I.T., Drone Home

*Updated below.

 

The ingrained depravity of the American ruling establishment can be found right in the media framing of perhaps the most depraved government policy of all. From the Wall Street Journal:

 At the center of a criminal probe involving Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information is a series of emails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.
The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side’’—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.
Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs. Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said. Investigators have raised concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s personal server was less secure than State Department systems.

So the scandal is not so much that a brutal White House/CIA murder squad exists. It's not so much that as a politically appointed bureaucrat and glass ceiling-breaking mob boss godmother, Hillary Clinton herself was grotesquely granted final say on the high-tech hits.

 The really horrendous scandal making elite eyeballs bleed is that she used an unsecure homebrew server to rubber-stamp extrajudicial assassinations. She let Deep State secrecy go by the wayside simply for her own selfish convenience.  She inartfully co-mingled her public and private affairs. Which people to turn into bug-splat in Pakistan and which people to invite to Chelsea's pricey society wedding got all mixed up in a basement in Chappaqua, New York.

It's not so much the breach of ethics and the breach of common law and the gross violations of basic human rights. It's the breach of etiquette. It's the breach of "national security" that has the spooks and the suits wringing their hands.

The Wall Street Journal's big scoop continues: 

Law-enforcement and intelligence officials said State Department deliberations about the covert CIA drone program should have been conducted over a more secure government computer system designed to handle classified information.
State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials. It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast and the U.S. diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

If Hillary Clinton is indicted, it won't be for anything so mundane as murder. It will be for failing to take care to properly cover up state-sponsored murders. It will be for potentially allowing potential murder victims to get prior warning of their imminent demises by Predator missile.

To the extent that Hillary's heretofore unknown role as Lady High Executioner is being covered at all, it's being framed around how her arrogance got in the way of her discretion. She put the reputations of her peers in the Establishment at high risk. "Hillary Approved CIA Drone Assassinations With Her Cell Phone" screamed the banner headline in Salon.

Now, to be fair, the Salon article does immediately launch into the fact that Clinton only nixed two of the requested strikes, while putting her personal stamp of approval on dozens more, killing an untold number of innocent civilians, including women and children. Information on 22 of the drone strikes were in emails stored on her private home server in Chappaqua.

Oh, and just incidentally, Hillary Clinton is indeed under criminal investigation by the FBI. This factoid was passive-aggressively confirmed in a White House press briefing on the very same day that President Obama heartily endorsed her as his successor and loyal partner in drone warfare. It's kind of his insurance policy;  she can't very well indict the Kill List president after he so kindly palmed off ultimate responsibility for Terror Tuesdays on her, can she? Like Obama before her, she will look forward, not back. Whether this is from the Oval Office or from a luxury suite in Club Fed is still an open question. Though highly unlikely, maybe she'll get the chance to savor both. The wheels of justice do grind slow, especially when they're attached to the presidential armed vehicle appropriately known as "The Beast."

Meanwhile, the Terror Channel (a/k/a CNN) actually blamed Christmas for Hillary's failure to be judicious about the extra-judicial drone executions. Under the "politics" section, CNN Justice Correspondent Evan Perez helpfully blogged:

The (drone e-mail) exchange in question took place over the December holidays when multiple officials were away from the office and without access to their classified email, and some of the emails were ultimately sent to Secretary Clinton's private email server, according to the official.

The FBI has not yet interviewed Clinton as part of its investigation. As CNN first reported, investigators have not found evidence to support criminal charges against Clinton and none are expected, but no final determination will be made until that interview has taken place.

As Mike Lofgren outlined in his book Deep State, CNN and other networks are largely funded and controlled by what Dwight Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex -- currently comprised of a conglomerate of defense contractors, corporate-funded think tanks, Wall Street bankers, private equity and media moguls, Silicon Valley billionaires, and their political puppets, consultants and lobbyists.

 "They advertise their wares on the Sunday shows," wrote Lofgren."They use taxpayer dollars for propaganda campaigns to push their wares...Whether they intended it or not, the contractors have succeeded in normalizing the abnormal by transforming the sale of a killer drone into the ethical equivalent of a Mad Men pitch for a new mouthwash brand." 

 
Since the Justice Department secretly opined that presidential executions of thousands of innocents ("militants") are perfectly legal, Hillary Clinton will not and cannot be charged with homicide nor even depraved indifference to human life. At the most, according to the rules set by and for the powerful, she merely committed a clerical faux pas, potentially resulting in a few red faces in some very high places. Barring any expansion of the FBI inquiry into her sketchy family financial empire, the most she can probably expect from DronemailGate is a slap on the wrist on grounds of sheer ineptitude.

