A Fraud Wrapped in a Fake Inside of a Fiction

 

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

When going about the miserable job of exposing so-called fake news outlets (translation: any outlet either fairly or unfairly critical of the defeated Hillary Clinton as well as US foreign policy) it's always best to do your dirty work anonymously. You see, if the Russian puppet-masters controlling even such popular progressive American sites as Truthout and Naked Capitalism ever discern your true identity, you run the risk of getting rubbed out by a KGB agent in one of the dark alleys connecting the impulses of your paranoid little mind.

Therefore, in a craven attempt to stifle dissent, to damage lives and livelihoods, and to drum up the loudest possible publicity while still protecting your cowardly hide, you slap up an amateurish website called PropOrNot, and then you shop around your McCarthyesque list of 200 undesirable Internet news sites to the mainstream media.
  
And miracle of miracles - a huge billionaire-owned corporate publication called The Washington Post agrees not only to publish your fraud about fakery wrapped up in fiction, but to protect your identity in the bargain. It's the exact same way that establishment mouthpieces always protect the identities of powerful establishment figures whenever there's a war to be ginned up, or a political opponent to be smeared. You really must be someone special, or at least work for something, or someone, that is very special.

No matter that your brand-new site was exposed as a fraud and fake in its own right within a matter of hours. Who cares?  Your damage has already been done. Your List of Enemy News Sites and enemy journalists continues to be Tweeted and re-Tweeted across the world millions of times. It is still the most popular news item on The Post. Even "respectable" journalists and politicians who otherwise wouldn't have touched your ridiculous smear job of a story with a ten-foot pole have no qualms at all about helpfully and gleefully spreading its nastiness. After all, if the establishment Post saw fit to print it first, serious people certainly are under no obligation to exert either their minds or their moral compasses.

Josh Marshall Verified account ‏@joshtpm

Genuinely incensed at reaction to WaPo/Russian disinfo story. WE WATCHED THIS HAPPEN IN REAL TIME. Specific ways it was done, vectors, etc.

• Retweets 1,270
• Likes 2,192
• 

6:24 AM - 25 Nov 2016

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 Paul Krugman ‏@paulkrugman Nov 25

Paul Krugman Retweeted Josh Marshall

Yes, yes, yes. Putin role was obvious to everyone except people getting their news from email-obsessed media.

***

Dan Pfeiffer Verified account ‏@danpfeiffer

Why isn't this the biggest story in the world right now?

Dan Pfeiffer is the former communications director for Barack Obama, who got the whole "Fake News" ball rolling during his farewell tour of the world last week. Obama is a lot like the anonymous operators of PropOrNot: when he sent out his own press releases of himself touring Athens, he deliberately left out the part where 7,000 demonstrators protested his arrival and in return were tear-gassed and beaten by police for daring to exercise democracy in the birthplace of democracy.

And Paul Krugman should talk. His own work has been regularly published on at least one of the respected progressive sites that PropOrNot has deemed to be "fake news."

We still don't know the identities of the person or persons behind PropOrNot, but judging from the earnestly juvenile quality of the site's rhetoric as well as the asinine quality of their Tweets, I suspect that a gaggle of recent college grads with a major in Safe Spaces were in need of work after their last gig at a certain campaign HQ in Brooklyn. Or maybe it's a couple of refugees from the "Correct the Record" SuperPac run by that other Clintonoid master of agitprop, David Brock of Media Matters.

The PropOrNotters sound like they come from a political oppo research shop, not from a think tank full of credentialed professionals volunteering their time and intellects for the greater public good.  Their latest update, for example, consists of a clip of comedienne Samantha Bee showing what Russian propaganda trolls "look and sound like in real life."

When you visit the site, you're told that your first assignment in "fighting back" against the malign forces of outside-the-Beltway independent journalism is to watch Samantha Bee (a Hillary supporter) on television. 

Because whether you know it or not, you are the victims of an orchestrated Russian campaign to eat your brains for breakfast.

Without even a hint of irony in light of the fact that its own anonymous propaganda was unquestioningly parroted by the Washington Post, PropOrNot accuses such independent sites as CounterPunch and Truthdig of undermining the work of consolidated, corporate-owned news organizations:   

These (independent) sites have US audiences estimated in the millions, parrot Russian state-owned propaganda, and relentlessly attack the important investigative work done by actual American journalists.

PropOrNot no doubt views such relentlessly and righteously attacked hacks as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer as "actual American journalists." 

