The Neoliberal's Guide to Resisting Trump

#Resistance alert! The Trump administration plans to axe stringent nutrition requirements for school lunches as well as delay the already-delayed consumer labeling of salty, sugary prepackaged food product. 

 This rollback of one of former First Lady Michelle Obama's signature initiatives is not only putting Our Kids'™ health at risk. It's also damaging the public relations campaigns of tax-averse, rent-seeking transnational corporations and the titans of the global plutonomy.

Somebody has got to scold Donald Trump. scold him hard, and scold him often. Not impeach him, mind you, because he is a serious crisis just too good to let go to waste. We must keep him around awhile longer and give all the professional virtue-signalers a quick and easy target. Because this president is not just a fish in a barrel, he's a bloated barracuda in a blimp. A target this easy and this entertaining likely won't come our way again for a very long time.

So Mrs. Obama has been getting lots of praise this week for valiantly and sarcastically standing up to Trump at her annual Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) confab. While not directly naming him or any of his gang, she accused his regime, in no uncertain terms, of not caring whether Our Kids™ are eating "crap." It's a new edgy Michelle, going outside the former first lady box of politesse.

Bold, feisty, and unleashed are just some of the verbal accolades being showered upon Mrs. Obama by the media.

What she said was true and admirable as far as it went. But she would have been far bolder had she also mentioned the ongoing crisis of childhood hunger in America. She failed to mention that one out of every four school-aged kids in the United States is now considered "food insecure." Too many families simply cannot afford the fresh, healthy whole grains, lean meats and fresh fruits and vegetables which Michelle Obama prescribes for them. The bottom 80 percent of income earners haven't gotten a raise in decades. The inequality gap is increasing all the time. The price of food continues to outpace parents' ability to adequately feed their children.

At no time during Michelle Obama's appearance at last week's culinary summit - or for that matter, at no time during her entire eight-year tenure as the self-proclaimed Mom in Chief™ -- did she ever call upon Congress to increase federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This is not surprising, given that her economically conservative husband actually cut spending on food stamps in several of his austerity budget proposals. Even after the neoliberal austerity craze was soundly debunked as oligarchic flimflam, Obama still slashed an additional $8.7 billion from the program last year. In the first year of his administration, during the height of the financial crisis, he'd even re-allocated stimulus funds earmarked for extra SNAP benefits toward implementation of Michelle's "Let's Move" exercise campaign.

She soon expanded that White House initiative to a philanthro-capitalist franchise called the Partnership for a Healthier America, which she still chairs alongside former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and current New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Frist, a Republican who resigned in disgrace after the reactionary Terry Schiavo fiasco, is now a wealthy lobbyist who also sits on the boards of various charities and for-profit research facilities.  Booker, considered a prime contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is a Wall Street-funded liberal whose most recent claim to fame was his vote to kill a measure allowing importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. As a participant in the so-called Food Stamp challenge a few years ago, he expressed shock that his $30 weekly stipend barely covered the cost of a small bottle of the imported olive oil he apparently cannot live without.

Donald Trump's value as the useful idiot in the Neoliberal Thought Collective is what actually helps keep the corporate wing of the Democratic Party going. Michelle Obama is not advocating for enhanced direct financial aid to struggling families for the very simple reason that the rich donors who fund her Partnership for a Healthier America initiative do not want "their" money spent directly on poor people via increased taxes.

 They do, however, desperately need to be perceived as good corporate citizens who care about the ever-growing ranks of needy Americans. If they can increase their profits and improve their brands through their self-aggrandizing association with the popular Obamas, so much the better for their bottom lines.

The PHA mission statement says it all:

 The Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) is devoted to working with the private sector to ensure the health of our nation’s youth by solving the childhood obesity crisis.

Although there is a correlation between poverty and obesity, nowhere on the PHA website are the words "poverty" or "income inequality" ever mentioned. Also missing in action are corporate greed, plutocracy and oligarchy. So let all good-thinking billionaires direct the public wrath directly at the decadent corpus of Dorito addict Donald J. Trump. Let us all accuse him of wanting to hook the youth of America on junk food. By channeling our hatred, let us all feel so good about ourselves as we continue paying slave wages to the workers of the world.

As an added incentive, potential donors are reminded on several Partnership web pages that "90% of consumers are more likely to switch brands to one associated with a good cause, given similar price and quality."

So let's take a look at just who is benefiting from this neoliberal health initiative ostensibly aimed at preventing a country full of sick, fat, lazy kids.

Walmart 

Despite its anti-obesity pledge to Michelle Obama, the retail grocery behemoth is a huge source of diet-related health problems. Although Mrs. Obama successfully got them to agree - one day, in the future - to put nutrition information labels on their foodstuffs, people on limited incomes are still forced to opt for cheaper food high in salt and fat.  So because of Walmart's meaningless promises, the onus is more than ever before on the poor for their "poor choices," and the Walton family can still pretend they care. No matter that they own as much wealth as the bottom 40% of American families, that they pay below-subsistence wages to their employees, and that they want to destroy public education as we know it. They're graciously allowing themselves to be touted by Partnership for a Healthier America as social service champions. Ka-ching!

Nestle 

 This company is literally sucking drought-stricken California even drier so as to continue making obscene profits on its bottled water subsidiary. But who cares, because Michelle Obama is a huge fan of bottled water herself.  Her own branded subsidiary, called "Drink Up!" puts its name right on the labels of most brands of bottled water you find in the grocery store. As an added attraction, the lead-poisoned residents of Flint, Michigan, are still being forced to use bottled water in lieu of getting their toxic pipes replaced.

