Kids Over Capitalism

Since presidential contender Elizabeth Warren recently asserted that she is "a capitalist to my bones," it should come as no surprise that her plan for universal child care in the United States is loosely modeled on the market-based kludge known as Obamacare.

Unlike the government-run systems operating in other social democratic countries, Warren's plan is predicated upon direct government payments to for-profit providers who will "partner" with municipalities and states. What the system giveth, the system can always take away if said providers  in any given state don't meet a set of amorphous standards, or can't be found in the first place.

In other words, it's a conservative plan of the type moderate Republicans might have suggested if there were still any moderate Republicans around.

But never say never, because wherever there's a predatory profit motive, there's always a way. Flush with all that excess cash, Wall Street has been getting into the lucrative early child care game with a vengeance in recent years. And they're even flusher with cash this year, thanks to Trump's tax code overhaul. When neoliberals gush that we must "invest" in children as though they were cattle futures, they're not kidding. Bain Capital, for instance, already runs a billion dollar-plus chain of day care centers. With more federal money possibly on the horizon should Warren's plan pass in Congress, look for even more Goldman Sachs and Evercore and BlackRock Little Tots Schools popping up in distressed neighborhoods all over this land. The win-win upshot is that even a Mom slaving at a $10 an hour fast food or retail gig would see her child care woes disappear.

For those parents desirous of in-home care, private equity is transforming this kind of care into a virtual Airbnb opportunity. An outfit called Wondercare purports to train teachers and provides software to help them get "qualified" to care for children. They even help with the rentals of empty homes to turn them into nurseries. All for a hefty cut of the profits, of course, and a big return for investors.

The financial disbursement power under the Warren plan would be granted to the states, many of which have notoriously already turned down federal Medicaid expansion for the sole reason of cruel, right-wing, social Darwinist ideology. So what could possibly go wrong with a universal child care program in a red state like Texas? Cash-strapped locales also have a tendency to "divert" block grant-type funds to other programs.

Granted, Warren's proposal --  even the most well-off of the qualifying parents would be let off the hook for child care expenses above seven percent of their incomes, and poorer families would pay nothing at all -- is certainly better than the big fat nothing-burger of a system we currently have in place in the richest country on earth. My own son and daughter-in-law had their first child last year, and my granddaughter's in-home care by a part-time babysitter amounts to nearly a quarter of their joint annual income, second only to their monthly house payment. (They have adjusted their own full-time work and sleep schedules so that one parent can be home for half the total work week, and they are both chronically exhausted as a result.)  Preschool costs can be almost as much as college tuition in some areas. The waiting time for admission to the one decent and well-staffed and comparatively affordable preschool in my own family's area is not weeks or months -- but years.

So yes, I think that they and most other parents would gladly accept a 25 percent or more reduction in their child care costs, no matter how many bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through to get it. And that, of course, is the catch. You have to have the time and the skills to jump through these hoops, and a lot of people do not for any number of reasons... such as, they're too tired after working three part-time jobs.

And those "providers" whom Warren assumes are waiting in the wings in the thousands to jump through all those bureaucratic hoops and to subject themselves to even more government scrutiny to fill non-existent slots in their programs? Don't even ask. But should private equity billionaires lobby Congress to pass her plan, I am sure that all costs of doing business with government bureaucrats will conveniently be passed on to the consumer, as will the "wealth tax" imposed upon them to pay for the care.

But still, everybody will enjoy that all-important freedom of choice so important to capitalistic enterprise.  As Warren writes in a Medium blog-post announcing her program, with a handy "petition" at the bottom so that you can get on her campaign fund-raising email list:

 Nobody would be required to enroll in this new program. But right now, millions of families can’t take advantage of child care because of its cost — and millions more are draining their paychecks to cover high costs. As a result, under the new program, an independent economic analysis projects that 12 million kids will take advantage of these new high-quality options — nearly double the number that currently receive formal child care outside the home.

The entire cost of this proposal can be covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax. The Ultra-Millionaire Tax asks the wealthiest families in America — those with a net worth of more than $50 million — to pay a small annual tax on their wealth. Experts project that the Ultra-Millionaire Tax will generate $2.75 trillion in new government revenue over the next ten years. That’s about four times more than the entire cost of my Universal Child Care and Early Learning plan.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman fulsomely praises the Warren plan just because it sounds so realistically modest. And comparing apples to oranges, he further gushes that 

Among other things, unlike purist visions of replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” providing child care wouldn’t require imposing big new taxes on the middle class. The sums of money involved are small enough that new taxes on great wealth and high incomes, which are desirable on other grounds, could easily raise sufficient revenue.

What uninsured Purist needs guaranteed health care if she can substitute it with the relief of partially subsidized nursery care? Presumably, reading between the Krugman lines, not even the kids enrolled in the germ factories known as day care centers will ever get sick, and Mom won't ever go bankrupt paying the doctor bills, premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

Anyway, here's my published comment on the Krugman column:

Since there's a serious dearth of child care centers and long waiting lists in many areas of the country, we need a more integrated approach to universal care.

  The federal government must be involved in both building new centers and staffing them with qualified workers. Since child care positions are usually underpaid and largely filled by women, these new jobs must pay a living wage, plus benefits.

We can't rely on a private, for-profit marketplace owned and operated by (mostly male) private equity moguls pocketing a huge chunk of government subsidies for themselves while cutting corners on the kids, the moms, and the female workers. A worker-parent cooperative system might be fairer.

Meanwhile, I hope that Elizabeth Warren will introduce her legislation in the Senate as soon as possible. It's a long overdue step in the right direction.

 And speaking of family values, we should embrace the philosophy of the Swedish universal caregiver system, whose aim is "to make it possible for both men and women to combine parenthood and gainful employment, a new view of the male role, and a radical change in the organization of working life."

Parents need the free time to combine work, leisure and fun, hobbies, community and political activism, and child-rearing.

 Besides radically extending paid child care leave, we should also subsidize voluntary stay-at-home parents and give them Social Security credit parity for their retirement years.

Prioritize kids over capitalism.

Coup-Coup For Democracy

Mere hours after unleashing a series of angry tweets accusing the FBI of plotting a coup to overthrow him, Donald Trump managed to get in a leisurely round of golf at his Florida club before going the Feds one better and showing them who's still the boss.

 You see, the FBI planned their coup in the dark. Trump actually staged a  televised rally in broad daylight on President's Day, no less, to officially announce to the whole world that he and his team of neocons are staging a coup to overthrow the government of Venezuela.

The revelations of two coup attempts in one day must have set a new record in the annals of global political intrigues. And Trump's game of coup d'etat tit-for-tat also gives new meaning to the conventional wisdom that not only is he completely lacking a sense of irony, he is absolutely nuts, a/k/a coup-coup. And since his latest medical exam also now places him in the clinically obese category, for all we know he might even be Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs along with suffering that creepy, kooky obsession with border walls.

Of course, since the US is the world's sole remaining superpower and Venezuela is a lesser country having the gall to balk at US corporate plunder, one of these coups is not like the other. The attempted coup against Trump, revealed by former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, was "illegal," according to the president and his cronies.

The attempted coup against Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, on the other hand, is simply the latest in a long line of "humanitarian interventions" against a small country which persists in disrespecting the inalienable rights of multinational corporations to plunder it of its natural resources. Maduro still hasn't gotten the message that his country, already squeezed to the breaking point by multiple factors, including US economic sanctions and embargoes going back for years, can only recover its stability if he allows Trump to destabilize it with much creative destruction and outright theft, not to mention bloodshed.

That is why the Powers That Be are fully on board with Trump's meddling in Venezuela's affairs while still whining that alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is not only just like Pearl Harbor, but that Trump himself was meddling in the FBI investigation of the meddling.

NBC News explains the planning and the plotting by the federal police to get rid of Trump:

The conversations came in the chaotic days after James Comey was fired as FBI director, McCabe told CBS, as the FBI became increasingly convinced that the president was obstructing into the agency's investigation in Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Rosenstein went as far to offer to wear a wire to the White House to gather information, McCabe said. (Officials have previously told NBC News Rosenstein made the remark sarcastically.)

Trump, calling McCabe "deranged," added in a tweet that "there is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who just elected a president they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more."

One reason that the permanent ruling class of the United State doesn't likewise think that it's "deranged" to try to overthrow the democratically-elected leaders of other countries is because they have self-immunized themselves from international war crimes statutes. Should any US official ever be hauled before the international court of The Hague for an act of mass murder, meddling and destruction, Congress has passed a law that would allow such a defendant to be rescued, by any weaponized means necessary, as though he or she were a hostage and not an alleged coup-instigator, aggressor, mass murderer, or torturer.

Before Trump came along, US leaders were more circumspect while plotting their regime-changing coups, invasions and wars. This secrecy served the purpose of keeping the inherent racist and class war aspects of these depredations hidden from the folks in the Homeland, lest any unabashed racist and classist rhetoric from the ruling class racketeers encourage too much freelance violence and racist rhetoric from within the ranks of the ordinary folks. If US leaders had to talk publicly about their depredations, they did so in the guise of protecting the human rights of the foreign people whom they were about to maim, torture, rape, kill, expel, or if the victims were especially lucky, simply rob.

Trump doesn't do fake-humanitarianism well. When he speaks of Central Americans as rapists, infestations, criminals and invaders, the standard "responsibility to protect" propaganda as he applies it to Venezuelans just doesn't ring as true as it did when previous presidents dished out their rhetoric in more tasteful globs of unctuous rectitude.

When Trump delivers the propaganda, any pretense at high-mindedness about Venezuela falls absolutely flat. His choice of the far right white nationalist Proud Boys chairman to act as his human backdrop at Monday's Miami rally while pledging assistance to brown-skinned Venezuelans probably didn't win many hearts and minds. When the embattled Maduro later went on TV to opine that Trump was acting just like a Nazi, he didn't have to convince his audience.

This, of course, also puts the pretend-opposition Democratic Party in a quandary. They are just as enthused about regime changes and wars of aggression as the Republicans are. Democrats in South Florida, which has a sizable Venezuelan population, also want to get rid of Maduro. But as the New York Times puts it,

To Democrats, all that suggests that the president may be more interested in wooing Venezuelan-Americans and other Latino voters than in promoting bipartisanship on the Maduro issue.
“I’m concerned about the Trump administration politicizing this issue, using Venezuelans’ suffering to score political points here in Florida,” said Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, Democrat of Miami. “We shouldn’t be using this as a political weapon.”

So much for the plight of actual Venezuelans. They apparently have no say in the leadership or direction of their own country. They must be portrayed as incapable of acting in their own best interests. What really matters is which side of the US Uniparty can score the most political points off the backs of suffering, starved-out people. Meddling is fine, just so long as the United States does it, and as long as the purpose of the meddling can be sold to the US public in a palatable series of lies.

As Noam Chomsky has written, FDR's famous Four Freedoms: of speech and worship, and from fear and want, are traditionally vaunted and then wantonly disregarded by leaders as they undertake their myriad invasions, coups and wars. But missing from the propaganda ("we must rescue the oppressed starving victims of X's reign and stop him from abusing his own people!") that they spread for domestic consumption is the all-important Fifth Freedom, the unspoken precept which explains much of what "we" do in the world. From his book Turning the Tide, an examination of US interventions in Central America up to the Reagan years:

(It is) the freedom to rob and exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that such a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the one that counts.

No matter that Communism collapsed decades ago. US Leaders, most loudly and recently Trump, still use the bugaboo of "socialism" to justify their meddling in other countries. In the latest variation of the "domino" effect or rotten apple theory, Donald Trump vows to defeat socialism in Venezuela lest the "virus" spread beyond any physical wall that he succeeds in building.

 "The rot and infection," added Chomsky, "of course are code words for successful social and economic development that might constrain the Fifth Freedom." 

Trump fails Coup Propaganda 101, his ruling class critics fret, because he makes this alleged virus of socialism too much about politically protecting himself rather than glibly lying about protecting "the country" -- which is code for protecting and enriching corporations and oligarchs. By railing against socialism in so vociferous and ignorant and self-serving a manner, Trump actually makes it look pretty good to everyday Americans - by which I mean citizens of the United States. The people in the rest of the Americas are not fooled by anti-socialist imperialistic cant, and haven't been since Columbus first sailed the Ocean Blue. Trump cannot effectively frighten the folks of the US Homeland about the proper designated strongman and bogeyman to overthrow, because he can't disguise the fact that he himself, in the miscast role of our duly elected president, is the de facto thug and bogeyman.

Oafish Greedy Selfish Trump-Style Imperialism

"Responsibility to Protect" Style-Savvy Liberal Imperialism

The man whom the establishment corporate media righteously lambastes for never reading, and for never getting his facts straight even on the rare occasions when he doesn't deliberately set out to lie, ironically brayed in Miami that "socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in the total ignorance of history and human nature."

But Trump also inadvertently acknowledged the inconvenient truth, which is that in the United States, the only existing and thriving socialism is the kind which benefits the plutocrats at the expense of the rest of us - a system of socialized risk for privatized profit.

"Which is why socialism must always give rise to tyranny...Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class."

It was corporate socialism, or neoliberalism, which gave rise to the tyrannical Trump. And it may well be Trump himself who ironically gives rise to true democratic socialism of, by and for the people.

Now, wouldn't that be a refreshingly crazy coup?

New York Times Calls Yellow Vests An "Invasion"

The protesters of France certainly have a nerve. The New York Times editorial board grouses that not only do they lack the requisite leader, a set of specific demands, or a detailed political platform, the Yellow Vests "show no signs of ending their weekly invasions of the capital any time soon."

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines "invasion" as: 1) an act of invading, especially incursion of an army for conquest or plunder and 2) the incoming or spread of something usually hurtful.

The primary implication of the editorial is that working class citizens of France have no inherent right to be in their own capital city of Paris, other than to go shopping or visit tourist spots. The secondary implication is that the Yellow Vests are disease-ridden. 

The newspaper's use of the word "invasion" to describe people who are exercising their civil rights in their own country eerily echoes Donald Trump's own grosser xenophobic rhetoric about the "invasion" of migrants and refugees from what he calls "shithole countries"  -- rhetoric which the more intellectual Times regularly and rightly criticizes.

The problem, the newspaper ever so delicately insinuates, is that the working classes are not only disrespecting class borders, they have now evolved into disrespecting even the semi-porous national borders put in place by the ruling elites for the main original purpose of assisting the free flow of commerce and capital. The fact that transnational corporatism immiserates and alienates people by depressing their wages and outsourcing their jobs is a truth universally acknowledged, even by the elites. But what really frightens the ruling class at this stage of growing unrest is that people are reaching across their national borders --  not to exchange money and goods, but to share their anger and to find common cause with one another.

The divide-and-conquer tactic used by the elites to keep the anger properly directed at anybody but the Lords of Capital is beginning to fray.  

The Yellow Vest movement is not only going pan-European, it even threatens to go global. And the New York Times is on it, invoking the Trumpian border paranoia in that discreet, dog-whistling, classist fashion at which it is so marvelously adept:

The grievances may be specifically French, but the sense of alienation is very much a part of the grass-roots discontent behind the vote for Brexit in Britain and for President Trump in the United States, and the populist movements pulling Europe apart.That was underscored last week when contacts between the Yellow Vests and the populist government in Italy caused a serious diplomatic rift. It happened when Luigi Di Maio, leader of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement and a deputy prime minister, met with a group of Yellow Vests in France and declared that “a new Europe is being born” of them. An outraged Paris called its ambassador back for “consultations,” the first time that has happened since 1940, when Mussolini declared war.

The third innuendo in the Times editorial is that not only are the Yellow Vests contaminated invaders from both within and without their defined limits and borders, they are also probably fascists. Why else bring up Mussolini and the Five Star movement?

This smear-by-association tactic is also evident in the piece by the op-ed section's David Leonhardt last week, in which he ever so politely slimes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her unpatriotic audacity in engaging in trans-Atlantic phone chat with British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn. She made a shocking effort to find common cause around issues that benefit regular people rather than finding new ways to reward oligarchs and multinational corporations. But the Times can't come right out and act like a snob. Therefore, if they can relentlessly attack Corbyn's left-wing populism by linking it with anti-Semitism,  then it illogically follows that AOC's own lefty-style populism is also fair game for their virtual scolding finger.

Only France's suave centrist banker president, Emmanuel Macron, can save the ruling elites from the unwashed invaders, concludes the Times editorial board. Macron is now bravely and tirelessly going around the country in shirtsleeves, no less, to talk people to death as a sign of his own noble sincerity.

The 41-year-old president is right to stick to his reforms and his vision of European unity, but if they are to survive, he must convince his own heartland that he really feels its pain.

I think what the editorial board means is that if he can only evoke his inner Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, perhaps he can just as glibly and ably convince some of "his" heartland people of his empathy. It's his unenviable task to breathe some new life into the punitive global Neoliberal Project that's been running roughshod over people for the past 40 years and which spurred global wealth inequality to unheard-of levels. In the US alone, the richest 400 billionaires now own as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent, or 150 million Americans, combined.

Meanwhile, the workers of Belgium have gone out on a national strike, shutting down airports, roads, factories and schools right in the financial elite heartland of the European Union.

Workers in Matamoros, Mexico, recipient of a plethora of factories in the 1990s,  thanks to the NAFTA-engendered exodus of good-paying factory jobs from the US, struck for higher wages this past week, and won, after the new liberal president's "pragmatic" minimum wage bait-and-switch failed. The workers demanded that everybody get a raise, not just a select token few. What's more, they disrespected the precious southern border by sending messages of labor solidarity to their protesting counterparts at GM's soon-to-close auto plants in Michigan.

And joining the series of recent nationwide teachers strikes in the United States, Denver educators walked out for a third straight day this week. As in the recent Los Angeles strike, teachers are not just demanding a living wage, but an end to school privatization and corporate control of education, and the tying of bonus pay to corporation-enriching pupil test scores.

There's a reason that the Times and the ruling elites which it represents are subtly and not so subtly denigrating regular people and their social movements. It's because they're scared to death of all this emerging human solidarity that they've actually been reduced to calling the rest of us "invaders."

They're not that far away from Trump, who is the symptom of the real disease of crack-addicted capitalism.

Breaking Up With #Russiagate Is Hard To Do

Caught up in a thorny Russophobic propaganda trap of their own making, Democratic presidential contenders are feebly trying extricate themselves from it without getting too badly scratched in the process.

Ignoring, if not outright disowning, designated national hero heartthrob Robert Mueller is especially hard to do, given that most of the corporate news "resistance" to Trump in the last two years has revolved around Trump's alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin and the largely ineffectual meddling by a handful of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. One "blockbuster" scoop after another has fallen apart, with the latest one - that Special Counsel Mueller has documents proving that Trump ordered his former fixer to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate scheme -- having been directly debunked by Mueller himself.

The #Russiagate propaganda crusade, you might remember, picked up steam in the days immediately following Hillary Clinton's embarrassing loss to Donald Trump. Her operatives had to come up with another scapegoat, besides the FBI, to divert attention from their own terrible campaign skills and lack of a coherent message. This emergency planning and plotting and placement of the propaganda by the Clintonites is well-documented in the book Shattered.

But with public polling revealing that the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling and collusion is way down on the list of the electorate's concerns, Democratic Party consultants are suddenly warning candidates away from using #Russiagate as a campaign issue.

Forget about an increasingly unhinged Rachel Maddow warning her MSNBC fans that we're all going to freeze to death in the Polar Vortex if "the Russians," and maybe even China, take it into their heads to mess with the US power grid. (see hilarious Jimmy Dore video below) 

 After two years of relentlessly propagating their dangerous and nonstop McCarthyite hysteria, it now appears that Mueller has been a lousy boyfriend, if not a stalker, all along. "2020 Dems See Danger In the Mueller Probe," according to a Politico piece published today.

Although skillfully flirting with the manufactured "seething outrage" of the politicized Russiagate franchise might help propel one lucky candidate to the Democratic nomination altar, the contenders must be very careful to not be seen as "politicizing" it, or enjoying it too lustfully.

Instead, using one of the favorite neoliberal buzzwords that justifies everything from austerity for the poor to endless wars of aggression, they have to be "smart" about it:

"Smart campaigns will war game this very quietly," said Ben LaBolt, a former spokesman from the Obama White House and 2012 reelection campaign. "They'll have smart plans on the shelf. But it's not something they'll talk about. It's not something that they'll broadcast."

Translation: campaigns will have to carefully and anonymously leak Russiagate propaganda dirt-slime to churnalists like Maddow without the risk of getting personally scratched in the process. Because that would really smart.

Not only would it hurt, but the cure for Trumpism actually turns out to be even worse than the disease:

Democrats working for 2020 candidates describe Mueller's work as something akin to a virus that will keep forcing their campaigns to take precautions.

I wonder if they'll come up with a vaccine in time to avoid getting infected by their own dirt-slime. I wonder how Mueller will react to being called a virus by the same fan club that's had such a huge crush on him for more than two years now. Maybe the Democratic operatives can invent a special condom to protect themselves from a Mueller STD or an unplanned Mueller pregnancy. Or, as one contender, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota bluntly puts it, they may even have to divorce themselves entirely from Mueller's probe.

It's the elephant in the room," said the party strategist working with a White House hopeful, fretting about the uncertainties tied to Mueller, from the rumors about possible new indictments to the advice from inside their own campaigns to just stay quiet about the topic.

What the anonymous strategists don't say and what the Politico article doesn't reveal is that #Russiagate might as well be called #Nothinggate. 

The so-called epidemic of "fake news" on social media which magically propelled Donald Trump to victory is itself fake news, according to Brendan Nyhan, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. A study conducted by his team of researchers reveals that blaming fake news for Trump's win has provided nothing more than a "psychological refuge" for the millions of Clinton voters disappointed with the outcome.

Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet.

His research, which relied upon the voluntary cooperation of people who allowed their Internet search histories to be examined,  reveals that only 27 percent of Americans visited a fake news site in the final weeks before the 2016 election. These sites were designated "fake" because they made wild and misleading claims about either Trump or Clinton. The vast majority of people who visited these sites did so because they already had opinions which gelled with those espoused by the sites. Even then, Nyhan writes, these fake sites only made up eight percent of the subjects' total news diet.

And despite all the hysteria to the contrary, Nyhan and his team found that visits to fake news outlets declined dramatically in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

The alleged scourge of fake news is merely the excuse being used by the public-private surveillance state to censor independent journalism and to suppress independent thought. It's easier for the Powers That Be and their postmodern McCarthyite media hacks to blame an outside bogeyman like Russia for "sowing dissent" among the increasingly precarious masses of people than it is for them to admit that their own wrongdoing is causing America to collapse. Their fear-mongering helps them avoid supporting policies like universal health care and a living wage or guaranteed income for every citizen.

Nyhan concludes:

 Finally, there remains no evidence that fake news changed the result of the 2016 election. Any such claim must take into account not just the reach of fake news but also the proportion of those exposed to it whose behavior could be changed. As noted above, approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets — a group that was already especially likely to vote and to support Donald Trump. Accordingly, my colleagues and I find no association between pro-Trump fake news exposure and differential shifts in candidate support or voter turnout.

But as Rachel Maddow might say, "what if" Nyhan and his team are really Russian stooges?

I have a feeling that despite the squeamish Democratic candidates' avowed trial separation from the Mueller probe, #Russiagate will die over her dead body, her top ratings, and her $7 million annual salary. She'll war-game it to death, if the ongoing climate catastrophe doesn't do the trick first.  

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.