Full-0f-Woe Super Wednesday

Look on the bright side, fellow progressives and socialists. Because as far as Joe Biden is concerned, his slew of primary wins hasn't even happened yet. He thinks that they will happen tomorrow, or on what he adorably dubbed Super Thursday. 

Wednesday's children and Sandernistas might be full of woe today, but just wait until tomorrow. Because while the fortune-telling nursery rhyme predicts that Thursday's child has far to go, Biden will only keep demonstrating how disturbingly far gone he truly is.

Godzillionaire Mike Bloomberg has dropped out. But as of this writing, Elizabeth Warren was still in, despite coming in third in her own home state of Massachusetts. Her top-secret Super PAC might soon make her an offer she can't refuse, however, and stop writing the checks that are keeping her campaign on life support. My prediction is that she will drop out and repeat what she did in 2016: refuse to endorse Bernie.

I hope I'm wrong, because in refusing to endorse Bernie she will be destroying her progressive brand and burying what is still left of her political career.

I think the original Democratic Party game plan was to keep Liz in the race all the way to the convention, just to siphon votes away from Sanders. I highly doubt that Barack Obama included her with the other candidates he obviously called after Biden's South Carolina win to make them the charm-offensive offers they couldn't refuse. She can't stand Biden, in particular his authorship of the bankruptcy bill favoring credit card companies and banks and punishing regular people, particularly women.

As Biden continues making what are still too kindly being called "gaffes," the media will get over its Super Tuesday group orgasm soon enough. At least Ronald Reagan had his rote acting skills to mask his own dementia most of the time. 

As far as the "shock" of Biden's wins is concerned, remember that until a few weeks ago, he was the front-runner for the better part of a year. He would have to literally stop campaigning and giving interviews from here to the convention to pull off a Reaganesque head-fake. His failure to even campaign in the states he won has itself been a winning strategy up to now. This is largely because the field was so thinly spread. And likely because enough voters were so spooked by the media's relentless fear-mongering and red-baiting that they pulled the lever for someone they think they know.

Now that it's just him and Bernie, Biden can no longer hide while he runs. For its own part, the Democratic Party is so bankrupt that it has made Joe its sacrificial lamb at the altar of the Trump Temple, just to keep an FDR-style liberal like Sanders out of the White House. 

When you think about it, this is really a form of elder abuse by the party leadership. It doesn't matter that Biden's vice president would be the real heir or heiress apparent for 2024 and probably already running things the minute Uncle Joe stumbles through the Oath of Office, should he miraculously beat Trump.

If the rumors are true and Biden names Stacey Abrams his running mate before the nomination, then Sanders will be free to follow suit and prematurely join forces with a firebrand like Nina Turner. 

Thankfully, Bernie did not mention that "Joe is a good friend of mine" in a speech to supporters on Tuesday night. But he did seem compelled to add that "Joe is a decent guy" before noting his vote for the Iraq War, his support for job-destroying trade deals and his career-long crusade to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's decency, then I don't know what Bernie's definition of pathological cruelty is.

Stay tuned.

Judge Judy and the Class War Election

You know you're in trouble when 10 percent of American college graduates think that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court. You know you're in super-supreme trouble when the wildly popular TV judge is campaigning for her pal Michael Bloomberg, who recently purchased the Democratic Party.

To paraphrase a real Supreme Court Justice, you can have free and fair elections with one person and one vote, or you can have Democratic Party super duper delegates possessing weighted votes. But you cannot possibly have both.

Of course, Justice Louis Brandeis was a lot more sweeping in his denunciation of oligarchic fascism. Though a permanent part of the American fabric, iron rule by the rich has more or less succeeded in hiding itself when every two and four years, regular people are super-duped into believing that they have an actual say. When Brandeis championed FDR's New Deal in 1933, he bluntly proclaimed: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

In an extraordinary burst of brazenness, the ruling aristocrats of the erstwhile People's Party have revealed in the New York Times that they will override the expected plurality of primary votes for Bernie Sanders, and will anoint their own nominee this July to pretend-challenge Donald Trump. Even if Sanders falls only one vote short of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, he will be soundly defeated on the second ballot of a brokered convention.

The superdelegates as much as admit that would rather see a second term of Donald Trump than acquiesce to stitching up even a few of the gaping holes in the social safety net that they've helped the mean old Republicans to rip to shreds over the last four decades of neoliberal capitalism.

The oligarchs who run the Democratic Party would rather see you die than have Sanders impose even a few minor taxes on their obscene wealth.

 Bloomberg surrogate  Judy Sheindlin, the highest-paid woman on television, recently spoke on behalf of her entire privileged class when she seethed: "America doesn't need a revolution. It's the most perfect country in the world and those people that are trying to change it don't have a chance because I'll fight them to the death!"

"Those people" are nurses, teachers, and a majority of young Blacks and Latinos.

Sheindlin, star of the long running courtroom TV series, has made a fortune exploiting and berating the mainly poor litigants who appear on her show. They are paid extremely modest appearance fees ranging from $100 to $500 for the privilege of being insulted. For her part, Judge Judy rakes in nearly $1 million per day of filming.

Her popular show is thus a microcosm of extreme wealth disparity and capitalist oppression and the class war, but with just the right liberal sheen to make it acceptable. She always gives credit to contestants who can demonstrate to her satisfaction that they are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But woe betide the single mom on public assistance who dares to claim in Judge Judy's court that she takes care of her children. "You don't support your children. I support your children!" is her common retort. "What an America!"

 But try, just for a moment, to empathize with Judge Judy. She is probably more scared than most members of the  more discreet oligarchy. Because if Bernie Sanders were elected president with a new progressive congress on his coattails,  and the country's poverty rate started going down with enactment of guaranteed health care, a government jobs program, living wage laws, debt forgiveness, and affordable housing stock, then the incidence of poor people resorting to suing other poor people in small claims courts just to survive for another month might also start decreasing. And then Judge Judy's blockbuster ratings might begin to suffer. 

Well, not quite. Her reruns, which she personally owns, will air into perpetuity or whenever humanity finally wipes itself out. Meanwhile, as she dished to fellow plutotainer and George Bush BFF Ellen De Generes, she's rebranding herself as "Judy Justice."

As it is, 10 million people tune in every single day to watch Judge Judy bravely wage the class war, Her fans feel better knowing that at least they're not as "dumb and dumber" as the contestants on her show.

 Sheindlin has much the same right-wing populist appeal as Donald Trump. But while his shtick is making his fans believe that everybody can get rich by being a jerk, her shtick is that no matter how much of a jerk and a loser you may happen to be, the best therapy in the world is to sit on your couch and identify with a well-educated multimillionaire insult comic with a preturnatural gift  for grinding the lesser people into pulp. The fact that a fair proportion of her supporting cast are deadbeat dads, bad girlfriends, drunk apartment-trashing college kids and small time grifters makes you feel better about your own oppression at the hands of the winner-take-all oligarchy. And a lot less guilty about laughing at the expense of your poor-shamed fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, as Sheindlin gushed to the plutocratic ladies of The View, the main qualifications for the presidency are being smart, rich and successful - as opposed to being smart, empathetic and egalitarian.

It is testament to their own pathological selfishness and desperation that plutocrats like Mike Bloomberg and Judge Judy are now personally and directly and very meanly waging the permanent class war as political candidates and surrogates rather than relying on the usual subterfuge of preaching the politics of I feel your pain" and "choice" and "personal responsibility." They're finally telling voters that not only do their votes not count, but that their very lives and livelihoods don't count either. 

They're the owners, and you're the commodities and consumers. Casting your lot with a democratic socialist is so way beyond the pale that it makes them blanch.

The liberal aristocracy's unabashed ownership of the "Democratic" Party is the height of irony. The whining of the anti-Bernie plutocrats also proves that although obscene wealth can buy power, it cannot buy self-awareness. Money destroys self-awareness and human empathy when it becomes the whole rationale for the existence of those possessing it.

Why else would party leaders and owners brazenly admit that they are willing to destroy their own organization in order to keep their individual wealth and to keep amassing it  even if it ends up killing them along with everybody else on the planet?

Judge Judy, of course, is not the only one suffering from misguided plutocratic angst. There are thousands of them.  Former Senator Chris Dodd's own living nightmare is the prospect of a Sanders For President bumper sticker being forcibly affixed to one of his luxury cars.  It's almost as terrifying as Chris Matthews' nightmare of Bernie Bros executing him in Central Park.

Dodd, one of the 90-odd antisocial superdelegates interviewed by the New York Times, whined right out loud: "People are worried. How can you spend four or five months hoping you don't have to put a bumper sticker of that guy on your car?"

He can't even utter the name of Bernie Sanders. "Those people" and "that guy" are as far as they can go when telegraphing racism and classism.

The Times did not see fit to mention in its article that fresh off a stint representing the Hollywood film industry, Dodd now spends his valuable time lobbying against Medicare For All and Wall Street casino regulation. 

Corporations are people are worried, my friend.

The other irony - besides that of the uber-wealthy naming their private political club "the Democratic Party" - is that slamming the door shut on a Bernie Sanders nomination also opens the door a crack for the rest of us. If the oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy their party for the sake of their own personal gain, a viable replacement, or true People's Party is there for the organizing. 

"Any Blue Will Do" voter-shaming, gaslighting propaganda will not work, even if a cheated Bernie Sanders exhorts his followers to defeat Donald Trump by getting behind Joe Biden or even the consolation prize of a severely compromised Elizabeth Warren. It certainly didn't work in 2016 when the coronation of Hillary Clinton was effectuated a lot more subtly and secretly than the blatant attempted destruction of the Sanders movement

The main thing to remember is that democratic socialism, or social democracy, or socialism will never emerge from electoral politics. And it will never emerge without relentless struggles against those who aim to control us and beat us into submission and even actual death. The powerful forces that aim to destroy Bernie Sanders - and us - have the military, the corporate media propagandists, the police and surveillance states at their exclusive disposal.

Judge Judy is right. It's a fight to the death. And it always has been, through most of American history, from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to the extermination of Indians, to the endless wars for profit abroad. But now is one of those rare times that the ruling class not only feels threatened, it readily admits that it feels threatened.  

And every once in a while, the people do win. The eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor,  the New Deal, the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, the Great Society - and all  were bottom-up victories that came under oligarchic attack from the very moments of their inception.

The oligarchs hate us, of course. But more importantly, they fear us. So we should carpe diem while they're so mindlessly obsessed with carping all the way to the bank. Let's make Chris Dodd's worst nightmare a living reality.

$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.

The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.

MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.

For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.

I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.

But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.

Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.

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

I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.

Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.

Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

My published response:

 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.

 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.

I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 

As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.

  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.

************** 


Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."
This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.

As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.

My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")

 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.

Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 

As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.

But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.

The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.

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

Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:

Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."

The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.

 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.

Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."

 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.

There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.

 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

Laughs and Loathing In Las Vegas

Given that a New York jury is currently deliberating the fate of Harvey Weinstein, Mike Bloomberg certainly picked a bad night to utter the words "women" and "consensual" in the same nasal breath.

 Weinstein's defense against rape charges is that it was consensual sex. Bloomberg's defense of the nondisclosure agreements related to his serial workplace misogyny ("Jokes I told") is that the gagging of women was also consensual. These gals, Bloomberg insinuated, loved every minute of his smothering legalities. So no, he will never release them from their lingering pleasurable bondage.

It remains to be seen whether the thousands of ads playing every single minute all around Bloombergville USA will offset his dismal debate performance. He seemed hell-bent not so much on winning the nomination and the presidency, but on winning the Oscar for his wizened, whining live-action portrayal of Mr. Burns. 

"Portrayal" is kind of a stretch, because the godzillionaire former mayor became stone cold dead on his feet once Elizabeth Warren got through with him.

Just the clip of him rolling his eyes in bored disdain as she destroyed him should be enough to ruin his candidacy. Then again, there are those nonstop ubiquitous ads costing him an estimated $3000 a minute just in local TV markets alone, the hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune being spent on bribing politicians and super-delegates and cable TV executives and journalists and paying off the country's entire stable of consultants, pollsters, PR flacks and caterers. At the rate that his vast fortune is consuming all the "talent," the least he can do is endow a graduate program in Electoral Chicanery at Harvard to keep churning out the elite entrepreneurs of the future.

Elizabeth Warren did Bernie Sanders a huge favor by going after Bloomberg, while only making soft murmuring complaints when the NBC moderators baited her with the Bernie Bro trope. As for Bernie himself, red-baited from both the right and the center, his theory that a couple of his online supporters might even be linked to "Russian interference" made me roll my own eyes in dismay. But I suppose we should be grateful that at long last, Sanders did not once preface an answer with "So-and-so is a good friend of mine."

Since his good friend Joe Biden is already a political corpse, nobody even bothered to call out his breathtaking hypocrisy when he scolded Bloomberg over his racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Biden's authorship of the racist Crime Bill set the stage long ago for Bloomberg's own ethnic cleansing ("gentrification") campaign. As recently as Obama's second term, the former vice president was leading the charge for more cops on the street and more high tech military hardware of the type used against the citizens of Ferguson, MO when they became upset over the police killing of Michael Brown. The fact that immigration activists loudly disrupted his closing argument was barely even mentioned in mainstream media debate narratives this morning.

Given that billionaire Tom Steyer was missing from the stage, centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar got more generous time to snipe at one another while urging everybody else to stop fighting so as to beat Donald Trump and magically "bring the country together."  What do you call it when two annoying, cloying centrists cancel each other out - besides its being a very refreshing sight to behold?

I've gone from dismay to delight that Bloomberg successfully bribed his way on to the debate stage. People finally got a look at him without the protective gauze of his glitzy TV commercials. They're also getting a much-needed true picture of the hordes of liberal politicians who have fallen all over themselves to endorse him in exchange for his "philanthropy." He has shown once and for all that not only can he not beat Trump, he is simply a more urbane, nasal,annoying - and dangerous - version of Trump. He is Trump without the stand-up comedy talent.

If Bloomberg is anointed the nominee in the second ballot of a contested convention - or worse, if he is simply the stalking horse for a third Hillary Clinton run -  it will spell the final and long-overdue demise of the Democratic Party and perhaps even usher in the long-overdue street actions and revolts and strikes that this country so sorely needs. It would likely be the smallest turnout in modern electoral history.

Even if Bernie Sanders does win the presidency, moreover, the corporate Democrats will have no other choice but to show whose side they are really on as they thwart his every reasonable executive action.

Thanks to Michael Bloomberg, reality in all its ugliness is finally getting a fair shake and a fair hearing. The rotten center cannot hold.

Democrats Boldly Pivot To Secret Wall Street Power Point Presentation

Maybe it's just a coincidence. But only hours after The Intercept published an interview with Ralph Nader, revealing that he'd personally telephoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to urge her to concentrate on "kitchen table issues," the New York Times up and announces that she will indeed be doing a complete 180 from her impeachment catastrophe to concentrate on kitchen table issues.

Without crediting Nader or mentioning his name, the Times puff piece attempts to rehabilitate Pelosi's tattered reputation and to convince its readers that her new Kitchen Table Initiative is both original and sincere.

But the attempt fails miserably. Maybe it's the subhead acknowledging that the Pelosi pivot is nothing but a gimmick to lure disaffected voters into the rapidly disintegrating centrist Democratic orbit. It's all talk and all strategy and no action whatsoever to make people's lives better.

As if to emphasize this cynical point, Pelosi brought in Wall Street mogul Steve Rattner to give a Power Point presentation to House members on how best to placate their constituents about an economy that serves Wall Street and punishes Main Street. This is according to "a person" who attended the secret session and shared the secret strategy with the Times. Since Rattner is also a regular columnist for the Times, let the guessing games begin.

 I'd call him a "disgraced Wall Street mogul" were it not for the fact that not only was he technically exonerated in 2010 for his financial malfeasance in a pay-to-play kickback scheme that stole from New York public employees -  he was handsomely rewarded for it. His Obama administration-assigned task of rescuing General Motors was accomplished by eviscerating its labor union and implementing a lower wage package for newer, non-unionized workers. And he got a lucrative book deal and the Times gave him his own column, which frequently harps upon the deficit and the need to cut social programs benefiting regular people while not taxing the uber-wealthy out of a couple of bucks.

His settlement with the government included a small fine and only a two-year ban from securities trading. It wasn't a slap on the wrist, it was a kiss on the hand.

Despite the top-secrecy of both Rattner's and Pelosi's private pep talks on strategy with congressional Dems, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg magically manages to quote Madam Speaker directly:

“Health care, health care, health care,” the speaker said, describing the party’s message during a recent closed-door meeting, according to a person in the room who insisted on anonymity to reveal private conversations. She said they had to be laser-focused on getting re-elected: “When you make a decision to win, then you have to make every decision in favor of winning.”

If I were Pelosi, I think I'd insist on anonymity too. Those inanely quotable quotes make even Platitude Pete Buttigieg sound like Cicero by comparison. . She might have opted for "winners never quit and quitters never win, but that neoliberal aphorism would have failed to capture her far more sinister intent. That intent is to cruelly pretend to care about the voters for the duration of the campaign season, for the sole purpose of winning power and holding on to power. I'm not the one saying that. Pelosi is saying that through the ruling establishment organ known as the Paper of Record. It's as though she doesn't realize that ordinary people who read are thus also rendered cognizant of her machinations.

Pelosi has belatedly come to the realization that since her failed impeachment spectacle has only served to strengthen Donald Trump and to increase his popularity, it's time to change strategy and go through the neglected motions of serving constituents. There will be no further feeble or grandstanding efforts, other than from within individual committees, to rein Trump in.

But rather than, say, bowing to overwhelming popular demand and allowing Medicare For All legislation to advance from the limbo of its various subcommittees to a full floor debate,Pelosi distributed a "For the People recess packet" to her members,instructing them to visit food pantries, after-school programs and senior centers to prove to the voters that they really, really care.  These photo-ops would serve to "highlight" Trump's planned cuts to social welfare programs rather than to introduce concrete legislative plans to strengthen them as the final year of his first term plays out.

It's like the corporate "raising awareness" celebrity campaigns to combat various diseases like cancer while simultaneously fighting tooth and nail against taxing the rich to help pay for the universal guaranteed care of sick people

It's only toward the end of Stolberg's article that the real impetus for Pelosi's Racket Packet is revealed: the palpable plutocratic paranoia over Bernie Sanders. His rise in the polls, implies the Times, is every bit as bad as Trump's acquittal and the Iowa caucus debacle:

The move to put impeachment in the rearview mirror comes after a dismal two weeks for Democrats. First, the Iowa caucuses turned into an electoral debacle, with no clear winner. Then a triumphant Mr. Trump arrived at the Capitol on the eve of his acquittal to deliver his State of the Union address, which ended with a seething Ms. Pelosi ripping up the speech for all to see.The Senate acquitted Mr. Trump the next day. Then Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, won the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, jangling the nerves of moderate lawmakers who fear that having a self-described democratic socialist at the top of their party’s ticket will cost them their seats.

 Pelosi consigliere and fourth ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries of New York is quoted as saying that since impeachment over one bribery scheme involving the withholding of high-tech missiles to Ukraine and possible subsequent financial harm to the weapons industry failed, we should just let Trump be Trump for the duration.

"His erratic, corrupt, unconstitutional behavior speaks for itself," shrugged Jeffries.

Although he has not yet joined with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus in formally endorsing that other oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, Jeffries is decidedly softening his once-strident criticism of the Stop and Frisk mayor. In a separate interview last week with GQ, Jeffries said he believes that Bloomberg's belated pandering apology for racial profiling was "heartfelt" because as a data geek, the former mayor finally looked at all the long-available data revealing that crime continued to go down after the courts finally put the kibosh on Bloomberg.

And just a few months ago, Jeffries very publicly welcomed Bloomberg to his "more the merrier" Democratic Party as a potential "change candidate" who can "get things done."

Letting Trump convict himself in the court of public opinion even as he ravages the public with renewed intensity with every passing day, and substituting pandering talk for even mild progressive action, is the exact opposite of Ralph Nader's prescription for Nancy Pelosi and her party.

He didn't suggest that her members simply drop by community centers and food banks to meaninglessly commiserate with people.He called on Pelosi to convene public hearings to which these ordinary people would be invited to testify and tell their own stories of life under Trump.

Such testimony, Nader said, would have far greater impact than the stories of a handful of State Department bureaucrats abused by Trump in the Ukrainegate scandal. But since such testimony would also implicate the Democratic side of the corporate duopoly, it's not going to happen.

"And what's really important here," Nader told The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill,  "is that she (Pelosi) wanted to tie up the Republicans in knots in the Senate and she only used one knot. She used one finger out of ten that could have been curled into a tough fist with very perceived abuses of the Constitution, of protective statutes, of income preservation and of turning over by Trump, turning over the U.S. government to Wall Street."

Of course, government by Wall Street was not only a done deal by the time Trump was elected, it was one of the main reasons why Trump was elected in the first place, chosen by millions of disgruntled victims of Wall Street over the corrupt tool of Wall Street known as Hillary Clinton.

The very fact that Pelosi actually took a phone call from Ralph Nader, whose stream of advisory letters to Obama and Bush in the past decade all went unanswered, is testament to her own mounting desperation. Nader readily admits that she simply wanted to pick his brain a little before she dispensed with his advice to hold public hearings.

She simply stole his idea for a Kitchen Table Initiative and turned it into a cynical propaganda campaign. And then she secretly called in Wall Street, in the person of of Steve Rattner, to give the Democratic majority their marching orders in a Power Point presentation.

Besides his regular gigs at the Times and on MSNBC's Morning Joe show,  Steve Rattner now primarily works for Michael Bloomberg, managing both his personal and philanthropic fortunes.

Way to pivot, Nancy! You're spinning your way right into a deep dark hole of your own corrupt making.

Lloyd Blankfein Stumps For Bernie Sanders

In a canny burst of reverse psychology, the Wall Street banking mogul who helped crash the entire global financial system in 2008 today refreshingly declared that a President Bernie Sanders "would ruin our economy."

Since 94% of all the American household wealth "lost" in the crash is now in the hands of the oligarchy, it is safe to assume that what former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein really fears is that a Sanders presidency would put a damper on his winner-take-all economy - or what Citigroup had secretly dubbed the "plutonomy."

Blankfein tweeted;

If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.

Whether he knows it or not, Blankfein just bleated out a campaign commercial for Bernie. He implicitly signaled his fealty to Donald Trump, who also regularly and falsely claims that the phony opposition party doesn't care about "our military," But Blankfein is obviously referring to Bernie's own refusal to vote for the latest obscene $750 billion Pentagon budget, the successful bipartisan passage of which is bloating Goldman Sachs's own war-connected profits to the monstrous proportions to which it has become accustomed.

Blankfein's peevish McCarthyite tweet actually seems tailor-made to spur even more record, small-dollar donations to Bernie, who won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday despite the best efforts of the corporate media to fool the country into thinking that second runner-up Amy Klobuchar was the break-out heroine of the night. The core media narrative is that since Bernie did not win by the same astronomically huge 40-point margin by which he trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016, it not only doesn't count, it is testament to the "chaos and divisiveness"  that Sanders brings to the Democratic Party establishment. As if that were a bad thing!

As far as the reviled "razor-thin" margin by which Sanders beat Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire  is concerned, we should be honest and admit that Bernie is indeed having a tough time luring in old white conservative people too set in their ways and too attached to Medicare For Only Themselves to abandon the rejuvenating young fogey soul-brother they've found in Mayor Pete.

None of the coverage denigrating Bernie's victory that I watched last night mentioned tthat more young people voted for him than voted than for all the other primary candidates combined. He got more than half the entire youth vote of 18 to 29 year olds, while the 38-year-old Buttigieg received only 22 percent of this demographic.

Bernie's slim margin of victory is based simply upon the much higher number of older voters turning out on primary day. As Vox reports,

One caveat: Older people are simply a bigger part of the electorate. In New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, people 45 and older made up 63 percent of voters, according to the exit polls. People aged 18 to 29 made up just 14 percent.
Historically, this has also been true nationally:Young voters are less likely to turn out. In 2016, less than half of voters aged 18 to 29 went to the polls, while a majority in all other age groups voted, according to the US Census Bureau.

And since older people are more apt than younger people to read the New York Times, and the Washington Post and stay riveted to CNN and MSNBC  they thus might be more prone to internalize the mainstream "narrative," and make the manufactured - and rankly xenophobic -  paranoia of Blankfein and others their very own.

Maybe Prince Harry, who reportedly is making a "billion dollar handshake" with Goldman Sachs, can help. He and wife Meghan already appeared at the JP Morgan Chase Investment Summit in Miami over the weekend to share their mental health expertise with some of the same billionaires and pathocrats who plundered the economy in 2008 and who are now so very, very nervous that their turbo-charged free rides and their mammoth runaway government welfare benefits and their padded portfolios might be in store for the Bernie Brake Pad Special. They're certainly in dire need of a muffler job. And the way their entitled complaining keeps backfiring on them, they might even be headed for the junkyard reserved for totaled luxury limos.

Blankfein and his fellow paranoid plutes should just relax and stay hunkered down in their eight car garages and stop with the class war antics and refrain from raising Bernie's profile so much with their negative attention. Because Sanders is not threatening a communist revolution or an overthrow of capitalism, or a 90 percent wealth tax, or total world peace, or anything remotely close. He is no more radical than FDR, whose ultimate aim was to save predatory capitalism from itself.