Like a Teflon Rolling Stone

Nobody who perpetrated the fraudulent and now-retracted Rolling Stone article about a University of Virginia gang-rape is getting fired. When propaganda in the interest of the ruling class replaces muckraking journalism in the public interest,  the facts become secondary. Stephen Colbert even coined a new word -- "truthiness" -- to describe the phenomenon of using story-telling to advance a particular agenda.

And that is just what the story of "Jackie" did. It jibed perfectly with the Democratic Party campaign strategy of fetishizing rape on college campuses, framing a felonious crime and its prevention into an identity-politics female empowerment movement. It deflected our attention from the inconvenient truth that the party of the New Deal and the Great Society has become the party of Wall Street and Permawar.

At the exact same time (last summer and fall) that Rolling Stone contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely began issuing what amounted to a casting call for the ideal college rape victim to star in her blockbuster article, the White House was rolling out an anti-rape branding campaign called "It's On Us." The Democrats desperately needed a narrative to differentiate themselves from the Republicans for the upcoming midterms. They desperately needed a new wedge issue variant to counter the GOP's "war on women." The perceived epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses fit the bill perfectly. Rather than talking about the rape of a nation by a gang of unprosecuted financial predators of Wall Street, we could talk about the rapes of young women by their unprosecuted predatory male peers on elite college campuses.

Mass post-meltdown public angst and outrage could be safely channeled by liberal leaders of the media-political complex. Nobody is a fan of rape, after all. We all have daughters, granddaughters, sisters and nieces. We can all relate.

Rolling Stone, an establishment magazine of "popular culture," knew a trending topic when it saw one. Sabrina Rubin Erdely found the ideal victim, and went on a sensationalistic rampage. Since the magazine was on a mission -- the cultural  equivalent of William Randolph Hearst's fraudulent but splendid little warmongering, sparked by the explosion of The Maine -- no corroborating evidence, witnesses or basic fact-checking were required. "Jackie" was the co-invention of both Jackie and Sabrina. Facts would only have gotten in the way of the yellow journalism. It is a conspiracy by any other name.

Columbia University, in its "scathing" report of the fraud, called it a failure of journalism. It should be called a botched, failed, criminally dishonest marketing campaign. The magazine officials themselves are in "mistakes were made" mode. Nobody is admitting to perpetrating a fraud. Nobody will lose his or her job over the unfortunate little episode. The worst tragedy that could come out of the whole thing is if we stopped believing that campus rape is a real problem, if we automatically assume that every rape victim is lying. And that is why Rolling Stone "reached out" to a panel of independent investigators in order to discover "where they went wrong."

Editor Will Dana practically brays out the noblesse oblige as he humblebrags about his own innate decency:

This report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone. It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document ­— a piece of journalism, as Coll describes it, about a failure of journalism. With its publication, we are officially retracting 'A Rape on Campus.' We are also committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report. We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students. Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings. 

Painful and sad.... but oh so fascinating, too!  From now on, they will police themselves, just like a Wall Street bank. We apologize if you were offended. Your comfort is our deepest concern. If you are now afraid to report your rape, that makes us sad. But not sad enough to fire ourselves. Because even though the story was retracted, it got an amazing number of clicks when it was published. It attracted more than 2.7 million views, the most ever for an article "not about a celebrity."

To its credit, the Columbia investigating team didn't buy Rolling Stone's self-protective altruism as an excuse. From the report:

Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong. Erdely's reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie's position.
It would be unfortunate if Rolling Stone's failure were to deter journalists from taking on high-risk investigations of rape in which powerful individuals or institutions may wish to avoid scrutiny but where the facts may be underdeveloped. There is clearly a need for a more considered understanding and debate among journalists and others about the best practices for reporting on rape survivors, as well as on sexual assault allegations that have not been adjudicated. This report will suggest ways forward. It will also seek to clarify, however, why Rolling Stone's failure with "A Rape on Campus" need not have happened, even accounting for the magazine's sensitivity to Jackie's position. That is mainly a story about reporting and editing.

By the time Rolling Stone's editors assigned an article on campus sexual assault to Erdely in the spring of 2014, high-profile rape cases at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt and Florida State had been in the headlines for months. The Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education was leaning on colleges to reassess and improve their policies. Across the country, college administrators had to adjust to stricter federal oversight as well as to a new generation of student activists, including women who declared openly that they had been raped at school and had not received justice.

There were numerous reports of campus assault that had been mishandled by universities. At Columbia, an aggrieved student dragged a mattress around campus to call attention to her account of assault and injustice. The facts in these cases were sometimes disputed, but they had generated a wave of campus activism. "My original idea," Dana said, was "to look at one of these cases and have the story be more about the process of what happens when an assault is reported and the sort of issues it brings up."
Jackie's story seemed a powerful candidate for such a narrative.

