Caveat Lector

"Let the reader beware" is especially important in this new age of McCarthyism, Trumpism and consolidated corporate-sponsored churnalism setting the agendas and formulating the group-think narratives.

Of course, discerning truth from lies, truth from truthiness, opinion from fact, fact from factoid and ad infinitum is difficult even in so-called normal times. We tend to seek information from sources that confirm our own biases. For example, if we want to be reassured that Trump voters really are a basket of deplorables, we look no further than Salon. If we're convinced that everybody in the government is out to get us, then Alex Jones's Infowars is manna from heaven (or should I say mannequins from outer space wearing tin foil helmets?) If we're comfortable trusting establishment figures and experts with credentials a mile long, we delve into the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and call it a news-consumption day.

Better yet, we read them all. We go outside our comfort zones, if only to find out what the alleged "opposition" is thinking and writing and imagining. I was particularly pleased last week when a reader left a comment on this blog stating that although she rarely agrees with me, she still reads my stuff. This is called having an open, curious mind.

It's healthy to be critical and discerning. As the motto on RT says: "question more."

And as Peter Van Buren writes in a Reuters op-ed, we need to go beyond this simple skepticism and learn the fine art of espionage.

Van Buren, a former State Department official who used to blog frequently at the Firedoglake (now Shadowproof) progressive site, says that given Donald Trump's paranoia and secretiveness about his shady business empire, journalists will probably have no choice but to rely on anonymous sources.

So how is one to judge? Van Buren writes,

Since an article’s unnamed sources are fully unknown to you as the reader, not every test applies, but thinking backwards from the information in front of you to who could be the source is a good start on forming a sense of how credible what you are being told might be.
For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting? A story claiming bureaucrats are unhappy with the new president might be legitimately sourced from a contact in the human resources office of a large cabinet agency. But how many people’s opinions would that source be in a position to know, beyond cafeteria gossip? Tens out of a workforce of tens of thousands? So if the finished story reads “State Department officials are unhappy with the incoming administration,” how credible is such a broad statement? Is it news what a handful of people think?

One warning sign that an anonymous source has an ulterior motive other than whistleblowing in the public interest is if he or she purports to know the "why" of any given revelation, or claims to have knowledge of the inner workings of the target's mind. Always question the source's possible hidden agenda.

Reporting that something "might be true" or "we can't prove that this is not true" are also warning signs of propaganda or a planted story. So is what Van Buren calls "piggybacking" off an existing narrative. For example, just because Donald Trump took possession of a luxury hotel in Washington doesn't necessarily mean that all foreign guests are staying there for purposes of pay-to-play. Just because something is probably accurate doesn't mean that every potentate visiting Washington has a bag full of cash for Donald Trump hidden in his Louis Vuitton luggage.

Van Buren suggests that readers emulate the CIA and the FBI when they assess the possibility that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party's emails or otherwise interfered with our elections. Don't take officials' word for it that it's "stunning" or "shocking." Read the fine print. Rate each report with your own level of low, medium, or high confidence. 

In plain English, take everything with a grain of salt. This is especially true if the publication is funded by a political party, or more commonly, by a PAC or a think tank offshoot. I always try to find out if the reporters of thinly-sourced pieces which rely upon "officials granted anonymity to speak freely given the sensitivity of the issue" are themselves members or "fellows" of a ruling class or defense industry think tank.

David Sanger of the New York Times, for example, who has written many of the recent stories about Russian hacking, is affiliated with both the Council of Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute, an elite group of policy-makers and "thought leaders" focusing on US-Russia relations and national security. I always read his articles with the salt shaker close to hand.

The one quibble I have with Van Buren's piece is its failure to address the secrecy and propaganda and First Amendment assaults by the outgoing Obama administration. James Risen of the New York Times called the Democratic White House "the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation" after being hounded for years to betray the sourcing for his exposé on Deep State malfeasance.

In another case originating in the Obama justice department, Fox News reporter James Rosen was named a "co-conspirator" in a different leak investigation.

And it was Obama who instituted the Orwellian "Insider Threat" initiative which requires government employees to spy on one another, even to the point of reporting their colleagues' reading materials and extramarital affairs back to their superiors.

There's a precedent for Trumpism and the incoming president's threatened purges of various government agencies and his threats to reporters. Or as Donald himself might Tweet it, the ingrained assaults on press freedoms and the public's right to know are not "unpresidented."  

Each commander in chief has this annoying habit of always paying his evisceration of the Bill of Rights forward. They take care of their own. They euphemise it as "continuity of government."

Because if they were ever prosecuted for torture or obstruction of justice or lying us into a war, where would our exceptional nation be in the court of manufactured public opinion?

Psy-Ops For Greed and Profit

Deep within his weasel-worded testimony before a Senate committee about alleged Russian cyber-threats, outgoing National Intelligence Director James Clapper called for a new "USIA on steroids" -- not once, but twice.

He was referring to the defunct United States Information Agency, the Cold War-era propaganda department whose reputed purpose was to battle the godless Soviet scourge. It was the Clinton administration, ironically enough, which finally abolished the agency in 1999 as capitalism replaced communism as Russia's go-to ideology. Bill Clinton welcomed with open arms the emerging Russian oligarchy and kleptocracy to his neoliberal project of trickle-down prosperity and big bubbles inflated by deregulation.

There was no mention at Thursday's hearing of the newly-enacted Global Engagement Center for the dissemination of American propaganda both within and without our national borders. So I'd hazard a guess that Clapper deems it too insufficient and poorly funded when compared to the operations of the unaccountable sprawling multi-billion-dollar USIA in its heyday.

President Dwight Eisenhower established the USIA in 1953, just as the Red Scare (code for dismantling the social programs of the New Deal) was getting underway with a vengeance. His administration outlined the psy-ops agenda in typically banal terms:

• To explain and advocate U.S. policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign cultures;
• To provide information about the official policies of the United States, and about the people, values and institutions which influence those policies;
• To bring the benefits of international engagement to American citizens and institutions by helping them build strong long-term relationships with their counterparts overseas;
• To advise the President and U.S. government policy-makers on the ways in which foreign attitudes will have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of U.S. policies. 

Feel-good Americana was broadcast to audiences in Soviet bloc countries via Voice of America radio programs. To give the propaganda shop an aura of professional journalism, there was even a clause added in the 70s that required the broadcasts to be "fair and balanced."

Also included in the USIA was the Fulbright Scholarship program for foreign students, as well as publications and films to counter what cold warriors then construed as "liberal" Hollywood's failure to play along with the anti-Soviet propaganda program.

After the alleged Soviet threat became moot, the USIA was drastically downsized into a sub-agency at the State Department, dubbed Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy.

But back to Clapper's testimony. Besides twice calling for a belated Christmas gift of a more powerful USIA pumped up on metaphorical banned substances, he also added the curious non sequitur that he himself has never been interested in getting rich while spying on people. 

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Never mind that in his numerous spins through the revolving doors, Clapper has made some truly big bucks, along with the usual generous exit bonuses typically granted to executives as they leave one private sector job for a stint serving "the public."

As Ken Delanian reported,

 In October 2006 he was hired full-time by DFI International, which was trying to boost its consulting with intelligence agencies. In April 2007, when he returned to public service as the chief of the Pentagon's intelligence programs, DFI paid him a $50,000 bonus on his way out the door, according to his financial disclosure statement. Five months later, DFI landed a contract to advise Clapper's Pentagon office, though company officials do not recall collecting any revenue from the deal.

Whenever he is questioned about his ethics, Clapper's typical response is that it was all legal, or that he didn't recall his private firm getting a profit, and anyway, who better to deal with greedy federal contractors than a guy who used to work with greedy federal contractors? He's a veritable Anderson Cooper with the slogan "keeping 'em honest." Never mind that he lied under oath to Congress in 2014  about collecting the communications of every man, woman and child in America.

Clapper's most recent private sector stint was at Booz Allen Hamilton, the murky multibillion-dollar NSA subsidiary and erstwhile employer of whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Clapper's denial that there is any greed factor in the American Deep State smacks of Lady Macbeth protesting a bit too much. As Michael Parenti writes in his introduction to former USIA diplomat Nancy Snow's revealing book about the agency, its hidden core mission was always all about hiding corporate greed and plunder under such anodyne niceties as "democracy" and "prosperity." To go along with weaponized interventions there must be cultural interventions.

 And that's where the USIA came in:

"A benign-sounding unit of government supposedly dedicated to informational and cultural goals, USIA is actually in the business of waging disinformation wars on behalf of the Fortune 500. 

Operating as a propaganda unit of a corporate-dominated US foreign policy, USIA ran interference for NAFTA, in Snow's words, 'doing nothing to advance the noble goals of mutual understanding and education,' while leaving a trail of broken promises about jobs and prosperity. USIA's efforts on behalf of NAFTA and other such undertakings have brought fantastic jumps in profits for big business, at great cost to the environment, democratic sovereignty and worker and consumer well-being."

Enter Donald Trump and his opposition to the moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership, and you begin to understand why the Powers-That-Be are throwing such a red herring of a hissy fit over Russian "hacking."

Donald is not a plutocrat's plutocrat. He doesn't like to share. Like a subversive FDR, and notwithstanding his own cabinet of millionaires and billionaires, he is being construed as a traitor to his class. His recklessness is bad for business and the smooth operation of the global hegemony. He is either unwilling or unable to accept that although regular folks elected him to the presidency, his real boss is the Deep State.

Trump has broken nearly 70 years of tradition by openly questioning the "intelligence community." This failure to grovel has so rattled our de facto oligarchy that one of its favorite henchmen, Senator Chuck Schumer of Wall Street, felt it incumbent to go on national television this week to issue a veiled threat to the president-elect:

 Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Actually it's Schumer who is pretty dumb, letting the cat out of the bag like that and admitting that what is now creepily called The Homeland is more Stasi state than representative democracy.

Schumer is, once again, doing his patriotic part for capitalism. This is the guy who tried to deflect public attention from Wall Street malfeasance during the Season of Occupy by suggesting that all citizens, including protesters, be stopped and frisked and vetted before being allowed to get on a New York bus or subway.  His plan went nowhere, but it hasn't stopped him from serving his true masters in every fear-mongering way that he can muster.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

There are at least two fronts, or factions, in the Donald Trump resistance movement. The first, which I wrote about last week, entails delegitimating both the election and the coming administration in the interests of the ruling class racketeers of the financialized global economy and its enablers in the corporate media and the political duopoly.

The second involves we the people, a diverse platoon of working class grunts who refuse to be expendable any longer, acting in behalf of ourselves and for our neighbors all over this burning planet.  As Nancy Snow outlines in her treatise on propaganda, solidarity fights against "free trade" have always enjoyed varying degrees of success.

Despite President Obama's best efforts to propagandize the Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate coup as being good for people and jobs, concerted citizens' campaigns against it, both here and abroad, have effectively killed it. Trump was only capitalizing on popular dissent against global oligarchy when he co-opted populism and made opposition to the  TPP and NAFTA a cornerstone of his platform.

Hillary Clinton's own championing of trade deals before she feebly disavowed them may well have helped cost her the election. And it may have cost Obama his own legacy as well.

As ever, whenever you feel confused or uncertain about what is going on in the highest echelons of power on any given day, always ask yourself the essential question:  Cui bono? (who benefits?)

Follow the money. You might not belong to what George Carlin called the club you're not allowed to be in, but there's nothing stopping you from making a big noise outside its gates. Afflicting the comfortable may not reverse the trajectory of all the wealth going straight to the top, but it might help slow it down. It's the struggle that truly counts.

And remember. It's a two-pronged war. We're not only doing battle with Trump, we're doing battle with the forces which produced Trump in the first place. And that includes the corrupt duopoly as it currently exists.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Ethics

 *Updated below.

