Obama's Violent Mood Swing

*Updated Below

Barack Obama didn't even find it necessary on Thursday to utter the word "drone" to explain how an American aid worker and an Italian aid worker died in Pakistan early this year. He didn't have to mention the countless thousands of others, known alternately as "collateral damage" or "suspected militants" whom he has killed over the years, because Congress has kindly decreed he needn't ever divulge their names or the grisly details. He will, however, nobly accept "full responsibility," cut a check or two, and move on.

And move on he did. Regrets, he had a few, but then again too few to mention. Because by afternoon, he was the center of hilarious attention at another White House event honoring the Super Bowl champs. Far from feeling deflated after his wooden apology (described as anguished and heartfelt by media sycophants) to his victims' relatives, he cracked jokes for eight straight minutes with the ballers who brawl both on and off the field. He devoted at least twice as much time regaling players and sports fans as he did explaining his drone kills to the hostage families and to the rest of us.

Within the space of a few short hours, Obama went from this:

 To this:

They don't call him the chameleon for nothing. He himself did once warn us that he was naught but a blank slate upon which we could pin all our hopes and dreams. So stop complainin' and lookin' blank, citizens, and eat your peas.

We've haven't played Parse-a-Prez for a awhile, have we? So let's give it another go, beginning with the Sad Obama character:

This morning, I want to express our grief and condolences to the families of two hostages.  One American, Dr. Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto, who were tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.

Right off the bat he absolves himself of any real blame by using the weasely passive voice. Predator drones launched on his personal orders deliberately smashed a group of human beings to smithereens in an act of state-sponsored murder. It was not a "tragedy." It was another war crime, hideously euphemized by Obama as an "operation."

 Warren and Giovanni were aid workers in Pakistan devoted to improving the lives of the Pakistani people.  After Warren was abducted by al Qaeda in 2011, I directed my national security team to do everything possible to find him and to bring him home safely to his family.  And dedicated professionals across our government worked tirelessly to do so.  We also worked closely with our Italian allies on behalf of Giovanni, who was kidnapped in 2012.

Weinstein's widow begs to differ with the condolator in chief. She is not shy about accusing the government of doing bupkis to find her husband and secure his release.

Since 9/11, our counterterrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives both here in America, and around the world.  And that determination to protect innocent life only makes the loss of these two men especially painful for all of us.  Based on information and intelligence we have obtained, we believe that a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region accidentally killed Warren and Giovanni this past January.

That is pure bullshit of course. His efforts, aka bombings, have caused mayhem and fear among innocent families. His efforts have helped destabilize vast swaths of the Middle East, most recently in Yemen, which is now being pounded by Saudi Arabia, Obama's authoritarian BFF and buyer of expensive American killing machines. Obama is especially pained by having to deal with the deaths of  two hostages, because it proves he and his team have no earthly idea who it is they're targeting. Their advanced technology was unable to detect the presence of the prisoners. They had no clue that prisoners are often kept in compounds.

It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes -- sometimes deadly mistakes -- can occur.  But one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.

Shit happens, but we wipe our asses with expensive toilet tissue, wash our hands, and move on. Because we're exceptional imperialists. Because we can get away with it. "America" is not perfect, but the cartel running the place surely must be.

Today we join their families and friends in honoring Warren and Giovanni -- two humanitarians who came from different countries but who were united by a spirit of service.....

  I usually tell a bunch of jokes at these events, but with the Patriots in town, I was worried that 11 out of 12 of them would fall flat. All right, all right. That whole story got blown a little out of proportion.

Bugsplat, drones, get it?

Uhhhh.... What's that you say? I got a little ahead of my skis and careened right into Obama's next speech by passive mistake? Ooops. Well, I do extend my regrets and accept full responsibility for mistakes that were made in the fog of blog. But let's turn the page, look forward, move on to Happy Obama:

All right, all right. That whole story (Deflate Gate) got blown a little out of proportion. All right, where were we? Here’s what makes the Patriots the Patriots. Even in the midst of a huge distraction, during the biggest media circus of the sports year, they stayed focused. As coach Belichick would say, it was simply on to Seattle.

(Obama can so relate to not letting blowback and distractions ever get in his way. He has that preternatural ability to flit from place to place, mood to mood, persona to persona.) 

"Gronkowski just being Gronkowski. He’s not making rabbit ears back there. I told him to keep his shirt on. He asked me what would happen if he took it off. I said, ‘Secret Service probably wouldn’t like it.’ He said, ‘What could they do to me?’

I got two words for you guys: Predator Drones. Or maybe Colombia hookers. Heh heh heh.

Obama was making an inside joke about the Secret Service's alleged lack of humor. At last month's annual off-the-record Gridiron Dinner, which Obama headlined, male reporters, aka media personalities, dressed as Colombia prostitutes and sang "We're Not Watching You" to the tune of "Every Breath You Take." The props included a White House fence and a drone flying overhead.

The Secret Service was not amused at being turned into a complete laughingstock, apparently. From the Washington Post: 

In a letter obtained by the Loop to Gridiron President Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, the trade association that represents the Secret Service let known its displeasure.
The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association “understands a good joke,” wrote Jon Adler, the group’s president. “But the jokes concerning the Secret Service’s recent issues came off lowbrow and unappreciated by our Members working at the dinner.”

I guess they didn't get the message that they are merely the help, and that although Obama proclaimed himself very angry in public about the prostitution scandal, his mood swung violently back to hilarity at the private dinner as the prostituted reporters played prostitute and thumbed their noses at the cops tasked with guarding official government hides. It was all in such good fun. There was absolutely no danger of the courtier press getting shot. They are too indispensable to the status quo.

We are so exceptional. God Help America. 

*Update, 4/24: Scott Shane of the New York Times has written a pretty chilling analysis of Obama's drone program. Or should I say his drone addiction: 

The drone’s vaunted capability for pinpoint killing appealed to a president intrigued by a new technology and determined to try to keep the United States out of new quagmires. Aides said Mr. Obama liked the idea of picking off dangerous terrorists a few at a time, without endangering American lives or risking the yearslong bloodshed of conventional war.

“Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us,” he often told aides.

By most accounts, hundreds of dangerous militants have, indeed, been killed by drones, including some high-ranking Qaeda figures. But for six years, when the heavy cloak of secrecy has occasionally been breached, the results of some strikes have often turned out to be deeply troubling.

Shane offers no evidence, nor any names of the hundreds of dangerous militants, defined in a secret document called the Disposition Matrix as any male of military age.

The president’s announcement on Thursday that a January strike on Al Qaeda in Pakistan had killed two Western hostages, and that it took many weeks to confirm their deaths, bolstered the assessments of the program’s harshest outside critics. The dark picture was compounded by the additional disclosure that two American members of Al Qaeda were killed in strikes that same month, but neither had been identified in advance and deliberately targeted.

In all, it was a devastating acknowledgment for Mr. Obama, who had hoped to pioneer a new, more discriminating kind of warfare. Whether the episode might bring a long-delayed public reckoning about targeted killings, long hidden by classification rules, remained uncertain.

This is an article designed to show that Obama is human and is doing some heavy soul-searching. Once it becomes evident that "everyday Americans" still don't care, the story likely will be sucked down the memory hole. My published comment:

Will the revelations of the botched drone strike cause a great national soul-searching? That's highly doubtful.

The majority of polled Americans don't care about the deaths and maimings of people living in "tribal areas." The xenophobia and fear-mongering blasting nonstop from Fox and CNN have been highly effective in normalizing signature strikes against persons both unknown and unknowable.

Within hours of delivering his apology for the "mistakes that were made in the fog of war," Obama was laughing it up at another White House event honoring the Super Bowl champions. He spent at least twice as much time cracking jokes and regaling the audience and the media as he had expressing his regrets to the families of the dead hostages. He even joked about what the Secret Service might do to a player if he took off his shirt.

Tasteless, arrogant, ruthless and sick.

No scandal, no consequences for Oval Office Murder, Inc. Because it was almost a year ago that the Senate quietly stripped an intelligence bill provision that would have required the president to supply the names and other details of everybody killed in drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. James Clapper complained that such transparency would undermine the effectiveness of what they euphemize as "operations."

Well, so much for the vaunted therapeutic surgical precision of the Kill List. I am surprised they didn't also joke that although the operation was a success, the wrong patients died.

Invasion of the Hillzabeth

(updated below)

I'd promised myself that I would limit my posts on Hillary to only one per week, lest I become as addicted to the effervescence as the mainstream press seems to be. With a full year and half to go before election day, I didn't want to suffer acute Clinton burnout on top of my chronic Clinton burnout. Even Hillary seems to be getting tired of herself. She is not so much running for president as she is sauntering for president.

But I couldn't resist her campaign's latest gimmick -- which is to claim that Elizabeth Warren is not really Elizabeth Warren, and that Hillary Clinton is not really Hillary Clinton. It's some kind of weird rip-off of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The plot is convoluted, so bear with me:

There never was an Elizabeth Warren, or at least not the Elizabeth Warren we think we know and love. The real Elizabeth Warren is Hillary Clinton. The fake Elizabeth, hogging attention in the Senate, crept right into Hillary's mind one night. She sucked out Hillary's passionate populism like a vampire sucks blood, claiming it as her own. What a bitch.

And all that's left of poor Hillary is a robotic wraith*. She wanders the plutocratic landscape, devoid of all emotion and humanity.

In case you're confused (I know that I am) I will let the New York Times explain it better. Amy Chozick, who has the enviable assignment of being the permanent Hillary beat reporter, headlines her story "Campaign Casts Hillary Clinton as the Populist It Insists She Has Always Been."

Like I said, this is shades of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As that cult classic movie begins, a boy insists that his mother isn't his mother, and a woman thinks her husband isn't her husband. and so forth. It turns out the townsfolk are getting subsumed, while they sleep, by giant alien outer-space pods who morph into exact facsimiles of the person they replace.  At first, people who insist that their relatives aren't who they say they are get written off as nuts. Until the movie progresses, that is, and everybody turns into a progressive pod-zombie. The few remaining holdouts gradually succumb to sleep through sheer exhaustion. It's just a movie, though. Neoliberal Death Match 2016 is all too real.

The Futile Fight Against Hillary Fatigue

Back to the Times article:

But now, the former secretary of state must persuade voters that she is the right messenger for the cause of inequality, not simply seizing on it out of political expedience.

