Everybody Is An Exile

Like many of you, I am seesawing between mild concern to barely suppressed panic during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an over-60 person with a few chronic health issues, including intermittent asthma, I am among the millions at increased risk of death if I get sick. So I am self-isolating, and hoping for the best. 

My son and daughter-in-law both have careers that bring them in intimate daily contact with distressed and/or sick people. I especially fear for their safety, because it is just about inevitable that they will be exposed to the virus. Then, best case scenario, they'll have to self-quarantine.

 What is truly scary is that those whose careers are in health and public safety will be out of commission in ever increasing numbers. People increasingly will be completely on their own.

The response at the highest levels of government itself has been nothing short of sickening. The Federal Reserve was lighting-quick to pump a trillion and a half dollars into Wall Street without so much as a "but how you gonna pay for it?" The US Senate, for its part, left town without voting on Nancy Pelosi's dismal House bill offering such a pittance to regular people that it amounts to a slap in the face. Most workers will not in fact qualify for paid sick leave. 

The richest oligarchs and the biggest corporations (read: the political donor class) have been carefully exempted from having to compensate their sick workers and family caregivers. Jeff Bezos will not have to spend one dime of his vast obscene fortune to do right by his Amazon employees.

Just as the banks were deemed too big to fail when the financial system crashed in 2008, corporations are being deemed too big to be humane while enjoying their own human rights under the Citizens United ruling and their socialism-for- the rich handouts.

Meanwhile, the corporate media are covering the government's free virus testing concession as a major victory. But something so radical as actual free medical treatment for sick people?? Not so much. 

But cheer up, proles, because some Internet cable companies have magnanimously pledged not to cut people off from service for 60 days when they lose their income and can't pay the bill .Oh, and Walmart and other retailers have generously offered their parking lots as testing venues. Transportation is on you. Sickness is no excuse not to have skin in the game and abandon your personal responsibility.

So here's the existential dilemma. How are normal people supposed to join together in solidarity and protest when we must isolate ourselves in order to barely keep on existing? As it stands, the Internet is a lifeline absolutely necessary for children to learn and friends and families to communicate. Forget about 60 days of guaranteed service and late fee waivers. The Internet should be permanently declared a public utility, owned and controlled by the public. It shouldn't cost anything.

Predatory capitalism dies so, so hard. 

******************

If you watched Donald Trump's grotesque press conference in the Rose Garden yesterday, and you were already feeling queasy, his performance amid a supporting cast of loathsome disaster profiteers from the retail and drug companies was enough to make you reach for the barf bowl. As proof that late stage capitalism is at its very core profoundly stupid as well as banally evil, the way that the assembled tycoons and sycophants glad-handed each other shows they truly believe that their wealth makes them impervious to what strikes terror into the hearts of mere mortals.

The way that Creepy Veepy Mike Pence paid homage to Trump  and licked his shoes made me fear that he'll come down with hoof and mouth disease along with the Coronavirus that Trump has been exposed to on more than one occasion.

Here's the New York Times comment I wrote on Maureen Dowd's column, "Plagued By the President":

Trump might brag about being untested, but the fact remains that he has been tested and found pitifully and severely wanting - no more so than during this past week.

 If Trump could carry a tune as well as he carries polluted water for his oligarchic cronies, he would have burst into song at the press con which conned nobody, not even the sycophants and Trump rat packers with the dollar signs glittering in their eyes. The aging obese Sinatra wannabe effectively wheezed out "call me irresponsible, call me unreliable, throw in undependable too."

Do his foolish alibis bore us? Uh-huh.

 Do we think he's not too clever, but still adores us? Yes to the first, hell no to the second. He bores us and scares us to death at the same time.

It's undeniably true that he's irresponsibly mad. Not about you, though. He is just plain mad. Not the criminally insane kind, because then we'd have to forgive him for he knows not what he does. It would take until the end of time for all the millions of people he has harmed and continues to harm with his vile words and cruel policies to read out their victim impact statements.

 The bejeweled prosperity gospel charlatans and their GOP cohort peddle their snake oil and lay their hands on Trump and tell us to pray away the plague the same way they told the LGBT community to pray away the gay, But judging from his ever deeper bronzed facial hue, Trump seems to have been self-isolating in the White House tanning bed. Maybe he's trying to burn away the germ.

