Gina Haspel's House of Waffles

After Gina Haspel's weasel-worded performance at her Senate hearing for the CIA directorship this week, the only surprise (besides her arrogance, that is) is the fact that so many lawmakers are still "waffling" over whether to confirm her to the post.

It's not because Haspel supervised torture sessions, including waterboarding, at a secret black site prison in Thailand and later destroyed the video evidence of same that the senators are wringing their hands, or pretending to. It's because she refused to be straightforward about whether she has a moral code or not. She refused to acknowledge that while torture may once have been deemed "legal" by the Bush administration, it has always been inherently immoral. She refused to admit there could even be a gap between bad law and basic morality.

This has put many politicians and corporate media pundits into a quandary, at least insofar as their own public personae are concerned. If only she'd groveled a little and said she has a few regrets for her war crimes, the wafflers (mainly liberals but also a smattering of conservatives) would feel free to wash their own hands of the sordid past, in which many of them were complicit at the time, if only by their very silence. They desperately want to look forward, not backward. But they can't. It's all nasty old Trump's fault, you see. 

If Barack Obama was able to successfully appoint torture apologist and architect (if not actual practitioner) John Brennan to lead the agency, and then later to suppress huge classified chunks of the Senate's report on CIA torture, redact Haspel's name, and instead classify Brennan, Haspel and their co-workers as "patriots who tortured some folks," then who are liberals to defy his conventional wisdom? Who are they to possibly sully Obama's carefully manufactured reputation as he rakes in the big bucks on the speaking circuit?

Their dilemma is that Trump is simply not capable of being as glib and discreet as Obama was in deploying the sadism and protecting the sadists in grand old circumspect American tradition. Trump has bellowed on more than one occasion that he'd love to bring back torture as official US policy rather than just continue outsourcing it, as Obama quietly did, to other countries. 

So if the Democrats make too big a public stink about Haspel and refuse to give her the job, it will be a slap on the wrist to Obama himself and a betrayal of all that the Democratic Party now stands for: unquestioning allegiance to the "intelligence community" as the manufactured foil to the Trump presidency.

The real unexamined issue is the existence of the CIA itself, which has operated as an unaccountable rogue state since its inception nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

How big a monster is it?

Well, when President Harry Truman said he never lost a minute's sleep over his atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rued the day he created the CIA in 1947 through the National Security Act, you get the picture. Right from the very start the agency has operated without the "moral code" the Senate now pretends to insist upon for its leader. It has operated far outside the rule of both domestic and international law, toppling foreign governments and killing leaders and "meddling" in the elections of war-torn Europe and beyond.  

So to ask Gina Haspel whether she's developed a moral compass since her benighted torturing days is like asking Jack the Ripper if he has a good bedside manner.

An excerpt from Plain Speaking, Merle Miller's oral biography of Truman:  

Merle Miller: Mr. President, I know that you were responsible as President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now?

Truman: I think it was a mistake. And if I'd know what was going to happen, I never would have done it....the President needed at that time a central organization that would bring all the various intelligence reports we were getting in those days, and there must have been a dozen of them, maybe more, bring them all into one organization so that the President would get one report on what was going on in various parts of the world. Now that made sense, and that's why I went ahead and set up what they called the Central Intelligence Agency.

 But it got out of hand. The fella ... the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they've got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I've told you, one Pentagon is one too many.

Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become ... it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody.

That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it's got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don't care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.
And when you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.

Since the Senate never even put its own legal rubber stamp on the creation of the CIA, the supposed accountability that Gina Haspel and her agency owe to our publicly elected representatives is just so much fiction, and it always has been. Housecleaning? Sure, if you count giving war criminals and other miscreants a lick and a promise, or if your idea of hygiene is sweeping dirt under the rug. The only cleaning up our elected officials ever seem to do is cleaning up on the fund-raising circuit, or in whatever realm of legalized bribery the Supreme Court has seen fit to allow.

