Happy May Day

Even though May Day was inspired by the fight for the eight-hour-day culminating in Chicago's Haymarket Massacre in 1886, the United States has never joined 80 other countries in declaring May 1st to be a legal holiday in honor of its workers. American politicians instead designated the first Monday of September as our own exceptional Labor Day, a day devoted to political stump speeches pandering to working class voters and family barbecues taking the place of marches in the streets. Honoring our historical labor struggles? Placing the worker above the boss in importance and value? Surely, you jest.

Before the September Labor Day caught on in the public's Great American Traditions mindset, US leaders frantically tried to suppress labor rights even further by declaring May 1st to be "Law and Order Day." Cue the deep bass thump-thump opening credits from the popular NBC franchise series about cops.  Cue the masses to get off the streets lest there be "clashes" with the night sticks and tear gas.

Sadly for the corporate suppressors of history, though, hundreds of thousands of underpaid teachers across America have been striking for a living wage in state after state after state. These are largely in hardcore conservative states  ("red"- so deliciously ironic in light of the upsurge of radical labor) whose corrupt leaders prescribed austerity for their citizens in the name of "fiscal responsibility" in the aftermath of the massive theft of trillions of dollars in household wealth, bowdlerized as The Financial Crisis of 2008. Gilded Age history just keeps right on repeating, simply because our leaders' refusal to learn any lessons from past struggles ensures the repetition.

Eric Chase of the Industrial Workers of the World explains:

Truly, history has a lot to teach us about the roots of our radicalism. When we remember that people were shot so we could have the 8-hour day; if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were burned to the ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend; when we recall 8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in the streets protesting working conditions and child labor only to be beat down by the police and company thugs, we understand that our current condition cannot be taken for granted - people fought for the rights and dignities we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The sacrifices of so many people can not be forgotten or we'll end up fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why we celebrate May Day.

In Arizona, where Trump wants to spend billions for a section of his symbolic Great Wall and where legislators have cut more than $1 billion from the state education budget in the decade since the financial collapse, the #RedforEd teachers are now entering the second week of their strike.

American leaders are just as anxious about the possibility of this latest strike spreading nationwide as their forebears were about the threatened spread of May Day agitations a century ago. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for example, insisted to a World Socialist Website reporter covering one rally in Phoenix on Monday that "education is a statewide issue" rather than a national one.

"We want to make sure that these walk-outs become walk-ins to the voting booths in November," she added in typical centrist Democrat cant.

Given that Trump's billionaire right-wing Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, also insists that education initiatives and funding are the sole responsibility of the states which have been starved into submission by austerity policies, you get the drift. The leaders of both corporate political parties would just as soon that the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, both in knowledge and in wealth, will just keep exponentially widening so that more and more "collateral damage" will keep falling into it.

Thank goodness of the teachers who are refusing to fall into it, and who keep educating the whole country about the fight for justice and the never-ending search for truth and the value of solidarity. 

The Heartbreak of Neoliberal Brand Damage

MSNBC pundit Joy Reid said on Saturday that it was "heartbreaking" for her to discover that she used to be such a blatant homophobe and that she "didn't do better back then," in the Dark Ages of the Early 21st Century. But to prove to her corporate sponsors that even damaged brands like hers can be rehabilitated with just the right public relations product, she used her Saturday "AM Joy" show to scrub herself clean with a whole panel full of LGBTQ human brillo pads. She sudsed and she buffed and she polished, she apologized and she pleaded, in a valiant 30-minute infomercial attempt to transform her tarnished image to brand new heights of surface brightness.

 And lo, she was verily declared to be a Profile in Courage by the members of The Club. Both the Queen of Russiagate herself, Rachel Maddow, and drone assassination legal eagle Eric Holder tweeted out their awe and admiration. And thus the defense contractors and the Big Pharma pill-pushers who keep Joy Reid on the air have given her a reprieve. Since not one single sponsor is fleeing in protest, Reid will keep her job as the go-to scold for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party will continue to pretend that Joy Reid is a "public intellectual" for the accomplishment of once having written a fawning book about Barack Obama, and for continuing to support Hillary Clinton while putting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump into the same deplorable basket. Reid will keep the centrist identity politics dream alive in the interests of capitalism and citizen-consumership.

So what if she's bashed gays and Muslims in even some of her relatively recent tweets?  So what if she initially tried to weasel her way out of her dilemma by lying and claiming that her old blog had been "hacked?" All is forgiven if one is a member of The Club.

Members of The Club just can't seem to get enough of showing their true right-wing liberal colors these days. After circling the wagons around Joy Reid, they're circling the wagons around their beloved faux-nemesis, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In case you hadn't heard, Sarah came in for a scathing put-down by comic Michelle Wolf at Saturday's annual Correspondents' Dinner. Here's a clip of the performance, which still has The Club mavens clutching their pearls in dismay:

In the interests of the free corporate press and the selective interpretation of the First Amendment, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association issued a lengthy apology for Wolf's performance, apparently having assumed that Wolf would act like Joy Reid and restrict her hilarious wrath to Trump, the Whole Trump and Nothing But the Trump. So when Wolf also eviscerated the corporate media, it was simply too much to bear. It does not advance "the interests of journalism" to have the interests of journalism critiqued at an event whose sole incestuous purpose has always been mutual masturbation among close relatives in the Media-Political Complex. (The one previous exception to this rule was when Stephen Colbert blasted the press for literally going along with Bush's invasion of Iraq. That was before Colbert achieved membership, and thus redemption, in The Club himself and his faux pas is now as newly old as Joy Reid's homophobic blog posts.)

Anyway, Michelle Wolf should probably be worried, because some of the quips from journalists are even funnier than her own routine. Peter Baker of the New York Times sniped that "I don't think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight."  What an understatement. What modesty.

Andrea Mitchell of NBC said Wolf's routine was even worse than that time Don Imus ridiculed Bill Clinton for his philandering. Maggie Haberman of the Times praised Sarah Huckabee Sanders for "impressively" not walking out when she found herself on the receiving end of the taunts for a change.

But the best defense of The Club of all comes from Mika "Morning Joe" Brzezinski:

Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah an apology.

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) April 29, 2018

Apparently, Mika would be more amenable to watching a childless single woman get humiliated on national TV, or watching a less-important woman get humiliated in a Walmart parking lot. It's not the humiliation that irks Mika - it's the fact of Mika watching it happen. She broadcasts her own sexism by defining the status of women based not upon their brains or accomplishments or ethics, but upon their marital and procreative status. Women have to support a lying liar like Huckabee simply because she virtuously possesses a husband and kids. Mika also broadcasts her classism when she asserts that all women have a duty to unite whenever female Club attack animals are attacked in public. I'm sure, though, that if her bigotry and hypocrisy were ever pointed out to her, Mika would be every bit as heartbroken as her NBC colleague, Joy Reid.

What I found way more offensive than Michelle Wolf (and I didn't find her offensive at all) were the incest-fests where Barack Obama joked in 2010 about killing the Jonas Brothers with drones and where George W. Bush pretended in 2004 to be looking for those non-existent WMDs under his Oval Office desk. No discomfort or heartbreak was displayed by the corporate press back then, in the Dark Ages of the Early 21st Century. On the contrary. The Club roared and howled and guffawed in appreciative laughter at each of those performances, because they were absolutely complicit in them.

No apologies were issued by The Club, and no big public relations efforts at damage control ensued. Nobody suggested cancelling future White House Correspondents' dinners, because nobody with coveted membership credentials was even close to feeling disgusted.

 War and war marketing pay a lot of their bills, and the obscene profits and destruction and jingoism help to keep them in the careerist lifestyles and mindsets to which they all have become so grotesquely accustomed.

Only in Dark Ages America could a comic's cracks about a White House propagandist's eye-shadow be deemed more offensive than millions of people getting killed and maimed in the US Imperium's endless crusades of state-sponsored terrorism.

As Michelle Wolf noted at the end of her routine: "And Flint still has no water."

The Rent Is Too Damned Low

So says that zany HUD director, Ben Carson, who wants people receiving Section 8 housing assistance to start paying as much as triple their current rent. His reasoning, if you can call it that, is that a triple kick in the teeth by the landlord will be just like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. The moribund renters will immediately hoist themselves off their cushy catafalques of dependency, flee their apartments, and land a fantastic, good-paying job that very same day.

No matter that, unless they're elderly or disabled, most of the people who receive government rent subsidies already do work, often at two or three minimum-wage jobs -- and that, without the Section 8 vouchers, their monthly take-home pay couldn't cover the costs of food, utilities, gas and vehicle maintenance, child care and clothing.

As much as the Trump administration loves to bash the Democrats, its campaign to punish the poor builds directly upon the Clinton administration's agenda to "end welfare as we know it." The Trumpies have even dubbed it Welfare Reform 2.0, in homage to Bill Clinton's Step 1.0. The 1996 termination of cash welfare benefits effectively condemned a million and a half Americans, mostly women and children, to whole lifetimes of extreme poverty. That's defined as existing (you can't call it living) on $2 or less per day.

Not satisfied with those figures, Donald Trump signed another one of his vague orders earlier this year, calling for federal agencies to impose work requirements on people receiving food assistance and Medicaid as well as public housing assistance. At least seven states have already required Medicaid clients to either work or enroll in job training programs at their own expense if they want to continue getting health care.

The demonization of poor people as lazy "takers" even as the extremely wealthy are getting outrageously richer thanks to recent Republican tax cuts, is of course nothing new. Ben Carson, good Christian that he is, is merely following the playbook of all the missionaries before him, dividing the good and deserving poor from the bad and undeserving poor, who are selfishly sucking up all that glorious rental assistance. Rather than calling for the wealthy to be taxed more to take care of the poor, Carson and his cohort believe that the poor should be forced to share their meager resources among themselves. There are too many miserable people allegedly "gaming" the system and deliberately impoverishing their fellow poor people. Therefore, the bureaucratic system should be adjusted so as to appear more generous as it dispenses fewer dollars to a greater number of people.

Carson seems to be plagiarizing the tract of two trailblazing Victorian housing "reformists", who after investigating "the condition of the abject poor" in Dickensian London, concluded,

"An attempt must be made to relieve in some wise and practical, though very limited way, the abounding misery, whilst care is taken to prevent the abuse of charity. In this manner the injudicious and inexperienced may easily do more harm than good, pauperising the people whom they wish to help, and making hypocrites instead of Christians. To indicate what we mean we may mention one case pointed out to us of a woman who attended three different places of worship on the Sunday and some others during the week, because she obtained charitable help from all."

Lest he, too, be accused of hypocritically pauperizing the poor, Carson proposes relieving the misery by raising the rent for subsidized housing clients to 35% of their gross income, up from the current 30%. This hike would affect about half of the nearly 5 million families now receiving benefits. The very poorest of the poor -- about 712,000 households -- would end up paying $150, or three times the current cap of $50. The Number Three does have some pretty heavy mystical Christian symbolism, after all. Both Jesus and Lazarus were supposedly resurrected after three days in the tomb, Christ was on the cross for three hours, and then of course there's the Holy Trinity, and Peter denying Jesus three times, etc. and ad infinitum.

But, I digress.

 It's not fair, said Carson in a conference call with reporters, for a quarter of poor Americans to be getting housing aid when another 75% of them are on waiting lists or even dying before receiving vouchers. From the Washington Post:

   Every year, it takes more money, millions of dollars more, to serve the same number of households,” Carson said. “It's clear from a budget perspective and a human point of view that the current system is unsustainable.”

He added that decades-old rules on rent calculations are “far too confusing,” often resulting in families who earn the same income paying vastly different rent “because they know how to work the system.”

HUD wants to scrap rules allowing deductions for medical and child-care costs when determining rent, which Carson said gave some tenants an unfair advantage.

“They know how to include certain deductions that other people may not be aware of,” Carson said. “We really want to level the playing field and make it much more even for everyone.”

Carson wants to make Charles Dickens's descriptions of abject Victorian poverty come to great life again, right here in Exceptional USA. Because if he and his kleptocratic cronies can't divide poor people and pit them against one another in a violent battle for stingy government help, then what possible good does it do to have an oligarchy?

With any luck, the Democratic minority will minimize the damage, and perhaps negotiate a slightly less onerous rent increase rather than, say, agitating for the construction of more public housing stock as well as shortening the outrageously long wait times for Section 8 vouchers. In Los Angeles, for example, the list was recently reopened after having been closed to new applicants for the past 13 years.

This might also be an optimal time for the Rent Is Too Damned High Party to go totally national and mainstream. Jimmy McMillan, the New York gubernatorial candidate who quit politics a couple of years ago because he said voters are too "brainwashed," received 41,000 votes out of 4 million cast in the 2010 election.

