The Selling of American Inhumanity

How can you tell when the New York Times is about to feed you a gigantic dose of bullshit? Whenever they use the passive voice in a headline, that's when the warning bells should start clanging in your brain: "Caution: Propaganda Hazard Ahead."

Today's dose, slugged "Many Obstacles Are Seen to U.S. Taking in Large Number of Syrian Refugees," seems designed to convince you that it would be a horrible idea for the United States to accept Syrian refugees on our precious shores.

A shadowy group of leaders and politicians and defense industry think-tankers, feeling the urge to push back against the mass sympathy and outrage engendered by the iconic photo of a dead three-year-old, has dictated to obliging Times reporter David M. Herszenhorn the myriad reasons why the European refugee crisis should not be an American problem.

Beware the Terroristic Hordes

Shielding the anonymous purveyors of official cowardice and personal unaccountability, Herszenhorn immediately quotes unnamed "critics" as calling the 14 Democratic senators urging President Obama to give asylum to more Syrian refugees "the Jihadi caucus."

Then he immediately pivots to defending a caring -- but helpless and hand-wringing -- Obama administration against these terrible straw men critics who shall not be named:

The criticism, which Obama administration officials say is baseless because of screening procedures asylum seekers undergo, was a powerful measure of the lack of political will and the practical obstacles that have hampered the United States’ ability to intervene more directly in what has become a full-blown migrant crisis in Europe.

Such obstacles, including an American public weary of overseas initiatives after more than a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain formidable, even as heart-wrenching photographs of dead children this week focused the American conscience on the Syrian crisis as never before and prompted renewed calls for more aid.

Anonymous administration officials cravenly foist the blame for their own paranoia and psychopathy onto a hard-hearted public "weary of overseas initiatives" -- as though feeding and clothing and sheltering people is equivalent to bombing them to death.

 Pleas for more aggressive American-led rescue measures seem all the more futile given the failures to reach a consensus on the country’s own immigration problems, made vivid in the simmering debate over policing the border with Mexico and calls by a leading Republican presidential candidate to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

President Obama is not even going to try to do the right thing because he is afraid of what Donald Trump might think. Trump might call Obama a loser if he starts acting all mushy and sentimental. And that will never do during the president's last 500 days when he is trying mightily to burnish his legacy as the Drone President of Warpeace.

 “Even if there were a green light from the Russians and the Chinese, the appetite for yet another military adventure in Syria is very, very limited among the American public,” said Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow and expert on international institutions at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think in this case, the administration is correct, the situation is so incredibly complex among the combatants, there’s very little evidence that United States or Western intervention would make anything better.

Again, humanitarian aid and the granting of asylum to suffering people is cast as a "military adventure" by one of the Times article's few named sources. (the only quoted government official is a Republican congressman) Stewart Patrick represents the shadow government hiding within an elite ruling class think tank funded and staffed, in large part, by the defense and oil industries. So the Obama administration is going to throw in the towel on asylum, even as it continues to bomb the hell out of Syria and other Middle Eastern locales and continues to spend $68,000 an hour operating the war planes targeting ISIS.

Choosing to help people instead of bombing them and starving them right out of their countries has "moral consequences," Patrick gravely dictates, adding that these choices and consequences should be Europe's problem and not that of the American ruling class and war machine. (quaintly called "the public" for purposes of propaganda and bloody hand-washing.) Besides, the US already throws a few dollars at hungry people, so please just leave them alone already.)

Each year, the United States grants residency permits to as many as 70,000 refugees from around the world, most referred by the United Nations refugee agency, which helps administer asylum requests. Only a small fraction of those have been Syrians, in part because the process typically takes up to two years, and the numbers of Syrians referred to the United States only began to increase after the start of the war four years ago.

While the State Department has said it plans to increase the number, to perhaps 1,800 by next year, it would be of little more than symbolic value given the more than four million Syrians in need of shelter.

 Taking in 65,000 Syrians, as the 14 senators had urged, is virtually impossible under the existing asylum process, which requires lengthy background checks. The small number has opened up the United States to charges of hypocrisy as it has implored European allies to accept more.

Blame it on the snails of the bureaucracy, not on the politicians. Besides, since the refugees are probably going to die anyway, why even bother? 

But Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, who just returned from a trip to Europe, said he found America’s allies there unable so far to coordinate an effective response.

“It is incumbent on the United States to be of greater assistance, yes, but the Europeans also have a responsibility here,” Mr. Dent said. “Our European partners have a much harder time exercising leadership. They don’t want the refugees. They don’t want the migrants. At the same time, I don’t know what they are prepared to do to bring about greater stability in the countries where there are problems.”