Nothing stings members of her inner circle more than the suggestion that their candidate is late to these issues. Mrs. Clinton was the original Elizabeth Warren, her advisers say, a populist fighter who for decades has been an advocate for families and children; only now have the party and primary voters caught up.

“I don’t know why we have this semicollective amnesia about her past positions,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and Mrs. Clinton’s policy director in 2008. “She’s following no one on these issues.”

Neera Tanden can gas-light we doubters all she wants, but there are some inconvenient truths about Humanish Hillary. Just like the pod people, she is both new and a con -- a Neocon. She is more hawkish than Obama. 

And although she speaks often about women and families, her words have not been followed by similar actions: quite the opposite, in fact. As a board member for Walmart while she was first lady of Arkansas, she remained silent as the Walton family fought unions and a minimum wage. And Alice Walton, who along with her fellow heirs owns as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, has already given $25,000 to the Ready for Hillary PAC  -- relative chump change which nonetheless is more than the annual salary of the average  female Walmart employee.

Hillary was instrumental in Bill Clinton's collusion with Republicans that cut off direct cash aid to poor mothers and children. And she bragged about it in her  first memoir. "By the time Bill and I left the White House," she gushed, "welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent!"

Well, she did say she was dead broke when she left, so I assume that she wanted the still-poor welfare moms to achieve parity with her in order to show solidarity with their champion. Don't even get me started on her championship of NAFTA, which saw the exodus of millions of jobs, including the jobs held by working women.

There's so much more, which I will get to often in the next endless year and a half. But meanwhile, Team Clinton is trying to rewrite fact as fantasy, omitting the scary special effects. According to the revisionary history, Hillary was a left-wing firebrand in the White House, until the State Department gig forced her to act boring and conservative and hawkish and non-Warrenish. From the Times again:

This perception comes because she wasn’t involved in the discussion for so long,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, said of Mrs. Clinton. Because, she added, in the White House “she had this reputation as being the very left-wing, liberal, Elizabeth Warren type.”

Anita Dunn must be living in a fog. According to DeSmogBlog, Dunn is a lobbyist who's gotten rich from, among other things, working for the tar sands and fracked oil industries as well as doing public relations for the railroads hosting those exploding oil bomb terror trains. She's spun through the Washington revolving doors so many times that she is no longer recognizable as a pod person. She's a blur.

A 16-page dossier called "Hillary Clinton: A Lifetime Champion of Income Opportunity" reads like a hokey Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the one where the filthy rich guy has the epiphany -- not to agree to pay more taxes, of course, but to marry the struggling single mom, and make us all feel vicariously good for about five minutes.

Elizabeth Warren, sniffed an aide, is only a "footnote" in the Book of Hillary. According to the Book, the too-big-to-fail banks do not even exist. They are replaced by commodities known as children -- who are too small to fail, assuming of course that they work hard and play by the rules. Then they can morph into investments like pork belly futures. Or pod-people. It is cute beyond words.

 I have no more words.

*Update, 4/23: Make that a radioactive robotic wraith. While some of us were sleeping, the New York Times published what would, in a sane world devoid of pod people, be the coup de grace for the Hillary campaign. Read the whole thing. The Clintons make Frank and Clare Underwood look like Ward and June Cleaver. Unfortunately, Democrats are viewing this meticulously researched and damning piece as just more one Hillary-hating attack by the Worse Evil Party. It has gotten so zombie-ish in the Land of the Free that you may now call yourself "pragmatic" for blindly accepting felonious behavior by your favorite candidates.

Of course, we've been governed by an organized crime ring for quite a while now. It's called the permanent ruling class.

 

Wink, Nod, Cough, Repeat

You can barely see the corrupt political traffic for all the polluting smoke out there.

The Republicans have held up the Senate confirmation of Loretta Lynch as attorney general for six unseemly months --  based not upon on her disturbing refusal to prosecute a drug-trafficking, money-laundering, terror-profiting mega-bank, but because of their feigned concern that victims of sex-trafficking might get government-funded abortions.

The Democrats, although rightly calling out the Grim Old Party for its hypocrisy and dog-whistle racism, are turning a willful blind eye to Lynch's (at worst) corruption and (at best) ineptitude. Not only did she fail to prosecute HSBC bankers for their original crimes, she's failed to prosecute them for pissing all over the sweethheart deal she gave them. The bank continued to shield wealthy clients who hide their cash in Switzerland to evade taxes. Loretta knew it, and did nothing.

But Al Sharpton (allegedly) went on a hunger strike to protest GOP treatment of her. Democratic Whip Dick Durbin compared her to Rosa Parks, as though Lynch is some kind of civil rights icon rather than a revolving-door corporate lawyer who has spent much of her professional life defending white collar criminals. Even Elizabeth Warren, who can normally be counted upon to call out Wall Street corruption and government complicity and regulatory capture wherever she sees it, is staying weirdly mum on this one.

Why?

Only the Shadow knows, and the Shadow is not telling. But I suspect it has something to do with party loyalty and wedge issues and identity politics and winning, winning, winning at all and any costs.

Before the Republicans accepted their plutocratic marching orders, fulfilling their assigned role of forcing Democrats to circle the wagons around Loretta Lynch out of misplaced gender, racial and party loyalty, there were, in fact, vague murmurings about her cozy relationship with Big Finance. Dave Dayen described the history in a Salon piece last fall:

Lynch’s first job was as a litigation associate at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in the mid-1980s. Their litigation department includes the legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who defended the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case (Abrams subsequently argued the Citizens United case, on “campaign money is speech” grounds). But it also does a great deal of white-collar defense in securities and antitrust law, representing companies like AIG, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Bank of America and more. It’s a corporate law firm.
Lynch then served at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn for 11 years, rising to run the office during the end of the Clinton administration, from 1999 to 2001. When she left, she became a partner at Hogan & Hartson (it has since merged to become Hogan Lovells). It’s a giant D.C. law firm specializing in government regulatory, corporate and financial law. Like Cahill Gordon & Reindel, it advises all sorts of corporations, and it even has a separate lobbying firm, one of the top five in the United States. We know that Lynch worked on white-collar criminal defense and corporate compliance while in private practice at Hogan & Hartson.
Eventually, Lynch went back to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn for a second stint in 2010, serving there until her nomination for attorney general. But in between, she worked in corporate law and white-collar criminal defense at two mega-law firms for nearly two decades.

To be fair, she did much pro bono work during her private career, and is rightly revered for successfully prosecuting the notorious Abner Louima gang assault-by-cop.

But another troubling -- and kind of strange --  aspect of her professional biography is her directorship of the New York Federal Reserve Board between 2003 and 2005, and her important role in getting that man-o-the people, future Obama treasury consigliere Tim Geithner, appointed as NY Fed president -- just in time for the Big Meltdown of 2008, which nobody could ever have predicted. (wing, nod, cough.)

And then quick as a wink and a hack, Loretta Lynch spun through the revolving doors to the Brooklyn US Attorney's Office, where she was responsible for prosecuting settling with some of the same clients and colleagues she'd canoodled with so very recently. These included Citigroup (which, as Elizabeth Warren notes, has effectively infiltrated the Obama administration.) Lynch was able to extract a paltry $7 billion fine from a bank the size of a country, most of which came out of investors' pockets, the rest clawed back from the US Treasury in the form of tax refunds based on "losses."

The HSBC deal was even worse. Not only was a major crime against humanity by the banking mafia swept under the rug via a deferred prosecution deal, the foxy cop (Lynch) in charge of the foxes in charge of hen-house apparently knew almost from the get-go that HSBC was reneging on its promise to behave itself and police itself. At the same time that the bankers admitted to aiding and abetting a consortium of vicious drug cartels, they were hiding about $120 billion of their wealthy clients' money. She saw something and didn't say something.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi described it as only Matt Taibbi can:

The DOJ acted very tough after the 2012 deferred-prosecution deal, swaggering in a strangely self-congratulatory public ceremony. Then-Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer shared a podium with Loretta Lynch here in New York, detailing how the bank's Mexican branches had fashioned specially-made teller windows so that drug gangs could more quickly slide in their cash.
Still, no individual had to pay a dime in fines, and nobody was charged. In fact, the harshest penalty any individual at HSBC had to suffer in that case was the partial deferral of some bonuses.
 hat looked bad back then, but now the Breuer/Lynch deal looks preposterous even by Eric Holder's standards. If our government knew back then that HSBC had been engaged in a sweeping global tax-evasion scheme, how could it have dealt out such a sweetheart deal on the money-laundering caper after being so informed?
This is a little like dropping a felony burglary charge to misdemeanor trespassing at a time when you've found out that your bug-eyed suspect with the rope and zip-ties in his trunk is wanted in a string of violent home invasions in another state. It's inexplicable, something no sane law enforcement official would ever entertain.

The equally indispensable William Black notes that the Obama Justice Department has been effectively captured by conservative economist-think, and that far from punishing HSBC officials, Lynch has actually gone out of her way to praise money-launderers and the aiders and abettors of alleged foreign terrorists. While the DOJ pleads that such banks are too big and too vital to jail, Black points out that government failure to prosecute them is a recipe for the next inevitable financial disaster. Read his whole piece, and weep.

"Will the HSBC deal come back to haunt Loretta Lynch?" Taibbi rhetorically and hilariously asked just a few short months ago.

The stunning answer is that far from being haunted, Loretta Lynch is now being celebrated by the Democratic Party as a feminist icon and martyr, a hostage who is now so gloriously rescued from GOP perfidy. Loretta Lynch is such a compelling symbol of the liberal brand that all indications are that she will continue to serve under a President Hillary Clinton, whose campaign arm had been circulating a fund-raising petition in her honor.

A grand bipartisan bill to combat sex trafficking will be forever positively linked to Loretta Lynch's name. Never mind that the whole controversy was a contrivance, in which Democrats pretended not to notice that the GOP had attached an anti-abortion clause to the original measure. This opened the way to five months of wedge-issue fundraising and five months of rebranding Loretta Lynch and forgetting all about her personal sleaze factor and her actual suitability for the job. 

Al Sharpton can finally eat again.

"Check, please!"

The "Heavenly City" of the Republican Right

By William Neil

I now live in the heavily Republican area of the Western Maryland mountains, which are closer in the gritty facts of harsh economic life to West Virginia than to those of  affluent Montgomery County, the “engine” of the Maryland economy, and where I used to live, but can no longer afford to.