In the customary derogatory style with which it writes about "fringe" candidates, the New York Times groused in 2015 that McMillan had had some nerve running on a tenants' rights platform when, as a Vietnam War vet, he was selfishly collecting disability payments and living rent-free in a subsidized apartment himself. Forget about the return of Charles Dickens-era living conditions for tenants in the Age of Trump, because as far as the Times was concerned, McMillan himself was nothing but one of those comical minor characters straight out of a Dickens novel.

Now, I know this might seem hard for some of you to believe, but the Times actually deemed McMillan to be even zanier than our current HUD director, whom the clownish Trump once had the chutzpah to call "sleepy" right in the middle of a campaign debate. Very serious reporter Alexander Burns wrote that incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo had cynically used McMillan to boost his own candidacy. (a ploy later used less successfully by the Clintonites, when they attempted to damage Jeb Bush by cynically triangulating and boosting Donald Trump):

In a move intended to minimize the influence of his Republican opponent, Carl P. Paladino, Mr. Cuomo insisted that a televised debate include all of the minor-party candidates running for governor. Mr. McMillan, a fast-talking performer in Dickensian costume, was a breakout star.

A “Rent Is Too Damn High” music video followed, along with appearances on cable television — a plot twist that may have presaged, in some respects, the rise of other populist entertainer-cum-candidates, like Donald J. Trump.

Well, times and political realities have certainly changed. "Send in the Clowns," once considered such a plaintive romantic song, has suddenly morphed into a victory dance with a brass band. The last election proves that anything is possible. New doors have been opened. So I think Jimmy should seriously consider staging a comeback, even this late in his career, and run against either Cuomo or Trump, if for no other reason than it would drive the New York Times utterly bonkers.

Should Big Brother Be Public or Private?

According to a new Pew poll, Americans hate the idea of the government controlling what they see, hear and read. But they're just fine with Silicon Valley calling the shots over what is and what is not "fake news."

Or so it seems on the surface. You see, the pollsters artificially limited their survey to just those two choices: public control of information vs. private control of information. Respondents were not asked whether they'd prefer no  censorship at all. See the explanatory note at the bottom of the graphic: "Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown." 

The non-answerers appear to have taken a tip from Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: as a form of protest against bullshit and control, they "preferred not to" to choose between two Big Brothers. So as far as the Pew Charitable Trust is concerned, the refusenicks don't count as desirable authoritarian personalities.

Offering people that third sensible alternative of nobody controlling internet information would not be in keeping with the aims of the Surveillance State. Let's face it: there is no real dichotomy between the nation-state and the corporate social media giants. Silicon Valley is essentially a nation-state in its own right, what with its annual GDP far exceeding that of many sovereign countries.

Therefore, offering people a "choice" between control by the Empires of Twitter, Apple, Google and Facebook, or control by their elected representatives is no choice at all. The oligarch-controlled government and the tech empires are essentially the same parasite, existing only to feast and grow fat off the money and data of the citizen-consumers of America.

Both legislators and social media tycoons will now be able to wave this distorted poll around as proof positive that Americans would dearly love to have all their news consolidated and monitored for their own protection. The only controversy will be which powerful entity can protect us better.

In an effort to keep the truth about the distorted nature of the poll from as many citizen-consumers as possible, the Pew people then proceeded to artificially divide the citizen-consumers of America into the artificial categories of Democrat and Republican. This is the standard fake attempt to make some fake sense out of the "fake news crisis initiative" that's taken precedence over discussion of social policies for the public good.

 It's all about the marketing of fake freedom.

 Majorities of both parties agree that people’s freedom to access and publish information online is a priority over having the government take action to curtail false information in a way that could limit those freedoms (60% of Republicans and Republican leaners say this, as do 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners). There are partisan differences when it comes to steps from technology companies. A majority of Democrats (60%) favor action by technology companies to restrict misinformation, even if it includes broader information limits online. Republicans, on the other hand, are about equally divided between the two options: 48% favor technology companies taking steps to control misinformation, and 50% favor protecting freedoms.

