Initial Thoughts On the Julian Assange Arrest

The right-wing nature of the corporate Democrats was on full display today as many liberals are openly celebrating the brazen arrest in the wee hours, USA time, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange within his legal sanctuary of the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Investors in the #Russiagate propaganda franchise may have been embarrassed and their narrative debunked, but the damage it has done survives. Here's the top-rated reader comment from the New York Times article on Assange's arrest, on one charge of criminal conspiracy to hack a computer:

A Russian propaganda tool, that's all he is, and Wikileaks as well. Assange has severely harmed the United States and other western democracies at the bidding of Russia. Read Wikileaks if you don't believe me, try to find anything other than information harmful to the west. Wikileaks may have started as a legitimate sunlight tool, but was early on compromised and subverted to Russian interests.

This person and the nearly 800 liberal readers who approved this comment apparently believe that we should not be aware of the false pretenses under which the US invaded Iraq, and that we should have remained blissfully and serenely unaware of the film footage which showed American helicopter troops shooting journalists and civilians to death, just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

I don't know what frightens me more: the Trump administration, or the fake #Resistance to it.

Here's my own published Times comment:

The press should not be breathing its sigh of relief that the Assange indictment is limited to an accusation of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, rather than charges of publishing stolen material. It seems that journalists covering this story and printing the leaked or stolen docs were worried that they'd be called as witnesses in this case and might even be deemed culpable themselves by our authoritarian, right-wing federal justice department.

But what is to prevent the lawless Trump administration from prosecuting the New York Times or any other media outlet with a similar "hacking" conspiracy in the future, based on a similarly evidence-free accusation that said outlet was not only the publisher of stolen documents but the actual thief of same? We're in the digital age now.

If you're celebrating Assange's arrest today on the grounds of some kind of vindication of the victimized Clinton campaign, you're siding with the authoritarian Trump regime and tacitly agreeing that the First Amendment isn't worth the parchment it's written on.

This has nothing to do with Julian Assange's personality or his motives. This has to do with the death of what is still left of both domestic and global democracy.

 Be careful what you cheer for. Your reliable sources of information are not as safe from the dangerous Trump regime as you might think they are.

The Times had approvingly noted that Assange was not charged, as many had feared, under the draconian Espionage Act, which could drag everybody who cooperatively published WikiLeaks documents down with Assange, but only with "egging on" Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence private, to download them.  If the media think they;re off the hook, they should have another think coming. 

There are some silver linings to Assange's arrest. First, the US and global corporate media will be forced to admit where their true allegiances lie. Will they start raising a stink about Chelsea Manning's cruel imprisonment for refusing to implicate Assange? Will they cover the story if Assange's rights to habeas corpus and a speedy trial are infringed upon, or worse, if he is "extraordinarily renditioned" to a CIA black site prison? Assange at least has the benefit of being a high profile figure, unlike hundreds or even thousands of previous nameless and faceless "enemy combatants."

 Second, Assange will presumably finally receive the medical and dental care that he needs. His life was definitely being shortened the longer that he stayed holed up in his virtual embassy prison.

 Third, any trial will require evidence. Although the Trump campaign itself has carefully been exempt from the indictment, which stems from alleged 2010 activities during the Obama administration, propagandists might actually have to admit that there is yet to be any concrete evidence that the DNC and Clinton campaign computers were "hacked" - either by Russia or by anybody else. The documents could simply have been downloaded and then leaked. The Clintonites, remember, refused to grant the FBI access to their servers, instead using a private security company to make their claims of Russian culpability.

Fourth, it forces public attention on legalized bribery as practiced by the US government and the International Monetary Fund which it controls to enforce its privatization and austerity regimens on poor countries. The current far-right corrupt government of Ecuador sold out Assange to the United States and the United Kingdom just weeks after receipt of a hefty IMF loan.

Assange could very well end up a free man. Extradition to the United States is not even a done deal, with some British media outlets like The Guardian already editorializing against it. Justice has been known to prevail at times, especially when the whole world is watching, and especially when much of the world is already adamantly opposed to Donald Trump and all he stands for.

This isn't over. 

Profiles In Ruling Class Chutzpah

The media-political complex is all abuzz that multimillionaire heiress and Boeing director Caroline Kennedy has named multimillionaire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the latest winner of the Camelot Dynasty's Profiles in Courage award. 

It's A Club & You Ain't In It

Pelosi is specifically being honored for ramming the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 and tacitly being honored for boldly going against the wishes of 70 percent of the US population by actively thwarting a true universal, single payer health care bill to replace it.

Multimillionaire former President Barack Obama, 2017's Kennedy prize winner, traveled all the way to Germany over the weekend in order to scold what he called American health care "purists" who have the crazy nerve to challenge the status quo. He called the current battle between Congressional centrists, like Pelosi, and progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal a "circular firing squad."

Winners Take All

This is a deliberate mischaracterization on Obama's part, because the centrists are the ones with the giant guns and the big corporate money, and the progressives are the underdogs with the $27 individual donations and the verbal slingshots. These two intraparty factions are as unequal as society itself. Obama refused to admit that the Circular Firing Squad within the Democratic Party is, in fact, a microcosm of the eternal Class War of the rich against the poor and working class. He instead framed the health insurance debate as a bunch of reckless extremists who unfairly attack the good, the rich, the wise, and the powerful.

Both of our establishment political parties and the transnational oligarchs who own and control them are scared to death of the social democracy and working class revolts now on the ascendant, global movements which threaten to undo 50 years of punitive austerity for the masses and record riches for themselves.

Obama made his latest antisocial remarks in Germany during a fund-raising "town hall" to benefit his own philanthrocapitalist foundation, so as not to be seen as directly interfering with party politics within the confines of the contiguous United States. He had previously met behind closed doors with Congressional freshmen to warn them against Medicare for All and to confront them with the usual "how you gonna pay for it!" bullying tactics. With a reported net worth now in the $100 million range only two years after leaving office, he made it abundantly clear that he and other wealthy people do not want to be taxed one more penny for the greater public good.

Of course, he put it a bit more delicately than that at his Berlin town hall:

“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States — maybe it’s true here as well — is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’” Obama said. “And then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.”
The former president said he believes this approach “weakens” movements, and that those that would like to see a progressive agenda “have to recognize that the way we’ve structured democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you.”

Notice how he cagily redefines "circular firing squad" as a one-sided attack by progressives against the neoliberal centrists, and how it is not the rich and the privileged side straying from our "structured democracy," but the poor and the indebted. The only weakening he fears is that of the corporate Democratic Party itself, which like any political party, exists mainly to win and adhere to power. In Obama's world, it is not Nancy Pelosi who's the shooter and the bully: it's the progressives representing the interests of the struggling majority.

Only an entitled plutocrat could call the widespread demand by the US citizenry for basic health care an issue of "ideological purity" rather than as a response to a capitalism-spawned public health crisis and threat to our very survival. In Obama's world, it is more important for the Have-Nots to respect the Haves, who very reasonably expect that tens of millions of people will have to get sick and die prematurely as a good-faith sign of their own co-equal reasonableness.

Obama ended his speech by advocating for patience and incremental change: “We have to be careful in balancing big dreams and bold ideas with also recognizing that typically change happens in steps. And if you want to skip steps, you can. Historically what’s ended up happening is sometimes if you skip too many steps you end up having bad outcomes.”

Obama gave no examples to back up his claim. Again - the only bad outcomes he has to fear are those which might require him and his ruling class cohort to cede power to the lower classes and pay higher taxes. He certainly couldn't point to any bad outcomes when Medicare passed in the 1960s, and millions of older people were suddenly yanked off their employers' insurance plans and forced into the new single payer system for retirees. He couldn't say that it was really stupid, in retrospect, for people to have become eligible as soon as they reached the age of 65 and not have to wait until 80, when the coverage could have been spread downward in pragmatic baby steps instead of skipping all those golden waiting years.

Obama dishonestly and effectively likens guaranteed universal health coverage to corporations like Boeing, which cuts corners and skips steps only to have have its airplanes crash, killing everybody on board. But he can't talk about Boeing, because for one thing, his benefactress Caroline Kennedy is now in charge of its oversight and auditing board, and the United States was the very last country in the world to, after much insane resistance, finally ground the faulty airplanes while shifting blame for the crashes to the pilots. 

Perhaps the latest Profiles in Courage winner, Nancy Pelosi, will now even have the courage not to haul Boeing executives before Congress to face any real consequences.

Even if they do get hauled before Congress, it will be for the purpose of individual congressional showboating and tongue-lashings and slaps on the wrist. For in the just the last year alone, Boeing spent more than $130 million lobbying, wining, dining, schmoozing and arm-twisting these same members of Congress. Its board, besides Caroline Kennedy, is a veritable who's who of the oligarchy, mainly tycoons from the extracting industries of Big Oil, Big Finance and Private Equity.