Another President Clinton, meanwhile, would be the ideal personification of COG (Continuity of Government.)  Her election is necessary for the continued smooth running of the Apparatus. She's a cog in the machine, whereas Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would be spanners in the works. (The Donald wouldn't be able to stop bragging about each and every successful Kill List hit. And then he'd send a bill for crashed Reaper Drones to the Muslims in tribal areas to really teach them a lesson and Make America Great Again.)

 The Obama administration itself is just a continuation of both Clintonoid economic policies and Bush military and surveillance policies, both of which were birthed by right-wing Nixonian paranoia and neoliberal Reaganism.  So of course Hillary Clinton is the most "qualified" candidate the country has ever known. She will continue the continuance of the continuation.

 

Hillary Laughs It Up With Lucky Libyan Survivor (NY Times)

She'll continue the Unaccountability Project as well, glibly spreading the manure of the dirty wars and political dirty tricks around to ensure that no one person's hands get completely filth-encrusted. If everyone is responsible, then no one can be responsible.  Hillary is the Super Glue to keep all the Deep State club members bound safely together in their corrupt web of money, mutual goals and careerism.

So rather than waste precious time comparing Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, perhaps we should spend more time asking why Obama and Clinton are so much like Bush and Cheney. Perhaps we should admit that a form of fascism is already here, and has been for a very long time. Trump is merely one of its more obviously putrescent symptoms.

"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing." -- FDR, message to Congress, 4/29/38.

####

*Update: The above post was largely researched and written before this morning's massacre in Orlando, Florida. The subject matter does tie in, in a way. It's still too soon to tell whether the shooting was the act of a deranged homophobe, or ISIS-inspired, or both. Blowback in response to the American drone assassination program and other acts of aggression is not out of the question.

 Readers, please feel free to use comments to talk about the shooting, or whatever else concerns you today. 

Stay tuned and stay braced for all the politicians waging all the wars to jockey for camera position to cry their copious crocodile tears and politicize this to the max. Stay tuned for the NRA urging us all to arm ourselves.

Hillary Clinches, But the Fist Still Clenches

Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders at least semi-fair and square. Despite numerous reports of fraud and mayhem at polling places and caucus sites, despite corporate press coverage of the Vermont senator which has run the gamut from zilch to negative to condescending, enough genuine human beings apparently liked her, really liked her, well enough to grant her the "presumptive" Democratic nomination. Race and fear and gender identity politics are still highly persuasive selling points, even for people who lack a steady job, are in student debt up to their ears, and struggle to subsist on a pitiful monthly Social Security check. 

"Clinching" is the new winning in corporate journalism-speak. You don't beat, crush, obliterate or trounce your opponent any more. That sounds as tacky as selling tickets to a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover. You delicately clinch whatever you think is owed to you. You substitute merit for meretriciousness. You fake it till you make it. You even do it before all the votes are counted, with a little help from your friends in the press.

Somebody just pinch me. Or punch me.

News reports in the wake of "The Clinch Who Stole Populist Christmas"  are painting Bernie Sanders as even more of a stubborn old grouch than usual. The New York Times sounded particularly aggrieved that he was not yet groveling at the feet of the Empress-in-Waiting, begging for mercy:

And so, despite the crushing California results that rolled in for him on Tuesday night, despite the insurmountable delegate math and the growing pleas that he end his quest for the White House, Senator Bernie Sanders took to the stage in Santa Monica and basked, bragged and vowed to fight on.

In a speech of striking stubbornness, he ignored the history-making achievement of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who became the first woman in American history to clinch the presidential nomination of a major political party.

Oh, how dare he keep clenching and denying the fact that Hillary is History Personified as she rides to the White House, bravely clinging to the moldy coattails of her husband.

Figurative jaw clenched in elite indignation, the Gray Lady huffs on:   

Mr. Sanders waited until 15 minutes into his speech to utter Mrs. Clinton’s name. He referred, almost in passing, to a telephone conversation in which he had congratulated her on her victories. At that, the crowd of more than 3,000 inside an aging airport hangar booed loudly. Mr. Sanders did little to discourage them.

Tuesday was, undeniably, Mrs. Clinton’s night, a milestone for women in politics and civic life 95 years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed their right to vote.

Jeeze, here I am a woman and I slept right through the historical milestone. I woke up this morning and the magic that will change my life forever still hasn't quite hit me. Maybe it was because as a New Yorker, I was denied the right to vote in the closed Democratic primary due to my failure to affiliate myself with the big tent corporate party by last year's deadline.

At almost every turn, he was grudging toward Mrs. Clinton, passing up a chance to issue the kind of lengthy salute that many, in and out of the Democratic Party, had expected and craved.

“It’s a blown opportunity to build bridges that are going to be extremely important in the fall,” said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, both Democratic and Republican. He worried that Mr. Sanders was becoming “a grumpy old man".

David Gergen, who is the same age as Bernie, is a very relaxed and mellow old man because he rakes in some very serious bucks as a Very Serious Person on CNN.