That Democrats would favor the tech giants controlling and restricting information more so than do Republicans would be kind of surprising, were it not for the Democratic Party's relentless, 18-month-long Russiaphobia campaign. After being raked over the coals by the DNC for publishing anti-Clinton ads from a St. Petersburg troll farm, Facebook has now become penitent enough to hire thousands of security state and law enforcement personnel to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

But luckily for actual democracy, the poll found that younger people of all political persuasions are less likely to accept surveillance by the tech giants than are adults 50 or older, 64% of whom said they'd welcome their news being policed by private overseers. "Only" about half of younger respondents want their information to be so controlled.

Maybe the control-loving youthful half just haven't had enough post-secondary education yet, because most respondents with at least some college oppose outside efforts to curb "fake news" and prefer to make their own decisions about what is true and what is bogus. The less education that people have, the more willing they are to have others higher up the technocratic food chain make their decisions for them.

No wonder there is a war on teachers, kids, and public education. The only freedom that the ruling class racketeers are marketing to an ever more dumbed-down population is the freedom from independent, critical thought. Their method of enslaving people is to offer them them the illusion of autonomy and choice, and then cynically label it "empowerment."

Hillary's Hypocrisy Will Never Cease

Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State once allegedly joked in a cabinet meeting that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be droned to death for publishing state secrets, has now morphed into her newest role: champion of free speech and press freedoms in the Age of Trump.

For some reason, Clinton was invited to give the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at PEN America's World Festival in New York City on Sunday night. As reported by Sopan Deb of the New York Times,

 She criticized Mr. Trump, not so subtly comparing him to authoritarian leaders who had suppressed journalism in their countries.

“Today, we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,” she said. “Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents.”

After listing more examples of Mr. Trump’s attacks on the news media, Mrs. Clinton said, “Now given his track record, is it any surprise that, according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them ‘talk’?”

This is highly ironic, given that when Clinton headed the State Department, she operated with a decidedly authoritarian bent herself when it came to the freedom of the press. While calling for a free and open internet abroad, and while praising the Arab Spring and the "Twitter and Facebook revolutions" inspired by Wikileaks, she doubled down on censorship at home. She went so far as to attempt purging Wikileaks from the web after it dumped embarrassing State Department cables for the whole world to see, covering everything from US war crimes and cover-ups to dirty tricks and petty gossip. One particularly cringe-worthy cable detailed how Clinton herself had ordered that all the plastic cups used by foreign diplomats at a U.N. conference be collected for DNA testing.

Meanwhile, her official 2011 Internet Freedom Agenda stated, “the internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. . . The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should.”

But as Timothy Garton Ash notes, this agenda simply did not and does not apply when it comes to the exercise of free speech within the United States itself. He calls it the Clinton Paradox:

When WikiLeaks, founded to release publicly significant information not published elsewhere, published information embarrassing to the US government, Clinton helped to co-ordinate action by government, banks and internet service providers to withdraw support from the organization and (unsuccessfully) remove it from the web. Other domestic policies likewise tend away from freedom and towards control. For example, the US Federal Communications Commission has now ruled that mobile devices are not subject to the net neutrality rules that prohibit discrimination of media content based on its source or destination.  Instead, mobile operators, who now control the means through which an increasing number of people go online, can block, throttle, or degrade any kind of content they like.  Most recently, the ominously named E-PARASITE bill was introduced into the US Congress. It stipulates that an internet service provider can be liable for any content or site that it delivers that has a “high probability” of being used for copyright infringement.  Critics of the bill claim that this provision could extend to almost any site that hosts user-generated content.

(Note: thanks in large part to freedom of expression on the internet, the "e-parasite bill" ultimately went down in defeat. But then came the destruction of net neutrality under Trump. Hillary did not address net neutrality during Sunday's "press freedom" speech and refused, as Wikileaks-released emails show, to champion it during her 2016 campaign. )

So it was something of a mystery to me why PEN, an organization of writers devoted to protecting the First Amendment and standing up to government censorship, would have invited Hillary Clinton to deliver their keynote address in the first place. So I went to the PEN website in search of clues. And I immediately got my answer.

It's the anti-Trump #Resistance, stupid! Writer-members have obediently and narrowly channeled their crusade for free self-expression into the vile person of Donald J. Trump, and only Donald J. Trump. He did, after all, just obligingly confirm their worst fears by joking he'd like to put reporters critical of his regime in jail for a couple of days to keep them in line. To be fair to Trump, though, this threat was merely on the say-so of fired FBI Director James Comey, who for his own jokey authoritarian part, also thinks it would be a fine idea to "put some (journalists' and leakers') heads on pikes" in this country if they start talking and writing too un-American. 

