My biggest "takeaway" (I do hate that word) from James Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is that Donald Trump equates being president with being the CEO of the biggest corporation in the world. Either that, or his demand for "loyalty" from the FBI director shows that he equates being president with being the godfather of the global mafia.
And in a perverse sort of way, Trump would be absolutely right about both job descriptions. His problem is that he doesn't stay in his proper place. Presidents have heretofore acted as super-salesmen and propagandists for the plutocracy, dutifully using their private armies (the CIA and Special Ops) without bragging and Tweeting about them. Previous presidents have carefully kept their individual psychopathies away from public view, for the most part. In some Freudian-slipped remarks at a pre-inauguration press conference on Jan. 11th, Trump bragged to the whole world:
"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."
He doesn't want to do a good job at both, because he views the country and his company as one and the same thing: a mega-merger for the ages, if not the greatest hostile takeover the world has ever seen.
Two months into his presidency, Trump was still persisting in his job description. He again called the United States a "company" during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before, again, belatedly correcting himself.
As far as James Comey is concerned, has there ever been a more slippery character in the canon of Washington political theater? Now seemingly forgiven for having helped destroy Hillary Clinton right before voters went to the polls, he has morphed from villain to All-American hero, a multimillionaire golly gee willikers Boy Scout in a six foot seven frame. He pulled off the awesome stunt of forcing the Democrats and Republicans to act in the lockstep bipartisan manner so beloved of the Washington neoliberal establishment. He openly admitted having head-faked Trump by waving the discredited "urinating prostitutes" dossier in front of his face during the transition period as a subtle way of telling the president-elect that the Intelligence Community (another loathsome phrase if there ever was one) has what Chuck Schumer called six ways from Sunday of getting him to behave. He openly admitted to carefully transcribing every Trump conversation - a practice he never bothered with under his previous bosses, Messrs. Bush II and Obama. He openly admitted leaking these transcripts to the New York Times and other outlets - even though they are now so "classified" that he simply could not in good conscience share all the salacious contents with the American public on national TV. Even so, Comey humble-bragged about the exhilarating freedom he now enjoys as a private citizen to destroy Trump by calling him a liar on national TV. This career prosecutor, steeped in the intricacies of criminal law, lays out a prima facie case for obstruction of justice and then sanctimoniously demurs from calling Trump's behavior criminally offensive. He is not enough of an expert.
And speaking of the subconscious, Comey's dramatic bodice-ripper account of his fraught private dinner with the Groper-in-Chief - he later told colleagues he never wanted to be alone with Trump, ever again - gains new meaning with revelations that he was once accosted as a teenager in his own suburban home by the infamous Ramsey Rapist. So Comey is apparently very sensitive to the vibes put out by serial predators. His narrative has garnered for him empathy, if not admiration, from every woman who has ever felt intimidated by her boss. It has also deprived Hillary Clinton of one of the main scapegoats for her election loss. And just one more speculation before I quit: would there even be a #RussiaGate had Hillary prevailed? I think not. After all, James Comey also unhelpfully mentioned that Vladimir Putin is an ecumenical abuser. Vlad wasn't just gunning for Hillary; he can't stand either side of the American Uniparty. He's not out to destroy the Democrats, who are already doing a pretty good job of destroying themselves. The appeal of a liberal 21st Century Inquisition does have its limits, especially in the wake of the punishing bipartisan Age of Austerity. Voters will be apt to stay home when their only choice is between Donald "Berlusconi" Trump and the neoliberal McCarthyites of the Surveillance State.
I haven't had time for original posting this week, so here are a few links to tide you over. If you'd like to comment on any of these, or on any other topic of interest to you, please feel free.
One Yemeni child is dying every 10 minutesand cholera cases have surpassed the 100,000 mark since the disease first broke out barely two months ago. This country is being blasted to smithereens by billions of dollars' worth of American and British weaponry sold to the Saudi royal family. Even so, all Western eyes are being properly directed toward the soap opera known as As The Comey Worm Turns. From the ubiquitous countdown clocks to the special theatrical trailer scripted by the newly rehabbed ex G-Man himself, today's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was being hyped as the blockbuster hit of the summer. If only the cable companies had been given more notice by the producers and directors of this political melodrama, I'm sure they would have upgraded it to a Pay-Per-View consumer experience.
Donald Trump chillingly boasts of despotic Saudi Arabia's infrastructure investment in the United States, and an unprecedented kleptocratic mass privatization of our public roads and public works and public services. Still, as we are persistently and forever reminded by the major media, the real crisis is that James Comey was afraid to be alone with Trump at sumptuous dinners while Yemeni children are starving. The pressure was simply unbearable.
Brits Go the Polls: The Tories are predicted to win. And why not, with savvy Obama campaign guru Jim Messina once again advising an ultra-conservative incumbent candidate? Somebody's got to manipulate the masses and preserve the Neoliberal Project and forever wars for posterity, after all.
You might think
that a Washington protest rally with only about two dozen
participants wouldn't get much media attention. But since
Saturday's event was organized by an anti-Trump, anti-Russian astroturf
operation called March for Truth, funded by a group of plutocrats, "intelligence community"
alumni, neocon war hawks, and centrist Democratic Party operatives, you
would be thinking very incorrectly indeed. Because of the importance of the big-money backers of Resistance, Inc., the New York Times plugged the "march" on its Facebook page
before giving the small-ball event some truly big league coverage in
the A-section pages of its Sunday edition. For without relentless
publicity, how are we, the rag-tag citizens of America, supposed to remember
that Russian Meddling in Our Democracy™ is the crisis of the century? And with the Times'
cooperative failure to reveal the names of the big players behind the
scenes, the Powers That Be can cling to the illusion that they still
actually have the power to mold public opinion, redirecting our angst
from quotidian economic concerns to ginning up a patriotic fever for war against
Russia. It's not for nothing that the newspaper also unceremoniously
dumped both the public editor and the whole public editor desk last week.
Accountability is so yesterday. So we never learn from reading the fawning Times piece by
Nathalie Nieves that one of the main organizers of #March For
Truth is a writer and "activist" named Andrea Chalupa, who recently Tweeted, with no proof, that "WikiLeaks is a proven front for the Russian government." Her sister, Alexandra, has been exposed
as the probable developer of the discredited McCarthyite website
PropOrNot, which published a blacklist of some 200 independent news
organizations scurrilously accused of being "unwitting" agents for
Vladimir Putin and stooges for Donald J. Trump. Indeed, the Times has engaged in a virtual coverup of the #March for Truth astroturf group's provenance. Nieves' article mostly consists of interviews with a handful of "just plain folks" who were ostensibly demanding the truth about TrumPutin complicity. (Nieves has to grudgingly admit, however, that most of the couple-dozen participants had really shown to protest against other things, like Trump's war on the environment) Still, she valiantly offers that such cool celebrities as Debra Messing have given money to "the cause" - thereby tacitly legitimizing the effort with that all-important Hollywood gloss. We must look to the#March For Truth website for supplemental facts. (To give Nieves credit, she provided a link) All you really need is a Google and a dream to figure out what the Times doesn't bother telling you.
Perhaps what is most revealing about this astroturf movement is the involvement of so many Hillary Clinton donors and operatives, including the Chalupa sisters just mentioned. This involvement gives further credence to the largely ignored tidbit in the book "Shattered" that #RussiaGate was, in fact, the brainchild of the failed Clinton campaign itself. Some of the "partners" listed on the #March for Truth website: Town Hall Project: founded by former Iowa Clinton campaign field organizer Jimmy Dahman. To its credit, this site and its app have enabled people to easily find the congressional town hall nearest them to agitate for all manner of progressive things, including single payer health insurance. To his own discredit, though, Dahman is choosing to emphasize Russophobia rather than the fact-based fear of getting sick while uninsured or underinsured.
"Across the country, constituents have flooded town halls to let their
representatives know that they want impartial investigations into
Russian interference in our elections," Dahman rather falsely brags on the March For Truth website. Pantsuit Nation: a Hillary Clinton Facebook-originated fan group, whose founder, Libby Chamberlain, is now being harshly criticized for personally cashing in on the first person hard-luck stories of poor and minority women she collated. Therefore, Pantsuit Nation has expanded its tarnished brand into some lucrative Russia-blaming to help keep the dream alive. Swing Left: founded
by Ethan Todras-Whitehall (writer/teacher), Joshua Krafchin (marketer
and entrepreneur) and Miriam Stone (brand strategist) They appear to be an honest trio of citizens just looking for congressional redistricting who now find themselves "veal-penned" into the RussiaGate franchise. This is ironic, given that the DNC had studiously ignored them, and the pro-Clinton Daily Kos had even once accused them of being Russian agents. The name Krafchin had apparently made the Russophobic hairs on the back of Democratic Party necks stand up. But now that Swing Left has been patriotically vetted, it's all good. The Opposition - this is just another news aggregation site for anti-Trump stories. Since no actual names are listed on this blog, inquiring minds want to know: is it Hillary prop, or not? Stand Up America - Founded and bankrolled by failed multimillionaire centrist
carpetbagger Sean Eldridge and directed by Jessica Adair, who most
recently served as Hillary Clinton's Women's Vote director in Nevada. DJ
Koessler, head of Clinton's digital ops in Brooklyn HQ, is the digital
director. Sean Quinn, digital strategist, formerly worked for Anne Lewis Strategies, a Democratic Party fundraising firm, whose own director previously worked in the Bill Clinton White House. This #March sponsor is so incestuous that it deserves its own diagram on Muckety. Rise To Run: this is one of several mystery sponsors of March of Truthiness that are so dark and so shadowy that they don't even have anonymous websites, let alone listing any human beings on them. Somebody had better check to make sure this isn't a KGB plant. Stand Up Republic -Founded
by Evan McMullin, former clandestine ops officer at the CIA and later a
Goldman Sachs banker before he ran for president as an independent
conservative. Co-director is Mindy Kaling (nee Finn), who worked on the Bush and
Romney campaigns. Their fervid, jingoistic statement on joining the Russophobic Resistance Fighters is a real keeper:
"Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn founded Stand Up Republic to help
Americans stand up in defense of the fundamental principles that have
made this country the true home of liberty and a source of hope for many
around the world. Stand Up Republic will build and organize a
grassroots movement in defense of liberty, equality, and truth in
America. Our priorities will be to uphold the Constitution and defend
the democratic norms and institutions upon which the protection of our
basic rights depend.
We invite all Americans committed to these timeless truths to join us today in this hallowed cause."
Hillary Clinton's latest excuse for losing the election to Donald Trump is that nobody could have survived on her pedestal of awesome inevitability. "I was the victim of the assumption that I would win," Hillary Clinton deadpanned in the latest episode of her perpetual Blame Game Tour. That's like complaining you've been fired based upon the unreasonable expectation of your boss that you'd show up for work. That's like complaining that after you fell in an Olympic relay race you'd bribed your way into, it was all the fault of the greedy officials who let you on the track as well as the stupid rubes who bet on your victory. I take full responsibility, but nothing is ever my fault. Hear me roar, whined Hillary to her well-heeled Silicon Valley audience. She presented her hosts with a complimentary bottle of an alcoholic concoction she called Rodham Rye. The stage was thus set for some sloppy softball mellowness to help make the vitriol go down. "Goldman Sachs paid me!" she squealed in delight at one point during Wednesday's interview. But the fact that she also spoke to camp counselors balanced the whole thing out. Also too, she helped hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. Plus, men get paid for the speeches they make.
Also miffed that Trump is stealing the media-blaming limelight from her, Clinton accused the press of treating her use of a private email system "as though it were Pearl Harbor." She obviously didn't get the irony of that remark, given how she acted like a Kamikaze pilot during her presidential campaign. She bombed in one suicidal campaign appearance after the other. She also had the nerve to rip the Democratic National Committee, which had bent over backwards to rig the nomination in her favor through, among other things, limiting the number of debates with Bernie Sanders and ensuring that their scheduling interfered with football playoffs and national holidays and weekends so as to attract the fewest viewers possible.
"I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party," she fumed, whereas Donald Trump got all his precious data handed to him on a silver platter. Harrumph. But the real paranoid coup de grace of her performance at a California technology conference was her rambling attack on "Americans" who must have helped "the Russians" to meddle in her campaign. “I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign,
and how did they know what messages to deliver?” she said. “Who told
them? Who were they coordinating with, and colluding with?”
After conjuring up an epic image of a thousand grotesque anti-Hillary bots and trolls cavorting about in cyberspace, she then paradoxically went on to call Trump a "very reactive personality" and questioned what, exactly, he means by the word "covfefe." It must be a secret coded dog-whistle to Vladimir Putin. That is the only possible, rational explanation. She was, after all, speaking at a Code Conference.
You can watch her whole spiel in the clip below. You are guaranteed to cringe in your seat as the litany of blame evolves into an ear-splittingly off-key crescendo of bilious self-pity. If more than a few minutes of unbridled narcissistic victimhood are too much for you to bear, however, then I highly recommend the troll-hunting scene from Peer Gynt as a more healthful substitute. It absolutely captures the essence of where this woman's head is at:
Meanwhile, Hillary's more understated understudy Chelsea Clinton went on TV herself to trill that the dashing of stupid people's unreasonable expectations about her mother was actually "an unexpected blessing." Chelsea said that although she's been told by outsiders that her family once planted petunias and tomatoes together when she was a tot, she has no independent memory of this event. All she can remember of her childhood is the hours of homework and the piano lessons that transformed her into the overachieving adult she is today. Chelsea says she is imagining the childhood she might have had as she watches Bill and Hillary in their dotage dig in the dirt with her own daughter in a DNA deluge. "It was such an unforeseen gift that my daughter was giving me to see my parents in that way," Chelsea smirked to the ladies of The View.
As long as Hillary Clinton keeps telling us over and over and over again that she is doing O.K. despite her persecution complex, maybe some of her psychotic magic will start rubbing off on us too. Long walks in the woods, organizing our closets, blaming Russians, guzzling the Chardonnay and the Rodham Rye like there's no tomorrow might help us forget all our unreasonable assumptions about there even being a tomorrow. Skol. Hiccup. And then gag me with a Covfefe.
Although reported hate crimes have indeed been creeping up in the era of Donald Trump, they have yet to reach the levels in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks of 2001. There has, however, been a sharp increase in anti-Muslim attacks since Trump's election. These are the findings of California State University-San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Director Brian Levin has compiled statistics showing that reported hate crimes - defined as attacks based upon race or ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, religion or disability - increased last year by an average of 6% in the largest American cities surveyed. Viewed separately, however, the increases during the presidential campaign year were 20% in Chicago, 24% in New York City, 15% in Los Angeles, 50% in Philadelphia - and a whopping 62% in Washington, D.C. Levin says its still too early to study hate crime data during the first few months of Trump's actual administration. The FBI will not release its own 2017 data until November. Even before Trump started getting nonstop television coverage at his hate-spewing campaign rallies, the hate crimes were starting to increase in the United States. Levin reports that religion targeted crime had already increased dramatically beginning in 2015, reaching its highest level since reporting began in the early 1990s. By 2012, the percentage of crimes motivated by religious bias had already tripled from 2002. The actual number of these crimes was listed at 1,244 incidents for 2015, an increase of 30 from the previous year. Levin cautions that the reporting of hate crimes is inherently fraught, given discrepancies in definition and the lack of cooperation in reporting them from various individual police agencies across the United States. Participation in the reporting system is purely voluntary. One jurisdiction's hate crime can be another jurisdiction's garden variety violent crime. Relatively few hate crimes are committed directly upon people. Only 15% of them constitute violent assaults causing severe bodily injury to human beings. Most of them are vandalism-related crimes against property, which have skyrocketed in recent years. Most perps prefer to operate under cover of darkness, leading to the conclusion that hate criminals are abject cowards. The Southern Poverty Law Center began compiling news reports of bias attacks immediately following the election of Donald Trump. Out of 1,094 incidents, 315 were directed at immigrants, 221 at African-Americans, 112 at Muslims and 26 against Trump supporters. For its part, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported 2,216 bias "incidents" in 2016 (an increase of 57% from the previous year) and 260 actual crimes (a 44% increase from 2015). The most recent was an arson attack last night on a Muslim-owned convenience store in San Antonio, Texas. The general consensus among the news media is that Donald Trump has made it safe for Americans to act out their aggressions again. The Memorial Day weekend news was replete with one horrific hate crime after the other. Most notable was a deranged white supremacist slaughtering two Good Samaritans trying to defend a hijab-wearing woman on a Portland, Oregon train. Of course, the hate was simmering, if not bubbling over in regular volcanic eruptions, long before Trump began braying out his message to the nation with the delighted assistance of profit-driven cable "news" channels. Donald Trump is just one of many facilitators in this Land of Peace and Plenty - especially now that's he's been gifted with the bully pulpit of 140 Tweeted characters direct from the Oval Office Emporium. So, the very same media-political-war complex whose longstanding motto is "if it bleeds, it leads," is now purporting to be shocked, shocked there is so much unsanctioned, freelance violence going on around here. We were supposed to keep our hatred under wraps and allow our betters to vicariously satisfy us with violent entertainment. Now that people are taking such matters into their own hands and daring to emulate and to take the Trump Reality Show so literally is cause for great alarm. The establishment seems to be losing its power to keep the citizenry contained. As Peter Gay writes in The Cultivation of Hatred, the function of national political leaders historically has been maintaining civic docility, obedience and above all, distraction.
If one could capture children, students, apprentices, even criminals in the silken chains of guilt feelings,if one could fabricate submissive love for authority figures, the heavy artillery of harsh punishments could be profitably replaced by the subtler and cleaner methods of psychological warfare. The bourgeois conscience was a fraud waiting to be unmasked.... humanitarian style, anxious to bring pugnacity to heel, was only a cover for economic greed, political self-interest and imperialistic lust for domination.
People are gazing upon their bellicose leaders and simultaneously refuting them and emulating them. The nostrum "Do as we say and not as we do" is losing its appeal, given how both Trump and his bellicose predecessors from both parties did nothing to assuage the free-floating anxiety and anger unleashed by the most extreme wealth inequality in modern global history. Only a very thin line separates the so-called homegrown terrorists of America from their mirror-image compatriots of ISIS. As Pankaj Mishra writes in Age of Anger: A History of the Present,
Trump and his supporters in the world's richest country are no less the dramatic symptom of a general crisis of legitimacy than those terrorists who plan and inspired mass violence by exploiting the channels of global integration. The appeal of formal and informal secessionism - the possibility, broadly, of greater control over one's life - has grown all over the world. The response of rulers is more fear mongering against Others.
Primitive regressive role model that he is, Donald Trump provides the perfect excuse for lashing out, at anybody and everybody. In the words of Peter Gay:
The liberal temper is so precarious because it is steadily under pressure from more primitive demands--for quick decisions, simple answers, forceful action, above all instant gratification. The threat--for most, the promise of--regression lurks everywhere. Most people find that hitting out, whether calculated or spontaneous, yields greater satisfactions than holding in, at least in the short run; smiting the other's cheek is more delightful than turning one's own.
Trump is the living antithesis of the liberal aggression so long controlled and hidden beneath vicarious violent entertainment on the one hand, and empty platitudinous happy-talk on the other. He is the opposite of a safety valve. His boilerplate critique of the Portland train stabbings could not have been more anodyne. "Unacceptable," he grudgingly Tweeted a full two days after the attack, adding the obligatory thoughts and prayers required of all bomb-dropping presidents whose assigned task is urging people to do as they say, and not as they do.
Jared Kushner, jack of all White House trades and master of none, is the latest topic of the official narrative conversation. He "is said to" have established back-channel communications with those damned Russians during the transition period. According to experts on such things, this might not have been totally illegal, but it was certainly unethical and outside the norms of how corruption gets done in official Washington. Don't get me wrong - I think that Jared is a perfectly loathsome human being. But it's just too bad, and actually kind of silly, that the FBI's investigation is not instead aimed squarely at his serial financial assaults on the poor tenants of his multitude of substandard rental units. An exhaustive investigation published last week by journalist Alex MacGillis reveals that Kushner has amassed a team of lawyers whose sole purpose is to hound tenants for back rent, late payments, and alleged damage to their units. In many cases, the harassment continues for years after they have left his premises. One of Jared Kushner's goals in life seems to be the financial and emotional destruction of the most vulnerable members of society - some of whom were and still are Trump supporters. MacGillis reports:
In 2011, Kushner Companies, with Jared now more firmly in command,
pulled together a deal that looked much more like something from the
firm’s humble past than from its high-rolling present. That June, the
company and its equity partners bought 4,681 units of what are known in
real-estate jargon as “distress-ridden, Class B” apartment complexes:
units whose prices fell somewhere in the middle of the market, typically
of a certain age and wear, whose owners were in financial difficulty.
The properties were spread across 12 sites in Toledo, Ohio; Pittsburgh;
and other Rust Belt cities still reeling from the Great Recession.
Kushner had to settle more than 200 debts held against the complexes
before the deal could go through; at one complex, in Pittsburgh,
circumstances had become so dire that some residents had been left
without heat and power because the previous owner couldn’t pay the
bills. Prudential, which was foreclosing on the portfolio, sold it for
only $72 million — half the value of the mortgages on the properties.
His slumlord enterprise has grown exponentially, with much help from federal subsidies and tax breaks readily available to wealthy real estate moguls. Kushner coldly describes his low income tenants as "an asset class" with money-making potential deriving from evictions, withheld security deposits, and other legal finagling. MacGillis continues,
There is a clear pattern of Kushner Companies’ pursuing tenants over
virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease — even in the numerous cases
where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side. Not only does the
company file cases against them, it pursues the cases for as long as it
takes to collect from the overmatched defendants — often several years.
The court docket of (one case) forinstance,
spans more than three years and 112 actions — for a sum that amounts to
maybe two days’ worth of billings for the average corporate law firm
associate, from a woman who never even rented from JK2 Westminster. The
pursuit is all the more remarkable given how transient the company’s
prey tends to be. Hounding former tenants for money means paying to send
out process servers who often report back that they were unable to
locate the target. This does not deter Kushner Companies’ lawyers. They
send the servers back out again a few months later.
But forget about that. It is because gentrification, and the privatization of this nation's public housing stock, and the deliberate absence of a federal guaranteed housing policy are bipartisan enterprises that it's more expedient to get rid of Trump and his clan by the tried-and-true scapegoating methods perfected during the Inquisition and later during the McCarthy era. If we can only learn to fear and loathe Russia and its treacherous Trumpian stooges more than we fear and loathe the all-American policies leading to the worst wealth inequality in history, perhaps we won't take to the streets in protest of what is really rotten in the state of Neoliberalism. We'll be so shocked and awed by the treason at the highest levels of the Trump administration that we might forget that our rent payments are eating up greater and greater chunks of our monthly incomes. We might forget that the abusive rental market is the natural outgrowth of the subprime mortgage market, and that unprosecuted banksters now act as landlords on the same housing they so recently foreclosed. Oligarchs like Kushner have discovered that the extraction process can go on, and on, and on. Poverty is such a lucrative industry for them. Right before he left office, President Obama secretly gifted the private equity giant Blackstone with another massive government bailout. This gift subsidizes any losses that investors might suffer as a result of evictions and neglected repairs of their plundered housing stock. It does nothing to help the victimized tenants of predatory "rent-to-own" scams. As a matter of fact, the bailout ensures that Blackstone slumlords can continue gobbling up distressed properties at no risk to themselves with the added benefit of artificially inflating real estate prices for regular home-buyers (just another "asset-class") faced with ever-dwindling choices. It also perpetuates the class resentments that gave rise to Donald Trump. Since Blackstone and other real estate investors now control whole swathes of foreclosed and distressed properties, the resulting increases in rent ensure that manufactured competition between low income and medium income people will continue to grow. For his own sleazy part, Trump continues to feed these class resentments through what Hannah Arendt has called "negative solidarity." We the teeming oppressed masses are invited to join him, a billionaire demagogue, in common cause against mutual enemies. In his latest fundraising email, slugged "Kicking and Screaming," Trump writes:
This month... the media tried to stop us.
...The establishment tried to stop us.
...The bureaucracy even tried to sabotage us from within.
But WE THE PEOPLE FOUGHT BACK! AND WE ARE STILL STANDING AND WILL KEEP FIGHTING UNTIL WE MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The Washington elites will go kicking and screaming until they’ve all been dethroned.
Right now, we’re just $142,693 away from hitting our FEC end-of-month goal. Will you contribute any amount -- I mean it, Karen, any amount you can -- to help us end the month so strong that the Fake News Media Machine falls into a complete panic? Can you donate $1 to Drain the Swamp?
Meanwhile and ever so coincidentally (of course) Trump and Kushner are solidly and intimately involved with Blackstone, which plans to invest some of "its" excessive cash into a joint Saudi Arabian venture to loot even larger chunks of crumbling American real estate and public infrastructure. This glaring scandal, too, is taking a back seat to the more pressing concern of nefarious "Russian back channels." I wonder why that is. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems quite odd that the media would launch into its latest phase of Russophobic mania within days of the shocking revelations that Kushner is taking total advantage of thousands of poor people, and that a new breed of Robber Baron owns and controls us, thanks to socialized risk-taking for private gain. Channeling the official conversation away from the escalating war on the poor back to #RussiaGate has the added bonus of protecting oligarchs and Uniparty politicians who indulge their own predatory appetites in a more circumspect fashion than the boorish Trump family seems capable of. Like father, like son-in-law, like unfettered capitalism itself. The umbel never falls too far from the parental hemlock plant. It takes root and multiplies like the noxious weed that it is.
I see that the New York Times, after months of igniting anti-Trump hysteria to a fever pitch among its readers, is now marching in lockstep behind the Democratic Party leadership.
In an abrupt about-face, the newspaper's editorial board is softening, if not abandoning, its campaign to destroy his presidency.
Just because the man is impaired is no reason for him to be impeached. Especially not while he is doing the business of the military-industrial complex overseas and selling weapons and American infrastructure deals to the highest foreign bidders. Whenever Donald Trump adopts the traditions of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the corporate media declare a truce. They euphemise the hypocrisy by using the hackneyed term "reset."
Whenever Donald Trump bombs a country or holds tempting dollar signs out to his critics, he magically becomes Presidential. Reset early, reset often. So within days of being castigated for insanely spilling state secrets and calling James Comey a nutcase, Trump is at least temporarily seen as rehabilitating himself in the eyes of the ruling establishment. He's maturely forgoing his Tweets and resetting his agenda to more sober goals. Trump has rid himself of extreme anti-Muslim sentiment by abandoning the odious phrase "radical Islamic extremism" and resetting his rhetoric to a more modest "Islamic extremism." Although his anti-Muslim travel ban elicited universal outrage from the whole free world, his sale of billions of dollars in weaponry to the autocratic Saudis has only elicited a yawn here, a moue of fake concern there. Trump hasn't quite reached the level of Watergate egregiousness, so let's give the psychopath a chance, moralizes the Times. Be patient, everybody. As long as the market hasn't crashed and rich are still growing richer under his regime, no state of emergency need be declared.
The media-political complex seems to have reached its next stage of Hillary loss grief. It has overcome depression and denial, and is now straddling the fence between bargaining and acceptance. What I've called the "Deep State" interregnum in the form of an official investigation by a trusted member of the plutocracy (Robert Mueller) is having the desired calming effect on The Times.
As its editorialists pontificate:
The national interest and the integrity of the democratic process are
undeniably at stake in the investigation. And it may turn out that the
president and his associates have engaged in an attempt to obstruct
justice; really bad stuff could turn up. But Watergate? We’re not there
yet. That’s a word that summons obstruction on a monumental scale, with
evidence to prove overt criminal acts — not least the White House
conspiracy to burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters. Scores of
administration officials were indicted or jailed when President Nixon
had to flee from office on the eve of certain impeachment.
It seems to me that the Gray Lady is confusing peaches with pears. The Trumpian graft and corruption being conducted right under our very noses ( awarding ownership and control of American infrastructure to a regime which cuts people's heads off and bombs Yemen into a state of famine and disease) is not quite as bad as Nixon giving cash bribes to burglars and then lying about it. That's because both sides of the Uniparty have long been selling this country out to the highest bidders, both foreign and domestic. If they make too big a deal out of Trump doing it too, it might endanger their own future profits. They want American voters to get riled up and resistant, but not to get too riled up and too resistant. Their objective is to eventually replace Trump with a more refined, slimy politician - not to blow up the whole de facto oligarchy. Plus, it is so much more convenient to just blame the Republicans and paint the Democrats as the virtuous, but powerless, opposition party. And look at what happened the last time the House impeached a president. Their hounding of Bill Clinton destroyed the dignity of the whole impeachment process. We can't make the mistake of impeaching over partisan pretenses ever again! The Times editorial smarmily concludes,
For Democrats, too much indulgence of impeachment notions could prove a
distraction from the more workaday and politically achievable challenge
at hand. Their main job is to rouse the public to use Mr. Trump’s
unimpressive polling numbers as leverage on Republicans, who already are
citing the Mueller investigation as reason to slow down congressional
inquiries into the Trump and Russia affair. Beyond that, they and other
critics should be working hard to win back a majority next year in at
least one house of Congress. This would secure them the subpoena power
to shed far better light for the nation on Mr. Trump’s and his enablers’
sorry deeds.
It's not about justice and the greater good at all. That would be so self-indulgent. It's definitely not about campaigning on a platform of Medicare for All, student debt forgiveness, affordable housing, a guaranteed job, and a guaranteed income. It's all about the Democratic Party winning back power by fomenting fear and loathing of Trump while still keeping him around long enough to gin up optimum fear and loathing-- and tons of campaign cash.
One person's "workaday challenge" might entail coming up with next month's rent check or insurance co-pay. What the plutocracy, represented by its Times mouthpiece, views as a workaday challenge is maintaining the status quo of its own unfettered wealth and power. As far as the New York Times is concerned, the only thing we need is to see the light. Food, shelter and medical care can wait for another day, another year, another decade. It's Democratic incrementalism you should believe in.
They want us to delay justice for Trump until the Democrats can be the stars of the show. Even if it risks electing him to a second term, it will be so worth it.
Trump is certainly not the only sociopath for whom winning is everything and for whom the daily struggles of ordinary desperate people are just a pesky afterthought.
