The Cult of Diminished Mental Capacity

It seems like it was only yesterday when your refusal to pledge allegiance to the cult of Russophobia got you branded as, if not downright unpatriotic, then at least the naive tool of Vladimir Putin.

Now that year-long investigations have turned up zero evidence that Russia "hacked" the 2016 presidential elections or that Donald Trump "colluded" with Putin rather than maybe just launder money with the help of the Russian oligarchy, the newest cult revolves around the 25th amendment and the juicy revelations contained in the hastily written and hastily released Fire and Fury.

If you express any doubt that Donald Trump is in the early-to-middle stages of Alzheimer's disease or another form of progressive dementia, then you are a naive fool who refuses to honor the long-distance diagnoses of mental health professionals who possess some sort of remote control PET scanner that sees directly into Trump's Swiss Cheese of a brain. 

Before the new cult of Oprah Winfrey came along the other day to take a little of the psychiatric heat off Trump, his melting brain and deteriorating personality were all that the pundits of CNN and MSNBC could talk about since the book came out last week. Finally, the "open secret" of the president's worsening dementia could be talked about in polite company!  And not just talked about, but weaponized. Knowing full well that Trump watches a lot of TV, they embarked on nothing less than a round-the-clock propaganda campaign to not only convince the public of his incapacity, but to convince Trump himself. He must have felt like Ingrid Bergman to dozens of cable news Charles Boyers. Don't ever dare to defend your sanity, my dear, because it only proves how insane you are. 

"Trump's 'Very Stable Genius' Tweet Proves He Isn't" is the expert opinion of CNN's Chris "Sigmund" Cilizza, with Meta-Narrative Disability as his differential diagnosis:

Trump's lack of strategy is, in an odd sort of way, the most consistent thing about him. Any look at his life tells you that he is someone who just, well, does stuff.

Why has it taken the political world so long to wake up to that fact? Because we tend to view presidents -- and presidencies -- as tied together by some sort of narrative arc. That each statement, each policy decision, each tweet is somehow in support of a broader agenda. That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That theirs is a story being told to us by the White House -- and it's our job to sniff it out.

Trump's presidency is abnormal in all sorts of ways. But perhaps the most important to understand is that it lacks any sort of meta-narrative. There are just his reactions to things. That's it.

And that, whether you like Trump or hate him, is not the hallmark of a three-dimensional chess-playing super genius.

This is quite a different tune than the one CNN was playing last year at this time. Back before he became so incapacitated, Trump apparently was a master gaslighter in his own right. He was making reality itself become hazy for a whole nation full of Ingrid Bergmans. But of course, it was really Putin who was pulling the gaslighting strings of his Trump puppet:

Russia even tried to gaslight US voters, as intelligence agencies concluded, trying to undermine their faith in the democratic process. And when Moscow thought Trump would lose, it planned to promote the view that the election was stolen, under the #DemocracyRIP banner, a plan whose seeds Trump had already planted.

The challenge will be a steep one for journalists and for all Americans, when so much of what comes from the next president has to be checked and double-checked. The first step is to establish when there is a gaslighting operation in progress.

The media's counter-gaslighting strategy has had an effect all right, but probably not what the pundits had in mind. Instead of reduction, via media torture, to even more of a quivering mess of an old man eating cheeseburgers in his locked bedroom while tweeting increasingly maniacal threats and complaints, the president strategized and decided to go on a full-on mental health campaign of his own. Since, like probably every president before him he is a textbook narcissist, he selfishly made the mental health all about him. He started to ever so carefully over-enunciate his words in public appearances. On Tuesday, he opened to TV cameras what would normally have been a private negotiating session on immigration reform. Not only did his mouth form complete sentences, not once did it hang open or even so much as dribble. Trump performed without incident for over an hour. He even uncharacteristally offered to "take the heat" from critics of his pro-DACA concessions rather than lash out as expected.  He simply was his usual un-meta self, with the Queens accent which makes the fluent media-political complex cringe so self-righteously.

What's more, the Democratic bigwigs in the room actually groveled and laughed and joked and preened and expressed great enthusiasm about working with this supposedly deranged man about his cruel plan to build a wall against immigrants. Once they got their seat at the lime-lit table, they couldn't help themselves.

 "Democrats are for security at the border,” Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer assured Trump during the meeting. “There are obviously differences, however, Mr. President, on how you affect that.” 

Richard Durbin, the Senate minority whip, likewise couldn't contain himself at the utter fascistic sanity of it all, gushing to Trump: "We’re all honored to be part of this conversation.There are elements you’re going to find Democrats support when it comes to border security. We want a safe border in America, period, both when it comes to the issues of illegal migration, but also when it comes to drugs and all these other areas.”

He later schmoozed to the TV cameras that "my head was spinning" over the 90-minute jam session with Trump. Political dementia is, like, so contagious.

As even the New York Times approvingly wrote, the collaborative aura and appearance of civility "were a remarkable break with the divisive messaging that propelled Mr. Trump to the White House and the harsh policies that have defined his first year in office, marked by efforts to demonize and deport immigrants who have entered the country illegally."

I guess you just can't gaslight a gaslighter after all.

It's preferable to the ruling class that cruel policies such as the mass expulsions of human beings be done as quietly and secretly as possible, as was the case under the Obama administration. Despite all his xenophobic rhetoric, Trump is not anywhere close to beating the discreet and intelligent Obama, who deported more people during his tenure than any other president.