So I guess as far as PEN is concerned, the enemy of our enemies (Trump and Comey) is our friend, regardless of whether she would love to silence Wikileaks and jokily kill its founder. No matter that the Obama administration in which Hillary served was dubbed by former New York Times reporter James Risen "the greatest enemy of press freedoms in a generation" and that Barack Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous regimes combined. The PEN blurb heralding Hillary's appearance gushes:

The theme of this year’s Festival—beginning April 16 and comprising more than 60 events across New York City—is Resist and Reimagine. The line-up will draw on global experiences, perspectives, and narratives to help light the way toward surmounting current crises here at home. At a time of unprecedented threats to free speech, open discourse, and the rights of historically marginalized groups​, Secretary Clinton will draw on her experience as the nation’s top diplomat and her ​career in politics​ to underline the centrality of free speech—broadly defined and vociferously defended—in sustaining healthy democracies and vibrant societies. Clinton has shown a life-long commitment to amplifying lesser-heard voices and buttressing safeguards for free expression.

Back in 2011, however, when Hillary Clinton was strenuously engaged in trying to purge Wikileaks from the Internet, and even allegedly calling for death to Assange, the PEN organization was vigorously defending him and his organization, and encouraging media outlets not to bow to government pressure against publishing the released documents. From its statement: 

The Wikileaks issue marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the media and the sometimes conflicting principles of freedom of expression and privacy and security concerns. The culture of increasing secrecy in governments and the rise of new technology will inevitably lead to an increasing number of transparency issues of this sort. PEN International believes it is important to acknowledge that while the leaking of government documents is a crime under U.S laws, the publication of documents by Wikileaks is not a crime. Wikileaks is doing what the media has historically done, the only difference being that the documents have not been edited.
PEN International urges those voicing opinions regarding the Wikileaks debate to adopt a responsible tone, and not to play to the more extreme sections of society. In a world where journalists are regularly physically attacked, imprisoned and killed with impunity, calling for the death of a journalist is irresponsible and deplorable.

Yet only two years later, a survey by the PEN organization revealed that many of its member-writers were feeling so cowed by Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance on US citizens that they had begun to self-censor. 

More than a quarter of the writers reported curtailing their time spent on the Internet and deliberately avoiding writing about and talking about certain topics in email and phone conversations. Another 16 percent admitted to censoring themselves in their articles and books. The majority of respondents thought that their activities were being monitored by the US government. The topics that they reported being afraid to write or talk about included military affairs, the Occupy movement, the Middle East and North Africa, mass incarceration, drug policies, pornography, the study of "certain languages," and criticism of the US government.

Fast forward another four years, and the fear and self-censorship have apparently reached soaring new heights. PEN invites Hillary Clinton, of all people, to lecture professional writers about freedom of speech.

 Arthur Miller must be rolling in his grave. 

 And Julian Assange is still a political prisoner, his own Internet connection completely cut off under pressure from the US government. The Democratic Party is even bizarrely suing him, along with his supposed co-conspirators Trump and Russia, for a "conspiracy" to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and thereby destroy American democracy.

For such a sore loser, Hillary Clinton has certainly turned out to be one hell of a big winner. She keeps right on ticking. And sadly, PEN seems to have become just one more inmate in what Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher so pithily called the "veal pen."

Speaking Ill of Barbara Bush Is Deemed Un-American

Randa Jarrar, a tenured creative writing professor at Cal State Fresno, is being investigated by her employer for tweeting: "Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”

This amazing departure from the flood of hagiography on the late Barbara Bush has evoked the wrath of decent people and Internet trolls all over America. Their belief in the First Amendment is apparently not as important in their belief in Emily Post, not to mention their belief a wrathful Old Testament God.

It is deemed improper to speak ill of the dead no matter how awful they may have been in life. And when an awfully important and powerful person dies, it is especially incumbent upon all good nonthinking Americans to pretend that they were living saints, regardless of whether you "agreed" with them or not. Death is a magical thing to magical-thinking people. It bestows upon the corpse, especially the still-warm corpse, a glow of righteousness for the mere fact that it no longer breathes. Speak ill of the dead, and you risk the dead person striking you dead, whether it be from their exalted perch in heaven and from the lowest circle of Hell. Even the most enlightened and liberal Americans can harbor an atavistic belief in ghosts and divine retribution.

And even if you don't believe in ghosts, and you have not joined in lockstep awe of Barbara Bush, you should feel ashamed of yourself for dissing her while her loved ones are still grieving. This is despite the fact that her loved ones are not so grief-stricken themselves that they canceled their previously scheduled plutocratic confab in Dallas. (see my previous post.) Just like a multi-day wake, it will end on the very day of Barbara's funeral in a Christian church.

Even though some of America's richest people are now gathered together at Dubya's presidential shrine to talk about money and power and influence instead of gathering to pray for the Matriarch, Professor Randa Jarrar and all of you heretics should at least feel ashamed of yourselves for not being in lockstep with our beloved awesome liberal ex-presidents, who are falling all over themselves in awe of Barbara Bush. 

The Washington Post leads its own smear piece on the comparatively powerless Professor Jarrar by juxtaposing her irreverent tweet with the bland words of two of the most powerful men in the country:

In the hours after Barbara Bush died Tuesday, even those who didn’t share the former first lady’s political views expressed their condolences and recounted warm memories of the Bush family matriarch.

Former president Bill Clinton, the man who once campaigned against her husband, called Bush “a remarkable woman” with “grit & grace, brains & beauty.” Another former president, Barack Obama, said she had “humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit.”

The Post then goes on to compare these calm and reasonable words with the "rants" of Jarrar against the Twitter backlash. 

School officials also said they were reviewing the tenured professor’s position.

More than 2,000 people had replied to Jarrar before she made her Twitter account private, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Some were upset at what they viewed as her incivility about a woman widely regarded as genteel.

For others, the sin was more basic: She had spoken ill of the dead.

Jarrar pointed to the comments as an example of “what it’s like to be an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout online expressing an opinion.”

“Look at the racists going crazy in my mentions right now,” she tweeted.

The Post quotes the college's president as saying that Jarrar's "taunting" remarks (including her snarkily referring Twitter critics to a suicide prevention hotline) "were beyond free speech. This was disrespectful. A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish. We are all held accountable for our actions."

Well, not so much if you started an illegal war and "tortured some folks" as did the honored and rehabilitated George W. Bush, or if you destroyed the entire global economy, as did the Wall Street bankers. This is, after all, Exceptional America. In any event, Jarrar has apparently so threatened Fresno State that officials have now put "extra security" in place in order to safeguard the safe-thinking population who harbor nothing but kind words and thoughts about Mrs. Bush.  And for further protection, in appeasement to the wrathful etiquette gods, the campus flags were lowered to half staff,  and College Republicans have scheduled a memorial service in her honor.

In case that isn't enough paranoia and superstition, the public shaming and virtual stoning of the free-thinking Professor Jarrar has even migrated to the Kingdom of Amazon where trolls have posted hundreds of harsh reviews on her books (which they haven't read) and thus lowered her ratings.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, who owns both the Washington Post and Amazon, will deliver a sold-out speech at George W. Bush's shrine on Saturday. This appearance has nothing whatsoever to do with honoring Barbara Bush, and everything to do with burnishing his image and instilling hope in Dallas that he will pick that Texas city as his second US headquarters, at much taxpayer expense. 

Cash-strapped municipalities are in a virtual bidding war to become part of the Bezos Empire. In exchange for his promise to create an estimated 50,000 new low-paying jobs for the winning city, the winning city will be expected to foot the bill for the infrastructure to ensure the smooth and ceaseless flow of profits to the richest man in America as well the smooth and ceaseless flow of goods to America's good-thinking citizen-consumers.

Only in America could this oligarch, whose employees are so poorly paid that they qualify for food stamps and Medicaid, enjoy the respect and a greater right to free speech than a professor whose talent and specialty is creative writing. 

She not only thinks independently, she's in the business of teaching young people to think independently and then to convey those thoughts to others via the power of the written word. Randa Jarrar is therefore deemed to be a clear and present danger.

If you still had any doubts that the USA is a full-blown fascist state with repressive religious undertones, you might as well disabuse yourself of them right now.  

Sinclair Lewis was right. Fascism arrived cloaked in the American flag, emblazoned with a cross, as evidenced most recently on the campus of Fresno State.

