Pelosi Says Trump Steals Attention From Her Dead Billionaire Hero

Every spring since 2010, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been an honored guest speaker at the annual Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit. Every year, she has put the essential liberal gloss on the inherently cruel deficit hawk propaganda underwritten by late Wall Street ultra-right billionaire Pete Peterson. Every year, she has helped to spread the mendacious message that it's not oligarchs like the Petersons who are impoverishing the population. It's selfish retirees and poor people who are gorging themselves on all those precious Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits, and who are thereby ruining the lives of entire future generations.

The Democrats want to snip a bit here, slash a little there, while the boisterous Republicans want to go wild with machetes. This makes Pelosi one of the good guys. She knows how to cut deals about what to cut, and when, and make it all seem so reasonable and therapeutic.

She didn't get away with her sweetened snake oil this year, however.

This year, Pelosi's carefully scripted diverting of public attention from the actual class war to some utterly non-existent generational battle over meager health and retirement benefits was rudely hijacked by Donald Trump.

No, the president didn't storm the stage. He wasn't even a guest. But he might as well have been, given that CNN news personality Manu Raju acted as Trump's virtual conduit, repeating his recent insults to Pelosi verbatim, ("You're a nasty, vindictive, horrible person!")  and semi-successfully goading her into reacting.

Pelosi did not take at all kindly to Trump's oblique hijacking of CNN, which is usually such a reliable deficit hawk co-propagandist. In fact, she was so ticked off by Manu Raju's relentless refusal to stay on the austerity topic and to help her fear-monger about the alleged government debt crisis, at times she almost sounded like that recent notorious doctored stammering and slurring Facebook video of herself. 

But this clip of her Peterson Summit interview is no doubt authentic, given that it was directly uploaded by CNN, the most trusted name in news. She does seem to garble and skip over and truncate her words at times. You be the judge:

"I don't care what you ask me. I'm not going to talk about him any more!" she seethes to Raju, before proceeding to talk about Trump some more, before going on to blather about "the future" and immigrant Dreamers who are here through no fault of their own and who often fight rich men's wars. (thereby implying that the desperate relatives who brought them here are not also human beings deserving of safety and security.) Plus, she added, "we have to protect our democracy from The Russians."

Pelosi did not explain what The Russians have to do with dishonest centrist scare-mongering about the deficit while Congress has cruelly implemented budget austerity for regular people and corporate welfare for billionaires. But as long as the whole performance already had been hijacked anyway, why not throw The Russians in for good measure? Anything to divert the attention from Trump's diversion of the attention.

"If I had been invited here to talk about the president, I would have found better things to do at home," she fumed, to enthusiastic applause from the fiscally responsible attendees.

In case you have never heard of Pete Peterson, he was Richard Nixon's commerce secretary before going on to lead Lehman Brothers and then to make billions as co-founder, and later seller, of the Blackstone private equity group. He might be personally deceased, but his thriving dynasty ranks right up there with the Koch Brothers as one of the most powerful oligarchic influences on national policy that this country has ever seen.

Peterson used a now-debunked 2010 study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, purporting to show that austerity stimulates economic growth, to justify his demands for cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

As the Center for the Media and Democracy reports:

The economists both have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson. As the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in the online report, "The Peterson Pyramid," the Blackstone billionaire turned philanthropist has spent half a billion dollars to promote this chorus of calamity.

Through the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peterson has funded practically every think tank and non-profit that works on deficit- and debt-related issues, including his latest 2012 astroturf supergroup, "Fix the Debt.”

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as "the most influential female economist in the world," was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, "A Decade of Debt," where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a "debt burden" stretching into 2017 that "will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come."

But nonetheless, here's what Nancy Pelosi gushed at the fiscal confab this week as she compared Peterson to the dishonest and dastardly Donald Trump, implying that Trump was deliberately stomping on his grave:

 "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

And boy, has she ever kept her gimlet eye on the budget! From convincing her Democratic majority to end long-term unemployment insurance in 2013 during the height of the financial crisis (just as impeaching Trump is "not worth it" now, holding up a budget deal just out of silly concern for the needs of millions of desperate people was "not worth it" then), to this year insisting on a Pay-Go rule as a means of killing Medicare For All before it ever comes out of committee, Nancy Pelosi, a multimillionaire in her own right, has always been a true servant of the Richest of the Rich. 

Naturally, the funding and terrible human costs of our trillion-dollar wars never come up for discussion, neither at Fiscal Summits nor in Congress. War is way too profitable. And the poor, the old, the sick, the precarious and the desperate are not profitable - as much as the oligarchy strives mightily to suck every last drop of sweat and blood from them. And, never once did Pelosi suggest that Trump's grotesque tax giveaway to the wealthy be reversed should Democrats regain power, massive deficit-creator that it is.

 For, as Pelosi lectured to an indebted socialist-leaning college student at a televised town hall in 2017, barely one month after Trump took office: "I have to say, we're capitalists. That's just how it is." 

And as much as she pretends to loathe Donald Trump, she also joined in the raucous bipartisan applause at this year's State of the Union speech when he vowed that socialism will never, ever come to the United States of America.

We'll just have to see about that. Pete Peterson is dead, and Nancy Pelosi has promised to retire by 2022, at the very latest. 

Still, the zombie austerians are not going down without a fight. 

Ever so coincidentally, just as the Fiscal Summit was wrapping up, the New York Times has published its latest scare-mongering piece about Social Security facing an insolvency crisis. The article is heavy on the need for retirees to tighten their belts and live on less, and totally lacking in the suggestion that the cap on FICA taxes be raised or even outright abolished. In other words, it's light on the idea that the Peterson Dynasty might have to fork over any of their excess cash to help their fellow human beings.

Biden Can Hide But He Can't Run

Status Quo Ante Uncle Joe's campaign has made the mistake of letting one pool reporter cover each of his big-dollar fundraisers in the interests of fairness and transparency.

On Monday night, Biden reportedly reassured a group of wealthy donors and lobbyists that he thinks quite well of the oligarchs whose interests they (and he) represent.

"Wall Street and significant bankers and people, they're all positive, they can be positive influences in the country. But they didn't build the country. The middle class built the country."

As for the Republican senators now so mysteriously in the thrall of Svengali Trump, Biden is cheerfully sanguine. Since he is essentially one of them, he is confident that he can jolt them out of their Trump hypnosis once he's back on the scene. Then they can relive the good old pre-Trump days of sedate racism, misogyny and generalized class war antics. All it will take, given that Biden has scrupulously avoided speaking to both the media and ordinary voters, is for the Democratic super-delegates to nominate him by acclaim at a brokered convention. Before that happens, though, the corporate media and his fellow candidates must be pressured into not attacking his debate performances as viciously as they will probably deserve to be attacked.

Meanwhile, Biden runs away from accountability, hiding behind closed doors as he dog-whistles to the Market:

"Here's the deal: we all know, and I don't think this is hyperbole, we all know in our gut this election is the most important election we've ever engaged in—and not just because I'm running," Biden said. "With Trump gone you're going to begin to see things change. Because these folks (his GOP pals) know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."

Biden should just cut to the chase and admit that he's the candidate of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) Party. That acronym comes to us direct from the late British P.M. Margaret Thatcher, and it means that there is no alternative to cutthroat capitalism and a Hobbesian war of all against all.

That is why Biden and other "New Democrat" centrists of his ilk love to point to Trump as the only enemy that regular people should ever need to fight. It's better for the corporate wing of the party to sound the warning that Trump is the next Hitler who threatens to abolish democracy, cancel the election if he doesn't win, take over TV stations and newspapers, and send storm troopers into the streets to arrest well-heeled liberal #Resistance, Inc. freedom fighters. Oh, and threaten US standing in the world, as if increasing death rates in the US, crushing education debt, homelessness, police violence, gun violence and relentless coup attempts and bipartisan bombings abroad were not pre-existing reputation-killers enough.

We're instructed that it is up to political content-consumers ("we the people") to defeat Trump by electing a kinder, gentler, more discreet monster to regress the misery to those halcyon days of slow frog-boilings, in hopes that enough people will notice their pain less in the future than they are noticing it right now.

As long as we are still allowed to vote, then we should have nothing to complain about. Better to have dictatorship by the Market than dictatorship by a demagogue produced by the Market. 

To give you another example of how tainted Biden truly is, when I Googled "A.P. pool report" in hopes of getting a verbatim transcript of his Monday night remarks, what actually popped up on the front page were myriad reports of Biden's penchant for swimming naked in his pool in front of female Secret Service agents.

If that isn't bad enough, my search for the Biden pool report on the latest fundraiser also brought up the attempt in 2012 by his operatives to "edit" press accounts of his campaign appearances. This attempted censorship was on top of a separate controversial Obama White House directive to journalists to submit their stories for "quote approval" prior to publication. It was also on top of the the Obama administration's record war on whistleblowers and its spying on journalists.

So Trump's much-criticized verbal assault on the media as "enemy of the people" is not so much an anomaly as it is a direct extension of the no less frightening media suppression of free speech as practiced by the previous administration.

Biden is acting more like Candidate Hillary Clinton every day, hiding from the media as he sends out his various underlings to explain his unconvincing flip-flop over his Hyde Amendment support, to name just one recent controversy. You might remember that Hillary's campaign literally corralled the press behind ropes at public events in order to lessen the chances of them actually popping a non-scripted question at her. 

It is getting so desperately pathetic on the invisible Biden trail that his campaign actually tweeted out a picture of his special friendship bracelet memorializing his insipid good-buddy bond with Barack Obama. This image should make everybody just shut up and swoon, right? (Rather than, say, cackle or vomit.)

 Biden is not your normal phony candidate. He is an unabashed high-level factotum for the financialized economy, and a craven one at that. He tries to hide his naked history by ineptly draping himself with myriad spokeswomen and the first black president (who probably picked him as his running mate only to reassure conservative white voters that the first black conservative president didn't pose a threat to them.)

Biden keeps insisting that Trump is an anomaly who burst forth from the ether. He ignores the truth that the past four decades of transnational, labor-destroying, deregulated market neoliberalism - increased riches for the wealthy and increased poverty for everyone else - is the Petri dish that nourished Trump. And Biden himself provided a lot of those nutrients, what with his racist wars against drugs and welfare programs, not to mention his votes for corporate "trade" agreements like NAFTA and for the illegal Iraq War.

Trump is no anomaly, no creature from outer space.  He is a mutation. He is the birth-product of the tainted and inbred late-capitalist strain of Oligarchs Gone Wild.

And Joe Biden is among the fertility doctors whose depraved policies helped to create him.

"Doctor Moreau for President!" would make a good campaign slogan for Biden, don't you think?  

In fact, this picture of Biden posing in a flag-emblazoned laboratory setting with indicted blood-testing fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is the perfect campaign poster. It sends the message that while the anti-science Trump slashes and burns with a scowl on his face, Biden will always suck our blood with a jovial technocratic smile. The life-draining work of TINA will continue to be discreetly performed in the shadows of the gleaming laboratories of pseudo-democracy, just as Biden is conducting his fake presidential campaign right now.

Bring Back the Good Old Days of the Future!

Picking At the Trump Pimple

Depending on whether you're a fan or a critic, Donald Trump in Europe was either too sexy for his shirt or too big for his britches. Or maybe his tailor quit in the middle of the job because Trump's deposit check had bounced. This is the picture that all the fashionista pundits couldn't stop talking about this week:

The next-most earth-shattering thing they're talking about, now that Trump's insults to Meghan Markle and the mayor of London are disappearing into the ether to keep the Trump Baby Balloon company, is that Trump threatened to single-handedly destroy Britain's beloved National Health Service!  Its demise will be the offer the Brits will be unable to refuse if they have any hope of a post-Brexit trade deal with Trump's United States.

"Mar-a-Lago Comes For British Health!" is the dire warning of the New York Times's Paul Krugman.

That would be the same Paul Krugman who warned only three years ago that the nefarious Bernie Sanders was coming for Obamacare, and who continues to speciously argue that single payer health care espoused by Sanders and other progressives is next to impossible "in the current climate.

Krugman writes,

As it happens, the British and American health systems lie at opposite ends of a spectrum defined by the relative roles of the private and public sectors.

 Although the Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage and increased the role of Medicaid, most Americans still get their insurance (if they get it at all) from private companies and get treated at for-profit hospitals and clinics. In other countries, like Canada, the government pays the bills, but health providers are private. Britain, however, has true socialized medicine: The government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors.

That skirts the truth, to put it politely. As I responded to Krugman in my published comment: 

The NHS is already opened up to private US companies and it has been at least since 2006. That was when the Hospital Corporation of America partnered with British medical facilities that serve only private patients.

 Other US-based corporations have followed suit, with the stated anodyne objective along the lines of "improving efficiencies" and other neoliberal buzz-phrases to mask creeping privatization.

Optum, a division of UnitedHealth, works with the NHS in contract negotiations and medications management. Kaiser Permanente also "advises" the NHS, and IBM provides it with electronic records services.

 This has mostly been under the radar, until Donald Trump came along and did his usual oafish thing. No wonder that the discreet wing of the ruling class can't stand him. He rips the mask right off all the plunder and the greed. He bellows that he wants to destroy the social contract wherever it exists in the world, from a platform where everybody can hear him, thus endangering the whole late-capitalistic plan.

A Henry Kissinger he definitely is not. It wasn't until years after the fact that the Kissinger-Nixon plot to "make Chile's economy scream" by overthrowing the socialist government with a CIA coup became widely known. Then it was too late.

 It's not too late in Britain. And hopefully, it's not even too late in the United States

Why do we keep hearing that Medicare for All is "impossible?"

 For one reason: It'd put a dent in the profits of the voracious oligarchy.

The most radical shift in the stealthy undoing of the NHS came in 2012, with the passage of Britain's Health and Social Care Act. This law specifically enforces a restructuring of the system based upon the advice of McKinsey, the US-based global consulting firm which has come in for some well-deserved criticism lately. As the public advocacy group Patients4NHS explains:

The Act ordered the NHS to use the private sector: it made it compulsory for those services that potentially could be provided by non-NHS organisations to be put out to competitive tender. Private companies are now involved in a wide range of NHS services, from GP or out-of-hours care to diagnostic services (such as scans or blood tests), elective (or routine) surgery and ambulance services. In addition, private, multinational consultancy firms are being paid considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money for advising NHS providers, such as hospital Trusts, on managing their service.

The NHS was already on the chopping block in the Obama era's secretive trade deals, such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), which not only would give private US-based corporations the right to destroy Britain's socialized medical care system, but would prevent any future governments from ever reversing the privatization!

So perhaps we should thank Donald Trump's freely oozing mouth for warning us about the systemic cancer which lurks beneath. He is putting his unwitting squeeze right on the corporate propaganda campaign which continues to vociferously deny that Britain's health care system is on the chopping block in trade extortion schemes that long preceded, and go far beyond, Donald Trump's clumsy unfiltered threats.

Ominously, the private companies already infiltrating the NHS are still permitted to use the NHS logo, thus further deliberately hiding their for-profit agenda from the British public. 

So Krugman and other critics who pile on Trump to the exclusion of critiquing the entire transnational anti-democratic corrupt system that created him in the first place are themselves doing harm by picking on just one particularly annoying unsightly zit while ignoring a whole body full of chronic deep-tissue lesions.

This is what critics who are not Trump, from both the right and the left, mean when they accuse the mainstream corporate media of purveying "fake news," both by commission and by omission. Krugman is no dummy. He knows, or should know, that the danger to the NHS preceded Trump by decades, and that the plunder of social welfare programs around the world will long outlast Trump - unless, of course, capitalism eats itself into extinction first.

Trump is simply the most glaring contemporary symbol, and symptom, of malignant terminal capitalism. Getting rid of him might feel good in the short term, but it's no cure for what deeply ails the sick and decaying body politic.

There's plenty more where he came from, within the highly weaponized Defense of Wealth industry.

The Trumps and the Royals Belong Together

What's with all the media frenzy over the Trump dynasty sullying the Windsor dynasty?

The conventional corporate wisdom is that if Donald Trump weren't such a gross oligarch, he would have cancelled his sullying of the British oligarchy -  because the invitation to sully was issued by a sullied prime minister who was forced to resign because of the Brexit mess. 

And it's not just the sullying. Trump is unfairly "meddling" in British politics by referring to various British politicians as either losers or as his personal pals. This rhetoric from a sitting US president is deemed highly abnormal and deviant.

What was considered normal and proper was former President Barack Obama, right before the Brexit vote, warning the Brits on their own soil that they would suffer dire trade consequences if they dared vote to leave the European Union.

Obama had the good taste to threaten the UK with being politely moved "in back of the queue" whereas Trump outrageously called the mayor of London a "stone cold loser." Ouch. 

 If Trump had any normality at all, he would at least have deployed one of his political operatives across the Atlantic to properly meddle in British politics. Obama himself adhered to exceptional American procedure when he graciously didn't say a word when his campaign strategist, Jim Messina, meddled by advising both Theresa May and David Cameron as they successfully vied for back-to-back Conservative Party residencies at Number Ten, Downing Street.

Of course, the very worst thing that Trump did in preparation for his visit to the U.K. was to insult Meghan Markle. When a tabloid journalist informed him that she'd called him "divisive and misogynistic" in a TV interview during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump used his favorite anti-woman buzzword ("nasty") when reacting to her remarks. He hastily added that he still thought that she'd be "a successful American Princess."

Cue the mass media outrage. And be sure to preface all the diatribes with such made-for-Lifetime headlines as "The Princess Vs. the Demagogue," as the New York Times's Charles Blow did in his latest biweekly #Resistance broadside.

This contrived controversy is an irresistible way for the liberal corporate media to fulfill their perpetual assignment. Their constant duty is to divert the attention of the hoi polloi from the Class War of the rich vs the rest of us. Instead we must learn to care very deeply abut the Intra-Ruling Class War of the good billionaires vs the bad billionaires. 

The Trump vs. Markle narrative is essentially a variation on the stale neoliberal romance theme of Girl Meets Billionaire, Girl Loves Billionaire, Girl Loses Billionaire, Girl Finally Marries Billionaire.

The plot of the latest potboiler is "Girl Meets and Marries Virtuous Oligarch Only To Have Her Happiness Sullied by Villainous Oligarch."  Peasants of the World are hereby urged to unite and defend the honor and serenity of Our Princess as she is assailed from without the walls of her castle by the Usurper to the American Throne. If we all just join together, and vicariously become Meghan Markle, we can momentarily forget about our poverty, our lack of health care,  our joblessness, our homelessness. Even if we're among the fortunate and the comfortable few, we too can find some relief from our crushing boredom and loneliness as we tune in to the saga.

Meghan Markle, according to Blow and other liberal pundits, is being punished for bravely going on TV and joking to Larry Wilmore that she'd stay in Canada permanently should her candidate, Hillary Clinton, lose. Blow paints her as the rare celebrity who broke from the mold and dared to criticize Trump, thereby putting her brilliant acting career at risk. It was almost as bold and as rare a move as if a Hollywood celebrity went on TV and cast doubt on the Russiagate cult. Of course, not even Meghan Markle could have cast doubt on the Russiagate cult before the Clintonites had even invented it. And nobody is casting doubt on it now. 

Just as bad as Trump are the right-wing tabloids accusing Markle of timing the birth of her baby to cynically avoid Trump during his state visit. Maternity leave is just an excuse. So let all the righteous pick a side: unite and defend royal motherhood from the Usurper, or defend the Usurper from royal motherhood. Those are your two choices.

But before we get too carried away, we must also remember that as much as we Americans fawn over royalty, and canonize Americans who marry royalty, we must first and foremost patriotically embrace our own hegemonic system of government as we fawn from afar. Charles Blow writes:

I have no royalist fetish or reverence. Indeed, I find the existence of royalty in any society problematic. But this isn’t as much about Trump’s reaction to a princess as it is about his reaction to a woman, in this case, a black woman.

It is so problematic that Blow pulls a Trump and elevates Meghan Markle from her official title of duchess to that of princess. Methinks he doth protest too much.

He glosses over both classism and racism by making the class and race war all about Trump against Meghan Markle. By celebrating her achievement-by-marriage and by calling her a princess, he simply exposes himself as a more politically correct chauvinist. By eliciting empathy for and celebrating a wealthy woman of color, he can also ignore the fact that mortality and morbidity for black mothers and babies in the United States is nothing less than shocking and shameful.  

And Flint still doesn't have clean water.

By championing Meghan Markle's right to speak her political mind, Blow and other pundits engaged in the business of selling their Moments of Trump-Hate can also ignore the fate of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, lying gravely ill in a British prison as the Trumps and the Windsors whine and dine, and the press corps gawk and wag their fingers at Good Dynasty vs Bad Dynasty.

And the Windsors can also bask in their own slickly marketed nouveau-liberal limelight and forget their own past fascist sympathies as they welcome a biracial American bride and new grandchild to their midst.  According to the royal family's media apologists, the Windsors were just ignorant victims of scary times. Unlike Trump, they were simply engaging in a harmless prank when they posed for the camera with their Nazi salutes. It is so unfair of the right-wing press to dredge up all those harmless scary memories, you see.

If Prince Harry can forget about once attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi, in the 21st century, then so should we, as we direct all our precious ire against Hitler-Trump.

We can also forget about Trump and Prince Andrew both being pals with convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe they can reminisce on the golf course.

And we can forget about the times that Prince Charles was a perfectly willing occasional guest at Trump's Mar-A-Lago palace during his forays into Palm Beach society and elite polo matches played for charity. When Trump was still just an ordinary social-climbing real estate mogul, according to an entertaining new book by Laurence Leamer, Charles even once personally called him from his private jet to grovel and ask if he could drop by. Trump was so excited that he abandoned his golf course right in the middle of his game to personally extend the welcome mat to the equally eager Prince of Wales.

Wealth and power always attract wealth and power, no matter the source. And white male supremacy is always an incestuous match made in hell. No matter how the media narrative spins it, the Trumps and the Windsors are crispy birds of a feather. Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

#Russiagate Exhaustion

I got tired just watching Robert Mueller III totter up to the podium on Wednesday to wearily announce that just because he'd found no evidence that Trump is a crook doesn't mean that Trump is not a crook.

Heads, which had barely begun to heal from the initial release of Mueller's written report, exploded anew when the special prosecutor announced he would prefer not to testify before Congress. His report, he said, speaks for itself. He is so, so done with it all.

Ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries summed up his party's dilemma all too well when he groused that "there is a difference between reading the book and seeing the movie on the big screen.”

It seems that Trump isn't the only American who doesn't read.  Polls have revealed for years that most US citizens don't read more than one or two books a year. And despite its best-seller status, "The Mueller Report" is pretty dry reading, even for die-hard readers.

Who has the time, anyway? Even an article in The Week about people not reading much any more was classified as a "speed read" in a probably futile effort to get more people to read it. 

If it's not on a screen, then it doesn't exist. And with so many shows to choose from, the recent bravura C-Span-streamed marathon reading of the report by an ensemble cast of Democrats attracted only a tiny number of eyeballs.

Politics is spectacle. Politicians see voters as a blob of consumers addicted to their various screens. The consent has been manufactured by the corporate media conglomerate, and the learned passivity is complete.

So the longer that our congress critters can keep the Mueller-centered suspense (and the #Russiagate franchise) alive, and the electorate barely awake, the better they think it will be for their ultimate goal, which is limited to winning elections and raising scads of money to do so.

Since Democrats are damned if they do impeach and damned if they don't, they might as well do the right thing as ordained by the Constitution. Otherwise, win or lose, they won't be treated kindly in the history books.

Oh, I forgot. People don't read actual books, not when there are rage-filled twitter feeds and Facebook flummery to keep them amused.

That's why corporate media outlets pounced with glee when Trump wrote one of his typically garbled tweets this morning. "Trump Tweets and Then Retracts, Statement that Russia Helped Him Get Elected" shrilled the New York Times in a particularly egregious example of "gotcha" churnalism.

Here's the original tweet that had media heads exploding in Toldja So! triumph: 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 3h

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

53.4K

7:57 AM - May 30, 2019

It's somewhat surprising that the Times isn't also reporting that Trump falsely claimed that Russia has literally disappeared off the face of the planet for the sole fact that it had nothing to do with getting him elected. But that would have entailed getting their fact-checker to refer to Google Earth in order to determine whether Russia is still there, and then writing a brand new outraged article about Trump's Eleven-Thousandth Lie.

It's exhausting. And it's futile.

When Concern-Trolling Oligarchs Attack

One way that hospital CEOs justify their increasingly obscene pay packages is to market the hospitals they run as "health systems" instead of hospitals. This is especially true when a private corporation (Continuum Health Partners) buys up several struggling charity hospitals at bargain basement prices and then merges them all into one behemoth.
They justify enriching themselves and their shareholders off the backs of the poor and the sick by occasionally voicing great concern for their treat-and-dump clientele. They run expensive ad campaigns, including videos which aired during the televised Academy Awards show.

One of the easier and more cost-effective ways to accomplish this onerous marketing task, though, is to publish an ad disguised as an op-ed in the New York Times.

And lest the wealthy Wall Street investors in Kenneth L. Davis's Mount Sinai Health System conglomerate of providers become unduly concerned about his concern for the poor, he enlisted as his Times co-author one of the best friends that Wall Street ever had: former Treasury Secretary and Citibank CEO Robert Rubin. There hasn't been this much deference to the sensitivities of the rich since 2015, when Mount Sinai officially dropped the Roosevelt name from the Roosevelt Hospital it subsumed in the interests of cost-cutting.

The gist of their concern-trolling Times piece is this: If only the poor and the sick didn't live in such crappy housing situations and had more to eat, then the poor and the sick wouldn't be straining our country's precious for-profit Health Systems to the absolute breaking point!

Now, why didn't we think of that before Rubin and Davis deigned to enlighten us about their awesome discovery, which seemingly ranks right up there with the unearthing of King Tut's Tomb? And to get us properly prepped for the absolute genius of their Eureka moment, the Times even cooperatively headlines the piece: "A Secret to Better Health Care."

D'oh!

Rubin and Davis start out by honestly admitting that American Health Systems are indeed a complete mess. But that mess is really the fault of other systems, such as the food stamp system and the housing system.

If our spending on social programs were (sic) more in line with other developed countries, our health care costs would fall. That means that as policymakers evaluate a social program, they should weigh not only its direct and second-order benefits — from reducing crime and recidivism to increasing productivity — but also its effect on lowering federal health care costs.

This demonizes the poor and the sick by conflating poverty and illness with crime. We must spend more on social programs, not because it is the right and the humane thing to do,  but because a little extra spending on poor people is better for the bottom line of both the System and the investor class. The goal is to get the laggards producing.

The impetus, or hook, for this op-ed appears to be the case of a recently-released Mount Sinai System patient who became trapped in his New York high-rise apartment when the elevator broke down. A System social worker prevailed upon management to make repairs, because the patient otherwise would have been unable to score his heart failure medication and (if he survived) then put an even greater strain on The System with a premature readmission and even possible denial of his untimely insurance claim.

If the System can suggest better nutrition and housing for its customers, it will also be less prone to lawsuits for releasing them too soon into horrible living conditions. It will help absolve them of responsibility when System management shows itself willing to suggest in the New York Times that mold be ameliorated and elevators repaired.

But no concern-trolling neoliberal manifesto could ever be complete without the oligarchs also insisting that the crime-prone lazy poor and sick also have some "skin in the game." Citing a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, Rubin and Davis continue:

And once in stable housing, beneficiaries can better pursue public benefits and job opportunities.The Los Angeles program showed even greater cost savings, according to a study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation. After receiving housing assistance, beneficiaries’ costs to the public health system plummeted. Inpatient services fell by 75 percent. Over all, the study found that, even accounting for the increased housing costs, recipients’ total social service and health care costs fell by 20 percent. And beneficiaries showed signs of reduced involvement in crime and improved mental health.

Notice how smoothly they pivot from the trapped man with heart failure to the miracle of all those sick and poor people suddenly getting law-abiding and spry and enthused about finding a job, and without the government even having to implement a federal jobs system with a living wage!

It's just too bad that the Times's big reveal of The System's Secret to Health doesn't also clue us in about the location of all those wonderful job opportunities. But as long as the message is bipartisan or nonpartisan, it's just got to be good. For rich people, especially.

My published response to the New York Times:

This column is so rich.

Pssst... want to know the real secret? The US oligarchy doesn't want our market-based mess of a health care system to be replaced by guaranteed single payer insurance.

 But rather than come right out and admit it, Mr. Rubin recommends a little stitch here and a little stitch there to repair a tattered social safety net that, it just so happens, he had a large role in shredding back when he was one of Bill Clinton's main economic advisers.

It was Rubin who also urged Clinton to work with House Speaker Newt "Contract With America" Gingrich to dismantle welfare. It was Rubin who wanted Social Security privatized. Thank goodness that our great national heroine, Monica Lewinsky, came along when she did and ruined that scheme before tens of millions of precarious lives were further ruined in the selfish interests of Wall Street.

 Thanks to deficit hawks like Rubin and 40 years of neoliberal austerity, our average national life expectancy has plummeted for the third straight year. If our oligarchic "thought leaders" really cared, they'd also be espousing enhanced Social Security benefits and better legal protections for tenants against greedy landlords. Decent housing shouldn't be limited to fixing broken elevators and slapping bleach on moldy walls. The rents are too damned high!

  Mr. Davis,co-author of this piece, is among the highest paid hospital CEOs, his compensation having risen to $12 million in 2017. 

Wealth inequality is the real killer.

As Dean Baker points out, Robert Rubin also was behind the 1990s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act deregulating Wall Street, which led to the collapse of the housing market in 2008, and the subsequent evictions of 10 million people from their homes. Rubin made a personal fortune from the bursting of the housing bubble. Most people have never recovered.

Was the man trapped in his apartment and suffering heart failure also a victim of Rubin's policies? Was he living in substandard housing because Wall Street had forced him out of his original home when he lost his job and couldn't pay the rent or the mortgage?

The New York Times op-ed doesn't say. 

It's a secret.

Give Me Your Bored, Your Rich, Your Coddled Asses

Jeff Bezos may have left the Big Apple in a huff because the huddled masses balked at building him a private helipad and paying him billions of dollars for the privilege of having a new Amazon headquarters in their neighborhood. But that snub didn't stop the world's richest man from returning to the Big Apple last week to mingle with his plutocratic peers at the exclusive star-studded gala opening of the new $100 million Statue of Liberty museum. 

When you're the colossal Jeff Bezos, simply mingling with your fellow billionaires and corporate donors is not enough. What do you give the man who already has everything? It was a dilemma, for sure. But they finally came up with the nifty idea of getting Oprah herself to award him his own Special Star, to be permanently affixed to a mural in the museum. It will vie with the 1883 Emma Lazarus sonnet ("The New Colossus") for millions of pairs of tourist eyes, yearning to be free to buy stuff on the Internet.

Well, not quite. It turns out that Bezos actually paid $2 million for his star, and it's ostensibly in honor of his immigrant father Miguel (pictured above). The wealthy may not only buy stars, they can also purchase stripes forged from the iron bars of the statue's original armature.

Oh, and since you're Oprah, you also got your own award, for your unspecified "contributions to freedoms, both domestic and abroad." It didn't cost her a dime, because freedoms are free and states of mind are priceless.

Hillary Clinton, wearing one of her signature Chairman Mao jackets, was also there. You might remember Hillary as the former Secretary of State who in 2014 warned "irresponsible" Central American parents not to send their endangered children north of the border. The US government would immediately deport them right back to the gang violence and poverty they had fled, at great risk to their lives and limbs, as a direct result of US-sponsored regime change coups. Hillary herself had been instrumental in forging the military coup that toppled the democratically-elected president of Honduras in 2009. Her decision to not welcome Central American refugees was not due to Trump-style racism and xenophobia, but simply in order to "send a message" to future incipient migrants.

Ha Ha, I Got a Star and You Didn't!

Former New York City billionaire Mayor Michael "Stop and Frisk" Bloomberg was also on hand, champagne in hand, to celebrate all the classy tempest-tossed freedom. 

Entertainment was provided by, among other stars, Gloria Estefan. She covered the old Kate Smith standard "God Bless America." I guess the plutocrats at the glitzy gala hadn't gotten the message that this song is newly acknowledged to be "tainted with racist lyrics" in much the same way that the Statue of Liberty itself is historically tainted with racism. The monument of freedom was never exactly viewed as a beacon of hope or welcome to Black people, despite the "emancipation" proclamation.

But, as Oprah's own "O" magazine hastened to glowingly report, Oprah herself offered such "moving words" about letting freedom ring and so forth on her very first visit to Liberty Island that racism was all but forgotten as everybody wined and dined and schmoozed. "America is about an ideal, and that ideal is for everybody" was her facile and reassuring message to her fellow plutocrats. 

Although the gentrification of Liberty Island and nearby Ellis Island has been creeping along for many decades, if not forever, the event which truly transformed this national park from a premier global public tourist destination to a Disneyfied pleasure palace and private corporate event venue was The Day That Changed Everything: Sept. 11, 2001.

The ritual trek by millions of the modern "wretched refuse of your teeming shore" up to the Statue's crown is now pretty much a thing of the past. Tickets to the top are very expensive and severely limited, ostensibly due to perpetual terror threats. Less than 20 percent of the island's annual 4 million visitors are ever allowed to enter even the base of the statue, let alone the pedestal and the crown.

Obviously, the traveling hoi polloi of the world need something besides the Jeff Bezos Star to attract them to this all-but-shuttered iconic site  As museum designer Edwin Schlossberg, the husband of heiress, political dynast and Boeing Director Caroline Kennedy, explained it to Forbes magazine:

“While the Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable icons in the world, few people ever get to climb to its crown or get to see Lady Liberty’s face up close. Our goal for the design of the museum experience is to immerse visitors in not just the grandeur and sweeping history of the statue but also the very idea of liberty itself. We want them to leave with a deeper understanding of what liberty means to them and the active role required to uphold it.”

To help ordinary people arrive at the nirvana of a deeper understanding of freedom, they will be allowed to watch an "immersive film"  about climbing up to the crown as a substitute for actually doing it. No active role will be required of them. They will be able soak up all that magical liberty without ever breaking a sweat.

You will not trudge. You will not plod. You will fly to the very top in only eight to ten minutes!

Weaving through this soaring theater space, museum-goers will learn the rich story of the Statue’s origins and be captivated by a virtual fly-through ascending the Statue that recreates interior views and sounds. Visitors will be invited to contemplate liberty today and its measures around the world, such as access to education, free elections, and a free press. 

Please remember as you wallow in all this simulated freedom that "access" to a human right is not the same thing as actually achieving it. Freedom comes at great monetary cost. Unless, of course, your name is Jeff Bezos and your corporate kingdom of Amazon not only pays no income taxes but is entitled to tax refunds. And a star on the Statue of Liberty mural.


The most important thing you can do to enhance your virtual freedom experience, though, is to bring your neoliberal state of mind (but no outside food or beverages!) with you to the Statue of Liberty Simulacrum. 

First, you need to believe that you still have as much "access" to the original statue as you have to the health care marketplace and a college education in the Land of the Free. You can roam around at will and gawk all you want.

And despite the United States being home to whole new lost generations of refugees from the middle class and indebted college graduates with few decent job prospects, the museum's corporate sponsors still aim to give their visitors all the liberal education they can handle in one truncated day. 

But you're not done yet, because the last stop before leaving the museum is the Inspiration Gallery.

In this awe-inspiring space, visitors can reflect upon what they have seen and experienced in the museum. Guests will be invited to document their visit and express their views by adding a self-portrait and collage of inspirational images to an ever-growing digital experience called Becoming Liberty. The tour culminates with an up-close view of Liberty’s most iconic symbol – her original torch – held high for nearly 100 years and still a touchstone of the light Liberty shines from generation to generation. Rescued from the elements and replaced in 1986, the torch will be the most powerful artifact visitors encounter as they reach the end of their museum experience. A model of the Statue's face offers another tactile moment, and the glass walls afford magnificent views of the Statue of Liberty herself set against a stunning backdrop of the New York City skyline. 

Finally, as much as the oligarchs and celebrities who partied hearty at the museum's glitzy grand opening might scoff at a Green New Deal to save the planet, they still want you to know that the Lady Liberty Simulacrum is as "sustainable" a construction project as any modern construction project can possibly be.

The museum embodies an environmentally responsible design and best practices for sustainability. It features material reuse of the existing Administration Building, a green roof-scape, and bird-safe glass exteriors. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it is set above 500-year flood levels and built to withstand hurricane force winds. 

So even though the Liberty museum brochure promises that you'll be blown away, if not drown in all that immersive experience, you won't actually be blown away or drown. If you can withstand the commercial Disneyfication of a great national monument, you'll probably be able to withstand anything.

Speaking of withstanding stuff, I would now like to reminisce about my own experience at the Statue of Liberty with my two young children back in the late spring of 1993.

The gala fun began way ahead of schedule, as we were driving to our town recreation center to catch a chartered bus down to the city and the ferry. As I was signalling for a left turn into the parking lot, our car was violently rear-ended by a motorist who said he was blinded by the early morning sun. Luckily for us, a town cop and a whole crowd full of fellow liberty-seeking day trippers witnessed the entire accident. Still in a daze, and so as not to disappoint the kids, I decided to go ahead with our trip after the police officer kindly arranged for our damaged car to be towed to a body shop.

On the way to the ferry, we passed the World Trade Center, still encased in yellow crime scene tape from the recent first bombing of the site. On reaching Liberty Island, we ate our brown-bag lunches on the pedestal (still allowed!) before trudging up the hundreds of narrow stairs to the Crown (at no extra cost!) to peer out at the New York skyline for a minute, all crammed together like wretched but hopeful refuse in immigrant steerage class.

Of course, the combination of the delayed whiplash symptoms from our rear-end car crash and the climb to the top left the three of us with extremely sore bodies by the following morning. But at least we can still humble-brag to anybody who will listen that we were among the last, lost decade of people ever to have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty at no extra charge. We had a completely immersible and tactile experience that my mind and body will never forget, right down to my aching arthritic vertebrae.

As Oprah plagiarized in her Liberty Pleasure Island keynote speech to the Leisure Class: "Let freedom ring!" 

But as the far wiser and far more original John Donne wrote a long time ago: "No man is an island, entire of itself.... And therefore never send for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."