A Critique of Obama's Speech

There are two main "takeaways" (unappetizing packaged choices in the limited corporate news menu) from Barack Obama's speech at the University of Illinois on Friday. The first one is that he finally let loose and pummeled Donald Trump into pulp. The second one is that he has joined the progressive wing of the Democratic Party because he is endorsing Medicare for All.

The first observation is correct as far as it goes. Beating Trump into jelly is not exactly a hard thing to do. Since I didn't watch the speech, I have no idea how "fiery" it actually sounded, and with Obama, it's always smart to separate the soaring delivery from his actual words. So I have read the transcript rather than watching the video.

The second observation by fans, both within and without the corporate media,  is the same kind of misinterpretation of Obama's passive-aggressive verbosity that got them so inspired, and later so disappointed, during his eight-year tenure.

Despite all the hype, Obama is not advocating for single payer health care, not by a long shot.  Here is what he actually said to his audience of college students: 

So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate.

That's it. That's all he said about Medicare for All. It's a "new" (huh?) good idea, some Democrats who aren't party leaders are running on it, ergo support all Democrats at the polls in November. Obama failed to mention that his own first set of official endorsements for Democratic candidates does not include the names of such Medicare for All proponents as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or in fact any progressive primary challengers to sitting congress critters. He is not endorsing these progressive policies outright, but only insinuating that he is for the express purpose of getting disaffected young people to the polls. It's a classic bait and switch, but the mainstream press is jumping all over that one little paragraph in an act of massive complicity.

In another bit of classic Obama, the former president began the speech by praising the civil rights and economic justice warriors of yesteryear, not as examples we should emulate via direct action, but merely as examples of who should inspire us to dutifully cast our votes for Democrats:

 I cannot tell you how encouraged I’ve been by watching so many people get involved for the first time or the first time in a long time. They’re marching and they’re organizing and they’re registering people to vote and they’re running for office themselves.

Obama made absolutely no mention of the recent teacher strikes, including the latest actions in Washington state and (soon) in Los Angeles.

The corporate media are not calling out Obama on this bit of right-wing humblebragging, either:

And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high, and the uninsured rate hit an all-time low, poverty rates were falling. I mention this just so when you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers and suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle, I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016 and -- anyway. I digress.

So we made progress, but -- and this is the truth -- my administration couldn’t reverse 40-year trends in only eight especially once Republicans took over the house of representatives in 2010 and decided to block everything we did. Even things they used to support.

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people who once felt solidly middle class still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day. And these challenges get people worried and it frays our civic trust and it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them.

Correction: household income for only the richest 10 percent is at an all-time high. And of course, if you average Jeff Bezos's wealth with that of the average Amazon employee, then yes, household wealth has skyrocketed.

Obama had two years with a congressional majority to "reduce those trends," but he preferred not to, not least because, as Wikileaks has revealed, his entire cabinet was not only vetted by Citigroup but generously peopled with its direct representatives. And isn't it so sad, he self-servingly goes on, that people "feel" so precarious even though he killed bin Laden and "wound down" -- not stopped, mind you -- the wars in the Middle East. These are not policies Obama says he himself created, but mere challenges to the ruling class about how to deal with people who "feel" the fix is in and the game is rigged.

His solution is not to offer solutions, like an end to wars and urging government criminal prosecutions of ruling class racketeers, but to guilt-trip young people into voting in the November midterms. If they don't, he lectures them, they are both cynical and lazy and not living up to the great civil rights leaders of the past, who paved the way for progressive success stories like Barack Obama.

Despite the allegedly inspiring and "fiery rhetoric" praised by the sycophantic media, Obama still cannot disguise the fact that he is offering the same old neoliberal, for-profit agenda as the only possible countermeasure to Trumpian "insanity." 

We know that people are tired of toxic corruption and that democracy depends on transparency and accountability, so Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns, but on good new ideas like barring lobbyists from getting paid by foreign governments.

We know that climate change isn’t just coming. It’s here. So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like increasing gas mileage in our cars, which I did and which Republicans are trying to reverse, but on good new ideas like putting a price on carbon pollution.

We know in a smaller, more connected world, we can’t just put technology back in a box. We can’t just put walls up all around America. Walls don’t keep out threats like terrorism or disease. And that’s why we propose leading our alliances and helping other countries develop and pushing back against tyrants.

Obama carefully does not mention that it was his policy idea to put immigrant families in prison and to deport more refugees and migrants than any other previous administration. He still limits desirable immigrants only to "dreamers and strivers" -- true believers in corporatism and capitalism rather than true believers in social justice and basic human survival. He carefully does not mention that he continued to press for the secretive and toxically corrupt corporate coups of the TransPacific Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) right up to the very end of Hillary Clinton's ill-fated campaign. The former Obama voters who opted for Trump were from some of the same rust belt states that saw their jobs disappear to "free" trade agreements and their sons and daughters' very lives disappear from fighting rich men's wars.

The newer trade agreements, the details of which were to be kept secret even for the first five years after ratification, assisted multinational corporations in bypassing the regulations of individual nation-states. They would have grossly expanded the use of Investor State Dispute Settlement Courts, which allow companies to sue governments if those governments' policies cause a loss of profits. They would allow transnational corporate actors to neutralize elections and dictate the policies of democratically-elected governments.

