Democrophobia Strikes Deep

One of the more common explanations offered by the pundit class for the elevation of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land is that there is an excess of "democracy" in this country. Even though the majority of Americans are stupid, the Narrative goes, they were tragically still functional enough to tear themselves away from Fox News to shamble forth, like the extras in Night of the Living Dead, to commit mass suffrage.

  Fear and loathing of the mob is even extending to the storied Big Tent of the Democratic Party. Having lost about a thousand state and national seats in the last decade, the party remains riven by its own factions of populism and elitism. Its much-touted Unity Tour proved to be a big flop, possibly because DNC Chairman Tom Perez's idea of unity was to purge the leadership of the populist Bernie Sanders supporters.

Since that purging did not automatically convince the populist faction to fall on their knees and beg for mercy, the next step is to publicly shame them for merely existing. "Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?" archly asked the New York Times this week in an editorial written by two credentialed academics:

Part of the problem for parties is our insistence that they be run democratically. That turns out not to be a very realistic concept. Yes, we can hold elections within parties, but party leaders will always have vastly more information about candidates — their strengths and flaws, their ability to govern and work with Congress, their backing among various interest groups and coalitions — than voters and caucusgoers do. That information is useful, even vital, to the task of picking a good nominee. As the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider once said, democracy is to be found between the parties, not within them.

Casting doubts about a party’s legitimacy — in particular picking a presidential nominee — can have real electoral consequences. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders highlighted Hillary Clinton’s contributions from well-heeled donors, and particularly her strong support among the party’s superdelegates, as signals that the nomination contest had been fixed for her and that the only way for the Democratic Party to be a truly democratic party would be to nominate Mr. Sanders.

(Come on, proles! You knew just from reading the title of this piece that it would be the latest in the Times' timeless series, "A Thousand and One Ways to Blame Bernie, Bash Trump, and Beatify Hillary.")

But the authors do have a point. As the late political philosopher Simone Weil observed, a political party exists in the interests of itself rather than in the interests of its members. And since the main goals are "to generate collective passions," to attract money and members, and to win and maintain power, it is always necessary to lie by employing the egalitarian language of democracy. Therefore, the very name "Democratic Party" is a lie unto itself.

  Weil wrote that political parties by their nature are misanthropic:

 "Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade. Hitler saw very clearly that the aim of propaganda must always be to enslave minds. All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it... Political parties do profess, it is true, to educate those who come to them: supporters, young people, new members. But this is a lie: it is not an education, it is a conditioning, a preparation for the far more rigorous ideological control imposed by the party upon its members."

Another French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, writes that the Hatred of Democracy now being openly displayed by the political "centrists" of the Democratic Party is as old as the de facto oligarchies which have controlled civilizations throughout history:

Double discourse on democracy is nothing new... we're used to hearing that democracy is the worst of government with the exception of all the others"... (but) the new antidemocratic sentiment gives the general formula a more troubling expression. Democratic government, it says, is bad when it is allowed to be corrupted by democratic society, which wants for everyone to be equal and for all differences to be respected.... The thesis of this new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization."

The current crisis in American democratic propaganda has its roots in the most severe wealth inequality in modern times.

In good times, leaders can more or less successfully urge people to consume - both material goods and entertainment - as a substitute for direct civil engagement. But with the hollowing out of the middle class comes the inevitable backlash. The financialized economy, or rule by the bankers, is virtually destroying the ability of most people to consume. Resulting dissent and unrest are threatening the confidence of the same elites who allowed deregulated capitalism to destroy the very consumerism which has nurtured it so well. Thus the haste with which they are now ramming through the repeal of Net Neutrality, the highway robbery known as Tax Reform, the ultra-consolidation of the already-consolidated mass media, revving up the war machine to epic suicidal as well as homicidal proportions, and making their emergency plans to privatize Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. They don't want too many healthy people getting in their way.

In a brand new report, Thomas Piketty and 100 other researchers have concluded that with extreme wealth inequality only growing worse with every passing year, all over the world, a whole panoply of social, economic and political catastrophes are inevitable. Worldwide, the top one percent of income "earners" have captured twice as much of the capital growth as the bottom half of the global population. Since 1980, with the rise of finance-controlled neoliberal forms of government, the massive transfer of public to private wealth has occurred in nearly all countries - so much so that public wealth is zero or in negative territory. While actual countries, like the US, have become richer, their governments have become poorer - by design. It gives them a perfect excuse to punish the poor in the name of "fiscal responsibility."

The Republicans, of course, have long stopped pretending to be on the "side" of the people who elect them in safe, gerrymandered districts. And increasingly, so have the establishment Democrats, with their own refusal to even acknowledge the wishes of the "Demos" for such nice but "impossible" things as universal health care, debt-free public education, a living wage and guaranteed incomes for those who cannot work or cannot find work. All they offer to the base is fear of Russia, with a concurrent redirection of populist anger at sexual harassment in Hollywood, corporate broadcast and print news, and to a much lesser extent, the Beltway and Silicon Valley. The financiers of Wall Street have so far been curiously exempt from the scandals, despite their many other serial predations and crimes against the body politic.

We do not even enjoy "representative democracy" in this country. Rather, as Jacques Rancière observes, we live under a system of Representative Oligarchy, "a representation of minorities who are entitled to take charge of public affairs either directly or though consultation."

 Everything is presented in terms of the economy and the Market, with the only "reality" offered to us, and to which we should aspire, being the unlimited power and glory of wealth. This is why centrist Democrats like Barack Obama constantly talked up a "balanced approach" to allow the co-existence of unlimited oligarchic greed with society's Left Behinds. The "losers" are urged to hone their skills, work hard, compete against your fellows, share the sacrifice, aspire to riches, and instead of complaining, get out there and vote!

Meanwhile, the rulers euphemize the slashing of the safety net with such weasel words as "modernization" in order to help the masses adapt to their ever more harsh realities. It's propaganda designed to give our oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. It follows, therefore, that the main reason that the wealthy liberal class hates Trump so much is because he foments the "divisiveness" making it so hard to keep the population sedated and under oligarchic control. 

The true definition of democracy is the struggles of ordinary people, both individuals and groups, for social and economic justice. These include struggles against the electoral system and the parties themselves.

Democracy has nothing to do with money-driven political parties and their agendas. It has everything to do with Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus.

Ruling Class Worrywarts

When Larry Summers says he's worried about Donald Trump, you can bet the banks he helped deregulate back in the 90s that his concern has nothing to do with how regular people will fare under the plutocrat-heavy Trump administration.

On the contrary. Larry Summers is scared that Trump will destroy capitalism itself. That much-ballyhooed Carrier deal brokered by the president-elect, which will save about 700 Indiana factory jobs from being outsourced to Mexico, is a slap in the face to the economy as rich people have known it, loved it, and profited by it.

Without a hint of irony, Summers writes in a Washington Post op-ed:

I have always thought of American capitalism as dominantly rule and law based. Courts enforce contracts and property rights in ways that are largely independent of just who it is who is before them. Taxes are calculable on the basis of an arithmetic algorithm. Companies and governments buy from the cheapest bidder. Regulation follows previously promulgated rules. In the economic arena, the state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enforce contract and property rights and to enforce previously promulgated laws.

Never mind that the laws of capitalism were written for the sole benefit of corporations and CEOs and trust fund kids. Never mind that no-bid contracts have been an operating principle of unaccountable government spending for decades, if not centuries. Never mind that the repeal of the Depression-era  Glass-Steagall Act, which Summers helped orchestrate during the Clinton administration, was in essence itself a repudiation of the controlled capitalism which Summers now purports to adore. Summers also worked with Citigroup's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan to deregulate the derivatives market. Later, he successfully thwarted an adequate stimulus package during his stint in the Obama administration.

Summers has never in his life fought for American workers or against the offshoring of jobs by multinational corporations searching for ever cheaper and exploitable human labor. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Carrier deal would give him agita. It would give him agita even if it were not steeped in crony capitalist motivations.

Summers' beef is that Trump aims to turn the "lawful" plunder and privatization model right on its ear and make us into a full-fledged Banana Republic, just like in (gasp!) Putin's Russia.

And since the Democrats are still blaming everyone but Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump's victory, Summers also takes the obligatory dig at Bernie Sanders, whom Summers claims "misses the point" by complaining that not all the Carrier jobs were saved from Mexico outsourcing.

And now comes the coup de grâce. Summers blames Democracy itself:

 Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people. They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders. I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

Translation: with Trump around, the rich may end up being unable to loot from the poor as legally and responsibly as they always have in the past. And it's all the fault of those poor people, who turn out to be not only stupid, but abusive and power-mad. Didn't they ever learn that consumerism is their only responsibility? Didn't they ever learn that "democracy" and voting rights are only the bait and switch tactics designed to disguise the awful truth that Capitalism rules?

The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who has been on his own interminable roll of blaming everything from white racists and the FBI and Wikileaks to Putin and "fake news" sites for Hillary's defeat, thinks his colleague Larry is really on to something. Krugman is so upset about the positive media coverage of the Carrier deal that he even seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is not only still the president, but that Obama has assured the nation that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. 

Krugman writes:

It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, we’re looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic (sic) and for freedom.

The most pressing concern he has is for the freedoms of the law-abiding robber barons. It seems as though the petty sniping by Wall Street Democrats at the HRC sniper-haters will go on for the foreseeable future. Party elites and pundits are throwing the same kind of temper tantrum that they accuse Trump of indulging in.

My published response to Krugman: 

So, Larry Summers is more worried about Trump ruining capitalism than he is about unfettered capitalism destroying the lives and livelihoods of working people.

Trump is performing the con abnormally. Therefore, grouses Summers (one of the three guys who "saved the world" by destroying it through deregulation), we have a fatal inversion. Instead of politicians passing laws to appease the corporations, we now have corporations appeasing a grossly incompetent anti-politician interested only in his own fortunes.

The Precursors and Enablers of Donald J. Trump

Trump is only a symptom - really, the excrescence - of the neoliberalism and resulting record wealth inequality which has been spawning right-wing populism all over the world.

Summers is worried that Trumpian crony capitalism is bad for the economy. But whose economy? It seems to me that he is really talking about the plutonomy: ownership of a financialized system which mainly benefits the 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population. Trump wants to be a member of that Club.

The working class - white, brown and black - doesn't factor in to the equation, other than elite worry-warts blaming them for not voting for the right candidate.

The bright spot is that even before he's sworn in (assuming he doesn't forget to show up to deliver a bizarre stream-of-consciousness inaugural riff) Trump voters are already expressing buyers' remorse. Apparently, some thought that their giant middle finger to the establishment was only symbolic.

Speaking of buyers' remorse, there's a neologism that should join "post-truth" in that annual list of verbal novelties put out by Lake Superior University. And that is "Trumpgrets."

Raw Story has the scoop on the whole gamut of raw emotions emanating from desperate people who couldn't care less if the plutocrats robbing them blind do it based on an Ivy League education and corner office, or if they do it out of unabashed ignorance and greed while wearing a red baseball cap.

But be warned: you have to be willing to laugh at and feel superior to all the remorseful Trump voters out there. In other words, you have to be a clueless liberal for whom the word "solidarity" is still missing from your intolerant vocabulary.

Where There's Disgust, There's Hope

With a new poll revealing that more than eight in ten voters are disgusted with politics, the big unanswered question is this: what in holy hell is up with that other 16-20 percent?  Are they on drugs?  More likely, they're in the same smug crowd as the top quintile of earners who've escaped the lasting depredations of the 2008 financial crisis. But that variable wasn't part of the polling agenda.

  You see, in corporate Thought Leader World, there's no such thing as the class war.

The 1,300 people contacted by the New York Times/CBS pollsters were asked only to divulge their party and candidate preferences, as well as to rate government performance and to voice their opinions on where the country and the "economy" are headed. They were even idiotically pressed about their feelings about Presidential Consort Michelle Obama.

 But were they ever queried about their own financial and employment status in order to determine whether widespread political disgust correlates with widespread precarity and depression? Of course not!  Because this poll, like so many others, was mainly designed to give the oligarchs who commissioned it a rough idea of how firm or tenuous their grasp on the governed is likely to be after Election Day.

The questions were designed, much as Hillary Clinton so generously explained to Wall Street bankers in one of her paid speeches, to help politicians coordinate their public positions with their private positions. After they pretend to feel the mass disgust, they then can choose to address it, ignore it, castigate it, or downplay it, depending on the situation and results of further polling and focus group testing.

