Noel Coward in a festive mood

quote unquote: Dorothy Day

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” -- Dorothy Day

Guilty until proven innocent

"According to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), since 1989, 2,515 men and women have been exonerated after proving their innocence. In total, among all known exonerees, Americans have shelled out a staggering $4.12 billion to incarcerate innocent men and women since 1989, according to a Yahoo Finance analysis. That’s largely money spent on trials, and the cost of housing inmates in prison. According to the Bureau of Prisons, in the fiscal year 2017, the average cost to house a prisoner was over $36,000 a year in federal facilities. But black men make up the majority of those wrongfully convicted — approximately 49%. And since 1989, taxpayers have wasted $944 million to incarcerate black men and women that were later found to be innocent. That number climbs to $1.2 billion when including Hispanic men and women."

The rest of the story:
US Taxpayers spent almost $1 billion incarcerating innocent black people (Blacks in Law Enforcement of America)

Too little, too soon

Only two articles of impeachment? Under most circumstances, prosecutors include all alleged crimes in an indictment. If the jury won't convict on one, they will on another. Multiple crimes also suggest a criminal mindset. His defenders are saying that even if Donald Trump is guilty of the Ukraine shakedown, it's a trivial and isolated offense that doesn't rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor. Nancy Pelosi's slowing down of the process opens the door to getting this right. If this is going to be done at all, there should be a second bill of impeachment. The Intercept points to 26 impeachable Trump offenses that were inexplicably overlooked or ignored by the House.

The rest of the story: The A to Z of Things Trump Could and Should Have Been Impeached For by Mehdi Hasan (The Intercept)

Corporate Media and 'Moderate' Democrats Are Defending the Oligarchy Against Bernie Sanders

The greatest trick the American oligarchy ever played was convincing the country they didn't exist.

by Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant – and donkey – in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy – defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes” – can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race” – Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar – for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post’s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign – from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity – only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence – with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth – defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who’ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg won the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country – from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis – can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

---- 

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

G.O.P. Lawmaker Had Visions of a Christian Alternative Government

He networked with local militia groups, talked about plans to create a 51st state called Liberty and distributed to his closest followers a “Biblical Basis for War” document that calls for the “surrender” of those who favor abortion rights, same-sex marriage, “idolatry” and communism. “If they do not yield — kill all males,” it said.

The rest of the story by Mike Baker (New York Times).

Should impeachment be a bipartisan effort?

Jimmy Dore, the former comic turned political commentator, now so smitten with the sound of his own voice he's become Rachel Maddow for Radicals, here interviews Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on her decision not to take a position on the articles of impeachment. Even at the cost of enduring Dore, Rep. Gabbard's argument is important, especially as the impeachment effort stalls.



Must reads:
✓ Pundits are pitting “fast” vs. “slow” and “Ukraine only” vs. “everything.” But smart and thorough is the way to go: Democrats Must Reject False Choices as They Pursue Impeachment by Joan Walsh (The Nation
✓ Tulsi Gabbard Releases Statement on Impeachment of President Trump
✓ The congresswoman, a Hawaii Democrat, called impeachment “a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities” and said she favored censure instead: Tulsi Gabbard Votes ‘Present’ on Impeachment Articles: by Michael Levenson (New York Times)
✓ The way to defeat a rightwing political coalition is through leftwing politics, not political theater: Impeachment is the wrong way to beat Trump by Bhaskar Sunkara (The Guardian)
✓ Socialists should see impeachment as an opportunity to attack a movement that poses a long-run threat to the Left’s very existence: The Left Case for Impeachment by Max B. Sawicky (Jacobin)
✓ Getting rid of Trump would be great, but Congress isn’t going to do it — we actually have to vote him out. And impeachment, a therapeutic ritual for MSNBC hosts and an act of score-settling by the national security state, isn’t helping: What’s the Point of Impeachment? by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)

Imagine

“I was stationed at CVS during the war on drugs.”

John Cleese Has a Theory on Why Political Correctness Is Rampant in Our Culture

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is one I absolutely do not subscribe to.” -- John Cleese

Christ Stopped at Ramallah

"Like all forms of tribalism, Identity replaces shared truths with private property. The Politics of Identity are therefore ideal expressions of capitalist economics. They also serve, quite directly, to kill mass numbers of our fellow human beings. All in the name of my pain trumping your pain. The embrace of the Holocaust as the defining act of inhumanity to which nothing else can ever be compared blinds those embracing its sonorities to other kinds of oppression and carnage, creating a deep perversity of meaning: making the condemnation of this towering act of evil the reason to ignore the rest, or to derogate them as inferior to the full-on nightmare of Nazi genocide. Merry Christmas, Palestinians." --- Joan Clams Bodenheim

He didn't know the half of it

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to degeneracy without the usual interval of civilization. -- Georges Clemenceau

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar.

You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.

Why can't Jaws be a Russian submarine?

Hollywood may have gotten a little more woke of late, but every screenwriter who has ever had a pitch meeting go off the rails will appreciate this one:

“I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.' When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn’t be Tubman, the executive responded, ‘It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference’” (Gregory Allen Howard, writer-producer of the Tubman biopic, recounting early days of two-plus decades trying to get the film off the ground).

Even now, it's an even bet there is more than one development gnome hoping to route the Underground Railroad through Wakanda.

Truth in sloganizing

Joe Biden's campaign slogan, “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead,” is lame bordering on pathetic. Can't one of his corporate underwriters contribute its marketing team for an hour or two to spin something catchy? In light of his comments on marijuana this week, I submit "No Pot in Any Chicken." More apt, given his campaign so far, might be the old MBA dictum, "Good Enough Is Good Enough." Or he could save time and money by unpack now the tattered "The Lesser of Two Evils" banner, the de facto campaign message of every Democratic presidential campaign, save 2008, of the last 40 years.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the millions of voters that agree with them are freaking out the billionaires.

The illustration is by Victor Juhasz.

Seem familiar?

Israel is doing to Palestinians no less than the United States did to Native Americans: stealing their land, penning them in reservations, impoverishing them, killing them.

Sanders, AOC Unveil $180 Billion Green New Deal for Public Housing

The legislation aims to repair and upgrade public housing by securing renewable energy sources for approximately one million federally owned public housing units, affecting some two million people.

Beauty is in the eye of the officeholder

The folks at UglyJerry made a font out of congressional districts, many of them twisted into alphabetical shapes by gerrymandering.

They want you to urge your congressperson to do something about it.

The biggest city in the US is joining a voting reform movement.

"New York City has become the latest -- and most populous  -- city to adopt ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for voting reform efforts.

"Voters in the city overwhelmingly approved Ballot Question 1 on Tuesday, enabling voters to begin using ranked-choice voting in local primary and special elections beginning in 2021.

"New York City joins 20 other cities around the country, as well as multiple states, that have already started using this method in various elections. Maine, notably, implemented ranked-choice voting for the first time in a federal election in 2018.

"Ranked-choice voting works much like its name suggests. Instead of picking just one candidate on the ballot, voters rank their top five in order of preference.

"Once those votes are cast, they are counted in the following way, Lee Drutman explains:

"Ranked-choice voting lets voters mark their first-choice candidate first, their second-choice candidate second, their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Each voter has only one vote but can indicate their backup choices: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place rankings, that candidate wins, just like a traditional election.

"But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This process continues until a single candidate gathers a majority.

"Advocates of ranked-choice voting argue that it has many benefits. Because candidates need broad-based support to win, they are forced to engage with a wide range of voters, including groups that do not always see outreach from political campaigns. Additionally, studies have found that ranked-choice voting increases the number of minority and women candidates who vie for elected office, partly because ranked-choice campaigning is less negative.

"In addition to shifting the nature of campaigns, ranked-choice voting also gives voters more freedom to consider the full slate of candidates. Because of the way that votes are tallied, an individual could feel free to pick their favorite option without worrying that in doing so they are acting as a 'spoiler' who contributes to the victory of an unfavorable or unpopular candidate.

"Opponents of ranked-choice voting argue that it complicates the process too much, both when it comes to voting and tabulating results.

"Overall, New York City’s decision to adopt the ballot measure — though it will only affect a specific set of races — will serve as a good test case for ranked-choice voting, and it signals growing momentum for this voting reform."

The rest of the story:
✓ New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for the reform by Li Zhou (Vox)
✓ How does ranked choice voting work? (The Committee for Ranked Choice Voting)
✓Voter Choice for Massachusetts is a campaign to place a question on the 2020 ballot that would bring Ranked Choice Voting to Massachusetts elections starting in 2022.

Bernie Sanders is Not a Radical, He Has Mass Support for Positions on Healthcare & Taxes

From 2016. True then. True now.

Trick or Treat

A lot of people on the streets today apparently still wearing their "homeless" costumes from last night.

Great nations do not fight endless wars.

 "Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America’s role in the world. Initiating a long-overdue process of aligning U.S. policy with actually existing global conditions just may prove to be his providentially anointed function. Go figure.

"The Valhalla of the Indispensable Nation is a capacious place, even if it celebrates mostly white and mostly male diversity. Recall that in the eighteenth century, it was a slaveholding planter from Virginia who secured American independence. In the nineteenth, an ambitious homespun lawyer from Illinois destroyed slavery, thereby clearing the way for his country to become a capitalist behemoth. In the middle third of the twentieth century, a crippled Hudson River grandee delivered the United States to the summit of global power. In that century’s difficult later decades, a washed-up movie actor declared that it was “morning in America” and so, however briefly, it seemed to be. Now, in the twenty-first century, to inaugurate the next phase of the American story, history has seemingly designated as its agent a New York real estate developer, casino bankruptee, and reality TV star.

"In all likelihood, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan would balk at having Donald Trump classified as their peer. Yet, however preposterously, in our present moment of considerable crisis, he has succeeded them as the nation’s Great Helmsman, albeit one with few ideas about what course to set. Yet somehow Trump has concluded that our existing course has the United States headed toward the rocks. He just might be right.

“'Great nations do not fight endless wars.' So the president announced in his 2019 State of the Union Address. Implicit in such a seemingly innocuous statement was a genuinely radical proposition, as laden with portent as Lincoln’s declaration in 1858 that a house divided cannot stand. Donald Trump appears determined to overturn the prevailing national security paradigm, even if he is largely clueless about what should replace it." -- Tom Dispatch

Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
                     -- William Epson (Missing Dates)

Old or young, climate change is the crisis of our lifetimes.

Meeting it is up to us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to forcing a political response.

"The political class, as anyone who has followed its progress over the past three years can surely now see, is chaotic, unwilling and, in isolation, strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises, let alone a vast existential predicament. Yet a widespread and willful naivety prevails: the belief that voting is the only political action required to change a system. Unless it is accompanied by the concentrated power of protest – articulating precise demands and creating space in which new political factions can grow – voting, while essential, remains a blunt and feeble instrument."

"The media, with a few exceptions, is actively hostile. Even when broadcasters cover these issues, they carefully avoid any mention of power, talking about environmental collapse as if it is driven by mysterious, passive forces, and proposing microscopic fixes for vast structural problems.

"Those who govern the nation and shape public discourse cannot be trusted with the preservation of life on Earth."

The rest of the story:

Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Must see TV

The best political ad of the season.

A Lego event in Helsinki yesterday included this Lego city.

Ha!

Basic Income: An idea whose time has come

"We live in a new world, remade by many forces: the disruptive technological revolution,
brought about by the computer and the internet; the globalisation of trade, migration and communication; a fast-growing worldwide demand running up against the limits imposed by a shrinking pool of natural resources and saturation of our atmosphere; the dislocation of traditional protective institutions, from the family to labour unions, state monopolies and welfare states; and the explosive interactions of these various trends." -- Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy

Brecht

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

             -- Bertolt Brecht

qoute unquote: Friedrich Engels

"In this country, social war is under full headway, everyone stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to anyone to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence or in a law-court. In short, everyone sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage." -- Friedrich Engels, 1845

End Game?

Bush the Younger abused executive power and overstepped constitutional boundaries.

Congress did nothing.

Obama abused executive power and overstepped constitutional boundaries.

Congress did nothing.

Then came Trump.

Congress?

Democrats test limits of oversight powers on Trump by Jacqueline Thomsen and Morgan Chalfant (The Hill)

Main Street, Santa Monica, July 4, 2019

                                                           (photo: John Gabree)

The languages of the white Christian nation.

How long would an Iranian drone last if it were spotted over "international waters" in, say, the Gulf of Mexico?

Left-Right is virtually meaningless.

AOC is not an outlier.

The divide is between the War Party and the domestic spending party, between the neoliberals and the New Dealers, between the 1%-ers and the rest of us.

The policies endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders and their allies are supported by the vast majority of American voters.

There are plenty of people to their left -- see Ralph Nader, Jacobin, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Jimmy Dorn, Robert Reich, anarchists, Socialists, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Richard Wolfe, Paul Buhle, Rev. William Barber, countless more -- who are, at least for the moment, limited to the power of persuasion.

Where did it get Obama?

“‘Right on,’ Ben Labolt, Obama’s 2012 campaign press secretary, said sarcastically of former Vice President Joe Biden’s “call to renew bipartisan cooperation. ‘Mitch McConnell and Mark Meadows will rush to form the Woke Caucus. And Nelson Rockefeller will be revived from his grave.’” -- Daily Beast

Sorry, Joe

With polls showing Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and even Cory Booker beating DonaldTrump, the Joe Biden campaign has lost its only rationale.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to War We Go

For those too young to remember, the draft had nothing to do with wind (although, if you were troubled by too much intestinal wind, that might have kept you out of the draft).

The Rule of Memo

The so-called prohibition against charging a sitting president with federal crimes is not a constitutional mandate. It's a Justice Department policy formulated in memos by lawyers who happened to be employed by Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton when the matter came up.

Reading List:
✓ Trump’s strategy to declare himself above the law and escape accountability by Paul Waldman (The Washington Post)
✓ Trump's Lawyer Says He Can't Be Guilty of Obstructing Justice: Is the President Above the Law? by Dale Eisman (Common Cause)
✓ The Supreme Court once rejected Bill Clinton’s claim of presidential immunity. Courts should now do the same with Donald Trump. The President Is Not Above the Law by Stephen B. Burbank, Richard D. Parker and Lucas A. Powe, Jr. (Politico)
✓ How Do We Keep a Criminal President From Running Out the Clock? One Possible Solution by Joshua A. Geltzer (Slate)

From the It's-A-Dark-Cloud-That-Doesn't-Have-A-Silver-Lining Desk:

The House Appropriations Committee this week approved its $690.2 billion version of the fiscal 2020 defense spending bill, sending the measure to the House floor.

In good news, the panel adopted an amendment by California Rep. Barbara Lee to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which opponents across the political spectrum have derided as a blank check for war. Lee's proposal would sunset the AUMF eight months after the spending bill becomes law.

For the record, total military spending is "budgeted" at $733 billion when contingency costs and nuclear-related funding are added.

From the It's-A-Dark-Cloud-That-Doesn't-Have-A-Silver-Lining Desk:

The House Appropriations Committee approved its $690.2 billion version of the fiscal 2020 defense spending bill on Tuesday, sending the measure to the House floor.

In good news, the panel adopted an amendment by California Rep. Barbara Lee to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which opponents across the political spectrum have derided as a blank check for war. Lee's proposal would sunset the AUMF eight months after the spending bill becomes law.

Total military spending is "budgeted" at $733 billion when contingency costs and nuclear-related funding are added.

Nina Turner on Bernie Sanders Record

Since the Reagan-Clinton era, these ideas have been considered "radical." Not anymore. Now it is time to complete the political revolution begun by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Voters who have already made up their minds about 2020 probably won't watch this, but anyone still genuinely undecided should give it a look.

Thimblerig

Nancy Pelosi is refusing to advance impeachment because "it won't pass the Senate," promoting instead legislation that won't pass the Senate.

Factoid:

Robert Caro, author of the epic must-read biography of Lyndon Johnson, has 11 identical Smith-Corona Electric 210 typewriters, proving that, even in the digital age, it is still the craftsman that matters, not the tools.

You have entered another dimension...

quote unquote: G. K. Chesterton

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." -- G. K. Chesterton (the first sentence of "The Napoleon of Notting Hill")

Could happen.

Warren: President. Booker: Veep. Sanders: Senate Majority Leader. Gabbard: Sec. of State. Harris: Attorney General. Hickenlooper: Defense. Yang: Treasury. Buttigieg, White House chief of staff. Inslee to Interior or EPA. Williamson: U.N. Ambassador: Moulton: Veterans Affairs. Bennett: Dept. of Education. Klobuchar: Agriculture. Castro: back to Housing and Urban Development. Swalwell, Ryan, Delaney and Messam play rock-paper-scissors for Transportation, Homeland Security, Labor and Energy. Gillibrand: Ambassador to Nauru, with apologies to Nauru. O'Rourke: U.S. Senator (TX).

Or not.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Sen. Elizabeth Warren today called for the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Referring to the Mueller Report, she said "[t]he severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States."

Is Congress beyond redemption? Or can it muster the courage to do the right and only thing?

quote unquote: G.K. Chesterton

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." -- G.K. Chesterton (the first sentence of "The Napoleon of Notting Hill")

The last refuge of a scoundrel is not patriotism. It's cable news.

Joe Biden is touchy but not feely.

"We Regret to Inform You Elon Musk Has Released a Rap Single About Harambe" -- Gizmodo 2019/02/31

Priorities

In the wake of climate change, as tropical diseases like dengue, yellow fever and Zika spread across North America, the U.S. government will discover it has the resources -- thus far unaffordable -- to pay for prevention and cures.

An autocratic leader. Pliant courts. A legislature timorous to the point of paralysis. No way to run a democracy.

It's past time for Congress to curb executive overreach.

The Founders did not intend to create a serial king; their goal was the opposite. James Madison and his cohort had a specific intent: to separate the powers of the state so that autocracy would die in its crib. By removing checks and ceding authority, the legislature has allowed too much power to accumulate in the hands of one individual. The season has come for the people's representatives to take that power back.

Tweet

Stalking Heads

With all due respect to the caution of the Democratic leadership, this guy has to go, now.

"It appears that Trump has a plan in order to fund the $8.6 billion for border wall funding and the $861 billion in increased military spending called for in his new budget: cut all funding for the arts and humanities, public television and radio, and libraries and museums.

"For the third time in a row, Trump’s proposed budget plan calls for the shuttering of the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The cuts come to a total of $897 million."

The rest of the story:
The White House says the cuts are part of the elimination of "wasteful or unnecessary spending." As if it couldn’t get worse, Trump budget would cut all funding for arts, libraries by Alexandra Jacobo (Nation of Change)

Consider:

Bye Bye Biden

The Democratic neolibs, Wall Streeters and corporate water carriers have to know that Beto O'Rourke not Joe Biden presents their best hope of fighting off the progressives. 

It must be very quiet at Biden Manor today. The Crown of Inevitability has turned out to be a paper party favor.

Here Comes Joe Biden and It's Worse Than You Thought

The former vice president is eager to stake out the middle of the road, between ultra-predatory capitalism and solidarity with working-class people.

by Norman Solomon (Common Dreams)

A former vice president and U.S. Senator, Joe Biden's "fealty to corporate power," writes Solomon, "has been only one aspect of his many-faceted record that progressives will widely find repugnant to the extent they learn about it."

When the New York Times front-paged its latest anti-left polemic masquerading as a news article, the March 9 piece declared: “Should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle.”

On the verge of relaunching, Joe Biden is poised to come to the rescue of the corporate political establishment—at a time when, in the words of the Times, “the sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats.” After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden is by far the most seasoned servant of corporate power with a prayer of becoming the next president.

When Biden read this paragraph in a recent Politico article, his ears must have been burning: “Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left.”

The direct prey of Biden’s five-decade “association with bankers” include millions of current and former college students now struggling under avalanches of debt; they can thank Biden for his prodigious services to the lending industry. Andrew Cockburn identifies an array of victims in his devastating profile of Biden in the March issue of Harper’s magazine. For instance:

•“Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools.”

• “Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.”

•Biden worked diligently to strengthen the hand of credit-card firms against consumers. At the same time, “the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.”

Media mythology about “Lunch Bucket Joe” cannot stand up to scrutiny. His bona fides as a pal of working people are about as solid and believable as those of the last Democratic nominee for president.

But Biden’s fealty to corporate power has been only one aspect of his many-faceted record that progressives will widely find repugnant to the extent they learn about it.

Since the #MeToo movement began, some retrospective media coverage has assessed Biden’s highly problematic role in chairing the Clarence Thomas - Anita Hill hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And in recent days, Washington Post reporting has brought into focus his backstory of pandering to white racism against African-Americans during much of his Senate career.

As a 32-year-old senator, in 1975, Biden commented: “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”

More attention is also needed to Biden’s role as Judiciary Committee chair pushing through the now-notorious landmark 1994 crime bill. In the process of championing the bill, Biden warned of “predators on our streets” during a 1993 speech on the Senate floor.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth,” Biden proclaimed. “It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.”

Now, a new Iowa poll shows Biden and Bernie Sanders neck and neck in the first-in-the-nation contest for the nomination, with the rest of the candidates far behind in the state. For quite a while, Biden has been sharpening his hatchet to swing at progressive populism in general—and Bernie in particular.

In typical Biden style, the former vice president is eager to stake out the middle of the road, between ultra-predatory capitalism and solidarity with working-class people. At an October 2017 gathering in Alabama, he said: “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he toldan audience at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

As Branko Marcetic pointed out in Jacobin last summer, “at a time when left-wing populism is increasingly accepted as the antidote to Trump and the GOP’s nativist and corporate-friendly pitch, Biden stands as a remnant of precisely the sort of left-averse, triangulating Democratic politics that Hillary Clinton was relentlessly criticized for personifying.”

Biden makes clear his distaste for the current progressive populist wave. “I know some want to single out big corporations for all the blame,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is true that the balance has shifted too much in favor of corporations and against workers. But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy or let industry off the hook.”

One of the many industries that Biden has a long record of letting “off the hook” is the war business. In that mode, Biden did more than any other Democratic senator to greenlight the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It wasn’t just that Biden voted for the Iraq war on the Senate floor five months before it began. During the lead-up to that vote, in August 2002, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he presided over sham hearings—refusing to allow experts who opposed an invasion to get any words in edgewise—while a cavalcade of war hawks testified in the national spotlight.

“It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible,” Middle East studies professor Stephen Zunes wrote. “More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on August 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.”

Joe Biden’s friendly TV persona appeals to many. He smiles well and has a gift of gab. Most political journalists in the mass media like him. He’s an apt frontrunner for the military-industry complex and the corporate power structure that it serves. Whether Biden can win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination will largely depend on how many voters don’t know much about his actual record.

[This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License]

Reading List:
✓ No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy By Andrew Cockburn (Harpers).
✓ Joe Biden proudly called himself a “Third Way” Democrat who hates “class warfare.” His forty-five-year political career shows how right he was. Joe Biden, Neoliberal by Brank Marcetic (Jacobin).
✓ ‘Weaker candidate than Hillary’: Democrats cast deep doubt on Biden’s 2020 value by ALex Roarty (McClatchy).

quote unquote: "1984" at 35

“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s

busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.” — Chuck Palahniuk

"Socialist" on the Today Show 1981

Here is a man who speaks for us. Phil Donahue was later fired from NBC for calling out the Iraq War.

For every political mistake
of the last thirty years,
there's a video
of Bernie Sanders
warning against it.

And another thing: Our coronations

The long delay between election and inauguration leaves room for all kinds of mischief (appointments, executive orders, proclamations -- imagine the trouble a lame-duck Donald Trump will stir up in the two and half months he will have to stew over his ouster).

The new president should be installed as soon as the election is certified and with as little pomp and circumstance as possible. We are trying to run a democracy, not a serial monarchy. The reason for the long delay is historical, not practical, and it distorts -- aggrandizes -- the office of president to have it pimped out in imperial array.

If the Oval Office was an airplane, Joe Biden would be way over the baggage limit.

We know what you did, Joe.
Joe Biden was a driving force in the fight against busing and federal school desegregation. In 1982, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he voted for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade and throughout his Senate career he voted for the Hyde Amendment prohibiting most federal funding of abortion, and he voted repeatedly against adding exceptions for rape and incest to the amendment. He was Senate leader on the Drug War and on Bill Clinton's draconian 1994 crime bill. He mishandled the Clarence Thomas hearings. He has consistently supported the military-security state. He voted for the invasion of Iraq while 23 of his Senate colleagues, including Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin, Dick Durbin and Paul Wellstone, had the wisdom not to. He carried water for the banking industry throughout his stay in the Senate. He co-sponsored the Bankruptcy Reform Act that hurt consumers and made it harder for students to discharge college-related debts. On criminal justice, he claims to have evolved, but as recently as 2016 he was still claiming credit for the "1994 Biden Crime Bill."

There are really two questions. With all this baggage, can he win (and given that most of the candidates he campaigned hard for in 2016 lost, that's a pretty big question)? And even if it appears that he can win, does he embody the political ambitions for the next president of today's Democrats?

Watch your words.

Harry Truman's vice president, Alben Barkley, was delivering the keynote address at a mock Democratic convention at Washington and Lee University on April 30, 1956. Barkley, newly returned to the Senate after his term as veep and a failed attempt at the Oval Office, spoke of his willingness to sit with the other freshman senators in Congress. He concluded with an allusion to Psalm 84:10, saying "I'm glad to sit on the back row, for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty." Then he dropped to the stage, dead of a heart attack.

quote unquote: Gerard Manly Hopkins

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (God's Grandeur)

Political Stockholm Syndrome:

So often does the kleptocratic political class betray working and middle class voters, that the victims, under continuous economic stress, unsettled by scaremongering media, and persuaded they must cooperate to survive, develop an emotional identification with the con men and grifters holding their futures hostage.

Musical Interlude

Pick your poison

Former House Speaker John Boehner, who is the chief spokesman for the cannabis industry, is one of SXSW's keynote speakers this year, talking about medical pot. Inquiring minds want to know: will he be drunk or stoned?

From the Silver Linings Desk:

"The top U.S. military official in the Pacific defended the Navy on Tuesday concerning two embarrassing collisions at sea that combined killed 17 sailors, saying that 'the fact of the matter is 280-odd other ships weren't having collisions.'" -- The Washington Post

Let's Have a Party

The ever-growing pack of Democratic presidential contenders includes six female candidates five of them politicians; two black senators; a Latino former Cabinet secretary; and an openly gay mayor. And we're just getting started.

Factoid

Here's a big number in the news that's absolutely meaningless: Facebook has amassed 2.3 billion users — more than there are followers of Christianity.

quote unquote: James Madison

"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” -- James Madison (The Federalist, No. 51, 1788/02/06)

James Madison: The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments [The Federalist No. 51], Independent Journal, New York, Wednesday, February 6, 1788.

Fact

quote unquote: NRA

What is Justice?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at the 2019 Women's March in New York City.

They're showing "Blackboard Jungle"

The LAUSD and negotiators for 30,000 striking teachers agreed to return to the bargaining table on Thursday, with Mayor Eric Garcetti acting as mediator. The breakthrough capped the third day of a strike in the nation's second-largest school district. On Wednesday, only about a quarter of the nearly 500,000 affected students went to schools that, as you'd expect with a staff of substitute teachers, have essentially turned into movie theaters.

From the Rust Never Sleeps Desk:

Darrell E. Issa to be Director of the Trade and Development Agency.

The Fight for West Virginia: Revival, Recovery, and Richard Ojeda

It’s November 2018, and the United States lurches towards a critical mid-term election with democracy at a crossroads.

In West Virginia, State Senator Richard Ojeda, a former Major in the U.S. Army, runs for Congress as a Democrat in a deeply Republican district. Can he flip a red seat blue?

Can laid-off coal miners learn computer coding and find employment in the new digital economy?

And can a group of young woman band together after opioid addiction to successfully restart their lives?

This is The Fight for West Virginia.

This is why teachers in Los Angeles are on strike.

More than 25,000 teachers in Los Angeles won't be going to work Monday after a breakdown in contract talks. The strike in the nation's second largest school district affects more than 1,000 schools and more than 600,000 students. A funding battle between teachers and the districts follows similar walkouts last year in six states.

Sen. Jon Tester Asks Colleagues to Stand Up to Trump on The Shutdown

Worth your time and attention:

Will a Californian make it to the White House in 2020?

Sen. Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, megadonor Tom Steyer and Rep. Eric Swalwell certainly hope so.

Unless, of course, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can make it happen sooner.

The rate and severity of shootings are accelerating.

"The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history came in October, when a gunman pent up in a Las Vegas hotel tower showered gunfire on concertgoers across the street, leaving 59 people dead and more than 500 others injured. A month later, a man opened fire on churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26. There were dozens of smaller-scale events this year. The Gun Violence Archive reports more than 14,000 people were killed and over 29,000 were injured in mass shootings in 2017. That might make it the worst year on record. (The map shown here does not include incidents after October 2.)

quote unquote: Thomas Jefferson

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them,

and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." -- Thomas Jefferson, writing to H. Tompkinson (aka Samuel Kercheval), July 12, 1816

Happy New Year