  Therefore, Obama calling Trump a "radical" for failing to uphold neoliberal norms is pretty rich. If he were honest, Obama would have decried the fact that unlike himself, Trump is not bothering to hide the realities of the class war of the rich versus the rest of us. Trump has dispensed with the soaring rhetoric or obfuscatory pretty words like Obama, who kept most of the people in line most of the time. Trump is endangering the ruling class right along with the working class. That is the real danger which has inspired Obama to speak out forcefully against his successor, who is not, as he once gushed, just another player in the 40-yarn line of the self-satisfied oligarchy. 

Here's what Obama cynically chuckled in a 2013 TV interview:

I mean, in most countries, you’ve got — you know, people call me a socialist sometimes, but, no, you’ve got to me real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a — what a socialist is. (Laughter.) You know, the — I mean, I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace. Stock market’s looking pretty good last time I checked, and, you know, it is true that I’m concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.

Medicare for All? You have got to be kidding. There's not enough profit and cutthroat competition in it. To question capitalistic plunder is to question the goodness of the wealthy getting more wealthy by the day. It wouldn't be a faux democracy if the oligarchs couldn't innovate and compete with each other.


Is it a coincidence that the former president is coming out of his hedonistic cocoon the same week that Michael Moore's new documentary, "Fahrenheit 11/9" is hitting the big screens? While lambasting Trump, the film also takes direct aim at Obama and the Clintons and the Democratic Party for allowing Trump to come to power in the first place. One scene shows Obama taking that infamous dainty little sip of heavily filtered Flint water in a stunt to show the country that the lead-polluted water was safe. He got the usual appreciative chuckles from the complicit officials seated at the table as he promised some new pipes one of these decades. The water was not safe back in 2016, and it still is not safe today, despite Obama's glib reassurances to one of the poorest populations in America.

Unlike the corporate media narrative, which holds that Trump decided to run out of pure, racist jealousy of Obama, Moore posits that his entry into the 2016 race was really inspired by jealousy of rock star Gwen Stefani getting paid more money by NBC than he was.

And while the film is being widely lauded as an effective takedown of Trump, not many of the reviews are taking note of Moore's equally scathing takedown of Obama.

An exception is (surprisingly) the Washington Post, which writes in its own review:

As many shots as he takes at President Trump, the provocateur filmmaker is also eager to expose a Democratic establishment he says has not done enough to push back against the White House or advance a progressive agenda.

“One of the reasons I made this movie is that I’ve come to the conclusion that the old guard of the Democratic Party is a greater roadblock to social progress than Trump is,” Moore said in an interview. “Because they’re taking half-measures, because they’re beholden to the same money and interests.”

*****

As a further antidote to the tediously contrived Obama vs Trump made-for-TV infotainment spectacle, here's Chris Hedges talking about his latest book, America: the Farewell Tour. As one member of the audience at the recent Politics and Prose bookstore appearance in Washington, D.C. observes, Hedges is a lot more fiery and militantly hopeful in person than he is in his writings.  

Murder On the Donald Trump Express

Everybody's digging for clues in the anonymously-written New York Times op-ed to discern the identity of its "high administration official" author.

(***Spoiler alert: if you haven't yet read the book or seen the film versions of Agatha Christie's Murder On the Orient Express, stop right here.)

I wouldn't be surprised if the internal White House coup to effectively neutralize the presidency of Donald Trump also extends to the editorial being a group effort. Mirroring the plot of the above-mentioned mystery classic, maybe they all wrote it. Each of them conspired to destroy a malevolent old man by contributing a few lines to the essay, thus thwarting the software technology designed to expose anonymous authors.

So the self-serving kleptocratic Trump administration, anxious to keep their boss physically in office the better to neutralize the rest of us into a state of penury and submission, now purports to be protecting us from the designated villain in this thriller of a set piece. Unlike the revenge killers in Agatha Christie's story, though, they themselves are not the victims of the bad guy, but his co-conspirators. And unlike the killers on the Orient Express, they're all stabbing Trump from the right instead of from both the right and the left. They are, in fact, co-opting the Democratic #Resistance, which is also attacking Trump from the right via charges of Russian collusion and its defense of the police/surveillance state.

The internal coup and its anonymous manifesto are another variation on the unaccountability theme so beloved of predatory capitalists everywhere. If all of them are guilty, then none of them can be blamed. Like the cowards they are, they hide themselves within their fortified institutions as they do their dirty work.

My guess is that the real brains behind both the coup and the op-ed, with its self-righteous, rather jingoistic tone, is Trump's chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly. The gratuitous simpering nod to the newly canonized John McCain is one clue firing off the synapses of billions of little gray cells in this real life version of the game of Clue. Another possibility is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who graduated from West Point and is also a couple or four heartbeats away from the presidency.  Since the Times says it offered the author anonymity to protect his job, that should also eliminate Mike Pence from the list of suspects. Since Pence is an official elected directly by the American people, Trump does not have the power to fire him - although, theoretically Pence could be impeached in Congress and convicted in the Senate under a Trump-beholden majority.    

