Picking At the Trump Pimple

Depending on whether you're a fan or a critic, Donald Trump in Europe was either too sexy for his shirt or too big for his britches. Or maybe his tailor quit in the middle of the job because Trump's deposit check had bounced. This is the picture that all the fashionista pundits couldn't stop talking about this week:

The next-most earth-shattering thing they're talking about, now that Trump's insults to Meghan Markle and the mayor of London are disappearing into the ether to keep the Trump Baby Balloon company, is that Trump threatened to single-handedly destroy Britain's beloved National Health Service!  Its demise will be the offer the Brits will be unable to refuse if they have any hope of a post-Brexit trade deal with Trump's United States.

"Mar-a-Lago Comes For British Health!" is the dire warning of the New York Times's Paul Krugman.

That would be the same Paul Krugman who warned only three years ago that the nefarious Bernie Sanders was coming for Obamacare, and who continues to speciously argue that single payer health care espoused by Sanders and other progressives is next to impossible "in the current climate.

Krugman writes,

As it happens, the British and American health systems lie at opposite ends of a spectrum defined by the relative roles of the private and public sectors.

 Although the Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage and increased the role of Medicaid, most Americans still get their insurance (if they get it at all) from private companies and get treated at for-profit hospitals and clinics. In other countries, like Canada, the government pays the bills, but health providers are private. Britain, however, has true socialized medicine: The government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors.

That skirts the truth, to put it politely. As I responded to Krugman in my published comment: 

The NHS is already opened up to private US companies and it has been at least since 2006. That was when the Hospital Corporation of America partnered with British medical facilities that serve only private patients.

 Other US-based corporations have followed suit, with the stated anodyne objective along the lines of "improving efficiencies" and other neoliberal buzz-phrases to mask creeping privatization.

Optum, a division of UnitedHealth, works with the NHS in contract negotiations and medications management. Kaiser Permanente also "advises" the NHS, and IBM provides it with electronic records services.

 This has mostly been under the radar, until Donald Trump came along and did his usual oafish thing. No wonder that the discreet wing of the ruling class can't stand him. He rips the mask right off all the plunder and the greed. He bellows that he wants to destroy the social contract wherever it exists in the world, from a platform where everybody can hear him, thus endangering the whole late-capitalistic plan.

A Henry Kissinger he definitely is not. It wasn't until years after the fact that the Kissinger-Nixon plot to "make Chile's economy scream" by overthrowing the socialist government with a CIA coup became widely known. Then it was too late.

 It's not too late in Britain. And hopefully, it's not even too late in the United States

Why do we keep hearing that Medicare for All is "impossible?"

 For one reason: It'd put a dent in the profits of the voracious oligarchy.

The most radical shift in the stealthy undoing of the NHS came in 2012, with the passage of Britain's Health and Social Care Act. This law specifically enforces a restructuring of the system based upon the advice of McKinsey, the US-based global consulting firm which has come in for some well-deserved criticism lately. As the public advocacy group Patients4NHS explains:

The Act ordered the NHS to use the private sector: it made it compulsory for those services that potentially could be provided by non-NHS organisations to be put out to competitive tender. Private companies are now involved in a wide range of NHS services, from GP or out-of-hours care to diagnostic services (such as scans or blood tests), elective (or routine) surgery and ambulance services. In addition, private, multinational consultancy firms are being paid considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money for advising NHS providers, such as hospital Trusts, on managing their service.

The NHS was already on the chopping block in the Obama era's secretive trade deals, such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), which not only would give private US-based corporations the right to destroy Britain's socialized medical care system, but would prevent any future governments from ever reversing the privatization!

So perhaps we should thank Donald Trump's freely oozing mouth for warning us about the systemic cancer which lurks beneath. He is putting his unwitting squeeze right on the corporate propaganda campaign which continues to vociferously deny that Britain's health care system is on the chopping block in trade extortion schemes that long preceded, and go far beyond, Donald Trump's clumsy unfiltered threats.

Ominously, the private companies already infiltrating the NHS are still permitted to use the NHS logo, thus further deliberately hiding their for-profit agenda from the British public. 

So Krugman and other critics who pile on Trump to the exclusion of critiquing the entire transnational anti-democratic corrupt system that created him in the first place are themselves doing harm by picking on just one particularly annoying unsightly zit while ignoring a whole body full of chronic deep-tissue lesions.

This is what critics who are not Trump, from both the right and the left, mean when they accuse the mainstream corporate media of purveying "fake news," both by commission and by omission. Krugman is no dummy. He knows, or should know, that the danger to the NHS preceded Trump by decades, and that the plunder of social welfare programs around the world will long outlast Trump - unless, of course, capitalism eats itself into extinction first.

