Grey Lady Gossip Girls

Everything that is so, so wrong with national political coverage in just four paragraphs: 

Carolyn Ryan, the Times political editor, says that one of the thrills and pleasures of her job is hearing from reporters about what they see on the campaign trail.

The national political reporters Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy have been crisscrossing the country: Ms. Chozick’s reporting focuses on Hillary Rodham Clinton and her candidacy; Mr. Healy has covered the presidential campaign generally. In a lively, dishy conversation between campaign stops, the reporters chat with Ms. Ryan about Mrs. Clinton and her campaign.

 Informal and high-spirited, their conversation includes Mrs. Clinton’s snack of choice (jalapeño peppers, whole), her “badass” State Department look, her confidence level, the comparative political skills of Hillary versus Bill Clinton, and questions about the candidate’s authenticity. (Complete with revelations: “She’s brilliant at selfies.”) 

With a few seconds for bellyaching about bad coffee in certain parts of New England.

The above babble is a teaser for the latest entry in a new New York Times feature called "Insider," which also happens to be the name of a tabloid TV program about both Hollywood and Washington celebrities. The Times Insider, shockingly enough, is reserved for those special insiders willing to pay extra to enter a digital gated community recently built behind the pre-existing paywall, itself designed to keep out the lower orders without the bucks to spare for the elite content and government propaganda that the Paper of Record churns out on a near-constant basis.

In other words, the Insider is news for the affluent, who are not too concerned about the day-to-day angst of normal people. Why read about single payer healthcare and crumbling schools when you can learn about Hillary Clinton's snacks and selfie skills, and what a "badass" dresser she was over at the State Department?  Oh yes. To give that spicy edginess to coddling the wealthy behind closed digital doors, the Grey Lady has finally become laid-back enough to utter the word "badass!" Too bad that it took the paper nearly a decade to go big and bold enough to admit that "enhanced interrogation" is really torture.

I must be more privileged than I thought, because I could actually access the gossipy podcast behind the gated community behind the paywall as part of a temporary free admission policy in hopes that I might part with more money to become privy to Insiderism on a regular basis. Based upon what I heard, though, I would not join Times Insider even if it were free.

The above teaser was actually a blessedly short synopsis of the very tedious and strained verbal "conversation" that ensued.

In case you were wondering, the "everything else" that Patrick Healy covers is named Bernie Sanders, who is not mentioned any more often than the Times can help, lest the mere mention of his name destroy Hillary's chances. Healy, to my utter shock, comes to his Bernie Beat directly from the Times' theater beat. After all, he tittered in the podcast, what is politics but performance art? No wonder that his Bernie articles are so heavily dismissive of Sanders' hair, accent, posture and couture as well as so snidely critical of his lack of schmoozing and baby-kissing skills.

Amy Chozick, who covers the Clintons exclusively, is disappointed that Hillary is not more like Bill, who has this "incredibly high energy and people skills" that his wife sorely lacks. This, after Chozick helpfully leaked her strategy to become more authentic and funny. Hillary is still pretty much a living, breathing "Policy Pez Dispenser," cheerfully chuckled Chozick within the safe confines of the gated digital salon. Oh, and although Hillary doesn't much care for political reporters,  she absolutely adores Mark Landler, who covers the State Department for the Grey Lady. Chozick is s-o-o-o jealous that Hillary doesn't seem to like her as well, even though she is always unfailingly polite.

Meanwhile, Healy wallowed in his own shallowness by remarking, without a hint of irony within his gated community behind the Wall: "Hillary Clinton thinks reporters are interested in the story behind the story, and that's just not tru-u-u-e!"

I think I'll go choke on a jalapeño pepper.

Cordially Yours, Jeb Bush

Flailing presidential candidate Jeb Bush has apologized for his odious suggestion that only Christian refugees be allowed sanctuary in his America.

"This was a horribly insensitive gaffe on my part," the scion of one of the country's premier crime families was heard to sheepishly admit on Tuesday. "What I meant to say was, only conservative folks with money, dynastic connections, elite degrees and professions or trust funds have an absolute guarantee of asylum in these, my United States. It's just a plus if they're High Church Christians, is all I'm saying. I didn't mean all Christians, fer chrissake. Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, especially, might be sadly out of luck when it comes to the political vetting process. Do you hear me, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson? And forget about the secular humanists. I'm handing those atheist folks a one-way ticket to the hell that my born-again brother created to keep y'all safe."

