The Eternal Fairy Tale of Russiagate

Since many of humanity's most enduring myths and legends are thought to have their origin in humanity itself, we can't expect the Russiagate saga to die any time soon either. It makes lots of money, spinning straw into gold for franchise owners and investors by the hour, by the month, by the Thousand and One Nights and A Night.

 It also seems to fill a great psychological need for the spinners, who still quaintly describe themselves as journalists. Were it not for the fact that their military/surveillance state-serving narrative edges us ever closer to confrontation with a nuclear-powered Russia, among other less-weaponized sovereign nations, I'd just say let them have their delusional fun while they can.

I haven't yet read the whole Mueller report, not even close - but I have glanced at the various interpretations of it. Whenever I see a headline with the words "Ten Things You Need To Know About the Mueller Report Right Now!" or " Fifty-Two Takeaways From the Mueller Report," my psyche goes into self-protective shutdown mode. I search in vain for other interesting or threatening things to learn about, such as Trump's barely-noticed veto of the Congressional resolution to stop the US-enabled Saudi genocide of Yemenis.

So it's mainly been through some magical process of osmosis that  I've absorbed the gist of Mueller's pricey report. To wit:

Richard Nixon has been vindicated!  Anything is legal if you're president. To paraphrase Donald Trump himself, when you're a president, you can do anything. You can grab the country by the short hairs and it's gonna let you. Mueller, who has sadly devolved from Father of Our Country into Absentee Deadbeat Dad, apparently as much as admitted that Trump cannot be prosecuted for obstruction of justice because presidents can obstruct justice all they want. And if they can act stupid or paranoid or emotional or spoiled rotten while they're at it, it's all the better for them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. (I knew there was a reason that the report was released on Maundy Thursday, a/k/a the Last Supper eve of the crucifixion.)

Plus, as Zephyr Teachout lays out in Corruption in America, when you're an oligarch, you can do anything, such as buying Congress and the Supreme Court and changing the corruption laws in America. Under our current system of legalized crime, the only thing that could get Trump prosecuted is his being caught personally accepting a bag full of cash in exchange for a veto or an executive order.

This legal restriction of corruption to quid pro quo, Teachout writes, was codified by the Citizens United and McCutcheon vs FEC Supreme Court decisions, which dictated that political donations are protected political speech, and not bribery. The redefinition narrows the scope of political corruption only to explicit deals. 

"It reclassifies influence-seeking as normal and desirable political behavior. It purportedly avoids difficult problems of definition. It attempts to wring the moral content out of the term corruption and tell a story about corruption that is consistent with a world populated by self-interested actors."

Since liberal pundits and politicians cannot reverse this process, absent a social democratic revolution (the prospect of which they loathe even more than they pretend to loathe Trump) they must revert back to fairy tale mode. The money and the arms must continue to flow to the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street/Silicon Valley investors. An Enemy Outside which "sows dissent" must always be conjured up to keep the domestic populism down. Therefore, they will keep spinning their propaganda straw into gold while there is still a viable world and a well-appointed newsroom or broadcast studio to spin it in.

So what else, besides six and seven figure salaries, explains the lasting appeal of the Russiagate folklore franchise to careerist news personalities and stenographers?

  The late fairy tale interpreter and Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz gives us a clue about what could be going on in their heads and those of their fans:

Actually. you can interpret a myth or fairy tale with any of the four functions of consciousness. The thinking type will point out the structure and the way in which all the motifs connect. The feeling type will put them in a value order (a hierarchy of values) which is also completely rational. With the feeling function, a good and complete fairy tale interpretation can be made. The sensation type will just look at the symbols and amplify them. The intuitive will see the whole package in its oneness, so to speak; he will be most gifted in showing that the whole fairy tale is not a discursive story but is really one message, split up into many facets. The more you have differentiated your functions, the better you can interpret because you must circumambulate a story as much as possible with all four functions. The more you have developed and obtained the use of more conscious functions, the better and more colorful your interpretation will be.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the best-known spinner of the nightly Russiagate fables, is not about to give up her Scheherazade role. She's made a fortune and a career out of connecting the dots on charts to explain how various low-level or innocuous meetings of Trump operatives with Russian operatives have amounted to one great overriding plot, with the grand overarching motif that Donald Trump is a Putin agent. The more details and dot-connections she can offer, the more believable that she makes her yarn become.

