Neoliberalism and Sex Slavery

It keeps on getting worse. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who as a US attorney signed off on the infamous secret sweetheart deal that protected convicted child molester Jeffrey Epstein as well as his entire network of plutocratic predators and enablers, continues to double down on his contempt for non-wealthy women and children.

As The Guardian reports, Acosta wants to destroy one of the few remaining agencies tasked with protecting the victims of global sex trafficking. He has recommended cutting funding for the International Labor Affairs Bureau by a whopping 80 percent, or from its current budget of $68 million to only $18.5 billion. In so doing, he is helping to protect all the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world from legal accountability.

The Department of Labor is widely respected for its vital role in investigating, prosecuting and preventing human trafficking worldwide. Experts say any major cut to ILAB would be a direct threat to the US government’s ability to combat the sexual exploitation of children.

 “A huge cut of this sort is bound to expose children to more risk of sexual trafficking,” said Kathleen Kim, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who co-authored California’s law on human trafficking.

“An 80% reduction at ILAB will undoubtedly eliminate many of the US government’s anti-human trafficking efforts that have been critical in encouraging action by law enforcement.”

 Kim said Acosta having granted the lenient plea deal to Epstein, combined with the proposed cuts to ILAB, made it entirely inappropriate that he continued in his current role.

“He should step down,” she said.

Whether or not Trump fires Acosta or he resigns voluntarily, the neoliberalized economy which fuels the sex slavery and other human rights abuses will continue to thrive, absent a complete counter-revolution against neoliberalism itself.

It is no accident that the victims of Epstein's human trafficking enterprise were poor and/or vulnerable, and that their poverty and vulnerability and that of their parents and caregivers are the direct results of a 40-year-long project of dispossession by the lords of capital. To amoral men like Epstein and Acosta, human flesh is just one more commodity, there for plunder by the wealthy few. The exploitation and trafficking of women and children is no longer just a third world phenomenon. It happens whenever and wherever the global oligarchs administer their economic shock therapies to remedy the very financial crises which they themselves create.

Anthropologist David Harvey explains the process in A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

"The loss of social protections in advanced capitalist countries has had particularly negative effects on lower-class women. and in many of the ex-communist countries like the Soviet bloc, the loss of women's rights through neoliberalization has been nothing short of catastrophic.

So how, then, do disposable workers - women in particular - survive both socially and affectively in a world of flexible labor markets and short-term contracts, chronic job insecurities, lost social protections and often debilitating labor, amongst the wreckage of collective institutions that once gave them a modicum of dignity and support? For some, the increased flexibility in labor markets is a boon and even when it does not lead to material gains the simple right to change jobs relatively easily and free of the traditional social restraints of patriarchy and family has intangible benefits. For those who successfully negotiate the labor market there are seemingly abundant rewards in the world of a capitalist consumer culture. Unfortunately, that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without every conferring satisfactions beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties of status by way of good looks... or of material possessions.  

"For those who have lost their jobs or who have never managed to move out of the informal economies that now provide a parlous refuge for most of the world's disposable workers, the story is entirely different. With some 2 billion people condemned to live on less that $2 a day, the taunting world of capitalist consumer culture, the huge bonuses earned in financial services, and the self-congratulatory polemics as to the emancipatory potential of neoliberalization, privatization and personal responsibility must seem like a cruel joke."

The reported scores of young girls who were lured by Epstein and his paid adult associates to sexually serve him as well as his circle of acquaintances were further victimized by their additional work assignment of procuring other victims, thus doubling their subsequent feelings of guilt from the victimization of their own peers. But at the time, the payments to them of hundreds of dollars by Epstein for services rendered must have seemed like winning the lottery, a means to enter the capitalistic consumer culture that had previously been way out of their reach. Becoming their own entrepreneurs in the Sharing Economy was a goal which had been drummed into them from birth. Now they know better. Their shamed silence was precisely what Epstein and Acosta were no doubt counting on. Non-disclosure agreements and other legally corrupt methods for the wealthy to avoid justice also probably factored into the longevity of this vast protection racket.

The main reason that Epstein got away with his crime spree for as long as he did, and why his initial "punishment" was so ridiculously light, is that his victims were specifically selected for their lack of clout and money and education. The relatively well-heeled victims of Harvey Weinstein, on the other hand, already had the built-in media platforms from which to articulately expose their ordeals. Many if not most are celebrities or well-educated professionals. Epstein's victims had and probably still have nothing.

The widespread orchestrated abuse of women and children is made possible by unregulated, financialized capital and record inequality. As the Epstein case illustrates, this abuse is not at its core just a gender issue or a question of misogyny. The social and economic maltreatment and exploitation of non-wealthy women and children is a major front in the class war being constantly waged by the powerful greedy few against the desperate many.

Vice Is Nice, But Licker Is Quicker

Before you get too happy about the news that the two-tiered American justice system is finally (maybe) holding wrist-slapped billionaire predator Jeffrey Epstein to legal account, please face reality first.

It's still a two-tiered system, where the rich get off and the poor get screwed.

Take the case of Lenise Lloyd Martin III, 36 and unemployed, who thought he could make a few bucks by joining the latest fad of posting a Facebook video of oneself licking a carton of ice cream in a store and then putting it back inside the freezer compartment. No matter that Martin was just desperately trying to cash in on the whole postmodern Fake News Franchise, and that he then honestly purchased the carton of ice cream, even producing the receipt to prove it.

