Ten Years After the Lehman Collapse

How a decade flies by when you're Richie Rich, and your class has sucked up a full 94% of all the household wealth "lost" in the financial crisis which began with the death of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008.

To hear liberal pundit Paul Krugman revise history by ignoring the endemic corruption of the global financial system, and to foist the blame for the continuing social and economic meltdown almost entirely on Republican obstructionism is to continue sliding down an Orwellian memory hole.   

Why did the response to a depressed economy fall short? We can debate endlessly whether the Obama administration could have gotten a bigger, more sustained stimulus through Congress; what’s clear is that some officials failed to see the need for stronger policies. When Christina Romer, the administration’s top economist, argued for more stimulus, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, dismissed it as “sugar.”

Beyond that, efforts to fight unemployment had to deal with a bizarre Beltway consensus that despite high unemployment and record low interest rates, debt, not jobs, was the real problem.

But the most important reason the great slump went on so long was scorched-earth Republican opposition to anything and everything that might have helped offset the fallout from the housing bust.

As you can see, Krugman almost, but not quite, chides the Obama administration by merely hinting at how enthusiastically the Democrats embraced an austerity regimen for the little people and boosted prosperity for the wealthy, not least by the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. Instead, he harps upon the GOP "blackmail" of Barack Obama, as if Obama himself weren't a true believer in neoliberal ideology (the market replacing representative democracy.) Then again, it wouldn't do for the most influential liberal pundit in America to put a damper on Obama's own ongoing revisionist campaign tour, in which he absolves himself of any and all culpability for the ongoing disaster affecting most people in this country.

Krugman then pivots to the GOP hypocrisy evidenced by the most recent round of tax cuts for the rich and the new conventional wisdom that deficits don't matter when Republicans are in control. He forgets to mention that the Democratic leadership is already vowing to re-implement the austerian "pay-go" rules if and when they retake power in November. This means that social programs benefiting ordinary people will have to be paid for by slashing other social programs benefiting ordinary people. The trillion-dollar wars which are truly bankrupting this country both morally and financially will go on as usual.

My published response to Krugman, who completely ignored the crime and corruption which caused, and continues to cause, so much misery:

 It's true that the GOP impeded the recovery. But they couldn't have stopped the Obama administration from prosecuting financial criminals and ensuring that bailouts went to Main Street as well as Wall Street.

Instead, CNBC's Rick Santelli dog-whistled the blame at "irresponsible" mortgagors (read: the poor and minorities) rather than on bipartisan deregulation. That rant gave rise to the Tea Party, and eventually, to Trump.

It was during the Clinton administration that Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Brooksley Born warned about toxic derivatives, and her SOS was duly shot down by Dep. Treasury Sec. Larry Summers, who accused her of fomenting financial crisis. How wrong he turned out to be, but expert that he is, he went on to become one of Obama's chief advisers.

For as Wikileaks has shown, Obama's cabinet was vetted by Citigroup. Geithner has since gone on to make big bucks in private equity, and Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's seat at white collar defense powerhouse Covington & Burling was kept nice and warm for him.

 Although the White House boasted in 2012 that it had criminally prosecuted 530 financiers since the collapse, a subsequent investigation by the DOJ's Inspector General revealed the real number to be only 107, with real restitution to the public less than $100 million, and not the boastful billion.

This is all a matter of public record. Maybe the Democrats will start winning elections once they start switching their allegiances to Regular Joe and Jane.

(as an aside, I really have to compliment the recent work of Times comment-moderators in removing all the nasty replies accusing me of being a Trump supporter, and worse, for my pointing out inconvenient and well-documented facts!)

The 2014 I.G. audit I referenced in my comment has to do with the Obama Justice Department's abject failure to investigate and prosecute mortgage fraud cases, and then blatantly lying to the public about it. It found that the absolute lowest priority of the FBI was in cracking down on fraud scams against homeowners and mortgagors. Despite Obama's ostentatious signing in 2009 of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) there was precious little enforcement or recovery. 

According to the I.G. report, this was despite what Krugman called a cynical obstructionist Congress appropriating "significant" funding ($196 million) to the Justice Department, through 2011, for the prosecution of mortgage fraud and other white collar crimes via the hiring of additional FBI agents and adding to the existing mortgage fraud tax force.

In a 2012 press conference, Eric Holder, along with officials from Housing and Urban Development and Treasury, outright lied about the number of cases brought under the so-called Distressed Homeowners Initiative. Remember, the fudging of the facts was the conclusion of Holder's own internal watchdog and not some lousy cabal of Republican obstructionists!

