Getting the Wanky Wonky Willies

 The world might be going to hell in a hand basket, but the battle royale  between the wealthy vulgarian and the wealthy elitist continues.

"I don't think anybody should listen to me, because I haven't really focused on it very much," bragged Donald Trump, preparing to cross the pond to play at his swanky Scottish country club. As he held court on the green, several swastika-emblazoned golf balls whizzed past his Secret Service detail, landing with laser-focused precision at his feet.

"Get em outta here," he growled, apparently mistaking the balls for the ballsy protester who threw them.

True, Trump had been unnecessarily restricting his vast and chronic ignorance to the ramifications of the Brexit vote. But how refreshing and rare for any presidential aspirant to admit to being as disengaged as the poor wanker next door.

Can you imagine Hillary Clinton ever advising voters not to listen to her? This woman is such a self-professed, hyper-focused wonk that her campaign has even started a fan club called Wonks for Hillary.

Whether you live in an ivory tower or only aspire to claw your way up to one, Hillary is here to help. Or at least a flack named Jacob Liebenluft, late of the Obama administration, is here to set you on a much easier glide path to Wonk Nirvana.

His email tells the whole snobby story: 

Friend --

 In an election that has often seemed like it’s about anything but policy -- Donald Trump seems to prefer name-calling and empty slogans -- I’m proud that Hillary is a bona fide policy buff. Yesterday, she even proudly declared the policies on our campaign's website to be “a little wonky,” and then she told us why that’s important to her:

“I actually sweat the specifics because they matter,” she said. “Whether one more kid gets health care may just be a detail in Washington -- but it’s all that matters to that family worrying about their child.”

Hillary thinks carefully about how best to solve the problems facing American families, and she’s not afraid to get in the weeds to figure out which policies will really make a difference. If you’re a policy nerd like Hillary, we’d love to invite you to a special new group: Wonks for Hillary. Add your name now to be one of the first to join, and we’ll keep you updated on key policy rollouts throughout the campaign -- and even invite you to join exclusive calls with policy advisors like me.

From health care expansion to investing in our infrastructure to gun violence prevention, Hillary has specific plans that dive deep into the root causes of these issues, and propose smart, targeted fixes that will implement changes people can really see and feel in their communities.

We’re running against a dangerous opponent whose policy ideas include legalizing torture and banning immigrants based on their religion. Hillary is going to keep fighting him the best way she knows how: by rolling out plans that will actually help Americans. When you join Wonks for Hillary, you’ll be able to talk articulately about those plans to anyone who’s interested -- and learn in-depth exactly how Hillary will help Americans as our next president.

Add your name to join Wonks for Hillary today:

(whereupon they get right down in the noxious weeds and direct you to a very wankish Gimme page.)

Actually, it's as scary for Hillary to call herself a policy buff as it is for Donald to brag about his willful wanky ignorance. The dictionary definition of "buff" is a person who is very interested in something, not a person who is particularly accomplished at something. For example, you can be a jazz buff without knowing how to read music or play an instrument. In other words, Hillary is an obsessed fan. She's such a foreign policy buff that she convinced Obama to bomb Libya without first figuring out what would happen in the aftermath: like epic instability and the drowning deaths of thousands of refugees.

And the political definition of "wonk" is anything but flattering. According to Merriam-Webster, a wonk is "a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures." In plain, vulgarian English (Wanklish) we can thus surmise that Hillary Clinton can't see the forest for the trees. She's an annoying nitpicker, and proud of it. If you're with her, you might as well consider Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder a positive personality trait.

And she has obviously learned nothing from Brexit or examined the root causes of the rise of neofascism, both here and abroad:

 From health care expansion to investing in our infrastructure to gun violence prevention, Hillary has specific plans that dive deep into the root causes of these issues, and propose smart, targeted fixes that will implement changes people can really see and feel in their communities.

She won't actually dig out the twisted roots of neoliberalism, cause of the worst wealth and social inequality in modern history. Instead, she'll get out her dainty little can of Roundup and spritz a bug over here, a withered leaf over there. Instead of espousing true single-payer health care, she'll urge sick people to shop around on the marketplace and maybe, eventually, decades from now, allow 50-somethings to "buy into" Medicare. She'll forge ahead with such "smart, targeted fixes" as implementing Republican-inspired and Clinton/Obama administration-approved "Promise Zones" in  a pitifully few select blighted communities out of a whole country full of misery and despair. And she'll call it a buff, rousing success. 

Promise zones don't actually provide direct government cash aid or jobs to the targeted communities. That's up to the unaccountable private businesses getting the government aid, the generous tax breaks and other incentives to "invest" in poor people.

Mark Partridge, a professor of urban-rural poverty at Ohio State University, told The Christian Science Monitor that such programs are by their very nature difficult to assess and measure, given the variables involved. Even a policy buff finds it hard to compare Chicago to Appalachia. So maybe the feel-goody vagueness is the whole point.

A caveat for any good news is: How much of it was because of the program,” says Dr. Partridge. “Did the program work or was this place just poised for takeoff?”
Analysts have also express concern that it can be hard to tell whether a program’s benefits reach the poorest people, rather than flowing largely into the hands of the business owners who get the tax credits, says Partridge. Another concern is that one neighborhood’s program might in fact penalize surrounding communities, drawing jobs, investment, and people away from nearby places not incorporated into the initiative and effectively “shifting the problem around the map,” he says.

Being a Wonk for Hillary also means subjecting yourself to a rigorous re-education regimen. The first step is getting in touch with your feelings.

“I respect the fear, the anxiety, even the anger that a lot of people are feeling,” Clinton told The Washington Post in her first extended interview on economic issues since clinching the nomination, “because the advance of globalization and technology has really replaced or undermined the future for many jobs.”

What people are feeling,” she added, “is that the economy failed them, their government failed them. They just are looking for somebody who will explain, in a way they will accept, what’s happened. So Trump comes along and he blames immigrants and he blames minorities and he blames women, and people are responsive to that because these are hard times that folks are going through.”

The Wonksplainer forgot, however, to mention that it was she and Bill who implemented many of the policies (NAFTA, welfare reform, financial deregulation) that are driving people to Trump. She ascribes the problem to generic "globalization," a process akin to the weather. Technology also arrived on the oligarchic scene fully formed in the transnational governing scheme known as the Technocracy. 

The Clintonian appeal to wonkitude is so elitist and so headache-inducing that you can't really blame the desperate Trumpophiliac next door for embracing his simple sloganeering promise to Make America Great Again. No math skills, no white papers, no charts, no statistics are ever required. All you need is a chainsaw and a dream to tear up the whole Zone.

And unfortunately for Hillary, she's unwittingly opened herself right up for even more wanky Trumpian ridicule. Here's the dictionary definition of "wonky" --

won·ky

ˈwäNGkē/

adjective

informal

adjective: wonky; comparative adjective: wonkier; superlative adjective: wonkiest

1. crooked; off-center; askew.

   
   

   "you have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth"

   • (of a thing) unsteady; shaky.

     
     

     "they sat drinking, perched on the wonky stools"
   • not functioning correctly; faulty.

     
     

     "your sense of judgment is a bit wonky at the moment"

"Berxit" Begins

No, that isn't a typo. I'll be writing more about Brexit (a/k/a "The Failed Neoliberal Project Comes Home to Roost") in a later post.

This is about a different exodus.  Bernie Sanders made "Berxit" all but official this morning, telling MSNBC that he'll definitely be voting for Hillary Clinton this November.

But be heartened, Bernie-or-Busters. Just as it will take Prime Minister David Cameron a little while longer to finally skulk off in abject defeat, so too will Berxit be a gradual process. Just as Cameron doesn't want to upset the Market God by bolting from Number 10 too precipitously, before his successor is officially named, so too does Bernie not want to completely alienate his own supporters before his big prime-time consolation speech at the Philadelphia convention late next month.

These things must always be eased into delicately. Sanders has been giving none-too-subtle hints of his coming endorsement of Clinton, announcing just the other week that Priority Number One in his "revolution" will be "joining with" Clinton to defeat Donald Trump. How much more nuance can we stand?

That "joining" has now gingerly advanced into voting. The voting will soon evolve into endorsement and an official nomination ceremony. The nomination will morph into a honeymoon of Internet fund-raising, and TV ads, and campaigning for - or perhaps even with - Hillary on the stump. It's not so much a revolution, it's a transition toward lowered expectations.

I don't know about you, but I much prefer my band-aids to be ripped off in one quick tear. All of this incremental teasing the adhesive off of the scab that Sanders is playing at just prolongs and intensifies the agony.

You see, just because he is voting for Hillary. Bernie still doesn't want you to think that he's abandoned you, let alone dropped out of the presidential race. He delivered yet another barn-burner of a speech to supporters on Thursday, ticking off each and every progressive policy demand for inclusion in the Democratic platform. He titled it "Where Do We Go From Here?" in apparent homage to the last book written by Martin Luther King Jr before he was assassinated. King, too, tempered his own radicalism by urging pragmatism to the "militant" Black Power movement leaders. Change doesn't happen overnight, he said, nor does it happen with any one politician's election. And violence never gets you anywhere. Of course, King was writing in the days of the Great Society and the civil rights legislation born of his own brilliant activism. Neoliberalism -- control of societies and economies by unelected oligarchies and banks -- was still a distant nightmare back in the 60s.

Bernie Sanders just seems to be having a clumsy time evolving from his role as a presidential candidate who raised millions of dollars and won millions of votes into the perceived role of non-affiliated radical movement leader, following in the footsteps of Dr. King.

Although King, too, had urged his often-disappointed followers to run for public office, he had never sought or held office himself. He was never co-opted by the Democratic Party. And not only didn't he ever vow personal political fealty to Lyndon Johnson, he spoke out vociferously against Johnson's militarism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War.

Bernie is not speaking out against war. Although a vague critic of "regime change" and CIA dirty tricks, he actively supports President Obama's drone assassination program and has voted for billions of dollars in military appropriations in his capacity as senator. Posing as an outsider his entire political life, he is nonetheless a consummate insider -- despite what his colleagues and the mainstream media like to pretend. He's voted with Democrats more than 90 percent of the time.

  Yet the pundits are still complaining about Bernie's continued "failure to concede". 

What does Bernie even want? is their tired, constant and agonized refrain. For every day that he stays in the race, he's only hurting Hillary and boosting Trump, for crying out loud!

Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times delivered the latest appeal (published only hours before Bernie went on Morning Joe to all but smother Hillary with kisses), urging him to stop it already with the wishy-washiness. A girl can't wait forever for the engagement ring, especially if she is "less adept at campaigning." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Hillary from Rosenthal, but still:

Bernie Sanders is making his exit from the Democratic primary campaign in such slow motion that it’s starting to feel like he might still be in the race at Christmas.

Rosenthal then pivots to the standard media Bernie-diss of comparing him unfavorably to civil rights icon John Lewis, a "real" revolutionary who continued the struggle this week by staging a sit-down strike against gun violence (and paradoxically supporting the continuation of the anti-democratic No Fly List while he was at it.) Lewis still has the scars on his head to prove his bona fides. All Bernie has is a head of wispy white (white! white!) hair. This is identity politics run amok, served up by the Times to obfuscate the class war of the feral rich against the rest of us.

"The chilling scene in the House was just a taste of what Sanders followers will risk if they do not throw their undeniable enthusiasm behind Clinton and other Democratic candidates, and the G.O.P. holds Congress and wins the White House in November," Rosenthal scolded.

Bernie just can't win, no matter how valiantly he tries to passive-aggressively throw both himself and his supporters under the neoliberal bus. The pundits will probably still be asking him what the hell he wants 20 years from now. If there is, in fact, such a thing as 20 years from now in a United States of America.

Even in the wake of the mass outrage and disgust and despair evidenced by the Brexit vote and the rise of Trumpism on this side of the pond, they just don't seem to get it. They're still unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in the creation of the worst social and economic inequality in modern history. 

Brexit, Berxit: The leaders of the free world are still stuck in the desolate room which Jean Paul Sartre described so brutally in No Exit. Nobody's willing to acknowledge the reasons for their own damnation, other than to say "mistakes were made." Even when salvation in the form an open door is offered to them, they refuse to leave, preferring instead the safe misery of each other's own dead company. "Hell,"wrote Sartre, "is other people."  

  Our planet is alternately frying and drowning from a lethal overdose of capitalism, yet the smartest people in the room still waste precious time kvetching about a rapidly cooling Bern.

Their own insecurity is showing. Panglossian denial of the awful reality no longer suffices.

$it-Down $tunt

It's an election year, and the Democrats need a new fundraising peg. So what better way to represent their constituents than to abandon their soft leather chairs for a soft thick carpet in a camera-ready show of solidarity against all the poor slobs being swept up willy-nilly in the Homeland Security surveillance dragnet? We have to keep guns out of the hands of those "potential" terrorists, dontcha know. They're guilty until proven innocent.

To hear the mainstream media tell it, this pseudo-strike by a bunch of liberal millionaires in the House of Representatives is a courageous act of civil disobedience against the malign forces of the Sovereign State of Republicantia. Those GOPers are such demented sadists they won't even pass a bill keeping guns out of the hands of whatever "Others" the Deep State decides to put on its secret and deeply undemocratic No Fly List.

Therefore, led by Civil Rights icon John Lewis, the House Democrats one by one lowered their pampered butts to the House Floor, their suddenly reanimated spines creaking in protest. They had their selfie-taking cell phones courageously charged and ready to document every fraught moment. And when Top Speaker Cop Paul Ryan summarily banned C-span cameras from the premises, the congress critters defiantly clicked on their Face Time apps so as to be able to communicate their marathon struggle on live TV.