Why wait until Donald Trump is sworn in for the oligarchic free-for-all to get started with a vengeance?

House Republicans met under cover of darkness at the end of the Christmas break to gut the independent body tasked with overseeing their ethics or lack of same. People are shocked, shocked I tell you. Because corrupt politicians usually don't brag so openly about how they pulled one over on their constituents.

It was momentarily heartening, therefore, to read the New York Times headline announcing that President-elect Trump "rebuked" the GOP politicians over their "bid to gut ethics office." Maybe he's at least semi-serious about draining the swamp after all.

But not so fast. If you had time to actually read the article past the headline, your newly hopeful heart would have plummeted like a turbo-charged rock straight to the bottom of the Washington muck.

In a pair of postings on Twitter, Mr. Trump called the Office of Congressional Ethics “unfair,” but he said focusing on it now was a case of misplaced priorities. He appended the hashtag “DTS,” an apparent allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington.

Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it

 Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 2h2 hours ago

........may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS

2,703 replies 4,174 retweets 15,028 likes

 The Times article, written by Eric Lipton and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, goes on to insist that Trump's alleged "rebuke" marks a major public break between Trump and the rank-and-file Republicans. The unannounced secretive move to effectively euthanize the independent ethics watchdog apparently caught even Donald Trump by surprise. And Donald Trump does not like to be caught by surprise. The congress critters were apparently "emboldened" to legalize their own corruption by the election of Trump, who has wasted no time signalling that his will be among the most corrupt administrations in American history.

You can't really accuse House Republicans of any actual creative genius here, either. After all, if the too-big-to-fail and jail banksters have been given the green light to police themselves, both in-house and under the protection of their revolving door government positions in the current administration, why shouldn't the lower legislative body openly and enthusiastically follow the same set of rules?

You'd think they were operating outside the de facto oligarchic norm or something, pulling a stunt like this.

 Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) had convinced his cohort that the Office of Congressional Ethics, set up in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct against lawmakers, should be run by the House Ethics Committee. Like vampires, Republicans voted to suck the blood out of oversight after sundown on Monday, without even bothering with the niceties of a seductive (public) debate beforehand.

As in other good public programs destroyed under the euphemism of "reform," Goodlatte said his proposal “builds upon and strengthens the existing Office of Congressional Ethics by maintaining its primary area of focus of accepting and reviewing complaints from the public and referring them, if appropriate, to the Committee on Ethics.” 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi then complained: “Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions. Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

Notice that Pelosi carefully restricted her moral outrage to the "new" Republican congress. Because it might have been too challenging for her to remember the fate of the Stock Act, passed in 2011 to combat insider trading by members like Nancy Pelosi. She and her husband had profited handsomely when, right on the eve of the "surprise" 2008 financial meltdown, they bought Visa stock at rock-bottom prices and then made a cool $100,000 on the resale, literally overnight.  She was absolutely mum when Congress later gutted a key provision of the Stock Act outlawing insider trading by family members of congress critters. Pelosi's husband and other congressional spouses, siblings and spawn can still commit insider trading perfectly legally and with utter immunity and impunity.

But I digress. Here's my published comment on the New York Times piece giving undeserved immunity to Trump in its misleading headline:

 Trump's so-called rebuke of House Republicans is like the annoyed flick of one wet noodle.

He's not miffed that the gutting of the official ethics oversight body under cover of darkness is undemocratic and corrupt on its face. He's miffed because he thinks that the gutting of Obamacare, the ripping of health coverage away from millions of people should take top priority. He's miffed because such a ham-handed power grab by a group of miscreants will shine too harsh of a public spotlight on his more pressing need for rewriting the tax code in favor of the plutocrats who already have way, way too much.

So thanks, Goodlatte and company, for transparently putting your corruption right out there in the open for all to see, and also for, unintentionally or not, dumping some quick-sand in the way of Trump's authoritarian march to a full-fledged oligarchy.

Most people are no longer amenable to being fooled even some of the time.

An informed populace is tyranny's worst enemy.

*Update:  It seems that Goodlatte and Co. have seen the error of the timing of their ways, and have at least temporarily reversed course on their official ethics-gutting. Their evisceration of the safety net may now proceed apace... or so the bastards think.

Hopiest. New. Year. Ever

This might be a silly question. But would all the pseudo-mourners who seem blissfully exempt from any real trauma in their own lives be proclaiming that 2016 was the worst year ever if Hillary Clinton had won the election?

Correction: make that The. Worst. Year. Ever. Because enlarging the font to apocalyptic proportions and adding superfluous periods in between words is the cool way for serious churnalists to broadcast their rhetorical expertise.

Lake Superior State University has just come with its annual list of banished words and phrases. But in my opinion, they jumped the gun, bigly. Because The. Worst. Year. Ever absolutely deserves to be on the top of the list. It is so much more annoying than Post-Truth. It's almost as cringe-worthy as Echo Chamber -- which, come to think of it, is the perfect home for The. Worst. Year. Ever, given that each one of those punctuation points is like a fist punching you in the solar plexus. Over. And. Over. And. Over. Again.

When you Google "2016 Worst Year Ever" you get a grand total of 270,000 hits. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Just in case you still haven't gotten the message, The Huffington Post put it in a banner headline (since disappeared) of what has to be the hugest type size available to propagandists posing as news-hounds. But like much of the other stuff you read in the HuffPo, the scare headline turned out be pure click-bait. The actual article is about a survey that the website conducted with YouGov, which reveals:  

 Overall, 26 percent of Americans say that 2016 has been good or excellent for the country as a whole, 36 percent say that it has been only fair and 31 percent think that it has been poor. Those numbers, if somewhat pessimistic, are also basically in line with December of last year, when 25 percent said that 2015 had been good or excellent, 44 percent that was fair and 27 percent that it was poor.

In other words, it's the Goldilocks effect, which has been in effect since probably forever. About a third of the population thinks life is too hard, another third thinks everything is soft and comfy, and the middle Panglossian third claim that they feel, if not exactly just right, then at least as tolerable as can be expected. The Google search results I mentioned above contained approximately the same results from news items: 2016 was terrible; 2016 was actually pretty great and only seemed terrible because of the collective psychic blow of all those celebrities dying; or 2016, sucky as it was, could always have been worse.

The New York York Times was more circumspect in its own headline, which also had the decency to cast a little doubt on last week's favorite meme while still finding it necessary to add those superfluous punchy periods to make their point: 2016: Worst. Year. Ever?

Charles Nevins lists the awfulness without, thank goodness, resorting to a listicle: 

 Randomly, incompletely: Syria, Zika, Haiti, Orlando, Nice, Charlotte, Brussels, Bowie, Prince, Ali, Cohen. Not everyone was delighted by the results of important votes in the United States and Britain, either.

 Can you tell yet that Charles Nevins is based in London, where they apparently still do dry, understated humor?

He goes on to remember some truly Worst Ever Years, like when a Sumatran super-volcano erupted 75,000 years ago and another volcano blew up in the same region in the 19th century, producing a year without a summer and crop failure and famine. And as bad as Donald Trump and his militarized cabinet of oligarchs promise to be, life under siege by Vikings and Visigoths and the plague-carrying rats they brought along as extra baggage certainly would have beat out 2016 as some of the Worst. Years. Ever. And the examples go on. and. on. and. on. The Civil War, the two world wars, the Great Depression, for example.

What really seems to have pushed 2016-haters over the edge into the morass of despair were the deaths of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds this week. It seems that more celebrities have died in 2016 than any pseudo-mourner can be humanly expected to bear. It's more unbearable, apparently, for the pundits singing the Worst Year Blues than the horrific uptick in opioid overdose deaths and the fact that 2016 has seen the highest increase in the general American death rate in more than two decades.

The New York Times editorial board puts 2016 in the new-ageish therapeutic terms of a Beatles hit: Take A Bad Year and Make It Better. Donald Trump's election, of course, is at the very top of the list of what they hiply noun-itize as "horribles."

 Yet so many bad things happened, from the unthinkable to the horrifying to the merely shocking. Things fell apart. Tyrants and terrorists trailed blood and rubble across the Middle East and Europe. Refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Right-wing extremism and xenophobia were on the march. The American election let loose old racial hatreds. The planet got hotter; the Arctic went haywire. The world was burning or smoldering or blowing up or melting.

But good liberal propagandist that it is, the Times glosses right over the actual political and plutocratic culprits of all the mayhem, and urges us to just brace ourselves for more "headwinds" (neoliberal-speak for more market based atrocities posing as natural weather events) as we remember to thank the good guys for the memories:

National protests shone a harsh light on police killings of black civilians. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama inspired millions, their achievements and grace rebuking the sour misogyny of the Trump campaign. American Indians in North Dakota braved rubber bullets and water cannons to protect their drinking water from an oil pipeline. Nations of the world — all threatened by a warming planet — ratified the Paris climate agreement. The global health community found ways to subdue the Zika virus and create an effective Ebola vaccine. The death penalty in the United States kept sliding into history’s dustbin. Some states, reflecting strong public support, began tilting the gun debate in the direction of sanity.

Putting Hillary Clinton, hawk and Wall Street maven that she is, in the same inspiring category as the Standing Rock protesters is a bit grotesque, given that she had coldly ignored their fight for clean water throughout her campaign. Also off-putting is the paper of record's denial of agency to the people advocating for their own civil rights:

That’s a message for these times. Lift up those in the Fight for $15, those fighting policing abuses and discrimination, those who are marginalized and poor and weak. This may be the most heartening development in a dismal year — the evidence all around that we know how to do this, and can indeed summon the will.

In other words, leave it to the experts to solve the problems of the underclass. Neoliberals still refuse to acknowledge that people need to be respected more than they need to be "lifted up" by the elites. This editorial was just another way of warning poor people to pipe down while they wait for the knowledge class to whimsically elevate them, and advising affluent people to relax, give to their favorite charities, or maybe even volunteer for an hour or two a week or a month. And before you know it, Trump or no Trump, you will start feeling pretty darned good about both yourself and about 2017.

Drew Brown of Vice has an opposite and more refreshing take on all the 2016 angst, which he describes as more kick in the ass than boot to the throat:

It's common to lament 2016 as a kind of spectacularly miserable year, a singularly awful global catastrophe where all the good celebrities died and all the bad ones became president. But 2016 is not sentient, and it's not deliberately tormenting you (no matter how much it sometimes feels that way). It's really just the year a number of cultural, technological, political, and ecological trends all collided into one another in the worst possible way.
In hindsight, it's easy to see how everything that boiled over this year was bubbling away for the better part of the decade. It feels like we live in a markedly—even unthinkably—different world than we did in 2011 or 2015. But we're really just catching a boomerang. This was the year our chickens came home to roost.

The oligarchs were taking over the planet and the planet was burning up long before Donald Trump was elected. But instead of looking climate disaster right in the face, we're supposed to be clutching our pearls over Russia, a fake epidemic of fake news, the alt-right, and post-truth. Contra the stuffy Gray Lady, Drew Brown does choose to acknowledge that oppressed people have innate power, and that the younger the people, the more socialism-minded they are likely to be: 

 Millennials take a lot of shit for being apathetic, flighty narcissists. But the other major Western political upheaval of 2016—the one spearheaded by a geriatric Jewish socialist named Bernie Sanders—shows that we'll come out in droves for anyone who will listen to us, for anyone willing and able to give voice to the demand that our lives don't have to get worse forever just so some monsters with suits and stock options can get rich off our labor while cities sink into the sea.

Don't pseudo-mourn, don't deplore the wrong people, and don't scapegoat the wrong people.

It's the class war, and no matter which legacy party is in power, we're still on the receiving end of the kicks and punches. So summon up hope wherever you can find it. But don't forget to be angry and stay angry as well.

Here's wishing all my readers and your families a very healthy and safe and tolerable new year. One thing is for certain: the sparks will be flying.

   

The Tax-Deductible Resistance Movement

If you act right now and heed the call of any number of liberal veal pens vying with post-Christmas merchants for your ever-dwindling dollars, you will automatically become part of the elite Donald Trump resistance movement.

 But time is running out!  If you don't fork over your cash by midnight on December 31st, you will lose the golden opportunity to deduct your gift from your state and federal income taxes. Your failure to contribute to the Doomsday fund drive by the deadline might even make you an enabler of the Apocalypse.

Resistance is futile to the Democratic Party's insane mantra that money in the hands of discredited experts is the true meaning of social justice. And well it should be, given that party operatives and pundits are still resisting looking in their own mirrors and seeing themselves instead of the visages of Putin and Comey and Old Whitey Trash. They're still doubling down on the message that since they allegedly suck less than Republicans, they can be our only saviors.

Ask not what the Democratic Party and its various propaganda offshoots can actually do to change your lives for the better -- by, say, advocating for Medicare for All, or supporting strong public labor unions. Ask instead how you can help enrich the same careerists who just shoved a failed presidential candidate down our throats like she was Good N Plenty candy. And it turned out that she was actually Ipecac, the very emetic that vomited up Donald Trump and the most extreme right-wing administration in United States history.

Neera Tanden, the Clinton operative who runs the Democratic Party-affiliated Center for American Progress, has been emailing me every day this week. Despite generous funding from Wall Street and multinational corporations, you'd think that her think tank was tanking from lack of cash. 

Here's her latest apocalyptic appeal, sandwiched appropriately between the ubiquitous come-ons from Kohl's and Harry & David:

Dear Karen:

This December, I’m reaching out to CAP supporters like you to highlight the threat our planet faces from Donald Trump’s policies. We owe it to future generations to stand up against the climate change deniers who are filling Trump’s future cabinet. If you share our belief that climate change is a real and imminent threat, please make a tax-deductible donation to CAP today.

We cannot stand by as Trump puts the profits of fossil fuel executives above the health and safety of our communities. Please donate today to help us push back against Trump’s policies and protect our planet from peril.

Thank you,

Neera Tanden 

If you are a rational person who can show solidarity with a corporate political party by daring to believe in climate change, then show it with your wallet. Help pay the salaries and protect the jobs of the elites so that they can continue their important work of sending out a steady stream of fund-raising emails to the people they still persist in believing actually still believe their spiels.

Above all, pay no attention to the  global polluters and greedy plutocrats who help Neera and her staff maintain the high-rent lifestyles to which they have become accustomed: Walmart, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, G.E., Pearson, Citigroup, AT & T, and Blackstone, to name just a few. Pay no attention to the inconvenient truth that many of these same anti-social corporations are either directly working with Donald Trump, or already profiting mightily from his trickle-down largesse. 

I also got an email from Robert Reich today. The former Clinton labor secretary seemed to be under the impression that I am a member of the wealthy donor class. It's very depressing, being told that inclusion in the Donald Trump Resistance Movement hinges upon your ability to send money. It hinges upon the elitist supposition that your most immediate worry is not where your next meal is coming from, but how much you can get away with writing off on your tax return in 2017.

But the most depressing aspect of Reich's appeal was the optimistic theory that donating money to Common Cause will miraculously help make Donald Trump honest and "accountable."

Americans deserve a president who is accountable only to us -- not to their own financial interests. But if Donald Trump and his family don’t entirely divest from his businesses and set up a blind trust, his administration will be compromised from Day 1.

Pressuring Donald Trump to not be a greedy crooked bastard is a little like closing the barn door after a dozen rabid stallions have not only escaped, but have run roughshod over the entire countryside for decades.  As Trump might say, that is just sad. Common Cause should maybe think about renaming itself Elite Cause.

And then there's the standard and artificially narrow identity politics aspect to the professional Trump Resistance Movement.  Feminism in our neoliberal age is largely restricted to "abortion rights" and the outrageous social injustice of successful women not making as much money as their peers. We're supposed to feel indignation that a Hollywood actress is only getting $50 million a picture as opposed to a guy's $100 million. We're not supposed to think about the Walmart cashier  forced to apply for food stamps and Medicaid because one malevolent family owning as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the US population is too cheap and depraved to pay a living wage to their employees.

On that note is the appeal from NYCitywoman.com that perkily arrived in my inbox today. In an attachment, I was told that as a bearer of the XX chromosome, I should become an Activista who must "act up" against Trump. Especially for us gals who came of age in the good ole protesting 60s, it's finally time to get back out there and smash stuff donate to worthy organizations like Neera's:

 This past presidential election has a silver lining: It’s turning progressives into hellbent supporters of human rights, voting rights, climate rights, refugee rights, minorities’ rights, women’s rights, and senior rights. Here’s how readers of NYCitywomen.com can participate—and win 2016 tax deductions if you hurry.

It would help immensely if the writer of the article could get the name of the actual publication straight. It's NYC wo-man, not wo-men. One man, one womb.  But anyhow, some of the ways that "progressive" womb-en can help are to sedately march (the day after the Inauguration), support NATO with all your heart, and "fight back" against "fake news" by subscribing to "legacy publications" like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Instead of offering to actually share your physical home with a female refugee, why not cut a check to the Red Cross? Cut other checks to Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee while you're at it. (Now, to be fair, NYCitywomen also suggests optional giving to Doctors Without Borders and the ACLU. And if you can summon up the additional energy to click on to a petition at CREDO, then so much the better)

At least we should be grateful that NYCwoman isn't following the unabashedly crass route of the Facebook group calling itself "Pantsuit Nation." Its founder is being rightly blasted for trying to profit personally from the individual trials and tribulations of women who supported Hillary Clinton. As former Pantsuit member Karin Klein writes in a scathing Los Angeles Times op-ed, she thought she was signing up for a real protest and resistance movement, made up of millions of women of all races, classes and educational backgrounds:

But the movement never happened.
Instead, there were stories. At first, eye-opening, gut-wrenching tales of the abuse and discrimination that people had suffered for being dark-skinned or female — most of the members are women — or “different” in some way. Then the wind shifted direction, and the group was flooded with heroic tales in which Pantsuit members, generally white, encountered someone involved in an outrageous act of hatred, usually against a person of color, and were the only ones in the store, the park, the workplace, wherever, to do anything about it.

The activism amounted to such meager efforts as appeals for donations of used clothing so that homeless women could apply for jobs. And then, after Hillary's defeat, came the coup de grace: the group's founder is asking that homeless and jobless women give her permission to republish their personal posts in a book she's writing. It turns out it's not protest, it's a PAC. Naturally, there's been no suggestion of any reimbursement to contributors, not even the offer of a shopping spree at the Salvation Army. Therefore, I suspect that Arianna Huffington may well have been the business model for Pantsuit Nation. Arianna, after all, got notoriously wealthy off the unpaid labor of bloggers before she quit managing her website in order to make more money instructing paid elite professionals how to balance sleeping well with careerism. Co-opting the success of Bernie Sanders's "Our Revolution," she annoyingly calls her own project "the Sleep Revolution."

Not surprisingly. her vapid endeavor has received glowing reviews from her own elite cohort:  from the blog of Neera Tanden's think tank, from Democratic mega-donor Anna Wintour's Vogue, and from the queen of individual responsibility herself, Oprah Winfrey.

After all, if you expect to summon up enough energy to Resist Donald Trump, you need your beauty sleep more than you need a good-paying job, medical insurance, and a roof over your head.

And should you become weary of working for free or almost for free, you can always climb the rickety neoliberal ladder of opportunity by getting yourself crowd-funded -- just like the experts do. It's how the Huffington Post pays many of its own reporters these days.

The professional resistance movement against Donald Trump is only the latest manifestation of what the late social critic Christopher Lasch called "The Revolt of the Elites." Phenomenally rich and privileged intellectuals, media personalities and celebrities are again co-opting protest and turning it to their own ends. It's this very merging of entertainment and politics that created Trump (and Reagan before him) in the first place.


Lasch presciently described what the corporate media are only now purporting to discover - an alternate reality, a/k/a "Post-Truth":

Washington becomes a parody of Tinseltown; executives take to the airwaves, creating overnight the semblance of political movements; movie stars become political pundits, even presidents; reality and the simulation of reality become more and more difficult to distinguish....

The "community" of the best and brightest is a community of contemporaries, in the double sense that its members think of themselves as agelessly youthful and that the mark of this youthfulness is precisely their ability to stay on top of the latest trends.

 So here's a thought. Let's start a resistance movement against the professional resisters.

Tell them all to go fund themselves.

Happy Bloody Holidays From the Obamas

For all eight years of the Obama administration, the (hard power) president and his (soft power) consort have delivered Christmas propaganda talks to the American people. The central theme of each and every one of them is the normalization of permanent war and the fetishization of armed military personnel as sacred objects.

An analysis of the Obamas' Christmas speeches reveals that the same four-part jingoistic formula operates in all eight versions. The two spouses take turns praising God, praising the troops and inflicting guilt. And pretty soon we get the idea that both God and War, saints and soldiers, require the same kind of homage and sacrifice from the laity, a/k/a the civilian population.

The militaristic religious propaganda of Mr. and Mrs. Obama is not unique or original by any means. Its time-tested authoritarian formula aims to scare people into accepting the state-sanctioned violence which has been the m.o. of armchair warriors since time immemorial. If you claim to have God on your side, bloodshed and immiseration of The Other on a global scale become not only acceptable, but virtues to be actively sought after.

The Obamas' annual Christmas spiels can thus be summarized as follows:

1. The set-up: We Obamas have scads of fun, and decorations, and music, and parties, and food, and adorable kids, and cute pets at the White House -- just like your families enjoy in your idealized safe warm homes all over America! (Or, if you happen to be broke and depressed, just imagine that we are at least offering you an invisible neoliberal ladder of opportunity to achieve all your holiday dreams someday.)

2. Jesus, Jesus, and Jesus. Jesus was born. Jesus had a family. Jesus was the savior of the world. Jesus suffered and died for our sins. We honor his sacrifice to avoid feeling guilty as we eat, drink and open presents on his birthday.

3. The armed fighting forces of America also have families. They also are our saviors. They also sacrifice and suffer and die for us.  You must also sacrifice as you honor and support the troops and their lethal guns and bombs and planes and tanks. You should help their long-suffering hardworking families, and dwell upon their hardships so as to avoid complaining about your own. If only everyone could be as noble and selfless and Christ-like as they are.

4. Therefore, since the troops are saints, then it naturally follows that Jesus is A-OK with state-sanctioned violence. Onward, Christian secular soldiers. And God Bless Us, Every American One.

Of course, depending upon whatever malignantly plotted or natural disaster befalls us in any given year, there are always minor tweaks to the Obamas' monotonous joy-spreading and war-mongering. For several years the president boasted that the troops would be coming home from Afghanistan. But beginning in 2015, the same year that he announced that troops would remain there for at least another 20 years, he gave up all Yuletide pretense that there will be peace in our time. Even Obama has his standards, apparently.

So just for the hellish fun of it, let's take a compare-and-contrast stroll down Jingoism Bells Lane to Obama Christmases past.

2009. The Victorious Year of Hope and Recovery on Wall Street, and Eviction and Depression on Main Street.

Barack: But even in these tough times, there’s still so much to celebrate this Christmas.  A message of peace and brotherhood that continues to inspire more than 2,000 years after Jesus’ birth.  The love of family and friends.  The bonds of community and country.  And the character and courage of our men and women in uniform who are far from home for the holidays, away from their families, risking their lives to protect ours.

