Commentariat Central: Trumps and Tramps Edition

The theme of this week's corporate media Narrative is Liberal Fire and Brimstone. Donald Trump's old tryst with a porn film actress and his subsequent, pre-election attempt to shut her up with hush money have brought forth whole legions of "woke" Cotton Mathers.

If you thought that the #RussiaGate hysteria was overwrought, then you aren't caught up on the feverishly manufactured outrage over #StormyGate. Democratic Party hacks are shocked that right-wing political evangelicals are not sufficiently shocked that Trump cheated on Melania when his little son was angelically asleep in his crib. Bring up Bill Clinton and other famous Lotharios at your peril, though, because before you know it, the dreaded "Whataboutism" label will be affixed to your bosom by the bespoke legions of progressive moralizers.

One important sub-theme of the corporate media class's witch hunt involves perhaps the hippest word out there: intersectionality. It's such a cool word that it was even used in an Oscars acceptance speech. So the pressing question is whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller can pull off a legal miracle and connect Trump's collusion with Putin to his collusion with Stormy Daniels. Could there be some sort of transatlantic Golden Showers conspiracy afoot?

I know, I know, it's all a distraction. But you have to admit that it's a more entertaining distraction than usual. There was that exciting episode over the weekend when Trump called the odious Chuck Todd of NBC a "sleepy-eyed son of a bitch" at his Nuremburg, Pennsylvania rally. And Todd, to plug his Meet the Press show, then tweeted that even though Trump is a horrible role model for children, he never allows his own children to speak ill of the president. Because journalistic access to the powerful, and the dignity of the Oval Office, are the two basic tenets of Todd's faith. Or something like that.

I've gotten sucked into the drama myself, because it is so much damned fun to get sucked into it. It's like binge-watching House of Cards on Netflix, when House of Cards was still really all about the Machiavellian Clintons more or less successfully hiding their sleazy machinations from the public, and when the election of the more openly sleazy and not-so-bright Donald Trump was still unthinkable.

So, getting right into the giddy spirit of things, I couldn't resist commenting the other day on Maureen Dowd's latest New York Times column, clickbaitingly entitled The First Porn President. It contained many salacious details about Trump's tryst with Stormy, including the juicy reveal that they'd watched "Shark Week" before, after or maybe it was even during their "textbook-generic" romp. 

My published response:

Trump confided to Stormy, "I hope all the sharks die."

I knew Trump was reckless, but I didn't realize he was also borderline suicidal. Naturally, as a malignant narcissist, he probably didn't get the Freudian meaning of his pillow-talk. But if this wasn't a cry for help, I don't know what is. Perhaps DOTUS (Ivanka, Daughter of the US) and SLOTUS (Jared, Son-in-Law of the US) can stop their maniacal grifting long enough to get Pops committed to a home for addicts (to money, to porn, to lying, to cheating, etc.) before he eats himself, and all of us, alive.

If FLOTUS (Melania, First Lady of the US) hasn't divorced him yet, she never will. There is very likely a pre-nup that makes Stormy's non-disclosure agreement look like a love letter. The third Mrs. Trump at least has his age and his fat-engorged arteries going for her as she bides her time.

 Forget the porn. The worst XXXX stuff I've had the displeasure of viewing lately was that gust of wind doing a strip-tease of the back of Trump's geriatric head as he boarded his plane. Not a Perfect 10 by any stretch. Not only is the rear of his pate bald, it was also curiously flat-looking.

Let Me Do a Few Tricks, Some Old and Then Some New Tricks

 As for Stormy Daniels, Trump stiffed her in more ways than one, given that she refused cash payment for sex solely on his promise of a gig on his Apprentice show. It never happened. 

 So may she live long and prosper. As for the rest of us, may we live long enough to see the backs of all the Trumps as they leave public life permanently.

(Note: in retrospect, I think I got Stormy mixed up with the Playmate of the Year, who turned down Trump's cash in exchange for a future slot on The Apprentice. So I sure hope nobody sues me for libel.)

***
Speaking of character assassination, Times scold Charles Blow certainly knows how to take all the fun out of scandal. He's all over the moralistic place in his own column today, called Melania Knew.

He skates just at the edge of calling FLOTUS a high-priced hooker, probably mindful of her successful libel suit against the Daily Mail for falsely calling her a high-priced hooker. So he goes the slick innuendo route instead:

When Donald first meets Melania, they are at a New York Fashion Week party to which Donald has been invited by the wealthy Italian businessman who brought Melania to America on a modeling contract and work visa. According to GQ, sometimes, to promote his models, the businessman “would send a few girls to an event and invite photographers, producers, and rich playboys.”

Trump is on a date with another woman that night. He is also in the process of divorcing Marla Maples, his second wife, with whom he had had an affair while still married to his first wife, Ivana Trump.

According to GQ, “He sent his companion to the bathroom so he could have a few minutes to chat up the model he’d noticed. But Melania knew of Trump’s reputation — which was immediately confirmed by the fact that he had come to the party with a date and was now asking for her number.”

That’s right, Melania knew.

Off with her head!

Blow goes on to complain that the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements which "have given voice to women" (who knew we had previously been so mute and muzzled?) have been rendered practically mute by Donald Trump. My two-part published response:

I always get a queasy feeling whenever a pundit, especially a male pundit, presumes to gallantly defend generic womanhood by impugning the character of one particular woman. What did Melania know, and when did she know it? Mr. Blow counts the ways and adds up the clues before shrugging and admitting that the whole thing is beyond his comprehension. (wink, wink, nod, and press the outrage button.)

Blow then gratuitously praises the #MeToo movement before pivoting to the wild assertion that Trump has "single-handedly aided in the numbing of America's sympathies for women."

 Huh? Are women successfully bringing some long overdue attention to sexual harassment and assault and gaining the support of millions of "woke" and angry Americans, or is the moronic Trump such a Svengali that he is making Americans completely apathetic and stupid? It can't be both.

If Blow cares about the plight of womanhood, perhaps he'll devote a future column to Trump's collusion with convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. A woman has filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump allowed Epstein to use Mar-A-Lago to procure girls for his underage sex ring.

 https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/jeffrey-epstein-trump-lawsuit-...

Maybe the reason this case isn't getting the same attention as the Stormy Daniels saga is that Bill Clinton has also been linked to Epstein. And this inconvenient factoid simply doesn't fit the current media Narrative.

 (Part 2) Anyway, the above-mentioned case has not gone to trial, possibly because there was one of those secret settlements the Trump Empire and the larger Empire of oligarchs are so famous for.

From last year's Politico article:

"Trump has also indicated publicly he knew of Epstein’s interest in 'younger' women, although he never suggested the financier crossed any legal lines.
'I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,' Trump told New York Magazine back in 2002. 'He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.'

These are children Trump is talking about. That's the real scandal. Or at least it should be.

( Curiously, the second part of my comment got three times the number of reader recommendations as the first part did. Could it possibly be because the stand-alone second part did not mention Bill Clinton?)

***

Paul Krugman is still stuck on Trump's "trade war" scandal, as though it were an economic policy and not a distracting political ploy tied directly to the special election in Pennsylvania, the heart and soul of steel country. He even put his "experts only" warning on his latest piece - Trump's Negative Protection Racket (Wonkish) -  I suppose to discourage non-wonks like me from going above my station to read it and weigh in. But since he preceded his wonky charts and math with the complaint that Trump's economic adviser, Peter Navarro, is nothing but a (shock!) propagandist, I therefore wrote about what I know a little bit about:

Navarro is using the same tactic that George Tenet and the Neocons employed when justifying George W. Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. The "intel" was made to fit Bush's gut feelings just as Navarro's advice is designed to gel with Trump's "intuition."

Generally speaking, economists have been used as propagandists at least since the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, ushering in the birth of the neoliberal thought collective and the whittling away of social programs for the greater public good. Why else would economics be the highest paid of all the social science professions?

Even liberal economists have been known to fall into this propaganda trap from time to time. For example, there was that whole unfortunate bashing of the sexist "Bernie Bro" straw men in 2016, to use as a weapon against pie-in-the-sky Medicare for All. It seems that necessary "details" were lacking then, as well.

Meanwhile, a strike by one of the lowest-paid but most honorable professions (teaching) was wildly successful, despite economists' warnings that there simply wasn't enough money to pay them and other public workers a living wage. This - the resurgence of a nationwide labor movement - is another story that our experts and leaders don't seem to want to hear.

The Persistence of Daylight Saving Time

It's not enough that here in the Northeast we've just experienced two snow bomb cyclones in the space of a week and that thousands of people are still without power and that a third Nor'easter is possible by Tuesday. 

As the meteorologists explain it, once this kind of weather pattern sets up, there is just no stopping it. 

And since policy-makers can't ever seem to escape their own pattern of not fixing what they and their forebears have already broken and adding to human misery in a million creative ways, we're still saddled with the atrocity known as Daylight Saving Time. This is the hellish week when we have to get used to losing an hour of sleep on top of shoveling the wet, heavy coronary-inducing snow. This is the hellish week when our policy-makers all scratch their heads and wonder whether it isn't finally time to end the torment and do away with this ludicrous time change altogether. So many more heart attacks and traffic accidents and workplace mishaps happen during this transitional week. Somebody who is not them should really do something about it!

Sno-o-o-oze. 

Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory"

At least they could be honest and change the cheerful "spring forward" bullshit reminders with the smiley-face tulips and daffodils into a Skull and Crossbones logo to better relate what this really is: Nighttime Stealing Time.

That will never do, of course. Because calling something 'saving' is SOP to make you feel resigned to being abused without your permission. (see, for example, the Republicans' proposed "health savings accounts" to replace Medicare and Medicaid.)

  The Turn of the Screw Clock is tantamount to mandated sleep deprivation in our already sleep-deprived society. Since sleep deprivation has been deemed torture by the Geneva Convention, it can't be hyperbolic to also define Daylight Saving Time as torture. Studies show that even occasional or "minor" sleep deprivation has a cumulative effect, permanently altering brain chemistry and damaging health. You cannot catch up on lost sleep. For some, that one mandated lost hour could be the difference between life and death.