OK, so I made that quote up. Despite his attempted dehumanization of refugees as pesky "challenges of the world," Jeb Bush did not verbally condemn them to hell based solely upon religion or lack thereof. All he said is that Syrians and Iraqis should present some sort of Christian I.D. prior to crossing the border into Exceptional USA. 

 Discrimination, which they grotesquely call "compassionate conservatism," has always has been an integral part of the Bush Family's ideological DNA. Simply read his bogus trickle-down platform and listen to his speeches, and you will discover that Jeb has devised a hell on earth for all poor atheists, all poor agnostics, all poor Catholics, all poor Jews, all poor Protestants, all poor Muslims, all poor Hindus, all poor Sikhs, all poor Jains and all poor Buddhists, regardless of where they come from, no matter whom they love.  He is an equal opportunity plutocratic class warrior. Muslims and immigrants are among the more recent convenient scapegoats for the rabid right wing, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks in France.

Jeb and his cohort simply feel a little freer to spew the fear and the hatred and the sanctimony these days. All he has to do is open his mouth and cable news is there in a flash to give him endless campaign air time at no cost to Jeb and much cost to the refugees.

And not to be outdone on the domestic front, even by himself, Jeb also just managed to mangle the fable that illustrates precisely why most poor, doomed, white, angry voters still get fooled most of the time by the likes of him, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Responding to a question at a campaign event about Bernie Sanders' call for free college tuition, Jeb lit right up. "This is a great question, I’m glad you brought it up! Because this notion that earned success in life, that the government can just take care of us, if we keep taking steps down that path, we’re in danger. And it’s insidious, because you don’t see it until it’s over. That’s the problem with this. It’s like the crabs in the, you know, whatever —the crabs in the boiling water."

(To be fair to Jeb, he was probably suffering from the congenital Bush family trait of not being able to maintain more than one picture-bubble in his head at a time. He was probably seeing the corporate media's cartoon caricature of "Crabby Bernie" as he struggled in vain to answer yet another unfair liberal "gotcha!" question.)

Luckily, a sympathetic audience member heard his silent cry for help, and yelled out: "Frogs!" 

(To be fair to Jeb, he probably didn't want to bring up frogs in his mangled metaphor, lest it dredge up memories about how W. used to stick firecrackers up frogs' butts just to watch them explode, a juvenile prelude to his blowing-up of the entire Middle East.)

But to further outdo even himself, Jeb gamely lumbered on with his gruesome tale:

“The frogs. You think it’s warm, and it feels pretty good and then it feels like you’re in a whirlpool—you know, a Jacuzzi or something. And then you’re dead. That’s how this works.”

Translation: Subsidized higher education for the masses is a clear and present danger to the Republican Party. Beware the functioning brain and the independent thought. Look at the Bushes, for whom congenital intellectual and moral deficits are worn like badges of honor and they got filthy rich anyway. If they can do it, you can do it. And if you still insist on college, debt peonage till the day you die will be your lot and your loss, and their gain.

Jeb might not be the Smartest Bush. But when it comes to disclosing the Right's true fascist agenda, he is at least an inadvertently Honest Bush. They make you feel all warm and wet and turgid, and then zap. They do you.

That's how it works, crabby frog-people. The oligarchy is tossing you into an epic maelstrom right out of Edgar Allan Poe. Life sucks, and then you die. That's exactly how it works. That's the Republican plan for America. 

GOP Jacuzzi for the Poor

Wargasms

It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for President Obama. It was almost enough to make you applaud the drone president for "standing his ground" when sprayed by a flood of saber-rattling spittle from the corporate press corps, some of whom had traveled to Turkey to "cover" the G-20 summit instead of to Paris to milk the terror for all that it's worth to their defense contractor sponsors.

And exploiting and enhancing and even creating terror is worth a whole hell of a lot to them. Glenn Greenwald has a chart showing that the stock of weapons manufacturers has taken off like a nuclear-fired missile since the Paris massacre. The so-called journalists bombarding Obama with their double-dog-dares disguised as questions all had their marching orders. And they marched in perfect lockstep.

Here's part of the official transcript. 

Margaret Brennan, CBS.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. A more than year-long bombing campaign in Iraq and in Syria has failed to contain the ambition and the ability of ISIS to launch attacks in the West. Have you underestimated their abilities? And will you widen the rules of engagement for U.S. forces to take more aggressive action?