Michelle:  I’ve met kids who wonder when mom or dad is coming home; grandparents and relatives who step in to care for our wounded warriors; and folks trying to carry on after losing the person they loved most in the world. 
And through it all, these families somehow still find the time and energy to serve their communities as well—coaching Little League, running the PTA, raising money to help those less fortunate than they are, and more.

2010. The Year of the Republican shellacking, and the abrupt end of Obama's super-majority in Congress. Obama had willfully set the reactionary stage for his party's defeat. He was, in fact, head cheerleader for austerity. With little to no pressure from the minority Republicans, he'd screwed the working class, rewarded the banks, and appointed ruling class members of the safety net-slashing bipartisan Bowles-Simpson "Catfood" Commission, whose agenda was directly funded by Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson.

Barack:  Because this is the season when we celebrate the simplest yet most profound gift of all: the birth of a child who devoted his life to a message of peace, love, and redemption.  A message that says no matter who we are, we are called to love one another – we are our brother’s keeper, we are our sister’s keeper, our separate stories in this big and busy world are really one. 
Today, we’re also thinking of those who can’t be home for the holidays – especially all our courageous countrymen serving overseas.
That’s the message I delivered when I visited our troops in Afghanistan a few weeks ago – that while you may be serving far from home, every American supports you and your families.  We’re with you.  And I have no greater honor than serving as your Commander in Chief....  (They are) a force of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives. 

Michelle: When our men and women in uniform answer the call to serve, their families serve, too.  And they’re proud and glad to do it.  But as long as that service keeps the rest of us safe, their sacrifice should also be our own.  Even heroes can use a hand, especially during the holidays.

(For more information on the "Joining Forces" public relations war initiative which Michelle Obama touts during the final seven Christmas talks, please see the post I wrote in 2011 about the national security think tank, Center for a New American Security, and the Wall Street/weapons manufacturing money which funds it. Michelle Obama is the perfect warm, caring actor projecting the soft power essential to getting citizens to accept the gory US imperialism being conducted in all our names.)

2011.  The year of Occupy Wall Street and its brutal dismantling by the Police State. The year of Deficit Mania, and the Grand Bargain of more severity and austerity for the struggling masses. The year that Obama grotesquely compared the government budget to the family budget and urged the poor to "share the sacrifice." And it's the year that Obama began his $1 billion faux-populist re-election campaign. For the first time, the Obamas in their Christmas cheer also suggested private charity to non-military families suffering under the plethora of sadistic, reactionary bipartisan budget cuts. At no time did they ever suggest government intervention to help the hungry and the homeless and jobless.

Michelle: This is such a wonderful time of year.

It’s a time to honor the story of love and redemption that began 2,000 years ago … a time to see the world through a child’s eyes and rediscover the magic all around us … and a time to give thanks for the gifts that bless us every single day.
                                                                                           
This holiday season at the White House, we wanted to show our thanks with a special holiday tribute to some of the strongest, bravest, and most resilient members of our American family – the men and women who wear our country’s uniform and the families who support them.... Our veterans, troops and their families sacrifice so much for us.

Barack: Giving of ourselves; service to others – that’s what this season is all about. For my family and millions of Americans, that’s what Christmas is all about. It reminds us that part of what it means to love God is to love one another, to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper. But that belief is not just at the center of our Christian faith, it’s shared by Americans of all faiths and backgrounds. It’s why so many of us, every year, volunteer our time to help those most in need; especially our hungry and our homeless.

2012. The Year of the Osama bin Laden execution, the revelation of Obama's personal White House Kill List, Hurricane Sandy, the Newtown Massacre, and the president's re-election. Since all was well in the Obamas' world, they assumed that all was well all over the country. Everybody's picking up their kid from college, and everybody has a house and a car and visiting grandparents and a washing machine. Even if the children of out-of-work coal miners aren't even getting a lump of coal in their stockings this year, the Obamas won another term. They're so absolutely basking in the glow of their own political success that they simply cannot suppress the maudlin, psychotic hypocrisy in their fourth yuletide sermon to America:

Michelle: We both love this time of year. And there’s nothing quite like celebrating the holidays at the White House.  It’s an incredible experience and one that we try to share with as many folks as possible. 

Barack: This weekend, parents are picking up their kids from college – and making room for all that laundry they bring with them.  Children are counting down the hours until the grandparents arrive.  And uncles, aunts and cousins are all making their way to join the family and share in the holiday spirit....
  And this year, that’s especially true for some of our military families.  You see, the war in Iraq is over.  The transition in Afghanistan is underway.  After a decade of war, our heroes are coming home.  And all across America, military families are reuniting.   
So this week let’s give thanks for our veterans and their families.  And let’s say a prayer for all our troops – especially those in Afghanistan – who are spending this holiday overseas, risking their lives to defend the freedoms we hold dear. 

Michelle: Our military families sacrifice so much on our behalf, and Barack and I believe that we should serve them as well as they serve this country.

Barack: For my family and millions of Americans, it’s a time to celebrate the birth of Christ. To reflect on His life and learn from His example.  Every year, we commit to love one another.

2013.The year Obama started campaigning in earnest for the secretive corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the year that progressives started campaigning in earnest against it. The year of more bipartisan slashes to the social safety net, as the House Minority Leader urged Democrats to "embrace the suck" and to go along with cuts to food stamp funding and ending long-term unemployment benefits, while vastly enriching the war and surveillance state. And last but not least, it was the year that Edward Snowden spilled the beans on the National Security Agency and the massive government surveillance of every man, woman and child. Even so, the Obamas cluelessly bragged about volunteering in a soup kitchen for a few hours:

Barack: Our extraordinary men and women in uniform are serving so that the rest of us can enjoy the blessings we cherish during the holidays.  But that means many of our troops are far from home and far from family.  They’re spending some extra time on the phone with their loved ones back home. Or they’re setting up video chats so they can watch as the presents are opened.  So today, we want all of our troops to know that you’re in our thoughts and prayers this holiday season.
And here’s the good news: For many of our troops and newest veterans, this might be the first time in years that they’ve been with their families on Christmas.  In fact, with the Iraq war over and the transition in Afghanistan, fewer of our men and women in uniform are deployed in harm’s way than at any time in the last decade.

Michelle: And with more and more of our troops back here at home, now it’s our turn to serve – it’s our turn to step up and show our gratitude for the military families who have given us so much. 

 Barack: For families like ours, that service is a chance to celebrate the birth of Christ and live out what He taught us – to love our neighbors as we would ourselves; to feed the hungry and look after the sick; to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.

2014. The year of the lowest mid-term election voter turnout in 70 years, and the ensuing loss of a record number of Democratic congressional seats. The year that Obama announced, falsely, that the war in Afghanistan was over. The year that Obama continued the evisceration of civil rights and signed into law the renewal of the Patriot Act, and codified indefinite detention and unlimited surveillance on citizens via the National Defense Authorization Act. The year that Obama signed into law the plutocrat-enriching "Cromnibus Bill" which, among other holiday treats, privatized public housing stock, cut funding to agencies tasked with regulating big banks, cut funding for Pell Grants, cut funding to pension plans,  and did away with requiring that truck drivers get enough sleep before hitting the Interstates. It was the year that Obama casually mentioned at a press conference that "we tortured some folks" during the Bush era. It was the year that he characterized sadists as "patriots." Perpetrators were not only never prosecuted, they still work at the CIA and their neocon bosses have gone on to much professional and financial success.

Barack: And today, our family will join millions across the country in celebrating the birth of Jesus – the birth not just of a baby in a manger, but of a message that has changed the world: to reach out to the sick; the hungry; the troubled; and above all else, to love one another as we would be loved ourselves.... In just a few days, our combat mission in Afghanistan will be over.  Our longest war will come to a responsible end.  And that gives us an opportunity to step back and reflect upon all that these families have given us.  We’re able to gather with family and friends because our troops are willing to hug theirs goodbye and step forward to serve.  After a long day, we can come home because they’re willing to leave their families and deploy.  We can celebrate the holidays because they’re willing to miss their own.

Michelle:And so, as our troops continue to transition back home—back to our businesses, our schools, our congregations, and our communities—it’s up to all of us to serve them as well as they have served us.  

2015. The Year that America conducted a deadly bombing attack on an Afghanistan hospital, killing more than 50 doctors, nurses and patients. Perpetrators were never criminally charged; they were simply denied future promotions. It was the year when the Obama administration brokered another billion-dollar weapons deal with the Saudis for purposes of slaughtering Yemeni civilians. It was the year that Obama announced a trillion-dollar upgrade to American's nuclear weapons program, and the US beat the record for arms sales; it sold $40 billion worth in just one year.  And it was the year that the legacy-burnishing phase of Obama's presidency began in earnest while Hillary Clinton geared up for her own ill-starred campaign for the presidential succession.

And it was the first year that Obama didn't lie in his Christmas speech about the troops coming home. Even so, Michelle half-admits that the Obama years have been one hell of a snow-job on the American public:

 Barack: Today, like millions of Americans and Christians around the world, our family celebrates the birth of Jesus and the values He lived in his own life. Treating one another with love and compassion. Caring for those on society’s margins: the sick and the hungry, the poor and the persecuted, the stranger in need of shelter – or simply an act of kindness....
 During this season, we also honor all who defend those values in our country’s uniform. Every day, the brave men and women of our military serve to keep us safe – and so do their families.

Michelle: So as we sing carols and open presents, as we win snowball fights... Let’s also take time to pay tribute to those who have given our country so much. Go to JoiningForces.gov to see how you can serve the troops, veterans, and military families in your community.
And together, we can show them just how grateful we are for their sacrifice. That’s a tradition we all can embrace – today and every day.

(The bellicose dream will never die. War is forever. Get used to it. Give war a great big Michelle-ish hug, and overcome any sickly inhibitions that afflict you during this joyous season.)

2016. The year that, shockingly, Barack Obama's Democratic Party utterly collapsed. In the eight years of Obama, the party has lost over 1,000 Congressional, governors' and state legislative seats, leaving it with a bench as thin as Oliver Twist's gruel. So this Christmas, Barack and Michelle are going very heavy on the light and airy sweetness in their valedictory holiday speech. In a variation on the holiday theme, they are uttering the word "Muslim" for the very first time in their yuletide lecture series. This verbal cultural inclusiveness is designed to make us forget all about Obama's own anti-Muslim wars and drone strikes in order that we may correctly direct our wrath at Donald Trump's asinine grinchiness and nuke-threatening tweets. And would it really be Christmas if Barry didn't keep insisting how great America already is, and what a truly Wonderful Life it is for all of us, despite the worklessness, the dwindling paychecks, the evictions and the unaffordable health care? So forget about Trump. If the Obamas are satisfied and hopeful, then we should be satisfied and hopeful too.

Barack:  Together, we fought our way back from the worst recession in 80 years, and got unemployment to a nine-year low.  We secured health insurance for another twenty million Americans, and new protections for folks who already had insurance.  We made America more respected around the world, took on the mantle of leadership in the fight to protect this planet for our kids, and much, much more.
By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we first got here.  And I’m hopeful we’ll build on the progress we’ve made in the years to come. 

Michelle: As always, many of our troops are far from home this time of year, and their families are serving and sacrificing right along with them.  Their courage and dedication allow the rest of us to enjoy this season. 

George Orwell must be caroling in his grave, now that Michelle has essentially plagiarized 1984 just in time for Christmas. War Is Peace (there could be no enjoyable Christmas without endless war) is the perfect segue into Donald Trump's own cadging of another essential part of Big Brother's motto: Ignorance Is Strength.

***
To counter the Obamas' propaganda, I offer the following antidote:

And once the holiday weekend is over, here's my suggestion for a new national anthem in this Age of Trump, to replace the blood-soaked Star Spangled Banner.