Monday Maunderings

You might be wondering why I stopped reposting my New York Times comments to this blog, as per reader requests.

Quick answer: I don't comment nearly as much as I used to. For one thing, responding to the constant barrage of stories about Donald Trump's latest belch,  Queen Hillary's daily crumbelievable a la carte wonk offering, or Barack Obama's self-referential legacy tour of glory was getting too depressing. And also too scary, given the downward spiral in the general quality of the allegedly moderated comments. Comment threads are getting nasty in this atavistic election season, in which every vote surely counts equally! When anonymous posters hurl vitriol at you from behind the cowardly safety of their home computer screens, it stings. It really does. I admit it, I am averse to conflict when I don't even get to know who I am conflicted with.

At a time when politicians are so loathed, and the paranoid overlords of the ruling class are doing everything in their power to tamp down the populist impulse, the pulsating comment threads kind of remind me of the swarm of bees that nearly took over my town last week. 

Some genius, or practical joker, left several crate-loads of bees on the side of the road. Lacking a hive and desperately needing to protect their Queen, they became became very confused and irate. They attacked every breathing thing, out of pure tribal instinct. My daughter Kat was walking near our apartment complex when she became a subject of their wrath. They aimed right for her head. As she screamed for help when they literally got stuck in her hair, the cars just whizzed merrily by until finally a Good Samaritan stopped to assist her. She was fine, but another victim was rushed to hospital after suffering an allergic reaction to the stings.  Flashing lights were eventually posted and a cop stationed by the side of the road to monitor the situation, which lasted the better part of a day. One plucky college student had the wherewithal to make a video, which the local newspaper published. The film immediately goes into slo-mo as soon as the driver spots the cop on the side of the road. Ever seen a stoned bee? Well, now you have!

***

A much, much scarier situation occurred over the weekend in Nevada, where the Democratic Party showed its true undemocratic colors for the whole world to see. If these authoritarian bigwigs can freak out over a couple of extra moot Bernie Sanders delegates crashing their elite party, I can only imagine what the national Philadelphia confab will look like. Sanders might not have a chance to win the nomination, but the police state antics displayed over the weekend are making me cheer on the Bernie Or Bust movement. I hope that its spirit and its activism survives long, long after Hillary or Donald takes the oath of abusing their office.  I also hope that no innocent people get hurt. But with enough people already getting hurt by this country's crushing, inhumane neoliberal policies, that is a risk that the desperate ones are willing and able to take. 

***

Now, back to the Times. I did actually break down and write three comments within the past week, but only because silence in the face of such cloying mendacity and superficiality was just not an option for me. I broke down. I took the loathsome bait.

First to annoy me was Frank Bruni, who emitted a sickeningly sweet and colorblind racist ode to Barack Obama, which he called "Obama's Gorgeous Goodbye." Bruni was especially tickled that Obama again scolded the Black Lives Matter activists during his Howard University commencement speech. Young black people who have failed to mind their manners when dealing with candidates who talk down to them is apparently one of Bruni's, and Obama's, biggest pet peeves.

My not very popular sarcastic response: 

This was a gorgeous addition to the ongoing Obama legacy tour. It truly captured the president's mythos and the spirit of compromise for which he does deserve much credit.

My quibble is this: why lecture the Black Lives Matter movement in such a scolding way? When black people are getting killed by a law enforcement at the rate of about one per day, they rightly protest, march, interrupt fundraisers of a politician who once called young blacks "super-predators who must be brought to heel," and make all the noise they can to try and stun our elected officials into paying attention to them. This is an existential crisis, not a tea dance or Aspen Ideas forum.

 Obama has been criticized in the past, notably by Ta-Nehisi Coates, for using graduation speeches to very successful young black people as a way to "dog-whistle" a reassuring message to white people. There is none of Martin Luther King's "fierce urgency of now" rhetoric coming from his lips. Then again, he's often said he is president of all the people, even the angry white dudes who can't find work because of off-shoring trade deals that have profits over people as their implicit mantra and their only objective.

We need to examine and acknowledge the root causes of their despair before lecturing people about their excessive "purity." There's nothing wrong with young people afflicting the comfortable when they refuse to budge from their comfort zones. When your very life is on the line, politeness seems almost suicidal.

One commenter actually gushed, "If only all black people could be like the Obamas!"

*** 

And then there was Maureen Dowd, with yet another breathless insidery account of one of her regular exclusive tete-a-tetes with The Donald. Some might call her series of pieces, showcasing the Raw Trump at his rawest, an example of the arch, deadpan satiric style with which she is capably comfortable. But her latest offering just struck me as lazy and dead. I responded thusly:

I really feel for Maureen Dowd. A whole week has gone by since her Trump satire, and the prospect of actual journalism has proven to be way too daunting. But kudos anyhow for the volcano metaphor and the heads-up that this op-ed would be a banal convergence of farce and tragedy.