Erdely, ironically enough, boasts on her own website that she specializes in writing about fakes and frauds and weirdos:  "She has written about con artists, murder investigations, vicious divorces, power brokers, lovable eccentrics, bioweapons, cults, sexual violence, medical ethics, hackers, LGBT issues, and teachers who have affairs with students—among other subjects."

She is a graduate of the Hearst School of Yellow Journalism. No, she isn't. I just made that up. She truthily dropped out of the Hearst School of Yellow Journalism before ever getting her degree. I didn't need a fact-checker for that fact, because there is, in fact, no such school. But it enhances my narrative.

The celebrity mattress-toting student was, in actual documented fact, a special guest at the narrative that was President Obama's State of the Union Address. (I am not making that up.) During February's televised Grammy Awards show, Obama himself in fact made a special cameo appearance to announce that "Rape is Not O.K." (although permawar and drone assassinations and financial crimes and deep-sea drilling and job-destroying secret corporate trade deals are still good to go.)

The Obama White House's campus rape fetish of a marketing campaign went into full swing last September, relying heavily on the same click-baiting culture of celebrity that Rolling Stone does.

Wired --another edgy culture-tech magazine -- called it "a smart branding campaign against sexual assault." (even though Obama's claim that one out of every five college women is sexually assaulted turned out to be wildly non-factual.)

The pre-midterm elections stunt was pure Madison Avenue, a direct creation of an advertising agency. It used celebrities (including, ironically, Jon Hamm, who plays an alcohol-soaked sexual predator on Mad Men)  and a slogan -- "It's On Us" -- to deliver the heretofore unknown message that sex crimes are not cool. The subliminal message? Vote Democrat. GOP fetus-detecting vaginal wands, rapists' penises, they're all the same in the grand electoral scheme of things. From the Wired article:

 After the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault compiled a report on sexual assault in April, the White House and Generation Progress (an arm of the nonprofit Center for American Progress) decided to launch a campaign promoting “bystander intervention.”
This is a new tack for these kinds of public service announcements: Rather than telling men ‘no means no,’ and instead of imploring women to report attacks when they happen, a bystander campaign calls on everyone to keep their eyes peeled and to create a culture that won’t tolerate sexual misconduct.
From there, Mekanism (the ad agency) essentially had free rein to whittle down the message. They pitched five ideas, almost went with “Get in the way,” and then settled on “It’s on us.” “The way most sexual assault messaging in the past has been, there’s a perpetrator and the victim and those are the two parties involved,” says David Horowitz, Mekanism’s creative director.

It's only a cynical hop skip and jump to the Tee shirts and testimonials and corporate sponsorships and interactive video games. You can even log on to take the It’s On Us pledge, and the website will generate a profile with your mug shot framed in the shape of the logo. (with the ultimate destination being the NSA Utah storage facility? It's an Obama two-fer!)

 

 You can then scroll through a rainbow land of Tips Against Rape, and educate yourself about "The Cause." In It's On Us World, all the men become predators, all the women are urged to become cartoonified Joans of Arc. No Means No! If you see something, say something.

The Rolling Stone rape story has been lambasted as a travesty of journalism. But it's not journalism. It's political marketing. It never would have been made possible without a tacit grant from the big money-driven media-political complex. The article is not part of any problem. It's simply a part of the neoliberal solution: keeping the masses alternately ignorant, sedated, entertained, and terrorized.

That is a fact.


 

Greedwashing Grifters

And a very Good Friday to one and all. 

It's been quite the OCD epidemic of self-serving damage control among greedy corporations lately. Apple, which has grown filthy rich off its slave labor in Chinese suicide mills and the minimum wage retail labor of debt-ridden millennials in Exceptional America, issued a strongly-worded statement against gay-bashing in Indiana this week. And Walmart did them one better, issuing a strongly-worded statement against gay-bashing in Arkansas only weeks after it offered a minimal increase in its starvation wages to a few carefully selected employees.

Somebody alert the Pope to start the canonization process.

And then there's McDonald's, which just makes itself look worse every time it tries to redeem itself in the court of public opinion. It was bad enough when they came out with that survival skills manual for employees a couple years ago, helpfully advising the Help to cut back on heat and food and sell last year's Christmas presents in order to afford this year's Christmas. It was hilarious enough when they started a marketing campaign in which lucky customers got randomly chosen to do a random good McDeed for the sole purpose of corporate greedwashing for TV. It was disgusting when they gave a miniscule wage increase to a miniscule number of employees this week. It was doubly disgusting when they actually gleaned glowing headlines for their cynical PR effort from the corporate media.

Of course, Walmart and McDonalds are among the corporations that only very recently and ostentatiously cut their public ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing billionaire bill mill that regularly churns out anti-labor "right to work" legislation designed specifically to destroy unions and thus keep everybody's wages depressed.  They're also among the 600 or so multinational corporations which are directly, or through such lobbyists at the US Chamber of Commerce, negotiating the anti-labor Trans-Pacific Partnership and its evil twin, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP.) Apple is in a global free market paradise all its own. The late lamented Steve Jobs made no secret of having no interest in bringing manufacturing jobs back to America.