 Her "intellectual" approach feeds into the competing feelings of inchoate Trump-hatred and powerlessness within the psyches of her audience of millions. We know, we just intuitively know, that the foreign agency of Trump must be true, especially when the message is constantly being split up and spun off among so many different expert storytellers in our six major media conglomerates. The more that the story can go round and round (circumambulation) the truer it becomes, and the more colorful the embellishments that can be added all the time. It gets so complicated that the plot holes and even the original plot gets fuzzy with time. It is a continuous closed feedback loop. And like climate change itself, it is proving very hard to stop, now that it has achieved a life of its own.

Robert S Mueller III, loyal establishment player that he is, is playing right along with the Russiagate franchise.The contrived existential threat of Putin-meddling is in the intro to his report. He was hired for a specific reason. Trump, painted by the media and now by Mueller as a con man and a stooge, might have dodged a personal bullet, but the country has not. The country, with at least 800 military outposts around the world still must be taught to fear a country with a grand total of nine. 

Be afraid, be thrilled, be very afraid, be very thrilled. Because those Russian internet trolls who planted a couple hundred Facebook ads and walked around the United States wearing Trump masks to fake protest rallies are not only still at large, they are lurking under the Freedom Bridge to US Election Nirvana. They are plotting, right now and as Rachel Maddow speaks, to pull you down and drown you on your way to vote in 2020.

The Discreet Charm of the Never-Bernies

How can wealthy liberals, anxious to protect their fortunes and their heirs from the predations of the poor, destroy Bernie Sanders without being seen as destroying Bernie Sanders? That is the delicate question.

The current tactic is the playing of the hypocrisy card. With revelations (by Sanders himself) that he is now a millionaire, thanks to his book sales, his fellow millionaires and not a few actual billionaires point to this fact as being "problematic."

It is especially "thorny" because Sanders is acting so damned "prickly" about it whenever the topic of his new membership in the One Percent Club is brought up - say, about every 10 minutes in the video chat rooms known as cable news shows and in the pages of such elite gossip rags as the New York Times.

"Good-natured" ribbing from late night pseudo-comedians is an integral part of this new front in the  destruction crusade, with the New York Times breathlessly reporting on Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel observed that Bernie appears to have spent none of his fortune on personal grooming or couture.

The same article quotes Stephen Colbert, fresh off his London junket fawning over Michelle Obama in the latest leg of her book tour, as drawling:

“Yesterday Bernie Sanders released 10 years of his tax returns. Finally, now we can get the answers to all of our Bernie-related financial controversies. Like whether he writes off mothballs as a business expense or a snack.”

The Times is once again doing what it arguably does better than any other corporate media outlet: it is engaging in a personal destruction crusade in such an arch, knowing, nuanced way that it does not seem to be engaging in any personal destruction crusade at all. 

The problem which the Gray Lady and her corporate media cohort now face is that Bernie has gone mainstream, and most important of all in their world, he has more cash on hand than any of his Democratic rivals. It's certainly a long way from the good old days of 2016, when all the Times had to do, personal destruction-wise, was to alternately ignore Bernie and deride him. It's even a long way from last year and early this year, when the propaganda tropes that he is not liked by women and black people went nowhere fast, given that public polls have shown the exact opposite to be true.

So now it's on to how Bernie Sanders is causing such great angst among the altruistic liberal rich that they might even be inconvenienced by a dreaded Brokered Convention next year.

Times reporter Jonathan Martin engaged in some good old fashioned shoe leather reporting as he pounded the pavement on both coasts to plumb the plutocratic depths of the "Stop Bernie" movement 

Parachuting down to Flyover Country for a day or an hour is, let's face it, nothing but lazy stenography. The rich love to read about themselves and not about some deplorable out of work factory laborer, even if the literature is not always as flattering to them as they might like. It was the rich, the class which could afford to buy books in the 19th century, who helped make Thackeray's satiric Vanity Fair, for example, the enduring bestseller that it came to be. And what 21st century PBS fan wouldn't kill to live in the snooty Downton Abbey?

Anyway, satiric critical portrayals of the venal rich sometimes have a way of turning such conniving grasping characters as Becky Sharp into admirable heroines whenever the corporate entertainment world gets hold of them. When Vanity Fair was made into a TV movie in 2004, for example, Reese Witherspoon magically transformed her into a plucky, adorable, rags-to-riches ingenue. Did I mention that Witherspoon had also recently played a celebrity softball-pitcher at one of those spunky, rags-to-riches Michelle Obama book tour appearances, where front row seats go for thousands of dollars a pop?

Anyway, I digress.

Martin's faux-satiric characterization of Bernie Sanders fans as "an unwavering base" of "fervent supporters" who endanger party unity had the desired effect of eliciting nearly 3,000 outraged responses from readers who are still smarting from the newspaper's cavalier treatment, three years ago, of both themselves and their candidate. These responses seem designed to be an "I told you so" cathartic moment for the nervous rich, proving once and for all to the sensitive elite class that Bernie Sanders supporters are, in fact, a fervent and unwavering mob... and so veddy, veddy unreasonable and dangerous.

Secondarily, Martin's surface-snide portrayal of the rich donor class as selfish pearl-clutchers and canape-gorgers who are  terrified of Bernie's "avowed socialism" seems designed to plant the very tiniest seed of doubt into the minds of progressive readers. Never mind that Bernie is no socialist, but rather a de facto FDR Democrat who sees nothing wrong with wars or the arrest of Julian Assange or with a better-regulated capitalistic system in general. If you can only plant that seed in these early days, it might even sprout and thrive by the time any actual voting takes place a little under a year from now.

Comparing Sanders with Trump is still tops on the "Stop Bernie From Eating the Oligarchy!" agenda. Martin posits that Bernie is just as paranoid as Trump, probably because Bernie (rightly) believes that the Democratic Party and its media sycophants are aiming for his personal destruction.

The main weapon, therefore, that centrist corporatists plan to wield against Sanders is Trump himself. Even the Sanders campaign acknowledges that beating Trump is their top priority, before passage of a single payer health care bill and other policies can even be seriously discussed. The wealthy backers of the party are taking solace in the fact that, just as he did in 2016, Sanders has vowed to support the eventual nominee. Which, if they have anything to say about it, will not be Bernie Sanders. It is only his promise to be an avowed player that permits him to stay in the game. Thus, his calculated silence on the Julian Assange arrest. He is silent even though it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the corporate Democrats were really out to get him in 2016.

So, there's this important nugget in the Times's cautionary tale:

“Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”
Or, as former (my bold) Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

If the anguished wealthy liberal donor class needs a slogan, here's a suggestion for them: 

Never Bernie! Never Trump! Always the Plutocracy - Always!

When you finally wake up the golden drops of their beneficence trickling down upon you after they nominate one of their own in a super-delegate-rigged second ballot, they tacitly confide to the Times, you'll realize just how abjectly grateful to them that you truly are, and should have been all along.

Blasphemy In the Church of Nine-Eleven

Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi

The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.

4:20 AM - 13 Apr 2019

• 13,147 Retweets
• 65,771 Likes
• 

20,228 replies13,147 retweets65,771 likes

 

 

1. 1. Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi Apr 13
      

      As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.

The target of much criticism from the left for her bland scolding of Donald Trump over his own incendiary Tweet against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Pelosi has since announced she will ask for another security review by the FBI and Capitol Police to determine how Omar, her family and her staff can be best protected from a sitting president of the United States. She has also belatedly suggested that his original offensive tweet, with a photo of Omar interposed with a graphic of the flaming World Trade Center, "be taken down."

Omar's remarks about Islamophobia at a conference last month were recently ripped out of context by a right-wing agitator, then enhanced by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, and finally grotesquely inflamed by Provocateur-in-Chief Donald Trump. What Trump actually presides over is not so much the government as it is the xenophobia and racism which has always been an integral, albeit usually verbally suppressed, part of the American ruling class agenda.

 And that very much includes the United States military, whose Civil War army was reconstituted and professionalized for the express purpose of enforcing the mass expulsions and exterminations of native American populations. To this day, military weapons and other hardware, such as the Apache helicopter, are named after Indian tribes. Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo prior to his extrajudicial sneak execution as Barack Obama began preparations for his re-election campaign.

 So Trump just happens to be the most vocal and vicious (and for the more discreet ruling elite, the most embarrassing) spokesman for this dark part of the American psyche, not arriving on the scene until some some 300 years after the Puritans first erected their own model shining City on the Hill off a foundation of corpses of the native populations of New England, whom they exterminated both through their diseases and their wars.

So the cowardly and tepid response of Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership to Trump's not-so-veiled incitements to racist violence against Omar in particular and Muslims in general, should thus be put into historical context.

Pelosi in her Tweet avoided directly addressing his threats against Ilhan Omar by diverting the issue into a bizarre sermon whose theme is that any discussion  of the Sept. 11th attacks should be akin to prayer - a "sacred memory" - to be chanted only with the approved words and contained within the walls of the established cathedral. This deflection is nothing new. The horrific act of mass murder began its transformation into a cult, founded and led by the political-media complex, almost from the day it happened. The attacks had to be fetishized in order to avoid discussions of its root cause, which was blowback by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, revenge against the US militaristic/capitalistic meddling and plunder in the entire Middle Eastern world and the militarization of Israel by its US partner, funder and enabler.

 The physical site of the lower Manhattan attack has been transformed into a national shrine and museum. The 2,753 victims have been canonized as martyrs.

The attacks became the impetus for even more US meddling, with the ensuing full scale military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and still-ongoing bombings of at least seven other majority-Muslim countries, including Ilhan Omar's native Somalia. More than a million people have died, been maimed or displaced by this overkill. The 9/11 attacks also became the perfect excuse to criminalize dissent and whittle away the civil rights of both US and global populations. They spawned a whole new Department of Homeland Security and transformed the  country into what journalist Todd Miller aptly calls Border Patrol Nation. This year, the United States Congress has allocated more money to the permanent war machine than it did during the bloodiest year of the Iraq War.

Long before the September day in 2001 "when everything changed," of course, Islam was being demonized by Western leaders, and their corporate news media and Hollywood propagandists. Islam has regularly been equated with fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism for decades. As the late Palestinian author Edward Said explained in the introduction of the 1997 edition of his book "Covering Islam," Muslims became especially convenient scapegoats after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the bombing by Libyan terrorists of the Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and other attacks, the simple utterance of the word "Islam" in the West became a means of attacking Islam. 

This, in turn, has "provoked more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. 'Islam' defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and of course an infinite number of different experiences."

This is exactly what Ilhan Omar was talking about in her speech last month,  correctly observing that the actions of "some people" on 9/11 paved the way for the perpetual criminalization of an entire religion as practiced in myriad ways by over a billion people worldwide.

As for Donald Trump, inveterate entertainment consumer and purveyor that he is, his own personal xenophobia did not sprout full-fledged from the murky depths of his personality disorder. He probably, for example, saw the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster, True Lies. Its star villains, notes author Zachary Karabell, are stereotypical Arabs "complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans" who must, in turn, be killed by the sexy intrepid American hero, played by future GOP California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

As Edward Said observed, "Covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what 'we' do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are."

Ilhan Omar was initially celebrated by the Democratic Party because she so perfectly fit its identity politics agenda as a cosmetic antithesis of Trump: she is a woman, she is Black, she is an immigrant, and she is a Muslim. If only she could have stayed in her appointed place as an exotic statue instead of criticizing the right-wing government of Israel - on top of having the effrontery to be one of the most progressive members of Congress. As such, she puts lie to the propaganda that Muslims live in a medieval, anti-feminist world. The corporate wing of the party, led by Pelosi, is not progressive and it fully supports the right-wing government of Israel. While pretending to be all-inclusive and anti-bigotry, this corporate wing has fully colluded in waging the forever wars on Muslim-majority countries. Pelosi never blinked an eye at Barack Obama's drone assassination program, which specifically targeted Muslim civilians as incipient terrorists simply by virtue of who they are and where they live (unprotected "tribal areas").

Pelosi therefore must have found it easier to castigate Trump for blaspheming  the "sacred memory" of 9/11 than to castigate him for implicitly threatening Ilhan Omar's life. It took her three whole days to even factor Omar's well-being into her narrative. Her main gripe was that Trump abused the sacred memory by making it all about himself and his political future. 

Although she didn't spell it out, Pelosi also implied in her April 13th tweet that the carefully unmentioned Omar had also abused the sacred memory by juxtaposing her own religion next to the US Imperium's virtual state religion and holy day of obligation, which became the very basis for attacking Omar's religion and its various adherents, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving people.

The Church of Nine-Eleven was constructed by the war-mongering capitalist elites for the sole propaganda purpose of ramping up war and plunder, cynically repurposing the victims and first responders into patriotic martyrs and human shields, even as some of these same first responders went to war to die for the sole profit of corporations. And, even as sections of the 9/11 Commission report implicating the Saudi government were kept secret for many years. The volunteer troops fighting the oligarchs' wars were then used by the Obamas and other politicians to shame the economically struggling population at home into "sharing the sacrifice" as jobs were lost and punishing austerity was imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. 

 Pelosi's tepid tweet sends the hysterical message that it is reckless, rank heresy for Trump to openly and verbally admit that he hates Muslims, Mexicans and all dark-skinned people.

Her sub-Tweet, gushing about her own visit to a US military base in Germany,  which is still semi-occupied 75 years after the end of World War II, says it all. When she writes that the military protection of "the American people" is her first priority, keep in mind that the de facto definition of "the people" and their national security is the corporate state, which armed forces must protect around the clock and around the globe if their plunder is to proceed apace.

As Edward Said wrote:

"The tendency to consider the whole world as one country's imperium is very much in the ascendancy in today's United States, the last remaining superpower.... Such an idea of rightful Western dominance is in reality an uncritical idolization of Western power. "

Keep in mind that Said penned those words in 1997, before 9/11 "changed everything." The ascendancy has already reached its peak and it has nowhere else to go but down.

Thus, for Pelosi and for her fellow imperialists, it is likewise heresy for a progressive elected representative like Ilhan Omar to bring too much attention to herself, to her maligned religion and her war-torn native country, to her fellow immigrants and refugees, and to bipartisan hypocrisy. The ruling class does not want the American public to get the idea that the United States kills and expels and robs people for any reason other than humanitarianism, or that other countries hate us not for our "freedoms", but for our crimes.

Pelosi might be getting this year's Profiles in Courage award from the Kennedy dynasty, but it's really Omar who deserves an award for her serene courage under immense, unrelenting pressure. In the days since Trump's incendiary tweet, she has received even more death threats, and Trump himself has escalated his Twitter attacks on her.

Even so, her mind is on the plight of others:

Ilhan Omar‏Verified account @IlhanMN

This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness. But these core beliefs are under threat. Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.

11:18 AM - 13 Apr 2019

Initial Thoughts On the Julian Assange Arrest

The right-wing nature of the corporate Democrats was on full display today as many liberals are openly celebrating the brazen arrest in the wee hours, USA time, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange within his legal sanctuary of the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Investors in the #Russiagate propaganda franchise may have been embarrassed and their narrative debunked, but the damage it has done survives. Here's the top-rated reader comment from the New York Times article on Assange's arrest, on one charge of criminal conspiracy to hack a computer:

A Russian propaganda tool, that's all he is, and Wikileaks as well. Assange has severely harmed the United States and other western democracies at the bidding of Russia. Read Wikileaks if you don't believe me, try to find anything other than information harmful to the west. Wikileaks may have started as a legitimate sunlight tool, but was early on compromised and subverted to Russian interests.

This person and the nearly 800 liberal readers who approved this comment apparently believe that we should not be aware of the false pretenses under which the US invaded Iraq, and that we should have remained blissfully and serenely unaware of the film footage which showed American helicopter troops shooting journalists and civilians to death, just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

I don't know what frightens me more: the Trump administration, or the fake #Resistance to it.

Here's my own published Times comment:

The press should not be breathing its sigh of relief that the Assange indictment is limited to an accusation of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, rather than charges of publishing stolen material. It seems that journalists covering this story and printing the leaked or stolen docs were worried that they'd be called as witnesses in this case and might even be deemed culpable themselves by our authoritarian, right-wing federal justice department.

But what is to prevent the lawless Trump administration from prosecuting the New York Times or any other media outlet with a similar "hacking" conspiracy in the future, based on a similarly evidence-free accusation that said outlet was not only the publisher of stolen documents but the actual thief of same? We're in the digital age now.

If you're celebrating Assange's arrest today on the grounds of some kind of vindication of the victimized Clinton campaign, you're siding with the authoritarian Trump regime and tacitly agreeing that the First Amendment isn't worth the parchment it's written on.

This has nothing to do with Julian Assange's personality or his motives. This has to do with the death of what is still left of both domestic and global democracy.

 Be careful what you cheer for. Your reliable sources of information are not as safe from the dangerous Trump regime as you might think they are.

The Times had approvingly noted that Assange was not charged, as many had feared, under the draconian Espionage Act, which could drag everybody who cooperatively published WikiLeaks documents down with Assange, but only with "egging on" Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence private, to download them.  If the media think they;re off the hook, they should have another think coming. 

There are some silver linings to Assange's arrest. First, the US and global corporate media will be forced to admit where their true allegiances lie. Will they start raising a stink about Chelsea Manning's cruel imprisonment for refusing to implicate Assange? Will they cover the story if Assange's rights to habeas corpus and a speedy trial are infringed upon, or worse, if he is "extraordinarily renditioned" to a CIA black site prison? Assange at least has the benefit of being a high profile figure, unlike hundreds or even thousands of previous nameless and faceless "enemy combatants."

 Second, Assange will presumably finally receive the medical and dental care that he needs. His life was definitely being shortened the longer that he stayed holed up in his virtual embassy prison.

 Third, any trial will require evidence. Although the Trump campaign itself has carefully been exempt from the indictment, which stems from alleged 2010 activities during the Obama administration, propagandists might actually have to admit that there is yet to be any concrete evidence that the DNC and Clinton campaign computers were "hacked" - either by Russia or by anybody else. The documents could simply have been downloaded and then leaked. The Clintonites, remember, refused to grant the FBI access to their servers, instead using a private security company to make their claims of Russian culpability.

Fourth, it forces public attention on legalized bribery as practiced by the US government and the International Monetary Fund which it controls to enforce its privatization and austerity regimens on poor countries. The current far-right corrupt government of Ecuador sold out Assange to the United States and the United Kingdom just weeks after receipt of a hefty IMF loan.

Assange could very well end up a free man. Extradition to the United States is not even a done deal, with some British media outlets like The Guardian already editorializing against it. Justice has been known to prevail at times, especially when the whole world is watching, and especially when much of the world is already adamantly opposed to Donald Trump and all he stands for.

This isn't over. 

Profiles In Ruling Class Chutzpah

The media-political complex is all abuzz that multimillionaire heiress and Boeing director Caroline Kennedy has named multimillionaire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the latest winner of the Camelot Dynasty's Profiles in Courage award. 

It's A Club & You Ain't In It

Pelosi is specifically being honored for ramming the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 and tacitly being honored for boldly going against the wishes of 70 percent of the US population by actively thwarting a true universal, single payer health care bill to replace it.

Multimillionaire former President Barack Obama, 2017's Kennedy prize winner, traveled all the way to Germany over the weekend in order to scold what he called American health care "purists" who have the crazy nerve to challenge the status quo. He called the current battle between Congressional centrists, like Pelosi, and progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal a "circular firing squad."

Winners Take All

This is a deliberate mischaracterization on Obama's part, because the centrists are the ones with the giant guns and the big corporate money, and the progressives are the underdogs with the $27 individual donations and the verbal slingshots. These two intraparty factions are as unequal as society itself. Obama refused to admit that the Circular Firing Squad within the Democratic Party is, in fact, a microcosm of the eternal Class War of the rich against the poor and working class. He instead framed the health insurance debate as a bunch of reckless extremists who unfairly attack the good, the rich, the wise, and the powerful.

Both of our establishment political parties and the transnational oligarchs who own and control them are scared to death of the social democracy and working class revolts now on the ascendant, global movements which threaten to undo 50 years of punitive austerity for the masses and record riches for themselves.

Obama made his latest antisocial remarks in Germany during a fund-raising "town hall" to benefit his own philanthrocapitalist foundation, so as not to be seen as directly interfering with party politics within the confines of the contiguous United States. He had previously met behind closed doors with Congressional freshmen to warn them against Medicare for All and to confront them with the usual "how you gonna pay for it!" bullying tactics. With a reported net worth now in the $100 million range only two years after leaving office, he made it abundantly clear that he and other wealthy people do not want to be taxed one more penny for the greater public good.

Of course, he put it a bit more delicately than that at his Berlin town hall:

“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States — maybe it’s true here as well — is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’” Obama said. “And then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.”
The former president said he believes this approach “weakens” movements, and that those that would like to see a progressive agenda “have to recognize that the way we’ve structured democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you.”

Notice how he cagily redefines "circular firing squad" as a one-sided attack by progressives against the neoliberal centrists, and how it is not the rich and the privileged side straying from our "structured democracy," but the poor and the indebted. The only weakening he fears is that of the corporate Democratic Party itself, which like any political party, exists mainly to win and adhere to power. In Obama's world, it is not Nancy Pelosi who's the shooter and the bully: it's the progressives representing the interests of the struggling majority.