There are more proper, preferred sources of information to help manufacture your consent. PropOrNot urges you to consume their corporate content and also to send them some of your money:

• Spread the word: Russia is attempting to manipulate the American people through online propaganda.
• Obtain news from actual reporters, who report to an editor and are professionally accountable for mistakes. We suggest NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, VICE, etc, and especially your local papers and local TV news channels. Support them by subscribing, if you can!
• Familiarize yourself with this project, at www.propornot.com, and especially our Introduction, Frequently Asked Questions, and Manual Propaganda Analysis example, so you can practice distinguishing between Russian propaganda and actual news for yourself.

The Proper Notters sound an awful lot like the people who inundated Internet comment boards during campaign season. You know the trolls I'm talking about. The ones who called you a Putin tool or a closet Trump supporter every time you espoused Medicare for All, or dared to criticize the Empress-in-Waiting, or praised Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. One such anonymous troll on New York Times comment threads has accused me on more than one occasion of really being Merry Levov in disguise.

When I Googled Merry Levov, I discovered that she was the bomb-throwing lefty extremist in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. In other words, a fictional character.

So, given the amateur verbiage on the PropOrNot site itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the self-proclaimed credentialed volunteers from the analytics and national security worlds turn out to be nothing but low-level political hacks in disguise.  The very fact that they offer ridiculous, pseudo-scientific methods to detect Russian propaganda is one clue. So is their frequent politician-speak use of the word "folks."

If they truly were such powerful "experts" at the highest levels of the Deep State, and not paranoid trolls sitting in front of a basement computer, would they be sending out silly Tweets like this?

Pinned Tweet

PropOrNot ID Service ‏@propornot Nov 26

Updated report here: http://bit.ly/2fyrUz1  Russian imperialists & bots/trolls are vewwy vewwy upset; we're stoked! #Путінхуйло

0 replies 3 retweets 7 likes

 PropOrNot ID Service ‏@propornot Nov 26

Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so vewwy angwy!! It's cute We don't censor; just highlight.

If it talks like a troll, walks like a troll and smells like a troll... it's a troll. Or should I say twoll?

As Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald expound in their exhaustive take-down of this scandal:

In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the Post described PropOrNot simply as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda – even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage – while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy but without the courage to attach their names to their blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin Senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.”

The Proper Nutters obviously thrive on all the negative attention. They claim to be receiving new names and suggestions for addition to the Banned List of 200 by the hour. They have only just begun. So much subversion and independent thought, so little time. And to make the situation even more tragic and un-American, some of the site operators they are targeting are completely, innocently unaware that the Russians are controlling their brains and their journalism.

But of course, their aim is not to censor - only to expose. They don't outright accuse the List of 200 of treason, or anything like that. Because this is America. 

Meanwhile, they're champing at the bit to sink their sharp righteous teeth into even more subversion:

1. We will do that as soon as we can sink our analysis tools and review processes into the outlets we've been asked to look into, and we'll be updating our browser plugin as well. Due to different volunteers being responsible for different parts of the option, please note that the list in the plugin is slightly ahead of the list on the website. We will fix that.
2. We are updating our homepage slightly, to give people a better sense for what the Russian folks working to influence US public opinion look and sound like.
3. We are proud to present our updated Black Friday Report, and extremely grateful to everyone who contributed! We look forward to your thoughts, suggestions, and contributions as we move forward. It is available for download here, or can be reivewed (sic) directly below:

 Whereupon all good liberal citizens and Samantha Bee fans are urged to turn one another in. Don't like a blog that makes you feel too angry or depressed? Report it to the Ministry of Truth, post-haste!

When all is said and done, of course, the real culprits here are the Washington Post and its Media-Political Complex co-conspirators and Re-Tweeters. All of them are wantonly discarding all the principles of journalism by treating a bunch of trolls as a legitimate news source. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Post and its Obama/Clinton pals and maybe even some deep state psy-ops shop turned out to be the real brains behind PropOrNot. To use the lingo of the fraudsters wrapped up in the fakery inside of the fiction, a lot of "folks" have gotten themselves pwned. And when they're inevitably exposed by name in all their McCarthyesque complicity, they can always plead ignorance, despite being the allegedly smartest experts in the room. Unaccountability is the cornerstone of their business model.

Just wait. The powerful people who hope to benefit from this ham-fisted intimidation campaign will end up blaming a bunch of unpaid volunteers (or FBI or CIA operatives pretending to be a bunch of goofy unpaid volunteers) with a website. Mistakes were made. Whoever could have imagined that such all-American untruthiness was going on in this Establishment?