Love and Greed In the Time of Coronavirus

The tipping point finally arrived on Wednesday. It was the day most people realized that the coronavirus pandemic is not a minor, "this too shall pass" inconvenience, or the kind of economic downturn amenable to the usual massive government bailouts of the rich and the comfortable, and punishments for everyone else.

This time is different. It was only a couple of days ago that the rich were still smugly kvelling that yes indeed, they are different from you and me. That famous observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald and its retort, allegedly by Ernest Hemingway - "yes, they have more money!" - have not been viewed by the Ruling Class Racketeers as either a withering critique or joke. It was both a compliment and a badge of honor.

Even as the new plague was overspreading a woefully unprepared globe, Wall Street erupted with glee last week when Joe Biden crushed Bernie Sanders in Democratic primary elections. On the day after Super Tuesday, predatory insurance companies gained $48 billion in "market value."

Today, that same stock market effectively crashed as Donald Trump unilaterally banned airline travel from Europe to the United States.

If that wasn't bad enough, Hollywood megastar and Democratic Party donor Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife had contracted the coronavirus. Although one may assume that they have excellent private health insurance and a whole team of round the clock doctors and nurses catering to their every health care need, the news that the rich's bodies are not so different from yours and mine - that they are made up of the same immune systems, flesh and bone and tissue - is vying with news of rationed ventilators in Italy and toilet paper shortages everywhere.

The plague suddenly has gotten very real. Everything is being cancelled, from the basketball playoffs to the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, which actually threatens to be de-gentrified as the wealthy flee to their country homes and their yachts, much as the nobility fled the cities during the plagues of the Middle Ages.

To call these ripple or even domino effects is a bit bland. Wait until the Amazon fulfillment centers can no longer fulfill. Not only because their underpaid and overworked and uninsured workers get sick, but because the merchandise is no longer being delivered, let alone manufactured.

Maybe then they'll finally start calling it a plague.

As Albert Camus wrote in his famous novel of the same name (La Peste):

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise....

"When a war breaks out, people say 'it's too stupid, it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack for getting its way, as we should see if we were not so much wrapped up in ourselves."

The current plague will either be the end of globalized neoliberal capitalism, or it will be the toxic engine turning our carceral/surveillance oligarchic system into a full-fledged global totalitarian police state.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's solution to the catastrophe - besides building both virtual and physical walls to keep the enemy immigrants and germs out - is to bail out his own hotel chain and to offer low interest loans to businesses. He also aims to stealthily destroy the Social Security trust fund by imposing a "temporary" payroll tax holiday.

For their own part, the congressional Democrats are offering insufficient increases in nutrition programs, mandatory sick days and expanded Medicare  for coronavirus, but not for other medical conditions. Think of the deliberately complicated paperwork and stress on an already over-stressed health care system. Think of the deliberate shortage of government bureaucrats necessary to handle the paperwork. "We meant well" will be repeated by the minute.

 To put the paltriness and the downright cynicism in perspective, the $250 million in additional funds they propose for Meals on Wheels tor the vulnerable elderly is less than half the amount that Michael Bloomberg just spent on his aborted presidential run.

Bernie Sanders has one last chance to make a moral case for his agenda when he debates Joe Biden in Arizona in D.C. this weekend. If we don't acknowledge that we're all in this together, we might as well start placing bets on what will kill us first: the coronavirus, or pathological neoliberal capitalism.

******

On to New York Times comments.

Paul Krugman is calling for a permanent stimulus package. Unfortunately, since he aimed his post at what he calls "a very wonky audience" and not normal people, it did not get the prominent placement in the regular opinion section or the audience it deserved. Perhaps if it had contained the requisite Bernie-bashing to accompany its dig at Joe Biden, it would have fared better in the product placement department. This one was a bit of an off-brand outlier, published when the Times was still publishing coronavirus updates next to a weirdly cheerful BP-ish avatar. He writes:

OK, if you’re still with me: I hereby propose that the next U.S. president and Congress move to permanently spend an additional 2 percent of GDP on public investment, broadly defined (infrastructure, for sure, but also things like R&D and child development) — and not pay for it.

