Normalizing Greed In the Age of Trump

The New York Times has a piece up on private equity mogul Steve Schwarzman's latest hedonistic birthday party. Andrew Ross Sorkin, scribe to the leisure class, marvels that ever since Donald Trump stampeded into the public sphere and began sucking up all the media oxygen, there hasn't been the usual outpouring of public disgust at conspicuous displays of consumption. Sorkin credits the alleged ennui to that master of excess himself, our newly elected president. 

Donald J. Trump has suddenly made the world of performance greed safe for the rest of the plutocracy. Or, so the plutocrats and their media sycophants are aiming to convince both themselves and us, the newly-awakened protesting rabble.

As I've written before, Trump is both a blessing and a curse to the neoliberal order, which has turbocharged wealth inequality and more than doubled the number of billionaires since the 2008 financial collapse. The economic "recovery," such as it is, has allowed the new oligarchy to suck up more than 90% of the gains, while condemning the bottom 90% of the population to an ever more precarious existence in what has become hideously known as "the sharing economy."

At the same time that Trump makes the ruling class's hair curl with his serial truth-telling about how corrupt the system is, and how the corrupt system has made him and them what they are today, his antics conveniently deflect attention from the pathologies of such heretofore loathed financial villains as Steve Schwarzman. 

The man just can't contain his excessiveness. This flaw might have mattered back in 2009, when progressive (cough) hero Barack Obama arrived in the White House to vanquish the greedsters by protecting their bonuses and extending their Bush-era tax cuts while imposing austerity on the rest of us and helping to foment the rise of the Tea Party and later, Trump himself.

So according to the latest neoliberal narrative, run-of-the-mill conspicuous consumption shouldn't matter as much to us, now that we have Donald Trump and his gene pool to kick around. Who really cares anymore that Schwarzman once spent $3,000 for a dinner of imported stone crabs with an old crab like The Donald presented to the masses for their sneering pleasure?

The fact that Schwarzman damaged his horrible image even further by hilariously casting himself as a victim of Nazi-style atrocities because of the toothless Dodd-Frank legislation also pales in comparison to the spectacle of President Trump charging admission to attend his Florida White House weekend bashes with heads of state.

So it's all the more awesome, enthuses Sorkin from his perch at the Times's wealth-serving DealBook section, that protests against Trump, the whole Trump and nothing but the Trump might also signal that other rich people are safe, that the public just doesn't care about generalized wealth inequality any more:

Mr. Trump’s election and the nominations of his cabinet of billionaires may draw ire from his critics, but the people who elected him — who draw largely from the middle and lower classes — appear nonplused by his, and other people’s, showy displays of wealth. Indeed, judging by various polls, much of the country aspires to live like Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Trump.

While Mr. Trump himself did not attend the party, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, did. So did others from the administration, including Elaine L. Chao, the transportation secretary; Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; and Wilbur Ross, the nominee for commerce secretary. Other guests included everyone from the prominent financier Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the fashion designer Donatella Versace to Susan George, executive director of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund in New York.

But let's not give too much credit to Donald Trump for improving Schwarzman's reputation enough to make his greed and excess more palatable to the consuming public -- who according to Sorkin's polls, aspire to luxury as greedily as Trump, rather than, say, modestly aspiring to a job with a living wage, a secure retirement and a safe roof over one's head. Knowing how the polls commissioned by the ruling class work, I would hazard a guess that the only choice given to people was who'd they rather be: Ivanka, or a bag lady?

  In any event, the public relations campaign to normalize and even celebrate the greed of the oligarch class had already reached something of a milestone a little over a year ago. The anti-Melania, First Lady Michelle Obama herself, appeared at a gala Washington event for the express purpose of heaping outlandish praise upon Schwarzman and a whole cabal of blood-sucking private equity rentiers. All that these tax-avoiding tycoons had to do in return was to make a meaningless pledge to hire more veterans of the endless wars which have brought them such endless profits.

"Kill and make a killing" trumped (sorry) the tired old Gordon Gekko motto "Greed is Good" way back when Donald Trump was still considered nothing but a media clown candidate.

Michelle Obama did her friendly fascism part of normalizing war profiteers and wealth extractors simply by lending her carefully manufactured "Mom in Chief" brand to their plunder. According to the press release put out by Schwarzman's Blackstone Group, the actual hiring of veterans was never an integral part of the public relations package. The initiative was pure, platitudinous "camo-washing."

The Veterans Initiative Summit is designed to support the recruitment, hiring, retention, and promotion of American veterans across private equity portfolio companies, and will bring together private equity firms and their portfolio companies to promote the sharing of best practices, to identify gaps and opportunities in veteran hiring processes, and to energize leaders as they continue to focus on these important issues. The two-day summit will be held on October 7^thand 8^th at the Grand Hyatt Washington, located at 1000 H Street NW.

Camo-washing doesn't, of course, mean giving the camels at Steve Schwarzman's latest Asia-themed birthday bash a spa treatment. Rather, it is a term coined by journalist Dave Dayen to describe the gifting of public money via either tax credits or direct grants or sweetheart prosecutorial deals to any too big to fail private corporation willing to give lip service to "the troops" and thereby drumming up both commercial and public support for all the tycoons in the Military-Industrial Complex Family.

Depending on what day of the week it is, the bad corporate actors of America are getting either a pat on the back or a slap on the wrist.

  And in October 2015, Michelle Obama was only too happy to give them all a big fat sloppy kiss on whatever cheek you might care to imagine. She thanked them for deflecting public attention away from the unemployed and very suicide-prone veterans of endless wars and from the Obama administration's own adamant refusal to push for an FDR-style government jobs program for them. Instead, Michelle Obama led the cloyingly-named and defense/private equity-funded "Joining Forces" camo-washing crusade.

She not only helped to normalize Trump-style greed, she put a patriotic sheen on it. And she made pathological violence in all its myriad forms so charmingly hilarious in the process:

I mean, private equity is one of the most competitive industries in this country; probably the closest thing you can come to hand-to-hand combat on a daily basis.  (Laughter.)  But Steve and Blackstone and all of you are doing this because you know that something bigger is at stake.  And you also know that while we’ve made important progress, we still have a lot of work to do on behalf of our veterans’ employment.
Now, it’s true that over the past four years, the unemployment rate for 9/11 veterans has dropped from the 12 percent in 2011 to 7.2 percent in 2014.  And since May of this year, it’s been around 5 percent.  That is a significant accomplishment, and it didn’t just happen by itself.  (Applause.)  It happened because folks like you stepped up, learned about what our vets and military spouses have to offer, and then you worked hard to set goals, and recruit and hire them.

I mention that Michelle's image was a very carefully manufactured brand only because her successors - Melania and Ivanka Trump - are coming under such outraged media fire for their own, not-dissimilar branding of their public positions. Establishment churnalists have no qualms about trashing their brand, even to the extent of one of their clique getting a mere slap on the wrist from bosses at New York Times for calling Melania a "hooker" at a public-private society event.

Michelle, you might remember, had her own branding problem in the early days of her husband's administration. It came in the person of her attention-addicted, social-climbing social secretary friend, one Desiree Rogers.

Rogers soon got the proverbial boot for acting too much like Ivanka Trump in public, preening for the cameras in her designer clothing and jewelry, and boastfully exposing the Obama mystique for what it truly was: nothing more than an advertising campaign. From the New York Times: 

Ms. Rogers had appeared in another glossy magazine, posing in a White House garden in a borrowed $3,495 silk pleated dress and $110,000 diamond earrings. But if the image was jarring in a time of recession, Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.

“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”

(snip)

  The White House eventually clamped down on her public profile. She was ordered to stop attending splashy events and showing up in fancy clothes on magazine covers. When Michelle Obama learned one day that Ms. Rogers was on a train heading to New York to attend an MTV dinner, the first lady told her longtime friend to cancel, associates said.

In other words, there has been a precedent for White House branding, Trump-style. Desiree Rogers might have lasted much longer in the White House were it not for those Trumpian reality show party-crashers known as the Salahis.

When the Obamas did their own excessive thing in the People's House, they at least made the effort to commit it far, far away from the People's view. It was during the recession after all, and rich and powerful leaders were forced to inconspicuously consume for reasons of optics. News and photos of the Obamas' secret and opulent 2009 Tim Burton-produced hedonistic Halloween party didn't come to light until nearly two years after the fact.

The party, which also served as a private focus group screening of the still-unreleased movie Alice in Wonderland, featured the stars of the film, including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. A smattering of military families invited for camo-washing purposes were served refreshments that included vials of fake blood. And they say the Trumps have no taste! 

In her book about "The Obamas," Jodi Kantor wrote that "White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged."

A Theory of the Ruling Class: Plus Ca Change, Plus C'Est La Meme Chose

"Nothing exceeds like excess" -- Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.

Sleepers Wake

Optional soundtrack:

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times does me and others one better with our rationalizations that at least Donald Trump has provided the silver lining of spawning the biggest mass protest movement since the Vietnam War. In a nod to his Versailles lifestyle, she describes his flailing fascistic antics as a lining of pure solid gold.

As I wrote in my published response to her Sunday column, Trump has indeed made millions of "Sleepers Wake!" in his own unique, Bach-wards, Antichrist sort of way.

"I hope the protests last," I wrote, "and that Trump's recent canoodlings with the border patrol, the sheriffs' association, the military brass, and the Intelligence (sic) Community aren't signs of of the suppression to come. If a squelching of dissent is what he has in mind, the "norms" are certainly in place for him -- the Homeland Security fusion centers, the Patriot Act, the FISA Court, etc. He's already supplementing those wonderful executive powers bequeathed to him with his own undemocratic brand of capitalistic crack - while the bored, compliant Congress critters are stoned into a stupor when they're not frantically buck-raking."

There is method to Trump's madness of insulting the entire judicial system and making a big show of rounding up immigrants. His real aim is to round up the half of the country that abhors the very ground he plods upon by pulling an "I told you so" the minute another blowback of a massacre occurs on our soil. He aims to scare people into getting off the streets and going home to stay obediently riveted to CNN, a/k/a the Terror Channel.

When I read recently that the new president is an obsessive-compulsive watcher of this military-industrial complex-sponsored cable outfit, it all started to make perfect sickening sense to me. Donald Trump and his band of Nazi White House advisers have been as brainwashed into their xenophobia as millions of other viewers. The manufacture of fear into the huddled masses is the primary weapon of capitalism gone wild. It's all they have left to control us.

 Meanwhile, the Vichy Congress continues its own bipartisan grift, plotting cuts to the social safety net as the price we have to pay for our precious "freedoms."

The Democratic Party is a lost cause.  During their recent and aptly named "retreats" in Baltimore and Houston, they were still bickering about procedures and catchy slogans, as opposed to an actual platform and programs that would benefit the refugees of the middle class, the working poor and the perpetual underclass. 

Another Sunday Times columnist, Frank Bruni, thought that the slogans left a lot to be desired: 

In one of many recent forums for the politicians vying to lead the Democratic National Committee — and, ideally, the party — out of the wilderness and into better times, the candidates were asked to distill the importance of fighting Donald Trump to 10 words or less.

I heard clichés: “Power to the people.” I heard fancy words: “Anathema.”

I heard answers over 15 and 20 and even 25 words.

Only one of the seven candidates onstage at this particular event — which took place in Washington just two days before Trump’s inauguration — came in under the limit, with a reply that was more upbeat than downbeat and more assertive than reactive.

“Freedom, fairness, families, future,” said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., using four words. “I got six left?”

Trump, correctly observes Bruni, has become the only reference point for every Democratic Party utterance. As a result, more voters are familiar with Steve Bannon, Trump's fascist guru, than they are with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of Wall Street, who famously shed crocodile tears as he co-opted the airport protests a couple of weekends ago. He became instant fodder for ridicule by Trump -- who knows his fellow plutocrat-serving New Yorker only too well.

But Bruni ultimately can't help but join the Democrats in their own losing game: tamping down the "re-litigation" of 2016, and decrying the disunity between the party's centrist corporate faction, and its populist progressive faction. Bruni, who with his Times colleagues went out of his way to both negatively boost Trump, and to alternately ignore and denigrate Bernie Sanders throughout the primaries, is still at it. He ends his column with yet another dig at Sanders, who has had the nerve to call for a major, disunifying party restructuring. 

My published response:

Mr. Bruni rightly criticizes the shallow intra-party nitpicking and the futile anti-Trump outrage.

But then he seems to suggest that all Democrats need do to win is to get rid of the wizened old fogies and put forth some young, photogenic (let's "groom" them!) and hip (in sync emotionally!) candidates who can be "ruthlessly pragmatic" enough to whip the electorate into a frenzy.

That is just sad.

Surmising that most people are shallow enough to be bored stiff with substance over style, all they can think about is a better "process." Cosmetic appeal, maps, narratives, diction and personality have become more important than, say, supporting single payer health care, a living wage, public unions, and a job for anybody who wants one.

 A cynical strategy that aims to fool enough of the people enough of the time just to get themselves back into power is a deservedly losing strategy.

Most of us aren't interested in who's the cutest, smartest liberal running for office. According to polls, younger voters lean toward socialism - which is absolute anathema to the party as it currently exists, in such thrall to Wall Street. Nancy Pelosi just last week condescendingly scoffed at a young man at a town hall who dared to question capitalism.

Younger people didn't rally around Bernie because of his looks, grooming and personality. There's a good reason that membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (not even a party, per se) doubled in 2016.

It's still the economy, stupid.

Democrats' Recipe For Success: Boycott Nordstrom

 Updated below.

Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for the Hillary Clinton campaign, has communicated her prescription for a revitalized Democratic Party like this:

 Overcome your fear of Donald Trump, all you crowds of protesters out there. But more important, don't use this mass protesting occasion to demand a few extra bucks an hour. Economic justice is simply not what Resistance, Inc. is all about.  Whatever you do, don't, don't, don't move further left into Bernie Sanders territory!

 Overcome your incipient extremism in more pleasant ways than selfishly demanding a raise and some medical care. Why not show your solidarity with the immigrant you hire at below-minimum wage by boycotting a few high-end department stores like Nordstrom's and Nieman Marcus? Why not give a poor person an occasional ride to the doctor? Why not spend a morning hanging around a job site to keep your eye out for Trump's immigration goons?

Now that President Obama is no longer around, deporting record numbers of migrants and refugees, even members of Jennifer Palmieri's own family are finally discovering just how edgy and political they can be. And therefore, so can you.

Best of all, you will be simply amazed at how empowered you feel by boldly refusing to shop at any emporium suspected of dealing overpriced Ivanka and Melania Trump bling.

"Don't get hung up on Ben Carson's nomination," Palmieri lectured any wavering voters who might be feeling a tad guilty about their Democratic senator further immiserating the homeless, the evicted, and the victims of private equity landlords. "Get out in the country.  And don't assume that everybody in those huge crowds wants $15 an hour. Don't assume we have to move to the left. It's all about identity on our side now. Tap into that identity energy!" 

Don't worry about whether the Democratic Party might hijack this protest movement, added Chuck Todd. Worry instead that the movement might hijack The Party. And then the Party might end up being so, so over. Without your identity, they have no identity.

It doesn't do to rail against the white-sheeted racists of the Republican Party and think you can overcome your fear, insinuated Palmieri.  Because according to her, it is not anger at social and economic injustice that consumes protesters.  It's the obsessive fear of Donald Trump grabbing at your crotches, and disgust at Nordstrom selling cheap Ivanka merchandise. Therefore, you must protect your identities as upper middle class (mainly white) women with all the 300 thread count fibers of your beings!

Schmoozing on MSNBC with her good friend Chuck Todd, Jennifer Palmieri in just eight magical minutes inadvertently communicated some reasons why progressives must rip off the tattered Democratic Party band-aid and throw it away once and for all. The party can no longer hide beneath its protective Obama brand cult of personality. 

Last fall's WikiLeaks trove of Clinton campaign director John Podesta's emails reveal that Todd and his wife, a Democratic Party consultant, threw a private intraparty dinner party in late 2015 for Palmieri at their Washington home as plans were being finalized for Hillary Clinton's second run for the presidency.

The leaks also reveal that Chuck Todd was Palmieri's go-to shoulder to bitch on whenever the Clinton campaign thought that NBC was treating Hillary unfairly -- as in, questioning her about the Clinton Foundation and its foreign government donors.

So here's a P.S. to the liberal freedom-fighters of the upper middle class --  don't forget to also protest Party Crasher Vladimir Putin while you prepare for the revolution by purchasing your pink designer cashmere pussy hats at Saks Fifth Avenue. (I have a feeling that Jennifer Palmieri would be mightily offended if the mob suddenly went into full sans culottes peasant mode, bearing pikes in place of acceptable Gucci bags.)

Meantime, while people are out on the streets demonstrating against The Donald and his juvenile Tweets, I am pleased to report that despite his best relentless efforts, Trump still hasn't been able to corner the market on petty vindictiveness. The Twittersphere is absolutely chock-full of alt-activism in the world of bourgeois retail, via such feeds as #GrabYourWallet.

Update 2/10: After Jennifer Palmieri appeared on MSNBC on Wednesday, Donald Trump took to Twitter and complained about Nordstrom caving to consumer outrage by dropping Ivanka's line. So, according to the Twitter campaign, it is now not only O.K., but patriotically incumbent upon you, to open up your fat wallets and let those retail profits fly again in a sort of reverse protest. It's how the Democratic Party wants you to think about citizen activism.

There is apparently no place for anti-Trump protesters who never could afford to shop at Nordstrom in the first place, due to The Party never taking a stand on a living wage bill.

Making Amerika Grate Again

Donald Trump doesn't read, and he is such a lousy speller that he can't even get through 140 Twitter characters without attaking (sic) the inteligence (sic) of the average person. So it should come as no surprise that he would want everyone else in the country to rise to the level of his own incompetence. 

In his militantly capitalistic crusade to make Amerika grate again and hate again, he aims to turn the federal Department of Education into the Bureau of Planned Ignorance. He has thus chosen a more incompetent (though much richer) person than himself to implement the transformation.  But since even Donald Trump must realize deep within his lizard brain that Betsy DeVos is an intellectual looser (sic) as well as a woman, he has provided her with her own special reverse amanuensis to help her complete the destruction.

You didn't really expect her to do any actual work in her new job, did you?  After all, she and her family have already donated a cool $2.25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, and another $900,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She herself reached in to her deep pockets and personally gave a combined $1 million bribe to 21 of the Republican senators who voted for her confirmation on Tuesday.

But more about her manly ensis, one Jerry Falwell, Jr. He was Trump's first pick to kill public education, but he turned down the job in order to enjoy the continuous freedom to grift public funds and to game the federally guaranteed  loan program for his own Liberty University students. He is one of the country's leading deans of the Church of Getting Wealthy With Jesus, a/k/a The Moral Majority.

Like Trump and Betsy DeVos, he inherited his wealth directly from his daddy. Like them, he'd spent a lot of time bribing politicians to do his bidding before finally figuring he could just cut out the corrupt middleman and screw the public all by himself. And he won't even need to be confirmed by the Senate before he becomes the de facto dis-education commissioner!

That's because Trump appointed him to lead a task force whose sole purpose is to divert public money from public schools and funnel it into private institutions... like Liberty University. Since Betsy DeVos herself has no experience in education, Falwell will not in fact be taking much, if any, dictation from her. He'll be doing all the diktating. 

Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Falwell manfully and humbly boasted that his task-master force "will be a big help to her and do some of the work for her."

Forget George W. Bush's pathetic question, "Is our children learning yet?" Because Jerry Junior's mantra is going to be "Is our children hating yet?" Just in case those godless librul courts do overturn Trump's travel ban on Muslims, Falwell aims to get Amerikan students locked, loaded, and ready. After the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015, he suggested that the kids start packing concealed heat.  “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them,” he fumed at the time with all the rapturous Christian fundamentalism he could muster.

While Amerika's children are reaching for their guns to kill terrorists and grizzly bears, Falwell will do his gosh-darnedest to curb the godless overreach of the federal government at the same time that he's playing God and dictating the moral behavior of young people.

At his own institution, students are not allowed to have "sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman." But given that 65,000 of them take all their courses over the Internet, enforcing this rule must be a truly awesome task for him. So perhaps in his new gig, Falwell can get the 17 recently unified klans of the Inteligence Community (sic) to help him out with his peeping tom duties.
 
Like Trump, Falwell abhors the freedom of the press, especially at Liberty University. When students criticized his endorsement of The Donald last year, Falwell censored the college newspaper and removed a column critical of Trump.

Censorship is already gearing up to be one of the core governing principles of the overreaching Trump regime. When the Senate voted right after Betsy DeVos's confirmation to officially muzzle one of their own -- Elizabeth Warren -- for daring to quote Coretta Scott King's criticism of Attorney General Designate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, you sort of get the inkling that the rest of us might also be in deep, deep trouble.

There is apparently a rule in the Upper Chamber which forbids members from condemning one another's behavior. That is really kind of quaint, given how the tradition fetishist Senators are so willing to overlook their president's serial assaults on common human decency. But since Trump has proven that hypocrisy is a winning virtue, they'll join him with impunity, rather than bother continuing to pretend-scold him for his serial transgressions. Who can even keep up with them, especially when most of their time is taken up with legalized graft.
 
  Meanwhile, the abysmal treatment by Republicans of Amerika's Progressive Darling is predictably enriching the coffers of the corporate Democratic Party by fomenting yet another bout of hashtag outrage from the base. From the New York Times:

 Immediately, Democrats took up Ms. Warren’s cause, urging on social media for Republicans to “#LetLizSpeak.” Ms. Warren said on Twitter that Mr. McConnell had “silenced Mrs. King’s voice” on the Senate floor, to say nothing of “millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.” Within hours of being shut down on the Senate floor, Ms. Warren read the letter from Mrs. King on Facebook, attracting more than two million views — an audience she would have been unlikely to match on C-Span, if she had been permitted to continue speaking in the chamber.

Enjoy C-Span while you've still got it. (I could take or leave Facebook, myself.) And stock up on those books. Ajit Pai, Donald Trump's nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, says he wants to take a weed whacker to the FCC. (So there's one more reason, as if you needed any more, to keep gas cans out of the vulgarian hands of the Trump mafia.) And that whacking job of Pai's could also well include the deliberate slowing-down of public information, such as C-Span feeds of congressional sessions. According to press freedom advocate Craig Aaron, Pai "has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the FCC during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine."

Is we detecting a pattern yet?

Cracking Up

An eon ago, when Trump was inaugurated, I wrote that he poses threats to two separate factions: the ruling class, and the rest of us. He threatens the movers and shakers with his big fat unfiltered mouth and he threatens the poor and working class with his cabinet of bloodthirsty military men and bloodthirsty economic terrorists.

Of course, his renegade crusade of disaster capitalism is nothing compared to the gigantic crack in the Antarctic ice shelf, which in a matter of months will spawn the most humongous iceberg ever seen on the planet. Trump is nothing if not a humongous media distraction from this imminent catastrophe.

His latest epic gaffe came over the weekend when Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News pundit who's made a financial killing with his grotesque series of Killing (Lincoln, Jesus, etc) bestsellers, asked him why he's such great pals with a killer like Vladimir Putin. (Never mind that Trump has never actually met Putin; the nightmare of the corporate media-political complex is that Trump isn't sufficiently interested in punishing Russia and killing Putin in the interests of American hegemony.)

Trump's blunt answer, "We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?" immediately sent shock waves through the upper echelons of power, and joy into the hearts of those few remaining critics of unbridled, state-sanctioned American violence and permanent war.

In an unintentionally hilarious editorial, the New York Times today suggested that when America kills people and starts wars and invades countries and imprisons more of its own citizens than anywhere else on earth, it does so out of inherently good intentions. Occasionally, passive mistakes are sometimes made by the unaccountable best and brightest in the humane process of destroying millions of lives.

 Trump, the Worst and the Darkest, has shirked one of his most important presidential duties by failing to tout American exceptionalism and declare the United States immune from the consequences of its own criminal behavior. The man whom they accuse of lying every single minute is suddenly not a good enough liar to suit them:

Asserting the moral and political superiority of the United States over Russia has not traditionally been a difficult maneuver for American presidents. But rather than endorsing American exceptionalism, Mr. Trump seemed to appreciate Mr. Putin’s brutality — which includes bombing civilians in Syria and, his accusers allege, responsibility for a trail of dead political opponents and journalists at home — and suggested America acts the same way.

The Paper of Record insists from one side of its mouth that the Trump administration cease and desist from its serial lying about inaugural crowd sizes, nonexistent massacres on our soil and all manner of "post-truth" atrocities. It then insists from the other side of its mouth that Trump blatantly lie about American war crimes, CIA coups and presidential kill lists. It insists that Trump ignore American brutality throughout the world and instead concentrate on Putin's much more limited brutality in his own oligarchic chunk of real estate.

The Times editorial board proceeds to twist itself into an even more convoluted pretzel:

 There’s no doubt that the United States has made terrible mistakes, like invading Iraq in 2003 and torturing terrorism suspects after Sept. 11. President Barack Obama often drew fire from Republicans for acknowledging the obvious — there are limits to American power and sometimes decisions to employ military force have resulted in “unintended consequences.” American drone strikes against extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, have sometimes killed civilians.

War crimes devolve into mistakes. Bombing people 26,171 times in just the last year alone has had the unintended consequence of making them permanently dead or maimed. All such targets are considered "extremists" due to the fact that they insist on breathing more oxygen that the American Imperium deems them entitled to. And thousands of droned dead civilians are downgraded into "sometimes" things. And this is so unfair, because the previous bomber-in-chief was still blamed by the opposition party for not bombing enough.

 But no American president has done what Mr. Putin has done in silencing nearly all independent media, crushing dissent, snuffing out Russia’s once-incipient democracy, invading Ukraine, interfering in the American election — apparently on Mr. Trump’s behalf — and trying to destabilize Europe. At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results, as when Germany and Japan evolved after World War II from vanquished enemies into trusted, prosperous allies.

Putin kills out of hatred and greed. America kills out of love and concern. As the Times now revises history, even Bush and Cheney wanted nothing more than to spread the goodness of democracy to Iraq, a country that they effectively destroyed, spawning the worst immigration crisis in all of global history. When the Clinton administration deployed its economic sanctions against that same country, Secretary of State Madeline Albright infamously declared that the resulting deaths of half a million children were worth it.

The Times editorial board makes no mention of how the Clinton administration and the "Harvard boys" actually enabled and sometimes personally profited from Russian crony capitalism after the break-up of the Soviet Union.  Among other culprits, Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers literally wrote the book on how to privatize Russia, create a handful of oligarchs, and immiserate the Russian people in the process. Neoliberalism (greed, inc.) has no national boundaries, and the media-political complex wants to keep it that way, despite all the hand-wringing and unfounded allegations of how Putin hijacked "our" election.

The newspaper finally stoops to one of the ruling class's favorite justifications for screwing the rest of us: if it's "bipartisan," then it's like a giant jar of sweet gooey Smuckers preserves -- it's just got to be good:

Mr. Trump’s willingness to kowtow to Mr. Putin in the Fox interview was too much even for the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who rebuked Mr. Trump, called Mr. Putin “a thug” and rejected any equivalence between America and Russia. The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, urged the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Trump’s finances and personal ties to find out if the Russian government was blackmailing him.

Never mind that there is no evidence, yet, of Trump "kowtowing" to Putin. And the fact that the Washington Consensuals have not yet gotten their hands on Trump's tax returns or other documents to prove their allegations doesn't say much about our vaunted "intelligence community," does it? The longer they fail to produce their smoking gun, the more one suspects that there is no "there" there.

The cracks widen, all over the world, both figuratively and literally.

The Trumps: Neoliberalism's Perfect Distraction

Stop the presses. Donald Trump had the unprecedented gall this week to hang up on the Australian prime minister, right after rudely reneging on Barack Obama's noble promise to accept a token number of people who fled U.S. invasions and bombings only to find themselves imprisoned in a privatized Down Under gulag.

To hear the ruling establishment whine about this Major Incident in the Oval Office, the refugee prisoners might as well not even exist. The big hang-up is all about a shocking breach of etiquette at the heretofore pristine pinnacle of world power. And so begins the daunting task of scapegoating a scapegoating old goat.

By concentrating on the disastrous manners of Donald Trump and his entire clan, the mainstream media deflects attention from the ravages of Disaster Capitalism itself. It's more convenient to instill hate and fear of the new president than it is to examine the forces that produced him and other right-wing populist demagogues like him.

Entirely lost in the conversation about Trump's serial breaches of protocol is the long-standing breach of the social contract. The media, far from being the champions of social and economic justice, are falling all over themselves to scoop each other in the etiquette sweepstakes.

Establishment mouthpiece The Washington Post leads the Miss Manners pack by informing us that Trump is not only rude, he is unnecessarily rude. After all, the new president should be joyfully reveling in his new power, if not metaphorically chain smoking the post-orgasmic cigarettes of the traditional media honeymoon period.

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief — a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

 Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

The Post doesn't bother to inform its readers why the refugee crisis has become such a hot-potato issue among staunch and congenial democratic countries. Better for the newspaper and its billionaire owner not to mention that it is the global banking cartel and multinational corporations which have caused so much unprecedented death and injury and disease and famine and infrastructure collapse and despair through endless wars and cruel austerity policies. Millions of people have literally nowhere to go and nowhere to hide because of just one thing: violent American imperialism.

The borderless military-industrial complex, when not letting migrants drown in the oceans or starve to death in flight from their war-torn homes, has been warehousing them in private prisons in such out-of-the-way places as islands off the Australian coast. And the Australian P.M. is in as much of a pickle as Donald Trump, because of all the bad publicity surrounding the subhuman treatment of refugee prisoners by some of the same multinational corporations profiting from wars and austerity and plunder. He wants to play Musical Refugees, offshore some of the human detritus so he won't look so bad to his electorate. His country's cruel private refugee prison system is actually run by Serco, the same multi-tentacled British conglomerate that was awarded $1.25 billion by the Obama administration for the disastrous roll-out of its health insurance marketplace. The company got the contract despite its long history of fraud and incompetence.

But never mind all that pre-Trumpian crony disaster capitalism. Step right up and gaze over here, all you Washington Post consumers - it's Trump, the Rude and Unready!

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump fumed as Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.

Forget the substandard inhumane living conditions endured by Disaster Capitalism's millions of victims. Because the Neoliberal Thought Collective has made them so easy to forget as they concentrate our collective wrath on such a limited man in such an artificially limited fashion.

But just in case you can't forget, please now direct your attention to the Old Goat's wife. Because Melania Trump is committing her own unprecedented breach of etiquette by refusing to move to Washington and play her assigned role as The Good Wife. As New York Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis tells it, things have gotten so bad that thousands of requests for private tours of the People's House have gone ignored. And worst of all etiquette breaches, they haven't even begun planning for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll yet! Professional concern-trollers are extremely concerned. Those dreaded passive-voice "questions are being raised."

 “She is far behind the curve compared to where modern first ladies have been by the time their husbands are inaugurated, in a quite unprecedented way,” said Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University who specializes in first ladies. “We are in uncharted territory here.”

No mention of the uncharted territory that so many millions of migrants and refugees and myriad other victims of neoliberal policies are finding themselves trapped in all around this burning, drowning planet. (And just as an aside, the whereabouts of Melania Trump immediately pale in comparison to the revelation that First Ladies Studies seems to be an actual academic discipline.)

If you're not sufficiently incensed at Mrs. Old Goat's ineptitude and selfishness, let's move on to First Daughter Ivanka Trump. She is taking a ton of liberal heat for advertising her brand last weekend at the exact same moment that hundreds of refugees were being detained at the nation's airports.

  USA Today sniffed,

Timing is everything in politics, as French Queen Marie Antoinette learned two centuries ago, and Ivanka Trump was reminded of over the weekend.
"Let them eat cake!" mocked the tweets and Instagram comments on Trump's accounts, after she posted pictures of herself and husband Jared Kushner dressed to the nines — she in a $5,000 silvery gown by Carolina Herrera — just as chaos and protests erupted at international airports over President Trump's just-signed order barring refugees and travelers from some Muslim countries.

It's gotten so bad that Nordstrom's was even forced to discontinue Ivanka's clothing line.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times was especially miffed because Ivanka let her husband Jared Kushner fondle her butt during the photo shoot. "He (adviser Steve Bannon) has a seat on the National Security Council. Kushner has his hand on Ivanka Trump’s seat," Bruni quipped while urging his readership to go ogle the picture.

Last month, feminist writer Jill Filopovic opined in a Times op-ed that Ivanka is practically alone among her wealthy peers and friends (including Chelsea Clinton) for not only being a totally fake feminist, but also a totally dangerous fake feminist. Filopovic, while decrying Ivanka's privilege and her ghost-written parenting advice book for career women, and her disturbing attachment to the Old Goat, also takes a gratuitous neoliberal dig at poorer women, who seem to be reproducing like rabbits without benefit of wedlock:

Unlike in past generations when educated women had a harder time finding partners, today, college-educated women like Ms. Trump are more likely than their working-class counterparts to wed, and also like Ms. Trump, usually delay childbirth until after the wedding. With the fewer financial stressors that come with dual incomes or a single extremely high one these educated couples divorce less often than those with fewer financial resources, despite other findings that both groups have comparable dedication to the marital ideal.

Filopovic of course has no problem with the trickle-down feminism of other neoliberal wives and spawn of wealthy men -- such as Hillary Clinton and Chelsea. So I left a published comment on her annoying and hypocritical screed:

This piece could just have easily been written about Ivanka's friend Chelsea Clinton, had her Mom won.

Chelsea wrote a book too, hers aimed at young people. She urges them to travel the world and and take some time out to get to know the poor. Like Ivanka advising women of her own class, or those aspiring to her heights, Chelsea was addressing versions of herself. She lives in as much of a mirror-bubble as Ivanka and other meritocrats with a conscience.

No wonder that even during the height of the nasty bickering between their parents, both women pledged undying friendship to one other. Class transcends the Duopoly.

There are plenty of highly educated young society matrons in New York and Washington and the West Coast, spewing the same neoliberal hucksterism (Be your own Mommy brand! Be your own entrepreneur! Lean In! Sleep Revolution!) as Ivanka Trump -- who, let's remember, couldn't even vote for Daddy in the New York primary because she'd forgotten to divest from her Democratic party affiliation by the deadline.

 So it's convenient that Ivanka suddenly becomes just the right hook upon which to hang this critique of "fake feminism." Since her father is such a big creep, she's fair game. If she were a real feminist, she would have disowned him years ago. Right?

Anyway, I guess it'll be fun in a gross kind of way watching her try to play Cordelia to Trump's King Lear. All the world's a political stage and we the audience are, as ever, merely being played.

Of course, the lifestyles and coutures and excesses of the Trumps are not that different from the lifestyles of the Clintons -- or the Obamas, who just moved into a mansion two blocks away from Ivanka and her family. The main difference is in the virtue-signalling.

If you must bomb many countries for many decades, and if you must reward yourself and your plutocratic friends and donors with record gains at the expense of the huddled masses who elected you, you also must maintain the proper decorum and use the proper platitudes. Instead of constantly boasting and consuming way too much way too conspicuously, you utter such phrases as "Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" and "When they go low, we go high" and "I am my brother's keeper.org."

When you go on your luxury vacations, you never, but never, post pictures on Instagram. While cavorting on a private island, for example, you discreetly allow the rare casual capture of your cool dad image, complete with flip-flops and a backwards baseball cap. And voila, you will fill the Internet with some of that much-needed joy so seriously lacking in the Trump gene pool. 

You have to combine the fakery with folksiness and flattery and finesse. And the Trumps will never in a million years be able to do folksiness and flattery and finesse. 

Half the country despises them because they're such rich oafs. The other half loves them, because the Trumps prove that if even clueless oafs like them can be successful, then anybody can be successful. Even you. Better an honest huckster than a phony huckster.

Having Your Trump and Eating It Too

Tired of seeing Donald Trump's mug and the mugs of hysterical pundits screaming that Donald Trump is making the sky fall with his every Tweet, I finally called my cable company to cut the cord.

 I told the person on the other end of the line that I only wanted to get rid of the TV portion of my Triple Play Package, whose monthly rate had gradually doubled since I first signed up for it more years ago than I can remember.

I was immediately transferred to the special agent in charge of getting subscribers to change their minds. She asked why I no longer wished to avail myself.

"Two words," I replied. "Donald Trump!"

Of course, since I write for a non-living, I couldn't let it go at just those two words. So I launched into my tirade of news just not being news any more. I want, I said, to be informed, not to be screamed at by corporate stooges telling me I should be spending all my days and all my nights Being Very Afraid of Donald Trump. I not only want to break up with Donald Trump, I want to break up with the entire Trump Terror Franchise.

Plus, since I have a couple of streaming services, cable TV is getting more redundant by the minute.

"You do realize, don't you," the cable rep cautioned, "That the movies you can watch on Pay-Per-View are newer than the ones you can watch on Netflix."

I don't care, I said. I'm still trying to catch up on films that came out 50 years ago. For example, I finally got around to watching "Nothing Sacred" with Carole Lombard for the first time in my life on Sunday night.

Finally realizing that I am indeed one of those people who can actually survive without cable TV, the Special Agent in Charge of Retention relented and offered me a very special secret deal available only to loyal customers like me. I'd get $50 knocked off my monthly bill, keep all my cable TV channels, and as an added bonus, they'd upgrade my Internet service to a higher, more professional speed usually available only to the elite business class.

Great! So why wasn't I offered this deal before, I asked.

The retention agent chuckled knowingly. I seems that I had stupidly failed to read the offer in super tiny print when it first came out in 2011, delivered with my monthly bill (actually, it's more like bi-monthly, since it's on a 21-day cycle.) R-i-i-i-ght, I agreed.

So anyway, an independent contractor of the cable company showed up right on schedule with my new modem. Not that I've scientifically measured the speed with which I can now access all my political fund-raising emails from the various Democratic subsidiaries of Resistance, Inc. or anything, but I honestly can't tell any difference at all. However, since the shiny new modem now sitting under my desk is almost twice the size of the older model, I will be a dutifully happy consumer. I just have to remember to call them back a year from now to re-cancel, before they automatically double my rates again.

So, as they say in the media biz, here's your takeaway: when dealing with your cable company, always behave like Donald Trump. Bluster, complain, meander insanely, and scoff at the pitiful enticements. And then, if you're as lucky, and successful and, like, as smart as me and The Donald, you will win. You will make your checking account balance, if not great again, at least healthy enough to cash in on the latest Buy One Get One Free Doritos deal, and munch merrily away while you consume All Fear, All the Time.

And just as an aside, the next time a cable guy or gal comes to your house, find out if they're directly employed by your "provider" -- which, as often as not, also creates the content as well as delivering it. Since their technicians are increasingly members of the low-paid, no benefit gig economy, please consider giving them a tip on their way out.
 
Meanwhile, the New York Times has some helpful advice on adjusting your media diet in the Age of Trump. Do I need to tell you that an integral part of this therapeutic regimen is to stop visiting Facebook and Twitter and reading blogs like Sardonicky, and instead restrict your consumption to mainstream media outlets -- such as New York Times?

It's because editors are like hospital dieticians whipping up a bland diet. One source for Christopher Mele's piece appreciates editors who "select the top stories and spare him from reading 'the incomplete, incremental, second-rate stuff often published online.'" (translation: anything that criticizes the centrist neoliberal establishment or departs from the official Narrative.)

Too much information in the Age of Trump, warn media experts turned shrinks, is like junk food laced with crack cocaine. It is harmful to your health. The Times quotes one media therapist expert, Dan Gillmor, who suggests a Slow News Movement modeled after the Slow Food Movement. Just because there's an endless selection of news product on the shelves doesn't mean we have to cram our maws with every last bite: 

“We haven’t been asking anything of the news-producing group, namely journalists, who I would strongly argue should be more involved in managing the insane flow of information and misinformation,” he said. “It would be better if we had an approach that said, ‘Calm down.’”

Some of the advice is just common sense. For example, if you made the mistake of watching Donald Trump's prime time Supreme Court Nominee Show on Tuesday night, you probably lost at least some sleep. A cheese is a cheese is a cheese. By any other name it would smell as pungent, especially if you're already prone to acid reflux or the night terrors.

So any day now, Big Pharma will be marketing its psychoactive cornucopia to sufferers of News Fatigue Disorder... in glitzy ads on the Nightly News.

I think I'll just pretend that my cable cord is not still intact and settle down with a good book. I hear that dystopian lit is making quite a comeback, Not only is Orwell's 1984 reportedly already out of stock on Amazon, but Hannah Arendt's weighty Origins of Totalitarianism is also doing a brisk business.

Sweet dreams, everybody.