Commentariat Central: Post-Kavanaugh Blues

As long as the New York Times keeps ignoring the war-mongering Atlantic Council's advice to shut down reader commentary, I'll keep shoving my two cents into their digital piggy bank of views, which they euphemize as "sharing our thoughts."

It seems like only yesterday that the liberal press was editorializing against Brett Kavanaugh, and it seems like only today that we're being advised to put all those bad memories of rape and corruption and mendacity behind us and redirect our energies toward the vaunted Blue Wave, and support corporate Democrats.

In his latest column, Paul Krugman describes the trauma of Christine Blasey Ford as being of "of secondary concern" within the big picture of looming Republican authoritarianism and Trumpist brownshirts. His colleague Charles Blow sarcastically tells readers to "rue the day and rend your garments" like hormonal lunatics, because Kavanaugh should suddenly be the least of your enemies. "Liberals get so high-minded, they lose sight of the ground war," he chides, referring to the looming midterms.

And about those loudmouthed protesting women beating on the doors of the Supreme Court:

On one level this would provide relief and release for a pent-up demand by most Americans to be heard and to calm some of the chaos. But, catharsis is an emotional response and an emotional remedy.

Hear that, ladies? Charles Blow says it's time to stop emoting and follow the sage advice of Charles Pierce, scribe of Esquire, "the magazine for men", and get to work fighting the racist Constitutional originalists by organizing a brand new constitutional convention which will require the permission of only two-thirds of our divided states.

First, my response to Blow (much inspired by my current reading of "Black Reconstruction In America" by the great socialist W.E.B. Du Bois):

If the Kavanaugh Caper proves anything, it's that the white men of the GOP are pining not so much for the Founders as they are for the oligarchic slave-owning planting class of the antebellum South.

Here's looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

This isn't a new civil war, as some pundits claim. The old civil war never ended. It's been going on with varying intensity more than 150 years. Donald Trump just ushered in one of its greatest revivals yet, abandoning the smarmy dog whistle for a bullhorn.The GOP has likewise stripped itself bare, flaunting its racism and sexism in an orgy of shamelessness.

That's not to say we should therefore put our blind faith in the Democratic Party, some of whose leaders are already urging us to "move on" for the sake of our sacred institutions, as they abandon any idea of impeaching Kavanaugh. That would be too, too unseemly. All you "purists" must realize that if the Dems pull this stunt, the GOP will only get their revenge down the road. And anyway, as the Times just reported, Wall Street is putting its corrupt money on the Democrats this year.

The media coverage of Trump's "victory" this week has also been downright disgusting. How quickly the pain of Dr. Blasey Ford and countless other women has been forgotten in the group-think coverage of horse race politics.

Co-opting, dividing and conquering regular people is how the ruling class racketeers roll. Don't fall for it. Vote, and then keep afflicting the comfortable.

And in response to a critical reader who thought I was unfairly sliming Trump voters as one bigoted monolithic voting bloc:

To clarify: I'm talking about the white male leadership of the GOP, not white male voters who vote Republican. Trump has displayed his own racism and sexism in countless ways, both verbally and operationally - his Access Hollywood remarks, describing Mexicans as rapists, his attempted dismantling of social safety programs, and of course his notorious birther campaign.

He co-opts the white working class male just as the oligarchic planters did during slavery. Poor whites fought the Civil War for the rich and were the hired overseers of slaves and bounty hunters of slaves so that the rich could bask in their own laziness while producing absolutely nothing. They deflected their own bad qualities on their enslaved work force and propagandized to the poor whites that with a little hard work, they too could aspire to the owner class. Likewise, Trump pretends to be on their side because after all, they have their white masculinity in common.

 Slavery ended, but the propaganda has proved more or less successful ever since. This is what I mean by divide and conquer. Our rulers would hate for the white working class and the black and brown working class to get together in solidarity against the modern day oligarchy.

Trump won because neither the white nor the black working class in rust belt states turned out for Hillary Clinton. Many who'd voted for Obama picked Trump. It's wrong to call all Trump voters racist and sexist. Plenty are just plain fed up and desperate.

As far as Krugman's standard diatribe against Trump and the Republicans' "paranoid style of politics" and incipient authoritarian rule is concerned, I do admit that I let my feminist anger get the better of me, and as a result, did not get many recommendations for this response:

 How quickly liberal men are calling the seating of Kavanaugh "of secondary concern" or "time to move on." That's a pretty callous response to the millions of women whose own pain at the hands of predators was rendered newly raw by the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford and others with the courage to speak out. Now that Kavanaugh's in, we're lectured that too many angry women might be spawning a backlash and endangering the so-called Blue Wave of the midterms. It's disgusting.

So let's pivot again to Trump, Trump and nothing but the Trump and ignore the fact that he is but the symptom of the equally noxious neoliberal style of politics which been devouring labor rights and the social safety net for going on half a century now.

Authoritarianism is already here. Just witness the recent "no debate needed" bipartisan appropriation by a near-unanimous Senate of nearly a trillion more dollars to the dreaded Trump regime to wage endless war.

  Look at Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the presidency. A "New Democrat," he impoverished millions of women in the 90s with his bankruptcy reform legislation and helped send millions of men to prison in the misguided war on drugs, which was really a war on black drug users. He will never prevail against Trump, who knows where all the bodies are buried... because they either aided his fraudulent rise to riches, or they turned a blind eye to it.

That's Trump's fascistic appeal. He pretends to eat his own, and his base feels replete.

Here's how a fellow reader named "Gerry" cut me down to size by erecting a straw-woman:

I think you paint with a too broad brush when you condemn liberal men as aiders and abettors of the Republican supporters of Trump. I don't hear any of my male liberal friends saying that the seating of Kavanaugh is of secondary concern and that it is time to move on. We are doing what we can to regain control of the House by volunteering and contributing. We are supporters of the Mueller investigation.
You sound mixed up to me. What are your politics?

My reply to "Gerry" --

 Um...Paul Krugman used the words "of secondary concern" right here in this column. He sounds like too many other liberal male pundits I've been reading and listening to these several days.

As far as my sounding "mixed up" is concerned, that his exactly how how Brett Kavanaugh and others described Dr. Blasey Ford. They also demanded to know what her politics are.

There has been much attempted gaslighting of women by both liberal and conservative men. The liberals concern-troll it by calling us emotional and confused, while the conservatives come right out and pronounce us nuts and liars.

But according to you, it's all good as long as Dems support Mueller and give money to candidates.

I rest my case.

The proscribing of the "narrative" to one's required membership in either right wing of the duopoly serves to stifle dissent. Liberalism is not the same thing as leftism, despite the ridiculous claims of Republicans who accuse the centrist business-friendly leaders of the Democratic Party of being Marxists. Thinking outside the corporate partisan box simply does not compute. The establishment media have done their job, and done it well.
======

Meanwhile, David Brooks, who is now practically indistinguishable from his liberal right-wing Times colleagues in their obsessive loathing for the lone corpus of Donald Trump, is back from book leave and has wisely completely ignored the Kavanaugh Caper and the midterm elections. 

Instead, he's shilling for another for-profit venture which involves corporations getting into community organizing by funding programs which use poor (mainly black) children as data banks. He desperately describes it as "A Really Good Thing That's Happening in America."

Visiting one South Carolina center called the "Spartanburg Academic Movement," or SAM, Brooks gushes:

SAM organizes the community of Spartanburg around a common project. Then it creates an informal authority structure that transcends public-sector/private-sector lines, that rallies cops and churches, the grass roots and the grass tops. Members put data in the center and use it as a tool not for competition but for collaboration. Like the best social service organizations, it is high on empathy and high on engineering. It is local, participatory and comprehensive.

SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, “We’re program-rich, but system-poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.

Yep, you guessed it. This is the same market-based neoliberal approach to government and social services that helped produce Donald Trump, and turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and the Republican Party into Insanity Central. Just the mention of P & G should set off alarm bells. It is what's called an oligopoly, a consolidated corporate behemoth which has cornered the market on most of the items you see on your grocery store shelves, with its garish plethora of brand names offering a false "choice" to consumers. 

That's the noxious genius of neoliberalism itself it just keeps rebranding itself. Life itself is just one great big advertisement.

David Brooks does not, of course, go there. Instead he is so excited about the continuing privatization of public spaces and the corporate enslavement of human lives that 

Frankly, I don’t need studies about outcomes to believe that these collective impact approaches are exciting and potentially revolutionary. Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks. Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.

My published response:

 While sounding warm and fuzzy, the gathering of data on children "from cradle to career" does have sort of an ominous Brave New World ring to it.

Who becomes the eventual recipients of all this valuable and intrusive data? Facebook, Amazon, the NSA, for-profit testing companies, anti teacher union PACs, or any corporate entity prepared to pay money for it?

This sounds suspiciously like another iteration of the increasingly discredited for-profit charter school movement which has sought to supersede good government education policy and the expenditure of public money on children.

So rather than unquestioningly celebrate the efforts of philanthrocapitalists and corporations seeking to burnish their public images with these kinds of slick "community" programs that purport to "measure" pupil progress, our free and fair press should dig deeper and do their journalistic duty: follow the money.

Rather than simply concentrate on kids "from cradle to career", America must start concentrating.on all its people from cradle to  grave. We already have some of the worst education and health outcomes in the civilized world.

A pivot to government in the public rather than private interest would include Medicare for All, debt-free college, a guaranteed federal jobs program... in other words, a rebooting of the New Deal for the 21st century.

If the wealthy investment class really wants to help poor children, let them stop bribing our politicians and start paying their fair share of taxes.

Shut Down Reader Comments Sections, Urges Atlantic Council

The American Ruling Class is terrified of losing its iron grip on power, money, people and information. To that end, one of its premier propaganda mills, the Atlantic Council, is calling upon respected news outlets to consider shutting down the "virus" of independent thought in the reader comments sections appended to their articles.

It's right out there in the open. They view ordinary people with opinions as a disease, a scourge that must be wiped out so that billionaires, corporations, military leaders, weapons manufacturers and their partners in political crime can get on with ruling the world and everyone in it.

The Council, already in the forefront of recent censorship efforts related to "fake news" and fomenting conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in elections and infiltration in both right and left-leaning Internet news sites, has just issued another manifesto pressuring establishment news organizations to play even more of a "gatekeeper" role than they are already do.

The defiantly militant title of a recent strategy paper says it all: "Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation, and Winning the Battle For Trust."

To make its scary point, the piece is preceded by a photograph of Japanese citizens having the gall to protest a US military installation in their country more than 70 years after the end of World War II. If it were not for the Internet, the Japanese would never know that the US was still occupying their country, apparently. 