It would have been considered politically incorrect to say that this act of limousine liberal disobedience was "a shot heard round the world," but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her best Ralph Waldo Emerson imitation nonetheless, gushing: "It was a discussion heard round the world!"

The New York Times, totally embedded, breathlessly reported on the revolutionary "insurrection":

As Paul Ryan left the speaker’s chair, Democrats shouted: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

There were scenes of chaos across the floor as Republicans tried to resume regular business. At one point, Democrats began singing “We Shall Overcome” — altering the lyrics to say “We shall pass a bill some day” — as Republicans shouted in outrage.

The only thing marring the civil disobedience verisimilitude has been the strange lack of riot cops, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons. The irony is that the same Democratic Party which orchestrated the 2011 crackdowns of the Occupy Wall Street camps don't perceive the irony of it all. They are not threatened by the Capitol Police: they're protected by them.

The irony is that their party convention next month has been labeled a National Security special event. Any protesters attempting to breach the fence protecting the official bigwig activists will be subject to bodily harm and arrest. The congress-critters conveniently passed a special law a couple of years ago (HR 347) protecting their pampered butts from just such a populist eventuality. Whenever the pols lurch forth from beneath their Dome, going out in public to raise money and make promises from afar to the proles, the Secret Service is legally allowed, by whatever means necessary, to keep any malcontents from getting too extremely loud or incredibly close.

Of course, there never were any Congressional sit-down strikes by Democrats protesting such sadistic austerian measures as food stamp cuts and the end of long-term unemployment insurance in the wake of the financial collapse.  There were no outbursts of We Shall Overcome when it came time to appropriate a trillion-plus dollars for endless wars and their associated drones, bombs, guns and bullets.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept this week, the mass shooting in Orlando has been the perfect excuse for hawkish Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein to double down on the brutal, violent and lucrative War on Terror while cynically hiding the real agenda under the wedge issue of domestic "gun control."

Here's what the millionaire civil rights sit-down strike is really all about:

Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.

Worse than the measure itself is the rancid rhetoric they are using. To justify this new list, Democrats, in unison, are actually arguing that the U.S. government must constrain people whom they are now calling “potential terrorists.” Just spend a moment pondering how creepy and Orwellian that phrase is in the context of government designations.

 What is a “potential terrorist”? Isn’t everyone that? And who wants the U.S. government empowered to unilaterally restrict what citizens can do based on predictions or guesses about what they might become or do in the future? Does anyone have any doubt that this will fall disproportionately on certain groups and types of people?

It's political theater designed to embarrass and provoke the Greater Evilists, who are so evil and beholden to the NRA that they're even willing to put guns in the hands of terrorists on watch-lists! It's even worse than the Democrats and Republicans joining together to sell billions of dollars' worth of arms to despots in places where they still chop people's heads off to teach them a lesson. The Dems' championship of the "No Fly, No Buy" legislation might prevent a death or two, but it's essentially a tainted band-aid with the adhesive removed.  It's also a blatant display of racial and ethnic profiling, since it would mainly target Muslims and any other "Others" who are spotted wearing turbans, having darker skins and speaking with accents.  

We shouldn't be applauding these Democratic poseurs, who've wasted no time blasting out their buck-raking emails fast and furious, urging us to show "solidarity" with them by donating our dwindling dollars to their campaigns:

They snuck in phones, took to Facebook and Twitter -- they have shown determination and grit in the face of nonsensical obstruction.

I've met too many families who've suffered after losing someone to gun violence. I've seen their pain and their frustration. I've held them while they cried, and mourned with them in their loss.

So today, as this remarkable piece of activism continues to unfold, I am so proud of my fellow Democrats. I want them to know I'm by their side. If you are, too, add your name today:

Thank you,

Hillary

Select an Amount

$3$5$10$25$50$100$250

 We should be calling them out for the hypocrites they truly are.

Smart Money, Stupid Money, and Flatulence

Let's cut to the cheese, I mean the chase. This presidential contest, at which we the plebeians are reduced to mere spectators, has officially devolved into a battle between elitism and vulgarity.

The headlines in the mainstream media blast out the story that the Clintonites desperately want you to hear. This is a battle between piles of cash. There's good, plentiful cash and then there's bad skimpy cash. None of it will ever actually be yours, or even used to improve your lives, but they do want you to root for it anyway.

And at this point, the smart liberal money (elite Clinton) is beating the stupid reactionary money (vulgar Trump.)