From Plymouth Rock To Standing Rock

It's that most exceptionally American time of the year, when we bow our heads in thanks, celebrating the birth legend of the great United States imperium. It's time to get all nostalgic about the myth of the libertarian pilgrims who fled British persecution only to co-opt, evict and exterminate the aboriginal people in the name of God and greed and freedom.

Even if you choose to ignore the historical propaganda, and use the day as an excuse to get together with friends and family, this whole Thanksgiving bounty thing is kind of hard to take if you live in Flint, Michigan, and your water is still poisoned by lead. While our president was on his grandiloquent farewell tour of the world last week, singing the praises of American democracy, it took a lawsuit and a federal judge to order the government to deliver more bottled water to Flint residents by a December 16th deadline. Democracy apparently doe not involve the president ordering the Army Corps of Engineers into Flint to begin immediate emergency work to replace the corroded water delivery system.

In the true spirit of the hegemonic holiday, government officials are actually appealing this very modest and humane judicial order, saying that it would be just too hard to deliver life-sustaining water door to door. If residents are too old, too sick, too language-deprived, too transportation-deprived, or too intellectually deprived to get themselves to a bottled water distribution center or to install a cheap ineffectual plastic filter on their faucets, then too bad for them. From the Detroit News:  

State officials argued the court order would require a “Herculean effort” equivalent to a large-scale military operation and cost the state at least $10.45 million a month, or $125 million annually. For more than a year, Flint’s residents have been advised against drinking their tap water without a filter due to dangerously high lead levels.

In a 37-page opinion, Lawson ordered home delivery of four cases of water per resident each week unless state and city officials can verify each resident has a properly installed and maintained faucet water filter.
The delivery order “increases the scope of the state’s emergency response to an unnecessary and insurmountable degree, particularly in light of the injunction’s time constraints,” attorneys wrote.

America's forced colonization and re-colonization by deregulated puritanical plunderers high on crack capitalism continues unabated. Thanks to the 2008 financial collapse that they orchestrated, grim reapers in suits are seizing distressed property for a song and then baiting inviting the distressed multitudes to partake of their leavings. (Drinking water is extra, however, and not only in Flint. If you can't pay your privatized water bill, you'll just have to swallow your stuffing crumbs dry.)

Water is only free when it is blasted out of a military cannon at the indigenous Americans and environmentalists currently protesting an oil pipeline in sub-freezing North Dakota. 

Just in time for Thanksgiving, law enforcers acting in the service of a few greedy oil company millionaires have escalated their attacks on unarmed citizens attempting to block construction of the polluting project. Police injured another 160 people over the weekend with the surplus military grade weaponry provided to them by the Obama administration. They used rubber bullets, percussion grenades, and tear gas, as well as highly pressured water which freezes skin upon contact. One woman was so seriously hurt that she might lose an arm. The Guardian reported:

Sophia Wilansky, an environmental activist from New York, was hospitalized in Minneapolis where surgeons are attempting to repair a severe injury to her left arm that destroyed arteries, nerves, muscle, soft tissue and bone, according to her father. She remains at risk of amputation, and if the arm is salvaged, it will probably have very limited functionality.
Wayne Wilansky, her father, contends that the injury was caused by an exploding concussion grenade thrown by law enforcement, who also deployed teargas, rubber bullets and a water cannon on protesters during a tense standoff on a bridge Sunday night.
But North Dakota law enforcement officers have aggressively countered Wilansky’s account, releasing multiple statements accusing protesters of setting off an explosion.

( Whether it's in Michigan or in North Dakota, or wherever powerful sadists roam free and unaccountable, have you noticed how the technique of victim-blaming is always at the top of their list of talking points?)

The nearly completed pipeline is meant to transport crude oil across the ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, and residents fear that the project will contaminate their drinking water. They're trying, to no avail thus far, to get the Obama administration to deny the Dakota Access company permits to extend the pipeline across the Missouri River. 

In a powerful editorial published today, the New York Times noted that this kind of cruel oppression against indigenous Americans has been going on for centuries. And corporate police state and media efforts to portray the protesters in a bad light is having the exact opposite effect:  

The department’s video was meant to portray the protesters as dangerous troublemakers, but the photos and videos in news reports suggest a more familiar story — an imbalance of power, where law enforcement fiercely defends property rights against protesters’ claims of environmental protection and the rights of indigenous people. American Indians have seen this sort of drama unfold for centuries — native demands meeting brute force against a backdrop of folly — in this case, the pursuit of fossil fuels at a time of sagging oil demand and global climatic peril.