So, a member of the Party of No has engaged in a fact-free finding mission and found the Europeans not up to his moral expectations. What else is new? If you want to act like a heartless bastard, the best tactic is to point out that the other bastards are even more heartless and inept than you are. Even though they are not: European countries, particularly Germany and even austerity-ravaged Greece, have been welcoming the migrants with open arms.

  To give it the obligatory balanced veneer, the article concludes with two former government officials gratuitously allowing that maybe the United States could do a bit more, like sending the Navy to rescue people in its ships so as to avoid any more drownings. But it would be so, so hard to coordinate landing points and such. (even though all they really need is a compass and a phone and maybe Google Mapquest.)

As I wrote in my published comment to the Herszenhorn article, "Their excuses proliferate as wildly as their obscene military budgets and their weapons of mass destruction. Vetting the applicants would take too long and cost too much money, they say. We have our own immigration problems, they whine. (Never mind that DHS is running privatized concentration camps for Central American mothers and children, hideously euphemized as "family detention centers.")

I concluded with a link to the International Rescue Committee -- where people who are not as jaded and unfeeling as our leaders and their propagandists would like us to be can go to get more information on how to help the refugees.

The IRC, which has so far gathered more than 13,000 signatures from American citizens on a petition demanding that the US Government do more to help the relief effort, notes that this country has only accepted 1,413 Syrian refugees since the civil war began five years ago. Germany, meanwhile, is willing to accept 800,000 this year alone.

President Obama, for his part, did find the precious time Friday to sign a new billion dollar arms deal with the beheading-happy Saudi king, the better to efficiently kill even more hundreds of innocent Yemenis. Because killing is easy, lives are cheap, and Obama has a legacy to burnish and a foundation to fund.

Ka-Ching Goes the Beat of My Cold, Cold Heart

Humanity, Globalized

In the eyes of government leaders, the much-vaunted free flow of capital across borders does not extend to human capital. They didn't count on globalization resulting in people desperately fleeing the effects of globalization.

The spoils of war know no boundaries as they spread to, and bloat to bursting the too-big-to-jail and fail global banking cartel. The left-over spoils of war trickle down in tiny toxic drops to human traffickers who suck up the collateral damage of war and foist it into airless trucks and trains and let it drown as its rudderless crafts capsize.

The lucky survivors get thrown into concentration camps and "family detention centers."

The tens of millions of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East and Africa are stateless people. As such, they have none of the human rights occasionally and gratuitously bestowed upon human beings by individual nations. 

The Jews, long the prototype of stateless people, from the Inquisition all the way to the second World War and beyond, have now been replaced by Muslims fleeing from the ravages of drought and climate change, civil wars from within and  invasions from without. Images of them desperately clawing their way onto trains in Hungary are reminiscent of displaced Jews clawing their way onto trains bound for the gas chambers.

The photograph of a drowned three-year-old washed up on a Turkish beach has momentarily shocked the world into paying attention. There has been a sudden public pivot away from viewing the refugees as festering sores and swarming tunnel rats into a pretense of caring. Even such xenophobes as British Prime Minister David Cameron have become willing to let in a lucky, token few. Is it perhaps because that iconic drowned toddler was wearing the same kind of adorable Croc shoes as little Prince George on his little feet?  Collateral damage suddenly gets a name and a face and some long-overdue humanity.

It seems that even neoliberal austerians can develop a conscience and a heart when public opinion shames them into it. Even cold-hearted Germany, punisher of the Greeks, is bending over backward to let the refugees in, some of its officials taking the moral lead and welcoming the human detritus of war into their own private homes. Germany, of course, is still reeling from the blow to its global reputation due to its complicity with the Nazis and the extermination of the Jews.

So far, we await American leaders developing this same sense of shame. So far, we wait in vain. Our own president is too busy taking selfies in front of melting glaciers to suddenly develop a melting heart. His idea of reparations to native Americans, most of whom were exterminated both directly and indirectly by American colonialists, is to benevolently restore the aboriginal name "Denali" to an Alaskan mountain. His administration still imprisons Central American refugees in border gulags euphemized as Family Detention Centers. Women and children are still labeled "national security risks" if they have the nerve to flee violence, rape and murder from south of our sacrosanct border. The American government, in thrall to the xenophobic rantings of Donald Trump and his reactionary followers, is not about to allow any more Others across our precious borders, despite the fact that American foreign policy created this epic Diaspora of Others in the first place.

It's NIMBY writ large.