Trump's own express of a train wreck is now being described by the entertainment-intensive corporate media as a veritable puddle of twisted molten metal. Since he is still physically alive and still inhabits the Oval Office, he is desperate to find out Whodunit, gathering all the suspects in his closed room to intimidate and persecute, but never to solve. He not only is sadly lacking in the Hercule Poirot little gray cells department, he even lacks a Hercule Poirot investigator or any more "fixers" to help him out.

As Poirot replied to Ratchett, the beady-eyed and universally loathed tycoon of a murder victim in the Christie story who offered him "big money" to expose the enemies who were plotting behind his back: "If you will forgive me for being personal, I do not like your face, M. Ratchett." 

So running out of friends, perhaps the paranoid Trump could do the obverse of the Orient Express solution. If his administration lackeys won't rat each other out, maybe he'll fire everybody. 

But that's a thriller for another day. Maybe then we can crib a different Agatha Christie classic and call it "And Then There Were None."

If only. 

Trump knows he is unqualified for his job and that is why he gutlessly keeps his alleged enemies close as he merely tweets his displeasure into cyberspace.

So for now, anyway, these are the versions of America we're stuck in:

Democratic Pandering Is a Warm Puppy

The Democratic Party can't promise you nice things like a debt-free education, guaranteed job and income, or single payer health care. But thanks to one of its billionaire donors, it can at least offer you a therapy dog to hug and pet and alleviate your misery while they herd you to the voting booth for the November midterms.

A voter drive called "Pups to the Polls" is aimed at college students in eleven "battleground states" throughout the country. The young people returning to campus are greeted by professional dogs who will allow themselves to be cuddled while their political handlers do the actual herding.

The A.P. reports,  

NextGen America, formed by billionaire activist Tom Steyer, hopes to be a game changer. Steyer is investing more than $30 million in what's believed to be the largest voter engagement effort of its kind in US history.

 The push to register and get pledges from college students to vote is focusing on states such as Wisconsin, Virginia, California and North Carolina with competitive races for Congress, US Senate and other offices...

"We want them to know they need to show up and when they do, we will win," said NextGen's Wisconsin director George Olufosoye. "We want them to know they have power."

Empowerment is no further away than the nearest warm puppy, they croon as they accuse those deplorable Trump voters of not living in "the reality-based community." 

Come to think of it, the warm puppy gimmick is really nothing but the kinder, gentler cousin of the classic Peanuts football con:

I mean, just pay attention to the salesman from NextGen (which actually sounds more like a new drug or an iPod than the name of a voter drive organization). We need them to show up so we can win. In other words, ask not what the elites can do for the proles, but what the proles can do for the elites. The Democratic Party is not even offering them a bare bone, or heaven forbid, letting them take the puppies home with them.

Now, to be fair, it's not that the Democrats are offering absolutely nothing to voters other than frenzied hatred for Donald Trump and irrational fear of Russia. As a matter of fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is magnanimously co-sponsoring a bill with Martin Heinrich (D-NM) which would direct government economists to measure  how much "growth" the alleged middle class is enjoying.  Not that they'll do anything to rectify wealth inequality, mind you, but at least they'll recognize its existence in order to show voters how much they care.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sugarcoats the proposed legislation:

This is a really good idea...

There was a time when asking who benefits from economic growth didn’t seem urgent, because income was rising steadily for just about everyone. Since the 1970s, however, the link between overall growth and individual incomes seems to have been broken for many Americans. On one side, wages have stagnated for many; adjusted for inflation, the median male worker earns less now than he did in 1979. On the other side, some have seen their incomes grow much faster than the income of the nation as a whole. Thus C.E.O.s at the largest companies now make 270 times as much as the average worker, up from 27 times as much in 1980.

Notice the soft-pedaling: the link between profits for the owners and income for the workers "seems to have been broken" rather than the gap already scientifically proven to have been growing ever wider with every passing year. Wages have stagnated for what Krugman dismisses as an ephemeral "many" rather than the actual vast 90% majority, while "some" are getting richer by the minute.

But Krugman has a facile explanation. You see, decades' worth of rigorous research proving beyond a a shadow of a doubt that we have devolved into an oligarchy won't hold a candle to the actual government doing its own redundant studies. For some reason, Krugman thinks that "people" will pay more attention to government economists than they do to private or academic economists, ignoring the fact that like every other elite group of experts, the economics profession uses the Washington revolving door with abandon.

 But there’s a big difference between estimates produced by independent economists and regular reports from the U.S. government, both because the government has the resources to do the job more easily, and because people (and politicians) will pay more attention. That’s why the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank, has been campaigning for something like the Schumer-Heinrich bill.

Krugman doesn't mention that the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is actually a rebranded subsidiary of John Podesta's Clintonoid think tank, the Center for American Progress, or that Heather Boushey, its director, was also the chief economist of Hillary Clinton's ill-fated presidential transition team, or that it actually wrote most of the Schumer-Heinrich bill.

He doesn't mention that the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is funded by subprime mortgage billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and that it is staffed by some of the same economic experts who helped create the subprime mortgage crisis and financial collapse of 2007-2008. 

The Sandlers, like many liberal oligarchs, have whitewashed their ill-gotten gains and given away a lot of their money to such worthy organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as providing the seed money to launch the independent media enterprise ProPublica. The Schumer-Heinrich legislation is therefore very much the spawn of neoliberal philanthrocapitalism, which has effectively supplanted representative democracy as the driving force of social and economic policies.