The sheriff of Assumption County, Louisiana assumed the worst anyway, and he arrested The Licker, mainly to issue a stern  warning to all the other incipient Lickers lurking in the supermarkets of America. Big Brother is watching you, and he's not the benign fraternal duo known Ben and Jerry of Vermont, either. Not even close.

This is especially true if you, like Martin, go grocery shopping while black. The young white woman who started the whole fad simply got a tongue-lashing from the authorities. Martin got thrown in jail.

The public health menaces who are attacking the nation's ice cream supply are real Sicko Lickos, as Rupert Murdoch's New York Post puts it, and they must be stopped before we all die. It seems never to have occurred to the professionally disgusted media and law enforcement personnel in need of a new enemy to hate and a new fear to monger that the ice cream makers should simply add those hard-to-remove plastic collars around the lids to prevent undue licking and the need to throw out hundreds of potentially tainted containers 

The cops were especially miffed because when confronted, Martin actually had the gall to claim that he hadn't done anything wrong by licking before buying. In fact, he was very cavalier about his heinous crime, said Lonny Cavalier, the sheriff's spokesman. He acted so downright disrespectful and dangerous that he's been rotting in jail since the Fourth of July - four more days than flight risk Jeffrey Epstein has been rotting in jail for running a massive child sex trafficking pyramid scheme for the past dozen or so years in the full brazen view of the entire two-tiered complicit criminal justice system and the plutocrats who own it. 

As the New York Times reported in an article buried deep beneath a virtual avalanche of Epstein coverage,

Mr. Martin was charged with criminal mischief for tampering with a product before he had purchased it, and with “unlawful posting of criminal activity for notoriety and publicity,” a rarely-used Louisiana law that makes distributing a video of oneself breaking the law punishable as an additional crime.

 Mr. Martin will spend at least four nights in jail awaiting his bail hearing. In Louisiana, the authorities have 72 hours to bring suspects before a judge, but because of the July 4 holiday, the clock did not start ticking until Monday. The earliest that he will be able to post bail is Wednesday.

Franz Borghardt, a defense lawyer, said that the authorities appeared to be trying to make an example out of Mr. Martin in an effort to put a stop to the flurry of ice cream licking incidents.
“This is a highly aggressive arrest based on a seldom-used statute that is constitutionally questionable,” Mr. Borghardt said.

In other Constitution news, a federal court has just ruled that Donald Trump acted very cavalierly and illegally when he blocked millions of critics from his Twitter account. But unlike his pal Jeff Epstein, he is still very much immune from legal accountability. Just ask his other pal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Even a constitutional amendment making it a crime not to do one's official congressional duty and impeach a criminal president probably would not sway her. After all, nobody paid much attention to that other constitutional amendment which banned liquor back in the day. And why would they? Ignoring the law made a lot of organized criminals very rich during the Depression, just as ignoring the law makes organized criminals very rich today. Congress itself is a virtual Speakeasy, operating in broad daylight. It's not a crime when drunk-on-power oligarchs do it.

Or at least, not usually. Every once in awhile, the Powerful Club does sacrifice one of its own, to give the restive populace the idea that nobody is above the law, not even Jeff Epstein. 

But ask yourselves this: would Bill Clinton pal Epstein have been arrested if Hillary Clinton were the one sitting in the Oval Office today and if Donald Trump's corrupt labor secretary hadn't been the one who'd given Epstein his original slap on the wrist?

And another thing: having been rightly castigated for their abject failure to protect the caged children in the southern border's concentration camps, the Democrats are desperate for another virtue-signaling hook by which to "resist" Trump. With Epstein's belated indictment, politicians and pundits are falling all over themselves as they scramble to defend the scores of sex-trafficked young girls whose continuing victimization by Epstein had been an open secret for years. It gives them a much-needed break from pretending to care about the imprisoned and abused refugees. 

And just in case championing Epstein's victims isn't enough, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are taking the brave stance of inviting the champion US women's soccer team to drop by their Speakeasy for a splashy photo-op. If they couldn't put any distance between themselves and Trump on their mutual persecution of the imprisoned immigrant children, they can at least brag about what good sports they are about sports. In lieu of introducing any actual legislation mandating equal pay for equal work and a living wage for all women and for all people, they're making a bit of a self-serving stink about how professional women athletes should make at least as many millions of dollars as their male counterparts do. Those fashion spreads in Vogue and those lucrative product endorsement deals just don't cut it.

You go, girls! And stay away from the ice cream, unless it's the Opulence Sundae  kind with the real gold leaf embellishments and the side of caviar that you pay $1,000 for. That's about $100 per lick, at least. The freedom to consume in freedom is the greatest freedom that the Neoliberal World has ever invented for those precious few who can afford it.

Meanwhile, enough with the political bickering. Let's all join together and celebrate more bipartisan cuts to the food stamp program as we celebrate Jeffrey Epstein's great legal reckoning. We will feel replete just knowing that the Ruling Class is on our side, as is God.

So On and So Fourth

*Updated below.

To the chagrin of thousands if not millions of Rod Serling junkies, the SyFy Channel cruelly nixed its annual Twilight Zone Fourth of July marathon last year.

