Rich Clueless Liberal Lives Matter

Richie Rich is turning born-again populist in his old age.

From coast to coast, celebrities are gathering in solidarity with their fans and other regular folk to protest the unthinkable election of Donald Trump, and to stand united behind their exiled quarter-billionaire sister, Hillary Clinton. Thousands have turned out in even the hippest, most gentrified neighborhoods in New York City, Austin, Atlanta and Chicago to blast out their love for one another.

 Cher, hostess of a star-studded big ticket Clinton fund-raiser this summer on Martha's Vineyard, peeked out the front door of her New York townhouse and Tweeted out her support to those marching past.

A Yale economics professor has made the final exam optional out of sympathy for legatees who are too traumatized to get out of bed, let alone hold a pencil in their tender fingers in order to figure out the logistics of supply-side and trickle-down.

Aging Pop Queen Madonna -- who'd previously bravely protested Trump's disgusting lechery by promising a free blow job to anyone who voted against him  -- did Cher one better and physically joined the rabble in front of Trump Tower on Wednesday night to voice her own outrage against the outrageous blow to elite womanhood.

Let Us All Lift Up Our Faces and Our Voices

CNN pundit/Democratic operative Van Jones made admiring headlines when he blamed Hillary's defeat on racism, something he cleverly branded as "Whitelash."

The Makeup of Flyover Country

 Gloria Steinem boldly penned an editorial in The Guardian to drum up popular support for a new plutocratic social justice movement, to be led by (who else) the Clintons and the Obamas. "We will not mourn. We will organize!" vowed the corporate feminist who'd once castigated female Bernie Sanders supporters as shallow groupies only "wanting to go where the boys are."

Steinem, just like her candidate, ignores the day-to-day lives of the poor and downtrodden by creating her own false reality - the one where Hillary Clinton never became a quarter-billionaire by serving Wall Street, and never threw millions of mainly minority women off the welfare rolls and sent their mates to prison in record numbers back in the bubble-icious boom times of the 90s.

"That’s why she was, and always has been, supported more by women than by men, more by voters of color than by white voters, and more by scientists than creationists. It’s also why she is deeply and vehemently resented," Steinem hilariously pontificated.

Even though Barack Obama's own national popularity is now reaching a record 60 percent,  the trending liberal meme is that Hillary was defeated because of racism. It also matters not to Gloria Steinem that nearly as many women as men voted for Trump:

Add the fact that many men, especially powerful men, haven’t seen a female authority since childhood, and they felt unmanned, threatened, and regressed by the prospect of Hillary Clinton in the most powerful position in the world. Add those white Americans who are about to become a minority for the first time, and are opposed to everything from birth control (because it lowers the white birthrate disproportionately) to immigration (because it doesn’t have racial and religious restrictions). Of course, this is guilt talking: they fear being treated as they have treated others.

Steinem never once blames the establishment. or the ruling class, or whatever name you care to give to Power, Inc. for this nation's social ills. It's the divide and conquer meme all the way: if wages are suppressed and jobs are scarce, then it's all the fault of the poor white Trump voters who are guilty of bigotry against black and brown people. 

She ends her screed in a similarly tone-deaf fashion:

I think this country is in a time of danger because most of us are escaping control by some of us. Just as we would never tell a woman, man or child to stay in a violent household, we will never go back to the old hierarchy. Despite ongoing threats, at home and in other countries, including a very racialized and gendered terrorism, we have many leaders who inspire democracy, who model it, and who know we are linked, not ranked.

Luckily, real change, like a tree, grows from the bottom up, not the top down. We have Hillary, Barack and Michelle to guide us. We will not mourn, we will organize. Maybe we are about to be free.

Steinem should just have screamed Power to the Plutocrats! or Down With Democracy!

She actually seems to believe that the fabulously wealthy and war-mongering Clintons and Obamas are the best choices to lead a new bottom-up movement. She confuses the emotional rock-bottom of a group of defeated elites with the social and financial rock-bottoms of millions of evicted, powerless Americans -- who this week screamed out their own powerlessness and outrage in the only way that they were allowed.

They voted for Donald Trump.

 To paraphrase Thomas Frank, it's almost enough to make you pity the poor billionaire. 

It's so tempting. So we really will have to work hard to harden our hearts against the plight of these unfortunate fortunates. 