Boushey, unsurprisingly, is full of praise for the Democratic minority agreeing to study a humanitarian crisis to death rather than actually doing anything about it. It is not in the interests of the Sandlers and the rest of the ruling class to do anything about it:

We commend Sens. Schumer and Heinrich for introducing this legislation. This is an important first step toward understanding how today’s economy is or is not working for most U.S. families.
It is not enough to know how rapidly the economy is growing. Americans want and need to know how the economy is performing for people like them. Evidence shows that broad-based economic growth is key to building a strong economy, and that starts with collecting the data that allow policymakers to understand how the economy is performing for all Americans.

Yes indeed, the majority of Americans who don't have enough money in the bank to pay for a $500 emergency car repair are just dying to find out precisely how the economy is not working for them.  We will feel so full and replete with this knowledge, so stuffed with facts and figures, that we will forget all about eating.

Here is my published Times comment to the Krugman stenography:

Schumer has certainly picked a convenient time to "measure" just how badly people are getting shafted. It is all too typical: pre-election season, Wall Street-beholden politician feigns interest, introduces a bill to merely study the problem until it either dies in committee or is whittled down to nothingness by the corporate lobbyists. All he needs to do is pick up any newspaper or even search Google to learn that Jeff Bezos makes the median Amazon salary every nine seconds. or put another way, raked in $6 billion in just nine seconds. That was in April 2016, so it's probably even worse now.

 We don't need another stinkin' study by some group of economists to know that wealth inequality is the worst it's been since the last deregulated Gilded Age - which by the way, came to a temporary screeching halt when FDR came to power and legislation like Glass-Steagall was enacted.

 So I'll believe Chuck Schumer is concerned on the day he introduces legislation reinstating Glass-Steagall, and gives full-throated support to Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, which would give more power back to workers, rather than dividing the spoils of growth among CEOs and shareholders.

Meanwhile, Trump is suddenly concerned about the deficit, and just decreed that federal workers will get no pay raises. Would he be Trump if he didn't create yet another scapegoat from the depths of human anguish in this country? It's the corruption, stupid, and it goes way beyond Trump.

So this is your choice, voters. Hug a puppy or read a study. Or if you want to go really big and bold, do both. Empower yourselves!

I haven't yet researched Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, which sounds good on the surface despite the oxymoronic title. Capitalism by definition is not accountable, its only purpose being to plunder, grow, plunder, hoard, plunder some more, suck dry and ad infinitum. But the gist of her bill dictates that corporations be forced to sign a government contract giving workers 40% membership on corporate boards of directors and be forced to share the profits instead of hoarding them or doling them out to a handful of wealthy investors.

The Warren bill doesn't take into account that major corporations are transnational or at least multinational and therefore are not under the control of any one government. They swear no patriotic allegiance whatsoever. How would this legislation, even if it did miraculously pass a corrupt Congress, ever be enforced?

Since corporations own the place, i.e. the entire planet, then social democracy must be both legislated and enforced on a global scale if it is to work for everybody.

So we need to not only hug puppies, we need to bring them out on the streets with us and howl in unison, and afflict the comfortable like there's no tomorrow. Believing that the same people who screwed us will now save us is like Charlie Brown believing that Lucy has suddenly turned nice. 

One Fell Into the Cuckoo Identity Trap

An attractive New York Latina is getting lambasted from right, left and center for not being able to decide if she's a Colombian immigrant and has the Jewish heritage she claims, and even whether, as a Caucasian woman she can claim to be "Hispanic."

 No matter that she's made a far more (for me) troublesome high-speed journey from conservatism to membership in the Democratic Socialists of America in the space of just a few short years, Julia Salazar is getting raked over the coals by both liberals and right-wingers for some pretty shallow things. The democratic socialist candidate for the New York State Senate finds herself helplessly floundering in the identity politics trap. She's damned if she immigrated, and she's also damned if she's native born. She doesn't help her own case that she keeps amending her answer according to the audience she's addressing. It also doesn't help when, like many a hollow pol before her, she blames her staff for getting her biographical details wrong.

Because all serious candidates for public office are now required to present a compelling personal story (narrative), the competition of who can be the most "diverse" is heating up. And when these personal back-stories get called out on their veracity by opposition researchers looking for any fault, the candidates' supporters, for whom the overarching campaign platform trumps honesty, come to their unquestioning defense. Instead of truth-seeking, one form of dishonesty props up another form of dishonesty, or lies battle lies, all for the justifiable end of "winning."

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, they become trapped like traps in a trap. 

Before you know it, candidates will have to produce their Ancestry genetic profiles along with their tax returns. And that elicits the specter of fascism, and its all-American progenitor, eugenics.

As far as the ridiculous debate over Salazar's ethnicity is concerned, it's a red herring. Anyone of Iberian heritage is bound to have either recent or distant Jewish and African ancestors, because pre-Columbian Spain was a thriving, diverse melting pot. Before Fernando and Isabella evicted the country's entire Jewish population and went to war against the Muslim "infidels" in the south, tolerance of differences wasn't the exception but the rule. With the Inquisition, many Jewish families were forced, on pain of death or torture or financial ruin, to become Christian "conversos" and hide their religion before the diaspora. Tomas de Torquemada, royal confessor and inquisitor of Holy Mother Church, himself had Jewish ancestry.