The Times went on to gratuitously castigate the "Bernie Bros", many of whom it predicts will spitefully and mindlessly gravitate to the next best thing: Donald Trump. 

Are these clinchers sore winners, or what?

Meanwhile, Bernie will meet with Barack at the White House on Thursday. We'll know the jig is up when the next scene will be that of Bernie and Barry mounting the steps of Air Force One together for one of those famous Kucinich-ish mystery rides. Let's hope that movie never gets made.

Obama is expected to make an official endorsement of The Clincher as early as tomorrow. In the interim, the White House has put out an official statement:

 Her historic campaign inspired millions and is an extension of her lifelong fight for middle-class families and children.”

Ouch. That's as good as saying she hasn't and won't fight at all for poor and working class families and children, whose extreme poverty rate has actually doubled since the Clintons did away with direct cash aid to the indigent two decades ago. That's as good as saying that Hillary will limit her charm offensive to the ever-dwindling, but still comfortable, middle class. It does not bode well for the jobless, the evicted, the pinched, and the marginalized.

So it's still all about the struggle and continuing to make history with the extension of a lifelong and bottom-up fight for affordable housing, good jobs with good wages, universal health care, public education and a secure retirement. 

If enough of us make a noise, maybe we can turn Clinching Clinton into Flinching Clinton. No politician, not even FDR, ever improved life for millions of people without a good swift kick or two or hundred from the Left, inspiring them to do the right thing.

 

Clintonoia Strikes Deep

Like most people, I knew the fix was in and that Hillary Clinton had the Democratic nomination pretty much sewn up. And along with a whole lot of people, I was absolutely gobsmacked when the A.P. called the nomination the night before today's all-important, delegate-heavy California vote. 

The news organization  took it upon itself to privately poll those 720 unelected super-delegates (wealthy donors, lobbyists, elected officials and party elders) as the basis for their announcement that Clinton has already clinched the nomination. Therefore, there is no need for New Jerseyites and Californians and denizens of smaller Western states and D.C. to even bother showing up to make their voices heard.

Our free and independent beholden press has informed them that their votes will not count.

This is one more indication, as if we needed any more, that American democracy is well and truly dead. The super-delegates pledging their allegiance to the Empress-in-Waiting were not even required by the news organization to give their names. Their anonymity is well protected. It is a slap in the face to even pretend-democracy. Forget Noam Chomsky's theory of Manufactured Consent. They have taken public consent right out of the equation and exposed the ugly old machine innards for all to see.

The  announcement of the Clinton nomination is not only premature, it is highly suspect. It is very poorly sourced, to say the least. Who's to say that the AP really even talked to the people owning the weighted votes? Did they verify identities before they trusted?That's just one of the questions we should be asking.

But the announcement that the primary is over before the fat lady sings has White House influence written all over it. President Obama was scheduled to be in New York tomorrow for a plutocratic buck-fest, and the liberal moguls want to be assured that they'll be getting plenty of Clinton bang for their bucks, especially in light of her unpopularity and FBI investigations into who really knows what chicanery. 

The fact that the Democratic establishment felt the need to get Bernie Sanders out of the way as quickly and as undemocratically as possible speaks to the dangerous inherent weakness and desperate aspects of the Clinton candidacy. She can't afford the optics of having Bernie win even one ultimately meaningless state primary. It might hurt her chances against the Trumpmonster.

After last night's chicanery, I really don't foresee legions of embittered Bernie Sanders supporters flocking to Hillary's embrace, do you? 

The only question left is what will Bernie do? Even a plea from the man himself to vote for Hillary will likely fall upon millions of deaf ears, Trump or no Trump.

Another distinct possibility: Against all the newest manufactured odds,Bernie could still beat in her California and elsewhere, making her premature coronation look even more corrupt and tenuous.

Here's my published comment on the New York Times banner-headlined article announcing this Pravda-like travesty of journalism:

This smacks of Clintonian paranoia and attempted voter suppression, especially in California. Whoever heard of calling a nomination based solely upon an unscientific survey of the unelected superdelegates?

I fault the AP for jumping the gun with this pseudo-scoop. It's just one more piece of evidence that the media is more interested in access and personality politics than in news-gathering and holding the powerful to account.

Everybody already knew that Hillary (despite her flaws) practically has the nomination in the bag. So would it really have hurt for her to save her victory lap until Tuesday night, PDT? This premature seizing of the crown just puts more taint on an already suspect process. It is unfair to both Sanders supporters and Hillary supporters to essentially inform them that their votes have been rendered moot.

When all the votes are counted, and if Hillary does secure the nomination in late July in Philadelphia, I will graciously congratulate her. Until then, we should hold off on the coronation and let what is still left of our democracy run its assigned course.

In other news, Hillary was spotted wearing a $12,495 Armani jacket during a recent event on income inequality. Personally, in light of last night's end run around representative democracy, I think the Kim Jong Il couture suits her much better.

