Fear Itself

"It's not the big things that are important to me, but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. I observe, note down the mosquito bites." -- Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness.

It's not so much that Donald Trump's Budget Manifesto of Hate is such a great big blow to our heads. For now, anyway, it's only a campaign speech dressed up in sadistic language and some alleged math.

 It's the ceaseless drone of the swarms of mosquitoes that's doing us in. By merely voicing their desire to punish our most vulnerable friends and family members, Trump and his Congressional cohort are accomplishing their core goal, which is inspiring fear. That we might not, after all, lose the daily bodily and social sustenance of Meals on Wheels; that we might not, after all, lose all our Medicaid and Medicare health coverage; that we might not, after all, get deported, beaten up or killed on the basis of our race, religion or ethnicity is of secondary importance to the main agenda of the oligarchs now directly running the government. The agenda is intimidation.

We're still only in Phase One of the Trump regime. And it behooves both sides of the duopoly to prolong his reign in the interest of maximum psychological control of the population. It's the anticipation of pain that does us harm before even one dollar of our Social Security is cut, before even one trip to our doctor's office is cancelled, before even one unionized nurse or public school teacher loses her job to the complete privatization of what is still left of the commons.

 We are being terrorized today, right this minute, by the mere threat of being punished tomorrow.

And once the Democrats make one of their feeble eleventh-hour deals with Republicans -- to perhaps rip more than the average number of holes in the social safety as opposed to tearing it to shreds in one fell swoop -- won't we psychologically tortured people feel ever so grateful to our leaders? We never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, do we? Our grit and determination and resilience and resistance will get us through, every single time. Rah, D-Team!

 Klemperer wrote in his diary: "How I dreaded the house search. And when the Gestapo came, I was quite cold and defiant. And how good our food tasted afterward! All the good things, which we had hidden and they had not found."

  A neoliberal gaslighting campaign is also on full bipartisan display in Congress. Democrats almost daily declare themselves absolutely helpless in the face of Trumpian tyranny, even as they make vague promises to save us if only we elect more candidates from within their own corrupt corporate apparatus. But for now, they say, we'll just have to wait Donald Trump out as they foment some more Russophobia to tide us over.

Dianne Feinstein, one of the highest ranking Democrats in the Senate, soothed that it's only a matter of time before we get some relief. There is no need right now for her and her liberal colleagues to personally confront Trump on his various conflicts of interest and his blatant breaches of the Constitution. As reported by Politico:

 How are we going to get him out?" the questioner asked.
"I think he's gonna get himself out," the California Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee replied.
Her comment was captured on video by LA Times reporter Javier Panzar, who posted the exchanges on Twitter. A Feinstein spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

So far, impeachment is off the table, just as it was once off the table for George W. Bush and his coterie of unindicted and still-thriving war criminals. Despite the mountains of evidence against Trump being unearthed almost daily, Feinstein claimed not to know whether he has committed any impeachable offenses. She did allow, however, that "questions are being raised" by such things as the Trump sons' international deal-making on behalf of the family. Trips for personal gain are being conducted on the taxpayer dime, and that doesn't look so good on the surface.

If Dianne Feinstein, with her estimated net worth of $42 million, can afford to bide her time, then so too must the frightened pensioner worried that her Meals on Wheels and her government heating assistance will get cut off. And once her food intake and her heat are mercifully reduced by a mere third, she'll rejoice just to be barely subsisting.

Meanwhile, we're told by liberal economist Robert Reich, "Washington is more divided, angry, bewildered and fearful - than I've ever seen it."

Oh, the poor things. It must be the upending of The Norms. The Republicans think Trump is nuts, and will pull the Party right down with him. Furthermore, Reich informs us, the White House itself is "a cesspool of intrigue and fear. Apparently everyone working there hates and distrusts everybody else."

  While Washington insiders are quivering and bickering, the CIA now enjoys carte blanche to assassinate at will with Predator and Reaper drones, the Pentagon has sent ground troops into Syria with no input or discussion by Congress, and a ravenous cabal of oligarchs makes the Robber Barons of the first Gilded Age look like angels by comparison. At least back then they built company towns and company stores to keep people indebted. If you're poor and indebted nowadays, they've been building privatized prisons to fulfill all your housing needs.

So while the political ruling class prepares for even more war by drumming up our fear of the Russians, the Social Contract is being ripped to pieces right under our noses.

There's been a lot of ink spilled recently about how comparing of Donald Trump's America to Adolf Hitler's Germany is wildly overblown. For one thing, Trump doesn't have thousands of Brownshirts running around the country beating hundreds of people up, every single day. In the United States, "only" about one person is killed by a law enforcement officer in any given 24-hour period. Such fascistic practices as New York City's "stop and frisk" police abuse of black and Latino men have eventually been ordered stopped by a functioning court system. And so far, every single one of Trump's anti-Muslim bans have been overturned by the judicial system.