Of course, Krugman waited until Bernie had been safely trounced by Biden to espouse what sounds awfully close to the anti-austerian Modern Monetary Theory championed by Sanders's economic adviser Stephanie Kelton and others, and which Krugman has previously derided.

My published comment:

If you're a normal human being reading this post, it makes perfect sense even if you don't understand the wonky charts and math. The message of a more humane and rational way of doing things still comes through.

 Trouble is, the politicians running the place are not normal human beings in that their fealty to the donor class of plutocrats has literally removed them from reality. The only norms they seem to care about are the rhetorical ones that Trump violates each and every day. It's that he is just so darned vulgar about trampling over the poor and working class.

 Never mind just him and a possible President Joe not welcoming Paul Krugman's suggestion for a permanent stimulus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the spirit of her guru, the late billionaire austerian Pete Peterson when she successfully restored the "PayGo" rule last year. Only three of her Democratic members (including AOC) dissented from the requirement that all new deficit spending be offset by cuts to other programs. Exceptions would be made for emergencies like pandemics but of course then everything goes back to abnormal as soon as is inhumanely possible.

  You'd think, wouldn't you, that all the critics of single payer health care would finally realize that allowing 80 million people to remain underinsured or lack any coverage all is not only cruel to them but injurious to the economy. The louder the centrists shriek "but how you gonna pay for that" at presidential debates, the more abnormal they sound.

And here's my response to Krugman's subsequent column, on Trump's refusal to acknowledge that a pandemic even exists - all of a piece with the whole history of right-wing denialism. (Of course, the Democrats at least have the grace to admit when a problem exists before not solving it, for which we should be eternally grateful!) His column was written before Trump finally went on TV Wednesday night to struggle through a tortured teleprompter rendering of "if we think it, it will leave."

My published comment:

Not that I wish anybody ill, but you do have to acknowledge the serendipity of Trump being exposed by N degrees of separation to the coronavirus at CPAC. If that's not the height of irony in this age of willful reactionary ignorance, I don't know what is.

 It turns out that Republicans are a lot more fact-based than they want to admit, once they start quarantining their own depraved cowardly selves out of an abundance of self-protective caution and everybody else be damned.

Today it's Ted Cruz in Texas. Dare we hope that tomorrow it might be Trump in Mar-a-Lago? While he's resting up and luxuriating in a tubful of gallons of black market hand sanitizer, he might even be convinced (lulled? terrorized?) to sign legislation sending stimulus checks to every man, woman and child in America - if only as a blatant Hail Mary pass to stimulate his fevered base's enthusiasm for his increasingly fragile reelection campaign.

 But seriously, I can also foresee him cancelling the election entirely due to the state of emergency that he himself has exacerbated by dint of his own criminal narcissism. His pal Rudy Giuliani almost succeeded in cancelling the mayoral election after the 9/11 panic, after all.

As far as the "market" and investor anxiety over the plutonomy is concerned, pardon me if I don't feel as sympathetic as I probably should. If Wall Street finally stops profiting off pollution, wars, and the misery and preventable premature deaths of others - I say tough cookies.

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders. 

But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.

First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left. 

A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption."  Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general. 

In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.

  There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition."  His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press.  The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.

 To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past. 

It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.

So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump. 

It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.

Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S.  over the weekend:

I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!

In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.

He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.

I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.

It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."

My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.

The Aesthetics of Disaster Capitalism

Why does the New York Times's digital masthead graphic of the deadly coronavirus bear such an uncannily perverse resemblance to the BP logo?

New York Times Serene Green Virus

Cheery Major Polluter Logo

If you thought Donald Trump was the only propagandist trying to soft-pedal a major disaster, think again. 

Think back, for example,  to when the Obama administration engaged in its own shameful cover-up of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion for months until underwater footage of gushing oil finally compelled the president to take one of his kids for a quick dip in the Gulf to prove that no disaster is too horrible to abandon our inner Doctor Pangloss.

 Just as BP still tries to portray itself as an environmentally friendly corporate citizen, it seems that the subtle aim of the Times and the ruling class it serves is to quell fears of the deadly virus by painting it in soothing glossy colors. The Gray Lady's pleasant zen-like Mandala is the exact opposite of the microscopic images which more realistically portray Covid-19 as an angry red ball with spikes,or only slightly less alarmingly as a brownish grayish blob festooned with little hairy tentacles.

