The Burdened Sourpusses of the Ruling Class

Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defense -- Mark Twain.

It was the guffaw heard round the world. Code Pink protester Desiree Fairooz snorted in disbelief when she heard Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III lauded as a champion of racial justice at his Senate confirmation hearing on January 10th. She and her group were duly escorted out of the building for daring to poke fun at Sessions and his whole crowd of withered old racist reprobates.

Since the Department of Jiffy Jeffy Justice then insanely insisted on prosecuting Fairooz and two other protesters on disorderly conduct charges, and actually found a jury intimidated enough to convict them, it's the guffaw that will go right on echoing, ad infinitum. Sessions and his cronies will go down in history as one of the prickliest bunch of thin-skinned misanthropes who ever couldn't take a joke.

And this particular joke is totally on them. The video clip of Code Pink protesters mocking both him and his policies would have been lost in cyberspace were it not for the Trump government's paranoid overreaction to it.

The prosecuting attorney helpfully rebroadcast Code Pink's trenchant message, railing to the jury that “Her disruptive behavior included yelling that Senator Sessions’ ‘voting record was evil’ and waving a sign that read: ‘Support civil rights, stop [S]essions’.”

Stop Stop Stop Sessions Sessions Sessions Evil Evil Evil. Support civil rights! plead the enemies of civil rights, over and over and over again. 

Jocular Jeff To America: Don't Laugh At Me, Or Else!

Like any bully, Sessions can dish it out, but he can't take it. His own many stale attempts at humor, such as denying voting rights to black people, have had a history of falling flat whenever presented to the Supreme Court for its amusement. And then there was his recent crack about Hawaii being nothing but an "island in the Pacific" after a federal judge there ruled against Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. Sessions apparently was unaware that not only is the state of Hawaii a whole series of islands, it was admitted to the union more than half a century ago. When you're an old racist reprobate like Jiffy Jeff, it must be very hard to escape from your imperialist, colonialist state of mind. Or should I say mindlessness.

The racism is hanging around his withered old neck like a rotting Confederate tombstone. Because in Jeff Sessions' America, they're still partying like it's 1860, or its twin, 1899. In Jeff Sessions' America, Rudyard Kipling still reigns at the top of the charts:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Just as American imperialists have always cracked down on their fluttered subjects like little boys ripping the wings from butterflies, so too do the Trumpist authoritarians want to teach a lesson to anyone not kowtowing to them with all the requisite sullenness. These officials intimidate and flail so mindlessly, because they are so deathly afraid of being mocked.

"Authoritarianism and a sense of humor rarely go together," writes Amnesty International's Steve Crawshaw in the new book Street Spirit.  "That's where protesters can gain the upper hand - or at least find an excuse to laugh at their rulers or other powerful players (who, in turn, have little clue how to react.)"

"Laughtivists"  adds Crawhaw, "can help destroy the sense of invulnerability that unwanted rulers need in order to sustain themselves. The more they are persecuted by these rulers, the more afraid and vulnerable the rulers themselves are made to appear."

I never would have heard late night comic Stephen Colbert's tasteless joke about Donald Trump were it not for the news that Trump's Federal Communications Commission is investigating him for possible violations of obscenity laws. Thanks to the thin-skinned authoritarians currently in charge,  Colbert's previously moribund ratings are nearly high enough to even surpass Trump's in his reality show heyday.

Now, because of government overreaction, we'll never be able to get that hideous image of Trump in the act of pleasuring Putin out of our minds. If there's one thing that might keep the boring RussiaGate scandal alive in the minds of American consumers, it's making a dirty joke out of it.

Hillary Clinton must be grimly cackling all the way to her new SuperPac as she hilariously tries to refashion herself as the elite face of the Trump Resistance. Therefore, it is all the more vital that we resist her brand of Resistance -- Elitivism -- with all the persistence we can muster. Our continuing existence as the free laughtivists of the Counter-Resistance depends upon it.

In case you're feeling depleted and powerless in the face of all this daunting resistant elitism, take a break from mocking the withered racist corpus of Jeff Sessions, and remember another monumentally tasteless joke. It was back in 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, that then-Madame Secretary Hillary quipped: "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

As Crawshaw writes in his book, millions of ordinary Egyptians then began to laugh so heartily that they took to Tahrir Square in a fit of peaceful protest, and Mubarek soon shuffled his dour way out the door to several years in the slammer. But that was a dictatorship, and we Americans still enjoy a modicum of constitutional rights. If only Mubarek had installed a private server and pretended to be holding a free and fair electoral primary. If only he'd cracked a scripted joke or two. If only WikiLeaks had not become the face of public interest journalism, then the fortunes of the Mubareks and the Clintons might be very different today.

The joke was on the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party when WikiLeaks emails revealed that Citigroup had literally appointed Barack Obama's cabinet for him. The treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was able to deadpan his way through his own Senate confirmation hearing, insisting that his failure to pay his personal income taxes was just an oversight. He later cracked the sick joke that foreclosing on victimized homeowners would be stretched out so as to "foam the runway" for unprosecuted banksters. He and his cronies laughed all the way to the bank in one big fat big circle of fun.

In case you're still not getting the neoliberal, insiderish brand of dry elitivist counter-humor, try this, because Hillary Clinton had her audience absolutely shaking. How could any one political standup routine be so creatively zany?