Here's an energy-saving suggestion for the next installment in the Dowd-Trump saga. Rather than feed us an allegedly verbatim account of yet another vacuous, one-sided conversation with The Donald, how about a podcast to save both yourself or your assistant(s) the trouble of typing out 800 whole words of exhausting stenography? I mean, although the titters and the air kisses were way too implicit in this piece, I am dying to hear them actually vocalized. I also want the sound effects of the call actually going through on speed dial. As a paying subscriber I deserve it.

And just think how many remunerative clicks that such an "I Hear It Now" Murrow-esque piece would get you.

I won't even bother asking whether you have any shame.

*** 

Last and definitely least is the latest from Paul Krugman, a/k/a "Clinton Operative K." (h/t Naked Capitalism.) Riffing on Hillary's ghost-written 90s ode ("It Takes a Village") to herself, Krugman first gloats over Republican pedophilia in high places before pivoting to Clinton's own incremental great love for children, equaled only by Krugman's own sudden and great piecemeal love for children.

My comment:

Krugman is only concerned about details when it comes to, say, single payer health care. Hillary's plan is also big on aspirations and short on specifics, but it's given a miraculous pass.

Of course, her ideas are good ones, especially better pay for workers and subsidized day care. But they still have neoliberalism (market-based solutions to social problems) written all over them.

The first clue is that Krugman and Clinton talk about kids as investments, from which the plutonomy expects to derive big dividends as tomorrow's worker bees and payers of regressive taxes.

Well, guess what? Children aren't cattle futures.

They need enough to eat, today. Growing bodies can't thrive on "increments." But year after year, food stamp stipends get cut. Republicans demand starvation ("he who eats must work") and then Democrats agree to give the nippers a wee nip and tuck here and there.

 Parents need jobs and living wages, today. Hillary should demand reversal of the repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Bernie Sanders's shocking claim that Clintonoid welfare "reform" has doubled extreme poverty in the US in the past two decades was deemed accurate by fact-checking organizations.

Kids require shelter, today. The rents are too damned high. Every year, 2 million kids face homelessness. Evictions are the new normal. We need a federal guaranteed housing policy.

Human rights can't be doled out in increments for the sole purpose of placating the Market God.

(Don't even ask me to re-post all the readers' responses to my offering. Let's put it this way: some of them make the Angry Bees of New Paltz seem like butterfly kisses with gossamer wings.)

Go to Hillary's Website for the Only Truth There Is, You Lefty Child Hater!

Charity Begins in the Castle

Charity Of, By and For the Rich: the Berggruen Philosophy Study Center

Just because they're the feral rich doesn't mean they lack ethics. Far from it. When they call themselves philanthrocapitalists, they are not kidding. They quite literally love their own capitalistic humanoid gene pools above all else.

Their philosophical conceit - that one simply cannot help the teeming masses without first giving precedence to oneself and to one's own class - is all too evident in Town and Country's latest annual list of the Top 50 Philanthropists.

Each plutocrat (or more likely, the designated PR flack) was asked to give a brief synopsis (their "Grand Plan") of his or her goals for humanity. Following is a sampling of the winning entries - with the usual gratuitous supplemental explanations in parentheses provided by your helpful Sardonickist:

Whitney Williams's Grand Plan - "To help the high-profile - Ben Affleck, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, etc. - put their money and influence to seriously good use." (The serious good use is centered in extremely poor parts of Africa, which are in dire need of some good old fashioned high-profile corporate plunder investment. And this philanthrocapitalist should know: Whitney got her start as trip advisor to First Lady Hillary Clinton and later worked as finance chair for Clinton's first presidential campaign. )

Emily Tisch Sussman's Grand Plan - "Reduce gun violence, among other things, as campaign director at DC-based think tank Center for American Progress."  (Among the other things, presumably, is the election of the seriously high-profile Hillary Clinton, whose lobbyist-campaign adviser just happens to be the founder of the corporate-funded Center for American Progress. Emily's parents, donors to the Clintons, are part owners of the New York Giants football team.  Daddy founded the Loews Corporation, and Hubby is a private consultant to the Pentagon... among other things.)

John Steinbaugh's Grand Plan - "Stop deaths from hemorrhage among soldiers on battlefields through RevMedx's invention of the life-saving syringe." (Why have a grand plan to actually stop war when your company-slash-charity can also be the lucky winner of many a Pentagon contract for many an endless war? You can't get blood from a stone, after all. You still need human bodies.)

Jessica Seinfeld's Grand Plan - "Break the cycle of family poverty through the cookbook author's nonprofit Good+ Foundation." (No government-funded food stamp increases or jobs programs or wage increases for hungry poor families are needed as long as you have a wealthy comedian's wife to share her tips and tricks.  And just so you know, that cookbook she's selling to help poor moms feed their kids might be unoriginal, but it was not plagiarized. So shut up, all you haters and class enviers!)