Meanwhile, as an elite soldier in the anti-Trump Resistance, Holder recently schmoozed to Ministry of Truth outlet CNN that he thinks he "has what it takes to be president" because  "(We need) somebody who has the vision for the job, somebody who has got the necessary experience, somebody who has the capacity, physical as well as mental. Somebody who also has the ability to inspire people, to make people believe government can be the force for good and make people believe in this thing we call America. (They) have to be able to move people, to bring up together in ways this President has clearly not done."

Translation: he has what it takes, because his white collar criminal friends have taken what everybody else once had. Holder has the proven ability to inspire more crooks to believe that government will be a force for their own good, ensuring that the very wealthy will continue to rely on socialism for themselves and penury and prosecution for everybody else. Trump has been woefully unable to pull the wool over ordinary people's eyes. The guy is pure, fake polyester. Plus, he is an incapable fat slob, while Eric is genuine silky-smooth, toned, and smart. He has a proven track record of moving people... right out of their homes.  

Actually, I'd love to see Eric on a stage with former NYC Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is also planning a presidential run on the Democratic ticket. After they finish gushing all over each other, they can argue about who's the tougher guy: Holder, who protected the banksters and evicted the poor, or Bloomberg, who is so nasty that even the nasty and corrupt New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, thought he was going too far when he mandated that food stamp applicants be fingerprinted.

Struggles of the Rich and Famous

It's no longer enough for the superstars of the media-political-entertainment complex to flaunt their hedonistic lifestyles on TV. Even the queen of conspicuous consumption herself, Kim Kardashian, has flaunted her political capital by recently orchestrating the release from prison of a woman sentenced to a draconian term under harsh American drug laws, before pot-smoking became P.C.

Turn on the cable or click on any number of cool liberal news sites, and you'll learn all about how the rich and powerful are "fighting back" against Trump via the #Resistance, Inc. franchise. Either that, or they're fighting one another, usually via Tweet, for attention, ownership, and power. This often involves actors and actresses firing off nasty tweets to/about Susan Sarandon, who has made a few politically incorrect comments in her day, such as opining that the election of Trump possibly - potentially - is waking up a true Left.

"Debra Messing Lashes Out At Susan Sarandon" made the headlines in The Washington Post today. Messing, who is also plugging a reboot of her TV sitcom, groused that the awakening of young people to socialism unfairly takes away from the plight of the kidnapped migrant children, and therefore Sarandon should "shut the f up."

See what I mean? No matter how hard you try to avoid this stuff, the corporate media just won't let you. 

If anyone besides "our poor children" are being victimized, the consolidated media conglomerate wants you to know, it's those career people in the top 10% of income ownership rather than in the bottom 10%. You don't hear anything about Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves and other media moguls groping and abusing and raping the office cleaning woman or the hotel housekeeper. You only hear about them victimizing relatively well-off and privileged women.

The outlier in the Predatory Boys' Club is, of course, Donald Trump, who goes after porn actresses and centerfold models, the better for the liberal class to sniff at how vulgar he is even in his choice of women to prey upon.

It's the job of The Star Collective to resist Trump so that we ordinary slobs don't get too carried away and start resisting the whole neoliberal financialized consumer culture that produced Trump in the first place.

As Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, the rich, famous and powerful maintain the status quo even while putting on a show of rebelliousness. Before Trump came along to upset this status quo through his vulgarity and self-parodying performances, the job of stars was merely to sell products and entertainment while flaunting their lifestyles, cars, bodies, mansions and vacations. At the most, a few outliers like Jane Fonda would generate a lot of pseudo-outrage by protesting the Vietnam War before it was cool to do so; and others, like brother Peter, would help the youth of America feel rebellious by smoking a lot of dope and making fun of redneck yahoos in the cult blockbuster Easy Rider.  

This conspicuous rebelliousness, co-existing as it does with the status quo of conspicuous consumption, is both banal and fake.

From Debord:

Stars -- spectacular representations of living human beings -- project this general banality into images of permitted roles.  As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.

This is why Madonna could yell through a bullhorn at an orchestrated, cop-free Women's March protest that she planned to burn down the White House and not get arrested for it. This is why George Clooney can get himself arrested outside the White House and be treated with deference and gentleness by the Capitol Police for the brief duration his career-boosting handcuffed photo-op. 