As the great socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair once so saliently observed, our two political parties are nothing but "the two wings of one bird of prey."

So I predict Haspel's eventual, albeit as narrow as decently possible, confirmation, with much hand-wringing and pragmatic posturing. Blue Dog Democrats will vote her in to placate their Trump Country bases and the more "progressive" Dems will say Nay, particularly if they have their eyes on the Oval Office. If and when one of them does win the highest office in the land, he or she can pretend the hand-wringing (or wing-fluttering) never even happened. We must look forward, not back, as Gina Haspel either continues her unaccountable ways or retires to much fanfare and a generous pension and a gig on cable "news" shows and an advisory role in some awesome Hollywood spy movies and TV series glorifying the CIA.

So far, according to CNN's "whip count" for Haspel, the vast majority of Senate Democratic birds are still undecided, with only the hawkish Joe Manchin of West Virginia declaring himself firmly in favor.  Bernie Sanders has sliced his own waffle right down the middle, tweeting soggily and jingoistically: "We need a new CIA director who is committed to the rule of law and will heed the advice of U.S. military leaders who vigorously oppose torture and uphold the values that have made us a great and respected nation. Ms. Haspel is the wrong choice to lead the CIA."  The other progressive Senate lion, Elizabeth Warren, declares herself a No or a "Likely" No.

Pass the syrup along with the blank ammunition.

Healthy Death By Natural Gas Causes

Filed under "Strange But True." (Optional soundtrack here.)

The New York Times has made a story about the use of nitrogen gas for executing convicts the lead article in this week's "Health" section. You might find such product placement tasteless, were it not for the fact that the extrajudicial drone assassinations practiced by the last three US presidents have also been euphemized in therapeutic terms, as "surgical strikes" which are preferable to torture and indefinite imprisonment.

It's the same deal for state-sanctioned murder here in the Homeland. Why expose yourself to gruesome symptoms like seizures and screams when you can witness a convict serenely dying from the inhalation of nitrogen gas? For the patient, it's almost as good as going to the dentist and whiffing laughing gas or ether.  

Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi have authorized nitrogen for executions and are developing protocols to use it, which represents a leap into the unknown. There is no scientific data on executing people with nitrogen, leading some experts to question whether states, in trying to solve old problems, may create new ones.

“If and when states begin carrying out executions with nitrogen, it will amount to the same type of experimentation we see in the different variations of lethal injection,” said Jen Moreno, a lawyer who is an expert on lethal injection at the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic.

The experts' moral battle is already half-won if they're actually calling their place of deadly legal business a clinic - even though their expertise is more that of a medical malpractice lawyer than that of a medical clinician.

"Okay, Inmate," says the beneficent Nurse Guard of the Near Future. "Time to go to the clinic for some anesthesia. It'll be just like going to sleep! You won't even feel a thing, unlike in the olden barbaric days when we used to give out those terrible drug cocktails, or heaven forbid, electroshock therapy in a chair."

The Times's health article continues:

With some 2,750 inmates on death row in 31 states and in federal and military prisons, any jurisdiction that tries something new will be scrutinized as a test lab.

The push for change comes because lethal injection, introduced 40 years ago as more efficient and humane than the electric chair or gas chamber, has not met that promise. Indeed, it has sometimes resulted in spectacles that rival the ones it was meant to avert.

This is starting to get a bit scary. Republicans might come out against this miracle cure because it will be tested in a lab, and Republicans hate everything even remotely scientific, even when it's inspired by The Island of Dr. Moreau.

And what a shame that all the humane methods dreamed up by the Dr. Moreaus of the modern medical execution biz have not yet met the early promise of humaneness. This is especially galling in an oligarchic society where "spectacle" is largely reserved for political horse-races, demagogic campaign rallies and sporting events carrying an acceptably high risk of permanent brain damage to participants and sometimes to spectators themselves. There is nothing worse than an unforeseen spectacle offending the delicate sensibilities of the target audience.

