PBS Still Insists That Climate Change Is Debatable

No matter that the United States has been hit by four hurricanes in just a little over a month, or that northern California is burning up right before our very eyes. In the interest of fairness to the predatory polluters of unfettered capitalism, PBS gave a platform to the worst of the worst on its News Hour Tuesday night.

The occasion was the Trump administration's announcement that it will "scale back" the Obama administration's own largely aspirational and relatively weak rollback of carbon emissions from existing power plants by the year 2030. The modest goal was merely to reduce emissions to 66 percent of 2005 levels.

PBS had originally invited EPA Director Scott Pruitt to appear on its program to help sell asthma, emphysema, cancer, black lung disease and other maladies to the public in a balanced attempt to counter the science facts offered by former EPA Director Gina McCarthy. But since Pruitt was allegedly either on another private jet junket or holed up in his soundproof bunker, he couldn't make it. And since the prospect of appearing on any TV network containing the word "public" probably makes him feel like vomiting, his notorious coal baron pal Robert Murray appeared in his stead. You could tell that it was on very short notice by the way Murray stumbled all over the script of talking points he was handed at the very last minute.

Here's Thumb In Your Eye, Proles!

His funniest talking point of all was that since "poor moms on fixed incomes" can't afford clean energy (or anything else, for that matter), we should at least let them stay warm with his cheap, dirty coal-fired energy.

 Murray wheezed:

 My stand is that the endangerment finding needs to be repealed, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
I have 4,000 scientists that tell me that it is not a pollutant. A lot of people, John, have made money off of promoting the politics of climate change and the politics of the Democrat Party, in promoting their windmills, their solar panels, and all other restraints and alarmist restraints on low-cost reliable electricity. And they have. And so we’re trying to put it back now and put it right. I believe that there needs to be a lot of discussion as to what the effects are of any climate change on the society, on our standard of living. We have an energy poverty problem. We do not have a climate change problem.

His claim of "4,000 scientists" advising him was not challenged at all by PBS personality John Yang. Nor was Murray asked about much money he himself has made from dirty fuel. Nor was he asked to explain how there can be climate change without it being a climate change problem.

   JOHN YANG: You don’t see climate change as an issue or a problem at all, despite what other scientists say?

 BOB MURRAY: I do not. I do not, because I listen to 4,000 scientists, and who tell me that mankind is not affecting climate change.

 JOHN YANG: Robert Murray, the founder and chairman of Murray Energy, thank you very much for joining us.

Perhaps Yang and his PBS employer are afraid of the litigation-happy Murray, and censored themselves rather than practice anything remotely resembling adversarial journalism. Murray most recently sued comedian John Oliver for daring to make fun of him, not only for his greed and mendacity, but for "looking like a geriatric Dr. Evil." Even before the show aired, Murray had threatened a lawsuit. The coal baron, who might as well be named an official member of the Trump administration, did not want the story of nine of his employees dying in a Utah mine collapse mentioned, even though a government investigation concluded that Murray's company was to blame. Murray still insists that an earthquake was the cause of the disaster, despite no seismic activity being reported at the time. Maybe the 4,000 invisible scientists he has in his pocket told him what he wanted to hear.

As the ACLU warns broadcasters and other media outlets, "you'd better stick to Bob Murray's script unless you want to face him in court." So when Scott Pruitt sent Murray to PBS to fill in for him, it was an offer that PBS apparently could not refuse.

Bob Murray is the Harvey Weinstein of the pollution lobbying industry. One dirty old man is just like another dirty old man, especially when he's as filthy rich as sin and has the power to spook politicians and the media into a state of total and abject complicity.

Observing Indigenous Peoples Day

The push to scrub Columbus Day once and for all from the secular religious calendar of the United States is gaining momentum, thanks to three things that happened in the past year.

First came the widely-publicized protests of the water protectors of North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux Nation. Even military veterans joined in solidarity to protest the construction of a polluting oil pipeline on sacred land. Despite some setbacks, resistance is on the ascendant.

Second is the popular demand, from all over the country, for the removal of statues and flags which celebrate white supremacy. 

And third has been the refusal of professional athletes and others to stand for the jingoistic rituals of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Spangled Banner. This is a direct rebuke to the militarism and racism which are the founding principles of the United States, not to mention the integral ethos of professional football.

All of this public "wokeness" in such a relatively short span of time is a giant leap in the direction of some long-overdue historical truth and reconciliation. And this reckoning isn't coming a moment too soon. Not only are we condemned to repeat the past if we won't remember it (Santayana), the past isn't dead because it's not even past. (Faulkner)

There is an absolute straight line from the plunder of the Americas by the Spanish in 1492 to the present-day terroristic war on a global battlefield. Donald Trump is the end-product of late capitalism and American imperialism, a mass psychosis on a crack cocaine high.

"Our nation was born in genocide," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. "We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode."  

It wasn't until nearly a quarter century after King's murder that Indigenous People's Day in the US got its official start. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean islands,  the city of Berkeley, California officially voted to mark the second Monday in October as a day of solidarity with aboriginal communities and as a protest against colonialism.

The late historian Howard Zinn wrote that the glorification of Columbus, a mass murderer for the ages, as a hero in the American creation myth is just the start of the continuous propaganda fed to us both in textbooks and by our political leaders:

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

 The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

Slaughter of the Arawaks

 
Although many school districts and municipalities are also increasingly refusing to honor Columbus on his very specious day, only four state legislatures have taken the plunge so far: Hawaii (whose native populations were robbed and slaughtered by sugar and pineapple barons under cover of militant Christianity); South Dakota (home of many a US cavalry land grab and massacre of indigenous peoples); Oregon (end-point of Lewis and Clark's manifest march to exceptionally bloody American destiny); and Alaska (Seward's Folly, and oil and gold-despoiled home to many a plundered aboriginal resident.)