I suggest that we build massive affordable housing complexes for refugees in the same gated Dallas luxury community currently housing George W. Bush, as well as throughout the wide open Wyoming plains that his unindicted co-conspirator Dick Cheney currently calls home. I suggest that the New York Times stop restricting its moralistic finger-wagging to the generic "West" and put the United States at the very top of the list of countries which are morally bound to rescue the human casualties of the wars this country's military-industrial complex has started and so richly profited from. After all, "We're Number One!" is the mantra being shouted by politicians from both major political parties. Let them put their money where their mealy, moralistic mouths are for a change.

If the xenophobes and the billionaires don't like it, maybe we can get the Corrections Corporation of America to build them some brand new luxury housing, with lots of gates and guards and barbed wire and high tech security systems to keep the Other out, and themselves blessedly hidden from the rest of us. 

Ten Years of Katrina

If you thought that American leaders were traveling to New Orleans these past few days to solemnly remember the victims and to acknowledge and apologize for America's shameful, ongoing response to the still-ongoing disaster of Hurricane Katrina, think again.

From Barack Obama to George W. Bush to Bill Clinton and all the politicians in between, they came and they saw, not to mourn, but to gloat over the neoliberal rebirth of a city. The only thing worse than their initial response is their current response. They are actually still congratulating themselves on a heckuva job well done. They actually used the word "celebration" more times than anyone has been able to count.

I guess they are saving their phony solemnity and their crocodile tears for the upcoming great exceptional American holiday of 9/11.

Barack Obama raved about American strength and Cajun cuisine, even jovially broke out into the theme song from The Jeffersons ("movin' on up to the east side -- to a deluxe apartment in the sky") as he toured a partially rehabbed neighborhood.

 Far from being shamed and shunned, George W. Bush was greeted with open arms and plaudits by Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu and DNC Vice Chair Donna Brazile before he scurried to a photo-op with black children at one of the for-profit charter schools that replaced the entire city public school system. Protests against his jarring presence were few to nonexistent.

Smooth-talking Bill Clinton, surrounded by Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Mary Landrieu and other groveling Democrats, spoke at the Smoothie King sports arena in the downtown area. He fondly reminisced about his many visits over the years to the decadent French Quarter, which largely escaped damage. Without mentioning the 1,800 lives lost 10 years ago, he urged the audience to laugh, dance and have fun, because they've earned it.

None of the politicians mentioned that even as the military and Homeland Security began evacuating people or providing them with food and formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers, they were rounding some of them up, imprisoning and torturing them in a makeshift prison (the "Greyhound Gulag") for the crime of existing in a flood-ravaged city. Blacks, Muslims, the mentally ill and all manner of suspects were accused of being terrorists or felons, caged without charge, even denied the usual phone call to loved ones. When they were eventually released, as much as months later, their confiscated money was missing, and they never got it, or their old lives, back.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has gratuitously used the occasion of the Katrina anniversary to shoot more Republican fish in a barrel, and to prop up Obama and Obamacare and the Democrats while he's at it:

There are many things we should remember about late August and early September 2005, and the political fallout shouldn't be near the top of the list. Still, the disaster in New Orleans did the Bush administration a great deal of damage — and conservatives have never stopped trying to take their revenge. Every time something has gone wrong on President Obama’s watch, critics have been quick to declare the event “Obama’s Katrina.” How many Katrinas has Mr. Obama had so far? By one count, 23.

Beyond that, Krugman continued, Katrina served to highlight the huge gap between Bush's macho image and Bush's sick reality. And then Krugman proceeded to trounce Donald Trump and nearly all the occupants of the GOP clown car. (He obviously cannot let the anniversary of a human disaster go to waste when it can be so easily used to trash the other side of the Money Party.)

Never once did he mention how Katrina highlighted the huge gap between rich and poor, and between black people and white people. In my published comment (since "disappeared" by editors) I pointed  out the reality that George Bush and his cabal of war criminals and cronies have never been held accountable for anything. Not the tax cuts to the rich, not the wealth and racial disparity that Katrina highlighted to a shocked nation, not the invasion of Iraq, not torture. I quoted Donna Brazile's glowing words to the media in my soon-to-be censored comment:

"Well, I'm one of those individuals that believes under President Bush's leadership, we got it right. It was slow. … The federal government had to figure out its role, and it took a while for the federal government to really figure out how to help us. And I think once the president made the decision that New Orleans would be rebuilt … the president made a commitment and I think he kept his word.”

The White House quickly confirmed that the rehabilitation of George W. Bush is now official and complete. The elite conventional wisdom is that Bush got a bum rap over Katrina. The poor guy's been reduced to painting his toes in his bathtub, fer cryin' out loud, so the rest of the cruel world is urged to forget that New Orleans once got turned into an epic toxic bathtub on his passive-aggressive watch.

Meanwhile the politicians swooped down upon the city like vultures to bipartisanly party like it was Mardi Gras in August.  