Justin Rockefeller's Grand Plan - "Convince the wealthy not only to invest their money in a socially responsible manner, but to do it more effectively through the ImPact." (You can make a ton of money by slushing giving just a little of it away. Poor people are opportunities. Incidentally, Justin apparently is a real Rockefeller, unlike that con-man murderer Clark Rockefeller, who also convinced the wealthy to give him their money by way of class affinity fraud. Justin is redundantly described as both a venture capitalist and a Democratic activist. His daddy is former Senator Jay Rockefeller)

Bill Pulte's Grand Plan - "Rid Detroit of blight by tearing down houses and making room for safe communities." (Translation: buy up properties for pennies, evict tenants, tear down, gentrify, get rid of "black crime", re-sell to white people or rent back to evictees at a markup, ka-ching. Pulte is a private equity mogul, a/k/a Master of Creative Destruction. And wouldn't you know it, the brother of Mitt Romney  (the founder of vulture fund Bain Capital) just happens to serve on this "charity's" board. Double ka-ching!)

Deval Patrick's Grand Plan - "Prove that you can make money and do good at the same time by starting a new division of Bain Capital that focuses on investment opportunities that benefit society by still turning a profit." (It's a small world, after all. Patrick, like Romney, is a former governor of Massachusetts; they must have met on one of their revolving door trips.  Patrick also served on the board of subprime lender Ameriquest, which turned a profit by foreclosing on thousands of poor people's homes in Detroit and elsewhere.) 

Kim Fortunato's Grand Plan - "Reduce childhood obesity and hunger through Campbell Soup's  signature philanthropic program, Campbell's Healthy Communities." (One small serving of Campbell's Healthy Request soup contains more than half the daily recommended allowance of sodium. The company actually increased the salt in its products after an initial ballyhooed reduction depressed sales. Since the mega-charity, the American Heart Association. also added its healthy logo to the cans of salinated soup, both it and Campbell's were the subjects of a class action lawsuit, charging fraud.)

The Cucinelli Family's Grand Plan -"Prove that capitalism and humanism can co-exist through business and the Brunello and Federica Cucinelli Foundation..." (Never mind that capitalism is to humanism what cancer is to a body. In his native Umbria, Cucinelli, known as the King of Cashmere, reigns as a literal feudal overlord. In a real castle, no less, with real-live peasants toiling in the surrounding countryside to provide some co-existing ambience.)

Anida Kamadioli Costa's Grand Plan - "Ensure that an iconic brand puts its money where its mouth is on such issues as conservation through the Tiffany & Co. Foundation." (The issues apparently don't extend to Tiffany divesting from the part of its gem supply chain allegedly responsible for Middle Eastern massacres.)

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg's Grand Plan - "To give away 99% of their Facebook stock, currently worth $45 billion,  through numerous nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative." (As has been widely reported, this charitable endeavor is not only a tax dodge, it aims to supplant democratic programs, such as public education. The bulk of the excessive Facebook cash is parked in a Delaware LLC.)

Nicolas Berggruen's Grand Plan - "Create a space to shelter the world's elite thinkers in a peaceful yet intellectually fervid sanctuary for reflection and dialogue through the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center." (Even rich thought leaders need charity and safe spaces. Berggruen was once known as the "homeless  billionaire" because he was reduced to living in his private jet after losing a third of his fortune in the Wall Street crash. But now he's opened his new lush California Zen paradise to such wealthy war-mongering luminaries as Tony Blair and Condi Rice, who can fervidly shelter in place for "Thing Long" bull sessions with their class peers.

It's one more example of charity literally beginning right in the home. Or, if not in an actual castle, at least in the second, fourth or eighth vacation home.

Now, this isn't to say that all 50 of the winning philanthropists showcased in Town & Country are as crass as the individuals and corporate persons I highlighted above. There still exist the usual rich people giving and raising money to study diseases which have personally afflicted them or their family members. There are the usual celebrities and their sincere pet causes. For example, Matt Damon modestly aims to provide clean water for the whole wide world, while Stephen Colbert is merely trying to humor regular people into donating supplies to public, not private, schools. There's no money or investment opportunity in it for them, other than the positive publicity and maybe a clever tax write-off of some sort.

So read more about the leisure class at your own leisure. You are guaranteed to be amazed and perhaps even inspired to add an updated chapter or two to Thorstein Veblen's landmark sociological study on the rich. Stung by accusations that they're a bunch of wealth-hoarding greedsters, the plutocrats have joined forces to create their own "Idle No More" movement. They're very busy conspicuously helping one another to aspire to help others to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. It's a hard knock life for sure... for the rich.

Pop quiz questions: What, if any, difference is there between conspicuous consumption and conspicuous giving? 

