The Democrats Have a Donor Problem that Even Bernie Sanders Can't Solve

Like a lot of people, I'm woke because of Bernie Sanders.

And like a growing number of people, I'm too woke for the post-election DNC propaganda Sanders is peddling to have its intended effect.

Correct-the-Record operatives on Twitter harass me non-stop about how my antipathy for Hillary Clinton helped elect Trump. That doesn't bother me. I believe we're better off with Trump than we would have been with Clinton because—asJimmy Dore has long argued—Trump puts an ugly face on the ugly policies at the center of American life.

Progressivism would have remained asleep under Clinton the same way it's slumbered under Barack Obama for eight years. Although I don't expect Trump's Department of Justice to protect children like Tamir Rice from homicidal cops any better than Obama's did, I do expect people to pay closer attention to such injustices under Trump.

But there's a different form of Brockbot harassment that does bother me because I see it working on some people. It takes the form of tweets like this:

.@EtsiSusi @rosiebudpisces @PoliticsPeach @chrislhayes why are we re-litigating teh primaries and general. There is real work to be done now

— Michael Lockett (@mal2091) November 18, 2016

The purpose of Lockett's tweet is 1) to remind people that a Trump presidency is a horrifying prospect (which it certainly is); and 2) to drive those horrified people back into the arms of the Democrats as their only protection (which the Democrats certainly aren't, as their neoliberal corruption is precisely what led to Trump's rise in the first place).

Instead of acknowledging the glaring flaws of Clinton's candidacy (FBI investigations are no big deal) and platform (even though the generals know that a no-fly zone in Syria will lead to war with Russia, that doesn't really count as long as CNN finds something else to talk about), Brock's minions continue to focus on fearmongering about the GOP:

The #GOPPlaybook since 1968. https://t.co/H2GQVnYuJL

— Michael Lockett (@mal2091) November 18, 2016

If Brock had not just met behind closed doors with George Soros, Neera Tanden, Keith Ellison, and the other neolib masterminds who brought us the Trump presidency, this hillbot nonsense would be easy to ignore.

But it's difficult to ignore when Sanders himself participates, as he does in this speech:

"When you lose the White House to the least popular candidate in the history of America... It is time for a new direction." #FeelTheBern pic.twitter.com/QJh2VzmFZd

— Bernie Wan Kenobi (@Old_Bern_Kenobi) November 17, 2016

It's great to see Sanders calling out the failure of the Democratic Party, but chilling to see him transition immediately to cheering for a Soros puppet like Ellison, who is simply a male embodiment of Clinton's warhawkishness. (The fact that Ellison also happens to be black and a Muslim is simply part of the identity politics screen behind which the DNC loves to hide its most destructive and oppressive policy priorities. Just as Obama's pigmentation was an effective diversion from the racist incarceration state over which he presided, Ellison's religion deflects attention from his eagerness to bomb Muslim children in Libya and Syria and anywhere else Soros desires.)

I don't deny that Ellison supports some genuinely progressive policies. The problem is that the Democratic Party funnels all progressives to the same group of donors, and the insidious influence of those donors invariably compromises the progressive instincts of these candidates. Ellison's progressivism is the window dressing that makes him palatable enough for voters to support him. But the end result is that the donors always get what they want from these candidates--while the voters who put them into office never do.

That's too grand a claim for me to prove in one blog post, but I hope to make the case watertight with additional entries in the coming weeks.

For the time being, I want to make my overarching thesis as clear as possible:

Since the Democratic Party is, as Kshama Sawant observes, a "graveyard" for progressives, the most important step the woke community can take towards defeating Trumpism is to move away from the Democrats as quickly as possible. I'm not saying we automatically have to get behind the Greens. I'm not saying we automatically have to form a new national third party. But I am saying that any progressive energy expended on behalf of the Democratic Party will be systematically opposed and dissipated by that party--even if the great Sanders says otherwise.

This truth is as painful for me as it is for anyone else who simply wants to fall back in line behind Sanders, but I have reached this conclusion based on evidence that I look forward to examining publicly (via this blog) as systematically as time permits.

The upshot is that when a hillbot asks me what I'm doing to stop Trump, my answer is that I'm trying to persuade Nina Turner to leave the Democratic model of fundraising-via-bribery. Accepting such a challenge will require bravery on her part, as she would have to cut her ties to the dark money (almost certainly from Soros and other prominent DNC donors) that taints 501c4 outfits such as Our Revolution.

I look forward to donating my time, energy, and money to the first political leader with nationwide recognition who has the courage to stand up to Trump by recognizing that we must first stand up to the Democratic machine that created him. In the meantime, the hillbots harassing me are wasting their time (except that I guess they aren't, since they're getting paid by Brock, who's getting paid by Soros, who's also paying Ellison).

For now, I'll just let this tweet from Smithee sink in:

Best single sentence description of Democratic dimwittedness I've seen yet. https://t.co/w5XlAk8tF0 pic.twitter.com/4GZwpLxkvM

— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) November 17, 2016

Hillary Clinton Is the Sacrificial Anode of the DNC Warship

Lots of people believe that the Podesta Group works for Hillary Clinton. In fact, it's the other way around.

The Podesta Group is working assiduously to implement a globalist agenda on behalf of the same corporate oligarchs who are pulling Clinton's strings, and Clinton is simply a tool that the Podestas can use to achieve their objective.

As long as an oligarchy-friendly candidate is installed as president, the Podestas will have done their job. There's no reason to think that Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or any other corporate Democrat would be a less effective agent of oligarchy than Clinton. In fact, we have good reason to suppose that all of these candidates (and dozens of other high-profile Democrats) would be more effective than Clinton could hope to be--since she lacks credibility, enthusiasm, and even the mensch-ness that Camille Paglia ascribes to Biden.

Paglia has long maintained that Clinton will be pulled from the race at some point and replaced by a Biden/Warren ticket.

Paglia may not have the personnel exactly right, but she's dead on concerning the strategy in general.

Whether Clinton's collapse at the 9/11 memorial service is as serious as some detractors claim, it certainly lays the foundation for Clinton to exit the campaign on the pretext of health considerations when the moment is right.

But when will the moment be right?

It isn't hard to see that postponing the substitution of Biden (or whomever) for as long as possible makes perfect sense from the perspective of the DNC and the Podesta Group.

Just think about how Clinton's 9/11 controversy has eclipsed other news items for more than a week. Is anyone talking about her failure to stand with the Sioux against DAPL? Is anyone talking about her tepid commentary on police brutality in communities of color? Is anyone talking about how the breakdown of the ceasefire in Syria is merely setting the stage for the war with Russia that Clinton and other Democrats (such as Leon Panetta) crave?

Nope. Instead, all we can hear is people without medical backgrounds arguing with each other about whether Clinton has Parkinson's Disease.

On the surface, her 9/11 collapse looks like just another typical moment of distraction in American politics.

But it's more important for us to recognize her candidacy as a meta-distraction, as will become obvious when Biden is proffered to the American electorate at the eleventh hour to make us think that we've been given a welcome exit from the choice between Trump and Clinton (even though we will all be able to see, after the election, that the choice between Trump and Biden amounted to the same thing).

Clinton's temporary candidacy protects the replacement nominee from any form of accountability. We should think of Clinton as the sacrificial anode of the DNC warship--the highly reactive and polarizing metal whose electrolytic purpose is to be corroded by the saltwater that would otherwise compromise the structural integrity of the hull.

If the Democrats had nominated Biden from the beginning, then he would be the one who looks like he holds environmentalists, peace-niks, and seekers of social justice in contempt.

If Clinton's biggest selling point is that she isn't Trump, then Biden's will be that he is also not Trump--with the added bonus of not being Clinton.

Like many people, I've mistakenly regarded Trump as the foil to Clinton for months now. In fact, both Trump and Clinton will turn out to be foils to Clinton's replacement.

No matter who that replacement is, s/he is unlikely to seem as self-serving, dishonest, and inhumane as Clinton--or as narcissistic, clueless, and petty as Trump.

Please bear this perspective in mind when Julian Assange releases whatever damning information Wikileaks is preparing to unleash against Clinton and the DNC.

No matter how damning that information is, it won't matter come election day because Clinton will have done her job by absorbing all the corrosion associated with the leak.

Furthermore, I predict that no matter how obvious it becomes that Clinton should drop out of the race in light of the Wikileaks revelations (whatever they turn out to be), she won't drop out until after the debates with Trump. The last thing the Democrats need is a gaffe-prone Biden going toe-to-toe with anyone as unpredictable as the Donald.

Anyone who's still wondering how the Democrats could possibly have selected as toxic a candidate as Hillary Clinton should consult the Wikipedia entry on sacrificial (or galvanic) anodes, according to which "the anode must possess a lower (that is, more negative) electrode potential than that of the cathode (the target structure to be protected)."

In other words, the more polarizing a substance is, the better it works to protect another substance.from corrosion in a charged environment.

If the ultra-polarizing Clinton really does stay on the ticket through election day, then the DNC critics are right to say that she was the worst possible nominee the Democrats could have selected.

But when she drops out to make room for Biden's pristine, unsullied candidacy, she will turn out to have been the best possible temporary choice.

If You Don't Realize that Propaganda Trumps Truth, Then Somebody Needs to Tell You So a Few More Times

As Joseph Goebbels observed, "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

The propagandist relies on repetition--not evidence. And repetition appears to be doing the trick as far as public perception of Guccifer 2.0 is concerned.

Once upon a time (as recently as June of this year), there was no Guccifer 2.0.

Then Guccifer 2.0 appeared out of nowhere with a blog and some leaked documents.

Immediately, CrowdStrike (which is a private cybersecurity firm, not a governmental agency) warned us that Guccifer 2.0 might be a Russian cyberspy. Note that in this first, tentative effort to overwrite reality with propaganda, CrowdStrike relied on a whether-or-not construction to articulate the accusation without quite asserting it: "Whether or not [the Guccifer 2.0 blog] is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin."

CrowdStrike's leaders (including former FBI Assistant Director Shawn Henry, who revolving doored his way into the presidency of a cybersecurity firm shortly after retiring from his government post in 2012) never got around to commenting on the authenticity of the leaked documents, but they lost no time in assembling a squadron of cybersecurity experts at similar firms who were willing to repeat the claims about Russian agency--based on the analysis of data provided to those firms by CrowdStrike.

Meanwhile, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker who had named himself after the original Guccifer (also Romanian) as a point of national pride.

We shouldn't trust Guccifer 2.0. He's a hacker who has all sorts of motives for concealing his identity. But neither should we trust CrowdStrike. They were brought in to handle the DNC data breach after it was detected, which suggests that their role in this affair has more to do with managing public relations than keeping data secure.

So it wouldn't matter at all to me if people responded skeptically to both positions by saying, "Who knows whether Guccifer 2.0 is Russian or Romanian?"

But that's not what people are saying because they haven't heard Guccifer 2.0's side of the story--even though they've heard CrowdStrike's assertions about Russian operatives from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and every major television network in the country.

This disheartening phenomenon was evident yesterday in one reader's comment on an article from Russia Today about how frustrated Guccifer 2.0 claims to be about the media's obsession with linking him to Russia:

Even though the comment plainly comes from a reasonable perspective, the writer appears to be completely unaware that Romania is even in contention as Guccifer 2.0's nation of origin. No one should be faulted for distrusting Guccifer 2.0. (I distrust him too!) But those who are interested in the story of whether he really is Russian should at least be familiar with what the hacker himself has claimed on the subject.

If the media's role is to inform us, then readers who are engaged enough by the Guccifer 2.0 story to comment on it should be able to demonstrate an awareness of the most basic claims being made by those involved.

But our media's job is not to inform us. Its job is to manufacture consent among the common folks for the agenda of the elites. And since the war profiteers backing Hillary Clinton's candidacy are eager to take us to war with Russia as soon as she is elected, the media's primary job in connection with Guccifer 2.0 is to use the hacker as evidence that America is already under attack.

The more frequently our newspapers and television pundits repeat that our electoral process is being manipulated by Vladimir Putin, the easier it will be to manufacture public consent for escalating the current proxy war in Syria into something bigger and more profitable (much as the the proxy war in Spain in the 1930s escalated into World War 2).

In January of 2017, after we're well and truly on the warpath against Russia, what will happen if a Romanian hacker surrenders himself to authorities to prove that he really was the lone individual responsible for the DNC leaks?

We'll go to war anyway. That much is obvious. But it's equally obvious that millions of Americans will say, "If he was just some random Romanian all along, why didn't anybody tell us so?"

He did tell us so. But realities that aren't discussed always seem less convincing than fictions that are.

Trump's Climate Change Denial Plays in the U.S. Because Our Corporate Media Ensures That Voters Value Advertising over Education

The echo chamber of corporate news has completely displaced reality for my parents.

My mother has always been patriotic. When I was a child, she wanted to prove America's superiority to Europe to me, so she showed me pictures of European children my own age who were missing limbs because their mothers had taken Thalidomide while pregnant. "We didn't have birth defects like that in America," she boasted, "because the FDA refused to approve that drug."

But after decades of listening to Fox News, she is now convinced that government regulation of the marketplace is the root of all evil.

My father has always been capitalistic. He used to say that climate change was a hoax made up by people jealous of the money raked in by the oil industry.

But after listening to Rush Limbaugh for years, he now argues that climate change is probably for the best because huge swaths of Canada will soon be comfy and warm.

My parents are hardly unique. There are millions of Americans just like them--mostly in their retirement years, mostly nostalgic for the America of their youth (the 1950s), and mostly responsive to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.

But the problem of a worldview warped by disingenuous reporting isn't limited to people like my parents. It includes plenty of people my own age (and younger) who believe that corporate media only distorts the perspective of older people who lean right.

We want to pretend that corporate media doesn't have a toxic effect on younger people who lean left (or at least left enough to think that there shouldn't even be a discussion about restricting abortion rights or LGBTQ rights or any of the other issues that the Democratic Party attempts to conflate with progressive values).

But how many people under 50 remember (or even acknowledge) the critical role that The New York Times played in securing the re-election of George W. Bush by postponing the publication of James Risen's story about warrantless wiretapping?

How many people under 50 object to the fact that our media spends more time covering Ryan Lochte than the flooding of Louisiana? How many of us grasp that corporate news outlets are choosing to focus on Ugly Americanism abroad so as to distract us from how ugly we are to our fellow citizens at home? After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, our professional reporters began calling the American citizens displaced by flooding "refugees." One reason these same media voices have such a hard time talking about the Louisianans displaced by flooding in 2016 is that "refugees" is now being applied to Syrians. The Syria problem stresses our vocabulary because we are temporarily out of words that can refer to poor (and mostly black) Americans without quite acknowledging their American-ness.

And how many people under 50 understand how bizarre it is that here in the U.S., our two major presidential candidates either deny that climate change exists (Trump) or pretend that it's under contol (Clinton)?

Trump and Clinton don't represent alternative solutions to the problem of pollution; they are simply two different brands of the same response. 

How does that happen? Is it really all because of Fox News? Or is it that one so-called journalist after another (in print, on radio, and on television) finds something other than the carbon-poisoning of the atmosphere to talk about?

It's not hard to understand how it happens once we recognize that Americans value advertising over education.

What we learn in school is less important than whatever agenda our advertisers promote via the airwaves. I learned all about the greenhouse effect of carbon emissions as an eighth-grader in public school (even in a state as backwards and oil-dependent as Texas!). But understanding the chemistry behind the problem is irrelevant in a nation in which no one ever talks about it. And we won't talk about it as long as almost every journalist gets a paycheck from an organization that is receiving hush money from the fossil fuel industry.

This is why I think that UK professor Ryan Thomas has no idea what he's talking about in a diatribe he released earlier today.

Thomas thinks MSM-bashing is dangerous because citizen-journalists lack the training/discrimination/critical thinking skills necessary to replace the journalism done by the mainstream media: "I’m unconvinced that rubbishing the BBC and The Guardian and getting your news from some bloke who makes graphs on Twitter is a wise move."

If Thomas confined his anti-MSM-bashing to his own side of the pond, then his article wouldn't be so irritating to me because the BBC isn't nearly as brain-deadening and tunnel vision-inducing as network TV in the US.

But the purpose of Thomas' piece is to stress the importance of entrusting journalism to the professionals--a notion that, if applied in the US, means leaving journalism in the hands of the very people who are being paid to subvert it.

Should I trust some "bloke who makes graphs on Twitter" more than Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and whatever corporate shill NPR has hired to lecture me for an hour about how the threat of terrorism requires the US to bomb more people who might become terrorists?

The answer obviously depends on the bloke in question because I can't know in advance whether the graph on Twitter might actually be designed to inform me. But I do know in advance that whatever the newscasters are telling me has been designed to deceive and distract me.

I don't mean to suggest that professional journalism is entirely dead. Lee Fang of The Intercept is just one clear example of print journalism being alive and well. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! routinely conduct eye-opening interviews with experts from around the world concerning topics that might otherwise receive zero attention. The idea that we must choose between network propagandists and blokes on Twitter is obviously a false dichotomy.

But when people outside the US pontificate about the dangers of bashing the MSM, I have to assume it's because they don't really understand the extent to which our MSM frames the discussion of everything in this country.

We're never allowed to examine the fact that Hillary Clinton sold influence to foreign governments in her time as Secretary of State because our MSM reporters are always eager to talk about something else--whether it be the latest preseason NFL football game, the "racist" overtones of a picture tweeted by Ellen DeGeneres, or the schadenfreude we can all experience when discussing Ryan Lochte.

Americans are going bankrupt every day because of skyrocketing healthcare expenses, but the lobbyists of our big pharmaceutical companies bribe our politicians to convince us that the only solution is to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership so that our medications can become even more expensive.

Jimmy Dore is the bloke on Twitter who exposes that faulty logic by asking, "How can Americans possibly afford cheaper medications?"

If I understand Thomas correctly, I should tune Dore out to listen to all the network and newspaper reporters who want to talk about anything and everything in the world that doesn't matter at all so that the exploitative status quo can chug along unimpeded.

On my side of the pond, we almost never use the word "bloke," so I'll leave it to Thomas to determine whether I've used it correctly in this blog post. He can also be the judge of whether I'm correctly employing another idiom I associate with the UK as I say "Bugger off" to him and anyone else who imagines that corporate media in the US is anything less than a sustained and coordinated propaganda campaign by corporate interests that have already transformed the US into a market rather than a society and are intent on doing the same throughout the world.

Go ahead, Professor Thomas. Take your potshots at citizen journalism. Prop up the powers that be. And when the BBC and The Guardian become as manipulable by corporate interests as ABC and The New York Times currently are, you can choose between elected officials who refuse to acknowledge or address any of the issues that matter most to your fellow citizens. Enjoy.

Trump Is the Ruse de Guerre That Justifies Every Other Ruse de Guerre

Yesterday's word-of-the-day from the Oxford English Dictionary was "ruse de guerre," defined as "A stratagem; esp. one intended to deceive an enemy in war. Hence: a justifiable trick or deception."

The idea that deceptions and betrayals are acceptable under certain circumstances is really the defining feature of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Clinton's supporters aren't just willing to overlook the lies and corruption of their candidate. They're positively eager to do so in the name of defeating Donald Trump.

Do they know that she's lying about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Yes, but they have to support her anyway . . . because Trump!

But wouldn't they prefer it if she would just be honest about her support for the TPP? No--because honesty might cost her some votes. 

Will they be disappointed when she signs the TPP into law as president? Of course not, since her phony opposition to it is simply a ruse de guerre to defeat Trump.

The same logic applies to every lie Clinton tells, every question from a reporter that she dodges, every vulnerable community that she sacrifices on the altar of "centrist appeal." It's all justifiable--every bit of it . . . because Trump!

As long as Clinton supporters accept Trump as the "existential threat" to the U.S. that he's made out to be, they will feel completely justified about their own betrayals of the democratic process, the Constitution, and their fellow citizens.

But Trump isn't an existential threat to anything.

He's simply the ruse de guerre that makes it easy for the Clinton media machine to justify every other ruse de guerre.

Trump is the neo-fascist strawman that allows Clinton to define herself negatively (as "not-Trump") instead of positively (which would be impossible, since there isn't any "there" there with Clinton).

I've been on the fence about Trump's intentions until today. Sometimes it looks like he doesn't know what he's doing, but sometimes it looks like he's trying to lose.

I considered the rumors that his campaign is a false flag operation for Clinton. I understood why some people believed that, but I never saw evidence that struck me as conclusive.

But when Fortune reported that the Trump campaign hired CrowdStrike to deal with a recent hacking episode, the scales fell from my eyes.

Cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike can't do what they're hired to do without having access to the computer networks of their clients, so such clients must be willing to trust their data guardians with their most important secrets. 

The fact that CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm with a track record of investigating hacks of political campaigns is perhaps a good reason to trust them.

But the fact that CrowdStrike is already working for the DNC is a much better reason for the RNC candidate not to trust them.

I don't know what this hire looks like to the rest of the world, but to me, it's a plain signal that the data networks of the Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign have now been fused through CrowdStrike.

And when we later learn that CrowdStrike was able to coordinate Clinton's coronation through an analysis of data voluntarily provided to them by Trump's campaign, the Clinton supporters will smile at the impoverished and imprisoned people of a toxic, smoldering planet and say that merging the campaigns was a ruse de guerre. 

With Enemies Like Donald Trump, Does Hillary Clinton Need Friends?

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

Every politician in history has intuitively grasped the importance of kissing babies and sympathizing with the grieving parents of young veterans who died in the service of their country.

So either Donald Trump is a new kind of politician--or he's not a politician at all.

Many of us are betting on the latter option at this point because Trump does not appear to be trying to win.

Instead, his role appears to be to distract as much attention as possible from the glaring flaws of Hillary Clinton's candidacy by making one outrageous political blunder after another. The nonsense isn't even limited to Trump. It extends to his supporters (such as Rudy Giuliani, who conveniently forgot the 9/11 attacks in a recent speech in which he contended that there were no successful terrorist attacks in America during the presidency of George W. Bush).

Trump has already won the GOP nomination, so at this point he should be working to build a coalition with independent voters outside his party--if he is trying to win.

But he isn't trying to win, so he's focused strictly on shoring up the support of voters who are already behind him (the evangelical Christians, homophobes, and anti-immigration zealots who were never going to vote Democratic in any case).

As I've observed previously in this blog, Trump has already gone over as a heel with the American electorate, but Clinton has yet to go over as a face.

What I haven't fully appreciated until now is that the DNC doesn't care whether Clinton goes over as a face or not. As long as Trump is sufficiently repugnant, the Democrats expect voters to settle on Clinton by default.

Considering the stranglehold the two-party system has on Americans, this strategy from the DNC will probably work.

The only thing that can stop what appears to be a scripted coronation of Clinton is a sudden surge by a third-party candidate. so the Democrats are (predictably) dedicating themselves to smearing the candidacy of Jill Stein. They don't really care if they offend left-leaning voters by wrongly accusing Stein of being opposed to vaccinations.

What a lot of people concerned with social, economic, racial, and environmental justice fail to see is that the Democrats don't care if they alienate us in 2016. They don't need friends as long as Trump has a sufficient number of enemies.

For a sample of how deaf the Democrats have become to the cries of their own progressive base, please treat yourself to this analysis of how a purportedly progressive talk show host (Thom Hartmann) bullies and berates a caller who dares to express how tiresome that Democratic deafness has become:

My favorite bit is when Hartmann claims that Clinton "isn't half bad" as a candidate.

This is the same Clinton who just appointed Ken Salazar to head her transition team for the White House, which is only a red flag for anyone concerned about the habitability of our planet. Salazar has contended that "there's not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone."

Hartmann would never serve as an apologist for the Trump campaign. How could he associate himself with the likes of Giuliani, who claims that there were no terrorist attacks in America during the Bush presidency?

But Hartmann is eager to serve as an apologist for the neoliberalism of Clinton. It's not "half bad" for him to be on the same team as a politician/lobbyist who denies that fracking poses any danger at all to the environment.

Wise up, progressive voters. 

Clinton doesn't need to be your friend. She only needs to turn folks like Trump and Hartmann into your enemies to persuade you that there's no place left on the political spectrum for your point of view. If Trump is your enemy and Hartmann is also your enemy, then you and your movement don't exist. And now that you realize progressivism doesn't exist, you should find something better to do with your time than to oppose the TPP, the carceral state, perpetual war, and the fact that Americans are dying every day because they can't afford medications that are readily available to ordinary citizens throughout the rest of the industrialized world. 

Game. Set. Match. Inevita-Hillary.

The Unblackening of Clinton Critics: Why the Voice of Larry Wilmore Had to Be Silenced

The biggest lie of the 2016 presidential election is the whopper Democrats routinely tell about their appeal to minorities.

These minorities are supposed to include the Latino population, but that's obviously not true--since Barack Obama earned the title Deporter-in-Chief by ordering the deportation of 7,000 immigrant children without so much as a court hearing on the subject. Even though some of those children came from countries savaged by Hillary Clinton's anti-democratic policies throughout Latin America, the Democrats like to pretend (without a scintilla of evidence) that America will treat Latinos at home and abroad better under Clinton than we have under Obama. (We won't.)

Minorities are also supposed to include Muslims, but it's hard for a president who uses drone strikes for extra-judicial assassinations of Muslim civilians (whether they are American citizens or not) to make the case that Democrats are as mindful of Muslim rights as they pretend to be. Clinton's unwavering commitment to interventionism should lead Muslims to expect her foreign policy to boil down to three sentences: "We went to the Muslim world. We saw the Muslim world. The Muslim world died." [Laughter.]

Minorities are also supposed to include the LGBTQ community--a community that is protected within the U.S. by laws and customs, not the presidency. Outside the U.S., if you want to torture, imprison, or execute people for their sexual orientations/identities, you'll need to make significant donations to the Clinton Foundation.

So who are these minorities that are so drawn to the Democrats? The way the Clinton media machine tells the story, there's only one minority community that really matters: the African-American community.

A central component of the DNC narrative in 2016 has been that Hillary Clinton appeals to "diverse" communities, but when Clinton was trounced by Bernie Sanders in Hawaii (the most ethnically diverse state in the country--with whites comprising less than 25% of the population), Clinton's surrogates refused to budge from their position that Sanders had no appeal in "diverse" communities. 

So when the Democrats accused Sanders of failing to appeal to diverse populations, what they really meant was that he wasn't appealing to black Americans.

But is that true?

The Clinton media machine doesn't care what's true. It doesn't care what Michelle Alexander has to say or how many people are listening to her (both inside and outside the black community).

It doesn't care what critics from the black left (such as Benjamin Dixon and others associated with Black Agenda Report) have been telling us for decades about how the Democratic Party shamelessly exploits black Americans for the political power it then uses to exploit those voters as citizens.

It certainly doesn't care if a Hindu from Hawaii (Tulsi Gabbard) wants to make a speech on Sanders' behalf at the Democratic National Convention.

But it cares a great deal about whether a black woman from Cleveland (Nina Turner) wants to do the same thing.

In fact, in Turner's case, the DNC cared enough to interfere by scrapping her speech at the last minute--because the worst sin that can be committed by corporate media in 2016 is to devote airtime to black voices that dare to be critical of Hillary Clinton (even if that criticism boils down to nothing more than supporting an alternative to her).

Accordingly, Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show had to be canceled.

The official story from Comedy Central is that Wilmore's show was canceled because of poor ratings. Wilmore's show inherited the time slot that used to belong to The Colbert Report and is down to just over half as many viewers as the Colbert vehicle claimed.

By that logic, however, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah should also have been canceled, since Noah has retained just over half of the viewers who used to tune in to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Ratings aren't the issue. The issue is that Wilmore dares to be critical of Hillary Clinton and DNC hypocrisy while Noah dares nothing and does nothing.

When Clinton first announced her candidacy, Wilmore brilliantly compared her to Khaleesi from Game of Thrones and suggested (based on a line of dialogue from the series) that Clinton's campaign slogan should be: "Hillary for America. I will take what is mine with fire and blood. I WILL TAKE IT."

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Wilmore created anxiety among white liberal elites by observing: "Bernie's been hanging out with Killer Mike, or as Hillary Clinton calls him, Superpredator Mike."

If Wilmore were white, he would be able to get away with this kind of schtick because the corporate media has done everything possible to accommodate the DNC myth of the Bernie Bro. White males can make cutting comments about Clinton because their criticism fuels the argument that the only people opposed to warmongering corporatism are white, privileged misogynists.

But when Clinton is criticized by one of the people who is supposed to be part of her firewall (a black man working in corporate media, no less!), that is cause for alarm.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when she does everything possible to prop up the school-to-prison pipeline.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her response to Black Lives Matter is less political (i.e. supporting reform of police departments throughout the country) than politically expedient (i.e. co-opting Black Lives Matter though a cynical manipulation of Mothers of the Movement).

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her closest political allies include Rahm Emmanuel (who has essentially sold out Chicago's minority communities to Wall Street) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (who advocates for the payday lending industry that exploits minorities throughout Florida).

In fact, it's so hard to say that Clinton is a friend of the African-American community that the only way the networks can manage to say it with a straight face is to ensure that NO black voices of criticism are ever heard in response.

If one such voice ever got through, then the balloon of Clinton's arrogance about her firewall might pop.

And we can't have that--so take a long walk off a short dock, Mr. Wilmore.

Chris Hedges Vs. Robert Reich on Differences That Simultaneously Make No Difference and All the Difference in the World

If you haven't watched the debate on Democracy Now! between Chris Hedges and Robert Reich (7/26/16--linked above), please do yourself the favor of reviewing the last 90 seconds, in which Hedges says:

I don't think it makes any difference [whether we elect Trump or Clinton]. The TPP is gonna go through whether it's Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is gonna be continued whether it's Trump or Clinton. We're not gonna get our privacy back whether it's under Clinton or Trump. The idea that at this point the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth.

Hedges' points are not only true, but virtually indisputable.

Nevertheless, Robert Reich roars back with heartfelt resentment: "I just wanna say equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is absolute nonsense."

The video closes out before Hedges can explain that he isn't equating the person of Donald Trump with the person of Hillary Clinton. All his argument does is highlight the absence of any practical distinction in the ways their policies will affect people in the U.S. and throughout the world.

That bitter and brutal truth is difficult for Clinton supporters like Reich to swallow even though they have already accepted it on some level. They know that Clinton will support the TPP once she's in office and that she'll promote aggression by the U.S. military throughout the globe and that she'll expand the powers of the surveillance state instead of curtailing those powers.

To people like Reich, however, it's preposterous to say that a Trump presidency and a Clinton presidency will come to the same thing because Trump will make them feel horrible about such policies and Clinton will make them feel good about the exact same policies.

Will Clinton stop police brutality against people of color in the U.S.? Certainly not--but every now and then she'll get some of the members of a choir in a black church to go on camera and forgive the police. Trump, by contrast, will laugh openly at the oppression of communities of color.

Will Clinton stop the U.S. military from murdering innocent civilians all over the globe? Certainly not--but she'll make long, incomprehensible speeches with lots of irrelevant (but nevertheless correct) facts that seem to warrant continuing the murders. Trump, on the other hand, will make short, incomprehensible speeches with a few irrelevant (and completely incorrect) facts that seem to warrant continuing the murders.

When Trump signs the TPP into law, he'll simply give the middle finger to the white working class people who voted him into office. When Clinton signs it into law, she'll just avoid press conferences for the next 200 days while occasionally appearing on The Rachel Maddow Show to deny that she is avoiding press conferences.

Trump will make us feel terrible about the moral bankruptcy of our country, but the Clinton media machine will do a top-notch job of distracting us from that moral bankruptcy.

So that's why Chris Hedges is crazy to suggest that it makes no difference whether we elect Clinton or Trump--because he's just focusing on what will happen instead of how we'll feel about what will happen.

Hitler Gave Us Quislings; The Clintons Give Us Quoslings

A quisling (named after Norway's Vidkun Quisling) is someone who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. A quosling (my word for followers of Hillary Clinton) is someone who collaborates with corporate interests to perpetuate the status quo.

While I was protesting the DNC in Philadelphia last week, I met some Democrats who are so disappointed in the nomination of Clinton that they intend to vote for Donald Trump. I can't follow their logic, but I can paraphrase it:

"Clinton is such a heinous liar that I have to vote for Trump, even though I know he is also a heinous liar."

"Clinton is such a despicable fraud that I have to vote for Trump, even though I know he is also a despicable fraud."

"Clinton is so shamelessly self-serving that I have to vote for Trump, even though he's every bit as shamelessly self-serving."

I think these folks just feel betrayed by the Democratic Party right now (as they should), and I expect most of them to wake up to the realization (before November) that it makes no sense to reward Trump simply for not being Clinton. In fact, this is exactly the sort of nonsense logic that led the Nobel Committee to award a Peace Prize to Barack Obama simply for not being George W. Bush (even though Obama, after accepting the prize, would turn out to be more committed to wars of choice than any president in U.S. history).

I'm not terribly worried about the Democrats who say they will vote for Trump, but I am terrified of those who say that they will hold their noses and vote for Clinton--especially in swing states.

For heaven's sake, why?

Clinton isn't just a flawed candidate; she's unconscionable. And those who say otherwise are lying to themselves and the people around them. If Trump supporters are driven by raw stupidity (the stupidity of believing that Trump actually has the political skill to defeat the TPP as he promises), then Clinton supporters are driven by raw cynicism (the cynicism of pretending that she has the political will to defeat the TPP as she promises).

The pro-Clinton arguments are just as inane as the pro-Trump arguments:

"Trump is such a heinous racist that I have to vote for Clinton, even though I know that the war on drugs to which she remains committed is unabashed racism masquerading as policy for the benefit of prisons-for-profit and the pharmaceutical industry."

"Trump is such a despicable xenophobe that I have to vote for Clinton, whose indifference to human lives all over the globe led to the coup in Honduras, the destabilization of Lybia, the rise of ISIS, and the Syrian diaspora."

"Trump is such a shameless climate change denier that I have to vote for Clinton, who will sell out the future of the planet to her fossil fuel sponsors just as eagerly as Trump, but who at least knows better than to seem gleeful about it."

Clinton supporters don't mind institutional racism; they just want a candidate who knows how to keep racism on the down low, where it's sustainable (unlike the obnoxious and unsustainable racism of Trump). Clinton supporters don't object to xenophobia; they just want a candidate who can slaughter innocent non-American civilians all over the planet without calling too much attention to the phenomenon. Clinton supporters don't care about whether future generations will have clean air and water; they just want someone who knows how to present the illusion that the climate situation is improving even as it continues to deteriorate.

Clinton supporters aren't dumb; they're just selfishly committed to the status quo because they believe it's their turn to reap their rewards for having supported self-serving corporatists such as Clinton over the years.

Clinton supporters are quoslings because they are actively and deliberately collaborating with the enemy--the corporate interests for whom the TPP amounts to a hostile takeover of the U.S. government.

Clinton supporters are quoslings because they are actively and deliberately working to perpetuate the institutional racism associated with the carceral state, the erosion of privacy associated with the surveillance state, and the genocidal impulses associated with the imperialist state.

Clinton supporters are quoslings because they are actively and deliberately working to help the Clinton media machine pretend that talking about climate change is the same as doing something about climate change.

They're quoslings because they know exactly what they're doing--and that's what makes their attempts to bully the rest of us into supporting Clinton even more repugnant than the anger that is driving some misguided Democrats into the Trump camp.

Quoslings are going to keep attacking Jill Stein for her lack of experience and her supposed non-viability because they don't understand that what draws us to Jill isn't her experience or her viability, but her fundamental human decency. They don't understand that no matter how flawed a candidate Trump may be, the monstrous indecency of Clinton will never become acceptable to those of us who know that the status quo has got to go.

Democrats keep telling me that I have to face the binary they're focused on: Trump v. Clinton. I'm not allowed to have a third choice because the political reality is such that anyone who doesn't support Clinton becomes a supporter of Trump. I don't accept that premise, but even if I did, it's plain to me that Clinton (who is spoiling for fights with Russia, Iran, and Syria) is a greater danger than Trump to the safety of Americans and people throughout the world.

But don't worry. I won't vote for Trump because I refuse to confine myself to your binary. If I'm going to be trapped in a binary, I choose this one: After the way the Democratic Party treated my candidate and my values in 2016, am I down with Dems or done with Dems?

That question is way easier to answer than choosing between the twin nightmares of Trump and Clinton.

I am done with Dems--done.

Also, I've seen Jill Stein in person, so I'm a lot more excited to discover what she can do than I am worried about whatever frivolous distinctions there might be between Trump and Clinton.

Hillary Clinton's Policies Are LESS Dangerous Than the Rhetoric That Belies Them

If you support Hillary Clinton because she is at least willing to acknowledge the reality of climate change (as opposed to Donald Trump, who continues to deny the phenomenon), then you apparently believe it's okay to overcook the planet as long as we have the paperwork to show that we smelled it burning a long time ago.

If you support Clinton because she hides her warmongering behind convoluted diplomatic relationships (as opposed to Trump, who talks cavalierly about murdering innocent civilians simply because they're related to suspected terrorists), then you apparently believe that World War 3 won't affect you as long as the corporate media agrees not to cover it.

If you can make peace with Clinton's dogwhistling brand of white supremacy (which is commendably circumspect compared to Trump's overtly racist rhetoric), it's probably because you think that disproportionately imprisoning people of color for nonviolent crimes only becomes a problem for Americans when our leaders use language ill-advised enough to make us confront it.

Over and over again, people insist that Clinton is somehow a "lesser evil" than Trump because even though she will make the same mistakes, she will at least dress those mistakes in palatable language for the population. Whereas Trump would argue, "Let's get rid of freedom of the press because I don't like what reporters are writing!", Clinton knows to say, "Because we can't afford to have journalists tipping the hand of investigators to our ISIL opponents, I'm afraid the authorities will be unable to comment further on [insert tragedy/scandal here] at this time, and we're asking our friends in the press for a temporary suspension of all coverage relating to the subject."

Clinton is a lesser evil than Trump in the same way that a coral snake is less deadly than a garden hose. Sure, the hose can kill people if someone turns it into a noose--but such a noose would be crude and inefficient and prone to breaking. The coral snake, on the other hand, knows how to kill silently and repeatedly without calling attention to itself.

Trump isn't just wrong about everything. He's obnoxiously wrong--wrong in a way that will catalyze American citizens and the rest of the world to oppose him.

Clinton is wrong in a different way: the politically expedient way of Obama. She is wrong about Wall Street the same way that Obama was wrong not to jail the CEOs of the big banks (or even to break up their institutions). She is wrong about race in the same way that Obama has been wrong to defend the trappings of the carceral state (the school-to-prison pipeline, the war on drugs, and a two-tiered system of justice). She is wrong about the environment in the same way that Obama has been wrong to use non-binding agreements (such as the Paris climate deal) as sops to people who want their grandchildren to have fresh air and clean water.

Trump's brand of wrong will essentially provoke change, whereas Clinton's brand of wrong is carefully designed to perpetuate the status quo.

And yet thoughtful people continue to assert that Clinton is somehow less dangerous than Trump.

I'm talking about people like Benjamin Dixon, who fell headlong into the Clinton bungee pit on last night's installment of The Benjamin Dixon Show:

Twenty-three minutes into the video, Dixon says, "If you are a black person supporting Trump, you may not be a white supremacist, but you're sure as shit standing next to white supremacists this week at the Republican National Convention . . so I need people to explain [their] thinking and [their] rationale and give me [their] priorities."

One rationale is this: If we really want to address the institutional racism that compromises our justice system (from the beat cop to the local district attorney all the way to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama), then we have to confront the inequities of that system. The fact that Lynch and Obama are both black only muddies the waters around the inherently racist nature of the oppressive system they support. If Trump is elected president, then when he attempts to appoint an avowed white supremacist as attorney general, the public will be galvanized into opposition (instead of blithely accepting the enforcement of white supremacist policies by Obama and Lynch simply because they happen not to be white themselves).

Dixon goes on to say: "Donald Trump may not be a Grand Master of the Ku Klux Klan, but he has the support of all the Grand Masters of the Ku Klux Klan." He knows perfectly well that Hillary Clinton also has their support, but he seems to take comfort in the fact that she knows better than to brag about it. Does that really make her less dangerous than Trump? Really?

"I want to know how a gay person can vote for Trump," Dixon demands at the twenty-four minute mark. But why doesn't he want to know how any LGBTQ person of voting age can justify supporting Clinton after witnessing her absurd mental gymnastics on the question of gay marriage? 

"I want to know how a poor person can vote for Trump," he says just 20 seconds later--and goes on to argue that in a single-factor analysis based on poverty, a voter would almost certainly choose Clinton over Trump.

Why? If two people are equally committed to robbing me blind, but I know that one will later deny having robbed me and the other will brag to the police about what he did--then I would definitely prefer to be robbed by the braggart. At the very least, his bluster will make it easier for me to convince the people around me that I was robbed. And at most, it might embolden those people to stand up for me.

Dixon is plainly conscious of identity politics. He is astute in his critique of the left's inability to talk about intersectionality as effectively as neoliberals do, but that doesn't seem to keep him from assuming that someone who overtly champions the oppression of the marginalized (Trump) is less likely to lead to an overhaul of the system than someone who covertly champions their oppression (Clinton).

Despite apocryphal reports to the contrary, Abraham Lincoln probably didn't credit Uncle Tom's Cabin (by Harriet Beecher Stowe) with starting the U.S. Civil War. But he may as well have done so in light of the novel's tremendous popularity (which made it second only to the Bible in U.S. sales in the 19th century). Even though Stowe's novel didn't start the Civil War all by itself, it helped solidify public opinion against slavery in the 1850s by presenting millions of readers with a despicable slave owner named Simon Legree. If a fictitious Legree could have such an effect in the age of the printing press, just imagine what a flesh-and-blood Trump will do for progressive values in the era of social media.

With an option like Jill Stein available to us, I believe that only a lunatic could vote for either Trump or Clinton. But if you are a) committed to change and b) convinced that you have to choose between either Clinton or Trump, then I don't see how anyone (from ethnic minorities to the LGBTQ community to environmental activists and peaceniks) can doubt that Trump is the far saner choice.

Donald Trump Knows How to Be a Heel; Hillary Clinton Has No Clue How to Be a Face

No pollster, historian, or political scientist has ever offered as succinct and accurate a definition of American politics as the one attributed to musician Frank Zappa: "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it took an entertainer to see our political system for what it is.

Neither should it surprise us that people with experience in the wrestling world (such as Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Donald "The People's Billionaire" Trump) are capable of translating that experience to success in politics.

Professional wrestling does something that all political parties attempt to do by creating a contest between a face (the good guy) and a heel (the bad guy). Before the 2016 election, however, the job of the two major political parties has been to depict their own nominees as faces and their opponents as heels.

Things are different in 2016 because the Democrats and Republicans seem to agree about who the face is (Hillary Clinton) and who the heel is (Donald Trump).

Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are essentially united in their support of Hillary Clinton. They can all see plainly that she's the more "presidential" candidate--so why can't the voters see it?

Why can't the voters understand that even though neither Trump nor Clinton will lift a finger as President to curtail police shootings of civilians (especially people of color), Clinton will be at least as effective as Obama when it comes to bemoaning such events as tragic?

Why can't the voters understand that even though both Trump and Clinton are lying about their opposition to the TPP, Clinton will do a better job than Trump of convincing voters, once she's in office, that it's a good idea to make our regulatory procedures subject to corporate oversight because the only way to save the American economy is by killing American democracy?

Why can't the voters understand that since the atmosphere is going to choke on carbon emissions anyway, Clinton will do a much better job than Trump of making people all over the world feel optimistic about the business opportunities associated with climate change?

Why can't the voters understand that it takes a delicate touch to use the U.S. alliance with Israel to simultaneously provoke war with Russia and Iran--and that Clinton has spent her political career developing the fine motor skills in the diplomatic fingers necessary to execute that maneuver, whereas Trump will probably bungle things and only end up going to war with one country or the other?

The answer is too simple for political pundits to understand, but right up the alley of wrestling afficianados.

The fact of the matter is that Trump has held up his end of the bargain. He has "gone over" as a heel--to the point that when people ask if Trump is serious about becoming president, his most vocal supporter in the media (Roger Stone) can get away with saying he's "fairly certain" Trump would serve as President if he were to win the election.

"Fairly certain"? C'mon now--if that isn't a guy from the crowd charging into the ring to break a chair over the head of a wrestler, what is it?

And what about yesterday's story that Trump's daughter Ivanka is under consideration as a vice-presidential candidate? That's right out of heel shenanigans 101--designed to get some folks in the audience to ooh and aah while most of the people around them boo.

Trump's longstanding relationship with Vince McMahon (of World Wrestling Entertainment) was mutually beneficial because Trump got to be in the limelight and McMahon got the services of a man who has an instinct for doing whatever it takes to go over with crowds.

But Hillary Clinton has no such instinct. She has never gone over as a face--not even in her unelected position as First Lady. There's nothing surprising about a face claiming to stand up for the rights of women and children, but it isn't enough to make the claim. Real faces--successful faces--manage to convince their audiences that they have a natural instinct to stand up for the helpless (which is difficult for Clinton to do with Marian Wright Edelman exposing Clinton's cynical reliance on her own ties to the Children's Defense Fund to sidestep criticisms that she and Bill have done more to harm vulnerable communities of color in our nation than any other couple in history--including Ronald and Nancy Reagan).

Hillary Clinton didn't go over as a face in Berta Caceres' opinion. She isn't a lovable champion of human rights in the minds of Syrians caught up in a disastrous diaspora. She didn't charm minimum wage workers in New York by refusing to support the fight for $15 until it was over.

It's time for the establishment to stop blaming voters for Clinton's failure to go over as a face.

Sure, wrestlers who are despicable human beings can come across as faces within the tightly scripted and confined world of the WWE. That's because the version of the wrestler that the WWE shows us is the only one we get to see.

But no matter how many staffers Clinton hires, she can't keep her public life as scripted and confined as is necessary for her claims of faceness to ring true. We see her for the heel that she is.

That's why it's starting to look like she'll lose to Donald Trump no matter how hard he tries to throw the match to her.

Corporate America Marshals Its Forces to Declare Independence from Democracy: One U.S. Citizen's Fourth of July Concerns in 2016

The FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's reliance on a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State has dogged her for over a year. However drip drip drippingly tiresome the email scandal has become, some unexpected developments breathed new life into the story the week before my nation celebrated its 240th Independence Day.

Clinton-Lynch Tarmac Meeting / FBI "Interview" Timeline

Monday, June 27: Former President Bill Clinton meets privately with current Attorney General (AG) Loretta Lynch aboard Lynch's plane on the tarmac of Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport for half an hour. FBI personnel instruct onlookers: "No photos, no cameras, no cell phones."

Tuesday, June 28: During a press conference at the Phoenix Police Academy, Lynch admits the meeting occurred but claims that she and Clinton talked strictly about social matters (such as golf and grandchildren) and did not broach any subject relevant to the ongoing email investigation.

Wednesday, June 29 & Thursday, June 30: The story of the meeting and its duration (broken by Christopher Sign of ABC15 in Phoenix) gains national media attention. 

Friday, July 1: Lynch acknowledges that it was a mistake for her to meet privately with Hillary Clinton's spouse, since Ms. Clinton is under investigation by Lynch's Department of Justice. Lynch also punts the question of whether Ms. Clinton will be indicted to James Comey, the current head of the FBI.

Saturday, July 2: Corporate media outlets friendly to the Clinton campaign report that Ms. Clinton spent the morning being "interviewed" (not "questioned"—and certainly not "interrogated") by the FBI concerning her use of a private email server.

Sunday, July 3: Clinton campaign mouthpieces spend the day assuring the nation that a recommendation for indictment from the FBI is unlikely. 

Monday, July 4: Citizens wonder whether James Comey's FBI will recommend an indictment of Clinton or not, but they try not to wonder too hard (because cognitive dissonance about America being subject to the rule of law is a real buzzkill on a patriotic holiday).

It's predictable—if pointless—that the Beltway bubble is suddenly abuzz with concern about the Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting and its potential impact on the indictment process. Realistically, however, the indictment itself is a side issue the same way that all issues become side issues with the Clinton campaign—since the only demand Clinton makes of her supporters is that they turn a blind eye to anything she may have done wrong because the candidate from the alternative party is unthinkable. 

If there is no recommendation for indictment, that merely indicates that the FBI is as subject to influence by special interests as any other part of the American federal government, which should come as a surprise to no one.

No one's mind about Clinton will be changed. Clinton spokespeople will claim that Comey's refusal to recommend an indictment proves her innocence. Clinton critics will claim that such a refusal merely demonstrates Comey's complicity in her corruption. 

If there is a recommendation for indictment, it's still true that no one's mind will change concerning Clinton. Her supporters will contend that with Donald Trump as the alternative, we have no choice but to elect her—even if it means empowering her to pardon herself for any wrongdoing she may have done and subsequently covered up. Her opponents will argue that the indictment is even more evidence of Clinton's corruption, but since they're the only ones concerned about that corruption, it won't necessarily prevent her from being elected.

The question isn't whether we the people of the U.S. want Clinton as president. The overwhelming majority of us don't.

The question is whether we can do anything about the election considering that our corporate overlords have decided to install her. 

I'm spending this Independence Day coming to terms with the possibility that matters are out of the voters' hands at this point (some four months prior to the election).

Clinton represents a grand corporate partnership. Her donors in media and finance get the most attention, but the Clinton coalition is also sponsored by the agricultural, military, energy, and pharmacological sectors.

Plainly, the purpose of trade agreements such as TPP, TiSA, and TTIP is to force democracies around the world to be more responsive to the demands of multinational corporations than to the vulnerabilities of their citizens. And just as plainly, the purpose of a Hillary Clinton presidency is to ensure that our government is as receptive as possible to the hostile corporate takeover portended by such agreements. 

The easiest way to force sovereign nations to privilege corporate bylaws over their own constitutions is by putting the might of the U.S. military on the side of the corporate bylaws. That's the world that American citizens willing to look outside their own narrow range of interests can see being built before their eyes on this Independence Day.

The U.S. military isn't executing the will or acting in the interests of U.S. citizens. It does the bidding of American politicians who lie to us about their motives, their allegiances, and their objectives as they wage war throughout the globe—to the point of having militias armed by our Pentagon battling other militias armed by our CIA in Syria.

America has become the world's Pinkerton Detective Agency: a private security firm on a collective retainer from the most powerful multinational corporations. The poor Americans who don't profit directly from the corporate hierarchy of that arrangement must fend for themselves in one coal town or another: buying groceries on credit from the company store, watching the Pinkerton thugs bust up any attempts to organize unions, and greeting each morning with the awareness that they are getting another day older and deeper in debt.

American democracy was never perfect. There were always questions about elections. Voters were always deliberately misled by political campaigns and outright propaganda. I'm not trying to suggest that America was pure and innocent for almost two and a half centuries before becoming the world's nuclear-armed mall cop in 2016.

But 2016 is different, for it marks the year when the powers behind the throne of our democracy decided that it was too much trouble even to pay lip service to democracy. They're tired of tricking us into thinking that ____ is our enemy. They need to be able to declare war on _____ at a moment's notice—without having to go through the onerous process of making the case (much less proving) that _____ did anything wrong and/or that the public supports taking military action against _____ for such a heinous (though unproven) act.

Whether Clinton is indicted or not, 2016 will be the year when the corporate juggernaut made democracy irrelevant throughout the world. Sure, the coup in Brazil matters. Sure, Islamist authoritarianism in Turkey matters. Guatemala, Honduras, Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine all matter. But the U.S. matters most—not because it's richer or has a longer history of democracy, but because the emerging global corporate state can only hold humanity hostage at gunpoint, and the U.S. is the only country with a big enough gun for the job.

Since the Truman administration, American democracy has been a very ineffective check on the expansion of the military-industrial complex. But at least the potential to check that expansion was always there, even if it remained mostly theoretical. 

I don't believe such a check will remain (not even theoretically) after 2016 (whether Clinton is indicted or not). Democracy may have died long ago, but even the illusion of democracy will be put to death by the end of the year. Corporations won't settle for being recognized as people. They'll be eager to demonstrate that some people are more equal than others—and with American democracy thoroughly exposed as the sham that it has been for a very long time, there won't be anything left to stop them.

Twelve score years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal."

Whether Hillary Clinton is indicted or not, the recommendation of the FBI (and her reaction to it) will demonstrate that American citizens are no longer created equal—that those who function as tools of the corporate agenda can always expect to be treated as if they are above the law . . . because they are . . . because corporate interests have superseded human interests at this point in our nation's development, which is why corporations should spend this Fourth of July celebrating their independence from the constraints of democracy.