Sweet Justice

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!

Nino No More

Although fowl play is not suspected, I think it's fair to say that Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Nino" Scalia died as he lived: holding innocent living things in contempt before killing them and calling it a luxury vacation. No longer will America have to quail in fright before the juridical jiggery-pokery of this odious little man.

"I am mourning this remarkable man," remarked Barack Obama, taking a moment out of his own bromantic luxury Valentines weekend golf vacation with his old high school posse. "A devout Catholic, he was the proud father of nine children and the grandfather to many loving grandchildren. An avid hunter, he had a passion for opera music, which he shared with his dear friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

"They say you mustn't say nothing but good of the dead. He's dead -- good!" chimed in the ghost of Moms Mabley. 

Not to be outdone, The Washington Post started running live updates on Scalia's continuing death.

Mother Earth declared herself well-pleased with the situation, given that the Supreme Court had been on the verge of declaring null and void the Paris Climate Summit agreements by putting a stay on Obama's Clean Power plan. All the increased smoke and fire and drought and famine will have to remain in Hell for the time being, now that new resident Scalia's deciding pro-Koch vote has been rendered permanently mute. 

The candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, meanwhile, honored Scalia's memory by hurling more opera buffa insults at one another on a kitschy stage festooned with garish pinks and reds to symbolize the group bromance of these manly men. In the muscular bloodthirsty spectacle of our pseudo-democracy, Every Kiss Begins With Kayfabe.

Trump Gives Rubio the Scalia Salute

From Clean for Gene To Learn From Bern

Note from Karen:

Peter Smith, a friend from Buffalo, sent me this piece he wrote for Artvoice, an independent weekly.

 
(Originally published by ArtVoice. Reprinted with permission.)

Can "Clean For Gene" Become "Learn From Bern?"

By Peter Smith

Once upon a time I introduced Senator Gene McCarthy to an audience of students at Dartmouth during the 1968 primary season. The largest auditorium at the College was packed to overflowing – the stage was full of people as well as all the seats and aisles. When “Gene” came on stage the audience exploded.

Fifty years later another insurgent is challenging the establishment of the Democratic Party. In 1968 McCarthy did not win in New Hampshire, but President Johnson decided not to seek another term. In 2016, the question is whether a former first lady will, amazingly, end up without the Dems’ nomination just as LBJ did?

One of the most important unknowables right now is whether young and enthusiastic supporters of the “insurgent” can face a few facts and become a more cohesive political force. “Clean for Gene” was all about asking young men and women in 1968 to shed their counter-culture characteristics and go canvassing in clothes that would not wrong-foot them when they called on regular folks. They did so.

The equivalent today is surely to persuade young supporters of Bernie Sanders to get serious. I have been watching politics for a long time, and I cannot recall ever seeing the number 86 beside a % except in totalitarian countries; but 86 is the percentage of under-25 voters Sanders won in the Iowa caucuses on February First.  Imho that is stunning.

What “getting serious” means is doing something more than “liking” this or that on Facebook, or following a trend on Twitter. A few days ago there was a very important and totally relevant Op-Ed in the New York Times. In it, Tom Friedman gave a young Egyptian the opportunity to share with a wide audience his experience with using social media as a political tool.  

The nub of the matter is that while social media launched the “Arab Spring” and played decisive roles in the overthrow of Mubarek in Egypt and other authoritarian rulers elsewhere in the Middle East, the role of FB and the others in creating a new regime – anywhere – was very limited indeed, if not totally absent. Young Americans, engaged in politics for the first time in their lives in 2016 must learn a lesson from that history if they are to help the revolution Sanders proposes to lead.

The fact that - I am told – Sanders supporters are posting horrendous words about Hillary Clinton has to mean that his young backers have to ”Learn from Bern!”

The first thing is to learn patience. The first thing is to learn consistency. The first thing is to learn civility. The first thing to learn is channeling passion. The first thing to learn is persistence.  A great many “First Things to Learn;” all of them are options. Different people will find some lessons easy, and they can act on their new knowledge immediately. But all of them will need to learn all of them if Bernie’s work is to prosper and succeed.