Comedienne Kathy Griffin, you might remember, was not treated so kindly by The Complex after she posted a picture of herself holding a fake bloody Trump head. But that was only because her stunt was considered by liberal virtue-signalers too vulgar and psychologically damaging to the Trump children. Even so, she's making her comeback on Twitter.

The anti-Trump hysteria is also the proximate cause of the mass media suddenly getting over its crush on Angelina Jolie and making her the bad guy in a child custody battle. Global humanitarianism is so out of style now, unless it's stickily glued to partisan politics and the fake Resistance.

As Debord further explains about celebrities posing as social justice warriors: 

They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations -- the decision-making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a government power may personalize itself as a pseudostar -- on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

It's a reflection of the false choices offered in our rigged election system, isn't it?

Moreover, the replacement by the spectacle of "representative" democracy extends to the further blurring of the line between entertainment and politics, and politicians becoming stars in their own right. Barack and Michelle Obama were full-fledged stars long before they left the White House and went on a long series of luxury vacations. And even though lacking in personal charisma herself, Hillary Clinton has also been elevated to star status. Most recently she was "spotted" (media-speak for a pre-arranged photo shoot) canoodling with Oprah at a celebrity bash honoring Ralph Lauren's 50 years of dressing the rich and famous.

 

Of course, everything is prearranged -- not that the phony Resistance Fighters are even trying to hide how phony their high-fashion, high-dollar protests are.

As reported last spring in Politico, the Democrats are so upset about having lost to "an insane person," they're openly turning to Hollywood for help!

Top actors and producers - as well as famous politicians too cowardly to be named in the article - meet in a Hollywood "writers' room" to discuss scripts for how to get disaffected and marginalized people not in the top 10 percent of wealth owners to the polls to cast their ballots to serve the interests of the top 10 percent, which is so much more inclusive than the GOP's service only to the top 1 Percent.  

“One of the first things we were at least talking about in the beginning meetings was how to improve upon the message as to what does the Democratic Party stand for, what does that represent,” said Andrew Marcus, who owns the television and film company Apiary Entertainment. “When the Republican Party or [President Donald] Trump is able to say ‘Make America great again’ and nobody that I know can tell you what the DNC or any of the leading candidates’ slogans [are], I think that’s a marketing problem.”

 It's not about making people's lives better. It's about conning the mark and closing the deal. By talking to Politico about their true agenda, they reveal themselves to be every bit as crass as Donald Trump. And in a way, that makes them even worse than Trump, because at least he proudly wears his own greed and dishonesty like a badge of honor.

Of the group’s long-term goals, the producer Cindy Cowan said, “We’re looking at November. But our bigger end game, like most people’s end game, is the presidential.”
Though Hollywood professionals and celebrities have long maintained ties to the Democratic Party, their significance has largely been limited to their ability to raise money for candidates and causes. The group meeting is unusual for the lack of a direct fundraising tie.
“I was looking for something to do that didn’t involve giving money,” ( writer-producer Alex) Gregory said. “What I like about this thing is it’s not transactional.”

Whew, that's a relief. Nobody is getting directly bribed with dirty donor money.  That odious chore is being saved for the Obamas and the Clintons, who are very busy these days "headlining" fundraising spectaculars by and for the rich and famous. 

To be fair, though, Hillary has not totally forgotten the nondeplorable little people. I got this email from her just the other day:

Friend --

 One of the most incredible things to come out of the 2016 election has been how many members of this big-hearted team have turned frustration into action.

You're leading local campaigns and organizing protests. Youre showing up at town halls, rallies, and phone banks. Youre using your voices to support candidates who are breaking barriers and to speak out against policies that do harm instead of good.

Id like to send you an Onward Together sticker to thank you for your commitment -- just make a donation of $5 or more today, and Onward Together will get your sticker in the mail.

 

Get my sticker

Because of your dedication and generosity, weve been able to provide 12 groups with mentorship, resources, and more than $1 million in financial support -- and thats only in our first year. As the midterms draw closer, well be backing even more hard-working, groundbreaking organizations and candidates.

If youre with us, then donate to support this work and let us send you a sticker to say thank you.

Onward!

Hillary

The money raised supposedly will be used by Hillary and her party to "mentor" the lesser people about being good protectors of the ruling class and keeping the sloganeering "narrative" firmly glued, like a cheap sticker, to the needs and internecine battles of various factions of the ruling class (cynically described by Obama as two teams playing nicely together within the 40-yard line of professional elitist sport.)

