The Dodgers Return to Brooklyn

I'll be honest. My brain started tuning out last night's Democratic debate after about three innings. The first strikeout came when Bernie was asked if he could name one example of Hillary Clinton changing her vote as a result of a corporate donation. He bungled it big-time. He popped a high fly out into right field, where it hovered in the air harmlessly before plunking smack dab into Hillary's placid, waiting mitt.

DANA BASH (CNN moderator) : Senator Sanders, you have consistently criticized Secretary Clinton for accepting money from Wall Street. Can you name one decision that she made as senator that shows that he favored banks because of the money she received? 

SANDERS: Sure. Sure. The obvious decision is when the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of wall street brought this country into the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession -- the Great Depression of the '30s, when millions of people lost their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings, the obvious response to that is that you've got a bunch of fraudulent operators and that they have got to be broken up.

That was my view way back, and I introduced legislation to do that. Now, Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: So the problem response -- the proper response in my view is we should break them up. And that's what my legislation does.

CLINTON: Well, you can tell, Dana, he cannot come up with any example, because there is no example.

 Why didn't he bring up the bankruptcy bill?

When Hillary was first lady, she sided with Elizabeth Warren and got Bill to veto some bank-friendly legislation which would have made it almost impossible for working families to declare personal bankruptcy, largely stemming from medical debt.

When Hillary became New York senator, she did an about-face and in 2001 voted for the bill - immediately after receiving hefty contributions from the same banks and credit card companies which demanded that struggling consumers be kept in onerous debt for the rest of their lives. As Warren wrote in The Two Income Trap:

 "The bill was the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton  could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble."

This was the smoking gun, the quid pro quo that Clinton has always denied exists. It does exist.

Not that political corruption and legalized bribery require a quid pro quo, by any means. Wealthy donors aren't paying for immediate favors. They are investing for the future -- a future of tax exemptions, corporate welfare, and a get out of jail free card with no expiration date.

Bernie was great at the sarcasm and the yelling, but not so great at digging up facts and answering questions directly. He often spoke over the moderators as Hillary just calmly stood there, grim smirk on her face, only occasionally needing to mar her calm demeanor with her trademark derisive cackle.

Both of them are artful dodgers of questions, because both of them are seasoned politicians. Both of them also looked like I feel: tired, cranky, and old. How can't they stand each other? Let us count the ways.

Hillary got knuckle-balled and beaned badly on those Wall Street speeches. She still offers no good explanation for not releasing them because even she, slick fielder that she is, can't come up with one good fake reason for not releasing them. For example, she could have said she lost them the same way she mysteriously misplaced those Rose Law Firm docs all those years ago.

Bernie twisted her into a soggy pretzel over whether she would or would not raise the cap on Social Security FICA contributions. He also did a good job exposing her bloodthirsty Neocon foreign policy (even Obama opposes her suggestion of a no-fly zone over Syria.)

 Bernie was supposed to release his 2014 tax returns today, because Jane apparently has finally found the time to log onto TurboTax. He still can't locate earlier returns, though. Like most of us shlubs, I suspect he probably lost his only tattered coffee-stained copies in the circular file.

With Clinton's spit balls and Bernie's unforced errors, the popcorn is beginning to taste a tad stale. But I'll root root root for the Brooklyn homeboy anyhow. If we don't win, what a shame. Then again, if Hillary is allowed to steal home because of a rigged electoral game, she can't very well call it a championship season either. Heads she wins, tails we all lose. The tickets to the Neoliberal Hall of Fame are way out of our price range.

The Everywoman Look (a Mary Poppins Original)

Thoughts?

Party Like It's 2016

The modern Establishment has been weirdly successful in getting Americans to believe that even though we live in an oligarchy, there's still enough democracy left to make sure that every vote counts.

Not this year, though. Two upstart candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are knocking that supposition for one big loop. Citizen-consumers are discovering that our "democratic" system has very sneaky, fail-safe ways of purging unwanted candidates from its private Duopoly. Of course, the outsiders are not being imprisoned or vaporized  as they would be in blatantly totalitarian regimes. In our system  -- which the late Sheldon Wolin  dubbed "inverted totalitarianism" -- the purging is accomplished through more subtle, but still ham-fisted, means.

Methods to the madness are employed by the method actors of the media-political complex.  Six major corporations control 90 percent of all disseminated content, in TV, movies and print. Access to the powerful has become more important than holding the powerful to account. When ownership becomes more consolidated, public accountability slides down the memory hole.

 Then there's the authoritarian infrastructure of the parties themselves. Super-delegates are given weighted votes in order to prevent gains by independent or grassroots candidates. The public-spirited League of Women Voters no longer controls the general election debates. A privately funded and owned commission does that now. The previews of primary town halls and televised bicker-fests are controlled by the parties themselves,  and they're sponsored by the corporate-funded networks. The GOP has held too many, while the Democrats have held too few. But the ads are legion. The ratings are high and the record profits are beyond the wildest dreams of the owners.

 And finally, there is the ever increasing influence of the direct cash "gifts" to the candidates. It now costs more than a billion dollars to run for president. And the ultra-rich who foot the bill, as Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have established, usually get what they want from the candidates they fund. No matter that the majority of us want expanded Social Security and universal health care. Since the rich do not want or need these benefits, the good life is not to be had by anyone but themselves. The richer that people get, the more paranoid they seem to become about some poor person stealing even the tiniest morsel from their dinner plates.

The fact that billionaire Trump is (allegedly) self-funding his campaign, and millions of ordinary people really are funding Bernie's is more of a direct challenge to Citizens United than any public interest group could ever have imagined. Money has finally arrived as a major campaign theme for perhaps the first time since bribery was legalized by the Supreme Court. And Big Money is not too happy about all this sunlight. It threatens to disinfect the whole sordid process.

Ballots aren't the only things that are weighted. Even sincere, popular, and legitimately elected politicians are prone to forget the voters once they are safely esconced in office. The corporate-controlled shadow governments of the CIA and the NSA and the Pentagon come knocking at the Oval Office door on Day One, extending their tentacles to give a welcoming squeeze and an offer the new dude cannot possibly refuse. Then there are the armies of lobbyists, euphemized as "consultants." These militarists and operatives are also regular guests on the corporate talk shows, the better to spread the propaganda and the news stories within the extremely narrow parameters which the ruling class allows.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders still presents a threat to the status quo, as the bigwigs strive to limit him, despite a recent slew of wins, to the bit part of the far-out fringe-dweller challenging Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, once so inordinately elevated and showcased by the greedy media at rallies which sometimes resemble violent racial cleansing sites, suddenly finds his own racist self on the receiving end of an attempted purge. First, the elites pretended to be disgusted by the guy as he raked in the bucks for them. Now, they pretend to realize that their spectacle has gone on for way too long. Why? Because  the corporations funding the politics are beginning to withdraw their brands and money from a potentially violent brokered convention. The delegates might even get denied their complimentary cans of Coke.

Trump's own children can't even vote for him in New York's closed primary next week. Anyone who forgot to change his party affiliation before an arbitrary deadline expiring many months ago will not be permitted to vote. This punishes the independents who have elected Bernie Sanders in eight out of the last nine contests, but it will also depress turnout from Trump fans who are not registered Republicans. This scenario especially rewards Hillary Clinton, whose main support in the state comes from older, registered Democrats.

Party elders did forget, though, to bar never-registered young people, who were given more time to pose as members of either party in order to participate in New York's election. So we shall see.

Even in a democracy, political parties were never meant to be democratic. I've written before about French philosopher Simone Weil's call (immediately post-Hitler) to abolish all political parties. Parties exist for purely selfish reasons: to grow without end, to gain new consumers, and to make tons of money.

 Nothing in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights says anything about citizens having to elect representatives from within the confines of parties.

Tellingly, it was the post-French Revolution Reign of Terror that spawned the modern political party system. So is it any surprise that variations on the fear factor are always on the platforms of both Republicans and Democrats? The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on women, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... and guns, guns and more guns -- the controlling of them, the wearing of them, the proliferation of them. Where would American political parties be without violence and paranoia as the glue holding the teetering duopoly together?

The three characteristics of political parties that Simone Weil outlined 70 years ago apply just as well to the modern Democratic and Republican machines:

1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.

2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.

3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit. 

She continued:

Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian - potentially and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so....

No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he belong to one) his own.

People are generally reluctant to acknowledge such a thing. If they were to confess it, they would naively be inclined to attribute their incapacity to their own intellectual limitations, whereas, in fact, the very phrase 'a political party's doctrine' cannot have any meaning.

An individual, even if he spends his entire life writing and pondering problems of ideas, only rarely elaborates a doctrine. A group of people can never do so. A doctrine cannot be a collective product.

Extrapolating from those words of wisdom, it is thus patently dishonest for "party elders" to claim that the current popular outsider candidates are not a Real Republican or a Real Democrat. There is no such thing.

And, given the totalitarian nature of the two-party system in the United States, it really is something of a miracle that two outsider candidates have turned the tables and essentially co-opted them, instead of the other way around.

Maybe there's life in the old Democratic gal yet. Maybe the Duopoly is on the way to the dustbin of history.

Krugman Backlash

It's when even the Clinton-leaning Huffington Post publishes a listicle called The Internet's 10 Best Responses to Paul Krugman's Hit Piece: 'Sanders Over the Edge,'  that you realize just how badly and deservedly the Times columnist's professional reputation has been damaged.

In case you've forgotten that nasty column published on Friday -- described by some critics as "Peak Krugman" -- the Nobel Bank Prize winner went on a demented tear, calling both Bernie and his supporters petulant, angry, purist, cultish, insubstantial, and vague. He also displayed a shocking ignorance of how banks work, which is probably why that group of Swedish bankers gave him a million or so bucks in the first place: to keep the ignorance flowing.

Naturally, the responses elicited by the column were just what the Clintonistas wanted: total outrage. I believe that this technique is called "gaslighting." See? Krugman and the other surrogates told you that Bernie Bros are off-the-wall paranoid! Tsk, tsk, tsk. You know, they never actually said Bernie is unqualified to be president: they just planted that headline so that he'd counterattack, just like they wanted him to. Of course they don't want him to drop out while they're busy blaming him for every shooting death in America! Now, let's everybody calm down and be civil about it.

Topping the HuffPo list is this withering critique:

And when you're done watching, be sure to check out #5.

Warrior Empress of Austeria

Before she became a progressive for purposes of collecting votes, Secretary Hillary Clinton traveled the globe for the purposes of collecting a record number of frequent flyer miles in the service of banks and multinationals.

Reading a blog-post by her staunch surrogate Paul Krugman the other day, about how those crazy Republicans try to sell such bogus products as "expansionary austerity" for the masses in order to jump-start economic growth, I was reminded of the time in 2011 when Hillary Clinton went to Greece and compared austerity to life-saving chemotherapy.

As if that rhetoric was not slimy enough, she also praised the failing, cash-strapped, indebted Greek government for devoting its scarce resources to helping her bomb the hell of Libya, and also for militarily preventing a humanitarian aid flotilla from leaving port to deliver lifesaving supplies to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Even then, the Empress-in-Waiting wore three crowns: neoliberal scold and protector of Big Global Finance; staunch friend of the right-wing Israeli government and punisher of starving Palestinians; and hawk extraordinaire who never met a regime she didn't want to change or a war she didn't want to fight.

What was kind of unusual is that she would tout all three sadistic credentials in  just one short speech. In light of her and Bill's past domestic record now coming under some much-deserved scrutiny, I think it's worth taking another look at this episode in her international antics as well.

When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Goldman Sachs load corrupt governments up with debts that they can never repay, the result is always the same. The creditors, back up by the governments who serve them, impose draconian cuts in social programs for the citizens of said country, and then allow the predators to swoop in and seize everything from water to electricity to ports to real estate to oil to precious historical artifacts and monuments.

Hillary Clinton, in a sort of job interview/debut for all those post-State lucrative, boosteristic speeches she gave at Goldman Sachs and other companies, performed perfectly to all their specifications in July 2011:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

 Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

If this speech sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it's because I also wrote about it last summer. But in light of her current populist message, I think her pro-business message bears repeating. Once an austerian and friend of the banks, always an austerian and friend of the banks. As much as Krugman loves to rail against Paul Ryan and the scamming Republicans as the causes of all that ails us, the GOP could never survive without Democratic complicity. The Duopoly serves identical plutocratic masters.

Unfortunately for some private investors in Clinton World, however, the betting on Greece didn't pay off particularly well. A hedge fund owned by son-in-law Marc Meszvinsky, a Goldman Sachs alum, lost a ton of dough betting on Greek debt and beaten-down bank stock. Oh well... maybe there was a hedge fund betting against the hedge fund for all we know.

  Although Krugman's main thrust in yesterday's post was how wrong it is to criticize Donald Trump solely about his protectionism, I seized upon Krugman's parochial blaming of horrible austerity policies on just the GOP: (and got plenty of pushback for my efforts; read the replies from the usual suspects if you have any time to kill.) My published New York Times response:

The Democrats might boast of being a big tent for a coalition of liberal policy wonks, but let's not forget that they, too, got caught up in the "expansionary austerity" craze not too many years ago.

Before Hillary Clinton became a born-again populist, she, too, dictated pain as a cure. And I'm not just talking about the domestic welfare "reform" of the 90s which plummeted millions of women and children into permanent poverty, or her foisting of partial blame for the housing collapse on subprime mortgagors/evictees.

As Secretary of State, Clinton also assigned blame to the victims -- not the plutocratic perpetrators -- of the entire global financial meltdown. In Greece, in 2011, she grotesquely likened austerity to "chemotherapy" which not only kills unhealthy cells but is a magical elixir which will help the body economic to grow.

 When she started running for president, she quickly changed her tune and said oh dear, what a Greek tragedy, as though it were never orchestrated by the IMF, the oligarchs, the big banks and the wonks of the rentier class.

Yes, Republicans are scary dudes, especially Cruz. But let's not limit the critique to them. There's plenty of pathology to go around. All around the world, where 80 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half combined.

(When the Syriza Party was elected on its anti-austerity platform, Clinton wasted no time pivoting from her gushing support of the deposed Papandreou government to pretending to lecture the Troika on its responsibilities to suffering Greeks. It was all part of the co-optation of that particular populist uprising while waiting for even more austerity measures to be imposed. The power players always must be perceived as having "tried." That is their passive-aggressive modus operandi. And as State Department emails reveal, their concern was geared more toward geopolitical war strategy than toward the suffering of Greek citizens. They were worried about a possible Grexit and potential collapse of the Eurozone and exodus of their fig-leaf NATO allies --  for purely profit and power-driven reasons, of course.)

Meanwhile, back in 2011, Clinton was commending Prime Minister Papandreou for helping her help the Libyan people to "secure a better future" by way of NATO-bombing the country into an anarchic band of extremist factions. This was before she uttered her bone-chilling words on the gruesome death of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."

And she'd concern-trolled the Papandreou's blocking of the aid flotilla (including one ship called The Audacity of Hope!) bound for Gaza by saying: "We commend the Greek Government for seeking a constructive approach in consultation with the United Nations to addressing the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza and working to avoid the risks that come with attempts to sail directly to Gaza."

Apparently those risks included about a million Palestinian families getting some desperately needed food and medicine. Too audacious for words. 

When I refer to Hillary Clinton as the Empress-in-Waiting, I am not kidding. 

When our rigged, super-delegated, brokered convention political system "elects" a president, the multinationals are indeed anointing the leader of their free world. 

Since the world is their oyster, no wonder they're clutching their pearls over an upstart named Bernie Sanders.

Clinton, the Media, and Money

No more Mrs. Nice Candidate.

Hillary Clinton was rapidly losing ground to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. She was sticking to her depressing impression of the banally evil Margaret Thatcher, who thrived before she died on a strict diet of lecturing the downtrodden that "there is no alternative"" to predatory capitalism.

Now, I realize that I'll be accused of anti-corporate feminism by musing about the art of the cackle, but here goes anyway....

This week, in light of her tanking poll numbers and recent primary defeats, she's imitating a more wickedly flamboyant Margaret. As in, "I'll Get You, My Pretty!" Hamilton playing the dual roles of Almira Gulch and the Witch of the West. She is out for Bernie blood with an over-acted vengeance.  There is nothing like answering a question about your opponent with a bout of forced derisive laughter to win the hearts and minds of the same young audience you are demeaning.

 Her handlers are betting that Hillary will have more than enough time to quick-change into Glinda of Oz by the time the sands of the hour-glass settle and she can make quick work of Bernie Sanders through a barrage of insults and innuendo. They imagine that they can castigate the millions of millennials who support Bernie, but then magically herd them into Clinton's hot air balloon for her quick voyage back to the White House.

And she is making no bones about the fact that she can't take the Bern for one minute longer. Enough is enough, my pretties, of pretending that this is still a democracy and that your protests will make a lick of difference in the grand neoliberal scheme of things. So it's off with the expensive kid gloves for the big reveal of the boxing gloves that lie beneath, hand-tailored to fit even the most ham-fisted politician.

Now that the contest has finally reached the wealth inequality and consolidated media epicenter of the universe (New York), Hillary Clinton is calling in all her chits from her partners in the neoliberal disinformation biz, a/k/a The Great White Way.

Before the final tally of her Wisconsin defeat was even in, the Clinton machine was circulating the "damaging" transcript of Bernie Sanders's editorial board meeting with the tabloid Daily News. Campaign publicists even helpfully highlighted the bits in which Bernie allegedly goofed in saying (correctly, it turns out) that the Treasury Department, under the president's direction, has the authority to break up the big banks. Tweet the faux-gaffes to your family and friends and then send us a buck, the Clintonoids begged.
 
The Daily News, which also published an inflammatory front page accusing Bernie Sanders of throwing the Sandy Hook Massacre families under the bus, is owned by right wing billionaire neocon "thought leader" Mort Zuckerman. He and the Clintons have socialized together both in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where Hillary penned her "Hard Choices" memoir in isolated plutocratic splendor between fund-raising gigs with the rich and famous.

  If there is one thing that Hillary does extremely well, it is bringing extremely rich and famous people together for fun and profit. And that includes rich media moguls like Zuckerman, who donated generously to her family foundation before siccing his editorial henchmen against Bernie Sanders in a board meeting that sounded more like a semantic waterboarding. 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the ensuing corporate media brouhaha over the Daily News transcript "absolutely bonkers." He writes,

In an exchange with the New York Daily News editorial board a few days ago, Bernie said he didn’t know if the Fed had authority to break up the big banks but the President does have such authority under the Dodd-Frank Act.

This drew an onslaught of criticism from the media: "Bernie Sanders Admits He Isn't Sure How to Break Up Big Banks," read Vanity Fair's headline. "This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders," said The Washington Post. "How Much Does Bernie Sanders Know About Policy?" asked The Atlantic. The Clinton campaign even said in a fundraising email "on his signature issue of breaking up the banks, he's unable to answer basic questions about how he'd go about doing it, and even seems uncertain whether a president does or doesn't already have that authority under existing law."

The criticism is bonkers. Bernie was absolutely correct when he said the President has the authority to break up the big banks under Dodd-Frank. He's repeatedly specified exactly how he'd use that Dodd-Frank authority to do so. His critics are confusing the Dodd-Frank Act with the Federal Reserve. Whether the Fed has the authority on its own to break up the biggest banks is irrelevant.

Clearly, Bernie has the Democratic establishment worried enough to try to twist his words into pretzels.

What do you think?

 No need to actually think this one through. Just follow the money.

In the next several weeks, the consolidated corporate media -- funded by the same banks, pharmaceutical giants, defense contractors and oil companies which fund Hillary Clinton -- will be like a troupe of flying monkeys, in full unified attack mode against Bernie Sanders and his message of a revolution against corruption and the worst inequality since the Gilded Age.

Politico last year published a list of corporate media gifts to the Clintons. At the very top is Carlos Slim, chief shareholder of the New York Times Company, who forked over at least $5 million.  Also in the multimillion-dollar range are James Murdoch of Fox News Corp; Newsmax, a conservative media group based in Florida; and Thomson Reuters.

Other donors are conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife; Abigail Disney; Howard Stringer, formerly a CEO at CBS and SONY; Bloomberg LP; Discovery Communications; George Stephanopoulos of ABC-/Disney; Time-Warner; AOL; HBO; Hollywood Foreign Press Association; Knight Foundation; Public Radio International; Turner Broadcasting; Comcast; NBC Universal; PBS; Politico owner Robert Albritton; AOL Huffington Post Media Group; the Hearst Corporation; PBS News Anchor Judy Woodruff; and the Washington Post Company.

Follow the money. The corporate media and democracy are antithetical to one another. As far as they are concerned, elections are a spectator sport in which you, the citizen, may participate once every two, four or six years by selecting one of the candidates they have chosen especially for you. Since they didn't choose Bernie Sanders, they are trying to destroy him.

And all indications -- half mile-long lines at Sanders rallies, his improving poll numbers -- simply reveal that the corporate media just aren't very good at what they do. They are abysmally failing at what Noam Chomsky has called the manufacture of consent. 

Guess what? The manufacturing has hereby been outsourced from the media conglomerate propaganda machine into millions of independent working minds and rebellious, fed up spirits.

As Auntie Em retorted to Almira Gulch in the very populist Oz classic: "Just because you own half the county doesn't mean you have the power to run the rest of us!"

Bernie Blowout in Wisconsin

He won Wisconsin by comfortable, if not yuge, double digits.

And lacking its usual video feed of an empty Donald Trump podium, CNN had no choice but to air Bernie Sanders's victory speech (in Laramie, Wyoming) almost in its entirety. For those of you who missed it, here it is. Unscripted and un-TelePromptered, it's a keeper for the ages.

Combined with this week's revelations of the global greedy gazillionaire money stash in Panama (are there any Clinton Foundation donors among the legions of tax-phobic hoarders?), here's hoping that April 2016 will go down as the time when the Neoliberal Project finally began its long-overdue demise, and moribund democracy got its second (or third, or hundredth) wind.

The Times Is the Pits (and the Pendulum)

Edgar Allan Poe, who blended fact and fiction in his dual careers as journalist and horror writer, would have had a field day working at the New York Times.

  For what other reason than fear-mongering would the Times conduct a premature Bernie Sanders burial service right on its most coveted plot? (top left corner of its homepage)

In what macabre liberal pundit Paul Krugman gleefully calls a "premortem," the newspaper has grimly collated several Bernie eulogies from Canned Obituary Central.

However, to avoid any appearance of hackery or complicity, the news ghouls were very careful to use the smarmy passive voice in the headline: "Early Missteps Seen As Drag on Bernie Sanders's Campaign."

The morning after he lost the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders held a painful conference call with his top advisers.

Mr. Sanders expressed deep frustration that he had not built a stronger political operation in the state, and then turned to the worrisome situation at hand.

His strategy for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination was based on sweeping all three early-voting states, and he had fallen short, winning only New Hampshire — to the consternation of his wife, Jane.

Actually, he did build a good operation. And he has ended up winning Nevada after all, a factoid which the Times conveniently doesn't see fit to print. The truth might take all the fun of out its exercise in S & M. It might take the fun out the premature burial festivities. It might even relieve the pain from the editorial torture.

So, although Sanders is gaining ground and "campaigning more effectively," he is still the Walking Dead as far as the media establishment is concerned. The subliminal message in the Times article is this: "Don't even bother to come out for the primaries, Wisconsinites and  New Yorkers and Californians. It's over before it's even over."

But to be fair, The Times does have a point when it chides Bernie for not attacking Hillary in the very first debate, when he so gallantly claimed that Americans are "sick and tired of your damned e-mails!" He had been polite to a fault, always careful to criticize the corrupt system rather than the corrupt Clinton machine. And, I suspect they're right when they posit that at the outset, Bernie's main goal had been to spread the social democratic message without seriously expecting to win contests and raise more money than any other presidential candidate in history.

And Cornel West, his surrogate from the Black Left, is right that Sanders should have engaged sooner with Southern black voters.

But the Times is revealing itself as a passive-aggressive propagandist, criticizing Sanders from two separate directions. He's not nearly mean enough. He's way too mean. Reading his political obit reminds me of the Pushmi-Pullyu character from Doctor Doolittle. His critics, their toxic centrism so deeply ingrained, seem to want to have it both ways.

Doctor Krugman the Undertaker, meanwhile, is forging ahead with his own obsessive-compulsive smear campaign against both Bernie and his progressive supporters. He, too, thinks we don't know our brains from our asses. So he pulls and he pushes and achieves diddlysquat for his efforts. 

 As I see it, the Sanders phenomenon always depended on leaving the personal attacks implicit. Sanders supporters have, to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged, been motivated by the perception that Clinton is dishonest, which comes — whether they know it or not — not from her actual behavior but from decades of right-wing smears; but Sanders himself got to play the issue-oriented purist, in effect taking a free ride on other peoples’ character defamation. There was plenty of nastiness from Sanders supporters, but the candidate himself seemed to stay above the fray.

Facts are such troublesome things. It is so much easier to bury someone than to  damn him with even the faintest of praise. Krugman actually sounds like a Grand Inquisitor here, purporting to know the inner workings of the minds of vast numbers of people. Whether we know it or not, our asses-for-brains have been taken over by the Republicans. We are no longer capable of reading books and even thinking for ourselves.

He is sounding more and more like his fake nemesis, David Brooks, all the time. He even indulges in a little liberal colorblind racism with this verbal belch:

But it wasn’t enough, largely because of nonwhite voters. Why have these voters been so pro-Clinton? One reason I haven’t seen laid out, but which I suspect is important, is that  they are more sensitized than most whites to how the disinformation machine works, to how fake scandals get promoted and become part of what “everyone knows.” Not least, they’ve seen the torrent of lies directed at our first African-American president, and have a sense that not everything you hear should be believed.

And now the hidden thoughts of Sanders are coming out in the open, endangering the chances of the Empress of Waiting even when Bernie himself hasn't the faintest chance of survival. Does it get any meaner, more gruesomely political than that?

My published response to Krugman:

I suspect that black and brown people ("non-whites") have a lot more on their plates than honing their sensitivity about the fabled Clinton Disinformation Machine.

Black Agenda Report has run several pieces about the lack of enthusiasm of Blacks for Bernie Sanders. Its leftist writers posit that black voters from the South were settling for Clinton out of sheer terror of what the GOP would do to them. At least Hillary wouldn't go so far as to overturn the Civil Rights Act. She doesn't hold rallies like Trump's, which actually resemble racial cleansing sites more than political rallies. She's a relatively safe bet.

That said, black (or as Krugman euphemizes them, "non-white") voters are not some sort of monolithic block. Northern black voters are supporting Bernie in higher numbers. And that includes Northern black politicians. James Sanders (!) of New York is primarying Hillary supporter Greg Meeks for his seat in Congress, and both Sanderses are giving each other support. So much for Bernie allegedly not caring about down-ticket races.

 Vile as the vast, right wing conspiracy is, the Clintons have always paradoxically thrived on it. It helps to tamp down and delegitimate fact-based criticism of them from the left. That Krugman is now accusing Clinton's progressive critics of enabling the Republicans is the oldest trick in their political grimoire. It's as anti-democratic as the super-delegate system.

The coronation of Hillary is as premature as Bernie's funeral.

 ***

So, contra Krugman and the Times, who is to say where exactly the boundary lies between political life and political death? As Poe wrote in the fictional version of  "The Premature Burial,"

 To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

The coverage of the endless presidential horse race of death by the Times and other corporate media outlets does indeed seem incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

And then Wisconsin happens. (tomorrow) And that unseen mysterious principle known as the Living Electorate sets in motion those magic pinions, those wizard wheels which have so befuddled the pundits this season.

Unlike most of Poe's fiction,"The Premature Burial"  actually does have a happy ending.

The narrator, used to being declared dead due to a condition called catalepsy, (or in modern times, burial deep within the pages of the Paper of Record) lives in constant fear of being interred alive. And then one night, his fears come true. He has been entombed despite taking what he had thought were all the necessary precautions.(telling the truth to anyone who would listen.)

And then he wakes up. He dreamed he was moribund because he was actually aboard a ship, sleeping in a very cramped space quite similar to a coffin.

My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts"—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.

Hopefully, Bernie and his supporters have already given up reading bugaboo Weird Tales of the Times, so full of the charnel apprehensions of Paul Krugman and the whole banal coven of hack writers.

And hopefully, any new "tone" that Bernie acquires will not be of the politically correct variety being urged upon him by Clinton surrogates, whose own campaign talking points seem to be suffering a cataleptic disorder of their very own. And temper? Bernie has never lacked it. You don't bellow about how sick and tired of the corruption you are without possessing a very healthy temper.