Trump is simply the most glaring contemporary symbol, and symptom, of malignant terminal capitalism. Getting rid of him might feel good in the short term, but it's no cure for what deeply ails the sick and decaying body politic.

There's plenty more where he came from, within the highly weaponized Defense of Wealth industry.

The Trumps and the Royals Belong Together

What's with all the media frenzy over the Trump dynasty sullying the Windsor dynasty?

The conventional corporate wisdom is that if Donald Trump weren't such a gross oligarch, he would have cancelled his sullying of the British oligarchy -  because the invitation to sully was issued by a sullied prime minister who was forced to resign because of the Brexit mess. 

And it's not just the sullying. Trump is unfairly "meddling" in British politics by referring to various British politicians as either losers or as his personal pals. This rhetoric from a sitting US president is deemed highly abnormal and deviant.

What was considered normal and proper was former President Barack Obama, right before the Brexit vote, warning the Brits on their own soil that they would suffer dire trade consequences if they dared vote to leave the European Union.

Obama had the good taste to threaten the UK with being politely moved "in back of the queue" whereas Trump outrageously called the mayor of London a "stone cold loser." Ouch. 

 If Trump had any normality at all, he would at least have deployed one of his political operatives across the Atlantic to properly meddle in British politics. Obama himself adhered to exceptional American procedure when he graciously didn't say a word when his campaign strategist, Jim Messina, meddled by advising both Theresa May and David Cameron as they successfully vied for back-to-back Conservative Party residencies at Number Ten, Downing Street.

Of course, the very worst thing that Trump did in preparation for his visit to the U.K. was to insult Meghan Markle. When a tabloid journalist informed him that she'd called him "divisive and misogynistic" in a TV interview during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump used his favorite anti-woman buzzword ("nasty") when reacting to her remarks. He hastily added that he still thought that she'd be "a successful American Princess."

Cue the mass media outrage. And be sure to preface all the diatribes with such made-for-Lifetime headlines as "The Princess Vs. the Demagogue," as the New York Times's Charles Blow did in his latest biweekly #Resistance broadside.

This contrived controversy is an irresistible way for the liberal corporate media to fulfill their perpetual assignment. Their constant duty is to divert the attention of the hoi polloi from the Class War of the rich vs the rest of us. Instead we must learn to care very deeply abut the Intra-Ruling Class War of the good billionaires vs the bad billionaires. 

The Trump vs. Markle narrative is essentially a variation on the stale neoliberal romance theme of Girl Meets Billionaire, Girl Loves Billionaire, Girl Loses Billionaire, Girl Finally Marries Billionaire.

The plot of the latest potboiler is "Girl Meets and Marries Virtuous Oligarch Only To Have Her Happiness Sullied by Villainous Oligarch."  Peasants of the World are hereby urged to unite and defend the honor and serenity of Our Princess as she is assailed from without the walls of her castle by the Usurper to the American Throne. If we all just join together, and vicariously become Meghan Markle, we can momentarily forget about our poverty, our lack of health care,  our joblessness, our homelessness. Even if we're among the fortunate and the comfortable few, we too can find some relief from our crushing boredom and loneliness as we tune in to the saga.

Meghan Markle, according to Blow and other liberal pundits, is being punished for bravely going on TV and joking to Larry Wilmore that she'd stay in Canada permanently should her candidate, Hillary Clinton, lose. Blow paints her as the rare celebrity who broke from the mold and dared to criticize Trump, thereby putting her brilliant acting career at risk. It was almost as bold and as rare a move as if a Hollywood celebrity went on TV and cast doubt on the Russiagate cult. Of course, not even Meghan Markle could have cast doubt on the Russiagate cult before the Clintonites had even invented it. And nobody is casting doubt on it now. 

Just as bad as Trump are the right-wing tabloids accusing Markle of timing the birth of her baby to cynically avoid Trump during his state visit. Maternity leave is just an excuse. So let all the righteous pick a side: unite and defend royal motherhood from the Usurper, or defend the Usurper from royal motherhood. Those are your two choices.

But before we get too carried away, we must also remember that as much as we Americans fawn over royalty, and canonize Americans who marry royalty, we must first and foremost patriotically embrace our own hegemonic system of government as we fawn from afar. Charles Blow writes:

I have no royalist fetish or reverence. Indeed, I find the existence of royalty in any society problematic. But this isn’t as much about Trump’s reaction to a princess as it is about his reaction to a woman, in this case, a black woman.

It is so problematic that Blow pulls a Trump and elevates Meghan Markle from her official title of duchess to that of princess. Methinks he doth protest too much.