So you see, laughtivists, it really is possible to both loathe Trump and to rejoice that Hillary Clinton lost the election.

The selective enforcement of the obscenity laws, meanwhile, is rendered all the more ironic given that Obama's FCC had given a cynical free pass to last fall's permanent feedback loop broadcasts of Donald Trump's infamous "pussy-grabbing" remarks. Who even knew that there were still obscenity laws on the books? The Democratic Party must have mistakenly believed that Americans are still shocked by obscenity. But rather than protecting people's ears, they preferred that people get shocked into voting for Hillary by the drumming up of maximum disgust at the more disgusting Donald Trump.

They preferred in vain.

The hypocrisy is just so damned funny, it's hard to even breathe sometimes.

Even so, the possibilities for hoi polloi mischief and guffaws get more endless with every passing day. Who gets the last laugh is yet to be determined.

 Sessions, Geithner, Clinton, & Unidentified Prankster Enjoy Moment of Mirth At Your Expense

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Brutalism We Can Believe In

Barack and Michelle Obama parachuted down to Chicago this week to unveil plans for their "family-friendly" $500 million architectural marvel.

This is their idea of family friendliness:

The Obama Center

Gee. Where have we seen this warm, comfy style of architecture before? Oh, now I remember. It's ye olde Aztec temple where all the families used to gather to watch their relatives get sacrificed in order to appease some chronically peevish deities who bore a striking resemblance to our own pantheon of Forbes 400 billionaires.

The Aztec Center

It's not as though people haven't been warned. As the blurb for The Obama Center so seductively purrs: "Greater Designers Design With Mankind in Mind."

And Obama has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing more than To Serve Man for the rest of his life. His library will be so much more than "an ego trip," he gushed. By boasting that it will even include facilities for "family barbecues", he was giving us very fair warning indeed. Why else construct his monolithic edifice with such monstrously awe-inspiring blocks of stone reminiscent of barbaric regimes past? I suppose that once you've enjoyed the power to order thousands of extrajudicial drone killings, it must be very hard to kick the cruelty habit.

"Through participatory and immersive experiences, the Center will tell Barack and Michelle Obama's story," the Obama Center website ominously intones, "while lifting the hood on the mechanics of change and inspiring visitors to spark their own."

I am starting to not like this. I am starting to get scared. There are already too many allusions to drowning and burning in this enterprise for my particular taste. What are we anyway -- hamburgers and weenies to be poked and prodded for doneness when the barbeque hood is lifted? Or are we nothing but failing engines in dire need of the Barack and Michelle lube job special?

Generously forgoing their usual $600,000 joint appearance fee in order to display their "renderings," the Obamas appeared relaxed after a three month series of tropical vacations. According to the New York Times,

 Speaking to several hundred people on the city’s South Side, Mr. Obama, who was tieless and in a jovial mood, said that the center could be “a transformational project for this community.”

“The main thing that Michelle and I contributed was just saying, ‘What is it that we want to see 10 years from now?’” he said, recounting his conversations with the architects who designed the center. “And we don’t want to see some big building that’s dead, and kids are getting dragged to it for a field trip. What we wanted was something that was alive, and that was a hub for the community and for the city and for the country.”

 (snip)

Mr. Obama said he wanted his library to include a children’s play area that would attract families from the neighborhood, and a community garden for schoolchildren. He said he wanted food trucks and some grills so people can barbecue, prompting chuckles from the crowd.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked. “We don’t have any folks who grill here? I thought this was the South Side of Chicago!

The Aztec kings also attracted families to their temples with food and games and music and bling in order to make the sacrificial experience and the repayment of onerous debt to rent-seeking deities a fun time for everybody. The chuckling wealthy donors in Obama's crowd were simply ignoring history as much as Donald Trump (who already has too many numerous shrines to even mention) when they so snobbishly snicker over the basic needs of the masses. Even Obama himself was being deliberately disingenuous, what with pretending that the oligarchs in his audience don't have "people" to do all their cooking for them. 

 Because Mrs. Obama lamented that Jackson Park did not have hills when she was a child growing up in the nearby South Shore neighborhood, Mr. Obama said the presidential center would be outfitted with a sledding hill.

Not that the Obama family will ever have to use a measly old sledding hill, given their annual luxury vacations to Aspen, courtesy of the war-profiteering and drone-manufacturing Crown family, the early financiers of his political career.

 Mr. Obama said he envisioned “a studio where I can invite Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg to do workshops on how to make films,” and “a recording studio where I could invite Chance or Bruce Springsteen, depending on your tastes, to talk about how you could record music that has social commentary and meaning.”

Oh, now I get it. It won't just be a temple, it will also be a Prince-style recording studio and oligarchic party venue all wrapped up into one big monolith. All Barry will have to do is snap his fingers and the mega-celebrities of the world will appear like magic to do his bidding. And every once in awhile, the sledding and barbecuing hoi polloi might even get invited in to gawk and be inspired, and forget that they haven't gotten a real raise in decades and that they will owe hundreds of thousands in student debt until the day they prematurely die. It's no accident that the chairman of the Obama Foundation is Martin Nesbitt, Barry's best friend.  Nesbitt is the founder of the private equity group that purchased the crooked for-profit University of Phoenix, which has profited so mightily off unpayable student debt. Some of the same Wall Street characters who comprised Obama's cabinet have now spun through the revolving doors to feed at the trough of Obama's money-laundering post presidential career.