Practically anybody with a Spanish surname has a genetic blueprint combining European, African, Arab, Jewish, and in the cases of Puerto Ricans and other colonial populations, Native American. So there is nothing even remotely "dishonest" about Salazar's journey of discovery of her Jewish ethnicity, and everything horribly wrong about critics denying her the right to her own ancestry and pettily accusing her of "cultural appropriation." The problem for Salazar comes when she makes her ethnicity a feature of her campaign plank, or at least allows her consultants and operatives to do so.

Like I said, I'm a lot more leery of how a person speeds her way from a right-wing political mindset all the way to a suddenly "cool" democratic socialist one. It usually happens the other way around, such as when former socialists, like Christopher Hitchens and Norman Podhoretz, suddenly pivoted drastically to neoconservatism and supported Bush's invasion of Iraq. 

I simply don't bother much any more with any candidate running on the ticket of either right wing of the Money Party, no matter how "progressive" he or she purports to be. While the lefty supporters of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are acting all shocked and dismayed about her sickening tweeted eulogy for John McCain, I just shrug. Whether her rock star treatment by the corporate press has swayed her into "playing the game" out of her own political self-interest, or whether  she really does believe that McCain is a hero, is moot at this point.

The problem is that although Julia Salazar rightly complains that people are "exoticizing" her as a star in the identity politics game, she refuses to come right out and disown identity politics itself. To do so would probably be politically suicidal in the current neoliberal climate. Damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't, she plays it both ways.

From The Intercept:

Salazar appears to be arguing that her experience of going back and forth to Colombia as a child has allowed her to experience a version of life in the U.S. as an immigrant. “There isn’t one immigrant identity. Colombia is where my family was and where I was in the first years of my life. Most of the time when people asked about my childhood, they haven’t been interested in literally where was I born. They wanted to know how the first years of my life were spent, and where my family came from,” she told Jewish Currents.
“I would never claim nor have I ever claimed to share the experience of someone who has lived a life threatened by deportation. That’s not part of my narrative. [But] I’ve experienced people exoticizing me, or alienating me, or treating me as different. … I can acknowledge the importance of my family, and how I’ve been separated from my family, and how my family chose to live in the U.S. to be safer. All of this is part of an immigrant narrative.”

Democratic Socialist though she may be, Salazar has fully been captured by the shallow ethos of the modern, corporate-funded Democratic Party. Although not an immigrant, she is co-opting the "immigrant narrative," which, to be fair, has been co-opted by every American politician in memory, no matter how remote the immigration. Bank-subservient war hawk Joe Biden. for example, never forgets to tout his roots in Irish-American Pennsylvania coal country in a ploy to cover up his true ruling class allegiances.

The ultimate question is what good is the Democratic Party, or any political party?

True, the Bernie Sanders faction of the so-called Big Tent did score the victory this month of disempowering the super-delegates -- but only on the first ballot in the nominating process. Failure to select a candidate will open the floodgates of the corporate will, so the first round bait and switch is a feature and not a bug of the so-called reform.

  Political philosopher Simone Weil was right when she observed in On the Abolition of All Political Parties that the primary concern of these exclusive political clubs is winning power and keeping power, rather than in making people's lives better. Just because the occasional "upstart" defeats an incumbent doesn't mean that the organizational structure of the machine itself will be defeated, let alone reformed.

 Weil wrote,

 "Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade. Hitler saw very clearly that the aim of propaganda must always be to enslave minds. All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it... Political parties do profess, it is true, to educate those who come to them: supporters, young people, new members. But this is a lie: it is not an education, it is a conditioning, a preparation for the far more rigorous ideological control imposed by the party upon its members."

And that, sadly, is true just as well of the so-called Democratic Socialists of America and their slate of young, attractive, rising star candidates.

Despite some recent murmurings of protesting American foreign policy and forging an anti-war plank, the DSA's last statement on the topic was posted nearly five months ago, and merely called for the implementation of an "anti-war think tank" within the organization, to be mainly devoted to a critique of Donald Trump's national security agenda.

As Weil wrote in her own critique of partisan politics, such fuzzy, aspirational proclamations are part and parcel of the con:

 "This conception is extremely vague.... No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he himself belong to one) his own.... A doctrine cannot be a collective product." 

Although not a political party per se, the DSA is in danger of becoming just another offshoot of the same Democratic machine it purports to disassociate itself from. Correction: the DSA is becoming so quietly assimilated into the machine, it's like the ancient propaganda is being greased with the same old neoliberal identity oil, as in branding and "narrative"-building. I hope I am wrong, and it's just my cynicism getting in the way again.

  But when their pressing concern is not whether the United States is helping to bomb Yemeni children to death, but whether one of their own is being unfairly maligned because of her biography and identity, your skeptic radar should probably start to wobble alarmingly across your brain-screen. It sounds like their idea of change, too, is nibbling around the edges of social issues and becoming respected members of the Donald Trump #Resistance, when the mere show becomes the thing, and participatory democracy goes to die yet another of its thousands of zombie deaths.

If that strikes you as being overly pessimistic, here's Jimmy Dore to make you feel even better:

John McCain Has Left the Room

And entered into his just reward, aka The Void. 

Insert boilerplate hagiography here:







  John McCain made the supreme final sacrifice and clung onto life until the very end of the Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard seasons, so that the well-rested Ruling Establishment can all gather for one of this year's premier social events - his "full dress" funeral at Washington's National Cathedral. No need to interrupt their vacations or even waste their waning beach days on their eulogies, because these were all efficiently and professionally written long before McCain's demise.

He was such a selfless hero, in fact, that he even seemed to schedule death for the precise anniversary of Senate colleague Ted Kennedy's demise nine years ago. These men were so bipartisan they even shared the same disease. This coincidence has already taken on the status of miracle in Corporate Media World. Bipartisanship is not only neoliberal pro-capitalist propaganda, it has expanded itself right down to the deeply cellular level, and is probably even a sub-atomic particle. 

Margaret Thatcher, who herself was elevated to centrist sainthood by the media-political complex upon her passing, was only touching the tip of the sadistic iceberg when she proclaimed that "there is no alternative" to the rich sucking the life out of the poor. The rich are not like you and me. They literally control life and when they're on their own death-beds, they're not dying like other people and gasping for air. They have nobly decided to "discontinue medical treatment."

The McCain funeral promises to be every bit as over-the-top bipartisan and self-congratulatory a spectacle as Kennedy's and every bit as air-kissingly schmoozey as Tim Russert's. I am hoping against hope that when Michelle Obama gives George W. Bush another one of her carefully choreographed redeeming hugs, it will be presented by the Corporate Media Borg as a split-screen image showing a scowling Donald Trump playing golf. That way, the professional Mourning Class can bask in the glow of their bipartisan superiority and cry their crocodile tears like the reptiles they are.

Make no mistake. They'll be plastering on the hagiographic excess the same way that John McCain once accused wife Cindy of plastering on the makeup "like a trollop, you Samantha Bee word!"  

Yes. They are all Samantha Bee words, every last war-mongering, money-worshipping one of them. They are feckless dealers in death who save their greatest sorrows for their fellow purveyors of death, destruction, and violence.

So let us all join Hillary Clinton in raising a glass to her good drinking buddy John as he tumbles into The Void. Because no matter how hard we might try, the Celebration of His Life will be unavoidable for the better part of this coming week. It probably won't be as bad as Ronald Reagan's sendoff, but it will be bad nonetheless.

It comes as no surprise that Hillary's own spontaneously calibrated outpouring of grief for McCain was centered around booze. The woman who drowned her electoral loss sorrows in numerous glasses of Chardonnay even made a special (and obviously pre-recorded) cable TV guest appearance on the Morning After of the void-entering to reminisce about downing vodka shots with John McCain as part of a drinking contest in Estonia.

 Why not? Bragging about her bipartisan alcoholic prowess was one of her main campaign themes to show how authentically and bipartisanly barbaric she is. It was a real feather in her cap when McCain (a never-Trumper till the end, except the parts about giving him money for war and staying mute about the tax breaks to billionaires) obligingly called her "One of The Guys." Hillary saw McCain's  masculinization of her as one of the high points of her career.

As a matter of fact, NBC's "Meet the Press" made the hawkish Clinton-McCain friendship one of the highlights in what can only be the first of many fond remembrances. One clip showed (who else) Tim Russert interviewing John and Hillary in 2006 and as much as endorsing one another for president.

Typical of the alcoholic sub-genre of The Narrative is the glowing piece on the CNN website, in which the consumption of booze becomes the hallmark of a patriot. The prose is as purple as the facial spider veins of late-stage cirrhosis:

 Both politicians managed four shots of vodka; the rules were unclear, but Hillary -- McCain's one-time political rival -- was declared the winner, according to the restaurant proprietor (though in her own account, Clinton said they "agreed to withdraw in honorable fashion," rather than name a winner). 

 That image sums up the humanity and character of the late Senator McCain, who will be mourned deeply on both sides of the political aisle. He embodied a more moderate brand of conservatism -- one that could separate politics and friendship -- that now feels distant and very much missed.

No wonder America is going down the tubes. Not only, as Shakespeare noted, is Hell empty and all the devils here. We are being ruled and regaled by a bunch of drunken incestuous neocon neoliberal reptiles who simply refuse to die even when they're dead. 

Calling the Bipartisan Shots Against the Backdrop of Predatory Capitalism

Having Your #Russiagate and Eating It Too

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel certainly feels the precarity and angst of the average working gal. It's getting to be a real juggle of a struggle in the neoliberal jungle, people!

  Last week she had to juggle rewriting and padding the "blockbuster" Microsoft press release about more Russian hacking, with caring for her infant daughter, with tweeting up a storm on behalf of the corporate security state, with booking TV appearances to plug the Microsoft story in the interest of the corporate sponsors. She arrived at one early morning gig at MSNBC (formerly Microsoft-NBC) after breaking numerous traffic laws, only to find out they didn't have the right makeup on hand. So it was a battle against both time and finding the requisite under-eye fatigue concealer.

  Just reading her "Times Insider" story about how hectic life can be for a dedicated yet frenzied #Russiagate journalist left me feeling exhausted. Her juggling routine left me juggling only two reactionary balls in my own head, compared to her hundred: whether to write her a note and advise her to prioritize her rat-race priorities for the sake of her mental and physical health, or to just ignore her. Tweeting her is not an option, since I have always had a deliberately moribund account.

  So pragmatic juggler that I am, I just decided to split the difference, drop the balls, and let off some steam on a blog she doesn't read. Who has time? Certainly not Sheera Frenkel, already so busy it's a wonder she still has time to breathe.

Her description of a #Russiagate-intensive day in the life of a Times working mom-reporter:

I’ve learned a lot about “the juggle” in the year since my daughter was born. I joined The Times as a cybersecurity correspondent last year when I was eight months pregnant, fully aware I was taking a high-pressure job just as everything in my life was about to change. But I have a supportive husband, family and friends. My editors and colleagues are understanding, and my husband and I were lucky enough to be able to afford a nanny. I looked around and saw so many moms doing it under circumstances so much tougher than the ones I was facing.

Her story itself is a juggling act within a juggling act. How does a working mom Times reporter accomplish kvetch-bragging about her privileged struggle without sounding so privileged and whiney about it? By juxtaposing her struggles with those of "ordinary" working moms who are not quite so well-paid, well-supported, well-understood, married, nannied, credentialed and befriended, of course!

There is a reason parents describe it as a juggle. Even with all the help, there is constantly a ball in the air you are in danger of dropping. Most days, the only way to get through is to remove one of those balls. Stories need to be written, baby needs to get bathed; we can go one more day without filling the car up with gas, buying groceries, doing laundry. The first thing to go is always the personal errands we used to prioritize: dinner with friends, a visit to the gym or a haircut. Those are now icing on the cake, if and when we get to them.

 And what about all those extras, those little things we all do to advance our careers that fall outside of the 9-to-5 requirements laid out in our job descriptions? There are the after-work drinks, the last-minute dinners with a visiting boss. The out-of-town conferences and meetings that aren’t mandatory, technically.

 Oh, and those annoying appearances on MSNBC and CNN, which are practically mandatory in Consolidated Corporate Media World. Tellingly, Sheera Frenkel does not write about how "supportive" her employer is in providing any kind of onsite nursery care, or subsidized long-term maternity leave. It's a competitive, dog-eat-dog out there, and "just saying no" to overwork, no matter how well-compensated, seems never to occur to her. She couldn't even say no when her bosses asked her write a sidebar story about juggling and tweeting for the weekend edition. They want you to know that there are dedicated professionals behind the #Russiagate propaganda, and that they are human beings just like you and me.

The subtext of her piece is that there's always some other talented journalist out there, waiting in the wings, salivating to steal your job right out from under you. So she and others in the professional "knowledge class" are resigned to the fact that they are essentially on call to their corporate propaganda masters 24 hours a day and seven days a week. She writes unquestioningly:

 In journalism, which is never a 9-to-5 job, it’s even harder. News breaks at all hours of the day, and any phone call might be an important source with blockbuster news. Journalists are increasingly pushed to have a presence on social media. They are called to speak on television news shows to promote their stories. To be the face behind the byline means being in a studio early in the morning or late in the evening — exactly the hours of the day most parents carve out to be with their kids.

Sheera Frenkel sounds like most professional people, a "willing slave of capital." She doesn't need her "caring" editors to order her to work like a slave. She has totally internalized the ethos, her only solution being how to creatively carve out some spare time for the baby.

As cultural critic Franco Berardi tells it in "Futurability," we are now in an era where

 The power of knowledge has been uncoupled from social welfare.We have entered an age of techno-barbarianism: innovation has provoked precarity, richness has created mass misery, solidarity has become competition, the connected brain has uncoupled from the social. 

The conjunction among bodies has become fragile, while the connection among disembodied brains has grown permanent, all-encompassing, and obsessional, to the point of replacing life with the spectral projection of life on the ubiquitous screen.

  So after her harried onscreen MSNBC appearance to plug the latest New York Times hysteria, all she could do to express her frustration was to take to the ubiquitous Twitter screen and vent into the void. And lo and behold, other working parents came out of the cyber-depths to vent right back. For one bright shining moment, Sheera Frenkel was no longer alone, no longer just a cog in the capitalist machine, no longer an ant in the mindless ant farm, no longer an atomized dehumanized automaton. The cyber-security expert was herself fleetingly cyber-secure.

Of course, those are not her words, but mine. Here are her words:

Lots of moms, and some dads, wrote me to say that they could relate to the impossibility of trying to give your all both at work and at home. Some people wrote to tell me that I was a terrible mother, and that I should have stayed home with my child. Others wrote to tell me I was a terrible journalist, skirting my responsibility to inform the public in order to be with my child.

That's another thing. Besides print reporters plugging #Russiagate to TV reporters, and print reporters then plugging and quoting TV reporters in the newspaper in order to cement the "narrative," it is also the duty of journalists working the #Russiagate franchise to tweet incessantly and thereby portray themselves as central actors - sympathetic, put-upon victims of both the reading public and Trump - in whatever story they are writing. It does not occur to them to quit Twitter, let alone their jobs, or after-hours drinks and TV appearances. At most, as the uber-productive Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently did, they will "pull back" from social media until such time as they can recover from the 24/7 chore of feeding the trolls and then having to write more Times articles about the chore of feeding the trolls and pulling back from Twitter.

