Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings.

Exactly.

Matt Stoller today at Twitter: "The core theme in the #bigtechhearings today was the contrast between democracy and monopoly power."

Why the Super-Rich Keep Getting Richer, by Grace Blakeley

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren't obscenely wealthy because they work harder but because their corporate empires drain society's resources – and we'd all be better off without them.

... In an interview the other day, I was asked why we should care about Jeff Bezos’ wealth if it makes everyone else better off. But the extreme inequalities generated by modern capitalism are making obvious something that Marxists have known for decades: the super-rich generate their wealth at the expense of workers, the planet and society as a whole.

In a rational and fair society, the vast resources of a tiny elite would be put to use solving our social problems.

Must-read essay about oligarchic rule and why it must be destroyed: "Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget."

Seldom have I seen the gist of the matter explained as accurately and clearly as in the following essay by Chris Hedges.

Of course, today was eventful. If you're gleeful at this seeming power move on the eve of Super Tuesday -- Pete and Amy out for president, but very much with the "in crowd", Bloomberg's money still theoretically available to bankroll the nominee Biden, and Sanders at last deposed -- your satisfaction is fully shared by the ruling power structure.

The oligarchy will find nothing disturbing in a center-right "democratic" platform stripped of meaningful content, one that excludes any mention of correcting (read: attacking) inequality. Even if this "GOP Light" capitulation were enough to defeat Trump, nothing much would change with the fundamental issues, would it? The tinkle-down would continue, as it has since RayGun was in charge.

Until you grasp this basic fact, center-right moderation borne of fear is just more of the same oligarchy fluffing. You'll be sorry; but then again, that's usually the way it plays out. We'll have ineffectively treated the symptoms yet again, while allowing the disease to rage on.

Click through and read the whole damn thing. Get off those personality cult fetishes, and FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget (Common Dreams)

The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope.

Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity—the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests — are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life.

Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our democracy, and finally our species, will become extinct.

The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution.

The United States stood on the cusp of revolution—a fact President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence — amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by aggressively curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with massive unemployment by creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), making the government the largest employer in the country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through the National Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking regulations, including the Emergency Banking Act, the Banking Act and the Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in today’s money of $9.88 billion for relief operations in cities and states. The Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing the highest earners at 91%.) Roosevelt’s administration instituted programs such as Social Security and a public pension program. It provided financial assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and culture. It created the United States Housing Authority and instituted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage and set a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted the country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party wildly popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party, should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.

But the New Deal was the bête noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo Roosevelt’s New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic — class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.

The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination ...

"It turns out the rich really are different from you and me. They drive like entitled jerks."

Without further comment.

It's official: The fancier the car, the more likely the driver's a jerk, by Alfred Lubrano (Philly News)

It turns out the rich really are different from you and me. They drive like entitled jerks.

They’re middle-finger-pointing, ride-up-your-trunk-bullying, outta-my-way motorists.

That’s the authoritative word from researchers who keep track of this sort of thing.

Three studies over the last five years show that people driving expensive cars were more likely to cut off other motorists and less likely to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks ...

You're adept at making tons and tons of money? That's nice. Now, get off my porch.

A few weeks back, I began to compile a list of the idols that get extremely short shrift in this contrarian's world.

These are the tenets of conventional Americans wisdom that I refrain from worshiping. If allowed to bop along unprovoked, I also generally don't openly disdain them, but today I'm feeling a tad challenged.

Among the concepts I refuse to worship are the narrow (automobiles as genital extension mechanisms, big-time college sports, Miller Lite tastes great) and the broad (gods and religion; flags and patriotism).

Capitalism's pretty high on my list of conceptual conscientious objection, especially the way we've come to practice it in contemporary America.

I accept that it takes all sorts to make a world, and for someone to be good at running a business is fine by me. I've even done it on an often unintentionally non-profit basis.

However, to me this skill exists alongside musical aptitude, vocational ability, linguistic prowess, and so many other components that define a human being.

When it comes to elevating capitalism to a value system I'm supposed to accept without question and venerate as the highest aspiration of a man or woman, then you can count me out. If memory serves, neither the Constitution nor the Bible stipulates capitalism, although as noted in the space only recently, a case can be made for Buddhist Economics.

The morning Constitutional: "It is capitalism that must be overcome to solve its inherent inequality problem."

The reason for today's rumination stems directly from a conversation I had yesterday, in which it was deemed an item of central importance that a wealthy man had been born poor, and raised himself up to praiseworthy status as a billionaire -- verily, a "self-made man."

Please.

Tellingly, even an obvious disciple of "the business of America is business" is capable of seeing through the fallacy of the "self-made man," as here:

Self-Made Man - No Such Thing, by Mike Myatt (Forbes)

Do you view yourself as a self-made man or woman? If you do, you may want to take another look in the mirror. What’s wrong with the “self-made” theory? Everything. If your pride, ego, arrogance, insecurity, or ignorance keeps you from recognizing the contributions of others, then it’s time for a wake-up call. If your hubris is overwhelming your humility then the text that follows is written just for you.

An article at Slate takes the debunking considerably further.

The Self-Made Man: The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth, by John Swansburg

I’ve always admired what my father accomplished, and how he accomplished it, while not quite sharing his confidence that his experience was repeatable, especially in our current economic moment. The yawning gap between the dearly held ideal of the self-made man and the difficulty of actually improving your station in America, particularly if you’re poor, made me wonder about the utility of the rags-to-riches story. Is it a healthy myth that inspires us to aim high? Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work?

The reason I personally refuse to worship the idol of the "self-made man" (note the traditionally and annoyingly masculine usage) parallels my unwillingness to fetishize capitalism, because in both instances, the common denominator is the accumulation of money and wealth to the exclusion of other characteristics that might be plausibly applied to a definition of adult success.

Put another way, we're all self-made to an extent in terms of our interests; taking into account the Forbes columnist Myatt's valuable listing of the ways we've all been helped by others along the way -- teachers, coaches, mentors, friends, co-workers -- most of us discover nuanced interests, and even when deprived of material resources, these are honed into what delights and defines us.

Impoverishment surely closes off certain of these avenues of self-development, and I'd be a fool to deny it. But I'd be equally foolish to say that the impoverished might choose at any point to embrace capital accumulation and lift themselves to wealth and influence. It plainly isn't so in most cases, and to push the analogy even further, some of us aren't inclined to be capitalists, just as I'm not equipped (or inclined) to sing Pavarotti's arias.

All the same, there might be a very poor 50-year-old man who can sing these parts because he's been practicing them on his own, passionately, his whole life, and to me, such a man would be eligible for lauding as "self-made" as much as any billionaire.

He's more likely to be denigrated because he remains poor. It always has to be about money, right?

Not in my world.

I may know how to play a game, and I may be good at it (or not). It doesn't mean it's the right game to play.

Wealthy blithering idiot David Jones Sr. knows "a pit of mediocrity" when he sees it -- most often in the morning while shaving.

Times like these are when I usually suggest eating the rich, but I’m not sure the vindaloo sauce is strong enough to make the rich remotely palatable. Stewing in Jones' own senility sounds like a better recipe, anyway.

SCALA founder blames ‘self-appointed busybodies’ for killing West End Walmart, by Caitlin Bowling (Insider Louisville)

During a speech to the Rotary Club of Louisville, David Jones Sr. blamed “faceless boards,” “so-called preservationists” and “self-appointed busybodies” for killing a proposed Walmart Supercenter at 18th and Broadway.

He also listed the death of the project as a reason he, PNC Bank Regional President Chuck Denny and Tandem PR CEO Sandra Frazier formed the Steering Committee for Action on Louisville’s Agenda (SCALA), which has faced backlash after Insider Louisville revealed its existence.

They “were disappointed that leadership failed to allow Walmart to build a large and greatly needed store on the corner of 18th and Broadway,” said Jones Sr., founder of Humana.

Walmart had planned to build a 154,722-square-foot store with a garden center, deli, pharmacy and optometrist in West Louisville, but the company backed out of the development after a lawsuit was filed by individuals and groups who opposed the design of the Walmart, arguing it did not fit the urban neighborhood. Walmart wanted to build the store back from the street with a 620-space parking lot between the front door and the street, but those who filed the lawsuit wanted it to abut the sidewalk.

“I just can’t tell you how disappointed I was at our lack of capability to allow Walmart. They would have provided 300 jobs, affordable food and other things, but most importantly, hope,” he said. “That disturbed me so much that I said to my friends ‘Why don’t we put together a group and see if there’s any way to get out of this pit of mediocrity.’ ”

Councilwoman Barbara Sexton Smith, D-4, asked Jones Sr. during the Rotary event if he saw hope for the area surrounding 18th and Broadway given that the YMCA of Greater Louisville and Passport Health plan to invest millions of dollars in developments there.

“Not nearly as much hope as I had when the Walmart was going there,” Jones Sr. said.

Trump? He's a symptom -- and he's not reading your tweets.

Come to think of it, it's also been just about a year since Dan Coffey demanded city council attorney Matt Lorch's head on a platter -- and both Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey replied, "How'd you like it cooked, SIR?"

ON THE AVENUES: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

It’s where Gahan’s and Dickey’s creation, the Good Ship Democratic Lollipop, currently rests, and taken together, these two narcissistic beached whales in a child’s overmatched wading pool are managing against all imaginable odds to make the buffoonish serial liar Donald Trump look precisely like George Washington.

And it's been 367 days since I mentioned that I can handle only one resistance at a time.

---

If you intend to “resist” Trumpism by doubling down on behalf of the Democratic Party as it currently exists and operates on a daily basis right here in the real world, as opposed to Disney World, then you’re in for yet another apocalyptic shock, because the party requires gutting down to the foundations, and probably beyond.

Speaking personally, I don’t care. Both major parties can go to hell, and the Democrats might as well go first. If the Democratic Party disappears, perhaps something better can be built in its place. How can it be worse?

Our gutless right-wing local version of pretend-Democrats is on life support, and the chairman’s delusional cluelessness seems to have become institutionalized. The humane thing to do would be to euthanize the party, and start all over again.

It’s also time to consider a point that almost none of us are prepared for, including me. This is the element of risk sustained by the resistance during the course of the opposition.

Or, if you will, an occupation.

If you’ve studied history at all, you know that when the going gets tough, the majority usually remains seated atop its collective hands. Meanwhile, the minority resolving to openly act finds that standing up for what they believe requires some skin in the game.

It’s risky, and isn't always pretty, either. Demonstrators are beaten and jailed. Dissidents are harassed and lose their jobs. Neo-Nazis attack people in the street, and Soviets ship them off to the gulag. It’s precisely the sort of retaliation that blacks, union members and Native American pipeline opponents experience as a matter of course, although whites like me tend to think that we’re exempted – because “law.”

Yeah, right.

I’m guessing that precious few Americans have a clue about how painful this “resistance” might become. We’ve taken for granted inalienable rights and freedoms, and when these pipe dreams actually have existed outside our idealized and addled imaginations (again, mostly white), they have been gained through direct action -- agitation, peaceful protest, civil disobedience and at times, regrettably, bloody violence.

That’s history, plain and simple, and a better appreciation of history would at least be helpful, although you may or may not discover the most relevant bits on your iPhone.

Finally, it won’t be enough for the left-of-center resistance to be solely predicated on identity politics and social justice issues of the precise sort that Mayor Gahan routinely and insincerely barters to local Democrats who are sufficiently gullible to accept toothless Potemkin human rights lean-tos in exchange for looking the other way as Gahan’s increasingly self-serving and megalomaniacal “luxury” expenditures exit the rails.

Up and down the line, Democrats have fiddled past the carnage of neoliberal economic orthodoxy for far too long, and it helped bring us to this lamentably idiocratic juncture. Understand that what’s coming over the horizon is very much about economics, too. Capitalism didn’t “win,” and all those –ism frictions have never left us, although we may have left them.