One pitfall is that execution teams must find a vein to infuse, a process that can be excruciating. In February, an Alabama execution team gave up after trying for more than two hours on an inmate whose blood vessels had been damaged by chemotherapy and drug abuse. His lawyer accused the team of opening an artery and puncturing the prisoner’s bladder. The state later said it would not try again to execute him.

If they're patient enough, the Alabama inmate mentioned above will probably die of his cancer anyway, and there won't be a need for the "team' to exert themselves on such an unfairly uneven playing field.

Incidentally, have you ever noticed how the humane human executioners rarely have names in these death penalty stories? "The state" suddenly develops this strange ability to verbalize without the benefit of a human larynx whenever people want to avoid accountability. It's every bit as miraculous as a therapeutic lethal injection.

But wait....

Lethal injection also involves drugs that, if given incorrectly, can result in suffering. One is a paralyzing agent, and the other stops the heart. The paralyzing drug was included in the original plan for lethal injection partly to make the process look peaceful and less disturbing to witnesses, by preventing the prisoner from thrashing around. Both it and the heart-stopping drug are supposed to be given after a powerful sedative has rendered the person unconscious, but if the sedative does not work properly, the other two drugs can cause significant pain.

Again, the ghouls must never be subjected to witnessing the pain of the executed. Otherwise, the spectators might emerge from their cocoons of placid spectatorship and join the rest of the world in opposing the whole barbaric concept of capital punishment.

 Barbiturates were originally used for sedation, but manufacturers began refusing to sell them for executions. So states tried substituting other drugs. Some were ineffective and left prisoners moaning in what appeared to be prolonged agony.

The drug manufacturers don't want their good reputations for the standard sedation of the masses to be damaged. Most of all they don't want their bottom lines to be damaged by all the adverse publicity that such off-label use might engender. People might even get the correct idea that their favorite healthy downers could actually kill them.

 Nebraska and Nevada hope to soon start using the opioid fentanyl as a sedative. Illegal use has made it a scourge of national death statistics, but medically it is an important painkiller and anesthetic. Defense lawyers in Nebraska have argued that fentanyl comes under a federal law that limits its distribution to lifesaving purposes, and that it is therefore illegal for a prison clinic to distribute it for an execution. A trial seeking information about the source of the fentanyl is scheduled for May 14.

Who knew that actual death statistics could be as subject to a "scourge" as a living, breathing thing? Maybe these snowflake statistics need some good old preventive care. 

But seriously, people in chronic, unrelenting pain are already suffering needlessly because doctors are getting too afraid to subscribe therapeutic opioids for pain relief. So what better way to demonize these drugs and their prescribers than to re-categorize them as official execution agents? Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if the death row inmate in Alabama mentioned above is being denied humane opioid therapy for his cancer because the prison is stockpiling it for future planned state-sanctioned overdoses.

In March, Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mike Hunter, said that using nitrogen was “the safest, the best and the most effective method available.”

There is scant scientific data to back up that statement. What little is known about human death by nitrogen comes from industrial and medical accidents and its use in suicide. In accidents, when people have been exposed to high levels of nitrogen and little air in an enclosed space, they have died quickly. In some cases co-workers who rushed in to rescue them also collapsed and died.

Hey, this is Oklahoma, home base of our anti-science EPA Chief Scott Pruitt. They don't need no stinkin' proof. But the part about the collateral damage to the "co-workers" is worrisome. The executioners using nitrogen might have to wear protective gas masks, which might make them look too much like KKK ghouls, which might upset the spectator-ghouls.

But look on the bright side:

Unlike lethal injection, the use of nitrogen would not require that the execution team dig around for a vein. An anesthesiologist, who requested anonymity because medical societies bar members from participating in executions or providing information to encourage them, said that nitrogen inhalation was less cruel than lethal injection. And since it presumably would involve no paralytic agent, witnesses would be able to see whether the person seemed to be suffering, he said.