Only an entitled plutocrat could call the widespread demand by the US citizenry for basic health care an issue of "ideological purity" rather than as a response to a capitalism-spawned public health crisis and threat to our very survival. In Obama's world, it is more important for the Have-Nots to respect the Haves, who very reasonably expect that tens of millions of people will have to get sick and die prematurely as a good-faith sign of their own co-equal reasonableness.

Obama ended his speech by advocating for patience and incremental change: “We have to be careful in balancing big dreams and bold ideas with also recognizing that typically change happens in steps. And if you want to skip steps, you can. Historically what’s ended up happening is sometimes if you skip too many steps you end up having bad outcomes.”

Obama gave no examples to back up his claim. Again - the only bad outcomes he has to fear are those which might require him and his ruling class cohort to cede power to the lower classes and pay higher taxes. He certainly couldn't point to any bad outcomes when Medicare passed in the 1960s, and millions of older people were suddenly yanked off their employers' insurance plans and forced into the new single payer system for retirees. He couldn't say that it was really stupid, in retrospect, for people to have become eligible as soon as they reached the age of 65 and not have to wait until 80, when the coverage could have been spread downward in pragmatic baby steps instead of skipping all those golden waiting years.

Obama dishonestly and effectively likens guaranteed universal health coverage to corporations like Boeing, which cuts corners and skips steps only to have have its airplanes crash, killing everybody on board. But he can't talk about Boeing, because for one thing, his benefactress Caroline Kennedy is now in charge of its oversight and auditing board, and the United States was the very last country in the world to, after much insane resistance, finally ground the faulty airplanes while shifting blame for the crashes to the pilots. 

Perhaps the latest Profiles in Courage winner, Nancy Pelosi, will now even have the courage not to haul Boeing executives before Congress to face any real consequences.

Even if they do get hauled before Congress, it will be for the purpose of individual congressional showboating and tongue-lashings and slaps on the wrist. For in the just the last year alone, Boeing spent more than $130 million lobbying, wining, dining, schmoozing and arm-twisting these same members of Congress. Its board, besides Caroline Kennedy, is a veritable who's who of the oligarchy, mainly tycoons from the extracting industries of Big Oil, Big Finance and Private Equity.

The trouble is that Barack Obama, designated celebrity ambassador of global neoliberalism, simply does not lie or dissemble well. Neither does Nancy Pelosi. Just before Caroline Kennedy tapped Pelosi as the latest plutocratic Profile in Chutzpah, Madam Speaker again lied through her teeth in an interview about single payer health insurance and why tens of millions of poor people will simply have to grit their failing or missing teeth and suffer pragmatically in service to their greedy overlords.

As Matt Breunig reports, the big lie that neoliberal centrists keep tellng is that "people" love their employment-based private insurance plans. It's a lie, because private predatory insurance "is a complete nightmare" for those trapped within the market-based, for-profit system.

Among those (in Michigan) who had employer-sponsored insurance in 2014, only 72 percent were continuously enrolled in that insurance for the next twelve months. This means that 28 percent of people on an employer plan were not on that same plan one year later. You like your employer health plan? You better cross your fingers because one in four people on employer plans will come off their plan in the next twelve months.
The situation is even worse for other kinds of insurance. One thing opponents of Medicare for All frequently say is that poor people in the US are already covered by free insurance in the form of Medicaid and that Medicare for All therefore offers them relatively little net benefit while potentially raising their taxes some. But what this argument misses, among other things, is that people on Medicaid churn off it frequently, with many churning into un-insurance.

And that churning is a feature and not a bug, because what is capitalism but constant, cutthroat competition? What are citizens but consumers of whatever the ruling class racketeers deign to dish out to us in the form of spectacle politics and cheap electronic gadgets to merge with our bodies as virtual biological appendages and tracking devices? 

Let's face it. The modern-day robber barons view the population as raw material and commodities which exist not for our own well-being and happiness, but for their voracious, relentless, inhumane profit.

More people than ever, especially younger people, are on to their con. The Profiles in Chutzpah are afraid.

And the best they can do is give each other glitzy prizes in televised galas which they sometimes allow us to gawk at in supposed admiration.