Scary, Ugly Reality

New York City, the global wealth capital of the world, now threatens to overtake China and Italy as the Covid-19 capital of the world. The governor declared a state of emergency as known cases statewide have spiked to 89 and are exponentially increasing by the day. Since the viral disease is covered by the corporate media as even more of a  deadly threat to Wall Street profits and plutonomic growth than it is to the health of mere mortals, it is incumbent upon the citizens and readers of the Times to panic responsibly. 

Maybe if we meditate upon the Gray Lady's mandala version of a deadly pathogen we will be more apt - if we're in the wealthy minority - to valiantly continue taking in Broadway shows and shopping at Bergdorf-Goodman for the latest in the increasingly rare lines of designer face masks and hand sanitizers.

The Times, liberal science-believing purveyor of propaganda that it is, at least has the decency to place a realistic yet very discreet black border around its mellow yellow/green serene virus illustration. That proves resistance to Donald Trump, who persists in oafishly viewing the pandemic through his terminally cracked rose- colored glasses. His soul brother Rick Santelli even went on TV to suggest that we quickly infect ourselves just to get it over with, as if we were toddlers whose mothers once thought it was as good time as any to expose the kids to chicken pox before they started school to avoid falling behind the rest of the class.

As far as the still-existing, wildly profitable, unaccountable and climate- destroying BP is concerned, it has recently emerged that the effects of the Gulf "spill" are even worse, nearly 10 years later, than we first thought. Satellite imagery had only revealed two thirds of the total damage. In other words, according to a new study, the hundreds of millions of crude extended to a geographical area 30 percent larger than originally reported. 

And the Trump administration continues to drill down both in criminal ignorance and in grossly accelerated off-shore drilling. Unluckily for the current cast of characters occupying the White House, they can't hide sick and dying and dead people as well as the last occupants were able to hide a sick and dying and dead ocean.

Full-0f-Woe Super Wednesday

Look on the bright side, fellow progressives and socialists. Because as far as Joe Biden is concerned, his slew of primary wins hasn't even happened yet. He thinks that they will happen tomorrow, or on what he adorably dubbed Super Thursday. 

Wednesday's children and Sandernistas might be full of woe today, but just wait until tomorrow. Because while the fortune-telling nursery rhyme predicts that Thursday's child has far to go, Biden will only keep demonstrating how disturbingly far gone he truly is.

Godzillionaire Mike Bloomberg has dropped out. But as of this writing, Elizabeth Warren was still in, despite coming in third in her own home state of Massachusetts. Her top-secret Super PAC might soon make her an offer she can't refuse, however, and stop writing the checks that are keeping her campaign on life support. My prediction is that she will drop out and repeat what she did in 2016: refuse to endorse Bernie.

I hope I'm wrong, because in refusing to endorse Bernie she will be destroying her progressive brand and burying what is still left of her political career.

I think the original Democratic Party game plan was to keep Liz in the race all the way to the convention, just to siphon votes away from Sanders. I highly doubt that Barack Obama included her with the other candidates he obviously called after Biden's South Carolina win to make them the charm-offensive offers they couldn't refuse. She can't stand Biden, in particular his authorship of the bankruptcy bill favoring credit card companies and banks and punishing regular people, particularly women.

As Biden continues making what are still too kindly being called "gaffes," the media will get over its Super Tuesday group orgasm soon enough. At least Ronald Reagan had his rote acting skills to mask his own dementia most of the time. 

As far as the "shock" of Biden's wins is concerned, remember that until a few weeks ago, he was the front-runner for the better part of a year. He would have to literally stop campaigning and giving interviews from here to the convention to pull off a Reaganesque head-fake. His failure to even campaign in the states he won has itself been a winning strategy up to now. This is largely because the field was so thinly spread. And likely because enough voters were so spooked by the media's relentless fear-mongering and red-baiting that they pulled the lever for someone they think they know.

Now that it's just him and Bernie, Biden can no longer hide while he runs. For its own part, the Democratic Party is so bankrupt that it has made Joe its sacrificial lamb at the altar of the Trump Temple, just to keep an FDR-style liberal like Sanders out of the White House. 