People are finally beginning to challenge the archaic but stubborn legal concept of Terra nullius, or the Discovery Doctrine.

It all started with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. By papal writ, Spain and Portugal agreed that all non-Christian territory was as good as unpopulated and fair game for plunder and enslavement. Other European countries then followed this same legalistic theory for their own settler initiatives. Thomas Jefferson himself declared the Doctrine of Discovery to be international law, a declaration which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. 

The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had actually been the first settlers on the mainland to act upon the Discovery Doctrine, using Calvinist Christianity as justification for their plunder just as the Spaniards had used Catholicism. The pilgrims built the foundation for the enduring belief in American Exceptionalism and the prosperity gospel. Certain individuals and groups are just so special that they obviously were chosen by God to be The Elect. Salvation is guaranteed to the materially successful chosen ones, while the poor and unlucky (and dark-skinned) probably deserve damnation.

  Scotch-Irish immigrants scrabbling for a piece of land in the aboriginal territory of the South were the ideological forebears of Donald Trump's base of aggrieved white people. It's no surprise that the supposedly ignorant Trump is a huge fan of populist land speculator, slave owner, and Indian killer Andrew Jackson, who finally ordered the mass expulsion of the Cherokee Nation in the infamous and lethal Trail of Tears.

And Trump is by no means the first or the only president to champion the white supremacy which is at the very core of the Discovery Doctrine rationale for the creation of the American settler state both here and abroad. In his 2009 inaugural address, our first cosmetically black president preached the settler creation myth gospel - unforgiving toil and torture and death as the price of "progress" - with all the regressive eloquence he could muster:

  "In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasure of riches or fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor - who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

 Time and time again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. This is the journey we continue today."

He might as well have titled his speech "Greed Is Good." In just those few paragraphs, Barack Obama echoed the bootstrapping Puritan ethos of condemning of the lazy poor, or the "fainthearted."  Whether the pioneers worked for slave wages till they died of exhaustion, or whether they were initially slaves "lashed by the whip," it was all so, so worth it. They did it all for Exceptional Us, the Chosen Ones, the Elect. As Obama revises history in a none-too-subtle appeal to the ultra right wing, even African slaves apparently "chose" to sacrifice for the greater good once they'd adjusted to their kidnappings. And oppressed people all over this great land of ours will gladly continue to serve, at great public cost and for great private profit for the very few.

Nowhere in his address did Obama mention that in order for this "journey" to prosperity to have succeeded, it was necessary for the elites to enlist those hard-working pioneer folk for the mass genocide of indigenous communities all along the way. Aboriginals weren't whipped; they were scalped (this is the original meaning of the term "redskin," by the way.) And of course, the majority of the poor white settlers who pursued their own American dream were doomed to disappointment once the grasping Trumpian precursors of real estate and railroad empires seized up most of the homestead properties for their own speculative purposes. These were the 19th century progenitors of the modern private equity and hedge fund guys.

And as further evidence of what Zinn calls the deliberate creation of false historical memories, Obama actually tacked on the bloodiest battle of the whole bloody Vietnam War -  Khe Sanh - to his litany of militant heroism, ranking right up there with the iconic battles of the Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. Vietnam might have been lost, but that record body count ratio of Vietcong to Americans certainly gave the generals something to brag about (or lie about) - so much so that the legend even made it into Obama's first inaugural speech.

As Roxane Dunbar Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People's History of the United States, the modern US Army had been created specifically to aid the white settler-squatters and militias who, in service to the elites, had already been robbing and exterminating people in the so-called "Indian Wars" since the early colonial days. As a matter of fact, the Second Amendment was written specifically to allow for both the continued killing of indigenous peoples and for the rounding-up of escaped slaves. "The militias were tasked with rubbing out one group of people, and capturing another," Ortiz writes.

The military's modern tactics of "irregular warfare" got their start in the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent. If you watched the recent PBS series on the Vietnam War, you'll have noticed that enemy territory was commonly called "Indian Country" - ripe for pillaging, burning of crops and homes, rape, torture, slaughter of innocent civilians of all ages, and the collection of body parts as trophies. Roxane Dunbar Ortiz noticed striking similarities in the diary entries of soldiers conducting the aboriginal genocide and those who fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

And, she continued, black and brown men have always been used disproportionately in American wars, both as a way for them to receive the economic benefits which might otherwise elude them, and to allow the white ruling class and military elites to pit one set of disposable people against another. "The Indian Wars were not fought by the blindingly white American cavalry of John Ford westerns but by African Americans and Irish and German immigrants," she writes.

The US military, in honor of the original ethnic cleansing even gave its relentless bombing campaign in Vietnam the name of a famous medicine man: Operation Rolling Thunder. 

And Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge once quipped at a press conference that "we have to get the Indians away from the fort so the settlers can plant their corn."

As Michael Herr wrote about the debacle of Vietnam, "we might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter."

  The American military has such a toxic addiction to slurring Indians as aggressive savages that they even co-opt their tribal names as cover for their own savagery. They launch Tomahawk missiles, and they bomb their human targets with Apache attack helicopters. There are Chinook, Lakota, Kiowa and Ute helicopters, along with C-12 Huron airplanes. And who can forget the secret code-name the Obama administration gave to the soon-to-be-assassinated Osama Bin Laden: Geronimo.

Praise the Ammunition & Pass the Popcorn: Armchair Warriors Watch the Geronimo Show

Whenever it's convenient, the American government does not hesitate to rely on historical racist animosity to justify every new atrocity. When Bush lawyer John Yoo wrote his infamous memo "legalizing" torture, he used as precedent an 1873 Supreme Court decision in a case involving the military slaughter of imprisoned Madoc Indians. Since these indigenous people had once been deemed to be subhuman and stateless "enemy combatants," Yoo invoked the principle of homo sacer, which means that anyone defined as a terror suspect may not only be tortured, but killed with impunity.

There is so much more to the atrocities perpetuated in 300 years of white supremacist rule in North America than there is space to write about in one mere blog-post.

But the very fact that school districts throughout the country, including in my own home town, are beginning to teach American history from the perspective of indigenous communities, is cause for hope. We still live in a settler society, and the vestiges of colonialism are everywhere you look. Besides the untold lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on our constant wars of aggression are dollars not being spent on universal health care and public education and jobs.

We're incessantly told that the road to happiness lies in consumerism and dog-eat-dog competition. The "faint-hearted" individuals who lose the corporate-sponsored game of life all too often resort to drugs, alcohol, guns and violence. Homelessness, joblessness and hopelessness are leading more people to commit suicide. The death rates in general for Americans, from what should be preventable diseases, are increasing as well. What we are witnessing, as Case and Deaton have demonstrated, are deaths from despair.

So our immediate task, bitter though it may be, is acknowledging that America is never going to be a paradise, a Terra Nullis of possibilities there for the taking, if only we're willing to work hard and play by the rules and wave the flag and support the troops.

The Horatio Alger myth is hazardous to our health. The road to national greatness has been paved with very malign intentions. The American dream was a fairy tale then, and it's a fairy tale now.

Facing reality by educating ourselves about unpleasant truths is the first step toward setting ourselves and our fellow citizens free.

The Hypocrisy of Liberal Interventionists

On the very same day that former Vice President Joe Biden tweepily called for legislation to end the gun violence that "tears our families apart," the managing director of his new liberal interventionist think tank published a New York Times editorial calling for even more American guns and violence in the proxy war against Russia in the eastern Ukraine.

Just because the ruling class warriors so easily cry their crocodile tears and tweet their maudlin thoughts and prayers over every pathologically regular outburst of domestic mayhem and death doesn't mean they will ever call a truce in their own international violence - not even for one single day.

There's way too much profit to be made in state-sanctioned death and destruction to ever take a break from it.

Therefore, even as the bodies still littered the Las Vegas killing field, Antony J. Blinken wasted no time trying to manufacture public consent for an even more spectacular theater of blood and gore. A scion of private equity and a product of the Ivy League, Blinken worked for The Atlantic before moving on to speech-writing and national security posts in the Clinton White House, the Obama White House under Biden, and finally in the Clinton State Department before moving through the revolving doors to think tank-land. He even has a side-gig as a regular "contributing op-ed writer" at the Times. 

Blinken argues, in true Best and The Brightest style, that the perfect way to "stabilize" a situation far, far away is for the USA to intervene in it with lots of guns and ammo. Remember how well that worked out in Vietnam and Afghanistan and.... oh, never mind.

Where there's greed, there's hope. Despite the widespread belief (or pretense of one) among liberal interventionists and Neocons that Donald Trump is a stooge of Vladimir Putin, Blinken makes the facile observation that Trump's own cabinet are certainly not puppets. This editorial, of course, is directed more at them than at us.  As a matter of fact, Trump's team of generals and oligarchs is a well-respected and entrenched part of the ruling class establishment. They all belong to the same Club which, as George Carlin so wryly observed, you ain't in. Blinken writes:

It starts with a united front among Mr. Trump’s senior advisers — Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster. They see Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine for what it is: a gross violation of the most basic norms of international conduct that the United States helped establish after World War II. It is not acceptable for one country to change the borders of another by force. It is not O.K. for one sovereignty to dictate to another which countries or organizations it may associate with. It is not all right for Russia to decide Ukraine’s future. Mr. Trump’s team rightly believes that if the United States fails to stand against the abuse of these principles, the international order America built will be weakened.

Translation: it is very much O.K. for the United States to violate international norms as in, say, invading Iraq in an act of unprovoked aggression or maintaining nearly a thousand military bases all over the world. It is O.K. for Blinken and his ilk to dictate to other countries, because the United States has arrogated to itself, and only to itself, the privilege of establishing a "new world order."

Blinken goes on to praise Dick Cheney acolyte Victoria Nuland, who as Hillary Clinton's deputy decided another country's future and orchestrated the coup overthrowing Ukraine's democratically elected president in favor of one willing to be a puppet of the United States. She "gave the Kremlin fits," Blinken gleefully reminisces.

But the economic sanctions that his former boss, Barack Obama, imposed on Russia are not enough. Nor are the US border troops encircling Russia enough. And with the hysterical RussiaGate propaganda campaign faltering badly here at home, the Democratic/Neocon alliance wants to take the last solution left to it in hopes of saving its own faltering imperium: a bloody proxy war against Russia:

For all these continuities in policy, one vital discontinuity would add a timely exclamation point: the senior team’s united recommendation that Mr. Trump lift restrictions on the provision of lethal defensive equipment to Kiev, notably anti-tank weapons.