He glosses over both classism and racism by making the class and race war all about Trump against Meghan Markle. By celebrating her achievement-by-marriage and by calling her a princess, he simply exposes himself as a more politically correct chauvinist. By eliciting empathy for and celebrating a wealthy woman of color, he can also ignore the fact that mortality and morbidity for black mothers and babies in the United States is nothing less than shocking and shameful.  

And Flint still doesn't have clean water.

By championing Meghan Markle's right to speak her political mind, Blow and other pundits engaged in the business of selling their Moments of Trump-Hate can also ignore the fate of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, lying gravely ill in a British prison as the Trumps and the Windsors whine and dine, and the press corps gawk and wag their fingers at Good Dynasty vs Bad Dynasty.

And the Windsors can also bask in their own slickly marketed nouveau-liberal limelight and forget their own past fascist sympathies as they welcome a biracial American bride and new grandchild to their midst.  According to the royal family's media apologists, the Windsors were just ignorant victims of scary times. Unlike Trump, they were simply engaging in a harmless prank when they posed for the camera with their Nazi salutes. It is so unfair of the right-wing press to dredge up all those harmless scary memories, you see.

If Prince Harry can forget about once attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi, in the 21st century, then so should we, as we direct all our precious ire against Hitler-Trump.

We can also forget about Trump and Prince Andrew both being pals with convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe they can reminisce on the golf course.

And we can forget about the times that Prince Charles was a perfectly willing occasional guest at Trump's Mar-A-Lago palace during his forays into Palm Beach society and elite polo matches played for charity. When Trump was still just an ordinary social-climbing real estate mogul, according to an entertaining new book by Laurence Leamer, Charles even once personally called him from his private jet to grovel and ask if he could drop by. Trump was so excited that he abandoned his golf course right in the middle of his game to personally extend the welcome mat to the equally eager Prince of Wales.

Wealth and power always attract wealth and power, no matter the source. And white male supremacy is always an incestuous match made in hell. No matter how the media narrative spins it, the Trumps and the Windsors are crispy birds of a feather. Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

#Russiagate Exhaustion

I got tired just watching Robert Mueller III totter up to the podium on Wednesday to wearily announce that just because he'd found no evidence that Trump is a crook doesn't mean that Trump is not a crook.

Heads, which had barely begun to heal from the initial release of Mueller's written report, exploded anew when the special prosecutor announced he would prefer not to testify before Congress. His report, he said, speaks for itself. He is so, so done with it all.

Ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries summed up his party's dilemma all too well when he groused that "there is a difference between reading the book and seeing the movie on the big screen.”

It seems that Trump isn't the only American who doesn't read.  Polls have revealed for years that most US citizens don't read more than one or two books a year. And despite its best-seller status, "The Mueller Report" is pretty dry reading, even for die-hard readers.

Who has the time, anyway? Even an article in The Week about people not reading much any more was classified as a "speed read" in a probably futile effort to get more people to read it. 

If it's not on a screen, then it doesn't exist. And with so many shows to choose from, the recent bravura C-Span-streamed marathon reading of the report by an ensemble cast of Democrats attracted only a tiny number of eyeballs.

Politics is spectacle. Politicians see voters as a blob of consumers addicted to their various screens. The consent has been manufactured by the corporate media conglomerate, and the learned passivity is complete.

So the longer that our congress critters can keep the Mueller-centered suspense (and the #Russiagate franchise) alive, and the electorate barely awake, the better they think it will be for their ultimate goal, which is limited to winning elections and raising scads of money to do so.

Since Democrats are damned if they do impeach and damned if they don't, they might as well do the right thing as ordained by the Constitution. Otherwise, win or lose, they won't be treated kindly in the history books.

Oh, I forgot. People don't read actual books, not when there are rage-filled twitter feeds and Facebook flummery to keep them amused.

That's why corporate media outlets pounced with glee when Trump wrote one of his typically garbled tweets this morning. "Trump Tweets and Then Retracts, Statement that Russia Helped Him Get Elected" shrilled the New York Times in a particularly egregious example of "gotcha" churnalism.

Here's the original tweet that had media heads exploding in Toldja So! triumph: 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 3h

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

53.4K

7:57 AM - May 30, 2019

It's somewhat surprising that the Times isn't also reporting that Trump falsely claimed that Russia has literally disappeared off the face of the planet for the sole fact that it had nothing to do with getting him elected. But that would have entailed getting their fact-checker to refer to Google Earth in order to determine whether Russia is still there, and then writing a brand new outraged article about Trump's Eleven-Thousandth Lie.

