours.

 And get to the polls on 11/6!

They need you so very much every two and four years, that it's all that their propagandists and sugar daddies can do to maintain the fleeting illusion that you matter more to them than money and power does. 

But wouldn't you know it?  Just when they had you almost convinced that they hate murderous despots like Vladimir Putin, their hypocrisy has become painfully exposed in L'Affaire Jamal Khashoggi.

Little did I, or perhaps most of us, know that even as the New York Times was railing against Donald Trump, Russiagate, and the absolute pressing necessity of voting for Democrats in November in order to keep the fascism at bay, the Paper of Record had been sordidly investing its time, record-breaking subscription revenue and journalistic talent into propping up the murderous and repressive Saudi Arabia dictatorship.

It turns out, though, that even late-stage capitalism on steroids has its limits, its momentary surges of conscience whenever bad publicity threatens. This moral compass was certainly moribund as the debonair crown prince of Saudi Arabia was recently feted by the American ruling class despite his regime's long history of bombing Yemeni civilians and beheading its own dissenting citizens. But when he stooped so low as to order the torture, murder and dismemberment of an important rich professional just like themselves, the Ruling Class Racketeers must at last pretend to act shocked and appalled. After all, this time the victim was a wealthy man who spanned the worlds of diplomacy, mainstream media propaganda and power-broking. He was one of them.

The Times simply cannot avoid owning up to its own complicit role in boosting the Saudi dictatorship, but tries nonetheless to save face by soft-pedaling it as ruefully as it possibly can. After all, even the most important media outlets and personalities and billionaires and corporations were duped by all that money and all that sparkling Saudi royal charm as the crown prince schmoozed them to death. There hasn't been anything like it since the Bernie Madoff debacle exposed the greed and stupidity of the upper echelons when his investment scheme collapsed in 2009.

  Media critic Jim Rutenberg writes,  

Vanity Fair noted at the time that the festivities were not marred by talk of civilian deaths in Yemen from Saudi-led airstrikes; the crown prince’s “anti-corruption” move to imprison scores of Saudi businessmen, including the owners of Saudi television networks and key rivals, at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton; or the five-year prison sentence the Saudi royal court handed the journalist Saleh al-Shehi for criticizing the government.

The embrace between the American establishment and the leader known as M.B.S. was set to continue in Riyadh later this month at a business conference hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed. The sponsors, partners and participants of the conference — known informally as “Davos In The Desert” — included a number of media companies: CNBC, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, CNN and Fox Business Network.

So even Donald Trump of all people is making empty threats to the Saudis. He won't stoop so low as to stop selling them billions of dollars worth of the weapons they need to keep killing Yemenis, because that might hurt the livelihoods of the Americans who manufacture these weapons. Let's face it -- the well-being of our nation is grotesquely defined by the stock market, which in its own turn is largely measured by how many people our elected representatives can impoverish, maim and kill. The business of America is death. Their lives and livelihoods depend on it.

Therefore, don't forget to cling to your own health and life long enough rush right out to vote for which team you'd like to do the killing and the weapon-selling for you, either Democrat or Republican. Because when it comes to war and obscene war profits for billionaires, no debate is ever needed. All they need is the fig leaf of your participation in their free and fair elections.

  As Trump told CBS News, which broke momentarily from the mainstream media script of pretending to despise him because of their mutual addictive dependence on lies, cash and weapons:

 "I'll tell you what I don't want to do. I don't want to hurt jobs. I don't want to lose an order like that. And you know what, there are other ways of punishing.
There's a lot at stake. And, maybe especially so because this man was a reporter. There's something, you'll be surprised to hear me say that, there's something really terrible and disgusting about that if that were the case. We're going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment."

He'll keep braying that refrain until November 6th. After that, Khashoggi will most likely go the way of Kavanaugh, down the Orwellian memory hole of public discourse. Money will quietly change hands, deals will be struck in back rooms, the story will be buried in favor of the next nugget of manufactured outrage, and everything will be tempered by the usual feel-good fluff about the doings of the rich and famous.

Meghan and Harry are pregnant! is already doing the diversionary trick on the front pages and breaking news emails.

Now get out there and vote. 

And while you're waiting for your five minutes of democratic fame, do what they did in the future home of the Obamas' $500 million shrine on Saturday. 

 Thousands of people have marched through downtown Chicago to express their displeasure at President Donald Trump and encourage voters to go to the polls for next month’s midterm election.
The march took place Saturday after a rally in Grant Park organized by Women’s March Chicago. The group dubbed the event March to the Polls.
A sea of people took to the streets, chanting “Let’s go vote!” as they walked from Grant Park to Federal Plaza. Some voters cast ballots at nearby early voting sites. Chicago is a Democratic stronghold.

Needless to say, there was none of what the corporate media is wont to describe as egalitarian "clashes" between the marchers and the police. This was a rally and march sanctioned by the powers that be, not by the powerless themselves.

Maybe when all that's left of The November 6th Event are tattered campaign fliers and broken promises, the people will finally take it upon themselves to march on behalf of themselves and their fellow human beings.

One can only hope. And agitate a whole hell of a lot. 

Get Ready For the Great Blue Ripple

The  Democratic leadership has two big goals if they win back control of the House next month.

First, there will be nonstop political theater and grandstanding as they haul various Trump officials before their committees in an effort to expose (not necessarily punish) the sordid corruption. Second, they will "shoring up" such  corporation-friendly enterprises as the Affordable Care Act and the increasingly watered-down Dodd-Frank financial reform package.

Since Democratic members with the most longevity lead committees and control the House legislative agenda, there will be no real efforts to implement Medicare For All and living wage legislation, nor will the Democrats move to reverse Trump's massive, trillion dollar-plus  transfer of wealth to the already financially bloated ruling class contained in his tax package.

Why should they? As the New York Times reported over the weekend, the Democratic Party is getting about a third more Wall Street money than the Republicans are for the midterm elections.. A huge wad of this cash comes courtesy of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who just registered as a Democrat for a possible run against Trump in 2020. 

The Hill interviewed the Democratic committee leaders about their big, bold and "ambitious" plans to make life absolutely great for the "good rich" and maybe even just a wee bit better for the rest of us.

Nita Lowey, Appropriations: Lowey, who's represented wealthy Westchester County in New York for the past three decades, is already satisfied with the bipartisan bill just passed, which added a billion dollars to the 2017 spending package, with extra funds to fight opioid addiction and aid medical research. If you want to know what she'll do if she wields the gavel next year, look for more of the same bipartisanship. Because cooperation and "order" in the House mean so very much to her. There is no word from her on addressing the root causes of addiction (not least of which are the despair and poverty engendered by neoliberal corporatism) or the fact that medical research is another name for pharmaceutical industry subsidies, that is, corporate welfare. 

Adam Smith, Armed Services. The Washington State Democrat will not do anything so drastic as to slash eternal war machine's obscene, nearly-trillion dollar annual budget, although he does think we probably have too many nukes. He also thinks that as long as we wage so many wars, the American public might appreciate a little more "transparency" about the damage and death being caused in all our names, especially in Africa. That would supposedly tamp down all the protests and anti-war sentiment currently tearing us apart. Of course, I jest. There is nothing close to an anti-war movement, given that it's mainly the poor and minorities who serve endless tours of duty out of sheer financial desperation. Smith, fine identity politics Dem that he is, also wants more financially desperate transgender people to retain their full rights to fight and die for oil companies and other multinationals.

John Yarmuth, Budget: It's the era of Big Data and oppressive algorithms, so this Kentucky rep wants his committee to have more of a data-gathering role and duplicate the work already being done by the Congressional Budget Office. Regular people don't need more money as much as our lawmakers require as much "discussion and analysis"as possible in order to maintain the status quo.

Frank Pallone, Energy and Commerce: Late-stage capitalistic commerce requires endless polluting energy to help speed humanity over the environmental cliff. So this might be why the twin evils are joined into one handy committee, to avoid any more silly redundancy. New Jersey's Pallone states that "stabilizing Obamacare" and keeping private insurers comfortable and their investors energized with never-ending profits will be his most pressing concern if his party regains power. He also just can't wait to rail against the "culture of  corruption" which exists only in the nasty old Trump administration, which seriously undermines whatever protections that health care "consumers" enjoy while going broke paying their high premiums and deductibles.

Maxine Waters, Financial Services: This California Democrat is among the least-bad of the party leaders and therefore strikes a lot of theatrical fear into the heartless hearts of the Republicans. She was even known to occasionally criticize Barack Obama, back when he was overseeing the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class and poor to the plutocracy in modern US history. Therefore, she looks forward to hauling Trump officials before her committee, and has reportedly singled out HUD Director Ben Carson and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for special scrutiny. This should make for some pretty good reality TV and plenty of campaign cash for presidential contenders from both parties.

When Trump editorialized that the Democrats are raging socialists who want to remake the country in the image of Venezuela, he was no doubt thinking of Waters's possible control of a committee which has the potential power to somewhat discommode the oligarchy. These people can't stand even the mere thought of a drop of anticipatory nervous sweat marring their pristine privileged selves.

Bennie Thompson, Homeland Security: The ranking member from Mississippi hopes to call more attention to the Trump administration's abysmal response to Hurricane Maria as well as to expose the "vulnerabilities" in the Transportation Security Agency's sometimes lackadaisical screening of American airline travelers, a/k/a suspected terrorists. Rather than stupidly support Trump's stupid border war to keep out Mexican and Central American immigrants and refugees, Thompson wants to push "smart technology" to give bipartisan anti-immigrant sentiment a nicer, and less openly paranoid and medieval, feel. He also wants criminal gangs to be deported before non-offending undocumented people are deported. Unlike Trump, his priorities are in order.

Adam Schiff, Intelligence: The former prosecutor from California aims to enhance his already glowing media star quality to near-blinding proportions. Therefore, RussiaRussiaRussia. And then when he's done with that, RussiaRussiaRussia. And Russia.

Jerrold Nadler, Judiciary: The only justice that the liberal faction of the Ruling Class wants us to care about is the Mueller investigation of Donald Trump. Therefore, Nadler will make no real effort to impeach either Trump or Justice Brett Kavanaugh if he wins control of the gavel. So besides "delving into" family border separations, lax gun laws and protecting the for-profit insurance industry from more Trumpian depredation, Nadler will also "fight for" legislation to protect Robert Mueller's job. Don't you feel better already?

Raul Grijalva, Natural Resources: This Arizona progressive is also among the tiny less-bad faction of the party leadership. Therefore, his most pressing task in preventing a quicker death for our rapidly ailing planet will be to demand accountability from corrupt Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and perhaps gain a little more time for all living things without really changing the trajectory. To his credit, Grivalja is one of those rare committee leaders who wants to do more than simply rein in or embarrass Trump. He gives priority to strengthening - not just restoring - laws protecting our air and water and endangered species.

Elijah Cummings, Oversight and Government Reform: The rep from Maryland is one of the most powerful Democrats in the House. As such, he will maintain the status quo of private, for-profit health care. He also plans a deluge of political theater in an effort to embarrass Trump and damage his chances for re-election. He told The Hill he hasn't exactly figured out how to do this yet, but by golly, this "tearing apart of the foundations of our democracy has got to stop!" Maybe he can even stage some more sit-down protests and walkouts to show how hard he is Fighting For Us while issuing his hundreds of subpoenas.

Peter De Fazio, Transportation and Infrastructure: This Oregon Democrat is also one of the good, or less-bad guys. He wants to protect airline passengers from financial abuse by the transportation oligarchs, and he actually has detailed legislation in hand for the repair of the nation's crumbling bridges and roads. These positive goals take precedence over any desire on his part to shame the Trumpies in nationally televised hearings.

Richard Neale, Ways and Means: The Massachusetts Democrat says he wants to "revisit" the way that Trump's massive tax overhaul was rammed through Congress. "Democrats are not opposed to the tax package on the whole, but are eyeing changes that would shift the benefits from the corporations and the wealthy to middle class workers," The Hill quotes him as saying.

This is another way of selling debunked, right-wing trickle down economics. When Democrats talk about "middle class workers," they're talking about their base - the merely affluent professional class, or the top 10 percent of income earners, whose property tax deductions have taken a big hit in the Trump tax code.

But lest all you tired, poor, or retired people feel left out, Ways and Means under Democratic control would also have the power to seize Trump's tax returns and read them behind closed doors. That should make the oppressed and struggling feel ever so much better.

Commentariat Central: Post-Kavanaugh Blues

As long as the New York Times keeps ignoring the war-mongering Atlantic Council's advice to shut down reader commentary, I'll keep shoving my two cents into their digital piggy bank of views, which they euphemize as "sharing our thoughts."

