Putin Invested In A Trump Presidency-- He Won Big-- "These Are Dark Times. They Are About To Get Darker."

2020 America by Nancy Ohanian

Will Trump dare go on the attack against Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (R), who said yesterday she might not back his reelection? Maybe that's what she wants. Although Trump won the state's 3 electoral votes in 2016, he only scored 52.9% of the vote and his popularity has ticked down ever since. The Morning Consult Trump Tracker's last look at Alaska found that his job approval was at 51% and that since inaugural day he had lost 19 points. An internal campaign poll shows Trump reelect number at just a dismal 47%-- and last time she ran, Murkowski wasn't supported by the Republican Party establishment and won anyway. I bet there are a lot of Republican Members of Congress who wish they could say the same and not be dragged down to defeat in the anti-Trump wave that's going to sweep over the country in November.

This is what Murkowski had to say about Mattis' remarks about Trump yesterday: "When I saw General Mattis' comments yesterday I felt like perhaps we are getting to a point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up... I was really thankful. I thought General Mattis' words were true, and honest and necessary and overdue. And, I have been struggling for the right words, and I was encouraged a couple of nights ago when I was able to read what President Bush had written. And I found that to be empowering for me as one leader." Asked if she will back Trump's reelection, she said: "I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time I think you know that. I didn't support the President in the initial election, and I work hard to try to make sure that I'm able to represent my state well that I'm able to work with any administration and any president. He is our duly elected President I will continue to work with him. I will continue to work with this administration but I think right now as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I'm going to vote for not going to vote for I think are distracting at the moment."

That didn't take long!

The immediate political problem may be Trump, but that is hardly the overarching political problem America is facing-- and our adversaries are aware or it-- and rejoicing in it. "The sight of U.S. police and other security forces tear gassing and beating up protesters are playing on television screens across the planet, offering irresistible fodder for foreign adversaries who’ve long accused the U.S. of hypocrisy. Never mind human rights records that are orders of magnitude worse than anything yet seen on America's streets-- some of these countries are now outright mocking U.S. officials.

Earlier this week, Chris Hedges noted that "The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a 'public thing' or the 'property of a people,' has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft."

The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.

There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.

If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray.  The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.

The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far behind police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the poor and people of color, possible.

Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty. The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care system. The schools do not educate their children, who live without adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count. Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services, food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.

The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released. The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for all of America.

The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.

...It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25 percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families.

And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.

The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.

How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?

I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent. But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself. I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.

It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S. military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and frustration that led to the uprisings.

The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking scapegoats. The idea that Antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.

The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.

The Status Quo Joe Return To "Normalcy"-- A Disaster Waiting In The Wings

Does a "return to normalcy" sound like a good idea after 4 years of Trumpism? It may sound vaguely tempting but it's anything but a good idea. The kind of "normalcy" Biden's campaign is based on is precisely the "normalcy" that plowed the field for the insidious growth of Trumpism. We spent a lot of time writing about that in 2019 and yesterday so did Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico: Joe Biden's secret governing plan. Team Biden is already putting a potential cabinet together. "Biden advisers," they wrote, "describe a Return to Normal plan-- a reversal of President Trump's unorthodox, improvisational style. Biden wants known, trusted people around him-- many from the Obama years." Although there are a couple of exceptions, most of the names are at the root cause of Trumpism. Here's the Politico list:

• John Kerry would love to take a new Cabinet position devoted to climate change, or might even accept a curtain call to return as secretary of state.
• Susan Rice, formerly President Obama's national security adviser, is another option for State.
• Mike Bloomberg, who swiftly endorsed Biden after the former mayor's campaign collapsed, would be a top possibility to head the World Bank.
• Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general under Obama who stood up to Trump and was fired, would be a leading contender for attorney general.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren as Treasury secretary could help unite the party.
• Jamie Dimon-- chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and mentioned over the years as a potential presidential candidate-- would also be considered for Treasury.
• Anne Finucane, vice chairman of Bank of America, is another possibility for Treasury.

Who would be more like Harding Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon? Not Elizabeth Warren, that's for sure.

They also will toss something over to Mayo Pete, "perhaps as ambassador to the UN, or as U.S. trade representative," either helping to "credential Buttigieg for a future national campaign."