As Guy Debord wrote, this concentration on sport and spectacle is meant to divert the attention of the Cheap Sticker Class from the real class war of the rich against the rest of us:

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance -- choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles... develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities.

Such as gaudy cheap $5 stickers that probably cost two cents to make in a sweatshop along with the price of third class bulk postage to mirror the third class/third world status of their precarious recipients.  

I feel sticky. I feel like I need to take another shower.

Obamamania Ad Nauseum

Charles Blow has added to the media hagiography with a column enthusiastically titled "Obama's Back!"

Month after lonely and harrowing month, establishment pundits like Blow have been "howling in the wind" and hoping against hope that the former president would finally step up to the mound as a closer/relief pitcher for #Resistance, Inc. What the gosh darn heck took you so long to reappear, as the liberal class turned its lonely eyes to you? Woo woo woo?

Well, the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind:

We have been howling into the wind so long that people dubbed our extreme objection to this deeply immoral and unscrupulous man Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, in fact, the new Bob Woodward book and the Op-Ed in this newspaper by an anonymous administration official prove us right. The fact is that most Americans now believe that Trump’s relationship to the Russian hacking and the hush money payments to women who say they had affairs with him are unethical or flat-out illegal.

 And regarding Obama's laundry list of complaints about Trump: 

He could have read similar words in a thousand essays written since Trump was elected.

But, for me, I deeply appreciate his words for another reason: He is loosening Trump’s stranglehold on the news.

There is only so much time in a news day, only so many column inches in a newspaper, only so much prominent real estate on a website. Up to this point Trump has dominated the news by overwhelming it, and no one has had the weight to challenge that dominance. Obama has that weight. Just by speaking he’s altering the diet of the news people consume.

 So there are a couple points which I didn't bring up in my previous post critiquing Obama's speech. His re-animation was a trifecta of a propaganda campaign, coordinated with the Woodward book and the anonymous New York Times op-ed. A lagging Obama even mixed my sports metaphors. He finally brought up the rear and crossed the finish line in hopes of Dems crossing that "most important election evah in our entire lifetimes" finish line in November.

Plus, as far as Blow is concerned, it's not the ex-president's words that count as much as his legendary existence. Blow condemns both himself and the corporate media class when he says that nobody else has had the strength to challenge the Trump saturation of news. Especially not the news people.

My published response (it was awarded a golden "Times Pick" for the sole reason that it fell into their "variety of views" ideal. In other words, it was an extreme outlier among nearly a thousand other comments ranging from O-gasmic to O-bsequious.)....

The recent gushing over Barack Obama as our born-again savior is deja vu all over again. I don't care if it's Obama, or Trump, or Hillary, or Bernie: the expectation that there's this one politician out there who can make it all better is unhealthy and antithetical to democracy.

Get past Obama's awesome delivery and comedic timing, and read the speech. He started out with the Founders and civil rights leaders, touting them as inspirations for people to go marching. Not so much to display our citizenship via teachers' strikes, sit-ins and boycotts, and other disruptions to the ruling order. We are simply to vote for Democrats in the mid-terms.

Obama is directly attacking Trump because it's that magical time that comes just once every two and four years and our votes become the sum of our civic duties. As much as he lauded candidates running on "new" ideas like Medicare for All, he didn't, as some of the hype has it, actually endorse single payer health care himself. As a matter of fact, his list of 80 endorsements includes no progressive challengers to Democratic incumbents.

 Of course the most amazing part of Obama's speech was that it rendered Trump temporarily comatose.

Meanwhile, whose fault is it that Trump controls the news? It's not just his. The media chooses to parse all his inane tweets and televise all his rallies. Because it's cheap, it's easy, and it engenders lots of outraged, lucrative clicks.

There's a lot more to fear in America than just Trump.

My heretical remarks opened the floodgates of outrage from the liberal Times commentariat. I'd reprint them, only they were so derisory that the moderators removed the worst of them, along with my own insulting replies. But they fit the usual mold: How dare you, a lowly ignoramus, insult the greatest president of our lifetimes? Medicare for All is impossible! Stop being such a purist! You took a cynicism bath. You're such a picky eater. What are your expert credentials and sources for your misinformation? You are destroying party unity!

In other words, ask not what the Democratic Party can do for you, because asking for nice things and demanding justice will make their privileged heads explode. 
 
 Surprisingly enough, nobody called me a deplorable closet Trumpie, but give 'em time.

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: