About Those "Grassroots" Pro-Mueller Rallies

To read and listen to all the media reports, Thursday night's nationwide protests against Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and in support of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's Russiagate probe arose almost spontaneously.

From CBS News:

Protests have sprung up across the country Thursday night calling for the protection of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia. Several hundred had gathered in New York's Times Square and other places like Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, North Carolina, Tennessee and Philadelphia.
In New York, demonstrators could be heard chanting "Hands off Mueller" and "Nobody is above the law" as they marched downtown. The Associated Press reported some held signs like "Truth Must Triumph" and "Repeal, Replace Trump."
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois joined several protesters in Chicago's Federal Plaza, AP reported.
Organizers of the protest said the naming of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was a "deliberate attempt to obstruct the special counsel's investigation," according to AP.
Thursday's show of disapproval came a day after President Trump asked Jeff Sessions to resign as the nation's top law enforcement official. He was then replaced by Whitaker, Sessions' chief of staff, who has been critical of Mueller's investigation.

Whenever an elected politician joins a "spontaneous" grassroots uprising, your bullshit detector should immediately escalate into the red zone.

What the corporate media carefully doesn't tell you about the protests' organizers should disabuse you of any notion that these protests simply "sprang up" out of any mass outrage over the discredited Russiagate probe, which has been going on for almost two years and has resulted in just a handful of indictments against Russian troll farm workers and the usual sleazy mix of money launderers and low-level political operatives.

Polls show that most people don't put the alleged Trump-Putin "collusion" to swing the 2016 election away from Hillary Clinton even close to top of their list of concerns and fears. Politico even recently warned all those Russophobes out there to tamp down their enthusiasm for any earth-shattering revelations or indictments from Mueller's office. And even if Mueller has or will uncover Trumpian malfeasance, his findings may never even be made public.

Therefore, the concern and the fear must be manufactured and packaged and marketed in order to get the citizenry ready for an otherwise issue-free Democratic Party presidential campaign season. It's slick, but it's also painfully obvious. 

I mean, what harried citizen would have the wherewithal to spontaneously construct a glitzy neon sign showing support for Iraq War cheerleader Robert Mueller, of all people? Summoning the proles to "save" this plutocrat is almost as bad as Trump summoning the proles to his neofascist rallies.

All you have to do to discover the powerful individuals and organizations and the scads of money behind these spontaneous grassroots protests is to visit the NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website and look for the fine print hidden beneath all the hype. Buried deep within the astroturf is a whole treasure trove of former and current Democratic Party politicians and consultants, alumni from the Clinton and Obama administrations, representatives of the permanent Security-Military State, and a healthy smattering of billionaire venture capitalists and hedge fund honchos.

Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of well-meaning participants in Thursday night's rallies were manipulated into serving power just as creepily as Trump's fans have been manipulated into serving power. The corporate media covering the rallies deliberately suppressed this vital information from its readers and viewers.

Among the protests' funders is Stand Up America, an astroturf propaganda mill started by Facebook billionaire Sean Eldridge, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 in my district after purchasing a mansion for that express purpose.  His top issue is not health care, civil rights or gun control. It is protecting Robert Mueller's investigation and by extension, vindicating Hillary Clinton and maybe even setting her up for a third run -- or as she seems to prefer, a coronation by acclamation at the 2020 party convention when the Superdelegates take over after an orchestrated first ballot failure.

So naturally, the Clinton fan club called Pantsuit Nation is also one of the main organizers of the spontaneous protests. It describes its main mission as "story-telling."

Libby Chamberlain created Pantsuit Nation as a “secret” Facebook group in late October 2016, inviting about thirty friends to wear pantsuits to the polls on Election Day. The group's emphasis on “going high” and a commitment to creating a troll-free space in which Clinton supporters could enthusiastically support their candidate struck a nerve. In the span of twenty-four hours, the group exploded to 24,000 members (new members can only be added by friends already within the group). Within a few weeks, group membership exceeded 3 million people. Our current membership is over 3.8 million people around the world.

Wow. "Exploding" sounds so much more spontaneous than "springing up", don't you think? There's nothing like spontaneous combustion to set all that plastic astroturf on fire and create a lot of smoke in the process.

And how grassroots can it possibly be without billionaire venture capitalist Tom Steyer's NextGen outfit in the mix? Maybe he can extend his get-out-the-youth-vote and impeachment franchise into petting zoos and puppies to keep the spontaneous protesters warm, if not fired up, on the next big march or rally.

One thing you can't help but notice as you click and scroll through all the grassroots "partners" is how eerily similar their websites appear, right down to the fonts and the layouts and the mission statements. As a matter of fact, many of them are renamed clones of one another, with the same consultants and directors. This broadcasts the message that there are many, many more spontaneous groups than really exist.

One such group,dubbed Every Voice, appears to be nothing but a re-tweeting platform and clickbait email aggregator whose Board of Directors all hail from the other organizations listed on the main NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website, including the Sierra Club and Democracy Matters. Those busy folks from the Democratic Consultant Class sure do get around, don't they? As a matter of fact, NIATL itself is the spontaneous creation of  MoveOn.Org, one of the Democratic Party's major clicktivist veal pens whose original purpose was to urge liberals to "move on" from the Lewinsky scandal.  It's a tangled web, for sure.

If it's a more diverse feel-good solidarity that you crave, then do check out the Truman National Security Project partner of the grassroots uprisings. I mean, any group named after the president who atom-bombed Hiroshima just to send a hegemonic message to the world and who later approved the unaccountable regime- changing CIA has got to have law and order on its side, right? Included on the board of directors is Hunter Biden, son of Joe, whose Ukrainian oligarchic connections are in direct capitalistic competition with Russia. Unlike Trump, though, he and Dad are apparently far, far above the law. Joining him is Steve Israel, late of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whose job is to advance centrist candidates and to bury progressive ones. 

If you joined Thursday night's marches, you might even think that its backers are also fighting Trump's mendacious campaign against Medicare for All, because a group calling itself Health Care Voter helped pay for some of those glitzy pro-FBI/Mueller signs. Fugeddaboutit. It's nothing but a campaign commercial boosting centrist Democrats whose aim is merely to "protect" the profit-driven Affordable Care Act from GOP assaults. 

Then there's a site called Rapid Resist, whose director, Yoni Landau, hails from Bill Clinton's White House Office of Management and Budget and whose assistant, Jacinth Yohi, has overseen digital operations for Democratic candidates when not engaged in "community-building" at Google and Uber, where the de facto salary for its gig drivers is less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

That's only a small sampling of the interconnected anti-Trump partnership of Democratic consultants, donors and other operatives who orchestrated Thursday's grassroots uprising. Read them and click through them until your eyes glaze over from all that spontaneous and very lucrative redundancy. 

Meanwhile, some cynics are even suggesting that liberal activists start a GoFundMe page for the ousted Jeff Sessions, whose last desperate act before being kicked out of office was ordering a halt to federal consent decrees to curb police brutality and other law enforcement abuses of the poor, the black, and the brown. Of course, these decrees have traditionally been nothing but unenforced slaps on the wrist and warnings to offending police agencies in such poverty-stricken cities as Cleveland. 

Still, Sessions managed to dig in the racist knife even further, by ordering that political operatives - not career nonpartisan lawyers from the Justice Department - will now have the power to "discipline" police agencies. Additionally, such decrees will have sunset clauses, meaning that the offending departments can simply run out the clock and do nothing to reform themselves as they continue to act with impunity toward an increasingly vulnerable and disposable population. 

Red Fascists, Blue Fascists, Old Fascists, New Fascists

With the Democratic Party and its various media sycophants and fund-raising offshoots now planning mass rallies in support of fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, I think it's safe to assume that fascism has officially arrived in America. 

Rather than march against Trump's militarization of the border, or for that matter, the US's brutal global militarization in general, liberals will be marching to express their shock and displeasure at the ouster of one of the most racist and xenophobic officials in modern American history. 

House Speaker-in-Waiting Nancy Pelosi got knocked off the playground seesaw within 24 hours of verbally pandering to Trump - in the name of "national unity" - in the wake of her party's feeble midterm victory, and immediately characterized the firing as a "constitutional crisis" because it endangers the interminable RussiaGate investigation of Trump by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is subordinate to the Attorney General.  

The media-political complex is shocked, shocked that Trump would replace Sessions with a DOJ "loyalist," who, we learn almost in an aside, has also been employed by CNN as a legal affairs talking head.

The outrage is not so much that Matthew Whitaker crossed the red line between public service employment and private media employment, but that he allegedly is a hypnotized Trilby to Trump's Svengali.  

The New York Times editorialized:

 Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.

Rather than criticize the glaring conflict of interest in Whitaker's recent post at CNN, the Times carefully limits its ire to Whitaker's conflict of interest regarding the Russiagate investigation. That's because emphasizing the CNN connection would not be in keeping with the "narrative" that Trump persecutes the corporate media and its various personalities by calling them "fake news" and "enemies of the people."

As I wrote in my published response to Charles Blow, whose own column on the subject also concentrated on Whitaker's pro-Trump verbiage on CNN rather than on this Department of Justice official's monetized connection to CNN:

The only thing more (ahem) shocking than Trump firing Sessions is that his successor, Whitaker, also works as a paid CNN legal contributor. The conflicts of interest in this American oligarchy, which still ridiculously poses as a republic, extend so far beyond the Trump gene pool, it isn't funny.

You'd think that Trump would disqualify Whitaker because of his connection to CNN. But the truth is that Trump loves the corporate media, and they love him right back. They give him all the free air time he requires, and then some. He, in turn, supplies them with record-breaking ad revenue and viewership.

The back-and-forth at the post-midterms press con between Trump and CNN star Jim Acosta appeared completely staged to me. These men are filling their required roles for "The Spectacle" (in lieu of gathering actual news or discussing the problems of ordinary people.)

Trump relishes this role because casting himself as a beleaguered victim-warrior endears him even more to his fans, who have been manipulated into channeling their very real grievances into the Trump "kampf." The Republicans owned by the wealthy stay silent because plutocrats and fascists have historically made very cozy bedfellows. I think it's now safe to declare that fascism has arrived, blue wave or no.

What if Trump held a rally or a press conference and nobody televised it? He'd immediately collapse like the over-inflated balloon of fetid hot air that he is. And the corporate sponsors would be very sad.

For those of you who missed it, here's the full clip of Wednesday's press conference:

 As presidential press conferences go, it was a riveting and bizarre treat, an entertainment special tailor-made for the profit driven corporate media. It even has a sequel, with the White House later accusing Acosta of "touching" the White House intern who'd attempted to remove his microphone, and then revoking his press access to the building. As if that wasn't enough, Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders began sharing a doctored video of Acosta accosting the intern. And that has led to  further outrage from the champions of a free corporate-sponsored press who simultaneously and hypocritically applaud the censorship efforts of Facebook and Google as pertain to more independent (unapproved) news outlets. 

 All concerned are playing their parts to perfection. Nothing buries popular demands for the public good, such as Medicare for All, like Democrats attacking Trump from the right and rallying neoliberal neofascists to protest the firing of their new confederate anti-immigrant hero, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III. It's a professionally coordinated "rapid response" astroturfed uprising reminiscent of the Tea Party.

Wall Street has declared itself well-pleased with all the outcomes of the Midterminals, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shooting up more than 500 points after the cosmetic restoration of two-party, duopolistic rule. The record $5 billion invested by the oligarchy into the one democratic vestige we still have left was money very well spent indeed, because most of the Democratic wins came in affluent Congressional districts.

When, in her post-midterminal victory speech (pre-Sessions ouster), Nancy Pelosi gushed that these meager victories prove that "we have a marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong" she wasn't kidding. The emphasis on the "we" serves to define unfettered capitalism as democracy for the very few and the very privileged who. she said, "have all had enough of division." Oh, and maybe they'll even give a little token relief to "hardworking Americans" who can demonstrate a lot of skin in their game. Pelosi is so into plutocratic unity that she even cadged a page from the Trump playbook and promised to Drain the Swamp of dark unaccountable money.

"Let's hear it more for pre-existing medical conditions!" she unnecessarily added to the cheers of an exclusive crowd of party operatives and donors and, of course, those dedicated and unpaid volunteers.

Bitter Little Blue Pills

Are you still feeling positively giddy and drunk on your Blue Wave cocktails on this Midterminal Morning After? Or are you already hung over and in dire need of a jolt of reality-based caffeine?

To borrow some of the cool media parlance currently in vogue, let's unpack the hidden meaning of the outcomes by taking a deep dive in a search of multiple takeaways of all the myriad things you need to know this morning.

On second thought, let's not. I am too hung over from reading the multiple media accounts of The Results to think as clearly as I would like.

Just a few muddled preliminary thoughts then:

--Many of the Democrats who lost their Senate seats were de facto Republicans who might have been punished by voters for pandering too much to Trump and for not being progressive enough. Here's looking at you, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly. I have absolutely no facts to back up this supposition, but it's pleasant to think about anyway.

--On that note, although Florida's Democratic gubernatorial contender, Andrew Gillum, narrowly lost, Floridians still voted to re-enfranchise more than a million of the state's convicted felons, most of whom are black or brown people once brutally imprisoned on minor drug charges or other nonviolent crimes. If that isn't progressive, I don't know what is.

--Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Kochtopia) is finally gone. That is a mammoth blue wave in and of itself.

-- As far as the Dems controlling the lower house of Congress is concerned, I've already covered it in some previous posts. The new committee chairs will engage in a frenzy of subpoena-issuing to Trump's corrupt cabinet. Executive privilege will be invoked. Referrals will be made to the Trump-led Justice Department. Lather, rinse, repeat. The neoliberal Octogenarian Troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn will make deals with the nasty Republicans in the interests of National Unity. The smattering of newly-elected "diverse" progressives will make fiery speeches on the House floor in an effort to get the cynical electorate herded back into compliance for Campaign 2020. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump will seesaw from cooperation to bickering and back again to keep everybody off-balance and guessing and tuned in to the never-ending reality show that substitutes for representative democracy.

--We ordinary slobs have still got our work cut out for us, despite what the New York Times is breathlessly over-hyping as the End of One-Party Rule, equating the blue wave panacea for electoral dysfunction with that other over-hyped little blue pill for erectile dysfunction. Who are they trying to kid? 

It'll be the same as it ever was. And just in case you don't understand that fighting and resisting Trump is not the same thing as making people's lives better, the Times gnaws off the bottle cap of bitter blue pills for you to swallow:  

But after eight years in the minority, Democrats hoping to reclaim the White House in 2020 will also have to prove they are interested in governing — and temper the liberal ambitions of the party’s most ardent left-wingers....

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who now hopes to be its next speaker, pledged to “work for solutions that bring us together, because we have all had enough of division.”

Get the picture? When the Democratic leaders say they're willing to work with Trump, they mean that they will enthusiastically join his mendacious fight against Single Payer health care. This is despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the electorate are in favor of it. The Democrats' worst enemy was never really Trump. It's always been the Left. So now that you have done your civic duty and voted and provided them with the fig leaf they've so desperately craved to legitimize their power, you are hereby expected to shut up and let the ruling class racketeers just all get along with one another as they always have done. Sew up your mouths and stop sowing such divisions (with much help from social media security state censors) while they sew up their deals.

 The one solution that has always brought them together is the appropriation of untold trillions of dollars to the profitable and privatized and unified and unaccountable corporate war and surveillance and incarceration apparatus. But since the viewers at home must still be kept entertained and engaged, there will also be plenty of anti-Trump theater on offer between the stealthy appropriations and backroom deals. The price of admission is high, and the tickets will not be refundable unless enough people make enough of a noise about how badly they've been cheated.

Midterminal Blues

There's already enough churnalism on the midterm elections without my adding to the glut. 

I spent most of the weekend not answering the insistent pounding on my door from unpaid campaign volunteers and ignoring the incessant reverberations on my cellphone from racist robocallers. I wasted precious minutes of my life relegating to the trash folder the never-ending demands for cash flooding my email in-box.

 At least, since I no longer pay for the torture that is cable TV, I was spared the misery of watching what are alleged by cable victims to be some the nastiest political ads in recent memory. 

Nor will I add to the chorus of "voter-shaming" being brayed from political operatives and pundits from far-right, center-right and center-pseudo-left, who chide us that our failure (or more aptly, our refusal) to vote for the pre-vetted candidates of the oligarchy will endanger our very existence as human beings.

Me? I already voted early by mail, as I always do. I chose Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins for governor of New York over the terminally corrupt Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins has never won an election in his whole life, but he actually garners a respectable percentage every time he runs. He even got a fairly friendly write-up in the New York Times. The establishment paper of record usually gives friendly write-ups to politicians it doesn't consider much of a threat to the status quo. That way, they can appear to be fair and balanced to the despised left among their readership.

 Since Democrat Antonio Delgado and Republican John Faso are in a dead heat in my district, I am sad to report that I held my nose and voted for Delgado.... but on the Working Families Party line, not the D line. This is the very first time I have ever voted "strategically," because although I have absolutely no expectation that Delgado would actually do much of anything for "working" (what about the single, the retired, the unemployed and those still in school?) people if he wins, at least he would presumably not fall into the Trump tank and cheer for refugees to get shot or imprisoned at the border. Plus, he only has two years in which to do the bidding of Wall Street. Besides, the next two years in a Democratic majority House of Reps look to to be nothing but non-stop theater and grandstanding about neoliberal values vs fascist values, with a host of Trump cabinet officials getting hauled before committees. The shaming will have the main, if not sole, purpose of embarrassing Trump and boosting Democratic fortunes for the interminable presidential sweepstakes, which begin at precisely midnight tonight.

And that's all I have to say for now about the Midterminals.

Putting Lipstick On a Neoliberal Pig

 This "cure" for the chronic electoral failures of a Democratic Party in thrall to the oligarchy sounds even worse than the disease:  

It seems to me that the Democrats’ story has to be built around the simple idea of investing in middle- and working-class people. Not “spending,” but “investing.” Spending sounds profligate; investing sounds prudent.

This is not to be done for reasons of “fairness.” That’s an absolutely vital point. Liberals reflexively want to make economic arguments about fairness. But this persuades only liberals. People who aren’t liberals — three-quarters of the country — don’t especially care about fairness. They do, however, care about growth. So Democrats need to argue that these investments, not tax cuts for the rich, are the way to spur growth.

 So writes Michael Tomasky, one of America's leading self-described "progressive" pundits, in a recent New York Times op-ed. While pretending to explore the reasons why the Democratic Party keeps losing elections, he completely ignores the needs, wants and problems of its vaunted working class constituency.  He assumes, moreover, that tens of millions of precarious Americans do nothing but sit around all day and worry about economic growth and the national GDP.

These people desperately want to be seen as "investments" rather than as, say, human beings with immediate requirements for food, income, medical care, and shelter. Tomasky views them as mere commodities in dire need of some better messaging.

The problem, according to Tomasky, is that three-quarters of all Americans are conservatives who don't care a fig about their neighbors and about "fairness."

From a pundit whose purported mission in life is to fight Republican lies, this claim could not be further from the truth. It is a Big Lie.

Poll after poll after poll reveals that most Americans are, in fact, liberals and progressives if not downright socialistic. Peter Dreier of The American Prospect compiled a comprehensive overview last year. Tomasky might be surprised to learn that fully 65% of these selfish, ignorant Americans care very deeply about the economic unfairness unleashed by unfettered finance capital, with an equal proportion believing that money and wealth should be distributed more evenly. 

Ninety-six percent of Americans - and that includes most Republicans polled - believe that money in politics is to blame for political dysfunction, with three-quarters despising the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling which equates corporate money with speech. Eighty percent think corporations don't pay their fair share in taxes, with nearly the same percentage believing that wealthy people don't pay their fair share in taxes.  So much for Tomasky's spurious claims that the lesser people -- er, I mean human commodities ripe for investment -- don't care about economic justice.

It gets worse (for the oligarchs running the place, that is.) Two-thirds of Americans want the cap on Social Security taxes lifted so that the wealthy pay a larger, fairer share. Two-thirds, including 42% of self-described Republicans, support labor unions. Three-quarters, including Republicans, want paid parental leave. And at least two-thirds of all Americans support government-sponsored, single payer health care insurance. 

And despite President Trump's fear-mongering about the "immigrant invasion" from Honduras," 68 percent of Americans—including 48 percent of Republicans—believe the country’s openness to people from around the world “is essential to who we are as a nation.” Just 29 percent say that “if America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.”

In light of these results, Tomasky's claim that Americans need any more "convincing" about what they do and should care about sounds increasingly more ridiculous.

So he does what all right-wing Democrats since Bill Clinton have done for the past several decades. He will feel your pain while promising you nothing but a good story:

The story could use a name. The venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, a former Bill Clinton domestic policy adviser, coined “middle-out economics” five years ago. President Obama even used the phrase a few times.

The important thing is the idea. Democrats must persuade America that there’s a better way to expand the economy than the way Republicans have been advocating for decades. Just as inflation and other ills opened the door for critiques of Keynesianism in the 1970s, so have inequality and disinvestment done the same for critiques of supply-side today. Someone just has to make them.

Tomasky must have forgotten that Bernie Sanders has been making this critique for decades, and that it was only because of the deliberate squelching of this message by the Democratic Party and the complicit establishment media that more people did not hear it.

Corporate Democrats are worried for a good reason. People are on to their con, and the party bigwigs are running low on policy proposals. So caught between the rock of attracting more voters with advocacy for Medicare for All and debt-free college, and satisfying the donor class - which is adamantly opposed to programs for the greater good  - they are still opting for the latter.  Meanwhile, they are going on one "soul-searching" propaganda binge after the other.

The "market knows best" ideology of neoliberalism has run roughshod over ordinary people throughout the world, with inequality now so extreme that fully half the entire globe's wealth now rests in less than a dozen billionaire pockets.

  This is now such common knowledge that the centrist Democratic proponents of the Neoliberal Project have no other choice but to acknowledge this hard truth and pretend to want to rectify if while actually making it much worse with their pretty rhetoric and their cynical inaction.

Follow the money. Besides his gig as a "contributing op-ed writer" for the New York Times, Tomasky writes full-time for the liberal Daily Beast - a subsidiary of the international media conglomerate IAC, which is owned by Democratic mega-donor Barry Diller and where Chelsea Clinton sits on the board. IAC not only controls and distributes much of the information we see, hear and read, it also owns the websites of "more than 150 brands and products," including Vimeo and several Internet dating sites.

Tomasky also is the full-time editor of the new-ish Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, whose own board of directors is a veritable who's who of the oligarchy. Under its glossy theme of "government for the public good" -- as shallowly opposed to the GOP's more brutal agenda - this quarterly journal espouses neoliberalism in its newly "progressive" form. You might call it neo-neoliberalism.

It is more than a little self-celebratory. The aforementioned Nick Hanauer, who runs/owns the place, wrote one recent article touting the alleged death of neoliberalism and praising his own "rousing speech" on why "Homo economus must die" upon his receipt of the Humanist of the Year award from MIT.

An excerpt:

Capitalism is the greatest problem-solving social technology ever invented. But knowing that capitalism works is different than knowing why it works. And contrary to economic orthodoxy, it is reciprocity, not selfishness that guides it—indeed—as if by an invisible hand. It is social reciprocity that builds the high levels of trust necessary for large networks of people to cooperate at scale. And it is only through these networks of highly-cooperative specialists that the complexity that defines our modern economy can emerge.

Hanauer, unlike your traditional rapacious Republican capitalist, is a member of the Good Rich Club. He comes not to destroy capitalism in its most brutally egregious Trump-like form. He comes to save it, He comes to put lipstick on an inherently antisocial pig. By equating democratic government with capitalism, the same as neoliberals always have, Hanauer is simply offering up more postmodern feudalism, with just the right dollop of noblesse oblige. (Invisible hands of highly cooperative "specialists" who work ever so nicely together, far from the prying eyes of the actual public.)

 Tomasky hilariously gushes in an accompanying article that his benefactor and de facto boss is the "plutocrat of the common man."

For further "balance," the latest issue of Democracy includes the obligatory homage to Democratic Socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who, we are assured, is really just an FDR-style liberal who has absolutely no intention of overthrowing capitalism. 

There is not one article in Democracy that is anti-war. War and death are the most profitable enterprises in our Democracy, after all.

 Besides a smattering of academics, including Robert Reich, with more or less bona fide credentials, its Board of Directors includes Robert Abernethy, vice chairman of the war-mongering Atlantic Council, which is also at the forefront of the Cold War 2.0 "Russiagate" propaganda campaign and a leader in the permanent Security State's call for censorship of social media and independent news organizations. Like several others on the Democracy board, he is affiliated with the neoliberal Aspen Institute and the Democratic Party's official think tank, Center for American Progress (CAP).

Melody Barnes, another director, is an alumna of CAP and the Obama administration who now works as a Wall Street lobbyist as well as serving on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, the unaccountable private subsidiary of the National Security Agency which was made famous by Ed Snowden's theft of documents demonstrating the oligarchy's mass surveillance of every man, woman and child on the planet. This is what Democracy is all about, after all.

Then there's billionaire William Budinger of the Rodel Foundation, a school "reform" zealot who was among the very first mega-contributors to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The destruction of teachers' unions and public schools have always been very high on his to-do list. Obama's Education Department, lead by charter school advocate Arne Duncan, certainly gave Budinger his money's worth. You might remember that when Obama's campaign offshoot, Organizing for America, made plans to go to Wisconsin to support teachers during the protests against Governor Scott Walker's war on public unions, Obama himself ordered their swift and hasty retreat.  

Anne-Marie Slaughter, liberal war hawk, nicely rounds out the Democracy advisory roster. (You can read the whole list of names here.)

 As Samuel Moyn observes, this Clinton State Department alumna and her cohort of "liberal internationalists have always endorsed a globalization that often ends up serving free markets more than it does political freedom, with economic equality its central omission and biggest casualty. Liberal internationalists have spoken admiringly of “the idea that is America,” in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s phrase, but the reality is that beneath the hype the United States has nearly always placed economic liberty first among its foreign policy priorities. Trump’s economic nationalism will hardly work either, but our main response to it has to be to invent a new form of liberal internationalism rather than fall back on the failed pieties and stale rhetoric that contributed to the ascendancy of Trump and other populists in the first place."

The writers and directors of Democracy can call themselves progressives all they want, but they can't put neoliberal lipstick on a pig without it leaving its telltale stains all over the place.

What if we, the designated pork belly futures of neo-neoliberal America's investment class, just turned up our snouts at the smarmy swill being marketed to us by pundits in service of the oligarchy? Maybe then they'd dispense with the lipstick entirely and simply offer us the whole unadorned pig to cuddle like a baby.   

Oh, wait. They already have!

(Photo credit: HuffPo)

  You might remember hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer as the impeachment guru and presidential contender who's spent millions of his own money bribing college kids to register to vote by staffing college campuses with cute puppies. Now, things have gotten so desperate for the Dems that Steyer is installing entire petting zoos all over the land to help those cynical kids get over their depression and college debt long enough to cast their votes for a Democrat With a Story.

His group, with the cool-sounding name NextGen, is also flattering the youth of America with free rolls of toilet paper. They don't explain why they think toilet paper is such a great bribery tool. Maybe they assume that the only time young people feel crappy is when they're on the can, and they will free-associate a roll of toilet paper with the squeaky clean Democrats who care so much about them. And then they'll get off their butts and vote!

The least that the corporate Dems could do for people is supply us with a free issue of Democracy for our bathroom reading pleasure.  Or better yet, old copies of the New York Times to stuff under our drafty doors in a futile effort to keep warm as winter approaches.

New York Times Discovers Cyber Racism

There is a ton of ugly, nasty, racist stuff on the Internet, and it occasionally inspires somebody to tear himself away from his screen long enough to commit mass mayhem. And The Times is on it.

In light of the well-publicized eruption of Internet-addicted people who act out correlating with Trump's racist rhetoric, columnist Frank Bruni goes so far as to flatly predict that "the Internet will be the death of us."  

What a glittering dream of expanded knowledge and enhanced connection it was at the start. What a nightmare of manipulated biases and metastasized hate it has turned into....

The internet is the technology paradox writ more monstrous than ever. It's a nonpareil tool for learning, roving and constructive community-building. But it's unrivaled, too, in the spread of lies, narrowing of interests and erosion of common cause. It's a glorious buffet, but it pushes individual users toward only the red meat or just the kale. We're ridiculously overfed and ruinously undernourished.
It creates terrorists. But well shy of that, it sows enmity by jumbling together information and misinformation to a point where there's no discerning the real from the Russian.

Bruni fights disinformation not with truth, but with disinformation of his own. It seems that he either didn't hear, or chooses to ignore, those rumors of the premature death of RussiaGate - despite recent sheepish obits from some of its own proponents. We've all been ridiculously overfed on a red-baiting mystery meat diet of Clintonoid nothing-burgers from Bruni and his Times cohort for going on two years now. 

So now, they also want you to believe that it's not the past 40 years of Reagan/Clinton neoliberalism, aka government welfare for billionaires and corporations and austerity for everyone else, but the monolithic Internet which has been sowing all these divisions among people who otherwise would be feeling all warm and tolerant toward their fellow men and utterly satisfied with their own precarious lives. 

For all that liberals like Bruni decry the divisiveness sown by Donald Trump, they ignore the divisiveness sown by the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history, an inequality created deliberately by a political plutocracy that has since devolved into an oligarchy. 

Blaming "Russians" for all our ills is no better than Trump blaming Mexicans and Muslims for all our ills.

And since he has duly declared the Internet to be the root of all evil, Bruni has no solution other than to monitor/censor free speech and prevent people from talking to each other. Because "Democracy is at stake." And we're all gonna die.

Democracy, you see, has nothing to do with actual people. Democracy as defined by the Establishment is Capitalism. The truth that we are all more likely to die from climate-destroying neoliberal capitalism than we are from the Internet must be suppressed at all costs. Instead, we are urged to cling to our "common cause" without the necessity of such a thing even being defined for us.

My published comment:

About a year ago I Googled "Martin Luther King," and near the top of the list was a website called "Martin Luther King. org."

The site was/is run by a white nationalist organization devoted to sliming Dr. King.

This year, under pressure, Google finally adjusted its algorithm. The hate site isn't there any more, at least not among the first several pages of search results for MLK.

But it makes you wonder how many impressionable people, including kids researching MLK for school assignments, clicked on the site and had their minds poisoned.

Cyber racism has been around as long as the Internet. It's illegal in Australia, but not in any other country that I know of.

Meanwhile Google, in its newfound socially responsible zeal, has also started suppressing material from legitimate sites which it deems not to be "mainstream" enough.

This censorship is a double edged sword, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to mangle a couple of metaphors. lt's like randomly installing spike strips on a freeway. Reckless drivers and careful drivers alike are indiscriminately stopped in their tracks. Many of the reckless drivers get away anyhow by finding detours, while many careful, responsible drivers become too leery even to venture out, lest driving "be the death of them."

Since (to use another cliche) you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, one solution would be to teach children, beginning at a very young age, how to think critically and to separate truth from lies.

Concentrating on Trump and such fringe-dwelling lowlife racists as Dylann Roof (who shot up an all-black South Carolina church in 2015) and most recently, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, also diverts public attention from the fact that police kill an average of three citizens a day, and that more black people are in prison today than were enslaved prior to the Civil War. The foreign victims of our state-sanctioned drone assassinations and undeclared wars are neither named nor cared about, not even on the Internet. Google and Facebook are helping see to that via their censorship policies.

The other side of cyber racism and cyber hate is the mass epidemic of media complicity and public apathy as it pertains to state-sanctioned violence. This attitude of complicity and apathy is beginning to change somewhat, but only because Donald Trump is president and he has dispensed with the dog-whistle racism and patriotic platitudes of "normal" presidents in favor of a bullhorn hybrid of Bull Connor and Benito Mussolini. Politicians and corporate media personalities are finally willing to call people like Sayoc and Bowers "domestic terrorists." Not because it is right, but because it makes Trump look bad and Democrats look good. 

You might remember that then-FBI Director James Comey heartily resisted calling Dylann Roof a terrorist back when the USA was so busily funding Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria and then entrapping/arresting American youths for "aspiring" to join ISIS.

Liberals in the Age of Trump are finally beginning to accept the fact that racist attitudes are not just limited to the "red state" South, but are as American as apple pie, and that the US is not, as Paul Krugman blithely posited during those epic Confederate flag tear-downs after the South Carolina church massacre, "a much less racist nation than it used to be."

Trump did not create neo-racism. He didn't invent American fascism. He just tapped into our pre-existing subterranean rivers, and sucked up the ancient polluted water, and spit it back out in words, actions, and more Trump-branded merchandise posing as political leadership.

Apocalypse Casts Shadow Over Midterms

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Just when the whole country should be uniting and going happily to the polls to democratically choose between right-wing fascists and neoliberal corporatists, the damned freelance violence has to rear its ugly head and dampen the great American spirit that has always made this country so exceptional. 

And it's not just the typical shadow-casting like, say, the FBI director calling Hillary Clinton "reckless" about her private email account right before the presidential election in 2016. This time, according to The Hill online newspaper, a veritable cloud of doom is hovering over us.

There's still more than a week to go before November Sixth, so give them time to conjure up some actual thunder, lightning and rain. If we can just get past this manufactured debris-festooned buildup to our great manufactured ritual, we 'll soon safely return to our more normal violent programming of shootings, religious and ethnic intolerance, and mindless sunny entertainment.

 Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, expressed skepticism that the rhetoric will cool in the last full week of the campaign, even as the country remains on edge. 

I don’t think anything’s going to cool tensions,” he said in an interview with The Hill. “This, on both sides, has the feel of the apocalypse if they lose.”

Mere days after a steroid-pumped dude living out of a van decorated with Trump wallpaper was arrested in Florida and charged with mailing pipe bombs to the security personnel and other underlings employed by wealthy Trump critics, another loser emerged from his seedy apartment in Pittsburgh and shot up a synagogue, killing several congregants and wounding others before getting shot himself by responding SWAT police.

In a country riven by a record number of mass shootings in just the past year, you might simply be inclined to think that this has just been another typical psychotic week in America. But coming as close as these incidents do to the only democratic ritual we still have left, they become prime apocalyptic fodder for the pundit class.

Not only that: the two latest Travis Bickle imitators to crawl out of the zeitgeist are portrayed by the media as little hunks of lumpen clay ripped off from the main supply for the express pre-election kneading and molding pleasure of Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump. No matter that only the pipe-bomb guy was the true Trumpie, and that the synagogue shooter didn't much like Trump because he isn't enough of an outspoken anti-Semitic fascist for his taste - these two men will go down in history, as told by establishment media, as brothers joined at the hip of hate. And it's all because of Trump, and not because of such things as evictions, bankruptcies, untreated mental illness, drug addiction, lack of a job.... or just because they've been evil nasty characters their whole miserable lives.

That's the narrative, and the media mavens are sticking to it. The first order of business, therefore, is to absolve both right wings of the Duopoly of the violent results of their anti-social, pro-corporate policies of the last 50 years. 

The Hill thus dutifully continues:

The chairmen of both parties' campaign arms in the House appeared jointly on a pair of Sunday talk shows, where they delivered a message of unity.
“We should come together as a country. This should not be a political response, but rather a response at how we can further bring us together,” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said on “Fox News Sunday.”
His Republican counterpart, Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), expressed confidence that the midterms would not prove to be an obstacle in efforts to unify the country.

And then they departed from their own platitudinous narratives and accused one another's campaigns of being "sleazy" and "racist," which casts even more shadows of doom over Doomsday. Why oh why can't our ruling class racketeers just all get along for the next week or so as our whole country explodes around us? 

We really shouldn't fret. This staged hand-wringing feeds the suspense factor so necessary to keep us hooked and riveted in an orgy of binge-watching. Because the ruling class racketeers actually do get along most of the time. They only pretend to hate each other so as to foment more hate among various factions of the US electorate and encourage us to channel our hate at the voting booth. People are encouraged to vote against someone or something, not for someone or something. Fear and loathing are the only emotions that our corrupt finance-capitalized political system are willing to market to the vast majority of the have-nots. And that's true not just in the US, but throughout Europe, and most recently, in desperate austerity-torn Brazilians' "choice" of a right-wing strongman to lead them. 

Once our homegrown American candidates are safely re-elected (or win office for the first time), they can buckle down to the onerous task of fulfilling the needs of the bribing billionaires and corporations and weapons manufacturers and private prison investors. There will be no more shadows or clouds, only friendly smoke-filled rooms.  

Maybe Donald Trump can even take a break from his frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies and 3 a.m. tweets long enough to rehabilitate his own image by starting another war and thereby develop some real presidential cred among the movers and shakers of this very violent country. If you're disturbed about the relative lack of coverage in the mainstream media about his abandonment of the nuclear treaty with Russia, wait till after November Sixth. Right now, the manufactured apocalypse of electoral politics must take precedence.

Maybe regular people, stoked up on their free-floating anger, despair and apathy, will finally see through the toxic smoke and go on a general strike against the oligarchy and its political lackeys and censorious propagandists. All it takes is a spark, or a tipping point. And there are already enough of those to cause massive forest fires and avalanches.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it's always deju vu all over again. This, from 60 years ago: