He's a Yankee Doodle Donald

In case you hadn't heard, President Trump will be the star of his own Fourth of July show in Washington this year.

Righteous people are all upset about the plans, because they deviate so recklessly from The Norm of presidents just sitting sedately on the White House balcony and watching the fireworks explode above our nation's great phallic symbol, a/k/a the Washington Monument. This monument might have presaged Trump when it sustained serious cracks a few years back due to a renegade earthquake believed to be caused by some very serious fracking in the area.

USA! USA! USA!

One typical headline bemoaning the sacrilege to be perpetrated upon our Great National Birthday is "Donald Trump Is Not America." 

 Oh, yeah?

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says he hates to waste his valuable column real estate on Trump, but sometimes patriotism and decency demand that he take a stand, that he set people and Trump himself straight on the fact that this holiday cannot, just cannot, be all about Him:

Most of his predecessors did nothing of the kind. They understood that the day belonged to the country, not its leader, and they didn’t conflate the two.
Trump does, all the time, and it’s alternately annoying, confounding and galling. If you’re not thrilling to his vision and submitting to him, you’re possibly guilty of treason — remember that rant? If you’re asking legitimate questions about unholy alliances that he may have forged or conflicts of interest he may possess, you’re orchestrating a coup.

Most Black people and native Americans also understand that this holiday was never about them, given that the great white Fathers and Constitution-writers decreed that the enslaved would be only counted as three-fifths of a person -- and that was only so that plantation owners could be as well-represented in Congress as their northern Brethren. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, certainly did not include the people he purported to own in his assertion that "all men are created equal." And as for the Indians, they had already been personae-non-grata and extermination fodder for hundreds of years prior to the signing of the national birth certificate - or, in the contiguous future USA, at least since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock settlers began infecting them with their European diseases before expelling them and killing them.

So, again, Trump is simply ripping the mask right off all the historical and hysterical hypocrisy that is the very heart of the Fourth of July. He is exposing and encapsulating and symbolizing American Exceptionalism into one symbolic little blob of corpulent flesh.

My comment on the Bruni column:

Trump's bizarre-spangled Fourth would lose its luster if only the cable TV networks will set aside their greed for one magical night and patriotically refuse to broadcast this grotesque event.

Will they, though? His Nuremberg-style rallies are always reliably lucrative for the networks and their corporate sponsors. Think of the audience share and the ratings, the blow-by-blow coverage starting at the crack of dawn's early light, the talking heads acting out all the shock, awe and outrage they can muster.

Who in their right consumer mind has ever stayed home on the Fourth to watch military brass bands playing on PBS, or a rerun of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" with James Cagney as George M. Cohan? Trump could literally change the whole tradition and meaning of this day for at least some people.

 Not that he'd use the occasion for the public good, of course, such as lecturing young people not to blow their fingers or their MAGA-hat wearing heads off with illegal fireworks. In fact, he might do the exact opposite, and load up his cheesy online store with Trump-branded sparklers or rocket grenade launchers for the kiddies. It would certainly help get people all hyped up for all the new global wars he seems so anxious to start with his pals Bolton and Pompeo.

 Boycott Trump this Fourth of July. As George M. Cohan might say as he rolls in his grave: "My mother will thank you, my father will thank you, my sister will thank you, and I will thank you!"

The Biden Critic Who Came In From the Cold

What's a well-paid New York Times columnist who moonlights as a regular MSNBC contributor to do when, repulsed as she is by Creepy Uncle Joe, realizes that her career probably depends on at least passive-aggressively promoting Creepy Uncle Joe in the interests of her corporate sponsors?

If you're Michelle Goldberg, and you have previously opined that Biden should never run for president, then the first step in your rehabilitation is to write a chastened column about all the polls that show Joe Biden with a substantial lead. You then subtly denigrate the anti-Biden "online left". You provide no evidence to back up your claim that this group has little to no influence over the vast, silent majority of Democratic "moderates" for whom the defeat of Trump trumps everything else. Defeating Trump is more important than Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Those nice things are for the "future" of the Democratic Party, not for the precarious present of the actual people and the planet they live on.

As horrible a candidate as Joe Biden is, after all, he could never be as horrible as Donald Trump.

Goldberg seems to want to have it both ways. She gives her reluctant tacit approval to the "electable" Biden, while still clinging tenuously to her faux-progressive feminist brand:

 I still think it’s a bad idea for the party to nominate a man who, among other things, voted to authorize the Iraq war and oversaw the televised humiliation of Anita Hill. But while it’s still very early, his poll numbers suggest that those of us who’d written Biden off could be the ones who are out of step with a lot of Democrats. (my bold).
The future of the Democratic Party is still with left-wing social media dynamos like Ocasio-Cortez. As Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann recently wrote in The Atlantic, she’s “often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation.” Right now, though, her generation is mostly in charge only online.

How odd that even though Goldberg had long ago dutifully joined the media chorus insisting that a Russian troll farm swayed an entire election by posting a few hundred cheesy ads online, the "Online Left" back home in the USA does not wield similar power and influence.

One explanation for this alleged lack of power and influence, she continues, is that MSNBC doesn't give lefty ideas as much coverage as Fox News gives to those in its own right-wing audience.

MSNBC (where I’m a contributor) doesn’t play a remotely similar role in mainstreaming fringe ideas. Polls tell us that Democratic voters don’t rely on it as their main news source the way Republican voters do with Fox, and it doesn’t take its cues from online left-wing subcultures. In fact, it often seems that Fox News pays more attention to progressive Twitter than MSNBC does, because the right-wing network loves to jeer at anything that looks like lefty overreach.

She doesn't mention that MSNBC also loves to regularly jeer at leftists, including but not limited to Bernie Sanders. The most infamous incident took place in March, when a different on-air contributor falsely claimed that Sanders had not mentioned gender or race until 23 minutes into his campaign announcement speech. (He had mentioned them immediately, and to this day, MSNBC has not issued a correction or apologized.)

She also doesn't name any "online left-wing subcultures," other than AOC's twitter account, or even explain what she means by this dismissive term. But by lumping them all together into one fringe-dwelling pot, she does manage to make them seem both suspect and scary. At most, she damns them with her very faint praise. They're not radical at all, but by golly, they're still fringe-dwellers despite the overwhelming support of more than 90 percent of registered Democrats for single payer health care.

I suspect that if Michelle Goldberg had mentioned the inconvenient truth that MSNBC is essentially a corporate Democratic Party propaganda mill and regularly lies by both commission and omission, she would no longer have her lucrative gig on MSNBC. Members of its revolving stable of occasional contributors get paid a reported average $85,000 to $100,000 a year to be available to rehash and promote their articles, their think tank research papers, and their Democratic Party consulting work. Their job is to agree with each other, and occasionally debate GOP operatives and politicians in the interest of "balance" and for shouting-over purposes. This keeps the audience glued to the screen in a simulacrum of mass indignation and righteous liberal solidarity. If it's not about the anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc., "the Russians," or the Mueller Report soap opera, then it does not exist.

Michelle Goldberg

Goldberg seems to have gotten the message that the time has now arrived for even the mildly restive liberal stable to get trotting in unison in the spectacle of the Horse Race, mainly by endlessly promoting that P.R. gimmick called "electability." (As I wrote last week, the electability gimmick was dreamed up in the 1980s by the Democratic Leadership Council to justify implementation of the undemocratic superdelegate system as a means to steer the party toward the right and keep it there permanently.)

Goldberg thus dutifully continues:

In his own horrific way, Trump seemed to expand the possibilities of American politics, making it seem as if the old rules of electability no longer applied. Many of us assumed that the expansion would go in both directions, since Trump’s rise represented such a catastrophic failure of the political center. But there are a lot of Democrats who don’t want a revolution, or even a protracted political fight. They just want things to be the way they were before Trump came along, when ordinary people didn’t have to think about Twitter at all.

My published comment: 

 The media promotion of Biden proceeds apace. Michelle Goldberg basically shrugs "what do I know?" as she pivots from finding Biden borderline-abhorrent to acknowledging that The Polls Speak.

 But what about those polls? What percentage of the people questioned were contacted by cell phone as opposed to landline? Few young people have landlines. "Biden leading by double digits!" is about as far as most people read. The polls then become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a magnet for the undecided voter.

Meanwhile,there are fewer stories about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. There are Zero stories about Tulsi Gabbard, whose opposition to the regime-change wars embraced by both establishment parties and mainstream media outlets makes her persona non grata in the "official narrative."

 Michelle Goldberg acknowledges that she is also a contributor on MSNBC, which exposes yet another problem of journalism. One corporate outlet or personality quotes another corporate outlet or personality, and ad infinitum until it all becomes "the conventional wisdom."

Beating Trump is now the be-all and end-all as news and political personalities and the "horse race" supersede deep discussions and reporting about the everyday problems of ordinary people.

 No wonder impeachment is "off the table." It would take attention away from the candidate whose main policy platform is "restoring America's soul." Whatever that even means.

 Who's up? Who's down? Who cares?

A Few Degrees Of Separation

By Jay - Ottawa

Just about every day, the news, with its endless reports of injustice and lunacy, can push us to react with 'a belly full of hate' (h/t Mao).  Whether for the perps (them) or the perped upon (us), hate can be injurious to your physical and mental health.  Reading about Trump and remembering his recent predecessors/predators in the White House (and the candidates who hope to scramble their way up the steps into the WH), as well as their henchmen wielding bureaucracies the Romans would envy, probably does lead to ulcers and more serious ailments of mind and body.  Printers' ink is so often poison.

We want heroes, we need heroes, not merely to keep us out of the doctor's office for belly aches and depression, but to provide us with the oxygen of inspiration.  There are people out there who are clear-minded and persistent workers, who are effective in creating zones of justice.  Take courage; those preserves are larger than we realize.

Chris Hedges interviews makers of justice zones regularly.  A few weeks ago he introduced his readers to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes books for laypeople as well as his professional colleagues.  In researching Frank and, later, buying one of his books, I was led to a website called Orbiter, where Frank is a contributor.  Orbiter's purpose: 

 "To elevate and enrich the public conversation about science, meaning, and morality. Orbiter seeks to bring accuracy, balance, and humility to a conversation about ideas that are often mischaracterized and misunderstood.”

So, Orbiter serves the needs of science to more widely communicate its findings and leaves the back door open to philosophers like Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of….  We know the truth not only through reason, but through the heart.” 

The Buddha, giving high place to compassion, may have been asserting the same thing.  Here's a talk by a Tibetan monk (1978) who, after a little windup, launches into one of the most touching salutes to mothers as exemplars of compassion.  (Just in time for Mother's Day in the US and Canada.)

Back to the need for heroes.  What did I find in my pass by Orbiter today?  A celebration of (of all people) Jean Vanier, a Frenchman whose non-medical solution to a medical problem has been copied in scores of countries.  Vanier died this week on Tuesday, age 90. His obituary appeared in the NY Times. 

Another obit can be found in Orbiter.  How come?  Vanier was not a scientist, but he did develop a few formulas that work.  He received the Templeton Prize in 2015, and I believe it's the Templeton Foundation that helps Orbiter stay afloat ($) to peddle science coupled with wisdom. 

Vanier found one approach to deal with the mildly mentally handicapped, which technique has been doing just fine by itself until science in its own special way comes up with a silver bullet to cure them. 

There is a short video at the bottom of the Orbiter article where Vanier describes the ridiculously unscientific, unsophisticated, heartfelt ideas that have helped make his chosen group of nobodies into valued, joyful somebodies.  May this heroic news serve as your antidote for the front page of tomorrow. 

Chris Hedges, Adam Frank, Orbiter, Templeton, Jean Vanier, all addressing the belly, the brain and the heart.  They are lights within the dark matter of the universe, with not so many degrees of separation and therefore a force.

New Democrats Enter Their Golden Oldie Moldy Years

Stung by Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972 and then battered by Ronald Reagan's crushing of one-term Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Democratic Party decided it needed a "third way" approach to win back power. They would accomplish this by starting a movement they dubbed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). It arrived complete with 140 congress critters and governors and a set of neoliberal principles which purported to split the difference equally between the working class and the big business/corporate class.

First they would need to co-opt and then distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity.

The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens."  It would instead offer the down-and-out a series of gentle shaming kicks and shoves in order to get them scrambling up invisible ladders of self-help and opportunity.

Joe Biden, the current alleged Democratic front-runner, was not only one of the original founding members of the DLC, he was also one of its very first presidential recruits. As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the Republican Party in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century.

Say Uncle, Or Bust!

 Back in the 80s, the three most common "colorblind" euphemisms for the "N" word being utilized by Biden and both establishment political parties were Welfare, Drugs, and Crime.

Reagan himself not so subtly railed against welfare queens and "young bucks" on food stamps in such blatantly symbolic places as Mississippi. But the Democrats, who still needed the support of black and brown people in the South, had to be a tad more politically correct. 

Mere months after Reagan took office, DLC architect Al From recalls, the House's then-named New Democratic Caucus was absolutely thrilled when on April 9, 1981, the New York Times published, verbatim, his entire "movement manifesto" of economic principles.

This nearly 40-year-old document has become the Bible of every conservative Democratic administration since Clinton, seamlessly morphing into Obama acting as the other heel of the Bush Jr sandwich filling...  and just wait till next year - or so From's neoliberal centrist wing of the party hopes  - to get Joe Biden for dessert, the goofy guy whom conservative Democrats have been hankering for as their president since 1972, when he was still only a 29-year-old senator (D-Capitol One) from Delaware, LLC/USA.

The first DLC (later renamed the "New Democrats" in the age of Obama) principle, after they get the requisite gushing over the New Deal out of the way, is austerity, or deficit reduction, even when times are bad, as a guard against inflation. Inflation hasn't been a problem since the 70s, but once they get all ballooned up with their addictive hot air, the Inflationistas and Deficit Hawks never die. The difference is that when Republicans cycle into power, deficits don't matter when it comes to giving tax breaks to the rich. And when it's the Democrats' turn, all programs benefiting regular people must be "paid for" by cutting other programs benefiting regular people. Both parties always exempt the permanent war machine from any of their inflation fear-mongering.

A related founding principle, a/k/a shameless propaganda, of the DLC is that since "people" (the rich) demand austerity and spending cuts, the New Democrats must always try to placate (the rich and) Republicans as a show of their good faith. But to prove that they really also care about the working and poor people who actually vote them into office, the Democrats will quickly add that the wealthy should (it's just a suggestion) equally share the burden of sacrifice.

Here's the clunky concluding chunk of the first Official DLC Manifesto reprinted verbatim for your reading pleasure. I have bolded all the neoliberal keywords, which have survived for four decades to poison our minds and our spirits and our lives to this very day. These principles remain at the rotten core of the Joe Biden agenda. They were baked into his political psyche from the very beginning of his career... which, by the way, more or less coincided with the beginning of Donald Trump's own career:

In controlling Federal spending, we intend to abide by the following guidelines:

-We will seek out and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse. We will provide the resources to prosecute those taking advantage of government benefits to which they are not entitled, whether wealthy tax evaders, illegal monopolies or participants in welfare fraud.

- We will promote the work ethic by encouraging recipients of government assistance to work and resisting cuts that would throw people out of work and onto welfare. 

- We will help those who cannot work, particularly the disabled, the sick and the elderly. A society cannot remain health and self-respecting while ignoring those who are poor and helpless through no fault of their own.

 - We will strengthen our defense force, in cooperation with our allies, to ensure world peace. We will increase military capability and readiness, eliminate Pentagon waste and renew the search for mutual arms control agreements.

- We will promote cooperation rather than conflict among the levels of government. We must recognize local strengths, local initiative and regional differences in the country as we decide the structure and number of Federal programs. We will not purposely add unnecessary tax and regulatory burdens to state and local governments.

 We will examine indirect spending through the tax code with the same critical eye we focus on direct spending. Wasteful and unfair tax loopholes will be closed.

- We will upgrade our efforts in the area of law enforcement to intercept the flow of illegal drugs across our borders, stem the tide of illegal immigration, introduce efficiencies into our criminal justice system, and work in partnership with state and local governments to combat crime. 

 - In short, we pledge to develop a lean Federal budget, which puts us on the path of balancing the budget and provides for the human needs of our people.

Translating the above into normal person-speak:

-- A poor single mother on food stamps is the same kind of villain as Donald Trump. We will demonize and even jail the poor mother while comparing her to Donald Trump, whom we never prosecuted or imprisoned. Not only that, we'll even promote him to our friends in corporate media as our Pied Piper GOP nominee, just to make DLC original founding member Hillary Clinton look better.

--The DLC, under Bill Clinton, soon got its dream fulfilled when millions of poor mothers got thrown off welfare in the 90s, only to be thrown into low-wage or non-existent jobs without the promised child care aid. At the same time, Donald Trump kept "losing" billions of dollars on paper, which allowed him to pay zero income taxes for possibly more than a decade, as he importuned crooked banks to fraudulently bankroll his real estate empire, which ultimately landed this self-made grifter his own hit TV show on NBC. So as you can see, the DLC's work ethic sermon of a manifesto worked exactly as intended. The New Dems helped to inspire Trump (a registered Democrat) to keep struggling against all odds. Even better, his ladder of opportunity turned out to be an elevator of opportunity!

--There are the deserving poor. and then there are the undeserving poor. The different groups of Poors must be divided, and taught to resent one another so that they will be less apt to resent the rich racketeers of the ruling class, including Donald Trump.  Ex-GOP Speaker Paul Ryan is unfairly often blamed by Democrats for coming up with this poor vs. poor crap all on his own. But, as self-avowed New Democrat Obama used to gently chide his Old GOP bro Mitt Romney: "You didn't succeed all on your own, Governor. You didn't build this all by yourself!"

- Calling Mr. Orwell. We will arm ourselves to the gills to promote world peace, love and understanding. We will impose sanctions on Iraq and the deaths of 500,000 children as a result will have been "worth it." Later in the War Is Peace endeavor, lethal Predator drone assassinations will  become therapeutic "surgical strikes," and the "externalities" of thousands of innocent dead will never be divulged and their names never revealed. 

--Regulations on capital and greed are bad. As a result, Bill Clinton and his bipartisan Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and other anti-graft legislation from the New Deal era. As a result of that repeal, the financial system crashed in 2008, just in time for Obama to win the White House and the Democrats to win the whole Congress and stuff the new ruling administration with the same deregulation-happy culprits, like Larry Summers, who caused the whole mess in the first place. And the regular people struggled on for eight more years until 2016, just in time for Trump and the Republicans to complete the inevitable cycle.

--Mexicans were bringing drugs across the border decades and decades ago! Blacks and Browns were committing all the crimes! Stop them, police them, jail them, and begin a new Jim Crow era and conduct a virtual slow genocide -  but be sure to call your institutional bigoted practices "efficiencies." Then slap a slick "War on Drugs" label on it so you don't sound racist. Decades later, act all shocked and appalled when Donald Trump unleashes his racist rhetoric and tragically rips the whole happy-face mask right off your long-standing official DLC manifesto.

As Al From wrote in 2013's "The New Democrats and the Return to Power," the original 1981 manifesto was the absolute catalyst for "vibrant economic growth in the private sector of the economy.... It was the right first battle for us to take on. It left a good impression and gave us running room for later reform efforts.... It allowed us to establish our new themes without fear of being crushed by the old bulls.... That the New York Times chose to print it in full was icing on the cake."

This manifesto set the Democrats on their relentless, 40-year trajectory to the right, moving the GOP even further to the right as a result.

From adds that as disappointed as DLC conservatives were when, in 1984, Biden "had the good sense to put a stop to our nonsense" of trying to oust Reagan challenger Walter Mondale and replace him with the reactionary Biden, they were confident that the younger man's zealous contributions to their right-wing platform would ultimately prevail. "Developing a winning message" was their ultimate goal then, and it's their ever more feeble ultimate goal now.

Their 1986 midterm message was "Defending America," which according to From, sent the Reaganites into conniption fits of jealousy for out-flanking them from the right.

From also brags that it was the core DLC membership who, in 1981, came up with the anti-democratic superdelegate system to ensure that the right-wing faction of the party would always prevail against any potential lefty upstarts.

This is also when the whole "electability" canard that the pundits can't stop talking about these days first took shape. "If the elected officials whose outlooks were moderated by actually having to be elected took a bigger role in the conventions, making them superdelegates would give them that role." he wrote.

Remember, the "reform" that bars superdelegates from voting in the first ballot at a contested convention is tailor-made so that a vast field of contenders, none of them with a clear majority, will cancel each other out, ensuring that only the conservative party machine will have the final say and coronation privileges. 

From actually credits Hillary Clinton with spreading the New Democrat ideology far and wide throughout the world during her stint as Obama's secretary of state. He doesn't mention the subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the same countries that Hillary so ingeniously inspired.

And in his own introduction to From's book, written just three years before Donald Trump was elected, Bill Clinton gushes that despite all the pain and destruction and death that it wrought, he is still a true believer in the DLC message of mass austerity, endless war, the continuous growth of capitalism, the expansion of globalism, "reform" of welfare and the fight against "crime". There is nary a word about the climate catastrophe.

Joe Biden himself is not putting the climate catastrophe anywhere near the top of his DLC-inspired agenda. Forget the U.N. report revealing that millions of plant and animal species will go extinct because of the crisis. Not content to be a do-nothing vice president, in 2011 he proclaimed that he was "the new sheriff in town" who would ruthlessly cut all the "waste, fraud and abuse" displayed by living beings protected by the big, bad guvmint. He was the anointed Anti-Waste Czar, whose first accomplishment would be to strike pictures and stories about endangered species from government websites.

War is not only Peace, but Public Ignorance is Strength, and therefore Biden announced:

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.

This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.

That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in The Federal Government.

Fast forward to 2019, and his fellow well-protected old New Dems Bill and Hillary Clinton have also sadly devolved into aging (if not quite extinct) vaudevillians, touring cities and speaking to half-empty auditoriums, where ticket prices have been drastically reduced for lack of interest. Hillary just confided to one friendly interviewer that the biggest thing the next Democratic president has to fear is not the climate catastrophe, but (drum-roll, please) - Vladimir Putin!

The crowds are roaring. But probably not in the adulatory fashion that the Clintons would prefer.  

As Vice President, Biden Was Still Bragging About His Racist Crime Bill

Presidential contender Joe Biden cynically co-opted Martin Luther King Day this year to express the very mildest of regrets for his draconian 1994 Crime Bill, which sentenced record numbers of mainly Black men to long prison terms for possession of even tiny amounts of drugs, especially crack cocaine.

“It was a big mistake when it was made,” he said. “We thought, we were told by the experts, that crack you never go back, it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different, but it’s trapped an entire generation.”

Biden pleaded that he was practically forced into drafting the legislation (originally called the Biden Crime Bill, but later somewhat unfairly renamed the Clinton Crime Bill) in his capacity as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This pleading, as well as his use of the passive voice, sounds eerily similar to his recent excuses about how powerless he was to protect Anita Hill from the abuse she suffered during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

It was the crack that trapped and imprisoned people, not Biden. It was the Republican crackpots on Biden's panel who victimized Anita Hill all over again, not Biden.

But whenever the occasion demands it, Uncle Joe admits that regrets, he has a few. But then again, too few to mention -- unless and until he is practically forced into uttering them.  

Even during his tenure as Barack Obama's vice president, and long, long after other "experts" had correctly called out the racial bias inherent in his Crime Bill,  Biden was still doubling down on the false and debunked narrative that drug use is the primary cause of violence in poor communities.

He was still gung-ho for the racist War on Drugs, or what Michelle Alexander has aptly identified as The New Jim Crow.

One occasion was the nomination of former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske in the spring of 2009 as the Obama administration's new "drug czar." Speaking to a room full of municipal police chiefs, Biden fondly reminisced about his direct role in the creation of the White House drug czar position as well as his authorship of his post-Crime Bill COPS legislation, which allocated federal funds for cities with large black and brown populations to hire more police officers and make more drug arrests and send more black and brown individuals to prison, often for decades, for minor drug possession offenses.

We know we needed tough laws, and we have tough laws. But that wasn't enough. We needed a balanced approach in combating drugs -- one that included prevention, treatment and enforcement.

And that's why when I wrote what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the '90s -- and quite frankly, many of you in this room literally sat and wrote that bill with me; it had my name on it, but you all wrote it -- when we wrote that back in 1994, I felt so strongly about the need to create specialized Drug Courts -- so we could have an alternative to incarceration and the traditional probation that included treatment and a way forward.

That's why I fought so hard for the Drug Free Communities Support Program, so we could bring together parents, teachers, business leaders, police, medical profession to prevent drug abuse and addiction in local communities.

 And that's why I, along with many of you, worked so hard for the COPS program -- because quite frankly more cops on the street is one of the best ways to keep drugs off the street.

Biden was actually to the right of President George W. Bush when he pushed, in 2002, for the addition of 50,000 police officers in America's cities, on top of the 100,000 cop positions originally funded under his 1994 Crime Bill. Biden complained, without evidence, that violent crime in inner cities had gone up as a direct result of Bush's cuts to his tough drug enforcement programs.

Biden also ran on a "tough on crime" platform during his failed 2004 presidential primary campaign. Correlating drug users with post-09/11 terrorism as well as with violence, he wrote on his website:

"Our police officers who walk the beat in every city and town across America are the backbone of homeland security  Whenever we need them, our police officers never hesitate to respond. Now they need us, and we should not hesitate to respond to law enforcement by giving them the tools they need to protect our communities. Let's save the COPS program, and, in so doing, say thank you to every cop on the street."

With Biden's crime legislation later widely criticized as the racist policy that it was, he burnished it with the "balanced approach" rhetoric that was a hallmark of other Obama policies, such as the imposition of austerity on the struggling middle and working classes and the poor coupled with paltry tax increases on the wealthy. Thus was added the cosmetic gloss of an ounce of prevention and treatment in the racist Drug War, ostensibly to "balance out" the continuing mega-tons of cruel and unusual punishment -- and to feebly camouflage the ongoing and underlying racism.

It's the same propaganda tactic Biden had used 15 years earlier to "arm-twist" his fellow Democrats into passing his Crime Bill which, besides putting 100,000 new cops on the streets, allocated $9.7 billion for the construction of new prisons, expanded the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty to 52, discouraged prison paroles and rewarded prisons with federal grants based upon increased parole-denial rates, criminalized gang membership, denied Pell educational grants to convicts, and imposed mandatory drug testing for released prisoners (practically guaranteeing a return to prison, because released prisoners have a very hard time getting work, finding housing and paying for food, given that they're denied housing and food stamp benefits because most applications forms contain a box to check for even minor convictions and,or  arrests).

 To all that cruelty he cynically tacked on the Sunset Law-prone Violence Against Women Act and a similarly temporary assault weapons ban in order to give his reactionary agenda that all-important cosmetic liberal gloss. These were sweeteners enough to convince even then-Rep. Bernie Sanders to reluctantly vote for the package.

As Michelle Alexander pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, the problem of violence is actually correlated not with drug use per se, but with the permanent effects of long-term incarcerations of mainly men on entire families and communities. A cop on every corner has done nothing, for example, to curb violent crime and gang activity in cities like Chicago. 

Moreover, with an epidemic of opioid addiction now affecting mainly white people, the racist War on Drugs is rapidly losing its effectiveness as a wedge issue and fear-spreading tool for right-wing politicians like Joe Biden.

Michelle Alexander wrote:

Drug law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has caused catastrophic harm. Nationally, the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional control outside prison walls — on probation or parole. More than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second-class status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.

This relegation of millions of people to permanent underclass status is reason enough to deny Joe Biden the Democratic presidential nomination. For one thing, there is virtually no distance between him and Trump as regards their disdain for black and brown people. I can just envision Trump patting Uncle Joe on the back during one of those televised corporate debates and claiming to be the real inspiration for the Crime Bill, what with the fear-mongering full page ad he'd taken out in the New York Times, calling for execution of the Central Park Five (who were later exonerated) just a few years before its passage.

 I guess Biden would only respond that at least he's mouthed a few convenient platitudes and words of regret for the national hysteria that he was instrumental in fomenting, while Trump has never offered any. 

 Trump, though, would then be able to one-up Biden by bragging about his commutation last year of the sentence of a grandmother serving life in prison on a cocaine trafficking charges: a sentence that was the direct result of the cruel Biden Crime Bill.

Denying Biden the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency has never been an easier sell. 

But try explaining that to the Party leadership and the donor class. 

Lunacy of the Elites

Since unfettered capitalism is killing life on earth at an unprecedented pace, the insatiable lords of unfettered capital have come up with a brilliant and unique, but far from shocking, response. 

They and they alone will literally escape from the world they have destroyed. Or so they psychotically surmise.

Even as a United Nations report detailing the accelerated species-killing effects of our ongoing climate catastrophe is released, the creators of this global catastrophe already have their own exit strategies planned.

Some of them are buying up property in some of the last remaining pristine locales on earth, such as New Zealand. Others are planning mega-yacht cities on the rising oceans. A few are even planning to colonize the moon and planets. Unlike the migrants fleeing the subsistence farms and other lands destroyed by excessive heat and drought and floods, however, these elite refugees are not looking to merely survive. They are looking to continue their ecological plunder and their wars - even when they reach the Moon, Mars, and infinite space itself.

These are the same ruling class racketeers, remember, who keep urging the Have-Nots to get real, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. These perennial colonizers scoff at Medicare For All as pie-in-the-sky and the Green New Deal as a pipe dream.

 Meanwhile, as they make their own plans for individual escape, they frantically erect their "smart" walls to keep some earthlings out and they build new prisons to keep other earthlings in. They deny tens of millions of people health coverage. They damage and kill as many people as they can get away with, with evictions and guns and drugs in poor communities at home and with bombs and drones and IMF loans in poor communities abroad. They call their victims collateral damage or "externalities" in order to salve their vestigial consciences. 

As philosopher-sociologist Bruno Latour explains in his brilliant Down to Earth, it's the predatory capitalists themselves who are terminally detached from reality. They are the lunatics posing as therapists who pit groups of desperate people against one another and laugh all the way to the bank.

Migrations, explosions of inequality and the New Climatic Regime: these are one and the same threat. Most of our fellow citizens underestimate or deny what is happening to the earth, but they understand perfectly well that the question of migrants puts their dreams of a secure identity in danger.

 For the time being, fully aroused and worked over by the so-called 'populist' parties, these citizens have grasped the ecological mutation in just one of its dimensions. The climate crisis is forcing people they do not welcome to cross their frontiers; hence the response: "Let's put up impenetrable borders and we'll escape the invasion!"

But it is the other dimension of this same mutation that they have not yet grasped: the New Climatic Regime has been sweeping across all our borders for a long time, exposing us to all the winds, and no walls we can build will keep those invaders out.

If we want to defend our affiliations, we shall have to identify these migrations also, migrations without form or nation that we know as climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion. Even if you seal the frontiers against two-legged refugees, you cannot prevent others from crossing over.

This intellectual disconnect paired with the fine art of scapegoating are perfectly illustrated in the May 6th edition of the New York Times, which juxtaposes the alarming new U.N. report on accelerated species extinctions with an editorial urging Congress to give President Trump all the billions of dollars that he is demanding for "border security."

Not once does the Times editorial board mention the man-made climate catastrophe as the cause for the surge in migration from Latin America, or that the catastrophe is a direct result of the longstanding plunder of the region's agriculture and natural resources by US corporations - plunder and ensuing human displacement facilitated and financed by the regime-changing US military apparatus.

Instead, the newspaper of record simply urges Democrats to counter Trump's inhumane policies and vile anti-immigrant rhetoric with the  "humanitarian" response of providing more refugee prison beds and "shoring up" military border patrol operations.

Democrats have other, lower-level concerns as well, such as ensuring that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is not used as an enforcement agency or that the contractors and facilities used to care for children meet certain standards. As a condition of handing over additional billions, they are likely to push for at least modest increases in oversight. They should aim to keep such tinkering as narrow and targeted as possible. If the White House is serious about needing the money, it should be prepared to agree to a few conditions — and convey the need for flexibility to Senate Republicans.
As for the clash over detention beds: Knowing how toxic the matter is, the White House would have been wise to leave it out of a request it needs to advance quickly, postponing that battle for a another day. Both sides need to dial back the fighting words, resist the temptation to finger-point and find a creative way through this minefield.

Translation: tone down the rhetoric to make the imprisonment of refugees appear less cruel -  and ultimately, to cause their plights to be forgotten by the public as much and as soon as inhumanely possible. Very subtly buy into the reactionary propaganda of an outside invasion. Talk about migrants as though they are booby traps in a "minefield." Grotesquely suggest that what we really need are better "contractors"  to "care for" the caged children. It's not the horrible reality of "detention beds" for tots that so troubles the Times editorial board as it is the "toxic clash" between well-heeled Democrats and Republicans who are so invested in placing blame on everybody and anybody except the real culprits: deregulated greedy capitalists.

Meanwhile, some elites feel so entitled that they've actually taken to describing the still-unspoiled Moon as their own exclusive property. Since they can't yet establish second or third or fourth homes on its surface, they can at least be satisfied with shooting their loved ones' "cremains" up in a rocket to mingle with moon dust for a really spiffy and high-priced funeral service.  

Why worry about climate catastrophes and the extinction of millions of plant and animal species here on earth when a corporation called Moon Express can soothe nervous elites?

The Moon is Earth’s 8th continent, a new frontier for humanity with precious resources that can bring enormous benefits to life on Earth and our future in space. Expanding Earth’s economic and social sphere to the Moon is our first step in securing our future. Not long from now a new generation will look up and see lights on the Moon, and know that they are part of a multi-world species.

Wow. This sounds even better than Sarah Palin being able to see Russia from her front porch. The "old generation" may be gasping their last breaths and starving to death, but the drastically reduced, renamed and new improved species we shall call Homo oligarchus will surely survive somehow on their yachts. The earth supply of water may have been polluted beyond potability, but Moon-water can always be zoomed down to them at the same time endless supplies of it are reconstituted as the rocket fuel of the future.

Moon Express's biggest competitor is the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, who has humanely invested some of his own billions in an outfit called BlueOrigin - because what better way to save Humanity than to plunder other nearby planets? He thinks he can literally "dig us out" from extinction by digging for natural resources elsewhere in the universe. Never mind that his vast fortune could literally end hunger and want on the Earth we already do inhabit today, rather than decades or centuries from now.

The big tell is how these billionaires and corporations describe human beings. When rich people talk about Saving Humanity, you can pretty much rest assured that actual people will continue to get screwed. This is especially true if they work for poverty wages at what are obscenely described as Amazon Fulfillment Centers.

Bruno Latour calls oligarchs like Bezos "obscurantic elites," because they do not want, or even pretend to want, to share the Earth with the rest of us. This selfishness is manifest in their public relations gimmick of wanting to share the Moon, Mars and all of Outer Space with the rest of the us. It is a way of keeping all the wealth for themselves while spewing the false hope that they alone can save us from the climate crisis that they themselves are simultaneously underwriting and tacitly denying:

Whereas until the 1990s one could (provided that one profited from it) associate the horizon of modernization with the notions of progress, emancipation, wealth, comfort, even luxury, and above all rationality, the rage to deregulate, the explosion of inequalities, the abandonment of solidarities have gradually associated that horizon with the notion of an arbitrary decision out of nowhere in favor of the sole profit of the few. The best of worlds has become the worst.

Looking down from the ship's rail, the lower classes, now fully awakened, see the lifeboats pulling farther and farther away. The orchestra continues to play "Nearer, my God, to Thee," but the music no longer suffices to drown out the cries of rage.

Now use your imagination, and superimpose the sneering face of Jeff Bezos (or any oligarch of your choice) over that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, and you'll get the picture:

The catch is that the modern version isn't funny, and there is no smooching and making up at the end.

And speaking of lunatics, did you know that the United States Senate voted unanimously in 2009 to officially strike the word "lunatic" from the federal code? They claimed it was to protect the mentally ill from abuse, but I suspect it was really to protect themselves and their donors from public criticism as they continue to conduct the official business of smacking ordinary humans right in the kisser.

To end on an optimistic note: the lifeboats might be sailing away, but we're still wearing our life vests in the alternate universe of the reality-based community, a/k/a Planet Earth. We refuse to drown.

Pelosi the Appeaser

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells the New York Times that the way to beat Trump is not through impeachment or championing progressive causes. To win, Democrats have to be more friendly to "centrists" - which is neoliberal-speak for the donor and corporate class which owns her organization.

If you cower, they (the mythical center of the electorate) will come.

Remember how well that smarmy strategy worked out when Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by granting him permission to invade neighboring countries in the belief the rest of Europe (and capitalist interests) would be spared?  Even more recently, remember how well that worked out when Pelosi's party thought it would be a great idea to run Hillary Clinton in 2016 and destroy Bernie Sanders at the same time? The polls and the pundits certainly thought she'd be a shoo-in to beat Trump.

So let's double down on that winning strategy. If it doesn't work out, it will all be the fault of the Deplorables, again. If it doesn't work out, Nancy Pelosi personally will never have to suffer. Nor will the Democratic donor class, who are flusher with cash than ever thanks to Trump's tax cuts and their investments in his military machine and prison-industrial complex.

It's a toss-up as to whether Pelosi's main problem is corruption or senility, or a combination of the two, when she posits that only a boring centrist can win in 2020. This boring individual will win by such a stupendous margin that Trump will never be able to challenge the results. 

On the other hand, the results of a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren victory could not possibly be stupendous enough to physically scare Trump out of the White House. Only a Biden or a Buttigieg or maybe a Harris would triumph in a landslide, which would bury Trump forever and ever.

Glenn Thrush reports:

Sitting in her office with its panoramic view of the National Mall, Ms. Pelosi — the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 — offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left.
“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

Of course, Pelosi's version of center left actually skews more toward right of center. She neglects to mention that the "moderates" who did win their mid-term races were heavily bankrolled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which refused financial aid to what she dismisses as the "exuberances"- including the victorious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She also neglects to mention that such right-wing Democratic senators as Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp lost badly in their own bids for re-election, despite their soulless valiant efforts to appeal to the Mythical Center.  

The tacit message of the Times article is that if Sanders or Warren win, Trump will not go quietly. But he magically will go quietly if Biden wins. 

If you really want to dig right down to the center of the centrist Id, Pelosi doesn't even want a Democrat in the White House. She'd rather dance the triangulation tango with Trump for four more years. 

Pelosi is trying to gaslight the electorate at the same time she dog-whistles her reassurances to nervous Democratic Party donors, who have made no secret of the fact that they dread Sanders or Warren in the White House, because both these candidates threaten to unconscionably use their power to serve people who don't have has much money as the big donors and the corporate lobbyists do.

She claims that if Democrats would just cringe pragmatically and appease Trump now, he will be less nasty and dangerous, less likely to irrevocably poison the minds of the malleable against the Democrats during the primaries and the general election. She bizarrely calls this her "cold-blooded plan" for victory. I'll grant her the cold-blooded part. And I'll even compliment her for having one hell of an overdeveloped lizard brain to go along with all that ice in her veins.

Her strategy amounts to pretending to be scared and disgusted by the Trump administration in public, but being complicit with, and accommodating to, the Trump administration in private. Pelosi seems confident that the actual public is not reading about this cynical strategy in the Times, mostly because they probably can't afford the subscription, despite working several jobs. And if the bottom 80 percent or so of the reading public are perusing the Times, maybe Pelosi can instill the requisite doubt and fear into their psyches.  I doubt that she cares about anybody but her donors. The underlying message to her real constituents is that she's got their backs. She's cold-bloodedly pushing the scales. Hers and theirs.

One thing to keep in mind about many Times articles and op-eds is that they are essentially telegraphed messages from the rich to the rich. But in a show of egalitarianism, they are happy to offer the lesser people a tiny box with which to share their expertise (1500 characters or less) with their peers. If you are very lucky, your comment will be accepted by some mystery algorithm and make it into print. If you write from a centrist, pragmatic  point of view, a human moderator is very likely to award you a coveted golden "Times Pick" icon. This digital badge of honor is the equivalent of a jolt of dopamine, and will encourage you to write more centrist - and influential! - comments in the future.

The Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time Tango. 

*Update, 5/5: Boy, do I ever feel dope-amined. After suppressing my submitted comment on a Maureen Dowd column for about five hours last night, the moderators not only finally published it, they awarded it a coveted Times Pick! I must have subconsciously inserted some pragmatism in there - but more likely, they viewed it as a hook for all the self-avowed "centrists" in Timesland to digitally venture forth to set me straight, to insist that yes, they really do exist, and that befuddled old me must not let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good. 

I have a bone to pick with Dowd's odd, but typically "insidery" characterization of Atty. Gen. Barr as a heretofore revered elder statesman in Washington, before Trump ruined his stellar reputation. How soon she and her corporate media cohort forget that it was Barr who orchestrated a pardon for (among others in the Iran-Contra scandal) Elliot Abrams - who has returned bigger and meaner than ever to spread more mayhem in Latin America via the ongoing US-led Venezuela coup attempt.

My comment is basically a rehash of the stuff I've been writing recently at Sardonicky, but I'll repost it here anyway:

No shock that D.C. insiders saw Barr as an upright member of the legal establishment, despite his crafting of pardons for war criminals under Bush Sr. In an ethical system, he would have been divested of the respectability badge decades ago.

  He served corrupt power then, and he serves corrupt power now. Yet somehow, Trump has suddenly and single-handedly corrupted an honorable man. This narrative speaks to the rot in the entire political establishment and the media's complicity in it.The media who so slavishly treated Mueller as a virtual Father of Our Country are now dissing him as a Deadbeat Dad for not sending Barr to the rhetorical naughty chair sooner. Why would he, when "tradition"  also dictates that no sitting president, not even Trump, can ever be taken to the legal woodshed and indicted?

Nancy Pelosi herself says impeachment is off the table, claiming that this Constitutional remedy would only embolden Trump to act brattier. In effect, she's the parent who yells a lot and threatens her kid with punishment but never follows through, which only emboldens the kid and his feral gang to act more brazen by the day.Meanwhile, in a Times interview, she says that only a mild centrist (not Sanders or Warren) can attract enough mythical centrist voters to beat Trump into enough of a quivering pulp to actually agree to vacate the White House when the time comes.

 It's Neville Chamberlain deja vu all over again.

"Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time."