The Army Corps of Engineers has called for more study and input from the tribe before it decides on whether to grant a permit. The pipeline company has asked a federal judge to give it the right to proceed with its plan to lay pipe under the river. There is no firm timeline for either decision.

Obama, meanwhile, cluckily pardoned one last Thanksgiving turkey as he basked in his twilight glow of record high public approval ratings. Cynically ignoring Flint and Standing Rock and the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history, he employed the slimy political tactic of red herring-with-wattles:

Tomorrow is one of the best days of the year to be an American. It’s a day to count our blessings, spend time with the ones we love, and enjoy some good food and some great company. But it’s also one of the worst days of the year to be a turkey. They don’t have it so good.

It could always be worse, proles. Put yourselves in the place of a Butterball, and you'll swear that your Flint drinking water is champagne, and that police blasts from a water cannon are a spa treatment.

Before long, Obama will passive-aggressively hand off the ultimate decisions on Standing Rock and Flint to his successor. Donald Trump, you might remember, wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. The new president is as unabashedly all-American as they come. Oh, and he just happens to have some of his own plundered money invested in the Dakota Access Pipeline, whose owners also conveniently donated to his campaign. 

Terrorism as the profiteers' weapon of choice is a grand American tradition that started the minute Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. Glorious greed is the whole basis of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. It's as bald and ugly as an obese plucked turkey.

  From Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States":

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.

 The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

 The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.

 A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narraganset Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots. As Governor Winthrop wrote: "They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampum for damages, etc. and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force." 

The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: "The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully... -"

And so it went. Pequot crops were slashed and burned, Pequot people died of European diseases if they didn't starve first, and their homes were razed to the ground, just like in blighted urban areas and foreclosed Rust Belt towns in the re-colonized States of the Homeland. The original assault against the native population was so intense and so thorough that in the end, perhaps a couple dozen inhabitants out of an original population of many thousands remained in any given locale. 

So let's contemplate how it felt, and how it still does feel for so many of us, to actually be on the receiving end of the imperialism that made this country so special.

But since I'm such a sucker for alternative history:

Wednesday (playing "Pocahontas")): Wait!

 Amanda: (a modern lady-who-lunches in the audience) What?

  Wednesday: We cannot break bread with you.

  Amanda: (playing Sarah, a pilgrim lady-who-lunches) Huh? Becky, what's going on?

  Becky: [whispered] Wednesday!

  Wednesday: You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."

  Amanda: Gary, she's changing the words.

  Wednesday: And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground. 

*** 

Here's wishing all my readers a very peaceful holiday weekend and a heartfelt thank you for your continuing interest and support. 

Dementia '16

The election of Donald Trump was not entirely a positive act of political free will. Leaving aside the fact that barely a quarter of eligible Americans voted for him, his victory had less to do with optimism that things will change, and more to do with a profound sense of despair that they ever can. The Electoral College victory also speaks to the passive-aggressive despair and disgust of the estimated half of eligible voters who chose to boycott the election between two of the most unpopular ruling class candidates in modern history.

  The election of Donald Trump might even be considered an outbreak of mass murder-suicide. The working class refugees who entered his hell abandoned all hope a long time ago. Maybe they figured they might as well take everybody down with them and check out quickly, rather than linger on, hooked up to the drip-drip-drip of the torturous neoliberal therapy prescribed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

For far too many of us, having hope and staying on the sunny side of life has become too damned exhausting. Pollyanna has been told in no uncertain terms to go take a hike. Why delay the inevitable? Bring on the noise, bring on the Trump.

Political theorist and media critic Franco "Bifo" Berardi writes pithily about the parallel right-wing depressive populism emerging in Europe:

Europe is a country of old people groping desperately for their lives, not out of love, but for property. A country of old people needing young nurses from the Philippines, Moldavia and Morocco; old idiots tormented by despising the agility of those young people, people who have suffered so much at our hands that they don't fear any more suffering, and don't care about the punishment of European law. Senile dementia (loss of memory, irrational fear of the unknown) is spreading in every generational stratum of European society, mentally frail and socially tired. Young voters who vote for rightest nationalist parties are no less obtuse than the frightened elderly, just as unable to think or find a way out of their conformism.

