A Circular Investigation Squad

 (*Updated below)

In a plot reminiscent of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, they're killing each other off in Washington. Robert Mueller is investigating Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is investigating Robert Mueller. The president has essentially issued a dictum of no confidence in Jeff Sessions, whereupon Attorney General Sessions ominously declared that he'll stay on the job anyway, for as long as it's "appropriate."

As long as he has time to whip up a bunch of indictments against Trump, Incorporated? The soon-to-be paroled O.J. Simpson had better get moving on that multimillion-dollar TV deal of his, because there's a whole lot of competition waiting in the wings. By the time the dust settles, there might not be anybody left on the island. Sad.

With no many incestuous relationships going on in so many high investigatory and governing places, conflict of interest has long been a feature, and not a bug, among Establishment types. And Trump is not only milking this congenital chaos for all it's worth, he's adding to the churn daily with some truly malevolent glee.

He manipulates the mainstream media at the same time he is manipulated by them. Why else give a no holds barred interview to his frenemy, the "failing" New York Times? To keep everybody scrambling, and out of breath in the futile effort just to keep up with him.

The way Trump spilled his guts to the Times the other day, you even have to wonder whether he'd rather be the star of his own courtroom drama than be president of the United States. Just imagine the ratings for the United States vs. Donald Trump show. It would pre-empt regular programming and investigatory reporting even more than it's already being pre-empted. To Trump, popularity and notoriety are the exact same thing. Perhaps a stint in a minimum security Club Fed would be preferable to the prison that is the White House. He'd still have a bottomless commissary fund and all the Doritos and Fox News he can consume.

So before he tries to pardon himself and his entire clan, I hope he also remembers to sign an executive order allowing TV cameras in the courtroom. It's the least he can do. The American people deserve it. Not only would we get gavel-to-gavel coverage of the lengthy (months or even years-long) trial, the rule would also apply to the Supreme Court, which currently allows only audio transmissions of its proceedings.

 Trump being Trump, he'd probably add the caveat that the camera must be aimed at him, his family, Ivanka's couture and jewelry, and his OJ-strength team of lawyers at all times. If he can prohibit pictures of the prosecution side, and most important, of the competing celebrities in the audience, he'll probably go for it. As long as it's all about him, what does he care?

He and his family naturally will also control all the licensing of movies and shows about themselves. Even though criminals are barred from profiting from their own stories, perhaps one of the grandchildren can be put in charge of the post-conviction family business. The six-year-old is already trained to perform Mandarin on cue, after all.

Trump will always be a star, albeit a dark, decayed star. He'll always have his fans. He'll always have Paris.

*Update, 7/22.

Despite common wisdom, a criminal trial of a sitting president is not outside the realm of whimsical possibility. 

The New York Times had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a Clinton-era legal memo hidden deep within the National Archives. (Apparently, the moniker "national" does not automatically connote that an agency will be transparent or public without first making the public jump through hoops!)

The memo, from the office of former Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, thoroughly debunks the notion that Trump would be immune from prosecution until or unless he leaves office. Writes Times reporter Charlie Savage:

“It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties,” the Starr office memo concludes. “In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.”

Mr. Starr assigned Ronald Rotunda, a prominent conservative professor of constitutional law and ethics whom Mr. Starr hired as a consultant on his legal team, to write the memo in spring 1998 after deputies advised him that they had gathered enough evidence to ask a grand jury to indict Mr. Clinton, the memo shows.

Included in the decades-old cache is a draft criminal indictment of Bill Clinton.

The plot thickens. So stay tuned for the latest Tweets from the Circular Investigation Squad and from the righteous custodians of the Incestuous Industrial Complex. Or don't. It's the weekend, and it's the middle of summer.

Ain't Nothing But a Hypocritical Hound Dog

Although Trumpism and human rights are obviously mutually contradictory, it still came as a huge shock in official circles when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson broke precedent and coldly refused to trumpet his agency's annual report on global human rights abuses. And to add insult to injury, he's even reportedly planning to close down State's War Crimes division.

How very oily of him. 

