Fly Eagles Fly

Usually I wouldn't address something that is just sports but the recent Superbowl between the Eagles and the Patriots is a very special case. Very personal. My wife is a huge Eagles fan and Tom Brady is the Devil, so this was the one game I've been most invested in since the last one I played myself back in high school. That direct experience, which I've mentioned before, is also how I plan to show that this game has some interesting socio-political implications, as well as this whole post just being an exercise in self-indulgence.

Brandon Graham

First, let's look at the politics of this game as they are just within the world of professional football. Everyone with a lick of sense already hated the Patriots - even their own fans resent them for their cheating - and the Eagles came in as the scrappy underdog Americans are conditioned from birth to cheer for. But as anyone who's followed an NFL season knows, uplifting narratives don't have half the staying power as the demoralizing success of teams like the Patriots, who were shooting for their sixth Superbowl victory, which is currently a club of just one. For all that old timey grit and hometown love driving the Eagles, these sorts of contests in America have historically gone to the crass and the sleazy, as best personified in the Brady-Belichek tenure of the Patriots.

Bill Belichik and Tom Brady represent a common wisdom that is much too common in America. The power of the single, unencumbered superstar to drive a franchise to ever greater heights of wealth and fame. It's the logic that got Donald Trump elected and caused the housing market crash, the logic of ubermensch capitalism that has been harder to kill than Rasputin or Dracula. Tom Brady himself is exactly the sort of hero Ayn Rand would dream up, a completely self-certain and self-satisfied prick who's sole skill - throwing a goddamn ball - is presented as justification for his rich vampire lifestyle. This is aided and abetted by Belichik's management style, where every Patriot player is just a cog in the Fordist machine. This is visible not just in Patriots' fans' own dismal slogans, like "Do Your Job," but also in how Belichik's machine revolves around the arm and ego of Tom Brady.

Nick Foles

When it comes together, the Patriots offense really is worth the hype. Brady proved this with some of the longest Superbowl throws in history, usually to high-functioning freight rain Gronkwoski. The Brady-Gronk pairing, as sports journalism knobs have dubbed them, carried the majority of the scoring during the game and, when the stars were right, proved unstoppable.

But building a franchise around one or two star players is as risky as building a political movement around the mythology of the strong leader. The Patriots proved that too, in all their pre-game hagiography of Brady which was both reminiscent and reflective of the typical American presidential campaign circus, where whatever tired old hack the party's money-men agree on is puffed up and deified like a Roman Emperor. It's the Great Man theory in history, which has looked more and more like a fantasy for power-worshipping nerds ever since Election 2016. And since the collapse of the Patriots offense in Superbowl LII.

Jay Ajayi

Whereas the Eagles' offense proved the old mantra of "four yards and a cloud of dust." Every other first down, they sent the ball up the middle, which will never clear ten yards but will always close the distance a little, giving a team more flexibility with their passing. Nick Foles didn't throw as many passes as Brady, let alone throw as far, but he didn't need to as the rest of the Eagles' offense could be counted on to keep moving the ball down the field. This makes for a slow but inevitable advance, bringing the Eagles close enough for field goals even when the Patriots managed to stop the run.

Teamwork, as the after school specials like to say, but it bears repeating as so much of popular American myth revolves around a single rugged individualist, rather than the long grind of group effort. It may not be as photogenic as Brady's long bombs but, as demonstrated, it gets the job done better. All it takes to make a good quarterback is a good arm, but a good offense needs a quarterback who knows when to swallow his own ego and get out of the way. That's how a good team can carry a mediocre quarterback, but not the other way around.

Chris Long

The Eagles still couldn't have pulled it off, though, if their defense wasn't so scary. A good defense isn't a wall, it's a grenade that sows terror and confusion. A great defense is a white squall descending on Tom Brady's stupid preppy face. The pressure they kept bearing down on him had him throwing for the stands more often than not, anything to save himself from a blitz that would make even Jack "The Assassin" Tatum wince. With Brady in retreat, the morale of the whole team collapsed because, like all tyrants, they had everything to lose in this game and no support from their bloodless oligarch of a coach.

There's a lesson in all of this. The lesson I've been circling around in all the football talk - that the powers that be are not gods, not invulnerable, just contemptible little schemers like Brady and Belichik. No different from a crooked auto mechanic or a Brooklyn hustler, mortal and alone. A great mass movement can unseat everyone from the Patriots to the Senate, if they follow the example set by the Eagles in Superbowl LII: keep driving forward and never give your opponent the space to breath. It won't be an easy victory but it'll still win elections like it wins games.

*sad trombone music*

Also, Justin Timberlake is a twat.

World War Trump

I've been trying to avoid the election. Because it's a stupid thing for stupid people. But sometimes the noise gets too loud, like it did over the weekend with everyone arguing over whether or not it's proper etiquette to call brain-dead racists "deplorable." A very Beltway sort of issue - trying to find some way to square the total objective grotesquery of a typical Trump voter with the wonk's instinct to not insult anyone who might see your LinkedIn profile.

And while every right-thinking human knew Trump supporters were deplorable from day one, what to think of the Clinton supporters?

future historians will point to this and ask how we didn't see the third world war coming pic.twitter.com/lvxQ3iqQEL

— Roger Bellin (@rogerbellin) September 8, 2016

I've mentioned before how Clinton's oh so liberal supporters seem to be kinda bloodthirsty. It's the biggest criticism of her record despite what Peter Daou and other well-paid apologists might tell you and it's always been rooted in the historical fact that Hillary Clinton has killed more Muslims than Donald Trump.

This often leads people to think Trump is a protest vote. Not necessarily a good one but at least a contrary point to the eternal grind of this technocratic empire. They cite a few things he's blurted about getting the US out of NATO and his criticisms of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Of coure, Trump is an American businessman and therefore a lying sack of shit.

James Woolsey, who served as CIA director in President Bill Clinton’s administration, will serve Donald Trump as a senior adviser on national security, defense and intelligence, the campaign announced today. 

Woolsey appeared on CNN shortly after the announcement, saying he joined the Trump campaign because he favors the Republican candidate’s defense budget proposal. Trump has proposed to lift the caps on defense spending.

CNN makes a big to-do about Woolsey having worked under the last Clinton and his time in the CIA, as opposed to his more recent work for anti-Russian NGOs. Probably because of that same wonk instinct to ignore the warts, like a good Victorian, and because distracting y'all from he's an even bigger neocon nutter than Hillary.

Woolsey’s resume of evil is impressive. He helped found the notorious Iraqi National Congress, which provided “proof” about Iraqi WMDs. And he also serves on the Center for Security Policy, headed by fellow goon Frank Gaffney, who in 2004 publicly advised President Bush to level Fallujah (which Bush did), invade Iran and North Korea (which Bush can’t but yet may try), and adopt “”appropriate strategies for contending with China’s increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin’s accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism.” Note how Gaffney, like Woolsey, equates “Islamofascism” with Putin’s Russia, making Russia a mortal enemy bent on destroying the US.

With the revolving door that is the Trump campaign, it's possible Woolsey will have quit in disgust by the time you read this. And if he does, another neocon will slither in to fill the post. American politics won't let any bad idea fail, whether it's bombing democracy into the swarthy hordes or celebrating business executives as innovators and job creators.

Screw this election. It's all deplorable.

Gazing into the Abyss

I'd like to talk about the nature of evil. "Evil" as a vaguely defined concept is awfully popular in American culture, especially since 2001, but it's never come in for sharp critique.

This is due to two powerful factors: 1) Americans as a general rule do not like to critique anything ever, hence why shit-awful movies like The Avengers and Transformers always make more money than anything worthy. And 2) A serious analysis of evil as a concept leads to discomforting revelations.

Let's start slow - Who do you hate? Just of the top of your head, someone you wouldn't mind seeing creamed by a bus? If you answered at all you've demonstrated evil, naturally, but that brings us to our next question: Why do you hate this person?

Have they done something to you? They probably have, since people are so invariably shitty to one another. Or, to go into murkier waters, has this person actually not done much of anything to you directly but something about their existence just offends you? Maybe they're more successful, maybe they're less successful but not bothered by it.

Maybe they're just different from you...

All of these reasons are evil, there's no denying. At least not by anyone who matters. But why would you have these reasons in the first place? Why should the material fortunes - or lack thereof - of another person concern you in such a way?

Because society told you to. Whether your parents or television or the other kids in your neighborhood, you were conditioned to hold these wicked views by others. Racism is often explained this way and while it doesn't touch on the depth of human atavism it at least gets the gist of things. Whatever malice you hold for others, if not founded in a direct personal experience, was fostered by the world around you as culturally normative behavior.

Here we move out of the comforting Neoplatonist definitions of evil and into the more grimly rationalist view. The idea that this is not in fact the best of all possible worlds, that the harmony we think we see in Nature is just an anthropocentric delusion, and that Evil is not an aberration in the grand scheme of things but rather the banal starting point.

[T]here’s only one evil, it suffuses everything we see, and while one might do less harm than the other, each of its warring parts is still fundamentally the same thing. Donald Trump’s frenzied populism couldn’t exist without the suffocating liberal condescension of a Hillary Clinton; nobody would ever vote for Clinton if it weren’t for the looming threat of a Trump.

That which is good, or at least not-evil, is not the baseline but rather the achievement. The long and ugly march of human history bears this out, though it is too often taken as a given. The old feudal hierarchies of Europe did not so much progress to liberal democracy as they were dragged kicking and screaming. As a labor activist once said, "It's never been easy," because every little improvement came from a confrontation with entrenched power that always sees its own self-perpetuation as the most important task at hand. Whether the power is claimed by divine right or meritocratic ladder climbing, it always seeks to preserve "order" at the expense of those outside its hallowed halls.

Evil, then, is both the natural state of existence and the resistance to changing for the better.

Bad Apples

American politics is like a game of Bloody Mary. If any subject more taboo or complicated than a bland platitude is spoken aloud, everyone freaks out and starts sleeping with the bathroom door shut. As if merely naming something gives it power.

Like the Alt-Right, or more accurately Young Republicans who are honest about their racism. Really, there's not a single difference between Alt-Right and Original Recipe except the Nazi anime avatars.

It's really just branding. Or re-branding, as Trump's ascendancy is making more and more Republicans unelectable. And despite Hillary's histrionics, the Alt-Right very much is Repuclanism as we have known it for decades:

In this election, we have the opportunity to repudiate not only Donald Trump but Trumpism, and not only Trumpism but the entire apparatus that gave us this man and this moment. That apparatus is the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. The movement and the party that gave us the Southern Strategy, that made white supremacy the major dividing line between the two parties, that race-baited its way to the free market as the dominant ideology of our time, that made hysterical, revanchist militarism the common sense of bipartisanship, that helped turn the Democratic Party into the shell that it is today (with plenty of assistance of course from people like Bill Clinton), that gave us Donald Trump.

Trump is a walking nightmare to his own party because he is their apotheosis. The GOP folks who'd like you to think of them as staid and rational are horrified not by the blunt fascist rhetoric but that their own deeply held reactionary beliefs are being trumpeted about. And it worries them because it's embarrassing around the other rich parasites in their little upwardly mobile enclaves in New York and DC. The Alt-Right, the Young Republicans of the 21st Century, are an echo of that trashy showmanship because they don't have any friends to offend.

Most important of all though, the Alt-Right is as impotent as their anointed Glorious Leader. Even if they constituted more than a fraction of a percent of the electorate, they're too busy masturbating over children and contemplating suicide to be an effective political force. Much like Trump's campaign logistics, there's no there there.