Berardi is not optimistic about how Trumpism and its global variants will play out. Everywhere we look, there are real and threatened pogroms, mass violence, inter-ethnic civil wars, unending global wars. Neoliberal pundits moan about divisiveness, but they seem unwilling or unable to ascribe it to the deadly, soul-destroying effects of plundering hyper-capitalism and the most extreme, demented wealth inequality in world history. The latest Oxfam report has 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the global population.

What Berardi calls "the ideology of unbounded growth and the cult of aggressive competition" must be replaced by a cultural revolution in basic human values. The brutalistic acquisition of money and property as ends in themselves, to which even the hopeless should aspire, has to give way to a program of sharing and solidarity.

It's not enough to shriek our outrage at Trump's daily outrages. It's not enough to vow that we will simply "fight back" against his personal brand of corruption, greed, racism and xenophobia. We have to acknowledge the fact that he himself is not the disease, but rather the symptom, or excrescence, of the disease. He ranks nowhere near those top 62 billionaires. But if he "succeeds" in his dystopian vision of the US presidency as the ultimate public-private partnership, he could well end up outdoing Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, the Waltons, and yes... even Vladimir Putin himself.

So, do you think it's therefore mentally healthy to put our faith in the sudden concern-trolling efforts of the deposed Democratic Party to vanquish Donald Trump? As the past eight years of the Obama administration have all too sadly shown, corporatism with a happy liberal face certainly did not prevent the rise of Trumpism. To the contrary, Obama's party has enabled and encouraged Donald Trump. He was their Pied Piper candidate. And just like in the fairy tale, now they think that they can avoid paying him.

The buzz that Barack Obama and his corporate backers and flunkies will use his post-presidency to form some sort of Democratic  government-in-exile, a resistance movement of wealthy identity-politics freedom fighters, would be laughable were it not so cynically dangerous.

 As political philosopher Simone Weil observed, political parties exist for four main reasons: to win power, to retain power, to raise a ton of money, and to attract new members.

And as his administration has proven, and Trump's administration is bound to horrifically prove, once pseudo-populists backed by establishment parties gain power, campaign promises for governance in the public interest quickly go by the wayside.  So are we really so terminally demented that we will continue to believe in Barack Obama's relentless propaganda even as we disavow Trump's?

Just look at the top consigliere of Obama's reanimated personality cult of a "political movement."

Multimillionaire David Plouffe cashed in on his own Obama service to become the public relations guru for Uber when its own Trump-like CEO was caught being a misogynist and tax evader. Once Plouffe performed some good liberal damage control in the mass media, he was immediately promoted to board member and legal adviser of the multinational corporation.  It's now his job to keep a happy face on the so-called "ride-sharing" multinational venture, which brags about allowing desperate victims of neoliberalism to become their own cab companies -- at least until the actual company unleashes its demented fleet of self-driving cars.

The business model of Uber actually has much in common with Donald Trump's business model.  Like Donald, Inc. Uber avoids paying the standard transportation licensing fees and liability insurance and other taxes which historically have allowed municipalities to build and maintain their roads, bridges and other infrastructure. This business model leaves ordinary people holding the bag so that Plouffe and Trump and the various plutocratic investors can laugh all the way to the bank.

Uber is just one of the latest clever exploitative ways to socialize the risks and privatize the gains.

Meanwhile, here's some of what Pollyanna Obama told his pal Plouffe and a phone audience of "volunteers" in an Organizing for Action (OFA) conference call last week: 

So stay close to each other.  Generate ideas.  Take some time to reflect and let’s brainstorm in terms of how you're going to work together to move forward.  Understand that I'm going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen.  But that's not so far off.  It's basically six, eight weeks away.  And I will have some time for vacation, but you're going to see me early next year, and we're going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do. 

In the meantime, make sure that you stay involved locally.  Find organizations that are speaking to your passions.  Continue to be engaged with OFA around issues that -- or just information and networking and ideas-sharing that can be done.  And if you do those things, I promise you that next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you, and the clouds are going to start parting and the sun is going to come back out, and we're going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we've been doing all these years before.

Among the amazing sunny stuff which he enlisted unpaid Obamabots to do for him was to market the job-destroying, wage-suppressing, environment-killing corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership to their unsuspecting friends and neighbors. I listened in on an OFA conference call on that topic last year. You can read a rough, scary transcript of the demented conversation here.

 And they say that Trump voters are delusional? There's plenty of authoritarianism and propaganda to go around. It is truly bipartisan in its utter brutality.  Luckily, the xenophobic Trumpian propaganda on the TPP ended up prevailing over the lovey-dovey Obamian propaganda on the TPP, and the deal is as good as dead. 

For now, anyway. The undead always seem to have this strange way of waking up just when you least expect it.

Speaking of which, Obama told his biographer, The New Yorker's David Remnick, that one of his main post-presidential goals is to create clones of himself and Michelle. I kid you not:

I’ll be fifty-five when I leave”—he knocked on a wooden end table—“assuming that I get a couple more decades of good health, at least, then I think both Michelle and I are interested in creating platforms that train, empower, network, boost the next generation of leadership. And I think that, whatever shape my Presidential center takes, I’m less interested in a building and campaign posters and Michelle’s dresses, although I think it’s fair to say that Michelle’s dresses will be the biggest draw by a huge margin. But what we’ll be most interested in is programming that helps the next Michelle Obama or the next Barack Obama, who right now is sitting out there and has no idea how to make their ideals live, isn’t quite sure what to do—to give them resources and ways to think about social change.”

If he were a true progressive, he would have called for better public education with higher pay for unionized teachers and curricula to hone critical thinking skills. He would have called for a global wealth tax on billionaires, a guaranteed federal housing policy, Medicare for All, and a guaranteed living wage or income to help all those budding public servants, and all the families of those budding public servants. Because if the next Barack and the next Michelle are cold and hungry and depressed, being unsure about what to do will be the least of their worries. As Bifo Berardi says, they first have to find a way out of neoliberal conformism and un-thought.

If Obama simply aims to groom his de-mented acolytes by steering them toward just the right FIRE sector funding for malleable politicians, and continues to propagandize about the social benefits of capitalism on crack, I won't be at all surprised.

And if people (and I mainly refer to the churnalists of the consolidated media) continue to give credence to the neoliberal Obama brand, then I have a driverless Uber car careening over a rickety bridge reinforced by cheap Chinese steel to sell them. It's built by $10-an-hour, non-union, no-benefit workers whose pensions were looted a long time ago by the same Wall Street investors cashing in on their sweat and tears and blood all over again. Their bridge spans a polluted river all the way to the twin deregulated empires of Kochtopia and Trumpistan.

Welcome to the new, improved New Abnormal.

 The corporate media, now engaged in their own self-pitying frenzy of victimhood-by-Trump, advise liberals to weep for the cameras, listen to soothing music, wear chic safety pins to show silent smarmy solidarity with the Vulnerables, and of course, shop. And then all hail the conquering public relations hero Barack Obama. And while you're waiting for his second coming, ponder the published reports that, as a self-anointed speaker to our passions, Chelsea Clinton is being groomed for Congress.

We have a choice. Run for the hills and wallow in terminal depression. Or resist, rebel, and retool. Give sanity a chance. Re-mentia, not de-mentia.

Donald the Dread

This might sound perverse, but as part of my post-Trump therapy I've been reading a biography of Ivan the Terrible.

No, I am not steeling myself for the dark days when the American Tsar (Caesar) and his corporate coalition of Oprichniki flay his political opponents alive before poking holes in the icy Potomac to dispose of their dismembered bodies. (especially since it's been the Hottest Year on Record for each of the last several hot years.) And I really doubt that Trump will personally murder one of his own sons and drink his blood for dessert. (although, once Obama hands over his unrevised Drone Kill List playbook to Trump, never say never. A taste for blood is said to be an acquired one)

But there are disturbing similarities between the dead autocrat and the would-be living autocrat.

Both are clinical paranoiacs, alternately attracted to and repelled by their various advisers --  who always run the risk of banishment or worse whenever their thin-skinned leader inevitably suffers one of those twittering fits of pique.

 So, to all the liberal pundits out there, clutching their pearls and biting their nails over every Trump appointment or rumored appointment:  Just wait a short attention-spanned Trumpian minute. Where Chris Christie went, so too may eventually go Steve Bannon and the rest of Trump's mutant coalition of alt-right racists, Ayn Rand ideologues and demented military men.

I learned from my reading that just like Donald, Ivan was a beauty contest junkie/owner/operator. He chose each of his suspiciously short-lived wives from "bride-shows." After his minions scoured the Russian countryside in search of babes to be brought back to Moscow, he ordered the terrified women stripped naked for his inspection. Just like Donald, he had his own rating system.  Among his diplomatic skills was the demand that the wife of the Swedish king be awarded to him as the price of a truce between the two realms.  (She voluntarily opted for prison.)

Toward the end of his sadistic reign, Ivan even made some moves (from afar, through her trade reps) on Elizabeth I of England. When she politely rebuffed him, he pressed her for the hand of one of her younger relatives. The trade rep suggested a young niece named Mary. Horrified, the canny but diplomatic Elizabeth sent word to Ivan that Mary was sadly not only not a Perfect Ten, she was scarred by smallpox. This was a lie, but it was more than enough to scare Ivan away forever. 

Like Ivan, Donald is a kleptocrat. Ivan the Terrible looted the rich as well as the peasants. Donald the Dread has been looting ordinary American taxpayers as well as wealthy investors for decades, via his status as a tax-dodging indebted billionaire real estate speculator holding all his bankers hostage. If he fails, they all fail. And that is probably what Barack Obama meant when he said that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. America, of course, is code for the oligarchy.

Like Ivan before him, Donald Trump is a feared man, but even his base of voters and the powerful men and women now groveling at his gilded feet for a job in his administration don't actually love, or even like him.

Finally, the bland smiley politician-face is in neither man's limited repertoire of expressions.

 

I suspect that before too long, Donald's only true believers will be his wife and his children. Ivan's only true believers were the occasional wife and the rare surviving child.

At least, unlike in Ivan's 16th century Russia, we do have a Constitution and alleged checks and balances in the form of a Congress and a court system. All that Ivan's subjects had to protect them was a corrupt Church and a simpering monk or two to keep him under control at extremely rare intervals. Despite his atrocities, he believed in God and quoted the Bible. He simply thought that a stint in Hell didn't apply to him, the anointed one.

Donald is more into the modern capitalist worship of Mammon, and rarely if ever utters the standard platitude "God Bless America." He is the only god he needs. It will be interesting to see whether he continues the presidential tradition of the Prayer Breakfast, the annual gala for global bigwigs to do their wheeling and dealing and looting in the name of the lord. He might just end up sending his theocratic veep Mike Pence in his stead.

So, although Sinclair Lewis's warning that "It" (fascism minus the anesthetizing liberal sheen) does indeed appear to be happening here, "It" will not likely happen overnight. We might just succeed in barely hanging on by our fingernails as we hope that once Trump wears out his welcome, he won't be succeeded by another Wall Street Democrat.

And that brings me to  Paul Krugman's premature Elegy for Medicare, published in today's New York Times. As I have written previously, because it will not be the Clintons triangulating merrily and stealthily with the Republicans in the latest round of safety net slashings, those battered, semi-delusional Democrats might actually screw up the gumption (along with their base) to "fight back" against Trump and his own mad monk, that simpering Ayn Rand fanboy named Paul Ryan.

But who's counting on the corporate Democrats, or Krugman's feeble boast that pundits like him are the only antidote to Republican lies? The same columnist who so sneeringly sniped against Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All proposals now purports to be an ardent defender of Medicare for the Few. Krugman sprays out his cheap, sickly-sweet room freshener to vie with Trump's own rancid skunk cabbage patch for just the right neoliberal share of the mass asphyxia.

My published comment:

The Howard Zinn aphorism "what matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but who is marching outside the White House" has never been truer or more urgent.

In the face of the almost unbelievable eagerness of the political leadership to "work with" Donald the Dread, it is imperative for the three-quarters of the electorate who DID NOT vote for him to make our voices heard.

It's heartening that a coalition of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street activists staged a sit-down in Minority Leader-elect Chuck Schumer's office this week. And that thousands of high school students are leaving their places of learning and closing down highways to protest looming deportations and threats to climate change agreements. Young people are learning the most valuable lesson possible: they're learning that they have power and agency.

It's up to all of us to strike fear into the alleged hearts of those in Congress with a sudden psychopathic hankering to do business with a psychopath. If they won't protect Medicare and Social Security and other safety net programs out of a sense of altruism and duty, then perhaps they'll do the right thing out of fear of losing their cushy seats.

Trump is beyond redemption. This is a guy who once cut off his own sick nephew's health insurance when Fred Trump neglected to provide for it in his will.

It was only bad publicity that eventually changed his mind.

So let's make Trump and his Ayn Rand co-conspirators an offer they can't refuse.

And here's the excellent riposte from Meredith-NYC:

 Lack of affordable health insurance still afflicts millions, as premiums rise, or insurance co’s pull out. Families deprived of bread winners to illness, or who have to pay for their elders' soaring medical costs, can lose what security they’ve managed to build up in our Darwinian economic system.