When you think about it, this is really a form of elder abuse by the party leadership. It doesn't matter that Biden's vice president would be the real heir or heiress apparent for 2024 and probably already running things the minute Uncle Joe stumbles through the Oath of Office, should he miraculously beat Trump.

If the rumors are true and Biden names Stacey Abrams his running mate before the nomination, then Sanders will be free to follow suit and prematurely join forces with a firebrand like Nina Turner. 

Thankfully, Bernie did not mention that "Joe is a good friend of mine" in a speech to supporters on Tuesday night. But he did seem compelled to add that "Joe is a decent guy" before noting his vote for the Iraq War, his support for job-destroying trade deals and his career-long crusade to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's decency, then I don't know what Bernie's definition of pathological cruelty is.

Stay tuned.

Judge Judy and the Class War Election

You know you're in trouble when 10 percent of American college graduates think that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court. You know you're in super-supreme trouble when the wildly popular TV judge is campaigning for her pal Michael Bloomberg, who recently purchased the Democratic Party.

To paraphrase a real Supreme Court Justice, you can have free and fair elections with one person and one vote, or you can have Democratic Party super duper delegates possessing weighted votes. But you cannot possibly have both.

Of course, Justice Louis Brandeis was a lot more sweeping in his denunciation of oligarchic fascism. Though a permanent part of the American fabric, iron rule by the rich has more or less succeeded in hiding itself when every two and four years, regular people are super-duped into believing that they have an actual say. When Brandeis championed FDR's New Deal in 1933, he bluntly proclaimed: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

In an extraordinary burst of brazenness, the ruling aristocrats of the erstwhile People's Party have revealed in the New York Times that they will override the expected plurality of primary votes for Bernie Sanders, and will anoint their own nominee this July to pretend-challenge Donald Trump. Even if Sanders falls only one vote short of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, he will be soundly defeated on the second ballot of a brokered convention.

The superdelegates as much as admit that would rather see a second term of Donald Trump than acquiesce to stitching up even a few of the gaping holes in the social safety net that they've helped the mean old Republicans to rip to shreds over the last four decades of neoliberal capitalism.

The oligarchs who run the Democratic Party would rather see you die than have Sanders impose even a few minor taxes on their obscene wealth.

 Bloomberg surrogate  Judy Sheindlin, the highest-paid woman on television, recently spoke on behalf of her entire privileged class when she seethed: "America doesn't need a revolution. It's the most perfect country in the world and those people that are trying to change it don't have a chance because I'll fight them to the death!"

"Those people" are nurses, teachers, and a majority of young Blacks and Latinos.

Sheindlin, star of the long running courtroom TV series, has made a fortune exploiting and berating the mainly poor litigants who appear on her show. They are paid extremely modest appearance fees ranging from $100 to $500 for the privilege of being insulted. For her part, Judge Judy rakes in nearly $1 million per day of filming.

Her popular show is thus a microcosm of extreme wealth disparity and capitalist oppression and the class war, but with just the right liberal sheen to make it acceptable. She always gives credit to contestants who can demonstrate to her satisfaction that they are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But woe betide the single mom on public assistance who dares to claim in Judge Judy's court that she takes care of her children. "You don't support your children. I support your children!" is her common retort. "What an America!"

 But try, just for a moment, to empathize with Judge Judy. She is probably more scared than most members of the  more discreet oligarchy. Because if Bernie Sanders were elected president with a new progressive congress on his coattails,  and the country's poverty rate started going down with enactment of guaranteed health care, a government jobs program, living wage laws, debt forgiveness, and affordable housing stock, then the incidence of poor people resorting to suing other poor people in small claims courts just to survive for another month might also start decreasing. And then Judge Judy's blockbuster ratings might begin to suffer. 

Well, not quite. Her reruns, which she personally owns, will air into perpetuity or whenever humanity finally wipes itself out. Meanwhile, as she dished to fellow plutotainer and George Bush BFF Ellen De Generes, she's rebranding herself as "Judy Justice."

As it is, 10 million people tune in every single day to watch Judge Judy bravely wage the class war, Her fans feel better knowing that at least they're not as "dumb and dumber" as the contestants on her show.

 Sheindlin has much the same right-wing populist appeal as Donald Trump. But while his shtick is making his fans believe that everybody can get rich by being a jerk, her shtick is that no matter how much of a jerk and a loser you may happen to be, the best therapy in the world is to sit on your couch and identify with a well-educated multimillionaire insult comic with a preturnatural gift  for grinding the lesser people into pulp. The fact that a fair proportion of her supporting cast are deadbeat dads, bad girlfriends, drunk apartment-trashing college kids and small time grifters makes you feel better about your own oppression at the hands of the winner-take-all oligarchy. And a lot less guilty about laughing at the expense of your poor-shamed fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, as Sheindlin gushed to the plutocratic ladies of The View, the main qualifications for the presidency are being smart, rich and successful - as opposed to being smart, empathetic and egalitarian.

It is testament to their own pathological selfishness and desperation that plutocrats like Mike Bloomberg and Judge Judy are now personally and directly and very meanly waging the permanent class war as political candidates and surrogates rather than relying on the usual subterfuge of preaching the politics of I feel your pain" and "choice" and "personal responsibility." They're finally telling voters that not only do their votes not count, but that their very lives and livelihoods don't count either. 

They're the owners, and you're the commodities and consumers. Casting your lot with a democratic socialist is so way beyond the pale that it makes them blanch.

The liberal aristocracy's unabashed ownership of the "Democratic" Party is the height of irony. The whining of the anti-Bernie plutocrats also proves that although obscene wealth can buy power, it cannot buy self-awareness. Money destroys self-awareness and human empathy when it becomes the whole rationale for the existence of those possessing it.

Why else would party leaders and owners brazenly admit that they are willing to destroy their own organization in order to keep their individual wealth and to keep amassing it  even if it ends up killing them along with everybody else on the planet?

Judge Judy, of course, is not the only one suffering from misguided plutocratic angst. There are thousands of them.  Former Senator Chris Dodd's own living nightmare is the prospect of a Sanders For President bumper sticker being forcibly affixed to one of his luxury cars.  It's almost as terrifying as Chris Matthews' nightmare of Bernie Bros executing him in Central Park.

Dodd, one of the 90-odd antisocial superdelegates interviewed by the New York Times, whined right out loud: "People are worried. How can you spend four or five months hoping you don't have to put a bumper sticker of that guy on your car?"

He can't even utter the name of Bernie Sanders. "Those people" and "that guy" are as far as they can go when telegraphing racism and classism.

The Times did not see fit to mention in its article that fresh off a stint representing the Hollywood film industry, Dodd now spends his valuable time lobbying against Medicare For All and Wall Street casino regulation. 

Corporations are people are worried, my friend.

The other irony - besides that of the uber-wealthy naming their private political club "the Democratic Party" - is that slamming the door shut on a Bernie Sanders nomination also opens the door a crack for the rest of us. If the oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy their party for the sake of their own personal gain, a viable replacement, or true People's Party is there for the organizing. 

"Any Blue Will Do" voter-shaming, gaslighting propaganda will not work, even if a cheated Bernie Sanders exhorts his followers to defeat Donald Trump by getting behind Joe Biden or even the consolation prize of a severely compromised Elizabeth Warren. It certainly didn't work in 2016 when the coronation of Hillary Clinton was effectuated a lot more subtly and secretly than the blatant attempted destruction of the Sanders movement

The main thing to remember is that democratic socialism, or social democracy, or socialism will never emerge from electoral politics. And it will never emerge without relentless struggles against those who aim to control us and beat us into submission and even actual death. The powerful forces that aim to destroy Bernie Sanders - and us - have the military, the corporate media propagandists, the police and surveillance states at their exclusive disposal.

Judge Judy is right. It's a fight to the death. And it always has been, through most of American history, from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to the extermination of Indians, to the endless wars for profit abroad. But now is one of those rare times that the ruling class not only feels threatened, it readily admits that it feels threatened.  

And every once in a while, the people do win. The eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor,  the New Deal, the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, the Great Society - and all  were bottom-up victories that came under oligarchic attack from the very moments of their inception.

The oligarchs hate us, of course. But more importantly, they fear us. So we should carpe diem while they're so mindlessly obsessed with carping all the way to the bank. Let's make Chris Dodd's worst nightmare a living reality.

$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.

The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.

MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.

For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.

I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.

But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.

Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.

***************

I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.

Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.

Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

My published response:

 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.

 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.

I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 

As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.

  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.

************** 


Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."
This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.

As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.

My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")

 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.

Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 

As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.

But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.

The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.

***************

Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:

Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."

The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.

 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.

Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."

 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.

There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.

 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

Laughs and Loathing In Las Vegas

Given that a New York jury is currently deliberating the fate of Harvey Weinstein, Mike Bloomberg certainly picked a bad night to utter the words "women" and "consensual" in the same nasal breath.

 Weinstein's defense against rape charges is that it was consensual sex. Bloomberg's defense of the nondisclosure agreements related to his serial workplace misogyny ("Jokes I told") is that the gagging of women was also consensual. These gals, Bloomberg insinuated, loved every minute of his smothering legalities. So no, he will never release them from their lingering pleasurable bondage.

It remains to be seen whether the thousands of ads playing every single minute all around Bloombergville USA will offset his dismal debate performance. He seemed hell-bent not so much on winning the nomination and the presidency, but on winning the Oscar for his wizened, whining live-action portrayal of Mr. Burns. 

"Portrayal" is kind of a stretch, because the godzillionaire former mayor became stone cold dead on his feet once Elizabeth Warren got through with him.

Just the clip of him rolling his eyes in bored disdain as she destroyed him should be enough to ruin his candidacy. Then again, there are those nonstop ubiquitous ads costing him an estimated $3000 a minute just in local TV markets alone, the hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune being spent on bribing politicians and super-delegates and cable TV executives and journalists and paying off the country's entire stable of consultants, pollsters, PR flacks and caterers. At the rate that his vast fortune is consuming all the "talent," the least he can do is endow a graduate program in Electoral Chicanery at Harvard to keep churning out the elite entrepreneurs of the future.

Elizabeth Warren did Bernie Sanders a huge favor by going after Bloomberg, while only making soft murmuring complaints when the NBC moderators baited her with the Bernie Bro trope. As for Bernie himself, red-baited from both the right and the center, his theory that a couple of his online supporters might even be linked to "Russian interference" made me roll my own eyes in dismay. But I suppose we should be grateful that at long last, Sanders did not once preface an answer with "So-and-so is a good friend of mine."

Since his good friend Joe Biden is already a political corpse, nobody even bothered to call out his breathtaking hypocrisy when he scolded Bloomberg over his racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Biden's authorship of the racist Crime Bill set the stage long ago for Bloomberg's own ethnic cleansing ("gentrification") campaign. As recently as Obama's second term, the former vice president was leading the charge for more cops on the street and more high tech military hardware of the type used against the citizens of Ferguson, MO when they became upset over the police killing of Michael Brown. The fact that immigration activists loudly disrupted his closing argument was barely even mentioned in mainstream media debate narratives this morning.

Given that billionaire Tom Steyer was missing from the stage, centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar got more generous time to snipe at one another while urging everybody else to stop fighting so as to beat Donald Trump and magically "bring the country together."  What do you call it when two annoying, cloying centrists cancel each other out - besides its being a very refreshing sight to behold?

I've gone from dismay to delight that Bloomberg successfully bribed his way on to the debate stage. People finally got a look at him without the protective gauze of his glitzy TV commercials. They're also getting a much-needed true picture of the hordes of liberal politicians who have fallen all over themselves to endorse him in exchange for his "philanthropy." He has shown once and for all that not only can he not beat Trump, he is simply a more urbane, nasal,annoying - and dangerous - version of Trump. He is Trump without the stand-up comedy talent.

If Bloomberg is anointed the nominee in the second ballot of a contested convention - or worse, if he is simply the stalking horse for a third Hillary Clinton run -  it will spell the final and long-overdue demise of the Democratic Party and perhaps even usher in the long-overdue street actions and revolts and strikes that this country so sorely needs. It would likely be the smallest turnout in modern electoral history.

Even if Bernie Sanders does win the presidency, moreover, the corporate Democrats will have no other choice but to show whose side they are really on as they thwart his every reasonable executive action.

Thanks to Michael Bloomberg, reality in all its ugliness is finally getting a fair shake and a fair hearing. The rotten center cannot hold.