Its centuries-old charity hospital has never re-opened. Instead, taxpayers footed the bill for a billion-dollar luxury medical center.  Obama gushed during his visit that the city has been transformed into "a laboratory for innovation" and "a place as entrepreneurial as any place in the country."

As his former chief of staff and now mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel once infamously said, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste." Use natural and man-made disasters to plunder the commons and privatize everything in sight and grow very, very rich at the expense of the pesky victims.

Incidentally, Paul Krugman is of course not the only pundit to either ignore the Katrina anniversary altogether, or to co-opt it for political, tribalistic purposes. FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has an excellent piece critiquing not only the failure of government to respond to the disaster, but the continuing failure of the mass media to  cover the poverty and racism that Katrina unmasked. They were initially shocked, shocked at what they saw. And not only have they forgotten, they are enabling the political class to keep covering up the fact that half of all Americans are only a paycheck or a Social Security stipend away from the streets.

Half of all American schoolchildren live below the poverty line, yet Donald Trump is sucking up all the attention and Obama is lauded for "renaming" Mount McKinley as an act of stupendous statesmanship.

The truth is that the political class would rather spend money on the endless "war on terror" abroad than even begin to acknowledge or rectify the economic and social terrorism being waged, with their complicity and approval, here at home. New Orleans is the living legacy of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Not only are our leaders punishing the dispossessed, they're cashing in on them. They never let a crisis go to waste, especially a crisis that they themselves had an iron fist in creating.

And they give each other their high-fives and their heckuva-jobs and promise us Nirvana if only we would vote for them, one more time.

Anti-Democracy Democrats

The Democratic Party may have belatedly kicked Jefferson and Jackson out of its annual dinners for reasons of political correctness (having apparently just found out that both presidents were a tad on the racist side). But that doesn't mean the Democratic Party has suddenly changed for the better after its nearly two centuries of existence.

To the contrary.

Having just limited presidential primary debates to a maximum of six, and even threatened sanctions against any candidate who goes outside the party to hold informal debates, the 21st century Democratic Party is still operating very much in the Jacksonian tradition. And that tradition is speaking up for the common folk out of one side of its mouth, and pledging fealty to its wealthy benefactors out of the other.

To their credit, two of the national candidates -- Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders -- both spoke out against the undemocratic nature of the Party at the DNC's annual confab last week, rightly noting that the game is rigged for the establishment and against the voter. Left unspoken was the common wisdom that the less the electorate gets to see the robotic and ethically compromised Hillary Clinton juxtaposed with other, more populist candidates,  the better are her odds of securing the nomination based purely upon her money and her weighted press coverage and her powerful connections and her shallow progressive rhetoric.

 As told by Howard Zinn in his A People's History of the United States, the recently banished Andrew Jackson was the Clinton prototype. Jackson was the first American politician to pretend to "feel your pain" in order to get your vote. "He was the first President  to master the liberal rhetoric - to claim to speak for the common man."

 Despite the fact that he owned slaves, exterminated Indian populations and sent federal troops to beat striking workers into submission, he still enjoyed widespread support from the newly-enfranchised working class.

It was the new politics of ambiguity- speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. to give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious form of control.

 Fast forward to 2015, and the Democratic establishment is still ingeniously, albeit desperately, trying to keep controlled debates largely confined to those between its own centrists and crazy Republicans. They don't want us to see arguments between centrist Dems and leftist Dems. Bernie Sanders is starting to give the plebes too many bright ideas and the power brokers too many conniption fits. The party establishment does not want the general public to see him and Hillary in too many head-to-head TV appearances. She might stumble. She might fall. She might start losing the super delegates who, she seems to undemocratically think, are not beholden to the wishes of actual primary voters.

America is in another of its periods of incipient rebellion, because the Precariat has gotten wise to the fact that we live under an oligarchy. Hillary Clinton openly admitted that she is anxious for a battle of the sexes and the hairdos between her and Donald Trump -- not a discussion about the malefactors of great wealth with Bernie Sanders. Even the four-to-six debates she has grudgingly agreed to are an inconvenience, a pesky bump in the road to her coronation. She and the Party establishment would prefer to give voters the choice between neoliberalism (free market solutions to social and economic problems, for the benefit of free market capitalists) and fascism (Trump's roaring xenophobia and racism for the benefit of free market capitalists) rather than a choice between neoliberalism and Sanders-style democratic socialism (for the benefit of ordinary people.)

That Sanders and even O'Malley are now shaking up the inner party structure from within is a stroke of genius. Sanders has long recognized that the establishment party system is anti-social to its very core and by its very nature.