It is a war of the ruling class against the rest of us, poor befuddled mortals who are so overloaded with choice that our heads are spinning. As author John T. Watts synopsizes a ruling class sovereignty "Challenge" conference held last spring, the masters of the universe must walk a fine line between cracking down on independent thought and dissent and not appear to be cracking down on independent thought and dissent.

  Watts, a former Australian military officer who now "consults" with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, bemoans the erosion of public trust in the media, which has dropped a full nine percentage points -- from 52 percent to 43 percent -- in just the past year, along with a 30 percent decrease in trust in government. He blames this not on widening wealth disparity directly caused by policies devised to serve only the interests of the wealthy and corporations at the expense of poor and working people, but on the "partisanship" fomented by disinformation campaigns from unregulated sources.

He also blames Julian Assange and the Wikileaks revelations of war crimes and corruption in high places, and without providing one iota of evidence, ties these leaks directly to Russia. If that weren't enough, too many people trust their "peers" more than they trust the proper authorities. The proles are talking too much among themselves, and the leaders are worried.

"Without shared facts," Watts complains, "society lacks the basis for a rational discourse."

The implication is that minds must therefore be better controlled with the proper, prescribed content from ruling class sources.

While bemoaning the lack of proper local news sources, he does not delve into the reasons why these local news sources have disappeared: the creative destruction of them by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Gannett, and their ultimate consolidation into only five or six corporate entities. He notes only that this disappearance has created a vacuum being filled by "unqualified" bloggers and "irresponsible" information sites:

Those who  can generate the most attention by playing to the audience's greatest fears, bias, and ignorance will generate more revenue. In this environment - where any individual can generate, modify, or subvert facts for material political gain - there are multi-tiered incentives for individuals and groups around the world to generate misinformation and disinformation for little cost and significant reward. In contrast, truth telling and fact checking are expensive and of arguably less material value. 

Watts could just as well be describing Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. If these media giants aren't ginning up war fever and Russiagate paranoia and big bucks with their reporters and on-air personalities just sitting around a table and interviewing each other rather than gathering information out in the field and talking to regular people, they're inviting government consultants like Watts to join them and hand-wring about how both Donald Trump and those useful Kremlin idiots of the renegade media are going beyond the bounds of good taste. That is, of course, before they take frequent breaks from their discussions to broadcast the latest Donald Trump Nuremberg-style rally or run commercials for oil companies and overpriced drugs.

So what is to be done to draw all those straying eyeballs away from the Internet and back to corporate and weapons industry-sponsored information sites where they belong?

Censorship, censorship, censorship!

It's not enough that Facebook and Google have already agreed to infiltration by thousands of law enforcement and military "gatekeepers" to monitor content in order to keep the minds of the globe sufficiently and pliantly narrow enough to soak up all the approved propaganda.

The self-appointed censors of the Military-Industrial Complex must appeal even more to the greed of such establishment organs as the Times, warning that their failure to disseminate the right propaganda might cause their advertisers to bolt. Therefore, the Atlantic Council is prevailing upon those advertisers themselves to demand more control of the news:

 Advertisers would get greater return on their investment if their message was attached to better quality material that properly engages the reader. Their brand can also suffer harm if it is associated with poor quality or misleading material. By demanding that their advertising is proven to be associated with high quality material, they will eventually realign some of the market forces and shift the incentives of the producers.

Translation: there can never be enough corporate control of our lives. If journalists and editors persist in maintaining the red line between their news and advertising divisions, a line which has always been the hallmark of a free press in democratic societies, the oligarchs will see to it that these noncompliant news organizations fail. Advertisers, not journalists and editors, must determine what is and what is not "high quality material." This is perhaps the most chilling of the Atlantic Council's prescriptions. It is an open threat to the First Amendment.

It gets worse. Watts also considers the readers who comment on articles to be  "diverse threat actors" and as such, establishment news sites should consider completely disabling reader commentary on articles. Too often, independent voices refute the corporate-funded and Pentagon-engendered propaganda on the news pages, or else they add supplementary erudite information (facts) not consistent with the narrow narrative. This outside commentary is becoming unduly influential.

Media producers need to recognize that adversaries are out there and actively seeking to cause harm through their medium.  They have a responsibility to respond to threats and raise awareness of the incidents occurring, both because it is their business to do so and because of a larger duty of care. In doing so, they need to be careful not to 'carry the virus' as one speaker put it. This means they should consider disabling commentary systems - the function of allowing the general public to leave a comment beneath a particular media item.

Adolf Hitler and other fascist demagogues also have used the term "virus" to describe Jews and minorities and perceived outside "threats," which paved the way for their expulsion and eventual extermination. 

And as Andre Damon notes, "What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints. The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built."

Interestingly enough, though, Watts also offers a suggestion that I happen to agree with. Contributors on the op-ed pages and independent outlets should always divulge who they work for and who is paying them -- either before or at the end of their articles. Unfortunately, Watt chooses not to reveal where his own paycheck comes from.

So I will. The funding sources for his work comprise at least 25 foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes on the Arabian peninsula, with millions donated to the Atlantic Council by the genocidal Saudis; bomb and gun and drone manufacturers; the gambling casinos known as banks; private equity parasites; climate-destroying oil companies... in other words, a veritable Who's Who of the ruling oligarchy. Of course, they prefer to call themselves the "Honor Roll," rather than the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Please feel free to leave your comments!