If he wins the Democratic nomination he will win the presidency. And a large percentage of the 1% will have to figure out how to respond. I am sure I am one of millions who are looking forward to finding out what they make of it all.

***

  (Peter Smith was the director of the arts center at Dartmouth when he introduced Gene McCarthy. Before that, he had been a member of the founding administration at UC Santa Cruz; after Dartmouth, he worked at Columbia University. He has lived in the Buffalo area since 2002.)

Kitchen Sink #2: "BernieSoWhite"

Now that Bernie Sanders has proven his cred with white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, the pundits are dutifully preparing us for his Great Fall in (Black) South Carolina and (Brown) Nevada. It seems that Hillary Clinton owns the African-American and Latino vote because she's been around awhile, and Bernie has had the bad taste to reside in lily-white Vermont for most of his life. Bad Bernie. Bad, bad Bernie.

For the best synopsis of Clintonian racist policies as opposed to Clintonian colorblind rhetoric, don't miss  Michelle ("The New Jim Crow") Alexander's piece in The Nation. It is scathing in its historical completeness.

It is so scathing that over at the pro-Clinton New York Times, columnist Charles Blow attempted to mitigate the damage by denigrating a new faction called the Bernie-splainers. (They appear to be closely related to those annoying Bernie Bros I hear so much about, but have never seen in the flesh, not even in my own lefty rowdy party college town.)

Blow begins: 

I cannot tell you the number of people who have commented to me on social media that they don’t understand this support. “Don’t black folks understand that Bernie best represents their interests?” the argument generally goes. But from there, it can lead to a comparison between Sanders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; to an assertion that Sanders is the Barack Obama that we really wanted and needed; to an exasperated “black people are voting against their interests” stance.

That's right. He cannot, therefore does not, tell us the actual number of white people who wrote him such insulting messages. Not one direct quote among the whole alleged bunch. Blow presents no evidence that any of the Bernie-splainers are presenting Sanders as a kind of Great White Hope to all those ignorant black folk, or have been "talking down" to black people.

Blow goes on to explain that Hillary-style "functional pragmatism" has always worked better for black people. I guess he forgot about Martin Luther King's fierce urgency of now, and his brave stance against incremental change, and his marches through Chicago, Washington and Memphis, and the poor people's encampment that continued as planned after he was murdered.

Then Blow pivots back into the stale establishment talking points about Bernie possessing a "whiff of fancifulness," and how it's always been safer to vote for politicians you know (Clinton) than politicians you don't know (Sanders.) He does not explain that many voters don't know about Sanders precisely because the newspaper which employs him has made it its duty to make sure they don't. 

While I completely get Blow's pique about politicians pandering to different demographics for the sole purpose of garnering votes, I am pretty appalled that he has resorted to the same old straw man (sexist bigoted progressives) argument in order to passive-aggressively boost Hillary's candidacy.

My published comment: (lots of wonderful ones: read them all.)

 You know what irks me? The epidemic of pundit-splaining about Bernie Sanders. Despite the best efforts of the mainstream press to alternately ignore, silence and ridicule him, Bernie isn't going away. And since he isn't going away, the corporate media are moving on to Plan B: pit liberal voters against one another. Gaslight them. Explain to the teeming masses that democracy is really just a theory, and not to be actually practiced outside of voting for approved candidates every two or four years.

We're told to vote by our gender, skin color or ethnicity -- or else risk offending the members of our endangered group. Madeleine Albright warns women about a special place in hell. Paul Krugman tells Bernie-supporters that our "happy dreams" are an invitation to a Trump presidency. And those ephemeral Bernie Bros are lurking in alleys, ready to pounce on American maidenhood.

I participated in a Latino conference call for Bernie a couple of weeks ago. Nevada state Rep. Lucy Flores, who is running for Congress, made the salient point that we are not members of some monolithic voting bloc, ripe for being scared into co-optation.. We vote on the issues. We have our own agency. 

 Don't fall for the same old divide and conquer techniques that keep struggling people down and out, and the plutocracy entrenched in power.

People are realizing that Identity politics is harmful to our health. We're showing a lot more solidarity these days.

And that is scaring the elites to death.

No matter what happens in the primaries, what is imperative is that the revolutionary enthusiasm prevails. No matter what the outcome, the word "socialism" has been fully integrated into the great American lexicon. No matter who wins and who loses, the country is moving in a decidedly leftward, anti-oligarchial direction. Clintonism ran out of steam a long time ago.

I suspect, too, that the recent visit of Pope Francis and his popular message of inclusive social justice and solidarity went a long way in facilitating the rise of Bernie Sanders, who has openly expressed his own admiration for the Pope and Catholic social teaching in the vein of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.

***

Suggestions for further reading:

Rima Regas, regular Times commenter, also runs an excellent blog (listed on my "roll" under Blog # 42). Her latest entries, on Hillary and Israel, and the lack of ethics in media coverage of Bernie Sanders, are must-reads. Her graphic showing the lovable Paul Krugman at an elite Clinton rally is a hoot.   

Black Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon reports that the best outcome of the Democratic primaries would be a permanent split in the party and an end to "the rich man's duopoly." He still believes that Bernie is "sheepdogging" young voters into the Democratic fold, and that he is probably as surprised as anybody that his democratic socialist message is catching fire. Dixon agrees with Blow's observation, adding that even though black people have a long radical political tradition, they historically have not voted for radical candidates in national elections. They vote Democrat mainly to seek protection from the sadistic GOP -- which, let's face it, would just as soon that black people disappear. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, co-opting black churches, colleges, sororities, fraternities and civic groups, resembles nothing so much as a protection racket.

  Most scathing line from Dixon's piece: "The Democrats ooze like pus from every orifice of the Black body politic."

Ouch. 

Some members of what the Black Agenda Report writers have famously called the Black Misleadership Class were out in force today, endorsing Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept's Lee Fang reveals, however, the "Black Caucus Pac" putting their power and their money behind her are not to be confused with the congressional Black Caucus itself. The 20-member Pac is actually composed of about half elected officials and half lobbyists, one of whom works for the largest manufacturer of the highly addictive opioid, OxyContin. Others are representatives from tobacco companies, Walmart and student loan giant Navient. What a great group of people that Hillary should be proud to have on her side. I hope the Bernie people call her out on these endorsements when, say, she brags about wanting to remedy the drug addiction problem in America.

The cigarette lobby infiltrating Clinton World also kind of puts a damper  on the Obama/Biden cancer cure "moonshot" continuing past this year too, should Hillary win the White House. 

Hillary needs to be smoked out, and fast.  

The Kitchen Sink: Episode One In An Infinite Series

To his credit, Bernie Sanders waxed sanguine in last night's victory speech. He fully expects the Clintonoids to throw the kitchen sink at him as well as everything else at their (garbage) disposal. He fully expects the mainstream media to continue treating him (and by extension, his supporters) with utter disdain.

The Kitchen Sink has Nixonian soap scum and rancid grease ringed all around it. It is already becoming a virtual petri dish of dirty tricks.

One recent artifact in the atrocity exhibition shows Hillary Clinton papering over the stonewalling about her paid Wall Street speeches with ever more layers of dishonesty.  Jonathan Turley writes that "an unknown group of Clinton supporters has created a clearly misleading site called Hillaryclintonspeeches that comes up whenever someone tries to search the controversies. What they find is not a site on the speech controversy, but a pro-Clinton site that directs them to glowing reviews of Clinton and campaign websites."

Turley is right. A Google search of "Hillary Wall Street speeches" brings up the phony site right near the top of the results list. Far from addressing the speech controversy, it is essentially an aggregation blog of all things Clinton. The writing itself, while not really terrible, is of decidedly high school newspaper caliber. Flint, Michigan, for example, is glossed over as simply "having a struggle with poor water quality." The latest entry, published post-Sanders rout, offered a robotic, blow-by-blow account of the Clinton Family's Day. First, they took a walk. Then, it snowed. Then, Hillary spoke. Yada yada yada. 

A few days earlier, it reported, Bill had said Bernie was a hermetically sealed hypocrite. 
 
The fan site, with archives dating all the way back to last week, is obviously a production of the Clinton Machine, with the express purpose of diverting attention from the alleged graft and corruption. They don't particularly seem to care about editing, or making their candidate sound especially coherent. The whole idea seems to be that if I can read about what Chelsea ate for breakfast, I will forget all about the fraud and corruption running like a polluted river through the family DNA. 