The trouble is that Barack Obama, designated celebrity ambassador of global neoliberalism, simply does not lie or dissemble well. Neither does Nancy Pelosi. Just before Caroline Kennedy tapped Pelosi as the latest plutocratic Profile in Chutzpah, Madam Speaker again lied through her teeth in an interview about single payer health insurance and why tens of millions of poor people will simply have to grit their failing or missing teeth and suffer pragmatically in service to their greedy overlords.

As Matt Breunig reports, the big lie that neoliberal centrists keep tellng is that "people" love their employment-based private insurance plans. It's a lie, because private predatory insurance "is a complete nightmare" for those trapped within the market-based, for-profit system.

Among those (in Michigan) who had employer-sponsored insurance in 2014, only 72 percent were continuously enrolled in that insurance for the next twelve months. This means that 28 percent of people on an employer plan were not on that same plan one year later. You like your employer health plan? You better cross your fingers because one in four people on employer plans will come off their plan in the next twelve months.
The situation is even worse for other kinds of insurance. One thing opponents of Medicare for All frequently say is that poor people in the US are already covered by free insurance in the form of Medicaid and that Medicare for All therefore offers them relatively little net benefit while potentially raising their taxes some. But what this argument misses, among other things, is that people on Medicaid churn off it frequently, with many churning into un-insurance.

And that churning is a feature and not a bug, because what is capitalism but constant, cutthroat competition? What are citizens but consumers of whatever the ruling class racketeers deign to dish out to us in the form of spectacle politics and cheap electronic gadgets to merge with our bodies as virtual biological appendages and tracking devices? 

Let's face it. The modern-day robber barons view the population as raw material and commodities which exist not for our own well-being and happiness, but for their voracious, relentless, inhumane profit.

More people than ever, especially younger people, are on to their con. The Profiles in Chutzpah are afraid.

And the best they can do is give each other glitzy prizes in televised galas which they sometimes allow us to gawk at in supposed admiration. 

Health Care Head Fakes

As I guessed that it would a week ago, President Trump's threat to kill Obamacare via some reactionary judges went nowhere fast. It was a diversionary tactic designed to make us forget about the still-secret Mueller report, of which he no doubt has gotten an exclusive sneak peak. Though exonerating Trump of plotting an electoral conspiracy with Russia, it is reportedly none too flattering to him.

Trump's bluster was bound to be short-lived, because the Republican senate majority doesn't want to risk trashing the Affordable Care Act so close to the 2020 election. In their heart of hearts, they love this plan, massive giveaway to the private insurance industry that it is. Moreover, Trump's own in-laws have their own huge stake in the grift, with the crown jewel of the Kushner brothers' financial empire being a multi-billion dollar online insurance company which depends on the ACA to survive.

Of course, the biggest beneficiary of Trump's short-lived health care head fake was the Democratic Party, which pounced on his threat as a means to raise campaign money while defending Obamacare in lieu of introducing Medicare For All legislation in the lower House. As a matter of fact, Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health care henchman, Wendell Primus had personally reassured insurance industry executives right after the November midterms that their capitalistic system would be living long and prospering under Pelosi's watch.

The secret meeting, originally reported by The Intercept in February, got renewed attention this week with some new reporting in Politico. Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Pramila Jayapal, chief author one of the single payer bills (HR 1384) confronted Primus directly over his undemocratic subterfuge.

This confrontation came only one day after Trump abruptly reversed course on his Obamacare offensive. His latest head fake has left Pelosi and her minions suddenly deprived of the fear-based rationale for keeping the neoliberal "there is no alternative" ACA alive. They find themselves forced to feebly deny the reports that they are actively trying to kill the universal care legislation supported by at least 70% of the electorate, including Republican voters. However, neither she nor Primus apologized for meeting secretly with insurance industry lobbyists in the first place.

Right before Trump inconveniently nixed his threat and left the Democratic leadership scrambling, the New York Times' Paul Krugman penned an exquisitely timed column about the latest nasty Republican plan to yank health care away from tens of millions of people. Being a victim of Trump's chronic head fakes is a terrible thing. This is despite the fact that Krugman dutifully inserts the latest tally of Trump's lies right at the beginning of his piece. As of Monday, at about the same time Trump was changing his mind via Twitter, he had lied a grand total of 4,682 times! He also happened to conduct his head fake reversal on April Fools Day.