New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman, in his usual Panglossian fashion, praises Walmart and McDonald's with the faintest of damns in his latest column. Sure, their token wage increases are on the crappy side, but they could also be the harbinger of things to come! "We" can give America a raise if we want to, fellow elite folks! Pretty please.

And then he really pulls a fast one. He stealthily inserts a plug for the TPP:

For one thing, global competition is overrated as a factor in labor markets; yes, manufacturing faces a lot more competition than it did in the past, but the great majority of American workers are employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade.

I really had to restrain myself responding to that snide little remark, which obliquely trashes both TPP opponents and that lowly, yet "protected," category of servility:

So, since most of us are servants, we shouldn't worry about the Trans-Pacific Partnership because the billionaires haven't yet figured out a way to offshore all those great cashier and hamburger flipping jobs?

People who lost their good-paying factory jobs to NAFTA have been forced to become members of the Precariat, working for peanuts at Walmart and McDonalds. And now they're expected to jump for joy because the billionaires decide to throw them a few pennies and bennies and milk the good press for all it's worth.

Disgusting and shameless.

The TPP, which has been described as NAFTA on steroids, will in fact destroy thousands and thousands more American jobs. Factory orders on durable goods in this country are already way down, and the situation will only grow worse with every new trade deal. At least PK isn't falsely claiming, as are other "progressive" astroturf campaigns, that the TPP will protect American jobs and level the playing field.

The living wage movement must join forces with other trade unions to fight back against both globalization and the anti-labor "right to work" cookie cutter ALEC bills now showing up even in blue states like Oregon.

Solidarity is our only hope.

Meanwhile, the latest employment report shows a slowdown in hiring for even the crappy New Abnormal jobs. Black people are especially hard hit, with their median wages falling by 3.6 percent since the start of the long depression, a rate twice that of whites.  Meanwhile, the AARP reports that nearly half of all job seekers over the age of 55 have been out of work for at least half a year.

Tell us again that deregulated hypercapitalism and globalization don't have a toxic trickle-down (actually more of an acid rain downpour) effect on the Servant Economy. We are not lovin' this.
 

No Fooling

 The president does not give a crap about you. 

In order for millions of mortgagors to save their underwater homes, all the newly-elected Barack Obama had to do in 2008 was give the O.K. to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Obama could have made a moratorium on foreclosures a pre-condition of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. But like Bartleby the Scrivener, he preferred not to. 

We already knew, from former TARP inspector Neil Barofsky's Bailout, that Obama and his own treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, had made relief for the banking cartel their top priority. They used TARP money to "foam the runway" for the Too Big To Fail/Jails (TBTFJs) by spreading out the foreclosures in a gradual fashion so as not to overburden the pampered plutocrats with too much paperwork. (Much of which later turned out to be fraudulent anyway, but that's another story.)

Now, as Dave Dayen notes, former House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank has casually mentioned in his new memoir that President-elect Obama coldly, callously and deliberately threw millions of innocent victims of the financial meltdown under the bus. Just because he preferred to.

TARP was doled out in two tranches of $350 billion each. The Bush administration, still in charge during TARP’s passage in October 2008, used none of the first tranche on mortgage relief, nor did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson use any leverage over firms receiving the money to persuade them to lower mortgage balances and prevent foreclosures. Frank made his anger clear over this ignoring of Congress’ intentions at a hearing with Paulson that November. Paulson argued in his defense, “the imminent threat of financial collapse required him to focus single-mindedly on the immediate survival of financial institutions, no matter how worthy other goals were.”
Whether or not you believe that sky-is-falling narrative, Frank kept pushing for action on foreclosures, which by the end of 2008 threatened one in 10 homes in America. With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.”

Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders.
Obama’s unwillingness to take responsibility before holding full authority doesn’t match other decisions made at that time. We know from David Axelrod’s book that the Obama transition did urge the Bush administration to provide TARP loans to GM and Chrysler to keep them in business. So it was OK to help auto companies prior to Inauguration Day, just not homeowners.

Now that Obama is in the twilight of his presidency, it is becoming safe for Democrats like Frank to come out of the closet and openly criticize the White House's corrupt allegiance to Wall Street. His fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, has just added a bombshell of her own to the revised paperback edition of her own memoir, A Fighting Chance.  Missing from the original hardcover bestseller was an anecdote of a meeting she once held with Obama's favorite banker, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, to discuss government regulation of the TBTFJs:

When the conversation turned to financial regulation and Dimon began complaining about all the burdensome rules his bank had to follow, I finally interrupted. I was polite, but definite. No, I didn’t think the biggest banks were overregulated. In fact, I couldn’t believe he was complaining about regulatory constraints less than a year after his bank had lost billions in the infamous London Whale high-risk trading episode. I said I thought the banks were still taking on too much risk and that they seemed to believe the taxpayers would bail them out -- again -- if something went wrong.
Our exchange heated up quickly. By the time we got to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we weren’t quite shouting, but we were definitely raising our voices. At this point -- early in 2013 -- Rich Cordray was still serving as director of the consumer agency under a recess appointment; he hadn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, which meant that the agency was vulnerable to legal challenges over its work. Dimon told me what he thought it would take to get Congress to confirm a director, terms that included gutting the agency’s power to regulate banks like his. By this point I was furious. Dodd-Frank had created default provisions that would automatically go into effect if there was no confirmed director, and his bank was almost certainly not in compliance with the those rules. I told him that if that happened, “I think you guys are breaking the law.”

Suddenly Dimon got quiet. He leaned back and slowly smiled. “So hit me with a fine. We can afford it.”

Dimon could well afford to sneer. Every time his bank gets slapped with token criminal charges by Obama's justice department for face-saving public relations purposes, he saunters over to Eric Holder's office to demand and get a sweetheart deal. Holder holds the requisite press conference, collects a fine (on paper only, because banks can always claw back the cash through declaring losses on their tax returns) and he and Jamie give each other big sloppy kisses under cover of darkness.

 Matt Taibbi, in one of his many articles exposing the criminal collusion between Wall Street and the White House,  quotes a financial reform advocate who describes the perfidy this way:

 "The kid-gloves approach that the DOJ and the SEC take with Wall Street is as inexplicable as it is indefensible," says Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets, which would later file suit challenging the Chase settlement. "They typically charge only one offense when there are dozens. It would be like charging a serial murderer with a single assault and giving them probation."

Taibbi was writing about the case of a former JPMC employee who blew the whistle on the bank, only to find herself out of a job and her whistleblowing hidden from public view by Eric Holder, thanks to Dimon paying a clawed-backed fine to the government in exchange for the A.G.'s silence.

This past year she (whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann)  watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts. 

After Jamie made his latest deal with Eric, he got a huge raise and the bank's stock value skyrocketed while hundreds of low-level employees were laid off. Crime really does pay during the Age of Obama.

The president not only does not give a crap about you. He openly despises you.

Still,  I guess we should count ourselves lucky that we don't live in Yemen, Somalia,Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and all the other parts of the earth that the Nobel Peace laureate continues to bomb with impunity. Or in Egypt, whose murderous authoritarian ruler just got the Jamie Dimon treatment: a sweetheart deal from Obama of another billion dollars in aid, along with tanks, missiles and F-16s  in exchange for a meaningless promise to cut back on persecuting gays, jailing journalists and executing protesters.

Victimization-by-state is always, and only, a matter of degree.

Dollars & Pence

Money talks, and Indiana Governor Mike Pence is listening.

It took the threat of an economic boycott and the declaration that the Hoosier State is an apartheid state to get presidential hopeful Pence to walk back his homophobic bill of hideousness. It seems that mistakes were made by the readers of the law, not by the writers of the law. Just because the law states that merchants are within their "religious" rights to deny service to the LGBT community doesn't mean that bigots don't respect the gays, whined Pence and his cohort. Their gateway drug to pre-civil rights right-wing euphoria seems to have gotten recalled before even making it out of Dr. Moreau's lab of legislative horrors. At least its toxicity might get watered down:

Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Pence said he thought the clarification was needed because of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the legislation.

He said that while the intent of the bill was not to discriminate against gay people, state officials must confront the perception that the law would allow just that. He asked lawmakers to pass legislation that would be on his desk by the end of the week.

“I believe this is a clarification — but it’s also a fix,’ Mr. Pence said. “I’m determined to address this this week.”

The law has set off a firestorm, with both critics and some supporters saying it would allow businesses to deny service to lesbian and gay customers if it offended their religious beliefs. Businesses, organizations, politicians and many celebrities have spoken out against the law, some of them canceling events in the state.

Money talks. Gay people and the people related to them and the people who do business with them spend money. Pence saw the $$$ on the wall. Although he may rely on anonymous billionaires to finance his state and national political machinations, he still relies on ordinary people for his continued professional existence. Better to pretend to swallow his bitter moral pill now so that he upchuck it back out at us later in a different form. Hate takes so many forms, and even haters are sometimes forced to pick their battles.

Although the Supreme Court has granted corporations speech rights, the granting of religious rights as cover for all manner of civil rights abuses is finally getting some blowback. When the NCAA threatens to pull the basketball championship from the Basketball State, even bigotry has to take a back seat to greed.

Which brings us to the rest of the country. Although there is no direct proof that the libertarian American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has directly orchestrated the sudden simultaneous influx of religious bigotry laws, they do have "bill mill" written all over them. The authors of the Indiana law are, in fact, members of ALEC.  And while ALEC officials deny they're behind the Indiana law and others like it, they also deny having anything to do with gun control legislation -- despite providing the template for the Stand Your Ground laws that enable the extermination of black people by thugs like George Zimmerman.

So, since the economic threat to Indiana has turned out so well, how about a boycott of not only the states passing homophobic and racist laws, but of all the  states and cities hosting ALEC conferences? Its next big confab is the annual Spring Task Force Summit on May 15 in Savannah, Georgia -- which relies very, very heavily on those millions of tourism dollars for its continued survival. How about we put our state legislatures on notice that we won't countenance spending public money to send our elected officials on this junket and others like it?

No More Trickle-Down Bigotry on the Public Dime

Gay advocacy and other civil rights groups might also spend their money to register for this event and liven things up a bit. You're apparently allowed to bring along a spouse, but not a live-in partner. The registration form actually stipulates "legal" spouse only, along with members of one's immediate, legal family. I am not kidding. Guests must wear their legal spouse name-tags at all times to seminars plotting such abominations as how to get rid of clean air and water and health care for the masses.

 The possibilities for fun are endless. And the actual summit only lasts for one day, so as to give participants plenty of time to conspicuously cavort and consume in Savannah, even take pleasure cruises to nearby Hilton Head Island. And it gives potential party crashers, both gay and straight, black and white and brown, plenty of time to picket and boycott and raise a general ruckus at every luxury venue where your local legislative grifter is caught living it up on the public dime.

Would lawmakers even dare show their faces in Savannah after the Indiana debacle? Of course they would. Because staying away would require a moral compass and the capacity for shame, which are automatic disqualifiers to ALEC membership. Any sense of shame has to be applied firmly from without and come attached with a price tag payable only by the actual venal politician caught in the act of serial perfidy.

Because money talks.

The Attempted Gaslighting of Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has the reverse Midas touch: every plutocratic nerve ending that she touches turns into a jello salad heavy on the fool's gold nuggets with some harmlessly dull razor blades thrown in for an added taste sensation.

You shall know the elite owners of the American political system by their desperation. The latest futile attempt to destroy the increasingly popular Warren is to cast her as the left wing mirror image of Ted Cruz. This exercise in false equivalency by the golden fools of the Extreme Center comes right on the heels of threats by big bankers to withhold a couple of thousand bucks from Democratic candidates who won't stop carping on wealth inequality.  The shakedown artists of Wall Street promptly fell flat on their asses with that pathetic attempt at extortion.

So today, an anonymous Democratic lobbyist slithered forth to accuse Warren of being Ted Cruz in drag. The Hill, a combination Politico-style gossip rag/ corporate news aggregation site, did the gaslighting honors in a lame attempt to give equal time to the increasingly dull-razor minds of the Trans-Pacific Partnership claque. The headline blares "Elizabeth Warren Plays Ted Cruz Role with House Democrats." (She might be on the verge of not only losing it, but hypnotically reading Doctor Seuss to them as she plots to shut down the government!)

What really happened was this. As Warren calmly explained the anti-democratic nature of Investor State Tribunals with which trade negotiators would supersede sovereign judicial systems, pro-trade Congressman Sander Levin (D-Mich) attempted, as the Hill article spins it, to "intervene" (that is, stage a mental health intervention) to get Warren to shut up during her own briefing session. This populist rhetoric of hers, complain the pro-trade plutocrats, is getting way too rancorous for their refined sensibilities:

One former Democratic staffer turned financial services lobbyist compared Warren's involvement in the House to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who frequently meets with House Republicans.

“Elizabeth Warren is the mirror image of Ted Cruz, and if we aren’t careful, she’ll drive the Democrats into the same ditch Cruz is trying to drive the Republicans,” the former Democratic staffer said.

The revolving door Democratic staffer is of course too cowardly to give his name.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street think tank Third Way, which is obviously the source of the anonymous gaslighter, is crazily granted "left of center" status in The Hill piece, the better to make Elizabeth Warren appear like the crazy lefty version of Ted Cruz.

In another Hill article by the same reporter (Kevin Cirilli) published earlier this month, former Democratic Party chairman Howard "The Scream" Dean also had attempted an intervention by telling Warren to "tone it down." (she has that malady commonly diagnosed by men about opinionated women: she is "shrill". It is not becoming for women to have "misplaced rage." Even "good billionaire" Warren Buffett is upset that Elizabeth is definitely not cute when she's angry. She doesn't do the Lean In trickle-down feminism thing well.)

“Our program cannot be soak the rich — that's a mistake and alienates middle class people. But on substance, the Warren wing is correct,” said Dean.
“The rhetoric about wealth creation needs to be scaled back because Americans like wealth creation,” he added. “The level playing field argument wins it for us. The reason you do not want to talk about ‘tax the rich’ is because when middle class people hear it, they hear ‘they're going to raise our taxes.’ Democrats can't do that.”

It's not that Democrats can't, Howie. It's that they won't. They're as beholden to billionaires as the Republicans. As one "pragmatic" Dem put it, in the falsely equivalent way that only radical Wall Street centrists can,  the GOP's vicious assault on ordinary people is the same thing as Elizabeth Warren's criticism of the corrupt plutocracy. "To the extent that Republicans beat up on workers and Democrats beat up on employers — I'm not sure that offers voters much of a vision," Peters (Rep. Scott Peters, D-CA)  said.

And then there's the subtle photography. From a recent article in Politico, headlining Warren as a power-hungry outsider, there was this unflattering, harshly-lit, larger than life portrait:

 Compare it to Newsweek's crazy-eyes rendition of Michele Bachmann in 2012:

With Hillary, you get literally decades of dynastic choices between Crazy Cat Lady and Haggard Hag:

 

Sorry, ladies. Because try as the corporate media might, they can never make you look as threateningly scary as this guy:

TPP: Even Worse Than We Thought

Not only are they secretly planning to take over the world, they were actually planning to keep us all in the dark about their multiple coups d'etat for four years. In four years -- or so the latest leaked document claims -- they were finally going to let us all know we'd been robbed. How very noble of them.

 Somehow, the corporations and their political lackeys thought that the widespread replacement of legislatures and judiciaries with private corporate tribunals would go unnoticed, for four long years. The estimated one third of the world's population to be victimized would remain unaware of why they were losing their jobs, their savings, their environments and their very lives.

Meanwhile, the people doing the plotting have to be fully aware of how criminally diseased the Trans-Pacific Partnership truly is by slapping a four-year moratorium on public release of the now-leaked portion of the contents.

  By classifying their coup as a national security secret, they admit that they'll never be able to claim that "mistakes were made." Because the people negotiating this deal are acting deliberately. Every bit as deliberately as the pilot who allegedly crashed the German plane into a mountain the other day.  The only difference is that the negotiators piloting this hellish coup-deville will survive their own recklessness. But only for a little while. For when wealth and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the whole edifice is bound to collapse from its own top-heavy weight.

Apparently, the TPP plotters thought that suing governments in dispute resolution tribunals and then winning their cases by default would enable them to collect their final judgments from us without our knowledge. They'd never even have to serve us with a subpoena. We would be denied our day in court to act in our own defense. The money would just magically disappear from our pockets and bank accounts, and we'd be none the wiser.

 The thieving pathocrats would do what they always do: lecture us and poor-shame us. We didn't save enough for retirement. We lived beyond our means. We didn't eat healthy foods. We didn't develop the necessary skills to survive in the New Abnormal Economy (aka the Plutonomy.)

But now, thanks to Wikileaks, we know the truth. Whenever an undemocratic government classifies a document, it's to keep the corruption hidden and the rest of us ignorant. So, passing this deal from hell just got a little bit harder for them. When even the New York Times can no longer ignore the criminality, President Obama's astroturf propaganda campaign, sold as a renegotiation of NAFTA and a middle class, progressive triumph, will have to come up with some brand new bullshit in a hurry. Senator Ron Wyden, Obama's main Democratic co-conspirator in getting fast track approval authority rammed through Congress, is being threatened with a primary challenge.

Public Citizen explains all the newly-leaked horror of a global tribunal system run amok, by plutocrats:

Enactment of the leaked chapter would increase U.S. ISDS liability to an unprecedented degree by newly empowering about 9,000 foreign-owned firms from Japan and other TPP nations operating in the United States to launch cases against the government over policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms. To date, the United States has faced few ISDS attacks because past ISDS-enforced pacts have almost exclusively been with developing nations whose firms have few investments here.
The leak reveals that the TPP would replicate the ISDS language found in past U.S. agreements under which tribunals have ordered more than $3.6 billion in compensation to foreign investors attacking land use rules; water, energy and timber policies; health, safety and environmental protections; financial stability policies and more. And while the Obama administration has sought to quell growing concerns about the ISDS threat with claims that past pacts’ problems would be remedied in the TPP, the leaked text does not include new safeguards relative to past U.S. ISDS-enforced pacts. Indeed, this version of the text, which shows very few remaining areas of disagreement, eliminates various safeguard proposals that were included in a 2012 leaked TPP Investment Chapter text.
“With the veil of secrecy ripped back, finally everyone can see for themselves that the TPP would give multinational corporations extraordinary new powers that undermine our sovereignty, expose U.S. taxpayers to billions in new liability and privilege foreign firms operating here with special rights not available to U.S. firms under U.S. law,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “This leak is a disaster for the corporate lobbyists and administration officials trying to persuade Congress to delegate Fast Track authority to railroad the TPP through Congress.”

In the past three years alone, at least 150 ISD cases have been launched under the much smaller trade agreements which are currently in effect.  Investors have, for example, already attacked Canada's patent medicine and fracking policies and Australia's anti-smoking policy. Chevron has dodged responsibility for despoiling the Ecuadorian ecosystem with its toxic oil. Under the TPP, American taxpayers would theoretically not only be on the hook for cleaning up the next major oil spill, it would end up owing multinational oil giants many more billions in lost profits. Crooked politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would never even have to make another sweetheart deal with Exxon Mobil. Polluters would avoid being sued, either criminally or civilly, in the first place.  And then they'd be able to collect cash damages under the table without so much as an embarrassing press release.

All perfectly legal. All perfectly tax-free. All perfectly corrupt. A shadow legal system is just what the shadow banking system needs to complete the global coup.

It's no accident that Michael Froman of Citigroup, President Obama's chief trade negotiator,  pocketed a multimillion dollar "exit bonus" from his employer to complete the dirty deed. Or that Bank of America gifted Stefan Selig with a $9 million severance package when he went to work for Obama's commerce secretary, billionaire Obama donor Penny Pritzker.

So let's stop them in their tracks. Tell your congress critter to say No to fast track authority for Barack Obama and the global mafia. Because the last I heard, we're still allowed to vote amongst all the variants of greater and lesser evil. Let's cling to the remaining tatters of democracy as tenaciously as they accuse people of clinging to their guns and religion.

Wonky Warmongering Wankers

The neoliberal colonization of Afghanistan proceeds apace, and Wall Street is laughing all the way to Wall Street.  And why not?  One of their own is now nominally in charge of the Graveyard of Empires. A boorish corrupt tribal leader of a puppet has been replaced by an urbane corrupt World Banker of a puppet so perfect as to be almost a clone of Barack Obama himself.  Permawar has finally gotten itself some class and nuance to sanitize the venality and the death.

The New York Times is on it:

When President Obama meets this week with Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s new president, he will finally be sitting across from an Afghan leader who is not brooding, agitated, suspicious or openly belligerent toward his American allies.

The previous Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, had a relationship with Mr. Obama that was fractious and poisonous almost from the beginning. The new Afghan president arrives for Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting looking for a similar menu of American commitments on troops and money as his predecessor, but Mr. Ghani is well-schooled in Washington’s culture of politics and diplomacy: He spent 15 years in Washington at the World Bank and used to own a house in suburban Bethesda, Md.

He knows enough not to blow his nose onto his sleeve, or have a drug-dealer brother. This suavity makes the corruption and the murder and the bribery so much more appealing to squeamish plutocrats who prefer their puppets to be pre-existing members of their own club. The guy is an Insider. The bribery was a done deal decades ago.

But despite the bonhomie between intellectual equals, the warmongering establishment must still pretend that Ghani is an outsider presenting a "challenge" so as to avoid accusations of collusion between mercenary equals:

Mr. Ghani is certain to push hard to keep the current 10,000 American troops and thousands of private contractors in his country through, or perhaps beyond, 2016 when Mr. Obama insists the United States’ longest war will come to an end. Mr. Ghani is also seeking long-term commitments of money and support from the United States, where members of the public are skeptical of the value of that investment.

“If the troops come out in 2016, the money is going to come out 20 minutes later,” said David Barno, the senior American commander of American and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. “That’s going to be a disaster. They can’t operate without that money.”

The war will end, but the fighting and death will continue. If "we" get out now, investors will lose money. One warmonger pretends to push, the other warmonger pretends to pull, and thus will the coalition remain intact. The Times article does not inform readers that Barno is a fellow of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington think tank founded, funded, and operated by the Permawar Industry. Among the CNAS directors and investors who stand to lose profits in the event of an Afghanistan troop pullout are revolving door Senator Joe Lieberman, and officials of Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs and such investment outfits/defense contractors as Evercore, Mannheim LLC, and the hilariously-named security software developer "Endgame." And we can't forget former Carlyle Group director Bill Kennard, the "key force" behind Obama's decision to launch negotiations for the anti-regulatory, anti-democratic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Kennard, an Obama campaign bundler who was duly named EU ambassador, now helps run the telecom-heavy Grain Management private equity giant, which also manages some of the country's largest pension funds.  He used to sit on the board of the New York Times Company. Talk about diversification. Follow the wanky war money all throughout this tangled web... if you can. If you dare.

 So, the New York Times "news analysis" continues with the usual anonymous government source gratuitously insisting that the MIC's new puppet is both independent and feisty:

And Mr. Ghani can be difficult. His broadly pro-Western outlook is balanced by a deep nationalist streak, and he is known in Afghanistan as much for his technocratic skills as he is for his short temper. Western diplomats know well that he is more than willing to “give us the back of his hand,” as one American official put it, when he thinks Afghanistan’s interests are being trampled by its allies.

As much as I would love to see Ashraf bitch-slap Barack in a fit of plutocratic pique, I have a feeling that the man becomes a real pussycat as soon as the White House shows him the money. He is a banker, for God's sake. The Times continues,

Advisers to Mr. Ghani and Mr. Obama expect that they will relate easily. Mr. Ghani is far more of a financial technocrat than a natural politician, and his professorial approach to governing is sure to seem reassuring to his American counterpart.