Our region has been consumed over the past few months by the campaign to stop fracking, and I’ve been getting itchy to write about the broader context of the political economy in which it takes place.  After all, Maryland’s new Governor, Republican Larry Hogan, successfully beat the much larger Democratic political machine by revving up the classic Republican Right ideology of Austerity, not much different than Reagan’s older rhetoric which captured the presidency in 1980:  anti-regulatory, anti-tax, anti-government, pro-free markets.   That formula, before it was called “Austerity,” was designed to deliver a permanent crisis in government by denying it revenue, thereby forcing cuts in spending in non-defense areas, because,  let us not forget, this philosophy insists on balancing budgets no matter what the broader economic circumstances: financial panic, recession, depression,  no matter, the Republican Right wants to dance on Keynes’ grave in a Dionysian  attempt to create the conditions which will restore business “confidence.”   This is one formula for “all seasons,” in other words, and one which has become the dominant economic ideology in much of the West.  But if you understood the meaning of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capitalism in the 21^st Century, you have to ask, how much more of the national wealth will businesses demand before they feel confident and deliver the goods:  jobs for all?  The American maldistribution of wealth now approaches that of the late 1920’s, just before the crash, and it was rising throughout the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century, when it was bad enough.  And since we are living in the second great age of Globalization, the first being 1870-1914, there is no guarantee that further gilding of CEO’s pay will produce the jobs, or if it does, they will be in our own nation.

  There is a particularly German variety of Austerity, which dominates the economic views in the key financial institutions of the increasingly shaky European Union, and which has driven the citizens of Greece to the economic wall.  Germany ideology presents a complication for American minds, doubtless, since isn’t this the same Germany of national healthcare, strong unions and environmental vision, supposedly  a social democracy at odds with American’s vaunted “exceptionalism,”  the one based on heroic individualism?  Well, that’s a complex story for another day, but for now, please note that what happens between the Greeks and the Germans in the ongoing negotiations is being watched very carefully in Spain, and in Italy, since the Syriza party’s coming to power in Athens in 2015 represents the first successful left electoral challenge to Austerity, something the existing supposedly “leftist” socialist/social democratic parties in France, Spain and Great Britain haven’t been able to manage.  The issues the Greeks in Athens are struggling with do have something in common with those in Annapolis, even though Greece is in the equivalent of the American Great Depression, but is being denied the tools that we ourselves used in the New Deal to help pull ourselves out: debt forgiveness and creative government job programs.

Did Maryland voters who elected Larry Hogan have this in mind when they supported him in November of 2014?  He claims they did and he has a decent claim, based on the values he talked about in building his organization.   If you listened to his speeches in the early going this year, all the classic tropes of the Republican Right and the Austerians were there, given added power, as always, by the legal requirement that the state’s budget must be balanced, with an additional fiscal vise being supplied by his party’s tax and fee rollback pledges.  Greece is like an American state in its relation to the European Union: it doesn’t control its own currency, it must use the Euro and it already had a huge government deficit heading into the economic crisis caused by European bank lending to those terrible, lazy southern periphery countries, the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.)

There is a personal side to this for me, though, which makes the Athens story mesh more closely with the one in Annapolis: the chief Greek negotiator, economist Yanis Varoufakis, has published two powerful essays about democracy and economics at the American website run by Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism, and I commented heavily upon the democracy/Internet focused essay, and it turns out that Varoufakis and I had been reading and thinking along similar lines without ever knowing it.  (The links will be provided at the end of this introductory essay.)  It turns out that American economist James Galbraith has also been working with Varoufakis in formulating a way out of the Austerity traps Greece is in, and he is one of the three authors who drew up an intellectual outline of solutions based in good part from the American New Deal, adjusted for the realities of the institutions of the contemporary European Union.  

Now it just so happens that a Letter-the-Editor appeared in our regional newspaper, The Cumberland-Times News on April 7^th which breathlessly, in about 300 words, described the distributionist evils of the big government sprung from Progressivism, the New Deal and LBJ’s War on Poverty.  Those programs have illegal origins, the writer, Jim Hinebaugh of Maysville, West Virginia, says, because the American Constitution, properly understand, does not authorize any of these activities,  which are essentially public charity undertaken with “other people’s money.”  In contrast, the more modest view of the 19^th century based on private property, was much more respectful “of the life, liberty or estate of another.”  

What is most interesting to me about his letter is not only its attack on progressive economics, but his “strict constructionist” interpretation of our brief founding Constitution, which his very idealized version of the 19^th century understood correctly , but which we on the left get so wrong.  In responding, I could have chosen to focus on this Republican Right “originalist” Constitutional theme, but instead I chose to sketch a very different picture of life in 19^th century American, to illustrate how a larger governmental response grew logically out of a response to repeated disturbances.  This is a century I have been increasingly reading and thinking about precisely because it is the Heavenly City of today’s Republican Right and if they ever get us there it’s going to turn out to be the same destination as the one in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cautionary 1843 tale of illusionary, technology driven material progress (the impacts of railroads especially), portrayed in the short story, The Celestial Railroad.  With just a little stretch, environmentalists can insert global warming into Hawthorne’s warning, driven by now worldwide visions of “middle class life” coming at an ecologically catastrophic cost, in Hawthorne’s terms, a worldwide Vanity Fair of pretense with terrible secular consequences.   