Earlier this year, as the Democrats were formulating their electoral game plan at their ambiguous winter "issues retreat" they were also busily banning press coverage and otherwise acting in a distinctly totalitarian fashion. We could have seen that their summer agenda would try to consist of more of the same. This time, though, they had to let the media in. It might have looked undemocratic had they not allowed Bernie and other candidates to speak. Since he is running within the establishment and not as an independent, they had no choice but to let him in. Pure political genius on Bernie's part to make a public, in-house stink.

Meanwhile, an #AllowDebate movement has sprung up. From The Hill:

(Ben) Doernberg said he launched #AllowDebate earlier this month after realizing that many Democrats like him are frustrated with the DNC’s handling of its presidential debates this election cycle.

It now boasts 30 active organizers, he added, and approximately 500 members.

“The DNC exists – at least in theory – to reflect the will of the voters,” Doernberg said. “It is incredibly obvious that the DNC apparatus views us a nuisance and purely wants us to go away. That just seems wrong to me.”

Doernberg said #AllowDebate is inspired by the stark contrast between this election cycle’s debate rules and the DNC’s 2008 approach.

He said his organization is exasperated with the DNC’s unwillingness to let candidates participate in outside debates, which was allowed the last time the Democratic nomination was up for grabs.

 In the 2008 cycle, eventual nominee then-Sen. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton debated each other 27 times, including outside debates.

“I think telling the candidates that they are banned from participating in outside events is incredibly undemocratic,” Doernberg said.

As French philosopher Simone Weil wrote 70 years ago in the wake of the last outbreak of global fascism, political parties are inherently undemocratic. She believed they should be abolished outright. Like capitalism itself, they exist only for the sake of their own existence. Their goal is to maintain power and enrich their leaders. Ordinary people are permitted to register for token membership and thereby become"sheepdogged" into compliance and obedience and loyalty to the designated plutocratic power broker. Ordinary people are not ordinarily permitted to have independent voices within the confines of the strict party system.

During this endless American election season, the standard complaint has been that the media are covering it as a horse-race rather than as a dialogue about issues. But political parties by their very nature are devised to be a game and a sport to which we are invited to participate as mere spectators, biting our nails in shock, awe and suspense, as we root for our favorite team.

 During this endless War on (and of) Terror, it's also apropos to remember that the very concept of the political party was born in the post-revolutionary Reign of Terror. Weil wrote:

The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?

It would be far more relevant, however, to ask: do they do the slightest bit of good? Are they not pure, or nearly pure, evil? If they are evil, it is clear that, in fact and in practice, they can only generate further evil.

Simone Weil observed that the extermination of Jews would have been just as evil under the Weimar Republic as it was under Hitler. And so too are the forever-wars and the mass deportations and the global trade deals and the record incarcerations and the political corruption and the police brutality and the racial profiling and the erosion of civil liberties and the pollution for profit just as evil whether they're performed under a Republican majority or under a Democratic majority.

Once political parties gain power, they always seem to forget the basic social contract. Their goal becomes greed itself: more votes, more power, more members, more money. Weil wrote, "Once the growth of the party becomes a criterion for goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people's minds. This pressure is very real; it is openly displayed; it is professed and proclaimed. It should horrify us, but we are already too much accustomed to it."

Or are we? 

This could be one of those infrequent moments in history when we are actually starting to become horrified. It is, ironically, this very sense of mass horror that should be giving us hope. No matter our social status, our race, our ethnicity, our nationality, we can all join together in horror and outrage over the fact that unfettered capitalism is literally killing us.

 People are beginning to discover their own agency and their own anger.

The abolition of the two major political parties is not likely to happen, of course. But the fact remains that both of them are being rattled from within, without, and below.

Whether these upheavals will lead to Trump-style fascism, or whether they will lead to a new New Deal, is still an open question.

Vampire of the Vanities

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

The conventional wisdom that the writing of New York Times columnist David Brooks sucks has taken on a whole new meaning with his most recent mishmash of a piece, titled The Big Decisions. The fact that he deliberately hides the conservative source of the funding for the author whose book on "transformational research" he peddles is just one of the problems with the column (more on that later.)

It's what poses as the subject matter. Let Count Brookula speak for himself:

Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. They drink animal blood, not human blood, and say everything about their new existence provides them with fun, companionship and meaning.

Would you do it? Would you consent to receive the life-altering bite, even knowing that once changed you could never go back?

The difficulty of the choice is that you’d have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess whether you’d enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or whether you would like.