Jim Acosta, CNN.
Q Thank you very much, Mr. President. I wanted to go back to something that you said to Margaret earlier when you said that you have not underestimated ISIS’s abilities. This is an organization that you once described as a JV team that evolved into a force that has now occupied territory in Iraq and Syria and is now able to use that safe haven to launch attacks in other parts of the world. How is that not underestimating their capabilities? And how is that contained, quite frankly? And I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is -- and if you’ll forgive the language -- is why can't we take out these bastards?

Ron Allen, NBC.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. I think a lot of people around the world and in America are concerned because given the strategy that you’re pursuing -- and it’s been more than a year now -- ISIS’s capabilities seem to be expanding. Were you aware that they had the capability of pulling off the kind of attack that they did in Paris? Are you concerned? And do you think they have that same capability to strike in the United States?
And do you think that given all you’ve learned about ISIS over the past year or so, and given all the criticism about your underestimating them, do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?

So Obama is standing his ground, for now. But you have to ask yourself whether this whole "him against the world" performance was a big fat set-up. He had to have known that by selecting CNN, the official Terror Channel, he'd be pressured to vengefully bomb, strafe, slaughter, and bomb again. Is this the way that he justifies starting another war, or more accurately, revving up the one(s) he's already been waging, both secretly and openly? Is this press conference one of the ways he again gets to portray himself as a mythical reluctant warrior, being dragged kicking and screaming into yet more death and destruction and billions of dollars in added profits for the war and surveillance industries?

Given that his own CIA director is also stirring up the bellicose paranoid fever, I suspect that this is very much the case. Back in the safety of the Homeland, John Brennan hand-wringlingly denounced all the pacifist "hand-wringing" (which actually amounts to a few pinkie fingers vaguely twitching on the outskirts of Peaceville) and demanded even more blanket surveillance of ordinary citizens. While he was at it, he tacitly blamed the abuses of the government spying programs and war crimes on the very whistle-blowers, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who have exposed the abuses and the war crimes. One is in exile and the other is in prison while the abuses of Superpower go on, unimpeded by either popular protest or the prosecutions and impeachments of past and present government officials.

It must be so, so hard for one set of murderous sociopaths to keep track of another set of murderous sociopaths. Pity the poor CIA, which unleashed a half-century-long torrent of Islamophobia when it deposed the democratic government of Iran in order to make the world safe for BP.

Good News, Bad News

The good news: Bernie Sanders (with some pretty, pretty, pretty good help from Martin O'Malley) beat Hillary Clinton handily in Saturday night's debate.

The bad news: Nobody saw him beat Hillary Clinton on Saturday night. Okay, so eight million of the already converted watched him beat Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, they were busy doing normal things on a Saturday night, such as watching college football players pummel each other into permanent organic brain damage and premature death. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, autocratic head of the Undemocratic Party, has pummeled the citizenry and enabled Hillary Clinton by scheduling very few debates at very inconvenient times. Bernie should have pounced in the very first debate when he had the chance and the audience. He coulda been a contendah.

The good news: The New York Times broke away from its terror coverage just long enough to write a scathing editorial against Hillary's cynical manipulation of terror to justify her allegiance to Wall Street. To their discredit, however, the editorial board seemed more miffed at her "failure to fake" and feel your pain than they were enraged that Clintonian neoliberalism has caused a whole heap of suffering to a whole bunch of people.

Middle-class Americans associate Wall Street with the 2008 meltdown of the economy that cost so many their homes and savings. In the debate Mrs. Clinton repeatedly referred to her plan for reining in banks, but offered precious few specifics. This is what happens when Hillary Clinton the candidate gets complacent. The debate moderator, Mr. Dickerson, had even tipped her off before a commercial break that the next topic was Wall Street.

Her effort to tug on Americans’ heartstrings instead of explaining her Wall Street ties — on a day that the scars of 9/11 were exposed anew — was at best botched rhetoric. At worst it was the type of cynical move that Mrs. Clinton would have condemned in Republicans.

She should make a fast, thorough effort to explain herself by providing a detailed plan for how she would promote measures protecting middle-class Americans from another financial crisis.

