Politics
A new book about Hillary Clinton’s last campaign for president -- “Shattered,” by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes -- has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book.
Soon after Clinton’s defeat, top strategists decided where to place the blame. “Within 24 hours of her concession speech,” the authors report, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Six months later, that centerpiece of the argument is rampant -- with claims often lurching from unsubstantiated overreach to outright demagoguery.
I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.” Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century. It was a movement of the left. As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes:
“The Morgans, Rockefellers and their ilk had captured the industrial revolution that dominated the U.S. after the Civil War. The farmers of the South and West fought back with a grass-roots social movement…They formed the People’s Party. Its socialistic platforms demanded public ownership of the major financial institutions, including banks, railways, power utilities and other private monopolies that were crushing the public well-being.”
I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.” Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century. It was a movement of the left. As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes:
Marine Le Pen is the latest fascist to be called a “Right Wing Populist” by the corporate media.
There is no such thing.
Let’s be clear: Populists are leftists. We support human rights, social democracy, peace and ecological sanity.
“Populists of the Right” are fascists. Their goal has a clear definition, as put forward by the term’s originator, Benito Mussolini: “Corporate control of the state.”
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When they take power, they become National Socialists, using the government to enrich the corporations and the rich, rather than Democratic Socialists, or social democrats, using the state to serve the people.
After Hillary Clinton’s devastating loss nearly six months ago, her most powerful Democratic allies feared losing control of the party. Efforts to lip-synch economic populism while remaining closely tied to Wall Street had led to a catastrophic defeat. In the aftermath, the party’s progressive base -- personified by Bernie Sanders -- was in position to start flipping over the corporate game board.
Aligned with Clinton, the elites of the Democratic Party needed to change the subject. Clear assessments of the national ticket’s failures were hazardous to the status quo within the party. So were the groundswells of opposition to unfair economic privilege. So were the grassroots pressures for the party to become a genuine force for challenging big banks, Wall Street and overall corporate power.
In short, the Democratic Party’s anti-Bernie establishment needed to reframe the discourse in a hurry. And -- in tandem with mass media -- it did.
The reframing could be summed up in two words: Blame Russia.
Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright scolded young women for supporting Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton before the 2016 presidential primary. They implied that in supporting a candidate based on politics instead of gender, millennials are either ignorant or complacent about the feminist struggle.
On March 8, the International Women’s Day celebration on the Ohio State campus revealed just the opposite. Many of the young women, men, and non-cisgender people who gathered on the Oval had just come from a 1,000-strong solidarity teach-in organized by Columbus Coalition for International Women’s Day. Most were far more in touch with the radical foundations of the women’s movement than its most recognized “icons” are.
“I’m a Marxist feminist, like Angela Davis and Rosa Luxemburg,” said Emily Shaw of the International Socialist Organization.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, famously coined the Orwellian phrase “alternative facts” when pressed about flat out lies told the previous day by White House press secretary Sean Spicer regarding the crowd size at President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The dictionary definition of a “fact” is a piece of information presented as having an objective reality. Accordingly, the term “alternative fact” is itself is an oxymoron. A fact is both indisputable and immutable. Having “alternatives” to a fact undermines its very meaning.
These semantic gymnastics are compounded by Trump’s fundamental and alarming misunderstanding of the role of the three branches of government and the media. The attempt by the Executive branch to recast the role of the media as the mouthpiece of the administration is dangerous. The media is the government’s watchdog, not its lap dog.
On November 21st, California secessionists calling themselves “Yes California” filed papers with the California Secretary of State proposing a November 2018 ballot measure that would ask registered voters whether California should secede from the US and become its own nation. If passed, the measure would strike language from California’s constitution that says the state is “an inseparable part of the United States of America, and the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land.” It would also require a special election in March 2019 for the sole purpose of asking voters whether they’re really sure they want to secede. The measure has been dubbed Calexit after Brexit, which is shorthand for Britain’s vote to withdraw from the European Union.
The last time Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the proverbial table was 10 years ago. At that time, I reported on an unusual incident:
Stage set: a dining room at left, an office at right
A woman enters the office where the phone is ringing. She answers it.
NP: Hello? Why do you ask? Yes, I'm sure. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Impeachment is off the table. Now let me tell you about some new legislative proposals that I think you're really going to like. I'll give you what we're going to pass in the first hundred seconds and in the first hundred months. Which one do you want first? Let's start with…
The woman's voice lowers but continues as lights go up in the dining room, where we see a cat jump off the table and wander into the office where the woman is hanging up the phone.
NP: Where were you sweetie? Was I ignoring you? Come here kitty kitty. I didn't mean to ignore you.
The phone rings. The cat leaves.
NP: Hello? Yes, this is Nancy Pelosi. Yes, I know, but an investigation investigates. It doesn't impeach. I've said it before and I'll say it again – Will you excuse me a second?