A clumsily-worded sample from "Hillary Clinton Speeches": 

On Sunday, Hillary sat down with Jake Tapper for an interview during CNN's State of the Union. In an episode that featured interviewed (sic) with candidates from both parties, Tapper asked Clinton about her record and how she deals with the double standard of treatment as a female candidate. She said, "We are still living with a double standard. I know it. Every woman I know knows it, whether you're in the media as a woman, or you're in the professions or business or politics, and I don't know anything other to do than just keep forging through it, and just keep taking the slings and arrows that comes with being a woman in the arena." Clinton was also asked about her trip to Flint, Michigan later Sunday afternoon. 

 Anyway, I signed up for an email subscription just for the hell of it, and received the usual anonymous "do not reply" WordPress confirmation request. But maybe my spies can figure out the source of this amateurish endeavor. My guess would be the Digital War Room of Hillary's Brooklyn HQ.

Judging from the inexpert writing quality, the actual scribes are probably unpaid interns. (First and foremost, she sat down with Jake Tapper. Asked about the double standard, Hillary talked about the double standard. Asked about her trip to Flint, Hillary talked about her trip to Flint, etc. The bloggers have apparently not yet gotten around to learning about punchy ledes and the avoidance of redundancy.)

 I mustn't be too harsh, though. After all, Hillary is too cheap to pay her young interns a salary. She does require a CV, two letters of recommendation, and also solicits Tweets from millennials, asking them to share with her how their crushing student debt makes them feel. Then she picks the lucky, wage-free winners. I'm willing to speculate that if they're really lucky, the Hillaryclintonspeeches bloggers might get partial credit toward their Communications 101 courses. They might learn about the five Ws, and even the H. (who, what, when, where, why and how.)

 Bernie Sanders, for his part, pays his young interns $10.10 an hour. He is the only presidential candidate to do so. I am told that they even write personal replies to people who email Sanders. None of this canned "Friend: Have my back. Send $1!"

 So much for Hillary's claim to care about the debt-saddled, underemployed youth of America. So much for winning their hearts, minds, or votes.

One important difference between the two Democratic candidates:

Hillary puts her mouth where the money is, and Bernie puts his money where his mouth is. Hillary is all about Her. Bernie is all about Us.

....To Be Continued.

He's So Vain

 (optional soundtrack.)

Poor Barack Obama. He went to all that trouble to break up the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement during one hippie-punching, pepper-spraying police state week back in the fall of 2011. And now it's all come back to bite him in the ass.

 The elders of the Democratic Party thought that they'd accomplished, if not the death of OWS, at least its co-optation. After all, Obama handily won re-election the following year. But mirabile dictu!  Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for 15 and other activist groups have sneaked right back in to occupy the Democratic Party itself. The national conversation has been hijacked by an FDR liberal named Bernie Sanders, who might end up not only succeeding Obama, but dealing the coup de grace to the entire Neoliberal Project of the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonoid Third Way.

Democracy is rearing its ugly head again, and Obama is reportedly very, very nervous about this whole revolution thing. Even with his legendary genius IQ -- augmented lavishly by the Deep State brains of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI  -- he never saw Bernie Sanders coming.

Empress-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton's gross corruption and incompetence has let him down, big-time. He is probably kicking himself for so ever cutely attempting to co-opt her as his Secretary of State, thereby keeping a dangerous political enemy close. Without that patronage fillip, she would only have been a First Lady, an unaccomplished Senator, and a failed 2008 presidential candidate. Without Obama's own arrogant willful blindness to her private Internet account and her use of public office to enrich her family slush fund, she might have even been fired halfway through her frequent flier marathon as his ineffectual Good Will Ambassador.

Obama has only himself to blame for the rise of Bernie Sanders and socialism as the default position of a whole lost generation of over-educated, underpaid, deeply indebted young people who have never known a day when this country has not been at war. And for that accomplishment alone, I think he should be allowed to keep his Nobel Peace Prize.

Since it would now appear unseemly to either actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, bring in Joe Biden, or directly criticize Bernie Sanders, Obama must look to other reliable sources to get his message of displeasure out. So he has turned to his exclusive cadre of journalists and opinion-writers to be his off-the-record conduits of the Obama Story he wants the public to hear.

Over the weekend, Carl Bernstein (both a White House insider and Hillary Clinton biographer) went on CNN to announce how very, very upset the president is about the ongoing bitter Democratic primary. It's hurting Obama's precious legacy. If Bernie Sanders beats Hillary, that legacy might go up in flames. Obama's corporate coup (the TPP) might be dust. His market-based health insurance kludge might morph into a single payer Medicare for All plan. Wall Street and corporate felons might actually be prosecuted instead of being granted the tax breaks and cabinet and government advisory positions to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, said Bernstein, the White House wants all the people to realize how absolutely imperative it is that Hillary Clinton be elected to succeed Barack Obama:

 
 Obama wants to broadcast the fear-mongering message that Sanders's socialism is out of touch with mainstream America -- despite the fact that millennial voters themselves overwhelmingly identify as socialist. As Bernstein tells it on CNN, Hillary's problem is not that she accepted money from Goldman Sachs and other banks: it's that she doesn't know how to feign proper humility before the public.

 The Washington insider wisdom is that Bernie isn't electable, and Hillary isn't delectable.

In other words, she can't do the "I feel your pain" head-fake as well as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

So, cue right-of-center David Brooks, not only an esteemed member of Obama's inner circle of off-the-record pundits, but often described as the center-right president's particular favorite columnist.

Brooks wrote an elegiac piece titled "I Miss Barack Obama" in today's New York Times. The accompanying photo shows Obama wand'ring lonely as a cloud to the Oval Office, embowered in a princely burst of flowering foliage in lieu of the more obvious crown of laurels. 

  Brooks channels presidential angst in all its froth and narcissism. Barack's greatest fear is not for the dire fates of ordinary people. It's that all his genius will be for naught, given Hillary's tanking numbers, the Republican clown car, and the specter of Bernie Sanders succeeding him.

Brooks mawkishly allows that while he often has had to pretend to disagree with Obama for partisan tribal purposes, the current occupant of the White House stands head and shoulders above mere mortals.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

There are no mass media-reported scandals because the Obama regime has been rightly described as the most secretive in modern history. We know few details of his drone assassination program, for example, or his own closed-door fundraisers, or what went on behind the scenes of the orchestrated crackdown on Occupy, or the suppression of the 9/11 report section dealing with the Saudi royal family's role in the attacks, or the suppression of the CIA torture report. And those are just the scandals that come immediately to my mind. (For a full accounting of his first term, please see the "Obama Scandals List" on my Blog Roll.)

Meanwhile, Brooks manages to destroy his own homage by displaying some unintentional colorblind racism, fawning over the Obamas as one of those "respectable" black families. Barack and Michelle have displayed "superior integrity," Brooks gushes. "You'd be happy to have them in your community." (Apparently they would be that rare black couple who would not lower Brooks's property values if they moved next door to him.)

Brooks would not like Bernie Sanders to live within a thousand miles of him, because he is "so blinded by his values that reality doesn't seem to penetrate his mind." He would rip health care away from thousands (SanderScare) and even worse, rip the wings right off the insurance raptors!  Obama, on the other hand, knows his proper place in the grand white supremacy scheme of things.  He also doesn't "wallow in the pornography of pessimism."

Obama always presents a rapturous, G-rated Pollyannish picture about how great America is, how much the economy is improving, how much he loves peace even as he rains down his bombs and orchestrates his secret coups. Because if he told the truth to people -- the truth that their lives and prospects suck because of the unfettered capitalism he enables -- then the people might just stage a revolution.

Oh, wait.

Bill Kills

Last night while you were watching a bizarre Superbowl commercial featuring an ultrasound fetus seizing up at the sound of Daddy crunching Doritos, First Dude Wannabe Bill Clinton went full Quentin Tarantino with a bizarre verbal seizure of his own.

Dressed nattily and folksily in a Buffalo plaid shirt, the aging ex-prez outed himself as a pathetic troller of Internet trolls who are (shock!) bashing Wifey based solely upon her XX chromosomes. Of course, the way the New York Times headline described his puerile hissy fit, it was a lot more intellectual: "Bill Clinton Launches Stinging Attack on Bernie Sanders." 

But Bill's tirade against Sanders -- as well as against the supporters whom Hillary hopes to seduce should she win the nomination -- was more like a flailing sledgehammer than the skilled jabs of a boxer or polemicist. 

He told the sad but unverifiable tale of an anonymous "female progressive blogger" who has been personally injured in comments boards by those ubiquitous and largely nonexistent Bernie Bros. He ridiculed Sanders for voting for the Wall Street-friendly Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton himself immediately signed after passive-aggressively sneaking it, at the last minute, into an 11,000-page lame duck omnibus monstrosity. Few legislators had a chance to notice it, let alone study it. Clinton now fails to mention why he signed it instead of vetoing it.

Clinton also went into high dudgeon because it appears that Bernie once slipped up and not only attended a DNC fundraiser, he had the gall to breathe the same air as the lobbyists in attendance. And on and on. If this is the best oppo research that the crack Clinton team can come up with, then Bernie is a shoo-in for both the nomination and the general.

It's almost as though Bill Clinton wants to put his wife's campaign out of its misery by killing it as quickly as possible. Or then again, maybe the whole idea is to deliberately make himself look like such an asshole that people will vote for Hillary out of pity. The anti-Bernie New York Times, for some odd reason, even described his appearance as "poignant." The reporter seemed to half-realize midway through dutifully transcribing Bill's unhinged remarks how truly bizarre they were.

Red-baiting has been proven ineffective. So has the ridiculous shaming of female voters by feminist "icons" Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem.

 Bill Clinton infamously co-opted the Reagan Revolution and turned the Democratic Party to the right by announcing during his first campaign that "the era of big government is over."

And now Bernie Sanders is proving through his own first campaign that the era of corrupt, Clinton-style identity politics is over. 

Trickle-down feminism of the type being espoused by multimillionaires Hillary Clinton, Albright and Steinem is as much a sham as trickle-down economics. Women living on the brink of financial collapse are not up for vicariously enjoying Hillary Clinton's shattering of any glass ceiling.

 We are all too aware of the falling, deadly shards that she has already left in her wake. 

Plutapocalypse Now

Could Friday's catastrophic collapse of a too-big-to-exist construction crane in the Big Finance Data Hub of lower Manhattan be a precursor to the collapse of the too-awful-to-believe presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton? After all, both disasters are rooted in the greed and corruption of the American plutocracy.

Just one day before the 600-foot-tall apparatus teetered and fell, killing one person and injuring several, it had been certified as safe as the pre-iceberg Titanic... as safe as the cumbersome machine straining to hoist another Clinton back to the heights of power. But sometimes all it takes is one fresh gust of wind to topple even the strongest-appearing edifice.

Today, all that remains of the New York accident is a bleak caravan of crushed luxury cars, broken glass, construction debris, gas and water main leaks, and pockmarked high-rises stretching for more than two city blocks. The gentrified landscape of the Wealth Inequality Capital of America was transformed into a post-apocalyptic movie in the space of a New York minute. It will take days, even weeks, for deconstruction crews to complete the painstaking job of separating the wreckage into removable pieces.

(credit: Roberto Alvarez)

From the New York Post:

 Officials have yet to explain why exactly the crane capsized, but one expert explained that a 565-foot boom is devilishly tricky to lower.“It will take hundreds of tons just to counterbalance that boom, and if you do it too quickly, it could be thrown off balance,” said James Pritchett, president of Crane Experts International, which investigates such mishaps. The crane’s operator, Kevin Reilly, 56, has a record of three DWI arrests, all from the 1980s. He was questioned by cops after the collapse and submitted to a Breathalyzer test, blowing a clean .000, law-enforcement sources said.

Locals said the crane’s looming presence had been making them nervous all week.

The irony -- that the collapsed crane was erected to install new infrastructure on the roof of the iconic Western Union building for the specific purpose of speeding up energy-hungry casino capitalism --  should not be lost on us. The whole point of putting monster-generators on the roof instead of in the basement or at ground-level was to avoid inconveniencing the residents of the tony neighborhood, as well as to avoid interrupting the high frequency trading orgy of the surrounding brokerage houses.

The irony is that high-speed trades are just the kind of fraudulent activity that Bernie Sanders railed against during his debate with Hillary Clinton the night before the accident. Sanders wants to institute a tax on the high-speed traders of Wall Street in order to pay for free tuition at public colleges. Hillary just wants the grifters to snort a gram or two less, and call it a reformation.

The doomed crane had been lowering 62,000-pound generators onto the steel-reinforced roof above the 24th floor of the landmark Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street, when squall warnings prompted crews to attempt lowering it to the ground for the duration. They lost control, and the edifice crashed, of its own top-heavy volition, to the streets below.

Since the city's existing power grid is not sufficient to power the servers, switches and storage units necessary for the turbo-charged capitalistic ambitions of a company called DataGryd, the owner has had to install his own private infrastructure. The original plans for underground installation were pre-empted by flooding fears in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. So, considerate guy that he is, CEO Peter Feldman seized upon the unique idea of going Up, Up and Up in order to avoid inconveniencing the high speed trader-tenants already making money hand over fist in both the building itself and in the surrounding neighborhood. Such high-speed trading is, apparently, extremely noise sensitive. "We had to modernize and future-proof the building. We had to turn the building inside out to do it," he told an interviewer in 2014. "But now we can meet future market demand."

Or maybe not. The sound of Feldman's collapsing crane has been compared to the sound of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11. Oops. But since Hillary Clinton is representing New Hampshire instead of New York this week, she is not rushing to the scene to comfort her Financial District constituents, as she bragged about doing in one of early debates. To the contrary, she took their money and ran... for the presidency.  

Meanwhile, the monster "crawler cranes" of the type that collapsed on Friday are a new and ubiquitous feature of real estate-booming, class-disparate New York City. People have compared them to the science fiction creatures known as the Transformers. Whenever one of these steel monsters appears in the neighborhood, whenever the wind kicks up, people get very, very nervous. 

Faux-progressive Mayor Bill De Blasio, just back in town after stumping for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, was sanguine about the latest catastrophe. Only one person was killed, he bragged. (The victim was a Harvard grad/math whiz employed at the high-speed firm responsible for more than half of all the rigged stock trading in the United States.) And anyway, this wasn't a case of blatant neglect, since Feldman's contractor was in the process of lowering the crane when it collapsed. Stuff happens. In capitalism as in war, you have to expect some collateral damage. "This is a totally different matter," De Blasio insisted, while Comptroller and former Public Advocate Scott Stringer accused overworked building inspectors of "sleeping on the job."  

Machine operators and political operators alike, it appears, have yet to learn the laws of physics.  

Things fall apart, things go ka-boom, whenever there is too much power and weight at the very top. Any toddler playing with her first set of building blocks quickly learns that you need a strong foundation to keep your tower from collapsing. 

NASA also came out a few years ago with a handy guide, called HANDY, to explain just how inequality inevitably leads to societal and economic collapse. It ain't rocket science.  Neither is the fact that corruption is the direct result of politicians taking money from plutocrats. No entitled candidate is immune. Not even fake Transformer Hillary Clinton. 

As a matter of fact, it was the deregulation-happy Clinton administration which has allowed high frequency trading (HFT) firms in the neighborhood of Friday's crane collapse to grow and flourish in the first place. As mentioned above, the one fatality of the collapse was employed as a "flashboy" or "mathlete" in the firm which has perfected the practice. President Obama has always strongly opposed taxing these outfits, as have the Wall Street contributors to both political parties. Clinton herself only very narrowly wants to reform HFTs, to the extent of barring "false orders" -- cancelling a trade the split second after it is ordered. Tax-free HFT itself would be kept in place under her administration. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, wants to rehab Wall Street by making it pay for gambling with other people's money.

 Capitalism on crack is devilishly tricky to detox, but detox it we must. Cure it of its addiction, or let it rest in peace before it kills the rest of us.

Stop the poison of the plutocracy. Feel the Bern.