Vampire Hunter D then seamlessly segues into how the choice to become a vampire is similar to the choice of becoming a parent, or joining the military. He shares links for a North Carolina philosophy professor named L.A. Paul and her alleged research into the "transformative experience." As Brooks tells it, she has concluded that life's major decisions are better made with your gut than with your rational mind. In other words, you should be more like George W. Bush, who readily admits to having invaded Iraq based upon his intestinal rumblings. Brooks seizes upon the Orwellian discovery (in the halls of academe, no less) that ignorance is strength, and he enthusiastically slithers into another one of his favorite haunts: the mysticism of moralism. (for thee and not for him and his ilk.)

Our moral intuitions are more durable than our desires, based on a universal standard of right and wrong. The person who shoots for virtue will more reliably be happy with her new self, and will at least have a nice quality to help her cope with whatever comes.

Totally maddened by this drivel, I then clicked on Brooks's link to his philosopher to see if he was just making this shit up. And way, way down at the bottom of her page, in small print, is the notice that a billionaire's trust fund (the Templeton Foundation) has awarded her and some Notre Dame professors a multi-million-dollar cash grant to delve into "transformations". From there, it is ridiculously easy to follow the money into the true, religious right anti-science agenda of this grantor. (Whenever you feel puzzled by a David Brooks column, it is always best to look beyond the gobbledygook and search for the cash connection. You will usually not be disappointed.)

 I will let my published comment to his column tell the rest of the story: 

 Following the links to L.A. Paul and her book, we learn that her research on the "transformative experience" is funded by a $4 million grant from the Templeton Foundation.

As Nathan Schneider wrote in "The Nation," this billion-dollar foundation also finances research on the "virtues" of the free market, intelligent design, and the inclusion of religious curricula in medical schools. It donates heavily to such conservative think tanks as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

http://www.thenation.com/article/god-science-and-philanthropy/

 Templeton's written purpose "is to encourage the top 1/10 of 1% of people and thereby encourage all people that progress in spiritual information is possible, desirable, can be done, and will be done."

Enter David Brooks, and his endless advice to the elite lovelorn, coupled with his relentless moralizing to the huddled masses.

In today's edition is the very subliminal message that all of you ladies on the Pill, or who might (gasp) even be contemplating an abortion, just go ahead and take the plunge into parenthood and maybe even some Brooksian nirvana on the side.

Left behind in the new "sharing" economy? Consider joining the military. Because let's face it, they're the only jobs the GOP is willing to fund.

 How vampires factor into all of this is anybody's guess. Maybe it's because the GOP make it their life's work to coddle the plutocrats sucking the rest of us dry.

David Brooks is an integral part of the corporate-funded media/political/academic nexus, which is in the business of hiding the perfidy of late capitalism within the muddy churn of the "marketplace of ideas." It remains unaccountable to the public, because its various agendas are rarely in the public interest. It is just surprising that Templeton is so honest about its true purpose of instructing the elite how best to "trickle down" its plutocratic gospel to the masses. Brooks is the power broker, selling the agenda of the robber barons of free market conservatism -- which is now in especial overdrive with the imminent arrival of Pope Francis on American shores. The pope, you may recall, made a recent reference to capitalism as a great big pile of steaming dung.

Thus does David Brooks turn to "spirituality" as co-opted by neoliberal vulture capitalists, movement conservatives, and other "thought leaders" suffering from a galloping case of Dark Ages nostalgia. And he gets paid mega-bucks to do it, while more real journalists are being eased out of newsrooms every single day. But, as Brooks glibly says, at least they'll be "left with a nice quality to cope with whatever comes."

The subtext of his Cotton Mather-lite column is "Go &%@% yourselves, plebes!"

Always look for and read the fine print. Always follow the money. Whenever possible, disinfect the vampires with the sunlight of exposure.

(A necklace of nice quality garlic bulbs wouldn't hurt either.)

Palace Intrigues

The punditocracy's second-favorite topic this week (after Trumpmania) is whether Joe Biden will run, and if he runs, whether he'll pick Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Also, rumors are flying that, not so very much behind the scenes, President Obama is doing everything in his power to mess with the Hillary Clinton candidacy. (After all, it is his FBI -- not the GOP -- that has picked campaign season as the optimal time to begin combing through all her emails. As if Obama didn't know that for the whole time that she was Secretary of State she was using a private account.) 

Machiavelli Muses

  Most of this is speculation, of course, and way beyond my investigatory capabilities as a blogger from the sticks. But one speculation is easily debunkable, and that is the possible endorsement of Biden by Elizabeth Warren. Unless she has totally gone over to the dark side, this is not going to happen. The truth is that not so very long ago, he was her Public Enemy #1.

It's all there in a 2003 book she wrote with her daughter Amelia, called The Two Income Trap.