Krugman writes:

Republicans just keep telling the same lies, over and over. Again and again they have promised to maintain coverage and protect pre-existing conditions — then offered plans that would cause tens of millions to lose health insurance, with the worst impact on those already suffering from health problems.....
ut Republicans cannot admit that the only way to protect pre-existing conditions is to emulate Democratic policies. The party of Eisenhower, or even the party of Nixon, might have been able to do such a thing, but the party of Fox News cannot.
Nor, however, do Republicans dare admit that they have no interest in providing protection that a vast majority of voters demands. So they just keep lying.

In other words, Krugman hews steadfastly to the corporate Democrat plan, sold to a scared public during the latest Trump Threat Week,  to merely protect coverage for pre-existing conditions as well as increasing federal subsidies for private insurers --  including, but by no means limited to, the very same Kushner family that liberal corporatists only pretend to hate.

My published response to Krugman:

How often do Republicans lie? How much do they despise everyone except rich people, preferably male and white? Let us tally up the totals and feel alternately angry and smug. Because hey, at least the Dems will fight for our inalienable right to pay hefty premiums to insurance companies and force them to cover the pre-existing conditions of some of us! After all, they're protecting a GOP plan, which leaves the GOP nowhere else to go but off the Social Darwinist cliff.

If we keep shooting stinking GOP fish in a barrel, maybe we can take the uninsured and underinsureds' minds off the fact that the US is the only civilized country lacking universal health coverage, and that the life expectancy of US citizens has dropped for a third straight year.

Anything to avoid informing people that contrary to centrist propaganda, any extra taxes they'd have to pay for Medicare For All would be far, far less than the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out of pocket medical expenses they now pay to our cutthroat market-based system.

 And that includes the cost of an ever-increasing number of premature burials.

Put another way, although 23 million people would lose coverage if the ACA is killed, another 29 million desperate people currently lack any coverage at all. But somehow, these have-nots aren't mentioned when pundits warn us not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Instead, we're told to feel guilty about the great national tragedy of jobless insurance adjusters.

*****

Here's more excellent input from Dr. Adam Gaffney of Physicians for a National Health Plan:

Manos: The Hands of Joe Biden's Fate

Finally a woman* had the guts to go public with her disgust about being creepily kissed, gripped, nuzzled or otherwise man-handled by scary presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Photos of Creepy Uncle Joe, long lurking on the Internet for viewing by anyone with a hankering for cheesy horror, have suddenly been rediscovered by The Establishment Media to get the benefit of their careful, nuanced analysis. Is Joe just a loving harmless grandpa who is so old-school or clueless that he never learned about boundaries? Or is he really your typical sexist pig, hiding his malevolence beneath a folksy persona, in the vein of Poppy Bush and his own gross "David Cop-a-Feel" habit?

Biden is a combination of sociopathies. He is the typical powerful ruler who plots and passes neoliberal legislation to punish and harm people. Then he further adds to the horror by touching the bodies of women in order to convey his power to them. Manipulative ministrations of this type make many women feel that if they hadn't been sending out those invisible signals of neediness and vulnerability, they would never have attracted the magical male touch in the first place. It's all their fault if they take Biden-style handsiness the wrong way. Failure to accept it in the loving aggressive spirit with which it was intended will only prove their needy ingratitude and chronic hangups. 

As Lucy Flores, the former Nevada legislator who wrote the New York magazine story about her own experience with Biden in 2014. says, her reaction was all about the power that Biden wielded at the time. As to the defense of Biden written by Stephanie Carter, the wife of Obama's former defense secretary, Flores noted - correctly, I think - that this was a completely different scenario. The Carters and the Bidens are long-time friends, and Flores had only met the creepy veepy a couple of times.

It's about power, and even more, it's about class. Flores is not a member of the ruling class, and the Carters and the Bidens are at its very pinnacle. The class aspect of this new Biden media "wokeness" comes through loud and clear in Stephanie Carter's Medium piece.

Her main complaint about again being the center of attention in "That Picture" is that it has spoiled the joy of starting her very own private equity company. (She is a former Deutsche Bank official and partner at ABS Capital, positions that were briefly thought to be potential conflicts of interest given that her husband was in charge of the Pentagon. but which soon were glossed over in the spirit of class solidarity.) Carter writes:

Last night, I received a text from a friend letting me know that picture was once again all over Twitter in connection to Lucy Flores’ personal account of a 2014 encounter with Joe Biden. Let me state upfront that I don’t know her, but I absolutely support her right to speak her truth and she should be, like all women, believed. But her story is not mine. The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful. So, as the sole owner of my story, it is high time that I reclaim it — from strangers, Twitter, the pundits and the late-night hosts.

Stephanie Carter wants her friends and colleagues to know that she doesn't know Lucy Flores. Why would she know her? But she condescends to allow Flores to speak "her truth" -- rather than, say, "the truth."

Carter goes on to complain that Joe Biden was simply comforting her because she had just slipped on the ice while visiting Arlington National Cemetery with a contingent of the Pentagon officials who personally had sent a fair portion the buried soldiers to war and were there to honor their "sacrifice." She added that Biden sensed her discomfort at being rudely asked by annoying members of the press about her well-being. They apparently went above their station in doing so. It got so bad that one female reporter from the low-class tabloid New York Post even had the gall to later confront her in her own apartment building to ask about That Picture of Joe nuzzling her and squeezing her shoulders.

Yuck. First, they rudely asked if she was O.K. after her slip and fall, then they asked her about That Picture, and now five years later it's all coming back to haunt her. They're asking her about That Picture all over again. The first round of asks completely ruined the "crowning achievement of my husband's career" and the second round of asks are ruining the high of her own crowning career achievement of "entrepreneurial" high finance.

It is absolutely tragic.

Meanwhile, members of the Biden class collective are snarkily criticizing Flores, who is now out of politics, for daring to sell stuff on the Internet. They are also casting subtle doubt on her story. You see, she used to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. Smarmy CNN personality Jake Tapper snidely wondered whether "politics" is at the heart of her motivation for telling her story.

“I want him to change his behavior I want him to acknowledge that it was wrong,” she said, “And I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no political accountability structure within our political space, either for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior, or more serious allegations of sexual assault.”

“We are not protected in politics,” she said. “And frankly, on a much larger scale, we also need to have a conversation about powerful men feeling that they have the right to invade a woman’s space whenever they like. This really is about women feeling like we have agency. If we don’t want you to touch us, then don’t touch us.”

Biden himself has been incommunicado, save for a few written statements pleading that it has never been his intention to intimidate women while nobly acknowledging that his female critics could have a different perspective. The actual attacks on Biden's critics as the only way to defend him are being done by his paid spokespeople and Democratic Party colleagues. The rich and the powerful always have paid spokespeople and colleagues to do their dirty work for them.

Biden should absolutely run for president if he still has the nerve to throw his hat in the ring for one of his many underlings to pick up and dust off for him. And he should absolutely be confronted over his sordid history of incarcerating black people via the infamous Crime Bill which he personally wrote, his treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation debacle, his support of the Iraq War, his championship of the Glass-Steagall repeal that set the stage for the 2008 financial collapse, his poor record on women's reproductive rights, his bankruptcy reform legislation that condemned mainly women to lifetimes of penury and debt to the usurious credit card companies that helped fund Biden's career.... the list goes on and on.

This campaign season is already so crazy that we should probably welcome Biden's hammy hands and cheese to give the class war a little levity for a change. Just when think you can't take any more of Perpetual Campaign Cinema, Joe's hands have been added to the script, and people are suddenly finding they just can't get enough of possibly the worst movie ever made. It's so bad, it's good. 

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't think that Biden's hands should be disqualified from running, as long as they remain firmly attached to his straight arms. Anything to keep the poor and the uninsured from remembering that Medicare For All will never, ever come to be under her interminable binge-watch.

And as Biden's gatekeeper, Bill "Torgo" Russo, reminds us, the horrific images of Biden's hands come from a Cottage of Lies guarded by right-wing trolls located deep within the Forest of the Dark Internet. There is nothing cheesier than those redundant manipulated hands of fate. The movie trailer gets it right: there is no way out.

* Update, 4/3: A total of four women have now come forward to complain about Biden. One of them is a sexual assault survivor who says that when then-V.P. Biden sat next to her at a conference for sexual assault survivors, he rested his hand on her thigh. She was 19 years old. His behavior can no longer be excused as mere cluelessness or friendliness. But just to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he is, in fact, merely clueless or insensitive. These are not qualities we should tolerate in a president, particularly a president whose job entails interacting and negotiating with women leaders, both foreign and domestic. I have changed my mind. Biden should not run. The fact that some prominent liberals have come to his defense is just as disgusting as his behavior, in my view. Their implicit argument is that because some women have welcomed his touching, there must be something wrong with those who do not. Contrary to the motto for Biden's campaign against college campus sexual assault -- "It's On Us"(men) -- the real message remains "It's On Them" (women).  

The photos of a President Biden nuzzling and stroking women will send the message to boys and men all over the world that such behavior is not only O.K. it is desirable -- just as Trump's hateful rhetoric gives tacit permission to people act out their darkest fantasies.