So the latest poll is not especially good news for the ultra-wealthy donor class which runs the place. Judging from the results, they have much to fear, especially from those mythical, toothless, barbaric hordes of incipient Trump revolutionaries they've dreamed up, gathering even as we speak at the gates of their dream home-fortresses. If we won't vote out of love and admiration, then let us vote out of sheer terror.

The Times imparts the grimmest of grim news to the plutocrats:

In a grim preview of the discontent that may cloud at least the outset of the next president’s term, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are seen by a majority of voters as unlikely to bring the country back together after this bitter election season.

With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.

How transparent the New York Times is, characterizing the natural disgust of voters as "toxic" rather than representative of healthy, functioning intellects. If the candidates are only passively "seen as" dishonest, then perhaps the fault is in the voters themselves. Something must be wrong with them, or maybe it's just the optics or the narrative.

If I were a seriously wealthy mover or shaker, I would seriously consider goosing the jobless stats by hiring a disgusted down-and-outer as my personal food and beverage taster. Somebody has to protect my august self from all that populist poison threatening my cosseted way of life. I would even pay them three times the minimum wage, with all the benefits, including a no-deductible, no co-pay platinum Obamacare plan.

  Sadly for many movers and shakers and opinion-manufacturers, the mass disgust orchestrated by the timely release of Donald Trump's repugnant Access Hollywood tape has not been as long-lived and as beneficial to Hillary Clinton as her campaign might have hoped. Those revolting Trump voters have largely recovered from being revolted at his misogynistic language, and are now back to being revolted about the rotten state of either their own financial lives, or the troubles of their neighbors and relatives. And of course, some of them are indeed as genuinely racist and psychopathic as US imperialism itself.

People are mad and scared, but not about the things that the oligarchy would prefer them to be mad and scared about. Disgust at Trump's racism, sexism and xenophobia does not necessarily translate into support for Hillary Clinton's crony capitalism and unabashed war-mongering. There are too many varieties of loathing experience to even count.

But back to Times/CBS: Since timing is everything whenever plutocrats choose to take the pulse of the populace, the corporate media pollsters conveniently began calling people immediately upon the release of James Comey's shocking announcement that the FBI's investigation of the Clinton emails would continue.

Most voters who were contacted said they had heard about the development. More voters said they were aware of accusations that Mr. Trump had made unwanted sexual advances toward several women.

Yet about six in 10 voters over all said the 11th-hour disclosures about each candidate would make no real difference in their votes. However, more people said the allegations about Mr. Trump were likely to negatively affect their votes than those who said the new email developments would discourage them from voting for Mrs. Clinton.

The horror. Those damned voters care more about their own situations than they do about palace intrigues, and backbiting in high places. The proles made up their minds a long time ago that they couldn't stand whoever it was they couldn't stand. October Surprises apparently don't mean as much as they used to.

To the ruling class racketeers, the electorate are like a plague of locusts who come out of hibernation every four years, instead of a more reasonable 17. They raise a fearful cacophony for a very short time, and then presto-chango - all that's left to remember them by are their harmless, silent little husks.

But where there's disgust, there's always the hope that the whirring masses will stick around a bit longer than expected this cycle. Species do evolve, even suddenly and unexpectedly mutate every once in a great while. 

As far as the increasingly furious and paranoid media/political complex is concerned, disaffected voters of the right and left might not hail from the same ideological places, but they are eminently interchangeable when it comes to their denigration by rulers. Whether they're in a Basket of Deplorables, or whether they're Berniebro Basement Slackers, they're equally extremist and ignorant. If they refuse to vote as they're expected to vote, then it can only be blamed upon the one horrible thing guaranteed to send chills up the spines of oligarchs: Populism.

  As French philosopher Jacques Rancière has rightly pointed out, the Establishment is actually a cabal of democracy haters. Citizen-consumers -- the "formless and squawking horde" -- are periodically allowed to vote, but only so that oligarchies can give themselves renewed power and legitimacy. Therefore, the term "representative democracy" is an oxymoron for the ages.

"It is because democratic man is a being of excesses, an insatiable devourer of commodities, human rights and televisual spectacles, that the capitalist law of profit rules the planet," Rancière writes. "With politics forgotten, the word democracy thereby becomes a euphemism designating a system that one no longer wants to call by its name, and the name of the diabolical subject that appears in place of that effaced word: a composite subject where the individual subjected to this system of domination and the one who denounces it are amalgamated. To paint a robotic portrait of democratic man, the best thing to do is to combine these characteristics: the young idiotic consumer of popcorn, reality TV, safe sex, social security, the right to difference and anticapitalist or alterglobalist illusions. Thanks to him, the denouncers have what they need: the absolute culprit of an irremediable evil."

The system that nobody wants to call by its true name is, of course, Oligarchy.

And the consumer-citizens know it. Whether right or left, Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Green or Socialist or Anarchist or Independent, we're getting sick and tired of being called idiots and extremists for daring to want decent lives. 

That 80+ percent disgust rate is actually cause for optimism. Those who govern or who strive to govern actually fear democracy as much as they hate it. Their constant refrain that job destruction and wage suppression and racist globalization are just like the weather, and that we'll all just have to get used to it and lower our expectations and share the sacrifice and bow down to market-based "solutions" simply doesn't fly any longer.

And what is true democracy, anyway, but the constant struggle to wrest a little power away from the oligarchs?

TPP = Total Plutocratic Predation

The fact that the Obama administration has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who shares the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the public is all the proof you need that this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad deal.

Through Wikileaks, though, we’ve been made privy to its wish list of corporate power grabs. These include, but are by no means limited to: global pharmaceutical price-fixing; putting the world's casino banking cartel on a steady diet of crack cocaine; scrapping the Fair Use doctrine and the free Internet and by extension, free speech; and riding roughshod over a whole panoply of food safety, public health, environmental, and labor laws.

Even if all the above were to be removed from the deal, the mere survival of a clause that replaces sovereign court systems with investor state dispute tribunals ruled by corporate lawyers is heinous enough. It's so bad that Obama and his Wall Street cronies need it to stay a classified secret for at least four years, lest the frogs wake up in their simmering soaking tubs, hop out in the nick of time, run wild, and eat the rent-seeking rich.

Joe Firestone has just published a masterful 23-count indictment of the TPP -- or as he calls it, a Dayenu Seder chant with 23 stanzas. Read, croak or intone the whole thing, then call your congress critter and repeat. A litany repeated often enough can be even more powerful than a bribe, especially when each stanza rings true.

 Obama and the Republicans are orchestrating an act of aggression, not only against American citizens, but against 40% of the world’s economy. This is a president, after all, who has given himself the right to kill anyone at any time in any place. This is a Congress which not only gives him a blank check to kill, but has its members regularly attend snuff films showing people getting blown up by presidential fiat. This is a Supreme Court which has declared money to be speech and political bribery to be legal. This is a Fourth Estate which now holds that accessing the comfortable and the powerful is easier and more career-rewarding than afflicting them.

So, think of the TPP as an invisible predator drone buzzing over your head. Once it strikes, it’ll be too late to run or hide. Protest will be futile. Because despite Obama’s derisive comparison of TPP opponents to Sarah Palin, it is indeed a death panel. By virtue of both its opacity and its toxicity, it effectively condemns democracy to an early grave. Did I mention another clause which guarantees that the entire treaty is designed to remain ironclad for at least the next several administrations?

Obama recently revealed his true inner Joe Wilson pissiness when he publicly shrilled out to TPP critic Elizabeth Warren:"You lie!"  He is absolutely shameless in slapping the “progressive” label on this deal and falsely claiming it supports millions of American jobs --  when it is specifically designed to offshore millions of jobs, effectively depressing wages and ramping up mass precarity.

Can you imagine, as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown did recently, if Obama had expended half as much energy pushing for a jobs bill and living wage legislation and universal health care and student debt forgiveness as he is in cramming this latest corporate tyranny grab down our throats?

The White House openly and chillingly admits that the neoliberal overthrow of state sovereignty is one of the "pillars of his presidency". At the expense of our own future, he has supreme visions of his own:

Finalists, Obama Library and Shrine design contest (credit: Curbed Chicago)

Tell your congressional reps to vote against fast track, and tell them today. Our time is running out. Remind them that regardless of their powerful donors, they still rely on ordinary human voters for their continued employment.

 We won’t ever forget. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.