And so that is how I came to write the rebuttal Letter-to-the-Editor which appeared in the lead “guest” slot this past Sunday (April 12^th).  I’m giving you, at the end of this essay, the full version I originally submitted, some 1500 words, which was edited down by me at the suggestion of the paper’s editors.  You’ll also get the full letter by Mr. Hinebaugh, so you can appreciate where the Right is coming from in his own words.  And as a check on my “translation.” 

I want to use these conservative assertions about the 19^th century’s virtues and my objections to it to help create the context, the intellectual and policy background, for the coming American Presidential race in 2016.  That’s an election, where, just to be clear, I’m not happy about the choices I seem to be facing, their “inevitability” in one case, and their uniform location on the Right in the other.  To paint that canvas, I need a little more space than that allotted in “Letters-to-the Editor” formats.   So bear with me.  

There is a great dichotomy building in American life today, and it grows from the deepest assumptions about the role of government in American economic life.  You can see the outlines in the exchange I had with Mr. Hinebaugh.  The heart of it is this: a minimalist national government will be straightjacketed by a “literal” reading of the original constitution, and we will all be subjected to the waves of creative destructions unleashed by the constantly churning private sector, whose power will be presented as omnipotent.  A longer version of this schizophrenic “dream” reads like this:  the Republican Right wants to return us, via their strict constructionist view of the Founder’s intent in writing the Constitution, to the same weak federal state that they say characterized the great 19^th century, a century when we didn’t have a regulatory state, environmentalists, powerful labor unions or consumer movements, or a vast printing press at the Federal Reserve.   With these countervailing powers out of the way, and taxes reduced by the ever shrinking government, the average citizen will have to face the awesome power of modern capitalism alone.  Apparently the expectation is that each citizen will be as strong and resourceful as James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, and as morally upright. But instead of shooting deer at incredible distances and rescuing Indian captured maidens, we will all be founding small businesses – nearly as heroic an act. The fact that Mr. Hinebaugh totally ignores the vast concentration of private power, national wealth and income that had been accumulated by the Robber Barons and their trusts by the late 19th is an astonishing feature of his assertions.  It is as if no abuse ever came out of this system of private property which is the foundation underneath capitalism, the real name of our economic system.  Lord Acton’s assertion that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” I have always taken to be a human universal, applying wherever too much power is accumulated, and I still do.  (Feminists might ask why I left out the next sentence from him: “Great men are almost always bad men.” It’s because it’s less convincing than the first two, and I wonder if they would think it would apply to great females.  Are we about to find out?)  

Hollywood's Trans-Obama Partnership

The latest Wikileaks dump of SONY emails reveals that, among many other things, SONY executives are royally freaked out about Wikileaks. The release over a year ago of the top-secret intellectual property clause of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was so upsetting to the studio bigwigs that they demanded -- and got --  a personal meeting between their industry lobbyist (Chris Dodd) and Barack Obama himself. They needn't have worried. Since they'd been dictating terms of the "trade" pact all along, all the president had to do was reassure them, once again, that he'd always have their well-padded backs.

He already announced that a threat to SONY is tantamount to a threat to our national security. What more could they possibly want? (Don't even ask. They live in La La Land.)

As Wikileaks founder Julian Assange notes, the newly released emails are a window into the cozy, corrupt relationship between Hollywood and the Democratic Party. Quid pro quo is broadcast loud and clear throughout the leaked emails, as is a virtual orgy of mutual star-struck masturbation. We see Obama "First Friend" Valerie Jarrett, esconced in the Beverly Hills Four Seasons early in the first term, busily emailing studio honchos and stars with offers of an intimate dinner with the Obamas, at the same time cadging invitations to A-list Hollywood parties for Obama hangers-on.

We see two-tiered pricing arrangements for celebrity photos with Michelle Obama. If a star wants to bring the whole family along for a FLOTUS meet-and-greet, it'll cost them extra. Every TV ratings bonanza following an Obama appearance on late night TV is followed by a flurry of congratulatory emails on the audience share and more demands for cash by the Democratic machine.

Assange writes,

"This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."
Sony is a member of the MPAA and a strong lobbyist on issues around internet policy, piracy, trade agreements and copyright issues. The emails show the back and forth on lobbying and political efforts, not only with the MPAA but with politicians directly. In November 2013 WikiLeaks published a secret draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IP Chapter. The Sony Archives show SPE's internal reactions, including discussing the impact with Michael Froman, the US Trade Representative. It also references the case against Megaupload and the extradition of its founder Kim DotCom from New Zealand as part of SPE's war on piracy.

The connections and alignments between Sony Pictures Entertainment and the US Democratic Party are detailed through the archives, including SPE's CEO Lynton attending dinner with President Obama at Martha's Vineyard and Sony employees being part of fundraising dinners for the Democratic Party. There are emails setting up a collective within the corporation to get around the 5,000 USD limit on corporate campaign donations to give 50,000 USD to get the Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo elected as "Thanks to Governor Cuomo, we have a great production incentive environment in NY and a strong piracy advocate that’s actually done more than talk about our problems."
Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.

Integrity, huh? Nobody ever accused the media-political complex of not having a sense of humor.

Speaking of integrity, there is indeed some occasional verisimilitude of it in No Drama-Obama World. Obama pal Henry Louis Gates (of "Beer Summit" fame) is seen bravely refusing to cover up Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestry for a PBS "roots" special which also stars, surprisingly enough, Valerie Jarrett. According to Gates, Affleck's great-great-great grandpappy was one of the "good slaveowners," so therefore the Harvard prof found the attempted censorship weirdly misplaced.

 "And he wasn't even a bad guy," Gates writes of a man who declared ownership of human beings.  "We don't demonize him at all.  Now Anderson Cooper's ancestor was a real s.o.b.; one of his slaves actually murdered him.  Of course, the slave was promptly hanged.  And Anderson didn't miss a beat about that.  Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand." (*see update below.)

Welcome to the Madison Avenue "branding" of civil rights in the Age of Obama. Things have gotten so post-racial that even slave owners can be rehabilitated as  good guys. And props to multimillionaire Anderson Cooper for being so sanguine with how he came by at least some of his inherited wealth.

And then there's some back-and-forth emailing about which celebs to honor with a fake made-for-the-media/political complex civil rights award named after W.E.B. Du Bois. It seems that accused sexual predator and Hollywood mogul/Dem donor Harvey Weinstein was a controversial choice for the honor because of his "personality." When Gates asked SONY/RAND honcho Michael Lynton to personally bestow the award on Weinstein, Lynton retorted, "I would do many things for you, Bro, almost anything, but not that."

So thank god that at least some war-mongering plutocrats still have their limits and the remnants of a moral compass.

Meanwhile, back to the Du Bois Awards for the Rich and Famous. Among the other honorees at the ceremony was... surprise... the ubiquitous Valerie Jarrett! Also Maya Angelou, posthumously and pre-stamp scandal. Sidney Poitier apparently didn't even make the cut.

If it's any consolation, the Wikileaks dump also shows that SONY executives get hit with political spam as often as we proles, aka Everyday Americans, do. The aspirational "level playing field" of the rich and the rest of us is real when it comes to an equal opportunity to get splattered with the same foul-smelling bullshit. For example, there was this July 2014 missive slugged "Boehner Should Be Ashamed!" from the DCCC addressed to (now demoted) multimillionaire SONY executive Amy Pascal:

Amy --

It’s been quite the week:

Speaker Boehner announced that Republicans were bringing back the Paul Ryan plan to destroy Medicare. But then you stepped up. In fact, you smashed our February grassroots fundraising record! And earlier this week -- thanks to supporters like you who stood up and spoke out -- Arizona's horrendous "No Gays Allowed" bill was vetoed!
We can’t thank you enough! By the way, want to hear something crazy?

Speaker Boehner hand-picked the man behind Arizona’s “No Gays Allowed” bill to be on his list of premier U.S. House candidates. Seriously. Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin was one of the architects of the discriminatory bill and led the charge to pass it. And now, Republicans have named him one of their “Young Gun” candidates for Congress.

It's inexcusable. Boehner must denounce Tobin. If he doesn't, he might as well put discrimination into the Republican party platform.

So can we ask one more thing? Help us reach 50,000 strong calling on John Boehner to denounce Andy Tobin and drop him from his list of top House candidates.

Poor Amy Pascal -- just like poor you and me --  was absolutely inundated with midterm election spam. Just like regular folks, Obama counts on her "grassroots support." Of course -- unlike poor you and me -- she has "people" to filter her spam. Here's another one, panic-titled "Boehner Wins Again!"

We don’t mean to nag, but this is urgent:
President Obama is under attack and we are in desperate need of your grassroots support.
As of yesterday’s House GOP hearing, Boehner’s lawsuit against President Obama is going full speed ahead. It’s critical that we respond now with an outpouring of grassroots power. Otherwise, we might as well throw in the towel for the remainder of his presidency.
Look, we are only 4431 away from hitting 200,000 donations since Boehner announced his lawsuit. If we don’t have a massive flood of support today to get us there: BOEHNER WINS.
We have to hit this goal to show Boehner what a horrible mistake he made when he decided to waste YOUR tax payer money on suing the President. Will you chip in $5 or more right now to get us over the top?
Name: Amy Pascal Suggested Support: $5.00

ALL GIFTS TODAY TRIPLE-MATCHED!
If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

ActBlue is an asshole,asking only $5 from a multimillionaire like Amy Pascal. I suppose her check was triple-matched by a $15 check from Angelina Jolie in exchange for Obama protecting all their pseudo-intellectual privileges into perpetuity and slapping Everyday People with automatic fines every time they illegally type the word "SONY" into their computers.

We also find out more about former Senator Christopher's Dodd's sleazy role in both HOP (the Hollywood-Obama partnership)  and the TPP. Never mind that the flaccid financial reform bill bearing his name potentially stands to get squashed like a bug by TPP's proposed investor state courts. Dodd also reveals that as a member in good standing of the Democratic Party, he is really not that into democracy itself.  And as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, he is also not into the so-called Fair Use doctrine, which allows content to be reproduced on the Internet as long as it isn't reproduced for someone else's profit.

As Tech Dirt lays out, one newly-leaked email by Dodd shows that he was royally upset over a speech given last year by Michael Froman, Obama's chief trade negotiator. Froman had paid some very bland and gratuitory lip service to Fair Use as a sneaky ploy to sell the TPP to a democracy-loving public. Dodd wrote,

As I know you are aware, the inclusion of “fair use” in free trade agreements is extremely controversial and divisive. The creative community has been, and remains, a strong and consistent supporter of free trade, but the potential export of fair use via these agreements raises serious concerns within the community I represent. Over the last 24 hours, I have received calls from my member companies questioning what they perceive as a significant shift in US trade policy and, as a consequence, the value of the TPP to their industry.

It may be that people are reacting to the subsequent press releases by private groups following your remarks. I am certain these concerns have been elevated by indications from the US government that the ISP liability provisions in the TPP are going to be weakened. Nonetheless, this issue is of enough significance that I felt I must reach out to you directly prior to your departure for Singapore to register our deep concerns.

Did you detect the plutocratic threat inherent in that email?  Hollywood movers and shakers are not mollified even when they're reassured that a certain level of bullshit must be first spread in order for democracy to be destroyed under cover of darkness. The export of Fair Use to the international entertainment marketplace might even be serious enough for them to seriously consider withholding their cash from Democratic politicians.

But not that $eriously.

*Update: The Guardian reports that "megastar" Ben Affleck ultimately did succeed in getting the segment on his slave-owning ancestor axed from the final version of "Finding Your Roots," which aired on PBS last fall. Henry Gates released the following statement after the censorship became public knowledge via the leaked emails:

“We are very grateful to all of our guests for allowing us into their personal lives and have told hundreds of stories in this series including many about slave ancestors – never shying away from chapters of a family’s past that might be unpleasant. “Ultimately, I maintain editorial control on all of my projects and, with my producers, decide what will make for the most compelling programme. In the case of Mr Affleck we focused on what we felt were the most interesting aspects of his ancestry – including a Revolutionary War ancestor, a third great–grandfather who was an occult enthusiast, and his mother who marched for civil rights during the Freedom Summer of 1964.”

In other words, they caved to the demands of a major Democratic supporter and  valuable liberal brand, and they "whitewashed" history. PBS praised Gates, saying it is clear from the email exchanges "how seriously Professor Gates takes editorial integrity."

Until someone richer and more famous than he made him an offer he couldn't refuse, apparently.

Meanwhile, Ben Affleck is reportedly a shoo-in for top honors in the next W.E.B. Du Bois celebrity civil rights awards. He's a nominee in the category of outstanding achievement in branding and revisionary history and also a finalist for self-aggrandizing excellence in the field of white liberal genetic purity.

#WealthyLive$Matter (one in a continuing series)

ESPN personality Britt McHenry has taken one for the team, graciously accepting a one-week suspension from her job as sideline eye candy and tweeting out an apology after she got caught in the act of poor-shaming a towing company employee. It seems that Britt, who makes her living playing for the cameras, failed to recognize that she was live on CCTV when she spewed her invective. Actually, she just kind of drawled out her invective in Not-Everyday AmericanSpeak. She sounds like a cross between Thurston Howell III and a character in Heathers:

Not only was she miffed at having to personally appear at a "scumbag" of towing office to bail out her car, she was incensed that the little people had failed to recognize her innate VIP-ness.

Without so much as a script, Britt effortlessly recited the same litany that right-wing taxophobes dish out on the public airwaves and in the halls of Congress every single day. Her big mistake was that she chose to forgo both the dog-whistle subtlety and the invocation of God that normally would have granted her immunity. Some highlights of her strangely flat-affect spiel:

• "That’s why I have a degree and you don’t.”
• “That’s all you care about is just taking people’s money. With no education, no skill-set. Just wanted to clarify that.”
• "I'm on television and you're in a fucking trailer."
• “Do you feel good about your job? So I could be a college dropout and do the same thing?”
• “Maybe if I was missing some teeth, they would hire me here, huh?”
• “Lose some weight, baby girl.”

Granted, nobody likes towing companies, and the outfit that towed Britt's car from a restaurant lot while she ate in the restaurant is notorious for stealing vehicles and then extorting drivers for money. But typical towing victims -- or in HillarySpeak, "Everyday Americans" --  are not rich and famous. When elites'  rides are towed, there are typically "people" to clean up the mess. The Help pays the fines and the restaurant tabs so the bosses can avoid breathing common air and noticing the tip jars. Poor slobs like you or I have to appear in person and part with our last few bucks to bail out ourselves or our rides as we sob and plead for mercy. Our pathetic everyday rants on CCTV don't make international headlines.

Therefore, it's quite a change of pace to see how a rich person berates a towing company --  not mainly for its unfairness and probable criminality, but for the physical appearance and educational bona fides of its staff. Britt McHenry has got the aggrieved, entitled post-preppie agenda down pat. Even in the throes of elite extremis, she thought to mention the debunked "skills gap" theory of why the rich are so rich and the poor are so downtrodden.

Judging from this selfie posted on USA Today's Big Lead site, Britt McHenry and her male bosses at Bloodsport, Inc. think very highly of her own skill-set:

Just wanted to clarify that.

Open Thread

I haven't had any free time for blogging this week, sorry to say.

So please continue to use the comments feature to discuss whatever ails, frightens or excites you.... or just leaves you uttering a big fat Meh.

I'll be back, eventually.