Some defenders of Biden say he is a saint compared to Trump, who boasted that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it. To date, there are no photos of Trump grabbing any woman's body part. Although there have been allegations of physical assault, his preferred method of degrading women is with his big fat mouth rather than with his hands. There are many degrees of bad behavior, none of which should be tolerated, particularly if they are tolerated in the big-dollar interests of either of our two deeply corrupt political parties.

New York Times Venezuela Coverage Hits New Low

The Paper of Record has given a "Venezuelan-American writer and comedian" named Joanna Hausmann a video platform from which to hilariously smear the growing anti-regime change protests in the United States. In the written warm-up intro to her stand-up routine of an op-ed, she writes:

From Noam Chomsky to Ilhan Omar, there is a growing movement on the American left known as “Hands Off Venezuela,” protesting America’s backing of the opposition leader Juan Guaido. Some of them even chant, “Maduro, friend, the people are with you.” In this video Op-Ed, a Venezuelan-American comic argues that these people are living on another planet and ignoring a dire humanitarian crisis.

What neither she nor the New York Times sees fit to disclose to their audience is that Joanna is the daughter of neoliberal Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, who has been named a chief adviser to self-declared interim president Juan Guaido.

As Bloomberg reported in January, Hausmann's reconstruction plan for a post-coup Venezuela would include the usual prescription: austerity for the masses and enrichment for the US-based oil companies which would swoop in and rescue the country from socialism.

In this case, that (rescue) fuel will come from the IMF rescue package, according to Hausmann. The influx of hard currency would go to investment in the all-important energy industry, fund imports and cover the government’s deficit, helping wean the country off the frenetic money-printing that has fueled inflation that’s counted in the hundreds of thousands. He doesn’t believe dollarization is the solution to the country’s inflation problem.

For some reason, the Times also has not see fit to print my submitted comment on the video op-ed, in which I point out this apparent oversight on their part:

It would have been nice if the Times had disclosed that Ms. Hausmann is the daughter of Ricardo Hausmann, the Harvard economist who is currently advising self-declared interim president Guaido.

 As an International Monetary Fund official in the 90s, Ricardo Hausmann was an integral part of the so-called Washington Consensus, which "advised" Latin American countries to sell off their state-owned resources to private investors in payment for IMF loans. He is also the pre-Chavez era former minister of planning for Venezuela.

Hausmann is yet to be confirmed to the cabinet of Guaido's "parallel government," and therefore reportedly demurs at commenting directly on the situation in Venezuela. So it must be nice to have a daughter to do the job in the guise of "comedy."

 https://www.voanews.com/a/guaido-names-hausmann-as-venezuela-s-idb-representative/4813590.html

Smearing anti-imperialist activists and intellectuals like Noam Chomsky by calling them "Maduro sanitizers" is indicative of the growing desperation of the neocon regime-changers in the Trump administration. And by the way, Chomsky is not a "fellow liberal." He is a leftist, which is not the same thing as a liberal.

Ms. Hausmann's video is reminiscent of the infamous 1992 congressional testimony from a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl in the run-up to the first Gulf War. Too fearful to even give her real name, she tearfully described personally seeing newborn babies thrown to the floor from their incubators by Saddam Hussein's invading soldiers. Neither she nor her hosts disclosed that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and that her eyewitness testimony was, in fact, a piece of total fiction dreamed up by a public relations firm for the purpose of manufacturing public consent for another US regime-change invasion.

The Times editorial board was duly outraged about that particular deception and demanded an immediate investigation of the congress critters who had participated in the subterfuge, revealed as such by a journalist from Harper's Magazine and not by the Times.

So when the conflict of interest and (easily discoverable) undisclosed nepotism inherent in Joanna Hausmann's video op-ed is pointed out to them by a mere reader, therefore, it must be an easy no-brainer for them to just ignore it and censor it. Publishing it might put on a damper on the public consent being so carefully manufactured for consumption by "fellow liberals" too squeamish to support Venezuela regime change. Her piece was trending at #4 in the popularity ratings the last time I checked.And the published comments are generally supportive of Joanna Hausmann's slick, heartfelt pleading for humanitarian intervention and as well as her gratuitous smearing of the left.

You'd think that since the Times has just been caught with rotten egg on its face after the Russiagate debacle, the paper would be a bit more careful about their propaganda. You'd think that at long last, they might have developed some shame, if not some actual journalistic ethics. And you'd be thinking very, very wrong.