It seems like only yesterday that the liberal press was editorializing against Brett Kavanaugh, and it seems like only today that we're being advised to put all those bad memories of rape and corruption and mendacity behind us and redirect our energies toward the vaunted Blue Wave, and support corporate Democrats.

In his latest column, Paul Krugman describes the trauma of Christine Blasey Ford as being of "of secondary concern" within the big picture of looming Republican authoritarianism and Trumpist brownshirts. His colleague Charles Blow sarcastically tells readers to "rue the day and rend your garments" like hormonal lunatics, because Kavanaugh should suddenly be the least of your enemies. "Liberals get so high-minded, they lose sight of the ground war," he chides, referring to the looming midterms.

And about those loudmouthed protesting women beating on the doors of the Supreme Court:

On one level this would provide relief and release for a pent-up demand by most Americans to be heard and to calm some of the chaos. But, catharsis is an emotional response and an emotional remedy.

Hear that, ladies? Charles Blow says it's time to stop emoting and follow the sage advice of Charles Pierce, scribe of Esquire, "the magazine for men", and get to work fighting the racist Constitutional originalists by organizing a brand new constitutional convention which will require the permission of only two-thirds of our divided states.

First, my response to Blow (much inspired by my current reading of "Black Reconstruction In America" by the great socialist W.E.B. Du Bois):

If the Kavanaugh Caper proves anything, it's that the white men of the GOP are pining not so much for the Founders as they are for the oligarchic slave-owning planting class of the antebellum South.

Here's looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

This isn't a new civil war, as some pundits claim. The old civil war never ended. It's been going on with varying intensity more than 150 years. Donald Trump just ushered in one of its greatest revivals yet, abandoning the smarmy dog whistle for a bullhorn.The GOP has likewise stripped itself bare, flaunting its racism and sexism in an orgy of shamelessness.

That's not to say we should therefore put our blind faith in the Democratic Party, some of whose leaders are already urging us to "move on" for the sake of our sacred institutions, as they abandon any idea of impeaching Kavanaugh. That would be too, too unseemly. All you "purists" must realize that if the Dems pull this stunt, the GOP will only get their revenge down the road. And anyway, as the Times just reported, Wall Street is putting its corrupt money on the Democrats this year.

The media coverage of Trump's "victory" this week has also been downright disgusting. How quickly the pain of Dr. Blasey Ford and countless other women has been forgotten in the group-think coverage of horse race politics.

Co-opting, dividing and conquering regular people is how the ruling class racketeers roll. Don't fall for it. Vote, and then keep afflicting the comfortable.

And in response to a critical reader who thought I was unfairly sliming Trump voters as one bigoted monolithic voting bloc:

To clarify: I'm talking about the white male leadership of the GOP, not white male voters who vote Republican. Trump has displayed his own racism and sexism in countless ways, both verbally and operationally - his Access Hollywood remarks, describing Mexicans as rapists, his attempted dismantling of social safety programs, and of course his notorious birther campaign.

He co-opts the white working class male just as the oligarchic planters did during slavery. Poor whites fought the Civil War for the rich and were the hired overseers of slaves and bounty hunters of slaves so that the rich could bask in their own laziness while producing absolutely nothing. They deflected their own bad qualities on their enslaved work force and propagandized to the poor whites that with a little hard work, they too could aspire to the owner class. Likewise, Trump pretends to be on their side because after all, they have their white masculinity in common.

 Slavery ended, but the propaganda has proved more or less successful ever since. This is what I mean by divide and conquer. Our rulers would hate for the white working class and the black and brown working class to get together in solidarity against the modern day oligarchy.

Trump won because neither the white nor the black working class in rust belt states turned out for Hillary Clinton. Many who'd voted for Obama picked Trump. It's wrong to call all Trump voters racist and sexist. Plenty are just plain fed up and desperate.

As far as Krugman's standard diatribe against Trump and the Republicans' "paranoid style of politics" and incipient authoritarian rule is concerned, I do admit that I let my feminist anger get the better of me, and as a result, did not get many recommendations for this response:

 How quickly liberal men are calling the seating of Kavanaugh "of secondary concern" or "time to move on." That's a pretty callous response to the millions of women whose own pain at the hands of predators was rendered newly raw by the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford and others with the courage to speak out. Now that Kavanaugh's in, we're lectured that too many angry women might be spawning a backlash and endangering the so-called Blue Wave of the midterms. It's disgusting.

