Disinformation, Neocon-Style

It's deja vu all over again. When you look closely at the pushback against the Nunes memo exposing the alleged misuse of the secret FISA Court for political gain or revenge, you begin to see a pattern and a formula.

The propagation of anti-Russian fever is weirdly reminiscent of the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.  That Vladimir Putin is "hacking" our crumbling democracy is as much an article of faith as Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction. The methods by which this faith is being propagated to the American public become especially obvious when you notice that some of the same Iraq War cheerleaders are involved in this latest neocon effort.

The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of amplification.

The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much information. The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.

This is what former Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2002.  His office fed New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and pointed to the New York Times as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.  To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the Times.

Where one neocon bit the dust, however, there are plenty more to take her place. Take, for example, one Molly K. McKew, a self-described "information warfare expert" who got her start in propaganda at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and went on to lobby Congress on behalf of some of the former Soviet satellite countries whose billionaire leaders she also personally advised, before reinventing herself as a Russophobic pundit on cable TV shows and penning articles for such mainstream organs as Politico and the Washington Post.

At least McKew, unlike Judith Miller, is honest enough not to pose as an actual investigative journalist. Instead, she modestly gives herself the Orwellian title "narrative architect."

How does an architect construct a narrative? To get the recipe, just read her latest lengthy, convoluted and alarmist Politico effort, entitled "How Twitter Bots and Trump Fans made #ReleasetheMemo Go Viral." The main secret ingredient of McKew's concoction is, paradoxically, the exact same process of amplification that she accuses the TrumPutin trolls of employing on Twitter. It takes one to know one, I guess. She liberally links to articles and data that she either dreamed up herself, or that come from like-minded Neocon think tanks, or that are anonymously-sourced articles in the establishment press planted by these same think tanks and revolving-door politicians.

The proof is in the pudding if not in the cake, McKew gloats. You see, Trump decided to release the Nunes memo before he even read it, thanks to the thousands and thousands of #ReleasetheMemo tweets arriving at his desk and those of the "Trumpiest of congressmen" in the past few weeks. It is such a terrible thing when mere trolls have the power to influence such powerful Establishment Influencers.

McKew further amplifies her Politico message by pointing out that since the mighty Washington Post also agrees that Trump and the GOP have been unduly influenced by Russian trolls, it has got to be true. Another term for this propaganda technique is affinity bias, which supplements the endless repetition of boilerplate talking points through the use of an echo chamber.

Since Molly McKew can't blame the twitter campaign directly on Russian trolls, she points to Russian bots who retweeted the messages of actual human Americans, thereby infecting the minds of many other Americans. If this sounds confusing, it is meant to be confusing. She therefore blames the nefarious use of computational propaganda, which she defines as

“the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”—has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials. The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.

Molly McKew then refers to a number of computational charts of Twitter feeds which derive directly from computerized analyses allegedly conducted both by herself and by former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy. (I previously wrote about this war consortium's bogus Hamilton68 Dashboard, which purports to have the Big Brother ability to figure out who is tweeting, what they're tweeting, when they're tweeting, and where they're tweeting it from. Naturally, McKew seizes upon the Dashboard propaganda to further amplify her own argument. Chertoff's organization itself amplified the #ReleasetheMemo amplification frenzy when it planted an article in HuffPo complaining that the hashtag had lost a bit of its oomph during the manufactured government shutdown scare. This piece was where I myself first learned about #ReleasetheMemo.)

McKew ultimately undermines her own analysis of "Russian interference" when she is forced to admit that her research revealed that real American human tweeters actually started the memo campaign. What difference does the truth really make at this point? So she is nobly respecting the privacy of the US humans involved. For now, anyway. The implicit message is that you American humans best be careful what you write, lest Putin appropriate your words and you become fair game for eventual unwanted exposure by the Molly McKews of this enterprise.

 It is computational propaganda—meaning artificially amplified and targeted for a specific purpose—and it dominated political discussions in the United States for days. The #releasethememo campaign came out of nowhere. Its movement from social media to fringe/far-right media to mainstream media so swift that both the speed and the story itself became impossible to ignore. The frenzy of activity spurred lawmakers and the White House to release the Nunes memo, which critics say is a purposeful misrepresentation of classified intelligence meant to discredit the Russia probe and protect the president.

McKew further amplifies her own neocon message when she links to the warmongering paranoia of the Atlantic Council, another pro-war think tank at the forefront of fomenting Cold War 2.0 for greatly amplified profits to the weapons manufacturers who own it and operate it.

We ordinary people are not supposed to know all this, though, because otherwise how could the neocons manufacture our mindless consent for perpetual war and help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" against death and destruction on the epic scale that a hot war with Russia would entail?  What matters is that we allow the "right" people to manipulate us and make us believe that our leaders really, really care about us. The "Russians," McKew and her fellow disinformation specialists warn us, would have us believe we're all on our own, without a hope and without a prayer.

"And yes," she concludes, "that also reinforces the narrative the Russians have been pushing since 2015: You’re on your own; be angry, and burn things down. Would that a leader would step into this breech, and challenge the advancing victory of the bots and the cynical people behind them."

It takes a professional Narrative Architect like McKew to construct a Potemkin Village made out of Mom and apple pie, with the American flag being the only drapery you'll ever need to protect your privacy and your lives.

A prolific tweeter herself, McKew amplified her message even more today by plugging her own appearances on both NPR and MSNBC to further warn Americans about the dangers of unsanctioned amplification. For super-duper amplification, the New York Times' David Leonhardt graciously plugged her piece in his column. She'll even be appearing at SXSW in Austin next month to amplify her paranoid brand to music fans. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans' cynical can of worms which I wrote about in my previous post is already on its way to being pried open thanks to Donald Trump's "unprecedented" attack on the surveillance state. The Times has filed suit, demanding that the entire transcript of the FISA matter regarding Carter Page be opened to public scrutiny. In ordering the cherry-picked Nunes memo declassified, Trump probably unwittingly opened a legal door toward more transparency. This is likely the real reason that the Neocon alliance was gnashing its teeth over a nonexistent threat to national security.

***

Further reading on Molly McKew and her Manichean mindset and possible grift:

Meet Molly McKew, War Lobbyist and Hero of #TheResistance, Washington Babylon. 

A New Cold War Against Russia is a Terrible Idea, New Republic.

American Says She Was Hounded Out of Moldova by Pro-Russian Politician, Buzzfeed

***

I've been reading Robert Coover's brilliant but underappreciated, maligned, and even repressed account (The Public Burning) of Cold War 1.0 and the Rosenberg executions. One passage in particular struck me, because it so perfectly captures the "zeitgeist" of RussiaGate, and why so many otherwise intelligent people are falling for the "narrative architecture" being amplified by Molly McKew and her compatriots in government and media.

Speaking as an imaginary Richard Nixon, Coover writes that there was

"... an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution's presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil... and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody on this case from the Judge on down - indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government myself included - behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama."

And further,

"And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves - or as they'd say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers - maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one) were members of the alleged conspiracy"

RussiaGate hysteria will live on until war breaks out, or until a Democratic-Neocon majority again takes over Congress and the White House and things can can get back to a semblance of normal: in other words, respectful bipartisanship and fairness and collegiality in love and secret war and tons of money. Nobody wants to give up his place on the stage at this point, because doing so would be both heresy and an admission of fraud, not to mention a career-buster. It's all a show. We are either complicit actors, unwilling spectators, or outright traitors to the Narrative Cause if we refuse to become properly cowed and afraid. We are simply not allowed to despise Donald Trump if we don't also firmly believe that he is a Putin puppet. We must pledge allegiance to the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, if only because Trump is treating them so nastily. His insulting Tweets are deemed by the Miss Manners crowd to be so much worse than his real crimes, such as extrajudicial drone assassinations of civilians, which have now already overtaken those of his predecessor.

The one weapon we do still have is to relentlessly expose "consultants" like Molly McKew for exactly who they are: war profiteers. As ever, simply follow the money.

Happy Groundhog Day

It's official. There will be six more weeks of winter because this is a science and reality-based community, and when The Groundhog sees his shadow, we gotta believe his predictions. Otherwise we would not be patriotic Americans.

The X-Files is back on TV, as you may have heard. Before they came out of hibernation last year in the wake of the Trump election, our intrepid FBI agents were last seen on the tube in 2002, chasing their ghosts and aliens. George W. Bush had just taken office, and the creepy Deep State at the center of the series was still just a paranoid dream. The tinfoil hat ethos of the show now seems kind of quaint and cozy, what with the Snowden revelations and the Patriot Act and the anti-democratically secret FISA court and Trump's ravings about aliens hiding under every bed and scaling every imaginary wall.

And how the tables have turned. The ultra-right wing of the Uniparty has suddenly has gone all renegade ACLU and demanded that our civil rights to due process and privacy be protected. Sure, the GOP just cares about the rights of Boss Trump, and not even remotely about ours. But once they open their cynical can of worms via the so-called Nunes Memo, who knows what unintended good consequences might ensue?

House Republicans will apparently use the so-called Rule X to release their doctored version of the X-Files, whereupon the "apolitical" FBI will be forced to defend itself, and so on, and ad infinitum, while the Democrats flail and wail and as much as admit that they are powerless hacks in thrall to the Military-Industrial Complex.

As Jonathan Turley writes about the obscure Rule X,

Indeed, the rule has come to mean the very opposite of its language. Subsection 11(g) has never been used in countless conflicts with intelligence agencies which simply refused to declassify information. That lack of use of has reaffirmed the widely held view of congressional committees being “captured” by the agencies they are supposed to oversee. The intelligence committees have a steady revolving door of staff between Congress and the agencies. Moreover, members often use closed sessions to remove embarrassing conflicts or scandals from the public view.
This is why the vote on Jan. 18 to activate Subsection 11(g) was accompanied by a virtual “Wilhelm scream” heard from Capitol Hill to Langley to Quantico. The “Man From Rule X” may be a somewhat flawed character, as to his motivations in taking this step. However, regardless of the content of the memo, the act of defiance under this rule has been too long in coming.

 Bring it on. Just because The Groundhog retreated back to hibernation doesn't mean that we have to. If he saw his shadow, at least that means that there is still some sunlight out there. It's high time that Rule X was used for the purpose for which it was intended and not as a convenient P.R. fig leaf to disguise the fact that our government's boastful version of "transparency" has long meant its exact opposite.

So who knows? As much as the gospel of trickle-down prosperity sold by the right wing Uniparty is a complete sham, the idea of trickle-down transparency is yet to be tested. The truth is out there, somewhere.

Wake Me When It's Over

*Update: The memo is now officially Out There.

It wasn't read into the Congressional Record via Rule X after all, but simply declassified by the White House for immediate release. Nobody upstages Trump. But at least the truth that there is a Rule X, and that the congressional intelligence flacks can release whatever they want as long as it's during an open session is now Out There.

How the memo itself relates to and/or avoids the whole or actual truth is yet to be determined, given that this is still very much an intra-establishment political battle in dire need of some anti-partisan outside analysis and more independent journalism. But that the discredited Steele "Golden Showers" dossier was allegedly presented to the FISA Court by the FBI without disclosing to the judge that it was paid-for private political opposition research does have the ring of truth to it. The Democratic-Surveillance State machine will be questioned and forced to defend itself in public, and these self-described Trump resistance fighters will absolutely hate being put in any kind of corner. It looks as if the phony "national security" excuse for politicians doing horrible things could be about to collapse under its own weight. Stay tuned!

State of the Bunion, With Heel Spurs

Since much of Donald Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint last night consisted of his own hands, Mussolini-like, clapping for himself, and his  frequent pauses to look around and see who was applauding him, the reviews saying this was one of the longest harangues of its type are misleading.

Before I get into the rancid meat of the speech, let's get the fashion sidebar out of the way first. Paul Ryan wore a suitably lighter shade of blue tie than Trump's, although he did botch his own opening line: "I preven-- present the president of the United States!"

First Lady Melania chose the Hillary Clinton nominating convention look: a blinding white pantsuit. There are already plenty of articles on the possible cultural symbolism and hidden meanings of this choice of couture, so I won't bother. As I previously reported, the Democratic ladies borrowed their style from the Golden Globe ladies, and wore funereal black. Nobody shouted "Shut up!" or otherwise disrupted the spectacle - which is, after all, the political equivalent of Hollywood's own multi-part orgy of theatrical self-congratulation. There were one or two nonverbal outbursts that sounded like projectile vomiting, which I swear came from my TV and not from me or my pet goldfish.

Now, to the speech. If I were asked to give it a title, it'd be a toss-up between "It's Always Sunny When You Got Somebody To Hate" or  "It'll Take a Trillion-Dollar Military Industrial Complex To Crush One Little Latino Gang From Long Guyland."

No way, as the New York Times cheerfully posited in its usual insane deference to the "occasion" of the S.O.T.U. if not the man, was this an appeal for "unity,"  unless a more cohesive jelly mold of fear and hatred was what Trump had in mind.  When read rather than listened to, in fact, it sounds like many bullshitting presidential victory laps of hope which came before it.

Here's my interpretation (his actual words are in italicized quotes.)

America is a lot like Dante's trilogy, folks. There's both a heaven and a hell and maybe a purgatory, but I've never really been one for centrism, so I'll keep maniacally spinning from hell to heaven and back again throughout this diatribe. If there is anything I'm a master at, it's keeping people so seriously off-balance they won't know what's really hitting them until it's way too late.

Ordinary people look out for ordinary people. Because America is a bootstrapping nation which hasn't had a safety net for so long there's no need to even talk about it in this speech.

So, thank you, Mr. Helicopter Rescuer in the audience, for being a human prop next to the White Pantsuit Supermodel, so we don't have to talk about how the government has turned its back on the people of Puerto Rico and "the Harvey."

Thank you, too, Mr. Firefighter dude for rescuing 60 people from the Inferno in California. It only goes to prove that just because you're trapped in a raging fire you don't necessary die from it. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Congresscritter Steve Scalise, who proved that just because you get shot along with many other people every single day in America, you can come out of your own trial by fire looking just fantastic, 10 years younger in fact, all because of our great health care system. (Scalise jumps to his feet to prove it and he even blows a two-handed macho Hollywood-style kiss to the president. Because gun ownership for anybody and everybody is what America is truly all about. This happy-ending shooting proved we are one great big happy country-family.

"If there is an opportunity, we seize it." Because predation and greed are what we're all about.

Even though wages are stagnating, I'll do like all my predecessors did and insist they're rising. Plus, since I can't get Jay-Z calling me a germ out of my head, I'll dig in a little deeper and claim that black people have never had it better. Also Wall Street is booming, which is great for the pension accounts it's appropriated until the bubble bursts and somebody who is not a billionaire loses their shirt, their house, and maybe even an eye.

So anyway, here's a shout-out to Steve and Sandy, who own a small factory in Ohio.  Also to their black employee, an all-American welder who is a great welder because his bosses told me he was. You think I personally have the time to look at his welding? So that's another racist dog-whistle completed, sending the message that black people are either uppity Jay-Zs, or not hard-working enough to score a seat next to the White Pantsuit Goddess. How can I be a racist when I highlight a black guy on my special night?

"If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything." This is a subtle dig at the 800,000 Dreamers, in the vein of critics who counter the Black Lives Matter Movement with "all lives matter." Trump hammers down on this "dream" theme several more times during his speech.

"In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is 'in God we trust.'” (At this point the camera pans to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is caught applauding this line as robotically as any spellbound person who has ever been positively conditioned throughout life to loaded buzzwords and thus avoid thinking of how this country has always used the tropes of God and family to inflict a whole lot of Infernos both here and abroad.)

"And we celebrate our police, our military, and our amazing veterans as heroes who deserve our total and unwavering support." If you question endless war for profit, or complain about police brutality, you're not a real (white) American.

On that Orwellian note, here's another shout-out to a human prop. Young 12-year-old Preston up there, sitting right next to the White Pantsuit Goddess, started a movement to plant 40,000 flags on the graves of soldiers. Because unlike flowers, flags never die. "Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans. Preston’s reverence for those who have served our Nation reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem." Naturally, this was a dig at the mainly black athletes who have taken a knee in protest of racism at football games. Nothing like using a nice little kid as your racist cudgel, eh, Trumpolini?

Now it's on to the appointment of conservative judges who will allow people to keeping buying more guns because the Second Amendment rules. A quick pan to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch doesn't elicit any emotion whatsoever.

 "All Americans deserve accountability and respect – and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people."
Naturally, as the Underminer-in-Chief, this new rule would not apply to Donald J. Trump. But it'd be nice to see Congress take him at his word, just for fun.

Now it's on to the manufacture of more gas-guzzling, fuel-inefficient cars to keep the wheels of Capitalism grinding on until the whole planet erupts into one Dante's Inferno after another.

But before that happens, Trump wants terminal cancer patients to stop schlepping from country to country in search of a quack cure when they should easily have "access" to untested therapies right here in the Homeland.

Also, Trump has directed his new HHS secretary, fresh from the profiteering pharma industry, to "fix the injustice of high drug prices."  He might mean the injustice to the drug industry of laws against price-fixing, which prevent them from conspiring to raise and fix prices to even higher levels than they are already.

On to infrastructure improvement, a meaningless suggestion which seems to come up at every S.O.T.U. speech. Private corporations will not sink any money into such a thing, because it's risky and the returns are slower than would be gleaned by simply gambling with customers' money and making more money off of money than off of things. And no president in recent memory has ever suggested that public works projects actually be totally public. Where there is no profit motive, there is just no American way.

"We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work. We want every child to be safe in their home at night. And we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.
We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity."

Notice he doesn't say that he wants every child to have guaranteed health care and a guaranteed public education. He does want every child to be afraid of "foreigners" who make them feel so jittery in their beds at night after they see his inflammatory Tweets. And ominously, he hints at more social safety net cuts to come in some very neoliberal language: "lifting" people from welfare to work and implying that poverty is some sort of cultural problem or individual foible. This is another classic racist and misogynistic dog-whistle employed mainly by the GOP, but also echoed by the Democrats' offerings of "ladders of opportunity."

Now it's on to fulminating the discredited trope of the "trickle-down" prosperity to be unleashed by the massive tax cuts for the rich. Oh, but let's throw in some paid family leave, because that's the pet project of Daughter Ivanka, a registered Democrat until Daddy ran for president.

Finally we get to the real rancid offal of the speech: Keep All Latino Furners Out with our big, beautiful fantastic border wall. To help him make his point, Trump points to a couple more human props whose children were killed by the notorious MS-13 Gang on Long Guyland. And then, using the old divide and conquer propaganda technique, Trump wags an approving digit at a Latino ICE agent who is patriotic enough to go after his own ethnic group.

Now that he got that out of the way, he doubles down on ending the visa lottery and thus barring immigrants from what he infamously called "shithole countries." And he again lies about so-called chain migration allowing any immigrants' distant relatives to get a free ticket into the country.

Next, he tiptoes around the crisis of opioid addiction by telling the heartwarming story of a compassionate Christian cop who adopted the baby of a heroin addict. The implicit message here is that there will always be people to care for the children of addicts, so the government and the oligarchs raking in the dough don't have to worry about it. Because if the children of powerful people become addicted, there are plenty of pricey rehab hospitals to take them in while other addicts either die in the streets, or go through withdrawal in overcrowded prisons, or some stranger comes along to "lift them up."

Would it be a proper S.O.T.U. if Trump didn't also demand unlimited Congressional funding for an already bloated military machine? Naturally, this last symphonic movement elicited the requisite fascistic chorus of USA!USA!USA! as a worthy substitute for fireworks and clashing cymbals. To get the crowd adrenaline flowing, he gushes over two soldiers who helped evacuate a hospital booby-trapped by ISIS explosives, because, as they would have us believe, American soldiers never, ever commit civilian atrocities.

And just in case you still had any doubts that the US military is planning a continuation (it never officially ended) of the Korean War, they should have dissipated with Trump's introduction of his final human prop, a North Korean refugee who lost a leg and whose family was forced to eat dirt helping him to flee to freedom. He further strove to overcome our sickly inhibitions about another war with the evening's most heartless use of human props - the parents of Otto Warmbier, who was apparently tortured by North Koreans before they released him back to the States, where he died of irreparable brain damage - although with the lack of an autopsy, the cause of death was never established.

This country belongs to the police and the military, Trump bellowed.

Is it a coup yet?

Commercialized Resistance Is Futile

Wealthy entertainers, hijacking social protest in the Age of Trump, have now declared themselves The People. They are not to be confused with the brave but often marginalized and ignored people who have struggled for justice throughout our nation's history.

Move over, all you inheritors of Eugene Debs and Rosa Parks. Because the "Industry" has got this covered. It's all under control. You see, the newest role of famous actors and musicians and other media personalities is to turn the often bloody and violent struggles for racial justice and workers' rights and human rights into one star-studded entertainment diversion after another. Rather than protest in the streets yourselves, all you have to do is sit back and watch celebrities pretend to do it for you on TV. And if you're very lucky, you can even be a member of the live studio audience or even an extra on the stage.

Just as the Women's March franchise was partly the brainchild of affiliates of the Conde Nast publishing empire, the wider #Resistance (to Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump) is itself the product of the Media-Political-Entertainment Complex.

To that end, a gaggle of glamorous millionaires is staging a "People's State of the Union" as an alternative to Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint this Tuesday night. So as not to deflect attention from centrist Democrat Joseph Kennedy III's official rebuttal to Trump, the  A-Listers are holding their own "prebuttal" event on Monday night in New York City, where a lot of them were already in town for the Grammy Awards.* To be fair to them, though, they're not actually marketing their gala at the tony Town Hall venue as a protest, but as a "celebration." It's an occasion for all virtue-signalers to bask in the solidarity, narrowly defined as their mutual hatred for Donald Trump.

As progressive actor Mark Ruffalo dished to the celebrity gossip rag People, the restrictive purpose of all these celebrity events is to get out the vote for the Democratic Party, which only recently purged people-intensive populists from all its leadership positions.

“In essence,” Ruffalo tells PEOPLE of the event, “it’s a better reflection of our state of the union based on a more populist point of view, based on the people’s point of view. I think it’s important because we have a president who has a difficult time with the truth, who has a radical, divisive agenda, and spends an enormous amount of time focusing on the negative and hopelessness and despair.”

The agenda, therefore, is not for the wealthy entertainers to demand protections for the most vulnerable people, but to help the most vulnerable people feel better about their situations, possibly by viewing more movies and TV shows about vulnerable people prevailing over hatred, discrimination and poverty through dint of their own humor, hard work, and all-American pluck.

Above all, the #Resistance events are about the activist Beautiful People celebrating themselves:

 “We want to celebrate this moment that we’re in of what is now probably one of the most influential and powerful and really beautiful movements to come into play in the United States since the civil rights movement,” Ruffalo explains, going on to describe the event as “a celebration of the power and the beauty of this movement, but also of our accomplishments and to focus on what’s to come in the immediate future.”

"It's the Mother of All Movements," he added modestly.

The announced host of Monday night's Celebrity Activist Apprentice reality show is yet another Democratic Party offshoot called We Stand United (not to be confused with the main financial backer, Stand Up America, a 501 (c) (4) bankrolled by the Facebook wealth of failed billionaire carpetbagger Sean Eldridge.) For the full A-List roster of performers, check out the People link above, because the last thing that these People probably need or want is more publicity, even publicity on an obscure little lefty blog. 

Led by a former Clinton campaign operative, Stand Up America was also at the "grassroots" forefront of urging Congress to establish an independent commission investigating Russian "election-meddling" in the wake of Trump's firing last year of FBI Director James Comey - who had only recently been evoking the wrath of Clintonites for dredging up the private server-Anthony Weiner mess just weeks before the 2016 election. The enemy of their enemy so conveniently becomes their friend in the interests of the fortunes of The Party. 

Meanwhile, what would commercialized protest be without the solidarity engendered by shopping? No anarchist black hats or Guy Fawkes masks will be tolerated at any sanctioned and capitalized protest celebratory gathering. The must-have item currently for sale on the Stand Up America website is a tee shirt emblazoned with the bold words "It's Mueller Time!" - because goodness knows, the Number One priority of the desperate one-fifth of Americans who now live near or below the poverty line is RussiaRussiaRussia.

Then the commercial resistance marketplace seems to have run out of righteous steam in a hurry, because all I could find were shirts and buttons and bumper stickers  labeled with "Resist" or for double the fun, "Resist. Persist." For only $24, you can score the Lady Liberty super-saver combo package, complete with a quartet of Resist buttons plus a shirt to pin them on for the sake of patriotic redundancy.

 Meanwhile, you will be happy to learn that the Women's March anniversary souvenir book "Together We Rise," is now ranked #5 on the New York Times bestseller list. I was lucky enough to be first in line to score my free ebook version (via the New York Public Library and its crushing partnership with the ubiquitous rentier monopoly Amazon) of the $30 list-price volume. 

Sadly, though, I have been unable to complete my reading to give you a full review at this time. Maybe it was the immediate shout-outs by the Women's March organizers to Facebook and Google, which helped jump-start the Operation Headcount "efficiencies" of the event. Maybe it was the fact that the protests were planned in the pricey Watergate Hotel and underwritten by Conde Nast, also the publisher of the new book. Maybe it was the hat-tip to professional MSNBC Russophobe Rachel Maddow, who supplied a huge chunk of the corporate-sponsored publicity. And since, for security reasons, only clear plastic backpacks were to be allowed at the D.C. event, the ubiquitous rentier Amazon quickly came to the monopolistic rescue and sold millions of cheap plastic backpacks to the marchers. Don't even get me started on pink pussy hats and the pink yarn shortage, which caused a big price spike for that color. Because, capitalism.

At least the organizers admitted that the initial, if not the core, purpose of the march was to give Hillary Clinton voters their moment of catharsis.

A few quotes in the intro jumped right out at me, and not in a particularly good way: 

"I kept running into Trump supporters and many Russians in the hotel and thought, Is this real?" remembers one organizer."

 "Hillary asked us 'How can I be helpful? Can I tweet in support of the Women's March?' We said, 'Absolutely.' So that day, she actually tweeted in support of us."

Now, to be fair, Together We Rise does flesh itself out with quite a few previously published or re-purposed essays by feminists, so I'll refrain from passing too harsh a judgment on the book until I've developed enough resistance to lurking treacle to finish the whole thing.

Sadly, I didn't see anything by Nancy Fraser or for that matter, any radical feminist, in the table of contents. So as an alternative, I would highly recommend her Fortunes of Feminism for a collection of scathing critiques exploring how the feminist movement has both been hijacked by, and has willingly colluded with, the profit-intensive ideology of neoliberalism. This current "wave" of anti-Trump feminism remains true to valorizing "the politics of recognition" over struggles for economic justice. The commercialized #Resistance is also virtually identical to the platform of the centrist, corporatized Democratic Party, in that both studiously ignore the need for redistributive economic policies, a fight which was at the very heart of the original leftist feminist movements, both in the US and internationally.

"The two-dimensional character of gender wreaks havoc on an either/or choice between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition, because it assumes that women are either a class or a status group, but not both," writes Nancy Fraser.

Rather than simply "resisting Trump," the Left, what's still left of it, must not only resist getting sucked into the anodyne Hollywood version of protest but also embrace Fraser's suggested motto: "No redistribution without recognition, and no recognition without redistribution."

When the rich and the famous and the powerful posture as agents of social change and protest, everyday people and their everyday concerns are tacitly left out. The idea is that we can simply watch everything on TV: switching channels between the odious Trump reality show, and the mind-numbing liberal reality show.

Take, for example, the Democratic Party's choice of the person to officially rebut Trump after the State of the Union spectacular. Rep. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts will make his national TV debut as the party's latest rising star and savior. (Oprah bowed out.)  He's certainly got the name and the looks and the bathetic dynastic mystique. Other than that, he has refused to co-sponsor the Medicare for All legislation now pending in the lower House. He is also a fiscally conservative deficit hawk in the vein of the oligarch-friendly Clintonian Third Way. And why not? Young Kennedy has collected more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the shadow banking lobby, with his top individual donors listed on Open Secrets as Harvard University, Crescent Capital Group, Nixon Peabody, Bank of America, and Bain Capital. 

So I think we can probably forget about any talk of economic redistribution during his rebuttal. As a matter of fact, his speech should mesh quite nicely with those delivered by the celebrity-soaked "People's" State of Union event on the preceding night.

Stay tuned, and don't forget to pass the stale popcorn. Even better, consider cutting the official content/delivery cord to give your brain a fighting chance to actually think.

* Update, 1/29: The surprise guest star of last night's Grammy show was Hillary Clinton, reading a selection from the anti-Trump breviary, Fire and Fury, and of course appealing to the mainly young TV audience of potential voters. This attempt at hipsterism worked out so well for her when Jay-Z and Beyonce threw her that election eve concert in Michigan! But make no mistake: Hillary is still the heart and soul, not to mention much of the monetized power, of the Democratic Party and its "resistance" franchise. Don't ask me why this is, because I honestly don't know. She maintains her access to the public stage as some sort of great national feminist symbol, even right in the wake of some old but embarrassing news about a predatory campaign faith adviser she once slapped on the wrist. So it's more than apparent that Trump fans are not the only ones plagued by a cult mentality of authoritarianism. This is the thing that the citizens of this country must actually resist.

The Artifice of the Deal: Extract and Excrete

I half-expected the squadron of military helicopters to start strafing panic-stricken Alpine tourists as it bore Donald Trump to his Davos destination the other day. The sight of the droning machines on the bleak Swiss horizon has been aptly compared to the famous opening scene of Apocalypse Now. The more recent highly scripted scene lacked only the Wagnerian soundtrack to augment the sense of looming shock and awe, mayhem and insanity.

But not to worry. Because for all his populist rhetoric, Trump loves the plutocrats gathering at their annual confab of greed and do-goodery as much as they love them right back. All talk of Russian collusion, porn actresses, the attempted firing of Robert Mueller, dementia, and corruption took a back seat as Trump took center stage to soak up the genteel love he's been craving his entire professional life. The richest of the richest gripped their turned-up noses with one hand as they grasped their Trumpian tax reform windfalls with the other.

Save for the occasional theatrical boo from the rafters, everybody seemed very satisfied and happy. It shockingly turns out that the anti-Trump resistance is nothing but a big act to deflect the attention of the screwed-over masses from the real complicity and the real collusion: that of Trump with the global financial elite and the self-professed "thought leaders" among them.

Even the New York Times, whose own revenue and readership have reportedly skyrocketed from the #Resistance franchise, was willing to at least partially bury the hatchet as the artless Trump and the artsy Davos crowd did their intersectional thing. For when it comes to the rich growing richer (and buying more Times ads) Trump is just one of those necessary evils to gloss over when the glossing's good - for the extremely rich, that is:

Rather than confrontation, both sides labored for conciliation, at least to a point. For one afternoon and evening, at least, Mr. Trump threw no protectionist grenades and even broached the possibility, however remote, that he would re-enter a Pacific trade agreement that he scrapped last year, if it were renegotiated. For its part, the Davos crowd welcomed its top critic with a reception and warm words.

The mood was strikingly different from a year ago, when Mr. Trump was about to take office and the globalists meeting in this mountaintop getaway reeled in shock, panicked that his campaign promises meant the end of the movement they had nurtured for decades.

 A year later, many of the business and political elites remain dismissive of him, privately rolling eyes and using words like “madman,” but there was excitement about economic growth, and the tax cuts and regulatory rollback he has ushered in.

As long as one can roll one's eyes and tut-tut about Queens accents while raking in the dough, all is right with the world. One can save one's Botoxed face and resist gravity as one valiantly pretends to abhor and resist Trump. For when it comes to unmitigated greed, snobbery conveniently cancels itself right out with just the right injection of reverse snobbery.

 Peter Baker, chief interpretative scribe of the Times's palace beat, enthused
that that wascally wabbit turned his fluffy little tail and reassured the panic-stricken oligarchs. And why not, since his "sober" speech was mostly written by Gary Cohn, his in-house Goldman Sachs advisor? The populist version of Trump will make its next gala appearance next week at the State of the Union speech, said to be the product of the ultra-right xenophobic wing of the White House, aka Stephen Miller.

Meanwhile, one can always rely upon CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the Times to dish the necessary dirt about how many Russian oligarchs are meeting secretly with the Trump contingent right out in the open, in front of the TV cameras and before our very eyes. The Russophobic narrative must be kept alive, albeit as a side-issue, as capitalists of all nations collude and connive in the spirit of good, global neoliberalism.

This go-round, liberal billionaire George Soros graciously played Good Cop to give cover to his fellow oligarchs as they all groveled before Trump. From the Times:

At a separate dinner on Thursday night, George Soros, the liberal financial trader and philanthropist, called Mr. Trump the vanguard of a new wave of authoritarian rulers that threatens open society.

“The survival of our entire civilization is at stake,” said Mr. Soros, while pointing a finger at “the rise of leaders like Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.”

In the days before Mr. Trump’s arrival, the leaders of India, Canada, France and Germany used a series of high-profile speeches to mount an aggressive defense of the global trading system, while other officials worried that Mr. Trump and other nationalists posed grave risks.

Back in the USA, meanwhile, comic relief in high places abounds. Word is now out that when the Trumps requested a loan from the Guggenheim of a Vincent Van Gogh painting - Landscape With Snow -  to display in the private White House residence, the museum made them a snarky counter-offer of the solid gold toilet satirically titled America.  This iconic sculpture actually gives a whole new meaning to so-called shithole countries.

The artsy-fartsy offer made perfect sense. For one thing, the 18-carat gold toilet cost sculptor Maurizio Cattelan (or his investors) more than $1 million to make. And since oligarchs like Trump love to posture as "makers" rather than takers, what better seat of power could he possibly desire?

Sadly, Trump turned down the offer. Maybe it had something to do with thousands of Guggenheim visitors having previously used the fully functional commode. No amount of Lysol or reams of paper covering could ever properly sanitize it for the Germophobe-in-Chief's protection. Or maybe it was just because he already has a couple of toilets in higher quality 24-carat gold encrusted with diamonds and rubies. 

More likely though, Trump, like most mortals, prefers comfort over style in his most intimate excretory moments. Therefore, he's probably installed at least one Numi toilet in each of his many residences.

For one thing, if one is male, one's urinary stream is guided by the Numi's blue laser light so as to avoid groggy mishaps in the middle of the night. There's no need to even wipe oneself when one owns this $6,000-plus commode, because it actually washes and dries one at the touch of a touchscreen. Just like Trump himself, the Numi can spit out water and blow air at the slightest provocation.

So the creator of the golden toilet is understandably resigned about Trump's refusal of his generous counter-offer:

Asked why he volunteered “America” to the White House, Cattelan told the Washington Post, “Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.”

It even makes plenty of sense when we're still alive. It makes even more sense when we're clinging to a mere semblance of life by the skin of our teeth. 

Oh well. Donald Trump will always have multiple versions of the iconic kitsch called Apocalypse Now On Snowy Evening to keep him company in his empire's multiple throne rooms. He'll always have the smell of Davos in the morning.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The grand dame of imaginative literature has died, aged 88.

Acclaimed author of such socialist/anarchist-oriented fantasy masterpieces as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin largely confined herself to poetry, social commentary and yes, blogging, in her later years. As a matter of fact, I was in the middle of a collection of her often hilarious essays when I got the New York Times alert that she had died at her home in Portland, Oregon after several months of ill health.

  My favorite essay in the collection ("No Time To Spare") so far is her skewering of an insipid questionnaire she received from Harvard University in 2011, in which aging alumni were asked what they cared about, and what they did in their spare time. And thus the title: when you're in your 80s, your days are rather too limited to worry about filling out stupid surveys which proffer golf, bridge, shopping and racquet sports as the most likely answers to how aging and comfortable Ivy Leaguers spend their free time. Not one of the choices for old-age activities lacked a capitalistic profit motive at its very core.

"An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome," Le Guin quipped. "But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with  doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between by upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly an deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time."

"What is Harvard thinking of?" she scoffed. "I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare." (Le Guin was actually a 1951 graduate of Radcliffe, the "sister school" of the then-all male university.)

She was an ardent critic of neoliberal capitalism throughout her life, more than apparent in her body of work. One of the questions on the Harvard survey of octogenarian grads was how they ranked, for "future generations," the importance "of economic stability and growth for the U.S., terrorism, improved healthcare quality and cost, implementation of an effective immigration policy, improved bipartisanship in politics and the export of democracy."

"Since we're supposed to be considering the life of future generations," Le Guin acerbically reacted, after noting that Harvard falsely equated economic stability and growth, "it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as 'terrorism. effective immigration policy and the exportation of democracy' (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don't like and trying to destroy their society, culture and religion.) Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty."

It's no accident that the death of this groundbreaking, award-winning writer, who John Scalzi calls the "spiritual mother of generations of writers," is barely being noticed on mainstream media. The New York Times obituary is now entirely gone from its initial placement below the digital home page fold. At the top of today's page, in fact, is a big spread about a "radical" new reality TV show called "RePaul's Drag Race" which commercializes the politics of personal identity for a mass audience.

Le Guin would probably have been amused, if not enamored, given that she was the literary ground-breaker of gender-bending narrative, with roots solidly planted in the original socialism-aligned feminist movement.

Here she is accepting the 2014 National Book Awards' lifetime achievement honors in decidedly anti-censorship and anti-capitalism ("a panic of ignorance and greed") language.

Neocon Democrats Already Blaming Russia For Shutdown Mess

If When the Democrats are pressured into striking a deal with the bad guys to keep the government chugging along for awhile longer, they want you to know it was all the Russians' fault. David Leonhardt (see previous post) will be so disappointed when he finds out that that his scolding had little to do with "the big cave."

The Democratic veal pen now known as HuffPo has collaborated with the new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy, to spread the word that the criticism of hapless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is emanating not just from American constituents, but from Kremlin "bots" using the hashtag #SchumerShutdown on social media.

Despite all the best algorithmic and human censorship efforts of Twitter, Google and Facebook, Russian-trolled anti-Schumer messages are "blowing up" the Internet. You see, The Alliance has devised its own copyrighted "Gizmo" measuring tool to prove it! The attack on Wall Street stooge Schumer is getting so bad it's even surpassed the nefarious #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. The Alliance would have you believe that no actual Americans ever had the intellectual wherewithal to be curious about much of anything before the Russians went on the Internet and infiltrated all their brains. You'd think that the all-American right-wing propaganda mill known as Fox News was just sitting around and twiddling its pudgy little thumbs.

HuffPo reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:

#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.

Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

HuffPo certainly did not see fit to inform its readers that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (which it approvingly describes as a "bipartisan" outfit led by former national security officials) is top-heavy with discredited extremist Bush-era neocons who thought it was a dandy idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond to make the world safe for greedy oil companies and bankers and "defense" contractors.

As a matter of fact, the head honcho of the Alliance is Michael Chertoff, Bush's Homeland Security director. The paranoia-for-profit industry has been very good to him, his private security firm having raked in big bucks from its no-contract Orwellian RapiScan machines used at airports all over the world to humiliate travelers on the pretext of thwarting terrorism. Chertoff has a nice supplemental gig working alongside Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, at the Covington and Burling white shoe law firm in Washington, D.C.

Also serving on the Alliance board are neocon columnist Bill Kristol; former acting CIA Director Mike Morell; CNN fear-monger, Harvard professor and former congressman Mike Rogers; Jamie Fly, foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio; and Clinton campaign operative and Obama administration official Jake Sullivan.

Glenn Greenwald called this power hub of Democratic-Neocon propagandists  "one of the most consequential but under-discussed changes in the American political landscape."

He wrote last summer:

The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics — accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc. — are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.
The union of Democrats and neocons is far more than a temporary marriage of convenience designed to bring down a common enemy. As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.

One bright note: from what I can tell, the nationwide women's marches over the weekend were not centered on Russia fear-mongering despite the best co-opting efforts of the Democratic Party. They were not even exclusively centered on "resisting" Trump, but rather on women running for office in the interests of social and economic justice, and people joining together in solidarity across class, race and gender lines.  

They'd better watch out, or next time the politicians (even the trolling Trump) and police might not be so friendly about the protests which they now find so convenient to encourage. They still seem to have no doubts that the marches are anything more than a get-out-the-vote effort for the establishment party.