The Insider Threat of Media Stenography

Well, at least CNN president Jeff Zucker is being honest when he whines that "we are not investigators. We are journalists."

He was responding to criticism that his network and other corporate media outlets had gotten the #Russiagate coverage totally wrong.

Back in the olden days, there was such a thing as shoe leather reporting, when news professionals would literally pound the pavement in search of the truth. Today it's rare for a reporter to ever tear him or herself away from the computer screen long enough to venture out of doors to talk to actual people on the street and where they live, or to comb through boxes of forgotten dusty files in courthouse basements and to treat with healthy suspicion the pronouncements and press releases of the wealthy and powerful.

Zucker and other media moguls complain that their news personalities are unfairly expected to be prosecutors with subpoena power, that they are ridiculously supposed to actually come up with their own hard evidence, otherwise known as documents and history and personal interviews with myriad people. It is not the job of journalists, in other words, to do something so extreme as to independently verify what they are told by powerful people.

To be fair, though, such investigative journalism has become much harder in recent years, particularly when the Obama administration began cracking down on government whistleblowers with such executive orders as the Insider Threat directive, issued in 2011, requiring workers to spy on one another to ascertain whether their colleagues are talking to reporters. As McClatchey News reported in 2013:

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

If it isn't digitalized or predigested, and if it doesn't come from a think tank or a political party or an approved government spokesperson, it simply doesn't exist to a whole generation of cowed stenographers toiling away in their increasingly repressive and consolidated corporate media hives. The exceptions are natural disasters like hurricanes, or unnatural disasters like the latest school shooting. Only then can they escape into the physical world to get some fresh air and maybe even gain some fresh insight from people who normally wouldn't be given a platform.

On the rare occasions that reporters do venture forth to take the pulse of the nation, they proudly pat themselves on the back for performing a bold feat of "parachute" journalism to prove that they care, they really care, what people in the Heartland are actually doing or thinking. They make sure everybody knows that they're not the elitists whom people, a/k/a the Deplorables, so often accuse them of being.

Zucker admits that his brand of journalism doesn't dig for the facts independently, but relies upon the "facts" that the media are given by their public relations and marketing colleagues in the government, electoral politics and private industry. His brand of journalism is often restricted to presenting  two differing - but not too differing - viewpoints on a given manufactured issue and then sitting passively back as the various factions duke it out on air.

Jeff Zucker is still completely in denial, proclaiming to the New York Times that he is "entirely comfortable" with having spread disinformation for the past two-plus years. It's not the media's fault that Mueller absolved Trump of "collusion", because it is not the media's job to debunk what the ruling class and their sponsors in the oil, weapons and pharmaceutical industries want them to sell to the public. 

And the most valuable product that they want to sell to the public is fear, to deflect attention from the "enemy within" to some amorphous "enemy without." One handy way that the media have accomplished this feat is to constantly lambaste Trump for his anti-Muslim, anti-Latino xenophobia and to replace it with their own anti-Russian xenophobia.

The various news organizations are still wallowing in the grief-stages of denial, depression, and bargaining, with just a hint of anger that they themselves have become the targets of criticism which does not come solely from Donald Trump. The president's own vengeful crowing is such overkill, in fact, that they shouldn't really worry about the continuing hatred from him and his base.

The only thing that they really have to fear is a sudden drop in their ratings and ad revenue now that #Russiagate is dead. Even MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whose Russophobic fear-mongering over the last two years topped everybody else's, has seen her ratings plunge since the synopsis of the Mueller report was released. She has even been demoted in some media accounts from hard-hitting crusading reporter to "cable TV personality."

While they're rushing to conduct some fake soul-searching, the media-political complex is no doubt plotting the next meta-narrative. Trump, as ever, reliably contributes to the lucrative franchise by playing the Bad Cop, railing against the media as he obligingly performs his various Outrages Du Jour to suck up all the undivided passive attention. 

This week, it was killing Obamacare, yanking funding from the Special Olympics, and caging migrants underneath a Texas overpass. Trump acts, and the media reacts. The virtue-signaling soars to fever pitch. And the money flows in torrents of outrage into the usual select pockets.

The New York Times, for one, has reported record profits during the Russiagate panic, with executive editor Dean Baquet going full Edith Piaf: "We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality."

Sing it, Dean!

Meanwhile, Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, under secret US indictment for his investigative journalism, is still a virtual prisoner in the Equador embassy. And whistleblower Chelsea Manning is still locked up in solitary confinement.

And despite his avowed disdain for Barack Obama and rhetoric about invaders from the Global South, Donald Trump has not only retained Obama's Insider Threat division for the suppression of truth, he has expanded it.

Last November, the Trump administration released a 19-step "maturity framework" directive for the detection of insider threats. The press release strives to mitigate the fascistically authoritarian nature of the  program by repurposing the entire federal work force as the "Insider Threat Community."

Details and required course material for government employees, devised by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, are readily available online. For example, one section advises employees how to detect mental illness in their co-workers and how to report suspected sufferers to supervisors. Workers must simultaneously be "sensitive" to the stigma associated with mental disorders and still be cognizant that mentally ill people might pose a grave internal national security threat. 

Since Donald Trump does not have a supervisor other than a complicit Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, guidelines regarding his alleged psychological issues do not apply and do not exist.

Still, somebody over at the Insider Threat School does seem to be trying to send a message. This chart, posted on the online course on mental illness, illustrates warning signs that government workers should be on the alert for and report to supervisors (click to enlarge):

Who, if anybody, is going to report this brilliantly subversive artist?

Health Care Kabuki

Since hell hath no fury like a president vindicated, Donald Trump has again gone on the attack against Obamacare. This time, though, Trump is doing an end run around Congress and is using another recent Texas court decision to try and overturn the law. 

The fake resistance Vichy Democrats, meanwhile, are doing their own oligarch-pleasing part by introducing a bill to merely "shore up" Obamacare and keep the private insurance predators in business. Single Payer is off the table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made sure of that, just as she has made sure that impeachment is off the table.

Trump isn't even bothering suggesting a replacement for Obamacare this go-round. He wants, or at least pretends to want, to destroy the whole thing in one fell judicial swoop. He is using the tried-and-true Goebbels method of viciously going on the offense as a way to play cowardly defense. For despite all his boasts of "exoneration!" Trump is not out of the woods yet.  Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III has reportedly farmed out acres of new evidence to states attorney general and US attorneys which tie him and his extended family to bank fraud, tax fraud, and real estate fraud, to name just three treats on the criminal smorgasbord. Never mind that these are the same local prosecution shops that have let the Trump empire get away with its sleaze for whole decades, absent making secret deals and paying the occasional civil fine. This time could be different, especially when there are political names to be made for any number of hungry headline-seeking prosecutors.

Now, here's where Trump's crusade to destroy Obamacare could hit a snag. As Vicky Ward lays out in her new book, "Kushner, Inc." the president's son-in-law Jared has a big financial stake in keeping Obamacare alive and kicking. His brother Josh's online health insurance company, currently valued at close to $3 billion, could be destroyed right along with the Affordable Care Act. Jared was adamantly opposed to the first attempt at repealing the law, for very good reason. Ward writes:

Josh had co-founded the online health insurer, Oscar, which was predicated on Obamacare: it could be purchased on the state exchanges that the Affordable Care Act had created.... If the new (repeal) legislation rolled back Obamacare, it could be financially catastrophic. Someone close to the brothers pointed out to me that "no other asset (in the Kushner family) comes close (to Oscar)." 

Trump's former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, a Democratic alumnus of Goldman Sachs, also opposed repealing Obamacare. Ward adds that at one point, Jared even brought in Obama health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, to consult on saving the law and by extension, saving the family's financial skin.

It all became moot when the late John McCain cast the deciding GOP vote that saved the law.

I wonder if Ivanka might now whisper in Daddy's ear that, as pleasurable as it is to scare and sicken millions of people by ripping their health insurance out from under them, it might be smarter to keep the family peace, and most important of all, keep the windfall profits flowing to the family, all thanks to Obamacare. The Oscar company's bronze plan requires subscribers to pay an $18,000 deductible before they receive any benefits at all, making it as legally corrupt as most neoliberal schemes designed to extract money from the desperate and put it in plutocratic pockets for the greater pragmatic good.

It's quite the dilemma for Trump. He will have to choose between pleasing his base, and pleasing his kids and the insurance companies. What variety of greed and graft shall he pick? Stay tuned.

It's possible and even probable that Trump's latest authoritarian gambit is just another head fake to distract the country from his own cowering fears and continuing legal woes. It could even be a way of thanking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for squelching impeachment talk, for slapping his main rival Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All plan, and for fighting her very hardest to further enrich the health care marketplace which has been so good to Trump's in-laws and other wealthy investors.

The corporate Democrats' bill, after all, greatly expands federal subsidies to the insurance cartel, which is already flush with record windfall profits.