Debate & Switch: So On and So Forth

So, am I the only one who found Elizabeth Warren's prefacing every evasive answer to debate questions with the word "So" so very irritating?

I started noticing the emergence of the word "so" as a trendy verbal tic several years ago, and it's become a real pet peeve of mine. For starters, its not as anodyne or natural as beginning one's answer with an "um," which merely signals that the respondent is gathering her thoughts. But using "so" to answer a question sends the warning to brace yourselves for a meandering, wildly tangential, off-topic, or evasive reply, or worst of all, a big fat whopper. As a former schoolteacher, Warren should know better than to misuse the word "so" like this. Back in the olden days, it was used mainly to continue one's own narrative or to expound upon one's own preceding thoughts. I personally often use as a synonym for "therefore." But saying it to preface an answer to a clear-cut question not only comes across as an insult to the questioner, it's an insult to good grammar.

As the dictionary says:

adverb

1. 1.

   to such a great extent.

   "the words tumbled out so fast that I could barely hear them"

   • 
     
     

     
     
   • 
     
     

     
     
   • 
     
     

     
     
2. 2.

   to the same extent (used in comparisons).

   "he isn't so bad as you'd think"
3. 
   
   

   • 
     
     

     
     
   • 
     
     

     
     
   • 
     
     

     
     
   • 
     
     

     
     
4. 
   
   

   
   

conjunction

1. 1.

   and for this reason; therefore.

   "it was still painful so I went to see a specialist"

   • 
     
     

     
     
2. 2.

   with the aim that; in order that.

   "they whisper to each other so that no one else can hear"

Warren began her answers with the word "so" so many times during the debate that I lost count of them.

But she was particularly evasive when asked if middle class taxes would go up under her alleged Medicare For All/Some/Who Knows plan. She could have explained, like Bernie Sanders managed to so (correct usage) cogently do, that the increased taxes for single payer health care would be far, far less than what the middle class currently pays private insurance predators in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

But like Bartleby the Scrivener, she preferred not to.

A prime example:

LACEY: Senator Warren, we've proposed -- you've proposed some sweeping plans, free public college, free universal childcare, eliminating most Americans' college debt. And you've said how you're going to pay for those plans. But you have not specified how you're going to pay for the most expensive plan, Medicare for all. Will you raise taxes on the middle class to pay for it, yes or no?
WARREN: So I have made clear what my principles are here, and that is costs will go up for the wealthy and for big corporations, and for hard-working middle-class families, costs will go down. You know, the way I see this is, I have been out all around this country. I've done 140 town halls now, been to 27 states and Puerto Rico. Shoot, I've done 70,000 selfies, which must be the new measure of democracy....

And the follow-up:

LACEY: Senator Warren, to be clear, Senator Sanders acknowledges he's going to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for all. You've endorsed his plan. Should you acknowledge it, too?

 WARREN: So the way I see this, it is about what kinds of costs middle-class families are going to face. So let me be clear on this. Costs will go up for the wealthy. They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down. I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families. 

Just An Intimate Modest Fireside Chat With the Folks

And so it went. I have to say, though, that I liked it when Warren began that one sentence with the twangy word "shoot." It simply oozed the down-home heartland sincerity that every voter craves.

I won't give you a blow-by-blow of the rest of the Gong Show, because life is too short. For example, I won't do a recount of how many times Kamala Harris referenced her mother sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. The woman apparently never slept.

 Bernie Sanders looked and did great during the few intervals that he was allowed to talk. Joe Biden was his usual goofy old self. He mumbled something incoherent about "clipping coupons at the stock market." He yelled a lot about his grifting son's honesty and America's mighty reputation as Noble Global Imperium. He also took very false and very paternalistic credit for getting Warren's consumer protection bureau started.

The best performance of the evening, in my view, was Tulsi Gabbard's. She scathingly critiqued the New York Times and CNN moderators and the whole establishment right to their faces for their organizations' smears of her:

"Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing “regime change” war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media, who have been championing and cheerleading this regime change war. Not only that but, The New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war. Just two days ago, The New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist, and all these different smears.

This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable. As president, I will end these regime change wars by doing two things: ending the draconian sanctions that are really a modern-day siege, the likes of which we are seeing Saudi Arabia wage against Yemen that have caused tens of thousands Syrian civilians to die and to starve, and make sure we stop supporting terrorists like Al Qaeda in Syria, who have been the ground force in this ongoing regime change war."

It's no surprise that in its own coverage of Gabbard's remarks, the Times doubled right down on its original smears while denying that equating her with Trump and questioning her patriotism and the unusual crossover support that she's getting from some conservative voters was even a smear in the first place. Disingenuous is too good a word for this increasingly reactionary Democratic mouthpiece.

The overarching corporate agenda for this debate was to elevate the centrists - Mayor Pete Buttigieg and the very low-polling Amy Klobuchar - by giving them inordinate amounts of time with which to attack an ascendant Warren from the right. They also served as surrogates for the faltering Uncle Joe, who got a bit of a break and less of a chance to mess up or lose his teeth or suffer an embarrassing eye bleed. 

The media-political complex seems to have written Bernie Sanders off at its peril, especially with his latest record fundraising haul and the newly-announced and very coveted endorsements of three members of The Squad: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

I could be wrong, but I think the bubble-encased pundits might be in for a yuge shock come Iowa and New Hampshire and beyond.

Capitalism Dooming Kids With Curable Cancers

Buried deep (Page A-21) within the dead tree edition of the New York Times today is a scandal far more deserving of outrage than the latest Ukraine-gate drama:

A critical drug that serves as the backbone of treatment for most childhood cancers, including leukemias, lymphomas and brain tumors, has become increasingly scarce, and doctors are warning that they may soon be forced to consider rationing doses.
Persistent shortages of certain drugs and medical supplies have plagued the United States for years, but physicians say the loss of this medication, vincristine, is uniquely problematic, as there is no appropriate substitute.

Could there, I wondered, have been recent blight of the periwinkle plant (Vinca), whose toxic alkaloids are used for the drug's manufacture?

No. The only blight in play is on the moral compass of Big Pharma, whose ultimate aim is not to cure diseases, but to bloat their stock prices, enrich their investors and reward their CEOs, both with outrageous salaries and golden parachutes when they retire.

Of course, the Times puts it a bit more delicately than that, only noting that Trump's Food and Drug Administration tersely announced that Teva, the drug's manufacturer, had made a "business decision" last July to stop manufacturing vincristine. The only remaining manufacturer is Pfizer, which is experiencing some vague "manufacturing troubles" of its own and can't keep up with demand. 

There are shortages not only of vincristine, but also of about 200 other drugs,  including standard antibiotics and injectable vaccines, including the one for rabies. The generic vincristine is the gold standard of treatment for pediatric cancers, including for lymphoblastomic leukemia (which currently has an 85 percent cure rate) along with lymphomas and brain and kidney tumors.

The oncologists interviewed for the Times article describe themselves as terrified at the looming "nightmare situation" of rationing medication, reducing dosages, or even facing a "Sophie's Choice" of which children will be treated and which children will simply be allowed to die.

This situation is not new. In a 2013 survey run by the New England Journal of Medicine, 83 percent of oncologists reported they had been unable to prescribe their first-choice chemotherapy drugs because of shortages, and either had to prescribe less effective alternatives or delay treatment.

What the Times doesn't report about Teva, the Israel-based multinational generic drug company that so abruptly stopped manufacturing Vincristine, is that it is also one of the six major firms now facing billions of dollars in liabilities because of its very lucrative and possibly criminal involvement in the manufacture of opioids for worldwide distribution.

Although Teva refused to comment to the Times about so heartlessly leaving kids with cancer in the lurch, you wouldn't know from its glossy glitzy website that it even had a problem. It brags to potential investors that its idea of helping patients is practically unique among other providers of life-saving medicines. (Because it stresses the money-saving over the life-saving aspects?) While it also correctly points to having left its "unique footprint" on world markets, what it modestly omits is that this footprint is literally crushing the life and the hope out of thousands of young cancer patients and their families:

As the world’s leading provider of generic pharmaceuticals, Teva’s medicines help patients and consumers in a way that few other companies can.

Teva produces 120 billion tablets and capsules a year in 70 pharmaceutical and API facilities around the world. Teva has a leadership position (top 3) in 25 markets globally. The scale and breadth of our generics portfolio has an unprecedented impact on global healthcare. Teva’s exceptional integration of generics and specialty R&D enables us to generate a robust pipeline of high-value medicines, with an emphasis on complex and branded generics. Our R&D capabilities have expanded beyond tablets, capsules, liquids, ointments and creams to a broad range of effective dosage forms and delivery systems.Teva has a unique understanding of - and footprint in - world markets, where our generic medicines are tailored to the needs of local patients, physicians and consumers. We also have an unparalleled ability to partner in commercializing generic products. Building on a remarkable track record of achievement, Teva continues to pursue a rich future in generics as we focus on patient needs, improving compliance, convenience, efficacy and safety, and providing affordable generic products to patients and society worldwide.

Since this is America, and American-style neoliberal capitalism has sickened the entire planet while a few plutocrats and corporations have gotten filthy rich, we can look for Master of the Universe Jeff Bezos to now swoop in like a vulture and make a killing off the backs of sick people, including sick and dying children. As Investopedia reported last month:

The worst-case scenario for drug companies may not be the cost of lawsuits. In August, Morgan Stanley analysts argued that the opioid settlements could present an opportunity for e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc to steamroll its way into the market as it's done in other areas. "If distributors face increased regulation as a byproduct of any settlement, the cost of doing business would go up, making it easier for a fourth competitor such as Amazon to enter the marketplace, " wrote analyst Ricky Goldwasser.

So I hope that when the Democratic candidates are asked to dish on one another's scandals at tonight's "debate," Bernie Sanders will pipe up and again point to the real scandal of how our greedy, for-profit, market-based health care delivery systems are literally killing the same people who they merely pretend to help. 

We have a choice: Medicare For All, or the prospect of having Alexa administer your child's chemo at the sweltering Amazon Fulfillment Center nearest you.

Astroturfing Impeachment

With slightly more than half of those polled now favoring the impeachment of Donald Trump, it behooves the liberal ruling establishment to corral them and carefully set the boundaries for protesting this president's myriad high crimes and misdemeanors.

There thus will be no emphasis on his massive plunder of the public purse via his unprecedented tax giveaway to the oligarchs. The plight of imprisoned refugees and migrants and the thousands of kidnapped and trafficked children will be all but ignored. His assaults on the environment will take a back seat, as will his frequent incitements to violence against minorities and vulnerable groups. His relentless shredding of the social safety net will proceed apace. There must be no protests against the US troop build-up in Saudi Arabia and of course, no resistance to the US-assisted genocide in Yemen begun under the previous Democratic administration.

If you hate Trump for all these reasons and more, you are nevertheless urged to direct all your precious energies into aiding the ruling class's internecine battle over which corporations and oligarchs will get to plunder Ukraine. You will be urged to defend the neoliberal Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden, from the corruption charges being leveled against him by Trump. No matter that you believe that Biden is, in fact, corrupt. The outrage you must develop on behalf of the "good" oligarchic faction is that a far more corrupt individual is leading the charge against Biden and his family.

To facilitate the proper channeling of your anger against Trump, rather than at the system which spawned him, the Democratic Party is "scrambling" to get a "grassroots" impeachment movement underway.

The first propaganda step is describing the organizers of the movement as "outsiders" - when, in fact, they are consummate insiders who get most of their dark funding from corporations and billionaires. As narrated by Politico's Maggie Severns, these "outside" groups have been sadly marginalized by party bigwigs for years. But thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, their impeachment day has finally come.

The flowers withering on the vine have gotten a magical dose of Miracle-Gro!

This organizational hub has sprouted in D.C., commissioning polling, sponsoring ads and trying to guide the energy in the party toward a message and result the public will support, while counteracting a blistering, expensive anti-impeachment campaign from Trump and the Republican National Committee.

It sure sounds like a spontaneous, bottom-up, grassroots uprising to me. It sounds almost as good as that time last year when thousands of progressive activists simply sprouted up with professional signs bemoaning the ouster of neoconfederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the feared ouster of Robert Mueller - whose status then sadly plummeted from Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad when he finally released his wishy-washy report and stumbled his way through congressional testimony.

As Politico's marketing of Astroturfed Impeachment Inc. continues, we finally get our first clue about the real money and power behind this campaign: 

At the center of the emerging movement are several progressive groups that boast big memberships, including Indivisible and MoveOn.org, that have quickly been joined by an array of other groups spanning the Democratic Party. Outside strategists including Zac Petkanas, former director of rapid response for Hillary Clinton, have started aiding the effort.

“It’s going to be very intense. It’s all hands-on-deck for grassroots folks and everybody in DC,” said Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director at the grassroots organization Indivisible.

Almost every email I get from Hillary Clinton includes a fundraising appeal for Indivisible, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of her defeat. Its sole purpose is to "resist Trump" by supporting Democratic candidates. You folks send the money to Hillary, and then she forwards it to the Indivisible folks. It sounds suspiciously like a variation of the scheme she devised during her second failed presidential campaign: she ostensibly raised money for a bunch of local Democratic Parties to help their local candidates. The local parties then funneled a big chunk of this money right back to her for use in her own campaign. It was a nifty way to skirt campaign finance laws, which limit the amount of money that each donor can contribute to any one particular candidate. Another word for what Hillary did is money-laundering. But thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, it was rendered perfectly legal.

So everybody join together and fight Trumpian corruption! And be sure use the "progressive" label every chance you get, in order to give credence and a semblance of authenticity to the astroturfed effort.

Indivisible, as New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel has revealed, now gets most of its multi-millions of dollars in annual funding from Democracy Alliance, a consortium of liberal plutocrats who gather at fancy parties to decide which Democratic candidates will best represent their interests. Vogel exposed them strategizing over how to successfully make their "Never Bernie" agenda a reality.

The original funding source of the Indivisible "grassroots" effort was the Tides Foundation. According to Source Watch,

The Tides Foundation, founded in 1976, has provided more than $300 million in funding for what it calls "positive social change ... We define 'progressive' as creating a positive impact on people's lives in ways that honor and promote human rights, justice, and a healthy, sustainable environment."

The seed money for the Tides Foundation, in turn, had come from a Reynolds Tobacco heiress. It has since (cough) wafted to a vast interconnected network of organizations and philanthrocapitalist foundations. 

The co-chairman of Tides, as listed on its website, is Columbia University dean Jason Wingard. "Dr. Wingard served as the chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank, where he led the strategy and implementation of thought leadership and management development solutions for the firm’s global workforce and clients. Previously, he served as vice dean of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he led Executive Education and oversaw one of the world’s largest providers of leadership development for corporate managers and executives. He also served as senior vice president of Regional Markets at ePals, Inc. and president & CEO of the ePals Foundation."

Whenever you hear a plutocrat described as a "thought leader," you should probably run for the hills. Capitalistic thoughts have this worrying tendency to privilege themselves while sermonizing to the less well-off - when they're not exploiting them, that is.

The other co-chair is Steve Zuckerman, described on the website as "Managing Director of Self-Help’s California operations and President of Self-Help Federal Credit Union. Self-Help is a leading nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) founded in 1980 and now manages almost $2 billion in assets and 42 credit union branches with more than 100,000 members. Self-Help has provided nearly $6.5 billion in financing to roughly 87,000 families, businesses and nonprofits. Previously, Steve spent almost 15 years with McCown De Leeuw & Co (MDC), a private investment firm based in Menlo Park, CA that focused on middle market management buyouts. Throughout his career, Steve has served on numerous nonprofit boards in the areas of economic justice and youth development. In addition to Self-Help related boards, he currently serves on the national governing board of Positive Coaching Alliance and the New Market Tax Credit advisory board of Opportunity Fund."

How to translate that convoluted bio? Since I'm in a good mood, I'll give Steve the benefit of the doubt and assume he generously he parlayed a tax-deductible portion of his vulture capitalist enterprise's obscene profits into loaning money (micro-lending) to the less well-off - so that one day, if they're extremely lucky, be able to buy the bootstraps to pull themselves up by. The market god only helps those who help themselves, which is why they put the Self Help label on it.

And how about that Opportunity Fund that Steve brags about? That was a gift given to tax-averse plutocrats and the investment class by Donald Trump himself as part of his tax reform/corporate welfare package. Although Opportunity Funds are supposed to benefit some 52 million struggling people living in distressed communities, it is doing the exact opposite. No wonder the liberal thought leaders from Tides and Democracy Alliance aren't emphasizing impeachment based upon theft from the public purse. They actually benefit from Trump's policies themselves.

While it's impossible to ascertain the identities of all the current donors to Tides, the 1,775 organizations receiving dark Tides money run the gamut. They include the elite private Brearley School (annual tuition $49,680), Duke University, M.I.T., Media Matters for America, the hawkish liberal think tank Center for New American Security... and surprise, surprise: the anti-Bernie Working Families Party!

Those Democracy Alliance/Tides/Indivisible liberal plutocrats, like most plutocrats, usually get whatever they want in the way of government policy. And right now, they seem to think they'll get most of what they want from the WFP-endorsed Elizabeth Warren. (If it's any consolation to Bernie and his supporters, the WFP also endorsed ethics-challenged New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive anti-corruption candidate Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on Corruption In America!)

Of course, the Politico article trying to drum up support for a limited impeachment inquiry doesn't tell you anything about the layers of incestuous muck enveloping and enriching all these veal pen organizations and their secretive donor networks. If it did, then "folks" might not get enthused, and the "progressive" organizations would have an even harder time trying to corral them into caring more about Ukrainegate than they care about paying the rent and putting food on the table and getting health care when they're sick and uninsured.

Listed affiliates of the Indivisible group include the ubiquitous Working Families Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the Democratic Socialists of America.

I have a suggestion. If Indivisible wants to be really authentic, it should change its name to Invisible. After all, Halloween is nigh and it's not only the wads of donor money that are getting darker.

Trick or treat! Or, in the corrupted, subverted, anti-democratic version of the holiday: heads they win, tails you lose.

Unless, of course, you can cut your way through their four-ply toilet paper-festooned gated communities and foundations with lots of extra batteries to load into your truth-exposing flashlights.

**************

Update, 10/14: I've revised this article by removing all references to a group called Influence Watch. This is actually an oppo-research project funded by the Capital Research Center, which itself is funded by such public-spirited corporations as Exxon-Mobil. In other words, an astroturf organization is exposing astroturf organizations it doesn't like!

 I was initially fooled, because Influence Watch imitates the style and layout of the reputable Source Watch, and has a nearly identical mission statement. I have independently verified Influence Watch's critical reporting on the Tides Foundation, and have even added information about the Tides board. The upshot: you certainly don't need right-wing oppo research to expose some of these Democratic veal pen organizations and the sources of their funding. It's even worse than what Influence Watch reported, as a matter of fact, because their research doesn't mention the direct role of private equity and Wall Street in choosing and financing the recipients of the Tides "charity."

It's a tangled web for sure.

Bad Fascism vs Less-Bad Fascism

First let's get the in-your-face variety out of the way. Donald Trump led another Nuremberg-style rally Thursday and vowed to bring the troops back home so that they might be deployed "somewhere else" - meaning, presumably, closer to home if not Homeland itself. And even though city cops were barred by their chief from attending the Minneapolis rally, Trump had his own detail of Redshirts on hand to escort protesters from the premises the moment he barked out the order.

Now let's get to the Democratic resistance to this offal-ness. Frontrunner Joe Biden (Fascist-lite) looks more corrupt by the minute, with reports (so far, by only right-leaning media outlets) that not only did he work closely with the CIA "whistleblower" in the White House, this same informant may also have accompanied the former vice president to Ukraine during and after the US-backed coup. Another report, via Rudy Giuliani, claims that Biden received a $900,000 contribution from a Ukraine lobbyist. Biden's campaign is furiously attacking the corporate media for covering all this sleaze, essentially demanding that they cease and desist from practicing journalism in the public interest (not that journalism in the public interest is that much of a thing any more.) Whether these allegations are true, mainly true, somewhat true, or false, mainly false or somewhat false seems moot at this point. Biden is being tainted by them. It's such a shame that this taint is covering up his proven 40-year record of anti-social neoliberal rhetoric and policy. But whoever said life was fair?

Elizabeth Warren, although inching up in the polls and threatening Biden's standing, is nevertheless being hammered from both right and left for "PregnancyGate." The scandal is that although Warren has been saying on the campaign trail that she was fired from a teaching job nearly half a century ago because of pregnancy, earlier video then surfaced of her explaining she'd quit the profession because she lacked the necessary teaching credentials.

Both narratives are likely true. Even if she weren't actually physically fired by her now-deceased principal, she had been due to give birth just as the new school year was starting in September. She knew she wouldn't be allowed to show up for classes either in labor or immediately postpartum, so she preemptively quit before they ever had a chance to fire her. Sure, she fudged the facts, but the essential truth remains that her pregnancy, and all the sexist bigotry then in play, got in the way of her career. She was, for all intents and purposes, barred from employment. So I'd give her a "mostly-to-somewhat true" rating. Her slanted version of events doesn't rise to the gross level of, say, Hillary Clinton's totally false claim that she once dodged sniper fire in Bosnia. Warren was trying to show empathy for women. Clinton was trying to show she was a war hawk to her bones.

But still, I'm torn. Even little bitty lies in the greater service to the truth are fraught, because they tend to turn into greater big fat lies in the service of whatever definition of "truth" is convenient at the time. What do you think?

Also of concern is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's implied threat that he will meddle with Warren's campaign by suppressing her ads and other campaign information as payback for her direct threat to break up his monopolistic social media giant. The pasty-faced little putz was caught on audio vowing to "go to the mat" to insure his continuing status as Master of the Universe. He might even do more damage than Russian troll farms in swinging the election away from Warren and toward, probably, Trump. Or just as bad, toward Hillary Clinton in the brokered convention lots of people are predicting.

Finally, there was Bernie Sanders's heart attack, and to make the blow even worse, the nearly simultaneous death of his daughter-in-law. The corporate press can barely contain its glee, producing an avalanche of "questions are now being raised about his candidacy" and "shadows are being cast on his candidacy" - which is nothing but code that ever so subtly bellows out "Quit, Bernie, Quit!"

My take is that if he wants to stop holding raucous rallies in order to rest and recuperate, then let him, and don't hold it against him. He can easily address the voters by video. Campaign seasons are way too brutally long anyway. If the other candidates in the field had any decency, they'd cut back on their own schedules out of solidarity, and as a way of protesting the made-for-TV spectacle that our politics has become. For those who market "party unity" above all else, then let them put their money where their mouths are for a change.

Speaking of protests, Tulsi Gabbard is threatening to boycott next week's debate over the continued rigging of the process by the Democratic National Committee, along with its rank commercialization into spectacle. If I were her, I'd use the few minutes allotted to her out of the dozen competing voices on the stage to vocally and loudly expose everything she knows about corrupt party machinations and profiteering media bias. Otherwise, the viewers at home might think she's acting out of sour grapes, or that she simply wimped out.

Somebody on that stage should, at the very least, express concern that a new poll reveals that fully 77 percent of Democrats "trust" the same CIA that, among its many other fascistic activities and atrocities, once rescued and then recruited Nazi war criminals to come work for the United States in the Cold War battles against "the Russians."

So my question is what they'll be chanting at next summer's Democratic Convention. Will "USA! USA! USA! be replaced by "CIA! CIA! CIA!"? 

This affinity for the "intelligence community" and "less-bad" fascism no doubt stems from Trump-hatred and not from any true admiration of this unaccountable and often rogue de facto branch of the government. Public opinion can turn on a dime, depending on whatever propaganda is being spooned out to the public at any given time. It was only a few short years ago that the public was on the definite outs with the spooks because of Bush-era torture and the break-in by the CIA of the computers of the senate committees that were investigating the torture.

But wait. Since comic Ellen DeGeneres recently shared a private box with George and Laura Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game, the message the ruling class wants to impart is that since the ruling class mission of Bush rehab has been accomplished, all the fans and maimed Iraq war veterans at home should just relax and enjoy it. If you're a contrarian who took issue with a celebrity schmoozing with a folksy war criminal, then it just proves how petty you are, announced a whole slew of co-celebrities and Democratic donors, strategists and pundits.

David Axelrod‏Verified account @davidaxelrod

What a horrific commentary about our times that @TheEllenShow should even have to explain herself for hanging with President Bush. Good for her!

Ellen, remember, is a treasured member of the same incestuous NBC family which employs Bush's daughter Jenna as a co-host on its infotainment "Today Show." Just like Meghan McCain, Hunter Biden, Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump and virtually all children of politicians and plutocrats, she achieved her position based purely upon her own talents and merits and expertise.

NBC is the same network that for years ignored former Today host Matt Lauer's  sexual abuse of its less-elite female employees, including sweeping an alleged rape under the rug. It's currently reeling from a new Ronan Farrow book alleging that it also suppressed reports of Harvey Weinstein's long history of predation. 

But I guess it could always be worse. NBC could be hosting - and tainting - next week's Democratic debate, which will be jointly controlled by the private media companies CNN and the New York Times. NBC won't get its own turn until November, when the Gong Show field could be winnowed down to a shocking final ten contestants.  

It's a real nail-biter. The lucky viewers at home will have a chance to cast their votes as soon as next winter. If you're in an early primary or caucus state which doesn't require corporate party membership as a prerequisite to participation, your vote might even actually count a little bit.

Isn't capitalist Democracy grand? Isn't Fascism grand when it's a fully-owned subsidiary of capitalist Democracy?

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.