Everything's Coming Up Stinkweed

 (optional soundtrack, but you probably should skip it: it's fingernails across blackboard annoying)

And they wonder why millions of desperate people are flocking to the neo-fascism of Donald Trump?

Here was Barack Obama doing his best Mama Rose impression last week in Elkhart, Indiana:

By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency.  That’s the truth.  That’s true.  (Applause.)  It’s true.  (Applause.)  Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs -- that’s the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history.  We’ve seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s.  We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we would.  We’ve cut the oil that we buy from foreign countries by more than half, doubled the clean energy that we produce.  For the first time ever, more than 90 percent of the country has health insurance.  (Applause.)

Obama can plead truth-telling three times in one stinking paragraph, but it doesn't change the facts. 

The day after his legacy-burnishing speech, an Elkhart electronic components factory announced it will cease production, laying off more than 200 workers. Then came the worst jobs report in five years. For every new job created last month, 12 more people simply gave up looking for work. People who give up are not counted among the unemployed. Thus, a jobless rate of four percent is worse than meaningless. It's misleading.

But Obama thinks it's all swell, it's all great, that you'll have the whole world on your plate:

Now, here’s the truth -- you can look it up.  These journalists here, they can do some fact-checking.  As a share of the economy, we spend less on domestic priorities outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- we spend less than we did when Ronald Reagan was President.  (Applause.)  When President Reagan or George W. Bush held this job, our deficits got bigger.  When Bill Clinton and I have held this job, deficits have gotten smaller.  (Applause.)  Our deficits have not grown these past seven and a half years; we’ve actually cut the deficit by almost 75 percent.  (Applause.) 

Even though it has been thoroughly debunked as a growth booster, austerity absolutely kicks ass. (Yours.) The president bragging about how New Democrats have colluded to cut social programs like food stamps and long-term unemployment insurance is a real winner in an election year. Obama spent less on people than Ronald Reagan did, and those silly Republicans still complain that he's not mean enough? Come on.

But Obama's spinning is only just beginning. Hillary and Bill cutting millions of people off welfare 20 years ago and doubling the extreme poverty rate in the process was just so totally awesome:

 Moreover, there are fewer families on welfare than in the 1990s.  Funding has been frozen for two decades.  There's not a whole bunch of giveaways going on right now.  Aside from our obligation to care for the elderly and Americans with disabilities, the vast majority of people who get help from the federal government are families of all backgrounds who are working, striving to get back on their feet, striving to get back into the middle class.  And sometimes, yes, their kids need temporary help from food stamps when mom and dad are between jobs.  But look, these kids didn’t cause the financial crisis.  These kids aren’t spending us into bankruptcy.  They're not what's holding back the middle class.  And, by the way, neither is Obamacare.  (Applause.) 

Making mothers with very small children leave their children to go to work at minimum wage jobs was just what the oligarchy doctor ordered. The Clintonoid welfare reform succeeded in suppressing wages and weakening labor unions. It made desperation the new normal. And if you can't be a desperate striver, struggling to get into the nonexistent middle class, they'll cut you off at the knees. Oh, and Obama even falsely equates hungry innocent children with market-based junk insurance while he's at it. (And they say that Donald Trump is a sociopath.)

Still, if you insist on feeling miserable and hungry, rest assured that Obama wants to make Third World workers even more miserable than you are. Thanks to Chinese slave labor, for example, even poor Americans can numb their sorrows by staring at a cheap imported flat screen TV.

 Now, it is true that a lot of supporters of trade deals in the past sometimes oversold all the good that it was going to do for the economy.  The truth is, the benefits of trade are usually widely spread -- it’s one of the reasons why you can buy that big, flat-screen TV for a couple hundred bucks, and why the cost of a lot of basic necessities have gone down.  Some parts of the economy, like the agricultural sector or the tech sector have really done well with trade.  Some sectors and communities have been hurt by foreign competition. 

So pay no attention to Donald Trump's claim that China is killing us and immigrants are taking all our jobs. Even as we speak, Homeland Security is rounding up and deporting thousands of innocent refugees fleeing the violence and strife in Central America.

But since it's an election year, and Hillary Clinton is winning only by virtue of an orchestrated party machine funded by millionaires and billionaires, and she still needs those Sanders voters, Barack Obama will nobly co-opt Bernie Sanders. Belatedly admitting that most people are just too flat broke to save, he is pivoting from cutting Social Security to strengthening Social Security. Curtain up, light the lights, you've got nothing to hit but the heights!

 But look, let’s face it -- a lot of Americans don’t have retirement savings.  Even if they’ve got an account set up, they just don’t have enough money at the end of the month to save as much as they’d like because they’re just barely paying the bills.  Fewer and fewer people have pensions they can really count on, which is why Social Security is more important than ever.  (Applause.)  We can’t afford to weaken Social Security.  We should be strengthening Social Security.  And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.  (Applause.)  And we could start paying for it by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more.  They can afford it.  I can afford it.  (Applause.)

As ever, Obama will not demand that the wealthy pay even a paltry 50 percent tax rate or that the cap on Social Security contributions be entirely scrapped.  He is merely asking them to contribute "a little more" out of the goodness of their hearts. As ever, Obama reminds us that he, too, is a very rich, beneficent guy. He is not one of you.

And as ever, don't actually count on eating and making a living or keeping your house or retiring right this very minute. You see, existential purists are not allowed in the Glass Half Full Club. When politicians like Obama and Hillary talk about reaching the heights of defeating the Trump monster, they are by no means talking about an alternative of roses and daffodils, sunshine and Santa Claus:

So that’s the choice you face, Elkhart.  The ideas I’ve laid out today, I want to be clear:  They’re not going to solve every problem.  They’re not going to make everybody financially secure overnight.  We’re still going to be facing global competition.  Trying to make sure that all our kids are prepared for the 21st century workforce, that’s a 20-year project, that’s not a two-year project.  We’re still going to have to make sure that we’re paying for Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare as our populations get older.  There are still going to be a bunch of issues out there.

By the time your kids are prepared for Brave New World, they'll be 50 years old if they should live so long. Serious issues will remain, down there in the Bottom 90 Percent basement apartments. But the Neoliberal Thought Collective will leave a rickety invisible ladder of hope propped up for you anyway. You can do it, all you need is a hand. Mister Market gonna see right to it.

 We’ve got to come together around our common values -- our faith in hard work.  Our faith in responsibility.  Our belief in opportunity for everybody.  We’ve got to assume the best in each other, not the worst.  We’ve got to remember that sometimes, we all fall on hard times, and it’s part of our jobs as a community of Americans to help folks up when they fall.  (Applause.)  Because whatever our differences, we all love this country.  We all care about our children’s futures.  That’s what makes us great.  That’s what makes us progress and become better versions of ourselves -- because we believe in each other.  (Applause.)  

There are the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. We must act out of nationalistic impulses. Patriotism is the religious glue that binds and gags us. The truth is out there. You gotta believe. And starting here, starting now, nothing's gonna stop us till we're through (with you.) 
 

 ***

What would a platitudinous presidential speech be without a Paul Krugman column to reanimate it, giving it a tepid jolt of Frankensteinish electricity?

Krugman actually does give a feeble swipe to Obama's Mama Rose-colored glasses by deigning to mention last week's terrible jobs report. It doesn't quite spell a recession, but it is still a disappointing "pause in the economy's progress," with the pundit's main concern being how the nasty Republicans will use it to blame the Democrats. Not once does Krugman even pay even lip service to the millions of out-of-work or underpaid Americans stuck in temporary and dead-end jobs. Things are still better under Obama than they were under Bush!

Even with a Clinton restoration, nothing can be done anyway, because of Republicans.  Krugman always avoids mentioning the political donor class of plutocrats which actually sets bipartisan policy. Ever the reliable Democratic factotum, he echoes the Beltway group-think: failure to act for the public good is caused by "Washington gridlock."  It's funny how this gridlock always magically melts away whenever the war and surveillance industries need trillions of dollars to upgrade their weapons and spy systems or otherwise democratically intervene in other people's backyards!

But given that any sudden economic crisis during election season might hurt Hillary Clinton's chances, Krugman is feeling a bit nervous:  "So the evidence of a U.S. slowdown should worry you," he ponderously intones. "I don’t see anything like the 2008 crisis on the horizon (he says with fingers crossed behind his back), but even a smaller negative shock could turn into very bad news, given our political gridlock."

It must be so nice living in an elite bubble, where your only worry is a slowdown in the effervescence.

My published response (actually a synopsis of and prelude to today's blog-post):

If Democrats have any hope of winning across the board in November, they'd better move beyond their defensive "be afraid of Trump" posture and admit that life sucks big-time for the vast majority of Americans. It's time to stop painting a rosy picture about the make-believe economic recovery for mere crass political purposes. It's time to start campaigning for a new New Deal.

To his credit, President Obama has finally come on board with Bernie Sanders's proposal for an expansion of Social Security: increase the monthly benefits and raise the FICA cap.

Yet only a day before the dismal jobs report came out, he speechified that "by almost every economic measure, America is better off" and that Trump's constant claim that the economy is doing poorly is a "myth."

It's happy talk like this that sends disgusted voters right into the arms of the Trumpmonster. It's a jingoistic Hillary speech that saved all its scathing rhetoric for Trump's personality disorder and all its rousing rhetoric for American exceptionalism and military might. Enough already.

Now's the time to take advantage of the GOP's disarray and come out swinging like the late, great -- and left -- Muhammad Ali. Now's the time to move beyond what's "possible" and fight for what is right.

