Son of #Russiagate

First let's get the obligatory "I'm not a Trump fan" disclaimer out of the way. The transcript of the July phone conversation that the U.S. president had with the Ukrainian president did indeed showcase Trump at his oafish, garbled, self-interested worst. He did indeed sound like a less talented and less subtle Tony Soprano.

 A smoking gun, though,the phone call definitely was not, Besides hinting that he wanted dirt on Joe Biden and his lovely son Hunter, Trump seemed just as interested in getting dirt on CrowdStrike. That's the investigatory agency employed by the Democratic National Committee which provided the FBI with its subsequent "assessment," or best guess, that the theft of emails so embarrassing to the Clinton campaign was done via  Russian hack rather than through an inside job. The FBI never independently examined the DNC servers, which Trump and others believe might currently be residing in Ukraine. There is an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into the actual origins of #Russiagate.

(I, for one, would love to get the dirt on CrowdStrike and the Clinton origins of Cold War 2.0)

The one thing that might nail Trump is the attempted cover-up of the transcript before he finally blinked and released the transcript - after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally blinked and agreed to at least consider impeachment. The CIA whistleblower, according to a just-released letter, claims that the phone call transcript in question had been illegally secreted within a separate White House computer system in order to protect Trump.

Even before the release of both the transcript and the whistle-blower complaint, the corporate media went into full hysterical overdrive last weekend. What finally changed Pelosi's mind were demands by the media and a group of so-called "Frontline" Democrats for impeachment. These congress critters, many of whom just happen to be former CIA and Pentagon employees, apparently made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

This is the same Nancy Pelosi who built her entire political career on the House Intelligence Committee. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who refused to impeach George W. Bush over his own abuses of power, including ordering torture and  illegally invading Iraq based solely upon fraudulent CIA claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that he planned to wield against the United States.

And this is the same old Democratic Party that would rather manufacture enemies and instill fear in voters than give voters what they actually want and what they truly need:  Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, medical and student debt forgiveness - you know, everything that Bernie Sanders is campaigning for. Once again, the elites are trying to co-opt non-elites in another one of their intra-oligarchical battles.

And who knows, maybe this is even their passive-aggressive way of getting rid of Joe Biden while they smarmily pretend to defend him against all manner of Trumpian slings and arrows. It could even be their passive-aggressive way of  getting Trump re-elected. They certainly aren't doing any favors to Elizabeth Warren's anti-corruption platform when she becomes forced to defend the corrupt Bidens on behalf of the party.

The best outcome will be the election of Bernie Sanders. This, of course, will happen over the DNC's cold dead body. (Fingers crossed.)

I responded over the weekend to the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof's hysterical Saturday column, which he penned even before the transcript and whistle-blower letter were released. He knew, he just knew, that there was something rotten going on. Because of the stinky stench! My published comment:

The Biden-Ukraine connection has been an open secret for some time. That Trump is using it for political gain has also been an open secret for quite some time. And it certainly is not the first, nor will it be the last,time that a president engages with a foreign leader for non-altruistic reasons.

 Look at the big picture. As the NYT reported back in May, "Hunter Biden...was one of many politically prominent Americans of both major parties who made money in Ukraine over the last decade. In several cases — most notably that of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman — that business came under criminal investigation that exposed a seedy side of the lucrative Western consulting industry in Ukraine."

The fact that an employee of the CIA - perhaps the most secretive and unaccountable, de facto branch of the US government ever invented - is raising an alarm should also be taken with a huge grain of salt. In my view, both the media and the Democratic Party are being way too friendly to this agency, not least by constantly describing it as the "intelligence "community" as though it were a sewing circle. In fact, it is an often rogue operation that "tortured some folks" and quite recently burglarized Senate computers to meddle with that body's investigation and reporting of said torture.

 This is more palace intrigue designed to pit American against American based on their allegiance to one wing or the other of the oligarchic duopoly. That's what stinks.

Needless to say, my unpatriotic failure to jump on the impeachment bandwagon with the New York Times was not kindly received by some of the Reading Faithful. 

I can no longer access either the stand-alone comment (reprinted below) or a  follow-up from one "Mike Bonnell" who urged the Times to investigate me and other non-believers in order to confirm his suspicion that we are Russian assets. I flagged them both. After the better part of a day, the Times in its infinite wisdom finally removed them. Because if there is one thing they insist on, it's that people remain civil to one another as the Paper of Record drums up the xenophobia to a fever pitch. They also removed my own reply to "Mike" in which I surmised that Joe McCarthy must be cackling in his grave. I'd also politely requested that he divulge his complete list of tell-tale Russian code words in the interests of keeping my fellow Times readers safe from subversives.  

Mike BonnellMontreal, Canada1h ago
The Russians are hard at it. I've read at least three comments (names below) that made me think of caviar as I read them. I encourage readers to check out the 'letters' by the following and see if they don't find the grammar, expressions and sentiments a bit...Russian-trying-to-write-'good'-English like.
"Karen Garcia, Kirk & Lars"

Gates Foundation: Poor People Need Better P.R.

The problem with poor people is not that they don't have money. The problem with poor people is that they have horrible reputations. And billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates wants to repair those reputations by holding a contest to see who in the Creative Class can propose the best ways to "combat the false narratives" about poverty in America.

