Chuckles and Checkers With Hillary

To combat an inexorable slide in the polls, Hillary Clinton and her team of marketers are using a two-pronged approach to resuscitating her campaign. To be even more metaphorically specific, they are using a plastic cannula to shove canned air through both nostrils of an oxygen-deprived patient.

The first prong of the Clinton cannula: just days after refusing to apologize for her private email server, she has apologized. By email, of course. Because delivering a Nixonian Checkers speech on live TV is just so yesterday.

 From Hillary Clinton's email blast:

 It's important for you to know a few key facts. My use of a personal email account was aboveboard and allowed under the State Department's rules. Everyone I communicated with in government was aware of it. And nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time.

As this process proceeds, I want to be as transparent as possible. That's why I've provided all of my work emails to the government to be released to the public, and why I'll be testifying in public in front of the Benghazi Committee later next month.

I know this is a complex story. I could have -- and should have -- done a better job answering questions earlier. I'm grateful for your support, and I'm not taking anything for granted.

Compare the tone to candidate Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech of Sept. 23, 1952: 

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that is why I am here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case.

 I am sure that you have read the charges, and you have heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took $18,000 from a group of my supporters.

Now, was that wrong? And let me say that it was wrong. I am saying it, incidentally, that it was wrong, just not illegal, because it isn't a question of whether it was legal or illegal, that isn't enough. The question is, was it morally wrong? I say that it was morally wrong if any of that $18,000 went to Senator Nixon, for my personal use. I say that it was morally wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled.
And I say that it was morally wrong if any of the contributors got special favors for the contributions they made.

The second prong of the Clinton campaign's cannula is to combat accusations that she is too stiff and contrived. Therefore, her spokespeople have formally announced that all future scripts will not only be spontaneous, they will also be compassionate and funny.  Hilarious Hearty Hillary will be coming soon to a political theater near you.

To help sell the image of the kinder, more humorous Hillary, her campaign operatives have enlisted the aid of the corporate media establishment, which trumpeted the announcement in one great, big, spontaneous blast.  

I couldn't figure out whether  New York Times Hillary beat reporter Amy Chozick was being stealthily satiric with her article, or whether she might be suffering from a bad case of Post-traumatic Constant Hillary Coverage Stress Disorder. First, there was this accompanying photo:

 Notice the jaw-clenched dude to her right, obviously a Secret Service agent, who could not look more miserable if he tried. He actually seems to be suffering a bad attack of gas. And then there's the guy right next to him who appears to be asleep on his feet. Are these really the optiminal optics for the re-marketing of Hillary as a combination of Mother Teresa and Joan Rivers?

And then there are the clueless words of the campaign operatives themselves. Chozick writes,

Asked about a moment they regret, Ms. Palmieri paused and then quickly settled on the ope the campaign used to corral reporters at a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire that became a symbol of Mrs. Clinton’s distance from the small-town celebration. A less intrusive rope had also been used to control crowds at other events.

 The Brooklyn headquarters, on the 11th floor of a high-rise, bustled with activity heading into the Labor Day weekend. Young people, sitting on bean bag chairs, worked on their laptops and cellphones. Bags of Hillary-branded snacks, like beet chips, were arrayed in front of a volunteer hall of fame collage.

Less intrusive ropes (invisible tripwires, maybe?) to keep out the masses and snooty Hillary-branded snacks for insiders are excellent selling points for any plutocratic candidate forced to pose as a populist.

Quick on the heels of the rebranding story came yet another piece from Ms. Chozick about an upcoming Hillary TV appearance. The original blurb to the story read: "Mrs. Clinton is expected to appear on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' on Thursday in hopes of reaching female voters who do not consume traditional media."

And therein lies the problem. The Times and the rest of the media-political nexus view us not as readers, thinkers, and engaged citizens, but as mere "consumers" who devour, or sniff, whatever content is placed in front of us. All they think they need is the right ad campaign for all to be right in the Feudal States of America.

It's time that Hillary and the Times got with the times and realized that the days of fooling most of the people even some of the time are long gone. The slow demise of democracy as illustrated by the selling of Hearty Hilarious Hillary is not funny. It is just plain tragic in a pathetic, maudlin kind of way. Kind of like this:

Labor Daze

They don't call us working stiffs for nothing. 

Granted, Labor Day in the USA is pretty much a public relations gimmick designed to make politicians feel better about giving the shaft to labor on the other 364 days of the year. President William McKinley, who only last week finally got his Alaskan mountain deservedly yanked out from under him, needed to placate the Pullman workers whose strike his federal troops had just lethally shut down. So he gave workers an extra day off instead of a raise and benefits and protections from the oligarchic police state.

 But when celebrity New York Times liberal columnist and economist Paul Krugman uses the occasion of Labor Day to totally ignore working people and instead write about Donald Trump's comparatively sane take on the economy, I think it's safe to assume that as far as the political-media complex is concerned,  working stiffs are not only experiencing rigor mortis. They've been entombed without so much as a cheap grave marker.

Call me naive, but I figured that on today of all days, the corporate press would take a break from the relentless Trump coverage.  Of course the day is still young as I write this. Maybe by sundown, Trump will have taken a backseat, and there will be articles on mattress sales and the price of sirloin and the crowds at the beaches.

(Update: Time Magazine broke down and covered Bernie Sanders marching in a picket line in Iowa in solidarity with workers at a corn processing plant. All is not lost!)

 Meanwhile, if you're tired of the labor coverage or lack thereof and if you subscribe to Hulu Plus, they're streaming some classic but forgotten films on working stiffs from the Criterion Collection. Last night, I watched "The Proud Valley" starring Paul Robeson. It's about an African-American sailor who somehow winds up in a Welsh mining town during the Great Depression to work with the locals. Robeson, who suffered more than his share of abuse in his home country based both on his race and his politics, refused with good reason to work for the American film industry, where parts for black people were largely confined to servants, slaves and tap-dancers. The movie, made on the eve of Britain's entry into World War Two, is a weird blend of Marxist musical and nationalistic fervor. The scene of the mine collapse is a classic in cinematography. Of course, "The Proud Valley" is rarely shown in this country. For one thing, there are no racial distinctions or dog-whistling tropes in the film. David Goliath, the character played by Robeson, is immediately assimilated as an equal into the community. For another thing, it celebrates labor and solidarity and communalism. Very un-American, to say the least.*

I, for one. am going to celebrate the rest of this Labor Day by not laboring any further on this blog. I plan to watch more working stiff films on Hulu!

Meanwhile, here is my published comment to Mr. Krugman, in which I refused to mention D.T. at all because the very thought of him on this day of all days gives me such unpleasant tremors:

The GOP candidates are so nuts that when you go to the Democratic (!) National Committee website, you find a whole page outlining the five worst ideas of each and every one of them. As Mr Krugman says, their supply side economics gospel was debunked as pure smoke and mirrors long ago.

  I looked in vain for information on a DNC agenda, but it appears that there isn't one yet, at least on the official site. The party line is more shooting bloated GOP fish in a barrel, and then announcing that there will be only four Democratic debates before the first primaries.

 This doesn't fly, particularly on a day set aside to supposedly honor the American worker. Although the rate of unemployment is indeed down, the labor participation rate is the worst it's been in more than 30 years, and wages, especially for minimum wage workers, have continued to plummet. More than half the teenagers who went looking for a job this summer were unable to find one, yet the New Deal-inspired Job Corps program for youth has been cut in each of the past six years under a Democratic administration.

 Most of the new jobs, for all age groups, have been in the low-wage service sector.

Instead of arguing over which GOP plutocratic candidate can best screw us, let's start making some noise about what really works for the economy.

How about, just for starters, a government jobs program, a guaranteed national income, and true universal health care?

Happy Labor Day, everybody!

 *Update Number Two: Reader Robert Sadin shares more on the true-life enduring relationship between Paul Robeson and the Welsh miners:

Robeson’s association with South Wales dates from 1928 when, whilst performing in ‘Show Boat’ in London’s West End, he met a group of unemployed miners who had walked to London to draw attention to the hardship and suffering endured by thousands of unemployed miners and their families in South Wales.

Robeson visited South Wales many times between 1929 and 1939, singing in various towns including Cardiff, Neath and Swansea. In 1938, he sang to the 7,000 people who attended the Welsh International Brigades Memorial at Mountain Ash to commemorate the 33 Welshmen who had died in Spain. He told the audience “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for me but for the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here."

When Robeson became a victim of McCarthyism in the 50s and his passport was revoked, members of the Welsh chorus portrayed in the film helped exert successful pressure on the Eisenhower administration to reinstate it.

Robeson had also just been the main government target in the Peekskill, New York riots of 1949. It was a wild and scary case of what today we might call Trumpism, or American fascism. Arch-conservative businessmen and politicians ginned up some right-wing populism and rumors about Robeson and his lefty friends, pitting poor unemployed whites against Communists, socialists, Jews, and black people. State police were sent to keep order, and either stood by or participated in the orchestrated mayhem themselves. The mob (dressed in business suits instead of white robes) even lynched Robeson in effigy. You can watch the late folksinger-activist Pete Seeger, another target at the Peekskill concert, reminisce about the riots on Democracy Now! 

This ugliness either runs in cycles, or it never really went away in the first place.

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.)