We are still allowed to choose from among a field of candidates approved by a handful of billionaires. We still have a free press, despite the corporate consolidation of the media into six main conglomerates and the demise of independent and local newspapers. Trump can call it "fake news" all he wants, but he doesn't have the power to send in federal troops to shut down the New York Times and CNN. For one thing, his approval rating is only the 30-something percent range. Hitler demanded, and got, national loyalty based upon his decades of hard work building up his very own hate-based political party. 

Trump is more of an afterthought, a side-effect, an excrescence of decades of neoliberalism's hard work of feeding itself into a bloated and corrupt system of unaccountable capitalism

That "it" hasn't quite happened here yet doesn't mean it won't, or isn't happening already, like Klemperer's thousand little mosquito bites. The attacks on American social programs have been ongoing for decades, reaching their zenith with the Reagan Revolution, and continuing apace since then.

While we're being distracted by those damned Russians, Paul Ryan and his pals are tearing up the Social Contract in full public view but to little public fanfare. The first House vote to destroy Medicaid as we have known it since LBJ's 1960s Great Society anti-poverty legislation is scheduled for this Thursday. Since punishing more people has now been made slightly more cruel in order to attract more GOP hardliners, its chance of passage is considered to be slightly better than it was last week.

But you wouldn't know it from reading the front pages or turning on the TV news.

From the top of today's New York Times homepage:

Comey's Haunting News on Trump and Russia.

 Fresh Worries on Russia from Trump's Weary Defenders.

FBI Confirms Inquiry on Trump Team's Russia Ties.

Stone, a Trump Ally and Dirty Trickster, Under Investigation For Russia Connections.

Below what used to be called the "fold," we finally come to a piece about the planned destruction of Medicaid. In bloodless anodyne terms, the piece lists such additions to the GOP bill as allowing upstate (read: white) New York counties to reduce their Medicaid contributions to Albany (read: punishing "those people" in New York City.)

And in its opinion section, the Times today published an op-ed suggesting that Democrats and Republicans can heal their differences by allowing private insurance predators to market "universal catastrophic coverage" policies across state lines.

 "It would be a step consistent with President Trump’s bold message and it could resolve the current debate on Capitol Hill, now headed in a direction unlikely to satisfy anyone. President Trump has never shied away from thinking big, and now he has the potential to turn the politics of health care upside down with a populist solution that might go a long way toward solving one of the nation’s biggest problems," enthuses Benjamin Domenech, publisher of the right-wing Federalist.

Got that, proles? Read mainstream media, and develop a constant unhealthy fear of Russia. Continue to also relentlessly fear and loathe Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump. Cheer from your nosebleed seats as Democrats and pundits gleefully call out his constant lies, grandstand on his unproven Russian connections, ignore his proven decades-long track record of graft and corruption right here in the USA, and do nothing to remove him from office. After all, he brings lots of clicks, and cable and newspaper subscriptions, and ad revenue, and political donations from the sleepless and rattled population.

Quite deliberately, they never discuss Medicare for All as the only sane, humane and cost-effective counterweight to GOP nihilism. 

Instead, we are told to dream the impossible dream of someday being able to purchase true, universal and unaffordable catastrophic coverage. We'll need it, because heretofore treatable, but soon-to-be neglected and uncovered, illnesses will needlessly lead to more humanitarian catastrophes.

Just take one item from the "budget," and the planned annihilation of the most vulnerable among us becomes all too obvious. Trump's proposed draconian cuts to the US Department of Agriculture alone are bound to cause a huge spike in the rate of food-borne illness, which in turn could lead to many catastrophic cases of sepsis in such vulnerable people as infants and the elderly and the immuno-suppressed.

And speaking of death by a thousand mosquitoes, Trump is even attaching a greedy profit motive to the fight against the Zika virus. As Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All proponent and the most popular politician in America, wrote recently:

Now his administration, through the Army, is on the brink of making a bad deal, giving a French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, the exclusive license to patents and thus a monopoly to sell a vaccine against the Zika virus. If Mr. Trump allows this deal, Sanofi will be able to charge whatever astronomical price it wants for its vaccine. Millions of people in the United States and around the world will not be able to afford it even though American taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion on Zika research and prevention efforts, including millions to develop this vaccine.

The Department of Health and Human Services gave Sanofi $43 million to develop the Zika vaccine with the United States Army. And the company is expected to receive at least $130 million more in federal funding.

But look over there, it's Russia infiltrating our democracy! Our leaders will never be able to prove it, but they'll gladly keep up the act as long as the right people continue to get rich. 

Regardless of party affiliation, plutocrats will tolerate Trump because he deflects attention from the system which they created and of which they are such an integral, self-dealing part. Their resistance movement should not be our resistance movement. Don't buy into their buzz.

Don't be afraid of Russia. Be afraid instead of Paul Ryan's rushin' fingers, ripping the Social Contract into a thousand tiny shreds in the grim hope that we won't notice the real catastrophe until it's way too late. 

Weekend Open Thread

This incident, which just about sums up how many people are feeling this week, occurred not too far away from where I live. So on the off-chance you missed this viral vid (more than a million views and counting) here it is again.

The first part of the clip is the Republican plan for our mass extinction. The second, in slo-mo, is the Democratic version of the same process.

Hellbent Persistence: The Chelsea Clinton Story

Second in annoyance only to Donald Trump's Tweets are the persistent stories about how Chelsea Clinton is being "groomed" for public office. Every time I read one of these ubiquitous pieces, I can't help but wonder: who, exactly, is doing all this mysterious grooming?

Mom? Dad? The DNC? MSNBC? The Hamilton Project? The Center for American Progress? The articles never say, exactly. So I have no choice but to let my imagination run wild.

What immediately comes to mind, totally unbidden of course, are the libertines of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. These depraved characters have the persistent habit of assaulting, in a variety of ways, the young people whom they've kidnapped and imprisoned in a remote luxury resort castle. The violations commence only after a very rigorous grooming regimen in which the victims are transformed into compliant and trusting objects who never exhibit even a whimper of protest, let alone display any emotions or original thoughts. The grooming has a profound deadening effect upon them.

That De Sade's predators hailed from the highest echelons of the church, the nobility, and academia would prove all too realistically prescient. But that's a blog post for another day.  

So anyway, once I manage to get those horrid sadistic images out of my head, the next thing that occurs to me is what an insult it is to use the word "grooming" about an already hyper-educated and impeccably put together woman like Chelsea Clinton. How much more grooming can one living picture of perfection even stand?

The publicists planting all these stories about her solo debut on the public stage are, I assume, getting paid top dollar by Clinton World. So isn't it a bit degrading to keep using this "being groomed" trope about Chelsea, as though she were a dog or a horse? Not only is the phrase demeaning, it robs her of her own agency. It implies that she needs lots and lots of expert help to maintain her position in life. And we all know that Chelsea only got where she is today by virtue of her own grit, talent and persistence.

She's even written a new book about these unique qualities, directly plagiarizing channeling Elizabeth Warren's recent tirade against racist Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions before his confirmation. After obeying Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's order to stop persisting and shut up, Warren had bravely continued her speech outside the Senate Chamber, via Facebook. She persisted in reciting a letter written by Coretta Scott King and as a result, her feminist brand skyrocketed to new levels, most notably within the elite Pussy Hat Brigade. Chelsea has recently become a branded soldier of The Movement herself. This is evidenced by her recent spate of #ResistanceInc tweets directed at Donald Trump and her publicizing of her toddler daughter's debutante stint:

 Notice that Chelsea didn't quite get to the level of "no drones, no bombs, no wars."

Chelsea's mom even got into the act, tweeting about Warren, the woman she'd only recently spurned as a running mate: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted. So must we all."

And thus was a whole Persisterhood industry spawned. What - you thought this was democratic socialism? There are She Persisted energy bars, and She Persisted fashions, and even a She Persisted online store with products designed for the "woman warriors in your life." If you are a persistentrepreneur looking for product placement, there are experts to help you market your stuff. They will even send you a monthly inspirational story to help you get marching all the way to the bank.

A Movement Can't Go Ka-Ching If It Ain't Got No Bling

So what better time for Chelsea Clinton to rush out another book, and call it (surprise) She Persisted?

Given that she's probably only had a few weeks to cobble this tome together, with little to no time for original academic research or multiple revisions or relentless editing, Chelsea's publishers are marketing it direct-to-children - or what she adorably calls "tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world."

Expose the nursery school set to neoliberal Clintonism while they're still too young to resist. Groom them early, groom them often. 

According to the helpful plug planted in the New York Times:

The book will share the stories of 13 historical women who relentlessly pursued their goals in the face of opposition, including Harriet Tubman, Nellie Bly, Maria Tallchief and Oprah Winfrey.

Now hold it right there, and I'm not talking about the gratuitous addition of billionaire Oprah Winfrey. I'm talking about the need of Chelsea's publicist for a copy editor of her own. These women are historic, not historical. The word historical applies to all women and to all the humans and events of the past. They existed, therefore they were. Historic, on the other hand, correctly connotes that these people were unique or highly influential in their fields. Plus, since Oprah is not even dead yet, it is highly insulting to call her historical.

  So somebody needs a little grammar-grooming here, no? And puh-leeze -- shouldn't these lucky 13 ladies be termed Herstoric? If it can't be politically correct, then what hysterical good is it?

If you think this is too cute by half already, wait a minute, because we're not done yet. According to the Times puff piece, you'll have to hold your breath until She Persisted reaches bookstores on May 30 for "a cameo that is yet to be announced." 

I'm not exactly sure, but I think that what Chelsea teasingly means is a bonus chapter featuring one of the most relentlessly persistent people around. You'll have to buy the ticket before the big reveal, though; did you really think she'd be giving this book away? Hah! It'll set you back $17.99 for all 32 pages of it.

Anybody want to take a wild, wild guess as to the identity of Secret Cameo? Hint: her own last book was titled Stronger Together. Published in September last year, its first week sales were so awful, it should have set off an immediate persistent cacophony of alarm bells.

In a truly democratic country, the political life of this Mystery Cameo person  would be considered historical - as in The Blessed Past. But now that she is reportedly being groomed to become the next mayor of the Income Inequality Capital of the World, I think we can safely say that it when it comes to this family, the chutzpah alone is of truly historic and earth-shattering proportions. It's been consequential, to say the least.

It's Surreal: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

The Moral Bankrupts of the Duopoly

Are you among the millions of Americans sweating the possibility that you'll lose your health care if Republican "reform" gets passed?

Well, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wants to make you feel better. In the event that you do have to endure more pain, suffering, depression and premature death because of GOP sadism, at least you'll have helped make the Democrats look good in the process.

This is exactly how Krugman grotesquely closes his piece on the "Trumpcare apocalypse."

Even though the legislation kicking tens of millions of people off Medicaid and increasing the premiums for Obamacare coverage to even more unaffordable proportions now looks to be D.O.A., Krugman doesn't put its passage outside  the realm of possibility. Some right-wing legislators are so depraved and so fanatical that giving a giant middle finger to the fact-based analysts of the Congressional Budget Office might be an opportunity too good for them to pass up:

Something like this C.B.O. score was a foregone conclusion; would it really have mattered much if it were 15 million losing insurance, not 24 million? How was this supposed to work out politically?

Again, I wouldn’t count out the possibility that this law will be rammed through regardless, with budget analyses relegated to the category of fake news. Democrats might even want to hope that this happens, so that there is no question about who to blame if insurance collapses. But the lemming-like way Republicans rushed into this disaster is still amazing.

The cancer patient on Medicaid whose chemo gets cut off when those proposed lifetime benefit caps go into effect will feel so vindicated. It will be so worth it to say "I told you so" on your deathbed, just to get the satisfaction of watching  multimillionaire Nancy "Embrace the Suck" Pelosi go into nonstop virtue-signalling and fundraising mode, as the United States morbidity and mortality rates skyrocket to even more epic proportions. And if more deplorable Trump voters suffer than righteous Democratic voters, so much the better. It's a prospect to absolutely die for, if you're like Krugman and have "the conscience of a liberal" as well as guaranteed insurance coverage of your own.

The Democrats are as morally bankrupt, in their own smarmy way, as the Republicans. Their tepid health care "fight" is not so much about protecting the tens of millions of people from Social Darwinist ideology as it is about winning back power on the theory that "they suck less." And they conveniently forget that what they are fighting so hard to protect is a Republican plan in the first place. No wonder the Republicans are so tied up in knots over its "repeal." It's hard to call something socialistic and then not admit that the main socialistic component of Obamacare is that it is welfare for the insurance cartel.

Assuming that liberals do manage to prevail in the 2018 mid-terms, they still have no intention of rallying around HR 676 and similar single payer health insurance proposals castigated by Krugman and his ilk during the Democratic primaries and still ignored by them as a sure-fire to win over working class voters.  They will instead be celebrating the fact that they managed to "save" the for-profit predatory health insurance system. Or as Krugman so cynically hopes, they will be gloating all the way to the bank.

Let's get real. Human lives and bodies are way too profitable to just let Obamacare as we know it go the way of the rotary phone. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton put it recently, the pharmaceutical industry is not about to give up its cannibalism when there's so much money to be made by both treating and causing disease in people. Obamacare and its kludge of insurance predators and outsourced Medicaid plans are in the same predatory rent-seeking category as payday loans and rent-to-buy housing scams and charter schools.

Another prime example of rent-seeking is that the Medicaid is funding opioid prescriptions for low-income workers, Deaton said. The results are workers who are becoming addicted and overdosing while profits are going to the Sackler family which owns Purdue Pharma that makes OxyContin.
Deaton said he favors a single-payer health system only because our current part-private and part-public system is exquisitely designed to give opportunities for rent-seeking.
“So I, who do not believe in socialized health-care, would advocate a single-payment system...because it will get this monster that we’ve created out of the economy and allow the rest of capitalism to flourish without the awful things that healthcare is doing to us,” he said.

Democrats have cleverly taken to calling the GOP health bill "Making America Sick Again." Actually, "Making America Sicker by Forcing Poor People to Buy their Own OxyContin" would be more on point. But that would be both too much of a mouthful, and a tacit admission that Democrats like things just the way they are.

 It also helps that the Sackler family of billionaires has generously donated to both sides of the morally bankrupt Duopoly while literally getting away with mass murder.

As a 2016 investigation by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity shows, drug companies have spent more than $880 million on lobbying and political contributions since 2000. Compare this to only $4 million spent on similar influencing efforts by organizations which exist to combat opioid addiction and the proliferation of pill mills, and you begin to understand why there is so much turmoil in bipartisan circles over Obamacare repeal and Medicaid destruction.

Somebody should alert that hyper-capitalist Donald Trump about the imminent danger to the oligarchic bottom line which GOP "reform" represents, especially since he himself has advocated for a single payer health care system on more than one occasion. 

If we can't appeal to his psychopathic selfishness, perhaps we can appeal to his psychopathic greed.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party should probably just hurry up and get on with its own collapse so that a new progressive party can arise from the ashes.  

As for HR 676,  re-introduced by John Conyers in January, it has now been referred to the House Committee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs, where it is bound to get maximum attention from the truth-telling mainstream media. Maybe they'll get around to discussing it as soon as they come down off their own latest high: blissing out over two whole pages of an old Donald Trump tax return.

So when you get the email from the White House asking you to share your own Obamacare horror story, you might consider just sending the president a copy of HR 676, that fantastic and fair single payer bill. It would save both him and you, like, an unbelievable amount of money. Best of all, taxpayers wouldn't be on the hook for expensive elective cosmetic procedures for rent-seeking plutocrats. The ultra-rich need to have some skin in the game just like everybody else. HR 676 would force them to pay for their facelifts and tummy tucks out of their own deep pockets. Sad.

This bill establishes the Medicare for All Program to provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with free health care that includes all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.
Only public or nonprofit institutions may participate. Nonprofit health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that deliver care in their own facilities may participate.
Patients may choose from participating physicians and institutions.
Health insurers may not sell health insurance that duplicates the benefits provided under this bill. Insurers may sell benefits that are not medically necessary, such as cosmetic surgery benefits.
The bill sets forth methods to pay institutional providers and health professionals for services. Financial incentives between HMOs and physicians based on utilization are prohibited.
The program is funded: (1) from existing sources of government revenues for health care, (2) by increasing personal income taxes on the top 5% of income earners, (3) by instituting a progressive excise tax on payroll and self-employment income, (4) by instituting a tax on unearned income, and (5) by instituting a tax on stock and bond transactions. Amounts that would have been appropriated for federal public health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), are transferred and appropriated to carry out this bill.

Pity the Poor Deep State

If Donald Trump hates Big Brother, and reasonable people hate Donald Trump, then it naturally follows that reasonable people should love Big Brother:

 Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, wrote on Twitter: “We are whistle-blowers, press, judges, legislators, cooks, teachers. We are #DeepState. We are the American people.”

That tongue-in-cheek message is the centerpiece of a New York Times "interpreter" article which solemnly tells us that although there is no such thing as the Deep State, it is getting a bad rap. The horrible stuff you're hearing about spies hacking into your iPhones and TVs is naught but a paranoid delusion of conspiracy buffs. So our convoluted duties as loyal citizen-consumers are, first, to deny that the deep state exists, and second, to co-opt its meaning. We must bowdlerize it and render it harmless and huggable.

Democratic Party Bumper Sticker

 The Times piece, written by Max Fisher, employs the usual experts to create a field of straw men and sophistry. The talking points:

--America is not Egypt or Pakistan. We are a democracy, and the good folks at the CIA, the FBI and the NSA are getting a totally bad rap from the new nutty president and his alt-right minions. The dedicated bureaucrats who listen in to the world's conversations and collect all your emails are people, just like you. If it weren't for Donald Trump crazily tweeting that he's been wiretapped, the spy agencies could continue doing their unaccountable thing in the dark. Because this is a democracy.

--American spies and the secret police are like climate scientists. They are united in professional victimhood. Just as the right-wingers have politicized researchers by forcing them out of their laboratories to defend the science, so too are the spooks being forced into the glare of sunlight. And it's all because of Trump's crazy allegations. We can thus deduce from the article that climate change research is very similar to spying on people and fomenting coups in foreign countries. CIA agents who torture Muslims in black site prisons and FBI agents working undercover to undermine protest movements deserve the same level of privacy as climate investigators who study receding polar ice caps and rising methane levels in the atmosphere.

--Look what's happened in Turkey. Its authoritarian president also used the Deep State paranoia method to destroy democratic institutions and kill a whole bunch of innocent people. You don't want that to happen here too, do you? You want to live, don't you?  So please, people, let the Intelligence Community carry on with its secret work in order to save democracy from people. Trade your privacy for an illusion of security.

Max Fisher is an alumnus of the corporate-funded "explainer" website known as Vox (the populi part has been left off for very good reason, since the writing is mostly done by self-described wonks tasked with pushing the neoliberal Clinton/Obama narrative to the ignorant populace.)  You might remember Max Fisher from a previous Times "interpreter" piece in which he explained why we should all hate and fear Russia, and love the secretive R.A.N.D. Corporation.

Thus does Fisher continue his strange love for our unaccountable and money-bloated "intelligence community":

Mr. Trump has put institutions under enormous stress. He has attacked them publicly, implied he would reject intelligence findings that cast his election in a poor light, hobbled agencies by failing to fill critical positions and cut off bodies like the National Security Council from shaping policy.

That has forced civil servants into an impossible dilemma: acquiesce, allowing their institution to be sidelined, or mount a defense, for example through leaks that counter Mr. Trump’s accusations or pressure him into restoring normal policy-maker practices.

There's nothing worse than forcing Top Secret America to endure the agony of the leak. After all, the Obama administration has just got done prosecuting more government whistleblowers than in all previous administrations combined. It even instituted a program called Insider Threat, which mandated that even non-IC government bureaucrats must report one another's reading material and marital infidelities on pain of getting fired for failure to snoop on the job. But that was all being done in-house. And now Trump, taunting bully that he is, is forcing them to take the fight to the public playground. 

Max Fisher writes:

When, for example, Mr. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones, he forced the F.B.I. into an unappealing choice: Let the accusation slide, though it implies the bureau broke the law, or rebuke the president and risk the appearance of playing politics.

Either way, the bureau loses some of its internal influence, public stature or, quite possibly, both. Losing stature can be especially dangerous, as the bureau needs public trust to effectively operate.

A reputation is a terrible thing to lose, especially since Americans have so long admired the FBI for wiretapping and smearing Martin Luther King Jr and writing him a vicious anonymous letter which urged him to commit suicide. 

When the Church Commission concluded in the 1970s that the FBI was a perfectly willing partner in all manner of political slime and democratic abuses, the police state might have gotten knocked down, but it quickly got up again.  Because as we all know, 9/11 Changed Everything.

We now have the Patriot Act, which has raised the stature of the FBI to such pristine heights that it can now secretly demand your personal information on the slightest whim or pretext. Congress has granted the agency the most unchecked authority it's enjoyed since Theodore Roosevelt secretly formed it more than a century ago as his own private spy detail, with neither the input nor the authorization of Congress.

As reported by Kevin Gosztola, since 2010 the bullied FBI has gotten virtually all its secret FISA Court bugging requests granted. It's enhanced its stellar public reputation by obtaining "national security letters" which have allowed it to nobly force companies to relinquish the credit card bills, phone records, and Internet search histories of more than 14,000 of their "terroristic" customers.

 For the most part, Barack Obama was able to effectively tamp down liberal resistance to the totally nonexistent Deep State through the magic of his charm offensive, even to the point of placating German Chancellor Angela Merkel when word leaked out that the American surveillance state had eavesdropped on her cell phone calls.

Now, Donald Trump is stirring up the whole can of worms. He is picking on poor lovable Big Brother, all for his own paranoid and selfish reasons. Trump must be stopped. 

It's getting so bad that IC flacks are being forced, all over again, to Tweet or go on the Sunday shows to flail against the cold hard truth that the NSA does, in fact, spy on Americans without a warrant by way of a loophole in the law allowing it to freely listen in to foreign phone calls with an American at one end. Or, if that won't work, the US can always farm out its domestic spying to other friendly countries, like Great Britain and Israel, in its surveillance-sharing network.

 Of course, this need not worry you, especially when you have an establishment organ like the New York Times to obfuscate and interpret and explain it so that may recover from any lingering ignorance and be #StrongerDeepStateTogether.

We are all Winston Smith now. So take a tip from his creator, the late great George Orwell, and come in from out of the cold:

 O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Deep State R Us: Love it, or leave it. Or talk back to your TV if you have nowhere else to go. You won't even need your tinfoil hat to know that it's listening. Your concerns and your complete satisfaction are very important to it.

Weekend Open Thread

What are you thinking, doing, watching, reading, listening to?

Smear of RT Backfires

As part of its relentless Russophobic campaign against Donald Trump, the New York Times this week ran a hit piece on RT, the Russian government's TV news network. The article, written by Steven Erlanger, is just one more chapter in the manufactured saga which has the all-powerful and evil Vladimir Putin hacking our election, orchestrating the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and elevating Donald Trump, alleged Russian stooge, to the highest office in the land.

One of the sources for the Times piece is the anti-Putin Atlantic Council, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank composed of about equal parts neocon hawks and liberal interventionists. In other words, it's run by a bipartisan collective of warmongers who get their paychecks from such entities as Goldman Sachs, General Dynamics and Exxon-Mobil. So, to prove just how treacherous a stooge he really is, President Trump proceeded to nominate Atlantic Council Director Jon Hunt as his new ambassador to Russia within 24 hours of the Times article's publication.

Oops. There is so much head-fakery and so much gaslighting going on, it's hard to tell just who is punking who on any given day in this, the twilight of the American Empire. The appointment of the anti-Putin Huntsman does kind of take the wind out of the sails of the anti-RT, anti-Trump critics. It kind of turns this whole Russophobic narrative of the TrumPutin clone right on its ear.

Then again, maybe not. The anti-Russia hysterics have dug themselves into such a deep hole they don't know how to get out of it. This saga will likely continue to the bitter end, if it ever does end. 

Further deepening their hole is the WikiLeaks revelation this week that the CIA has a program which can falsely trace leaks back to any source that it chooses. Spy agency assertions -- that the leaks of DNC emails showing how the party sabotaged the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the subsequent dump of the Podesta email trove proving Hillary's allegiance to Wall Street -- were both traced directly to Russia renders their "high confidence" even more suspect.

And if all else fails, and it does seem to be failing, they'll blame those selfish, disloyal millennials who tune in to such RT shows as Watching the Hawks and Redacted Tonight. Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden has already gone so far as to accuse millennial hires of dumping the CIA documents through WikiLeaks. It's just terrible that the Intelligence Community is turning into an assisted living facility with no other choice but to import hacker slackers to perform the dirty deeds of an aging Establishment.

But back to the RT hit job by the New York Times.

Erlanger, the paper's London bureau chief, begins his particular smear piece by graciously granting RT executives the opportunity to deny that the media group is "an agent of Kremlin policy and a tool directly used by President Vladimir V. Putin to undermine Western democracies — meddling in the recent American presidential election and, European security officials say, trying to do the same in the Netherlands, France and Germany, all of which vote this year."

He goes through a laundry list of so-called experts who opine that RT, despite all its protestations to the contrary, is not only a propaganda mill, it is the actual inspiration for the epidemic of "fake news" currently plaguing the great American psyche.

Erlanger writes:

Even as Russia insists that RT is just another global network like the BBC or France 24, albeit one offering “alternative views” to the Western-dominated news media, many Western countries regard RT as the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West.

Western attention focused on RT when the Obama administration and United States intelligence agencies judged with “high confidence” in January that Mr. Putin had ordered a campaign to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” discredit Hillary Clinton through the hacking of Democratic Party internal emails and provide support for Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate said he wanted to improve relations with Russia.

Erlanger then insinuates that RT once hacked C-Span. A technical glitch in a broadcast last January caused a pristine and democratic Congressional hearing to be over-ridden for a few minutes by "Russian propaganda."  Erlanger immediately covers himself by admitting that well,yes, this was only a technical snafu on the part of C-Span itself. But just by writing about the incident again, he slyly succeeds in raising new doubts in the minds of his American readers. It's another variation of the propaganda technique of damaging a reputation through the magic of innuendo.

Erlanger continues by innocently acknowledging his own profound confusion:

Watching RT can be a dizzying experience. Hard news and top-notch graphics mix with interviews from all sorts of people: well known and obscure, left and right. They include favorites like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Noam Chomsky, the liberal critic of Western policies; odd voices like the actress Pamela Anderson; and cranks who think Washington is the source of all evil in the world.

But if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin.

Translation: anyone refusing to declare full allegiance to Big Brother USA is a nut. Noam Chomsky is the same person as Alex Jones. Everything bad you ever heard about American wars and the military-industrial complex and Wall Street greed and income inequality and rigged elections? It's all in your head, because obviously you never would have felt disgruntled unless you were totally and unknowingly assimilated by the Russian borg.

 To deflect legitimate criticism of the American mainstream media, where 90% of all information is controlled and disseminated by six corporate-funded conglomerates, Erlanger quotes another expert claiming that RT's only goal is to spread political, economic and media influence. Of course, nothing that you watch on CNN has anything to do with selling forever wars by means of giving non-stop coverage to mass shootings and terror attacks and endless campaign coverage to Donald Trump.

CNN and other American outlets defending themselves against Trump's Twitter attacks are not the same thing as RT defending itself against attacks from American media mouthpieces. Such a defense is just another indication of its propaganda motive, according to Erlanger's sources. What is wrong with them, reporting about the ongoing smear campaign against them? Such complaints only prove their essential guilt. They doth protest too much.

Meanwhile, Erlanger slantingly agonizes, RT "is both a slick modern television network, dressed up with great visuals and stylish presenters, and a content farm that helps feed the European far right. Viewers find it difficult to discern exactly what is journalism and what is propaganda, what may be 'fake news' and what is real but presented with a strong slant."

After briefly reverting to fair and balanced mode and allowing another group of journalists to deny that RT is nothing but an alt-right propaganda mill with a leftist gloss, Erlanger dutifully pivots right back to his Security State sources so as to double down on the smear.

The gist of his whole piece is that if you, the American news consumer, has any doubts about the goodness of the people running your country, then it is just possible that RT has taken over your brain if you've watched any of its programs. Says one NATO public relations flack quoted in Erlanger's article: "Over time, it's more about hard power and disinformation." (So if you're a fan of such respected and well-regarded RT hosts as Larry King, Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, Thom Hartmann or Ed Schultz, you'd better watch out. Hurry on over to CNN and let the stentorian voice of Wolf Blitzer help you overcome any sickly inhibitions you might still harbor about our trillion-dollar wars.)

Ben Nimmo, another NATO flack who now gets paid "studying" RT for above-mentioned pro-war, NATO-aligned Atlantic Council, directly accuses the Russian media network of acting as a conduit for "hacked material" such as Clinton campaign director John Podesta's emails.

Maybe Atlantic Council Director Jon Huntsman, Trump's new ambassador to Russia, can get to the bottom of all this nasty propaganda and hackery once he lands in Moscow. Or maybe not. Just like Barack Obama, who named him his own ambassador to China, Huntsman is well-known for being something of an ideological chameleon with the added charming ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth. "If Trump continues to pursue rapprochement with the Kremlin," warns that other Deep State mouthpiece, The Washington Post, "suspicions will run very high about his motives, and Huntsman will be called upon to defend the policy as beneficial to the national interest."

With all the hysteria over a foreign government influencing American elections, it's notable that the Atlantic Council, with its assignment of a staff person to do nothing but "analyze" RT's nefarious influence, is itself accused of being financially compromised by foreign governments.

 It's received donations from nearly two dozen countries since 2008. 

Under political pressure, the Atlantic Council finally released its foreign donor list in 2013. Besides taking lobbying cash from such repressive authoritarian regimes as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, it also relies heavily on donations from various oligarch-controlled energy cartels, most notably in Turkey.

Other donors to the Atlantic Council comprise a veritable who's who of the global plutonomy -- a whole panoply of billionaires, multinational corporations and media outlets. The full list, found here, includes Exxon-Mobil, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, 21st Century Fox, Novartis, Pfizer, the Blackstone Group, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and JP Morgan Chase. If you're interested in a definition of the "National Interest," simply refer to this list.

The funding of mainstream media propaganda which insanely equates progressive humanitarian policies with right-wing authoritarianism can be a very expensive proposition. So it's nice to see all these plutocrats sharing the wealth among themselves, isn't it? Smart-sounding, constantly-aired defenses of hyper-capitalism in the Times and the Post and on CNN and MSNBC do not come cheap, after all.

  So it seems that Donald Trump has made a very savvy choice in Jon Huntsman. It makes it even more obvious that the smear campaign against RT is just another one of those sweet-smelling toxic smokescreens giving more cover to the usual suspects of the global plutonomy.

It's somewhat shocking, as well as bleakly entertaining, whenever the oligarchs break out of their self-protective molds and start bashing and bitching at each other right in full public view. Is the Trumplandia crime family really doing battle against the Deep State cartel, or are they only characters in an epic soap opera designed to keep our minds off our own everyday miseries and precarious existences?

Pick a side. Or don't. Stay tuned. Or not.