But to hear Sheera Frenkel cheerfully tell it, it's all been worth it. Or so she says. To admit otherwise might put a damper on her career. 

That's sad. Back when I was a working-mom journalist, my most memorably frantic career moment came when I had to abandon an article and leave work early when the school nurse called me to pick up my daughter, on whose head lice had been discovered. I drove the 20 miles to pick her up, envisioning juggling my nitpicking editor with the physical picking of nits. Luckily, the "lice" turned out to be just remnants of shampoo, which as a juggling working mom I had failed to completely rinse out the previous night. The school nurse's name was, aptly enough, Mrs. Dudman. I doubt that she reads this blog or even tweets, let alone breathes. She'd be at least 97.


 Back then, (in the temporarily booming deregulated Clintonoid 90s) I was even allowed to work from home on days that my kids were sick. This being before the Internet, the paper would actually send a courier over to pick up my copy.

Reporters covering local news aren't the only ones out of a job these days. What's a courier, anyway?

Foreign democracy-meddler Rupert Murdoch eventually bought the local paper, which was drastically downsized and assimilated into the consolidated corporate media borg. I didn't even have the outlet of Twitter to unleash my angst and my wrath. I think that was probably a blessing and still is, because unleashing your angst on Twitter and expecting to hold on to your brilliant career when, ten years from now your angst is deemed un-PC, is not conducive to a continued brilliant career in any field.

I wouldn't trade places with Sheera Frenkel for a million bucks or a thousand cable TV spots.

Isn't It Rich: Trump, Madonna, and Chelsea Clinton

Despite his best efforts, Donald Trump is not quite the shoo-in for best performance by a rich, famous, entitled and clueless narcissist this week.

The internet is exploding because Madonna made her VMA show tribute to the late Aretha Franklin all about herself and her own struggles to achieve fame and fortune. She is now known as Me-donna, which is quite a big step up from Material Girl. She's made Trump's own accolade to Aretha -- "She worked for me on numerous occasions " -- look almost magnaminous.

But sorry, Don and Me-Don, because neither of you has anything on Chelsea Clinton. Unlike both of you, she at least brings a little class to the narcissistic table.

Then again, she didn't have the Queen of Soul to compete with her, because the sole topic of the day was the Clinton family and her book sales. 

Persistently still plugging "She Persisted" in Scotland, the daughter of Bill and Hill was asked, yet again, if she will ever run for office. Definitely maybe someday, but definitely not right this very minute was the nuanced Clintonoid reply.

Chelsea classily explained:

"While I disagree with the president … I think my family ... is being really well represented. But if that were to change, if my city councillor were to retire, if my congresswoman were to retire, my senators, and I thought that I could make a positive impact, then I think I would really have to ask my answer to that question."

This is honesty as only the clueless rich can convey it. As long as her family is being well-served by her politicians, she is content, because their needs are being met thank you veddy much. She disagrees with Trump on almost everything - she abhors his presidency - but she is not about to complain about the tax breaks he has gifted to her. The needs, wants and interests of the less-fortunate people of her voting district(s) do not enter into her thought processes at all. They are invisible to her, and unlike your typical phony populist,  she doesn't have the capacity to even pretend to see them, let alone care about them.

She will run for office only if she can make a positive contribution to her family fortunes. Once The Help retire, she might be forced to serve herself for lack of any more family retainers.  At least it sounds that way. To be fair, though, she does at least pay lip service to her own class, admitting that "I feel incredibly protective of Barron Trump" before generously reminding everybody that he has been "bullied for his appearance."

I mean, was anybody even thinking that Barron has a problem with how he looks before Chelsea insinuated that there is something not quite right about the kid? As she readily admits, her feelings of protection toward the youngest Trump son are simply not credible.

Sadly, Chelsea Clinton's wealth and expensive education haven't even made her discourse as erudite as she pretends. "If... I thought I could make a positive impact, then I would really have to ask my answer to that question" is either crafty Clinton doublespeak, or an indication of some seriously muddled thinking.

But as Mother Hillary once wisely asked her answer, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" 

Plus, you can always blame the narcissism of rich people on genetics. Hillary and Madonna are tenth cousins, having shared the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. 

They're all one great big happy self-satisfied family.

Madonna and Hillary

Madonna and Chelsea

Although Chelsea and Ivanka Trump used to be besties, they're not speaking to each other these days. And sadly, Chelsea hasn't expressed the same indignant concern for lesser sister Tiffany Trump, who suffered the ignominy of having to avoid Madonna during a recent high-fashion event in New York and even required extra Secret Service protection as a result. That's because Madonna had also made the first Women's March against Trump all about Madonna, and threatened to blow up the White House.

That's another way the rich are different from you and me. They're never held accountable, because enough of us are enjoying this show way too much to even care. Either that, or we're too numb or jaded to care.

  It's what happens when the Spectacle replaces participatory democracy.

So I hope that maybe definitely someday, Chelsea will find herself forced to protect her own interests when, let's say, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez decides to run for the ignominiously retiring Chuck Schumer's Senate Seat on a socialist platform. Now, that would be spectacle to participate in with gusto and vengeance.