Bloombergville Redux

Months before the Occupy movement sprang up in 2011 and its first major encampment made New York City's Zuccotti Park a household word, there were sidewalk sleepovers known as Bloombergvilles. The longest of these anti-austerity protests, in front of City Hall, lasted for three weeks before police broke it up and arrested 13 of the participants.

Inspired by the Depression-era Hooverville shantytowns erected by the destitute and homeless, the pre-Occupy Bloombergvilles were set up to irritate the city's multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose watch the Big Apple had become Income Disparity Capital of the Universe. The big Wall Street banks got the bailout while the rest of us got the bum's rush as well as the bill for both their reward and our punishment. As Bloomberg's own personal wealth was in the process of tripling to more than $53.4 billion, making him the eighth richest person in America, wages of workers stagnated and more jobs disappeared. Social programs were cut nationally and locally. Bloomberg even ordered that the city's food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as if they were criminals, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally put the kibosh on that cruelty.

Bite Me

It goes on and on. Bloomberg in 2011 had very Trumpily appointed as schools chancellor his own version of Betsy DeVos, a crony named Cathie Black, despite the fact that she had no education experience. Her liberal take on school overcrowding was to wonder out loud why poor minority women didn't use birth control. Unlike DeVos, though, Black didn't last too long on the job. Maybe it was the disclosure that Bloomberg had also had to hire a separate person to actually do Black's job for her.

 The very legitimacy of democratic institutions had become a critical issue of contention and mass outrage long before Donald Trump ever stumbled onto the scene to cast a lot of unwanted light on the corruption long endemic in our neoliberal society, in which government and corporations are for all intents and purposes the very same entity.

Then, as now, you would never have known that people were taking to the streets if you got all your news from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Six months before the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge Occupy (first by ridiculing it and later by covering it as legitimate news once the police beatings began) there was a "Day of Rage" march on Wall Street by a diverse group of thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists, retirees, doctors, nurses - in other words, a cross-section of humanity forging a new solidarity which cuts across income and racial and "identity politics" lines.

Young student debt slaves are forming coalitions with the homeless, the recently unemployed or underemployed professionals of the middle class, trade unionists and others with the common experience of having suffered injustice and who are united in outrage. This building of cross-class coalitions is something relatively new. The "helping professions" have all been in the forefront because their ability to do their jobs has been so adversely affected by the budget cuts of the neoliberal project. Likewise, people who had heretofore been permanently relegated to victimhood, such as the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill have taken on activist roles in protest movements as well. Tenant unions have sprung up as associations of eviction victims united in fighting landlords, more apt of a name than ever in these times of neo-feudalism.

The Bloombergville/Occupy movement was the beginning, in America at least, of the refugees from the middle class finding common cause with more historically oppressed groups of people. It was a slap in the face to the Divide and Conquer regimen which created enough of a norm-busting vacuum for Donald Trump to be ushered into power, courtesy of the arcane Electoral College and the dismal campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Pre-Occupy March 2011 March On Wall Street

The only media outlets bothering to cover this huge Bloomberg-era march and rally were Al Jazeera and the Amsterdam News.

So, for me anyway, nothing brings back memories of the heady, halcyon days of those civic uprisings than the possible/likely/all but certain entry of the despised Bloomberg, a virtual parody of smug class privilege, into the Democratic presidential primary race. Nothing spells irony better than Bloomberg's plaintive reason for running for the presidency in the first place: to restore the "norms" that the elites feebly claim were so suddenly and tragically lost during the reign of Donald Trump, along with the "legitimacy" of our democratic institutions.

Politics has been in legitimacy crisis mode for decades. Long before Trump, there was deep distrust of citizens for their government, a reality which Trump and other right wing "populist" leaders have co-opted brilliantly.

 Political parties are not allies of the citizens. And since the political system depends on the mass loyalty of citizens, it reacts to this negativity by clamping down, via censorship, policing, mass surveillance. As Barack Obama made plain in his annoying lecture on "wokeness" last week, deferential citizens are viewed as better citizens than critical citizens. He wanted to deflect from the scary truth that conflict is absolutely essential for the development of democratic rights.

It was Bloomberg (who was offered and turned down the World Bank presidency by Obama) himself who had directly crushed legitimate democratic protest when he spearheaded the orchestrated nationwide police crackdowns on the Occupy camps in December, 2011. (To be fair, he got a little help from the Democratic veal pen of organizers, such as MoveOn, which had attempted to co-opt the movement by starting its own get-out-the-vote "99% Spring" astroturf imitation,  which mysteriously disappeared around the time that the camps were destroyed.)

Bloomberg's threatened entry into the race is all about saving the oligarchy at the continued expense of the rest of us. His candidacy is living proof that we do indeed live under neo-feudalism,  and that our quadrennial participation in presidential politics is a privilege granted to us, and not a right. Specifically, his entry into the race is meant as a warning and a rebuke to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its popular candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

His entry into the race is above all a sign of desperation by the oligarchs that there is the tiniest possibility that they may actually be parted from a smidgen of their obscene wealth sooner rather than later.

From Barack Obama last week chiding the victims of his austerity policies to tone down their indignant rhetoric, to mega-banker Jamie Dimon complaining on TV that the "success" his predatory cohort is being disrespected, to Jeffrey Epstein pal Bill Gates threatening to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee. the Ruling Class is wallowing in a virtual orgy of overblown sensitivity. They are so corrupt that any vestigial insight into the ugly fact of their own corruption and criminality has long disappeared. whittled away by both their ill-gotten gains and the fawning coverage they get from their corporate press courtiers.

Bloomberg even owns his own media empire, a feat he had accomplished long before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

No wonder all the usual suspects are welcoming this godzillionaire ex-mayor to the party with open arms, despite there being no chance that he'll win the nomination, let alone even make it on to the debate stage. Bloomberg has all the debate stage he wants in the way of free publicity. 

One positive point: the Stop and Frisk former mayor who made extreme racial profiling by cops a core part of his agenda, makes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who failed to rein in police misconduct and to address racism in his own little town, look like the rube he is. He's also pulling the rug right out from under fellow centrist Joe Biden, increasingly viewed as a liability by the Owning Class because of his chronic "gaffes" and obvious mental decline. 

Bloomberg's self-funding billions will buy him all the air time and space he demands with which and from which to hurl class venom at the lesser people under the guise of hurling venom at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He is the leader of his own party, the Oligarch Party. His MAGA motto is to Make America Gentrified, Always. His task is to promote the narrative that 1) Bernie and Liz are making our Trickle-Down Tyrants so nervous that they can't even pee their golden drops of beneficence on us without getting a nasty groin-ache; and 2) the serfs of the Heartland are so bummed and so terrified by the prospect of guaranteed health care and debt-free college that they will vote for Trump again out of a dearth of centrism.

Bloomberg has heeded the call of fellow financier Steve Rattner, who is granted regular New York Times opinion page space despite his tacit admission to robbing public pension funds in a sleazy kickback scheme. Like most members of his class, he avoided criminal indictment and prosecution by "settling" with New York and agreeing to pay a fine. Like most members of his criminal class, he no doubt later claimed the fine as an income tax deduction.

Three days before Bloomberg filed the paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic primary, Rattner complained in the Times that even worse than Medicare For All and the threat to private insurance predators are Warren's regulatory reforms and taxes, which would greatly threaten his class's ability to rob, cheat, steal and pollute:

Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.

 Oh, the humanity. Notwithstanding that Warren cringe-worthily said that among the Black leaders she'd consider for her cabinet were Bain Capital's Deval Patrick and Melody Barnes, late of the Obama administration and revolving doors to JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton, at least she's making them momentarily uncomfortable, albeit probably unnecessarily so if she wins the nomination. They count Bernie out at their own peril.

Since normal tycoons, meanwhile, are so not used to defending themselves in public, it will now fall to Bloomberg to seamlessly continue what Barack Obama started last week by way of gaslighting the underdog and reassuringly dog-whistling endless class supremacy to the traditional movers and shakers of The Realm who have so richly rewarded Obama since he left office.

And just to be on the safe side, the Oily Garchs will protect their bullshit narrative by ostentatiously moving Wall Street's mythical bull sculpture to a place of greater safety. Just last month, a protester doused it with fake blood. And the month before that, another ne'er-do-well violently bashed it with a toy metal banjo. This symbol of the Overlords was not only punked, it was plinked. And that is so rude, seeing as how the Overlords paid homage to women's rights -  not by passing wage parity legislation -  but by commissioning a Fearless Girl statue to face down the Charging Bull.

No word if Bull will be reunited with Girl, who also had to be fearfully removed from the site due to safety concerns.

Maybe Bloomberg and the other belly-aching, plutocrapping Thought Leaders can get together before the first terrifying Democratic primaries and strain to come up with a solution to the pressing dilemma of where they can run, where they can hide.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Biden Plagiarizes Both Obama and Trump

Well, maybe plagiarism is too harsh a word to hurl at the old reprobate copycat, whose own stated goal is to keep serving the fat cats and defending their right to crush everybody else into oblivion. But his much-maligned Medium post, in which he accused Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren of "my way or the highway"elitism, absolutely was ripped right out of Barack Obama's anti-progressive playbook.

It was only last week that Obama briefly emerged from his luxe retirement to once again chide the serfs who refuse to suffer the American system of neo-feudalism gladly, who call their lords and masters nasty names on Twitter rather than reaching across the class divide to find common cause with the very people who are making their lives nasty, brutish and short. Contrary to Biden's oafish attack on Warren, however, Obama's sermonizing about the dangers of "cancel culture" was almost universally praised by the mainstream media as being a "breath of fresh air" in this divisive Age of Trump.

Headlining the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, where plans for his presidential center and golf course on public parkland have run into legal challenges from neighborhood activists who are crying foul because of gentrification and rising rents and the damage to the environment that his project is already causing, the former president expressed his displeasure with a gaslighting attack upon citizen activism in general:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

As Obama had previously admonished those protesting the location of his Center, occasional appearances by Chance the Rapper should alleviate all their concerns about his refusal to sign a community benefits agreement to offset the rising rents of gentrification and the destruction of their public park. After all, if the former president could once be generous enough to call misanthropic former House Speaker, sadistic Ayn Rand fanboy and less refined victim-blamer Paul Ryan "a good man, a family man," why can't the lesser people also put away their "wokeness" and stop making so many unreasonable demands for a better, more equitable life for themselves and their communities? 

Why be an independent activist when the Obamas are touting their planned shrine as "a catalyst for activism and social change" without offering any information about how this would actually happen?

Enter Joe Biden, who is now being eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren in many polls. He's also being eclipsed by Bernie Sanders. But, thanks to the relentless media blackout of Sanders, Biden can keep on pretending with the rest of them that Bernie doesn't even exist. He therefore limits his umbrage to Warren, who has rightly accused him running in "the wrong primary" because of his opposition to Medicare For All and soaking the rich to help the less well-off.

Biden therefore summoned up his inner deflective Obama: 

But at another level these kinds of attacks are a serious problem. They reflect an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics. If someone doesn’t agree with you — it’s not just that you disagree — that person must be a coward or corrupt or a small thinker.Some call it the “my way or the highway” approach to politics. But it’s worse than that. It’s condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view.It’s representative of an elitism that working and middle class people do not share: “We know best; you know nothing”. “If you were only as smart as I am you would agree with me.”

Accusing the victims of your own cruel, nasty policies of being nasty and scary is a common tactic of right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Joe Biden hurling the "elitist" epithet at Warren not only ignores his own life-long service to, and enrichment by, the Elite, it allows him to portray himself as just a regular working-class guy. Not only has he ripped a smarmy page right out of the scolding Obama playbook, he's going one step further. He is essentially plagiarizing  Donald Trump, stealing the successful fascistic technique of reversing the dichotomy between perpetrator and victim.

Just as Biden, the elitist in anti-intellectual blue collar clothing, uses Warren as proxy for the estimated 84 million uninsured and underinsured Americans and their advocates, selfish and unreasonable extremists for demanding single payer health insurance as a basic human right, Trump, the phony populist, for his own part scapegoats the victims of racism as being the direct causes of racism. When, for example, he was confronted last year by a Black reporter about his white nationalist rhetoric, he retorted: "That is such a racist question!"  

Just as Trump brags about his nonexistent high poll numbers among African-Americans, Biden brags that "millions of Democrats" are, just like him, dead-set against their fellow human beings being afforded a healthy, secure life. Both Biden and Trump deploy the ultra-right weapon of transforming groups of people who have traditionally been the targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. They play divide and conquer with a vengeance.

A series of debates between these two senile servants of the oligarchy would constitute a gruesome mind meld of epic proportions. Obama will rue the day that he ever kvetched about "cancel culture" if he ever gets to witness Trump and Biden canceling each other out on live corporate TV.

All the Protests Not Fit To Print

The New York Times has been hard at it in recent weeks, trying to drum up popular support for the "impeachment inquiry" currently being stage-managed in private by Democratic Party officials, the corporate media, and a coup crew of unelected military-intelligence bureaucrats acting as a kind of Greek chorus of jingoism.

While we regular schlubs await public testimony against Donald Trump with languid breath, whatever minimal interest we do have in the Ukrainegate Affair is being sustained by a steady drip of leaks, suppositions and personality profiles of the known cast of characters. As per usual, most of this information is on deep background as befits the "sensitivity" of the Deep State actors involved. Any day now, the Impeachers tease, we might just be lucky enough to get our very first glimpse of the heavily redacted inquiry transcripts. This is exciting news indeed, because the House Intelligence Committee leading this inquiry usually shares nothing with the public.

To make the suspense even more pleasurable, the anonymous CIA "whistleblower" who first spilled the beans on Trump's phone call to the president of Ukraine, in which he requested dirt on the rapidly failing Joe Biden, has promised (through his lawyer, due to the sensitivity of his matter) to answer or deflect in writing any questions that the GOP minority committee members might have for him.

A couple of weeks ago, I'd half-jokingly predicted that this CIA informant would ultimately get his 15 minutes of TV fame by testifying with the aid of voice-altering technology and with a protective hood over his head to give the show that extra boost of James Bond thriller atmosphere. But he will not be part of the movie, at least for now. Of course, it all depends on the ratings. If not enough people tune in to the Impeachment Follies when they finally do get underway sometime during the doldrums of this upcoming holiday season, they may decide to bring out their anonymous star after all, in a last ditch effort to save the show. Chairman Adam Schiff can only perform so many soliloquys. (Prosecutor Schiff, you may have read, had originally wanted to be a Hollywood screenwriter, but then had to resort to political drama when that career didn't pan out for him.)

But I digress. What has all this to do with public protest, which the various impeachment cheerleaders of the pundit class have been urging upon us ever since the dawn of the Impeachment Inquiry saga?

Well, it turns out that the only domestic public protests that the New York Times, for one, are interested in are the ones where people boo Trump at sporting events, and the astroturfed ones that professionally herd people into sedate groups bearing mass-produced designer impeachment signs.

 When, beginning on Halloween, about a thousand people spontaneously took to the streets of Brooklyn for three straight nights to protest police brutality and unaffordable subway fares, the Times wasn't interested. Rather than cover the ad hoc street protests, the Gray Lady devoted most of her weekend digital home page to a forensic analysis of Trump's 11,000 tweets.

If your only source of news is the New York Times, the Washington Post, or MSNBC, these citizen protests did not even happen. The total blackout of coverage is the other side of what Trump derides as "fake news." It is lying by omission.

To its own credit, impeachment-intensive CNN did briefly cover the Brooklyn unrest, as did the New York tabloids and local TV news outlets, if only to highlight the rowdiness of the crowds, the obscenity of their language, and the color of their skin. (Be very afraid of young black and brown folks acting disrespectfully to the uniformed police forces, some of whom had been unfairly caught on cameras beating up subway turnstile jumpers as well as innocent bystanders.) 

To the extent that the outpouring of outrage by oppressed human beings was covered, it was to subtly caution viewers about the dangers inherent in unauthorized, non-impeachment centered demonstrations. CNN slyly described the police brutality in the subway station as "police fighting with teens," as if they were co-equal combatants, as if the uniformed fighters did not come unfairly decked out with guns, night sticks and handcuffs.

Protesters chanted "no justice, no peace" Friday night as they marched by the Barclays Center arena, where the NBA team Brooklyn Nets play. The protests came days after a video shared widely on social media showed officers fighting with teens at a subway station in the city,according to CNN affiliate WABC.
Some protesters hurled profanities at officers, confronted them at a subway station and spray-painted police cars with slogans such as RIP Eric Garner -- the man who was choked by a New York police officer in 2014, WABC video shows.

Those taking part in the protest highlighted the recent video that shows police breaking up a fight among teens at a metro station as an example of police brutality.
In the video, an officer can be seen punching what affiliates said was a 15-year-old boy after police responded to a fight between two large groups that spilled into the Jay Street-Metro Tec subway station. Teens allegedly kept fighting and resisted arrest, and one punched an officer, WLNY reported.

The tabloid New York Post at least saw fit to mention in its own much meatier coverage that the core impetus for the protests was the recent subway fare hike,  leading to a shocking increase in turnstile-jumping by the people who can't afford the new $2.75 price of admission to the city's crumbling and neglected subway infrastructure. This mass refusal to pay, in turn, has provoked a police crackdown amounting to a terror campaign.

The Post reported:

The demonstration was in response to a planned crackdown on fare evasion by the NYPD — and two controversial police actions in Brooklyn subway stations in recent weeks.
In one of the incidents, an NYPD cop sent straphangers scrambling in terror when he pointed his pistol toward a window from the platform at the Franklin Avenue station in Brooklyn.
In another incident, an officer was caught on camera slugging a 15-year-old boy in a wild melee at the Jay Street-MetroTech station in Downtown Brooklyn.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” one protester, a 31-year-old woman who works in media said. “I mean, it’s monstrous. My f—king tax dollars are going to this? It doesn’t make sense.”

As of Monday morning, there was nothing at all on the three nights of protests from the New York Times, which is headquartered across the class divide mere miles from the scene. This is quite odd, especially since the newspaper had provided coverage of similar protests in Chile against subway fare hikes in particular and against neoliberal austerity in general. As a matter of fact, columnist Michelle Goldberg devoted an entire piece recently to the lack of protest in America, pointing specifically to Chileans as examples of the popular activism we should all emulate in this age of Trumpian authoritarianism.

But the purpose of protest in America, as defined by the ruling class, must be limited to supporting the interests of the more righteous, militarized, censorship-happy side of the Duopoly.

When it comes to screeching "Lock him up" at Donald Trump, the sky's the limit.

But when it comes to emerging from the dark underground subway system to fight back against the police surveillance state, people will simply be ignored in hopes that they will eventually give up and go away in despair.

The only elected New York official who has even bothered commenting on the financially strapped straphangers' anti-police brutality movement was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. From the tabloid Post, again: 

“Ending mass incarceration means challenging a system that jails the poor to free the rich,” the first-term Democrat wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
“Arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community. New Yorkers know that, they’re not having it, and they’re standing up for each other.”

A spokes-cop for the city's police union responded by calling AOC and all the other citizens who do not accept state-sanctioned brutality graciously "cuckoo."

The Washington Post's ironic motto in the Age of Trump, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" is supposed to signal that consolidated corporate journalists are doing their jobs against all odds. Either cynically or inadvertently, the Jeff Bezos Gazette speaks the truth that mainstream media itself is helping to kill what little is still left of democracy by ignoring any news that is not directly approved, manufactured, packaged and delivered by Information, Inc.

Whatever, Pelosi

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became deservedly notorious this summer for coldly dismissing negative reactions to her complicity with Donald Trump's vicious border policies. Topping the list of atrocities are the abduction and imprisonment of thousands of migrant and refugee children. In disdaining the votes of "the Squad" of four progressive congresswomen against the appropriation of billions of dollars to pay for Trump's campaign of xenophobic sadism, Pelosi effectively tried to silence the voices of both the victims and the many people protesting these government-sanctioned crimes. She did so by very publicly calling them "the public whatever."

In Pelosi's shuttered view, the fact that only four Democrats out of 435 elected representatives in the lower House had chosen to honor the interests of immigrants, human rights activists and the liberal left in opposition to her "go along to get along" edict made them personae non gratae.

"If the left doesn't think I'm left enough, so be it," she griped to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in July, over an intimate San Francisco brunch.

Fast forward nearly four months, though, and Pelosi has done a complete about-face regarding the value of actual people and the wants and needs of the actual public.

Summoning a gaggle of elite columnists to her inner sanctum on Monday, Pelosi carefully positioned herself right beneath the bust of Abraham Lincoln in order to solemnly announce that "public sentiment is everything."

Corny Propaganda Or Whatever (staged photo credit, NY Times)

"With it, you can accomplish almost everything. Without it, you can accomplish almost nothing," was her echo of a truism beloved by calculating oligarchs from at least the days of the Roman emperors whenever they needed public backing and warm new recruits for their latest military incursions.

With no apparent self-reflection and without any sense of irony, Pelosi was almost plagiarizing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had responded to Madam Speaker's belittling July Maureen Dowd column by retorting in a tweet: "The public 'whatever' is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve change in this country." 

 But Nancy Pelosi wasn't talking about the traumatized caged and abducted children to her elite press couriers on Monday. She apparently ignored a shocking new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which now places the total number of migrant children victimized by Trump at over 5,400 and still counting. This is about five times the tally admitted to by the Trump administration, which continued its family separation policy even after a federal court ordered it stopped, and even after he flourished his own executive pen to pretend to stop it. The photo-op of a Trumpian antic was completely due to the widespread public backlash that Pelosi later derided as the "public whatever."

Nor did Pelosi react (on the record at least) at her closed press gathering on Monday to the Trump administration's own admission last week, after the release of the ACLU report, that Homeland Security and ICE cops had started caging kids - including 207 under the age of five - even before issuing his "zero tolerance" policy, in which anyone crossing the border without authorization would face prosecution.

Public sentiment about the plight of powerless kids and refugees doesn't count. But public sentiment about the plight of the National Security State does count. And it is for Trump's egregious attempt to abuse the national security apparatus for his own political gain and to damage a Democratic rival (Joe Biden) in the process that public sentiment must be aroused, by any artificial means necessary. 

It must not be aroused to achieve the meaningful structural change that AOC and Bernie Sanders call for, but aroused simply to give legitimacy to elite efforts to remove the current oligarchic placeholder known as the president of the United States.

As New York Times columnist and Pelosi invitee David Leonhardt (who just last week did the party's bidding through his column about "taking to the streets" to demand Trump's impeachment over UkraineGate) writes:  

Public sentiment is going to determine the outcome of the impeachment inquiry. If Democrats can persuade even a small share of President Trump’s supporters that he shouldn’t be president, he will almost certainly lose the 2020 election. If Democrats can persuade a modest share of those supporters, he will be at risk of losing the support of congressional Republicans and being removed from office by the Senate.

It's the same old story. It's all about the liberal political and consultant class winning power and keeping power. Trump must be brought down, not only because it is the morally right thing to do, but because it is the politically expedient thing to do.

Amazingly enough, though, the usually compliant Leonhardt has a tiny little bone to pick with Pelosi:

 The battle for public sentiment explains why Pelosi and other House Democrats changed course yesterday and announced that they would hold a vote on Thursday to “affirm” their impeachment inquiry.The language of the resolution is a bit too clever for my tastes: The Democrats insist that this is not a vote to authorize an inquiry. And, legally, they don’t need to take any vote. The Constitution doesn’t require a vote to open an inquiry, and a federal judge recently upheld the legality of the inquiry.
But Trump and congressional Republicans were winning the public debate over the lack of a vote. It made Democrats seem sheepish about the inquiry. So I think they’re right to hold a vote of some kind, in which each House member will go on record as supporting or opposing the inquiry.

It's the same old story. Democrats find it more expedient to be perceived as doing the right thing rather than be caught doing the right thing. This "vote to affirm" is a staged gambit to fool the public into believing that Pelosi's meaningless, superfluous gesture is tantamount to doing the right thing and allowing the public to finally get a glimpse into the still-secret impeachment "inquiry" - which, for now, is restricted to a closed room.

 Pelosi was meeting with us columnists, from several publications, to explain her thinking on impeachment. I asked her how she planned to make the case that this Trump scandal was different from all of the others that have failed to move public opinion; she said she would have an answer when the inquiry was complete. She promised that it would revolve around “simple and repetitive clarity about the Constitution of the United States.”

And complicit stenographer that he is, Leonhardt left it at that. There was no follow-up, no push-back from him against Pelosi's deflective non-answer to his very simple question. There were no questions at all, apparently, about the plight of the tens of millions of "lesser people" suffering in media-imposed silence through the Trump regime. He dishonestly claims that "public opinion" has not been moved by such things as pediatric concentration camps. I guess he wasn't paying attention to all the ad hoc protests by regular citizens at the concentration camps, or to the occupation of Pelosi's office a year ago by the independent Sunrise Movement agitating for a Green New Deal to combat the climate crisis. (which Pelosi later derided as the "green dream or whatever." The woman not only can't seem to keep her disdain for people to herself, she also has a very limited vocabulary.) 

Nancy Pelosi and her crew of media stenographers are living proof of what French political philosopher Simone Weil described as the main function of any political party: to generate "collective passions" and to indoctrinate voters on just what these collective passions should be limited to. That's because the ultimate goal of any political party is not to protect the public good, but to achieve growth of itself without limit. Political parties are thus microcosms of capitalism itself.

This not only explains Pelosi's non-answer to the complicit David Leonhardt's procedural question, it explains why Trump's impeachment will likely not center around his institutional child abuse, his racist incitements to violence, his misogyny and reputed history of serial sexual predation, his cruelty to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans, his planned cuts to food stamps and government health insurance, or his deadly assaults on the environment. 

As Simone Weil wrote, amidst the last outbreak of global fascism, in "On the Abolition of All Political Parties":

  "In principle, a party is an instrument to serve a certain conception of the public interest. This is true even for parties which represent the interests of one particular social group, for there is always a conception of the public interest according to which the public interest and these particular interests should coincide. Yet this conception is extremely vague.... No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he himself belong to one) his own.... A doctrine cannot be a collective product."

There's the public (non-elite) sentiment and the private (elite) sentiment. Or, as the possible 2020 Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton once assured Goldman Sachs bankers in a paid speech, there is a "public position and a private position."

Pelosi's task, and that of her media couriers, is to meld the public with the private just long enough to gain back the power they crave. And then it's back to The Same Old Story. 

So wouldn't it be great if people took the streets and expanded the elites' astroturfed movement for Trump's impeachment into a general strike to stop capitalism right in its tracks, even if for only a day or a week? 

They're doing it in Hong Kong, Haiti, Chile, Bolivia, France. They're doing it all over the world. So how about we give non-sanctioned political protest a chance here as well? It seems like it should only be a matter of time before most of the people here in the USA get miserable most of the time, with no longer even a moldy old couch to be a potato on, or a smart TV to absorb claptrap from. Suddenly and magically they will discover that not only do they have feet, they still have brains that function independently.

Bolton Meets Beckett

Or as Peter Baker, the New York Times scribe of the rich and powerful puts it, all of Washington, D.C. is anxiously Waiting for Bolton.

But bringing Samuel Beckett's Theater of the Absurd to a whole new level, this production will probably not be held in a public venue, but in the same Secure Room that all the previous impeachment playlets and teasers have been performed. 

 It goes something like this: the actors recite their lines to a small group of directors, who then impart their analyses to the news people lingering outside in the hall, and then the news people report what they only heard second-hand to
an audience waiting in vain for the real thing.

"It's not the same thing," as Vladimir bitterly complains to his friend Estragon in the Beckett classic, Waiting For Godot, before repeating the essential motif of the tragi-comic play: "Nothing to be done." 

But Baker strives nonetheless to impart to his readers a "you are there" feeling of excitement and suspense to make you feel like you're an integral part of the whole dark surrealistic spectacle:

As the House impeachment inquiry enters its second month, there may be no witness investigators want to question more than John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser....

Mr. Bolton implicitly criticized Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, declaring that “despite all the friendly notes and photo ops, North Korea isn’t our friend and never will be.” But he also wrote that the nation’s security “is under attack from within,” citing “radicalized Democrats.”
The conflicting signals were maddening. After either resigning or being fired last month depending on whose version is to be believed, is Mr. Bolton so estranged from Mr. Trump that he might provide damaging testimony to House investigators? Or does he share the president’s view of out-of-control Democrats pursuing an illegitimate impeachment out of partisan excess?

Bolton threatens to become as beloved of liberals as his former boss, George W. Bush, who has been successfully rehabbed by the likes of Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, and just about the entire consolidated media hive, a/k/a Resistance, Inc. When it comes to getting rid of Donald Trump, neither the illegal invasion of Iraq, nor torture, nor Fox News neocon propaganda gigs, nor even the elevation of Bush's lawyer Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court can stand in the way of doing the moral thing to return the country to its righteous imperialistic and pluto-normative roots.

Bolton and Bush Bromance

Acknowledging this sordid truth is Rep. Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, who dished to Baker: "What it (the opaque impeachment inquiry) says is this is not about competing Republican versus Democratic visions of American foreign policy. This is about whether our foreign policy should be made in the national interest or in the personal political interests of the president."

Translation: it's not fair to let one oafish outlier of an oligarch ruin the profitable business of war and plunder for the rest of the pathologically greedy Forbes 400 billionaires, the life-destroying oil companies, and the sociopathic weapons manufacturers.

I forgot to mention that along with the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, the rehabilitation of his prime torture architect, lawyer John Yoo, also continues apace. Not only has Yoo been granted regular self-serving op-ed space in the New York Times as a bona fide member of Resistance, Inc., he is near the top of every star national security reporter's speed dial.

Baker writes, coyly omitting any talk of torture, indefinite detention, or the antidemocratic "unitary executive" agenda espoused by Yoo and which is now so outlandishly benefiting Trump:

According to the testimony given to Congress so far, Bolton was a central figure in trying to prevent any delay in releasing foreign aid to Ukraine,” said John Yoo, a University of Berkeley law school professor and senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “I cannot see how any responsible investigation would not seek Bolton’s appearance.”
But he added that the White House would presumably “go to the mat” to fight any effort to interview Mr. Bolton. “If the White House were to fight the House impeachment on executive privilege grounds, Bolton would be the hill on which to die,” Mr. Yoo said. “The Trump White House could claim not just that the impeachment investigation is illegitimate, which is its current line of defense, but that it is defending the right of future presidents to have an effective White House and to conduct a successful foreign policy.

Whenever the mainstream media want to impart the aura of legitimacy and goodness to their tainted sources, they gratuitously include their sources' elite academic bona fides and professional credentials. We are supposed to be cowed and impressed.

Continuing with that trope, Baker respectfully describes Bolton as a "Yale-trained lawyer" who "brought years of experience when Mr. Trump made him his third national security adviser in March 2018."

He "served in" the Justice Department - as opposed to subverting it and bending US law to the whims of invaders and torturers and thieves. And he is currently making money hand over fist doing his own deals with foreign governments while raising dark PAC money, both for his fellow reactionary politicians and for his own possible run for the presidency. Since Bolton is not Trump, this is totally cool, as Peter Baker gushes approvingly:

The combination of his pedigree and the possibility that he really does have incriminating information about Mr. Trump makes him a particularly appealing witness to Democrats. The prospect of one of the nation’s most visible foreign policy conservatives testifying against his former boss would, in their view, underscore the significance of Mr. Trump’s transgressions.

It's the law of the political Mob. If one boss is willing to spill the beans on another boss, he will go down in history as one of the good guys -- especially if he paves the way for a Democratic sweep in 2020. This is what hypocrites describe as "pragmatism."

So will Bolton show up to testify, or won't he? Neither he nor his lawyer (whose firm's macabre motto is "Victory Or Death") are saying. Like the original CIA "Ukrainegate" informant before him, whose identity will never be made public and who will never have to testify before Congress in open session because his testimony allegedly has been corroborated by other secret testimony, Bolton is coming uncomfortably close to being cast as an actual victim-hero in the Impeachment Follies narrative.

Baker:

 So now Mr. Bolton has been left in the middle, a key witness in the unfolding impeachment drama. His friend, Thomas M. Boyd, an assistant attorney general in the Reagan and Bush administrations, said Mr. Bolton understands his obligations to guard the confidentiality of communications with the president but will also be prepared to give his unvarnished views if it comes to it.

This sympathetic portrait of Bolton in the Times is about the same man who once threatened to kidnap and physically harm any justice from the International criminal tribunal in The Hague who dared prosecute Americans for war crimes committed in Afghanistan. This is the same man who helped orchestrate the phony casus belli for the US invasion of Iraq. This is the same man who has championed the Apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal crimes against Palestinians.

John Bolton's going from the dark side to another dark side is probably contingent upon the same factors that Beckett's Estragon and Vladimir posited for whether or not the mysterious Godot would ever show up for a reason that is never even explained.

"He couldn't promise anything... he'd have to think it over... in the quiet of his home... consult his family... his friends... his agents... his correspondents... his books... his bank account... before taking a decision... it's the normal thing... is it not?...I think it is..."

"And where do we come in? ... On our hands and knees.... As bad as that?.... We've no rights any more?.... You'd make me laugh if it wasn't prohibited."  

The Smell of Astroturf in the Morning

I'm sure I'm not the only one getting carpet-bombed with impeachment emails from one Democratic Party offshoot after another, asking for money, phone calls to Congress, and my participation in a protest march demanding the ouster of Donald J. Trump from the White House.

MoveOn, the group originally formed in 1996 to corral voters for Democrats by urging them to "move on" from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is now seeking "crisis" donations to pay for professional organizers to travel to battleground states to corral voters to demand the impeachment of Trump.

I got one email this morning from a Brent J. Cohen, executive director of "Generation Progress". It was addressed to "Joe," the same pseudonym I used when I signed up several years ago to handsy Joe Biden's "It's On Us" campaign to combat campus sexual assaults.

In case you're wondering why I didn't use my real name, it's because, suspicious person that I am, the use of multiple names to sign up for these various enterprises is how I keep track of who's sharing my email address with whom. So I immediately assumed that "Generation Progress" is simply one of the many names given to the Democratic Veal Pen network, names invented to make people believe that they're being bombarded by myriad independent groups instead of by one gigantic, corporate party-affiliated, mother of all bunker busting missiles.

Not that they try that hard to disguise themselves, mind you. For one thing, they use their real names. For another thing, the fonts and designs they use on their various websites are eerily similar to one another. 

(Hillary Clinton's PAC)

Let me quote from the Brent Cohen "Generation Progress" email that landed in my inbox this morning.

"We the people should be a reality, not just a quote," the pitch begins. "Tell Congress that Trump compromises our morals and values. It's past time to remove him from office." --

Joe-- Democracy is one of the most fundamental American values. Our democracy isn't, and never has been, perfect, but we aspire to reach a place where 'We the People' is a reality and not just a quote. Right now, Donald Trump is attacking our democracy. By pressuring the president of Ukraine to intervene in American elections and on his behalf, Trump has taken his attacks to a new level. This is an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense. It's vital that Congress hears from you on this: tell them it is time to take action." 

Cohen helpfully provides a link my congress-critter's email address and phone number. But I have to say, I find it really hard to get all fired up about democratic morals and values and UkraineGate when the congressional intelligence committee hearings on the scandal are all being undemocratically held behind closed doors.  All we're getting are third-hand dribs and drabs of whatever damning revelations the secret tribunal feeds to the cooperative establishment media to then regurgitate to us. We don't get to watch the testimony live and unfiltered on TV the way we did in the Watergate impeachment hearings back in the 70s.

Probably realizing the irony of his democratic pleading, Cohen proceeds to quickly gloss over the secondary reasons to demand Trump's impeachment: his racism and xenophobia, his incitements to violence, his scoffing at the climate crisis, his refusal to take action on gun violence.

No public impeachment hearings are scheduled for those particular crises and affronts to democracy, but if you want to, you can keep them in the back of your mind when you call Congress to demand that Trump be impeached and removed from office. Because it is only with your help and your complicity that the Democrats can sweep these annoying issues right under the rug as they carefully limit their inquiries to UkraineGate. In so doing, they advance the electoral fortunes of Joe Biden and other low-polling centrists who can bat clean-up in case his campaign collapses.

 Cohen signs off his email "in solidarity" to give you the further false impression that not only is he on your side, he's every bit as progressive and community-minded as the striking teachers of Chicago or the Yellow Vests of France.

It is, of course, a scam.

Not only is Cohen, a former Obama White House fellow and adviser, the "executive director" of Generation Progress,  but Generation Progress itself is just a division of the powerful, corporation-funded Clintonian think tank known as the Center For American Progress. Cohen's specific job is to corral young people into the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Between his White House gig, where he helped start Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" privatized initiative to get young black men off the streets and out of jail (while ignoring young black women) and close the "opportunity gap," Cohen has been a fellow at the D.C. Policy Center, a "non-partisan think tank working for a strong and vibrant District of Columbia." Its advisory staff includes a senior partner of the ethically challenged McKinsey consulting firm and the chief financial officer of the Emerson Collective, a secretive venture capital organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the former Goldman Sachs trader and the billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The Board of Directors actually running the D.C. Policy Center mainly come from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, along with sports and entertainment venture capital, the Sun Trust oil company foundation, and the Exelon energy company.

I'm telling you all this just to give you a general idea of where these professional impeachment advocates are coming from, who is financing them, and who will ultimately benefit from your unpaid phone-banking and marching efforts and other volunteer activities to remove Trump from office. 

Hint: it won't primarily be you.

Notice that Cohen and all the others importuning and gaslighting you under a pretense of "democracy restoration" are all employed by a tight little network of oligarchs, with the same names and world-destroying corporations popping up over and over again on the Boards of Directors of supposedly liberal philanthropic organizations.

Notice that these people don't ever offer you anything tangible, such as affordable housing or a debt-free education, in return for your controlled activism. They merely offer a return to what they call a moralistic, normative way of keeping you down and out. They simply want the status quo ante, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They want to keep the lethal, neoliberal, market-based project that spawned Trump alive and kicking.

The propaganda that they're promulgating in the establishment media conglomerate is also quite shameless, with pundits cheer-leading astroturfed impeachment marches and protests as though they were coming up with the ideas all on their own, rather than rewriting press releases from the Democratic Party machine, or desultorily riffling through their Rolodex of reliable think tank sources to get the scoop.

"Want Trump to go? Take to the streets" urged "woke" centrist New York Times columnist David Leonhardt last week, pretending that there is no such thing as astroturfed movements where Democratic corporatists are concerned: 

The impeachment inquiry has reached the stage when it needs an outside game. We all know where the inside game is likely to lead: House Democrats will impeach Trump; Senate Republicans will acquit him; and he will claim vindication. But Trump’s presidency has become too dire for Americans to accept that outcome without trying to change it.... 

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.

Leonhardt pretends that there is no organized oligarchy bankrolling this protest movement. He insanely casts the billionaire-run duopoly as too weak and therefore in great need of our warm bodies to give it legitimacy. He approvingly writes that the plutocrat-driven "Indivisible" group that I wrote about last week is some sort of legitimate grassroots undertaking.

The comment that I submitted on his column, in which I exposed the financial power behind the impeachment drive, was rejected. Maybe it was my alternative suggestion calling for a nationwide strike against the whole rotten capitalistic system that doomed it to the ether.

His Times colleague, columnist Michelle Goldberg, then ever so coincidentally came up with own utterly independent idea for "taking to the streets" to impeach Trump.

"1, 2, 3, 4 Trump Can't Rule Us Any More" is the clever slogan that she and her sources dreamed up for the plebs to shout as they march in sedate, civil, plutocracy-sanctioned mobs, sublimely safe from any police tear gas or mass arrests.

She professes herself baffled that Americans aren't rising up against Trump the same way, for example, that Chileans are rising up against high subway fares and austerity. She carefully doesn't suggest that Americans also rise up against the 40 years of neoliberal austerity that led enough desperate people to vote for a phony populist in the first place. That is not part of the plutocracy-sanctioned impeachment narrative.

Instead, Goldberg gaslights American couch potatoes:

So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse. This presidency began with the biggest protest in American history, and its first two years were marked by a series of high-profile demonstrations. But three years in, even as the conviction that Trump threatens the Republic unites stolid military heroes and socialist feminists, demonstrations against the administration have faded. Lyndon Johnson was famously tormented by protest chants that could be heard through the walls of the White House. Why isn’t Trump?

Um... I consider myself a socialist feminist, but there is no way in hell that I will ever unite with such "stolid military heroes" as Trump critic James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has gleefully gloated about the sadistic pleasure he got killing Iraqi civilians. Goldberg, of course, is simply trying to legitimize the right-wing reactionary partnership of the Democratic Party with the Pentagon/CIA de facto fourth branch of government.

Goldberg also conveniently doesn't mention that LBJ-era antiwar protests erupted when we still had the draft. Now that only non-elites sign up for the military, often out of economic desperation, our forever wars are out of sight and out of mind for most of the US population.

The military-industrial complex which Goldberg so hideously valorizes and humanizes has been striving to help Americans overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against war for decades by creating one imaginary outside enemy after another. After the debacle of Vietnam and the fall of the USSR, it became "Muslim terrorists." And with the Mideast now in shambles courtesy of American Exceptionalism, it's right back to Russophobia again and the smearing of antiwar dissidents as "Kremlin assets."

As nauseating as Trump is, the toxicity of liberal McCarthyism and the corporatized jingoistic anti-Trump resistance movement is downright stifling.