Ten lucky winners will receive grants of up to $100,000 each if their ideas meet the standards of a secret panel of "expert" judges. According to The Hollywood Reporter, entries may include the written word, performance pieces and documentary films.

The Gates Foundation still pretends to be utterly baffled about the root causes of the most extreme wealth inequality of modern times, in which eight or twelve oligarchs - including Bill Gates himself - have pocketed more cash than is owned by the bottom half of the entire global population. 

Thomas Piketty and other economists, along with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have thus proposed both domestic and global wealth taxes on these modern-day robber barons; their combined holdings could easily feed and house everybody on the planet who needs food and housing. But since the wealthy don't want to be taxed, they concern-troll instead, offering a mere pittance to "explore" ways to fix the very problems that they themselves have had an outsize hand in creating.

The poverty guru in charge of the Gates contest can't even explain its goals coherently. Although a Harvard-trained lawyer, Ryan Rippel sounds more like a graduate of the Joe Biden Culinary Institute For the Study of Word Salads: 

These stereotypes are so problematic in the search for solutions,” says Ryan Rippel, director of U.S. economic mobility and opportunity at the foundation.
“They cause us to demean people and not actually be in the conversation with a lens of humanity and a deep commitment to getting to the bottom of the nature of the challenge.”

Rippel never quite gets around to listing just what these stereotypes about poor people are.

His objective is the standard one beloved of philanthrocapitalism: to study the problems of poor people and in lieu of direct cash aid, to give money to experts who can study those problems some more. If poor people are consulted at all, it must be through the filter of rich people, or consultants and experts who get their funding from rich people and tax-averse corporations. Or, as Rippel so cogently explains on his web page, he is involved with "a number of partnerships to generate new data and public goods in service to those working to address barriers of opportunity."

Before poor people can ever hope to be housed and fed, the rich first must get to the bottom of the nature of the challenge. Because if Bill Gates's flunkies hope to fend off a wealth tax on his fortune, they must first pretend to commit to caring. And before they can pretend to commit to caring, they must dive into the deepest depths of their wells of greed and conduct more endless studies to help absolve them of all blame and responsibility.

Gates's new casting call to Hollywood is his foundation's first anti-poverty initiative designed exclusively for the United States. It comes just as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are ramping up their calls for taxing the wealthy, with the goal being to redistribute the wealth downward. The Gates Foundation's pushing of the narrative that poor people have a reputation problem is in itself a passive-aggressive narrative of poor-shaming. If something must be "combated" then there must be some basis for its actual existence. Right?

Since there are no rules restricting this contest to Hollywood and other media professionals, I suggest that poor people themselves should enter for the chance to win a hundred grand. A homeless person in California might chronicle her daily life on skid row with a borrowed smart phone. A struggling mother on a meager SNAP budget can write about visiting her poorly-stocked local food pantry every month. Somebody else could explain how they cut corners to meet rising rents on Walmart wages. The possibilities are endless.

Stories emphasizing solidarity among people would be even more compelling, such as Chicago teachers and nurses striking and marching right alongside their students and patients. An employee-produced documentary about the horrible working conditions in Amazon fulfillment centers and the resulting burgeoning labor movement would be similarly inspiring.

That way, when the Gates Panel of Experts ultimately awards the grant money for a film about Chelsea Clinton and her books-in-laundromats initiative, or to a heartwarming Joe Biden-inspired documentary about reputation-battered minority parents getting new record players to boost their kids' vocabularies, the poor themselves can cry foul and expose tax-avoiding philanthrocapitalism for what it is: a neoliberal greed racket to keep poor people down and out.

Deadline for entry is eight weeks away, so you'll need to come up with your ideas in a relative hurry so that the Gates Foundation can cut the checks in time for the big Democratic primaries next year.

But let the entrant beware. For buried deep within the Gates's criteria for winning their poverty propaganda funding is this neoliberal gem:

Change from a sole focus on lack of money to money, power, agency, and dignity.

In other words, they will fund only those portrayals of the "respectable" poor for whom the chronic and crushing lack of money is not their most pressing and selfish concern, for whom having enough cash to feed and house themselves and their families is of co-equal importance with such intangibles as identity and self-worth. Bill and Melinda Gates do not want to be parted from any of their own excess wealth. They do, however, want to feel good about themselves and their excess wealth. And they want you to feel good, too. Because through their embrace of the respectable, deserving poor as opposed to the undeserving poor, they can remind all the respectable "non-elites" in their audience that your own plight could always be worse. You might never even enjoy the privilege of seeing a poor person in her native habitat without Bill and Melinda as your anthropological field guides.

They want to discourage mass uprisings of increasing numbers of poor people by pretending to help poor people to help themselves with non-existent but optimistic "ladders of opportunity," along with helping Wall Street to help the poor with digitized financial services. And, of course, lots of Microsoft computers in classrooms in privatized, for-profit, non-unionized charter schools.

They also don't want Bernie Sanders to be president. His latest proposal to fund Medicare For All and other poverty-busting programs would literally cut the obscene Gates fortune right in half. Rival Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is only politely asking the tech mogul and his cohort for a mere two cents on the dollar.

Oil-Friendly Obama Buckrakes Off Greta Thunberg

"You're never too young to lead" reads the header of the fund-raising email from Barack Obama that landed in my in-box this week  It was accompanied by a short video clip of his decidedly stiff meeting with Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.

The former president is not collecting donations to save trees, however. He is collecting money to cut them down, specifically to cut them down at pristine public parkland in Chicago to make way for his presidential center and professional golf course. In using Greta Thunberg to raise money to "inspire a new generation of leaders" who will burn untold gallons of jet fuel traveling to his center for the privilege of being inspired by his legacy, Obama has proven conclusively that cynicism has no age limits.

You're never too young or too old to believe that everybody is exploitable and everything must have a profit motive.

It's not as though centamillionaire Obama needs the funds to pay rent to the citizens who ostensibly own the parkland on which his shrine and entertainment complex is to be built. In a sweetheart deal inked with City Hall, his organization will pay only $10 for a 99-year lease on the property. Meanwhile, rents in the surrounding neighborhood, populated mainly by poor, retired and working class people, have already started to go up even before ground has officially been broken on the Obama Center.

Once many of those oxygen-contributing, shade-producing trees started coming down last year despite a lawsuit and without a public hearing or formal approval, the fix for the neighborhood seemed to be in. This is despite Obama's glib assurances to concerned residents he doesn't have to compensate them for their financial pain because gentrification won't happen until at least the next generation, or until his daughters might be affected by it. Not that Malia and Sasha will ever be priced out of their housing because of gentrification, of course.

But if you pay attention to this reality, you're probably too cynical to get with his feel-good neoliberal program. As Obama wrote in his buck-raking email, Greta Thunberg - without her even being consulted on the matter  - "embodies why Michelle and I started the Obama Foundation in the first place."

That's the power of young people - unafraid to believe that change is possible and willing to challenge conventional wisdom. Greta and her generation are making their voices heard, even at a young age. That's what's possible when we let (my bold) young people lead the way.

Of course, allowing young people to lead the way did not apply when, under the Obama administration in 2011, scores of Occupy camps throughout the United States were broken up by club-wielding police in a nationally orchestrated assault. Young people are inspiring only when neoliberal government and corporate leaders give them the green light, and only when their actions can help elect the desired political party, or help line the desired pockets.

And that's the examples of the idea behind the Obama Foundation. If we foster the next generation of young leaders with the tools, resources and connections they'll need down the road, then they'll handle the rest.

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It makes you wonder how Greta Thunberg and the crowds of young people all over the world who are striking and demanding policies to address climate change ever came this far without Barack Obama as their inspiration. Without his "fostering" resources and myriad connections to powerful investors, how can they possibly be the neoliberal tools they need to be in order to be properly co-opted?

Nowhere in his fundraising email does Obama even directly bring up the climate catastrophe, and how wealthy, powerful and influential elite leaders can and should address it right this very minute. That's because climate change per se is not on his bucket list. He is only here to promote the young people who are promoting clean energy, using them to burnish his own image, as well as to profit from their independent efforts.

Otherwise, people might remember his own fealty to the fossil fuel industry. He  would prefer, for example, that they forget his months-long delay in barely acknowledging that the Gulf of Mexico was being permanently polluted by BP -  until graphic images of dead sea and shore life and a live underwater video feed of a blown well cap spewing out tons of crude gave him no other choice but to slap Big Oil on the wrist - after taking a dip in the Gulf with Sasha to convince us it was clean, the same way he later took his tiny sip of filtered Flint water to prove that it was safe.

He also doesn't want people to remember (or maybe even learn for the first time) that mere days after ostentatiously signing the Paris climate agreement in 2015, he quietly approved the previously-banned exportation of domestic fracked crude oil and its natural gas byproduct to the rest of the world. Like so many other toxic products which harm life, this measure was tucked safely inside a thick budget bill, and received little to no media attention. For his own part, Obama was still cynically basking in the media glow of Paris. His "all of the above" energy policy combined increased pollution and windfall industry profits with measures which only very slightly ameliorate pollution and global warming. His lifting of the ban on oil exports was cynically exchanged for a pathetic five-year tax credit for wind and solar energy providers.

 Obama discreetly sold out on the climate long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene to boast and bray about selling out on the climate. The two men differ a lot in style, but not so much in substance. Trump, as evidenced by Obama's own appointment of fossil fuel promoter and profiteer Ernest Moniz as his Energy Secretary, is not the first chief executive to have cynically staffed his cabinet with regulation-busting industry insiders. (Moniz, taking time out from well-compensated service on numerous energy and vulture capitalism boards, is currently embarked on an anti-Green New Deal crusade, which he describes as a "counterbalance" to the bill proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey. He calls his own plan the Green Real Deal, because unless environment-destroying capitalism is invited to help fix what it has wrought, nothing can be real.)

As Jenny Zou of the Center of Public Integrity reported last year on Obama's reversal of the oil export ban:

“You’re giving one side something forever, and [another] something for a limited time. It didn’t strike us as the best deal,” said Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. Cohen was an aide to Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., when interest in the ban spiked on Capitol Hill. Markey was the deal’s most vocal opponent, calling it a “Trojan horse” for “pumping up Big Oil’s profits.”

Climate change was an afterthought in the debate over the ban, Cohen said. Both sides were fixated on how crude-oil exports would affect energy prices, not greenhouse-gas emissions. Experts wrongly predicted exports would amount to “a trickle, not a flood.” And Democrats mistakenly banked on pollution-cutting policies such as the Clean Power Plan — one of several Obama-era regulations being tossed out by Trump — to drive investment in renewable energy.

Even though the Obama White House publicly discouraged efforts to undo the ban, it ultimately signed off on the deal. Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, called it a “pathetic compromise” driven by the administration’s pro-export agenda. “The minute the White House staff signaled that they were going to endorse the lifting of the crude oil ban, all of the Democratic opposition to it evaporated,” he said. “Everybody was like, ‘Why would I go to the mat if my president isn’t going to the mat?’”

(It's probably no coincidence that Rep. Joe Kennedy III, who owns $1.75 million worth of stock in Exxon-Mobil and Chevron and other fossil fuel companies, has just mounted a primary campaign for Markey's Senate seat.)

It was only a year ago, at a gala fund-raising event in Houston, for some of the same oily oligarchs who had convinced him to lift the export ban, that Obama jokingly pointed to his role as Oil Extractor-in-Chief as inspiration for them to fork over more cash to an oil-funded think tank which exists for the deadly propagation of lethal, oily, free-market ideas. 

True to form, the New York Times gushed over the event, lauding the oil and gas industry-serving alumni from the two Bush administrations and the Obama administration for proving that bipartisanship isn't completely dead, and for acting ever so un-Trumpily civil to one another. 

"Not only did I not get indicted, nobody in my administration got indicted," Obama also humble-bragged to the assorted oil and gas moguls. Yes, and neither have any of them, despite their best efforts to squelch scientific evidence of climate change, their cover-ups of oil spills, their poisoning of wells by fracking chemicals, and their frequent violations of the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act when they bribe tin pot dictators to allow the theft of the natural resources of other, mainly poor, countries. 

Now, notice the contrast in tone and body language at Obama's meeting this week with Greta Thunberg, who appears to be less than inspired and amused as Obama clumsily tries to fist-bump her and then lamely asserts that "we're on the same team."

Meanwhile, for detailed information on the activists and Woodlawn neighborhood residents trying to stop Obama's environmentally destructive takeover of public parkland in Chicago, I encourage you to visit Jackson Park Watch for the lowdown on this sweetheart deal of a construction project and all the legal challenges to it.

Democratic Senators Secretly Hope For Trump Re-Election

Or, as The Hill newspaper so delicately puts it, the neoliberal wingnuts in the Democratic Senate minority "quietly hope that Biden wins the nomination over rivals" Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Because there is no way that Biden, given his declining mental faculties combined with his racist, war-mongering, pro-Wall Street history, can ever beat Trump despite what largely unreliable polls say. Fewer people - especially fewer young people - will come out to vote for Biden than came out for Hillary Clinton. He is actually worse than Hillary Clinton, who at least didn't pocket $200,000 for enthusiastically endorsing a swing state GOP politician during her numerous paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other predatory institutions.

It was a speech, incidentally, that then-V.P. Biden delivered right in the middle of a 2016 Midwest midterm campaign swing for his fellow Democrats. As the New York Times reported, Biden gushed to a group of conservative business leaders that Michigan's Fred Upton "is one of the finest guys I ever worked with."

 Mr. Biden’s remarks, coming amid a wide-ranging discourse on American politics, quickly appeared in Republican advertising. The local Democratic Party pleaded with Mr. Biden to repair what it saw as a damaging error, to no avail. On Nov. 6, Mr. Upton defeated his Democratic challenger by four and a half percentage points.

Upton is such a great guy that he voted against establishing humanitarian standards for the people being held in border prisons and for Trump's continued sale of arms to Saudi Arabia for its war against Yemeni civilians, as well as the continued unfettered deep sea drilling for oil. He also voted to approve Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. All told, Upton is such a great guy that he's voted with Trump more than 85 percent of the time.
  
No wonder that The Hill's Alexander Bolton granted pro-Biden senators anonymity to whisper their wishes as they smeared Bernie and Liz. They don't want to be outed as hypocritical, de facto Trump enablers who are very supportive of his bloated military, his shredding of environmental protections, his planned cuts to the social safety net, his cruel crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, his tax giveaways to predatory capitalists, his whole oligarchy-serving agenda. According to Bolton, these Democrats cower in fear at the very thought of saving the planet and making regular people healthy and secure:

The two progressives are to the left of many of their colleagues, and some of their best-known proposals, such as “Medicare for All” and free college education, do not have widespread support within the Democratic caucus.

 If Warren or Sanders wins the party’s presidential nomination, there will be pressure in the Senate to adopt their proposals. And there could be tensions between a nominee and senators who do not back their proposals.

Another factor is the race for the Senate. Some Democrats think it will be easier to win races in conservative-leaning states such as Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia if Biden is their nominee and not Warren or Sanders.

In other words, the lobbyists, oligarchs and corporations which bankroll these craven senators will feel uncomfortable, the prospect of which makes the Democratic senators feel uncomfortable, because they might actually be forced to acknowledge where their true allegiances lie and who their real constituents are.

And Alabama? This sudden concern about the vote totals in Alabama is right down there with Trump's Sharpie marker putting George Wallace Country in the direct path of a hurricane. Alabama has suddenly become a battleground state, usurping even Michigan - which Biden would probably lose to Warren and Sanders and later to Trump, largely because of his continuing support for NAFTA and other anti-labor "trade" schemes and despite his endorsement of a Republican in 2016.

Better to have a united duopoly and to maintain America's one big business party than to have an ascendant Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. A President Sanders or (to a much lesser extent) a President Warren would only endanger the "party unity" trope peddled by the centrist Neoliberal Wing as though the party is an actual country deserving of rights and protection and nurturing rather than as the exclusive country club that it truly is. All of a sudden, therefore, it's more important to protect Alabama's arch-conservative Democratic Senator, Doug Jones, than it is to ensure that the climate catastrophe is addressed and that US citizens get the same guaranteed single payer health care as the rest of the civilized world.

You can almost smell the stench of desperation wafting right off the The Hill article.

Dianne Feinstein of California, who is rumored not to be seeking re-election to another term (she's pushing 90, thanks mainly to her own guaranteed health insurance and her stash of billions) is one of the few Democratic senators with the chutzpah to openly back Biden, even if it means overlooking her own state's younger neoliberal presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris.

Feinstein also is at least patriotic enough to privilege the entire United States plutocracy over just Alabama and the rest of George Wallace County, saying coherently:"If you ask me to weigh America, I actually think America is a pretty centrist country."

Earth to Dianne: The scales already are tipped way too far to the right, and they will remain so with either a Biden or a Trump in the Oval Office. The only way to balance them is with a left-leaning president - say, Bernie Sanders - and the political extinction of people like you.

They are nameless neoliberals who know only how to smear progressive ideas and candidates as they peddle their own stale pragmatic garbage. Hear them anonymously and desperately roar:

The Kode of the Kavanaugh Klique

It's too bad that the New York Times royally botched coverage of what is supposed to be a well-researched and nuanced new book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, written by two of its own reporters. Because in choosing to highlight a previously unreported and unknown episode that had Kavanaugh's Yale frat brothers shoving his penis into a girl's hands at a drunken dorm party, the paper went the exact opposite of nuance, and veered into full tabloid territory.

Only after more than a day's worth of outraged calls for Kavanaugh's impeachment by the Times-reading public and anxious Democratic candidates did the paper finally append an online correction to the piece, acknowledging that the second woman allegedly abused by Kavanaugh at Yale University has no memory of it and refused to be interviewed for the book.

 The one alleged eyewitness serving as the authors' second-hand source is one Max Stier, who is lauded by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, among others, for being a bipartisan Rhodes Scholar and a Washington insider with an impeccable set of credentials. Thus does the minima-culpa "explainer" piece written by Times Deputy Editorial Page editor James Dao simply double down on the specious claim that since Stier's account has been "corroborated" by others, including members of Congress, it's fit to print. In Times World, apparently, corroboration is defined as at least two important people confirming to the Times that yes, they had indeed heard that story first-hand from Stier. As such, even though Max Stier himself refuses to repeat his account to the Times, it is not grounds for the paper refusing to publish what amounts to second-hand gossip.

Dao wrote:

During the authors’ investigation, they learned that a classmate, Max Stier, witnessed the event and later reported it to senators and to the F.B.I. The authors corroborated his story with two government officials, who said they found it credible. Based on that corroboration, we felt mentioning the claim as one part of a broader essay was warranted.

This is very much related to the Times and other corporate media outlets regularly writing evidence-free #Russiagate and war-mongering propaganda pieces based purely upon the "high confidence" of well-placed government sources who must always remain anonymous because of the sensitivities of the matter.

But the printing of gossip wasn't even the worst part of the Kavanaugh story. In promoting its "blockbuster" article on Twitter on Saturday evening, somebody* on the Times Opinion Page actually blurted out this gem:

"Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun. But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn't belong at Yale in the first place."

(Just to be clear, the alleged victim who has no recall of the previously unreported incident and refused to be interviewed for the book is not Deborah Ramirez, who is the main focus of the Times essay.)

So even before the offensive promotional Tweet and the apology for the Tweet, the feeble semi-retraction, and the pitiful disclaimer/explainer by James Dao, another problem with the essay is its implication that as a good, virginal, sheltered working class Catholic girl, Ramirez was more traumatized by Kavanaugh's behavior than a more experienced and worldly and non-religious young woman would have been. That subtext, in my view, became the whole basis for the Times's original promotional Tweet: that a non-virgin, or your typical sophisticated Ivy League gal, would have found having a penis thrust in her face to be stupid, harmless fun, and she would have taken it in her stride. 

In other words, if Brett Kavanaugh had only adhered to the Kode of the Klique and restricted his frat boy antics to jaded young women of his own high social class, then everything would have been hunky-dory. So while the essay treats Ramirez sympathetically and respectfully, and is not at all kind to Yale "culture," the promotional Tweet had a distinctly snobbish, classist, even sexist, undertone to it. It didn't quite blame the victim for feeling offended, but it came close enough. It also implicitly slut-shamed more well-off young women who "fit in" better at abusive elite institutions. The subliminal message is that their money and possessions and position protect them from all harm and hurt feelings and constitute the basis of their self-esteem. 

But that's not how Dao sees it. Rather than directly addressing the classism and sexism of the tweet, he simply puts forth the usual boilerplate excuse of how, since some sort of undisclosed rigid "process" wasn't followed, the tweet was not up to the Times's usual standards of excellence. They will be reviewing this unexpected process failure very carefully to determine how they can do better in the future. Process failures seem to be the rule rather than the exception lately, as in the Times' retraction of a recent headline that had Donald Trump vowing to fight racism, right after the El Paso gun massacre committed by a fan of Donald Trump. 

So despite the Times's obvious cherry-picking of the "scoop" of the previously unknown story of a second female Yale victim, I still get the sense that the book itself is probably well worth a read, that it is an in-depth sociological examination of what made Brett Kavanaugh who he is, and how his upbringing and class status and connections have catapulted him all the way to the Supreme Court.

The criticism by some of my fellow Times readers of my own early comment, which called for Supreme Court term limits, was based entirely upon my failure to get with the desired narrative program and immediately jump on the Kavanaugh Impeachment bandwagon. 

Here's how I responded to writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's high school pal and alleged witness to the attack on Christine Blasey Ford, wrote a revealing book called "Wasted" in which he describes the insular, privileged, and alcohol-saturated world of the Georgetown preppies, their parents and even their Jesuit instructors. It's a highly conservative world, and a very misogynistic one.

 Even rich girls in the D.C. suburbs were subjected to the "pranks" perpetrated by these boys. including one group calling themselves the Inquisitors. Every weekend they'd don religious garb and trash the expensive home of a girl whose family, they'd ascertained, would be out of town. When finally caught, they were not prosecuted, but the Jesuits cooperated with the police and made the culprits do community service in a local soup kitchen. When they reneged and faked a written report on their charitable works, about a dozen of them were barred from graduation ceremonies.

Judge's parents then fondly and proudly dubbed them the Twelve Disciples.

 Kavanaugh is a permanent member of this club. The patriarchy that preys together, stays together.

His disturbing presence on our highest court should be the impetus for term limits. Without them, we could get rid of Trump tomorrow, but his horrible legacy would persist for many decades to come. The court should be staffed by revolving teams of jurists from lower courts. This will help prevent its further dangerous politicization, especially under predatory presidents like Trump.

The book "Wasted" has nothing in it about how the girls in this exalted social circle felt about being "harmlessly" pranked by having their homes destroyed. Tellingly, though,he affectionately describes the well-off victims as the Klique's "little sisters" who were such good sports they never bore them a grudge. One of the vandalized properties, Judge claims, was owned by a senator (whom he respectfully doesn't name, along with protecting the identities of everyone else in the book except himself and his parents) You get the distinct impression that the rich are very carefully taught, from earliest childhood, to keep each other's secrets. Because you never know when this unwritten Kode of Silence will come in handy, and if the drunken guys who once trashed your house (or worse) might be in a position to help you advance someday. Because their parents know your parents, and at the rarefied top of the power elite mountain, everybody is connected to everybody else. It's a small, small world.

The rich are different from you and me. It's not just that they have unlimited money. It's that friendships and ethics don't seem to matter to them as much as the life-long transactional relationships they cultivate for purely Machiavellian reasons.

*Update: Robin Pogrebin, the book's co-author, finally copped to writing the offensive tweet herself, after initially having denied doing so. As a jaded New Yorker and Yale classmate of Brett Kavanaugh she, personally, would have reacted differently to having a penis thrust in her face. Therefore, "people" took her tweet the wrong way.  Come to think of it, I think I'll skip her book. My experience has always been that if people can so glibly lie about one thing, they lie about other things. Plus, I am already sick of this story. 

Banality and Bile At the Democratic Debate

Like Dante's fifth circle of hell, the fifth in an endless series of Democratic Party debates was an infernal three-hour mix of anger and sullen resentment. If you made it through all three hours,  you deserve more than a medal for valor. You rate an upgrade to Purgatory. That's because ABC-Disney didn't stop at torturing you with too many candidates and not enough substantive questions. The network actually chose to air a graphic ad showing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez melting down in flames - ostensibly to get Trump's base all fired up and ready to go.

The first part of the epic featured Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders furiously arguing health care at center stage, just above the River Styx. Once the TV moderators managed to get the requisite neoliberal talking points about "how you gonna pay for that?!?" out of the way, it was on to the supporting cast, who in a true democracy would have been left sullenly gurgling just beneath the surface.

But the theme of the evening had been decreed as "The Reanimation of the Moribund Centrists" in keeping with Dante's Fifth Circle actually being the middle portion of hell. Therefore, candidates polling in the low single digits got as much, if not more, speaking time than the lead actors. Except for Joe Biden, of course, uncomfortably sandwiched as he was as he was between Warren and Sanders. He talked up a word-salad tempest.

But in their homages to Droner and Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, their loyalty to the world's biggest military machine, their waffling on immigration, their jingoistic approval of American exceptionalism, their naming of Donald Trump as the source of all evil without criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own shamefully complicit role in preventing passage another assault weapons ban, the 10 candidates admirably proved that they are, indeed, simply different sides of the same coin. As centrist Amy Klobuchar so brilliantly posited, a  Democratic Party divided against itself cannot stand. She didn't add that this is especially true when it's stuffed to the rafters with tons of foundation-busting filthy lucre. She also didn't add that the collapse of shoddy buildings is not only inevitable, it is desirable once the area has been safely evacuated.

But if we ourselves just couldn't stand listening to that litany of feel-good claptrap for three tortuous hours, and collapsed or tuned out from sheer disgust or just plain boredom, then we're probably too extremist for them to even bother with.

Not that the heavily coined candidates are all equally tarnished, of course. At least two of them are actually counterfeit. Kamala Harris, with her sordid "progressive" history of jailing poor mothers of truant kids, is one. Pete "Medicare For All Who Want It" Buttigieg is another. 