It's coming up on the weekend, so nothing is off-topic.

Kavanaugh Kapers, Kontinued

Mark Judge, the sole corroborating witness to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's alleged attack on Christine Blasey Ford more than three decades ago, has finished his interview with the FBI.

Due to Kavanaugh's growing notoriety, a long out-of-print digitized, bootleg version of Judge's memoir - "Wasted" - is now widely available for download on the Internet. While Judge's sworn insistence that he has no memory of the incident has been greeted with derision in some quarters, his literary confession itself is so chock full of alcohol-fueled memory lapses and terrifying blackouts that the likelihood of anyone forgetting such an egregious event as attempted rape actually starts to seem plausible.

The one episode in the book that hasn't been widely reported (if at all; I haven't seen it written about anywhere) is a caper involving a mob of about 50 Georgetown Prep seniors - at least half the graduating class - and an aborted vandalism attack on the home of the daughter ("Barbara Gordon") of a sitting US Senator, who is not named in the book. Judge had recently started an unauthorized newspaper poking fun at the school in general and the Vatican in particular, and writes that one day he was approached in a school bathroom by a boy he calls "Corey Joyce," the leader of the "Inquisitors" gang, who wanted some publicity while demanding anonymity, lest his future academic and career plans be jeopardized.

The Inquisitors normally acted in small groups of 10 or 12 Georgetown boys. They had gathered names of all their acquaintances from neighboring all-girl Catholic schools and then determined which families would be out of town on a given weekend. Then they'd draw eligible names from a hat to determine the lucky winner. Their vandalism spree had been going on for months, and had caused quite a bit of consternation among affluent families returning home to find their places mysteriously trashed and festooned with toilet paper, raw eggs and shaving cream.

The planned assault on the senator's home - "a mansion as big as a hotel" - would be the grand finale before graduation, and "Cory" wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. He boasted to Mark Judge that his "assault troops" only "do students from Washington's finer virgin vaults."

To help get as many recruits for the Ultimate Kaper as possible, Judge posted a notice in the paper, foolishly calling for all senior boys to gather for a Saturday night "hay ride." The school administrators, rattled by the recent four-month spate of vandalism affecting the affluent Catholic clientele in the area, got suspicious and alerted police. 

Meanwhile, a large group of Georgetown Preppies dressed as priests, nuns and brothers gathered on that final weekend to drink beer at a pre-vandalism get-together. Cory himself was dressed up as a bishop, complete with the telltale mitered hat and flowing "avocado green" vestments.

Bishop Cory addressed the revelers,

"My brothers and sisters," he said, nodding toward the nuns. "We are gathered here this evening for a very special reason, to destroy a young woman's home."

"The land is defiled with the scourge of sin... It is the sin of arrogance, and the guilty are rich Catholic schoolgirls. Under the lash of their tyranny, we are forced into compromising with Satan. We are forced to endure inane chatter with their fathers before taking them out... They must repent and be punished!"

A cheer went up.

Sadly, though, not only was the targeted senator's mansion heavily fortified, the lights were on, and the whole family was unexpectedly home. Undeterred, the drunken nuns and priests regrouped right out in front of the mansion to plot their next move. Then they saw the police cars and scattered. "Cory" himself was briefly arrested. Since he was too busy bloviating that night, he didn't have as much to drink as the others, and he passed his Breathalyzer. The cops didn't even check his car, he boasted at school on the following Monday. They didn't tie him to any of the vandalism raids. He was just another dumb rich punk out for a joyride.

Judge escaped the cops, but his own troubles were far from over. To punish the whole class, the school demanded that they immediately hand in the journals they were assigned to keep while doing public service in a soup kitchen, mandated in order to cut down on the students' partying and drinking and to give the school some positive press. Judge, like many of the others, had not bothered keeping a diary of his good works as diligently as the future Supreme Court nominee had so carefully kept his own diary as putative proof of his innocence 30 years down the road. Judge foolishly wrote up a quick slew of bogus entries, was caught, and was barred from participating in graduation ceremonies. His sin was not so much his involvement in the alcoholic crime spree, but his dishonesty about a homework assignment.

When he told his parents about his punishment, "My father silently made a drink and retreated into his den. He was so upset he didn't even want to look at me. My mother sat in the living room watching TV, too stunned and upset to speak."

But when Mom and Dad later found out that about a dozen other Georgetown prepsters - Mrs. Judge laughingly called the boys "the twelve disciples" - had been similarly barred from graduation, they didn't feel so bad, and even praised young Mark for his service work, while calling the diary "a dumb assignment." 

And the partying continued. In the book, Judge describes both his parents and many others in the conservative Catholic social set of Washington as high-functioning alcoholics who often turned a blind eye to their own children's drinking habits and occasional anti-social behavior. The atmosphere was strict authoritarianism in church and school on the one hand, and benign parental neglect on the other hand. Judge actually thought alcohol was an intellectual stimulant for many years, given how many of the drinking adults he knew were so rich, respected and successful. Even the Georgetown Jesuits had a well-stocked bar in their campus living quarters.

And Mark Judge, even in a book ostensibly atoning for and explaining his alcoholism and journey through recovery, didn't see the vandalism as a bad thing. These girls were all good friends of the Georgetown Preppies, Judge wrote, and it was just a matter of some good-natured ribbing of their "little sisters."

The rich are different from you and me. They have expensive insurance. And even if they didn't, everything is so easily replaceable whenever it's lost, stolen, vomited on, or hilariously destroyed just for the good harmless fun of it.

And that brings us forward more than 30 years, to his buddy Kav's own long- overdue accountability and the proven, breathtaking lack of honesty in his recent Senate testimony.

It'll be interesting to find out whether the FBI inquisitors questioned Mark Judge about the Inquisitors gang, and whether his memories of the names and faces involved are still as clear and fresh as they were when he wrote his confessional memoir.

The Kavanaugh Capers

I have to admit that I got momentarily hopeful during Brett Kavanaugh's meltdown before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday afternoon.

Despite his denials, it was supremely obvious that this middle-aged preppie had watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against him that morning. He had noticed, right along with the rest of the country, that the Republican men on the committee were sniveling cowards who abrogated their own sworn duties to a female sex crimes prosecutor in a vain attempt to hide their historical misogyny from the world. 

Therefore, in a desperate attempt to save his professional life, he dropped the noblesse humility routine and unleashed the ugly aggression he had more or less kept hidden from the world for his entire life. Between copious gulps of water to hide the self-pitying tear-water gushing unbidden from his beady little eyes, he waxed bathetic about his obsessive-compulsive, calendar-keeping father being the role model of minutiae for any red-blooded American preppie who worked his tail off competing in violent sports and hanging out at the country club. He blubbered about being the only child of a woman jurist whose idea of family mealtime conversations was badgering her husband and son in practice sessions for courtroom inquisitions. The Kavanaugh kitchen table apparently did double duty as a witness box.

No wonder Kavanaugh kept sobbing and slugging the water through his angry tears. His throat must have dried up just thinking about the torture of his upper middle class home life - torture that he may have relieved by drinking to excess and assaulting young women and girls before he finally graduated to writing the legal justifications for torture as a well-credentialed pathocrat in the Bush administration. He finally matured just enough to sublimate his sadism.

Until, for possibly the first time in his adult life, he was called to account.

Kavanaugh's unhinged, paranoid opening statement should have been enough to condemn him. Who wants a cornered wild animal on the Supreme Court? Even the most die-hard Republicans might have taken pause, given that one of their own was making a Donald Trump ultra-right campaign rally look almost like a sober academic exercise in comparison.

Very naively, I expected that the very first words out of lead Democrat Dianne Feinstein's mouth would be to ask him whether he'd been drinking alcohol that afternoon, or if he was taking any psychotropic medications, or if he had ever sought or received mental health counseling or substance abuse treatment. Demanding that he count backward from 100 or name the first president would also not have been beyond the pale, in light of his public tantrum with its own microcosmic mix of mood swings between anger, despair, megalomania, and paranoia.  Instead, she appeared merely stunned and mindlessly persisted with her own rehearsed line of softballs.

Oh well, I thought, the woman is in her eighties. She's probably tired. But then, one after the other, the Democratic "opposition" of trained legal eagles fell like a house of cards. One after another, they asked the same lame question about why Kavanaugh wouldn't independently request an FBI investigation into the latest allegations.

It didn't take long for both the feral Republicans on the panel and their nominee to sniff the terminally anemic Democratic blood. After only a few minutes they even dispensed with their female sex crimes prosecutor proxy and started not so much asking questions as ranting their opposition to the Democrats. (They actually did make a valid point in speculating which Democrat had  leaked Dr. Blasey Ford's name to the media without her consent.)

As for Kavanaugh, his own tears quickly dried as he went into full prosecutorial mode against his own pretend-prosecutors. If they dared question him about his drinking habits, he hectored them about their own drinking habits. And they sat there, and they took it. He was the raging locomotive, and they were the decrepit piles of automotive rust stuck on the tracks.

Lest he be seen as a Mama's boy for conferring too often with his own attorney, a woman named Beth Wilkinson who is married to current CNN contributor and former NBC star David Gregory, Kavanaugh took breaks from the proceedings at regular intervals. (compared to only one taken by Dr. Blasey Ford that morning.)  To be fair, though, he could also have a weak bladder from drinking all that water, or whatever it was.

The bad parts: Kavanaugh will probably be confirmed, once GOP "moderates" Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins can safely vote No with the help of perhaps a few Democratic wingnuts like Joe Manchin giving him the thumbs up. Kavanaugh will then proceed to take more legal revenge against women, and children, and men, than he normally would have without having been accused of sex crimes.  

Strangely enough, though, there is plenty of good stuff coming out of this hearing.

--Most important of all, Dr. Blasey Ford is inspiring many more women to speak up about - and out against - their own predators. It has been a catharsis. Even if her own attacker is confirmed, her testimony will not have been in vain. Predators in all walks of life and from all social classes have been put on notice like never before.

--For anyone who still thought the Democrats were the champions of the little guy, and gal, they were disabused of their faith from watching the sad liberal performance at Thursday's hearing. Not only was it not the "grilling" that was advertised, the Democrats may as well have donned their butlers' uniforms and presented Kavanaugh with a tray full of gourmet soft-serve custard. They are so used to serving money and power they couldn't help being their normal, collegial, deferential selves to his snarling face. They will save their faux vitriol for the TV cameras and their fundraising emails.  This debacle should cost them plenty in both money and votes, hastening the demise of a hopelessly weak and corrupt party which has become nothing but the slightly liberal appendage of this country's de facto totalitarian system of one-party rule of, by, and for corporations and billionaires.