It's exhausting. And it's futile.

When Concern-Trolling Oligarchs Attack

One way that hospital CEOs justify their increasingly obscene pay packages is to market the hospitals they run as "health systems" instead of hospitals. This is especially true when a private corporation (Continuum Health Partners) buys up several struggling charity hospitals at bargain basement prices and then merges them all into one behemoth.
They justify enriching themselves and their shareholders off the backs of the poor and the sick by occasionally voicing great concern for their treat-and-dump clientele. They run expensive ad campaigns, including videos which aired during the televised Academy Awards show.

One of the easier and more cost-effective ways to accomplish this onerous marketing task, though, is to publish an ad disguised as an op-ed in the New York Times.

And lest the wealthy Wall Street investors in Kenneth L. Davis's Mount Sinai Health System conglomerate of providers become unduly concerned about his concern for the poor, he enlisted as his Times co-author one of the best friends that Wall Street ever had: former Treasury Secretary and Citibank CEO Robert Rubin. There hasn't been this much deference to the sensitivities of the rich since 2015, when Mount Sinai officially dropped the Roosevelt name from the Roosevelt Hospital it subsumed in the interests of cost-cutting.

The gist of their concern-trolling Times piece is this: If only the poor and the sick didn't live in such crappy housing situations and had more to eat, then the poor and the sick wouldn't be straining our country's precious for-profit Health Systems to the absolute breaking point!

Now, why didn't we think of that before Rubin and Davis deigned to enlighten us about their awesome discovery, which seemingly ranks right up there with the unearthing of King Tut's Tomb? And to get us properly prepped for the absolute genius of their Eureka moment, the Times even cooperatively headlines the piece: "A Secret to Better Health Care."

D'oh!

Rubin and Davis start out by honestly admitting that American Health Systems are indeed a complete mess. But that mess is really the fault of other systems, such as the food stamp system and the housing system.

If our spending on social programs were (sic) more in line with other developed countries, our health care costs would fall. That means that as policymakers evaluate a social program, they should weigh not only its direct and second-order benefits — from reducing crime and recidivism to increasing productivity — but also its effect on lowering federal health care costs.

This demonizes the poor and the sick by conflating poverty and illness with crime. We must spend more on social programs, not because it is the right and the humane thing to do,  but because a little extra spending on poor people is better for the bottom line of both the System and the investor class. The goal is to get the laggards producing.

The impetus, or hook, for this op-ed appears to be the case of a recently-released Mount Sinai System patient who became trapped in his New York high-rise apartment when the elevator broke down. A System social worker prevailed upon management to make repairs, because the patient otherwise would have been unable to score his heart failure medication and (if he survived) then put an even greater strain on The System with a premature readmission and even possible denial of his untimely insurance claim.

If the System can suggest better nutrition and housing for its customers, it will also be less prone to lawsuits for releasing them too soon into horrible living conditions. It will help absolve them of responsibility when System management shows itself willing to suggest in the New York Times that mold be ameliorated and elevators repaired.

But no concern-trolling neoliberal manifesto could ever be complete without the oligarchs also insisting that the crime-prone lazy poor and sick also have some "skin in the game." Citing a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, Rubin and Davis continue:

And once in stable housing, beneficiaries can better pursue public benefits and job opportunities.The Los Angeles program showed even greater cost savings, according to a study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation. After receiving housing assistance, beneficiaries’ costs to the public health system plummeted. Inpatient services fell by 75 percent. Over all, the study found that, even accounting for the increased housing costs, recipients’ total social service and health care costs fell by 20 percent. And beneficiaries showed signs of reduced involvement in crime and improved mental health.

Notice how smoothly they pivot from the trapped man with heart failure to the miracle of all those sick and poor people suddenly getting law-abiding and spry and enthused about finding a job, and without the government even having to implement a federal jobs system with a living wage!

It's just too bad that the Times's big reveal of The System's Secret to Health doesn't also clue us in about the location of all those wonderful job opportunities. But as long as the message is bipartisan or nonpartisan, it's just got to be good. For rich people, especially.

My published response to the New York Times:

This column is so rich.

Pssst... want to know the real secret? The US oligarchy doesn't want our market-based mess of a health care system to be replaced by guaranteed single payer insurance.

 But rather than come right out and admit it, Mr. Rubin recommends a little stitch here and a little stitch there to repair a tattered social safety net that, it just so happens, he had a large role in shredding back when he was one of Bill Clinton's main economic advisers.

It was Rubin who also urged Clinton to work with House Speaker Newt "Contract With America" Gingrich to dismantle welfare. It was Rubin who wanted Social Security privatized. Thank goodness that our great national heroine, Monica Lewinsky, came along when she did and ruined that scheme before tens of millions of precarious lives were further ruined in the selfish interests of Wall Street.

 Thanks to deficit hawks like Rubin and 40 years of neoliberal austerity, our average national life expectancy has plummeted for the third straight year. If our oligarchic "thought leaders" really cared, they'd also be espousing enhanced Social Security benefits and better legal protections for tenants against greedy landlords. Decent housing shouldn't be limited to fixing broken elevators and slapping bleach on moldy walls. The rents are too damned high!

  Mr. Davis,co-author of this piece, is among the highest paid hospital CEOs, his compensation having risen to $12 million in 2017. 

Wealth inequality is the real killer.

As Dean Baker points out, Robert Rubin also was behind the 1990s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act deregulating Wall Street, which led to the collapse of the housing market in 2008, and the subsequent evictions of 10 million people from their homes. Rubin made a personal fortune from the bursting of the housing bubble. Most people have never recovered.

Was the man trapped in his apartment and suffering heart failure also a victim of Rubin's policies? Was he living in substandard housing because Wall Street had forced him out of his original home when he lost his job and couldn't pay the rent or the mortgage?

The New York Times op-ed doesn't say. 

It's a secret.

Give Me Your Bored, Your Rich, Your Coddled Asses

Jeff Bezos may have left the Big Apple in a huff because the huddled masses balked at building him a private helipad and paying him billions of dollars for the privilege of having a new Amazon headquarters in their neighborhood. But that snub didn't stop the world's richest man from returning to the Big Apple last week to mingle with his plutocratic peers at the exclusive star-studded gala opening of the new $100 million Statue of Liberty museum. 

When you're the colossal Jeff Bezos, simply mingling with your fellow billionaires and corporate donors is not enough. What do you give the man who already has everything? It was a dilemma, for sure. But they finally came up with the nifty idea of getting Oprah herself to award him his own Special Star, to be permanently affixed to a mural in the museum. It will vie with the 1883 Emma Lazarus sonnet ("The New Colossus") for millions of pairs of tourist eyes, yearning to be free to buy stuff on the Internet.

Well, not quite. It turns out that Bezos actually paid $2 million for his star, and it's ostensibly in honor of his immigrant father Miguel (pictured above). The wealthy may not only buy stars, they can also purchase stripes forged from the iron bars of the statue's original armature.

Oh, and since you're Oprah, you also got your own award, for your unspecified "contributions to freedoms, both domestic and abroad." It didn't cost her a dime, because freedoms are free and states of mind are priceless.

Hillary Clinton, wearing one of her signature Chairman Mao jackets, was also there. You might remember Hillary as the former Secretary of State who in 2014 warned "irresponsible" Central American parents not to send their endangered children north of the border. The US government would immediately deport them right back to the gang violence and poverty they had fled, at great risk to their lives and limbs, as a direct result of US-sponsored regime change coups. Hillary herself had been instrumental in forging the military coup that toppled the democratically-elected president of Honduras in 2009. Her decision to not welcome Central American refugees was not due to Trump-style racism and xenophobia, but simply in order to "send a message" to future incipient migrants.

Ha Ha, I Got a Star and You Didn't!

Former New York City billionaire Mayor Michael "Stop and Frisk" Bloomberg was also on hand, champagne in hand, to celebrate all the classy tempest-tossed freedom. 

Entertainment was provided by, among other stars, Gloria Estefan. She covered the old Kate Smith standard "God Bless America." I guess the plutocrats at the glitzy gala hadn't gotten the message that this song is newly acknowledged to be "tainted with racist lyrics" in much the same way that the Statue of Liberty itself is historically tainted with racism. The monument of freedom was never exactly viewed as a beacon of hope or welcome to Black people, despite the "emancipation" proclamation.

But, as Oprah's own "O" magazine hastened to glowingly report, Oprah herself offered such "moving words" about letting freedom ring and so forth on her very first visit to Liberty Island that racism was all but forgotten as everybody wined and dined and schmoozed. "America is about an ideal, and that ideal is for everybody" was her facile and reassuring message to her fellow plutocrats. 

Although the gentrification of Liberty Island and nearby Ellis Island has been creeping along for many decades, if not forever, the event which truly transformed this national park from a premier global public tourist destination to a Disneyfied pleasure palace and private corporate event venue was The Day That Changed Everything: Sept. 11, 2001.

The ritual trek by millions of the modern "wretched refuse of your teeming shore" up to the Statue's crown is now pretty much a thing of the past. Tickets to the top are very expensive and severely limited, ostensibly due to perpetual terror threats. Less than 20 percent of the island's annual 4 million visitors are ever allowed to enter even the base of the statue, let alone the pedestal and the crown.