Joe Biden, though, is the real deal. Besides constantly hectoring suffering people to "get real, man!" while flouting his obvious senility, Biden also proved that he is as much a biliously burbling unabashed racist as ever:

Linsey Davis: Mr. Vice President, I want to talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?

Biden: Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.
No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.
Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Somewhere in the murky pit that passes for his brain, Biden thinks that black and brown parents, well-meaning though they may be, are too ignorant to take care of their own children without a lot of outside professional help. He also seems to think these poor parents should playing LPs on their vintage phonographs in order to boost their children's vocabulary. It is essential that every single child develops the skills to make three, four and five-year-olds go to school.  Because their poor incapable parents never did. They might even be as befuddled as Uncle Joe himself.

Of course, besides being an unrepentant racist, Biden is also still an unrepentant plagiarist. His prescription for vocabulary therapy (in lieu of living wages, food aid, housing aid, etc) for black and brown people was stolen from Chelsea Clinton and her campaign for books in the laundromats frequented by black and brown mothers. If there's one thing that earnest bigots without a racist bone in their bodies sincerely believe, it's that black and brown mothers would never talk to or read to their children on their own initiative.

Biden made his remarks at a historically black college in Houston. It's too bad that Julian Castro didn't slam him over them like he did when, earlier in the debate, he accused Biden of senilely forgetting what he'd just said five minutes ago about healthcare.

The other candidates were not much better. Even Bernie Sanders obligingly described Nicolas Maduro, the brown Venezuela president, as a "vicious tyrant" - in an apparent effort to defend himself from comparisons to Venezuela-style socialism. He also didn't redeem himself in the post-debate spin cycle when he called the unabashedly racist Biden a decent human being and "a friend of mine."

I guess it was a blessing in disguise that the moderators kind of forgot that Bernie was even on the stage, because he'd appeared to be losing his voice. Croaking dissonant outrage combined with the cracked Biden-style long-playing record is not the kind of smooth, relaxing,"electable" sound that ABC-Disney obviously wanted to sedate its audience with.

Maybe if Biden and Bernie and Liz are the last candidates standing many months from now, they'll finally lose all the friendly pretense and the slick collegiality that reminds the rest of us that we're not in their club, and we never will be.

But How You Gonna Pay For That?

Warren's Social Security Reform Not As "Scrappy" As Bernie's

Just in time for the third Democratic debate in Fossil Fuel Boomtown USA (Houston, TX) Elizabeth Warren has unveiled a plan that would increase the monthly Social Security benefit by $200 for every recipient by "asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program."

Unlike the very similar bill reintroduced by Bernie Sanders earlier this year, Warren doesn't flat-out suggest entirely scrapping the current $132,900 cap on taxable earnings. But just like Bernie's legislation, her sweeping, smart and totally original brand-spanking new bold plan also calls for separate taxation of select investments to augment the payroll tax system. 

Interestingly enough, Warren did not join with four other Democratic senators - current presidential contenders Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, along with Jeff Merkley and former contender Kirsten Gillibrand - in co-sponsoring Bernie's original Social Security expansion bill in 2017.

Hmm.

 But back to the gist of it all: as Bernie has been talking about for many decades and as Warren has begun talking about as the 2020 horse race heats up, the very restrictive cap now in place means that the ultra-rich essentially finish paying off an entire year of Social Security taxes on January 1st, contributing exactly the same amount to the program as someone who earns $132,900 a year. Wealth is by no means taxed at the same rate as work. It's not even close.

Put another way, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates pay the exact same amount in Social Security taxes as a middle class single or two-income couple living in a modest home in the suburbs. If oligarchic empires were subject to full progressive taxation, the nation's retirement program could conceivably flourish into perpetuity. 

So, unlike Bernie's bill, whose progressive taxation of plutocratic wealth would guarantee the solvency of the Social Security trust fund for the next 50 years, Warren's more modest proposal would extend it for less than half that span, or for 20 years. 

Therefore, her claim that she is proposing the "biggest and most progressive increases in Social Security in nearly half a century" is a bit overblown, and not just because it copies the Sanders bill without crediting it. Her language is a lot less class-conscious than his is. Instead of demanding that the wealthy pay more, she is politely "asking" them to, as though they actually have the choice to refuse. Her suggestion that plutocrats contribute more is also far less than what ordinary people might consider a "fair share."  This is especially true since this requested, allegedly fair share serves to protect the long-term interests and the rattled psychic security of the rich in this age of rising civil discontent. Her tax reforms to benefit regular people are really no skin off rich financial noses at all. Best of all, the convoluted tax figures which she puts forth, unlike a true permanent scrapping of the cap, would be very much subject to back-room tinkering and bipartisan sausage-making and horse-trading, with maximum input from the minimally affected donor class and their teams of hungry lobbyists. The poor, of course, have no lobby.

In her own much more liberal way, Warren echoes the mantra of her former boss, Barack Obama, uttered reassuringly to the Wall Street bankers who ruined the economy. She is the latest thing standing between the squeamish, tax-averse wealthy and what Obama denigrated as the "pitchforks." Oh, and she also wants to seduce older Joe Biden fans into her camp as she brings up his own myriad disgusting efforts to cut Social Security.

It's interesting to note, meanwhile, that even as she claims to support Bernie's Medicare For All legislation without yet putting forth her own original detailed plan, one of Warren's rationales for modestly increasing monthly retirement benefits is to help struggling seniors meet their rising medical and drug costs. She writes in her Medium post:

In 2019, the average Social Security beneficiary received $1,354 a month, or $16,248 a year. For someone who worked their entire adult life at an average wage and retired this year at the age of 66, Social Security will replace just 41% of what they used to make. That’s well short of the 70% many financial advisers recommend for a decent retirement — one that allows you to keep living in your home, go to a doctor when you’re sick, and get the prescription drugs you need.

She makes it a point to sell her plan as a stopgap measure just "in case we don't adopt Medicare For All." (wink, nod to the neoliberal Clinton operatives she is reportedly canoodling with these days.) And just to emphasize, Sanders's M4A legislation would abolish the 20 percent co-pays that are financially breaking so many struggling older people covered under regular Medicare.

And in pointing out that Congress hasn't increased Social Security benefits in 50 years, her suggested $200-a-month increase, adjusted for inflation and the rising cost of living, is actually a pittance. To her credit, she does call for revising cost of living calculations to ensure that monthly benefits keep pace with the costs of barely staying alive. It's certainly a lot better than Barack Obama's failed attempt to reduce benefits through a chained CPI formula.

So don't get me wrong. There's plenty to like in Warren's plan, not least of which is in the inclusion of unpaid stay-at-home mothers and other caregivers in the earnings tables, thus boosting their future Social Security benefits. 

But here's the catch (there's always a catch):

My plan will give credit toward the Social Security average lifetime earnings calculation to people who provide 80 hours a month of unpaid care to a child under the age of 6, a dependent with a disability (including a veteran family member), or an elderly relative. For every month of caregiving that meets these requirements, the caregiver will be credited for Social Security purposes with a month of income equal to the monthly average of that year’s median annual wage. People can receive an unlimited amount of caregiving credits and can claim these credits retroactively if they have done this kind of caregiving work in the last five years. By giving caregivers credits equal to the median wage that year, this credit will provide a particular boost in benefits to lower-income workers.

Given that caring full-time for a newborn, a toddler, a preschooler, or a sick or elderly relative means being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, this reimbursement formula seems far from generous or fair. It's giving part-time status to a full-time job whose "median wage" includes mandatory unpaid double overtime.

 Say you're a single mother in her 40s, 50s or 60s who struggled financially ten or 20 or 30 years ago and has a spotty paid work history and no retirement savings as a result. You're out of luck under Warren's plan. You would have had to squeeze all that approved care-giving into the last five years to qualify for better retirement benefits. And even if you had, you'd still have to jump through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops in order to qualify for "credits." What busy parent or caregiver has ever bothered to keep a written record of his or her hours?

Given that we are increasingly becoming a jobless society in a "gig economy," wouldn't it make more sense to phase out the traditional work requirements for Social Security altogether? And no, Social Security should never be replaced with the universal basic income (UBI) proposals so beloved of technocrats and billionaires like Elon Musk. For starters, UBI would eliminate all other programs serving the vulnerable, the old, the young, the sick and the disabled. It would, effectively, be a highly regressive scheme, with the poor essentially subsidizing the middle classes and the affluent because those in need would get less than they do now, even under already meager assistance programs like SNAP (food stamps.)

Chunks of Warren's own technocratic Social Security reform package seem unnecessarily stingy - not to mention confusing and complicated - especially when they're coupled with her worthy suggestions to give full widows' benefits to prematurely retired disabled women, and to restore a deceased parent's survivor benefits to full-time students up to age 22. (Under Ronald Reagan, survivor benefits were cut off when the beneficiary reached age 18 or graduated high school.)   

Bernie demands that avaricious billionaires pay more, and he welcomes their hatred. Warren not only politely asks them to contribute a fair share, she consistently refers to the wealthy as "families," thus gifting them with qualities of nurturing and humanity that many of them don't even remotely possess. She lumps professionals making a tad more than $250,000 in with criminal oligarchs who've looted billions from the body politic. This effectively removes the onus from the oligarchs, besides, perhaps, alienating a few of the wealthy elites currently rooting for her while attracting less well-off Biden supporters who might be convinced to root for her with the dream of an extra two hundred bucks a month wafting through their heads.

 Her new suggested FICA tax rate of 14-odd percent on the entire top two percent, split with one's putative employer, certainly seems meager compared to the 90 percent rate imposed upon the highest earnings in the Eisenhower years. A self-described "capitalist to my bones," Warren is loath to directly address the class war, loath to demonize the obscenely rich, loath to directly call them out by name.

There's just enough wealth redistribution in Warren's plan to make the neoliberal thought collective pretend to howl with outrage at the mere prospect of being parted with even a modest percentage of their wealth. They might even have to fire one of their maids or forgo purchase of their third luxury car next year. 

Bernie is much more to the point. He cuts right to the chase and he names names and he unabashedly evokes the public indignation so absolutely necessary if we are ever to truly change the system rather than just tweak it around the edges.

Bernie Sanders

✔@SenSanders

Donald Trump made $694 million in 2016. That means he stopped paying Social Security taxes 40 minutes into the year.

Meanwhile a middle-class worker paid Social Security taxes the entire year.

I say to Trump: pay your fair share. Let's scrap the cap and expand Social Security.