Sodexo

 This Fortune 500 multinational was the most recent recipient of the PHA's coveted Partner of the Year Award. To qualify for this honor, a company must have proven that it "is working to ensure the health of our nation’s youth, making healthier choices more affordable and accessible to families and children across the country. The partner must demonstrate how it is executing key strategies beyond the PHA commitment, including focusing on those populations disproportionately impacted by obesity; doing well while doing good; using an innovative approach to address childhood obesity; or creating a ripple effect within their industry."

Here's how Sodexo has been doing ripplingly well (profiting) these past few years. Among Sodexo's innovative impacts are wages so abysmally low that its workers have gone out on strike on several occasions. Students at nine American colleges and universities have boycotted the company in recent years to show worker solidarity and also to protest Sodexo's lucrative investment in private, for-profit prisons.

Sodexo once sued to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and accused it of racketeering for daring to organize its workers. And in 2012, right down the street from me at the State University of New York at New Paltz, a Sodexo regional manager personally disrupted a student demonstration by tearing up protest signs. The following year, Sodexo hamburger was outlawed in Great Britain after inspectors detected horse DNA in the beef patties. There have also been several reports of physical prisoner and military recruit abuse by Sodexo employees.

But look over there, Mrs. Obama -- it's the dastardly Donald, not caring one crap about all the crap Our Kids™ are eating. What's wrong with this guy, anyway, ignoring scores of corporate pledges to reduce sodium content by the year Zero at the very latest. Still, if all goes according to Neoliberal Thought Collective plan, the more frequently that he goes low, the better they will look as their profits soar as high as a gigantic snort of the highest grade capitalist cocaine.

They are in no great hurry to get rid of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, besides the three corporate luminaries I listed above,  there are plenty of other plutocratic do-gooders clamoring for their share of the greed-washing attention and a chance at winning this year's Key Strategizing Award. Many of them are start-ups specifically created to pad PHA's list of sponsors, while others are subsidiaries of the parent donors, and still others are public relations front groups simply posing as companies. (see my final entry for an example of the front group genre.)

 Here's a sampling from the complete list:

Aagwatt

 A Chicago-based bottled water startup whose modest and circumspect mission is to "educate, satiate and innovate for the betterment of humanity..... We strive to fuse the service of free education into everyday consumer products to bolster, foster, and reinforce an academic learning experience. At AAGWATT™, we strive to make sure our products and brands speak to the 'student experience' and in turn to help students achieve their academic goals. Our first product, which is already on the market in select locations, is HYDROCATION® bottled water. HYDROCATION® is AAGWATT™’s flagship brand that places key educational concepts on product labels that are designed to help facilitate the student’s mission to obtain their degree. The HYDROCATION® educational labels are interactive; if you scan the image on the product label you can learn more information about that particular area of study and concept."

What the aagwatt!  Michelle should immediately send Donald Trump a whole case of this educational water to counteract both his excessive salt-saturated Dorito thirst and his profound ignorance. This brilliant beverage seems guaranteed to correct his Tweeting grammar overnight as it stuffs his massive head chock-full of reality and other facts. Whoever said Trump has a monopoly on bullshit simply isn't drinking enough of the right stuff.

American Beverage Association

  Donald should actually love this lobbying conglomerate, because its members' massively unhealthy drinks are made in America, sold in America, and massively, massively consumed in America. Their products are one of the leading causes of obesity and Type II Diabetes and hypertension in America. But to help deflect our attention from these facts, the ABA has partnered with Michelle Obama's health club to put their pricey bottled water on the shelves next to all their sugary sodas. Their official motto is actually very similar to that of the Democratic Party: "We Find Strength in Unity." You have to admit that this is the perfect snappy comeback to Trump's own "Ignorance Is Strength" shtick.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield

The least that this medical insurance behemoth could do was add its name to healthy greed-washing, given the record profits it has enjoyed under the Affordable Care Act. When Michelle Obama was so sarcastically dissing Donald at her health summit, she was also implicitly championing the rights of increasingly consolidated and rightly endangered private insurance. Anthem and other predators couldn't turn a profit without a constant supply of healthy young human bodies from which to suck monetary nourishment in the form of onerous co-pays and deductibles.

Blue Sea Development

Here's another corporation that should be right up Trump's alley. It's a New York-based real estate development company which, like Trump, receives generous corporate welfare assistance via tax credits. It inveigled its way into Michelle Obama's consortium by pledging to build playgrounds and hydroponic gardens, with 25 percent of its units designated as "affordable,' thereby more than qualifying it for the government subsidies not available to mere tenants. Among the investors is too big to fail/jail megabank JP Morgan Chase.

Haws 

Hee hee. This is just one of the many private water product companies affiliated with the Drink Up! subsidiary of  Michelle Obama's health partnership. For a limited time only, all orders will be accompanied by a free personal emergency eyewash bottle. Could there be any more perfect remedy for chronic Trump fatigue? The company also sells "Hydration Stations" for use in office settings, as well as socially responsible fancy hygiene faucets called EyePods.


Hyatt Hotels

This chain has pledged to serve guests' children poolside snacks containing 16% fewer calories and 25% less sodium than, say, a Trump-owned property with Doritos coming out the wazoo. It helps immensely that Hyatt is owned and run by Chicago's Pritzker family, early financial backers of Barack Obama, who duly appointed billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker as his second term commerce secretary, once she'd settled that nasty labor dispute with hotel workers. Serving healthy snacks will no doubt attract many more good-thinking guests to the pool.

KinderCare Learning Centers

This is a for-profit national chain of day care centers. Acquired by sometime Donald Trump advisor and convicted junk bond king Michael Milken for $1 billion in 2005, it's the largest chain of its kind in the United States.  Although its teacher salaries and worker morale are reportedly far below national norms, management has nevertheless agreed to serve healthier snacks. Mothers will therefore flock to its doors knowing that both the chain and its chained providers are part of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative. Donald Trump should really consider investing in this exploitative outfit, in case he hasn't already done so. Show us those tax returns, Donald, to prove that you care about Our Kids™!

Kwik Trip

Not to be confused with the Simpsons' Kwik-E Mart, nor with the store in the movie Clerks which sells cigarettes to four-year-olds. To help Kwik and similar overpriced convenience emporia salvage their horrendous reputations, Michelle Obama has convinced them to stock their shelves with a few fruit and veggie choices to make it appear as though they care about Our Kids™. There was no agreement, of course, to actually reduce the mainstay junk food selections, especially an in-store brand temptingly called Urge. Because, you know, investors can never quit the urge to extract every last crumb.

Lamar Advertising

Owns and maintains 325,000 highway eyesores all across our dystopian American landscape. So keep your bottle of emergency designer eyewash handy! But seriously, Donald Trump should be interested, because this billboard company also doubles as a real estate investment trust fund. So when his administration flacks insist they still have utmost respect for Michelle Obama, I suspect that they sincerely mean every word of what they say.

Mars Food

In exchange for some great publicity and possible future awards, this candy manufacturing goliath has pledged to Michelle Obama that it will reduce the sodium content in its crap food products by "an average of  20%" by 2021! By making this promise, it purports to encourage healthy eating habits right now this very minute! Can you say awards gala? On the other hand, since Mars was also part of the corporate effort to prevent GMO labeling on its food products, Donald Trump is likely a huge fan in more ways than one. On the other, other hand, Trump is also apt to tetchily hate it, given that Obama's State Department had honored the company for promising, one of these days, to stop abusing its African cocoa bean pickers.


Mercedes Benz USA

It promised to make car buyers sign a pledge never, ever to let their kids eat crap food as they recline their sedentary selves in its luxurious, polluting gas guzzlers. Kidding! It actually "pledged $10.5 million to build a national, sports-based youth coaching force. That money is being distributed through grants to Laureus USA, which helps identify, train, place and support coaches and youth sporting organizations nationwide. Mercedes-Benz commits to training 1,000 coaches in after-school sporting programs in order to reach 150,000 children across the country."

Also too, it gives "capacity-building grants" to an outfit called Girls On the Run, which is not to be confused with actual human girls getting individual cash grants, or anything like that. Charities give to charities give to other charities. It's a nice legal way to launder whole carloads full of money.

Nike, Inc

Pledged to give a few more millions to the obesity charity in exchange for more free publicity. Michelle Obama famously joined its ad campaign in Chicago on the exact same day that Mayor Rahm Emanuel shut down 50 public schools and fired a bunch of teachers. Overpriced Nike sneakers made by Asian wage slaves will help Chicago kids run faster through the gunfire on their way to their schools in distant neighborhoods. Not to be outdone, President Obama also pimped for Nike in a speech touting his doomed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now it seems the company will just have to wait for its 40 cents-an-hour Vietnamese factory work detail until another centrist wins the White House. Meanwhile, Obama reportedly is still being allowed to keep his custom inauguration footwear. The spiffy shoes should make a great exhibit for the new library as well as perpetuating the cult of Nike.

Reebok

In America the Good, there is no monopoly on cheap, overpriced  athletic footwear manufactured by low wage foreign workers for import to America. Therefore, not to be outdone by Nike's ad campaign, the Reebok company has also pledged millions of dollars to help get those poor fat lazy American kids up and moving before they even start their sprint to school.

Ricker Oil Company

You'd think that this convenience store operator would consider changing its name to something more appetizing, wouldn't you? Then again, since the plastic containers used for bottled designer water are petroleum-based, we should probably commend this company for truth in advertising.

The Honest Company

Donald Trump wouldn't know the meaning of this company even if he drank a gallon of Hydrocation chained to a KinderCare chair eating an Urge snack in a Ricker Oil convenience store. But frankly, neither would I.  From what I could gather from a quick read of the slick Honest web page, it's a consortium of 85 celebrities and athletes and other friends of Michelle Obama who have joined together in solidarity to promote the eating of fresh fruit and vegetables. They term their effort a "sexy marketing campaign." Because goodness knows, besides being tempted by benevolent overpriced sneakers, Our Kids™ must also be targeted with sexual come-ons in order to fool them into doing unpleasant things. 

Once you get past all the linky layers on this PHA page, you finally do discover what the Honest Company honestly is: it's a billion-dollar emporium selling "affordable" baby and cosmetics products to the financially comfortable and the socially responsible. Another PHA link takes you to a site marketing resistance-oriented fashion in colors representing the whole fruit and vegetable spectrum. One bright orange tee shirt shows a guy covering his eyes and saying "I Can't Hear You, Haters!"

Who knew that eating healthy could also be so damned edgy and protest-y and anti-Trumpian!

Honestly, though, has the Honest Company ever considered renaming itself the Cynical Company? Has the Partnership for a Healthier America ever thought that Partnership for Healthy American Plutocrats might be a more apt moniker for what they actually do? Because for all the celebrity glitz, glamor and natural organic bling they use as cover, kids always know bullshit when they smell it.


On that note, Happy Mothers Day to Sardonickists everywhere. Don't forget to drink up after you wake up and smell the sneakers.

$urvival of the Fittest

By Jay - Ottawa

Stiff fingers tap out the first sentence on my keyboard, but the spell checker redlines the word 'dystopia.'  Hmm…it IS a word and I DID spell it correctly.  Was the Microsoft programmer who worked on this feature clueless about Orwell's "1984," or was the programmer directed to send unpleasant concepts and their exemplars down the memory hole?

Cormac McCarthy is the next to get redlined.  Well, OK.  His first name is rare this side of Dublin.  Despite the laurels placed on McCarthy's brow late in life, few people other than English majors read his troubling novels "Blood Meridian" and "The Road."

Actually, "The Road" is not dystopian literature.  It is more often categorized as post-apocalyptic realism, a giant step beyond dystopia to where the entire globe has been despoiled.  You might, if you behave, be allowed an ice-cream sundae in a dystopia.  The best you can hope for in a post-apocalyptic world is rancid ice cream under stale whipped cream and a rotting cherry on top.

Chris Hedges, a very serious man, also writes about dystopias but under the category of nonfiction.  He describes realities so dismal and hopeless you wish they were fiction.

As if we didn't have enough gloom from the Dark School of fiction and nonfiction, we now discover their disciples multiplying like bats out of a cave.  The newest dystopian writers obtain better material just by looking around.  The latest dark spirit to connect the available dots of politics, economics, climate change and human nature is a French philosopher, Bruno Latour.

Latour writes as though he was able to plumb the minds of the super rich.  Forget their supposed attraction to capitalism and avarice.  Something else is afoot, a plot, an altruistic conspiracy.  It goes like this.  Billions of people are accustomed to a standard of living the globe cannot support.  Recycling and cutbacks in carbon use are absurdist diversions for the masses.  The Greens are kidding themselves, not to mention the rest of us, with their solar panels and low-flush toilets.  The Paris Agreement of last year, signed by 195 nations, is an empty gesture to assure their populations that something is being done to push climate change out of sight.  However, the elites know better; the globe is long past the tipping point of climate apocalypse.

Something several orders more severe than alternate energy development is needed, and immediately, to pull back hard from the Sixth Extinction.  The elites are fully aware of the stakes.  They also know that the billions of people who make up the modern world cannot be encouraged, or even forced, to scale down sharply to a lifestyle from the Middle Ages.

What's the alternative for elites who appreciate these facts and exercise power?  It is twofold: to become billionaires and to head for the hills after amassing everything needed for survival.  Big money––not asceticism, virtue and fairness for all––will buy the few tickets available for survival of the few.  Here's Latour explaining why we must have deregulation, welfare cutbacks, climate denial and income disparity:

"If this plausible fiction is correct, it enables us to grasp the 'deregulation' and the 'dismantling of the welfare state' of the 1980s, the 'climate change denial' of the 2000s, and, above all, the dizzying increase in inequality over the past forty years.  All these things are part of the same phenomenon: the elites were so thoroughly enlightened that they realized there would be no future for the world and that they needed to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible …; to construct a kind of golden fortress for the tiny percent of people who would manage to get on in life …; and, to hide the crass selfishness of this flight from the common world, to completely deny the existence of the threat [of] climate change."

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/ 

It is we, the billions of nobodies, who are the grasshoppers in Aesop's fable.  We plague the earth with our great numbers and boundless appetites.  The monied elites are the farsighted ants.  There is a noble purpose behind the surface chaos over which they preside.  For the sake of the human gene pool, lifeboat ethics must prevail.  The elites are laboring to cull our species as efficiently as possible.  They must act fast and remain steadfast in their purpose.  Ultimately, the preservation of humanity depends on the billionaires, "the tiny percent," in their "golden fortresses."  Think of that next time you are tempted by selfishness to protest against their deconstruction of society as we know it.

* Those of you under 70 years of age are advised not to read this essay.

The Come(d)y Hour

FBI Director James Comey wasn't merely fired. He was "terminated" and then removed from office.

Just look at the wording of Donald Trump's announcement. It has all the despotic flair of an execution order for a previously coddled apparatchik who has deeply, deeply disappointed his Leader. It is also deeply, deeply cowardly, since the Leader himself takes no responsibility for his own decision.

"You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately," Trump passively dictated in a scene reminiscent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole sordid mess.

In a further parody of the New Testament, the part that has Peter the Apostle denying any knowledge of Jesus Christ on three separate occasions, Trump perversely reminds Comey that he had denied knowledge of any Trumpian wrongdoing on three separate occasions.

Trump, who can never resist covering his own tender ass, has essentially made a veiled threat, thanking the FBI in advance for keeping its hands off him. In consigning the FBI director to the proverbial gallows as the latest scapegoat, he is sending a mafia-style message to Comey's successor. 

Comey has finally outlived his usefulness. He'd made the mistake of trying to play both sides of the Uniparty off against each other instead of, say, prosecuting Wall Street criminals. He should have just resigned last summer, after the airport tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Bill Clinton made him the fall guy. He displeased the Republicans by not indicting Hillary Clinton and he displeased the Democrats by gratuitously lecturing Hillary about her reckless stupidity.

 Barack Obama, who himself had cravenly risen above the fray in order to avoid the pitfalls of actual leadership, conveniently flew out of the country on a private jet this week to lecture the rest of world about healthy eating and climate change.

"You get the politicians you deserve," Obama cynically schmoozed in Milan to an audience full of sated plutocrats who'd paid 850 euros apiece for the privilege of being reassured.

Meanwhile, to make the Comey saga a thriller in true Grand Guignol style for the folks back home, it was Trump's personal private bodyguard - not Secret Service personnel - who delivered the execution order to FBI Headquarters. Comey himself reportedly learned his fate from news bulletins just as he was giving a schmoozy speech of his own in Los Angeles. He wasn't talking to the wealthy political donor class, of course, but to the public-private law enforcement community tasked with protecting and absolving the wealthy donor class. It has long been Comey's job to foment fear of Terrorists in basements in order to deflect attention from the rampant white collar/corporate crime spree and deferred prosecution agreements with the Department of Justice.

To make the Comey story even more gruesomely delicious, Trump's publicity flack took media questions in the virtual shadows, cowering near or behind a bush on the White House lawn after he ordered all the camera lights turned off. "I know nothink," was his standard reply to a barrage of questions. "Spicey" deliberately gave the media something even more exciting to write about and to speculate about. Did Sean Spicer wet his pants? Is Sean Spicer on drugs? Does Saturday Night Live desperately need more funny material?

Are the Democrats and their veal pen offshoots in a renewed frenzy of email fundraising?  First they wanted Comey fired, now they say he was fired for the wrong reasons. Click here to prove you are a good citizen who demands the right reasons!

  Something has infiltrated what's still left of our democracy, all right, but it sure isn't Putin. This is all about two ruling class factions battling each other in a massive power struggle that has little or nothing to do with the needs and desires of ordinary people. It's the dregs of democracy and the spoils of the whole world which are still very much up for grabs.

Have you noticed how Obama and Hillary Clinton are now re-positioning themselves not just as national leaders, but as world leaders and elite influence-peddlers? As far as finance capital is concerned, there are no borders. Populism - which in their neoliberal world, means the looming threat of actual people demanding such nice things as survival - is Public Enemy Number One to the "centrist" global plutocracy. Why else would cool, calm, above-the-fray Obama be interfering in foreign politics and openly endorsing an investment banker in the French elections? Why else would Hillary be chronically "submitting" to interviews conducted by fellow members of the private ruling class club known as the Council on Foreign Relations? (Google the list, and look for Nicholas Kristof, Christiane Amampour and Andrea Mitchell.)

Meanwhile, the collapse of a crumbling tunnel on top of a huge toxic pile of nuclear waste in Washington State is going largely unnoticed and unreported. Ditto for the insane escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Ditto for the looming famine in Yemen.

Situation hopeless but not serious. The radiation is contained, because opioid addict and Energy Secretary Rick Perry said it is. The terror is contained, because the imminent deployment of 5,000 more American terrorists will "break the deadlock." The peasants are contained because the plutocrats are droning and starving and drugging poor people to death all over the world.

 Everybody move along, nothing to see or hear or get excited about except the latest sordid plot twist in Palace Intrigue Theater. If you didn't catch last night's episode, cleverly titled Tuesday Night Massacre, then you haven't been paying attention. Heaven forbid that you haven't picked your favorite character yet, or a side to root for in what amounts to a permanent political campaign.

Stay tuned while we pause for another commercial break brought to you by Big Oil and Big Pharma. Grab the popcorn before the mainstream media hauls out the next panel of fact-checkers and spell-checkers and virtue-signalers and knee-jerkers and paid lobbyists.  Because Donald Trump has just burped out another inane Tweet to save everybody from engaging in any actual thought.

We Are Not Amused

 In the spirit of the establishment sourness I wrote about the other day, the New York Times Division of Standards and Practices has seen fit to axe two of my published comments in the past week. Since I only submitted three comments during this time frame, this amounts to a record 66% rejection rate.

My first censored comment was in response to a very bland editorial chiding Barack Obama for his unseemly demand for $400,000 per speech. I pointed out that the much more popular Michelle is only getting $200,000 for her gigs, a dismal half of what her husband earns. "What ever happened to equal pay for equal work?" I asked rhetorically. "We should all be out marching in the streets to protest this terrible inequity!"

The Gray Lady apparently does not like sarcasm and snark. If one cannot in good conscience rush to the defense of the greedy and the powerful, then one must be careful to vent one's criticism sincerely, respectfully and responsibly.

My second censored comment (to a Maureen Dowd column about Trump being a threat to public health) was very censorious of Donald Trump and the House GOP's vote to gut health care coverage. Although I never thought it was possible to be too rude to Donald Trump, especially in the liberal New York Times, it turns out I was very wrong. Just because one is upset that the cartoonish Donald Trump was gleefully celebrating the premature deaths of tens of millions of Americans is no reason to compare the shape of Trump's head to that of a cartoon character.

Oddly enough, though, my comment was allowed to stand for a full 24 hours and glean more than 1,000 reader recommendations before it was disappeared. So in this case, the removal could either be the result of the first three shifts of censors being asleep at the moderating switch, or too many sensitive readers signaling their displeasure too many times over the course of the day.

Here's what was deemed so offensive. (I thought to make a copy of it) -

That photo of Sponge Don Squarehead saluting his orchestra of smirking white male supremacists speaks a thousand ugly words. But it's concert master Paul Ryan who really takes the cake for one of the most comprehensively deadly eugenics initiatives in modern history. That he had the nerve to preen and simper before the cameras is terrifying evidence of a truly depraved mind.

Second only to Trump and Ryan in horrible optics was Ivanka, smiling banally as she and Prince Jared watched the final House vote on TV. She should write a sequel to her book, about how working moms can creatively scrimp by forgoing health insurance. She could include tips on the best name brand pliers for self-help dentistry, maybe even start her own line of suture threads in the latest fashionable colors to avoid those unnecessary ER trips with the kiddies.

But even if the Senate refuses to rubber-stamp the AHCA, that still leaves 30 million people without health insurance and tens of millions more saddled with unconscionably high premiums and deductibles. And since Trump is only interested in winning at all costs, he should put his presidential mouth where his private citizen mouth used to be. He should demand Medicare for All. Everybody covered from cradle to grave. No predatory private insurance middle men. No pre-existing conditions. It's all paid for with a progressive income tax and a tax on high speed Wall Street trades. It will make Americans feel great again and add years to our lives.

On second thought, maybe the Times censored me because I just won't shut up about Single Payer health care, which has been officially censored from the agenda of the corporate Democratic Party.

The Burdened Sourpusses of the Ruling Class

Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defense -- Mark Twain.

It was the guffaw heard round the world. Code Pink protester Desiree Fairooz snorted in disbelief when she heard Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III lauded as a champion of racial justice at his Senate confirmation hearing on January 10th. She and her group were duly escorted out of the building for daring to poke fun at Sessions and his whole crowd of withered old racist reprobates.

Since the Department of Jiffy Jeffy Justice then insanely insisted on prosecuting Fairooz and two other protesters on disorderly conduct charges, and actually found a jury intimidated enough to convict them, it's the guffaw that will go right on echoing, ad infinitum. Sessions and his cronies will go down in history as one of the prickliest bunch of thin-skinned misanthropes who ever couldn't take a joke.

And this particular joke is totally on them. The video clip of Code Pink protesters mocking both him and his policies would have been lost in cyberspace were it not for the Trump government's paranoid overreaction to it.

The prosecuting attorney helpfully rebroadcast Code Pink's trenchant message, railing to the jury that “Her disruptive behavior included yelling that Senator Sessions’ ‘voting record was evil’ and waving a sign that read: ‘Support civil rights, stop [S]essions’.”

Stop Stop Stop Sessions Sessions Sessions Evil Evil Evil. Support civil rights! plead the enemies of civil rights, over and over and over again. 

Jocular Jeff To America: Don't Laugh At Me, Or Else!

Like any bully, Sessions can dish it out, but he can't take it. His own many stale attempts at humor, such as denying voting rights to black people, have had a history of falling flat whenever presented to the Supreme Court for its amusement. And then there was his recent crack about Hawaii being nothing but an "island in the Pacific" after a federal judge there ruled against Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. Sessions apparently was unaware that not only is the state of Hawaii a whole series of islands, it was admitted to the union more than half a century ago. When you're an old racist reprobate like Jiffy Jeff, it must be very hard to escape from your imperialist, colonialist state of mind. Or should I say mindlessness.

The racism is hanging around his withered old neck like a rotting Confederate tombstone. Because in Jeff Sessions' America, they're still partying like it's 1860, or its twin, 1899. In Jeff Sessions' America, Rudyard Kipling still reigns at the top of the charts:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Just as American imperialists have always cracked down on their fluttered subjects like little boys ripping the wings from butterflies, so too do the Trumpist authoritarians want to teach a lesson to anyone not kowtowing to them with all the requisite sullenness. These officials intimidate and flail so mindlessly, because they are so deathly afraid of being mocked.

"Authoritarianism and a sense of humor rarely go together," writes Amnesty International's Steve Crawshaw in the new book Street Spirit.  "That's where protesters can gain the upper hand - or at least find an excuse to laugh at their rulers or other powerful players (who, in turn, have little clue how to react.)"

"Laughtivists"  adds Crawhaw, "can help destroy the sense of invulnerability that unwanted rulers need in order to sustain themselves. The more they are persecuted by these rulers, the more afraid and vulnerable the rulers themselves are made to appear."

I never would have heard late night comic Stephen Colbert's tasteless joke about Donald Trump were it not for the news that Trump's Federal Communications Commission is investigating him for possible violations of obscenity laws. Thanks to the thin-skinned authoritarians currently in charge,  Colbert's previously moribund ratings are nearly high enough to even surpass Trump's in his reality show heyday.

Now, because of government overreaction, we'll never be able to get that hideous image of Trump in the act of pleasuring Putin out of our minds. If there's one thing that might keep the boring RussiaGate scandal alive in the minds of American consumers, it's making a dirty joke out of it.

Hillary Clinton must be grimly cackling all the way to her new SuperPac as she hilariously tries to refashion herself as the elite face of the Trump Resistance. Therefore, it is all the more vital that we resist her brand of Resistance -- Elitivism -- with all the persistence we can muster. Our continuing existence as the free laughtivists of the Counter-Resistance depends upon it.

In case you're feeling depleted and powerless in the face of all this daunting resistant elitism, take a break from mocking the withered racist corpus of Jeff Sessions, and remember another monumentally tasteless joke. It was back in 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, that then-Madame Secretary Hillary quipped: "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

As Crawshaw writes in his book, millions of ordinary Egyptians then began to laugh so heartily that they took to Tahrir Square in a fit of peaceful protest, and Mubarek soon shuffled his dour way out the door to several years in the slammer. But that was a dictatorship, and we Americans still enjoy a modicum of constitutional rights. If only Mubarek had installed a private server and pretended to be holding a free and fair electoral primary. If only he'd cracked a scripted joke or two. If only WikiLeaks had not become the face of public interest journalism, then the fortunes of the Mubareks and the Clintons might be very different today.

The joke was on the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party when WikiLeaks emails revealed that Citigroup had literally appointed Barack Obama's cabinet for him. The treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was able to deadpan his way through his own Senate confirmation hearing, insisting that his failure to pay his personal income taxes was just an oversight. He later cracked the sick joke that foreclosing on victimized homeowners would be stretched out so as to "foam the runway" for unprosecuted banksters. He and his cronies laughed all the way to the bank in one big fat big circle of fun.

In case you're still not getting the neoliberal, insiderish brand of dry elitivist counter-humor, try this, because Hillary Clinton had her audience absolutely shaking. How could any one political standup routine be so creatively zany?

So you see, laughtivists, it really is possible to both loathe Trump and to rejoice that Hillary Clinton lost the election.

The selective enforcement of the obscenity laws, meanwhile, is rendered all the more ironic given that Obama's FCC had given a cynical free pass to last fall's permanent feedback loop broadcasts of Donald Trump's infamous "pussy-grabbing" remarks. Who even knew that there were still obscenity laws on the books? The Democratic Party must have mistakenly believed that Americans are still shocked by obscenity. But rather than protecting people's ears, they preferred that people get shocked into voting for Hillary by the drumming up of maximum disgust at the more disgusting Donald Trump.

They preferred in vain.

The hypocrisy is just so damned funny, it's hard to even breathe sometimes.

Even so, the possibilities for hoi polloi mischief and guffaws get more endless with every passing day. Who gets the last laugh is yet to be determined.

 Sessions, Geithner, Clinton, & Unidentified Prankster Enjoy Moment of Mirth At Your Expense

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Brutalism We Can Believe In

Barack and Michelle Obama parachuted down to Chicago this week to unveil plans for their "family-friendly" $500 million architectural marvel.

This is their idea of family friendliness:

The Obama Center

Gee. Where have we seen this warm, comfy style of architecture before? Oh, now I remember. It's ye olde Aztec temple where all the families used to gather to watch their relatives get sacrificed in order to appease some chronically peevish deities who bore a striking resemblance to our own pantheon of Forbes 400 billionaires.

The Aztec Center

It's not as though people haven't been warned. As the blurb for The Obama Center so seductively purrs: "Greater Designers Design With Mankind in Mind."

And Obama has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing more than To Serve Man for the rest of his life. His library will be so much more than "an ego trip," he gushed. By boasting that it will even include facilities for "family barbecues", he was giving us very fair warning indeed. Why else construct his monolithic edifice with such monstrously awe-inspiring blocks of stone reminiscent of barbaric regimes past? I suppose that once you've enjoyed the power to order thousands of extrajudicial drone killings, it must be very hard to kick the cruelty habit.

"Through participatory and immersive experiences, the Center will tell Barack and Michelle Obama's story," the Obama Center website ominously intones, "while lifting the hood on the mechanics of change and inspiring visitors to spark their own."

I am starting to not like this. I am starting to get scared. There are already too many allusions to drowning and burning in this enterprise for my particular taste. What are we anyway -- hamburgers and weenies to be poked and prodded for doneness when the barbeque hood is lifted? Or are we nothing but failing engines in dire need of the Barack and Michelle lube job special?

Generously forgoing their usual $600,000 joint appearance fee in order to display their "renderings," the Obamas appeared relaxed after a three month series of tropical vacations. According to the New York Times,

 Speaking to several hundred people on the city’s South Side, Mr. Obama, who was tieless and in a jovial mood, said that the center could be “a transformational project for this community.”

“The main thing that Michelle and I contributed was just saying, ‘What is it that we want to see 10 years from now?’” he said, recounting his conversations with the architects who designed the center. “And we don’t want to see some big building that’s dead, and kids are getting dragged to it for a field trip. What we wanted was something that was alive, and that was a hub for the community and for the city and for the country.”

 (snip)

Mr. Obama said he wanted his library to include a children’s play area that would attract families from the neighborhood, and a community garden for schoolchildren. He said he wanted food trucks and some grills so people can barbecue, prompting chuckles from the crowd.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked. “We don’t have any folks who grill here? I thought this was the South Side of Chicago!

The Aztec kings also attracted families to their temples with food and games and music and bling in order to make the sacrificial experience and the repayment of onerous debt to rent-seeking deities a fun time for everybody. The chuckling wealthy donors in Obama's crowd were simply ignoring history as much as Donald Trump (who already has too many numerous shrines to even mention) when they so snobbishly snicker over the basic needs of the masses. Even Obama himself was being deliberately disingenuous, what with pretending that the oligarchs in his audience don't have "people" to do all their cooking for them. 

 Because Mrs. Obama lamented that Jackson Park did not have hills when she was a child growing up in the nearby South Shore neighborhood, Mr. Obama said the presidential center would be outfitted with a sledding hill.

Not that the Obama family will ever have to use a measly old sledding hill, given their annual luxury vacations to Aspen, courtesy of the war-profiteering and drone-manufacturing Crown family, the early financiers of his political career.

 Mr. Obama said he envisioned “a studio where I can invite Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg to do workshops on how to make films,” and “a recording studio where I could invite Chance or Bruce Springsteen, depending on your tastes, to talk about how you could record music that has social commentary and meaning.”

Oh, now I get it. It won't just be a temple, it will also be a Prince-style recording studio and oligarchic party venue all wrapped up into one big monolith. All Barry will have to do is snap his fingers and the mega-celebrities of the world will appear like magic to do his bidding. And every once in awhile, the sledding and barbecuing hoi polloi might even get invited in to gawk and be inspired, and forget that they haven't gotten a real raise in decades and that they will owe hundreds of thousands in student debt until the day they prematurely die. It's no accident that the chairman of the Obama Foundation is Martin Nesbitt, Barry's best friend.  Nesbitt is the founder of the private equity group that purchased the crooked for-profit University of Phoenix, which has profited so mightily off unpayable student debt. Some of the same Wall Street characters who comprised Obama's cabinet have now spun through the revolving doors to feed at the trough of Obama's money-laundering post presidential career.

But forget about your cares and woes and Obama's historical corruption. There's always plenty of mush to consume from his New York Times-assisted public relations campaign:

“What we want this to be is the world’s premier institution for training young people in leadership to make a difference in their countries, in their communities and in the world,” he said.

Not just any institution, but the best, most premier institution on the entire planet. Stop by for a quick training session and be ready to go back to any third world country or neighborhood with some really premier neoliberal propaganda to appease the millions of people worried about where their next meal is coming from.

It's eerie that Obama's mantra of "giving back to the community" is the same dogma employed in the sacrificial rites of the Aztecs. In one ritual, the designated victim was made to intone, right before his or her heart was cut out: "I embrace mankind. I give myself back to the community." 

 So I don't understand why Obama tiptoes around the reality that we actually are the next meal for the global billionaire class of ravenous and malevolent gods. 

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Hypocrisy and History in the Age of Trump

To hear the establishment media tell it, you'd think that Donald Trump was the only president in American history ever to have extended a friendly hand to a murderous foreign autocrat.

According to the critics, Trump relies upon his primitive reptile brain rather than upon his cerebral cortex whenever he performs foreign policy. When Trump reaches out to The Philippines' dastardly Rodrigo Duterte, he's being stupid and naive. When, on the other hand, Barack Obama sold Saudi autocrats billions of dollars in weapons with which to to kill innocent Yemenis, he was being coolly pragmatic. When Obama played a genial round of golf in Hawaii with Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak, and later whitewashed that strongman's abysmal record of graft and human trafficking, he did so for the intelligent altruistic purpose of raking in more profits for multinational corporations via the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He didn't do it to build a hotel with his name on it.

So the Washington Post approvingly gushed about Obama's Christmas golf course diplomacy with the corrupt Malaysian leader in 2014,

Obama has established perhaps a better working relationship with Najib, after making the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to Malaysia in nearly half a century last spring. It was unlikely they had an in-depth discussion of their foreign policy agendas on the course, however, but perhaps focusing instead on trying to avoid the sand traps.
In a statement, the White House said: "The two leaders took the opportunity to discuss the growing and warming relationship between the United States and Malaysia.  The president said he looked forward to working with Prime Minister Najib in 2015, during Malaysia's chair year of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations."

 Obama's hypocrisy (in removing Malaysia from the list of the world's worst human traffickers based solely on Razak's shallow promise to try to cut back on all those shallow graves) bothered Democratic Party officials only insofar as the "optics" of it might endanger their future electoral prospects.

According to a 2015 leaked email sent to Hillary Clinton's campaign director by one of her operatives, it wasn't the fate of hundreds of Malaysian sex trafficking victims that bothered them. It was the possible "backlash" from labor groups. Or, so their cerebral cortices alerted them.

Of course, now that Donald Trump is himself calling Najib Razak "one of my favorite prime ministers," the righteous critics are getting very worried about the relationship. Trump even had the temerity to partner with Najib in a game at his New Jersey golf course several years ago.

There's plenty to criticize Trump for, of course, but the growing hysteria over his diplomatic efforts fairly reeks of hypocrisy on steroids. Methinks that those gleefully mocking Trump's ignorance of American history should probably take a refresher course in that subject themselves.

"Trump's 'Very Friendly' Talk With Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike," blares the New York Times headline. As Mark Landler explains:

During their “very friendly conversation,” the administration said in a late-night statement, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects in the Philippines, to visit him at the White House.

Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.

It's a good thing the bureaucrats aren't raising objections over the United States' own policy of extrajudicial drone killings conducted under the last three presidents. It might make them seem  ignorant of history and hypocritical at the same time. 

“By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”

Trump has a personality disorder, whereas Barack Obama and George W. Bush were both perfectly sane as they not only bombed thousands of innocent people to death, but perpetuated America's own murderous war on "drugs" -- meaning, of course, the war on drug-takers. This includes using the CIA to funnel weapons to drug cartels as well as ensuring that poor people became addicted to drugs, the better to criminalize them and to imprison them.

And Senator Murphy should definitely read Stephen Kinzer's excellent new book about the birth of American imperialism (The True Flag) before he bloviates about human rights. It was Theodore Roosevelt, the inventor of the term "bully pulpit," who after the illegal US attack on The Philippines in 1898, subsequently oversaw the massacre of more than two thousand innocent Filipinos just for the sheer jingoistic enjoyment of it. And it was President Bill Clinton who, selectively forgetting history himself, posthumously awarded Roosevelt the Medal of Freedom.

But never mind all that, because the Times is not done ginning up its selective outrage quite yet:

It is not even clear, given the accusations of human rights abuses against him, that Mr. Duterte would be granted a visa to the United States were he not a head of state, according to human rights advocates.

Still, Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. Duterte, and other strongmen as well, is firmly established. Both presidents are populist insurgent leaders with a penchant for making inflammatory statements. Both ran for office calling for a wholesale crackdown on Islamist militancy and the drug trade. And both display impatience with the courts.

So I guess that means that no more Saudi kings and other autocrats will ever be welcome upon our exceptional shores in the future, right?  Of course that's not what the Times is getting at, not at all. Their beef is that past presidents and their chosen (subservient and cooperative) global buddies are more proficient at protocol and politesse. Normal presidents never make inflammatory statements as they go about their killing sprees. They are very careful to manipulate their silverware correctly at state dinners, and to blandly use all the proper nouns and verbs when making public statements. When American presidents want to ignore the Constitution, they're not supposed to say so right out loud. Instead, they have their lawyers draft secret memos and opinions which allow the extrajudicial atrocities. Or, they go very circumspectly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get the necessary rubber stamps for whatever they want to get away with... far away from public scrutiny and accountability.

 The Times article persistently plods ahead:

Mr. Trump has drawn the line with one autocrat: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose chemical weapons strike on his own people prompted the American president to order a Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.

But Mr. Trump’s affinity for strongmen is instinctive and longstanding. He recently called to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on his victory in a much-disputed referendum expanding his powers, which some critics painted as a death knell for Turkish democracy.

Never mind that there is as yet no concrete evidence that Assad ever ordered a chemical weapons strike. All that matters is that deep within the reptilian part of his primitive brain, Trump has an instinctive love for strongmen. Every democracy he touches turns into lead.

The affinity of American presidents for foreign strongmen is nothing new. Franklin Roosevelt, a president who also occasionally acted on instinct, was a big fan of Benito Mussolini before World War II spoiled the camaraderie. Il Duce congratulated FDR on his 1932 victory. And,Historian Mark Weber writes,

President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for the Italian leader, and sent him cordial letters. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to an American envoy: “... I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.” In another letter a few weeks later, the President wrote: “I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.”
Mussolini's regime received particularly warm praise from America's business leaders. In his 1972 work, Prof. Diggins writes (pp. 146-47): "With few exceptions, the dominant voices of business responded to Fascism with a hearty enthusiasm. Favorable editorials, could be read in publications such as Barron's, Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, Commerce and Finance, Nation's Business (the official organ of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the reputable Wall Street Journal. Aside from the press, the list of outspoken business admirers reads like a Wall Street 'Who's Who'."

Some things never change. Hypocrisy is as wholesome and normal as apple pie, Mom, and the true flag. And, of course, golf.

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