In the eyes of American officials, Mr. Ghani has also proved willing to take on the role of wartime leader, unlike Mr. Karzai, who sought to limit raids and airstrikes by foreign forces, and even by the Afghan Army.

Two Obamas in a pod. Unrelatables who can relate. Cool, detached professors who can kill without breaking a sweat, unlike those recalcitrants who balk at their women and children becoming collateral damage during night raids by uniformed psychopaths. Ghani is presentable enough to be paraded in plain sight, allowed to eat in public, and express articulate appreciation as he is escorted to the same tourist sites he could probably see from his D.C. suburban backyard not too many years ago.

Doug Ollivant, who worked in the National Security Council for Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush, said Mr. Ghani is a “Western-oriented” leader who would be comfortable rubbing shoulders with intellectuals at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the Aspen Ideas Forum in Colorado.

“He’s a creature of Washington, a creature of Aspen and Davos,” he said. “He’s extremely comfortable moving in these circles.”

Cue Tom Friedman, who will no doubt wax rhapsodic about this sophisticated banker-wanker creature in an upcoming column. Who knew that you could be a plutocrat and a puppet at the same time? You can be a hybrid creature called a Plupup who needn't even grovel or suck up.  If you can rub shoulders at Davos and Aspen, then who cares about all the innocents you're rubbing out someplace else? Certainly not your fellow pathocrats.

Ollivant, as the Times conveniently forgets to mention, is also a war profiteer par excellence. His think tank, the New America Foundation, is funded by Bill Gates  and other Silicon Valley billionaires, with an emphasis on Common Core training for a compliant cannon fodder citizenry. As a member of the David Petraeus Brain Trust of military "intellectuals" who have failed upward since their destabilization of Iraq, Ollivant makes big bucks in private equity. And as a lifetime member of the Council of Foreign Relations, he is a sought-after White House consultant who also frequently appears on CNN to drum up the terror and the patriotic fervor, lest the public remember that Iraq and Afghanistan have been unmitigated, deadly disasters.  His job at Monument Capital Group Holdings is based on expertise in "post-conflict/emerging markets."

In other words, he specializes in the Plunder division of Disaster Capitalism. And lots and lots of killing. A blog post he wrote for the Terror Channel (CNN) couldn't be more blatantly bloodthirsty and money-hungry if it tried. Some snippets:

...We need to promote our forces who work best with allied forces in these spaces where the state is weak or nonexistent: the Army's Special Forces (popularly known as "Green Berets"). These forces have undergone significant neglect in the past decade, as the anti-terrorism capabilities of Joint Special Operations Command (SEAL Team Six and Delta Force) were seen as the most pressing need.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, Special Forces teams were known to be tasked by their commands — or decide on their own — to pursue a more aggressive "kill and capture" mission, rather than work "by, with, and through" their indigenous partners. It will require cultural change (and likely an improved funding stream) inside the military to emphasize that these Special Forces teams — seen as considerably less glamorous than their Joint Special Operations Command counterparts — are the capability most needed for future warfare.

Third, we need to continue to focus on prepared and ready land power — our own rifle squads, companies and battalions who can do the dirty business themselves, if need be....

... Many observers have pointed out that the military's traditional personnel management system has defects, both in recruiting and development. There are a host of suggestions, but any proposal that increases flexibility and expands the talent pool without degrading the necessity of producing leaders who can lead young men into combat should be seriously considered.
Long-standing suggestions to increase language training, allow for late entry and/or sabbaticals, increase technical skills, get input from subordinates on their leaders, and recruit outside traditional pools -- for instance, in Silicon Valley -- should all be seriously considered. All will be necessary for these coming ambiguous fights.

Young men from the lower classes fight dirty over there so that the plutocratic "thought-leaders" can schmooze and munch caviar at the Aspen Ideas Festival over here.

What would be a nightmare to normal people is Ollivant's blissful wet dream:

 It is possible that our next war will resemble nothing that anyone has predicted, perhaps a naval battle over the Arctic, or — God forbid — a nuclear exchange. And yes, it is possible that war could emerge between China on one side and South Korea, Japan or even the United States on the other in the South China Sea, though it is not overstatement to claim that this would bring about the end of the world economy as we currently understand it. But the most likely outcome, barring some shock to the world system, is that future wars will strongly resemble those occurring today. 

Never once does this warmongering wanker even remotely consider diplomacy as an alternative to wars. It's not part of his job description. Peace would be the kiss of death to profit.

It's no surprise that Ollivant titled his blogpost "What War Has in Store." Because as far as the global oligarchs are concerned, death and destruction are tantamount to a global shopping spree of orgiastic proportions.

But you won't learn about this in the pages of the Paper of Record, where war is  about how well a bunch of wealthy, well-dressed intellectual wankers can all get along so famously.