Before she founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, before Obama threw her under the bus, before she became a politician and a powerful senator, Warren was that rare bird, a Harvard economics professor with a side gig as a consumer advocate. It was her task to go after the credit card industry predators ruining the lives of struggling middle class families -- particularly those headed by single mothers -- and arm-twist congress-critters into keeping the bankruptcy laws working in favor of the families being crushed by usurious debt. She discovered that in the previous 20 years, the number of women filing petitions for bankruptcy had gone up by 662 percent.

"Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in a financial collapse," she wrote in the preface to her book. She found that bankruptcy was becoming the biggest cause of family change: more than death, divorce, heart attacks, cancer, graduations and other disruptions.

She called it the "two income trap" because no longer can a even a married woman go to work to help out in hard times and make extra money for non-essentials, no longer can a mother stay home when a child, spouse or elderly parent gets sick, without fear of financial collapse. Now they were in the workforce just to barely break even. And when finances collapse, it's mainly the women who bear the brunt and take the blame and the responsibility, Warren wrote. 

Long before the 2008 financial collapse, home foreclosures were skyrocketing.

And Senator Joe Biden represented Delaware, the Credit Card Industry Capital of the World. The bankers who were his political donors wanted to make it harder for people to discharge their debts via personal bankruptcy.

Biden, who'd been trumpeting himself as a champion of women's rights in his capacity as sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, was anything but when it came to championing their economic rights. He was also co-sponsor of bank-friendly reform legislation that has made it difficult if not impossible for families struggling with credit card and medical debt to declare bankruptcy and start afresh.

"And in a statistic with special significance for Senator Biden," Elizabeth Warren wrote, "more women will be victimized by predatory lenders than will seek protection from an abusive husband or boyfriend."

"Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening," she added while scoffing at his campaign literature featuring glossy photos of himself with National Organization of Women (NOW) officials.

That other self-professed champion of women, Hillary Clinton, also voted with Biden and the Republicans in favor of the banks and against debt-ridden mothers, in 2001. This was a total flip-flop from her previous stated position. As Warren wrote, "The bill was the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton  could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble."

Sweet Nothings... Joe and Hillary

I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warren met Biden at his Naval Observatory digs this past weekend. Her agreeing to become his running mate on a possible Democratic ticket would be as grotesque as her quitting the Senate to become a lobbyist for Citigroup.

Not going to happen. I predict she either stays neutral, or if she endorses anybody, it will be Bernie Sanders, who has joined in her proposal to break up the big banks by introducing legislation to do just that. If Hillary wins the nomination, Warren will be forced to make a token appearance at the convention -- and that should be the sum of her curbed enthusiasm.

Sanders, by the way, just got the endorsement of Cornel West. This should help put a dent into the punditocratic meme that Bernie and black people don't get along.

Trump Happens

Sinclair Lewis warned us about this character 80 years ago.

The resemblance between the quasi-fictional postmodern demagogue named Donald Trump and the fictional Depression-era demagogue named Buzz Windrip is so uncanny as to make me wonder whether Trump hasn't used It Can't Happen Here as a handy guide to how to win the presidency during hard economic times.

See if you can guess which of the two candidates spun out the following word salads: (answers are below) 

"I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly holler right out we've got to change our country. The Executive has got to have a freer hand and to be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a bunch of shyster lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates..., But these economic changes are only a means to an end and that end must be fundamentally the same principles of liberty, equality and justice that were advocated by the founding fathers of this grand land back in 1776."

***

"I will build a Great Wall -- and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me -- and I'll build them very, very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words."

***
"My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength -- though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us -- we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should all be very glad."

***

"I shall not be content until this country can produce every single thing we need. even cocoa, coffee and rubber, and so we keep all our dollars at home."

***

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. they're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

***
"Usually I'm pretty mild, in fact many of my friends are kind enough to call it 'folksy'... but I hope none of the gentlemen who have honored me with their enmity think for one single minute that when I run into a gross public evil or a persistent enough detractor I can't get up on my hind legs and make a sound like a two-tailed grizzly in April.... I have always succeeded in licking them, so that my indignation at these homicidal kleptomaniacs is not personal by entirely on behalf of the general public."

***
"So I've watched the politicians, I've dealt with them all my life, if you can't make a good deal with a politician then there's something wrong with you. You're certainly not very good. And that's what we have representing us. They will never make America great again. They don't even have a chance. They're controlled fully, they're controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, by the special interests, fully."

***
"An honest propagandist for any cause, that is one who honestly studies and figures out the best way of putting over his message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks, it just confuses them, to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people."

***
"One of the earliest things I would do, probably before I even got in, and I wouldn't even use, you know I have you know the best negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones. You get a lot of them. They are not good. They get the good stories, because the newspapers get buffaloed, but they're not good. But I know the negotiators in the world,  and I put them one for each country. Believe me folks, we will do very well very very well."
***

(Answers: Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Trump, Windrip, Trump. The quotes from Windrip are from "his" bestselling book, Zero Hour: Over the Top.) 

Sinclair Lewis wrote his cautionary dystopian satire as Hitler and Mussolini were increasing their power in Europe, and FDR, still in his first term, was beginning to implement New Deal policies to combat crushing 25 percent unemployment. The novel has Windrip wresting the Democratic nomination away from Roosevelt because the incumbent president and other candidates were "far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist."

Sound familiar?

Windrip offers a hodgepodge of a platform, capped by a promise of a guaranteed yearly income of $5,000 to white citizens only. He calls for a nationalization of the banks by the new "Corpo" party, and lower taxes for only those plutocrats who swear fealty to Windrip and his regime Just as Trump loudly dog-whistles persecution of Mexicans, Windrip openly calls for the persecution of blacks and Jews -- because, as Lewis trenchantly noted, "nothing elevates a dispossessed farmer or factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, that he can look down upon."

Windrip also calls for an end to labor unions and putting women back in the home where they belong. He vows unlimited financial support for police, the military and veterans.

Sound familiar yet?

Windrip, like Trump, is so extreme and so gruesome and so hilarious that none of the establishment press takes him seriously as they chronicle his every word, as they are drawn to his every public appearance like flies to a jar of rancid honey. And that includes Doremus Jessup, the newspaper editor hero of the novel, who counsels his readers that "this comic tyranny cannot endure.... It can't happen here."

The one thing that most perplexed him that there could be a dictator with some of the earthy sense of humor of Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward.... Windrip could be ever so funny about solemn jaw-dropping opponents. Did that, puzzled Doremus, make him more or less dangerous?

Sound even a teensy bit familiar? How many of us have chuckled appreciatively as Donald Trump skewers the denizens of the GOP Clown Car and exposes the inbred corruption of the entire political system that the rest of them don't dare address for fear of evoking the wrath of their plutocratic sugar daddies? Trump makes us temporarily forget our woes by allowing us into the inner sanctum of his billionaire brain, letting us rise to the level of his own incompetence. He has made stupidity cool again. He's made the world safe for xenophobia.

But back to Sinclair Lewis's warning. Buzz Windrip's first order of business, upon taking the oath of office, is to declare martial law and temporarily suspend habeas corpus because of some unnamed outside threat and to preserve "national security." His storm troopers, dubbed the Minute Men, proceed to place recalcitrant Congress members and other critics into protective custody. Poor people are beaten by police for the crime of being poor. The unemployed are herded into labor camps. And once their new sub-minimum wage jobs force the gainfully, privately employed themselves into forced labor camps, the cycle continues. Concentration camp torture sessions under the guidance of licensed physicians are the order of the day for dissidents and independent journalists and political prisoners.

Just like Windrip, Donald Trump appeals to the basest instincts of the masses, with his toxic combination of stand-up comedy, racial dog-whistling, zombie economics, jingoism,  and paranoia. So far anyway, there has been no line he hasn't been able to cross without a "yuge" uptick in his favorable ratings. Even when some Boston thugs beat up and urinated over a homeless Latino man last week, even after Trump approvingly called them "passionate followers of mine," the cheers from the right wing and the astounded coverage from the pseudo-left media continues unabated.

This is not funny. This is, frankly, getting downright scary.

The fascism, or corporism, that Sinclair Lewis warned about, has actually been with us for a long time now. Trump just trumpets it more brayingly. Trump and his progenitor Buzz are "just something nasty that's been vomited up," as wealth inequality, a permanent state of war and mass surveillance, and racist police brutality "continue to ferment like ptomaine" in our national gut.

Under the Obama administration there has been an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers and journalists, an ever-escalating drone assassination program, a record number of deportations, a complete blurring of lines between government and big business, increased incarceration of black and brown people, burgeoning poverty, and an over-stressed, underpaid, precarious labor force.

While the liberal class gasps in phony outrage over the Republicans' use of the odious term "anchor babies," it largely ignores the Obama administration's own cruel and inhuman imprisonment of babies, children and mothers in America's privatized migrant detention centers. A federal judge has recently issued a scathing critique of the Department of Homeland Security for keeping innocent refugees from Central American violence locked up like animals and denied due process of law. To the howls of indignation from the Obama regime over "national security," she has ordered those gulags emptied within two months.

So forget about the Republican vs. Democrat, Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil, electoral match-ups.

What we are really witnessing is an epic battle between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment. 

Playground At a Family-Friendly Housing Unit