But forget about your cares and woes and Obama's historical corruption. There's always plenty of mush to consume from his New York Times-assisted public relations campaign:

“What we want this to be is the world’s premier institution for training young people in leadership to make a difference in their countries, in their communities and in the world,” he said.

Not just any institution, but the best, most premier institution on the entire planet. Stop by for a quick training session and be ready to go back to any third world country or neighborhood with some really premier neoliberal propaganda to appease the millions of people worried about where their next meal is coming from.

It's eerie that Obama's mantra of "giving back to the community" is the same dogma employed in the sacrificial rites of the Aztecs. In one ritual, the designated victim was made to intone, right before his or her heart was cut out: "I embrace mankind. I give myself back to the community." 

 So I don't understand why Obama tiptoes around the reality that we actually are the next meal for the global billionaire class of ravenous and malevolent gods. 

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Hypocrisy and History in the Age of Trump

To hear the establishment media tell it, you'd think that Donald Trump was the only president in American history ever to have extended a friendly hand to a murderous foreign autocrat.

According to the critics, Trump relies upon his primitive reptile brain rather than upon his cerebral cortex whenever he performs foreign policy. When Trump reaches out to The Philippines' dastardly Rodrigo Duterte, he's being stupid and naive. When, on the other hand, Barack Obama sold Saudi autocrats billions of dollars in weapons with which to to kill innocent Yemenis, he was being coolly pragmatic. When Obama played a genial round of golf in Hawaii with Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak, and later whitewashed that strongman's abysmal record of graft and human trafficking, he did so for the intelligent altruistic purpose of raking in more profits for multinational corporations via the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He didn't do it to build a hotel with his name on it.

So the Washington Post approvingly gushed about Obama's Christmas golf course diplomacy with the corrupt Malaysian leader in 2014,

Obama has established perhaps a better working relationship with Najib, after making the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to Malaysia in nearly half a century last spring. It was unlikely they had an in-depth discussion of their foreign policy agendas on the course, however, but perhaps focusing instead on trying to avoid the sand traps.
In a statement, the White House said: "The two leaders took the opportunity to discuss the growing and warming relationship between the United States and Malaysia.  The president said he looked forward to working with Prime Minister Najib in 2015, during Malaysia's chair year of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations."

 Obama's hypocrisy (in removing Malaysia from the list of the world's worst human traffickers based solely on Razak's shallow promise to try to cut back on all those shallow graves) bothered Democratic Party officials only insofar as the "optics" of it might endanger their future electoral prospects.

According to a 2015 leaked email sent to Hillary Clinton's campaign director by one of her operatives, it wasn't the fate of hundreds of Malaysian sex trafficking victims that bothered them. It was the possible "backlash" from labor groups. Or, so their cerebral cortices alerted them.

Of course, now that Donald Trump is himself calling Najib Razak "one of my favorite prime ministers," the righteous critics are getting very worried about the relationship. Trump even had the temerity to partner with Najib in a game at his New Jersey golf course several years ago.

There's plenty to criticize Trump for, of course, but the growing hysteria over his diplomatic efforts fairly reeks of hypocrisy on steroids. Methinks that those gleefully mocking Trump's ignorance of American history should probably take a refresher course in that subject themselves.

"Trump's 'Very Friendly' Talk With Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike," blares the New York Times headline. As Mark Landler explains:

During their “very friendly conversation,” the administration said in a late-night statement, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects in the Philippines, to visit him at the White House.

Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.

It's a good thing the bureaucrats aren't raising objections over the United States' own policy of extrajudicial drone killings conducted under the last three presidents. It might make them seem  ignorant of history and hypocritical at the same time. 

“By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”

Trump has a personality disorder, whereas Barack Obama and George W. Bush were both perfectly sane as they not only bombed thousands of innocent people to death, but perpetuated America's own murderous war on "drugs" -- meaning, of course, the war on drug-takers. This includes using the CIA to funnel weapons to drug cartels as well as ensuring that poor people became addicted to drugs, the better to criminalize them and to imprison them.

And Senator Murphy should definitely read Stephen Kinzer's excellent new book about the birth of American imperialism (The True Flag) before he bloviates about human rights. It was Theodore Roosevelt, the inventor of the term "bully pulpit," who after the illegal US attack on The Philippines in 1898, subsequently oversaw the massacre of more than two thousand innocent Filipinos just for the sheer jingoistic enjoyment of it. And it was President Bill Clinton who, selectively forgetting history himself, posthumously awarded Roosevelt the Medal of Freedom.

But never mind all that, because the Times is not done ginning up its selective outrage quite yet:

It is not even clear, given the accusations of human rights abuses against him, that Mr. Duterte would be granted a visa to the United States were he not a head of state, according to human rights advocates.

Still, Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. Duterte, and other strongmen as well, is firmly established. Both presidents are populist insurgent leaders with a penchant for making inflammatory statements. Both ran for office calling for a wholesale crackdown on Islamist militancy and the drug trade. And both display impatience with the courts.

So I guess that means that no more Saudi kings and other autocrats will ever be welcome upon our exceptional shores in the future, right?  Of course that's not what the Times is getting at, not at all. Their beef is that past presidents and their chosen (subservient and cooperative) global buddies are more proficient at protocol and politesse. Normal presidents never make inflammatory statements as they go about their killing sprees. They are very careful to manipulate their silverware correctly at state dinners, and to blandly use all the proper nouns and verbs when making public statements. When American presidents want to ignore the Constitution, they're not supposed to say so right out loud. Instead, they have their lawyers draft secret memos and opinions which allow the extrajudicial atrocities. Or, they go very circumspectly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get the necessary rubber stamps for whatever they want to get away with... far away from public scrutiny and accountability.

 The Times article persistently plods ahead:

Mr. Trump has drawn the line with one autocrat: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose chemical weapons strike on his own people prompted the American president to order a Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.

But Mr. Trump’s affinity for strongmen is instinctive and longstanding. He recently called to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on his victory in a much-disputed referendum expanding his powers, which some critics painted as a death knell for Turkish democracy.

Never mind that there is as yet no concrete evidence that Assad ever ordered a chemical weapons strike. All that matters is that deep within the reptilian part of his primitive brain, Trump has an instinctive love for strongmen. Every democracy he touches turns into lead.

The affinity of American presidents for foreign strongmen is nothing new. Franklin Roosevelt, a president who also occasionally acted on instinct, was a big fan of Benito Mussolini before World War II spoiled the camaraderie. Il Duce congratulated FDR on his 1932 victory. And,Historian Mark Weber writes,

President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for the Italian leader, and sent him cordial letters. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to an American envoy: “... I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.” In another letter a few weeks later, the President wrote: “I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.”
Mussolini's regime received particularly warm praise from America's business leaders. In his 1972 work, Prof. Diggins writes (pp. 146-47): "With few exceptions, the dominant voices of business responded to Fascism with a hearty enthusiasm. Favorable editorials, could be read in publications such as Barron's, Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, Commerce and Finance, Nation's Business (the official organ of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the reputable Wall Street Journal. Aside from the press, the list of outspoken business admirers reads like a Wall Street 'Who's Who'."

Some things never change. Hypocrisy is as wholesome and normal as apple pie, Mom, and the true flag. And, of course, golf.

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Making May Day Great Again

In nearly each of the six years of this blog's existence, I've written a commemorative post honoring May Day, the international holiday set aside to honor the rights and accomplishments of workers.  My common theme was that although the global meaning of May Day was born out of the labor struggles which culminated in Chicago's Haymarket Massacre, the United States itself has officially ignored the occasion. Instead, our politicians designated the first Monday in September as "labor day" in order to placate nervous and predatory capitalist employers and to make the holiday all about summer's last gasp, to be celebrated with parades and barbeques and pandering political speeches.

But thanks in large part to the election of Donald Trump, the true meaning of May Day is coming back with a healthy vengeance. Americans by the tens of thousands are joining with their international brothers and sisters to fight for the rights of the working people in general, and immigrant workers in particular. Even though it is not a legal holiday, people are ditching work and school and even forgoing shopping trips in order to take to the streets in some long-overdue solidarity.

  Today's actions, which happen to fall on the 150th anniversary of the first eight-hour day law ever passed in the United States, are forecast to be the biggest general strike in decades.

This is in spite of Trump's made-for-TV rally for the Rust Belt on Saturday night, when corporate-funded cable networks went along with the ratings spectacle, even as their own journalists were made the perfect scapegoats of the evening as they indulged themselves at their annual self-congratulatory dinner.

Trump simply uses the divide-and-conquer tactics beloved of robber barons throughout history. Whenever they've needed to quell civil unrest, they've diverted attention from their own greedy selves. Although an oafish novice at the give and take of national politics, Trump has long been an expert of stoking the politics of violence and resentment. Our demagogic president's shtick is not only to feel your pain, but to place himself smack dab in the middle of all the free-floating persecution. Despite his billions, there is no difference between Trump and you, his down-and-out audience. That is the only  solidarity you should believe in. He hasn't fulfilled all his promises yet, but by golly, isn't it fun to mock those liberal East Coast snobs in their gowns and their black ties? Isn't it fun to hate the clueless elites of CNN and the New York Times, and forget all about that stack of unpaid bills for at least a couple of hours? Isn't it cathartic to blame "illegals" for stealing your jobs out from under you? Isn't it satisfying to blame other countries for your dire financial straits,  rather than to aim your anger where it truly belongs: at the oligarchs and the multinational corporations, mostly headquartered in America, which have sucked up more than 90% of the wealth recovered since the 2008 financial meltdown?

Trump no doubt hoped to rile up his audience enough to form counter-protest blocs on May Day. If bloody fights again break out, as they recently have in places like Berkeley, between his supporters and opponents , then it will become all the easier for corporate media to ignore the true meaning and message of this day: demands for a living wage and equal pay for equal work, health and safety protections on job sites,critiquing the inhumanity of the gig economy, and highlighting the growing demands for universal health care and for enhanced Social Security benefits for retired workers as well as for their survivors, and for the sick, injured, and disabled.

But Trump, media tycoon that he is, knows very well that if it bleeds, it leads. And so does the rest of the plutocracy, with its pathological and historical vested interest in keeping working people down, out, and permanently oppressed. So think of his Saturday night rally as a warm-up act. He wants nothing more than to turn struggling people against one another and transform our streets into Fight Club USA. Let the little people beat each other up as the rising tide of greed elevates Trump and his fellow swamp creatures

We have to keep the solidarity alive and remember that this is not just about fighting Donald Trump. It's about fighting the whole Neoliberal Project and turning the tables in the class war.

This is not, as Trump bellows, about taking the country back for the benefit of a handful of pathocratic "job creators". This is about us, taking our entire world back while there's still barely enough time to save both it and ourselves from premature and tragic death. 

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Don of the Hundred Days Vs. Barry the Buckraker

Everybody who's anybody in the corporate media bubble is talking about the First Hundred Days of Trump's presidency. Since I don't live in the corporate media bubble, I don't care about this milestone and won't contribute to the churnalistic echo chamber. I'll just sum it all up by observing that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.The rich continue to get richer, the poor continue to get poorer. And our elected leaders and their greedy plutocratic clients will never lose their appetite for endless war and plunder all over the globe. For them, what should be the main course is always just the appetizer.

Meanwhile, there was a shallow phony outrage side-issue this week. The  media bubble is aghast, aghast I tell you, that the saintly Barack Obama is raking in $400,000 per speech. Liberals are upset not because Obama is proving himself to be just one more avaricious plutocrat, but because his shameless cupidity is making the moribund Democratic Party look even worse than it already does. With Buckraking Barry sucking up some of the negative energy from Dastardly Don, it's getting even harder for the party to salvage its tattered reputation as it sends out ever more feeble SOS's of virtue-signalling.

Michelle Obama should perhaps boil down her simpering battle cry from "When they go low, we go high" to "We live high."

Populist superwoman Elizabeth Warren daintily offered that she is "troubled" that Obama now has the audacity to be claiming his deferred compensation for all those hard years of being the only thing standing between the bankers and the pitchforks. But in the spirit of Washington etiquette, Warren studiously avoided criticizing the ex-president. She has finally achieved the true Insider status she once so passionately decried. 

In her first memoir, written in the waning days of her outsiderism, Warren described a dinner with Obama economic adviser Larry Summers: 

Late in the evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. By now, I’d lost count of Larry’s Diet Cokes, and our table was strewn with bits of food and spilled sauces. Larry’s tone was in the friendly-advice category. He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
I had been warned.

  Warren apparently heeded the warning. Because when confronted this week over the antics of Barry the Buckraker, she only groused generically about the influence of big money on "this place." Individuals are never held accountable for their actions in This Place. Only geography is held accountable. Or maybe it's The System.

Likewise for Bernie Sanders, fresh off his "unity tour" of trying to lure disgusted voters from their ruined lives into the stultifying atmosphere of the tattered Democratic tent. He hilariously called Obama's big payday "unfortunate." What he meant, of course, is that the optics are unfortunate, not that Obama's growing multimillion-dollar fortune itself is unfortunate.

As pro-Democratic organ Salon puts it, Obama wearing his greed right on his sleeve is really bad for the party's "brand." It's not that his piggishness will irritate his own loyal personality cult, it's that it makes him look like a hypocrite to the gleeful Vast Right Wing Alt-Right Conspiracy.

"It's not a good look," Sanders clarified.

Sure it is, Bernie! Look on the bright side, and think about it this way: Obama is putting some much-needed liberal gloss on the Gordon Gekko mantra. As an extra value-added bonus, his orgy of buckraking makes even the avaricious kleptocrat Donald Trump seem almost normal. If Obama is good and Obama is greedy, then it naturally follows that Greed is not only Good, it is better than ever. 

Trump should have nothing to worry about from here on out, especially if he continues to faithfully follow Obama's lead by sanctimoniously bombing the hell out of any country of his choosing. If he continues to satisfy the corporate media bubble's ravenous appetite for death and destruction, then the transition from indirect oligarchic rule under Obama to direct oligarchic rule under Trump might end up being remembered as a minor bump in the road. Trump's had very a rocky first hundred days of his on-the-job training session. He's found it difficult to master the art of public relations. Unlike his smooth-talking predecessor, he's been so uncouth. He unfashionably lumbers and blusters, and the media have become way too spoiled by the previous president charming and strutting and chin-stroking his way through office.

The Art of Obama Maintenance: Fashion To Die For

Bernie and Liz should just relax about the Zen Master of Cool's quest for cash. Pretty soon, nobody who's anybody will probably even care. Because as the magazine for men, Esquire, gushingly foretold just a couple of months ago, "Obama's most stylish days are yet to come."

When you wear a cool leather jacket while stepping off your private jet on your way to yet another schmooze-fest with your Wall Street buddies, nobody who's anybody in the churnalistic bubble will ever dare be so insensitive as to ponder how much money you're charging for gracing the world with your existence. They'll be too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing over your sartorial splendor:

Returning from their vacation in the Virgin Islands, the former president and first lady were photographed in an excellent display of airport style. Michelle looked chic as always in a black turtleneck and oversized cardigan. And Barack absolutely nailed his casual style with dark blue jeans, a gray button-front shirt, brown leather shoes, and the crowning piece: a slim brown leather jacket.

If only Donald Trump could get his own fashion shit together so awesomely, the Esquire reporter sniffed in conclusion. Barry looks so laid-back and cosmopolitan wearing his mantle of dead cow, while Trump with his Archie Bunker accent and his polyester baseball cap and his oversized ties comes across as a "try-too-hard aging rocker." Ugh.

So let the shallow journalistic idiots continue scratching their heads and wondering why Trump's "deplorable" fans still swear their undying fealty to him despite all his broken promises to them and his failure to drain the swamp.

Let Obama keep raking in the bucks and showing the real world more of the true inner core lurking beneath the shiny weeds.

  Then let both sides of the Uniparty collapse from the weight of their own corruption that much sooner. Let new political organizations and movements rise from their neoliberal ashes and their pricey leather jackets and their money-laundering charitable foundations and their ever more unabashed use of public office for private gain.

Let the timeless, vintage fashion of social democracy make one of its periodic and long-overdue comebacks.

The Bland Semantics of Capital Punishment

Press accounts of the Monday night executions in Arkansas of two convicted murderers are almost universally anodyne.

"Arkansas" ordered the lethal injections, which were then approved by the "courts," whose orders were finally obeyed by "Arkansas" in an utterly passive manner. No human beings, either as individuals or as groups, are made to bear any moral responsibility for the taking of two lives. 

The headlines seemingly come from the same corporate media echo chamber:

Arkansas Executes 2 Men In One Night -- CNN. 

Arkansas Executed Two Men on the Same Gurney -- ThinkProgress.

Arkansas Carries Out First Double Execution Since 2000 -- Reuters.

Arkansas Executions: Why It's Executing 11 People in 7 Days -- Time.

Here's how the New York Times led its own account, which was squeamishly and tastefully buried below several articles on Trump's first hundred days:

 Arkansas executed two convicted murderers on Monday night, the first time in almost 17 years that any state has executed two inmates on the same day, as the state carries out a series of capital punishments before one of its lethal injection drugs expires.

Jack H. Jones Jr. died at 7:20 p.m. local time, and Marcel Williams at 10:33 p.m., both from the injection of a three-drug combination, after a flurry of failed, last-ditch appeals. The executions in the death chamber at the Cummings Unit, a state prison southwest of Pine Bluff, came four days after the state put to death another killer, Ledell Lee. A fourth condemned man, Kenneth Williams, is scheduled to be executed on Thursday.

If you are envisioning a giant map of the state of Arkansas magically coming to life and killing people, then that is just what the unaccountable killers want you to envision. Who held the needle, Fayetteville or Hot Springs? We don't know. All we know is that the men died from some anonymous, passively administered injections.

Further down in the article, however, we learn that "infirmary workers" rather than the legendary hooded executioners were the administrators of the death-dealing drugs. Capital punishment is thus downgraded to a medical procedure carried out by health care personnel.

Since it is impossible to totally avoid naming any names, the Times does finally inform us that one Judge Kristine Baker of the US District Court issued a brief stay of execution for the second inmate, given that the first inmate reportedly "gulped for air" prior to his passive demise. But apparently satisfied that the gulping fell within normal pathological parameters, the judge allowed the second round of injections to proceed as planned.

  To give a sentimental gloss to the brutality, we get the standard juicy details of what each man ate for his final meal.  "Arkansas" was humane enough to give them whatever they wanted. Fortunately, unlike the 1992 case in which the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector decided to save his dessert "for later" after Governor Bill Clinton gave the final OK for his execution, both men apparently ate every bite of their final repasts, which included Butterfingers and Mountain Dews. Real Southern hospitality was extended by "Arkansas."

  Arkansas politicians and their henchmen are on an accelerated execution schedule, given that the companies manufacturing the heavy duty tranquillizers used off-label as chemical homicide agents are now refusing to sell them for such terrible purposes. As a result, the pencil-pushing executioners are in a hurry to use the medication they already have in stock, before it expires. Heaven forbid that they administer an expired drug to their patients. It might have gone stale or even toxic. It might have become too dangerous to use. And that would be so inhumane. 

You have to look far and wide to find any news account which assigns human agency to the executions. Creede Newton at The Intercept breaks out of the mold through his article about the Arkansas medical director being in danger of losing his license for procuring the capital punishment drugs under false therapeutic pretenses. Unfortunately, we are not made privy to Doctor Death's actual name, because "Arkansas" has a law protecting the identities of such people. It's telling that the lawsuit against the good doctor was not filed by any human rights group, but by the pharmaceutical distribution company being asked, by fraudulent means, to provide the drug in question.

Even reporters scoring tickets to the Arkansas executions on Monday night were not truly allowed to witness them. They were given the censored version.  As Jacob Rosenberg writes in his own harrowing account, spectators were barred from viewing the human placement of the IV delivering the drugs. A black curtain separated them from the procedure, and the audio feed was also frequently cut off throughout the death process.

... Even as a witness,  I could not say if Marcel Williams felt pain or what happened during his death by the midazolam three-drug protocol.

The process is designed to feed me details as a viewer that can give me the appearance of peaceful passing.  But this will not have been the experience of Marcel Williams. By the time the potassium chloride, which stops the heart and can be excruciatingly painful, was administered, the protocol ensures that even if the prisoner felt pain I would not see it. The paralytic was in place.

Maybe we should change our exceptional nation's mottoes from E Pluribus Unum and In God We Trust to our own three-drug protocol: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.

"Shattered": A Slog of a Reading Experience

 It's not until the end of their gossipy rehash of the doomed Democratic presidential campaign that the authors of Shattered finally get around to dishing out their biggest scoop.  RussiaGate was the brainchild of Hillary Clinton herself. Her campaign has never really ended at all, because it was just one subsidiary of the Clintons' vast financial and political global empire.

So once she got past the brief shock of "conceding gracefully" to Donald Trump, Clinton was back in campaign mode with a vengeance. Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen write:

On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia's intelligence service) and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists.)....

"She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way," this person said.

That strategy had been set within four hours of her concession speech.

 Clinton operatives got right to work in Brooklyn headquarters. "For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

And thus does Hillary's campaign as a sort of empress in exile continue. After a much-publicized sojourn in the woods designed for purposes of humanization, she has emerged as the face of Resistance,Inc. Still not learning the lesson of what happens to an anointed presidential candidate who abandons the working class, she's restricted her emergence only to those locales where the rich and famous gather. Her most recent event was, ironically enough, at a Tribeca Film Festival discussion about saving elephants.

I'm a person who can never quit a book once I'm past the midway point, so I spent much of the weekend reliving the depressing slog that was the Hillary Clinton coronation crusade. If you happen to enjoy reminiscing about the pettiness and backbiting and divide and conquer tactics of any office job you've ever held, then this book will truly resonate. Shattered has the same dull throbbing effect as discordant church bells echoing through the Slough of Despond.

  To get Hillary's minions to talk to them, Parnes and Allen promised each of them total protection and anonymity in order to elicit maximum invective and optimum dirt. The authors are quick to confess that on the numerous occasions when they purport to know what their sources were thinking, they mean that their sources actually told them what they were thinking. You'd think that stream-of-consciousness was a whole new literary device in nonfiction political writing.

If their thought-narrative explanation is true, then the gossipy sources of Shattered include not only the hired help, but such luminaries as Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Obama, for example, "thought" that Hillary looked sick and terrible at the Democratic National Convention. Bill "thought" that Donald Trump was lowlife scum for bringing Bill's female victims to one of the debates. Bill, alone out of all the clueless people who appear in Shattered, had bad vibes about his wife's chances from early on. He correctly thought, in several sentences and over many pages, that the election was going to be a repeat of Brexit. He comes across as one of the few intelligent people in this whole literary slog, as a matter of fact.

Hillary herself is directly outed as a source for the book via this passage:

'I'm no longer a candidate or public official,' she thought. I'm not going to be the leader of a party in the future. I want to exit with grace - and do it quickly.'

And we can assume that her next unspoken thought was to come out of the woods after the shortest possible decent interval in order to force an exhausted public to relive the campaign into eternity and beyond.

Shattered is being widely praised (and maligned, as the partisan case may be) as a scathing exposé of Hillary Clinton and her cadre of grasping sycophants. But the book only scratches the surface of the rot, delving as it does mainly into gossip and character attacks. There is no reporting on such dirty Party tricks as the herding of Vegas casino workers into one huge venue to force public bloc voting in the Nevada caucus, and the later purging of voter rolls in the New York primary. There's no reporting on the scheme to bypass campaign financing laws by directing her donors to contribute to state parties, which then rerouted the cash right back to her. The authors, who so ably burst the bubble in which the Democratic nominee and her campaign resided, themselves write from deep within the bubble of establishment Beltway journalism. Their previous book about Clinton's reign as Secretary of State, for example, was so fawning to powerful actors that it was considered "required reading" for Washington insiders.

No wonder that People on the Inside were so ready, willing and able to anonymously spill their deepest and nastiest guts and thoughts to this reporting duo. It must have helped immensely that co-author Jonathan Allen is a revolving door alumnus himself, swirling at various times between working for politicians and covering them as a Beltway journalist. At one point, he ran former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's congressional PAC. Since DWS is treated harshly in this book - even her curly hair is witheringly mocked - I can only assume that the experience ended as badly for Allen as the experiences of many a Clinton operative given leave to speak off the record, in the spirit of operative solidarity.

And it does get nasty. Campaign Manager Robby Mook, for example, seems to have been universally disliked.

"He was more interested in "maintaining the castle than winning the war," an unnamed somebody groused.

And Mook wasted no time in neutralizing the worshipful founders and volunteers of the Ready for Hillary super PAC once their free services were no longer required. "As one Democratic insider familiar with Mook's thinking put it, 'When you're done with a condom, you throw it out.'"

Throughout the book, Hillary herself wobbles between two stereotypical roles: victim and bitch. Her heart really wasn't ever in it, we're told at the outset.The only reason she ran was because she thought nobody else in the party could win. Her big mistake was then to assign too many cooks to one curdling pot.

There were so many actors and so many servants that "Clintonworld looked like a traffic jam on a Venn diagram, with so many interlocking and concentric circles that it was next to impossible to determine who was in Hillary's ear."

She "had set up rival power centers everywhere. And no one had enough authority to make the others play nice. Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary's will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal."

As a further indication of their own Washington media insularity, Parnes and Allen dutifully toe the line in parroting the disdain which the establishment had and still has for Bernie Sanders and his supporters. He is once again stereotyped as an old coot with the cheap suits and the wild hair and the flailing arms. The phrase "pie in the sky" is the common descriptor of his campaign platform throughout the book. Just because they aim to tell the whole unvarnished truth about Hillary Clinton doesn't mean they want to do any favors for Bernie, whose fans are characterized throughout the volume as "dead enders" and "haters."

In the chapter "Feeling the Bern," the co-authors just can't resist indulging in the usual silly false equivalency. When you adhere like a tick to the extreme center, there can be no discernible difference between the radicals of the Tea Party and the radicals of Occupy Wall Street:

"They scapegoated different segments of society -- immigrants on the right and bankers on the left, for example." 

Yep, those poor Wall Street tycoons take just as much undeserved crap as a sub-minimum wage farm worker or restaurant line cook.

Allen and Parnes are also careful to disguise the lobbying career of Minyan Moore, one of Hillary's "Super Six" cabal of unpaid secret campaign overseers. While working for the campaign, Moore continued her employment with Dewey Square, a notorious astroturf operation responsible for crafting such sleazy initiatives as Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson's Fix the Debt initiative to cut Medicare and Social Security. The authors don't inform their readers about this fact, because generalized political corruption is not a part of their chosen narrative. Instead, they describe Dewey Square as a public service organization.

Once I got past the chapter on Bernie, I started to read with a more critical eye. It dawned on me that Parnes' and Allen's main self-assigned task was to critique a candidate who failed to protect the endangered Neoliberal Project for the benefit of the establishment. Hillary wasn't as suitably proficient as Barack Obama. She failed to co-opt the rabble. Once I received that epiphany - that the authors of Shattered have no beef with the actual oligarchic system -  their tell-all tome lost much of its muckraking luster for me. It became a slog, something to be gotten through.

This is not to say that are no masterful barbs and illuminating goodies to enjoy during the rehash of this memory lane trip through political hell. The following anecdote, about an August 2015 conference call in the wake of Hillary's private email server scandal, left me both laughing and wondering who to despise more: the Clintons, or their spineless careerist minions:

Hillary's severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning - both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary's failures - Hillary's talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it.... It was hard to tell what was worse -- getting hollered at by Bill or getting scolded by the stern and self-righteous Hillary. Neither was pleasant. 'You heard him,' she admonished 'Get it straight.''

It was an astonishing moment -- and one that would stick in the minds of Hillary's aides for the rest of the campaign -- for two reasons. First, Hillary was already inaccessible to most of her own staff, preferring to communicate through Abedin. So, a phone call featuring both Hillary and Bill was a real rarity. But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.

Her economic message wasn't getting through, her aides realized, because she hadn't told the truth to the public about her emails and she was under federal investigation.

From hippies scapegoating Wall Street tycoons to Hillary scapegoating the hired help: will the inhumanity never cease? As Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri is quoted as whining, "We (Clinton and her staff) aren't ever allowed to have nice things!"

Another surprise, for me at least, was the extreme and paranoid lengths to which both the Clinton and the Sanders camps went to ensure that the Philadelphia convention we saw on TV was totally different from what really went on in the Wells Fargo arena. A special "boiler room" was set up so that "every time a Bernie supporter raised an anti-Clinton sign, a whip team member in the convention hall could relay the message quickly to the boiler room. The team there would send a note to Bernie and Hillary aides on the floor, who would ask the person to take it down. The flash-speed communications network would turn out to be a major factor in transforming what was a tumultuous convention into a unified one on television."

Remember all the times the crowd began chanting "USA! USA!" at inappropriate times during Clinton's acceptance speech?  What many of us suspected at the time was all too true: it was an orchestrated performance to drown out the hecklers.

The tacit message in Shattered is that if the Democratic establishment wants to find successful candidates to keep the neoliberal dream alive, they'll have to be more like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than Hillary. According to Parnes and Allen, this is where Hillary so abjectly failed:

She had to explain why the turn-back-the-clock promises of politicians like Sanders and Trump were empty and why voters' anger had to be converted to a commitment to policies that would bring their communities into the future. It was a bank shot compared to a vow to end trade and resurrect coal jobs. Bill was a much better explainer  than Hillary, but she had to do something to bridge the distance between what she thought these voters thought they wanted and what Hillary believed would be best for them."

She failed to convince the ignorant rabble about their overlords' core beneficence. She failed to convince enough of the people enough of the time to allow themselves to be co-opted in the service of elitism. She wasn't a genuine enough huckster.

And she had, and still has, the unmitigated gall to blame her failure on everyone but herself.

 "In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message for her - a construction deeply at odds with the way Sanders and Trump built their campaigns around their own gut feelings about where to lead the country."

I give Shattered a solid C, with an additional "minus" for the stupid denigrating trope of Bernie Sanders acting out of the same pure gut feelings as Trump.

For all their clever repartee and their access to insiders both large and small, the real gutless wonders are Parnes and Allen. The underlying exposé of their book is that mainstream media functions largely as a protection racket. This book ultimately fails to hold anybody directly accountable for Donald Trump, least of all the media and Barack Obama and Trump himself. Like so many other explainers of its kind, it focuses on mistakes in "process" as it mind-numbingly accentuates the horse-race aspect of the presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Obama's own political campaign continues. He was in Chicago today with the specific goal of inspiring the next generation of Barack and Michelle Obamas.

I can hardly wait for the slog through their $60 million twin memoirs.