Obviously, the traveling hoi polloi of the world need something besides the Jeff Bezos Star to attract them to this all-but-shuttered iconic site  As museum designer Edwin Schlossberg, the husband of heiress, political dynast and Boeing Director Caroline Kennedy, explained it to Forbes magazine:

“While the Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable icons in the world, few people ever get to climb to its crown or get to see Lady Liberty’s face up close. Our goal for the design of the museum experience is to immerse visitors in not just the grandeur and sweeping history of the statue but also the very idea of liberty itself. We want them to leave with a deeper understanding of what liberty means to them and the active role required to uphold it.”

To help ordinary people arrive at the nirvana of a deeper understanding of freedom, they will be allowed to watch an "immersive film"  about climbing up to the crown as a substitute for actually doing it. No active role will be required of them. They will be able soak up all that magical liberty without ever breaking a sweat.

You will not trudge. You will not plod. You will fly to the very top in only eight to ten minutes!

Weaving through this soaring theater space, museum-goers will learn the rich story of the Statue’s origins and be captivated by a virtual fly-through ascending the Statue that recreates interior views and sounds. Visitors will be invited to contemplate liberty today and its measures around the world, such as access to education, free elections, and a free press. 

Please remember as you wallow in all this simulated freedom that "access" to a human right is not the same thing as actually achieving it. Freedom comes at great monetary cost. Unless, of course, your name is Jeff Bezos and your corporate kingdom of Amazon not only pays no income taxes but is entitled to tax refunds. And a star on the Statue of Liberty mural.


The most important thing you can do to enhance your virtual freedom experience, though, is to bring your neoliberal state of mind (but no outside food or beverages!) with you to the Statue of Liberty Simulacrum. 

First, you need to believe that you still have as much "access" to the original statue as you have to the health care marketplace and a college education in the Land of the Free. You can roam around at will and gawk all you want.

And despite the United States being home to whole new lost generations of refugees from the middle class and indebted college graduates with few decent job prospects, the museum's corporate sponsors still aim to give their visitors all the liberal education they can handle in one truncated day. 

But you're not done yet, because the last stop before leaving the museum is the Inspiration Gallery.

In this awe-inspiring space, visitors can reflect upon what they have seen and experienced in the museum. Guests will be invited to document their visit and express their views by adding a self-portrait and collage of inspirational images to an ever-growing digital experience called Becoming Liberty. The tour culminates with an up-close view of Liberty’s most iconic symbol – her original torch – held high for nearly 100 years and still a touchstone of the light Liberty shines from generation to generation. Rescued from the elements and replaced in 1986, the torch will be the most powerful artifact visitors encounter as they reach the end of their museum experience. A model of the Statue's face offers another tactile moment, and the glass walls afford magnificent views of the Statue of Liberty herself set against a stunning backdrop of the New York City skyline. 

Finally, as much as the oligarchs and celebrities who partied hearty at the museum's glitzy grand opening might scoff at a Green New Deal to save the planet, they still want you to know that the Lady Liberty Simulacrum is as "sustainable" a construction project as any modern construction project can possibly be.

The museum embodies an environmentally responsible design and best practices for sustainability. It features material reuse of the existing Administration Building, a green roof-scape, and bird-safe glass exteriors. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it is set above 500-year flood levels and built to withstand hurricane force winds. 

So even though the Liberty museum brochure promises that you'll be blown away, if not drown in all that immersive experience, you won't actually be blown away or drown. If you can withstand the commercial Disneyfication of a great national monument, you'll probably be able to withstand anything.

Speaking of withstanding stuff, I would now like to reminisce about my own experience at the Statue of Liberty with my two young children back in the late spring of 1993.

The gala fun began way ahead of schedule, as we were driving to our town recreation center to catch a chartered bus down to the city and the ferry. As I was signalling for a left turn into the parking lot, our car was violently rear-ended by a motorist who said he was blinded by the early morning sun. Luckily for us, a town cop and a whole crowd full of fellow liberty-seeking day trippers witnessed the entire accident. Still in a daze, and so as not to disappoint the kids, I decided to go ahead with our trip after the police officer kindly arranged for our damaged car to be towed to a body shop.

On the way to the ferry, we passed the World Trade Center, still encased in yellow crime scene tape from the recent first bombing of the site. On reaching Liberty Island, we ate our brown-bag lunches on the pedestal (still allowed!) before trudging up the hundreds of narrow stairs to the Crown (at no extra cost!) to peer out at the New York skyline for a minute, all crammed together like wretched but hopeful refuse in immigrant steerage class.