They should so do what poor pundit Paul Krugman did on the Day the Liberal Dream Music Died. Relax a lot in between those annoying, but totally necessary, bouts of elite populism. Give it the tired, stale, tried and untrue "balanced approach" that has always worked out so well for extreme centrists:

That said, does it make sense on a personal level to keep struggling after this kind of blow? Why not give up on trying to save the world, and just look out for yourself and those close to you? Quietism does have its appeal. Admission: I spent a lot of today listening to music, working out, reading a novel, basically taking a vacation in my head. You can’t help feeling tired and frustrated after this kind of setback.

But eventually one has to go back to standing for what you believe in. It’s going to be a much harder, longer road than I imagined, and maybe it ends in irreversible defeat, if nothing else from runaway climate change. But I couldn’t live with myself if I just gave up.

So I guess he'll keep writing his usual New York Times column about how wonderful Obamacare is for the retail clerk who has to fork over a $12,000 annual deductible and co-pay out of her $10,000 precarious annual paycheck. You probably know her very well. She is the woman who never gets to take a vacation anywhere, let alone a luxury vacation inside of her own frazzled head.

Live It Up With Yourself! Lift Your Glass As You Rest Your Weary Ass

Trumpus Triumphans

Er... make that President-Elect Y2K16. The elites are absolutely convinced that their America is going to die.

I am surprised, but not as deep-down shocked as I probably should be, by the stunning Trump upset. It was only the sacrosanct polls that kept me from disbelieving that Hillary Clinton could really "win this thing." (And that type of phraseology from Democratic operatives is one of the many, many, many reasons that the liberal party's identity politics, fear-mongering and virtue-signalling failed so abysmally at winning this thing.) 

So, while the deservedly discredited corporate pundits are busy clutching their pearls* and waiting for Armageddon, let me venture out upon the glass half-full route for now. I'll patiently wait until something that post-victorious Trump actually says or does forces me tear into this personally repulsive man with all the fiber of my being.

-- Flyover Country's giant middle finger to the establishment should make it harder than ever for Barack Obama to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the lame duck session. Such an action would expose him once and for all as being a tool of the oligarchy and a disbeliever in democracy itself. The people have spoken, loudly, against globalization and trade deals.

-- Clinton Land might add financial bankruptcy to its moral bankruptcy. Since they will have zero influence on anything anymore, the global money spigot to the family slush fund will dry up. The family might even have to sell off one of its properties to help pay the bills. Chelsea might have to get a job that doesn't involve sitting on a board for a million dollars a year. Her previous threats to run for office herself if the current crop of politicians doesn't please her will come to naught. Any more talk of a Clinton Dynasty will send Democratic operatives running for the hills in horror.

-- Peace might actually have a chance. It remains to be seen whether the Neocons will suck Trump into their noxious orbit, and whether his short vulgar fingers will seek out the nuclear button as soon as a foreign dignitary pisses him off.  One thing in his favor is that he doesn't drink alcohol. (The jury is out as to whether cocaine causes his chronic sniffling.)  Also, although liberals have turned a blind eye toward Obama's drone assassination crusade, they might not take as kindly to Trump boasting about every tribal Muslim male of military age he kills, just for the sheer fun of it. Maybe Trump will never develop the taste for bloodshed. Maybe his vices stop at bigotry and fraud.

-- Without a Democrat in office to placate the masses with trickle-down incrementalism, a social and/or labor movement from the left might have an actual chance, especially if/when voters discern that Trump is totally bullshitting about feeling their pain and bringing the jobs back.

-- Fearing that the ears and eyes and brains of their little ones will be damaged by Trumpism, parents might finally cut the electronic cord, permanently, and take the kids to the library for some real entertainment. Free the shackled imaginations of youth. Make America think again.

-- We thought that Clintonoid Neoliberalism was done for when the financial system crashed in 2008, only to have the oligarchs clamp their iron jaws down on the rest of us and suck up all the gains for themselves, widening the wealth gap to historic proportions. Now that Hillary is toast, maybe the experts will realize that tender liberal market solutions to social problems are a total sham. Of course, the greed industry will die over our dead bodies.  

Like many of you, I got maybe four hours of sleep last night, and that sleep was tortured by some pretty weird dreams. Part of me still thinks I'm dreaming this whole thing, and that any minute now I'll wake up to the strident tones of Hillary's acceptance speech, lethal shards of glass from the cavernous Javits Center ceiling falling all around like joyless confetti as the rest of us take desperate cover.

So fasten your seat belts. Let the pundits roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. Let the Wild (T)rumpus start. Let's try to make the best of another in a whole series of long national nightmares. Because there are always plenty of monsters to tame, plenty of battles to be fought. Giving up is never an option.

No Joke: Obama Reads "Where the Wild Things Are" to America's Children

* If there was a diplomatic post for Pearl Clutcher in Chief, I would nominate the New York Times' Paul Krugman for the honor. In a Tweet last night he actually blamed Jill Stein (who gleaned a whopping .07% of the vote) for costing Hillary the state of Florida.

Today, in a morning-after futile attempt at awareness, he bemoans the death of the "romantic vision" of the America he still loves: a concept he castigated only a few short months ago during his mean spirited spree of Bernie Sanders-bashing in the futile service of his failed candidate.

My response to the Pearl Clutcher of Wisdom:

The crash of '08 not only wasn't the kiss of death to neoliberalism (private control of the public sphere), it actually strengthened the resolve of oligarchs who destroyed lives and livelihoods by sucking up more than 90% of the "recovery." So maybe the election of Trump will be a wake-up call, rather than the coup de grace that liberals fear.

I can't see him lasting a full term. Perhaps he won't be impeached, but criminal indictment is not out of the question. And that leaves Mike Pence a couple of years to do his damage. We can only hope that the Dems turn the tables and become the new Party of No.

And maybe Krugman will rethink his critique of the left. His call today for a romantic vision for the US would be funny were it not so tragic. In May, he sneered at it:

"Romantics: This kind of idealism shades over into something that’s less about changing society than about the fun and ego gratification of being part of The Movement. (Those of us who were students in the 60s and early 70s very much recognize the type.) For a while there – especially for those who didn’t understand delegate math – it felt like a wonderful joy ride, the scrappy young on the march about to overthrow the villainous old. But there’s a thin line between love and hate: when reality began to set in, all too many romantics reacted by descending into bitterness, with angry claims that they were being cheated."

My romantic vision of Krugman losing his column space out of sheer ineptitude and careerism is not, unfortunately, likely to be part of an American dream come true. The neoliberal concept of meritocratic experts "failing upward" will hold steady, at least until the results of climate change fry the grid.

Donald Trump: Candidate Y2K16

Remember the late 90s, when everybody was in a tizzy over the imminent end of the world because the geeks hadn't fixed the clocks in computers? And remember how we woke up on January 1, 2000 to an intense hangover of continuing life, our money still in the bank, electricity still thrumming through the grid.. and most important of all, intact and crystal clear cell phone and Internet connections?

This time around, the disaster hysteria revolves around the very slim chance that a different kind of virus known as Donald J. Trump will usher in Armageddon.  If Trump is elected, Putin will invade America, take over the Internet, and super-rich people will be fleeing the country in droves. It couldn't get any worse than that last part.  

And it would be all your fault because, even if you personally voted for Hillary Clinton, you obviously didn't work for her hard enough, guilt-tripping your friends and neighbors into voting for her too. This failure to work for free for a quarter-billionaire is the new original sin. Because only Hillary can save the planet. The Guardian said so right in a front page editorial over the weekend.

What really had the serious people freaking out over the weekend was revered odds-making guru Nate Silver giving Donald Trump about a 35 percent chance of beating Hillary. As a result, he is being declared a jerk and a traitor by the HillHuffPo. How dare he crunch numbers that are not, at minimum, one hundred percent favorable to Hillary Clinton? Nate Silver is causing unnecessary "waves of panic" all across the landscape. By putting his thumbs on the math scales, he is almost as dastardly as FBI Director James Comey himself.

The declaration of treachery in turn unleashed an F bomb-laced, 14-part Tweet-storm from Nate Silver, who in his own defense was even forced to partially plagiarize Michelle Obama.

"When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time," the math whiz fumed.

But Nate Silver's feelings getting hurt is nothing compared to the angst that The Market is experiencing in the End Times. They're in a downright shuddering frenzy. With Donald Trump's poll numbers improving, the S&P 500 was down for the ninth straight day on Friday, something that hasn't happened since 1980. The Donald Bug has led to the most prolonged selloff in stocks since the '08 financial crisis.  Even the manufactured Y2K Bug-Panic of '99 didn't have the power of Trump.

So it's only natural that media pundits would also be scared out of what passes for their wits.

Frank Bruni, who only last week vowed to quickly get over his Trump coverage addiction, isn't quite there yet. He admits to being "terrified" by Election Armageddon. Even if we all wake up Wednesday morning breathing a sigh of post-Trumpian relief, our fear will linger on like a really bad case of the measles:

There’s no end here, just a punctuation mark, a measly comma between the rancor that has built until this point and the fury to come. And there’s no way to un-see what all of us have seen over these last 18 months, to bottle up what has been un-bottled.