Trump is getting crushed, not by the allegedly superior and more humanitarian policies of Hillary Clinton, but by her big fat mean Money Machine. It really is a Dollarocracy, people!

Trump Starts Summer Push With Crippling Money Deficit  jeers the headline in today's New York Times:  

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.He has a staff of around 70 people — compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton — suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall. And he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday, after concerns among allies and donors about his abili a competitive race.

Nothing insults and weakens a narcissistic tycoon more than accusing him of being flat broke. Not accusations of bigotry, or misogyny, or xenophobia, or con artistry, or sprayed-on tan, or fake hair. In Trump World, honest and direct personal groveling before members of one's own class is tantamount to panhandling and an admission of failure. It's a slap in the face to the Art of the Deal. It's a blow to Trump's super-ego, or more accurately, to his super-id. His self-worth is based entirely upon his net worth. And his net worth is looking more and more like a Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme by the minute.

Fund-raising efforts for Mr. Trump have been hampered by the candidate’s own erratic public comments. He has repeatedly said he will pay for his own campaign even as his volunteers fan out around the country to solicit six-figure checks, confusing allies and potential donors alike.

“Two days ago, he said, ‘I may fund it myself,’” Mr. (GOP Operative Ed) Rollins said. “Donors are all being cautious about what’s going to happen here.”

And if Hillary Clinton is labeled a rich elitist candidate in the process, solely defined by her bank account, that suits her just fine. It deflects attention away from the essential vulgarity of her own rise to power, her subsequent self-enrichment from her family foundation, political influence-peddling, paid speeches, and various venal SuperPacs.

She has no Trumpian qualms. After all, she heartily admitted that she and Bill were "dead broke" when they left the White House, just barely scraping by with a new estate in Westchester County and multimillions in book advances, not to mention a Senate seat representing Wall Street for Hill and the lucrative speaking circuit for Bill.

Her virtue, they want all of you poor slobs out there to know, lies in her superior ability to handle her money and get an endless supply it by expertly stroking and grooming an endless supply of eager donors. Trump's vice is not only his mishandling of his own possibly fraudulent fortune, it's also his inability to hire the right people to handle, and get, the billions in campaign cash that he so desperately needs to win. Schmoozing well with others doesn't come naturally to a media bully whose main claim to fame is firing people when he's not kicking them out of his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies.

Hillary knows how to take advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. As leaked DNC documents show, her bundlers are even furnished with a delicate script to help coax the mega-rich from their money. Donald hasn't  figured how to flatter too many people besides himself yet, and time's running out. Therefore, as the media narrative has it this week, he should be disqualified on the basis of his puny finances as well as on the basis of his policies (whatever they really are; he hasn't figured that out either.) The handful of wealthy donors who select the candidates, win the elections and buy the government policies and tax breaks they want, certainly don't want to invest in an incompetent or lying gasbag with attention deficit disorder.

 The self-dealing benignity of the educated wealthy has been an integral part of the mythology of American liberalism since the founding of the Republic - just as dissing greater-evil barbarians like Trump has always been part of their public relations campaign to hold on to power. They claim to abhor his boorish divide-and-conquer rhetoric, even as they themselves are just fine with the status quo of Planned Political Gridlock for Plutocratic Gain. Similarly, the smart Founders justified owning other human beings by simply pointing across the pond at those vulgar Brits, who had the poor inhumane taste to banish people to workhouses and debtors' prisons.

Not that everything is calm and cool in Clintoncashland, of course. Otherwise it wouldn't be Clintonian. Even with her premature "clinching" of the nomination, Hillary is strangely still paranoid about Bernie Sanders.

On Monday, for example, the New Jersey Democratic Committee unceremoniously purged its own former chairman just because he is a Bernie Sanders delegate. The booted official, State Assemblyman John Wisniewski, wryly called the move ironic, given that right before he was dumped, the committee had been discussing ways to unify Clinton and Sanders supporters.

This move came right on the heels of the Congressional Black Caucus vowing to fight Sanders's proposal to abolish the super-delegate system, in which both elected officials and unelected donors and lobbyists get weighted votes to put establishment candidates over the top in intra-party contests. The CBC is also vehemently against holding open primaries in states that currently bar Republican and independent voters from casting ballots in Democratic primary contests. "We wouldn't want to have to run against our own constituents," protested Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), somewhat feebly and undemocratically.

Apparently, Hillary's campaign slogan of "breaking down barriers" doesn't quite extend to opening doors to more marginalized voters. 

Meanwhile, the cash-strapped marginalia plan to fight the political hot air with some potent gas of their own. Vulgarity is as vulgarity does, as my mama used to say. So former Green Party vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala has announced an epic Fart-In to counteract Hillary's acceptance speech next month in Philly.

Honkala, a single mom who has personally dealt with poverty and homelessness, told Truthdig: 

“We will be holding a massive bean supper for Bernie Sanders delegates on American Street in my Kensington neighborhood on the afternoon of July 28,” she said. “We are setting up a Clintonville there, modeled on the Hoovervilles of the 1930s where the poor and unemployed built shanty towns. The Sanders delegates, their bellies full of beans, will be able to return to the Wells Fargo Center and greet the rhetorical flatulence of Hillary Clinton with the real thing.”

Honkala said she would issue an invitation to Sanders to join the bean supper, which she is calling Beans for Hillary. She has asked donors to send cans of beans to 1301-W Porter Street, Philadelphia, Pa., 19148.

“Any remaining beans will be served to the homeless, although we will, of course, be urging Sanders delegates to eat as much as possible,” Honkala said.

This kind of flips the noxious advice to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil right on its butt.

How about making the Evils hold their own noses for a change?  

 Jonathan Swift, writing under the pseudonym Don Fartando, may have been the first to warn the proles of the severe health hazards of bottling up your gas. He  wrote a satiric pamphlet, called "The Benefit of Farting" way back in 1722, to counter a scolding sadistic screed published by the austerians of the wealthy ruling class, advising the poor on "The Benefit of Fasting."

Confronting the bombastic Clintonian winds of war with a mass outbreak of popular bumbast might be just the therapy that everybody needs.

The Fart of the Deal

Commentariat Central

Readers, while I struggle to get my columnizing act together for the week, I thought I'd share a few of my recent New York Times missives with you. As always, you are invited to contribute your own comments in the usual space below. No topic is off-limits. Vent, grouse, and be merry.

***

Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Forgetting, 6/20

I'm starting out with one of those insightful op-eds that still get published by the Gray Lady from time to time. Actually, the entire "Stone" philosophy series stands head and shoulders above the punditory likes of David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. They're essays written in conversational form, with a new guest philosopher or academic featured every week.

In the latest edition, Evans interviews Henry Giroux, who writes:

What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of “greatness” that serve to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence against others. Spurrned on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.

My published comment:

 If only every opinion piece in the Times were of this high calibre, what a wonderful world it would be. What hope there might still be for democracy.

Henry Giroux is right that the crux of the matter is education (or lack thereof.) No matter that Donald Trump can't read or speak, when most of his audience, on average, only reads one book per year. (And that book was probably "written" by Trump.)

To the extent that our neoliberal political system is still investing in public schools, it is concentrating on the STEM curricula in order to prepare the wage slaves of the future. History, philosophy and literature are going by the wayside, because the last thing the oligarchy wants is citizens who can actually think. As Henry Giroux says, everything is regimented for optimal human control. It's brutal, and it's violent. And Trump is only the latest symptom of the fascism (or corporatism) that has been an integral part of this country for a very long time.

 Even though it's gotten almost to the point of environmental annihilation, capitalism is incapable of knowing or caring that as an obscene cancerous growth, it too is doomed to die, right along with its host: the body politic.

America is in dire need of a huge -- y-u-u-uge! - dose of intellectual and moral therapy.

Thanks again for a stimulating discussion. It should be part of the American curriculum, the Congressional Record and maybe even stealthily inserted into the telepromptered speeches of Trump and Clinton.

***

Trigger warning: it's mostly downhill from here. So let's get the most odious entry out of the way first: 

Paul Krugman, Is Our Economists Learning? (6/18)

The Conscience of a Liberal starts off with a whimper:

 Bernie is doing his long — very, very, very long — goodbye; Trump appears to be flaming out. So, time to revisit some macroeconomics.

And then Krugman returns to doing what he does best: denouncing those god-awful, dishonest, paid-for austerian economists from the GOP side of the duopoly. Without a hint of self-reflection as he comes off his own marathon of hippie-punching at the Bernie Sanders threat to the Clintonian succession, Krugman bemoans

"...the bad behavior of quite a few professional economists, who invented new doctrines on the fly to justify their opposition to stimulus and desire for austerity even in the face of a depression and zero interest rates."

This, from the same eminence grise who slammed Bernie's ideas for single payer health care and free public college tuition, because he deemed them to be unrealistic pipe dreams in the current austerian political climate, and also because numbers adding up and crunching are more stimulating to experts like him than the idea of bettering people's lives.

My response:

It must be such a relief to revisit one's area of expertise after having spent the last many months leading the elite charge against Sanders and his progressive supporters, those annoying Bernie Bros. The creation of straw men out of thin air must have been absolutely exhausting.

Now it's time to pretend that the orchestrated smear job against people who support progressive ideas like Medicare for All never even happened. Let Bernie tilt at his windmills -- he's no longer a danger to the established order of things. Hillary "clinched" it, we can finally relax.

It's time for "unity", which in corporate Dem-land includes tearing down the usual suspects of supply-side economics and "expansionary" austerity. This is as easy as pie, compared to the difficulty of tearing down Bernie's New Dealish pie-in-the-sky ideas -- like massive government stimulus spending.

I wouldn't even have bothered commenting on this piece, were it not for Krugman's lingering and petulant penchant for leading off with a gratuitous Bernie Sanders dig (his "long - very,very, very long - goodbye") even when the man is already down, out, and squashed flat by the neoliberal bus.

"The Long Goodbye" is also the title of a Raymond Chandler novel, described as "a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance."

So whether he meant to or not, Krugman has basically reminded us that Bernie Sanders is a mensch for the ages.

***

Maureen Dowd, Trump in the Dumps, 6/18.

After months of just letting Trump be Trump in a series of columns in the fun, "style-section" genre, Dowd is finally distancing herself from the GOP presumptive nominee, even going so far as to muse that "now, Trump's own behavior is casting serious doubt on whether he's qualified to be president."

Ya think?

Dowd admits that knowing Trump for 20 years might have blinded her to the danger. You see, she writes, 

Trump told me he could act like the toniest member of high society when he wanted, and he would as soon as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals. He said his narcissism would not hinder him as he morphed into a leader. But he can’t stop lashing out and doesn’t get why that turns people against him. Everything is filtered through his ego. He reacted to Orlando not as a tragedy so much as a chance to brag about “the congrats” he got for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

My published response:

 So, you've finally seen the Trumpian light. Or should I say darkness.

Better late than never, escaping right in the nick of time from the slimy clutches of a man who deigned to absolve you from his misogyny, at least to your face. That glow from all those exclusive interviews and intimate dinners at Trump Towers in full view of hundreds of envious gawkers has paled, apparently. Was it the 70% public disapproval rating that finally got to you, or did your moral compass finally stop spinning in besotted confusion? Was it the gut-wrenching televised spectacle of Donald's rapprochement with Megyn Kelly that caused the epiphany? Or, maybe the last straw was when he banned the elite Washington Post from his entourage.

That must have been too close for comfort.

 Better to be the instigator of the big breakup than find yourself on the receiving end of it, right?

Besides, it has become a "thing" with the recovering elite press corps to see who can blast Donald with the cleverest Tweeted Trump putdowns in any news cycle.

It's telling that you were even momentarily swayed by Trump's bland assurances that he really didn't mean it when he demonized Muslims, Mexicans and disabled people. The pseudo-populism was like the bouquet of roses all abusers give their victims. As long as he's against NAFTA and GOP corruption, he can't be a total psychopath, right?

 And now that he's gone from cool billionaire to the Biggest Loser, Ms. Dowd bolts.

Cue Amy Poehler: Really, Maureen? Really?

***

Maureen Dowd, Girl Squad, 6/11.

I actually thought that this column, published the week before, was pretty damned funny. Dowd imagines the recent creepy veepy-vetting visit paid by Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton. Bitchiness and hilarity ensue. A sample:

Warren sighs. “True, my faithful are peeved at me for not running and for endorsing you instead of Bernie.”

Hillary pours herself some coffee. “I know you’re intrigued by the idea of being my vice president,” she says. “I heard you tell our gal Rachel Maddow that you’re prepared to be commander in chief. But you know I can’t put you on the ticket, don’t you?”

"Because the country isn’t ready for two wonky women for the price of one?” Warren asks dryly.

“No,” Hillary says, biting her biscotti, “I’m not ready. You, the so-called Sheriff of Wall Street, attacked me as the Shill of Wall Street. Why should you get the glass slipper when you were foot-dragging on my glass-shattering moment?”

My response:

Good one, Maureen. But I doubt that the Empress-in-Waiting would actually have poured her own cup of coffee. She has "people" to do that for her.

I was a bit taken aback when Liz gushed that she'd fight her heart out to elect Hillary. Because in her memoir "A Fighting Chance" she was pretty adamant about fighting her heart out for the little guy. So maybe she's as terrified of the Trump monster as everybody else. Or maybe she just took the advice of economic adviser Larry Summers, who once warned her over dinner that if she wanted to be a Washington insider, the cardinal rule is that you never, ever criticize other insiders.

Maybe she's been overcome and assimilated by the Beltway Borg. It happens.

But being an optimist, I like to imagine that the meeting with Madame Secretary went something like this:

"You want me to keep Tweeting The Donald for you, Hillary? Then you swear on a stack of Bibles that you'll loudly condemn corporate trade deals during every public appearance, even when Obama is standing right next to you. You'll shriek out support of my bill restoring Glass-Steagall. You'll completely shut down your 'charity.' Bill will not, I repeat not, be in charge of revitalizing the economy or anything else, and he'll stop giving paid speeches. You won't stuff your cabinet with neocons and plutocrats. And take the vice gig and stuff it. And those are only my opening offers."

I like to imagine that Hillary then kowtowed to Elizabeth, instead of the other way around.

***

Nicholas Kristof, Why I Was Wrong About Welfare Reform, 6/18.

This was an apology for so ignorantly supporting the Clintons' wanton destruction of the cash aid safety net for poor mothers back in those bubble-icious deregulated Roaring 90s:

I was sympathetic to that goal at the time, but I’ve decided that I was wrong. What I’ve found in my reporting over the years is that welfare “reform” is a misnomer and that cash welfare is essentially dead, leaving some families with children utterly destitute.

He sets the empathetic but still tacitly judgmental tone in a profile of a Tulsa grandmother raising her drug-addicted daughter's toddler even as she herself recovers from drug addiction and a criminal history.  Fortunate enough to live in a home she inherited from her own grandmother, she survives on food stamps and church donations of clothing.

So, Kristof unctuously declares, the last thing Grandma needs is some actual cash in her pocket. What she needs is some good old-fashioned Clintonian neoliberalism:

So here’s where I come down. Welfare reform has failed, but the solution is not a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.

That starts with free long-acting birth control for young women who want it (70 percent of pregnancies among young single women are unplanned). Follow that with high-quality early-childhood programs and prekindergarten, drug treatment, parenting coaching and financial literacy training, and a much greater emphasis on jobs programs to usher the poor into the labor force and bring them income.

My comment:

 Kristof describes the plight of the poor most eloquently. And then he offers feeble solutions to what can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe in the most unequal country on earth.

Funny that he never mentions that it was the Clintons who spearheaded "ending welfare as we know it," and that his band-aids for the resulting doubling of the extreme poverty rate come straight from Hillary's campaign playbook.

What's wrong, exactly, with direct cash aid to the poor? Do Kristof and Clinton have that much mistrust in poor mothers' and grandmothers' ability to handle money? Why further demean them by denying them agency and control?

 Hillary's program has Jeremy Bentham-like "control of the poor" written all over it. Instead of getting even an extra $2 a day to spend as they see fit, poor mothers are instead offered parenting skills lessons under the elitist notion that poverty equals ignorance.

And when mothers of infants are forced to go from welfare to low-wage work under threat of losing benefits, Hillary's solution to the psychic damage from lack of maternal bonding in the home is to offer "empathy curricula" in schools.

Women are cut off from aid, such as rental assistance, for failure to appear at any given state-mandated appointment. If they didn't get the notice in the mail because of homelessness, too bad.

Put the coddled rich under the microscope for a change. Stop their direct cash aid from taxpayers. Usher them into a brave, new, humane world.

And a follow-up comment in response to a reader who took umbrage at my critique of the Clintons:

 Kristof passive-aggressively glosses over the bit where President Clinton signed the bill. I used the word "spearheaded" to convey the fact that both Clintons actively lobbied to kick millions of poor people, mainly women, off the welfare rolls. It was on their neoliberal agenda from Day One. It was not something that they did under GOP duress. As a matter of fact, condemning millions of people to lifelong poverty never could have been accomplished by Republicans alone. Clintonian complicity was very much the main ingredient.

 This column smells like another concern-trolling whitewash to me. Ironically, although the bill was euphemized as the "Welfare Reform and Personal Responsibility Act," Hillary herself takes no personal  responsibility for it now that she is running for president as an alleged champion of women and children. In her second memoir, though, she actually boasted that by the time she and Bill left office, the welfare rolls had been trimmed by 60%.

No apologies, no regrets, no reform of the reform to reverse the sadism and to make things right for poor moms and kids, the main victims of the man-made economic "recession."

I'll be writing more about Hillary's moralistic 21st century ideas for poor people in future posts. They deserve more scrutiny.

 There's more than one way to control, even dispose of, excess humanity, just as there are infinite ways to euphemize the policies that bring about the results most beneficial to the plutocrats, for whom too much is just never quite enough.