Did it ever occur to the anesthesiologist too afraid to give his name that certain witnesses attend executions for the sole reason that they want to see a person suffering? I'm surprised that there isn't yet professional literature on triggers for sensitive execution witnesses, or the providing of special safe spaces for them. Maybe the State should just dose them with calming drugs before the curtain goes up on the whole grisly spectacle.

  Meanwhile, the free market dogma of the profit motive for anything and everything will probably win out in the end: .

Seizures might occur from inhaling nitrogen, he said. But if the technique appears to go smoothly, he predicted that other states would quickly adopt it.

In fact, according to state documents, in May of 2016, an Arizona company sent a sales-pitch letter for nitrogen gas executions to Nebraska corrections officials. Among the standout features of its Euthypoxia Chamber: It “produces calm and sedation followed by inebriation and euphoria;” it “requires no medical expertise;” and it guarantees “the demise of any mammalian life in 4 minutes.”

A humane person might be tempted to scream "a pox on all your Euthypoxia Chambers!" But remember, this is Exceptional America we're talking about. So in true efficient neoliberal spirit the Times health article concludes:

Experts on state-sanctioned execution methods suggest that the search for a palatable means of carrying out death sentences is itself uniquely American. Aside from the United States, the relatively few countries who execute prisoners typically do so by hanging, beheading or firing squad — methods which most Americans find repugnant. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that such a reaction exemplifies the collision between two contradictory traits that streak through the national identity.

“One is a tradition of tenderness, with us being the safeguard of human dignity and decency,” he said. “The other is a culture of violence. And when you’re concerned about human rights and dignity, that carries an aversion to gruesome killings by the state. But the death penalty is inherently violent — so those traditions now are really at loggerheads.”

The debate is very similar to the one about America's choice, not for peace, but between the "palatable" dropping of bombs on innocent civilians and the deployment our own precious "boots on the ground."

The Healthy Choice Times article is grotesquely framed between cruel capital punishment and loving, healthy murder. The outright abolishment of capital punishment as the most logical solution to this manufactured dilemma never even enters into the paper's equation. It's all about how to keep the spectator citizen-consumers tranquilized and happy, heads permanently buried in the suffocating quicksand of ignorance and apathy.

How (a few of) the Mighty Have Fallen

Irony reached new heights Monday night, when New York's attorney general was forced to resign his office for slapping and choking women even before the last opulent bondage and torture-themed costume had exited the annual Met Gala. The poor New York Times was even forced to temporarily replace its best and worst-dressed slideshows of the decadent event with the shocking news of Eric Schneiderman's downfall.

And talk about role reversal --  he will now be investigated by Cyrus Vance, the same Manhattan district attorney whom Schneiderman had been ostensibly investigating for the alleged deep-sixing of a New York City police investigation of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

I say "ostensibly," because Schneiderman has always been something of a poseur. You might vaguely remember him as the "tough on Wall Street" prosecutor who was conveniently co-opted by President Barack Obama in 2014 to head up a special federal task force on financial crime. Needless to say, not one banker ever went to jail as a result. This could possibly have been because Obama somehow not only forgot to provide Schneiderman with an office staff, he'd even neglected to give him an office. Or one single phone.

But Schneiderman got the next best thing to a real function, official Oval Office cuff-links, or a trip to Disneyland. He got an honored seat next to Michelle Obama at that year's State of the Union address.  He got the biggest political prize of all: saturated, nationwide corporate media coverage.

More recently, he'd bathed himself in glowing saturated coverage by posing as righteously as the legal face of the anti-Trump #Resistance as he'd once posed as the new anti-bankster sheriff in town. He pretended to be Lancelot defending legions of Guineveres at the same time he was abusing them in the castle keeps of his West Side bachelor pad, the Hamptons, and wherever the rich and famous congregate. So it should come as no surprise that Schneiderman would defend his assaults as "consensual role-playing" exercises.

  I signed up for Eric's mailing list way back in the good old days when I still thought he was sincere about fighting Wall Street in the vein of one of his predecessors, the also-fallen Eliot Spitzer. I first became smitten with the dapper Schneiderman persona in 2011, when the Obama administration began putting a lot of pressure on him to back off the banksters. My AG-crush reached its crescendo when Kathryn Wylde, a New York Fed official, actually confronted Eric on the sacred steps of the Catholic church where the funeral for Governor Hugh Carey had just been held, and demanded that he lay off Bank of America. When he was kicked off a federal panel by an Obama factotum for refusing to make a sweetheart deal with foreclosure fraudsters, I was in his email fan club for life. Or so I thought at the time.

Despite my gradual awakening to Eric's true posing nature, the revelations of his sadistic violence still have the capacity to shock. And here I thought that Timothy Cardinal Dolan, partying at the decadent Catholic-themed Met Gala on Monday night, right alongside Rihanna dressed as a Borgia pope, was the shock of the day. This event was the total obverse of Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities, as Dolan profusely thanked private equity robber baron Stephen Schwartzmann for financing the "Heavenly Bodies" museum exhibit, which includes a leather bondage mask draped in rosary beads and a near-topless scarlet dress fashioned from cardinals' robes.   

If even the righteous professional virtue-signalers of Dark Ages America can't beat them, the pragmatic philosophy goes, they might as well join them. How else would the Church remain the wealthiest institution on the face of planet?

As for Schneiderman, his mortal sin was that while he was pretending to beat up the bankers, he was beating up on women, both physically and emotionally. He compensated for his craven wrist-slap of Wall Street by slapping women's faces so severely that he literally left his hand-print on one victim's skin, while he rendered another woman chronically hearing-impaired.

One thing I always found weird about his frequent fund-raising emails was that he rarely signed them himself. A female campaign underling usually wrote them on his behalf, probably to distance him from money and the incessant grubbing of it. Like many a top cop before him, he invested a lot of time and energy into the maintenance of his squeaky-clean, virtue-signalling image. (see Comey, James.)

It of course came as no surprise when current Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a stalwart friend of Wall Street despite some recent progressive role-playing exercises, was the first VIP to demand Schneidermann's resignation on Monday. For his part, Cuomo may or may not also be under official investigation for bribery and other corrupt things which have nothing to do with the #MeToo movement. So he's probably safe, despite experiencing some ostensible discomfort from his primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon.

As a matter of fact, Schneiderman probably could have gotten away with his violence and alleged drug abuse were it not for the "wokeness" of his victims, engendered by the #MeToo movement. 

Only a precious few of the Mighty ever fall, and it's usually for the crime of not having kowtowed to other Mighty Righties obsequiously enough - or as Cardinal Dolan put it at Monday night's Met Gala, not adhering smarmily enough to "truth, goodness and beauty".

Why else would the wealthy celebrities dress up in their Torquemadan S&M attire at their annual Bacchanalia if not, as Dolan gushed, to show that "we love to serve the poor to do good.  And that's why we're into things such as art, poetry, music, liturgy and, yes, even fashion, to thank God for the gift of beauty."

When Sneering Pundits Attack

Pundit Paul Krugman, who used much of his 2016 New York Times column space to sneer at Bernie Sanders and even pettily punch down on his supporters, has conveniently pivoted back to concern-trolling progressive mode just in time for the 2018 midterms. 

He now directs his ire at what he calls "The Big Sneer"- other pundits (whom he doesn't bother naming) who are allegedly complaining that Democrats (also unnamed) running for office don't have enough "new ideas." This is both sexist and silly, according to Krugman.