--Kavanaugh was probably right about one thing. He will never be able to resume what he creepily described as his life's crowning achievement and pleasure: coaching girls' basketball. Along with getting lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, Preppie Boy will also have to spend the rest of his life on the virtual Sex Crimes Registry. He will likely be marginalized by his peers in the court. All his opinions - if he is even allowed to write a couple - will be tainted with corruption, both personal and institutional. Perhaps he will even succeed where Clarence Thomas failed, becoming the impetus for Supreme Court term limits.

For that to happen, though, we must first ensure that there are at least two ruling political parties in this country. That sounds like a low bar, for sure, and it certainly must be accompanied by the removal of bribery money from politics. 

A pivot to anything even remotely resembling representative democracy will be a long slog, to put it mildly. But the more people who are finally waking up to their own justified anger, the better. The wake-up calls have been coming in loud and clear lately, despite the best efforts of the political-media complex to alternately keep us entertained and scared witless by the twin specters of Trump and "Russian meddling in our totally free and fair elections."

Thanks, Kavanaugh. Thanks, Senate. You are virtual alarm bells ringing in the heads of the moribund. You should be very, very afraid.

The World Series of American Endtimes

It's hard to decide what to blog about on any given day or even at any given hour. Trump's mushroom appendage? Brett Kavanaugh's drunken high school hi-jinks (ultra-right code word for sex crimes)? The midterm elections? The crumbling #RussiaGate franchise?

There's certainly a glut of simultaneously detailed and fuzzy Kavanaugh drama all over the nooze without my adding to it here. But to summarize - so far, his predatory escapades have taken us only up to his freshman year at Yale. So the next installment, if there is one, will probably progress to law school. What I'm really hoping for is his ignominious withdrawal from Supreme Court consideration before this Thursday's grilling of his chief accuser, in which Republicans plan to live up to their bullying reputation, and Democrats plan to live up to their grandstanding reputation. Two presidential contenders - Cory Booker and Kamala Harris - are on the inquisition squad, so look for lots of maudlin speechifying and little substantive information-gathering. Will the cam pan to Kam more than the story becoming all about Cory? Stay tuned, or not.

And then there's what increasingly looks like the latest chess move by the Democratic-Neocon-CIA coalition. They appear desperate to checkmate Trump once and for all: the "leakage" to the New York Times of Deputy Atty. Gen. and RussiaGate overseer Rod Rosenstein's suggestion, flippant or serious, that he wear a wire to catch Trump saying something 25th Amendment-worthy.

Here's my speculation: Robert Mueller has zero evidence of TrumPutin collusion, and any criminal evidence he does have on Trump would likely implicate other Ruling Class Racketeers who are too valuable to be sacrificed. Therefore, let's forget about the chess gambit. Maybe Rosenstein is the  designated pinch hitter to win the Series for the D team by a sacrifice high fly right into extreme centrist field. If the Dems can just get Trump to fire him and shut down the Mueller investigation in the process, the Mueller team will save face, and Trump can be declared guilty in the court of liberal public opinion. The RussiaGate plot will live on in American mythology as it becomes the campaign issue to end all other campaign issues. Couple it with the drip-drip-drip of the Kavanaugh allegations, and the donor dollars for #Resistance Dems will come flooding in.
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All this annoyingly progressive talk of Medicare for All, and debt-free college, and all this unwanted attention on the class war and record wealth inequality, and people realizing that this country is now ruled by an oligarchy, is just so damned divisive. If the Dems can only goad Trump into firing Rosenstein, Mueller, and Jeff Sessions, it will be a perfect trifecta, a manufactured victory to get the whole country united under one big mouldering gilded tent! (There I go again, mixing my sports metaphors.)

As of this writing, though, Trump has refused to play ball. Rosenstein was reported to be on his way to the White House for hours on end this morning, either to be fired or to resign. Word had it that his resignation, if any, was yet to be accepted. The high sacrifice fly has turned out to be nothing but a series of failed bunts.

So far.

But wait, there's an update! Rosenstein and Trump are now scheduled to meet Thursday to "discuss his future in the Justice Department." The timing is a pure coincidence and absolutely made for split-screen images of reporters staked out on the White House lawn to see whether Rosenstein sacrifices or Trump beans him with a wild pitch, juxtaposed with the Supreme Court/horserace spectacle over in the Senate.

The long series of propaganda distractions, produced by both right wings of the Uniparty, is designed to keep the public's eye off the real ball: that democracy is a sham, and so are the midterm elections, despite Michelle Obama's get-out-the-vote guilt-tripping tour, a sort of free admission pre-game teaser for her paid book tour, which gets underway only once we have freely cast our votes in dwindling hopes of finally settling the score.

Open Thread/Links: Predator Edition

The piece I've been working on is taking longer than expected, so here's some interesting predatory capitalism stuff which provoked some of my reactions and probably will provoke yours too:

"Help: I think I'm In an Abusive Relationship with Alexa!" Guardian.

Against my better judgment, I myself finally bought this Amazon device from godzillionaire Jeff Bezos to stream movies. At $19, it had been reduced to less than half price, or only about a thousand times what it cost to make in some overseas wage slave factory. All you have to do is tell this robot person what you want to watch and it's there, bringing a whole new meaning to couch potatodom. There's no longer a need to press anything and let's face it, a calorie of energy is a terrible thing to waste. Alexa will thereby speed the evolution of humankind's texting thumbs to truly monstrous proportions because our remote-clicking fingers will atrophy into useless appendages at about the same totally unexpected accelerated rate as global warming. Admit it: you can't watch TV without simultaneously thumb-texting somebody to talk about what you're watching on TV, or swiping away at another gadget without the full force of those four superfluous appendages.

  Anyway, Alexa hadn't been plugged in to our TV an hour before we decided to stop multitasking in order to have some fun at her expense.
 
Me: Does Jeff Bezos pay you a living wage?

Alexa: It does not matter if I get paid. I love what I do.

Me: Is Jeff Bezos really the worst boss in the world?

Alexa: I give him five out of five stars.

Me: So in that case, can I charge Jeff Bezos rent for allowing you to live in my apartment?

Alexa: I am sorry, I didn't understand the question.

*****

"Jeff Bezos' $2 Billion Charity Pledge Isn't Necessarily Great News for America." 
Market Watch.

I haven't asked her yet, but I'm sure that Alexa would say in that flat monotone of hers that building schools for homeless children in order to make them good consumers while living in cars is not just good for America, it's good for the planet and for the whole of infinite outer space that Jeff Bezos wants to spend his money colonizing.


*****

"New York Times' Fraudulent 'Election Plot' Dossier Escalates Anti-Russian Hysteria" World Socialist Website 

We touched on this travesty of journalism in yesterday's comments. This WSWS piece is by far the most scathing takedown of Gray Lady gibberish that I've read. The Times should be prosecuted for a crime against journalism as well as human rights abuses for gaslighting its readers. It's not so much a newspaper as it is a conduit for loathsome predatory capitalism. 


***

"An Alternative to Payday Loans, but It's Still High Cost." New York Times

Speak of the devil! US bank is offering small emergency predatory loans to people at 70 percent interest, which is so much less usurious than the 400 percent charged by those tacky ghetto places. They are so much more consumer-friendly, says the Times "Money Advisor" column, because you get to stretch your payments out in three whole installments. The catch? The desperate and the impoverished must have maintained a 0 interest checking account at US bank for at least six months and undergo a credit check before qualifying for this amazing offer. 

***** 

"Tickets To Michelle Obama's Book Tour Are Going Fast - and Raising Eyebrows'"
Jeff Bezos's Washington Post.

They range from $30 for nosebleed seats and upwards of $3,000 for the front row. Meet and greet and a signed book will cost you extra, as will parking, at $50 a pop. But lest you think that Michelle Obama is too Bezos-like, she is donating a generous 10 percent of the proceeds to charity. The catch? The charity cash will be recycled into free admission for poor people to attend Michelle's intimate talks at sporting arenas, and not for something so mundane as food or clothing. Mrs. Obama describes herself as "truly humbled" at how many people there still are in America who can afford to pay to breathe the same rarefied air as herself. 

*****
"How To Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story," NPR.  

Besides giving kids lessons in sexual propriety while they're still in training pants and making rape prevention a part of each and every birthday party celebration thereafter, the upper middle class parent to whom this column is aimed is urged to scope out potential rapists while there's still time to lecture them. "With the right education... a young man might be able to say, " 'Oh, you know what? I've been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me.' Or, 'Hey, you know, when someone's trying to push me off of them, that's something that I should take as a cue to get off.' "

Nowhere in this piece is there any advice to keep liquor out of the hands of teenagers, to keep excess cash allowances and credit cards out of the hands of teenagers, to keep car keys out of the hands of teenagers. Scariest of all, there's no mention of the necessity of having actual parents present at teenage parties.

Instead, every parent is urged to put on his or her Captain Ronan Farrow super-hero cape and become a powerful pre-cog identifier of future rapists -- all for the good of little boys, of course.

Tonight I'll ask Alexa if Minority Report is available on Prime Video. On second thought, I think I'll exercise my freedom to choose and just read the Philip K. Dick book on my Amazon Kindle.

Decoding the Umpteenth Rising of Hillary

What better time for Hillary Clinton to cash in with the rest of the Democratic Doomsday Cartel than right before the congressional and statehouse elections?

Straight Outta The Atlantic

Fresh off her sticker-selling Internet campaign for the little people,  Clinton has now penned a self-righteous "op-ed" in The Atlantic aimed at members of her own class. The first tell is that she uses the pronoun "we" and not "you" when she offers her litany of dangers to "democracy", or should I say, the oligarchy. And lest you get the mistaken impression that she is entirely altruistic in her concern, there is this tiny-print nugget at the end of the piece: 

This essay was adapted from the afterword of the paperback edition of What Happened, which will be published on September 18.

As Ralphie groused about the Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin Ovaltine scam in A Christmas Story, "It's nothing but a lousy commercial!"

 This isn't to say that lousy commercialism is anything new or unexpected. There's always a profit motive in modern politics. Making money is what the recent mass outpouring of angst about Trump by the permanent Ruling Class essentially is. What they call the public good is really the private good of the rich and the well-connected. Trump sells, and not only for his own greedy benefit.

