State of the Bunion 2019: The Heel That Spurred

I used to have such fun deconstructing Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches, digging under the multiple layers of obfuscation and soaring double-talk and platitudes to finally arrive at the essential neoliberal message of reassurance to the Masters of the Universe. 

With Donald Trump, though, there is no such need to parse. What you hear is what you get. And fact-checking is a wasted effort. Just follow Dorothy Parker's recipe and assume that every word he utters is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Maybe it was because he avoided the draft with a phony diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels, but Trump's amateur rendering of Major Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove was a tad on the wooden side. The moment that he forced a couple of moribund World War II vets out of their wheelchairs did not quite rise to the level of sadism we have come to expect from this president. But the TV cameras did their best, capturing every wincing, creaking, grimacing moment as aides dragged the two men to their feet for the obligatory ovations before gently shoving them back down again for the viewing pleasure of America.

Another guest of honor, a young boy invited to the event because his last name is Trump and he's been bullied as a result, escaped the other Trump's hectoring speech by simply falling asleep. (Recovering Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not attend this year, so I guess somebody had to do the napping honors.) Just like his namesake, Joshua Trump simply wasn't up to the job of pretending to be interested. If the president's jingoistic boilerplate rhetoric and the thundering applause and raucous cries of USA! USA! USA! it inspired weren't enough to wake a child from his slumbers, then how do Trump and his team of neocon kleptocrats expect the rest of us to overcome the sickly inhibitions of our recurring Vietnam Syndrome and get all excited about invading Venezuela and replacing socialism for the people with socialism for the corporations?

But at least Trump cares about The Children. He used as another human shield a little girl named Grace, who because she lives in a rich country without universal health insurance, had made it her life's work to collect money for St. Jude's Hospital. Then she was stricken with cancer herself. Therefore, Trump will not ask that Congress pass Medicare for All. to help with her expenses. He will ask for public funding for cancer research so that private pharmaceutical companies can make a whole bunch of money on new cancer drugs.

But for those hardworking parents going broke paying premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses, Trump will offer them the peace of mind of more charter schools for the enrichment of the oligarchs. 

I am also proud to be the first President to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave — so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child. There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days.

Now, what immediately came to my mind was children being ripped away from their parents at the border and then imprisoned in cages. And that made me think of the bone-chillingly cold conditions endured by inmates of the federal prison in Brooklyn when the power failed in the wake of Trump's shutdown and the Polar Vortex that so unfairly and illegally crossed our precious borders.

But, I was mistaken. The grisly images that Trump harbors in his sick demented mind are fetuses being ripped out of their mother's wombs and Democrats cheering with delight at the graphic spectacle. So here's a thought. Maybe if the refugee moms who cross the border start hiding their babies under their clothing instead of holding them tenderly in their arms, the mad doctors of ICE will be less likely to rip them away.

Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.

Yes, let's. And we can start by reuniting the migrant children with their parents and passing a single payer health insurance plan that covers everybody from cradle to grave. Maybe even Trump himself can finally be cured of his Jack D. Ripper-style paranoid fantasy that aliens are invading him and sucking away all his precious bodily fluids.

Sadly, though, when Trump D. Ripper spoke of the final part of his agenda being the protection of security, he wasn't talking about health care, Social Security, a living wage or a guaranteed income. He was talking about the improved security of the Masters of War, to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars in bomb and munitions and surveillance and invasion funding each and every year.

And all the white feminist regalia and stony-faced Democrats in the audience notwithstanding, the Senate in a solidly bipartisan vote actually rebuked Trump this week for daring to reduce troop levels in Syria and Afghanistan without first asking their permission, notwithstanding that they were never asked for permission, by the previous administrations, to invade and occupy and commit grisly acts in these countries in the first place.

Trump's speech, which the New York Times called the third longest SOTU speech in history, ended on this insipid, hackneyed and threatening note: 

Here tonight we have legislators from across this magnificent republic. You have come from the rocky shores of Maine and the volcanic peaks of Hawaii. From the snowy woods of Wisconsin and the red deserts of Arizona. From the green farms of Kentucky and the golden beaches of California.
Together, we represent the most extraordinary nation in all of history. What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered?
I ask the men and women of this Congress: Look at the opportunities before us. Our most thrilling achievements are still ahead. Our most exciting journeys still await. Our biggest victories are still to come. We have not yet begun to dream.

And here I thought I was in the middle of a waking nightmare. 

Joshua Trump probably had the right idea. 

Democrats' Co-option of Race Hits Snags

The liberal class is all in a tizzy about Virginia Governor and amateur blackface entertainer Ralph Northam and his staunch refusal (as of this writing) to resign. Judging from all the media coverage, the tizzy is not so much about Northam injuring black people because of his racist behavior. It's that the incontrovertible evidence of his racist behavior is coming so close to the next election.

It was bad enough when Northam first admitted that he was either the dude in blackface or the dude in the KKK garb in his medical school yearbook photo, before quickly retracting the confession. But when he appeared on the verge of reprising the Michael Jackson moonwalk dance he performed as an Army medical officer, all bets about his "woke"  post-racial mindset were off. He still doesn't get it.

In this age of politics as spectator sport, politicians are used to manufacturing their own dramatic personal narratives as a way to avoid addressing deep societal problems. The standard excuse they use is that every crisis - like, say, 30 million Americans lacking health insurance in the richest country on earth - is just too close to Election Day for us to insist that our endangered, pragmatic and sensitive Democratic politicians do anything about it beyond mouthing platitudes. No matter that there is more than a year to go before November 2020. It's always a perpetual campaign. Their winning a seat is more important, in the long term, than the long-term survival of their constituents.

It's even worse in Virginia, which will hold its own off-year statehouse elections this coming November. As the HuffPost reports, quoting the usual Democratic operative granted the usual anonymity to speak frankly because of the sensitive self-dealing involved:

Democrats have a good  chance of taking control of both the House of Delegates and the state Senate, where Republicans currently have narrow majorities, in November. Republicans now hold a three-seat majority in the state House and a two-seat advantage in the state Senate. But Northam remaining at the top of the ticket could jeopardize Democrats' shot at unified control of government.
It's an unimaginable scenario going into an election cycle," said an advisor to a Democratic state senator who requested anonymity to speak freely. "This is the closets opportunity Democrats have to take control of the legislature in a generation."

The anonymous operative said the party is terrified that, absent Northam disappearing, Republicans will use the yearbook photo in campaign ads in an effort to depress black turnout. The operative did not comment on what Democrats have to offer the black voters of Virginia, besides cosmetic diversity.

They lose control of the narrative when one of their own party selfishly lets out his true inner reactionary and thereby endangers the careers of his fellow politicians besides, come to think of it, deeply wounding the feelings and perhaps even endangering the very lives of the black and brown people they supposedly care so much about. It becomes especially fraught for corporate Democrats, whose main, and perhaps only, theme and narrative of this perpetual campaign is beating Donald Trump just for the sake of beating Donald Trump.  They'v been working overtime to  flaunt the "diversity" of their own slate of candidates as a virtue-signaling tool to show that they are not racists like Trump and his Republican Party.

As Politico reported in November about the party's planned reliance on race and racial issues to defeat Trump:

The recent, more explicit rhetoric on race among potential 2020 Democratic hopefuls -- who, to varying degrees, have addressed racial issues for years -- is at least partly strategic. Black voters are likely to be decisive in many 2020 primaries, especially in the South.

"It's fairly simple -- s/he who wins the black vote, wins the primary," one advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign said in a text message. It was no accident that Clinton's first major policy speech during her 2016 campaign was about race and the criminal justice system. "It's time to end the era of mass incarceration," she said at Columbia University in April 2015. Clinton frequently discussed implicit racial bias on the campaign trial, and used the term "systemic racism" in her Democratic National Convention speech accepting her nomination, the first major party nominee to do so. But she was an imperfect messenger for those policies, given that her husband signed the 1994 crime bill that contributed to the era she was condemning." 

It also didn't help that in her own first memoir, Clinton fondly reminisced about the prison slave labor she used as Arkansas first lady. Abiding by racist tradition, she wrote, quickly won out over her initial misgivings.

It also doesn't help the corporate party cause when designated presidential favorite Kamala Harris gets caught on video bragging to an audience of rich white donors about prosecuting the poor, mainly black, mothers of truant children and even imitating their dialect while doing so. "If you don't go to school, Kamala gonna put both you and me in jail," she laughingly imagined one distraught mom saying to her child. Since Harris had "a lot of political capital," she was going to spend it by summoning up her bold inner white supremacy-serving angel, much to the chagrin of her own staff. Because if there is one thing that endears neoliberal candidates to their donors, it's their willingness to go against their own base and their own party. It has nothing to do with making their constituents' lives better. In fact, it's the exact opposite. The more that they're willing to punish the poor, the better that the wealthy plutocrats like it.

So with Ralph Northam now entering the fray and making such a complete ass of himself by not employing the standard Clinton-Harris Democratic dog whistle, it makes it all that much harder for Democrats to wield their hollow anti-racist cudgels against Trump and the GOP without looking like complete hypocrites.

The corporate Democratic Party, like any political party, is all about power being an end in itself. It is the exact opposite of what Martin Luther King Jr. had to say about the use of "political capital" and power:

"When I talk about power and the need for power, I'm talking in terms of the need for power to bring about the political and economic change necessary to make the good life a reality. I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community."


So what is a postmodern hypocritical Democratic operative to do?

Change the subject, of course, and smear a popular progressive with the guilt-by-association racist brush.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times is in a bit of a tizzy because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke by phone over the weekend about forging a trans-Atlantic alliance with British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom the neoliberal class has long smeared as an anti-Semite. Leonhardt says that because the left-wing Corbyn "cozies up" - that is, shares occasional stages with - "known anti-Semites" -  that makes him the same thing as a racist GOP white nationalist. And it makes AOC "problematic," especially in a week when "the whole country is rightly denouncing Ralph Northam's bigotry."

This is a stretch, declaring her guilty by her association with a leftist politician himself declared guilty by associating with alleged bigots. It's kind of a third degree of guilt by association.

This is how slyly they use their racist cudgel, by accusing popular leftists as well as "deplorable" Trump voters of racism. They easily pounded Bernie Sanders with it because of his alleged discomfort with black people, because he's a white guy from a whitey white state. They had a hard time at first with AOC, given her own brown skin and their own shallow reliance on identity politics. Now it looks as though they finally think they've got a plan to bring her down. Guilt by association by association by association. 

The pounding of their anti-racist cudgels rings about as hollow as the rest of their platitudinous neoliberal rhetoric.

Smart Adult Cruelty

The news that hunger-striking imprisoned migrants in Texas are now being force-fed, in clear violation of international human rights statutes against torture, is being greeted with a collective yawn from the adults in the Bipartisan Caucus For Sadistic Sanity.

It's not about the physical torture, you see. That is something that everyday Americans are not allowed to see on their TVs. Force-feeding is a really disturbing thing to witness, according to Human Rights Watch:

Force-feeding – which involves pushing a feeding tube down a patient’s nose – can be very painful and is inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Medical ethics and human rights norms generally prohibit the force feeding of detainees who are competent and capable of rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food. A relative of two men being force-fed with nasal tubes by ICE told the AP the men are having persistent nose bleeds and vomiting several times a day.

Even Human Rights Watch is so squeamish that it initially refers to imprisoned migrants as "patients." 

 Meanwhile, the controversy that is truly roiling the media-political complex is the cruel semantics of the Trumpian wall-talk, and how they can overcome it. The obvious profitable solution to the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over Trump's demand for a wall is simply to use the word "smart" when describing how to punish, track, harass, terrorize, torture, cage and deport brown-skinned people fleeing for their lives from some of the same countries the US has destabilized over decades of regime change and economic plunder. What adult in the room doesn't love technology?

His threats of an emergency declaration to force the military to construct a physical barrier notwithstanding, even Donald Trump is now reportedly eager to jump on the Smart Xenophobe bandwagon in order to save face after his various concrete and steel wall proposals all crumbled into dust last week with the temporary reopening of the government. As The Hill reports:

Tech companies are increasingly bullish on building a "smart wall," which would incorporate new technologies to beef up security on the southern border.
Many firms see a potential windfall with both Democrats and Republicans floating the idea of tech improvements as an alternative to President Trump's call for a steel barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats have said they would back as much as $5.7 billion for a smart wall. Trump himself discussed the idea when announcing the deal to end the recent government shutdown.

Trump ruefully had to admit that walls and moats are medieval, whereas Reaper drones and cameras are modern and efficient and smart. This is especially true since the state of Israel is ready, willing and able to share its own long expertise in controlling the undesirable humans imprisoned in its open-air Palestinian gulag from breaching that border. One such company, Elbit Systems, is eager to line the entire Arizona-Mexico border not with Trump's dumb retrograde wall, but with a virtual barrier of smart modern towers decked out with radar and cameras.

Montana Senator Jon Tester wants to award a contract to a Montana company  for a long, snaking, smart underground wall of fiberoptic cable that would alert the border patrol every time somebody takes a step or even draws a trembling breath. This is not at all the same kind of corrupt bribery scheme as Trump conniving and colluding to build a luxury tower in Moscow. For one thing, it's smart legalized corruption.

The main catch to all this smartness and modernity, according to civil libertarians, is that US citizens will also unavoidably be caught up in the surveillance and the terror. No technology can differentiate upstanding American human citizens in border states from non-US humans, because nationality and race are not biological constructs. 

"Legal" residents of border states, therefore, might not like government drones constantly buzzing above their heads or watching facial recognition technology stations being installed in their backyards, even if it is for the profitable national security of unfettered multinational capitalists.

Smart experts insist it is only what people can actually see that can hurt and scare them and therefore endanger the security and profits of the multinational tech companies. Maybe once the experts can figure out how to make drones and surveillance towers as invisible as their torture chambers they'll have better luck winning over American hearts and minds.

The War Against Single Payer Intensifies

A recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that guaranteed single payer health coverage for every American is as popular than ever.

But much to its discredit, this respected foundation also used some pretty slimy "Harry and Louise"-style push-poll tactics in its survey in a seeming effort to tamp down the enthusiasm and give ammunition to opponents of Medicare For All.

 What if, the respondents were passive-aggressively asked, "they heard" that universal guaranteed insurance would lead to delays in diagnosis and treatment, and even to rationed care? Would they still want Medicare For All then?

 And what do you know: the enthusiasm for single payer suddenly dropped by a whopping 44 percentage points!

So, the inherent message is clear. People desirous of a nonprofit health care system enjoyed by every other civilized country in the world are not only befuddled, they are stubbornly set in their ways. It is not in the Kaiser pollsters' job description to inform their targets that alleged delays in treatment are simply right-wing talking points beneficial only to health care market privateers, and have little to no basis in fact.

The oft-repeated claims by Republicans of deadly, life-threatening waiting times in Canada, for example, are completely false. It's true that Canadians do have to wait longer than Americans for such elective surgeries as knee replacements and cataract removals. Even so, they have the option of paying out of pocket to a private provider if they so desire. Canadians in need of immediate care get immediate care. And on average, they live three years longer than Americans.

  The malign objective of the single payer naysayers in the Oligarchic States of America is to send the message, either directly or indirectly, that Medicare For All "might be" dangerous to your health. Better to stick with the reliable economy-busting, budget-crushing predatory arrangement that we already have. It sucks for sure, but at least it's better than a world full of known unknowns and unknown knowns. 

Anti-single payer pundits and politicians, meanwhile, are pouncing on Kaiser's manipulated poll results with barely contained glee. David Leonhardt of the New York Times even goes so far as to declare in his headline that Medicare For All is a "trap" for Democratic presidential contenders. They'd better be careful, or Trump might win.

It does not occur to Leonhardt to actually critique the negative push-polling inserted by Kaiser in its survey, using false information and scare tactics that are identical to those employed by such conservative, profit-driven think tanks and media outlets as the Heritage Foundation, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal. He simply repeats the propaganda, essentially warning candidates like Kamala Harris to be careful what they promise to fickle, stupid people who simply don't understand complicated stuff: 

Some 56 percent of respondents said they favored “a national plan called Medicare for All in which all Americans would get their insurance through a single government plan.” A large majority of Democrats backed the idea. Almost a quarter of Republicans did, too.
The poll’s details, however, were a lot of less positive about Medicare for All. In fact, they showed why single-payer health care may turn out to be one of the few problematic issues for Democrats heading into 2020 — if the party isn’t careful. Harris has highlighted the tensions this week, saying on Monday night that she supported the most aggressive version of Medicare for All before moderating her position, via aides, late yesterday.

It also does not seem to occur to Leonhardt that candidates who pander to voters on Medicare For All, only to cravenly walk back their support within hours via campaign flacks, as Kamala Harris did, are more apt to lose votes based upon their own shallowness and hypocrisy rather than on sincere, consistent advocacy for programs for the greater good.

Who knew that people finally getting peace of mind, no longer having to worry about going bankrupt or losing their home or dying prematurely because they can't afford treatment when they get sick or hurt, would be so "tense" and even worse, "problematic?"

To paraphrase Cindy Adams: Only in America, kiddo. Only in America.

Smart Plutocrats, Dumb Trumpocrats

Don't you hate it when the rich and powerful can't all just get along? 

The plutes have really been blowing it lately. Their standard operating procedure of pitting the hoi polloi against each other in a never-ending orgy of divide-and-conquer, while at the same time craftily plundering the same hoi polloi of every last dollar and drop of sweat-labor they possess, is showing signs of some serious wear and tear.

 Having been carefully trained to fear and respect - if not love - the plutocrats, and to strive, as a top-secret Citigroup manifesto once put it, to become "pluto-participants" in the enterprise, the hoi polloi are getting wise to the con. The propaganda center can no longer hold. Strikes and protests and riots are breaking out all over the place: in Los Angeles, in Mexico, in France, to name just three in the last week alone.

The plutocrats, in the process of losing their propaganda war if not their actual class war on anybody with no money, appear to be losing their minds at about the same rate that the hoi polloi are losing their patience.

Unable any longer to keep their bickering and their palace intrigues behind closed gilded doors, the ruling class is desperately trying to salvage dwindling hoi polloi compliance and good will by at least letting us gawk at their sordid end-of-empire show as it plays out in real time.

Entertain yourselves from the nosebleed seats as the royal battle between the stupid, crass plutocrats (Trumpocrats) and the smart, sensitive plutocrats plays out. Root for your favorite stars. Stay tuned for the coming attractions in Horse Race 2020 if you ever find yourself unaccountably losing enthusiasm for the thrilling main event.

The lead actors now playing the Stupids for our entertainment misery are President Donald Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur "Mr. Burns" Ross. They've far, far exceeded all expectations in their roles as gross cartoon villains in the first exciting installment of Shutdown USA. These two human malignancies had craftily advised the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors working without pay for the better part of a month to simply take out a loan - just in case those form letters the White House thoughtfully provided, begging for mercy from landlords, mortgage companies and other creditors, didn't do the trick.

Enter the lead actress, intrepid multimillionaire centrist Nancy Pelosi, to save the day for the Smart Plutocrat Team. In the latest episode's exciting climax, Madam Speaker boldly forces Trump to cave and to call a temporary truce, ending the shutdown. She is being widely praised by the fawning corporate media reviewers as a feminist bad-ass in heels. Not only does she deny Trump his Wall, but perhaps even more painful to him personally, she denies him his coveted prime time spot as star of the annual State of the Union gala.

  And she'll spend the next three weeks continuing to show the whole intimidated world what a primitive wimp he is by altruistically offering him billions of dollars for "a smart wall." This means that Democrats will push for more humane, high-tech ways to terrorize and punish migrants and refugees, while Pelosi further shows her chops by tamping down all those pesky rumblings of Medicare For All in her caucus. There are just no billions of extra dollars to spare for "smart" hoi polloi health, apparently. 

Because no way is Nancy Pelosi ever content to just clutch her pearls like the Democratic #Resistance Fighter of yore. She wears them like a studded collar, like the warrior queen and de facto first woman president that she truly is. Elevating her to such regal status allows the corporate media to ignore the fact that massive labor unrest and sick-ins at the nation's airports was a disruption that even the Trumpocrats couldn't ignore.

I know it's hard to surpass Pelosi's brilliant bravura performance, but it seems that there is another eager ruling class racketeer lurking in the wings. So getting second billing in this week's Smart Plutocrat lineup is multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is pondering his own primary run as a Democrat, based primarily upon his claim that he's a smarter CEO than Trump.

Skillfully exposing Trump as the poor negotiator and klutzy psychopath that he is, Bloomberg did him one better and showed that not only is he, Bloomberg, a smarter overlord, he is a plutocrat who can also do noblesse oblige whenever the rare need arises. Not content to merely employ the royal "we" to show that he is not amused, he also employs pop culture references and humor to show that he's down with the hoi polloi.

"The longer we have a pretend CEO who is recklessly running this country, the worse it’s going to be for our economy and for our security. This is really dangerous.... It’s like the government version of a bad horror movie, but instead of Freddy Krueger and the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ we’ve got Donald Trump and the ‘Nightmare at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'"

Trump wonders as he wanders. Bloomberg panders as he ponders. Therefore, we can forgot all about the nightmare of his three-term New York City mayoralty, highlighted by his edict that all food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as though they were criminals. And speaking of bad dreams, his "Stop and Frisk" crusade of city cops terrorizing virtually every single black and brown male existing within his domain lasted for years before a judge finally declared it to be inhumane and unconstitutional. Unlike the oafish Trump, Bloomberg is a smart, competent sadist capable of keeping his cruelty carefully hidden beneath platitudes. He's more like smarmy circumspect innkeeper Norman Bates than boastful slasher Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, you will be happy to know that despite all their unprecedented smartness, Bloomberg and Pelosi already face some more stiff competition. Because otherwise it wouldn't be a true democracy, would it? 

As Hillary Clinton just informed her PAC subscribers in a missive slugged "Let's not be distracted," she, Bill, Chelsea, and 500 of their closest public-private partners will burn untold tens of thousands of gallons of climate-destroying private jet fuel to convene this week in San Juan to discuss all the neoliberal ways that they can make Puerto Rico an even better and smarter de facto colony than it was before Hurricane Maria destroyed it, and Trump insulted its residents by throwing paper towels at them.

Unlike Trump, Hillary doesn't crassly throw stuff. (She also doesn't crassly announce her third presidential candidacy, preferring instead to send out sensitive feelers to gauge the reaction.) She does, as is her wont, always put her own grievances first, even placing herself above suffering Puerto Ricans in making her email pitch. Never mind island mudslides. The Clinton Foundation, she altruistically announces in the very first paragraph of her email, has been the victim of much mud-slinging from the dumb Trumpocrats:

When I ran for president, this top-rated global charity was dragged into a political mud fight. In the two years since, people with an axe to grind have continued to try to undermine its work by attacking them (sic) and making false accusations.

 So combine your outraged solidarity-pity for Hillary and your hatred of Donald Trump with concern for Puerto Ricans  and try, ironical as it might sound, to "resist the vitriol" and stop being so distracted by Trump's dumb oafish antics. Instead, give generously to the Clintons so that they, rather than US government agencies funded by raising taxes on the rich, can help the entire "greater Caribbean" to "build back better" via "practical solutions."

Although she offered few details on exactly what this practicality will entail, and no information at all about the confab's 500 attendees, Hillary Clinton does allow that one of her biggest concerns is the alleged "rising youth crime rate" in Puerto Rico. Her idea of bringing these youths to heel is "access" to mental health care and entrepreneurship training... making Puerto Rico great again and safe again, especially for tourists. 

She made no mention of raising the minimum wage in Puerto Rico, which Congress in its infinitely smart wisdom had reduced to $4.25 an hour for workers below age 24 the year before Maria hit. It was a common-sense austerity measure designed to placate the indebted commonwealth's bond holders, a very smart bunch of plutocrats indeed. Maybe some of them are even smart enough to be among the Clinton Foundation's group of 500 carbon-belching island rescuers.

Update 1/28: Just as I was finishing up this post last night, billionaire and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz officially announced on 60 Minutes that he is seriously thinking about an independent presidential candidacy, fomenting enough buzz in the media-political complex to preclude their cravings for his overpriced caffeine beverages. 

Schultz, while posing as a smart plutocratic centrist, actually betrays his inner dumb crass authoritarian Trump when he says that he wants "America to win."

This should be interesting if it lasts. If Schultz can buy his way into the corporate-sponsored debates as an independent candidate, then it will be harder for the Duopoly to deny other third, fourth and fifth parties the same privilege. I don't think the police would dare chain Schultz to a chair in a warehouse as they did to the Green Party's Jill Stein when she showed up to debate Obama and Romney in 2012.

Robert Mueller, Father of Our Country

The name of this country is the United States of Oz, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller III has been operating the gears behind his secret curtain for going on two years now. The fate of renegade President Donald Trump, as well as the fate of the whole nation, rests in Mueller's hands, and his hands alone. Or so we are told, day in and day out, by the political-media complex.

Absent a competent president with a popular mandate who possesses traditional authoritarian qualities and the respect accruing thereto, Mueller has stepped into the breach. Unlike a traditional elected leader, Mueller exercises unaccountable, undemocratic power. He is thus so paradoxically vulnerable, by dint of his own lack of a public persona and mandate, that a weak and corrupt Congress must also craft special legislation to protect Their Man Behind the Curtain.

Mueller's very invisibility has fomented the growth of his own Authoritarian Personality Cult, composed of some of those traditional, mythical presidential qualities so sorely lacking in Donald Trump's more public personality cult.

The Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève differentiated four kinds of power-wielding pure authority: that of father over children, that of master over slaves, that of judge of civic behavior, and that of leader of state and party. An ideal president or prime minister must possess all four of these qualities, or at least be able to present a reasonable fascimile of them: paternal disciplinarian and soother-in-chief, mature and selfless pragmatist, bully pulpit moralizer, and the setter of his own party's platform or agenda.

Kojeve could have been talking about Donald Trump when he wrote how the "leader of the band" rather than "leader of the state" type of primitive authority can supersede the more "enlightened" kinds in the rise of totalitarian regimes: 

A band of kids gathers to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band's leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts.

Every time that Trump bellows "build the wall" or "lock her up" at one of his rallies, the band of kids in the audience roars its approval, just as the crowd roars its approval every time he counters the elite discourse of more qualified corrupt politicians with his personal insults and disdain of facts. He won the election because he "got" the anger and disgust of the electorate, while the others did not.

So there's this uncomfortable vacuum. Trump is the opposite of loving father, the opposite or moral arbiter, the antithesis of Solomon of Biblical judicial fame. And although Mueller does partially fill the acceptable authoritarian vacuum as benevolent judge, jury and executioner, the natives are getting restless. Teachers are striking, democratic socialist upstarts are getting elected to Congress and too many people are demanding universal health care and taxes on the rich.

Since supplemental physical and verbal authority is sorely needed to augment the strong silent Mueller mystique and to oppressively placate the restive and frightened public, enter the forces of the national security state (the FBI and the CIA) as adjuncts if not full partners of the "opposition" Democratic Party.  Law enforcement personnel and spies have effectively taken over the cable propaganda networks and corporate print publications in order to become the public relations "face" of the anti-Trump resistance, as we all wait with baited breath for Robert Mueller's own final word as some sort of Second Coming of Christ.

That Mueller is, in fact, a totalitarian corporate leader in his own right was made painfully clear by the media's cowed reaction to his "rare" pronouncement last Friday (albeit through an Emerald City gate-keeper) that the BuzzFeed scoop claiming that his office possessed documentary evidence proving that Trump had instructed his former fixer to lie to Congress was not accurate.

The media reaction to Mueller's terse pronouncement was swift and it was chastened. If the Man Behind the Curtain refutes something, then his must be the final word. At most, the deferential media are presuming to beg our wonderful paternalistic wizard to please, Sir, explain to us exactly what was not accurate about the Bombshell. 

Even brown-nosing "veteran journalists" are confused by the paternalistic rebuke from on high behind the curtain, finding it hard to square with BuzzFeed's own insistence (aping the "high confidence" of the Security State in it own myriad unproven RussiaGate allegations) that it has "high confidence" in the accuracy of its own reporting.

CNN's Brian "Reliable Sources" Stelter jumped to the Wizard's defense, accusing BuzzFeed of acting "shockingly casual" toward Mueller when it first asked him to comment on the latest allegations.

Meanwhile, somewhat shockingly, the Columbia Journalism Review seems to diverge from the narrative as it warns reporters to start acting like journalists instead of Mueller personality cultists:

But commentators should be careful not to treat the special counsel’s office—whose inner workings are opaque—as the infallible, benevolent voice of God. In any case, the statement neither kills the central essence of the story (it does not take a position on whether Trump did, in fact, tell Cohen to lie), nor specifies exactly what Mueller thinks BuzzFeed got wrong.

Well, maybe not so shocking after all, because the CJR's criticism of Mueller is not so much pushback against the special prosecutor's power as it is reflective of the disappointment among the media operatives of the RussiaGate franchise that one more "blockbuster that changed everything" story turned out be a dud. Because maybe it's not really a dud at all, but only a delayed explosion. Where there's relentless propaganda, there's always hope. Faces must be saved.

Mueller is a de facto dictator because not only does he elicit fawning respect from the press, his presence also serves to frighten Trump and his band of kleptocrats from doing anything too criminally outrageous and discourages incipient criminals from accepting White House job offers to further their own interests. Most important, Mueller usurps Congress's constitutional mandate of oversight - with, of course, the full permission and complicity of Congress. The legislative branch, while planning its own piecemeal investigations of the Trump administration, readily admits that it clears the probes with Mueller first, not wishing to step on his toes or interfere with his own work.

Dead silence, meanwhile, emanates from Dad's Den. The Wizard tinkers on, operating his legal gears, protected from public gaze and scrutiny. Talk of impeachment ebbs, flows, recedes and rises again in regular little wavelets. The faux-Resistance media can barely contain themselves, gnashing their teeth over their increasingly debunked RussiaGate narratives, but ravenously ready to devour the next "plant" about Trump malfeasance from anonymous sources within the national police security state -- sources who, if not among Mueller's own top-secret team of investigators, are at least operating in tandem with them.

No matter that Trump damages the world and the people in it a little (really, rather a lot) more every day. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and one insidious form of totalitarianism is doing battle with another.

Why else would the Ruling Class continue using the right-wing former FBI director and Iraq War architect and the authoritarian Police Security State as their Resistance? Why would they continue accusing Trump of treason, yet unaccountably allow him to stay in office more than two years after Putin allegedly installed him in the Oval Office with cheesy Facebook ads? They will do whatever it takes to maintain their grip on their own record wealth, using the police state as their propagandists and news sources at least until the lesser evil corporate Democrats can take up the slack and further fill the authoritarian vacuum with their endless identity-intensive campaigning and debates and a record number of candidates. Who knows, perhaps one of them will defeat Trump in 2020. 

And if they don't, it won't affect the oligarchs one way or another. Trump has only ever been a symptom, the end-stage product of malevolent capitalism long disguised as representative democracy.

And whoever said irony is dead doesn't remember this bloodthirsty neoconservative 2003 exhortation from the Bush regime:

"We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

--- Robert S. Mueller III, quoting Ephesians 6:12-18, to make the case for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deaths, dismemberments and displacements of hundreds of thousands of people, both civilian and military.

Inspiration Blues

A commenter on this blog challenged me this morning to talk about something positive or learned for a change. 

I don't know about the "learned" part, but I think the New York Times comment I wrote last night on Paul Krugman's latest ode to the wonderful Democratic Party was pretty damned positive. 

Pushing his own glass half-full scenario in the midst of the government shutdown, he lavished great praise upon Gavin Newsom, the new and untested governor of California, and applauded all-blue New Jersey's strict enforcement of the Obamacare rule that everybody must buy private, for-profit health insurance, or face tax penalties. The result of this mass extortion is that the extortion is more broad-based, and premiums have come down.

 But even better, one of the bluest of all blue states (Washington) now has a public option supplement to the private insurance cartel, thus absolving the still-thriving cartel from using more of its record profits to treat the sickest of the sick, instead passing on such costs to the taxpaying public while cartel CEOs pocket the difference in stock buy-back schemes. 

And on the other liberal coast, New York City Mayor Bill di Blasio even wants to build more affordable housing in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the Universe and provide more access to medical care!

Therefore, there was no need for Krugman to even mention the Los Angeles teachers' strike, the housing crisis, and the continued and growing public demand for non-profit Medicare For All. Because Democrats sure know how to govern, unlike those nasty old Republicans.

My published response to Krugman's column: 

Why no shout-out to the striking L.A. teachers exerting such effective pressure on the new governor and other Democrats? Without the resurgent labor movement, it'd be business as usual, even in the bluest of blue locales. Forty children per classroom is a shame in such a rich state, home to many a Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaire and mogul.

 Bill di Blasio isn't making new proposals for better health care and low-income housing just out of the goodness of his heart. It's taken citizens with the courage to confront him at his gym workouts, cell phone cameras at the ready, over the shameful conditions in the city's public housing projects as well as the homeless crisis. Although he's made strides in the construction of more "affordable" housing, NYC's homeless numbers are still at near-record highs.

The homeless also just happen to have their own Coalition.

 If Dems are moving left and finally beginning to abandon austerity, it's because the public is forcing them to.

Regarding health care: individual states implementing public options is no substitute for a federally administered single payer system. The House majority thus far is only paying lip service to Medicare For All, with the chairwoman of the relevant subcommittee, Anna Eshoo, just announcing that she might not have time to hold hearings after all. She represents Silicon Valley, home of many a tech billionaire.

 So a Women's March group plans to storm Congress on Friday to demand Single Payer.

We have miles to go before we sleep.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the DNC has disassociated itself from the Women's March for more reasons than just the alleged anti-Semitism of one or two of its founders. Protesters are branching off from the original Democratic-centric/centrist intent of the enterprise, independently evolving far beyond simply "resisting" Trump and the Republicans. Good.)