***


I usually profoundly disagree with everything that conservative New York Times pundit Ross Douthat writes. But as he insightfully opined in his Sunday column (days before the Democrats engaged with Trump in that bipartisan matter so beloved of the establishment press): 

But op-ed provocations notwithstanding, the 25th Amendment option isn’t happening — not without some major presidential deterioration in the midst of a major crisis, and probably not even then. And while I blame Republicans for a thousand things that brought us to this pass, it’s too extreme to blame them for not pursuing an option that’s never been tried before, against a president who was recently and (yes) legitimately elected, especially when that option requires extraordinary coordination across the legislative and executive branches and could easily fail … with God-only-knows what kind of consequences. So unless Robert Mueller has more goods than I expect, we are going to live for the next few years in the way that America lived during the waning days of Nixon, the end of the Wilson administration, and perhaps at other moments known only to presidential inner circles — with our own equivalent of the petticoat government, which in this case includes military uniforms, dress suits and whatever outfits Ivanka and Kellyanne Conway favor (but not, any longer, the layering of collared shirts perfected by Steve Bannon).

My published response:

The more the media rails about Trump's mental status, the more the third of the electorate which supports him will feel the vicarious paranoia and outrage against the "elites" who, they feel with some justification, are trying to gaslight him out of office sooner rather than later.

There's cunning method to Trump's madness. After all, it does take a special kind of malevolent brain to be able to con and market your way into the ranks of the Forbes 400. The real scandal is not that he "colluded" with Russia to deny Hillary her coronation, it's that his corrupt way of doing business over the decades has been so rewarded by the very Establishment now seeking his ouster.

As long as the stock market keeps booming and the rich keep growing richer, the #Resistance will continue playing out as a soap opera for our aghast entertainment. Were it not for the fact that Congress has done zilch to take away Trump's capacity to blow us all to smithereens at any time, this whole show would be a work of, like, great comic genius.

The media had their chance to destroy Trump's candidacy. Instead they nourished it with $5 billion worth of free advertising. His TV rallies and debates were ratings bonanzas. Media mogul Les Moonves even gloated that Trump "may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!"

Meanwhile the "demented" Trump is completing plans to destroy Medicaid and snatch health care away from millions of poor people. Where's the media shock and outrage over that?

#MeMeMeMeToo Hits the Red Carpet

 * 1/8 Updated Below

I must have been asleep at the switch, because until last night I hadn't even noticed that the New York Times now has an actual Gender Desk. It must be the replacement for the defunct and less click-worthy Environment Desk that they got rid of a couple of years ago.

 No possible way would they dub it the "Woman's Page" of newspapers of yore, seeing as how that section was rightly derided as sexist for the plethora of recipes, fashions, mothering tips and how-to-please-your-hubby guilt trips. So now it's morphed to the anodyne and politically correct "Gender" moniker.

As far as the alternately melting and freezing Earth is concerned, who needs coverage of corporate pollution and climate change when our jaded hearts can be warmed by millionaire actresses vying for Best Dressed in Black honors at Sunday night's Golden Globe awards? Some of them are even bringing along honest-to-goddess politicians and activists. It's sort of a reversal of the pre-Trumpian White House Correspondents Dinners, when Hollywood stars came to the Potomac to see and be seen as guests of the corporate media.

The Times is sending its own large team of A-List reporters to provide blow-by-blow coverage of the Hollywood event, which it bills as a veritable Town Hall forum for political activists rather than the booze-soaked second-rate advertisement for the big budget film industry it's always been. It's even sending the award-winning photographer who won a Pulitzer for his glam shots of Barack Obama - the star president who not only collected bundles of cash from Harvey Weinstein, but who made performance art a major part of his own governing strategy.  Since everybody who's anybody will be wearing funereal black to send a stern message of solidarity to Harvey Weinstein as they slosh their drinks, it remains to be seen whether the pics themselves will be rendered in serious black and white in order to mirror the grave glitter of it all.

Times star reporter Glenn Thrush, who was just quietly welcomed back to the newspaper after his suspension for drunkenly hitting on and badmouthing young female journalists at his previous job, is apparently not going along on the Hollywood junket. His presence would be an insult to the women reporters who are thoroughly disgusted that their newspaper's scolding of predators does not apply to the in-house predators who rake in so much revenue from their edgy, insidery Trumpworld reporting.

Regarding the Times's edgy new series/newsletter called The#MeToo Moment (as opposed to Movement), reporter Bonnie Wertheim explains that they'll be "switching things this year" and putting the emphasis not so much on "who" the actresses are wearing but on "what" their choice of outfit signifies for them, their careers, and "the future of the industry." In other words, Hollywood will be given a much-needed boost of gravitas by the Gray Lady. Clothing is not only a fashion statement, it's weaponized speech! Who knew? So entertainment journalists are now officially on notice to #AskHerMore.

I can hardly wait for all the self-righteous anti-Trump Alzheimers jokes, the annoying Tom Steyer impeachment ads explaining that an apple is not a banana, the pharmaceutical ads for E.D. and opioid-induced constipation, the anti-aging cosmetics ads, the movie tie-in ads, and of course the numerous political campaign trial balloons sure to be launched this evening. 

*Update 

I was wrong about a couple of things.

First, only one political trial balloon was launched, and that was from Oprah Winfrey. If her rousing speech on human rights wasn't her debut as a 2020 presidential candidate, I don't know why she even bothered. Donald Trump's empire was and is no impediment to his stint in "public service," so why should Oprah's be?  It's truly a #MeToo moment for billionaires to become more directly involved in politics, rather than just peddling their influence and donating their money. Tom Steyer (whose impeachment ad thankfully did not run during the Golden Globes) is also said to be mulling a run, as is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Ditto for Tom Hanks, who sadly didn't get to give his own rousing speech last night because he didn't win for pretending to be Ben Bradlee. I'd be very surprised if the DNC bigwigs were not actively courting Oprah at this very moment. Because if anyone can pull off a victory based solely upon star power and populist oratory and identity politics, she certainly can. It's just too bad that she delivered her speech while receiving the Cecil B DeMille award, named after the notoriously predatory Hollywood director.