In other words, the Empress-in-Waiting blew it and let down the One Percent big-time by failing to pander to the Left/middle class in public while delivering to the Right/wealthy in private. Besides altering the theme of the debate at the last minute to foreign policy (her over-hyped bailiwick) to give her a perceived advantage, the debate moderator even gave her a heads-up on the Wall Street questions. The Beltway bent over backwards for their designated winner, and this is how she treats them? Oh, the elite humanity!

The bad news: The media-political nexus has decreed that all talk of the economic terror constantly being unleashed against ordinary citizens by the capitalist extremists beholden to the Market God must be "off the table" for the duration of the "official" terror hysteria outbreak/official mourning period.

 Climate change? Fuggedaboudit. What are mass extinctions compared to the latest, greatest threat to exceptional American Value$ that ever threatened? 

Vox's Brad Plumer, to name just one media hack, hysterically rails against Bernie Sanders for even bringing up the actual climate during this designated time of International Grief and Fear. Plumer says it is so "off-base" to directly link drought to violence. After all, if you're that hot, hungry, tired and thirsty, civil war should be the last thing on your mind, Plumer punditocratically pontificates from the comfort of an actual building. Apparently, jihad and strife only break out during balmy boom times and bubbles-a-plenty.

  It has been deemed disrespectful to bring up foreclosures, stagnating wages, unemployment and political corruption at a time when the important people are so busily milking terror for all it's worth. And in terms of advertising revenue and lobbyist dollars for them, and enhanced profits for the war industry, Terror is worth a yuuuuuge bundle. You gotta Keep Fear Alive. "Terrorism, Not Taxes!"  is the new campaign theme, shrilled another Times article:

The assault on Paris has thrust national security to the heart of the presidential race, forcing candidates to scramble and possibly prompting voters to reconsider their flirtations with unconventional candidates and to take a more sober measure of who is prepared to serve as commander in chief.

They just cancelled out their own "Hillary So, So Disappointed Us!" op-ed. From making fun of his accent and his hair, now they're claiming that Bernie is a bad boyfriend for not wallowing in fear and jingoism on our flirtatious Saturday night date.

The good news: Hillary Clinton was beautifully blindsided by rude boy Bernie Sanders, who went off the pre-approved "all terror, all the time"  debate script, and reduced her to bragging that her billions in Wall Street speaking fees and donations have been offset by the fact that 60 percent of her "small donors" are women. She brought her shallow, cynical identity politics into glaring high relief, and it was not a pretty sight. Nor were her lame excuses for helping destabilize the entire Middle East.

The bad news: Hillary is still ahead in the polls. Money still rules politics. The whole system is probably corrupt beyond all redemption. Bill Clinton is now openly appearing with her at campaign rallies, to much applause. Make no mistake, this is an attempted third term, a Clinton restoration, another co-presidency, another chance to cut the social safety net.

The good news: Bill Clinton is probably too old and decrepit to resume chasing after White House interns and female staffers. The Clinton restoration probably does not apply to his entire anatomy. His quadruple bypass probably precludes the ingestion of Viagra.

The bad news: As loathsome as the Clintons are, they are easily beatable by the Republicans, who probably already have a scandalous October Surprise or twelve up their sleeves. Also, before we rejoice that Clinton the Horn Dog has lost his horniness, we must remember that it was only the Lewinsky affair and impeachment distractions that prevented his planned cuts to Social Security and Medicare during those bubble-icious deregulatory 90s boom-times. Therefore, impotence can have its upside when it serves the potentates. The septuagenarian specter of the Clinton Restoration is a huge aphrodisiac for the richest of the rich.

The good news: There is a whole year to go before Election Day.

Paris

More hundreds of innocent people were again caught in the crosshairs of Permawar last night, in what is being described in the Western media as a terrorist attack rather than as a counterattack against Western imperialism. 

Pope Francis is right in calling the night of carnage one more battle in a "piecemeal World War III."

From the Elysee Palace (Elysium, or abode of the gods), French President Francois Hollande proclaimed the attacks to be an act of war perpetrated and planned by the Islamic State, which is now seemingly getting its wish and being officially recognized as a nation unto itself:

“France, because it was foully, disgracefully and violently attacked, will be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” Mr. Hollande said on Saturday, adding that France would act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”

France has already gotten a head start. Way back in 2012, Hollande armed the "good" Syrian rebels in a direct breach of a European embargo that then forbade weapons sales to that war-torn region. Maybe that is what President Obama meant last night when he bragged that France has always stood with the United States Empire in its own lawless, never-ending, obsessive compulsive quest to bring peace to the world through tanks, drones, guns, and various CIA coups and proxy wars. Except, of course, for the time post-9/11, when Francophobia became so intense within the elite American political class that Congress changed French fries into "freedom" fries on its menu in an inane act of solidarity to go along with its embrace of the paranoid Patriot Act and Bush's fraudulent invasion of Iraq.