 So somebody has to fill the patriotic holiday TV vacuum, right? And that somebody turns out to be none other than Showman-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump. As Daughter of the United States (DOTUS) Ivanka might say, "It's totally surreal!"

So in lieu of time travel and cheesy flying saucers and the Monsters Coming to Maple Street, all manner of military bombers and jets and helicopters will darken the skies over D.C. on Thursday evening. There will even be a few tanks on display on the National Mall to thrill the ticket-holders, not to mention regaling those stuck in their houses in the throes of Twilight Zone withdrawal. C-Span coverage of Trump's horror show should hopefully tide them over.

Sadly, not even the SyFy Channel will be airing this true-life frightening event. As a matter of fact, only Fox News will join C-Span in the wall-to-wall coverage. Both MSNBC and CNN say they will adhere to their previous scheduled programming of various talking heads sitting around a table bitching about Trump and bragging about their own righteously indignant decisions to replay only the most gruesome "highlights" of his Fourth of July show. Heaven forbid that they collude with Trumpian authoritarian narcissism on this sacred day of all days. They already do enough colluding with his authoritarian narcissism on the other 364 days, or whenever he holds a Nuremberg-style campaign rally in some flyover city that they themselves would never live in, let along visit other than to cover a Trump event or a tornado. 

There are, let's face it, already more than enough displays of hideous military might on American TV screens. Tune in to any of the cable Sunday shows, and at least one of the sponsors is bound to be a branch of the military or the manufacturer of the same kinds of death machines which will so distastefully and outrageously fly over Washington on the Fourth of July.

But for some reason, Recruiter-in-Chief Trump's own Independence Day theatrics are giving all good war-mongers and true some serious conniption fits.

 The Best and the Brightest are not used to death machines flying directly over their own hallowed democratic institutions and gated communities and manicured lawns in the greater D.C. area, the wealthiest per capita section of real estate in the entire United States.  

And speaking of grass, they're suddenly all concerned about parks. They're bitching about the obscene cost of the Trump Show - more than $2.5 million of it allegedly coming from National Park funds, which would be better spent improving and cleaning the parks. These are the same critics who don't ever bat an eye at the trillion-odd dollars spent every single year on the death machines so grotesquely being put on public display on one nightmarish night for the whole world to see. They prefer that their death machines operate far, far away where American citizens don't get to see them actually killing innocent people.

The Guardian newspaper is typical of the corporate media-political class outrage over Trump's Fourth of July apostasy:

The event takes place in a politically hostile environment: Hillary Clinton took more than 90% of the vote in the District of Columbia in the 2016 election, whereas Trump secured just 4.1%. The Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue is one of the few outposts in the capital where his supporters are conspicuous. 

And for decades, presidents have kept a low profile during Washington’s annual celebration of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, as typically hundreds of thousands of people gather at the National Mall for a nonpartisan concert and fireworks.

 But ever the disrupter, Trump its putting himself centre stage this year. He tweeted on Tuesday: “Big 4th of July in D.C. ‘Salute to America.’ The Pentagon & our great Military Leaders are thrilled to be doing this & showing to the American people, among other things, the strongest and most advanced Military anywhere in the World. Incredible Flyovers & biggest ever Fireworks!”

Trump is egregiously not only creating his own Christmas in July, he is trying to create his own Super Bowl in July. It is an unprecedented breach of protocol the likes of which the Military Industrial Complex has never seen. 

 You see, besides waging never-ending wars, it has only been at violent corporate sporting events that the United States Military has regularly performed such public displays of authoritarian, nationalistic strength. 

Maybe (besides aspiring to be Hitler) Donald Trump is simply getting back at Professional Football. Not only was he prevented from buying his own team several years ago, his constant harangues at football players who refuse to stand for the National Anthem have been greeted with derision. So if professional football players disrespect both him and the flag, his Fourth of July stunt might his way of dissing them right back. 

Speaking of the spending of public money on war propaganda, a little scandal erupted with news that an estimated $10 million in taxpayer money had been paid out by the Obama Defense Department between 2011 and 2015 to 14 National League teams simply to "put on elaborate patriotic salutes to the military."

As Think Progress reported, Trump's criticism of players who "take a knee" during the playing of the National Anthem is really an unwitting defense of a policy put in place during the Obama administration, which importuned players to take part in jingoistic salutes to the flag and other propaganda events honoring the troops and the armed forces. The whole point of the militarization of football games via this "paid patriotism" was to recruit more young people to join an ever more depleted and exhausted all-volunteer military.

The year before Trump won election, and as a result of Congressional oversight, the NFL announced it would be ending its war marketing programs and returning a token $724,000 of the Pentagon payout money it had pocketed for staging blatant recruiting drives during games and using its athletes to do so.

But the National Anthems and the marching military bands and the elaborate flyovers at the Super Bowl itself still remain time-honored traditions. As the U.S. Air Force bragged in a press release for this year's earsplitting performance:

“Supporting this event is a tremendous honor for the team and the U.S. Air Force,” said Lt. Col. John Caldwell, Thunderbirds commander and leader. “We look forward to showcasing the pride, precision and professionalism of our nation’s 660,000 Total Force Airmen to football fans around the world.”

 The Thunderbirds’ flyover, its first public event in 2019, will feature six F-16 Fighting Falcons, soaring over the Mercedes-Benz Stadium at the moment the final notes of The Star Spangled Banner are sung. They will take off for the Super Bowl LIII flyover from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Marietta, Georgia.

The Thunderbirds last flew over the Super Bowl in 2017 at the NRG Stadium, Houston.

 The Thunderbirds’ team is composed of eight pilots, four support officers, 120 enlisted Airmen and three civilians serving in 28 Air Force job specialties. In 2019, the Thunderbirds are scheduled to perform at 65 air shows in 33 different locations all over the world.

Since the unit’s inception in 1953, more than 300 million people in all 50 states and 60 countries have witnessed the distinctive red, white and blue jets in thousands of official aerial demonstrations.

Here's the performance, in case you missed it. You probably also missed the mass outcries expressing the nation's horror and outrage at this shameful example of aggressive American exceptionalism. Because there were none. On the contrary - it is the media's task to relentlessly hype this kind of patriotic horror and do their part to recruit more troops before they profit from showcasing them in their wheelchairs and caskets:

And it's not just at football games that the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps perform flyovers to encourage more sports fans to enlist to serve in the nation's endless wars.They're also doing their stunts at Major League Baseball games, at college games and, most disgusting of all, even at Little League season openers.

New rules now allow up to four aircraft at a time to perform at each standard sporting event flyover, while limits on ground equipment displays have been virtually abolished. 

These flyovers, of course, are expensive. But the military actually justifies the costs by claiming that the promotional spectacles are all part of the pilots' training experience. Better to fly over the bodies of thousands of people where everybody can watch you learning your craft than to practice your skills lonely and unseen and unsung above unpopulated deserts and bodies of water. 

Current estimates are that the military honors at least 850 flyover requests from sports groups each year, at varying costs. A seconds-long six-plane flyover for six F/A-18A jets from the Navy's Blue Angels squadron, for example, runs taxpayers about $36,000.

So while it's gross and it's self-serving, let's put Donald Trump's fascistic Fourth of July extravaganza into some perspective. He's glorifying himself, of course, but he's also just simply horning in on the lucrative corporate war machine which has been so profitable for so few and so deadly to so many.

Maybe enough people will be so turned off by his shameless narcissism that they won't immediately rush out to their nearest military recruiting office to enlist after watching the flyovers and listening to his jingoistic rants. That distinct possibility is probably what's really riling up the war profiteers, the neocons, the liberal interventionists and the media sycophants.

Trump makes war look tawdry and ugly and disgusting. Tanks a lot, Trump!


*Update, 7/5. For those who missed his speech, Trump at least got into the true spirit of The Twilight Zone's time-travel episodes when he snort-bellowed these words:

"In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. 

"Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."

Trump could have been riffing off any number of classic Twilight Zone plots. There's the classic episode about the airplane that entered a time warp and passengers saw dinosaurs where La Guardia Airport should have been. And then there was the one about the guy who went back in time and tried to warn everybody about historical catastrophes. But the best comparison between Trump's addled revisionist history might be to "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville," which features a bored corrupt millionaire who literally gets stuck in a past that never existed except within his own warped mind. Judging from the amount of loud sniffling he did during his tirade, could Trump have hit the cocaine before taking up position in front of the Lincoln Memorial?

Colonel Bone Spurs had to have been on something to actually stick to his script and summon up the chutzpah to urge people to join the same military he had so studiously avoided during his Vietnam-era youth. As it was, his bleary image behind rain soaked bullet proof glass made him look like a crazy old coot who'd forgotten to take his clothes off before hitting the shower and performing his spittle-inflected ode to bloody American Exceptionalism. At least he didn't sing.

Stop Calling Corporate Democrats "Moderates"

To hear the establishment media tell it, you're an extremist if you want guaranteed health care for all, affordable housing, free higher education, a living wage, and even, god forbid, peace on earth. You're a "moderate" if you're a corrupt Democratic politician who demands more pain for the masses  and more power for the runaway capitalist/donor class whose endless pursuit of pleasure and riches is directly fueled by the pain and sweat-labor of others. 

If you're a Blue Dog or a New Dem, and your idea of representative politics is passing legislation that takes from the poor and gives to the rich, then you're a reasonable "centrist." But if your name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar, and you often vocalize your desire to take from the rich and give to the poor, then you don't speak reasonably. Instead, you "huff" out your extreme agenda in a crazily indignant manner.

"Huffed" is exactly how New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis has framed a statement by AOC in the Paper of Record's latest in a long string of blatant propaganda pieces extolling the virtues of the right-wing reactionary Democrats, whose latest name for themselves is "The Problem Solvers' Caucus." These corporate shills' attempt to hide their true oligarchic agenda from the electorate, while scaring suffering voters and gaslighting the party's ever-more-popular left flank is beginning to reek of desperation.

They seem to believe that the more times they utter or write the word "moderate" to describe the rank endemic corruption in the Democratic Party, the more likely it is their message will cow voters, an increasing number (at least 40 percent) of whom are beginning to accept the reality that socialism in some form is the only possible antidote to the capitalism that is literally killing us.

"For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power," the Times confidently proclaims.

And in case that headline didn't slam you hard enough, Hirschfeld-Davis's lead announces it again:

For all the talk of a Tea Party of the left, the true power in the House revealed its face last week — the Mighty Moderates.
The failure of House liberals to attach strict conditions to billions of dollars in emergency border aid requested by President Trump highlighted the outsize power of about two dozen centrist Democrats, mainly from Republican-leaning districts, who are asserting themselves to pull the chamber to the right.

Notice the contradictions in just that one paragraph. Although the word "moderate" connotes calmness, it also now takes on a militant mightiness. Calling these politicians moderates is like calling wars of aggression peace marches. And how can one be a "centrist" while at the same time making no secret of the fact that the true aim is to pull the House to the right? I'm just surprised that they aren't also calling themselves "muscular." After all, some of the new members have come to Congress directly from careers in the armed forces and the "intelligence community." That was the Democratic leadership's whole plan to "resist" Trump: attack him from the right by joining forces with the war and surveillance sectors.

The supplemental aim of this "news story" in the Times is to absolve House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of any personal responsibility for the debacle of last week's shameful Democratic collusion with Trump's sadistic treatment of migrants and refugees. The Paper of Record attempts to rehab her image by placing her in the supposedly powerless liberal camp. Although she herself is a corporate centrist to the core, as evidenced by her frequent public accolades to the recently deceased anti-New Deal billionaire Pete Peterson, and her outspoken disdain for single payer health care, and her passive-aggressive failure to bring up drug price control legislation, Nancy Pelosi has obligingly been cast as a progressive warrior queen who tries her mightiest to suppress the Mighty Moderates. Never mind that these right-wingers were heavily bankrolled by Madame Speaker's own corrupt Democratic Congressional Campaign Commitee (DCCC) in order to suppress any upstart progressive challengers... such as, for instance, AOC.  

Pelosi's excuse is that because these heavily bankrolled "moderates" are credited with flipping the House from red to blue, she must now kowtow to their every whim if she and her party expect to maintain their hold on to power. This Article of Truthiness is given an extra boost of verisimulitude by the Times when Hirschfeld-Davis uses as her "expert" source one Laura Hall of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, quoted as saying:

“If you’re Speaker Pelosi or another member of the Democratic leadership, you have to always be thinking about those members whose seats went from red to blue and helped to flip the House.”

The Times does not inform its readers that BPC is in its own turn heavily bankrolled by the for-profit health care industry and therefore is adamantly opposed to Medicare For All and other policies for the greater public good. Its Board of Directors includes insurance company CEOs, private equity honchos  and Silicon Valley moguls. One director, David T. Blair, founded firms with such anodyne names as Accountable Health Solutions and Catalyst Health Solutions and Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) to help disguise the fact that at their extreme cores they are lobbying firms. Their poorly hidden purpose is to ensure that Medicare For All fails and that profiteers continue to get rich from the pain of others. Former First Lady Michelle Obama even lent her name to the endeavor, under cover of caring about and combating the nation's alleged childhood obesity epidemic. (You can read more about all the writhing corporate tentacles sucking the life out of what's still left of America's health here.) 

As an aside, Cory Booker, who is running for president on a co-opted Medicare For All platform, is nonetheless still listed is one of PHA's advisors. He is famous for, among other things, once having killed a bill that would have allowed drug reimportations from Canada. He is very sorry for that boo-boo now, but his name and his smiling face are still very prominently displayed on the PHA website. Of course, it could always be one of those Russian troll farms at work again, interfering in our Democracy.

But never mind about the underlying corruption and the corporatism, because the Official Media Narrative has it that things are getting mightily yet moderately ugly in the Lower House. And it's mostly all the fault of upstarts like AOC, who are "playing right into the hands of gleeful Republicans" by openly blasting the party's collusion with Trump and his sadistic immigration policies.

In her op-ed barely disguised as a straight news story, Hirschfeld-Davis can also barely contain her own centrist agenda:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whose rock-starlike popularity on the left has given her a louder than usual microphone for a first-term lawmaker, accused the moderates of being the new Tea Party.Their tactics, she huffed, are “just horrifying.”

AOC did not assert her opinion in the polite and collegial way her party elders have always relied upon to mask their organization's own innate ugliness. Instead, she "huffed."

From the Free Online Dictionary:

v.intr.1. To puff; blow.2. To make noisy, empty threats; bluster.3. To react indignantly; take offense.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of a volatile chemical or substance as a means of becoming intoxicated.v.tr.1. To cause to puff up; inflate.2. To treat with insolence; bully.3. To anger; annoy.4. Slang To inhale the fumes of (a volatile chemical, for example) as a means of becoming intoxicated.

"Moderate," on the other hand, embraces a whole slew of positive and calming qualities whether the word be noun, verb, or adjective.

adj., n., v. -at•ed, -at•ing. adj.1. kept or keeping within reasonable limits; not extreme, excessive, or intense: a moderate price.2. of medium quantity, extent, or amount: a moderate income.3. mediocre or fair: moderate talent.4. calm or mild, as of the weather.5. of or pertaining to moderates, as in politics or religion.n.6. a person who is moderate in opinion or opposed to extreme views and actions, as in politics.v.t.7. to reduce the excessiveness of; make less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous: to moderate one's criticism.8. to preside over or at (a public forum, meeting, discussion, etc.).v.i.9. to become less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous.10. to act as moderator; preside.

The term "moderate" as applied by the establishment media to the corrupt corporate shills of the type residing in the Republican wing of the Democratic Party is therefore a complete mask. So is its synonym, "centrist."