Not that the United States has ever actually looked in the mirror and condemned its own abuses and war crimes, which include but aren't limited to capital punishment, solitary confinement and the shackling of pregnant women in domestic prisons; aggressively invading other countries; torture by the CIA in black sites; bombings of hospitals; and extrajudicial assassinations by drone.

 It's that the Trump administration refuses to abide by the norms and traditions of its virtue-signalling predecessors. The serial giant middle fingers of Trumpian contempt make our exceptional country look bad to the rest of the world. His regime deprives us of our righteous opportunities to lecture the rest of the world. 

A further indication of the domestic erosion of human rights is the fact that the State Department official who did comment to the press on the annual human rights report did so anonymously, out of fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

The government's annual report calling attention to global crimes against humanity has ever had any legal clout, mind you. As a matter of fact, the State Department has always functioned as a major arms broker to the same vicious regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, which it presumes to occasionally criticize. Still, as PRI reported in March, Tillerson's lack of engagement and flouting of tradition sends a chilling message to rights organizations as well as a tacit message of encouragement to autocrats in places like Turkey and the Philippines. The shallow hypocritical American rhetoric which has historically waved its feeble pompoms for human rights efforts around the world is completely evaporating:

The international watchdog Human Rights Watch linked Tillerson's no-show to what it fears is a broader decision by Trump's administration to downplay America's leadership role on the issue. 

"Trump's anti-Muslim refugee policy and hinted cuts to foreign aid have heightened concerns that the US won't be a vocal player on human rights issues abroad," HRW Washington director Sarah Margon said. 

 Tillerson's absence, she added "reinforces the message to governments, rights activists and at-risk minorities that the State Department might also be silent on repression, abuse and exploitation."

To complement that episode of passive-aggressive silence, Tillerson also aims to do away with State's Office of Global Criminal Justice, whose business is vocally "deploring" or "condemning" the war crimes of others while ignoring American atrocities - and while supplying the Deplorables with billions of dollars' worth of weapons every single year. The former Exxon CEO has already reassigned Stephen Rapp and his entire war crimes staff to other duties.

From the New York Times article about Tillerson's "reorganization" plans:

The war crimes office has modest resources. It has a staff of about a dozen and an annual budget of about $3 million, and it has generally been run by an envoy appointed by the president.

Mr. Rapp came to the office with considerable experience: He served on an international tribunal on the atrocities in Rwanda and prosecuted war crimes in Sierra Leone before President Barack Obama appointed him to lead the office in 2009, making him the ambassador at large for war crimes.

Mr. Rapp also played a major role in arranging for one of Syria’s most important defectors to provide thousands of photographs to the F.B.I. of detainees who had perished in President Bashar al-Assad’s prisons.

In the two decades that it has existed, the office has played an important role in bringing perpetrators to justice. Mr. Rapp worked behind the scenes to press Kosovo to accept its new human rights tribunal. The office also pushed Senegal to try Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad.

The key phrase here is "behind the scenes." The United States not only refused during the Clinton administration to become part of the International Court of Justice, it aggressively worked behind the scenes to weaken it, before it eventually denounced it, during a five-week conference in Rome.

As international human rights barrister and activist Geoffrey Robertson recounts in his excellent history, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle For Global Justice,

Although the Clinton administration had previously advocated a world criminal court and Clinton himself called for it in his 1998 visit to Rwanda, his personal authority was eroded at the crucial time by the domestic fallout from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. After her blue dress was taken by the FBI for DNA analysis, he capitulated to the Pentagon, which had for some months been briefing the military attaches of its allies that the Court was a danger to soldiers of the Western alliance. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced that the Rome Treaty would be 'dead on arrival' in Congress if there was any prospect of the indictment of a single American soldier....

The US delegation rejected the principle of universal jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity (other than genocide) so vehemently that the US Defense Secretary William Cohen threatened Germany and South Korea with a US troop pull-out if they persisted in their support for the Statute.

Trump is really not much of an anomaly after all, is he?

So, rather than hound his administration for the ongoing horrendous war crime of 40,000 Iraqis crushed to death in their homes by American bombs or shot to death in the streets of Mosul by American-made guns, the media-political complex is instead hounding him for canoodling with a slimy bunch of Russian oligarchs. These are some of the same characters who were originally aided and abetted in the plunder of their nation by the "Harvard Boys" of the Clinton era.

Since these things are too horrific to report, and since such journalism would be against the best interests of the global ruling class, it behooves them to change the narrative and divert the attention. They've concluded that it's better to hound Trump for RussiaGate and for his slaughter of the English language than it is to howl in outrage about his administration's slaughter of human beings.

Saved By the Clot

(*Updated below)

Despite its best intentions, a Congress stuffed with aging millionaires does provide the occasional benefit for the downtrodden rest of us.

We should probably thank Senator John McCain and the surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain for our latest reprieve from getting our crappy health insurance coverage slashed into worse than nothing. Because of McCain's illness, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was forced to delay voting on his cruel plan to punish the strapped and the ill for the benefit of the richest of the rich. 

And especially for those of us who personally rely upon, or whose family members rely upon, Medicaid coverage: we must seize upon this gift of time to spread the word about how god-awful the GOP's bill truly is. This cruel legislation would punish and doom to a even earlier death the fully one-third of all Americans who receive Medicaid when they become underpaid, unemployed, sick, hurt, disabled, or old. In putting a cap on lifetime Medicaid benefits, the Republican legislation is a true stealth weapon of mass destruction.

The Democrats and the corporate media cannot, for the most part, be bothered to spread the word too thickly. They're too busy spreading, like unhealthy dollops of clotted cream, all the latest RussiaGate gossip and innuendo. They're too busy drumming up the paranoia, too busy softening up the American public for more war and more arms sales for them to get too mushy and soft-hearted about spreading the word that a Medicare for All plan would be both humane and cost-effective. And, incidentally, virtually repeal-proof, what with 100% of the population becoming contributing beneficiaries.

While McCain, who has a history of melanoma, is expected to stay out of Washington for at least a week, medical experts say his healing could take much longer. I would recommend just making it a whole recovery summer. If his fellow senators get too bored, they can always venture out to town halls to try and explain to their constituents that cruelty is freedom.

 Besides the irony of one legislator's personal illness getting in the way of his sadistic cohort depriving tens of millions of people from receiving care is the irony that this one particular senator never need worry about where the money will come from to pay deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. He very likely will never even have to look at a hospital bill. His gold-plated congressional insurance will see to that.

Meanwhile, yet another study reveals that even under the selective benefits of the Affordable Care Act, the United States still has the worst health care among the 11 rich nations studied. It is also the only country in the study which lacks true universal coverage.

Regardless of your income and insurance, you will get the worst care and the worst access to care if you happen to live in the exceptional Land of the Free. While nearly half of low-income Americans complain of restricted access to care, even a surprising 26% of the well-to-do report having difficulty paying their uncovered medical expenses.

You read that right: a wealthy American has more trouble getting and paying for care than even the poorest Brit or Aussie. Even the affluent misanthropes who stand to benefit off the backs of the sick and poor if this bill is passed don't have it as good as they think they do, despite all the concierge medical services their money can buy.

The Commonwealth Fund study, aptly titled Mirror, Mirror 2017, found that although the US spent $9,364 per person on health care last year, the United Kingdom and its single payer National Health Service came in first in the survey - despite an expenditure of only $4,094 per person. The runners-up are Australia and the Netherlands.

In each of the categories studied, the US ranked dead last or near last, with the exception of better outcomes for its hospitalized heart attack and stroke patients. The failing categories include equity of care, administrative efficiency and outcomes, primary care affordability, and financial protections against destitution for citizens who get sick or hurt. 

America also does relatively well in doctor-patient relationships, end of life care, and survival rates for such diseases as breast cancer. It does poorly on infant mortality rates, and it has the lowest life expectancy of the 11 countries for citizens who reach the age of 60. 

The richest country on earth still has the highest rate of preventable deaths. America is indeed exceptional, the unfairest of them all.

*Update, July 18: Two more senators have joined the Clot Caucus, and ding dong, the bill is dead! Or is it? The late great George Romero, whose undead franchise is more alive than ever, might have a thing or two to say to all the revelers out there. As might the late great Mark Twain, who quipped that "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" after reading his own obituary in the newspaper.

To proclaim that the GOP's bill to destroy the health care of tens of millions is dead is about as premature as the late great Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the living burial. When plutocrats want something, or more aptly, when they demand everything, they don't give up. Otherwise, they wouldn't be plutocrats.

So read the fine print. The headline in today's New York Times, for example, merely notes that the two new Senatorial defections only "signal" the end of TrumpCare.

And then there were these ominous rumblings from the mythical "other side" of the Aisle of the Dead:

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, responded to the announcement on Monday by urging his Republican colleagues to begin anew and, this time, undertake a bipartisan effort.

“This second failure of Trumpcare is proof positive that the core of this bill is unworkable,” Mr. Schumer said. “Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.”

Whenever you hear the words "bipartisan" and "long-term stability to the markets" uttered by a politician, you should brace yourself for the fortified oligarchic shock troops assembling for yet another awesome surge. They don't call Schumer the Senator of Wall Street for nothing. The day that he utters the phrase "Medicare for All" will be the day that his campaign war chest goes bare and his commanders quickly advise a permanent R&R and a brain scan. 

Be They Ever So 'Umble

A Good Ole Pair of Bellicose Bipartisan Bros

 
At a folksy gala held at his Dallas shrine on Thursday, George W. Bush told Bill Clinton and a group of military, business and civic leaders that the most important quality America's chief executive can possess is humility.

Whereupon he bragged that his friendship with Clinton was "one of the most unique relationships and important relationships in US political history."

That'll sure teach Donald Trump, the obvious target of the virtue-signalling. Were it not for Bush having been so blessedly meek, the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent global refugee crisis might never even have happened. He would have been too busy stomping all over Al Gore and still bragging that he won the election six months into his administration. If he hadn't been so modestly clearing brush in Texas during the summer of 2001 rather than wallowing in Washington and insanely tweeting, he might have made the huge narcissistic mistake of heeding the written warning that America was in imminent danger of being attacked. He would thereby have allowed a huge crisis go to waste.

As it turned out, Nine Eleven was the gift that keeps on giving to the global oligarchy. If it weren't for George Bush discreetly doing his cowboy shtick when it counted the most, the lucrative War on Terror never would have been possible.

"I think it’s really important to know what you don’t know and listen to people who do know what you don’t know,” Bush modestly and incoherently burbled."The decisions you make have a monumental effect on people."

He is right, because his decisions continue to reverberate all over the globe. Even as he bonded with Bill in Dallas, 10 women and children died of dehydration in an Iraq detention camp for relatives of ISIS fighters. That, according to Iraq Body Count, brings Bush's monumental effects on the people in that country alone to a grand total of 268,000 corpses.

 Bill Clinton jovially agreed with his bro about the lingering effects which ex-presidents have. “You want to be able to say, ‘Things were better off when I quit, kids had a better future, things were coming together, You don’t want to say, ‘God, look at all the people I beat.’”

You want to be able to say, look at all the women we forced off welfare and sent to work at low-paying jobs with none of that subsidized child care we promised. Look at all the black dudes we sent to prison, beating previous incarceration records. Look at how we deregulated the banks that crashed the economy. Look at how we monumentally doubled extreme poverty in the United States. It sure beats bragging about all the crooked politicians you were able to beat!

NYT Now Admits the RussiaGate Saga Is Harmful to Our Health

While Donald Junior's "scandal" is even eclipsing news of the crack-up of an entire continent, the supposedly moribund stealth care reform bill is thrashiing through Congress like a silent but deadly sidewinder rattlesnake.

Before millions of victims even know it, they'll have been bitten right in the ass, without recourse to the antitoxin which normally would be on standby from the first responders of the erstwhile Loyal Opposition (a/k/a the Democratic Party and their media sycophants.)

It seems that our legislators are just doing what they do best. They pick a time when people aren't paying attention, and then they ram their latest bolus of poison through our veins. What more exquisite "serious crisis" timing could there be than the smoking gun of Donald Junior's secret meet-up with a Russian femme fatale with a law degree? American oligarchs can't wait to sink their fangs into what is still left of the democratic body politic.

To his credit, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has somewhat broken ranks and written a panicky piece entitled "Table Russia, Focus on Health Care" in today's edition. 

It seems that the Senate majority is trying a bait and switch that makes Don Junior's victimhood at the hands of a Russian lawyer promising Hillary Dirt look like he actually won the Super-Ball Lottery. That's because the so-called Cruz Amendment would allow insurance predators to sell policies as worthless as a degree from Trump University.... as long as they also pretend to balance their graft with just the tiniest bit of honesty. People aged between 50 and 65 would be forced to pay the highest prices for increasingly worthless coverage.

Leonhardt writes:

The next few days seem crucial. Senate Republicans are meeting today and plan to unveil their new bill. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has vowed to vote on a motion to proceed next week.

There is a risk that the Russia news, important though it is, will keep people from paying attention to what’s going on in the Senate. Millions of Americans’ access to decent health care is at stake.

Leonhardt issues his belated warning based upon a panicky email he received from a former Obama administration official. Since nowhere in his piece does he mention the verboten phrase "Single Payer Insurance" as an antidote to the reptilian malevolence, you have to wonder if what they're mainly worried about is that establishment Democrats, rather than the GOP, will end up getting blamed at the polls. Their obsessive-compulsive devotion to RussiaGate to the exclusion of the actual public interest will come with a cost.

Since establishment Democrats are demonstrating themselves to be so weak and panic-stricken, what better seriously critical time than right now to make them an offer they can't refuse? Support Medicare for All, right now, or go down in defeat in 2018. If, as they claim, health care is a universal human right, then it should not be O.K. to let tens of millions of American remain either totally uninsured, or so underinsured that they avoid going to the doctor and can still go bankrupt if they get sick or hurt.

Unity, schmunity.

MSM Puts the Pedal to the Meddle

*Updated below.

The corporate media is in full Russophobic overdrive again. The over-hyped meetup between Trump and Putin in Hamburg last week spurted more gallons of high octane gas into the tank of official discourse, to wit: the Kremlin Has Meddled, Does Meddle, and Will Meddle in American Democracy Forever and Ever Amen.

Elder CNN Situation Room Stentorian Wolf Blitzer, more breathless than usual on Monday afternoon, announced that Donald Trump Jr.'s gleeful response to an email claiming that Russians had dirt on Hillary is finally - finally! - exactly the proof we need...  of the possibility that the Trumps directly colluded with Putin to cost Clinton the election

This is an apparent upgrade from the improbability that Russia infiltrated the brains of the American electorate through a nefarious campaign of fake news,  making Trump a co-conspirator only by default. If a thing can now be deemed absolutely possible, then we're halfway home to reality itself. 

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, meanwhile, can see the future despite admitting having no official current access to intelligence. Russia is prepping the 2018 Battlefield with its meddles of mass destruction even as we speak, he told CNN. Not that there is any actual evidence of this meddle-prep, mind you. The only requirement for intelligence is Possibility's close cousin, High Confidence.

The New York Times is creamily spreading, mini-scoop by mini-scoop, a whole series of friendly leaks from anonymous sources within the government, all regarding that "smoking gun" of emails to and from Trump's son.  The big scandal today is that Junior shockingly "loved it" when told that there was dirt on offer from Russia on Hillary Clinton. Plus, (and this engendered yet another news-flash to my inbox) the Times now has a physical copy of the email itself, an upgrade from simply reporting on what was dictated to them from their anonymous sources. Junior then proactively leaked said emails to the media himself, because if there's anything the Trumps hate, it's being scooped by the fake media on stuff that turns out to be totally unfake.

 The implicit message of the JuniorGate subsidiary of the Russophobic franchise is that Junior was unpatriotic and possibly -possibly! - treasonous for even talking to reps of Russian oligarchs, not to mention having the poor taste to gloat over oppo research on Hillary. The Times and other big media outlets neglect to add that these oligarchs have been given absolutely free and legal permission for the past several decades to launder their plundered money in luxury New York City real estate. The Trumps not engaging with rich Russians would therefore make no sense.

Junior's crime, if it is in fact a crime, is that he is stupid, a liar, and failed to disclose to the proper security agencies the meeting with a Russian attorney (who, as it turned out, was mainly a bait-and-switcher with the agenda of overturning Russian sanctions and not, in fact, in possession of any Hillary "dirt").

The inclusion of the eldest Trump son in RussiaGate gives added high entertainment, high-octane value to the Political-Media Complex's heretofore weak orchestrated campaign to weaken, if not get rid of, Trump himself. The very fact that President Trump sat down with Putin at the G-20  had been characterized as near-treasonous. It's as if they met in a back alley or Trump Tower rather than at a highly-publicized conference organized and attended by the global oligarchy.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, notorious for implementing Obama's Terror Tuesday policy of thousands of extrajudicial drone killiings, went on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday to scold Trump for saying it was "an honor" to meet Putin. “An honor to meet the individual who carried out the assault against our election?” Brennan fumed. “To me, it was a dishonorable thing to say.”

This, from the same spook who was caught hacking into Senate computers to spy on elected individuals who were reading a (still-suppressed and redacted) report of CIA torture. This, from the same spook who over a 30-year career was intimately involved in some of the 81 documented "meddlings" and attempted regime changes conducted by the United States, with varying degrees of success.

Here's Brennan's full friendly conversation with the Democratic Party-affiliated Chuck Todd:

If you think you're seeing more than the usual amount of blatant government propaganda couched in some unprecedented sensationalist tabloid language recently, you're not dreaming. Under cover of last Christmas, the outgoing President Obama quietly signed a law making government dissemination of domestic propaganda perfectly legal. Of course, it is cynically written in terms of being "anti-propaganda" in order to fool people into thinking that political campaigns such as RussiaGate are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" - bipartisanly introduced by Republican Senator Rob Portman - established a Global Information Center within the State Department whose job is to collect and collate foreign attempts to endanger national security by spreading "fake news." The law also directs that money grants be given to "non-governmental agencies" willing to help the government keep track of all those efforts to undermine said national security interests.

Could the mainstream, corporate-funded media be included in the category of a helpful non-government agency?

Given their spreading groupthink willingness to engage in counter-propaganda propaganda to the near-exclusion of actual independent investigatory journalism, I wouldn't be too surprised. As it is, CNN and MSNBC and Fox all employ "former CIA analysts," retired generals, revolving-door political hacks and officials, corporation-funded think tank "scholars," and even cross-over Times and Post reporters, to form panels and disseminate what are increasingly the same talking points, repeated ad infinitum, the better to manufacture the public consent.

Not that propagandist stenography is anything new, of course, but in this digital age, it has the added strength of traveling at the speed of light. Or should I say darkness?

For a primer on how the New York Times, in particular, has historically relied upon red-baiting and Russophobia to help enhance the interests of the ruling class, look no further than this damning piece by Edward S. Herman. The Times started hating on Russia during the 1917 Revolution, and they've never looked back.

Fake news, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And the Times and its media cousins are looking none too gorgeous these days.

*Update 7/12

I wrote this post before the publication of Junior's email chain, which is a pretty chilling encapsulation of the casual corruption of the Trump clan in particular, and the international oligarchy in general. These people have a hands-on, clannish approach to a politics in which, as Trump as gaffed in the past, there is literally no line between the country and his company. They not only think they own the place, they do own the place, and they act with breathtaking impunity. Why not? Despite decades worth of evidence of larceny and fraud, law enforcement has never called them to account. Why should they quit just because Big Daddy is now president of the United States?

They're being called to account now because it is not in the best interests of other segments of the ruling class to be nice to Russia. Trump's interest in making friends with Putin connotes sharing of global looted wealth, especially oil, combined with a lessening of NATO sabre-rattling for fun and defense industry profit.

The mega-dot - more of an exclamation point, really - connecting all the events in question is that Daddy Don apparently knew more about the June 2016 meeting on Hillary dirt than he's let on. Coincident with this meeting was Trump's promise, at a rally, for a major reveal about Clinton corruption in the coming days. That big reveal never materialized, probably because the dirt that the Russians promised on Hillary was never forthcoming. The Trumps have been revealed to be as gullible as they are greedy.

If Trump goes down for this, others should go down too. They probably won't, but at least they might have to squirm for a while before the choking dust from the smoking gun clears, and they (think a minute about President Mike Pence) can urge us all to "look forward, not back."

Meanwhile, Trump is so desperate that he has submitted to a ritual Laying On of Hands. Although no devils were seen fleeing the Oval Office, one evangelical participant was quoted as saying, "I get goosebumps thinking what God is going to do."

It Don't Mean a Thing If You Ain't Got That Good Christian Bling

A Paine-ful Weekend At Bernie's

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could have been writing about why the "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual when what's really needed is a global revolution against the whole rotten global financial system. No matter that Paine was talking about Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than a despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

In this interim between the 4th of July and Bastille Day, with Hamburg burning as the G-20 oligarchs party and plunder, what better time to renew our acquaintance with that great global radical, Thomas Paine? He helped foment revolution in the American colonies, and in France and (unsuccessfully) in his native England, where he was thoroughly despised by the aristocracy. His particular nemesis was the anti-revolutionary conservative Edmund Burke. Were he alive today, I can almost guarantee that Burke would be writing scolding opinion pieces for the New York Times. It's probably no accident that the newspaper's star conservative columnist is diehard Burke fan David Brooks.

Since Trump and his fellow plunderer-parasites both here and abroad are indeed too abominably filthy to be cleansed, nothing short of a complete revolution will do, as evidenced by the brave people facing water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and other military police hardware in Germany.

Take the health care crisis here at home. Despite the overwhelming clamor for universal, government-run medical insurance from the vast majority of the American populace, response from the higher-ups has ranged from horrified, to dismissive, to tepid.

Bernie Sanders's prescription was just suddenly downgraded to the same piecemeal "reform" of our for-profit, market based insurance system as originally suggested by the Obama White House. So compared to what Thomas Paine demanded in The Rights of Man, it's quite the cynical travesty.

Bernie: "Everyone knows that the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect. Our job now is to improve it, not destroy it. Further, instead of throwing 22 million Americans off of health care, we must move to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee healthcare to all people as a right not a privilege through a Medicare-​for-​​a​ll, single​-​payer system."

Tom: "When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it."

 Just as Barack Obama did before him, Sanders - now the most popular politician in America - is wasting the moment and submitting to the vested interests before he even gets started. He's putting off introduction of his long-promised Medicare for All legislation and instead meekly suggesting a Medicare buy-in option for 55-and-overs, as well as a public "option" so as not to unduly discompose the predatory plunderers of the private insurance cartel. 

  What about the times that try the souls of the tens of millions of citizens who either totally lack health insurance coverage, or can't afford the premiums and deductibles of what covers only a portion of their medical costs? They'll still have to die or go bankrupt if they get sick under the existing Obamacare law, which Democrats see as the be-all and end-all of the current debate.

As health care advocates Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese point out,

 We are already spending enough on health care in the US to provide comprehensive health care to everyone. We have a bill that lays out the framework for a National Improved Medicare for All healthcare system: HR 676. A majority of Democrats in the House have signed on to it as co-sponsors.
So, why are they trying to convince us to accept a public option or a Medicare buy-in? It’s because they are corrupted by money – campaign contributions that they receive from the corporations that profit from the current system. You may say, well Bernie doesn’t take corporate money, so why would he go along with this charade? It may be because he has greater allegiance to the Democratic Party than he has to the supporters of Medicare for All, his base. He may fear losing positions on committees or his new position of leadership within the party.

 We have to be clear and uncompromising in our demand for National Improved Medicare for All NOW! We can’t put this fight off any longer because those in power will always try to knock us off course. The people and their families who are suffering under the current healthcare (non)system can’t wait any longer.

 If Bernie Sanders really believes that health care is a human right, then why does he accept that millions of people are being denied this right today, right this very minute? Until such time as he deems it safe to "compromise" with the predatory plunderers who'd just as soon see us all dead, people will continue suffering and dying prematurely. The gradual granting of health care rights which he espouses is as if Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation had "pragmatically" given relief to only half the country's black people or if his Great Society had "realistically" given Medicare and Medicaid insurance to half the country's elderly and poor people.

Either health care is a right, or it isn't. Whatever happened to justice delayed is justice denied?

As Thomas Paine retorted to Edmond Burke's treatise against the French Revolution: "Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there is no such thing as rights anywhere, and that he had none himself; for who is there in the world but man?"

The mass psychic revolution for universal health care in the United States is already a done deal. Bernie Sanders can either accept this fait accompli, or he might as well join the Democratic Party's latest bumper sticker campaign of "We Suck Less."

As it stands now, Bernie is nothing if not an adherent of what Paine called the "caterpillar principle." Since all courts and courtiers are alike, they all consume similar policies and narratives which have little or nothing to do with people and nations. "While they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution.They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

Far from voicing any solidarity with the anti-capitalist demonstrators in Hamburg, Bernie Sanders acted every inchworm the caterpillar courier in tweeting to Trump and his fellow oligarchs what their three top priorities should be at the G-20 summit:

1) Growing global economic inequality. The G20 has a major role to play in making sure the benefits of growth benefit all humanity.

(This is boilerplate neoliberal tripe. Talk about, but don't question whether this "growth" is healthy or cancerous. All of humanity sounds so much vaguer and grander than, say, mentioning the refugees and victims of endless wars of American and transnational corporate aggression.)

  2) North Korea. Trump should use the G20 to develop a consensus. Real leadership is bringing parties together to de-escalate tensions.

(Bernie fails to mention the forbidden word: peace. In his prescription pad, real leaders need not actually stop arms production and sales and reduce military spending to help pay for health care, but rather tamp down the "tensions" a wee tad in order to keep the defense contractors in business without obliterating the entire planet in the process. He needs those F-35s to stay in Vermont. Perhaps he didn't feel the need to chide Trump on climate change amelioration given that the president is already a world pariah in that regard.)

3) Russia’s meddling in our election. When Trump meets with Putin he must make clear interference is unacceptable & must never happen again.

(He not only swallows the Democratic Party's specious RussiaGate claims whole, he eagerly disseminates the propaganda to his followers. He is part of the lie.)

 

 In effect, Bernie deflects attention from our health crisis at the same time he pays mild lip service to it in the form of "fighting back against" one president and only one side of our corrupt Duopoly. Meanwhile, the more hardcore naysayers desperately try to do their own parts. They insist that a swift transformation to a single payer system is impossible, because most sane people would object to a tax increase. But their "math" doesn't bear out their paranoia. As economist Robert H. Frank lays out in (of all places) the New York Times, a Medicare for All arrangement would actually save us all a ton of money:

By analogy, suppose that your state’s government took over road maintenance from the county governments within it, in the process reducing total maintenance costs by 30 percent. Your state taxes would obviously have to go up under this arrangement.

But if roads would be as well maintained as before, would that be a reason to oppose the move? Clearly not, since the resulting cost savings would reduce your county taxes by more than your state taxes went up. Likewise, it makes no sense to oppose single-payer on the grounds that it would require additional tax revenue. In each case, the resulting gains in efficiency would leave you with greater effective purchasing power than before.

Since Single Payer covers everybody, the countries which now implement such systems have lower overall costs because most of the people covered are relatively healthy. Contrast that with the United States, where the government restricts public coverage to the most vulnerable and sickest groups: the elderly, the disabled, and veterans of our endless wars. We pay more and we get less. The have-nots are taught to resent the haves, entrenching the oligarchic plunderers even more securely in power. So if everybody enjoyed the same privileges, they'd have no reason to either resent one another or settle for lesser evil candidates.

And if everybody enjoyed the same benefits, it would become next to impossible for reactionary politicians, acting at the behest of corporations and oligarchs, to yank these benefits away from the whole population, united in solidarity to the tune of more than 320 million human bodies.

So let's all be realistic, and demand the impossible. Universal health care is not only a human right, it's plain common sense. Don't let the oligarchs get you down and keep you down. Vive le revolution!