Of course, the combination of the delayed whiplash symptoms from our rear-end car crash and the climb to the top left the three of us with extremely sore bodies by the following morning. But at least we can still humble-brag to anybody who will listen that we were among the last, lost decade of people ever to have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty at no extra charge. We had a completely immersible and tactile experience that my mind and body will never forget, right down to my aching arthritic vertebrae.

As Oprah plagiarized in her Liberty Pleasure Island keynote speech to the Leisure Class: "Let freedom ring!" 

But as the far wiser and far more original John Donne wrote a long time ago: "No man is an island, entire of itself.... And therefore never send for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

War Crime and Punishment, American-Style

If you are a soldier or a mercenary accused or already convicted of a war crime, President Trump will gladly grant you a pardon. Just in time for Memorial Day! He'll even call you a hero and patriot if your sadistic actions against human beings were especially gruesome and outrageous.

But, if you are a former Army intelligence analyst and whistle-blower named Chelsea Manning, and were instrumental in exposing war crimes to the world, you've been thrown back in jail. Not only that, you'll be heftily fined for every single day that you refuse to cooperate with the US government. The so-called Justice Department refuses to back down from its relentless demands that you testify, before a top-secret grand jury, against the publisher of damning and incontrovertible evidence of United States war crimes. 

Physical (due to gender transition medical issues requiring specialized care), psychological and economic torture are your own very special Memorial Day treats from the Trump administration. You are essentially being punished for the same things you already admitted to and served years in prison for, before Barack Obama ultimately commuted your sentence rather than issue you a complete pardon.

And if you are Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher of Manning's cache of war crime evidence, then you, too. have been jailed in Great Britain as you fight extradition to the United States on a trumped-up "conspiracy" charge related to the massive 2010 document dump outlining United States malfeasance ranging from the banal and petty to the brutal and deadly.

Such is the upside-down system of justice of the Permanent War State, a/k/a the World's Sole Remaining Superpower.  By their cowardly, vicious and hypocritical acts ye shall know them.

Some of the servicemen for whom Trump is considering pardons have already been convicted of murder. The New York Times broke the story on Saturday:

One request is for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, who is scheduled to stand trial in the coming weeks on charges of shooting unarmed civilians and killing an enemy captive with a knife while deployed in Iraq.
The others are believed to include the case of a former Blackwater security contractor recently found guilty in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis; the case of Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, the Army Green Beret accused of killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and the case of a group of Marine Corps snipers charged with urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters.

Trump has already pardoned one convicted murderer, Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, who'd been found guilty of the 2008 killing of an Iraqi prisoner during an "interrogation."

Of the unarmed people Special Ops chief Gallagher is accused of recklessly gunning down were a woman wearing a hijab and an elderly man. The young captive he is charged with stabbing to death was on a table receiving emergency medical treatment. Gallagher later reportedly bragged about killing the helpless injured man in emails to colleagues.

It seems obvious that by pardoning these military men right in the middle of enhanced saber-rattling by his Neocon advisers, who are itching for a war of aggression against Iran, Trump is sending a not-too-subtle message to his base of supporters. The message is two-fold: he's got their backs for the damage already done in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is loath to send any more of them to fight and die anywhere else.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggests that for once in his reign of error, Trump could act as the proverbial "adult in the room" if he controls his in-house war-mongers, particularly National Security Adviser John Bolton, one of the original architects of the Iraq War and also one of the brainless brains behind the ongoing US-led coup attempt in Venezuela.

In an echo of the hawks conspiring with Iraqi exiles to concoct a casus belli for Iraq, Bolton told members of an Iranian exile group in Paris in 2017 that the Trump administration should go for regime change in Tehran.

 “And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!” Bolton cheerily told the exiles.

When Bolton was the fifth column in the Bush 2 State Department — there to lurk around and report back on flower child Colin Powell — he complained that W.’s Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) was too limited, adding three more of his own (Cuba, Libya, Syria). Then, last year, Bolton talked about “the Troika of Tyranny” (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela). His flirtations with military intervention in Venezuela this month irritated Trump.

My published response:

Trump won election in many of the distressed locales that sent a disproportionate number of their sons and daughters to fight and die in Bush's wars. Thus, his reluctance to send more troops on another misguided and deadly adventure. This is his voting base we're talking about. And he did make his opposition to Bush's wars a campaign issue.

 It's not that he cares a fig about these people. of course. It's that he wants another term.

He also doesn't care about all the Middle Eastern civilians who have died, been injured, displaced and finally, been denied refuge in the US by Trump. If he didn't despise them, he wouldn't be readying pardons for several US troops accused or convicted of war crimes Meanwhile, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury against WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, who published evidence of these war crimes and whom the Trumpies seek to extradite.

 Talk about a topsy-turvy world!

The scary thing is, Trump could revert to temper tantrum mode in an instant if a Gulf of Tonkin-type pretext convinces him that he has no other choice.

 Finally, too many in the media, even erstwhile Trump critics, still have never met a war they didn't like. The journalistic cheerleaders of the Iraq War are still around to act as propaganda tools of their sponsors in the weapons, aerospace and oil industries, which always profit the most from the blood of innocents.

It's way past time for another anti-war movement.

Given that we no longer have a draft, that last suggestion is not too likely to happen. Absent a mass moral awakening in this country to the unequal class aspect of our forever-wars, the mostly poor and working-class people who get killed in them tend to slide down the Orwellian memory hole of the collective American psyche.

A study jointly conducted by professors at Boston University and the University of Michigan Law School concluded there is indeed a direct correlation between the number of casualties from three specific states during the Bush-Obama wars and the 2016 election results in those states.

From the report's synopsis:

"Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America. Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.

There are many implications of our findings, but none as important as what this means for Trump’s foreign policy. If Trump wants to win again in 2020, his electoral fate may well rest on the administration’s approach to the human costs of war. Trump should remain highly sensitive to American combat casualties, lest he become yet another politician who overlooks the invisible inequality of military sacrifice. More broadly, the findings suggest that politicians from both parties would do well to more directly recognize and address the needs of those communities whose young women and men are making the ultimate sacrifice for the country."

The moral of this story is that if we can't appeal to amoral politicians' humanity and altruism, then at least we should be able to appeal to their political self-interest. 

Maybe that's wishful thinking too.

Iraq War cheerleader Joe Biden, who currently leads in the polls for the Democratic nomination, not only made the decision to plop his own campaign headquarters in Pennsylvania, he also delivered his official maiden campaign speech in Philly over the weekend. He didn't mention bringing home the troops and ending Permawar. He called instead for "unity" and bipartisanship, and a return to the golden years of the previous administration, bragging about passage of the increasingly costly and restrictive Affordable Care Act and a tepid economic stimulus program that did little to make people's lives better.

In a move reminiscent of an aviator jacket-attired George W. Bush strutting on board a Navy aircraft carrier to deliver his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, Biden strode onstage and manfully "ripped off his aviator sunglasses and threw his jacket into the crowd... the event felt like authentic Biden."(according to a Politico reporter on the scene of the boilerplate action.) 

Ugh.

When will they ever learn?

As repulsive as Trump's looming pardons for a handful of murderous service members may be, are they any more repulsive than Barack Obama schmoozing that "We must look forward, not back" to explain that he would not be holding Bush, Cheney, current CIA Director Gina Haspel and the whole gruesome gang accountable for their own war crimes and torture sessions as well as for the illegal invasion of Iraq itself? Are they any more repulsive than Obama ruefully admitting that "we tortured some folks" as he redacted whole chunks of the Senate report on torture that the CIA had already hacked? Although these politicians and apparatchiks never (I assume) personally wielded an assault rifle or a combat knife or operated a drone joystick or dropped a bomb, they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the deaths and injuries and psychic damage done to millions of people in the name of American "democracy."

It's just as repulsive that the United States is the only Western democracy that has refused to sign the Rome Statute treaty, which would render it culpable in the International War Crimes tribunal. As a matter of fact, if any high or low American official is ever hauled before this court to face justice, there's a law passed by Congress authorizing the American military to break the suspects out their Hague holding cells and whisk them off to the safety of Homeland soil.

Guess who dreamed up that self-immunizing policy? Perhaps one reason that Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange have been persecuted and deemed permanent enemies of the state is that the WikiLeaks cables also revealed how John Bolton came up with the idea of immunizing the U.S. government from international war crimes statutes as well as from the laws of the countries they were invading and occupying.

So perhaps the most valuable mission that Trump has ever unintentionally accomplished is that he has freed other nations, especially in Europe, from the bonds of paying unquestioning homage to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Knaves.

The Iraq invasion's hideous "Coalition of the Willing" is no more.

So maybe somebody should inform the stubborn war-hungry Neocons in both of our establishment political parties and the corporate media of that inconvenient fact.

Somebody should also clue them in to the fact that that their continuing punishment of Chelsea Manning for leaking the "collateral murder" video is so warped and so unjust as to be criminally insane.

Finally, somebody should tell them that Julian Assange is a publisher deserving of the same First Amendment protections as every other journalist.