By the time the dust settles on this bummer of an election, the only purpose the Alt-Right will have served is as a convenient scapegoat for all those "decent" Republicans who still want to starve anyone not born into a Fortune 500 executive suite. They'll be able to point to them - "See? It was those neonazi freaks, not us!" - and Hillary will join them, since she's just as much an establishment conservative as her BFF and noted war criminal Henry Kissinger.

The Alt-Right won't mind of course. Those sad screwheads would love to be used by a woman.

Your Vote Does Not Matter

There isn't so much a silver lining to Election 2016 as there is a gallow's humor punchline. For all the striving of Third Parties and the popular push for social democracy, the choices in November come down to Donald Trump or a Republican. That's the most nihilistic of slapstick.

Since before the Philly convention the Clinton campaign and its apparatchiks have worked hard to court establishment Republican support while showing contempt for their nominal base on the political Left. Either Clinton herself is being honest about her long-held neocon principles or she is committing career suicide. Her supporters think it shows she can win in November but they also think Muslim women objecting to Jen Kirkman's shitty jokes is misogyny. The Democrats, from the ruling class to the rank and file, are sailing towards the future with an Alfred E. Neuman "What, me worry?" obliviousness to how much everyone hates them.

The same hate, much more than racist nativism, just fuels Donald Trump's campaign. It's easy to dismiss his supporters as paranoid morons because they are - every single one of them -  but this is less a collection of individual failings than it is the collective result of generations of political and government dysfunction. Trump fans thinking Black Lives Matter is secret ISIS psyops comes from the exact same social atomization and sense of powerlessness that lead so many (presumably) sane people to think September 11th was orchestrated by the Bush II administration. As documented by Matt Taibbi in The Great Derangement, the point of 9/11 Truthism isn't so much a quest for justice as it is a grasping after personal meaning in a culture simultaneously celebrating individual achievement and stymieing that very same achievement through social and economic policies by and for a 1% oligarch class.

That Trump was born and bred in that class doesn't worry his supporters anymore than Clinton's professed love of Goldwater worries the good liberals. The presidential race is too tied up in atavism and personal egos grasping for that same elusive meaning as the Truthers for anyone to give ground or admit that the majority of Americans who don't like either of these assholes might have a point. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Hitler Trump, same as no vote same as questioning the DNC's vote-rigging in the primary. Everything is acceptable if it's your side and all the Muslims should vote against Trump if they don't want to be deported (implicitly voting for bombing other Muslims). It's the Jack Johnson versus John Jackson fight everyone expected between Clinton and Jeb! but much cruder thanks to Trump's Fox prime time manner of speaking.

But what's really ugly is that Donald Trump is the successful insurgent candidate. The Democrats have waged war on their own base to keep Sanders off the ticket, only to turn around and see the supposedly authoritarian opposition fold to some neonazi yahoos who believe Alex Jones. The same forces that have spent twenty-odd years calling for Hillary Clinton's head are now lining up behind her to protect their own phoney baloney jobs.

The most successful challenge to the system is coming from a minority fringe of cranks, the same flat-earth flatheads Karl Rove cultivated as "values voters" which, with his limited intellect, he believed could be steered by his seven-figure Yalie buddies indefinitely. Those same piggies are now running for cover behind the woman they hate most in the world and precedents suggest she will steamroll over The Donald in an electoral blowout to rival Nixon's in '72. Trumpism as a sentiment may be here to stay but the GOP as an effective political force is now castrated, their only hope for success being low voter turnout.

And would that be so bad? There's a neocon at the head of the liberal party and an incestuous con-man perched atop the wreckage of the opposition, so why bother legitimizing this farce by choosing sides? Vote Third Party or for yourself or not at all. You're vote really, truly does not matter.

Assuming it ever did.

NATO Nonsense

The worst thing about the Republican National Convention this past week is that it was broadcast. America has plenty of ridiculous fringe lifestyles, from trekkies to furries to anime perverts, but you don't see CNN breathlessly reporting on their sad little rituals.

The Internet Outrage Machine has been overclocked every day but if there's one thing that actually deserves special mention it's the Combover Feurher's comments on NATO:

He said the rest of the world would learn to adjust to his approach. “I would prefer to be able to continue” existing agreements, he said, but only if allies stopped taking advantage of what he called an era of American largess that was no longer affordable.

This is an outrage among the coastal yuppie enclaves but I've been hearing the same sentiment from Northern Virginia Republicans since the 1990s. And that's really what I want to say here - that Trump's comments are completely in the mainstream of American conservatism.

Spend enough time at Fairfax summer barbecues and the conversation always turns to how the liberals are destroying America. Not just with all the sex and hippity-hoppity music, but specifically how Democrats are both weak on national defense - leaving Us open to Our Enemies, whoever they are this week - and simultaneously how the Dems are expending American resources on taking care of ungrateful foreigners. Yes, they do have it both ways because Virginia Republicans are fucking morons.

Trump merely echoed the second half of their deluded worldview - the self-flattering assumption that the rest of the world needs to be policed by America. As opposed as the various State and DOD office drones  claimed to be to "nation building" in the Clinton I years, it was always predicated on the assumption that all those other countries full of poorer, browner people needed the patrician hand of the US to raise them out of Third World squalor, to keep their distant streets safe and to tuck them in at night. And these objections were always couched in a finger-wagging "Well they should take care of themselves!" rationalization that never admitted trying to police the world in the first place was a bad idea.

And not due to ignorance. If anyone in America should have a handle on the realities of geopolitics, it would be just these proto-Trumps carpooling around DC and Arlington. They're educated folks, upper middle class at the least, and hold TS security clearances with the military and intelligence agencies of a nuclear superpower. Yet they still blame immigrants for their problems and take Fox News seriously due to bog-standard American chauvinism.

Really, this latest turn against NATO is just the logical extension of the 1990s opposition to all things United Nations. Middle class suburbanites who'd never set foot in Manhattan spent the '90s bitching and moaning about how much space the UN offices took up, how much it strained the resources of poor put upon New York City - which itself was the wretched hive of scum and villainy for other conservative gripes. Because America is always the one taking care of everyone while also being under siege from those same dependents. It's an international variant of the "Water Carriers versus Water Drinkers" meme of the past eight years.

More to the point, this is not a new sentiment nor a strictly Republican one:

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

And we know how those same Republicans against nation-building behaved in the Bush years. All those isolationist principles proved as constant as wax - much like how all the current Clintonites who marched against the Iraq War in 2003 have spent the past year celebrating Hillary's own imperial wankery.

Donald Trump's shirking of NATO duties is not some aberration. It's perfectly in line with post-Reagen American culture: an opposition to the empire's wars when the other party is in the White House, mixed with a sanctimonious narcissism that only Our Side can do what is Right for the whole world. And all easily reversed as soon as the reins of power change hands.

Come meet the new boss, same as the old...

What Innovation?

With Donald Trump poised to campaign as the anti-establishment upstart for the rest of this year, let's take a look at the philosophy underpinning his whole image: that business produces something good.

The connection between capitalism and innovation is more than a cable news talking point, though it contains all the veracity. This assumption has, if not driven decades of legislation and popular opinion, at least served as the purported reasons for aligning more and more of the world towards corporate interests. Letting "entrepreneurs" do as they wilt supposedly fires the imagination of all the John and Sally Galts, sitting in their usually inherited executive suites. This is presented as a good thing for everyone as whatever these rugged individualists can dream up will trickle down to the rest of us who are too busy working to come up with the Next Big Thing.

What is never addressed is how much good said Next Big Thing might actually be. This is an important point to consider, as so much of the "innovative" tech industry is at best a solution looking for a problem. The fact that so many of them don't work is another issue never addressed in polite conversation or TED Talks. This is inevitable though, as the much-vaunted free market begins and ends with products.

When it comes to artistic expression and scientific inquiry - the only meaningful human endeavors - capitalism fails even more thoroughly. You can go see various Hollywood stars wailing on each other in spandex and CGI right now to see what happens when film is a slave to the market, or just go back through half of this blog. As far as the sciences the record is much much worse.

In fact, business interests are actively stymieing scientific research. From outrageous operating costs to rent-seeking patents on knowledge, "free enterprise" is demonstratively neither in the ever more important field of genetics. Worse still, the demand for pseudoscience and quackery rewards charlatans from climate change denialists to that Blood Type Diet moron. Theories that are wrong and outright harmful, but maintained by the vagaries of a market predicated on irrational consumer desires.

And then there's the not so small matter of NASA. Space flight remains the most titanic - and titanically expensive - human achievement but the ultrawealthy United States hasn't been beyond Earth's orbit since 1972. Unless you count unmanned drones and you don't. No one does. As has been pointed out before, there is no profit-motive in travelling to the stars so there has been no "innovation" in forty-four years.

The coddling of the business class does not promote any real innovation or progress. It just sanctifies monomania.

Liberals for Empire

It should come as no surprise a self-proclaimed "Goldwater Girl" thinks the Contras were keen. To paraphrase Ted Rall, Hillary Clinton never met a war she didn't like.

What should come as a surprise is all the card-carrying liberals trumpeting her neocon bullshit as the latest victory over Sanders and his movement for common human decency. Should come as a surprise - probably does for some of you dear-hearts - but really doesn't. As I mentioned last time I commented on this bummer of an election, American liberals love blood and violence when it's their own team pulling the trigger. Hell, I'm guilty of it myself!

And Democrats really do have a history as good imperial managers. Much like the British, who raped everyone and everything they could find below the equator for a century. Just because they're good at it doesn't mean it's not objectively terrible.

But that raw ugliness and evil of global empire is still a foreign concept to Americans of every political persuasion. This is to be expected with the Tea Party and the Trumpers, as their entire raison d'etre is spite and hatred for life. But it's still a bit shocking to see the folks who still kvetch over Bush's wars turn around and advocate for basically more of the same.

Rather, it would be shocking if this hadn't been going on for the past decade. At least.

[T]he real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, the New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

A so-funny-it's-sad way of paraphrasing the position of the US media and political class on the Iraq war is "We shoulda invaded on Thursday instead of Tuesday." And that simplistic We're The Good Guys notion is shared by many of the rank-and-file liberals who marched and protested and all turned very silent once a black Democrat was commanding the exact same drone executions as a Texas dipshit.

This goes back decades, well before Reagan but let's start in the '80s anyway because it was the worst era ever. Also because Sanders is getting flak for not disavowing the Sandinistas, who are now the Bad Guys for the liberal press because reasons. Reagan's financing of the Contra death squads who targeted the FSLN gets most of the attention but it was really just SOP for the US at the time in every sovereign nation south of the border. Like El Salvador:

When she heard the screams, Rufina, who together with her children had been sitting on a bench with her back to the front wall of the house -- the wall facing the church -- climbed up on the bench so that she could look out a small window high up in that wall. Through the window she saw soldiers leading groups of men from the little whitewashed church -- blindfolded men whose hands were bound behind them. Each pair of soldiers led five or six men past the house of Alfredo Márquez and took them out of the hamlet in various directions. After a time, she saw her husband in one group, and as she watched, along with young Cristino, who had climbed up next to her, eager to see what was happening, they both saw him -- Domingo Claros, twenty-nine-year-old woodcutter, husband of Rufina and father of Cristino, María Dolores, Marta Lilián, and María Isabel -- bolt forward, together with another man, in a desperate effort to escape the soldiers. But there was nowhere to run. The men of the Atlacatl levelled their M16s and brought both men down with short bursts of fire. Then the soldiers strode forward to where the men lay gasping on the ground, and, unsheathing their machetes, they bent over them, grasped their hair, jerked their heads back sharply, and beheaded them with strong blows to the backs of their necks.

The El Mozote massacre was conducted against suspected Marxists, just like hundreds of others. All with the tacit approval if not active support of US intelligence and special operations. Stan Goff provides some excellent snapshots - including the bumbling alcoholics from the State Department overseeing all this horror - in Full Spectrum Disorder. But to see how things really don't change, you have to read his first and arguably better book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti. It recounts his time with 3rd Special Forces ODA 354 in the first Clinton era, trying to do an invasion and occupation humanely so as to relieve his old and battered conscience - and just how doomed his efforts proved to be:

Are you anti-FRAPH?
Yes.
Why?
They're a death squad network.
According to the task force command, they're to be treated as the legitimate political opposition.
They're still death squads. Were we ordered to work with them, too?
No, you weren't ordered to work with them, but it sounds like you harassed them.

There's more in the book of that bureaucratic double-think. So much more, but it's not what got Goff brought up on charges that "were either silly or pure bullshit, but a couple of them were true..." It was his own team, his comrades-in-arms who were just as indoctrinated to the American fantasy of Good vs. Evil as Salon knobs like Amanda Marcotte. Not one of them would ever self-identify as liberal - a few were anticipating race war in the bucolic Clinton years and are likely strident Trump supporters today - just like no Hillary Men or bourgeois feminists consider themselves on the side of death squads. Except maybe this guy.

The liberal interventionists have just as much blood on their hands as the neocons. They used to try and hide it but with Sanders showing he can win, they've all lost their marbles and wouldn't even blink at a Clinton-Kissinger ticket come November. 'Cause there are bad guys to kill, dontcha know.

The Sanders Question

Do not ask if Bernie Sanders can win. He can. He has more popular support than Clinton and anyone in the GOP Clown Car. He's gone from 0 to lightspeed in an election everyone expected to be the sole domain of Hillary Clinton since about 2013. He's not only got the support, he's got the political savvy to convert it into real electoral victory and maybe even into some desperately needed policies.

Rather ask: Will Bernie Sanders win the nomination?

That's a much harder question to answer, less because of the fickle electorate and more because of the forces of traditional power arrayed against Sanders. His bottom-up campaign looks all the more impressive when you look at how the very party he is running for is determined not to have him.

By April 2015, over half of the Democratic Senate caucus had already backed [Hillary Clinton's] bid for the nomination — far more early endorsements than any candidate in either party has gained in this century. To date Clinton has won the backing of 38 of 46 Senate Democrats, 148 of 188 House Democrats, and 12 of 18 Democratic governors.

In contrast, Sanders has two House Reps and many many many people whose only influence is the ballot. If he can win against his own party he's certainly passed the ever crooked "electable" test so often used to weed out dissident voices, so why would a Democratic Party that actually wants to hold on to the White House still oppose him?

It's not his foreign policy - the biggest point of criticism among his Leftist detractors. Which do indeed exist. While not voting for the Iraq War, Sanders is just as pro-Israel and pro-Empire as every other D on Capitol Hill. This would do nothing to hurt his "electability" either as rank and file Democrats - whatever their protestations in the latter half of the Bush II presidency - are just as eager for war as the Republicans they post snarky memes about on Facebook. War may be bad for children and other living things but plenty of American liberals can find a way to rationalize it as long as one of their own pulls the trigger.

Just look at that Kenyan Islamo-Socialist, Barack Obama. Mister Hope and Change may prefer drone warfare to boots on the ground, but the results are much the same. Drones make good cold, imperialist logic but it's still a far cry from the radical peace based foreign policy advocated by Kucinich in 2008 and the Green Party today.

And as gross as it may sound, being a peacenik really would make Sanders unelectable. The Cruise Missile Liberals want America to kick ass just as much as the muzzie-hating conservatives, they just want it done humanely - as if humane war is even possible! - and their rhetoric isn't as obviously racist. These two factions have never been as opposed as the culture war noise would have you suspect, as they've always been little more than feuding sides of the same white middle class family.

It's not his conventional foreign policy that has the party brass so scared, but rather Sanders's economic priorities. He calls himself a democratic socialist but his proposals are little more than reheated New Deal policies. That's still too far to the left for history's second biggest fans of capitalism, whether out of fear of change or because it would drive away the corporate money that post-Clinton Democrats use to win elections. That they haven't done anything very liberal since the New Deal doesn't stop people from arguing about the importance of their winning elections.

Which gets to the very heart of opposition to Sanders: He challenges the fundamental assumptions of American elections. His economic populism has already crossed the usual Red versus Blue divide, uniting working whites with urban people of color. That's something very new and very frightening to a party that thought it could run on the fear that a Republican would overturn Roe V. Wade indefinitely, much as Karl Rove thought the GOP could run on the false promise of doing just that.

Sanders, like Occupy, has re-oriented the political dialogue to the basic needs of the citizenry - prompting Hillary Clinton and her daughter to disparage any notion of universal healthcare with rhetoric straight out of Mit Romney's campaign. That blue collar Christians, atheist vegan programmers, and black nurses all think it's a good idea doesn't matter because there is no business support for such an unprofitable venture.

And this is what Election 2016 comes down to. A test not just of the Democratic Party but of American democracy in general. If a popularly supported insurgent candidate like Sanders is defeated by money and privilege, what chance do the rest of us little people really have?

#ResistCapitalism

As Obama enters his final year and Clinton II devolves into desperate red-baiting, let's take a look at what the past eight years of DNC economics has wrought.

Not a whole lot. While some more jobs have opened up since the 2008 crash, they haven't been enough or paid enough to make up for the losses among middle and working class folks. It still counts as a recovery though because finance is booming.

For now.

Business, according to economist Thorstein Veblen, is not a productive sector of the economy. Production is antithetical to its purpose as that would mean spending something - or in the current case anything - to get to somewhere profitable. Business needs Industry, the material side of the economy with all the production and innovation, to sponge off of in ever more complicated trade deals and financial instruments.

It's really been something of a coup for Business in the past thirty odd years because now those same financial instruments that once robbed productive workers of their earnings are now robbing other financial instruments in a closed system that will generate wealth so long as no one looks too closely.

You'd think that means Wall Street is one audit away from another crash and you'd be wrong. The Fed demonstrated with its recent rate hike that the central bank is firmly behind the private banks in whatever ludicrous gamble they choose.This has nothing to do with "market stability" or whatever fantasies of fairness libertarians indulge in rather than facing reality - that being "[t]he Fed is a central planner that dare not speak its name."

None of this, from federal regulation to Wall Street money laundering schemes, is a rational or natural outcome. This is as politically driven as the hue and cry of #OscarsSoWhite. It's the same old politics that informed the Ancien Regime and the Robber Barons, the notion that being born with more stuff means the rest of society should serve to provide you with even more. The GOP funded pundits and even some Democrats may so otherwise - something about fair play and competition - but that is all trash. They are fools, liars, or both.

Economics has never been about what's fair. It has always been about power and survival. You don't owe a manager or CEO anything and the sooner everyone catches on to that single liberating fact, the sooner central planners like the Fed will start serving the interests of the productive classes, rather than Business.

Christmas at Ground Zero

“Wars have a funny way of taking on a life of their own” wrote Mark Ames after Turkey shot down a Russian plane and World War III became a very real prospect.

It’s taken a backseat to Donald Trump’s strip mall fascism and the Clinton II machine devouring all in its path, but Obama might be facing a real war between First World nations in his final year. And all because of Syria.

There are parallels to another war a hundred years ago: uppity peasants, great power treaties no one ever expected to act on, and a single incident turning into a snowball of death and destruction. To his credit, Obama hasn’t made any firm commitments to Turkey in the event Putin puts Ankara on his list. But then, he and the US at large isn’t about to abandon a NATO member, no matter how pants-crappingly stupid they’re acting.

It would be easy to blame this all on the Turks - they’ve been coddling ISIS all through the Kobane campaign - but that would be letting the rest of the Western powers off the hook. And as we’ve established, the Western powers are fucking idiots.

We’re talking about the groups that have smiled and made nice with the House of Saud, the most reactionary power since the Victorians went out of business and the biggest net exporter of jihadism from the Maghreb to Chechnya. Even now, DC is talking about punitive measures against Iran for less than what North Korea has been doing every year since 2006. Iran is the only effective counterweight to Daesh in the Middle East, but Bibi don’t like ‘em so they’re official enemies of democracy. The Saudis don’t like ‘em neither, cause Israel and The Kingdom are both firmly on the wrong side of history.

They could afford to be wrong up until now thanks to being America’s most valued proxies, but that’s rapidly changing:

In the first half of 2016 we should be contemplating a situation where the S-400s will be targeting and covering the whole Turkish-Syrian border. This will be the moment when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will completely lose his marbles.

The US and Europe could have quashed ISIS when it was just starting in 2013 - or at the very least scolded the Saudis until they turned off the cash flow. But everyone was busy worrying that some of the many thousands to die in Syria might have been gassed by Assad’s forces, rather than just lined up against a wall and shot. This isn’t “chickens coming home to roost” though, this is geopolitical bungling that could see Russian bombers taking more detours over the Turkish border, everyone provoking each other until either Trump or Clinton II takes the reigns and decides to look tough...

A full nuclear exchange is still unlikely, since Putin isn’t suicidal and the American ruling class is terrified of anything that might curtail their donations from Wall Street. But don’t be surprised to hear about US troops shooting at other white people for a change in Ukraine once the new president-elect is sworn in.

...and a happy New Year!

The American Yeltsin

Everyone is still having a fit over the overt racism Donald Trump has been spewing for… well, his entire life. But specifically his demand that Muslims be locked from entering the US. Even if they’re US citizens, if they’re friends of Muhammad than they ain’t allowed.

While this is racist and fascist and all sorts of ugly, it’s also just plain ridiculous. Like every other “policy” Trump has presented, it amounts to TV’s biggest blowhard yelling at a perceived problem and that’s the end of it. Too many rapist immigrants? Deport them all, logistics be damned! The Chinese are beating America at green energy and other infrastructure investments? Negotiate them down, somehow! Income inequality? You should be paid less anyway, so sayeth The Donald!

Every proposal Trump makes is as shallow as his hair, so it plays well to the spiteful morons who support him. How much he means it and how much he’s just playing to the ignorant screwheads who still think Bush II did a good job is a question Trump himself couldn’t even answer. While his campaign is serious, he remains a profoundly un-serious candidate.

So let’s talk seriously for a moment about what would happen if he actually won. Not just the nomination, but the general election. Would a Trump presidency really be the Fourth Reich we’re all worried about?

Nah, not really. It would suck from one end to another, the biggest bummer in American presidential history since Dubbya’s second term. If you’re not white and stupid you might as well run for Mexico now, where you’ll get more respect and more conscientious police. But no one is likely to end up in a government extermination camp and, despite his posturing, there won’t be any wars besides the usual colonial skirmishes that Clinton II wholeheartedly supports.

But if you do get ground up into soap, it will be by a for-profit entity. Trump’s history as a business man consists of the sort of corporate raiding and chicanery that not even Mitt Romney would tolerate. A man whose only proven skill is declaring bankruptcy to his own advantage is not going to start pogroms by executive order, he’ll just sell the material to do so to the lowest bidder.

That’s the real danger of a Trump presidency: the outsourcing and offshoring of the instruments of government will accelerate exponentially. The short-fingered vulgarian won’t stoop to exterminating Muslim Americans himself, he’ll just let some other billionaire asshole buy up half the National Guard armories in the country. Then it’s all just private enterprise and self-starter initiative when a Somali family gets riddled with bullets.

And don’t think there aren’t many Americans itching to mass murder their fellow citizens. Inequality is already driving a boom in rage massacres and racism always finds convenient scapegoats for real economic distress.

@realDonaldTrump This clearly shows that America is ready for Trump. https://t.co/Ad0hJSyOyx pic.twitter.com/qQLA2xHVCP

— Jason Bergkamp (@keksec_org) December 10, 2015

Anyone but Sanders or Jill Stein in the White House will ensure that same stress persists. Exacerbating the racist dimension only serves Trump’s interests now during the primaries, when he needs to win over the rubes . Trump’s real goal once sworn in will be the same as Boris Yeltsin: selling off everything not nailed down and securing a tidy profit for himself. It makes good business sense and that’s the only sense that’s allowed anymore in America.

American ISIS

Friday, a citizen of the United States perpetrated a terrorist attack that left three dead and over a dozen injured. Three guesses as to which god he cited as inspiration.

"Allahu akbar!"

Admittedly, Robert Lewis Dear only invoked the “dead baby parts” meme conservative presidential candidates were pimping earlier this season. Whether Dear was avenging said dead babies in the name of Jesus or Allah hasn’t been explicitly stated yet but come the fuck on.

Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 29, 2015

People with a little awareness are going to be pointing out the obvious terrorism of things like this and the murder of George Tiller and the past bombing of clinics - and no one in power will do a goddamn thing about it. Because Robert Lewis Dear and others like him are useful idiots to American Erdogans up until they go postal.

Who will stand with the American people, and who will stand with Planned Parenthood’s selling of aborted baby body parts for profit. (4/8)

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 3, 2015

Ted Cruz is already offering prayers to the same God who gave Dear his marching orders. Because once the GOP base snaps they cease to be part of the broader conservative movement - a movement startlingly similar to the reactionary Sunnis who've been mass murdering French people this year. Shooters like Dear are instead declared lone nuts, whose behavior was impossible to predict despite fitting a clear profile again and again. Because that's a lie American conservatives need to believe even more than the notion Jesus actually likes them.

Also, Matt Walsh is a cunt.

This is John Galt

Jeb Lund finally figured out Ben Carson: the good doctor is so far up his own ass he’s in negative space.

Ben Carson might be so brilliant and talented that he cannot detect how often he's being an absolute moron.

This also puts Carson’s neck and neck race with Fuckface von Clownstick Donald Trump into perspective, as we see them not as ridiculous clowns but as the end-state of a national belief in the inherent superiority of material success. While Trump’s purported skill as a businessman is up for debate, his success is a truth no one will dispute. Similarly, Carson reached the top of his profession by being a very very good neurosurgeon long before he climbed into the GOP clown car. And neither man has had to tolerate others telling them "no" since before most of you were born.

This is what Ayn Rand’s unbounded egoist heroes really look like. Unfettered by the whims of society or archaeological records, Trump and Carson are pursuing the highest office in the land because they are simply used to getting what they want. Neither will ever actually reach it - and boy will their resulting tantrums be a sight to see - but the sheer ridiculousness of their campaigns is only possible because they have been so successful. Americans will not argue with success, so no one has ever told these potential emperors that their junk is hanging out.

Broken Empire

There has been a single theme running through the presidential debates of late that can best be summed up with a line from the only good TV show of the past fifteen years: "All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again."

Ben Carson, a guy who says crazy shit and has no past experience in politics, is currently leader of the GOP pack. Sound like a similar situation from four years ago?

Admittedly, Carson doesn't look like he's going to implode as spectacularly as Herman Cain but then neither did Herman Caine. Similarly, Rick Perry got pretty far as a racist blowhard before collapsing under his own weight just as Michelle Bachman started as every Tea Party crazy's hero before turning in lame performances alongside the rest of the field and eventually folding due to her rampant scandals. And through it all, everyone kept saying Romney was done and should just go home.

It may not play out exactly like that in 2016. Trump could possibly overwhelm the GOP machine with his racist populism, offering bitter proof that elections are indeed still decided by the people. Chris Christie might not suffer a massive coronary or another indictment by next November, just as Rubio may look like a grown-up and Cruz may actually get a vote. But all of that is as likely as Carly Fiorina sticking in the race past December.

On the opposite side, you've got nothing but the inevitability of Clinton II. Yes, Bernie Sanders has been fun to watch. No, he is not pushing the Clinton Machine leftward. If anything, the farcical Benghazi committee proved Hillary can keep on keepin' on and her opponents are simply too ridiculous to stop her. Obama went into Election 2012 with a similar centrist record and mopped the floor with White Obama - imagine what's gonna happen when 2016 comes down to Bush III versus Clinton II. Their policies are close enough to constitute incest. It'll be the first election decided purely on nostalgia for past administrations: "Did you prefer NAFTA or the PATRIOT Act?"

Yet this zombie dance is amped up as the most important election of our time. Just like the last election, and the election before that, and so on. No matter who wins next year, American troops will still be in Syria and school kids will still be shooting each other for various spaz reasons that have nothing to do with politics as discussed on the Sunday morning shows and much more to do with the harsh economic realities not even Sanders could hope to remedy. And that latter is just providing more excuse for the huge natsec blob to trip over its own feet.