Election Day will redeem and settle nothing, not this time around. No matter who declares victory, tens of millions of Americans will be convinced — truly convinced — that the outcome isn’t legitimate because untoward forces intervened. Whether balloons fall on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, there will be bolder divisions in America than there were at the start of it all and even less faith in the country’s most important institutions.

I know exactly what he means. The FBI, which has been in its own frenzy of fear-mongering through entrapment of marginalized people into fake terror plots while ignoring warnings of real terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, is a prime example. It's been such a well-regarded public institution for well over a century. And just look at it now. James Comey's re-opening of the Clinton email investigation and meddling in our free and fair elections has seriously tarnished its stellar reputation. It has effectively neutered its recent noble accomplishment of secretly scanning millions of our Yahoo email accounts. If we can't all be considered terrorists until never proven otherwise, we might as well become atheists and refuse to recite the Pledge. If we're going to be divisive, we may as well go whole hog and be boldly divisive.

And the rest of the world respecting us? Forget about it. Donald Trump has been such an embarrassment. He is doing untold damage to the reputation of Barack Obama, so beloved throughout the globe for his humanitarian wars and drone assassinations. If Trump wins, the rich and famous people had better think of emigrating to Waziristan so they can huddle in the safety of the tribal regions. Better to hear drones constantly buzzing above your heads than to have to listen to Donald's potty mouth all the time.

In its recent survey of global attitudes,  Pew researchers discovered that the majority of residents of other countries strongly disapprove of both the Obama administration's drone attacks and its widespread surveillance upon ordinary citizens. Trump would seriously erode these ratings, because he would probably be prone to bragging about the atrocities. The United States might not get as many Likes in the global popularity sweepstakes under Trump. It would lose the favorability it still enjoys, against all odds. Even Nate Silver might be flummoxed.

And what a toll a Trump presidency would take on freedom of the press. His serial insults of news agencies and reporters might even cause the USA to drop from its current dismal 41st place in Reporters Without Borders' annual ranking list. What a dreadful blow to our national reputation it would be for Mauritania or Slovenia or Niger to beat us in the event of a Trump victory. It's already bad enough that the highly ranked Scandinavian countries are as transparent about informing the public as they are generous in their "people first" social welfare programs.

Of course, much of the fear-mongering about the Trump of Doom is for crass purposes of last minute fund-raising for the Democrapublican Party and its respective offshoots. So any email you're receiving slugged "Dead Heat!"  is bound to contain a panic-stricken appeal for cash.

Here's former Bernie Sanders supporter Robert Reich mongering on behalf of  MoveOn, one of the biggest Democratic veal pens in existence:

By now, we all know the stakes of this election—and the choice between a dangerous authoritarian demagogue or a woman of great experience and commitment, running on the most progressive major-party platform ever.

We all know the real threat that Donald Trump could win. The polls have tightened to a dead heat this week, with Trump ahead in many battleground states.

Even the normally cool President Obama is siding with Nate Silver and pretending to push the Trump panic button. “This should not be a close race, but it’s going to be a close race," he warned North Carolina voters last week.

Obama should just relax. 

I, for one, am feeling very relaxed. I just mailed in my ballot, and feminist that I am, voted for four fine women: Jill Stein of the Green Party for president; Robin Laverne Wilson of the Green Party for U.S. Senate; Zephyr Teachout of the Democratic Party for U.S. House of Representatives; and  Pramilla Malick of the Democratic Party for New York State Senate.

(Malick is really something of a miracle in these parts. Although the GOP incumbent has run unopposed for decades, more people have chosen "blank" on their ballots than have actually voted for him. Senator Blank has been the real victor for way too long. So it's nice to actually have a real human choice for change.)

I'll be back after Election Day... assuming that there is no shocking TrumPutin Armageddon and I still have an Internet connection.

Vote! And don't let anybody tell you you're throwing your vote away if you choose to diverge from the Duopoly. That line of bull got stale a long time ago.

As Corey Robin lays out in an excellent post, we mustn't let the inevitable gaslighting by Hillary supporters get to us:

 Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote—out of the more than 100 million cast—determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.
These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of…a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against…three veto points.
Somewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith has a passage about how we identify with the trials and travails of a king, giving him all of our sympathy and understanding, yet are so repelled by the tribulations of the lowly that we can scarce understand what they’re going through.

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ― Charles Dickens

 

Where There's Disgust, There's Hope

With a new poll revealing that more than eight in ten voters are disgusted with politics, the big unanswered question is this: what in holy hell is up with that other 16-20 percent?  Are they on drugs?  More likely, they're in the same smug crowd as the top quintile of earners who've escaped the lasting depredations of the 2008 financial crisis. But that variable wasn't part of the polling agenda.

  You see, in corporate Thought Leader World, there's no such thing as the class war.

The 1,300 people contacted by the New York Times/CBS pollsters were asked only to divulge their party and candidate preferences, as well as to rate government performance and to voice their opinions on where the country and the "economy" are headed. They were even idiotically pressed about their feelings about Presidential Consort Michelle Obama.

 But were they ever queried about their own financial and employment status in order to determine whether widespread political disgust correlates with widespread precarity and depression? Of course not!  Because this poll, like so many others, was mainly designed to give the oligarchs who commissioned it a rough idea of how firm or tenuous their grasp on the governed is likely to be after Election Day.

The questions were designed, much as Hillary Clinton so generously explained to Wall Street bankers in one of her paid speeches, to help politicians coordinate their public positions with their private positions. After they pretend to feel the mass disgust, they then can choose to address it, ignore it, castigate it, or downplay it, depending on the situation and results of further polling and focus group testing.

So the latest poll is not especially good news for the ultra-wealthy donor class which runs the place. Judging from the results, they have much to fear, especially from those mythical, toothless, barbaric hordes of incipient Trump revolutionaries they've dreamed up, gathering even as we speak at the gates of their dream home-fortresses. If we won't vote out of love and admiration, then let us vote out of sheer terror.

The Times imparts the grimmest of grim news to the plutocrats:

In a grim preview of the discontent that may cloud at least the outset of the next president’s term, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are seen by a majority of voters as unlikely to bring the country back together after this bitter election season.

With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.

How transparent the New York Times is, characterizing the natural disgust of voters as "toxic" rather than representative of healthy, functioning intellects. If the candidates are only passively "seen as" dishonest, then perhaps the fault is in the voters themselves. Something must be wrong with them, or maybe it's just the optics or the narrative.

If I were a seriously wealthy mover or shaker, I would seriously consider goosing the jobless stats by hiring a disgusted down-and-outer as my personal food and beverage taster. Somebody has to protect my august self from all that populist poison threatening my cosseted way of life. I would even pay them three times the minimum wage, with all the benefits, including a no-deductible, no co-pay platinum Obamacare plan.

  Sadly for many movers and shakers and opinion-manufacturers, the mass disgust orchestrated by the timely release of Donald Trump's repugnant Access Hollywood tape has not been as long-lived and as beneficial to Hillary Clinton as her campaign might have hoped. Those revolting Trump voters have largely recovered from being revolted at his misogynistic language, and are now back to being revolted about the rotten state of either their own financial lives, or the troubles of their neighbors and relatives. And of course, some of them are indeed as genuinely racist and psychopathic as US imperialism itself.

People are mad and scared, but not about the things that the oligarchy would prefer them to be mad and scared about. Disgust at Trump's racism, sexism and xenophobia does not necessarily translate into support for Hillary Clinton's crony capitalism and unabashed war-mongering. There are too many varieties of loathing experience to even count.

But back to Times/CBS: Since timing is everything whenever plutocrats choose to take the pulse of the populace, the corporate media pollsters conveniently began calling people immediately upon the release of James Comey's shocking announcement that the FBI's investigation of the Clinton emails would continue.

Most voters who were contacted said they had heard about the development. More voters said they were aware of accusations that Mr. Trump had made unwanted sexual advances toward several women.

Yet about six in 10 voters over all said the 11th-hour disclosures about each candidate would make no real difference in their votes. However, more people said the allegations about Mr. Trump were likely to negatively affect their votes than those who said the new email developments would discourage them from voting for Mrs. Clinton.

The horror. Those damned voters care more about their own situations than they do about palace intrigues, and backbiting in high places. The proles made up their minds a long time ago that they couldn't stand whoever it was they couldn't stand. October Surprises apparently don't mean as much as they used to.

To the ruling class racketeers, the electorate are like a plague of locusts who come out of hibernation every four years, instead of a more reasonable 17. They raise a fearful cacophony for a very short time, and then presto-chango - all that's left to remember them by are their harmless, silent little husks.

But where there's disgust, there's always the hope that the whirring masses will stick around a bit longer than expected this cycle. Species do evolve, even suddenly and unexpectedly mutate every once in a great while. 

As far as the increasingly furious and paranoid media/political complex is concerned, disaffected voters of the right and left might not hail from the same ideological places, but they are eminently interchangeable when it comes to their denigration by rulers. Whether they're in a Basket of Deplorables, or whether they're Berniebro Basement Slackers, they're equally extremist and ignorant. If they refuse to vote as they're expected to vote, then it can only be blamed upon the one horrible thing guaranteed to send chills up the spines of oligarchs: Populism.

  As French philosopher Jacques Rancière has rightly pointed out, the Establishment is actually a cabal of democracy haters. Citizen-consumers -- the "formless and squawking horde" -- are periodically allowed to vote, but only so that oligarchies can give themselves renewed power and legitimacy. Therefore, the term "representative democracy" is an oxymoron for the ages.

"It is because democratic man is a being of excesses, an insatiable devourer of commodities, human rights and televisual spectacles, that the capitalist law of profit rules the planet," Rancière writes. "With politics forgotten, the word democracy thereby becomes a euphemism designating a system that one no longer wants to call by its name, and the name of the diabolical subject that appears in place of that effaced word: a composite subject where the individual subjected to this system of domination and the one who denounces it are amalgamated. To paint a robotic portrait of democratic man, the best thing to do is to combine these characteristics: the young idiotic consumer of popcorn, reality TV, safe sex, social security, the right to difference and anticapitalist or alterglobalist illusions. Thanks to him, the denouncers have what they need: the absolute culprit of an irremediable evil."

The system that nobody wants to call by its true name is, of course, Oligarchy.

And the consumer-citizens know it. Whether right or left, Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Green or Socialist or Anarchist or Independent, we're getting sick and tired of being called idiots and extremists for daring to want decent lives. 

That 80+ percent disgust rate is actually cause for optimism. Those who govern or who strive to govern actually fear democracy as much as they hate it. Their constant refrain that job destruction and wage suppression and racist globalization are just like the weather, and that we'll all just have to get used to it and lower our expectations and share the sacrifice and bow down to market-based "solutions" simply doesn't fly any longer.

And what is true democracy, anyway, but the constant struggle to wrest a little power away from the oligarchs?

Poison Pills

 (Optional soundtrack)

Much to my chagrin, not one trick-or-treater showed up at my door this Halloween. This was despite all my welcoming decorations and the strains of spooky holiday music wafting from my humble abode.

 I've therefore had no choice but to binge these past few days on a bowl full of "fun-size" Kit-Kats. Still, the jittery chocolate hangover I'm suffering is pure bliss compared to my election hangover.

One antidote that's worked calming wonders for me so far is news that Donna Brazile will never again show her face on CNN for money. The media will never be the same. They loved their girl. Now that she's gone, whatever will they do to fill all that deadly dull air time? Never again will she have to "persecuted" by the media for feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign. Brazile, of course, is just one of the way too many partisan hacks posting as journalists on TV. When I symbolically condemned these talking heads to post-election jars of formaldehyde the other day as a Halloween gift to the tortured, I still wasn't aware that Donna had already been condemned without me. I have to admit, it was pure holiday magic.

Because perhaps even worse than her big offense of cheating was the way, in one of the leaked Podesta emails, that she'd flippantly denigrated a voting citizen as a nameless "woman with a rash" whose debate question on lead poisoning was one of the two (that we know about so far) which she leaked to the Clinton campaign. Brazile made it sound as though the woman was hoarding a stash of illegal poison instead of being sickened, over time, by the water of Flint, Michigan. "Her family has lead poison," Brazile inartfully explained to Hillary's campaign manager.

 Brazile told Podesta March 5 to expect a question from a resident of Flint, Mich., about the city’s water crisis, writing in an email, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”
At the Flint debate the next day, CNN moderator Anderson Cooper introduced Flint resident Lee-Anne Walters, who said the city’s water had poisoned her family. She asked what the candidates would do about the issue. (Walters told Fox News on Tuesday that she still has a rash from the tainted water.)

More disgusting than CNN's belated disgust at Brazile's behavior is that executives kept the news of her ouster on the QT for two weeks before finally admitting, on Halloween, that she had in fact been fired.

Even more disgusting than that, though, was Hillary's cold-blooded refusal to even decently answer the "rash woman's" question in the first place.

From the transcript of the Democratic forum starring Bernie Sanders and Clinton:

COOPER: I want to go to Lee-Anne Walters. This is Lee-Anne Walters. She was one of the first people to report problems with the water in Flint. One of her twin boys stopped growing. Her daughter lost her hair.

She says she’s undecided, and has a question for both of you to answer, but we’ll start with Senator Sanders. Ms. Walters?

QUESTION: After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines.

(APPLAUSE)

 SANDERS: I will make a personal promise to you that the EPA and the EPA director that I appoint will make sure that every water system in the United States of America is tested, and that the people of those communities know the quality of the water that they are drinking, and that we are gonna have a plan to rebuild water systems in this country that are unsafe for drinking.

CLINTON: Well, I agree completely. I want to go further though. I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies.

So, I want to do exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere.

Bernie was plenty vague himself, but notice that Hillary outright refused to promise to get the lead out quickly in an effort to save lives, today. She only committed to discussions, within five years, to put together a plan to solve the humanitarian catastrophe. She wouldn't even commit to commit during her first term in office. This is what Hillary means by incrementalism. She as much as accused Ms. Walters of being too much of a purist by expecting pure water for her family any time soon.

Lee-Anne Walters, who told the media after the March debate that Hillary's cold non-answer had made her feel like "throwing up in my mouth" was absolutely livid when she discovered this week that her question had been pre-submitted to Clinton.  "She should be disqualified," Ms. Walters said.

***

Maureen Dowd has an illuminating piece in the New York Times magazine about the incestuous New York social world of the Trumps and the Clintons -- which, for purposes of neoliberal efficiency and best practices, I prefer to call Clump.

Once upon a time, the clans were members of the Mutual Admiration Society, but for purposes every bit as toxic and murky as Flint's water: 

The friendship, on both sides, was a transaction. Not personal, as they say in the “The Godfather” — just business. Trump’s life in New York was all about promoting the brand and making money for the family business. It was the same for the Clintons. A former Clinton White House official puts it more bluntly: “This was a classic Clinton go-where-the-money-is move.”

“They all played the same game in the same town with the same thing in mind,” says Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who was invited to Trump’s third wedding and served prison time for tax fraud and other felony charges. “Better your relationships and build the business. It’s all about money and getting ahead and hedging your bets and playing the angles.”

While Trump openly brags about canoodling with the Clintons and boasts how their socialite daughters are still the very best of friends, Hillary's operatives strive mightily and unsuccessfully to downgrade the clans' historical relationship as much ado about nothing. (For some reason, Dowd dished about the Mar-A-Lago wedding and the golf outings, but omitted their slimy joint jaunts on convicted billionaire pedophile Jeff Epstein's Lolita Express. She also left out the society page hoopla about Chelsea's friendship with fellow society matron Mrs. David Koch, which I wrote about under the title "Kochclintopia Inc" last year.)

Here's my published response to Maureen Dowd's piece:

Good article on how the elite take care of their own, whether or not they really "like" one other. If we learned nothing else from the WikiLeaks/Podesta emails, it's that money really does talk and that such values as peer loyalty and honesty and governance in the public interest went out the window awhile ago, if it ever even existed at all.

For the Clinton people to try to "play down" Chelsea's friendship with Ivanka is laughable. They apparently missed her recent appearance on "The View" when she gushed: "We were friends long before this election and we'll be friends long after this election. Our friendship didn't start with politics and it certainly is not going to end because of politics. I have tremendous respect for Ivanka."

There are plenty of photos of Chelsea and Ivanka hugging and kissing and gazing upon one another with the same kind of glittering, vacuous adoration that Hillary aimed at Donald at his $ociety wedding.

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/news/a17627/chelsea-clinto...

 I thought it was really strange that (at the last debate) Hillary kept smiling serenely and with much apparent enjoyment as Donald lobbed insult after insult at her. But then it dawned on me. They know it's all in the game. Only, the plenty of tears that will fall will not be theirs, but ours.

Money's gotta talk. Grifters gotta grift.

It's All In the Game (2nd optional soundtrack)

Neoliberal Undead Match

What better day for the flurry of breathless announcements that Hillary and Donald are now in a Dead Heat? They're allegedly in as tight of a race as the sales of their Halloween costumes. Oh, the Humanthony.

For purposes of oligarchy and wage-suppressing globalism, that overpriced and suffocating Clinton or Trump mask you might be wearing to scare the crap out of your friends and neighbors tonight was manufactured in China for mere pennies. Because USA! USA! USA!

The bummer of a plot twist in this year's contrived suspense is that since fully one-fourth of battleground state voters, and 21 million nationwide, have already cast their ballots, nothing that either candidate can do at this point will make a lick of difference. Even the final tranche of WikiLeaks emails expected to come out this week has the aura of anticlimax.

But it's a contest! Trump is gaining momentum! A professor who has correctly predicted presidential outcomes for the past three decades says so! It ain't over until CNN finally goes off the air on a cold day in hell and all the talking heads repair to their dusty, formaldehyde-filled jars for a long winter's nap.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Something Clicked This Way Comes

Just a few quick thoughts and speculations on the latest thrilling episode of Hillary's Life of Scandal.

--While a hypothetical President-elect Clinton would not have the immediate power to fire FBI Director James Comey for trying to spoil her coronation, she theoretically could grant herself the additional power to abolish the entire agency once she took office. Since dissension within the ranks of the Bureau was reportedly the impetus for Comey's letter to Congress about some newly-discovered emails, Hillary would remain highly vulnerable, with or without the current director's resignation.

 -- Look at the whole murky history of the FBI. Teddy Roosevelt did a sneaky summer end-run around an adjourned Congress in 1908 by unilaterally creating his own executive police force. Congress had refused to go along with the formal creation of such a federal agency, rightly fearing that it would operate in too much secrecy. Ominously, the plutocratic Attorney General directly tasked by Teddy with manning the Bureau just happened to be the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. What one aristocratic Trust-buster and an Emperor's spawn giveth, a once and future mistrusted Empress can (hypothetically of course) easily taketh away.

--When Congress refused to give AG Charles Bonaparte any money for his spy agency, he ignored them, and simply appropriated personnel from the Secret Service. The FBI has been an illegal agency from the outset. But as has been its wont, Congress is loath to overturn an executive order or a secret legal opinion or stealth bombings and invasions once they are "done deals."

--Since the first official task of Roosevelt's quasi-public cop shop was to enforce the Mann Act, and crack down on female sex workers by infiltrating houses of prostitution, wouldn't it be a hoot if one of its very last recorded acts was the attempted destruction of a political campaign by way of cracking down on a male sex addict?

--Of course, the main impetus for the creation of the FBI was the growing popularity of socialism, which spawned widespread paranoia within the ruling class. Roosevelt, remember, only became president when his predecessor was assassinated by an "anarchist." The scary Other back then were not Muslims and Mexicans, but Germans and Italians and other European immigrants. Domestic espionage upon all manner of civil and labor rights activists and pacifists and other critics of the military-industrial complex has long been at the core of the agency's mission. See, for example, COINTELPRO and most recently, the outrageous FBI scanning of Yahoo email under the direction of the talented Mr. Comey. 

 In sum, Hillary, intelligence aficianado that she is, could and likely would simply replace the current FBI with a carefully purged new agency all her own, called the New Improved FBI. 

-- According to its own auto-hagiography, the current Bureau has prided itself from its very inception for selectively rooting out political corruption. In the First Gilded Age, as in our ongoing Second era of inequality, "corruption was rampant nationwide... with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full power." So, who knows, Comey might actually think he's a rare and bold adherent of the noble historic spirit of his spy agency.

-- For those willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, James Comey is simply doing his unpleasant job, creating an unavoidable smallish mess out of the pre-existing humongous mess created by Clinton herself. As noted above, he is probably bowing to pressure from the rank and file, said to be disgruntled by the government's prior kid-glove treatment of Hillary. As a group, law enforcement unions are almost uniformly supporting Law and Order candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This doesn't make a lot of sense, given Hillary's own established hawkishness and pro-police history. Then again, Hell tends to be murky.

-- Democrats who are strutting and fretting at Comey (see, for example, Paul Krugman's Twitter meltdown) for politicizing Clinton's mess should direct some of their wrath at President Obama, who in a fit of pathological bipartisanship nominated the shadow banking/surveillance-friendly Republican FBI Director in the first place. Comey's reputation for honesty was a huge selling point at the time. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

--Just when we thought the duopoly, rampant as it has been with promises of war, and threats and actual outbreaks of violence, and revelations of sexism and fraud in the highest echelons, couldn't go any lower, it just got lower. The direct intervention of an unconstitutional police state into the electoral process is something out of a Banana Republic. The attempted hijacking of the "Neoliberal Death Match" between a publicly loathed multimillionaire and a publicly loathed billionaire is just one end-product of the deeply ingrained corruption which has been integral to the American ruling establishment for a very long time. 

--But the extinction of American representative democracy is nothing compared to the ongoing extinction of two-thirds of the earth's animal species. Since that scenario of dusty death is too frightening to contemplate, you are all hereby urged to turn on CNN in order to get fully briefed on DikiLeaks, as well as to get fully hoodwinked by those insipidly incessant and multicultural "I'm An Energy Voter!" commercials sponsored by the planet-destroying petroleum industry.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

 ***
Nought's had, all's spent/ Where our desire is got without content;/ 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy/ Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. -- Lady Macbeth.