But Krugman is still not giving us info on many other countries, where citizens of all ages, working or not, pay their taxes for and use their medical services —at much less expense than ACA. US Medicare and the supplemental still cost hefty monthly premiums.

He avoids discussing America’s basic flaw---health care as a maximum profit center. And contrast this with govts abroad who negotiate insurance costs, or are single payer. Even their rw parties don’t aim to destroy this. Backward America needs these role models publicized by the media, to demand reform.

A friend in his 30s complains of having to read through dozens of pages of documents to choose his insurance enrollment. And it’s complicated legalese---what does he have to pay for basic catastrophic coverage if he gets hit by a bus? And if he’s traveling and needs emergency care, how does he know a nearby hospital is in his network? He can’t know. So if he’s hit by a bus out of town, he may also be hit by tens of thousands in expenses as well.

Yes, bash Trumpf, but how can Americans demand standards common in the rest of the civilized world, if our liberals with a conscience don’t even use this in their arguments?

Some Propagandists Are More Equal Than Others

President Obama momentarily forgot his conciliatory overtures to President-elect Trump the other day as he grasped at yet another straw man to blame for the ignominious defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Not only did the Real Media fall down on their assigned job of propagandizing Hillary or Bust, complained Obama, but something called "Fake News" has arisen from the Internet swamp and gobbled up all our brains. This sad state of affairs has even taken the self-burnished luster right off his own final propaganda tour of the globe.

As a stalwart example of Real Media in the service of the powerful, the New York Times was its usual commiserating self as it reported on Obama's joint press conference Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

But instead of basking in the glow of his valedictory tour of Europe, Mr. Obama used the moment to make a passionate and pointed attack on bogus news stories disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms, twice calling such false reports a threat to democracy in his hourlong news conference.

(snip)

 “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” Mr. Obama said. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”

Thank goodness that Obama's own packaged reporting on the Athens leg of his grandiose tour was so outstanding. His press office sent out the equivalent of millions of pretty "wish you were here" postcards of him touring Greek ruins and antiquities. Recipients of his travel diary were gratifyingly shielded from unpleasant scenes of 7,000 desperate and angry Greek citizens being tear-gassed and beaten in the streets mere blocks from his heavily fortified seaside hotel. The people were democratically protesting both American militarism and the austerity measures inflicted upon them by the global banking elite, which Obama has so ably represented and protected during his eight years in office.

Obama knows very well what, and whom, to protect.

So here's what he wants you to watch on TV and read about on the Internet:

The Well-Packaged President

 “And so when you visit a site like this not only are you getting a better understanding of Greece and Western culture but you’re also sending a signal of the continuity that exists between what happened here, the speeches of Pericles, and what happened with our Founding Fathers.

“And it’s a very important role for the President of the United States to send a signal to the world that their culture, their traditions, their heritage, their monuments, are something of value, and are precious, and that we have learned from them." 

 Despite all the noise from the Real Media, its Nate Silver-ized signalling of probabilities and statistics failed abysmally during the recent election. But never mind all that. Obama will keep sending out his own magical signals in hopes of beating alt-Fake News in the brain-gobbling sweepstakes.

And here's the part of the presidential visit that your virtue-signalling Tour Guide to Democracy studiously ignored, and what he'd prefer you to miss as well. Monuments and statues and ancient literature co-opted in the service of self-serving American propaganda are apparently more valuable and precious to Obama than hungry and desperate modern-day human bodies:

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama’s visit to Greece on Tuesday was met by angry protesters held back by riot police firing tear gas. About 7,000 people marched through central Athens while Obama attended a banquet at the presidential mansion just a few miles away. Hooded protesters and members of the Communist Party held up signs reading “We don’t need protectors,” “Yankees go home” and “Unwanted,” while some demonstrators tried to break through police cordons to get to the U.S. embassy. The protest saw violent clashes, with some demonstrators throwing petrol bombs at police. While Obama met with Greek leaders to express support for the debt-stricken country, the protesters appeared to be angry about the timing of the visit. Obama, the first U.S. president to visit Athens since Bill Clinton in 1999, was in town just two days before the anniversary of a 1973 revolt that helped oust a military junta backed by the U.S.

And from Obama's rarified alternate universe of approved bogus news:

 Above, Beyond, and Away From It All

a

 "Because what that does then is send a strong signal around the world that we view ourselves as part of a broader humanity and a community of nations that can work together to solve problems and lift up what’s best in humanity.”

 And the last signalling word from the Real World: