Paine v. Establishment Pains-In-Asses

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could just as well have been writing about why the liberal hand-wringing "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual. What is really needed is not just a so-called Blue Wave in the congressional midterms, but a global revolution against the whole rotten global tyranny of finance capitalism. No matter that Paine was talking about the revolution against Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than true corrupt despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

The "revolution" and freedom we're supposedly celebrating today was actually one group of rich men - the "Founders" - disentangling themselves from another group of rich men in Great Britain. Their aversion to taxes and their embrace of the institution of slavery, which was already well on the way to abolition in the British Empire, was at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would not be granted to enslaved people in America for nearly a century. And it was only granted on paper, and only for a little while, until the Jim Crow laws superseded both the "aspirational" Declaration and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The pursuit of happiness for the owners of capital has always been contingent upon their freedom to oppress, enslave and even kill those they consider disposable. America has been at war, at one place or another, for a grand grotesque total of 223 years since the Declaration was signed in 1776. So Paine was right when he wrote:

"To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to nations, would be to take from such government the most lucrative of its branches."

and

"Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government."

All courts and courtiers are alike. They form a common policy (or "narrative") which is separate and detached from the rights of people and nations. It's commonly known in the US as the Duopoly, or the good cop/bad cop two party system, or perhaps even more accurately, the Duplicity.

 Paine wrote, 

 "And while they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution....They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

While we don't have the hereditary succession of a monarchy, we do have an aristocracy. We do have both political and media dynasties, which have more and more consolidated power unto themselves. 

And it's no accident that this American aristocracy, besides its orgy of violent wars both at home and abroad,  has waged a virtual war on public education in recent years. And that is because, as Paine wrote: "The more ignorant the country, the better it is fitted for this species of Government" (of hereditary succession, or what's today euphemized as the "meritocracy" of the elites).

As we celebrate 241 years of freedom, The Duopoly is currently in a virtual storm of overreaction to the "shock" primary election of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated one of the most powerful congressional Democrats in the country. But unlike the establishment's open disdain for Bernie Sanders during his own primary battle against Hillary Clinton in 2016, they're treating Ocasio-Cortez like a comparative rock star. She's young, she's charismatic, she's attractive, and she's Latina. So the pundits are sadly unable to fall back on attacking her as too old, too white, too crabby and too sexist as they did Bernie, despite the fact that her platform is nearly identical to his. They therefore will try to celebritize her into watered-down ineffectiveness. Her "story" will outweigh the policy proposals they find so dangerous to their self-interest.

They're obviously trying to co-opt and monetize her for their own ends, inviting her on all the political talk shows and plastering her picture all over the front pages. It seems to me that they're trying to make the best of a bad (for them) situation, in hopes that her popularity will spur more disaffected young people to pull the lever for Democrats across the board in the November midterms. Once she arrives in Washington, they'll try to relegate her to the sidelines. They will definitely order her, as they do with all her fellow reps, to immediately hit the phones and fund-raise for the Party for at least half of every working day.

A prime example of this attempted co-option is a Tweet sent out Tuesday by one of Barack Obama's closest and most trusted advisers, tamping down the notion that Ocasio-Cortez is even a lefty:

  Valerie Jarrett‏Verified account @ValerieJarrett

Valerie Jarrett Retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Love seeing @Ocasio2018 define herself rather than letting others do it for her. Seems like the right North Star to me

Valerie Jarrett added,

Alexandria Ocasio-CortezVerified account @Ocasio2018

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans.…

8:58 AM - 3 Jul 2018

1,527 Retweets
14,030 Likes

 If you need more proof of the game that is afoot, the corporate media's chief liberal Bernie Bro-basher, Paul Krugman, posted a column on Tuesday very tepidly reversing his negative position on Medicare For All and limply applauding Ocasio-Cortez, insofar that it's unfair to compare her to a Tea Partier as some of those other centrist pundits are so unfairly doing. She is a "reasonable Democratic radical" as opposed to an insanely independent radical like Bernie. In other words, Krugman is falling in Obama/Clinton/Party line, and patting her on the head. He helpfully links to her campaign website, which to his passive-aggressive satisfaction entirely omits any wonkish details of her platform. And then he sneakily equates Medicare for All with the bait-and-switch "public option" being proffered by centrist Democrats posing as progressives for purposes of re-election.

So, about Ocasio-Cortez’s positions: Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare – basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.

Krugman is disingenuous, if not downright duplicitous. My published response:

 Well, this piece from Paul Krugman is certainly an improvement over his nay-saying re Medicare For All around the time that Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton such a run for her Wall Street money.

Even so, there's still that lingering "but where are the details?" little dribble of cold water implicit in his defense of this good and sane and non-radical proposal. So I would suggest that anyone interested in the details visit the Physicians for a National Health Plan website for links to both Medicare For All bills now in Congress, as well as a wealth of other helpful info:

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources

For those who still insist we must retain the austerian "pay-go" method of financing things that will help make people's lives better, Modern Monetary Theory is finally entering the mainstream. More here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern-monetar...

The politicians who have no qualms about mindlessly appropriating more than a trillion dollars to our endless war machine and surveillance state should absolutely be called out on their hypocrisy every time they insist that there is just no money for Single Payer or a federal jobs guarantee, or that we have to rob from the poor to pay for the poor. The politicians who spout such nonsense are in thrall to the big money interests running this show. It's high time that the tycoons of unfettered capitalism get booed off their self-serving propaganda stage.

Chuck Schumer, Comedian

My senator, Chuck Schumer of New York, wants me to call my senator to express my displeasure with Trump's Supreme Court nominee.

The rights of organized labor depend upon my phone call, but even more, the fates of Roe v Wade and the "Affordable" Care Act depend upon me and a couple hundred million other Americans picking up the phone and imagining, if only for one minute, that we still live in a democracy and that our voices count.

Chuck. for some reason probably related to sheer longevity, (he's never had any career but that of a Democratic machine politician) is now the senate minority leader. Proving that longevity doesn't equal strength, he has written an op-ed in the New York Times as much as admitting that his party has thrown in the towel over the Supreme Court. The only pathetic gambit he has left is gaslighting and guilt-tripping liberals:

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has created the most important vacancy on the Supreme Court in our lifetimes. Whoever fills Justice Kennedy’s seat will join an evenly divided court with the ability to affect the laws of the United States and the rights of its citizens for generations. Enormously important issues hang in the balance: the right of workers to organize, the pernicious influence of dark money in politics, the right of Americans to marry who they love, the right to vote.

Perhaps the most consequential issues at stake in this Supreme Court vacancy are affordable health care and a woman’s freedom to make the most sensitive medical decisions about her body. The views of President Trump’s next court nominee on these issues could well determine whether the Senate approves or rejects them.

As a big recipient of Wall Street largesse himself, Schumer can well afford to ignore the fact that the very unlamentable Kennedy is the Supreme who actually wrote the odious majority opinion in the Citizens United case, glibly granting wealth the same rights to speech as flesh and blood humans. And the "affordability" of the political football known as Obamacare is very much up for debate. If anything, the moniker is downright cynical, given that much of this non-surance is too unaffordable to use for way too many people.

 Deep-pocketed conservative special interests are chomping at the bit to take down the health care law. They will sponsor any conceivable litigation against the Affordable Care Act with the potential to reach the Supreme Court. A reliably conservative majority makes it much more likely that one of those attempts succeeds.

Of course, President Trump’s nominee will not admit that they would vote to overturn a woman’s freedom to choose or gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Just like Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Roberts and Samuel Alito before him, the next nominee will obfuscate and hide behind the shopworn judicial dodge, “I will follow settled law.” (But as we have seen in many decisions, including the Janus ruling this past week, settled law is only settled until a majority of the Supreme Court decides it is not.)

Chuck doesn't mention that enough of his Democratic colleagues, not least of whom was then-Senator Joe Biden and his defense of  then-nominee Clarence Thomas over sexual harassment claims, have regularly, albeit "reluctantly" voted to confirm these conservative nominees. They will likely do so again - reluctantly and with the deepest of reservations, of course. Because in the end, the interests of their most important constituents - the very wealthy donor class - are what matter. 

Now, get yourselves ready for Schumer's inevitable dog whistle to his most important constituents:

For Americans who value our rights and the progress our country has made over the last decade, it is no longer enough to wait until November to safeguard the rights and opportunities we enjoy today. The Republican majority in the Senate is razor-thin. One or two votes in the Senate will make the difference between the confirmation and rejection of an ideological nominee. If the Senate rejects an extreme candidate, it would present President Trump the opportunity to instead select a moderate, consensus nominee.

Who has made "progress" over the past decade other than the rich? What opportunities and rights are regular people supposedly enjoying right this very minute? Schumer pretends to care about the evisceration by the court of  collective bargaining rights, but I don't ever remember him championing the rights of striking teachers. The big giveaway in that paragraph is that the feckless Schumer will gladly confirm a more "moderate" candidate of Trump's choosing, someone who will defend private insurance predators and abortion rights but will not necessarily defend the rights of poor and working people to live. He will happily confirm a centrist judge who will allow the wealthy few to continue enjoying their inordinate rights, privileges and progress. Chuck ignores the real extremism: that deaths from despair in the US are increasing solely because of corporate-friendly policies, and that the CEO to worker pay ratio is more than 300 to 1.

To that end, the Senator from Wall Street gives Times readers with phones and email accounts his preferred talking points:

  If you do not want a Supreme Court Justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade and undo the Affordable Care Act, tell your senators they should not vote for a candidate from Mr. Trump’s preordained list. Democrat, Republican, independent, liberal or conservative — we should all want a more representative process for choosing the next Supreme Court justice.

If you want the rights of the poor and working classes to be protected more than you want the Great Insurance Protection Racket Act protected, then don't bother.

My published response to Chuck has been disappeared from the thread twice so far. So while it's still standing, for the time being, here goes:

Well, Mr. Schumer, since you are my senator, there is no need to call you with regard to Trump's Supreme Court pick. We know where you stand on Roe v Wade and the ACA... although I do seem to remember that you threw health care under the bus in 2014.

It was a mistake, you said, to pass it in 2010 when most Americans were struggling to survive in the wake of the Wall Street collapse. You remember - that time Main Street got screwed so that the Big Finance could get even richer off the backs of the rest of us?

Fast forward to 2016 and the merely technical election of Trump - a man who rose to power amid the austerity politics of 1970s New York, with the full complicity of the Democratic machine. And now fast forward to 2018 and you have the gall to write that "we" have to stop Trump - because the New York machine never stopped him when they still had the chance, all those many decades ago. Instead, the state and city gifted him with untold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tax breaks and incentives. That's when the Dems themselves began turning right and favoring the interests of the big banks and business leaders over the rights of the working class. Hospitals and fire stations were closed so that Trump could prosper.

This goes so far, far beyond the appointment any one reactionary unelected Supreme Court justice. But nice self-serving try, Mr. Schumer, pretending that our phone calls to a corrupt Senate have more clout than the corporations running the place.

For the lowdown on how Trump rose to power and fortune in the 1970s with the help of the Democratic machine and the rightward lurch of liberals into the arms of finance capital, and the invention of manufactured crises and ensuing austerity policies nationwide, I highly recommend reading "Fear City" by historian Kim Phillips-Fein.

As noted in the New York Times review of the volume, published last year:

Of course, the definition of liberalism was shifting too. The postwar boom that had enabled the ambitious Great Society programs of the 1960s was over, and so too was the full-throated commitment to progressive bulwarks and principles, to labor unions and an activist government. Many of the men — and they were almost all men — who emerged from the private sector to help steer New York out of the fiscal crisis were Democrats, but not of the Beame vintage. A case in point is the financier often credited with rescuing the city, Felix Rohatyn, the master fixer who helped bring together the banks and unions, while persuading the city’s leaders to reduce their spending and rethink their budgets. Here he is portrayed in a less flattering light, not as ill-intentioned but as the most prominent member of a group of unelected financial executives making critical decisions about the future of the city without any input from or accountability to its citizens.

(Chuck was getting elected to the New York State Assembly at around the same time Donald Trump was making his moves on distressed properties and people in the Big Apple. They've always had a "pragmatic," transactional, deal-making kind of relationship. As Nancy Pelosi once put it, these two guys can speak Noo Yawk to each other. Chuck even thinks that Trump "likes" him despite everything. And that is most likely true, insofar as someone as paranoid and dogmatic as Trump can actually like anybody).

So, as Kim Phillips-Fein recounts in her excellent history, Trump had hired Democratic Governor Hugh Carey's chief fundraiser to lobby New York City's unelected, banker-heavy Urban Development Corporation for the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel. To date, Trump has pocketed well over $350 million in public money from that deal alone. Despite, or really because of, his sleazy bombast, Trump was a valuable commodity to the liberal politicians (in thrall and in onerous debt to the big banks) in office at the time. He continued to be a valuable commodity, because his success encouraged other sharks and investors to come buy and sell property in the near-bankrupt city, thus appeasing the bond-holders and possibly even averting a worldwide bond market collapse, due to the fear and jitters of the investor class. Trump's addiction to publicity and risk was instrumental in making New York a "home away from home" for the global elite. He was a key player in the Democratic Party's rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society, and the transformation of the metropolis into the wealth disparity capital of the US, if not the entire world, that it now is.

In light of the shock victory of democratic socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of The Bronx in last week's Democratic primary, I found this passage in Phillips-Fein's book to be particularly and deliciously ironic:

 Donald Trump and the developers who exploited the city's desperation to build their towers had little interest in the rest of New York. The fact that millions of dollars went to subsidize their building projects instead of restoring public services or promoting recovery in the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the city never registered as a moral concern. Quite the contrary: the mood among the city's new elite in the wake of the fiscal crisis was confident and upbeat.... As the seventies drew to a close, Trump commented to the newspapers that he believed things were looking up for the city -- it was clearly on the road to recovery. 'I'm not talking about the South Bronx,' he elaborated, perhaps unnecessarily. 'I don't know anything about the South Bronx." (quoted in Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump Cuts the Cards, Village Voice, 1/22/79.

Suddenly The Bronx is right back on the map. The corporate Democratic machine is running out of gas, grinding its old rusty gears in feeble protest. And the only voice the Grand Old Guignol Party has left is Donald Trump's own tooting, off-key clown horn. The concept of a "moral economy" is again on the ascendant due to the blatant immorality at the core of the class war.

Maybe, just maybe, things are turning around.  They are revolving. And I don't mean the revolving doors between Washington and corporate America, either. I mean revolving as in revolution.

Never has the directive to "call Congress and make your voice heard" sounded more ridiculous, especially coming from the minority leader of the Senate. I gave up calling him when he answered my questions and views about Single Payer health coverage with the same boilerplate email, saying he is really liberally open to having conversations and debates about how to make the "Affordable" Care Act better.

This is a guy who once called for Homeland Security TSA agents to man all the New York subway platforms and do Rapiscan probes and body searches on terroristic commuters as well as establishing "no ride" lists for trains.

People are out on the streets, displaying some actual solidarity with immigrant and refugee families. The struggle might not be ultimately successful, but at least it's a struggle, after a whole stultifying decade of neoliberal Obamism/Clintonism.

Pigs, Hogs, and Suicide Nets

Donald Trump visited the site of the new Foxconn factory on Thursday, outlandishly praising the Taiwan-based electronics giant as "the eighth wonder of the world" and mouthing vague threats against Harley-Davidson, which has announced it will outsource more jobs to Europe as a result of the president's chaotic trade war tariffs.

"Don't get cute with us," sneered Trump in his best Tony Soprano imitation. He was, after all, speaking in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. A Harley factory which manufactures the iconic Hog motorcycles is located right nearby, so perhaps he fancied that his electronically-enhanced (by an addicted cable TV news conglomerate) voice traveled there by magic. Or maybe it was just by the usual osmotic method with which Trump seems to infiltrate our brains whether we like it or not.

I suspect Trump might be dumping all over Harley-Davidson simply because he knows he wouldn't look good posing on one. The Hog would be in danger of collapsing under the weight of the pig. This guy looked like he could barely even hoist a shovel for his Foxconn publicity stunt.

But perhaps that's mean of me. He could be dumping all over Harley because he is still obsessing over Hillary Clinton and free-associates the Hog with all that money she made on hog and cattle futures when she was first lady.

I also suspect that Trump is gushing all over the new Foxconn plant because, just like himself, it is foreign-owned and will be rewarded handsomely via billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives, a/k/a corporate welfare.

I even suspect that, given that Foxconn became infamous for its installation of suicide nets for its Chinese wage slaves,Trump and his cronies might actually be betting on American suicide futures instead of Hog and hog futures.

As reported by The Guardian on a visit to one of Foxconn's notorious Chinese factories:

“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”

Consider the fact that Wisconsin taxpayers will not see a dime of their forced investment in this plant for at least 25 years. Consider the fact that Foxconn promises to create 13,000 new jobs with bait-and-switch salaries of $50.000  being bandied about in the press releases. Consider the fact that suicide-by-gun in Wisconsin is far more common than in most states.

 Consider the fact that the vast majority of these deaths are of white rural males in the prime of their lives - men who have seen their jobs disappear, their lives and livelihoods ruined. Deaths from despair among struggling working class people are increasing all over Exceptional America at a shocking rate.

In 2016, 142,000 Americans died from drug and alcohol-induced fatalities and suicide, an average of one person every four minutes. The Centers for Disease Control notes that this represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year.

Trump is so depraved I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he cited this increase as more proof that America is winning under his reign. He really is that much of a stupid and cruel man. 

There is so much more oligarchic profit to be made by investing in cheap, flimsy made-in-America suicide nets than in strong social safety nets like Medicaid and food stamps. There's so much more fun and profit in private prison futures and the construction of "tender age" facilities for migrant child prisoners than in public education futures and standard subsidized child care.

Trump is a cruel and stupid and vicious man. He is also the very model of a major neoliberal, entirely emblematic of the democracy-destroying and soul-destroying hypercapitalism which rules the world. 

America is turning into our very own Foxconn factory. Depression, suicide, drug overdoses and gun massacres are becoming normalized. It's just not a very good place for human beings.

***

Full disclosure: I hoisted a hunk of this post from my published New York Times comment on Paul Krugman's Harley-Davidson column. I am not one of those sticklers who avoids self-plagiarism like the plague. I am simply lazy sometimes, and as far as I know, there is no such thing as unremunerated theft of one's own profitless intellectual property, even though my comment apparently became the legal property of the Times Company the minute I submitted it. If the Times were Trump, they'd probably already be in court. But since they are certainly striving mightily to distance themselves from Trump even as they breathlessly gift him with every last pixel of the constant publicity he craves, I don't think I have much to worry about in the frivolous lawsuit department.  

I bring plagiarism up only because I noticed that one of the most highly recommended comments on the Krugman column got briefly called out as an unattributed copy/paste of a news article about Trump-supporting Harley employees. Both the "reader reply" politely calling the commenter out and the apologetic response from the original called-out commenter have since disappeared from the thread. The original plagiarized comment has, however, been allowed to stand by the moderators. Maybe the Times's avowed standards and practices as pertain to originality do not apply to the unpaid back-benchers. Or maybe the paper thinks that what it can hide from readers won't hurt them, and concurrently, that even plagiarized comments are fine as long as they are solidly both anti-Trump and anti-Trump supporter.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole-hill, or more accurately, out of the teeming ant-hill that is the typical major newspaper online comments section, but plagiarism has always been one of my biggest pet peeves. 

I'm not naming this commenter because I think he got the message, plus he did graciously own up to his faux pas. 

As far as the Times goes, meanwhile, do they ever own up to anything?

Sarah Sanders's Mendacity Is Now Weaponized

Those incipient flash mobs champing at the bit to heckle White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders some more and call out her serial mendacity should maybe consider investing in some bullet-proof vests. That's because she'll be getting her own Secret Service detail, beginning as early as today.

According to CNN, 

The Secret Service declined to comment, telling CNN: "For operational security purposes the Secret Service does not comment on its protective operations."

The news comes days after Sanders was asked to leave a small Lexington, Virginia, restaurant because of her role with the Trump administration, a move that has since sparked a national conversation on civility and public service in the age of Trump.

NBC News first reported that Sanders would begin receiving protection.

Sanders did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

It was Sarah Sanders herself who couldn't wait to comment to the whole world, via Twitter, that she had been denied service. She even broke the law by using her official public position to air a private grievance. But instigation is what she does. It runs in the family.

So from now on, whenever Sarah and her family travel to an entertainment venue, men with guns will case the joint and make sure that there are no protesters or other foreign people lingering on the premises before she proceeds to indulge her appetites.

There is still no word whether the men with guns will also accompany her to her White House press briefings, where she has been assailed more than usual lately because of her serial lies and defense of her boss's corruption and inhumane policies.

Not that the press corps are that particularly adept at afflicting her, of course. They've been too used to groveling before power for too many years. Sarah is as serene as stone as the reporters ratchet it up for the cameras.

For her own part, Sarah Sanders is every inch the Nurse Ratched character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  Her job is not to impart information and help, but to scold the inmates for selfishly wanting their five minutes of TV time and asking annoying questions which always veer off her chosen Trump-glorifying topic for that day's group session.

Granted, her stony stern visage does occasionally crack into something resembling a smile. But I can't figure out if it's a grimace or a rictus... or maybe it's nothing more than horrible postpriandial gas pains competing with the verbal effluent as, more often than not, she eats the press for dessert.

But usually it's more like this, the sociopathic version of an RBF:

Medication Time, Gentlemen

This daily afternoon soap opera starring the chief White House propagandist and a revolving cast of caged corporate media personalities and stenographers  (with the occasional rare walk-on by an actual journalist), thus becomes the Real Story. The inmates of the press room huddle together in the Occupational Therapy corner after each session to rehash the rudeness and the latest lies and personal insults that the starchy gatekeeper with the pearls has just imparted. Viewers and fans just can't help but feel the pain and the outrage.

 But now that there will be orderlies with guns at Sarah's side at all times, the standard shock treatments which this presidency administers on a near-constant basis should probably be the least of our worries.

Pitchforks In the Service of Plutocracy

 (updated below)

"My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," Barack Obama reassured a group of nervous tycoons in 2009, when the government bailouts of Wall Street were eliciting a tsunami of popular outrage.

Absent a new New Deal and absent any prosecution of said Wall Street bankers, that outrage soon evolved into the Tea Party movement on the right, the ephemeral Occupy movement on the left, and the virtual canonization, via slick corporate media propaganda, of Barack Obama himself as combination martyr, philosopher-king and rock star.

People were carefully taught to despise and fear one another, rather than aim their ire properly at the runaway capitalism that got us all into such a mess in the first place. Home foreclosures, many of them fraudulent, skyrocketed. We were told it wasn't the bankers' fault, but the fault of all those irresponsible people who took on debt they couldn't afford.

 If people didn't lose their jobs outright, often never to work again, their wages stagnated even as the richest Americans sucked back more than 94% of the wealth "lost" due to Wall Street shenanigans and unprosecuted crimes. People were told by one party that their lack of work was due to migrants stealing all the jobs, and by the other party that they had a "skills gap," and needed just a bit more education in order to become the entrepreneurs of their own lives.

People were urged to join the Republicans if they blamed the first African-American "food stamp president" for their troubles. People were urged to join the Democrats to show their love for our first African-American president and to hope for a better life tomorrow.

 Republican leaders, meanwhile, showed their own perverted love for corporations and billionaires. Democratic leaders, despite their own fealty to corporations and billionaires, also graciously expanded their love for the top 10 percent of wealth-holders. They preached to the bottom 90 percent that with enough hard work and grit and education, they too could reach the ranks of the top 10 percent. And if they could not, then their special "identities" would carry them through. If they weren't to be paid a living wage, then at least their identity labels would be recognized and respected. 

It was a dog-eat-dog world then, and it's a dog-eat-dog world now. Competition, not cooperation, is "who we are" in America. That's been true for the past 240 years.  

And ten years after the financial bailouts and the greatest concentration of wealth placed in the fewest hands since the last Gilded Age, people are trapped inside two political parties. There's a civil war brewing. The disposable troops are the hapless draftees of the Duopoly, fighting one another for neither monetary nor spiritual benefit. People are punching down and across, instead of up at the top, where the real culprits and the true enemies are.

"Let them eat resentment!" has long been the unspoken motto of phony Republican populists, riling up the masses in service of the elites.

"Let them eat Trump for breakfast!' has replaced the insipid "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and "when they go low, we go high" platitudes of the corporate Democrats as they rile up the mere aspirants to the upper middle class, and celebrities raise their own social media profiles by appearing at party-sanctioned protest photo-ops.

Going high by espousing policies for the greater good, such as single-payer health care and debt-free education, is simply not an option for professional liberals as they approach yet another lackluster midterm election season. #RussiaGate simply isn't selling any more. But Latino kids getting ripped away from their parents certainly is, all of a sudden, after Latino families getting ripped apart by harsh immigration enforcement for two terms of Obama went virtually ignored.

The enemy is Trump, and nothing but the Trump. And, of course, all his minions.

As I suspected, the corporate media's coverage of the Poor People's Campaign rally in Washington over the weekend turned out to be scanty to nil. Exceptions were the Washington Post and NBC.

When I clicked on the HuffPo this morning, I was momentarily heartened by an oversize photo of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) raising her fist in the air and firing up an angry progressive crowd.

Unfortunately, the venue was not the Poor People's rally for social and economic justice. It was right in the celebrity heart of LaLa Land. And the ominous headline was a very Trump-like incitement to violence. "Waters Storms: Trump Admin. Not Welcome Anywhere!"

She was referring to recent events at Washington-area restaurants, where Trump officials were either hounded off the premises by activists, or formally asked to leave, as happened to Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and members of her family over the weekend. 

(Waters) warned members of Donald Trump’s cabinet to be prepared for a slew of outraged heckling and public shaming on the streets and in restaurants and stores if they continue to support the president’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented immigrants.

“You think we’re rallying now? You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she vowed at an enthusiastic Los Angeles rally Saturday. “Already you have members of your cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants ... protesters taking up at their house saying ‘no peace, no sleep.’”

Waters is giving Trump exactly what he wants. She is feeding his administration's bunker mentality with manna from heaven. And if somebody in his cabinet gets hurt, all the better for him. The sense of mutual persecution which he engenders in his supporters will rise right along with his already-rising poll numbers.

At the risk of being accused of the dreaded "what about-ism," I wonder where Waters was when Obama's ICE and Homeland Security thugs were rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting record numbers of them. Luckily for her and most of her fellow Democrats, Obama wasn't tweeting out incendiary messages calling them "animals" and "invaders" who don't even deserve due process rights.  Obama made it easier for both liberals and conservatives by simply calling the parents of unaccompanied minor refugees "irresponsible," with his only lofty goal being to send them a stern paternal message from the soft bottom of his heart. He also had a good relationship with Mexico, and very quietly sent Joe Biden to broker a deal for the detention and expulsion - and often imprisonment and torture - in that country, long before Central Americans ever got the chance to reach the United States border. He also bribed offered financial aid to the often corrupt governments of the refugees' countries of origin in exchange for their discouraging potential border-crossers by any means necessary.

In other words, Obama partially outsourced this country's longstanding policy of cruelty to refugees the same way he outsourced to foreign black site prisons the CIA torture he pretended to ban soon after he took his oath of office. 

Much is being made of Trump's weekend tweet calling for an end to due process rights for migrants. But little was made of the Congressional Research Team's 2014 report that the US appropriated more than $100 million to the Mexican government for the purchase of such inhumane anti-immigration enforcement tools as canine teams and electric prods. 

The New York Times, which actually once did quite an admirable job criticizing Obama's harsh immigration policies - including the odious "Secure Communities" dragnet he set up during his first term - has seemingly completely forgotten all about that legacy as it goes about the business of manufacturing anti-Trump outrage in its liberal readership. According to an editorial published on Saturday, the caging of migrants was a magical leap straight from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump, with nary a Barack Obama in sight, other than his laudable executive order protecting the "Dreamers."

Still, as the editorial correctly notes, Obama actually got a huge break from Republicans when they falsely accused him of being soft on illegal immigration.

Party leaders fanned those flames, accusing Mr. Obama of being imperious and “lawless.” In one bit of twisted logic, Mr. Boehner argued that the House couldn’t possibly take up reform legislation because it couldn’t trust Mr. Obama to carry out said legislation. Thus, the battle lines continued to harden.

Nothing allows unfettered capitalism to continue ruling and ruining the world like accusing a true champion of the free market like Barack Obama of being a Marxist peacenik. It sent, and continues to send, millions of good-thinking liberals straight to his defense. The nostalgia craze for Obama and his no-drama, intellectual, "scandal-free" regime has become something of a cult in its own right. 
 
My (not highly recommended) published response to the Times editorial:

 I was just re-reading some of the NYT's brave editorials (here, here, here) lambasting President Obama's cruel immigration policies, including the Secure Communities initiative which ended up deporting more immigrants than in all previous administrations combined. The reader comments were quite revealing, with the most popular coming from the pro-deportation crowd.

But there was a resistance movement back then, too, especially during his first term. Democratic mayors refused to comply with a directive ostensibly designed to cull "dangerous criminals" and kick them out of the country. The vast majority of deportees caught in the ICE dragnet turned out be upstanding people who'd lived in the US for many years. This was a cruel policy that also ripped families apart.

So I guess it's testament to the divisive politics in the Age of Trump that the editorial board would now opt to completely gloss over this stain on the Obama legacy. To his credit, he did eventually soften his stance and give respite to the "Dreamers" - but only after political pressure from activists and civil rights groups forced him to do the right thing, both morally and in the interests of his party.

So there's that one silver lining to Trump's cruelty. It's making people mad as hell. Polls now show that 75% of the population is against his own "zero tolerance" policy. 

 Do we care? Of course we do. And let's hope that we keep caring, and fighting injustice regardless whether the Dems win back power this year and in 2020.

Update, 6/26: Meanwhile, the corporate Democrats have designated Maxine Waters the "bad cop" for her calls for direct civic action against the Trumpies. The view of party elders, like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, is that the goading of public officials in public places of food and entertainment will have an adverse effect for liberals at the polls. The elders have therefore "distanced" themselves from Waters's rhetoric. Pitchforks, even if wielded in the ultimate service of plutocracy, have a way of getting out of control and extending themselves to... oh, I don't know... complicit Democrats who have no qualms about gifting the dreaded Trump with billions of dollars in war paraphernalia and personnel?

Maxine Waters did not directly call for violence, of course. But the HuffPo and other organs of professional "resistance" made that goal implicit in their banner headlines, in my humble opinion.

So the question we have to ask is this: what if the public shaming of the Trumpies is so successful that they actually quit their jobs and leave Washington forever? It's who we replace them with that should concern us.

Not one of the Democratic elders who are complaining about Maxine Waters's call to action have given even the slightest lip service to the civil disobedience and nationwide arrests of members of the Poor People's Campaign. Not even Maxine Waters is giving lip service to the Poor People's Campaign. 

Poverty is simply not a part of the official narrative.

Putting a Progressive Gloss on Neoliberalism

Former Clinton campaign aide and Obama/Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan has a piece up in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas explaining how the centrist Democrats have finally seen the light that their centrist message is not a big hit with voters.  

But try as he might, he just can't hide the bait-and-switch behind a hodgepodge of progressive rhetoric. The fraud of replacing the conservative "New Democrats" with the brand new "New Old Democrats." is exposed right at the start of his piece -- which, as the editors helpfully inform the time-pressed among us, is a "41-minute read."

So after approximately a one-minute read comes this disclaimer about why the New Dems have been acting more like Old Republicans for about the last trillion minutes:

 It turned out to be a 30-year tide, one that shifted the center of political gravity dramatically. From Ronald Reagan’s “[t]he most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” to Bill Clinton’s “[the] era of big government is over,” all the way through the 2012 election, a new consensus shaped by Reagan prevailed. Democratic presidents, Clinton and Barack Obama, surely advocated for and pursued progressive policies, but within limits defined for them, forced to trim their ambition compared with the Great Society and New Deal eras. Republican presidents, meanwhile, aggressively dismantled the progressive scaffolding of those earlier periods. Along the way, economic inequality skyrocketed—and America’s middle class kept losing ground.

If Sullivan right off the bat refuses to take ownership of the Democratic Party's policies and decisions, you can pretty much rest assured that the next 40 minutes will be a slog of blame-gaming, revisionist history and gaslighting. He deprives both Clinton and Obama of any personal agency at all. They were "forced" by those nasty old right-wingers like Pat Buchanan to "trim their ambitions" according to the limits defined for them and not by them. 

At least Sullivan doesn't tack on the standard apologists' trope that "the progressives/left let them down." 

But thankfully, that fickle liberal public is now finally waking up and believing that government can and should make people's lives better.  It's just too bad that the simultaneous epiphany of Jake and his fellow New Old Dems is being so drowned out by the fickle media's addiction to Donald Trump's tweets.

And, Sullivan continues, the media shouldn't really be fretting that the Party is moving too far left, particularly in the direction of de facto Old Dem Bernie Sanders - who, by the way, is as dotty and detail-free as he ever was. That's because you can be a corporate centrist and a progressive at the very same time! Or more accurately, you should be able to sell voters on the notion that you can serve corporations and struggling people at the very same time.

But back to Jake Sullivan's personal epiphany about the pressing need to change, not the actual plutocrat-serving policies of the New Old New Dems, but the message they are selling to voters:

I am obviously not the first person to see these trends or make these points. Others have been advancing this case for a while now. In fact, I have to confess that I did not fully appreciate the need for a more dramatic rethink at the start of the 2016 campaign. I was Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser, responsible for developing and rolling out proposals on everything from tax policy to bank regulation. But before that, I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in the centrist politics of the era. And I had spent the years leading up to the campaign working on foreign policy, traveling the world and learning what was happening “over there” instead of coming to terms with what was going on back here.

That was the apology to Hillary Clinton that all her minions have been issuing in print lately. Jake was in such a Reagan bubble and flitting around the world so much that he was incapable of bursting the Reagan bubble that Hillary herself was helplessly trapped in. Jake let Hillary down, big-time, and now he's reinventing himself as the Great Progressive New Old Dem Hope. He repeats himself, just in case Hillary did not get the message the first time:

 This is not to rebuke the New Democrats of the 1990s. For one thing, the Clinton years, while imperfect, produced greater growth and fairness—with rising wages across the board and particularly strong gains for disadvantaged groups–than anything we’ve seen since. For another, the political constraints of the time were real. Bill Clinton came into office with a big, bold agenda, but the defeat of his health-care plan (remember Hillarycare?) and the walloping he took at the ballot box in the 1994 midterm elections forced him to dial back his ambition and seek more incremental progress where he could find openings.

Sullivan omits the fact that the booming economy of the Clinton years was largely the result of a bubble engendered by an orgy of deregulation: the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking regulations and the passage of telecommunications legislation which enabled the consolidation of the mass media into five or six giant corporate entities. He fails to mention the record poverty soon to become apparent thanks to the 1996 repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children. And he fails to mention that one reason "Hillarycare" failed was not so much the result of those "Harry and Louise" TV ads, but because Hillary refused any outside input from advocates of single payer health care. Its failure was more the result of bickering between the giant insurance companies and smaller insurance companies and her stubborn penchant for secrecy.

But never mind all that stuff he never even mentioned, Sullivan soothes. Because "we're in a different moment now" and have always to look forward, not backward. Sure, Hillary was wrong to denigrate Bernie Sanders as too pie-in-the-sky. But she was wrong only in her choice of denigrating words, not in the substance of her critique:

 He was offering prescriptions for the world as it once was, not the world as it is and will be. His worldview was rooted in the 1970s; he had little to say on the changing nature of work, the changing character of American families, or the enduring realities of globalization. (For example, his agenda lacked clear plans for dealing with workers in irregular employment relationships, or those dislocated by technological change.)

I must have read that paragraph ten times (adding many wasted minutes to my 41-minute allotment)  and I still couldn't understand what it meant. It finally dawned on me. It doesn't mean anything at all. It simply conveys the same old denigrating message that Bernie is a doddering old dinosaur who wouldn't know a real family if one smacked him in the face. He is so, like,'pre-Reagan 70s and doesn't understand that globalization is a natural phenomenon and, just like the weather, beyond the control of the neoliberal politicians like the Clintons who gladly helped finish what Reagan started.

But my time's a wastin' and so is yours, so I'll skip the fluffy filler and go straight to Sullivan's Platform for the New Old Democrats:

Recognize that the "future of work" is actually "the present of work." (Since it's already a gig economy right this very minute, we have to discuss things like buying into Medicare -- rather than, say, demand single payer coverage for everybody regardless of their employment status. Apparently forgetting that he'd just criticized Bernie for his lack of details, Sullivan writes about worker rights: "If we start from this basic premise ('the future is here') we can figure out the details so we can both promote innovation (my bold) and protect workers."

(This is the same old neoliberal centrism. "Innovation" is code for the profits of big business, which must be protected with the same old enthusiasm causing the increasing stagnation of wages over the past 40 years. Sullivan just cannot quit being a New Dem.)

 The roles and responsibilities of families have changed... People aren’t looking for handouts. These are working adults looking for a fair deal for their participation in the workforce. Hillary raised these challenges incessantly in her speeches, but they didn’t count as part of an “economic message,” because they were seen as soft “family” issues. They’re not. They are core economic issues. 

(Therefore, what families need are not single payer health care or subsidized  child care, but rather just a little "help" paying for these exorbitant costs out of their own pockets. This is Classic Neoliberalism 101. There will be no end to the privatization of everything and everything for a profit.)

 Recognize the service sector.

This is another way of suggesting that the Old New Dems should give up on the stereotypical male Trump voter, forget the factory workers and the steel workers, and concentrate on working class women, like home health aides. He writes, "So Democrats need to develop a story and a strategy for ensuring that workers in the caring economy, the services economy, and the value-added manufacturing economy receive not just a decent income and stronger benefits, but also dignity and respect along the way. I confess I don’t have the answers for how exactly to make this happen, but I do know that we should elevate these questions in the national policy dialogue."

(He just gave away the con, again. Before these workers get their fair wages and health care, the New Old Dems have to spin them a yarn because of course he doesn't have any actual answers for them. I suspect he doesn't imagine any of these overworked servants/ listeners are reading his piece in "Democracy" - a concept which does not seem to apply to actual people any more. But hey, as long as actual people get some "recognition" then what more do they want from the Newbie Oldies?)

  Education, education, education!

The emphasis should therefore shift away from degrees and diplomas and toward skills and credentials. Instead of prioritizing “free college,” we should prioritize debt-free lifelong learning: Every American willing to meet basic requirements should be able to find a training opportunity, at any stage of their lives, that provides them with job-relevant skills at a cost they can (truly) afford, and a job on the other end. This approach will both assure the ongoing vitality of middle class families and their children, and also provide new pathways for children of poverty to enter the middle class.

How many neoliberalisms can you count in just that one paragraph? You have exactly two minutes, and the clock is running right now! So I'll just give you a time-saving synopsis of what Sullivan is actually saying:

People are mainly stupid compared to us Old New Old Dems, so keep learning your whole life until you drop dead. Don't expect any help in meeting those basic requirements and always strive for a job that you can afford and never expect your boss to be able to afford you. Because that's not how it works in the Now-Future. Of course, the life-goal of every poor person is not to eat or find shelter, but to "seek a path to the middle class." Thankfully, though, Sullivan has replaced those rickety "ladders of opportunity" offered by the New Dems to the "launchpads of opportunity" now being sold for a very limited time by the New Oldies But Moldies.

Phew! I'm sorry to say that having gone way beyond my allotted 41 minutes, I  was unable to launch myself to the blissful end of this piece and sadly did not achieve full neoliberal Nirvana. But if you follow the helpful link in the first sentence of this much briefer synopsis, then you too can have the opportunity to get access to every golden word, regardless of your level of wonkiness or lack thereof.

Good luck, and have a great sardonic weekend.

NY Times Claims Cash For Poor People Is "Unpopular"

The Gray Lady might be ostentatiously clutching her pearls over Donald Trump's anti-social treatment of migrants and refugee children, but that doesn't mean its sympathy for the downtrodden is universal.

On the contrary. In a well-buried (Page A17) article outlining Trump's latest plans to demonize and punish the poor by labeling nearly all social safety net and entitlement programs with the dog-whistle "welfare," the Times explains:

The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare. (my bold.)

Unpopular with whom? The Times doesn't say. But the implication is that everybody - the dwindling number of people receiving the paltry stipends and people who heartily resent those receiving paltry stipends - are just as disgusted as the conservative politicians and the real welfare kings and queens of America: the billionaires and the corporations.

 Nor does the newspaper explain that, thanks to Bill Clinton's cruel "reform" of welfare in 1996 and the discontinuation of long-term direct cash aid to the poor, giving money directly to families is nothing but a misty memory of the New Deal anyway.

FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children was replaced with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants. Since this program limits cash aid to two years and imposes job requirements upon poor mothers with few or no child care subsidies, perhaps the Times meant to say that it's the mechanics of this meager substitute, which has actually plunged millions of people into extreme poverty since its inception, that is so unpopular with beneficiaries. The hoops that must be jumped through and the paperwork that is commonly lost before those temporary checks ever come trickling in is a feature, not a bug, of TANF. The mental aggravation and shame it engenders might actually be called an "unpopular" impediment to those thinking of applying for help.

As reported by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in fact, less than one-fourth of all qualifying poor people eligible for TANF ever get benefits. This is down from the 68% of eligible people who signed up for aid in 1997.

Decreased access to TANF benefits has left the poorest families without resources needed to meet their basic needs.  TANF’s predecessor, AFDC, played a significant role in reaching families, particularly those with children and those in deep poverty.  TANF has failed to maintain that standard.  TANF benefits are not sufficient to lift families out of poverty in any state,^[9] and TANF does far less than AFDC did to lift families out of deep poverty.  While AFDC lifted more than 2.5 million children out of deep poverty in 1995, TANF lifted only 420,000 children out of deep poverty in 2014. (See Figure 4.)  In 1995, only three states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving AFDC.  By 2016, the vast majority of states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving TANF.  
Under TANF, the poorest families have become worse off.  In the decade after TANF’s creation, average incomes fell by 18 percent among the poorest children in single-mother families, reflecting a large drop in the receipt of cash assistance.  These families recouped some of these losses after 2005 due to expansions of SNAP, while their average income from TANF benefits continued to decline during the Great Recession.  Still, between 2005 and 2012, these single-mother families lost further ground.

Figure 4

Meanwhile, the Times article continues, the consolidation of the remaining New Deal and Great Society programs into one super-agency under the authoritarian directorship of one bureaucrat will make them that much easier to cut, if not abolish outright.

“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”

I think, especially in light of the recent border atrocities, we all should realize by now the value that our political system places on families and children. While the Republicans are viciously punishing people, the Democrats feebly promise to "invest" in them as long as they stay in school, work hard, and play by all the cutthroat rules of the relay race we call Life.

In other words, neoliberal capitalism kills, and it kills absolutely. 

Rebranding programs which help children, the unemployed, the disabled and the elderly along with millions of working poor people struggling to get by on stagnant wages as "welfare" would presumably be greeted with wide public support, by both liberals and conservatives, educated and uneducated alike. This is because most polling is slanted toward the interests of the rich.

For example, one recent Los Angeles Times survey about public attitudes toward government aid to the poor was conducted with funding from the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute. Is it any surprise that respondents answered the questions in the manner most pleasing to the oligarchs paying for the "research?" For example, most of the thousand or so people contacted agreed that government "welfare" has failed to bring people out of poverty.

Ominously, therefore, slapping the welfare label on workers who qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, despite earning above the official ridiculous $24,000 cutoff of the poverty line for a family of four, might make it easier to demonize whole new swaths and new generations of struggling Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

Extra cash money for the poor and near-poor? According to the Times, this is such an unpopular concept that it doesn't even bear discussion, let alone pride of place on the front page alongside Trump's much more important, outrage-engendering tweets and his exciting fascist rallies.

 Nor has there been any prominent coverage of this weekend's Poor People's Campaign march on Washington for social and economic justice and an end to endless wars and militarism. Maybe that is because the corporate sponsors of our corporate media don't consider tens or hundreds of thousands of poor people taking matters into their own hands and taking to the streets to be all that "popular," either. The last thing they want is for too many voters to start adding the word "poor" to the prescribed list of political identities.

They'd prefer you just identified as a person who aspires to join the ephemeral middle class and whose only civic duty is to vote every two or four years.