The Overreach Concern Trolls

If it's not the damned Russians coming to get us, it's those damned Overreachers.

The Overreachers are a brand new breed of bogeymen. They've popped up virtually overnight from the deepest depths of the Democratic Party, taking up residence beneath every punditory bed, jostling for precious space with Putin and his rabid apricot poodle, Donald. It's an uncomfortably tight and alarming squeeze for all the corporate journalists and columnists so desperately trying to keep up with all the ins and outs of Group Think. 

Only the cleverest among them can manage to put Russia and Democratic Party Overreach into the same column or article or cable TV shout-fest. If they can blame Russia for sowing the desires and demands among the electorate to have single payer health care and debt-free education, then they've got themselves a real plot.

Overreach manic-depression is emerging as a real invented disease, thought to be genetically related to Trump Derangement Disorder and Russophobia Syndrome. Symptoms include terror of Medicare For All, with its unthinkable lethal outcome of treating and healing tens of millions more sick people. Also of great worry to Overreach phobics are Bernie Sander's education and medical debt jubilees.What totally sick, anti-capitalist ideas, according to the diagnosticians of the media-political complex. They might even be more deadly than heart disease or diabetes or cancer. 

Overreach, besides being a monstrous malady in itself, can also act as either a hypnotic or a stimulant drug, depending on the pusher or the user. If left-leaning candidates like Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser but no less terrifying extent, Elizabeth Warren don't stop spreading this crack opioid epidemic of Overreach to the rest of the liberal class, and to their fellow candidates and citizens, delicate arms are likely to get jerked right out of their sockets. And then Resisters Inc. won't be able to flail and punch at Donald Trump as virtuously and as daintily as they do now. And then what? Trump might win a second term and then they'll be reduced to typing out their columns and speeches with their toes.

Concerned New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall therefore asks: "How Can Democrats Keep Themselves From Overreaching?" 

 Edsall studiously ignores the voices of actual voters in his piece, turning instead to the usual cast of credentialed experts from corporate-funded think tanks, academia, Party leadership (Clintonite talking head Paul Begala among them) and polling agencies. 

For example, there's this nugget which hilariously conflates progressive activists and the Left with the rich donor class:

The role progressive activists play in setting the Democratic agenda provided Trump with an ideal target, helping him portray the Democratic Party as dominated by a doctrinaire elite. In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute, characterized these progressive activists as:
Much more likely to be rich, highly educated — and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.

This one paragraph insinuates the false, but standard. centrist talking point that Blacks are poorly represented among progressive activists. This trope ignores both the history of the bottom-up civil rights movement and current movements like Black Lives Matter. It ignores the fact that labor movements, by their very nature, are the farthest thing from elitism you could probably ever imagine. The current labor movement, among teachers, nurses and auto workers, is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The subliminal message Edsall imparts in this paragraph that if you're a leftist, you are also racist and probably also an elitist snob. 

Edsall does not disclose that the Agora Institute is bankrolled by the Niarchos shipping dynasty, or that The Atlantic is owned by multi-billionaire investor Laurene Powell Jobs. And although "agora" is the Greek word for the public square, there is no sign of the actual public or any actual demos anywhere to be found among the Institute's aptly named Board of Overseers. Rather, the new oligarchic definition of "public square" is a bastion of neoconservatism and neoliberalism: transnational corporations, private equity vultures, weapons industry think tanks and even representatives of such repressive US client states as the Kingdom of Jordan. Thomas Edsall's climate change denialist and right-wing colleague, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, is also listed as an elite Overseer of the Agora, as are the Board Chairman of Merck Pharmaceuticals, the senior adviser of Henry Kissinger Associates, and Gary Kasparov, founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, whose neoconservative main purpose, besides fomenting Cold War 2.0 against Russia, is overthrowing leftist governments in Latin America under the guise of human rights.

Edsall thus performs the usual centrist trick of using right-wing sources to concern-troll on the alleged behalf of the liberal left. The irony of using this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to criticize an Overreach Monster that exists only in the heads of the war-mongering aristocracy and its publicists seems to be quite lost on him. Then again, he's only reporting what the credentialed experts tell him.

And make no mistake. The plutocrats who get rich off our endless wars are the very same climate-destroying plutocrats who adamantly oppose the health, debt-free education, and financial well-being of everybody else. 

My published response to Edsall:

Have you noticed that those warning of Democratic "overreach" are the centrists and the plutocrats? Begala's party is the one that deregulated Wall Street and the telecoms, rammed through NAFTA and reformed "welfare as we know it" - all contributing to the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history.

 The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the rich, and the rich usually get what they want in the way of policy. Thus they rail against such egalitarian measures as Medicare For All while championing LGBT rights and the inclusion of a few select historically oppressed "identities" in their boardrooms and corner offices. They sell us a more diverse oligarchy as a substitute for true racial, gender and economic justice.

They are loath to even mention such a thing as the class war.

The media, meanwhile, give us wall-to-wall impeachment coverage as it mainly ignores how hard most of our lives are. We're supposed to care about "Ukraine-gate" and not notice that Trump once again is cutting food stamps, and that he just signed an executive order further privatizing Medicare.

 Many Trump voters actually support Medicare For All. So if the Democrats want to win people back, they'll give us at least some of what we want and need instead of saying that nice things are impossible with the country so divided right now. We're supposed to accept the free flow of trillions of dollars to our bloated military, and meanwhile pragmatically agree to just die sooner.

No more.

Trump Channels Tulsi Gabbard

If he wasn't such a blithering idiot, Donald Trump wouldn't stop with the shock announcement that he is withdrawing US troops from northeast Syria, leaving the Kurd fighters to their fate of possible extermination by the Turkish dictator. He wouldn't stop with simply borrowing Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard's antiwar rhetoric to justify his rash decision:

“The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades. I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”

If he really wanted to wreak revenge on the Democratic Party/CIA Partnership which is seeking his ouster, he would go far beyond embracing all the insanity ascribed to him and begin to attack his enemies from the left. He might go into full bonkers mode and even start talking up Medicare For All. He'd advance from channeling Tulsi to channeling Bernie Sanders.

Not that he would really mean it, of course. His idea of single payer health care would be probably be Medicare For All Whites Who Are Rich Enough To Pay For It. He rarely means anything he says, anyway. Even his Syria troop withdrawal is, at the moment, just the latest in a long series of whimsical threats and diversionary tactics to get the neocons and the liberal hawks riled up as he simply adjusts the territory and the bombing. But channeling Tulsi in his tweets no doubt appeals to his base in those areas of the country which have seen a disproportionate number of their sons and daughters killed and maimed in the forever wars, and whose voters therefore picked Trump over the hawkish Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The Syria troop withdrawal is also a way for Trump to deflect attention from his impeachment and Ukraine-gate woes, to give his opponents a new reason to hate him while also gaining him some support from what is still left of the peace movement - which, incidentally, rightly criticizes Barack Obama's own role in creating ISIS by arming Syrian terrorist groups. As reported by AntiWar.Com:

The Syrian Civil War is one of the worst tragedies of the 21st century. Over 500,000 people have been killed. The Obama administration knowingly armed Al Qaeda affiliated opposition groups at the beginning of the war. A declassified document from the Department of Defense dated August 12th 2012 said, "The Salafist, The Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." The document also said, "AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media."

 Continuing the war in Syria has become a bipartisan effort. Any politicians who make efforts to end our involvement in the war come under enormous criticism. Congresswoman and 2020 presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard took a trip to Syria in 2017 and had an unexpected meeting with Assad. Now whenever faced by liberals who don’t like her, Gabbard gets called an "Assad Apologist" no matter what the issue is. Even after the most recent debates when Gabbard went after Senator Kamala Harris over her record as a prosecutor, Harris responded in an interview after and said, "I think that this coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad…I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously."

There is no way, meanwhile, fake peacenick or not, that Trump would ever reverse his xenophobic immigration policies. As a matter of fact, his fascistic administration has just issued a new directive requiring all immigrants to either have private health coverage or prove their independent financial wherewithal to pay for their care out-of-pocket. I guess that lets out the Kurds, whom Trump is leaving high and dry at the Syria-Turkey border, from ever entering the US as refugees. 

Still, if Trump could only begin to nudge his autocratic mindset just a wee bit more in the Huey Long direction instead of simply doubling and tripling down on the tyrannical regression, his approval ratings might just start to pick back up.

Because seeing as how his bowing to elite pressure and intensifying economic sanctions against his alleged puppet-master in Russia and then even scrapping the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear arms accord did not in the least placate the Cold War 2.0 warriors who want to see him gone, what more does Trump have to lose at this point?

Many Trump voters already support Medicare For All. These are among the same voters who have been successfully indoctrinated by the ruling elites into scapegoating immigrants as the enemies who are stealing all those jobs. As much as they claim to hate "socialism" and Big Government, Trump voters live in the reality-based world in which you can still go bankrupt even if you're insured. You can still lose your health care if your job disappears or if your employer decides he can no longer afford to pay the premiums. Regardless of political ideology, people in ever greater numbers are struggling to pay the bills.   

So if he wasn't such a very stable moron, Trump would move to the left, at least rhetorically. It certainly worked to his advantage during the GOP primaries, when everybody applauded his hilariously insulting take-downs of anointed front-runner Jeb Bush, forced to defend his brother George's illegal invasion and occupation and destruction of Iraq.

The liberal interventionists now raising such a ruckus over his latest threat to end a war are the very same elites who, while giving Trump even more Pentagon funding than he asked for, vow to defend the predatory Affordable Care Act to the death. Think of their anguish if Trump starts gaslighting them and opposing the ACA by calling for its replacement with a true single payer system akin to the coverage enjoyed by service members and veterans and Congress. The centrists would themselves go nuts if forced to futilely do battle against such a multi-pronged daily onslaught of craziness. It would be a real hoot to watch as the US Imperium collapses around the whole sorry lot of them, in any case.

So who knows? If any more of his GOP cohort start throwing him under the bus regarding Ukraine-gate and his Syria policy, Trump could always spitefully quit the party in a huff and become an Independent, if not the registered Democrat that he was for most of his life.

There may come a point where Trump has nothing left to lose.

Now that Trump is so embattled from all sides, perhaps now would be a good time for Bernie Sanders to renew the "M4A" challenge he issued to the president two years ago:

“Ideally, where we should be going is to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people as a right,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s why I’m going to introduce a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program.”

 Sanders said he would reach out to President Donald Trump and urge him to back this and other effective measures to improve health-care coverage, starting with pending legislation of limiting drug prices.

“President Trump, come on board,” Sanders said on CNN. “Let’s work together. Let’s end the absurdity of Americans paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”

 Support for such a “socialist” intervention seems to be growing. The Pew Research Center found in January that 60% of Americans surveyed believe the government should be responsible for ensuring health coverage for all.

That was two years ago. Support for single payer across the political spectrum is now at least 70 percent, despite the best propaganda efforts of the corporate-sponsored news media and the health insurance lobby. They emphasize the tax increase bogeyman without informing the audience that any increased taxes for M4A would still be about half what people are now paying in premiums and deductibles. 

In other words, say as a hypothetical that you currently pay $20,000 (including the premium, a high annual deductible and co-pays) for a private insurance policy. That expenditure would stop. You might end up paying $10,000 in additional taxes depending upon your bracket and deductions, but that still leaves you in possession of the $10,000 previously sucked up by Blue Cross or United Health. This extra ten grand will not only make your life better, it will help the economy at large. No more shopping around on an online insurance marketplace every single year. No more worries about your employer dropping your coverage. 

The powers-that-be don't particularly want your lives to be better. That would be an insult to capitalism itself, whose ultimate aim is to sicken all but the very rich.

Unstable and malignant system that it is, capitalism will eventually kill even the oligarchs, some of whom seem to think they can escape to Outer Space one day to save themselves.

Trump is certainly not the only moron in the mix. 

True Confessions, TrumPelosi-Style

Donnie just stole all the thunder from the Democratic Party's Ukraine-gate impeachment case. He entered a shock pre-emptive guilty plea right on the White House Lawn before heading off to Florida to sign an executive order allowing private insurance predators to profit even more blatantly from government-funded Medicare than they already do.

Unlike most guilty pleas, though, Trump's admission that he did ask the president of Ukraine get dirt on the Bidens was not entered in the spirit of contrition or with the abject aim of getting off with probation or a plea deal. It was entered in the spirit of Bite Me.

From the gobsmacked Guardian newspaper report:

Trump was asked what he thought Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who Trump was recorded pressuring to investigate the Bidens – should do.

“If they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said when asked what he wanted Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to do.

“I would say President Zelenskiy, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Trump then discussed his trade war with China, before adding:

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in Ukraine.”

He and his minions will keep asking foreign governments to investigate the political origins of the Russiagate story, and to get the Bidens while they're at it.  Trump will continue acting with impunity, triple dog-daring the other side of the Duopoly to just try and stop him. All on national TV. So much for the "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up of the crime" trope. 

It's the exact opposite of Nixon's "I am not a crook" ploy. Trump is boasting "I am a crook. Whaddaya gonna do about, my fellow American crooks, chumps, and swamp creatures?"

Meanwhile, not even his administration's boastful fascistic announcement that it will forcibly take DNA samples from imprisoned migrants and refugees for inclusion in a racist data base is distracting the Democrats from their Sublime Message. Nor is the simultaneous blockbuster report that Trump had ordered refugees and migrants to be shot in the legs if they try to swim alligator and snake-infested moats or to scale electrified razor-topped walls painted just the right dystopian shade of black. 

To show just how solemn she is and how seriously she takes her sworn constitutional duty to consider to impeach Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC-Disney's Good Morning America on Thursday to trade impeachment quips with the hosts and to inform the TV audience that "we have some serious repair and healing to do in our country for what he's done so far."

Just the day before, she'd insisted that she is still eager to chat with the world's most dangerously unhinged criminal leader on long-overdue repairs to the nation's crumbling infrastructure. She's also pushing prescription drug price-tweaking as a feeble substitute for the single payer health care system demanded by the vast majority of Americans. It behooves both right wings of the Duopoly to go through the motions, if for no other purpose than to keep the rabble in line.

Pelosi carefully made no mention of any serious repair or healing for what 40 years of neoliberal austerity, coupled with the record enrichment of the Military-Carceral-Surveillance Complex, have done to our country. To confess this would be to implicate herself. Boasting of criminality is not her style. The closest she comes is her frequent praise for the vicious Ronald Reagan and her appearances at Pete Peterson austerity conferences for the punishment of the poor and the self-glorification of the plutocracy.

But like Trump, Pelosi was also making a bee-line to "battleground state" Florida on Thursday. He was pandering to well-heeled retirees in The Villages, a kind of Disneyland for the right-wing geriatric set.  She was attempting to seriously heal an elite group of well-heeled Venezuelan exiles, and to show continuing support for the cruel economic sanctions leveled (beginning under Obama) against the less well-off citizens of Venezuela. She was and she is fully on board with the Trump administration's attempted overthrow of the socialist Maduro government. As such, she planned to huddle with high-ranking representatives of Juan Guiado's US-backed right-wing opposition to plot their next moves. The violent US-backed coup attempt is hideously euphemized by Florida Rep. Donna Shalala as "a peaceful return to democracy."

A discussion forum for "invited guests only" was to include such elite Cold War 2.0 concerns as "Russia’s growing military presence in Venezuela" and the spread of uninvited (or bottom-up) citizen protests against US-backed political corruption in Haiti. As reported by Jacobin, 

 Last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The resolution said the body did not recognize the Maduro government, noting it was concerned “about the worsening political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis” and “the breakdown of democratic order and serious human rights violations.” It was part of a gambit to legitimize opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claim to power.The vote was a quid pro quo, according to Gilles.
“The US is supporting Moïse because of the vote against Venezuela,” she noted.
Whether or not the vote is a main reason, it is clear to any Haiti observer that Moïse — who came to power in races where only about 21 percent of the population even bothered voting — has remained in office only because of the support of Washington and its partners.

Unlike Trump, the last thing Pelosi wants is to be seen actually meddling in foreign countries for crass political gain right in the middle of a virtue-signalling impeachment gambit. Ergo, she was barring the media and the public from important parts of her taxpayer-financed junket to Florida. Otherwise, the Quid Pro Quo accusation that the Democrats are hurling at Trump might boomerang right back at them as pertains to the Haiti-Venezuela connection. Ironically, Trump fans were planning to protest her visit on the silly grounds that she is a pro-Maduro democratic socialist rather than the exact opposite.

That's how the two right wings of one bird of prey envisioned by Upton Sinclair stay aloft. For all the mutual ruffling of their feathers, they always give each other protective cover where it counts the most: the talons and the beak. 

Trump brags about his corruption and skips the platitudes. Pelosi embraces the platitudes and hides her corruption.

And both of them paste on the obligatory grotesque grimace whenever the spirit of bellicose bipartisanship in service of Oligarchy demands it.

Democracy, CIA-Style

By artificially narrowing the Trump impeachment inquiry to "Ukraine-gate" under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all but assured that this constitutional remedy for removing a criminal president from office will proceed largely in secret, away from the public eye and away from public accountability.

At the very least, much if not most of the star witness testimony of the unnamed CIA official, who is rather ridiculously being marketed as a "whistle-blower," will not be held in a public forum. This is for the ostensible reason of protecting him from the nefarious machinations of Doctor Evil, a/k/a Donald Trump.

To help effect public compliance with this essential secrecy, the ubiquitous Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff is waxing breathless to the point of asphyxia on the corporate cable shows about all the complicated security protections needed to be put in place in order to keep the Informer's identity anonymous and his physical well-being assured.

Once the script of the CIA official's testimony has been honed and edited to self-serving perfection, this individual may finally make his debut before the cameras incognito, probably with a hood over his head and his voice disguised by some of the cool technology that we so admire in the Hollywood movies about our sexy, daring, cool and selfless Intelligence Community. Whatever props can elicit the maximum cloak-and-dagger excitement for the TV audience, the better that the producers of the Democratic Party-Security State-Media Complex, or Impeachment, Inc. will look.

Meanwhile, we'll have to be satisfied with such tawdry episodes as The Rudy Giuliani Story. In perhaps the most extreme role reversal and plot twist in modern political theater history, the once-lauded Mayor of Nine Eleven has morphed from prosecuting mob bosses to defending them. 

Lest the Impeachers come across as too James Bond-ish, Nancy Pelosi has carefully leaked her own secret list of solemn Impeachment Talking Points for use by the supporting congressional cast as they head for their home districts for a two-week recess to try and convince their constituents that the national security of the elites should be of grave concern to one and all.

Forget hassling your elected representatives about health care and the climate catastrophe and your crushing college debt and your unaffordable housing costs. Because the fates of certain centrist Democrats are more important than your lives. Pelosi and her henchmen are thus embarking on an unabashed Psy-Ops campaign of the type first devised by the CIA itself some 75 years ago in order to convince the world that they were not safe from Russian aggression in the aftermath of World War II. 

And make no mistake: "Ukraine-gate" is not only about impeachment, it's about the reanimated Cold War against Russia waged by an ever more militarized United States. With 800 to perhaps one thousand global bases under dire threat by Putin's grand total of nine, the USA is obviously in profound danger from "the Russians" - not least because they posted a few thousand cheesy Facebook ads to swing the election to Donald Trump and to sow domestic discord in the Happiest Place on Earth. That's right: America was a consumer paradise, a virtual Disneyland on steroids before Trump came along to spoil the mood and make American consumerism look bad to the whole free world. If we can only get rid of him and go back to the Status Quo, all will be well.

As it is, Trump is such a profound threat to the world order that even his imposition of more economic sanctions on Russia and his trashing of a nuclear arms accord were not enough for the order-mongers. The fact that he withheld, or is accused of withholding, a fortune in deadly weapons from the US-sponsored Ukrainian fighting forces was the last straw. It was more than the American Security State can be expected to bear.

So think of this artificially narrow impeachment inquiry as a proxy battle in the larger US-backed Ukraine vs. Russia war. The CIA has always acted in behalf of US multinational corporations anxious to plunder the wealth and natural resources of other countries and anxious to overthrow "corrupt" socialist-leaning or worker-friendly regimes. The CIA has always partnered with or installed US-friendly right wing puppets, arming them and training their death squads.

 They view Donald Trump as the Putin surrogate who has had the absolute chutzpah to denigrate corporation-serving NATO forces even as he caved to their Russophobic demands in a futile attempt to show that he can be just as vicious a team player as the rest of the elite American establishment. 

It hasn't worked. He just can't keep his big oafish mouth shut, and his clumsy paranoid tweeting thumbs still, and his self-dealing and corruption under as good control as his fellow elite leaders have historically done. He totally lacks the charm offensive skills so necessary in any chief executive, whether it be of a corporation or of the One Exceptional Nation itself. 

Donald Trump has got to go. He is not a good marketing or propaganda tool for our weaponized Democracy, neither the domestic variety nor the deadlier exported variety.

The Democrats and their "deep state" partners don't want to delve too deeply in Trump's long history of financial chicanery, however. Because as the Mueller investigation so painfully showed, some of their own respectable colleagues also run the risk of becoming collateral damage in such open-ended investigations. Witness the downfall of super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and the criminal trial of former White House attorney Greg Craig, who served under Obama and who was just acquitted of charges stemming from his own self-dealing in behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs.

But lest the corporate Democrats look even more like the hypocrites they are, they're claiming that a handful of valiant "front-line" representatives are in danger of losing their seats and the House of losing its majority if impeachment proceedings are not severely truncated and limited in scope.

"Front-line" is a telling bellicose adjective, describing a cadre of conservative congress critters who supposedly are just as endangered as the anonymous CIA "whistle-blower" due to their wins in solid GOP districts. Two of the most prominent Front-liners are Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who themselves are high-ranking (allegedly former) CIA officials.

Thanks to a highly coordinated week-long corporate media blitz calling for Trump's impeachment,"the polls have changed drastically on this," Pelosi said in a carefully-leaked "private" conference with her members on Sunday. In so saying, she used another common information warfare ploy: transforming a desire of the elite class into a desire of the non-elite class through the magic of propaganda and the measuring of its effectiveness through skewed, selective polling.

But lest the Party appear too gleeful and vindictive, she added:

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution.”

As far as we know, she didn't suggest that congress critters appear at their constituent town halls decked out in religious garb and swinging incense-wafting chasubles, the better to awe-strike people who already are feeling mightily struck down by the worst income inequality of modern times. 

But as the New York Times reports, they will be "clutching talking points cards headlined 'No One is Above the Law.'"

These index cards contain a Holy Trinity of classic psy-ops techniques for the lawmaking preachers to inculcate into their congregations: (my interpretations in parentheses)

• that Trump “engaged in serious wrongdoing betrayed his oath of office and undermined national security;” (security for the ruling establishment and the maintenance of elite rule)

• that the president “pressured a foreign government to target a political opponent,” and what’s more, “tried to cover it up;” (instill fear in the populace by the "othering" technique, or xenophobia.)

• and that Democrats are planning to stick to just the facts in the inquiry as it moves forward. (the facts which fit the desired narrative, but which do not necessarily include facts which don't adhere to the narrowly defined narrative.)

It is an easy-to-understand, digestible narrative, unlike the other inquiries Democrats have been pursuing, including the Russia investigation, hush money payments and Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
“I still believe in story,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California and a close ally of Ms. Pelosi. “There’s clarity to this Ukraine story.”

Centrist Democrats must think that their constituents are real dolts, unable to understand even basic cheating or bribery, yet easily swayed by Cold War rhetoric and the fear and xenophobia that it instills. All people need in lieu of guaranteed health care and food on the table is a good story, especially if it has echoes of James Bond or Austin Powers to keep them diverted and entertained. 

The coincidental fact that the CIA whistle-blower law was just quietly changed to allow reports to be based on second-hand complaints and information should alert us to the inconvenient truth that this secretive, unaccountable "government within a government" has also arrogated to itself the power to remove, in collusion with our elected representatives, any elected representative that the ruling elites of Empire don't like - in this case, Donald Trump.