Not, of course, that these weapons in the hands of strangers (CIA-trained security forces) need ever actually be used. Their mere presence on the battlefield would give Putin pause, Blinken maintains. Everybody knows that guns don't kill people, only people kill people, and that people never, ever arm themselves for bloody aggression, but merely for "protection." That is also the first commandment of the N.R.A., which the Democrats find so easy to malign whenever innocent American citizens become the targets some nut job, or "lone wolf."

Nowhere in his op-ed does Blinken bother reminding readers that Joe Biden, who pays his salary, has a strong vested interest in maintaining an American presence in Ukraine. Even the New York Times was forced to print the news in late 2015 that Hunter Biden, the lobbyist son of Joe, had magically landed a lucrative seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine's biggest gas company, right after the US-led coup. Although there were the usual murmurings of corruption and nepotism, these were quelled by the former Veep himself, who arrived in Ukraine to rail against... you guessed it. Corruption! A gas company spokesman also scoffed at the accusations, saying that "strong corporate governance and transparency are priorities shared both by the United States and the leadership of Burisma. Burisma is working to bring the energy sector into the modern era, which is critical for a free and strong Ukraine.”

Blinken's newest job, as noted above, is running the former veep's Biden Penn  Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

Its quasi-religious "mission statement" has such a nice, creepy, Brave New World-ish ring to it. As a matter of fact, it reads suspiciously like a gas company press release. Any ad campaign without freedom and strength and modernity in the script is like transparency without sunshine. (the parentheses contain my own interpretation of the dense doublespeak):

U.S. leadership has sustained (its arrogant supremacy) an open world for more than 70  years, enabling virtually every advantage we (only the extremely wealthy) enjoy as (multinational corporations and plutocratic dynasties)Americans and helping to ensure our (gated communities) safety, our (obscene wealth inequality) prosperity, and our way of life (for the privileged few). Comprised of common norms, rules, and institutions, the American-led liberal international order (reliable state intervention in aid of finance capital, at the sole expense of the world's poor and working classes) has facilitated the free movement of (rich) people, (luxury items and weapons) goods, (military/surveillance state propaganda) ideas, and (deregulated) capital; protected the sovereignty and self-determination of  (client states) nations; and promoted basic human rights (of capitalism and corporations) and fundamental freedoms for all peoples.(the freedom of poor people to adapt to the needs of the ruling class and the liberty to work until they die.)

 Today, this order is under threat.(by both ultraright populism and a resurgence of New Deal-style social democracy, or even socialism) and it is being challenged by authoritarians (Trump, Putin) and extremists (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn) and strained by the pace, scope, and disruptive nature of global change.(deliberate antisocial policies hurting everyday people which we, the Warriors of the Ruling Class, ourselves put into place 40 years ago, and which are now threatening to bite us in the ass) It is in our (self-centered) interest as (privileged) Americans to defend the (neo)liberal international order, even as we work to (viciously quash social unrest and censor free speech on the Internet and stir up fear of Russia) improve it to better (enrich ourselves to the point of bursting) reflect the times in which we live and address the (opportunities for profit at any human cost) new challenges we face.

Second in command at the Penn Biden Center is multimillionaire Steve Ricchetti, whose decades of lobbying for such powerful monoliths as AT&T, the American Hospital Association, Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Eli Lilly, the American Bankers Association and General Motors make him perfectly qualified to conduct foreign policy and ensure that war always stays perpetual and profitable for those privileged few who never have to actually fight in them. As an official in the Clinton Administration, Ricchetti also was instrumental in passing the anti-democratic 1996 Telecommunications Act, which ensured that ruling class power and its relentless propaganda would become consolidated within only six media giants funded by the same corporations which he continues to serve. He is the very epitome of the Revolving Door Continuum.

 And staffer Ariana Berengaut's claim to fame, according to the Penn Biden blurb, was her appointment as the first-ever State Department ambassador (under Hillary Clinton) to the Silicon Valley Empire of billionaires. Yes, Silicon Valley is indeed its own nation-state, requiring the protection and frequent public intervention of the traditional federal government with which it is a full and equal partner.

Biden's think tank is a virtual home away from home for literally dozens of exiled technocrats and propagandists from both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

These kinds of start-ups cost money, so Joe Biden took some precious time out from tweeting his sorrow over the latest gun massacre in order to court and flatter and placate rich people in an in-person speech. Joe is as alarmed as they are over Bernie Sanders's claims that the world's six wealthiest oligarchs (including billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of the war-hungry Washington Post) are actually cutting the lives of poor people short. Bernie's speaking truth to power was so alarming, in fact, that the Post gave him three Pinocchios for no good reason at all, other than that the rich are different from you and me: they not only have more money, they don't choose to use the Oxfam model for measuring their obscene wealth. 

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research notes that the three-Pinocchio rating dumped on Bernie by the Post is downright hypocritical, given that the newspaper itself is so intent upon whining about the debt and the deficit, and spreading such lies as Social Security is going broke, the old are eating the young, and that austerity and cuts to social programs are really good for healthy economic growth.

But Joe Biden is having none of this reality-checking and truth-telling. In a stump speech in Alabama for Senate Democratic candidate Doug Jones, Biden did his folksy charm reputation very proud. He can co-opt populism in the service of elitism with the best of them:

 “Doug understands about tax fairness,” Biden told the crowd. “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” 

The comment comes amidst the debate over tax reform, for which President Trump and congressional Republicans last week unveiled a new plan that would both lower the corporate tax rate and cut the number of individual tax rates. 
Sanders has railed against the Republican tax framework and has historically slammed tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. Both Sanders and Biden are widely viewed as potential contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Need we say more? The revolving door of the finance-capitalized Brave New World Public-Private Partnership Empire spins at such a dizzying pace that it's hard sometimes to even discern the bump-stock gunfire it generates. We have become too conditioned into not seeing and not hearing the violence which exists at the very highest echelons of power.

Distractions In the Time of Cholera

So Donald Trump landed in Puerto Rico, and to everybody's pseudo-shock, immediately discerned that as bad as things might seem to the naked lying eye, they don't hold a candle to the real American disaster known as Katrina. He does have a point, though, because given the delayed federal response and the lack of vehicles and fuel and personnel, they still haven't gotten around to bringing out all the bodies. So far, maybe two dozen people have officially been declared dead, compared to the nearly two thousand who were robbed, by dint of infrastructure neglect, of their lives in New Orleans. And the aftermath of Hurricane Maria promises to be a very long and lethal disaster indeed.

  But as reported by The Hill, a Beltway political gossip organ, the most important scandal today is not that the collapsed electrical grid had deliberately been primed for destruction by the austerity measures imposed from on high by the US government and predatory Wall Street creditors on the say-so of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The real scandal of Trump's stage-managed visit is that he rudely snubbed his latest Twitter nemesis, the female mayor of San Juan, when he proffered his gratuitous thanks to the military and other dignitaries.

 He wouldn't even say her name. Carmen Cruz apparently isn't doing a heckuva job. She is sadly not a Perfect Ten.

So to protect all the guilty, the media emphasis has been duly placed upon how doubly unappealing Donald Trump is whenever his serial misogyny collides with his serial racism. Cue the outrage. And definitely change the subject, which in a just and sane world would be the hidden human suffering of serially ignored people.

In other news which serves to direct all the blame toward Donald Trump, and to deflect it from cruel, longstanding bipartisan US policy decisions adversely affecting the economic and social well-being of Puerto Ricans, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman has created a nice little journalistic side-scandal of his own.

It seems that the good professor and Laureate of a generous bank-issued Nobel prize had falsely claimed that not only is there an outbreak of deadly cholera in Puerto Rico, Trump himself had caused it! (Trump's ramping-up of Barack Obama's terroristic drone wars with the help of the US-weaponized Saudis has indeed caused an actual cholera outbreak in Yemen, but that saga of human suffering has, for the most part, been dutifully ignored by American media.)

On September 30th, Krugman feverishly tweeted:

Cholera. In a US territory. Among US citizens. In the 21st century. Heckuva job, Trumpie.

He later partially retracted this false information by allowing that it was not (yet) confirmed. But it was his days-long delay in actually scrubbing* his original Tweet that is the most troubling aspect of this brouhaha. Even real journalists make factual mistakes on Twitter all the time, and they usually make prompt corrections and apologize when they're called out.

Not Paul Krugman, though.

But he finally did respond publicly today in a terse "explainer" in the Times' deliberately obscure new "Reader Center" section - complete with a fawning  introduction by his editors, who gratuitously mention his academic bona fides in the apparent hope of softening the credibility blow to one of their star columnists. Krugman will not apologize - he will merely be thoughtfully rueful as befits his status:

The Reader Center is a newsroom initiative that is helping The Times build deeper ties with our audience.

In this piece, Paul Krugman, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times and a Nobel laureate, reflects on (my bold) sending an inaccurate tweet about the presence of cholera in Puerto Rico.

"On cholera, in the heat of the moment, I got sloppy. I saw a tweet about cholera from someone I usually take seriously, assumed there was reporting behind it, and tweeted it out. I was wrong, and admitted the error.

That’s a warning about Twitter, and how easy it is to be careless; I will be more careful next time.

What’s important is not to let some exaggeration distract from the terrible reality in Puerto Rico."

As of this writing, I am the only reader to become distracted enough by his distraction from all the distractions to take advantage of these deeper audience ties and actually reply to his pabulum. My published comment:

 "Reader Center" is not a worthy substitute for the now-defunct Public Editor's position. Margaret Sullivan probably would never have allowed Paul Krugman to get away with this flippant pseudo-apology.

He tries to blow the whole thing off with a "let's move on, nothing to see here, folks" excuse for his Tweet, which displayed not so much compassion for Puerto Ricans as it did gratuitous contempt for Trump.

Additionally, he only partially retracted his original Tweet, with a shoulder-shrugging "OK, cholera not confirmed. Conjunctivitis yes; lack of clean water (situation worsening, not improving) makes it a risk. But not certain."

Moreover it took him days to actually scrub* the original Tweet, after it had garnered more that 32,000 "likes" and about 14,000 retweets. In other words it went about as "viral" as an epidemic of dysentery. His choleric correction, on the other hand, got only 1600 likes and 500 retweets.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2017/10/u-professor-emeritus-kr...

 It's telling that Mr. Krugman has only chosen to address this issue after the CDC, PolitiFact, and Princeton called him out on it. When such dicey outlets as Breitbart and Infowars instantly raised the alarm, it apparently was a matter of nasty Fake News sniping about virtuous but "oops" Fake News. No need to delete, let alone deign to reply.

The damage to credibility is already done. Heckuva job, Professor.

 * Correction: I'd assumed, in the heat of the moment, that because PolitiFact's link to Krugman's original false tweet led to nothing, that the professor had probably wisely deleted it. Then I double-checked. I was wrong; it's still posted on his account, and it's more popular than ever. I apologize for the error! (and hopefully the Twitter execs will include it in the cache of fake news that Congress is so intent upon acquiring.)

It's Not Terror If An Old White Guy Does It

Just because it's the worst (nonmilitary or state-sanctioned) gun massacre in modern American history, and thousands of people were terrified by it, doesn't mean you get to call it a terror attack.

A quick Google search of headlines on the Las Vegas atrocity reveals that media outlets are mostly going with "mass shooting" to describe the carnage. Not only was the gunman apparently not a Muslim or an ISIS sympathizer. He was an older white professional with no criminal record who lived in a $400,000 house. Talk about an atrocity not being media-ready, or especially Trump-ready! The most that the bombastic president could glumly tweet out was hs "deepest condolences" minus the usual dog-whistling outrage at which he is so adept.

There was no way CNN could cue the canned Doomsday soundtrack for this one, and absolutely no way that weapons manufacturers could immediately book and run the usual ads which both fund and ramp up the War On Terror. National security actors were left twiddling their thumbs by the phone. For one thing, the shooter himself was at one point in his life an auditor for the mega-weapons, fighter jet, bomb and drone manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Talk about not fitting the standard narrative!

So all CNN could come up with as of this morning was Suspect Killed 50+ People and Had 10 Rifles.

NBC was similarly bland, but went even further and put its own headline in the passive mood: More Than 50 Killed and 406 Hurt Near Mandalay Bay. They did not mention that concert-goers were "terrified" until the second paragraph. The suspect is not an assassin, he is a "gunman."

CBS managed to bypass human agency entirely in its headline: Las Vegas Shooting Leaves At Least 50 Dead.

It's not until the second page of the morning's Google results that we venture across the pond and get the name of the domestic terrorist right in the headline. The BBC bluntly announces: Las Vegas Shooting: Steven Paddock Kills Over 50 People.

But wait, stop the presses! The Independent, also based in the UK, announced that Isis was claiming responsibility after all!* Adjust the Google algorithm, pronto, as the corporate media outlets cue the Doomsday soundtracks and enlarge the headline fonts to full capacity for the global terrorized viewing pleasure of millions.

If this claim of Isis involvement is true, watch as Paddock magically metamorphose from a respectable guy who just "snapped" to a stark raving mad evil jihadist in the space of a minute.

Celebrities and politicians will adjust their own settings and change the tune of their Tweets asap, vying for the chance to be first to blame it all on either Trump (if they're Democrats) or the vast Muslim conspiracy (if they're Republicans) to supplement the hash-tagged thoughts and prayers to the victims of the inevitable #VegasStrong.

As ever, all talk of gun control legislation has been declared "too soon" out of solemn respect for the dead. If they couldn't get it done after the Sandy Hook massacre, they certainly won't get in done for a few hundred country music fans. What happened in Vegas will, sadly, probably stay in Vegas.

Of course, when a right-wing white supremacist congressman named Steve Scalise is the victim of a would-be assassin, the media will fawn all over him and his miraculous, well-insured recovery, while he solemnly hopes that his shining courageous example will break the "gridlock" and inspire a whole new wave of bipartisanship. (as in tax cuts for the wealthy, and social program-slashing for the rest of us.)

Country music star Jason Aldean, one of the Vegas performers, was certainly right when he observed that "this world is sick."

*Update: The FBI said there is no evidence of Isis involvement in the Vegas terror attack. So let our rulers put this terrible tragedy behind us as they get on with the important work of terrorizing the public with the narrative of Russian meddling in American politics, a/k/a the war on democracy itself. The Kremlin agitprop on Facebook has gotten so bad that even Fido isn't safe.

Be properly afraid and patriotically believe everything the "intelligence community" tells you through its Mighty Wurlitzer house organs, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Never Let a Serious Manufactured Crisis Go To Waste

While Trump is sending in the military, under cover of humanitarianism, to quell any incipient native unrest on Puerto Rico, his good-thinking critics in Congress are obsessively adhering to their own McCarthyite agenda.

The latest episode in RussiaGate has congress critters criticizing Twitter for, of all things, not taking the whole Cold War resurgence propaganda campaign seriously enough.

Senator Mark Warner, far from grousing to TV cameras that Puerto Rico is being criminally ignored by the White House, and that American citizens are being allowed to die for no good reason other than cruelty and greed, groused that he was very disappointed that Twitter had furnished his witch-hunting intelligence committee with only 200 accounts possibly linked to fake news trolls operating out of the Kremlin.

Never mind that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have in his own pocket the names of 200 subversives acting for Russia right within the US government, people were shocked and awed enough that McCarthy didn't even have to produce his nonexistent list. Times have changed, though, and if you can't come up with at least a million Russian operatives who sneakily forced American voters to pick Trump over Hillary, then your whole hysterical plot is in danger of completely falling apart. From the New York Times:

The company’s  presentation “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.”

Translation: Has Twitter now, or has it ever been, an associate of Vladimir Putin or a member the Russian Federation?

Adam Schiff went on CNN Thursday to vaguely not answer any questions about what actual evidence he might have in his own pocket regarding Twitter malfeasance. He said that his House Intelligence Committee has "only scratched the surface" of the alleged massive meddling by Russia in our democracy. He's only had almost a year to scratch, and congressional fingernails grow more slowly than we might like. And then he was caught flat-footed when, as almost an afterthought, Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Puerto Rico catastrophe. Schiff, looking perplexed, said he "thinks" that Congress might be voting on a long-term relief bill next week... or maybe it's the week after that. He's not sure, because that's not his department. But he certainly seems sure that RussiaGate is far, far more important than thousands or even millions of American citizens sickening and dying right before our eyes on national TV.

From the front-page Times article, which is handily placed above the old news that American citizens are being callously allowed by their own government to sicken and die:

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, would not answer questions about the briefing on Thursday, and his spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Warner said that he and Mr. Burr would hold a news conference as soon as next week to update the public on their investigation and try to draw attention to the continuing threat by foreign entities to the American political system.

It will be very hard to draw the attention of Americans who are faced,every single day of their lives, with such mundane threats as climate change catastrophes, lack of jobs and health care, institutionalized racism and police brutality, and rents that are too damned high. The propagandists of the Democratic/Neocon Alliance have taken on the very daunting task of making us believe in magic. Just as Trump is sending in the troops to Puerto Rico to stifle the dissent as they hand out the water bottles, our government is sending in the shock troops, trying to stifle dissent by tacitly accusing more and more people of treason. If you dare to complain about your lot in life, or to call out social and economic injustices, then you are unpatriotic and probably a dupe of the Russians. So it's best for everybody to shut up, and let American leaders get on with their gaslighting.

The modern congressional witch-hunters are very poor propagandists if they think that gullible Americans will be shocked that somebody in Russia spent a paltry $100,000 on some fake ads which proceeded, all by themselves, to magically propel Donald Trump to victory. Since this is chump change compared to the billion dollars that Hillary Clinton raised and spent on her own failed bid, it must mean that a crappy hundred thou has more clout than a billion smackeroos. This is what Mark Warner and Adam Schiff actually expect us, knowledge-impaired dupes that we are, to believe as they strive valiantly to reduce our quivering jelly brains into one great big puddle of fear and docility.

Perhaps they can get a friendly state attorney general to sue Twitter and take this all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, even the tiniest smattering of "possibly foreign" cheap fake ads is a subversive violation of the great Citizens United ruling, which equates money with speech. The very survival of all-American greed and capitalism is at stake.

Trump To Puerto Rico: Drop Dead

 **9/28 Updated below.

OK, so maybe that's a little harsh. But more likely, it's not harsh enough, given that Donald Trump's administration is actually in the business of hastening death - be it by attempting to yank health care from millions, reducing public housing assistance, destroying environmental protections, scoffing at banking regulations, and of course, waging endless wars and expanding drone strike assassinations to wherever on the globe "terrorist" Muslims live, breathe and drive. (not counting, of course, his good oil-rich friends in Saudi Arabia.)

Trump took a break from his racist tirades against professional football players, and has finally gotten around to hurling his white supremacist racism against Puerto Rico.  Following the All-American austerity Bible of foisting "personal responsibility" upon the poor for the benefit of the predatory billionaire class, the president, in a triple whammy of a Tweet, dutifully blames the American citizens of this island commonwealth for their own plight:

"Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble....

It's (sic) old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated, with billions of dollars....

owed to Wall Street and the banks, which, sadly must be dealt with. Food, water and medicine are top priorities - and doing well #Fema."

As bad as this sounds, it's really nothing worse than how United States leaders have treated Puerto Rico for the past 120 years of its unwanted status as a de facto United States colony plundered by banksters, sugar barons and drug-makers. At least Trump is not ordering the Air National Guard to bomb our fellow American citizens, as Harry Truman did back in 1950, for having the audacity to seek their independence from Uncle Sam. 

It was not until many decades later that the FBI, under a Freedom of Information Act demand, released files which revealed that about 100,000 Americans residing on that island had been systematically harassed, and often jailed and tortured and experimented on and killed, for participating in the nationalist movement. Naturally, US officials used the same tried and untrue and permanent excuse of "Russian meddling" to justify their own atrocities.

So in the long run, Donald Trump's clumsy bloviating against Puerto Rico might even have the silver lining of causing mainland Americans who hadn't even realized that this island is part of the United States to join forces against him, and to demand an immediate government response to a "natural" humanitarian catastrophe caused, in large part, by man-made climate change.

As the New York Times reports, 

A new poll of 2,200 adults by Morning Consult found that only 54 percent of Americans know that people born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, are U.S. citizens. (Because Puerto Rico is not a state, they do not vote in presidential elections, but they send one nonvoting representative to Congress.) This finding varied significantly by age and education. Only 37 percent of people ages 18 to 29 know people born in Puerto Rico are citizens, compared with 64 percent of those 65 or older. Similarly, 47 percent of Americans without a college degree know Puerto Ricans are Americans, compared with 72 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 66 percent of those with a postgraduate education.

Inaccurate beliefs on this question matter, because Americans often support cuts to foreign aid when asked to evaluate spending priorities. In our poll, support for additional aid was strongly associated with knowledge of the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. More than 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support aid, compared with only 4 in 10 of those who do not.

Unlike the presidents before him, Trump is not even remotely trying to cover up the historical, institutional and corporate racism inherent in America's ongoing "War Against All Puerto Ricans." 

This disdain had heretofore been carefully hidden under the usual benevolent "white man's burden" kinds of platitudes. At least, unlike Teddy Roosevelt, Trump isn't ordering that only English be taught in this Spanish-speaking territory's schools.

A longtime protectionist ban (the Jones Act) on any non-US shipping to or from the island remains in place, meaning that emergency humanitarian aid from South America, Central America and Cuba, and all unaffected, or less-affected Caribbean locales, is still ridiculously outlawed, at great human cost. The Trump administration has denied a request for a waiver which would allow, among other things, swift lifesaving foreign shipments of gasoline to power the generators of Puerto Rico's sweltering hospitals.

That's outrageous, to put it very mildly. (**see update) But where was all the liberal outrage in 2015/16, when officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (unelected American governing bodies) foisted a Greece-like austerity regimen upon Puerto Rico when it defaulted on a $58 million predatory loan repayment? The Obama White House was certainly very quick to nix the kind of bailout it had only recently gifted to the Wall Street banks which had plundered Puerto Rico in the first place.

  At the same time that the big banks were underwriting subprime mortgages on the mainland and turning ("securitizing") them into fraudulent toxic financial instruments, they were going on an orgiastic Puerto Rican bond-buying spree, and foisting the paper on colluding hedge funds. When that all went kaput, the neoliberal solution was to reduce the federally mandated minimum wage for select groups of Puerto Rican Americans, to close public schools and fire teachers, to cut pension funds, to freeze the wages of public employees, to raise college tuition, to reduce Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians (causing a mass exodus of doctors from the island to the mainland), and to cut food stamp stipends.

As World Bank economist Anne Krueger wrote at the time, cutting the too-generous-for-Puerto Ricans minimum wage of $7.25 makes perfect sense,  "because higher labor costs force Puerto Rican businesses to raise prices, making the island more expensive for tourists than neighboring Caribbean nations."

In other words, the dark-skinned Puerto Ricans should sacrifice and get paid less money to buy fewer expensive groceries so as to dissuade wealthy, cost-conscious (and white) tourists from vacationing instead in Jamaica or the Bahamas, where the dark-hued servants earn even smaller pittances. Moreover, Krueger went on, the $7.25 minimum wage also discourages multinationals from locating their businesses in Puerto Rico. After all, the big pharmaceutical companies have already left in a snit for much friendlier wage-slave countries.  This exodus, in turn, had the awful effect of "causing more workers to opt for collecting welfare over working." So let's cut their welfare assistance even more, to get them out of their hammocks of dependency and send them to work at a special introductory rate as low as $4.25 an hour.

Paul Krugman, resident New York Times liberal columnist and self-limited critic of only the GOP side of institutional white supremacy and austerity, dutifully approved:

  A recent report commissioned by the commonwealth’s government argues that its economy is hurt by sharing the U.S. minimum wage, which raises costs, and also by federal benefits that encourage adults to drop out of the work force. In principle these complaints could be right. In particular, even economists who support a higher U.S. minimum wage, myself included, generally agree that it could be a problem if set too high relative to productivity — and Puerto Rican productivity is far below mainland levels.

 Trump, in his own brash and insensitive way, is merely repeating what the poobahs of the Neoliberal Thought Collective have been dictating to the world for decades: it's the poor who must bear every burden and who must be blamed when they're not "productive" enough to fix the problems caused by the rich. Trump simply lacks the necessary finesse, the concern-trolling obfuscation, the colorblind beneficence of the modern colonial mindset as displayed by the Kruegers and the Krugmans and the Obamas of the world.

In spite of his own ignorant self, Donald Trump is turning out to be a damned good educator. 

  Therefore, may his ugly campaign of divide-and-conquer have the unintended consequence of actually uniting more people in both the pursuit of knowledge and in class/race solidarity.

*Update: Responding to criticism, Trump said he'll visit the island next Tuesday, scope it out, and continuously praise the strength and resiliency (neoliberal code for "you're so screwed") of the great Puerto Rican people. "It's very, very tough because it's an island... sitting in the middle of an ocean, and it's a big ocean, a really really big ocean," he insightfully prattled.

Meanwhile, CNN has amped up its coverage of the Puerto Rico catastrophe, with pundit Nia Malika Henderson even voicing the hope that since Trump watches a lot of cable news, perhaps he'll stop congratulating himself on the "great ratings" for his lackluster response long enough to allow his brain to soak up some of the awful human suffering going on outside his own self-involved little world.

We'll see. People are literally running out of time.

**Update 9/28: After initially refusing to waive the Jones Act lest the profits of the American shipping industry be reduced, Trump, through his Homeland Security secretary, reversed course and waived it after mounting pressure from the Puerto Rican governor and members of Congress, as well as from Defense Secretary James Mattis, who cited "national security" rather than humanitarianism as the prime reason. The war department obviously fears an outbreak of civic dissent on the island. This waiver will allow international disaster aid to flow to Puerto Rico. The most necessary commodities are water and fuel.

Meanwhile, long-term disaster assistance is still on hold, although Wall Street banks and hedge funds have "charitably" offered to strangle Puerto Ricans with even more debt in order to repair their destroyed electrical grid. Whatever happened to the quaint notion of the  Army Corps of Engineers performing this task as an ordinary public service? Maybe they're all tied up building infrastructure elsewhere, such as Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.

And here's the cruel catch (isn't there always a cruel catch?) The Jones Act waiver is cruelly limited to only 10 days. This means that emergency shipments from foreign countries will have precious little, if any, time to load up supplies and get to their destination. Trump obviously doesn't want his faux-concern for suffering Puerto Ricans to overcome his very real concern for American shipping magnates. This waiver is nothing but a one-way ticket to hell.

I hereby double down on my original title, Trump to Puerto Rico: Drop Dead!