As Tariq Ali points out in his book, aptly titled "The Extreme Centre: A Warning," it is the "moderate" neoliberal who has been the cause of the most radical social and economic inequality in modern history, if not all recorded history. These Mighty Militant Moderates in service to the rich began rising with a vengeance as soon as the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain went crashing down.

Capitalism, intoxicated by its victory and unchallenged from any quarter, no longer felt the need to protect its left flank by conceding any more reforms. Even a marginal distribution of wealth to reduce inequalities was off the agenda.

Under these conditions, social democracy became redundant. All it could offer its traditional supporters was fear, or vacuous ideological formulae, whose principle function was to conceal the poverty of any real progressive ideas: 'third way,' 'conflict-free politics,' 'beyond left and right.' The net result of this was either an electoral shift towards the far right...or an increasing alienation from politics and entire democratic process.

Regardless of political party and regardless of individual country in the transnational corporate world, as Ali wrote two years before Brexit and the election of Trump, we the citizens of the physical world are increasingly trammeled by 

An authoritarianism that places capital above the needs of citizens and upholds a corporate power rubber-stamped by elected parliaments. The new politicians of Europe and America mark a break with virtually every form of traditional politics. The new technology has made ruling by clique or committee much easier. They are immured in exclusive bunkers accessible only to bankers and businessmen, service media folk, their own advisors and sycophants of various types. They live in a half-real, half-fake world of money, statistics and focus groups. Their contact with real people, outside election periods, is minimal. Their public face is largely mediated via the mendacious propaganda of the TV networks.  

This is why the Powers That Be have decreed that election periods never have a period at the end of them. The spectacle of controlled elections is the only frayed thread left dangling in our political system.

Without this frayed thread, people tend to start smashing things, like the wonderful citizens of Hong Kong are doing right now.

So look, over there, folks back here in the Land of the Free! The horse-race is on, and our elected officials are calling each other nasty names, so pick your favorite team. The Times and other media sycophants will always be there to tell you all the takeaways and the five or ten essential things you absolutely, positively need to know today.

Debate & Switch, Part Two

Mere hours after their congressional colleagues joined with Republicans to allocate $4.6 billion to hire more sadistic border patrol agents and ICE staff to arrest and cage children in concentration camps, 10 more Democrats took to the debate stage Thursday night. Almost unanimously, they vowed that if elected, they will decriminalize border crossings and provide medical insurance to undocumented migrants. It was quite a nifty way to avoid discussing that day's shameful capitulation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had just caved to approving the so-called "humanitarian aid" package after Vice President Mike Pence promised he'd keep her in the loop on the refugee kids (whom she'd only that day described as her lion cubs in need of maternal protection) who die in ICE custody as soon as  possible after they take their last breaths.

Or, as the New York Times blandly described it, putting the best possible face on some truly gruesome bipartisan collusion:

Her retreat came after Vice President Mike Pence gave Ms. Pelosi private assurances that the administration would abide by some of the restrictions she had sought. They included a requirement to notify lawmakers within 24 hours after the death of a migrant child in government custody, and a 90-day time limit on children spending time in temporary intake facilities, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

The Democrats might have lost their Battle to send toothbrushes and soap to the traumatized imprisoned children at the border, but if they beat Trump next year they'll make damned sure that every non-criminal traumatized adult and child refugee gets a Medicaid card. Freedom might not be a basic human right any more, but health insurance will never die, especially if it's insurance that can't actually be used within the confines of cages or while hiding from a beefed-up border patrol. No place is safe, because the "border" is now defined not only as every state in America, but wherever American corporate interests and client regimes exist. In other words, the U.S.border comprises a major chunk of the planet. 

This makes it so easy for Democratic candidates, especially the senators who conveniently didn't have to vote for the latest border aid package, to cynically promise a health insurance card for every undocumented pocket. What migrant in their right mind would risk everything applying for an I.D. card, thereby making it easier for ICE agents to locate them?

This horrible truth was the main switcheroo part of Thursday night's Debate & Switch spectacle in Miami. Nobody on the NBC moderation team and none of the candidates took so much as a swipe at Nancy Pelosi and her right-wing Democratic colleagues, who are grotesquely described as "moderates" in corporate media narratives.

Luckily for Madam Speaker, the fresh hypocrisy was conveniently overshadowed by California Senator Kamala Harris's withering and well-rehearsed attack on front-runner Joe Biden's sordid racist history. Rank opportunist and jailer of black mothers of truant children though she herself may be, Harris was the perfect prosecutorial attack machine, given that she herself had been bused to school as a child in Berkeley.

As is his wont, Biden only made his bad situation worse, stammering querulously that localities like Berkeley - and not the federal government - had the right to set integration policy. This made him sound just like George Wallace and the Southern racist's guide to "state's rights" as a means of keeping the institutional racism and segregation alive. 

Although Harris prefaced her attack with the disclaimer that she doesn't think Biden himself is a racist, she couldn't have elicited his deep-seated racist mindset any better than she did. 

We'll see how this plays out in the polls, and whether Biden's lead will be affected. If it's not, then there are more silent old white Deplorables out there in the Homeland than those who profess to be in Trump's base. There also might be more conservative older black voters out there who prefer the racist they knew yesterday to the racist they know today.

If anything, Biden could actually benefit from the Trump Effect: compared to the current psychopathic Oval Office occupant, Creepy Uncle Joe doesn't look quite as bad as he otherwise might have. Trump has set the bar conveniently low for him and for all of them. Voters have been effectively desensitized to a relentless and daily regimen of Trumpian shock therapy.

And Thursday night's debate performances from the other contenders always could have been worse. Bernie, for example, could have chimed in and announced that the country is sick and tired of hearing about Joe Biden's damned racism. As it was, he was probably wise to play it safe and stick to his talking points. These talking points were certainly amplified, if not outright plagiarized, by Harris and the other opportunists on the stage.

And in piling on Biden, Harris also obliquely threw the former Deporter-in-Chief, Barack Obama, under the bus. Even Biden indirectly criticized Obama's "Safe Communities" deportation dragnet, which caught up millions of undocumented but otherwise law-abiding people and foisted upon them one-way bus tickets back to hell before the Obama administration finally abandoned the program in the face of myriad court and municipal challenges.

Perhaps more shocking than Harris's attack was "moderate" Mike Bennet of Colorado lambasting Biden, and by extension Obama, for caving to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during 2012 budget negotiations. This was when the Bush tax cuts for the rich were made permanent, while even more austerity (the "Sequester") was imposed on government programs benefiting  ordinary people. In a classic example of political bait and switch, Biden bragged that he got the GOP to raise taxes because a small proportion of the tax cuts did in fact expire... a feat for which regular people have been punished ever since. 

Thanks to Thursday's debate, there is a slight chance that it will dawn on more people that Trump became president for a very good reason. He instinctively knows that the masses of people are feeling pain and anger, and he acknowledges that pain and anger while co-opting it in service of the extremely wealthy. The corporate Democrats who brag about "getting things done" in the interests of bipartisanship are not your friends. They're also not particularly good at pretending to be your friends.

It was almost a miracle. Obama, more skilled than most in his party at  pretending to be your friend, came out of the debates with his carefully marketed reputation suffering some collateral damage. The bloom is coming off the plastic rose. And it's about time. 

Debate & Switch, Part One

Calling a two-night casting call of 20 presidential hopefuls a "debate" was always a bit of a stretch. But Wednesday's audition, which pitted one lone leading Democratic candidate (Elizabeth Warren) against several stand-in candidates (and even a few talentless actors who appeared to have literally stumbled from street to stage by sheer accident) made it more obvious than ever what the true purpose of this corporate charade is.

And the purpose of Decision '20 is this: dilute the message and the messengers enough to make Bernie Sanders disappear, or at least fail to stand out as sharply as he did during the the 2016 campaign. Have a bunch of pale imitators jump on his bandwagon with enough clattering and stamping feet and enough voices braying in the same progressive key that his original message is muted and rendered ultimately harmless for the moneyed interests truly running this show.

NBC could barely keep its own moneyed interests contained on Opening Night, failing even to mute the microphones of two of its multimillionaire personalities-cum-debate moderators as they chattered inanely backstage, ruining one of  Elizabeth Warren's rare chances to answer a question. Cut to commercial, because somebody's got to pay for the spectacle by selling stuff the audience at home neither wants nor needs.

Since I no longer have cable TV, Wednesday night's livestreamed show was the first time I'd ever heard some of these alleged candidates speak. Beto O'Rourke was the winner in the category of failing to live up to all the hype I've been reading about him. Despite his best efforts to mimic the cadence and timbre of Barack Obama's speechifying, and his stilted forays into speaking Spanish just to show that he can speak Spanish, the only thing this guy was a candidate for was the vaudevillian cane around the neck to drag him off the stage in the middle of his vapid spiel.

And it's too bad that there was no curtain to erase the visages of the two dudes at either end of the stage.  I'm talking about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who crashed both the campaign and the debate stage in one of his many escapes from New York City, where he is widely despised for using his security detail for daily travel to a Brooklyn gym where he can tell homeless people to get lost while working out on his treadmill. He interrupted the other candidates as much as he interrupts his official work day back home.

 At the other end of the stage was some blowhard tycoon and ex-congress critter named John Delaney, who was given all the time he wanted to perform his peevish bald Mitt Romney routine, complaining about all the annoying people who are making his life so miserable.

This guy didn't need a hook around his neck. He needed a punch in his smirking prune face and a cut-off of his microphone. If he is allowed back for next month's Debate & Switch, it will be all the proof we need that this game is well and truly rigged. As if we needed any more proof.

Best performance by a supporting actor in the Platitudes category was, of course, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (D-Private Equity and Big Pharma.) To hear him tell it, he still lives in the slums of Newark and has to fight against gangs every single day on his way to the Senate floor. I was only surprised that he didn't also recount that terrible time a few years ago when he took part in the Celebrity Food Stamp Challenge and discovered how shockingly hard it is to buy a tiny bottle of imported olive oil with the average weekly $30 SNAP stipend.

Not that there weren't any high points to Opening Night, mind you. Elizabeth Warren actually raised her hand in affirmation when moderator Chuck Todd asked the group if the private insurance industry should be left out entirely of Medicare for All. (So did de Blasio, but he is so desperately pandering in so many ways that he 'll do, say, or interrupt anything just to get another minute of fame.) Warren's hand-raising was important, though, because she had heretofore been rather skittish on her support for true single payer health care.