Sleep deprivation has been blamed for the Chernobyl meltdown, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger disaster. Many of the recent train crashes have been blamed on undiagnosed sleep apnea, which causes sufferers to wake up hundreds of times during the night without even realizing it.

Factor in our chronic lack of sleep with the exhaustion pinnacle that is Nighttime Stealing Week, and you've got a recipe for a whole bunch of tragedies.

 The irony is that the whole time-altering scam started out as a joke by none other than Ben Franklin. He facetiously suggested that colonists could save money on candles if they advanced their clocks ahead by an hour in the warmer months. And the rest, like most of ironic American history, is history. The Gothamist has 21 more reasons why the Great Time Robbery sucks, as if you needed any more.

Meanwhile, if you're feeling tired and cranky after being forced to set your clocks ahead, try not to smash stuff as some chipper TV news-mannequin urges you to just put on your happy face and dress yourself in sunshine and indulge in that horrible, neoliberal-sounding Power Nap after your Power Lunch. Try some blood pressure-reducing Ohhhhhmms between the Yawwwwwns.  There might still be a foot of grimy gray snow on the ground where you live, but try to visualize all those hopped-up horny Easter Bunnies "springing ahead" wherever you look.

 Don't be a downer. Take an upper. If you're not into drugs, just raise up the curtains and greet the glorious dawn! It's empowering. Which is pretty stupid, since DST actually means it's still dark outside at 6 a.m. Dawn is dawning a whole hour later now. So, scratch that. Stay up a whole hour later instead, and watch the romantic sunset.  Your body clock may be screaming in protest, but those diurnal rhythms are just so yesterday. We live in an artificially lit, techno-connected 24/7/365 brave new world of higher worker productivity and stagnating wages. Get used to it, proles, because there's always another poor slob waiting to take your place, willing to get by on less sleep just for the chance to survive another delightful 24 hours.

 So let's keep a lousy idea that was lousy when they dreamed it up in those mythical, simpler, agrarian times for no other reason that it exhausts us. Sleep, as a universal, equal opportunity, no-cost phenomenon, is profitable only for the sleepers. The global economy is not making any money while you're snoozing, folks! The world cannot be made safe from terror with a country full of lazy snorers strung out in their hammocks of dependency. And in a hyper-capitalistic world that commodifies everything from drinking water to health care, if it's not profitable, then we must get rid of it. The plutocracy's answer is not more sleep for better health, but less sleep for us translating into more money for them.

And what better place to study how to efficiently reduce sleep than the Eternal War Complex? From ABC News:

By devising superhuman ways of staying awake for up to seven straight days and nights, military officials hope to lend U.S. soldiers a strategic edge in future conflicts.

 "Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation … will create a fundamental change in war fighting and force employment," says a recent statement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.

 "This program is really out of the box," says John Carney, director of DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance program. "We want to look at capabilities in nature and leverage it so we can apply it in ways that no one thought possible."

 Don't look for our millionaire congress critters to pass a bill abolishing Daylight Saving Time any time soon. We are so divided in this country that nobody can agree on who is even to blame for it. It seems that farmers have gotten a bad rap for it all these years, when they actually were among its most vociferous opponents back in the day. And Ben Franklin's input seems to have been a myth as well, just like the mythical level playing fields and ladders of opportunity.
 Sleep itself is the enemy of neoliberalism and cancerous profits.

 As Jonathan Crary lays out in "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep",
 the Free Market never sleeps, and nor should we be allowed to. Every moment that we slumber is a moment that we don't supply our labor, a moment that we're not connected to a device, a moment that we aren't purchasing and consuming goods or health insurance or "content" in the marketplace of things and ideas. Restful sleep is a literal and physical slap in the face to capitalism, and the Market refuses to tolerate it. So up and at 'em.

I'm exhausted just thinking about this hellishness. I think I'll go take a power nap. I'll dream about a million tired people giving a group middle finger to the predators of the free market. I'll dream that a mass uprising will scare the living daylights out of all of them and they'll writhe in defeat, and return to us all those stolen hours and stolen lives and destroyed livelihoods.

Dreaming and breathing may be limited, but they are still free, despite the best efforts of the Free Market. On second thought...been to an Oxygen Bar or shopped oxygen product lately?

Jill Abramson's Little Plastic Obama

Former New York Times executive editor and current Guardian columnist Jill Abramson obviously didn't catch Barack Obama's recent verbal trashing of the poor, elderly and disabled in Chicago. But that ignorance seems the least of her problems, judging from her latest opinion piece blathering on about the Democratic Party giving her such renewed hope: 

 It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.

 Well, I suppose it could always be worse. In clinging to a true-to-life tiny plastic Obama, at least she isn't the type of deplorable magical thinker who carries around a soft cuddly cloth Obama and a box of hat pins. Better a plastic talisman who oversaw the loss of a thousand Democratic seats in his eight years in power than no plastic talisman at all.

And at least Jill's plastic Obama doesn't have one of those pull-strings activating all the mealy-mouthed hippie-punching soundbites we miss so much.  Such mechanisms in dolls have been rightly criticized for the damage they do to the creative imaginations of the children who play with them. It's so much more fun for kids to put words into their dolls' mouths and transfer all their own hopes, dreams, love and humanity to a cold inanimate object. It's certainly a mature step up from clinging to a moldy old security blanket.

As an antidote to the tons and tons of plastic goo that will never degrade in a million years in America's toxic landfills, here's the indispensable Jimmy Dore caustically deconstructing the life-size Obama's icy lecture to the poor, elderly and disabled people of Chicago. The bankers are definitely still pulling all of Plastic Barry's strings.

Critiquing Evil On Evil Platforms

The main reason I never "monetized" this blog with Google AdSense, Amazon affiliate ads and the like is that getting paid mere pennies while enriching major corporations off my labor was an offer I could very easily refuse. I write here because I enjoy it, because it's cathartic, and because there is no pressure to meet deadlines and quotas or adhere to repressive standards.

Even so, I find that certain keywords and topics in my blog posts do have this weird way of translating themselves into ads which follow me wherever I go on the Internet. After publishing my last piece critiquing Obama's presidential library, for example, I suddenly got inundated with photos of his smiling face, urging me to congratulate him on a job well done. Naturally, a click took me directly to a page soliciting money for his $500 million presidential library.

I've tried free trials of gizmos like AdBlocker, which only slowed down my already slow Internet connection on my ancient operating system. A slick marketer promising me complete protection from other slick marketers is another highly refusable offer. So whenever I remember to, I just temporarily clear my browser cache of "cookie" trackers. And voila, Nobama! For now.

I've previously written about my mild discomfort using the "free" Google Blogger platform to write my posts, especially in the wake of revelations that the Silicon Valley tech giant was joining forces with the "intelligence community" to censor content from independent writers and suppress certain sites on its search engine. Their "Don't Be Evil" public relations slogan from yesteryear gets more ironic by the day.

A new revelation that Google is now partnering directly with the Pentagon to track human beings via drones makes me even more uncomfortable. As reported by Gizmodo,

Google’s pilot project with the Defense Department’s Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
Some Google employees were outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations, sources said, while others argued that the project raised important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning.

 Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,” he said. While Google says its involvement in Project Maven is not related to combat uses, the issue has still sparked concern among employees, sources said.

Eric Schmidt sounds like he's been canoodling with Obama and taking a page from his placatory playbook. Schmidt says that the tech community, like any other citizen-subject category, has this emotional problem leading them to crazily believe that the War Cartel is killing people incorrectly, rather than as legally permitted by a once-secret opinion written by former Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder ramped state-sanctioned murder up a huge notch, from killing people legally (via capital punishment, during the fog of war, and whenever the backs of black and brown people present an existential threat to police officers) to killing them "correctly." The correct use of drones, as former Obama CIA Chief and current NBC analyst John Brennan once outlined in his proudly leaked "Disposition Matrix" manual, is defined as the downgrading of people from human beings with civil rights to "militants," or any nameless pseudo-humans existing in the prime of their lives.

Forget about Don't Be Evil. Google's new motto should be "Don't Be Incorrect."

Gizmodo continues,

The project’s first assignment was to help the Pentagon efficiently process the deluge of video footage collected daily by its aerial drones—an amount of footage so vast that human analysts can’t keep up, according to Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who co-authored a lengthy July 2017 report on the military’s use of artificial intelligence. Although the Defense Department has poured resources into the development of advanced sensor technology to gather information during drone flights, it has lagged in creating analysis tools to comb through the data.

This is one small step for the Pentagon and one giant leap for official unaccountability.  Notice how the Neoliberal Thought Collective always uses the weasel word "efficiency" to justify everything from draconian cuts to domestic social programs and education, to the killing and maiming of people through the endless War On Terror. The poor confused warmongers just can't keep up with all that vast death-data as they scramble to decide who to track and kill next.

But look on the bright side:

Although Google’s involvement stirred up concern among employees, it’s possible that Google’s own product offerings limit its access to sensitive government data. While its cloud competitors, Amazon and Microsoft Azure, offer government-oriented cloud products designed to hold information classified as secret, Google does not currently have a similar product offering.
A Google spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement that it is providing the Defense Department with TensorFlow APIs, which are used in machine learning applications, to help military analysts detect objects in images. Acknowledging the controversial nature of using machine learning for military purposes, the spokesperson said the company is currently working “to develop polices and safeguards” around its use.

There can be no accountability for digital death product, because nobody will know what they're doing anyway. Google, lacking the same secret status as the oligopoly known as Amazon, will never have its sensitivities bothered by the actual sight of mangled human bodies.  Perhaps Google can borrow John Brennan from NBC for a little while, so he can craft a new manual of safeguards absolving them from prosecution should their artificial intelligence ever accidentally kill more than the acceptable number of innocent people.

***

It's probably unfair to just pick on Google, when the whole Internet is bloated with so many other amoral, state and corporate-sanctioned, platforms.  When the acceptable content providers are not deliberately dressing evil up in shiny propaganda for American consumption, they're just being plain mind-numbing and innocuous. Take the New York Times -- or as I find myself doing more and more these days, leave it.

Like many other people, I enjoyed Adam Rippon's skating and offbeat humor during the otherwise stultifying Olympics telecasts on John Brennan's network. I especially admired Rippon's refusal of a job as a paid commentator for NBC before the Olympics even ended, because it would have entailed moving out of the low-rent Olympic Village and leaving all his friends.

So anyway, now that Rippon is the latest new bright $hiny iconic thing, the New York Times is on it.  

 "He became well known in America in less than a month. After his figure-skating Olympic bronze, what's next? We grilled him about where he's going," the Times burbled in the digital front page intro. Why not? He is now a "for-real" famous person!

For real. The questions asked by a whole posse of reporters and editors could have been lifted straight out of a Hard Copy or Inside Edition interview instruction manual. Read the whole thing, right down to the edgy vernacular language that is de rigueur for any hip digital journalist trying to beat the Click pack. They, like, really like using the word "like" a lot as they try to goad the skater into slipping into their own shallowness. Here's my published response:

I got a kick out of Adam Rippon during the Olympics.

I didn't get such a kick out of reading this "grilling" of him. By their questions you shall know them... and mourn for the Paper of Record's sad descent into tabloid journalism. If there is one thing that Donald Trump has accomplished as reality show president, it's been to bring the level of discourse, if not down to his level, then at least very close.

One of the grilling questions is how Rippon's celebrity status has affected how "brands and sponsors approach you." One of the reporters actually said "I feel like, just from someone who wasn't in Korea, the narrative blah blah blah." Is this real, or is this an "Onion" parody about how many shallow buzzwords can be forced into one annoying media question?

And, like, would celebrity life even be worth living without agonizing over "pushback on social media?" To engage with trolls or not to engage -- that is the grilling question on the minds of Americans, the majority of whom don't even have $200 in savings to pay for an emergency car repair.

And oh, just because we question you over and over and over again about your "body image" doesn't mean that "people" are saying you're fat. But again, how about those advertisements and endorsements? And for even more clicks, we'll ask if the Olympic village was "really like a hotbed... of sexual Tinder, Grindr, everything." Because inquiring minds want to know.

Soggy grilled cheese replaces depth journalism. Sad.

Thanks, Obama

It's no surprise that in the Age of Trump things are getting mighty precarious for the majority of Americans. It's getting so dicey, in fact, that people were holding a prayer vigil in Chicago Tuesday night.

(credit: Chicago Tribune)

The protest was not, however, part of the nationwide, Democratic Party-approved #Resistance rallies against President Trump. It was a bona fide grassroots uprising against former President Barack Obama and his refusal to promise that the poor, elderly and disabled won't lose their (barely) affordable housing when his $500 million shrine opens on previously publicly-owned parkland a few short years from now.

Activists in the Jackson Park Watch community group finally had a chance to confront him directly this week during his final push for approval of the Obama Center. They again asked him why he won't sign a contract which guarantees that they won't be pushed out of their neighborhoods either during construction or after the opening of the project, which will include a luxury hotel and a professional world-class golf course. (Such written agreements are standard when a major construction project, such as the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn, threatens to displace existing residents and local jobs. The written agreements then can become the basis of lawsuits when the developers fail to follow through on their promises.)

 Obama's contemptuous answer when residents asked him to sign on the dotted line? Don't complain about what hasn't happened to you yet, especially when he can eventually attract celebrities like Jay-Z and Chance the Rapper to the premises. It's not like their depressing neighborhood is booming all on its own. And anyway, what could possibly be more important than economic development?

As reported by the Chicago Tribune, 

"A lot of times, people get nervous about gentrification and understandably so," he said. "It is not my experience ... that the big problem on the South Side has been too much development, too much economic activity, too many people being displaced because all these folks from Lincoln Park are filling in to the South Side. That's not what's happening.
"We have such a long way to go before you will start seeing the prospect of gentrification,” he said. “(My daughter) Malia's kids might have to worry about that. Right now, we've got to worry about broken curbs and trash and boarded-up buildings. That's what we really need to work on."

Nothing wins the hearts and minds of potential displaced persons like being sarcastically told by some fabulously rich property developer that since they live in a run-down trashy place anyway, they have nothing to complain about.  Nothing makes poor people feel better and more included than also having their worries flippantly compared to those of a privileged, set-for-life heiress.

While most of the $500 million cost of the Obama Center will be borne by private donors, the public will be on the hook for an estimated $175 million upgrade of surrounding infrastructure and roadways. Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Michael Chaffey said a new underpass will also be needed to allow for construction of the 18-hole golf course, to be designed by Tiger Woods.

Ever the neoliberal scold talking from both sides of his mouth simultaneously, Obama soothed,

 “Sometimes there’s a feeling of stuff being done to us and not for us.
Sometimes there’s a feeling of suspicion and concern and trepidation. That means you’re worried,” he said.
But he emphasized that the project can’t satisfy all constituents and said his team is eager to get moving into the construction phase.
“Twenty years from now, I want young people from across the South Side … to look at this center and say, ‘This is a sign that I count. This is a sign I can change the world,’” he said. “That is more important than any legacy I can ever have.”

The first step in gaslighting people into accepting something counter to their own interests is to diagnose them with an emotional problem; they have "feelings" rather than rational thoughts. The next step is to insist that the rich and the poor have the same core interests; in this particular case, Obama's personal glorification at their expense is couched in concern for generations yet to be born who will eventually flock to his Center like pilgrims flock to Rome, Lourdes, the Statue of Liberty, and Mecca. The final gaslighting step is to cast protesters as self-centered ingrates incapable of imagining a future Utopia in their own blighted back yard. You can't satisfy all the people all the time, so why even bother? As reported by Politico, Obama even groused that if he promised the South Side activists that they'll be taken care of, he'd be bombarded by too many "organizations" nitpicking him over boring things, such as lost jobs and public spaces and rising rents and and unaffordable property taxes. Their anxieties are absolutely nothing compared to the mythical hordes who will come to Chicago to be awed and inspired by a brutalistic monument to Obama's eternal greatness.

And as for the priced-out poor people in the neighborhood? Who needs a house when the Obama Center's more important purpose is to "send a message" that their lives really, really do matter to him? It's not an improved reality that should count. It's the "sign" and the symbols that should keep people hopeful and happy and resilient as they struggle to survive in a neoliberal landscape where the almighty "Market" has all but replaced policies for the greater social good.

Despite his lame weasel-wording, all indications are that Obama will get his way in Chicago. There's the support of his good pal the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, of course. And despite mild criticism of the almost paranoid secrecy surrounding the project and its glowing but unrealistic promises of future jobs and riches, the Tribune is editorializing in enthusiastic favor. Curbed Chicago even cynically gushes that the Obama Center will help future (as opposed to pesky current) community organizers to acquire more effective organizing skills:

The center wants to support those who have organizing experience and also those who want to get involved but don’t know how. Programs on everything from coding to athletics to the college application process are planned as well. Obama even mentioned bringing in Chance or Jay-Z to the recording studio to work with young artists.

Many of the anxieties felt by South Side residents were touched on throughout his speech. He validated these feelings but ultimately downplayed some concerns, reminding everyone that his intention is to create something that benefits the community and that he’s not profiting from this.

Whether or not you trust Obama’s abilities or intentions, his pitch for the center was heartfelt and clearly argued. He was asking for the people’s trust, and cited the politician that inspired him to come to Chicago in the first place.

“Here’s the thing. You can never make folks 100 percent happy. We want to be open and we want to listen. We are going to be ‘fairer than fair,’ to quote Harold Washington, in how we approach the design of this Presidential Center.”

Still missing Obama, liberals? This is the same right-wing "eat your peas" rhetoric employed during his austerity push after losing his Congressional super-majority in the 2010 mid-terms.  Unlike the widespread media panning of Trump's ignorant cruelty, though, Obama is still almost universally praised for being "measured," "heartfelt," and "thoughtful" even as he unleashes the relentless forces of sadistic neoliberalism against a historically oppressed population.

The shaming and the blaming of the poor, the elderly and the disabled will continue, no matter what faction of the Uniparty is in power. When South Siders complain and express their perfectly rational fears, they're told that they're letting Obama down. "Were the developer anyone other than Obama, whose deep roots on the South Side made it the only real choice for his presidential center," scolds the Tribune's Dahleen Glanton, "it is likely that he would have packed up his drawing board and gone elsewhere."

Such a patient man, parachuting down to the South Side for a minute to make his final, reasonable, irresistible offer. Any normal Trumpian greedster would have taken his marbles and his tax breaks and gone home by now. But not the long-suffering and intrepid and talented Mr. Obama.

Nevertheless, He Persisted

Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying (continued)

The timing of these two announcements (within 24 hours of each other) is probably just a weird coincidence:

1. Monday: The State Department, using funds donated by the bloated Pentagon, is launching a brand new $40 million offensive against scary "foreign propaganda."

2. Tuesday: Alumni of the Clinton and Obama administrations are launching a brand new major national security "strike force" against scary Donald Trump's scary responses to the scary foreign propaganda.

The first initiative is designed to propagandize against the Enemy Outside, and the second one is designed to propagandize against Enemies Inside, Outside and All Over. Both offensive forces are ultimately designed to instill the requisite levels of free-floating anxiety in an already anxious, yet unduly depressed and disgusted and financially strapped, electorate. If they can't get people to the polls with the promise of a better life tomorrow, maybe they can get people to the polls by dangling the prospect of no life at all tomorrow. 

 Be miserable and barely hanging on, or be dead. It's your choice.

The first initiative adds massive amounts of military money to the State Department's Center for Global Engagement, which Barack Obama signed into law in 2016 for the express purpose of propagandizing directly to the American public. In other words, it is an elite and glorified troll farm that should be the envy of those 13 grossly underpaid and recently indicted Russian sock puppets. From The Hill:

The new influx of funds will bolster the center’s operations in the current fiscal year. 
“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight,” Steve Goldstein, the department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, said in a statement. 
“It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive.” 
The announcement comes less than two weeks after special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for allegedly participating in an elaborate scheme to meddle in the 2016 presidential election by creating false U.S. personas and spreading divisive content on social media platforms.

Goldstein comes to his diplomatic gig direct from Corporate America, where most recently he was chief of marketing for BP Global Solutions. Previously he was a vice president for TIAA, a financial consulting firm, and also had served as vice president of communications for the Wall Street Journal. As founder of a start-up called Winning Algorithms, he seems absolutely perfect for his new gig doling out public money for all manner of aggressive and offensive things.

This definitely falls into the category of "Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying," given that the Silicon Valley tech giants are obviously being paid directly by the government to censor content that the government doesn't like. Facebook, for example, has already announced it will hire at least a thousand new law enforcement and surveillance state personnel by the end of this year to monitor the ads and political posts from its users. When you think about it, $40 million to fight the grossly underpaid Russian trolls sneaking their cheesy click-bait ads onto social media is probably just a down-payment. Censorship and the suppression of dissent costs a lot of money.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a Trump appointee who has openly called Trump a "moron" and nonetheless continues serving at the pleasure of Trump, has no choice but to go along to get along. There's lots of oil and gas out there, and his own recent employer, Exxon-Mobil, and its investors and stockholders, are no doubt counting on him.

The new money will be used, in part, to supply grants to civil society groups, media providers, academic institutions, private companies and other organizations that are working on projects to counter disinformation. 
The department said it plans to award an initial $5 million in grants from the so-called Information Access Fund. The fund will receive $1 million in initial seed money from the State Department’s public diplomacy coffers in order to get off the ground quickly, the department said.

And lo and behold, quick as a wink, "National Security Action" sprang into action - less than a day after the State Department announced that any number of vague, unnamed entities will be partaking in the propaganda windfall for a whole new offensive army of paid meat puppets  Again, it's probably a total coincidence, given that the 200 Obama and Clinton alumni are coyly not revealing who, exactly, will be paying their bills. The Washington Post, which got the big scoop, didn't bother to ask - possibly because it, too, is partaking of the State Department troll farm "seed money" to prevent all that domestic discontent-sowing going on around here.

"We decided, essentially, this is an emergency moment and that there was a need to pull together the national security community on the progressive side to counter Trump's policies and put forward an alternative" in this midterm year, said  (former Obama national security adviser) Ben Rhodes, one of the founders.
Leaders of the new group described its mission exclusively to The Washington Post ahead of its debut Tuesday....

 We're a temporary organization. Our hope is to be out of business in three years," Rhodes said.

(When, presumably, they can all traipse back into more secure security gigs  under a Democratic majority.)

The new group of credentialed experts, via TV appearances and op-eds and Democratic campaign consultancies, hopes to instill a new brand of existential angst into voters which Hillary Clinton simply could not sell them. The problem, says Democratic national security strategist Wendy Sherman, is that voters were more seduced by Trump's populist message than they were scared by his reckless bellicosity and his appalling ignorance of international affairs. Therefore, it is the new group's daunting task to scare voters into accepting the Democrats' and Republican neocons' more discreet ways of waging wars and colonizing the world's populations via trade deals and corporate plunder and predatory loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Of course, being a career diplomat herself, she didn't put it quite that way. Because that would have been way too Trump-like and crass.

Instead, 

She cited climate change and Trump's withdrawal from the Paris accord as one decision with deep national security implications, and the heightened rhetoric and tension surrounding North Korea's nuclear program as another. The group will also focus on cyberthreats in general and Russian election interference and Trump's response in particular, Sherman and others involved in the effort said.
"It's not easy to talk about national security issues" in local elections, Sherman said. "Most often, people don't see it as having anything to do with their daily lives, but here we have climate change, North Korea and other issues that have everything to do with people's lives. I think people are much more aware of it" now than in 2016, Sherman said.

Again - $40 million to convince Americans, most of whom don't have enough savings socked away to pay for an emergency car repair, that North Korean nukes and Russian interference should be their most pressing concerns, doesn't seem like nearly enough cash to pay all these "aggressive" experts. 

And as for Trump caring about a $40 million or even a billion-dollar domestic propaganda campaign that also has him in its cross-hairs: he doesn't. He's already achieved fame and personal fortune beyond his wildest dreams. All the negative and never-ending attention in the world - even from his own Secretary of State - has been nothing but beneficial for his brand.

Commentariat Central

As per reader request, I'm reprinting some of the recent comments I wrote on New York Times op-eds and articles that I haven't incorporated into regular posts.

Today, Maureen Dowd parodies Donald Trump's reading of "The Snake" at last week's CPAC orgy. In case you didn't know, CPAC is not the mask-gizmo worn by sufferers of sleep apnea. It's the modern version of a KKK rally with no masks needed to hide the bald-faced hate and lies.

So anyway, as a little background, Dowd ran in the same celebrity circles as Trump for decades. And it was only natural that when he started to pretend to run for president, she let him invade her column space to just let him rip. Now, like the rest of the media pack who gave him a limitless microphone for the pure shock and entertainment value of it all, she's falling all over herself to bring this lunatic down.

Since Dowd wrote her latest piece in the form of a poem, I wrote my response as a riff on The Spider and the Fly:

In memory of a Maureen Dowd column -- Introducing Donald Trump, Diplomat -- published on August 15, 2015, when, theoretically, it might still have been possible to stop Donald Trump in his tracks.

(and with my sincerest apologies to Mary Howitt)

"Won't you come up to Trump Tower?" said the spider to the scribe.
"Misogyny's on offer, and you're welcome to imbibe."

 Since access, not affliction, was the famous pundit's wish
She said "of course" and then she let the slimy monster dish.

"Rosie is a bully, I could smack her in the nose!" --
What better banter could there be for Maureen's brilliant prose?

And Megyn Kelly bleeding from her "wherever?"
Nobody ever did decree that click-bait need be clever.

"I win, Maureen, I always win," and he pounded on the table.
And duly did our scribe transcribe, quick as she was able.

Then she dared to ask him if he was a bully
And made no comment when he boasted, "Fully"

Because if journos are nice to Trump, not nasty
Their access to his loathsome self will be so ever-lasty.

Now, FF to Trump in Twenty Eighteen
And Dowd has turned righteous, scathing, and mean.

Better late than never, I guess
To try and clean up this unholy mess.

 But oh what a tangled web we sew
When first we practice stenographic Journ-o.

***

I know I've been hard on the Times lately for all its hysterical Russophobic schlock, but they still do some pretty good investigation journalism as well, especially on local news.

The only surprising thing about the latest blockbuster which exposes New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's corrupt pay-to-play administration is that it is virtually buried beneath all the Russophobic schlock on the homepage.

It seems that Andy has ignored ethics laws and has accepted millions of  campaign dollars from the wealthy donors he appoints to various state advisory boards - which have the power to make and break anything with a dollar sign attached to it. In other words, it's a permanent closed feedback loop of enrichment for the already obscenely rich, at the public's sole and involuntary expense.

Mr. Cuomo’s donor-appointees span the state’s vast network of boards and authorities. They have served as trustees of both the city and state university systems, on the panel overseeing economic development and on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York City’s subways and buses. Most positions are unpaid, but they hold great power and prestige: Board members can approve multibillion-dollar contracts and multimillion-dollar grants, oversee the distribution of tax breaks, and have broad influence over everything from the state’s highways to local arts projects.

Bribery and corruption have consequences. Another little-reported scandal in New York State involves the pollution of the drinking water supply of Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City. While the state has allowed this small city to temporarily tap into the Catskill Aqueduct, the pumping of "filtered" water from the tainted reservoir will resume next month, even before testing is completed.

My published comment, including a link with all the details:

While Cuomo is raking in the dough from his cronies, he is upset because Newburgh, NY has filed a notice of claim against the state for its lack of urgent response to its contaminated drinking water crisis. He doesn't think it very nice of officials who think that Cuomo's solution of tapping into the Catskill Aqueduct while the toxic Washington Lake reservoir water undergoes testing and more testing is a joke. The state plans to resume pumping "filtered" water from the lake next month. Anybody remember Flint, Michigan?

Cuomo actually said that officials are suing to make a bunch of lawyers rich. and not because people need safe water to drink and bathe in. The contamination, incidentally, comes not from lead, but from runoff of toxic chemicals used in firefighting drills by the military based at nearby Stewart Airport, which is run by the Port Authority, which is staffed by the Cuomo donor named in this excellent article.

Threatening to sue is "not hospitable or collegial or kind of them," Cuomo said last week.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/02/22/cuomo-o...

 Maybe if the inhospitable Newburgh officials started giving big bucks to Cuomo's campaign war chest, he might come around and arrange for some clean water for the ingrates.

Better yet, voters can easily arrange for a one-way ticket right out of Albany - unless prosecutors can get to him first, of course.

***

I hadn't commented on Paul Krugman's schlock for quite awhile, mainly because he always writes the exact same column: "Donald Trump is an evil jerk and all the Republicans are vile." I mean, who knew, right?

But I broke my embargo for his Friday piece because I wanted to get in my two cents on the gun control renaissance sparked by the latest mass shooting.

As usual, Krugman artificially narrows the decline and fall of the American empire to just one faction: those nasty old Republicans. The Democrats, apparently, do not even exist, neither in his column nor in the reality-based world. So, he is at least honest by omission as he writes:

Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — security from crazed gunmen, security from drunken drivers, security from exorbitant medical bills (which every other advanced country treats as a right, and does in fact manage to provide).

In short, you might want to think of our madness over guns as just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Yep, that sounds like Trump’s America.

My published response:

 What gives me hope that the students will succeed where the adults have failed are recent polls showing that half of millennials would rather live under a socialist system than a capitalist one. Sen. Marco Rubio visibly blanching on live TV as a teenager confronted him over his financial ties to the weapons industry possibly signalled the beginning of the end of the stranglehold the predatory oligarchy has over us.

Even if we passed a law tomorrow banning the sales of military-grade weapons to anyone with a pulse, there'd still be at least one gun for every man, woman and child in the US. It would take whole generations for all these weapons to rust out. Granted, by then the entire planet may be on fire or flooded, and guns will be the least of our existential worries.

It will be up to our terrorized but very brave students to find solutions that give peace, sanity and the environment even a smidgen of a chance.

While Trump, an unnatural politician if there ever was one, literally requires crib notes instructing him how to feign humanity, Congress keeps giving him carte blanche to wage our endless wars. He's far from the only pathocrat in the toxic mix. The sickness runs far, far deeper than any one corrupt and inept president.

 It certainly comes as no shock that Trump, having completed his own secondary education at a military academy for troubled youth, believes that schools should dispense with terror-free learning and get on with the weaponized discipline.