So let's pivot again to Trump, Trump and nothing but the Trump and ignore the fact that he is but the symptom of the equally noxious neoliberal style of politics which been devouring labor rights and the social safety net for going on half a century now.

Authoritarianism is already here. Just witness the recent "no debate needed" bipartisan appropriation by a near-unanimous Senate of nearly a trillion more dollars to the dreaded Trump regime to wage endless war.

  Look at Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the presidency. A "New Democrat," he impoverished millions of women in the 90s with his bankruptcy reform legislation and helped send millions of men to prison in the misguided war on drugs, which was really a war on black drug users. He will never prevail against Trump, who knows where all the bodies are buried... because they either aided his fraudulent rise to riches, or they turned a blind eye to it.

That's Trump's fascistic appeal. He pretends to eat his own, and his base feels replete.

Here's how a fellow reader named "Gerry" cut me down to size by erecting a straw-woman:

I think you paint with a too broad brush when you condemn liberal men as aiders and abettors of the Republican supporters of Trump. I don't hear any of my male liberal friends saying that the seating of Kavanaugh is of secondary concern and that it is time to move on. We are doing what we can to regain control of the House by volunteering and contributing. We are supporters of the Mueller investigation.
You sound mixed up to me. What are your politics?

My reply to "Gerry" --

 Um...Paul Krugman used the words "of secondary concern" right here in this column. He sounds like too many other liberal male pundits I've been reading and listening to these several days.

As far as my sounding "mixed up" is concerned, that his exactly how how Brett Kavanaugh and others described Dr. Blasey Ford. They also demanded to know what her politics are.

There has been much attempted gaslighting of women by both liberal and conservative men. The liberals concern-troll it by calling us emotional and confused, while the conservatives come right out and pronounce us nuts and liars.

But according to you, it's all good as long as Dems support Mueller and give money to candidates.

I rest my case.

The proscribing of the "narrative" to one's required membership in either right wing of the duopoly serves to stifle dissent. Liberalism is not the same thing as leftism, despite the ridiculous claims of Republicans who accuse the centrist business-friendly leaders of the Democratic Party of being Marxists. Thinking outside the corporate partisan box simply does not compute. The establishment media have done their job, and done it well.
======

Meanwhile, David Brooks, who is now practically indistinguishable from his liberal right-wing Times colleagues in their obsessive loathing for the lone corpus of Donald Trump, is back from book leave and has wisely completely ignored the Kavanaugh Caper and the midterm elections. 

Instead, he's shilling for another for-profit venture which involves corporations getting into community organizing by funding programs which use poor (mainly black) children as data banks. He desperately describes it as "A Really Good Thing That's Happening in America."

Visiting one South Carolina center called the "Spartanburg Academic Movement," or SAM, Brooks gushes:

SAM organizes the community of Spartanburg around a common project. Then it creates an informal authority structure that transcends public-sector/private-sector lines, that rallies cops and churches, the grass roots and the grass tops. Members put data in the center and use it as a tool not for competition but for collaboration. Like the best social service organizations, it is high on empathy and high on engineering. It is local, participatory and comprehensive.

SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, “We’re program-rich, but system-poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.

Yep, you guessed it. This is the same market-based neoliberal approach to government and social services that helped produce Donald Trump, and turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and the Republican Party into Insanity Central. Just the mention of P & G should set off alarm bells. It is what's called an oligopoly, a consolidated corporate behemoth which has cornered the market on most of the items you see on your grocery store shelves, with its garish plethora of brand names offering a false "choice" to consumers. 

That's the noxious genius of neoliberalism itself it just keeps rebranding itself. Life itself is just one great big advertisement.

David Brooks does not, of course, go there. Instead he is so excited about the continuing privatization of public spaces and the corporate enslavement of human lives that 

Frankly, I don’t need studies about outcomes to believe that these collective impact approaches are exciting and potentially revolutionary. Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks. Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.

My published response:

 While sounding warm and fuzzy, the gathering of data on children "from cradle to career" does have sort of an ominous Brave New World ring to it.

Who becomes the eventual recipients of all this valuable and intrusive data? Facebook, Amazon, the NSA, for-profit testing companies, anti teacher union PACs, or any corporate entity prepared to pay money for it?

This sounds suspiciously like another iteration of the increasingly discredited for-profit charter school movement which has sought to supersede good government education policy and the expenditure of public money on children.

So rather than unquestioningly celebrate the efforts of philanthrocapitalists and corporations seeking to burnish their public images with these kinds of slick "community" programs that purport to "measure" pupil progress, our free and fair press should dig deeper and do their journalistic duty: follow the money.

Rather than simply concentrate on kids "from cradle to career", America must start concentrating.on all its people from cradle to  grave. We already have some of the worst education and health outcomes in the civilized world.

A pivot to government in the public rather than private interest would include Medicare for All, debt-free college, a guaranteed federal jobs program... in other words, a rebooting of the New Deal for the 21st century.

If the wealthy investment class really wants to help poor children, let them stop bribing our politicians and start paying their fair share of taxes.

Shut Down Reader Comments Sections, Urges Atlantic Council

The American Ruling Class is terrified of losing its iron grip on power, money, people and information. To that end, one of its premier propaganda mills, the Atlantic Council, is calling upon respected news outlets to consider shutting down the "virus" of independent thought in the reader comments sections appended to their articles.

It's right out there in the open. They view ordinary people with opinions as a disease, a scourge that must be wiped out so that billionaires, corporations, military leaders, weapons manufacturers and their partners in political crime can get on with ruling the world and everyone in it.

The Council, already in the forefront of recent censorship efforts related to "fake news" and fomenting conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in elections and infiltration in both right and left-leaning Internet news sites, has just issued another manifesto pressuring establishment news organizations to play even more of a "gatekeeper" role than they are already do.

The defiantly militant title of a recent strategy paper says it all: "Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation, and Winning the Battle For Trust."

To make its scary point, the piece is preceded by a photograph of Japanese citizens having the gall to protest a US military installation in their country more than 70 years after the end of World War II. If it were not for the Internet, the Japanese would never know that the US was still occupying their country, apparently. 

It is a war of the ruling class against the rest of us, poor befuddled mortals who are so overloaded with choice that our heads are spinning. As author John T. Watts synopsizes a ruling class sovereignty "Challenge" conference held last spring, the masters of the universe must walk a fine line between cracking down on independent thought and dissent and not appear to be cracking down on independent thought and dissent.

  Watts, a former Australian military officer who now "consults" with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, bemoans the erosion of public trust in the media, which has dropped a full nine percentage points -- from 52 percent to 43 percent -- in just the past year, along with a 30 percent decrease in trust in government. He blames this not on widening wealth disparity directly caused by policies devised to serve only the interests of the wealthy and corporations at the expense of poor and working people, but on the "partisanship" fomented by disinformation campaigns from unregulated sources.

He also blames Julian Assange and the Wikileaks revelations of war crimes and corruption in high places, and without providing one iota of evidence, ties these leaks directly to Russia. If that weren't enough, too many people trust their "peers" more than they trust the proper authorities. The proles are talking too much among themselves, and the leaders are worried.

"Without shared facts," Watts complains, "society lacks the basis for a rational discourse."

The implication is that minds must therefore be better controlled with the proper, prescribed content from ruling class sources.

While bemoaning the lack of proper local news sources, he does not delve into the reasons why these local news sources have disappeared: the creative destruction of them by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Gannett, and their ultimate consolidation into only five or six corporate entities. He notes only that this disappearance has created a vacuum being filled by "unqualified" bloggers and "irresponsible" information sites:

Those who  can generate the most attention by playing to the audience's greatest fears, bias, and ignorance will generate more revenue. In this environment - where any individual can generate, modify, or subvert facts for material political gain - there are multi-tiered incentives for individuals and groups around the world to generate misinformation and disinformation for little cost and significant reward. In contrast, truth telling and fact checking are expensive and of arguably less material value. 

Watts could just as well be describing Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. If these media giants aren't ginning up war fever and Russiagate paranoia and big bucks with their reporters and on-air personalities just sitting around a table and interviewing each other rather than gathering information out in the field and talking to regular people, they're inviting government consultants like Watts to join them and hand-wring about how both Donald Trump and those useful Kremlin idiots of the renegade media are going beyond the bounds of good taste. That is, of course, before they take frequent breaks from their discussions to broadcast the latest Donald Trump Nuremberg-style rally or run commercials for oil companies and overpriced drugs.

So what is to be done to draw all those straying eyeballs away from the Internet and back to corporate and weapons industry-sponsored information sites where they belong?

Censorship, censorship, censorship!

It's not enough that Facebook and Google have already agreed to infiltration by thousands of law enforcement and military "gatekeepers" to monitor content in order to keep the minds of the globe sufficiently and pliantly narrow enough to soak up all the approved propaganda.

The self-appointed censors of the Military-Industrial Complex must appeal even more to the greed of such establishment organs as the Times, warning that their failure to disseminate the right propaganda might cause their advertisers to bolt. Therefore, the Atlantic Council is prevailing upon those advertisers themselves to demand more control of the news:

 Advertisers would get greater return on their investment if their message was attached to better quality material that properly engages the reader. Their brand can also suffer harm if it is associated with poor quality or misleading material. By demanding that their advertising is proven to be associated with high quality material, they will eventually realign some of the market forces and shift the incentives of the producers.

Translation: there can never be enough corporate control of our lives. If journalists and editors persist in maintaining the red line between their news and advertising divisions, a line which has always been the hallmark of a free press in democratic societies, the oligarchs will see to it that these noncompliant news organizations fail. Advertisers, not journalists and editors, must determine what is and what is not "high quality material." This is perhaps the most chilling of the Atlantic Council's prescriptions. It is an open threat to the First Amendment.

It gets worse. Watts also considers the readers who comment on articles to be  "diverse threat actors" and as such, establishment news sites should consider completely disabling reader commentary on articles. Too often, independent voices refute the corporate-funded and Pentagon-engendered propaganda on the news pages, or else they add supplementary erudite information (facts) not consistent with the narrow narrative. This outside commentary is becoming unduly influential.

Media producers need to recognize that adversaries are out there and actively seeking to cause harm through their medium.  They have a responsibility to respond to threats and raise awareness of the incidents occurring, both because it is their business to do so and because of a larger duty of care. In doing so, they need to be careful not to 'carry the virus' as one speaker put it. This means they should consider disabling commentary systems - the function of allowing the general public to leave a comment beneath a particular media item.

Adolf Hitler and other fascist demagogues also have used the term "virus" to describe Jews and minorities and perceived outside "threats," which paved the way for their expulsion and eventual extermination. 

And as Andre Damon notes, "What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints. The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built."

Interestingly enough, though, Watts also offers a suggestion that I happen to agree with. Contributors on the op-ed pages and independent outlets should always divulge who they work for and who is paying them -- either before or at the end of their articles. Unfortunately, Watt chooses not to reveal where his own paycheck comes from.

So I will. The funding sources for his work comprise at least 25 foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes on the Arabian peninsula, with millions donated to the Atlantic Council by the genocidal Saudis; bomb and gun and drone manufacturers; the gambling casinos known as banks; private equity parasites; climate-destroying oil companies... in other words, a veritable Who's Who of the ruling oligarchy. Of course, they prefer to call themselves the "Honor Roll," rather than the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Please feel free to leave your comments!

It's coming up on the weekend, so nothing is off-topic.

Kavanaugh Kapers, Kontinued

Mark Judge, the sole corroborating witness to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's alleged attack on Christine Blasey Ford more than three decades ago, has finished his interview with the FBI.

Due to Kavanaugh's growing notoriety, a long out-of-print digitized, bootleg version of Judge's memoir - "Wasted" - is now widely available for download on the Internet. While Judge's sworn insistence that he has no memory of the incident has been greeted with derision in some quarters, his literary confession itself is so chock full of alcohol-fueled memory lapses and terrifying blackouts that the likelihood of anyone forgetting such an egregious event as attempted rape actually starts to seem plausible.

The one episode in the book that hasn't been widely reported (if at all; I haven't seen it written about anywhere) is a caper involving a mob of about 50 Georgetown Prep seniors - at least half the graduating class - and an aborted vandalism attack on the home of the daughter ("Barbara Gordon") of a sitting US Senator, who is not named in the book. Judge had recently started an unauthorized newspaper poking fun at the school in general and the Vatican in particular, and writes that one day he was approached in a school bathroom by a boy he calls "Corey Joyce," the leader of the "Inquisitors" gang, who wanted some publicity while demanding anonymity, lest his future academic and career plans be jeopardized.

The Inquisitors normally acted in small groups of 10 or 12 Georgetown boys. They had gathered names of all their acquaintances from neighboring all-girl Catholic schools and then determined which families would be out of town on a given weekend. Then they'd draw eligible names from a hat to determine the lucky winner. Their vandalism spree had been going on for months, and had caused quite a bit of consternation among affluent families returning home to find their places mysteriously trashed and festooned with toilet paper, raw eggs and shaving cream.

The planned assault on the senator's home - "a mansion as big as a hotel" - would be the grand finale before graduation, and "Cory" wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. He boasted to Mark Judge that his "assault troops" only "do students from Washington's finer virgin vaults."

To help get as many recruits for the Ultimate Kaper as possible, Judge posted a notice in the paper, foolishly calling for all senior boys to gather for a Saturday night "hay ride." The school administrators, rattled by the recent four-month spate of vandalism affecting the affluent Catholic clientele in the area, got suspicious and alerted police. 

Meanwhile, a large group of Georgetown Preppies dressed as priests, nuns and brothers gathered on that final weekend to drink beer at a pre-vandalism get-together. Cory himself was dressed up as a bishop, complete with the telltale mitered hat and flowing "avocado green" vestments.

Bishop Cory addressed the revelers,

"My brothers and sisters," he said, nodding toward the nuns. "We are gathered here this evening for a very special reason, to destroy a young woman's home."

"The land is defiled with the scourge of sin... It is the sin of arrogance, and the guilty are rich Catholic schoolgirls. Under the lash of their tyranny, we are forced into compromising with Satan. We are forced to endure inane chatter with their fathers before taking them out... They must repent and be punished!"

A cheer went up.

Sadly, though, not only was the targeted senator's mansion heavily fortified, the lights were on, and the whole family was unexpectedly home. Undeterred, the drunken nuns and priests regrouped right out in front of the mansion to plot their next move. Then they saw the police cars and scattered. "Cory" himself was briefly arrested. Since he was too busy bloviating that night, he didn't have as much to drink as the others, and he passed his Breathalyzer. The cops didn't even check his car, he boasted at school on the following Monday. They didn't tie him to any of the vandalism raids. He was just another dumb rich punk out for a joyride.

Judge escaped the cops, but his own troubles were far from over. To punish the whole class, the school demanded that they immediately hand in the journals they were assigned to keep while doing public service in a soup kitchen, mandated in order to cut down on the students' partying and drinking and to give the school some positive press. Judge, like many of the others, had not bothered keeping a diary of his good works as diligently as the future Supreme Court nominee had so carefully kept his own diary as putative proof of his innocence 30 years down the road. Judge foolishly wrote up a quick slew of bogus entries, was caught, and was barred from participating in graduation ceremonies. His sin was not so much his involvement in the alcoholic crime spree, but his dishonesty about a homework assignment.

When he told his parents about his punishment, "My father silently made a drink and retreated into his den. He was so upset he didn't even want to look at me. My mother sat in the living room watching TV, too stunned and upset to speak."

But when Mom and Dad later found out that about a dozen other Georgetown prepsters - Mrs. Judge laughingly called the boys "the twelve disciples" - had been similarly barred from graduation, they didn't feel so bad, and even praised young Mark for his service work, while calling the diary "a dumb assignment." 

And the partying continued. In the book, Judge describes both his parents and many others in the conservative Catholic social set of Washington as high-functioning alcoholics who often turned a blind eye to their own children's drinking habits and occasional anti-social behavior. The atmosphere was strict authoritarianism in church and school on the one hand, and benign parental neglect on the other hand. Judge actually thought alcohol was an intellectual stimulant for many years, given how many of the drinking adults he knew were so rich, respected and successful. Even the Georgetown Jesuits had a well-stocked bar in their campus living quarters.

And Mark Judge, even in a book ostensibly atoning for and explaining his alcoholism and journey through recovery, didn't see the vandalism as a bad thing. These girls were all good friends of the Georgetown Preppies, Judge wrote, and it was just a matter of some good-natured ribbing of their "little sisters."

The rich are different from you and me. They have expensive insurance. And even if they didn't, everything is so easily replaceable whenever it's lost, stolen, vomited on, or hilariously destroyed just for the good harmless fun of it.

And that brings us forward more than 30 years, to his buddy Kav's own long- overdue accountability and the proven, breathtaking lack of honesty in his recent Senate testimony.

It'll be interesting to find out whether the FBI inquisitors questioned Mark Judge about the Inquisitors gang, and whether his memories of the names and faces involved are still as clear and fresh as they were when he wrote his confessional memoir.