Tulsi Gabbard, despite moderator Chuck Todd's ham-handed attempt to dredge up allegations of homophobia and the corporate media's studious ignoring of her throughout the primary and in debate coverage itself, was the most "Googled" of all the candidates during the show. She fell flat, i.m.h.o., when she failed to raise her hand along with Warren and de Blasio when Todd pitched the Medicare for All question at the group.

We'll have to wait and see whether Gabbard and her anti-war message advance in the polls, and also whether Warren's current status as media darling du jour and the only thing standing between Wall Street and Bernie Sanders survives. I doubt it, and I also doubt that Warren will help them keep their contrived "Liz vs Bernie" narrative alive either. She didn't take their bait at the first Debate & Switch show, anyway.

Stayed tuned, and stay glued, and stay close to your drink of choice. It'll make you feel like you're more than just a spectator.

Bernie's Student Debt Jubilee

Bernie Sanders is announcing legislation of truly Biblical proportions: the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of United States student debt.

The bill, with the co-sponsorship of Democratic Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, would wipe the slate clean for each of the nation's 45 million student borrowers, both rich and poor, and would be paid for with a Wall Street transaction tax. As such, it goes much further than Elizabeth Warren's plan, which would means-test student debt and forgive a smaller total amount of $640 billion. The wealthy, defined as households making more than $250,000, would stay on the hook for their education loans.

In one fell swoop, therefore, Sanders's bill destroys the argument that it's unfair for the wealthy to bear the entire burden of loan forgiveness. It also renders moot their standard demand that the less well-off must always "have skin in the game" so as to avoid the dreaded moral hazard of free ridership. If the children of the wealthy also become entitled to a free higher education, then the proverbial Playing Field might truly be leveled. No student will have a leg up or a head start just by virtue of how much money the parents have, either for tuition or for "bribing" institutions of higher learning to admit their children in the first place.

Everybody would be privileged. The much-ballyhooed meritocracy might finally develop some relation to reality. Every student will legally and morally accomplish what Donald Trump has boastfully admitted on more than one occasion: that he became successful because he is one of the few privileged owners of wealth connected enough to figure out how to manipulate debt to his own advantage.

If he rails against student debt forgiveness during the presidential campaign, he'll sound like even more of a hypocrite than he already is. 

 Why do I say that the Sanders plan is Biblical? Because the forgiveness of debt goes back to the dawn of civilization. Most famously, a prophet named Nehemiah, a Babylonian Jew and the appointed governor of his native Judea, became very testy in a very Bernie-like way when he noticed that whole generations of his people were living in permanent debt bondage because of the greed of wealthy landowners. "Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers. and said unto them, 'Ye exact usury, every one his brother.' And I set a great assembly against them," he wrote in the Book of Nehemiah.

So while Sanders calls his own plan to end whole lifetimes of punitive student debt peonage a "revolutionary" one, it's really an idea that is very firmly tethered to history, especially pre-democratic history. And it is also quite modest, in an FDR-style liberally democratic sort of way, given that Nehemiah's Law of Jubilee stipulated that all debts owing from the powerless to the ruling class automatically be cancelled every seven years. It was the only way to keep civilization chugging along.

As anthropologist David Graeber chronicles in the book "Debt: the First 5,000 Years" the obliteration of debt has become the result in just about every major peasant revolt in recorded history.  

And since our current oligarchic system is one of the most extremely unequal in all of recorded history, the inherent unfairness of the feudalistic American student debt crisis has become more apparent by the day, with stories abounding of retirees in their 60s and 70s having their Social Security checks garnished to satisfy their student loans, and even dying in penury, still mired in decades' worth of crushing student debt.

Since debt is premised upon two equal parties entering into a contract, the trillion-dollar financial systems which demand the lifelong servitude of powerless student borrowers are exposed not only as unequal and immoral, but criminal. Such contracts should now rightly be viewed as fraudulent and such loans as predatory. 

As Graeber points out in his book, the Old Testament debt jubilees were ordained expressly to keep the promise of the Promised Land to formerly enslaved Jews. Wouldn't Bernie's own plan similarly keep the promise of the American Dream alive for perpetually indebted college graduates? After all, higher education is marketed as a ticket to a better life, not as a ticket straight to the hell of precarious, low-wage employment in a gig economy.

Graeber writes, "Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation - the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land."

So another consequence of Bernie's permanent Student Debt Jubilee, coupled with legislation for tuition-free courses of study at public institutions, might be that students will begin to study what they're good at and what interests them and what might make the world a better place, rather than what courses might make them the most money and enable them to pay off their student loans. In other words, art and literature, education and the social sciences might begin to vie with business and finance curricula in popularity. Institutions of higher learning might discover that it no longer behooves them to be endowed and dictated to by Wall Street, think tanks and transnational corporations. Those forgiven their debts will not, like Trump and his oligarchic cohort, have cheated the system. As co-equal beneficiaries of free higher education, they also would be less likely to then turn around and cheat their own employees and bilk their investors and pit one group of powerless people against another group of powerless people. 

Resentment and fear might go out the window, right along with the punishing debt.

A Debt Jubilee would not only be good for the country's economic health - think of the boost to the system if 45 million graduates suddenly have more money to spend on things like houses! - but our mental and moral and environmental health as well.