Just because things are going well now doesn't mean they'll continue to go well.

But as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I wonder how many pundits can write whatever they like any more.

While I think Bernie's had his run, and is now a Hellery asset, Caitlin Johnstone at www.inquisitr.com is on the march:

...There is a thrum emanating up from the ground on which we walk, from the trees which we rest under, from the howls in the wind....It goes “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie…”

[snip]

I said it back then, and I’ll say it again. Let it be known — if Tim Kaine or Joe Biden are nominated in place of Hillary Clinton, there should be unmitigated and furious indignation and outrage.

[snip]

They are not legitimate alternatives. They have not been popularly nominated; they were not included in the primary process; they have not been under the scrutiny of the press or the public, and they did nothing to demonstrate that they are the choice of the people. Because they aren’t. Not one vote went their way.

[snip]

The resumed criminal investigation plus the Observer recording of her saying she favors rigged elections coming out on the same day means her campaign is dead. If she died today, they’d find a way to replace her. Her campaign is dead.

[snip]

They will tell us they can’t do Bernie while trying to give us Tim Kaine. If they can do Tim Kaine, they can do Bernie Sanders.

[snip]

And we’re awake to your tricks, Podesta et al. We know how you move. We’ve seen too much, and we know all your plays. We know you’re furiously trying to create a human-sounding response for her right now while frantically back and forthing all over the place in text and on the phone. We know you’re illegally coordinating with your super PACs right now to create distractions and to bring your army of online shills “on message.” We know that if we try to join in peaceful protest, you will send in disruptors to make us look violent. There’s so much we know now. That’s just a slice of your playbook, and WikiLeaks has plenty more.

And what if this were to happen? How can we be certain that Bernie would get the opportunity to do anything? The two wings of the corporate party will wrap themselves defensively around the corporatist center to prevent We the People from having our say, much less rule.

This nation is done. What other conclusion can be drawn from the 20 fools who ran against Bernie for the presidency, with two of the worst winning nominations. The worst of the worst own the entire process, and we are the enemy. We want to pretend that our laws still mean something in the face of uninhibited greed.

from last week.
The Global Empire - Tariq Ali talks to the author Thomas Frank about the unfolding mess of the USA’s upcoming election and the failure of its political and electoral system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atWpZ9PMHTc (30 min)

if they dare. What's he doing with the profit? Acting like an imbecile, not smart just greedy as hell. Exploiting everything within reach to belch out a few more pennies, because investors. immagetthefuckupouttaheeeeeeeere...

A worldwide Amazon boycott would definitely send them a messooh what's that shiny new thing? What was I saying? LOL

~kerplunk~

Poignant piece about the media collusion to bring down Sanders, thanks for calling our attention to it.

Hardly anyone is digging in to expose the media's (with the exception of the Intercept and a few others, even major favorite Taibbi has been slipping into the clutches of the Fear) over-the-top, bizarre and unprecedented collusion this election cycle beside Thomas Frank. He's been traveling the country speaking some serious truth to power that is music to the ears of true progressives who hoped for a New Deal-style makeover from Obama, and who then went to the trenches with Bernie Sanders for what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime real New Deal candidate. I get the feeling those fake-assed Democrats at TOP shit bricks when the name Thomas Frank is mentioned. That's because he's on fire lately, with the focus on the reasons why we are all here, because the Democratic Party sold out the 99%. They deserve the grave they're digging now.

I stayed up in bed riveted reading this excellent piece. Some excerpts:

Perhaps it was the very particular media diet I was on in early 2016, which consisted of daily megadoses of the New York Times and the Washington Post and almost nothing else. Even so, I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval.

He goes on to wonder how a guy with such a legitimate Left point of view, and so free of scandal, could be taken down by such a perennial liberal paper as WaPo. Goes on to say his views were perceived by the Beltway insiders as such an existential threat, because of who they are and what their world is like.

The Washington Post, with its constant calls for civility, with its seemingly genetic predisposition for bipartisanship and consensus, is more than the paper of record for the capital—it is the house organ of a meritocratic elite, which views the federal city as the arena of its professional practice. Many of its leading personalities hail from a fairly exalted socioeconomic background (as is the case at most important American dailies). Its pundits are not workaday chroniclers of high-school football games or city-council meetings. They are professionals in the full sense of the word, well educated and well connected, often flaunting insider credentials of one sort or another. They are, of course, a comfortable bunch. And when they look around at the comfortable, well-educated folks who work in government, academia, Wall Street, medicine, and Silicon Valley, they see their peers.

Then he methodically analyzes a succession of hit-pieces they churned out relentlessly, 5 to 1 negative on Bernie, where for HRC it was 50/50. Some of them are astounding to read (I missed a good many when they were published, and was furious reading their pathetic, snotty derision and fabrications, much of it derived and regurgitated from the Clinton campaign). The backdrop to all this "Bernie is wishful thinking, he's not going to get any of these things, he doesn't understand this or that," is people were desperately wanting to hear such populist talk, not the least because it would dignify their worries and concerns and get the conversation started, which the media up until then had completely shirked away from. It went on and on, ignominiously ending with this:

The danger of Trump became an overwhelming fear as primary season drew to a close, and it redoubled the resentment toward Sanders. By complaining about mistreatment from the Democratic apparatus, the senator was supposedly weakening the party before its coming showdown with the billionaire blowhard. This matter, like so many others, found columnists and bloggers and op-ed panjandrums in solemn agreement. Even Eugene Robinson, who had stayed fairly neutral through most of the primary season, piled on in a May 20 piece, blaming Sanders and his noisy horde for “deliberately stoking anger and a sense of grievance—less against Clinton than the party itself,” actions that “could put Trump in the White House.” By then, the paper had buttressed its usual cast of pundits with heavy hitters from outside its own peculiar ecosystem. In something of a journalistic coup, the Post opened its blog pages in April to Jeffrey R. Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, so that he, too, could join in the chorus of denunciation aimed at the senator from Vermont. Comfort the comfortable, I suppose—and while you’re at it, be sure to afflict the afflicted.

Franks concludes genuine Left Wing ideals are an anathema to the 10% Professional Class.

For one thing, we learn that the Washington Post, that gallant defender of a free press, that bold bringer-down of presidents, has a real problem with some types of political advocacy. Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect or misguided, in the paper’s view: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy, they might have a long and distinguished history, they might be commonplace in other lands. Nevertheless, when voiced by the people in question, they become damaging.

Looking back from the vantage point of several months, however, it seems to me that the real recklessness is the idea that certain political questions are off-limits to our candidates—that they must not disparage the party machinery, that they must not “revile” the Wall Street bailouts, and so on. Consider the circumstances in which Post pundits demanded that Sanders refrain from disparaging the Democratic National Committee. Democratic elected officials across the country were virtually unanimous in their support of Hillary Clinton, President Obama was doing nearly everything in his power to secure her nomination, and the D.N.C. itself was more or less openly taking her side. All these players were determined (as we later learned) to make this deeply unpopular woman the nominee, regardless of the consequences. Maybe Sanders didn’t have the story exactly right—nobody did, back then. But still: if ever a situation cried out for

Really what it comes down to is, the insiders will tell you what is attainable and what is not, according to what keeps their lifestyles firmly in place.

The reason the Post pundits embrace these tidy sophistries is simple enough. Knee-jerk incrementalism is, after all, a nifty substitute for actually thinking difficult issues through. Bernie Sanders ran for the presidency by proposing reforms that these prestigious commentators, for whatever reason, found distasteful. Rather than grapple with his ideas, however, they simply blew the whistle and ruled them out of bounds. Plans that were impractical, proposals that would never pass Congress—these things are off the table, and they are staying off.

Clinging to this so-called pragmatism is also professionally self-serving. If “realism” is recognized as the ultimate trump card in American politics, it automatically prioritizes the thoughts and observations of the realism experts—also known as the Washington Post and its brother institutions of insider knowledge and professional policy practicality. Realism is what these organizations deal in; if you want it, you must come to them. Legitimacy is quite literally their property. They dole it out as they see fit.

The doublespeak couldn't be more obvious.

Think of all the grand ideas that flicker in the background of the Sanders-denouncing stories I have just recounted. There is the admiration for consensus, the worship of pragmatism and bipartisanship, the contempt for populist outcry, the repeated equating of dissent with partisan disloyalty. And think of the specific policy pratfalls: the cheers for TARP, the jeers aimed at bank regulation, the dismissal of single-payer health care as a preposterous dream.

Here's the catch. These kiss-ass positions are so shortsighted and this embarrassing epoch of collusion between well-off, hermetically-sealed upper middle class pundits will be coming back to haunt them.

Now, here’s the mystery. As a group, journalists aren’t economically secure. The boom years of journalistic professionalization are long over. Newspapers are museum pieces every bit as much as Bernie Sanders’s New Deal policies. The newsroom layoffs never end: in 2014 alone, 3,800 full-time editorial personnel got the axe, and the bloodletting continues, with Gannett announcing in September a plan to cut more than 200 staffers from its New Jersey papers. Book-review editors are so rare a specimen that they may disappear completely, unless somebody starts breeding them in captivity...

So why do the people at the very top of this profession identify themselves with the smug, the satisfied, the powerful? Why would a person working in a moribund industry compose a paean to the Wall Street bailouts? Why would someone like Post opinion writer Stephen Stromberg drop megatons of angry repudiation on a certain Vermont senator for his “outrageous negativity about the state of the country”? For the country’s journalists—Stromberg’s colleagues, technically speaking—that state is pretty goddamned negative.

They're removed from reality, playing in a fantasy world of doing as little as possible as a muckraker to ensure your precious upward mobility.

Here in the capital city, every pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward. We cling to our credentials and our professional-class fantasies, hobnobbing with senators and governors, trading witticisms with friendly Cabinet officials, helping ourselves to the champagne and lobster. Everyone wants to know our opinion, we like to believe, or to celebrate our birthday, or to find out where we went for cocktails after work last night.

Until the day, that is, when you wake up and learn that the tycoon behind your media concern has changed his mind and everyone is laid off and that it was never really about you in the first place. Gone, the private office or award-winning column or cable-news show. The checks start bouncing. The booker at MSNBC stops calling. And suddenly you find that you are a middle-aged maker of paragraphs—of useless things—dumped out into a billionaire’s world that has no need for you, and doesn’t really give a damn about your degree in comparative literature from Brown. You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late now. Too late for all of us.

Fucking brilliant.

There's a lot more that Frank has done this season, and it's worthwhile to check out. I've watched a number of his speaking appearances for "Listen Liberal" (as well as for his other books) and have been a long-time fan (although I was a bit befuddled that he sort of overlooked or gave shirt shrift to Occupy, when doing speaking engagements for "Pity The Billionaire").

I can't think of many who have provided such of rock solid criticism and illuminating insights to the inner working of the New Democrats, which began under the Clintons and runs through the veins of the Obama administration, and the fucking disaster we're in a the present moment, with all those old New Democrats salivating at the keys to the pantry again. Basically, their idea was to jettison the heritage as Party of the People's responsible to middle and working class voters, for the big money donation of Wall St and corporate America and the votes of the top 10% upper middle class white professionals, who used to be reliably Republican voters but have now been swayed. He uncovers how Clinton and Newt Gingrich were all set behind closed doors (the public face was adversarial, the private face congenial, because, hey, now we're talking money, for our friends, donors and ourselves) to see out Social Security to Wall St but then you Monica got down on her knees.

If you haven't seen any of these they're worth your time:

Just read the last paragraph of any article to see what the intended editorial slant is.

What's so sad is how unsubtle it is. It's like they have so much contempt that they don't even bother to try.