They got over their food fetish quickly enough, but their war fetish lives on, and on, and on.

So does the jingoistic rhetoric. "They hate us for our freedoms" is enjoying a patriotic comeback from across the A to B political spectrum, clanging away throughout the land like a hollow cracked Liberty bell. The word "blowback" is nowhere to be seen or heard from within the parochial halls of the US media-political complex.

But the anodyne "values" are being belched out like projectile missiles. Obama himself managed to emit them a total of five times within a larger blast of boilerplate lasting less than two minutes:

"....this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share."

  "Paris itself represents the timeless values of human progress."

  "We are reminded in this time of tragedy that the bonds of liberté and égalité and fraternité are not only values that the French people care so deeply about, but they are values that we share."

 "And those values are going to endure far beyond any act of terrorism or the hateful vision of those who perpetrated the crimes this evening."

Meanwhile, Obama supplemented his mawkish Values with the hackneyed "thoughts and prayers" for the wounded and the dead, words that he recently professed to be so weary of while performing his official duty of mourning domestic gun violence victims. He did not offer monetary aid, help with funeral expenses, medical care, psychological counseling, or promises to end the bombings and give peace and refuge to some of the displaced, expelled people now barely surviving in makeshift refugee camps in Calais and elsewhere in Europe. 

He did promise more of the same "revenge is mine" Old Testament chest-thumping that we thought we'd seen the last of with the exit of the unindicted and richly rewarded George W. Bush. Obama offered more death.

 "We’re going to do whatever it takes to work with the French people and with nations around the world to bring these terrorists to justice, and to go after any terrorist networks that go after our people," Obama vowed to his TV audience.

Oh good. That must signify that he will also prosecute the American military terrorists who only last month obliterated the hospital run by the France-based Médecins Sans Frontières.

Or not. When the United States performs terroristic acts, they are done with therapeutic surgical strikes and bombs of democracy. They don't call them Patriot missiles for nothing. America's acts of aggression are hidden behind such grotesque monikers as Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Odyssey Dawn and Operation Inherent Resolve.

Total deaths in Paris attacks: between 100 and 150.

Total deaths in Iraq War(s): 224,000. And counting.

Plutocrats in Plunderland

Just as Hillary Clinton was professing her sudden and unexpected opposition to exclusionary charter schools, the think tank founded by her own campaign manager was very conveniently and coincidentally going on full school privatization overdrive offensive.

Clintonite John Podesta's Center for American Progress, already exposed as a corporate front group by Senator Elizabeth Warren, has gathered together the usual suspects -- private equity vultures, Silicon Valley moguls, neoliberal politicians, charter school advocates, billionaire philanthropists and lobbyists -- under a telltale hashtag called TeachStrong. (the immediate supposition that teachers are inherently weak and in dire need of improvement should be your first clue about their true agenda!)

I got the email announcing #TeachStrong on Tuesday, which appropriately enough was also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Alice In Wonderland". So get ready for a tortured trip down a neoliberal rabbit hole:

It's time to elevate and modernize the teaching profession. (began CAP's email.)

Our students are falling behind internationally. In an effort to catch up, we are asking more from our teachers than ever before. Yet we continue to provide them with inadequate preparation, training, and pay.To address this gap, the Center for American Progress and 40 partner organizations are launching the TeachStrong campaign. It is a movement to change the national education policy conversation and make modernizing and elevating the teaching profession the most pressing and significant education policy priority for our nation. As a part of the campaign’s launch, TeachStrong held an event today with Governor Jack Markell (D) of Delaware and Governor Terry Branstad (R) of Iowa, where they discussed the need for a bipartisan effort to act.

"Modernization" is the neoliberal buzzword for privatization. And whenever they crow about "bipartisan" you can almost feel the tentacles of Wall Street grasping you around your throat. And whenever they brag about their "diverse" groups joining together for a project, you can rest assured that even cursory searches of their funding and leadership will reveal astroturf groups within political parties within marketing divisions within corporations.