 Trump is the most criminal person ever elected to our nation's highest office, so you may ask why it should even matter if the CIA is coordinating his removal.

But it does matter, because a disturbing precedent is being set, one that is actually antithetical to the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi claims to so revere. 

What if by some miracle Bernie Sanders overcomes the Democratic Party's meddling and undemocratic machinations and does indeed become our next president?

The CIA, promoted and even initially staffed by some of this country's most eminent intellectual and financial elites from the cosseted world of the Ivy League, the landed aristocracy,Wall Street and prominent mainstream media outlets, will no doubt perform its sworn duty and do everything in its power to remove him from office, on any pretext whatsoever. A coordinated, relentless, disempowering stealth campaign of red-baiting to prevent any resurgence of the New Deal would probably begin within a day of his election.

And it would all be perfectly legal. It was during Christmas week 2016, when nobody was paying much attention, that Barack Obama very modestly, quietly, and un-Trumpily signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which allows the State Department to coordinate its own domestic propaganda programs with other agencies and mainstream media outlets in order to battle so-called foreign disinformation. Such domestic propaganda from government agencies, specifically aimed at US citizens, had previously been banned. 

As Mint Press News reported,

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

 “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, hails from the US Air Force's elite Special Ops division. A veteran of the war on Iraq, he is a currently-serving member of the Air National Guard and was recently deployed to the militarized Texas border "to oversee security." 

California Democrat Lieu, an early proponent of Trump impeachment, also hails from the Air Force, with a current rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve Command. Pelosi appointed him her assistant whip in 2017

It's no big surprise that Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment, Inc. are limiting the scope of their investigations. They don't want to expose themselves as the loyal anti-social and anti-socialist servants of the oligarchy and the Military-Industrial Complex that they always have been.

They are just as much the enemies of democracy as the more boorish Trump.

Cancel NYT Subscriptions-Gate

Chuck Schumer famously warned a newly-elected Donald Trump in 2017 that the CIA "has six ways from Sunday" to get him if he didn't stop bashing the "Intelligence Community."

Fast forward nearly three years. The New York Times, which is pushing Impeachment Now! with a vengeance - virtually its entire digital home-page is plastered with impeachment articles - is itself getting bashed from all sides for "outing" a CIA analyst as the whistle-blower. The scandal is that three anonymous government sources fed the Times enough information to make it pretty easy for the vengeful Trump administration to identify him. Not only was he posted to the White House for a time, he is an expert in US-Ukraine foreign policy. That should narrow it down to - oh, I don't know - one individual or maybe two.

Executive Editor Dean Baquet defended the revelation, lamely explaining that without it, readers might believe Trump's reckless allegation that the whistle-blower's report is nothing but a "political hack job." (As if liberal Times readers would ever take Trump's side in anything, and as if Trump fans would even read the Times in the first place!).

 And besides, as a subsequent article pleads, the Trump White House has known about the whistle-blower complaint for weeks, and the need to protect his identity is now moot.

The whistle-blower was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity, and has since returned to the C.I.A.

 His complaint suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The whistle-blower’s expertise will most likely add to lawmakers’ confidence about the merits of his complaint and tamp down allegations that he might have misunderstood what he learned about Mr. Trump. He did not listen directly to the July call, but some White House colleagues told him that they were concerned they had witnessed “the president abuse his office for personal gain,” according to the complaint.

It should be fairly obvious from reading it that the author of the report is highly literate and extremely well-versed in foreign policy matters as well as the law. That the Times still felt the need to trumpet his credentials simply points to how obsessed the Knowledge Class is with proper credentials. The well-credentialed expert must have his Best and Brightest bona fides broadcast far and wide in order to elicit the proper respect and awe from the befuddled teeming masses.

One possibility is that the CIA, and probably also the Democratic Party, wanted the Times to semi-out the whistleblower, and then pretend to be all upset and aghast about the danger that the newspaper poses to their vulnerable agent. It's another week, another round of threats on Twitter to cancel one's Times subscription. That'll show 'em!

This controlled-leak tactic was employed in the New York Times's 2012 blockbuster scoop revealing the existence of Barack Obama's top-secret Kill List. It actually was a story spoon-fed to the Times with the aim of turning Obama's soft-on-terror image into that of a macho war hawk who nonetheless "agonized" before making his lofty, cerebral decisions about which Muslim "militant" to drone to death next. He was up for re-election in just a few short months. Nobody dreamed of impeaching him for extra-judicially assassinating people.

The Paper of Record is the establishment mouthpiece. It has been known to regularly submit national security articles to the proper authorities for vetting before publication. It has been known to suppress information about the illegal Bush wiretapping program at the specific request of George W. Bush himself, agreeing to delay publication until after he was safely elected. It helpfully broadcast the phony WMD stories to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Paper of Record has also had no qualms about throwing both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange under the bus after it so enthusiastically published slews of articles based upon the Wikileaks cables. Both of these war crime-exposing whistle-blowers are still rotting in jails. Any New York Times concerns about their safety are M.I.A. Democrats and Republicans alike still complain that they, along with the exiled Edward Snowden, should have gone through "proper channels" instead of acting independently and going to the press.

There's a lot more to this impeachment-by-CIA whistle-blower than meets the eye, and a lot more questions that must be asked. Was, for example, the whistle-blower involved in the Obama administration's orchestration of the Ukraine coup in 2014, which overthrew an admittedly corrupt but still democratically elected leader? Is this really mostly about the Democratic Party-Media-CIA Cooperative not wanting their own meddling and corruption exposed?

The very fact that impeachment appears to be restricted to "Ukraine-gate" is highly suspect. Cold War 2.0 and Russophobia are huge money-makers for weapons manufacturers, Wall Street investors and revolving-door politicians.

If it was regular humanity that the Democrats were so concerned about, they'd also impeach Trump on grounds of his cruel imprisonment of refugees in border concentration camps, along with the kidnapping and trafficking of perhaps thousands of migrant children. Instead, Nancy Pelosi handed over billions of dollars to Trump so that he could continue merrily scoffing at the "norms" which they pretend to hold so dear.

+++++++++++++++++

Times columnist Paul Krugman, meanwhile, thinks that impeachment will be good for the Economy - meaning the sacrosanct Market, which, much like Ayn Rand's Atlas, has merely "shrugged" over the Big Impeachment News:

If we had a normal administration, one that, whatever its ideology, was trying to govern the nation well, the distraction and paralysis that comes with an impeachment investigation could have adverse side effects, although even then the historical record is unclear. (Compared with the Trump era, the Nixon administration was a paragon of good government.)

 But this isn’t a normal administration; it has never seemed to care much about governing, and it is actively hostile to civil servants trying to do their jobs. So paralysis is good. The more time Trump appointees spend worrying about potential prosecution rather than planning loyalty purges, the better off all of us, from ordinary citizens to giant corporations, will be.

Impeaching Donald Trump is good for the economy.

Do you get the feeling that Krugman's definition of "ordinary citizens" and "all of us" is anybody who resides in the top 10 or 20 percent of income earners?

My bummer of a published response: 

The plutocrats will keep chugging along no matter what happens to Trump. The Senate confirmation of anti-labor lawyer Eugene Scalia as the new labor secretary is doubtlessly making the Market very happy, what with his long history of defending corporations against workers and fighting regulations that protect the rights and health and safety of workers.

 So impeachment cuts both ways, both distracting the Trumpies and distracting the rest of us as it becomes the latest media spectacle. Even in the unlikely event he is removed from office, the lives of ordinary people will not improve as a result.

 The planet will continue frying, drowning and suffocating. Assault weapons and violence will proliferate and spread. Tens of millions of people will keep going broke and dying prematurely due to the lack of the kind of guaranteed health care enjoyed by every other advanced nation.

Police will continue killing an average of three people every day. Congress will continue funding forever-wars and about 800 military bases around the globe. America will still incarcerate more people than anyplace else on earth.

What our ruling elites call American Exceptionalism should really be called American Deviance.

The Scalia confirmation, quietly voted upon Thursday at the height of Impeachment, Now!, has rightly been called "obscene" by Bernie Sanders. It is also being conveniently buried by the Times and other corporate media giants.

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.