Corporate Media Goes Full Frankenweenie

The elite media sewing circle of neoliberalism, having spent years assembling the Trump monster, now faces the daunting task of trying to rip their creation apart at the seams. Much to their chagrin, however, the creature is poking them right back in their tender little eyeballs with their own sharp needles.

Donald Trump has had the absolute gall to call them a monstrous Enemy of the People in one of those endless Tweets that always seem to convulse them in such painful stitches.

The actual people, whose trust in the mainstream media was already at a record low before the election of Trump, are not exactly taking the side of the six major news conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we are allowed to see, hear, and read in this tawdry little turnabout.

Therefore, it's time for unraveling pundits and media stars across the centrist spectrum to gin up some outrage on behalf of themselves, to cast themselves as the latest and most important victims of Trumpism. If you listen to them talk about Trump's recent press conference instead of just watching it for yourself,  you might be under the impression that The Donald is maniacally shutting down all the networks and newspapers, rounding up all the journalistic suspects, burning a whole bunch of books, and otherwise destroying the First Amendment.

 You might forget all about the root cause of Trump's rage, which is the torrent of leaks about his chaotic administration coming out of the Intelligence Community and other government bureaucracies. You might forget that the media has aligned itself with the Deep State in order to bring Trump down in the interest of their own self-interest -- which is the continuing militarized dominance of the Exceptional USA.

You might also forget that even before Trump's dogged "war" on the media, the majority of American writers for years have reported self-censoring out of fear of Deep State government surveillance.

Although the manufactured outrage of the churnalistic class runs as wide and as deep as its characteristic shallowness allows, for now I'll just comment on two of the self-pitying screeds emanating from the august pages of the New York Times.

Frank Bruni has gone way beyond pain. The needle in his eyeballs apparently has been tipped with Novocaine, because Trump has left him feeling absolutely numb.

 He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves.

They blend together under the numbing banner of what a freak show he can be, of Trump being Trump. And so the show screams on.

Part of this excess is his nature. Part of it is design. Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.

Bruni should perhaps ponder whether the media "intensification" of the Russia "questions" could be the real cause of his debilitating condition. It is so tiring to make stuff up, especially after you've already spent over a year helping to stitch together a $5 billion free advertising campaign for the monster. 

Here's my published comment:

Day after day, week after week, month after month, the media has been giving Trump exactly what he wants: nonstop attention.

He's a master provocateur and the media is an easy mark. Trump acts, media reacts, Trump counter-reacts, ad infinitum. You think you're exhausted, Mr. Bruni? Just for once, I'd love to read a column of yours that didn't have Trump or one of his fascist pals at its quaking epicenter.

He didn't have a "meltdown" at his presser - the press did. He was in absolute control of his own theater. I'm even starting to wonder whether his "mental illness" is also feigned, to keep us hopping in search of the latest diagnosis. There's a method to his alleged madness. After all, many a CEO and professional actor and politician has similar, albeit more muted, characteristics on "the spectrum."

 What if he gave a press conference or delivered a speech that media refused to broadcast or live-blog? What if only two pool reporters clambered aboard Air Force One for the weekly jaunts to his Florida club? What if Trump burped out a Tweet and we failed to get insulted, gradually weaning ourselves from the constant contest to outdo each other with the cleverest riposte?

Trump is nothing but constant belches of fetid hot air. The courts are thus far thwarting his directives. So are the people. So instead of simply reacting to him, let's be proactive and demand of the whole system the social and economic justice we deserve.

Treat Trump as a symptom, not as the disease.

Now we come to Maureen Dowd, who claims to have been so well acquainted with Trump over the past several decades that she practically had him on speed dial throughout the campaign, even dishing about the private luncheon she enjoyed with him in his Tower. The tone throughout the electoral season was that he was such a narcissistic goof, who could possibly take him seriously.

Now she's been forced to change her tune to save her own credibility. But far from being as numbed and enervated as Bruni, she finds herself melodramatically Trapped in Trump's Brain.

 It’s a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness. Of course, this is merely the observation of someone who is “the enemy of the American people,” according to our president....

Like all narcissists, he doesn’t like to be told if he’s screwing up, so he surrounds himself with people who don’t tell him.

The president is still oblivious about the shudder that went through the land, beyond the base that likes seeing the press jackals flayed, during his gobsmacking 77-minute masterpiece of performance art in the White House Thursday.

It was more Norma Desmond than Norman Vincent Peale, the Trump family pastor who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking” and influenced Donald’s thinking as a child.

There must be something wrong with me, because I didn't shudder once during his presser, despite being as far away in left field from his "base" as you can probably get. I admit that I guffawed at some parts, cringed at many parts, and gasped at other parts. But for some reason, I failed to totally freak out. I also have to admit that I enjoyed seeing some of the self-important hacks getting told off for futilely needling and "fact-checking" the guy who just can't seem to help his mendacious self. Trump knows full well that most people don't care which president got the most electoral votes in all of history.

 Dowd's attempt at wicked needlepoint, complete with the decorative Sunset Boulevard edging, fails for once to mention Hillary Clinton's role in all this drama. It just so happens, though, that Hillary met Norma Desmond in person at about the same time that Trump was delivering his own garish bravura performance.

  My published response to Maureen:

 Of course Ms. Dowd is not an "enemy of the American people." But neither has she consistently performed journalism in the public interest this past campaign season, what with her throbbing Trump soap opera disguised as an ever so clickable series of columns.

So now she's joining the pack of corporate newshounds in a ravening quest to bring down the same fox they so recently went out of their way to feed and pamper.

Oh My Poor Eyeball (Plush Frankenweenie Takes Shelter in Protective Plastic)

Speaking of Norma Desmond, there's a whole media chorus line of them, both in and out of drag, wearing identical virtue-signaling masks as they position themselves in the center of the stage.

But you know what's a real drag? For a frightened public to be so ill-served by a pack of churnalists vying for top prize in the media aggrievement sweepstakes. It's like they're lost without the cozy sycophancy they used to mistake for reportage in the pre-Trump days.

Therefore, my nomination for the Norma Desmond award goes to CNN's Chris Cuomo, who grotesquely likened Trump's "fake news" insult to being called the N word.

I watched the same presser as the pundits, but somehow missed Trump's epic "meltdown." What I saw was vintage Donald, playing the press corps like they were cardboard fiddles.

They've been out of tune and out of touch with regular people for way too long.

My Rx: cancel the annual White House Correspondents' incest-fest, wean yourselves from Trump tweets, and cover some town halls.

Maybe if the media were a little less reactionary....

The Deep State Speaketh

 *2/16 Update Below.

The first Deep State leg of the punishing journey that Senator Chuck Schumer called "six ways from Sunday" is now complete. The Intelligence Community has officially begun its vendetta against Donald J. Trump. 

Not that we should mourn the newly deposed General Mike Flynn, of course. The man was not just a loose cannon in a whole cabinet full of them, he was a human cluster bomb. A ground war with Iran on his watch was never a question of if, but of when. Flynn was practically salivating blood in his hateful haste to kill as many Muslims as possible. So good riddance to him.

 I have just a few thoughts on what could possibly be going on with the Consensuals of the Washington establishment.

1. They just really, viscerally hate Donald Trump's guts, as well as his unfiltered Queens-accented voice speaking uncomfortable truths about the Military Industrial Complex and American imperialism. Above all, they just hate that he is ruining their long-held plans for at least a warming of the cold war with Russia. They don't want all those troops in Norway and Estonia and Poland just going to waste. If there is a true peace with Putin, the American-based oil cartels might have to negotiate nicely with Russia over all that oil lurking in the Bering Sea. And they don't want to share.

2. The Establishment needs a Crisis in order to push through more bipartisan cuts to the social safety net. That crisis is Donald Trump himself. The Democrats, especially, are desperate for a platform to attract voters to their party. Since they are unwilling to suggest such nice things as universal health care, a guaranteed national income or living wage, a federal jobs program, progressive tax rates, a tax on high-speed trades, student loan forgiveness and free public college tuition, they'll go into default mode. They'll conduct multiple investigations into the Trump-Putin connection to redirect our attention into the more desirable realm of fear and trembling. We'll hear day after day that Trump is a traitor. We may never get to see proof in the way of his easily obtainable income tax returns. The Consensuals will never direct their friends in the Intelligence Community to hack into the IRS database, of course, because that would be as illegal as eavesdropping on Mike Flynn's phone calls with the Russkies.

3. The timing of Flynn's fall, on Valentine's Day, is heart-breakingly exquisite. It (perhaps inadvertently) makes us recall mob wars and massacres past. Still, it deflects public attention from the nearly simultaneous confirmation of Robber Baron Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, and the fact that a Democratic administration never prosecuted his fraudclosure scheme when it had the opportunity. It had something to do with campaign contributions.

4. If the Establishment is so concerned about the possible infiltration of Russia into our precious democratic system, why then was Putin pal Rex Tillerson so readily confirmed as Secretary of State? Could it be that the Senate loves Exxon-Mobil more than it hates Trump?

5. If the Obama administration was so fully aware of Trump's dangerous treachery, at least since last summer, why then did it complacently sit on its hands? They are either cynical self-dealers, or just plain stupid and inept.

 I have no way of knowing whether Trump is actually a Russian stooge or a Trojan horse or a traitor. But what is obvious is that mainstream media outlets are acting as Deep State mouthpieces. Reading the New York Times story linking Trump and his minions to Russia, I could almost envision a CIA agent or two dictating the copy to reporters as they typed feverishly away.

As in all previous churnalism which has sought to drum up Russophobia (which they now seek to integrate into #Resistance, Inc.)  the propaganda and the weasel-wording are blatant. The "current and past" government sources are all anonymous.

The Times article, for example, takes a sarcastic off-the-cuff remark about Hillary's emails made by Trump last summer and then clumsily links it to concurrent conversations that some of his associates were having with some unnamed Russians:

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The dismissal of Mike Flynn is all of a piece with the shocking "news" that a bunch of American plutocrats were doing business with a bunch of Russian plutocrats, as if this were a new state of affairs and not the decades-long result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US welcome mat being put out for the new Russian oligarchy to invest in everything from New York luxury real estate to oil pipelines to uranium mines in the American west.

 The Times piece smarmily concludes:

 The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

The Washington establishment doing battle with Satan himself still wouldn't negate the fact that they are using the slimy McCarthyite (and Stalinesque) tactic of guilt by association.

We the people must not be sucked in to this elite war as unwitting co-propagandists. We should be asking them "where's the meat?" at the same time that we relentlessly question why they are so hell-bent on permanent war, unconstitutional surveillance on ordinary citizens as well as powerful generals, and what, exactly, their power struggle has got to do with the rest of us.

Their struggle is not our struggle. Their prize is not our prize. Not by a long shot.

Update, 2/16: The Democratic Party's veal pen organizations are already asking for money for #TheResistance based primarily on the Trump administration's alleged Russia connection. The goal is for impeachment; social and economic justice issues are taking a back seat. In other words, we are supposed to put all our cash and our hopes into Congressional investigations rather than taking matters into our own hands by getting out on the streets. After all, the Consensuals don't want us to get too much of a taste for direct action, lest we start demanding pie in the sky like single payer, universal health coverage. And the worst part is that the Democratic Party wants us to align ourselves with the unaccountable right-wing Deep State to achieve "progressive" goals.
 
Concomitant with the New York Times "scoop" referenced above, these appeals began flying in to my inbox.

MoveOn.Org --  "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

That's what we all need to ask—and what Congress must investigate—in the wake of revelations that Trump knew for weeks about Michael Flynn's secret and likely illegal conversations with Russian officials.

People's Action (describes itself as a consortium of "grassroots" organizing groups headquartered in Chicago) --  "Until an investigation is completed, Trump's mandate is suspect.... We will not let a potentially illegitimate president cut Medicare, privatize Social Security, repeal the Affordable Care Act and deport millions of our neighbors without a fight.

(The wording of this is clumsy, if not itself a bit suspect. So, it would be O.K. with them for a "legitimate" president to cut the social safety net and deport millions of our neighbors, as Obama has already done?)

Color of Change --  "While Trump is lying about millions of voter fraud cases, the real threat to our democracy is  Putin's involvement in our election and Russia's illicit ties to Trump and his administration. But even more threatening is Congress' refusal to do anything about it. Black people have fought to make our democracy real and we won't stand for any threats, foreign or domestic, to our ability to participate in free and fair elections."

A further indication that Democratic Party leaders are scared that the rabble will go beyond its appointed duties and attack them as well as Republicans at town halls is Chuck Schumer's appeal for help from Bernie Sanders. It is now Sanders's duty to make all the activists sit down and shut up.

According to the Washington Post, the Wall Street-friendly senator was shaken when protesters had the gall to demonstrate outside his own private residence recently. What gives? This was supposed to be a resistance against Trump and nothing but Trump, and now the agitators are converging on blue states. Oh, the horror.

They basically explained to Bernie, it looks like you could be the person that could calm down and make sure their energy and all this enthusiasm is directed in all the right proper channels,” (West Virginia Senator Joe) Manchin said. “Bernie has a voice, and if [protesters] want to be active, then direct them to where the problem may be or where they anticipate a problem.”

While Sanders is staying mum on the request, he has not, thus far, formally requested that his supporters stay mum about anything.

Normalizing Greed In the Age of Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(snip)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleepers Wake

Optional soundtrack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My published response:

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

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

That is just sad.

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

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

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

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

It's still the economy, stupid.

Democrats' Recipe For Success: Boycott Nordstrom

 Updated below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Amerika Grate Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is we detecting a pattern yet?

Cracking Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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