And in the mix for VP, according to VandeHei and Allen, are Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris (if not Attorney General), Cory Booker, Deval Patrick, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Tammy Duckworth, Val Demings... "One adviser told us when we asked who the V.P. pick would be: 'Whoever Jim Clyburn wants it to be.'"

They also note that the chief of staff "would likely be Ron Klain, who held that job for him when he was veep." And Michèle Flournoy, an Obama undersecretary of defense, would be the favorite to run Biden's Pentagon.

Biden, a throw-back institutionalist, relishes an emphasis on governing, norms and restoring alliances. That includes respect for experts, and for the art and science of governing. This evolving plan is all in Biden's comfort zone-- all meant to send a public signal of stability.

Remember, Harding, who ran on a platform that could be boiled down to "A Return To Normalcy," won in a landslide and was once extremely popular. Today his short stint in the White House-- he won in 1920 and died in 1923-- is routinely considered one of the 3 worst presidencies in history.

What Biden's campaign represents is the status quo ante-- the normalcy of the time before Trump... when Obama (and Biden, more or less) were inadvertently laying the ground for Trump with their centrist agenda. Biden wants to re-embrace that agenda today. He seems to have persuaded himself that his "great relationships" with Senate Republicans will make the country a better place and that it will all be one great big Grand Bargain of he's in the White House. Was he not milking those relationships while the Senate was screwing over the Obama-Biden administration? He seems to have forgotten that Merrick Garland was another of many, many, many examples of the Obama administration moving right to compromise with the Republicans, who would then just move the goal posts further and further right. Garland was more like a mainstream Republican nominee than a Democratic nominee. Obama, offered him as a compromise to replace Scalia. And now Biden is saying he'd nominate him again if he had the chance-- the ultimate in an utterly clueless status quo ante vision.

And with sizable majorities of Americans favoring raising taxes on the wealthy so that they start paying their fair share, where does Biden go? Back to the already way too low rates under Obama. Forget AOC's proposal for a top marginal rate of 70%... Biden told Chris Cuomo on CNN that he'd like to raise the top rate to 39.5% and take the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

Whatever the question or the topic, State Quo Joe wants to take it back to the way it was under Obama. Medicare-For-All makes no sense to him-- just tweaking an entirely inadequate Obamacare system that was always just a weak incremental first step towards universal healthcare anyway.

Warren G. Harding ran on many of the same premises that make, at least to pundits and other status quo Democrats, a "compelling" case for Biden. In the 1920 campaign, "A Return to Normalcy," was a reference to what life was like before the disruption of the Great War (World War I). Here's how Harding made his case: "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." As expected, Biden is making a similar case based post-Trumpist disruption to the status quo.

By the way, the 1922 midterms were a complete disaster for the GOP because of Harding's pro-business/pro-rich people policies. The Republicans lost a mind-boggling 82 seats in the House and 8 Senate seats. Harding died (age 57) a few months later. If Biden is elected I'll predict right now that he will be an even worse, though similar, president than Harding.

As Chris Hedges noted yesterday, "There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited-- as he was viciously Friday in the New York Times’ 'As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity'-- and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either. Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power-- which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery-- and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth."

The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism.

We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system, especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don’t need a “Punch and Judy” show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.

Conservatives And Corruptionists Rally Behind Status Quo Joe-- Even They Know The Oligarch Would Be A Disaster

Pick yer poison

A friend of mine-- a generally reliable DC political operative-- told me Sunday evening to watch for the power within Democratic Party politics that Obama still wields on Monday. He didn't tell me how but, sure enough, early Monday morning-- after Steyer had already bailed on Sunday-- we all saw first Mayo Pete and then Amy Klobuchar close down their campaigns and endorse Biden-- and just as establishment-connected centrists-- primarily hack politicians-- began endorsing Biden from coast to coast. Writing yesterday for Newsweek, Alexandra Hutzler reported that there is intense pressure on Bloomberg to pull out too. "But the wild card in the 2020 Democratic field," she wrote, "is Michael Bloomberg... with virtually unlimited resources, the 78-year-old billionaire has more options than his rivals to stay in the race-- despite calls for him to drop out-- even if he doesn't start to collect primary victories. 'If the reason for Bloomberg getting into the race was that everyone else seemed anemic as opposed to Sanders and someone needed to take him on, well that's not the case anymore. Not after South Carolina,' Democratic strategist Scott Ferson told Newsweek."




I doubt it will be meaningful but yesterday already saw EMILY's List endorse Warren, perhaps giving her some false hope that there's a pathway to victory for her.

And as Biden emerges as the only viable moderate alternative to Sanders, calls for Bloomberg to exit are likely to increase. Both Kofinis and Ferson said the longer Bloomberg stays in the race, the more likely it is that either Sanders wins or that there is a brokered convention.

That's not likely to bode well with moderate Democrats, who are already concerned that Sanders could run away with the party's nomination. Buttigieg alluded to such a possibility as he abruptly suspended his campaign Sunday night.

"He didn't want to be the person who hung on too long and could be blamed for an eventual Sanders nomination," Ferson said.

Buttigieg's exit came less than 24 hours after Steyer bowed out after his unexpectedly poor performance in South Carolina. The editorial board at USA Today suggested that other Democrats follow Buttigieg and Steyer's lead and drop out of the race.

Klobuchar quickly followed suit, effectively ending her campaign Monday. According to NBC News, she will announce her departure Monday night and throw her support behind Biden ahead of Super Tuesday.

If Bloomberg doesn't perform well on Super Tuesday, he has no chance to capture the number of delegates needed to secure the party's nomination. But thanks to his $1 billion war chest, he can afford to remain in the race, though many experts say his prolonged appearance would be a detriment to the Democratic Party. Staying on the ticket would likely siphon votes from other candidates and lead to a contested convention or to a landslide Sanders victory.

"The Democratic Party is not going to nominate Michael Bloomberg. It's just not going to happen," Kofinis said. FiveThirtyEight forecasters currently predict there is less than one one-hundredth of a chance Bloomberg wins the Democratic primary.

Bloomberg has said he'd continue to pour millions into the race to fund whoever wins the nomination, even if it's not him. But during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Bloomberg signaled he'd continue as a candidate even if he doesn't finish in the top three on Super Tuesday.

On Monday, Bloomberg told supporters in northern Virginia that he had just spoken to Buttigieg and Klobuchar (who are both expected to back Biden) and that he wished them well.

"I thought both of them behaved themselves," he said. "I felt sorry for them but I'm in it to win it."

This came just as Politico put into print what much of the Democratic establishment had already been whispering about Bloomberg for a month now: that his lies are worse than Biden's lies and closer to Trump's lies. (DISCLAIMER: Neither Biden nor Bloomberg is worthy of public office because, like Trump, they feel entitled to lie at will.) Laura Barrón-López reported that Bloomberg's lies risk putting the Democratic Party in jeopardy. "First," she wrote, "came the heavily edited video of Democratic candidates looking speechless at a debate when Mike Bloomberg points out he’s the only one of them who’s started a business. That was followed by tweets of fake quotes last week attributed to Bernie Sanders praising dictators. And shortly before that came news that the Bloomberg campaign was paying social media influencers to hype the billionaire, a novel move by a presidential candidate that was never contemplated by election law."

“This is absolutely dangerous for the fair functioning of our political process,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of digital platforms and the Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said of the video and tweets posted by Bloomberg. “And it could very well send the Democrats down the slippery slope of disinformation.”

That would further erode discourse online and contribute to an already distrustful electorate, he added.

Republicans including President Donald Trump have increasingly used disinformation online. One glaring example was a doctored video of a stammering Speaker Nancy Pelosi that President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guliani circulated in May on his Twitter account and then deleted. The Atlantic ran a lengthy magazine piece under the headline: "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President."

In response, Democrats have debated whether to engage in similar tactics. With his virtually unlimited budget Bloomberg has amassed an enormous digital operation: He is the only Democratic hopeful with the financial wherewithal to even begin to challenge the sophisticated digital machine Trump has built. And the former New York City mayor-- eager to distill what will resonate with voters-- is testing tactics and messages more aggressively than any of his Democratic rivals.

But the campaign’s flirtation with disinformation and its use of paid-for social media to spread his message have also raised questions about the lack of regulation applied to politicians and their campaigns on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

...Only two candidates-- Joe Biden [who lies every time he opens his mouth] and Elizabeth Warren-- have issued official pledges to not use illicit tactics. In June, Biden promised no bots, deep fakes or disinformation. Warren has openly feuded with Facebook over its standards for allowing false statements in political advertising, and she released a policy proposal to crack down on disinformation.

Combating the expansive and fast infection of the seep of disinformation into American elections isn’t being “pollyannaish about blood sport in politics,” said Graham Brookie, head of digital forensic research for the Atlantic Council. It’s about being “extremely vigilant about anything that would be potentially misleading.”

Brookie didn’t consider the edited debate video disinformation, but said it walked up to the line. He did, however, call the Bloomberg tweets quoting fake Sanders’ comments “outright disinformation.”

“While a number of consumers might identify it appropriately as satire, you can't depend on an audience to clearly and coherently consume information,” Brookie said.

Over the weekend, Chris Hedges noted that "Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity-- the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests-- are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life. The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution."

That's why, as Hedges went on to explain, "the New Deal was the bête noire of the oligarchs" and why "[t]hey began to undo Roosevelt’s New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic-- class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate."

The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process. The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the world’s prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the world’s population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy.

The leaders of the Democratic Party-- the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez-- would rather implode the party and the democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the party’s nominee, will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.

Natasha Korecki for Politico: According to Advertising Analytics, Bloomberg has yet to book TV ads after Super Tuesday. A source with knowledge of the conversations said talks were occurring at the staff level between the Biden and Bloomberg campaigns since last week. A separate source said high-level donors who had been persuaded to hold back on Biden following devastating losses in Iowa and New Hampshire had started pushing back, telling Bloomberg team members they were likely to shift back to Biden."

Want more on the oligarch who bought his way into contention? Historic.ly is running an excellent series on him. Part 2 is here.

Manufacturing Consent-- Are Trump's Tweets Losing Their Power?

Yesterday, Memorial Day, Trump woke up in Japan-- but you would hardly know it from his tweet stream. His main topics were his grievances against members of Congress who want to impeach him, how bad Congress is in general, a shout out to Liz Cheney for suggesting FBI agents are guilty of treason. some crap about Netanyahu's trouble forming a coalition government in Israel and a couple of canned obligatory Memorial Day tweets his staff inserted.

Trump tweets more than ever-- but his tweets don't mean what they used to. CNN's Brian Stelter reported yesterday that he's tweeting a lot more. "From his obsession with TV ratings to his around-the-clock usage of Twitter," wrote Stelter, "Trump is clearly savvy about the attention economy. But there are some signs that he is garnering less attention than he did, say, one year ago. Google data showing 'interest over time' for the search term 'Trump' shows him at or near a yearly low for the past month. And Andrew Tyndall's research into the nightly newscasts shows that Trump sound bites have dropped by a quarter in the past two months. All of this could be fleeting, of course... But the president is tweeting a lot more often. We counted 664 tweets and retweets in the past 30 days, up from 226 in the same time period last year. The question arises: Is Trump having to try harder and harder to get the public's attention?

Over the weekend, Neal Rothschild reported for Axios that Trump's tweets are losing their potency, that they no longer "pack the punch they did at the outset of his presidency. His Twitter interaction rate-- a measure of the impact given how much he tweets and how many people follow him-- has tumbled precipitously... It's a sign that his strongest communication tool may be losing its effectiveness and that the novelty has worn off. Trump's interaction rate has fallen from 0.55% in the month he was elected to 0.32% in June 2017-- and down to 0.16% this month through May 25. (The metric measures retweets and likes per tweet divided by the size of his following.)"

Trump's lines of attack have been repeated so much that they don't shock anymore, says Toronto Star Washington bureau chief Daniel Dale.

Because norm-breaking tweets have become the new norm, Dale says, he doesn't cover them as often-- and therefore, casual readers hear about them less.

Attacking the Mueller investigation went from scandalous to routine for Trump, and accusing government officials of treason went from groundbreaking to commonplace.

Since April 1, Trump has tweeted about:

• "No Collusion" 54 times
• "No Obstruction" 30 times
• "Witch Hunt" 30 times
• "Hoax" 19 times
• "Radical" Left/Democrats 17 times
• 13 or 18 "Angry Democrats" 12 times
• "Presidential Harassment" 10 times
• "Treason" 7 times

While the number of interactions per tweet Trump generates has increased 21% between his first six months and most recent six months, it lags way behind his follower growth of 110%.

And he's tweeting more, which could make any individual tweet less likely to stand out.

The pace of Trump's tweet has picked up over the course of his presidency, from 157 times per month during his first 6 months to 284 times per month over the last 6 months.

May is on pace to be the lowest month for Trump's Twitter interaction rate since January 2016.

Not counting posts he retweets, he is at 343 tweets through May 25-- closing in on his one-month record of 348 in August.

Tweeter by Nancy Ohanian

His top tweets since Putin put him in the White House:

1- The pro wrestling video of him taking down a man with a CNN logo for a head. (930,531 interactions)

2- Insulting Kim Jong Un (592,052 interactions)

3- Threatening Kim Jung Un (538,564 interactions)

4- Merry Christmas (592,052 interactions)

5- "Good Morning, Have A Great Day" (538,564 interactions)



Chris Hedges posted a media analysis of his own to TruthDig! Monday: The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate, one that's neither about Trump's tweets nor all that much about Trump in general. He began by referencing Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which "exposed the techniques that the commercial media used to promote and defend the economic, social and political agendas of the ruling elites. These techniques included portraying victims as either worthy or unworthy of sympathy. A Catholic priest such as Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, murdered by the communist regime in Poland in 1984, was deified, but four Catholic missionaries who were raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by U.S.-backed death squads were slandered as fellow travelers of the 'Marxist' rebel movement. The techniques also included both narrowing the debate in a way that buttressed the elite consensus and intentionally failing to challenge the intentions of the ruling elites or the actual structures of power."

Manufacturing Consent was published on the eve of three revolutions that have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media’s faux objectivity, the introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, and the creation of internet platforms-- owned by a handful of corporations-- that control the distribution of news and information and mine our personal data on behalf of advertisers, political campaigns and the government. The sins of the old media, bad though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of hate. Matt Taibbi, the author of Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Media Makes Us Hate One Another, has dissected modern media platforms in much the same way that Herman and Chomsky did the old media.

The new media, Taibbi points out, still manufactures consent, but it does so by setting group against group, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two Minutes Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide. It is mesmerized by the fake dissent of the culture wars and competing conspiracy theories. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on political personalities. Civic discourse is defined by invective and insulting remarks on the internet. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. The result is political impotence among the populace. The moral swamp is not only a fertile place for demagogues such as Donald Trump-- a creation of this media burlesque-- but channels misplaced rage, intolerance and animosity toward those defined as internal enemies.



The old media sold itself as objective, although as Taibbi points out, this was more a reflection of tone rather than content. This vaunted objectivity and impartiality was, at its core, an element of a commercial tactic designed to reach the largest numbers of viewers or readers... The old media rigidly held to the fiction that there were only two kinds of political opinions-- those expressed by Democrats and those expressed by Republicans. These two positions swiftly devolved into caricatures on radio and television. The classic example was the show Crossfire, in which two antagonists, the stereotypical liberal and the stereotypical conservative, could never agree. The liberal, Taibbi pointed out, “was always cast as the person who couldn’t punch back. He was always in retreat. The conservative was always in attack mode. A personality like Tucker Carlson.” These staged and choreographed confrontations were, in essence, sporting events.

...The fact that on most big issues the two major political parties are in agreement is ignored. The deregulation of the financial industry, the militarization of police, the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale surveillance of the population by the government all have bipartisan support. For this reason, they are almost never discussed.

“It’s always presented as two parties that are always in disagreement about everything,” Taibbi said, “which is not true.”

“We [members of the press] are not focusing on the timeless, permanent nature of how the system works,” he said. “We don’t think about the central bank. We don’t think about the security state. We don’t think about any of that stuff. We focus on personalities. Donald Trump versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That simplifies everything and allows us to not look at the bigger picture.”

Once the old media model imploded with the arrival of 24-hour news networks, Fox-style news and the internet, the monopoly of a few dominant newspapers and networks ended. In the new setting, media organizations tailor their content to focus on specific demographics.

“MSNBC, which has gone through some interesting changes over the years, markets itself as a left-leaning network,” Taibbi said. “But it was so intensely pro-war in 2002 that it had to uninvite Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue from the network. This latest thing was ‘Russiagate’ and the constant hyping of the narrative ‘If you watch, you might learn any minute that we, along with Robert Mueller, are going to take down the president.’”

The media model not only sets demographic against demographic, it mutes and destroys investigations into corporate systems of oppression and genuine dissent.

“You don’t have to make the news up for these people,” Taibbi said of the process of carving up the public. “You can just pick stories that they’re going to like. You start feeding them content that is going to ratify their belief systems. Fox did it first. They did it well. They started to make money. They were No. 1 for a long time. But this started to bleed into the rest of the business. Pretty soon, everybody was doing the same thing. It didn’t matter whether you were the food channel tailoring content for people who liked food or MSNBC who tailored content for people who leaned in a certain political direction, you were giving people stuff they wanted to hear.”

“Previously, you were looking at the illusion of debate,” Taibbi said of the old media model. “You would see people arguing on ‘Crossfire.’ On the op-ed pages, there were people who disagreed with each other. Now, most people’s news consumption experience is tailored entirely to their preferences… If you’re only reading media that tailor to your particular belief system you’re not being exposed to other ideas. It’s going to be progressively more vituperative.”

“One of the first stories that taught the news business you can actually sell anger as a product was the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal,” Taibbi said.

MSNBC built its brand and its audience by relentlessly warning that the presidency of Bill Clinton was in mortal peril during the Lewinsky investigation. It repeated this formula by spending two years hyping the story of supposed Russian collusion with the Trump administration.

“What they were trying to do was basically create the impression that [a new] ‘Watergate was going on, you better tune in because at any moment this could all go kaput,’” Taibbi said of the Lewinsky scandal. “They got an enormous market share. Fox added a twist to it. Fox took the same concept and openly villainized the characters. They decided to make Bill and Hillary Clinton into caricatures and cartoon figures, aging hippies. They kept running clip after clip of Hillary Clinton talking about how she didn’t bake cookies. They knew their audience was going to react to all these images in a certain way. They sold people stories that make them angry. They told them, ‘If you keep tuning in, somehow you are a part of the process. You are a part of this ongoing prosecution of this culture enemy that we’re showing you… We tell you about somebody you don’t like. We keep telling you about it over and over to dominate the ratings.’”

The result, Taibbi argues, is a marketing strategy that fosters addictive and aggressive behavior. The more the habits of readers and viewers on the internet and electronic devices are tracked, the more the addiction and aggression are fed.

“This creates more than just pockets of political rancor,” he went on. “It creates masses of media consumers who have been trained to only see in one direction, as if they have been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way... Even without the vitriolic content, just the process of surfing and consuming the news has a lot of the same qualities as other addictions-- like smoking cigarettes or taking drugs. People get addicted to the feel of their phones. They get addicted to the process of turning on screens. You especially get addicted to the idea that you’re going to turn on a news program or read an article and it’s going to tell you something that is going to anger you even more than you were yesterday.”

The template for news, Taibbi writes, is professional wrestling.



“Wrestling was a commercial formula that they figured out worked incredibly well,” Taibbi said of the corporate owners of news outlets. “There was a simplified morality play where there was a good guy, who was called the baby face, and a bad guy they called the heel. They relentlessly hyped the bad guy. The heel was more important in wrestling and more popular than the face. The amount of tickets they can sell is a direct correlation to how much people hate the bad guy. You have to have a hateable heel in order to make the formula work. This is how news works.”

Reporters, Taibbi writes in his book, “now regularly do the outraged hero, finger-pointing routine whenever they are within a mile of Trump. Jim Acosta’s confrontations with the president, for instance, seemed pulled straight from WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment] outtakes. Trump’s whole presidency has turned into a heel/hero promotion with Bob Mueller in the face role.”

“Trump fits like a glove into the commercial formula of all of this,” Taibbi said in the interview. “That’s what’s fascinating about it. He actually makes more money for the MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times side than he does for Fox and the Daily Caller. He’s a cartoon character who is a perfect heel. You have an utterly simplified political landscape. There are only two ways to be. You are either for this incredibly noxious figure or you are against him.”

But, Taibbi notes, there is a diminishing return as with any addiction.

“You always have to constantly increase the level of the rhetoric in order to get people to keep coming back,” he said. “You can’t be narrowly ‘incompetent’ or ‘corrupt.’ Sooner or later, you have to get to the point where you’re saying ‘demagogues,’ ‘authoritarians,’ ‘dictators.’ Finally, as Glenn Beck discovered, you have to start calling them Hitler. Beck got to the point where he was simultaneously calling people Hitler and Stalin. It wasn’t enough just to be Hitler.”

“If you are defining somebody else as that bad, then everything is permissible,” he said. “We saw this with Russiagate. The same sort of liberal commentators who, ages ago, would have been very concerned about things such as the collapse of attorney-client privilege, or the FISA program, any of that stuff. They don’t care about it anymore. They just want to get the person.”

The shaping of the public into antagonistic tribes works commercially. It works politically. But it is a recipe for social disintegration. I watched competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia seize rival mass media outlets and use them to spew vitriol and hate against the ethnic group they demonized. The poisonous images and rhetoric that were pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia led to a savage fratricide.

The United States is already plagued by an epidemic of mass shootings, death threats against critics of Trump, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, and aborted assassination attempts, including a Trump supporter’s mailing of pipe bombs last year to prominent Democrats and CNN, an effort to decapitate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, as well as terrorize the media outlet that is the party’s principal propaganda arm.

“If you’re constantly winding up audiences and telling them that all of their troubles are a result of this other group that is literally Hitler, that they’re literally Nazis, they’re literally Stalin, sooner or later some people are going to start picking up weapons and do something crazy,” Taibbi said. “This is why people are correctly upset about Fox News. But they should also be concerned about other forms of media. The formula is similar across the board.”

“Our system of bubble economics is going to produce some kind of a catastrophe at some point,” Taibbi, the author of one of the finest books on the 2008 financial crash, Griftopia, concluded. “At which point, if you tell people often enough that their next-door neighbor is literally in the league with Nazis or terrorists or whatever it is-- of course Fox pioneered this, going back to the Iraq War, when we were told liberals were terrorist supporters-- sooner or later, there’s going to be violence. The inability of society to agree on a common set of facts means the media has failed already. It means we’re just not reaching people. [In this atmosphere] we will never be able to work things out in a civil way.”

Air Force One by Nancy Ohanian

Pathology, Khashoggi, Capitalism & Climate Change

The sons and daughters of the uber-rich

by Gaius Publius

Capitalism is an economic system that encourages people to act from the most pathological individual motives and promises the best social outcome.

Noam Chomsky said that our current ideology is producing a nation, a world, of psychopaths. From an interview with Rob Kall:

R.K.: Okay, so you have written and I am going to quote you here,

“if you care about other people that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people you might try to organize or to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school or afford food to eat or things like that. In the United States that’s called libertarian for some wild reason. I mean it’s actually highly authoritarian but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.”

Now, since we last spoke I have been doing a series of articles on psychopathy, psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists and it sure sounds like you’re describing them when you describe people who don’t care.

N.C.: Well there is a huge propaganda effort that we are all aware of to try to turn people into psychopaths who don’t care about anyone but themselves. That’s not new actually. They go back a hundred and fifty years, the early days of industrialization in the United States. Working people were bitterly condemning the industrial system that was being imposed, the way it was taking away their freedom, and one of the things they condemned is what they called the new spirit of the age– ‘Gain wealth forgetting all but self,’– Exactly what you’re describing. That’s a hundred and fifty years ago and ever since then there have been enormous efforts to drive these sociopathic attitudes into people’s heads. [emphasis added]

About this, Chris Hedges adds from his personal experience:

At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.

It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?” They were surrounded from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering to their desires and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in distress—whatever petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated their universe and took precedence over the suffering of others, even those within their own families. They knew only how to take. They could not give. They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism.

I would take statements like that last one literally. We're ruled by people "deformed and in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism." Note: This isn't just Trump he's talking about.

Corporations As Force-Extenders for the Pathology of the Rich

Hedges' observation certainly explains why executives at the Ford Motor Company would use a cost-benefit analysis to decide how much safety to put into the Ford Pinto, a car prone to explode from a simple rear-end collision. As one law student at Wake Forest University bloodlessly put it, "Should a risk/benefit analysis be used in situations where a defect in design or manufacturing could lead to death or seriously bodily harm, such as in the Ford Pinto situation?"

That cost-benefit analysis goes like this: Which is more expensive, to settle lawsuits resulting from death claims, or to upgrade the product so fewer people are killed? Human executives at Ford weighed the options and chose to settle the death claims instead.

See what I mean? Psychopaths.

Hedges generalizes the situation this way: "It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power." He goes on to characterize rule by the super-rich as observed by such varied writers as Aristotle, Sheldon Wolin and C. Wright Mills. "Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not know how to nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless greed."

Keep "tyranny or revolution" in mind; we'll come back to it.

In today's world the wealth-producing engine of the super-rich is corporate capitalism. As I wrote some years ago, big corporations loot the wealth of the world so their true owners, the CEO class, can loot their corporations and buy anything else on earth they want or need. When only the rich have money, the whole of the rest of the world is always for sale.

Now that the super-rich have bought the U.S. political system, the last piece, their last lock on power, is in place. Tyranny or rebellion: if the political system can't be recaptured in an orderly, electoral way, nothing but withdrawal of the "consent of the governed" can change course we're on.

The Ubiquity of Assassination

Which leaves us where? Not in a good place. For another example of rule by psychopaths, consider the Khashoggi murder, but from a different perspective:

Tech executives withdrew in scores from a high-profile Saudi investment summit amid the uproar over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — but top Silicon Valley companies show no signs they plan to unwind their lucrative business ties with the country.

The oil-rich kingdom, with its long history of human rights violations, is the single largest funding source for U.S. startups — and a financial pipeline for companies like Uber, Twitter and Tesla.

It's not just the Trumps of the world that live by death. Our liberal gods as well are steeped in blood (including the blood of cheered-on, murderous intent). The pathological desire to murder to gain wealth, to kill to retain power, is everywhere we look. To quote an old commercial, we're soaking in it.

The Pathology of the Climate "Debate"

Which brings us round at last to the climate catastrophe we're about to face, the single greatest world-historical issue in the world. As Dave Roberts pointed out here, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation are not the same, either morally or in their results.

Mitigation is a collective and widespread effort by a society to lessen climate damage by collectively addressing the causes. Where will the money come from? The society as a whole.

Adaptation, on the other hand, is intensely local: What one town or state will need to adapt to climate disasters will be different, and differently expensive, than what another town or state will need. Where will the money come from? That too will be local.

A program of mitigation is collective and deeply moral; also deeply effective, to the extent that good choices are made, since the force of the tsunami itself, as it were, is lessened. A program of adaptation-only, however, is a program of abandonment, a program of "each to his own and look out below." 

Needless to say, we're on the path of adaptation only, of not really acting until disaster is at the door, and have been for decades. And when the moment occurs when the waters do rise, the super-rich will only protect themselves, the poor being left to fend as best they can. "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" said the CEO of Home Depot about anyone not like him. You can see this attitude as well in the discussions they have amongst only themselves.

Rule by psychopaths takes us to this place. So long as we're frozen to inaction on our twin disasters, climate and wealth, this is what waits for us. We're ruled by these people until we choose not to be, or events overtake us all.

Exxon On the IPCC Report

But let's not close on that somber note. Let's close instead with a humorous quote, with Exxon's response to the latest IPCC report:

ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All The Oil

..."Just think, one day soon, we’ll all be gone and that oil will still be there in the Earth, never to be removed, [said CEO Darren Woods]. It’s a travesty.” At press time, Woods announced ExxonMobil’s plans to quadruple its oil production in an effort to extract it all from the Earth while there was still time.

Ok, that was the Onion, but they're never really wrong, are they?

GP