Mourning Barbara: The Bush Way of Death

George W. Bush finally explained himself this morning on Fox Business News. What more perfect venue could there be for a bereaved plutocrat for whom capitalistic life must go on regardless of the fact that his mother Barbara is not yet decently buried?

The day after Mrs. Bush's death at the ripe old age of 92, a tearless, stoically jovial George told Maria Bartiromo that as Babs lay moribund she joked to the doctor, "You want to know why George is the way he is? Because I drank and smoked when I was pregnant with him!"

Calling Doctor Freud. Spoiled son blames Mom for his personality disorder, which as far as we know first manifested itself in the 1950s when he stuffed firecrackers up the rectums of frogs just to watch them blow up. Could the frat boy draft dodger who went on to send lesser mortals to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq be a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome?

The glowing New York Times review does not go there. It's too soon. It is especially too soon to speak ill of the war criminal sons of newly-dead ruling class matriarchs. Instead, we are regaled in article after article about Barbara Bush's iconic "saltiness" vying with her down-to-earth grandmotherly persona, and how she kept George and the rest of clan laughing their asses off right up to her final dying breath. And beyond. Because as far as Dubya is concerned, there's no such thing as tear-stained laughter. Leave that maudlin stuff to his daughters grieving over their "Gammy." In his septuagenarian world of grief, there's just the usual unseemly preppie guffawing. We saw this in action at a 2016 memorial service for the slain Dallas police officers, when George showed his sorrow by giggling and swaying back and forth in a kind of goofy dance.

Dubya couldn't go on TV soon enough to tell his heartwarming anecdote about his life in utero. To be fair, the interview had already been scheduled long before Mrs. Bush decided to forgo further treatment for her failing heart and lungs. And he will also nevertheless persist in hosting his annual "leadership forum" to be held today at his presidential shrine in Dallas (Mom will be interred on the grounds of the first President Bush's shrine on Saturday). The Times reported approvingly, 

“My mother would say, ‘Make darn sure you participate fully in the leadership forum,’” he said. “In other words, ‘Don’t sit around and feel sorry for me or yourself, more importantly, but move on with life.’ And that’s what we’re doing.”

Nothing, not even the death of a mother, will ever get in the way of End Stage Capitalism as practiced by America's great ruling class dynasties.

The honored guest at this year's confab will be Priscilla Chan, wife of embattled Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. She'll be talking about school privatization and machine learning for plutocratic fun and profit.

 “We’re thrilled that Priscilla Chan will lend her visionary expertise to a conversation around how our children learn and the future of how we educate students in this country,” said Ken Hersh, President and CEO of the Bush Center. “Education is core to our mission at the Bush Institute, and we share The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s belief that every child should have the opportunity to recognize their full potential. I look forward to an important conversation around how parents, educators, organizations, and communities can contribute to learning environments that meet the needs of all children.”

If nothing else, her discourse is sure to beat the grief-addled Dubya's plaintive "the question must be asked: is our children learning?" back when he was pushing his repressive No Child Left Behind initiative for plutocratic fun and profit. Chan reportedly will also talk about "access to" affordable housing - as opposed to, say, the actual building of affordable housing for the poor financed by the tax dollars of the wealthy, or an actual increase in federally subsidized rent assistance programs.

It's so heartwarming that Bush's oil tycoon pal Hersh can also get past Barbara Bush's death and gush that every child should get just enough education to "recognize" their potential, as opposed to oil tycoons like himself getting fairly taxed to make sure that poor children can realize their full potential and avoid going to their own deathbeds saddled with onerous college and medical debt.

Also appearing at the non-cancelled Leadership Forum will be former Federal Reserve Chairman and Brookings fellow Ben Bernanke: New York Times op-ed contributor and American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks; Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace. Closing the festivities will be America's richest oligarch, Jeff Bezos, founder of the Amazon oligopoly and owner of the Washington Post.

Sadly, both the Forum and the Funeral will be closed to the public. Because privatized plutocratic life must always go on, and George W. is absolutely convinced that Mom is fondly looking down on the whole charade from her own privileged perch in heaven. To paraphrase Babs herself, she was privileged to begin with, so this is all working out very well for her whole family and their close circle of friends. It will work out so well for them, in fact, that they'll even save themselves the expense of an extra-long trip on their private Lear jets to attend her funeral in Houston.

May they all rest in the peace and knowledge of their own exalted rectitude.