Twelve times more people gave up looking for work than got a job last month. And our death rate is increasing.

We're not merely worried, Mr. Krugman. We're running the gamut from despair, to disgust, to outrage.

The Green Shoots of Stinkweed

Not So Friendly Fascism

"As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say I am afraid," wrote the late political scientist and Truman administration adviser Bertram Gross about the creeping threat that he called Friendly Fascism.

It is only with the rise of Donald Trump, who wears his totalitarian mindset on his sleeve and bellows out the hatred loud and clear through his big fat mouth, that even the mainstream media are finally daring to utter the dreaded F word, 35 years after Gross presciently spelled it all out for us.

Bertram Gross

Under Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama, the preferred labels have been "corporatism"  or "neoliberalism" -- a partnership between government and big business whose main purpose is rewarding the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And it's all been effected through the free and fair elections of "participatory democracy."

American-style fascism has been around for decades. But until Trump came along to fill the democratic gap with his own brand of Unfriendly Fascism, most people preferred not to acknowledge the awful truth. It has helped immensely, of course, that each of our recent presidents has been blessed with a relatively warm and outgoing personality. Ronald Reagan made the world melt with his avuncular smile. Even George W. Bush was voted the most favorite guy you'd like to have a beer with, continuing right where  Bill  "I feel your pain" Clinton had left off, with his slick down-home campaign of "ending welfare as we know it," Wall Street deregulation and job-killing trade deals.

And even our great national Bush nightmare seemed short-lived, tempered by some surface pushback from the Democratic establishment and the dream election of dream candidate Barack Obama, who himself has presided over an ever-widening gap between rich and poor and an escalation of nuke manufacture and military adventurism. But he still talks a good populist game when he feels like it.

 How soon we forget that his administration spied on and ultimately tear-gassed the Occupy camps right out of existence before gaining his second term in office. How easily most Americans are able to gloss right over his war on journalists and whistleblowers, his drone assassinations of thousands of people (if they're not nameless "militants", then they're always the latest high-ranking Al Qaeda leader), his record deportations of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing the violence and poverty of US-dependent and spawned fascisms in the Global South countries, and the loading of his administration with millionaires from the criminal enterprises known as banks. And then there's his championship of the various global corporate coups euphemized as "trade deals."

  Given his personality, intellectual prowess, and acting skills, it is still considered really bad taste to slap friendly Barack Obama (whose approval rating is again soaring above 50 percent) and even his cold hawkish pal Hillary Clinton with the fascist label. But Donald Trump is fair game. He doesn't pretend to be something that he is not. He wears his con artistry and his racism and his misogyny like badges of honor. If he's compared to Mussolini, if he is endorsed by North Korea and Russia, then he considers them to be compliments of the highest order. If he cheated some fairly well-to-do marks out of some of their cash in another get-rich-quick real estate scam cynically labeled "Trump University", that's his right as an American titan. Hucksterism is as American as Mom and apple pie and the flag.

Trump is what happens when, as Gross wrote, "the formal democratic machinery nourished by establishment promises -- too often rendered false -- of more human rights, more civil rights and civil liberties.... is contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition." In other words, the mixed messages we've received have rendered enough of us confused enough to embrace the simplistic solutions and aggrieved worldview of Donald Trump. We have been invited to channel our hopes and dreams, as well as our long-simmering resentments, against both plutocrats and our fellow les miserables, into the candidacy of one of the most famous crass materialists and competitors the world has ever known. We are only doing what we've subliminally been ordered to do all along by the purveyors of Friendly Fascism: love thy neighbor, sure, but don't ever hesitate to advance your own selfish selves at the same time. Be a winner!

  And now the purveyors are crying foul because they can't control the "charismacho" monster they've very deliberately created in their inhumane Laboratory of Neoliberalism.

Back in the Reagan years, when Gross published his book warning of creeping fascism, he listed 10 sources of optimism which he hoped would stem its tide. Read them and weep:

1. A vibrant anti-war movement, which pushed the Reagan administration into arms control negotiations with the still-extant Soviet Union.

2. An anti-nuclear power and environmental movement "that has been a decisive factor in stopping the growth of the nuclear energy industry in the U.S."

3. "A neighborhood movement that has brought millions of ordinary people, conservatives included, into responsible activism against corporate and bureaucratic exploitation."

4. Labor unions "that are likely to be radicalized by the pressure of a rank-and-file indignant over rising unemployment, provocative anti-union federal policies and intense corporate efforts to roll back earlier wage and workplace victories."

5. Government employees who have collectively been joining labor unions in larger numbers and "who have often been willing to blow the whistle in public" about Reagan's racist and pro-plutocrat policies.

6. Civil liberties and civil rights organizations... are "fighting back militantly against almost every one of the Reaganite assaults on the Bill of Rights."

7. "Organizations of older people that have already proved their mettle by beating back one after another of the Reaganite attacks on social security entitlements... and in the case of the Gray Panthers, playing a key role in nursing the embryonic full employment movement."

8. "The small beginnings of a more serious socialist presence with the merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American movement into the New Democratic Socialists of America (D.S.A.)"

9. "Continuing progress, despite the regressive forces of sexism and homophobia, in the extending the liberating values of the women's movements and the civil and human rights of lesbians and gay men."

10. "In the words of Kusum Singh, a warm current of 'bottom-sideways communication' among people who are fed up with the elitism, snobbery and hierarchy of most private and public democracies and are inventing democratic leadership styles that escape 'charismacho.'

Well, at least part of Gross's Number Nine dream has come true. And Number Ten is alive and kicking, despite the charismacho campaign of Trump. Whether his brand of nasty fascism can be wholly emasculated is unlikely, given that the consolidated media, led by some of the highest-paid CEOs in America, just can't quit the mega-bucks he is bringing them. Even an empty Trump podium has more value for them and their sponsors than either a boring technocratic speech by Hillary Clinton or a plutocracy-threatening barn burner of a Bernie Sanders rally. And if the CEOs can instigate and document the growing police state violence outside the Trump venues, it's all the more titillating and remunerative for them. What do they care? Their pampered hides are protected by their own private security details and gated communities, and their obscene wads of cash are protected in both off-shore accounts and domestic LLCs.

Bombast at Comcast: The Consolidated Media Candidate

Friendly Fascism is so yesterday for these people. "Bring on the noise, bring on the Trump" has replaced the Fairness Doctrine, which federally mandated broadcasting in the public interest. And in true friendly fascist fashion (say three times fast) the New York Times has portrayed the modern Frankensteins as "struggling" valiantly to contain their creation. "The television news industry is wrestling with how to balance fairness, credibility and the temptations of sky-high ratings as it prepares for a presidential matchup like none other," the Gray Lady simpered. "Still, the presence of Mr. Trump can be irresistible, especially in an election in which viewership and advertising rates have soared, generating tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue for an industry threatened by digital competition."

Oh, what a quandary for the hyper-rich media moguls, so threatened by the digital competition. Forget the threat to democracy itself in the person of Trump. This is a threat to dog-eat-dog capitalism and endless growth, so who cares if the cancer dies right along with the host?

And despite all his own made for TV pearl-clutching over Trump and the media circus, Barack Obama isn't at all interested in bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. The public interest is not only the least of the Establishment's worries, it is antithetical to their own interest: money begetting power begetting more money begetting more power in an endless, toxic closed feedback loop of greed.

Look again at Numbers One Through Eight of Bertram Gross's Wish List. They make Bernie Sanders's "radical agenda" look downright reasonable and moderate in comparison. And yet to the Neoliberal Thought Collective, the senator from Vermont is the reanimation of the Red Menace.

Fascism is here, it's entrenched, and it's anything but friendly despite the sober-sided smiley-face propagandists pretending to do battle with the Trumpmonster. So how about we all get together and beat up all the bullies in all their various and extra-Trumpian forms? The Sanders campaign has been a nudge in the right direction. A neighborhood movement (see #3) made up of millions of people from across the ideological spectrum is just the kind of solidarity that will make the reptile people quake in their Ferragamo Python loafers (list price, $985).

Bodies of Water

An Ocean of Plastic (photo credit, UC-Santa Barbara)

***

"Bodies of Water"

By Nan Socolow

Aeons past

before the plates

became continents

when this Earth

was young

bodies of water

encircled

Pangaea.

Now our

blue planet

is a dying zone

a waking nightmare

pillaged and

plundered,

its watery places

ravaged by mankind.

Civilization has

dumped debris

detritus dreck

bottles and jars

and enough plastic

to gyre and gimble

and strangle the

Pacific wabe.

Bizarre fish

snakeheads

and sea lampreys

with sucking razor

sharp teeth delve

in the fresh water 

of the mighty Mississippi

and Great Lakes

And Lionfish

from Indian and Pacific seas

swimmers loosed from

American aquaria

dressed gauzily 

to kill in fetching saris

swirl en masse

in the Caribbean

Pythons, boas

gators lurk in the

marshy sawgrass

of the Everglades,

eyes aslit for innocent

passers-by

to squeeze and

swallow

The five continents

that were once

Pangaea, connected

like the carapace on a

hawksbill's shell or

jigsaw puzzle pieces,

are now apart and prisoned

by waste waters.

Billions of people

dying for a drink

of clean water for

their birthright

of potable water.

Global warming

and climate change

are inconvenient truths

of our lives

on Earth,

though denied by some

human folk who buy

and chugalug water in billions 

of little plastic bottles

that will remain on Earth

long after we've gone.

***

(This poem by Nan Socolow will be included in a volume (working title, Invasive Procedures: Earthquakes & Calamities) due to be published later this summer.)

What Hillary Deserves

As a long-term leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the staunchest defenders of the often-rogue CIA, Dianne Feinstein of California certainly knows the value of elite secrecy.

And she thinks that her sister in extreme wealth, extreme power politics and extreme secrecy is getting a bum rap over that withering State Department Inspector General's report, which exposed Hillary Clinton's pathological need for secrecy and corresponding pathological need to lie. According to Feinstein, Hillary has already admitted that mistakes were made, and so it's time to move beyond her character traits (Incisive and Determined! Compassionate! Plus, Qualified!) and concentrate on the real campaign "issues" -- first and foremost of which are, from her point of view, Donald Trump's negative character traits.

Feinstein's Shield of Hillary Character Traits

  When ABC's Jonathan Karl suggested on the TV program "This Week" that Clinton had possibly broken the law by not only installing a private email server in her basement, but subsequently stonewalling the investigation (half of her emails were erased and her staff was ordered to keep quiet about it) -- Feinstein blew up.

 "Whoa, wait a second," she protested. "I don't believe she was trying to hide anything. I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century. Let me tell you what I do think, I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life. She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends, and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her emails."

Public life is such a bitch. Clinton apparently was forced against her will into her cushy Secretary of State job by a conniving President Obama, who knows how to keep his friends close and his friends like Hillary even closer. He knew, or he should have known, that Hillary was breaking the law by using a private server. He knew or he should have known that her family foundation was profiting big-time through her stint at State. He knew or he should have known, to name just one influence-peddling example, about the big Saudi donation to her private organization in the immediate wake of his administration's multibillion-dollar arms sale to the Saudis. He could have easily staged an early intervention in the privacy of the Oval Office.

But for whatever reason, he preferred not to.

Much has been written about Obama's preference for "the long game." And revenge is always a dish best served cold.

Perhaps he sees himself as operating above the fray by allowing his one-time opponent to clinch the nomination as his successor and then simply sitting back to watch her hang herself by the rope of her own personality traits. Perhaps I'm totally mistaken. Psychoanalysis is always best left to the experts, after all.

But it's a fact that Obama has been carefully obtuse in his "defense" of his former nemesis.

“I’ve got to be careful because, as you know, there have been investigations, there are hearings,” he told a TV interviewer last month before the IG report's release. “Congress is looking at this, and I haven’t been sorting through each and every aspect of this. Here’s what I know: Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.” 

That's pretty damning with faint praise.The subtext is that as idiotic as Hillary's actions might seem, her heart is in the right place. Obama doesn't really think she's a criminal. She's more like that hapless Cincinnati mother who unintentionally let her mischievous little boy slip through a zoo enclosure this past weekend. It was Mom's intention to give her kid a fun day at the park and look what happened. But since the only harm came to a gorilla, and the child himself was not critically injured, it doesn't rise to a felonious level. If the parents are held legally accountable, it will be due to a Twittered outpouring of public demand as well as their social status. Only the little people are regularly held liable for carelessness, bad judgment and ineptitude. It's the American way. So far anyway, Hillary appears unlikely to be held liable for her own breach of duty.

Maybe Obama and Clinton's defenders and apologists would be singing a different tune if her email setup had resulted in the demise of a beloved animal. Americans love to be outraged by the deaths of caged or tame wildlife like Harambe the Gorilla and Cecil the Lion and Marius the Giraffe.

 It is so much harder to wrap our heads around atrocities like 700 refugees -- including many young children -- drowning in the Mediterranean during the same weekend as the gorilla dying at the zoo. This collateral human damage of war and violence was instigated by, among other pathocrats, none other than Hillary Clinton herself. No public outrage = no public accountability. There is definitely no petition with half a million American signatures on it, demanding justice and sanctuary for those fleeing Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

But back to Hillary and the email stonewalling saga. It is a fact that she has always clung to an almost paranoid secrecy about even the most mundane aspects of her life, such as White House travel personnel records and land deals gone bad, which in the end signified absolutely nothing much. Her need for secrecy is her Achilles heel. And Obama can certainly relate, presiding as he has over the most secretive administration in history and instigating his own Orwellian directive for government employees to spy on one another's lunchtime reading materials and marital issues.

We must not fault Hillary Clinton for wanting a private life. Does she even, deep down inside, really want the presidency?

Her pal Dianne Feinstein speaks truth to power. Since Hillary Clinton is indeed "a woman who wants a little bit of a private life" without the press and the public constantly looking over her shoulder, we should give her an out. We should allow her to gracefully suspend her presidential campaign while there's still time. 

Let's give Hillary exactly what she, and we, deserve. And to be really incisive and compassionate, let's hold a retirement party for Dianne while we're at it. Both of them seem in dire need of a break.