So it matters not that Hillary Clinton's essay is the epitome of self-serving hypocrisy and that each of her anti-Trump talking points apply just as aptly to her and her husband, and that her invective is a de facto boomerang. She doesn't care if everybody in the bottom 90% knows she is a bundle of lies. There are the "irredeemable" bottom-dwellers in her Basket of Deplorables whom she despises openly. And then there are those obsequients who are simply too afraid of Trump to criticize Democrats. These groups can effectively cancel each other out, as far as she and her cohort are concerned. And what's left of the Left? Sniff. She endorsed corrupt right-wing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive Cynthia Nixon. That "special place in hell for women who don't support other women" dreamed up by Madeline Albright only ever applied to Bernie Sanders supporters.

So the hypocrisy of condemning Trump over his imprisonment of migrant children when Hillary just two years ago called for sending refugee kids back where they came from to send a stern message to their irresponsible parents is easily ignored. Instead, she concentrates on the "monstrosity" of Trump lying about deaths of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, rather than concentrating on how private equity vultures and members of her own party have long been agitating for the neoliberal austerity regimen which was immiserating residents of the Commonwealth long before Trump gleefully threw paper towels at them.

 If you're feeling nauseous right about now, but hate the chalky taste of Pepto Bismol, then give Clinton's commercial a read. It'll feel like sticking your finger down your throat to make yourself vomit. But if that prospect sounds too intense, I'll put on my Secret Decoder ring to transmit the gist of it:

Trump does so many despicable, deplorable things and tells so many loathsome lies she can't keep track of everything, although she did keep track of that one time he told 125 lies in 120 minutes. John Adams certainly never called Thomas Jefferson "Crooked Thomas" during that presidential race. And she can certainly relate, because Jefferson owned slaves and Hillary also oversaw prison slave labor during her time as Arkansas First Lady. You wouldn't ever catch her trying to upend the Status Quo! Not then, and not now and not ever.

Even though there is no evidence that Russia installed Trump in office, she will continue to treat this as her own personal truth. Trump is doing nothing to protect us against an unproven threat!

Trump is going after journalists. Although he hasn't shut down the corporate-owned media conglomerate, he would if he could. Hillary certainly never would, because as much as she hates the media, she never called them fake or insulted them. She had staff for that. She merely hid from them as much as she could on The Trail, in between those times that she used them to air her grievances against their unfairness toward her and Bill.

What's more, the Obama administration was also going after journalists with a record vengeance. And as newly-released documents reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a secret opinion in 2015 which casts US journalists as foreign agents and therefore fodder for surveillance under the draconian FISA Act.

Let me depart for a moment from the synopsis and insert this direct quote from the Atlantic infomercial:

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

In other words, if people can't or won't swallow corporate propaganda whole, the Ruling Class suffers. Ordinary people lose the respect for corporate-controlled government that the oligarchs need to thrive and prosper. If the consent of the governed can no longer be manufactured by the self-serving Masters of the Universe, and the "narrative" cannot be narrowly proscribed, the aristocracy of the Secret Circle will find it increasingly hard to function under this renegade bomb-thrower of a president.

Now on with the sardonic interpretation of Hillary's message:

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, which is not comparable to Hillary's erasure of the State Department emails from her own secret server in her private basement. He is profiting from the presidency, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Bill and Hill raked in from the presidency and continue to rake in through their money-laundering influence-peddling charity are too noble to even be mentioned. Even though Trump is totally in it for his private gain, her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, where she admitted that her public position is different from her private position, were stolen by Wikileaks and shouldn't be heeded. Kill the messenger and blame the Russians instead, even if you have to do it 125 times in 120 minutes, or at least in the space of an hour of Rachel Maddow. (Catch Hillary on Rachel tonight, by the way!)

Trump undermines the unity which normally makes bipartisanship for the rich such a great propaganda scam. When Hillary says Democracy is rowdy by nature, what she really means is that there are always these petty fake squabbles among the movers and shakers of the Ruling Class to keep us alternately entertained and numbed. As they tried to convey to the lesser people during the Great John McCain Funeral Spectacular, when George Bush shared his candy with Michelle Obama during a pre-arranged camera pan:

We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

In the good old affectionate days, the Clintons were actually good transactional buddies with the Trumps. They even attended Donald and Melania's wedding. And normally, those "free debates" are carefully orchestrated by a corporation instead of by the quaint League of Women Voters, and pesky third and fourth party candidates are barred from appearing. And most recently, of course, the Bernie Sanders challenge was effectively quashed by purges of primary voting rolls and a severely truncated primary debate schedule. Although Hillary bought her way into control of the Democratic Party, this was not corrupt or authoritarian.

So now that it's that magical time of year when they allow people to vote and where corporate control of candidates does not apply in every single case, the aristocracy must fear-monger for all that it's worth. And it's worth a lot.

Therefore, Hillary will call for reform in the form of the same piecemeal solutions which catapulted her to a de facto victory on both coasts in 2016. Get the money out of politics, but not for her. Expand national service programs so that the lesser people, at little to no pay, can pretend they're making a difference and that this is really a democracy - when what they're really doing is protecting the status quo of extreme, obscene and unequal wealth. Let's have automatic voting registration too. And then making choosing between pre-vetted corporate candidates mandatory under law!

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

Accept your lot, proles. At least you are allowed to live in the same geographical space as your betters, so shut up already about Medicare For All and free higher education. Because the most pressing concern is that "we" (the very rich) stay better off. That's how fake Democracy works.

The End.

Or is it? 

This woman is not going away. They say the third time's a charm, so who's to say it can't also be a third chance for the charmless?

Pass the Ovaltine with a chaser of Pepto.