And about those ads. No, Viagra and opioid constipation didn't make the cut, because the sponsors of the #MeToo-centric spectacle were all about selling social responsibility in keeping with the narrowly prescribed theme. The New York Times ran an ad consisting of a page of scrolling print of "He Said, She Said, He Said, She Said, He Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said..." It would have been more effective if Glenn Thrush wasn't the elephant in their newsroom. Mention of due process might have been nice too. Oprah herself added to the righteous flavor when she (perhaps) mistakenly called for more "persecutions" - rather than prosecutions - of offenders.

Facebook ran an Orwellian ad about changing society for the better. L'Oreal continued telling women that we should buy expensive cosmetics from them because we're "worth it." Mass Mutual pretended to be a church with a choir instead of an insurance sales pitch. Discovery appeared in several slots to tell people to be good citizen-consumers and buy more stuff on credit. Why not, since a new Deutsche Bank study shows that the number of American families with more debt than savings is now at its highest point since 1962?

Not once did anybody mention Trump, who already was the butt of all the jokes at the Academy Awards. The social purpose of the evening was as highly scripted and restricted as the Morticia Addams couture. It was all about the #MeToo moment in the approved narrative moment in time.

And is it only me, or does that new hashtag #TimesUp also double as a plug for the New York Times? I smell a Pulitzer ad campaign to go along with Oprah's presidential ad campaign.

Bomb Cyclone For Healthcare

It's January, and it's cold and snowy outside, and therefore, the media tells us, the end of the world is nigh. Iguanas are literally falling out of trees! Wind chills are expected to plunge below zero for the next two whole days!

It's January, and Donald Trump is still president, and therefore the end of the world is nigh. The only new twist in this man-made disaster is that the people who surround him and enable him as he storms and fumes and tweets his way around the White House were willing to spill their guts for a new blockbuster book. They don't seem to realize how venal they themselves look by putting their careers and their fortunes above the good of the country as they gleefully call Boss Trump an idiot and a moron behind his back. The punditocracy is giving new life to the 25th amendment as a backup to the flailing RussiaGate investigation.

These are the bombshell blockbusters dominating the official discourse this week. These are the cyclones in the news cycle.

But conveniently lost in the swirling vortex are some malevolent plans to force the poorest of the poor to die more quickly than usual. People getting their healthcare through Medicaid will now be forced to work in some states, even though many of them already do work: whether be it toiling away at Walmart and McDonalds, or staying at home to care for children or sick or elderly family members.

What Bill Clinton accomplished by kicking millions of people off cash welfare in the 90s, the Trump administration hopes to finish off by ensuring that the vulnerable fall through the remaining tatters of the safety net. 

As a matter of fact, the supposedly demented Trump and his minions are using Clintonian welfare reform (Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF) as their template for the destruction of Medicaid.

Seema Verma, the arch-conservative ideologue and Hewlett-Packard exec named by Trump to lead the Medicare and Medicaid Services division of HHS, is spewing the old canard that  "able-bodied" adults who get government-funded health care coverage are the victims of a form of bigotry. Unless they are forced to work until they drop, her twisted logic is, they will feel just like slaves, but without the sustaining self-sufficiency. "The days of low expectations are over," she vowed.

But, as a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the efficacy of TANF for incentivizing welfare recipients to go to work has proven, people don't work because they're forced to, they work because they want to and they have to in order to live. People are not, as a rule, inherently lazy. People are unemployed for the simple reasons that they can't find work, or because they become too sick to work, or they got laid off, or because they otherwise face insurmountable barriers to employment.

Forcing Medicaid recipients to work will not only not lift them out of poverty, it potentially will have the result of impoverishing them still further, when employee labor costs such as transportation and child and elder care are factored into the Trump administration's proposed draconian requirements.

Furthermore, as the Kaiser study shows, the state administrative offices involved in implementing the TANF work requirement over the past two decades have ended up costing the government more than it ostensibly saves through its mandatory work requirements. It costs money to hire more bureaucrats to keep track of the people it is supposedly trying to "free" from willful idleness. It's also been demonstrated that the children of parents who are forced to work at low-paying jobs in exchange for minimal benefits have more behavioral problems, thus adding to the long-term costs to society of slashing safety net programs. Having Medicaid coverage when working at jobs which provide no health insurance at all actually saves both the government and private business money, because reliable heath care helps people to keep working, especially when their jobs involve repetitive stress and heavy lifting.

The Kaiser report authors add that when the Trump administration shames the "able-bodied adults" it would like to exclude from Medicaid, it doesn't even bother to define that term. It could very well include the mentally ill, the illiterate, the drug-addicted. Nobody knows, probably least of all the incurious and semi-literate Donald J. Trump.

The one silver lining of Seema Verma's hideous agenda is that so far, anyway,  "only" eight states have expressed an interest in seeking a federal waiver for the Medicaid work requirement. Among them is economically hard-hit Kentucky, whose state-run KyNect marketplace and  Medicaid expansion were lauded as the preeminent success story of the Affordable Care Act. The number of insured people there increased by 105% over four years, the largest increase of any state. Put another way, only six percent of Kentuckians remained uninsured last year.

The other seven states opting in to the work requirement are Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, Utah and Wisconsin, all of them led by conservative officials.

Matt Bevin, the Tea Party governor of Kentucky elected in 2015, at first wanted to completely overturn Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. But such was the uproar that he "softened" his stance somewhat, and is applying for a federal waiver not only for ushering in the work requirement, but for an actual reduction in services, beginning this year.

Among the proposed new requirements for getting a prescription filled, or getting a tooth filled, is passing the high school equivalency exam and enrolling in job training classes, as well as finding the financial means to attend courses dealing with smoking cessation and other health problems. People who've qualified for Medicaid because they meet poverty guidelines will also be monitored under what is dubbed a "My Rewards" account. Health expenditures exceeding $1,000 annually will count as a demerit on one's permanent record, although any actual rewards accruing to the compliant care-avoiding patient remain shrouded in mystery.

As health reform advocate Louise Norris points out, with Bevin's plan almost guaranteed to get quick approval from the unhinged Trump administration, half a million Kentuckians will get kicked off the Medicaid rolls within five years. This will happen in a state which already has one of the highest death rates in the country from opioid overdoses: nearly 30 people out of every 100,000 last year.

Naturally, Medicaid has also become the convenient scapegoat for too many "able-bodied" adults scoring too many opioid prescriptions from unscrupulous pill mills. Carefully missing from these conversations is why people are getting hooked in the first place. Many times it's because they're out of a job, were evicted from their home, and are so bummed out that they will do just about anything to ease both their psychic and their physical pain.

  This front in the class war of rich versus poor is the bomb cyclone which will tear families and workers apart for decades, if not for multiple generations. But to hear the mass media tell it, the real emergency and the real crime is still that Donald Jr. talked to "the Russians", and that fascist provocateur Steve Bannon is calling it treasonous.

Donald Trump is far from the only nut in this party mix.

Molting Season For Deficit Hawks

Resident New York Times altar boy Ross Douthat slunk into the confessional last weekend and pleasured himself with what he called some righteous journalistic flagellation. Now that Republicans are firmly entrenched in power, and now that the billionaires and corporations have been gifted with the permanent tax cuts costing the public at least a trillion dollars per decade, Douthat has nobly decided to apologize for being so wrong about his life-long crusade against Big Bad Government. It turns it's been a pretty damned Good Big Government  all along, working as it has for the benefit of the very rich at the expense of everyone else.

So in the interests of the sated (for now) alpha-raptors of the oligarchy and the mid-term appetites of the Reptilpublican Party, Douthat is dutifully retreating to the molting room for recovering deficit hawks. He's clinging to his John Maynard Keynes breviary as he recites the Confiteor and pretends to shed some of that self-righteous plumage of his.

Through My Squawk, Through My Squawk, Through My Most Grievous Squawk

Douthat used to pretend to be afraid of inflation. But now that the tax overhaul will inflate the wallets of the Forbes 400 to bursting, he no longer has the appetite for bullshit which has already served its purpose:

Instead, in hindsight the most important economic argument of the early Obama years was between two schools of thought that agreed we should put more money into the economy and only disagreed about how to do it — the Keynesians who wanted massive government spending and the market monetarists who favored looser monetary policy. Today, both sides of that debate look far better than the strict fiscal and monetary hawks, and the endless arguments about Bowles-Simpson look like an interesting exercise that did not deserve so much swarming attention from politicians and the press.

So far, so good. But then again,

 There are always real limits on what government spending or tax cuts can accomplish and how far they can go. A society only has so much productive capacity, dumb tax cuts can be hoarded and dumb spending used to enrich special interests or subsidize social pathology, and too much spending can eventually induce inflation.

Despite his self-flagellation with a few loose strands of al dente pasta, Douthat still cannot resist labeling the lower classes as a "social pathology," can he? He simply cannot flagellate to the extent of redirecting his knout at the real pathologies: the Pentagon and Wall Street, aka the Military-Industrial Complex.

My published response to his column:

This sounds suspiciously like a mea culpa of convenience. Now that the obscenely rich have been awarded their reverse Robin Hood of a tax cut, it's finally safe for the deficit hawks to admit that the austerity they've been shoving down our throats for the past decade and longer was nothing but a scam to enrich the oligarchs like they've never been enriched before.

Since this will be an election year, of course it behooves the GOP to pretend to embrace Keynes and modern monetary theory while the embracing's good... for them and their paymasters, that is. As long as they can fool enough of the people in their gerrymandered districts about their sudden devotion to Medicare and Social Security, they can bide their time until November, when the safety net slashings can re-commence with gleeful abandon.

 Ross gives the whole cynical game away when he implies that Social Security recipients "misspend" their paltry monthly checks, and furthermore, that this worker-funded insurance program be means-tested. Do you see too many old people selfishly eating three meals a day, Ross? Irresponsibly blowing their noses on three-ply tissue instead of two-ply? Wastefully setting their thermostats at 68 degrees instead of a more seemly 55? I really am curious about how you expect people just barely scraping by as it is to save cash.

If deficits really don't matter (and they don't) then I challenge Ross to support expanded Social Security and Medicare for All.

Now, just because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has sorely disappointed diehard deficit hawk Paul Ryan by vowing that Medicare and Social Security cuts will be off the table during this election year doesn't mean that vulnerable people still can't be punished in other creatively destructive ways.

That the leaders of both corporate political parties are getting together with the White House this week to wheel and deal and horse-trade and sausage-grind on the budget should be cause for great concern. Safety net cuts always work better when they're done in an opaque, bipartisan, accountability-free fashion. For example, the GOP might give an inch on DACA protections for young immigrants coupled with inhumane border crackdowns, while the Democrats might give a mile on more food stamp cuts and a major "reform" of the federal disability benefit system for the extremely poor. It always helps the oligarchic cause whenever they're forced to work in secret under an artificial deadline - in this case, the January 19th end to their bipartisan "continuing resolution" to keep the government open.

So while the deficit hawks might be in their merely temporary rest period, the molting of the Snakes in Suits will proceed at breakneck speed every day of the year. It has to. They are so engorged on their prey they have to keep shedding to grow all that shiny, scaly new skin and continue slithering around, searching for new victims to torture and kill. As usual, vast expenditures for perpetual war and the mass surveillance of citizens will not be subject to much, if any, debate.

In the serpentarium known as Congress, the Democrats are the baby boa constrictors, who lie around lethargically when they're not lovingly squeezing their victims - who, legend has it, "have nowhere else to go" - while they sleep. The Republicans are the friskier reptiles, puff adders and rattlesnakes who make a lot of show and noise as they sink their fangs into the body politic before they feed the bulk of the carcass to the King of All the Reptiles: the Corporocracy.

Lament at the Billionaire Zoo: "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing"

Neoliberal New Year: Goody Bags For the Homeless

The best part of the New Year for me so far is that the flood of fundraising appeals from political organizations and parties and charities has suddenly dried right up, virtually overnight. Especially annoying were those hysterical come-ons promising that my monetary gift would be triple-matched by some mystery mogul. If I didn't give, the implication was, this pathocratic jerk would just keep hoarding his excess cash out of pure, miserable spite.

Even more annoying than the year-end money grubs were the false pretenses under which the money was being grubbed. And out of the hundreds of appeals I've received over the past few weeks, none was more disgusting than the mawkish missive I received from former president Barack Obama.

In this cruel winter of brutal cold, with homelessness and opioid addiction reaching record levels, Obama took some time out from his umpteenth tropical vacation to thaw out the hearts of his donors with his own award-winning brand of contagious inspiration.

If you ever listened to his insipid weekly addresses to the nation during his  eight-year tenure, you should know the formula by now.  It always starts out with the obligatory gushy gaslighting - since life is so good and optimistic for him, then it naturally follows that it has to be good for you, too. If you're not solidly in the middle class, then at least you can aspire to membership by dint of hard work and magical thinking. Pay no attention to the harsh realities surrounding you, lest you become jaded. The dismal results of austerity for the masses and riches for the rich are mere "challenges" to be confronted with the same old piecemeal solutions contained in shiny new gift-wrap.

There will apparently never be an end to his victim-shaming, financialized way of seeing things, aptly described by Adolph Reed, Jr. as a "vacuous-to-repressive" worldview. Obama writes in his latest email to potential donors:

I know optimism isn't always fashionable. Certainly not when we're fed a steady stream of cynicism on television and an on social media. We face some extraordinary challenges, but consider the long view. If you think about it, by almost every measure, America and the world are better off than they were fifty, twenty, even ten years ago.

(And they still wonder why Hillary "America Is Good Because America is Great" Clinton lost to the cruel but occasionally brutally honest Donald Trump?  Of course, in politician-speak, "America" is code for the Plutonomy, which is indeed better off than ever before, at the expense of the rest of us.)

But because Obama was the first cosmetically Black person to be elected president, it just naturally follows that all Black people are better off as a result, despite the fact that they became much worse off during his tenure. Still, he blithely reassures his wealthy potential donors that because they elevated the first technically Black person to the presidency, there's no need to worry their coddled little heads about the rest of the Black population. He avoids the obvious truth: that the Owner Class has always allowed a few women and people of color to advance as a way of keeping white supremacy and wealth inequality alive and well and immune from liberal criticism:

I was born at a time when women and people of color were systematically, routinely excluded from huge portions of American (read: plutocracy) life.. Today women and minorities are rising up in the ranks of business, politics and everywhere else. That's just one of the significant shifts we've seen And when you measure it against the scope of human history - it happened in an instant!

Since Gilens and Page established that the wealthy donor class, as a group, are adamantly opposed to government spending on social programs, health care, and public education, Obama willingly feeds this gilded age pathology by denying reality every bit as viciously as his faux-nemesis, Donald J. Trump. In a time of rising death rates in this country, deaths due to outright despair and rank poverty, Obama actually schmoozes:

Around the world, we live at a time when fewer people are dying young and more people are not only living longer, but better.

Remember that Obama is talking to the wealthy donor class. I doubt that many of the world's poor people got to read his Happy New Year telegram. They not only don't have the Internet, they often don't even have electricity (like half of Puerto Rico), or are otherwise occupied fleeing violence or scavenging for food. But maybe they will rise up eventually, though not in the mawkish way that Obama pretends to envision.

The fact is that more people are living short, nasty, brutish lives. Obama seems to be cherry-picking his happy statistics in order to make his donors feel better about their own unfair share of the pie. To make a terrible situation look good, corporation-beholden entities like the World Bank measure income inequality when they should be measuring wealth inequality. Also, the very definition of poverty has been diluted down to make things seem rosier than they really are. Even though poverty has been steadily increasing over the last several decades, the actual number of poor people is artificially decreasing, thanks to capitalistic measurement tools based upon bullshit rather than upon math. The United Nations' Millennium Campaign, for example, currently defines extreme poverty as living on a dollar a day. In actuality, though, in such rich countries as the US, people who scrape by on $2 cash a day are correctly defined as being extremely poor. As a matter of fact, the US government itself calculated more than a decade ago that people needed at least $4.50 a day to meet even basic minimum nutrition requirements.

Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics calls the baseline poverty definition used by Obama and his neoliberal cohort absurdly unrealistic. If Obama used honest parameters, though, he'd have have to admit that at least 80 percent of the world's population now lives in abject poverty. And that might make the rich greedsters feel very poorly about themselves. So poorly, in fact, that they might not give their unearned and untaxed wealth to the tax-exempt Obama Foundation for Oligarchic Feel-Goodery.

Family-Friendly Brutalism

So to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, Obama offers three anecdotes about the sunny side of Dystopia. Two of his stories involve the oppressed helping the oppressed in order to achieve the desired inspiring level of Bootstrapping Nirvana. And, because tax-dodging philanthrocapitalism is the solution of last resort as social programs get cut and slashed by the oligarch-run government, Obama also gushes over a multimillionaire sports star who is donating his paychecks to fund scholarships for a whole new generation of Baracks and Michelles.

Concerned about the epidemic of homelessness? Don't be. Who needs a roof over one's head when one can be blessed with goody bags? Obama writes:

At five years old, Jahkil Jackson had witnessed the struggles of Chicago's homeless when his aunt took him to Lower Wacker Drive to hand out food to those camped there. He found himself restless, wanting to do more. With a spark of inspiration and the help of his family, Jahkil created Blessing Bags - kits full of socks, toiletries and snacks that he could offer to those in need.

"Let them eat goody bags" is so much more heartwarming than Trump's heartless "let them eat paper towels" response to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, is it not?

Now, to be fair to Obama, he is just echoing the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless's own piecemeal solutions to the lack of permanent affordable housing for poor people. Perhaps (I think cynically to myself) with the windfall profits from their new permanent tax breaks, such corporate sponsors as JP Morgan Chase can build some actual houses for the homeless, rather than continuing to corner the market on the same homes they foreclosed (often illegally) during Obama's tenure.

If you happen to be among the millions of people devastated by last year's record storms and fires, Obama doesn't want you to complain about how slow and meager the response from Trump's government has been.  Instead, we must follow the example of the Houston wedding planner who, rather than waste a whole banquet, helped the bride to distribute all that excess food around the neighborhood. Why hector your congress critters for actual monetary aid and government help when you can augment your wedding planning business by starting your own Facebook page to organize debris-clearing parties, and then dub it "Recovery Houston?" It certainly gets FEMA off the hook.

Are you a rich athlete who's making out like a bandit from Trump's tax cuts?  Then aspire to be like Philadelphia linebacker Chris Long, and donate some of your paychecks to fund a few scholarships, and thereby tamp down both racist hate and all that unicorny talk of free college from the likes of Bernie Sanders.

Barack Obama, that glib and glittering neoliberal tool of Wall Street, is retooling himself as an international goodwill ambassador of continuing austerity for the many and prosperity for the few. Rather than demand more generous government disaster aid, construction of public housing, and an end to lifetimes full of crushing student debt, he's simply continuing to do what what he did as president. He is calling for tiny symbolic gestures and using his own celebrity persona as a beacon of hope and inspiration. He is continuing his career as a consummate bullshitter.

Taking this inspirational bullshitting journey with Barack Obama will cost a lot of money. Therefore, rather than direct private or public cash aid to the poor and vulnerable, Barack Obama wants the money to be sent directly to him, to fund his continued lecturing to the poor and minorities, but mainly for the construction a $500 million shrine to himself in Chicago, complete with golf course. "Transaction fees" to cover your digital donations will be extra. Besides boring old cash and checks, wire transfers will also be cheerfully accepted - not least because, just like Obama's fantastical list of global recovery improvements, they "happen in an instant." Especially during this latest stock market bubble, there's no need to even redeem any your marketable securities. For your full tax-deductible convenience, just have your broker or your private wealth manager fill out the paperwork so that both you and Obama can get the most bang for your charity buck.

***

My own New Year's resolution, as I enter my eighth year of blogging, is to do my best to keep exposing neoliberalism as the deadly germ warfare of rich versus poor that it truly is.

So... here's to a realistically hopeful and happy 2018 to everybody except the billionaires, the Trumps, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and most members of Congress.

Hillary Is the Least Most Admired Woman In the USA

 

Although Hillary Clinton has again won the over-hyped Gallup title as the "most admired woman" in the United States, her slim margin of victory over Michelle Obama essentially makes her the least popular winner in the entire history of this horribly annoying poll.

In another wipe-out,  Donald Trump narrowly lost to Barack Obama. If nothing else, this result is sure to engender a torrent of new "it was rigged!" tweets from the president, in what is traditionally a very slow news week. If it's any consolation, Obama still has a lot of catching up to do to beat Dwight Eisenhower's own record as most admired man in America ever in the history of Gallup polling.

If it is any further consolation to Trump, although "Crooked Hillary" has retained her popularity title for the 16th consecutive year out of 22 total lifetime wins, finding even a couple hundred people to vote for her out of the thousand-odd who were polled was a fraught enterprise. "She managed to win this year because she remains arguably more prominent than other contenders," Gallup contended. "However, retaining that stature may be more challenging in coming years with her political career likely over."

Ouch. Well, it could always have been worse. Gallup could have gone the Vanity Fair route and advised Hillary to take up a new hobby, such as knitting. Although the usual purveyors of manufactured liberal outrage are screaming "sexism" at this harmless snark, I think the people who should be really offended by this hysteria are the knitters of America. Admired males and females alike can be, and historically have been, accomplished knitters. As a crocheter myself, I was even a little jealous that Vanity Fair hadn't recommended my needlework skill-set to this minimally admired person.

If it's any further, further consolation to Trump, Gallup also predicts that as a sitting president, he's bound to beat Obama sooner or later - provided, of course, that he is still the most unpopular President this same time next year. The pollsters predict that Barry's star will soon fade as well, despite that over-hyped interview with Prince Harry Saxe-Coburg (whose great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, by the way, became an enthusiastic knitter after his abdication) was "breaking the Internet" this week. No matter, though. If Obama can brag that he, out of hundreds of millions of other Americans, felt delightfully "serene" as he listened to Trump's bizarre inauguration speech last January, he probably doesn't get too needled when it comes to people admiring him or not.

The other runners-up in this year's popularity contest were a mixed bag, ranging from Pope Francis to Mike Pence to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Benjamin Netanyahoo to Beyonce.

For those of you who care enough to be actually knitting your brows over the poll results, please take heart. Because fully one-quarter of those contacted by Gallup could not name one single person whom they most admire. Another nine percent chose a friend or a family member over any of the usual Big Media Names. 

This exhibit of independent thinking from a tiny but "statistically significant" sample of the American populace is what actually gives me a smidgen of hope for the New Year.

Classy American Christmas

Yes, Virginia, there was not always a Santa Claus. In the early 19th century, Washington Irving, in the guise of a venerable colonialist of the ruling Knickerbocker dynasty, borrowed the old Dutch legend about Saint Nicholas and re-purposed it into the prototype of the American Santa Claus. A scant hundred years later, Coca-Cola re-purposed the re-purposing, and created the mass market image of Santa that we cherish to this very day - the morbidly obese dude with the snow-white beard and the red suit. 

Depression-Era Santa With His Handy Whip

 I guess Santa must have imbibed a whole lot of that original cocaine-laced high calorie sugary drink to gain all that weight and still be able to fly as high as a kite all night long. The subliminal message of Coca-Cola, even as it markets its brand to poor third world countries today, is that it's always better to be an unhealthy fat person than to look like the original St. Nick: decrepit, pale, and skeletal.

Although Charles Dickens is regularly credited as the "inventor of Christmas,"  the modern American version is very much the joint creation of the landed New York gentry, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Our own post-Puritan, modern secular observances started as a public relations/propaganda campaign to get the rabble off the streets, and indoors, and therefore so out of sight and mind that the minority rich, safe within their own mansions, didn't have to give them another thought or another penny.

In the early days of the Republic, Christmas, when it was celebrated at all, was celebrated more like we observe Halloween today. The hoi polloi would roam the streets and bang on the doors of the high and mighty for handouts of food and money. Since the revelers were often drunk and rowdy, this had become a matter of grave concern to the moneyed classes. For one thing, Coca-Cola hadn't even been invented yet, and there was no electricity, let alone TV and Internet. The growing immigrant population couldn't even be trusted to go to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play without it devolving into a fatal fracas.

The poor, especially the newly-arrived immigrants, had been rioting at Christmas-time practically since the founding of the Republic. Enter Washington Irving a/k/a Dietrich Knickerbocker. This writer, whose Legend of Sleepy Hollow has long been a staple of Halloween in America, actually helped to reverse our fall and winter holidays with his lesser-known Christmas stories. He had the leisure time to write his tales thanks largely to the generous support of his brother-in-law, a wealthy Wall Street financier.

Irving's yuletide yarns centered not around the harsh realities of New York's teeming slums, but around a benevolent, but entirely fictional, English squire who proactively welcomes the whole neighborhood into his Bracebridge Hall manor house before they get the crazy idea of annoyingly begging, not to mention breaking and entering. In the "those were the good old days" fashion so beloved of American myth-makers and modern demagogues, Irving tried to market Noblesse Oblige as a way of denying that hardships even existed in the tenements and sweatshops of New York City. In his own totally non-existent world of the recent European past, the rich and the poor had mingled as one great big happy family. Irving literally invented such legendary Christmas traditions as "The Crowning of the Lord of Misrule" as a more desirable way for exploited and restless working people to hope for the future, to believe in the beneficence of the plutocrats, and to celebrate the Winter Solstice as quietly and as peacefully as their betters. It was the 19th century version of Fake News.

Indeed, the Upper Crustopoly of yesteryear sounds remarkably similar to the 21st century Republican ideologues and liberal philanthrocapitalists and their insincere hectoring of the poor to get out their "culture of dependency" and embrace hard work and damp down their anger and resentment through the occasional entertainments provided to them by their necessarily stern masters.

Irving unctuously wrote,

There is something genuine and affectionate in the gaiety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word or a small pleasantry, frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.

Irving's literary propaganda was slow to catch on with "the lower orders," however. Either his targeted audience didn't read, or they were too poor to buy his books, because in 1828 the ruling class of New York City was finally forced to officially create a metropolitan Police Department to protect their lives and their property from the mob. Poor people had gone way beyond merely hitting up the aristocrats for food and petty cash at Christmas-time. The were rioting, burning, and looting to protest against gross class inequities. Wars among immigrant factions erupted, including attacks on worshipers as they came out of church. The ruling class essentially reinvented Christmas out of stark nativistic fear of the growing political power of ethnic populations, particularly Irish Catholics.

Astor Place Riot of 1849

  Santa's co-optation as a jingoistic political prop also proceeded apace. During the Civil War, he was drafted for a psy-ops campaign against the Confederacy. President Lincoln commissioned famed cartoonist Thomas Nast to create a bellicose image of the Right Jolly Old Elf (already having been further modernized by Irving's plutocratic pal Clement Moore in The Night Before Christmas) regaling a group of Union soldiers, an image that was to be distributed en masse in the slave-holding states.

If you thought that Billy Bob Thornton's hilariously perverted portrayal of Bad Santa was extreme, just get a load of Nast's vision of a St. Nick who gives with one hand and kills with the other. As historian Matthew W. Lively describes it,

Nast drew a patriotic Santa dressed in striped pants and a coat covered with stars sitting on his sleigh beneath a waving American flag. Two drummer boys in the foreground of the sketch appear fascinated with a jack-in-the-box toy. One soldier is shown opening his box to find a stocking stuffed with presents, while another soldier holds up the pipe he received as a present. In the background, other soldiers play football, chase a greased boar, and cook Christmas dinner. 
More surprisingly, Santa is shown amusing the soldiers by hanging a wooden effigy of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. So no one is mistaken as to its meaning, a text accompanying the drawing notes: “Santa Claus is entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, and Jeff Davis seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”

This was a direct slap in the face to the South, where Alabama, in 1836, had become the very first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday. It did not become a formal national holiday until 1870. Could this North vs. South campaign be the real, albeit forgotten, source of Fox News's perennial War Against the War Against Christmas agit-prop campaign?

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas in America if we didn't get an endless loop of Yuletide TV spots of greetings from the troops in our nearly 1,000 military bases throughout the world to help us appreciate that killing and war happen, even during the Season of Peace. As an added propaganda bonus, theocratic Vice President Mike Pence even put the Christ back in Christmas with his visit to, quite literally, a whole second generation of US soldiers in Afghanistan. They've been there for almost as long as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle was in his 20-year coma.

Meanwhile, good luck to the 21st century gentry as far as getting poor people off the streets back home. Protests and riots might now be in a state of abeyance thanks to the relentless trickle-down, fear-mongering propaganda of the consolidated media-political complex and the country's addiction to electronic gadgets and drugs. But right along with the skyrocketing death rate from opioid abuse, homelessness once again is on the rise in the Homeland. People have taken to the streets not to protest, but because they have nowhere else to live.

More than half a million Americans will be spending Christmas outdoors or in a temporary shelter this year.

But, as Donald Trump's Housing and Urban Development Director Ben "Bootstraps" Carson puts it, "homelessness is not a government problem. It's everybody's problem" - meaning it's nobody's problem, especially not the problem of the pathocratic billionaires who've just received Congressional carte blanche to literally steal the last shriveled apple from the last little child's ragged Christmas stocking.

So despite the booming stock market and record economic "growth" and slightly lower poverty rates and slightly higher average wages, the rent is still too damned high for a lot of people. As reported by The Guardian, 

There was an increase [in homelessness] of 4.1% in New York. In the west, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento and Oakland all reported surges of varying sizes. Most of the increase across the country is driven by people living in doorways, tents and RVs as opposed to in shelters. People of color are dramatically overrepresented: African Americans make up over one-third of the number.
In one sense the prevalence of homelessness seems odd, because the national poverty rate has fallen to around the same level as before the recession. Yet homelessness is linked to economic growth. In some of the nation’s more desirable major cities, housing is rapidly appreciating to a point where it is out of reach for lower earners.
Median hourly wages in the US have barely budged for decades, from $16.74 in 1973 to $17.86 in 2016, in terms of 2016 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But in New York, for instance, the hourly wage required to comfortably rent a one-bedroom is $27.29. In Los Angeles, it is $22.98.

But to make Ben Carson, and actually all of us, feel somewhat guilty about our own less-bad lives, The Guardian is also running a companion piece about how individual homeless people are bravely (or maybe just cynically) counting their meager blessings this year.

Many are grateful just to have their own tents to live in. Others are going the nostalgic Charlie Brown Christmas route and decorating their pathetic shedding rejected trees with a few donated plastic ornaments. "My boyfriend wants to just put it in a milk crate with a paper bag, but I’m going to make a proper stand for it," one woman said. "I have some fake Christmas presents that I’ll put under it. And if I can somehow manage to make about $10, I can get four strings of battery-operated lights to put around it."

***

Paul Krugman, one of my favorite New York Times pundits, has, for at least the thousandth time, announced that only the Republican side of the Duopoly despises the working class.

Like Rip Van Winkle, he seems to have been asleep during the Age of Obama, in which under a Democratic majority, the top One Percent reaped fully 94% of all the household wealth lost during the 2008 financial collapse. But neoliberal propaganda needs must, so Krugman restricts his class war angst to the GOP's newly-enacted tax bill. He was apparently napping during Obama's own quiet parting gift to America in December 2016: a bailout of Wall Street foreclosure kings turned high-rent private equity landlords.

Krugman fumes:

How did they [the GOP] manage to produce this political lemon? Josh Barro argues that Republicans have forgotten how to talk about tax cuts. But I think it runs deeper: Republicans have developed a deep disdain for people who just work for a living, and this disdain shines through everything they do. This is true both on substance – the tax bill heavily favors owners over workers – and in the way they talk about it.

My published response:

 In a 2011 "Meet the Press," David Gregory gently and gingerly confronted Paul Ryan about his sick desire to cut Medicare, even though 80% of Americans don't want it touched. Then as now, Ryan scoffed in that slimy, earnest way of his.

"Leaders are expected to lead and are expected to change the polls, because that's what the country wants," he actually said.

"Country" and "America" are of course GOP-speak for the top 1%, a/k/a the Donor Class, a/k/a the Owner Class. And Trump goes them one better. "L'Amerique, C'est Moi!" is what he actually means when he says the tax bill is a giant Christmas present to America. That is, if he could speak French - or even English above a fourth grade level.

His pathological greed has made him so ignorant that he probably thinks Noblesse Oblige is one of those foreign terrorist organizations gathering at our precious borders.

When Ryan says the reverse Robin Hood tax package will become more popular over time, what he's really saying is that the actual population will become so demoralized and so weak over time that they won't even have the energy to get mad, let alone respond to polls. Another metaphor for this phenomenon is the frogs slowly dying in a pot of simmering water - although the GOP's culinary method is to set the burner up to an immediate furious boil before they dump us all in for the quickest possible kill.

Joyeux Noel, everybody!