After a whole Democratic primary campaign season spent sneering at single payer health care and debt-free higher education as "pie-in-the-sky" utopian pipe dreams, Krugman complains that it's not fair for somebody like Paul Ryan to be lauded by the media, while the righteous Democrats are chronically sneered upon for being so dull and dreary:

I’m not saying that politicians shouldn’t be open to new thinking and evidence about policy. But a political party isn’t like Apple, which needs to keep coming up with glitzier products to stay ahead of Android. There are huge problems with U.S. policy on many fronts, but very few of these problems come from lack of good new ideas. They come, instead, from failure to act on what we already know – and, for the most part, have known for a long time.

Since Krugman has never been one to sneer at himself, he does not name himself as the most prominent expert who took the good idea of Medicare For All and sneered all over it in his quest to ensure that Bernie would never beat Hillary in the rigged Democratic Party primaries.

Now, to be fair to Krugman, he doesn't actually go so far as to belatedly espouse Medicare For All, which he dutifully sneered at as "a distraction" when Hillary came out against it on the campaign trail. Rather, he now carefully opines that "access" to universal health care is a good idea, with only a non-progressive president and Congress standing in its way. He doesn't mention that even the uninsured and underinsured already have ways to "access" their local emergency rooms  - by taking an ambulance, an Uber, or even crawling there on their hands and knees if they have to, to display that all-American grit, determination, resilience and entrepreneurship.

"Access" is not the same thing as actual care. "Access" isn't getting health care without the fear of going bankrupt and getting even sicker from the relentless worry about how the heck you're ever going to pay the mortgage or rent on top of that mountain of medical bills.

And, to be even fairer to Krugman, he isn't actually calling for an end to the endless obfuscatory delay-tactic discussions of how "we" are ever going to pay for all the good ideas that have been floating around since at least the time of FDR. "Details" do still matter, especially when they're thrashed about in think tanks and universities by credentialed experts. Because despite his claim that Democrats shouldn't be constantly hounded to come up with "new ideas," one never knows what new ideas will burst forth while pounding into dust the details of the good ideas in the think tanks.

 And thus does Krugman effectively destroy his own argument for "keeping it simple, stupid!"  Meanwhile, though, there still has to be a sneering Strawman upon which to divert all our sneers:

So why the demand for new ideas? Partly it’s because pundits are bored with conventional policy discussion – and/or don’t want to be bothered learning enough to understand actually existing policy issues, preferring sparkly new stuff they can praise simply for its newness. Partly it’s just an excuse for sneering at Democrats, which as I understand it is required by the pundit code.

In case you were wondering why Krugman's historic and relentless and punditory sneering at Bernie and his supporters doesn't actually count as sneering, repeat after me: Bernie Is Not a Democrat, Bernie Is Not a Democrat, Bernie Is Not a Democrat. So of course he doesn't really count as either a sincere human being or a politician  --  and neither should you, if you're a lefty or an independent.  

Since Krugman doesn't bother delving into who actually finances this "pundit code," I mentioned it in my published comment:

When media pundits urge Democratic politicians to "go big, go bold and go new," what they're really prescribing is more austerity for the masses and more riches for the billionaires and corporations who keep them on the air and in print.

This embrace of plutocratic values - "ending welfare as we know it," the deregulation of Big Finance and the telecoms, the offshoring of jobs and manufacturing via "free" trade deals, and the "tough on crime" policies resulting in mass incarceration - is how the "New Democrats" first grabbed power in the 90s. Despite the aftershocks of these neoliberal policies and the loss of a thousand legislative seats in the past decade alone, the party elders and their media stenographers want more of the same. This championship of the status quo is actually their perverted definition of "new."

It doesn't help their message that the most famous New Democrats are now hitting their 70s and 80s. The pundits and the oligarchic donor class running this show are desperate for younger, more charismatic "rising stars" to sell us the same old "Incrementalism You Can Believe In."

Of course Medicare for All is a great idea, and would be much more cost-effective than our current privatized system. But they don't want to admit this because ordinary people having too many nice things might give Mr. Market a nervous breakdown.

Until we force finance capital and the government to get a divorce, and overturn Citizens United, nothing is going to change.

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.