 Governor Markell, (D-Oligarchy) for example, was one of the original members of Bill and Hillary Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, a/k/a the party's conservative Big Business wing. Before entering politics and most recently becoming an education concern troll, he held managerial positions at First Chicago Corporation, McKinsey, Comcast and the Nextel Corporation. As governor, one of his first accomplishments was the legalization of sports betting. In December 2013, following a lengthy investigation,  a special prosecutor found that Markell had violated campaign finance law in 2008 by advising high-rollers how to sidestep donation limits. However, since the very brief statute of limitations had expired, and the prosecutor graciously allowed that ignorance of the law is an excuse when it comes to the misdeeds of VIPs like Markell, no criminal charges were ever pressed against him. 

Markell is just the type of principled, qualified cat we need to help kids learn and to "elevate" teachers and improve their skills, don't you think?

 

My Reality Is Just Different Than Yours

But back to #TeachStrong and its diverse group of partners with the Brave New World goal of "building a better teacher." 

Trust me: this gets curiouser and curiouser, the further down the rabbit hole you plummet, and the harder you try to dig your way back out of the muddy morass. 

But take a peek behind the curtain anyway...

... and you can find the entire Fab Forty on the #TeachStrong webpage. To discern the funding and the people behind each partner, simply Google each of them individually, and then look for the fine print under "Our Board" or "Our Advisers" or "Our Directors" or "Our Team." Much to your surprise, you will discover that many of the "diverse partners" making up #TeachStrong are actually subsidiaries or downright clones of themselves! Here's a sampling of the subterfuge:

"Alliance For Excellent Education": led by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, a lobbyist for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Common Core testing-for-profit program. His alliance is a front group for something called Digital Learning Day, which sells educational software to public schools. From that, he has developed "Project 24," which in turned spawned "Future Ready Schools," which gets taxpayer funding from Obama's Department of Education. Besides being a recent recipient of the "Bammy Award," he also serves on the Barbara Bush Family Literacy Board. Like a bipartisan circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.....

Anyway, Wise gets assistance at his Alliance from Daniel H. Leeds, who also  happens to sit on the board of the Center for American Progress! It's a small world after all. Leeds is the president of Fulcrum Investments, a private equity firm with a stake in charter schools and educational software.

"America Achieves": Another charter school front group, listing its funders as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Will and Flora Hewlett Foundation among other philanthrocapitalists. Its executive director, Jon Schnur, served on Barack Obama's transition team and as an advisor to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who is soon leaving public service to spend more time with his money family.

"Digital Promise": This front group is at least upfront about admitting that teachers and students are not its top priorities. According to the website: "Building relationships with developers and entrepreneurs is core to Digital Promise’s work. The Corporate Partner Program aims to create mutually beneficial relationships between our corporate partners, our staff, and our network. We engage with corporate partners as thought leaders, co-designers, and problem solvers alongside our education leaders and researchers."

Well, if you can engage with Thought Leaders, who needs any damned teachers? And their corporate sponsors are a Who's Who of the Oligarchy. The ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates, Hewlett Packard, McGraw-Hill, Apple, Amazon, Discovery and Microsoft to name just a few. Ka-ching! 

And the Board of Directors is to die for. Among them is one Gilman Louie, described on Digital Promise's website as "the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. (my bold.) Previously Mr. Louie built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Mr. Louie founded and ran a publicly traded company called Spectrum HoloByte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer. He has served on a number of boards of directors, including Wizards of the Coast, Netwitness, Ribbit, Zephyr Technologies, the National Venture Capital Association, the CIA Officers Memorial Fund and currently chairs the Mandarin Institute and the Federation of American Scientists."

Just the kind of intelligence expert we need to spy on entertain advertise to teach our kids, and to elevate our teachers to the highest heights of servitude, huh?

"Emerson Collective": Founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder and jobs off-shorer Steve Jobs, this "partner" of the CAP anti-teacher offensive is obviously in no great need of outside funding. As a result, watch for a Brave New World Jobs Elementary coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Students will concentrate not on the Three R's, but on "personalization" and "syncing." Needless to say, this involves lots and lots of very pricey educational software, to be installed in both homes and classrooms. Mrs. Jobs explains:

"We've developed a set of algorithms that choreograph the movement of students between learning stations (that include both live and digital instruction), identify the skills and concepts each student is ready to learn as well as which of their classmates need the same skills. As a result, students spend more time on skills they are ready to learn, understand their personal learning goals, and are accountable for their own learning. Learn more about our most recent results here.

Are we all mad here, or do you think that Laurene Jobs and Gilman Louie would make an excellent team? Ka-ching on steroids!

"Hope Street Group":  Just when I thought I'd finally reached rock bottom of the rabbit hole with Laurene Jobs' Orwellian vision, there is this hilariously named education reform front group. Actually, you should probably abandon hope once you've entered this domain, which prominently features the mugshot of outgoing Education Sec. Arne Duncan. It seems to have little or nothing to do with actual teaching, what with its core message that education must be viewed as "an economic opportunity," along with health and jobs, small j, to be oxymoronically aligned with "market forces for social good." (the accepted definition of Clintonian third way politics, or neoliberalism.)

 The Board of Directors is a star-studded cast of plutocratic characters from private equity, the tech industry, vulture capitalism and the predatory health insurance cartel. 

Hope Street is definitely Arne Duncan's baby (or at least one of them), now that he is retiring from "public service". Triple-triple-triple Ka-ching!

"Third Way": If it's American Progress, and there is money to be made from the commonwealth, you cannot possibly leave out Wall Street billionaire and Clinton pal Pete Peterson. Now that his austerity for the masses initiative is in temporary hibernation due to campaign politics, he might as well glom onto public education to get his outsized share, right? This guy actually wants Congress to reauthorize George Bush's No Child Left Behind scam, and the Clintons' think tank is welcoming him with open arms, just as Bill and Hill welcomed him with open arms to their family foundation, and even lent out daughter Chelsea in calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The aforementioned astroturf organizations are just a tiny slice of the Center for Progress's #TeachStrong initiative. To be fair, there do seem to be a few legitimate teachers' groups interspersed among the lot for appearance's sake, not least of them Randi Weingarten's American Federation of Teachers, which mysteriously endorsed Hillary Clinton without even bothering to take a vote from actual members.

 "... if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

Commentariat Central

The poobahs of the New York Times opinion section were up to their usual reality-altering tricks this past weekend.

First, there was Maureen Dowd's pre-mortem elegy to George H.W."Poppy" Bush, which had the desired effect of plugging the new hagiography by Jon Meacham. The book has gleaned headlines because Poppy finally chastized W over Iraq at the same time he called Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld a couple of "iron asses."  Dowd painted a picture of a principled elder statesman tortured in his dotage by the legacy of his idiot son. Riffing on Dylan Thomas, she mawkishly urged Poppy to "not to go gentle, man, into that good night."

Meanwhile, pouncing on a recent study on mortality rates, good Christian bitch Ross Douthat raged, raged against "The  Dying of the Whites" and blamed the usual cultural breakdown and lack of religious faith for the epidemic of suicides and drug abuse among poorer white people. If only whites could learn to be as accepting of their reduced circumstances as blacks and Latinos are to their chronic marginalization, he said, maybe then they'd give life a chance.

And not to be outdone, Paul Krugman yawned, yawned against the dying of the whites as he boringly blamed, blamed the Republicans rather than globalization and political corruption and the oligarchy for the epidemic of suicides among struggling middle-aged white people. He said there might be something to Douthat's cultural breakdown theory after all, while proclaiming that the jury is still out as to whether income inequality and the greed of the plutocracy has anything to do with poor people dropping like flies for no strikingly apparent reason that he can fathom. So it must be the fault of those nasty replicons. And Krugman, acknowledging that Obamacare and a slight raise in the minimum wage might "not be enough to cure existential despair," does not offer any solutions of his own, or God forbid, give a shout-out to Bernie Sanders' social welfare agenda.

I responded to each of these lovely people. First, to Dowd:

I think I'll give Meacham's bio a pass. That the publisher's blurb brags that he was granted unique access to all Poppy's and Bar's diaries as well as to their august doddering selves should be your first clue to run for the hills. Your second clue is that Poppy is openly shilling for what smells like a shameless hagiography*.

The fact is that a corrupt scion like W can only grow out of a corrupt family tree. An oil-rich Skull and Bones river oozes right through the thought-free realm that shelters this whole misbegotten dynasty.

Unmentioned in the cheap Freudian analyses about obscenely rich fathers and sons is the fact that Poppy himself never could have clawed his way to the top without the help of the Ford administration's Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Although Poppy followed the grand Bush family tradition of being woefully underqualified, they orchestrated his appointment to head the CIA as a cynical means of pushing back against the Church Committee. Once there, Poppy accomplished such feats as destroying all the records of the CIA's hideous mind control experiments. He helped the Neocon cabal give birth to their whole criminal enterprise 40 years ago. They enriched the military-industrial complex by falsely hyping Soviet threats, just as they would later falsely hype the Iraq threat.

They always were asses, iron or otherwise.

Intelligence failure is built right into the Bush DNA.

They deserve neither biographies nor therapy. They deserve indictments.

*********

Now, my retort to Ross Douthat: 

It's the class war, stupid.

Ross blithely supposes that since black death rates haven't been increasing as sharply as those for poor whites, the suicide epidemic must be a cultural, religious thing as well as an economic thing. The fact is that black mortality still surpasses white mortality. It's just that in this age of record wealth inequality, whites are finally gaining parity in the race to the misery mountaintop. Or, to be more accurate, the plummet to the depths of a hell created just for us by a de facto pathocracy.

Douthat's suggestion that blacks and Latinos have developed some sort of "resiliency" to oppression that should be emulated by whites smacks of both classism and racism. In other words, his prescription is to just get used to the new feudal order, and pray a lot. Indulge in the opiate of the masses instead of Oxycontin, and all will be well in your pathetic little worlds.

Here's my prescription: instead of voting against their own economic interests and keeping the Republican Simon Legrees in power, desperate white people should join in solidarity with their brown and black brothers and sisters and fight back against the oppression and inequality.

Thanks to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. the idea of democratic socialism is starting to sound mighty appealing to the dispossessed of all races, colors and creeds.

Let's follow his advice and automatically register all people to vote on their 18th birthdays. Let the revolution begin.

******

Finally, my comment on Krugman's "Despair, American Style":

Capitalism on crack, deregulation, globalization, the corruption of the money-hungry political class: These are the poisons causing our existential despair. Call it post-modern eugenics.

Corporate coups like NAFTA, and the looming TPP and TTIP, shutter the factories that traditionally employ lower-educated white people, driving their jobs offshore and depressing their wages. People who are "shockingly" killing and over-medicating themselves know that they will never get another job. "This ('free trade') is not a bloodless process," then-Sen. Barack Obama correctly told a group of financiers at the Hamilton Project back in 2006.**

Meanwhile, we're informed that if we haven't succeeded, we haven't tried. We have a "skills gap." Fascist right-wingers urge us to hate thy neighbor as thyself, while centrists tell us to look at the wonderful new job stats as we sign up for predatory health insurance and they "fight" for a slight increase in the minimum wage by, say, 2020 or thereabouts. Leftist pols who want to expand -- not just "protect" -- Social Security get little to no coverage in the complicit, corporate press.

It was only recently that the government began cracking down on the notorious "pill mills" of Florida, and restricting the manufacture of limitless numbers of opiates. (Read "American Pain" by investigative journalist John Temple, and the Case-Deaton report won't seem shocking at all.)

Chronic despair should be declared a public health emergency.

*******

The New York Times pundits should take heart, though. As the dynastic George W. Bush himself once admitted, "I don't understand how poor people think." 

* Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of "Family of Secrets," posits that the new bio is a huge cover-up. That most people will neither buy it nor read it matters not. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. Baker offers exhaustive evidence in his own book that, far from being the mild-mannered virtuous statesman of legend, Bush the Elder has been up to his eyeballs in intrigue and corruption and dirty political tricks his entire life. It was Poppy, for example, who gave Karl Rove his first big break. Baker even suggests a Bush-as-CIA spook connection, through various degrees of separation, with the Kennedy assassination. Yikes. Needless to say, his book was almost universally trashed by the establishment media when it was published, via that tried and true technique called "gaslighting the author." (See: Seymour Hersh.)

** Note Obama's opening remarks in the video above, as he smarmily congratulates Robert Rubin ("Bob") and the other architects of the soon-to-be worst financial meltdown in history for leading the country on "the path to prosperity." Note how he refers to the victims of globalization as "losers."

Obama readily acknowledges to the plutocrats vetting him that "trade" deals like the TPP are harmful to regular people. He admits that the "work being done here" has horrific consequences, and says nothing to discourage it. This performance was effectively his audition to head the Democratic ticket. He obviously passed with flying colors.

COGs (Continuity of Government) in the Machine