Earlier today, I remarked to friends that there’s nothing like a room filled with annoyed citizens to produce remarkable levels of concentration on the part of local elected officials. Everything changes when humans act together, in concert, as opposed to separately, isolated from each other. I'm a cynic, but I haven't abandoned hope.

Resistance?

I’m trying my best here in Anchor Flats. If there is any time left over, I’ll help you with Trump.

Deal?

---

Now, that was a vintage rant, and I'm sticking with it. Granted, I didn't foresee the Dan Canon candidacy, or the delightfully concurrent way the civil rights attorney's campaign for 9th district congressman has held a mirror up to toxic Gahanism during a time of Lorch purge, Speck grid botch, NAHA putsch and Mt. Tabor subjugation.

By the way, here's some truth from Bernie Sanders. Friends, look past the diversions and shell games ... and follow the money.

Let’s wrench power back from the billionaires, by Bernie Sanders (The Guardian)

If we stand together against powerful special interests we can eliminate poverty, increase life expectancy and tackle climate change

Here is where we are as a planet in 2018: after all of the wars, revolutions and international summits of the past 100 years, we live in a world where a tiny handful of incredibly wealthy individuals exercise disproportionate levels of control over the economic and political life of the global community.

Difficult as it is to comprehend, the fact is that the six richest people on Earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.7 billion people. Further, the top 1% now have more money than the bottom 99%. Meanwhile, as the billionaires flaunt their opulence, nearly one in seven people struggle to survive on less than $1.25 (90p) a day and – horrifyingly – some 29,000 children die daily from entirely preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia ...

Local Democrats gear up for the talent show, except "you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism."

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi asked that Steve Bannon be fired, and a day later Bannon was gone. I was struck by this single passage in Taibbi's article.

... Prospect writer Robert Kuttner noted with surprise in his piece that Bannon seemed upbeat. He essentially told Kuttner he believed the Charlottesville mess and stories like it were a long-term political windfall for people like himself.

"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em," he said. "I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Speaking for myself, perhaps this lifelong atheist's revulsion at public displays of piety, when otherwise unaccompanied by private acts aimed at gaining the stated objective, explains why the past week's gestures have left me not so much cold as completely disinterested.

It isn't that I disagree with many of them, having been proudly "anti-fascist" since around 1978, so much as lament the left's ongoing inability to place the focus on the genuine economic evil perpetuating our divisions: capital accumulation, big money, robber barons, the One Percent-- call it what you wish.

Inequality results from more than one contributing factor, but really, don't we need to follow the wealth?

To me, Bannon's phrase "economic nationalism" reads as code for those who'll perpetuate divisions to keep the money where it rightfully belongs, and in this usage, Bannon might be detestable but at least he's honest. He knows his bosses' names, and makes sure their birthday cards always arrive on time.

Democrats imagining themselves as leftists or progressives in a Clintonesque mold are in thrall to an illusion. You can serve the interests of capital accumulation, or not. There isn't much of a middle ground, if any, and yet local "Democrats" avoid this introspection as though you were asking them to ban same sex marriage or reinstitute Jim Crow.

I cannot recall a local Democratic Party candidate speaking about anything of a genuine balls-out economic nature apart from Dan Canon, who hasn't yet even contested an election. But we're treated to a never-ending series of resolutions and gestures -- and faux Democrat Jeff Gahan's dog-whistling putsch against public housing, which by now should have been publicly condemned by every Democrat in the city.

But instead, everyone merrily plans events, concerts, talent shows and diversions, and while they're engaged in these wild goose chases, functionaries like 1Si's Wendy Dant Chesser ensure the worsening of the fundamental economic imbalance by serving our regional oligarchs first -- and maybe some of it will trickle down, eventually.

Presumed left-wingers, note that your omelette remains uncooked because almost no one among you is willing to break a few eggs. A member of Jacobin's editorial board explains why, and if you fancy yourself a progressive ...

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn, by Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobin)

You can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism.

 ... So “far-right racist” doesn’t make Bannon particularly unique or worrying. It’s how devastatingly well he understands liberalism’s failures and how willing he is to craft a fraudulent and reactionary program for those who’ve only experienced decline during the Clinton and Obama years.

Like a mutant weed growing out of a shit-covered pile of compost, Bannon has cultivated his particular brand of reaction entirely within the decomposing corpse of American liberalism. In no other soil could it ever have blossomed.

And:

Bannon’s ambitions make gruesomely clear that liberalism and the Democratic Party in no way represents the left-wing obverse of conservatism and the GOP. And liberals, deep down in their hearts, understand this. They have no true ideological counterpoint — no real program and certainly no vision for changing society for the better. Michael Wolff correctly diagnosed Bannon as “embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury.” This doesn’t just refer to his disgusting comments — it includes his fiery ambition, something the Democratic Party has altogether lost. And even at its absolute best, liberalism’s aspirations were only a watered-down, cheap knockoff of the utopian dreams of communist and socialist activists.

Then:

But you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism. A paltry means-tested welfare state just flips white-supremacist programs and policies “for the deserving us not the undeserving them.” Both fit comfortably in the ruling-class politics of divide and conquer as opposed to the broad solidarity they fear. How can we expect the public to rally around something like Medicaid when huge portions of the working and lower-middle classes don’t qualify for it? Universal social democracy — a more transformative program than the one Sanders campaigned on — is called for. We’re in the midst of a reckoning with the neoliberal consensus. The Right has made their play, and now we have to make ours.

In closing, a suggestion to my councilman: if Team Gahan won't show you the results of its rental housing registration program, perhaps a new council resolution would do the trick. Just make sure to craft it in a manner emphasizing human rights rather than economic imperatives, or Adam will overrule you.

As Floyd Dems gut public housing: "In (Bernie Sanders') reckoning, the problem with the American economy wasn’t some shadowy cabal of interested parties, but the entire billionaire class."

Yesterday in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Adam Dickey rushed to assure doubters that all the standard requisite anti-fascist bromides were being dispensed via social media.

In other words, his usual form sans content.

Meanwhile, eight months into Deaf Gahan's public housing takeover, with fumbling functionary David Duggins doing just as slipshod a uninformed stooge's job at his new megabuck NAHA appointment as any of Donald Trump's federal appointees, neither Dickey nor his party has uttered so much as a peep about resisting this outrage -- although they remains united in censoring heretics like me, which conveniently enables them to ignore valid questions and maybe even sleep at night on widely scattered occasions.

But androids don't sleep, do they?

Populism for Plutocrats, by Matt Karp (Jacobin)

Democratic leaders still haven’t learned: you can’t fight the forces of oligarchy without naming the enemy.

 ... If “our politics and our economy” are rigged, who rigged them? Democrats, after all, have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-five years. From Bill Clinton’s serial deregulation of Wall Street to Obama’s decision to bail out predatory banks rather than victimized homeowners, elected Democrats have done their fair share to fashion the plutocratic order that now dominates the American economy ...

 ... But if “A Better Deal” is a blueprint to challenge the forces of plutocracy, it could use another draft. It includes lamentations about monopoly control over airlines, eyeglasses, and craft beer, but not a single mention of unions. (Without a much more comprehensive program to boost the power of workers, no combination of antitrust enforcement and infrastructure dollars — let alone job training programs — will level the playing field) ...

 ... Yet even as Schumer and Pelosi announce the dawn of a new Democratic populism, the weakness of their own language betrays them. Is it possible to fight plutocracy without identifying any actual plutocrats?

The main point: Know Your Enemy.

What distinguished the Bernie Sanders campaign more than any other issue — including his support for free college or Medicare for All — was that he named his enemy. Among his other objectives, Sanders’s attacks on “the 1 percent” were an attempt to reorder American politics around class lines: not with a stale disquisition on stratification, but by tapping into Americans’ anti-billionaire sentiment, religiously excluded from mainstream politics by both parties but thrumming powerfully just below the surface.