Like the FBI's latest addition to childhood trauma: a video game! It teaches you not to be a puppet by getting you to be paranoid of your swarthier classmates, because Islamic State has been behind so many school shootings in America. It's not just a creepy, Orwellian attempt at conditioning fear into the youth, but it's as completely wrong and divorced from reality as the words that come out of Rand Paul's mouth when he goes off script.

This is the new normal, America. Declaring the old ideas to be the future while blaming foreignors for the failed capitalism devouring our lives. Thank God for Vladimir Putin.

*   *   *

UPDATE: I'd just like to give Ben Carson credit for imploding even more ridiculously than Herman Cain :D

Coward in Chief

The single most striking thing about Donald Trump's presidential campaign is also the single thing nobody in the respectable media will dare say aloud: The man is scared stupid.

I remarked on Mitt Romney having a similar problem some years ago, but Trump is much worse. Where Romney displayed the venal grasping typical of the business class, Trump's campaign is a desperate search for self-validation. He can't stop talking about his poll numbers or how he got such high marks as an undergrad, except when asserting for the umpteenth time that whatever demographic he just insulted really truly loves him. It's so transparent and yet no one will state the obvious that Donald Trump has crushingly low self-esteem.

For further proof, look at his defensiveness on, well, damn near everything. An offhand crack about his ugly hair sent Trump into a Twitter tirade, protesting too much at insinuations he wears a toupee. When Univision reporter Jorge Ramos asked him about his immigration policy, he panicked and had Ramos thrown out. Megyn Kelly had the temerity to question his choice of words and he spent the next week talking about her period! These are not the actions of a confident man.

THIS FAKE HAIR LOOKS FAKE

He's gotten a tremendous amount of attention so far for two reasons: a) the only other campaign story is Hillary Clinton's emails and not a single person really gives a damn about that and b) Trump seeks out attention like that grubby kid who's single mom was always too drunk to pay any attention to him. Trump says ugly, hateful things for the same reason a fourteen year old who just discovered punk rock says "Fuck!" at the family dinner table. He needs attention to validate his monad existence, any attention at all. He is terrified of being thought a loser, which is a terror often found in losers.

It's a blatant and easily exploited weakness. Donald Trump insists everyone loves him because he just doesn't love himself. Take away the news cameras, the crowds of racist rubes, and he'll shrivel up in misery and self-loathing. Putting such a fragile person in any position of power, let alone at the head of the world's most heavily armed empire, is guaranteeing not just trouble but embarrasment. Donald Trump is so desperate for the affections of others that he'd bomb his own casinos in his first hundred days in office if Vladimir Putin said it would get him invited to the next Shanghai Cooperation Organization mixer.

Baltimore, Media, and Oligarchy

A special post today. Alexandra K kicks off our coverage of Election 2016!

As Morgan Freeman recently said in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, “Fuck the media.” Their usual negligence in coverage has been particularly egregious in the senseless death of Freddie Gray. At this point his tragic end is but a footnote to them; the early peaceful protests failed to elicit much attention outside of the state, but add some riots and fires and the national media bigwigs are falling all over themselves to get the most outrageous images and stories. If conflict sells papers, then conflict and the kind of one-sided reporting that perpetuates widespread prejudices is what the papers will say!

The fact that Baltimore is the site of the latest police murder of an unarmed black man is also a particular plum to an institution that is obsessed with king-making. That’s because Martin O’Malley, the aspiring candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, was mayor of the city from 1999 to 2007, right before serving two terms as Maryland’s governor. O’Malley’s been mulling a presidential run since before his second term as governor ended, but few people outside of the Mid-Atlantic states knew who he was. Now suddenly everyone (who pays attention to what’s going on in the world) knows he who is, and the media is determined to tar and feather him with the Baltimore riots to kill his chances for the presidency. “Baltimore riots hurt O'Malley's already slim chances” crows Politico, the hottest broadsheet in Washington DC politics today. From “Who is Martin O’Malley?” he is suddenly considered the Giuliani of Baltimore for his police policies as mayor.

As someone who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1990s, and who lived and worked in the Washington DC area in the late 2000s, the comparison seems more than a little ridiculous to me. Full disclosure: I’ve been an O’Malley fan even since before I knew he was considering a bid for the presidency, because of his support for renewable energy. When I started working for a solar energy company a few years after that and Maryland had great policies and incentives for the solar projects, that didn’t hurt either.

But that’s also why I never thought he’d never really have a chance to be president: he seemed too liberal. Not only a supporter of clean energy and climate policy, he also defends abortion rights, oversaw the passage of the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act in Maryland, and he’s in favor of same-sex marriage; basically he’s on the center-to-left of most any political issue that you can think of. Even the news outlets that have floated him as a liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton in the primary didn’t really take him seriously.

So the hysteria over his policing policies in Baltimore seems ironic and more than a little suspicious to me now. O’Malley has acknowledged that as Mayor he played a role in shaping the city in which Freddie Gray’s life was taken (even as he’s heavily played defense). Understanding the numerous intertwining factors of policy, history, racism, economics and demographics isn’t something that lends itself well to our sound-bite driven political news culture, but O’Malley doesn’t have a choice but to talk about it; the media has decided he has to. He knows this, and that’s why he’s planning to make Baltimore a central focus of his campaign. That will only be a successful strategy for a relatively unknown candidate if the media decides they want it to be, and my current guess is that they don’t.

During the national coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, I don’t remember the media mentioning that Florida’s Stand Your Grand law was passed during the administration of Jeb Bush, but reporters would love a Bush candidacy. I think the media would do anything for a Bush vs. Clinton contest, but I’m not going to speculate on the reasons for that here. The larger point here is about the consequences of media influence; information and how it’s framed is a major determinant of public opinion. Public opinion sways politics, policy-making and current events. Which then goes back to the media. See how it all cycles? Keep your eyes open America. Seek the truth and always question. When O’Malley said “We are all responsible for Freddie Gray,” he was being politically tactful, but think about what that really means too.