Is it uncharitable to ask whether we can actually afford rich people?

Campaign '16: Media Lothario Wars

Who's the more disgusting dirty old man, Donald Trump or Bill Clinton? Well, it kind of depends on which cheek of the duopoly you happen to favor.

Fox News got the Lothario sweepstakes started on Friday, with the revelation that Clinton was much more frequent of a flyer on convicted billionaire sex offender Jeff Epstein's jet than inquiring minds ever cared to know. The Big Dog took more than 26 separate international trips on the "Lolita Express," giving a whole new meaning to the Clinton Global Initiative. The plane was so named because it contained a bed for pig-men to have sex with underage girls. Mind you, there has never been proof that Bill Clinton himself victimized any teenagers on his trips, which date back more than a decade.

In the interest of bipartisanship, the New York Times today has its own big colorful spread on the misogyny of Donald Trump. However, in the more important interest of political correctness, the Paper of Record is framing its exploitative investigation into the seamy underworld of depraved plutocrats around how "uncomfortable" Trump has made various women feel over the decades. Dozens of women dished to Times reporters about how shabbily they've been treated by him both in the workplace and in private social situations. Bottom line and the Big Reveal: the Donald is unique among wealthy bosses. He is a pig-man extraordinaire, and the Times is on it. He therefore should not be allowed anywhere near the White House, which has such a grand history of treating women with the utmost dignity and respect.

 And in the meantime, the Gray Lady is not above titillating her readers just as much as Rupert Murdoch titillates his. What's an election for, if it's not about the ratings and circulation numbers of our famously free press?

It's going to be a very long six months, people.

Feeling the Brand

Granted that you have take anything you read in Politico with a grain of salt, but this little trial balloon sounds plausible enough if you happen to suspect that the Bernie Sanders campaign has already embarked on the first leg of its road to Clinton capitulation:

 A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.

Operating under the assumption that Sanders will win the California primary but still fall far short of amassing enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, the document calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.

The main purpose of the so-called Revolution '16 movement would be to "mobilize voters under 30" to show up for down-ticket progressive candidates as well as for Hillary Clinton. The draft proposal also suggests holding a separate convention event for Sanders supporters to supplement his speech at the official (and closed to the general public) Democratic convention. Nothing like a party to soothe the feelings -- and the consciences -- of the uninvited and the disenfranchised!

If the group at first focused primarily on combating Trump, the thinking goes, it would provide those Sanders fans with justification for eventually voting for Clinton.

 “This is a populist year in American electoral politics with signs that it may mark the beginning of a populist era. It would be very unwise for the decidedly un-populist Hillary Clinton to move with too much confidence towards a full-on confrontation with Donald Trump,” they continue. “A Sanders-led (as opposed to Sanders-centered) independent entity could provide a much needed, articulate and energized economic populist voice to the anti-Trump effort without the intrinsic compromising effect posed by close association with Neoliberal Democratic elites, as well as weaning the volunteer base off total reliance on individual candidates during one-off election cycles.”

Of course, this is only a trial balloon coming from anonymous sources "close to and within the Sanders campaign". Bernie Sanders's hands are still clean. He will have the final say, depending on whether his "fans" are actually willing to pay the toll for this bridge too far. There's no immediate pressure for the candidate himself to don the full herding costume. The campaign has already sent out its pack of media cattle dogs to do the teasing preliminaries.

Meanwhile, that giant lasso is coming closer and closer, making the thundering herd a tad skittish.

 So in order to bewilder them and head off a threatened mass stampede for the exits, the humane neoliberal factory farmers will build a spanking-new shiny customized slaughterhouse large enough to hold millions of enthusiastic voters. And there will be plenty of cud to chew and lots of togetherness to keep the herd placid and compliant and anesthetized as the Hillary brand is seared slowly into their backsides.

So... what'll it be, proles? This:

Or this?

Nothing New Under the Corporate Media Sun

Even though Bernie Sanders now has little to no chance of getting the Democratic nomination, the media are not letting up on him. The fact that he is still campaigning and still railing against the malefactors of great wealth has the malefactors screaming for him to stop, just stop already and be quiet or go away and leave them alone unless it's to help "unify" their private, closed Party.

The latest incident that has them clutching their pearls in elite hysteria was his appearance last week on The Rachel Maddow Show, where he had the effrontery to criticize the corporate-owned media.

Though he speaks truth to power about the shallow, sporting-event, identity politics-driven nature of the coverage, his solution -- for a Democratic Party-financed TV network to counter Fox News propaganda -- had me scratching my head. I sadly suspect that his particular "revolution" is now devolving into a public relations battle between the two big business parties. Why not go whole hog and call for a resurgence of an independent socialist press that is not beholden to advertisers at all? He could have plugged Jacobin, Counterpunch or any of the several genuinely leftist outlets. 

I suppose I quibble. But personally, I wouldn't want Debbie Wasserman Schultz's lunch-hooks anywhere near a new progressive version of Fox.

 MSNBC, for years the unofficial house organ of the DNC and the Obama administration, only recently pivoted to general election coverage. Comcast is not stupid. The "overlords," as Maddow calls them, know a good Donald Trump deal when they see it. There is more advertising value in airing an empty Trump podium or an empty Trump suit for minutes or hours at a time than there is in discussing "issues" or covering a Bernie Sanders rally. 

Since Bernie is still out there, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman continues to falsely equate reactionary Trump supporters with "Bernie Bros," who allegedly are sending harassing Tweets to both himself and the Two Nates (Cohn and Silver) -- the duo who so successfully predicted a near-zero chance for a Trump nomination.

Krugman just can't seem to quit his angry white Bernie straw-dudes, even though the Left actually does include women, older people, and black and brown citizens to boot. The scary socialist trolls are as big on "empirical denial" of "center-left" facts as conservatives!

Although it’s a bit worse when some of those supporters are actual campaign surrogates. Of course, campaigns can’t be held responsible for everything their supporters say, all, we can ask whether Sanders himself is inclined to dismiss inconvenient facts. Well, as you know, I think the answer is yes, on issues ranging from economic projections to the sources of Clinton primary victories.

 I was therefore primed to notice when Sanders declared that Democrats need their own version of Fox News. What does he mean, exactly? Should the proposed network engage in similar factual distortions and outright falsehoods, except this time in the service of progressive goals?

 By the way, it wouldn’t work. Fox caters to an audience of angry old white men; the angry young white guys who would want a left-wing version of this message are fewer in number, have less purchasing power, and anyway don’t get their news from TV. But that’s a side point.

I broke down and wrote a response, because it seems that despite my avowed boycott, I just can't quit the habit of occasionally calling out the Conscience of a Neoliberal:

 Krugman is right. Some on the left, whom he persists in denigrating as "Bernie Bros", are indeed in empirical denial. They have trouble accepting the fact that wealth rules the world, and that the corporate-owned media do not represent the public interest.. They believe in a utopia of debt-free public education, health care for all, a decent job at a decent wage, a secure retirement, a more or less permanent roof over their heads. How silly of the desperate ones to want change today or tomorrow instead of 50 years from now, if even then. How anti-pragmatic of them not to get with the program, and join in the team effort of lambasting Trump and cheerleading Clinton to the finish line.

Why won't they listen to Krugman and former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell, who has already warned them not to make a fuss at the convention of party bigwigs?

What this is really about is a resurgence of socialist ideas, with or without Bernie Sanders. Back in the waning days of the last Gilded Age, vested wealthy interests were terrified of an anti-capitalist muckraker named Upton Sinclair. Getting the Bernie treatment in the NYT and elsewhere is nothing new. Sinclair even went so far as to measure the column inches devoted to plutocrats as opposed to humanitarians to prove his point.

Read "The Brass Check," his exposé of corporate journalism, and you will see that nothing much has changed, except that the media are much more consolidated.

The "facts" still have a well-known money bias.

My comment was inspired by Chapter XXII of Sinclair's book, which begins:

The thesis of this book is that our newspapers do not represent public interests but private interests; they do not represent humanity but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth. And suppose that you wished to make a test of this thesis, a test of the most rigid scientific - what would you do? You would put up two men, one representing property, the other representing humanity. You would endeavor rigidly to exclude all other factors; you would find one man who represented property to the exclusion of humanity, and you would find another man who represented humanity to the exclusion of property. You would put these two men before the public, having them do the same thing, so far as humanly possible, and then you would keep a record of the newspaper results.

Sinclair, never famous for personal modesty, compared his humanitarian self ("besides Jack London, the most widely known of living American writers throughout the world") to Vincent Astor, whose only claims to fame were first that he was born; second, that he lived on an estate; third, that he married money, and fourth, that he inherited $65 million -- at the time, beating the all-time record for inherited wealth. Sinclair continued,

And now for the action of the two men. It appears that the New York Times, a great organ of world capitalism, in its effort to camouflage its true functions, had resorted to the ancient device of charity, used by the Christian Church ever since it sold out to the Emperor Constantine. Early in December of each year, the Times publishes a list which it calls "One Hundred Neediest Cases" and collects money for these hundred families in distress. The Times never goes into the question of the social system which produces these harrowing cases, nor does it allow anyone else to go into this question; what it does is to present the hundred victims of the system with enough money to preserve them until the following December, so that they may never again enter into competition for mention in the list, and have their miseries exploited by the Times.

That should help answer Bernie's question. Plutocrats don't want you to know about their game, because what they don't want you know could hurt them, very badly. Sinclair self-published his book in 1919, ten years before the oligarchic greed he decried crashed the entire economy. Later, it was the activist pressure of the socialist movement that actually ushered in FDR's New Deal. If they'd had the likes of Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman and their neoliberal free-market ilk around to lecture the proles and propagandize for the wealthy, who knows? We might never have gotten a national jobs program, publicly funded infrastructure, and Social Security.

The Times still does its annual charity drive as it serially glorifies the extremely wealthy all the year round. Just check out the real estate section on any given day, to see what kind of digs $10 million will buy you. 

 Were it not for real estate magnate Donald Trump's billions, do you really think he could have gleaned all his free front-page publicity from the Times and other outlets? You don't need a scientific study to prove that Trump has gotten more coverage than the Pope, Bernie Sanders and millions of actual poor people combined -- or anyone who can't afford the price of a subscription, let alone the price of a display ad.

Upton Sinclair finished his New York Times take-down with the following humorous anecdote. When he wrote an open letter to Vincent Astor in 1914, asking him to justify his lavish lifestyle when millions of his fellow citizens were starving, only one of the many city papers in circulation at that time published it. That was the New York Call, a small socialist paper. The Gray Lady turned up her nose at such a thing. An attack on capitalism? No way!

Then Astor got wind of the letter, and he answered it. Or, as Sinclair theorized, a shrewd family lawyer or a secretary probably answered it. Astor's reply was offered to every major newspaper, and every major newspaper published it. Most of them, including the Times, splashed it on their front page, with Astor's picture. They wrote glowing accompanying editorials about the magnanimous indignation of the young multimillionaire who deigned to defend himself against those nasty socialist attacks. Astor complained that Sinclair's ideas were "fallacious and impracticable," and that help for the needy would come over time, without the need for radical change. Besides, he sniffed, he'd spoken to experts, and was informed by experts that "the condition of laboring people has greatly improved over the last several generations."

Sound familiar? Upton Sinclair was a Bernie Bro.

And less than two decades later, the whole economic system came crashing down because of oligarchic greed and the media's enablement of it.

I have a feeling we won't have to wait 20 years for the next big "event." For one thing, the earth itself, drowning and burning and melting as it is, just never learned how to get with the incremental, pragmatic program. 

Mother Earth is an impatient Bernie Bro. Pass it on. 

This Just In From Hillary's Think Tank

Stop the presses! Straight to my in-box from the blog of the "progressive" Center for American Progress (founded by Clinton campaign manager and lobbyist John Podesta) were the top two click-bait teaser headlines to make your Mothers Day Weekend like, totally, rock the vote:

Hillary Clinton's faith is poised to play a big role as she turns to the general election.

And, how Secret deodorant miserably failed at explaining the wage gap.

You might think this was just another one of one of those unintentionally funny non sequiturs, but hold on a sec.

I think it signals that Donald Trump will be unable to make this cold saintly woman sweat as he lobs his barrage of sexist insults at her. It's the next chapter in the Prescribed Hillary Narrative: sucking up some anti-Trump votes from the horrified religious right, while simultaneously allowing her to outdo a deodorant brand in explaining gender wage disparities. She is doubly poised for triangulation and armpit hygiene. And she's making no secret about it. She is cool, calm, and collecting. She is confident, and so should you be.

"I'm With Her" (Ad for Poise Deodorant)

The Secret deodorant brand might have landed in the liberal refuse dump right along with her paid speeches, but Hillary Clinton is still perfectly willing to share a couple of her other personal care habits with all of you everyday ladies out there... on this very Hillary Mothers Day weekend:

"My two secrets to staying healthy: wash your hands all the time. And if you can't, use Purell or one of the hand sanitizers. And the other is hot peppers. I for some reason started doing that in 1992, and I swear by it!"

 two secrets to staying healthy: wash your hands all the time. And, if you can't, use Purell or one of the sanitizers. And the other is hot peppers. I eat a lot of hot peppers. I for some reason started doing that in 1992, and I swear by it. Hillary Clinton
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hillarycli458809.html

My two secrets to staying healthy: wash your hands all the time. And, if you can't, use Purell or one of the sanitizers. And the other is hot peppers. I eat a lot of hot peppers. I for some reason started doing that in 1992, and I swe
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hillarycli458809.html

Hillary might be wise to rethink at least one of her product recommendations. Overuse of hand sanitizer and constant hand-washing are not just symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, they can be a health hazard in and of themselves.

 With its high alcohol content, hand sanitizer is harmful if swallowed by the poised-for-success kids or grandkids poised to climb their ladders of opportunity. It can turn your hands into sandpaper-like husks. It speeds up the skin's absorption of the toxic BPA lurking on the surface of the plastic bottle. Anti-bacterial soap kills protective skin flora, which you need to repel fungi, viruses and harmful kinds of bacteria. It, and some hand sanitizers on the market, also contain triclosan, which can damage the endocrine system. In animal studies, this chemical additive has been shown to reduce muscle strength while amplifying testosterone levels. Given that Hillary and her minions love to tout her "muscular" foreign policy credentials, this could pose a real threat to her hawkishness down the road.

Hand sanitizer is not effective against the norovirus, which causes many "stomach flu" outbreaks.  And most importantly, the germophobia which seems to afflict Hillary (and too many other Americans) could theoretically harm those with whom she comes in physical contact. Overuse of antimicrobial products can lead to a generalized resistance to antibiotics.  And since Trump, too, is a hardcore hand sanitizer addict and germophobe, the next six months might be hazardous to our well-being in more ways than one. This campaign could well turn out to be a real MRSA-thon unless Donnie and Hill can get over their squeamishness.  The handshake part of the debates alone will be a real hurdle for them. So they'll probably stick to the usual elite politesse: air-kissing.

And as far as religion and pandering to evangelicals are concerned, Hillary should dump this whole church lady routine and put more of her faith in actual science. After all, she's a Democrat, not a Republican.

Oh, wait....
 

Obama to Flint: Drink Up and Pipe Down

President Obama finally got around to bringing the pipes to the residents of Flint, Michigan this week. His rich baritone pipes, that is - not the kind they desperately need to replace the corroded system still leaching toxic lead into the drinking water supply of thousands of families.

Did you really think that the slow genocide of an entire city full of non-rich working people would qualify as a national disaster prompting an emergency presidential declaration and the immediate presence of billions of dollars and the Army Corps of Engineers? Since there is no immediate profit to be made from lead-poisoned children, the lead-poisoned children will just have to quite literally suck it up until some tax-averse charitable corporations can partner with politicians and figure out how to leach some extra bucks for themselves out of this tragedy.

The residents of Flint will have to wait years for the expensive new pipes, Obama vowed.  Meanwhile, in a downright bizarre effort to prove that lead in human bodies is not really as bad as it's cracked up to be,  the big man himself took a couple of tentative sips of filtered Flint tap water. (Presumably after it was thoroughly refiltered, retested and deemed safe by the Secret Service, who normally supply and serve Obama's a la carte potables.)

Unlike the emergency bailout of the Wall Street bankers, unlike the rescue of the state's auto industry, there is no "fierce urgency of now" in Obama's Flint playbook. Check out the typical neoliberal buzzwords in bold:

 We are ensuring that we have a plan for the system to work over the long term; and that we are certain that our kids here in Flint are going to be able to take advantage of their talents and opportunities well into the future.

Just because kids have ingested and bathed in near-lethal levels of lead and developed behavior and learning issues and broken out in sores doesn't necessarily mean they can't eventually "live up to their potentials", he soothed. Expensive fresh fruit and vegetables can even ameliorate the effects! (He doesn't give any tips on how to actually wash your produce, however.) And sometimes all it takes is a trip to the doctor to reassure parents that a little potential brain damage is not necessarily such a bad thing. The important thing now is that parents act responsibly, use the free filters and the expanded Medicaid being so magnanimously provided for them. Meanwhile, rest assured that politicians and bureaucrats are working hard on planning to come up with a plan for maybe eventually getting some additional funds that somehow never are an issue when it comes to spending trillions on Permawar and tax loopholes for the wealthy.

It may take a year.  It may take two years.  It might take more to get all the pipes replaced.  And in the meantime, folks have to be able to use water.  So trust that the tests have been done and the filter system works. 

It's safe to drink as long as you aren't below the age of six, chronically ill or immune deficient, in which case you are royally screwed.

 Third point.  In order for us to clean out the system, to flush out the contaminants, and to have confidence that, as we fix the system, it’s actually going to be safe for all the households in Flint, we need everybody in Flint to start helping us flush out that system.  And so I guess there’s a program called Flush For Flint.  It’s not the most elegant name.  (Laughter.)  But the concept is pretty simple if you think about it, and that is we need everybody to turn on their tap in the kitchen, in the tub for five minutes a day so that the water is running and whatever contaminants are sitting in there start getting pushed out. 

You will of course still have to pay for all that wasted water. If only we could flush out the whole contaminated pathocracy while we're at it. But no dice:

 Now, I understand if people are scared and they’re not using their water, that they may wonder why is it up to me to be part of this process of fixing it.  But the bottom line is, is if you’re not doing your part, then these outstanding folks around the table who want to help can’t do theirs.

Whether it's the housing crash or chronic joblessness and income inequality caused by Wall Street greed, at least half the onus must always be placed on the victims. Whether it's CIA "patriots (who) tortured some folks", or fine family men like Paul Ryan who cut social programs, they are all simply outstanding folks. So if you're not part of the public relations solution, you're part of the problem, proles! You have to have some skin in their rigged game.

 And what I’m encouraged by is I think a recognition at every level of government that we have to take what has been a crisis and see if we can turn this into an opportunity to rebuild Flint even better than before.

It's the dogma of creative destruction. Rich people view poor people as investment opportunities. The poor are reliable sources of profit, be it by forcing them to take out payday loans to meet their water bills, raising their rents, penalizing them unless they buy worthless junk health insurance, punishing them within the private prison system, using them as killing machines for profitable wars, experimenting with them in privatized schools, taking a cut from their food stamp balance every time they buy a gallon of milk, ad infinitum. The possibilities and the profits are truly endless. Flint is just one more opportunity for disaster capitalism to helicopter down and pounce once the pouncing is good.

I’m confident that we can do that if we’re all working together.  And I emphasized to the governor and I emphasized to the mayor that my job here today is not to sort through all the ins and outs of how we got to where we are, but rather to make sure that all of us are focused on what we need to do moving forward on behalf of the children of Flint.  That’s my priority.  And that’s got to be all of our priorities.

As per usual, there will be no accountability for the wealthy criminal class. Every man-made crisis must have either benevolence or ignorance at its core. Therefore, Governor Rick Snyder and the other officials who knew that the Flint water was contaminated for years and did nothing about it, will not be blamed and definitely not be prosecuted if Obama has his druthers. As he vowed at the beginning of his reign regarding the Bush-Cheney war crimes, his job is to look forward and not backward. The powerful must always protect their own kind and their own class, regardless of party affiliation.

 Last point. I think people are understandably scared when they hear that their child may have ingested some lead, it may have gotten into their system, and that that may have some long-term impacts or create particular challenges for kids.  But it is really important for all of us to remember that kids are resilient.  And every kid in Flint is special, and has capacity, and can do great things.  And the fact that they may have had some drinking water that was contaminated doesn’t automatically mean somehow that they’re going to have huge problems or that they’re not going to be able to reach that potential.

The glass is always half full of lead-tainted water. They don't call it Special Ed for nothing, after all. I'm just surprised that he didn't also nominate lead as an essential mineral. But wait, the best is yet to come:

When I was five or six or seven, a lot of homes still had lead paint in it. (sic)  I might have ingested some lead paint when I was two or three years old, because at the time, people didn’t know it.  So we’ve got an entire couple of generations of Americans who have done really we despite the fact that they may have had something that is not optimal.  And how lead interacts with any particular child is going to be different, and what each child needs is going to be different.  And some kids are going to be fine, and they’re not going to be affected.  Some kids may have more of an -- it might have more of an effect.  

He "might have " snacked on lead paint chips as a child, but look how awesomely well he turned out. Putting aside the utter sneering cynicism of that statement, let's take him at his word. Could his decision to drone to death hundreds and maybe even thousands of people residing on his presidential Kill List be a result of subtle organic brain disease that's left his IQ intact? Could his serial lying about corporate coups known as trade deals stem from a lead-based, neurological deficit in the areas of the brain which house aggressive impulse control and a moral compass?

Of course, the pathology does not belong to him alone. It's rampant throughout the media-political corporatocracy. It has been a long tradition of neoliberalism that the more abnormal the situation, the more vigorously the market-based thought collective will seek to normalize it. People can have their life-sustaining water poisoned due to the criminal neglect of their leaders, and then be urged to simply accept the band-aids of a little free medical coverage and a temporary filter for their faucets while their leaders stay wealthy and free and powerful.  If "folks" expect anything more, like emergency declarations and new pipes before next year, then they are harboring utopian delusions. They are letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Generally I don’t do stunts, but here you go.  (Takes a sip of water.)  Now, this had a filter on it.

 I reckon it's like those safe filtered cigarettes that the Marlboro Man who died of lung cancer used to advertise on TV.  But hey, if you only take one puff or one sip over the course of your entire lifetime, you most likely will indeed live long enough to reach your full, post-presidential potential. Ka-ching!

Meanwhile, even the Democratic mayor of Flint is not buying Obama's bullshit. Karen Weaver says the cheap filters are simply not working at all in many of the homes receiving the still highly contaminated water.

  But to hear the Neoliberal Thought Collective tell it, the only thing we have to fear is Donald Trump himself. The guy for whom scapegoating was a winning proposition is now the Scapegoat Du Jour. The whole world is apparently terrified of a Trump presidency. I imagine that his xenophobic Kill List would be even scarier than Obama's xenophobic Kill List. It would definitely be more sexist. 

Even neocon candidate Hillary Clinton is concerned enough to go email-trolling for donors to her brand new Stop Trump Fund.

 Dig that horror film devil-horned zombie hand coming out of the grave to grab you and bite you and turn you into another zombie!

Be afraid. Send Hillary a buck as she gathers together her own horde of Bush-Cheney neocons to fight the zombie menace. Then go guzzle some nice filtered water.