Open Thread

I'd meant to post something original today, but unfortunately a major plumbing issue affecting several of the units in my complex will be interfering with the blog. Our regular handyman threw up his hands in despair last night and the major troops and outside contractors are being called in. I've been told to stay out of the kitchen. From past experience with such things, I am expecting the noise to fall somewhere between a dental drill on steroids and a jackhammer.

If anybody is out there, talk about whatever you like in comments. Meantime, here are a few of my recent New York Times comments to inspire you or disgust you or just leave you in a state of numbed apathy.

First, Charles Blow wrote about the privileged Oklahoma frat boys of Sigma Epsilon KKK and their racist chants on the bus. He is not shocked, shocked. My response:

There's a reason they call them frat brats. Rather than go to college to develop their cerebral cortices, they exercise the tribalistic, primitive limbic area of their brains. Their majors are brawls, beer, babes and bigotry. If there aren't any freshman pledges around to haze, then they'll pick on other people whom they deem weak or marginalized. If there is no physical prey immediately available, they'll conjure them up, braying their KKK anthems and telling their foul jokes.

And when they get caught, what do you think they do? They go into full Paula Deen mode. Nobody feels as bad as they do, they pathetically sob. They are not bigots -- the beers and the peers made them do it! Even their Paula Deen clone of a housemother joins in the folksy fun, for crying out loud. And OMG, look over there! There are black students caught on video, threatening the poor white frat boys. Will horrors never cease.

Boys on the bus chanting odium is nothing new, because the school bus has been bullying central all their lives. Luckily, this country is currently in a rare self-examination mode, and schools are falling all over themselves to take hazing, rape and blatant racism at least somewhat seriously, lest they lose their government and corporate funding and precious reputations.

 But the rot is still simmering and will inevitably come to a boil. Just because racism isn't sanctioned doesn't mean it's not endemic. Sigma Delta Hate is as close as the house next door.

And where would the New York Times op ed page be without Hillary to kick around and obsess over?  Entering the fray is so very hard to resist. So here are my comments to Frank Bruni and Gail Collins respectively:

 Hillary Clinton's cover of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way" fell flat. She came across like Nixon, testily defending her emails and mawkishly bringing up her sainted mother's funeral arrangements contained therein as prey for a ravening press corps. She made them grovel for credentials, then pre-emptively accused them of having no interest in the real scandal of the GOP's attempted sabotage of the White House-Iran negotiations.

"Now, I would be pleased to talk more about this important matter," she said, "but I know there have been questions about my email, so I want to address that directly, and then I will take a few questions from you."

She never did address the Iran question, nor was she asked about the fact that some of her charity and political donors (Goldman Sachs, hedge fund billionaire Richard Perry) are also among the donors funding the bomb bomb bomb Iran campaign currently in full throttle in Congress and think tanks and on cable TV. Her email scandal is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

If Mrs. Clinton thinks she can coast to the Oval Office while hiding from the public, treating the press like dirt, and avoiding debates with challengers from the left, she should have another think coming. Then again, we no longer have a functioning democracy. Perhaps we should let the people in charge of the DNC know, right away, that they can expect a voter boycott if they insist on shoving this damaged politician down our throats.

 ***

Gail Collins is right: the media should be pressing Mrs. Clinton on her policies. We know we're never going to find out whether she was micromanaging Chelsea's wedding on the public's dime and time instead of her own, so we might as well move on to more important stuff that will affect all of us directly.

Will she support expansion of Social Security in these tough times? Her family foundation has had an uncomfortably close partnership with Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who's made it his life's mission to cut our earned benefits. Chelsea herself teamed up with Catfood Commissioners Simpson & Bowles to try and convince college kids that their grandparents were stealing their medical care and futures. What's up with that?

Look at the advisers. If former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin comes on board, raise the warning flag. It was Rubin (helped by John Podesta and Larry Summers) who orchestrated financial deregulation, paving the way for the economic crash and the ensuing worst wealth disparity in modern times. Don't let her blame that mess on just the GOP or "irresponsible borrowers." We need restoration of Glass-Steagall, and as Elizabeth Warren suggests, a dismantling of the TBTFs. What's Hillary's position on that?

Ask her about drones, gun control, dealings with corrupt foreign governments like Saudi Arabia, and corporate coups disguised as "free trade" deals.

Don't just let her get away with platitudes about breaking glass ceilings.

Billionaires For Bombs

Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision which wed money to politics, the billionaires running the place have thumbed their noses at representative democracy and are now more brazenly dictating foreign policy and starting wars. The American Republican Party and Israel's Likud Party are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same entity, led and funded by Sheldon Adelson and a sordid little cabal of predatory high rollers.

The latest kerfuffle that has everybody shouting "treason" and "sedition" involves freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) doing an end-run around the White House's nuclear negotiations with Iran and getting most of his Goplikud cronies in Congress to sign a letter to Iran, warning that once President Obama leave office, all deals are off, so let's call the whole thing off while we are still ahead.

Cotton's biggest financial backers just happen to be the Adelson-funded Club for Growth and Wall Street billionaire Paul Singer, whose stated main life objective is to bomb the hell out of Iran. A veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Cotton, the great young Neocon hope of the future of the Forever Wars, beat incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor last fall with two-thirds of his campaign war chest coming from outside his state.

Vice President Joe Biden yesterday issued a strongly-worded statement on the GOP's breach of protocol regarding the Iran negotiations, but without even bothering to note the slimy connection among Wall Street and Israel and domestic senatorial perfidy. From Politico:

“In 36 years in the United States Senate,” Biden said,“I cannot recall another instance in which senators wrote directly to advise another country — much less a longtime foreign adversary — that the president does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them.”

Cotton responded to Biden on Tuesday, saying that he and the other senators who signed the letter are “simply speaking for the American people.”

Just so you know, The American People are now defined as the Multinational Oligarchy. In this particular case, the American People are named Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer. Their money speaks for all of us, regardless of who we voted for in the last election.

Singer, who specializes in loading  foreign countries like Argentina down with debt, the better to plunder them in the future, openly and unabashedly wants to start a war with Iran for the future plunder of all its oil. He's largely gotten a pass from the corporate media for his malevolence, because he's the "rare moderate Republican" who backs gay rights -- not least because he happens to have a gay son. But as a 2014 profile of him in The Nation reveals,

First and foremost in Singer’s hawkish foreign policy portfolio is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank whose scholars have promoted “crippling sanctions,” bombing Iran, and sought to downplay how ordinary Iranians might react to a pre-emptive bombing campaign. The hedge fund mogul contributed $3.6 million to FDD between 2008 and 2011, making him the organization second-largest donor after Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus.

“Too much has been made in the West of the Iranian reflex to rally round the flag after an Israeli (or American) preventive strike,” wrote FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht in 2010. And in October 2013, as Washington and Tehran were engaged in the early stages of an unprecedented diplomatic détente, FDD Executive Director Mark Dubowitz and Gerecht, writing in The Washington Post, called for the passage of more sanctions, a move which would have certainly hindered diplomatic progress, because “abandoning the long quest for atomic weapons would be an extraordinary humiliation for Iran’s ruling class. That isn’t going to happen unless Iran’s supreme leader and his guards know with certainty that the Islamic order is finished if they don’t abandon the bomb.”

Before Biden went apoplectic over the seditious Tom Cotton, his boss had mouthed a few mealy words about "donors" interfering with his negotiations with Iran, but he was quickly shouted down by the incensed Billionaires for Bombs party. Could the reason that Obama and Biden are now keeping mum about the big money behind Cotton's letter be that a Hillary Clinton booster is also behind the Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran campaign? His name is Richard Perry, and he gives generously to her foundation as well as to the right-wing Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Again, from The Nation:

Perry, the media-shy owner of Barneys and manager of the Perry Capital hedge fund, runs in the Clintons’ New York City and Hamptons social circles. He gives to the Clinton Foundation and, along with his wife, makes no secret of his support for Hillary Clinton’s future political aspirations. A 2007 New York Times profile of Richard and his wife, Lisa Perry, describes two large portrait photographs of Hillary Clinton adorning the hallways of their penthouse apartment. In a Tablet magazine profile two years ago, Lisa Perry explains that she lost interest in politics because she “really wanted Hillary to be president.” Despite that disappointment, she contributed to Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, though her husband, who had contributed in 2008, gave no money.

The Democrats can't call out the Goplikuds' dirty money without also calling out their own dirty money. So they'll pretend that this is all about a naive young Arkansas upstart named Tom Cotton and the Republicans' lack of respect for President Obama. 

* Update 3/11: Never thought I'd hear myself write this, but Tommy Freedom has written a good column on this same subject: Sheldon Adelson as the Doctor Evil character, de facto leader of the not-so-free world. Unfortunately, our favorite chin-stroking pundit does not follow his Eureka moment to its logical conclusion, and call for the ditching of Citizens United.

So which do you prefer: Goplikuds or Republikuds? 

Update #2: Mondoweiss has more on the Republikud letter ostensibly written by Cotton, (reportedly at a $1 million price-tag) pointing out more of the money/bribery details. Friedman's former Times colleague, Bill Kristol, was allegedly the scribe behind the bribe. This scandal is starting to make Hillary's emails smell like roses. I can't wait for the media to start asking her about her own donors. I can't wait for Eric Holder to convene a grand jury. I probably wait in vain.

Hypocrisy Marches On

Nobody ever promised you a bridge-crossing from mendacity to truth, people.

As a matter of fact, President Obama admitted as much Saturday during his Selma speech. While his dulcet words now waft high above the Homeland, waiting to be chiseled into the marble halls of his library shrine (if not into the hearts and minds of the populace), one of his paragraphs remains as firmly grounded in the American soil as a patch of ineradicable Alabama kudzu:

Look at our history.  We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters.  That’s our spirit.  That’s who we are.

Oh What a Tangled Web of Kudzu (credit: Alabama Press-Register)

Without a willing suspension of disbelief in our own mythic history and the endless spinning of our national yarn, where would we be as a country? We Shall Overcome our cognitive dissonance, or our heads will surely explode.

  But plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Without even a hint of irony, Barack Obama proclaimed: 

 We have endured war and we’ve fashioned peace.  We’ve seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives.  We take for granted conveniences that our parents could have scarcely imagined.  But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship; that willingness of a 26-year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five to decide they loved this country so much that they’d risk everything to realize its promise.

It was only a day before Obama uttered those words that, risking their own freedom, a group of protesters was arrested outside a Nevada Air Force base, where soldiers are still at war, busily droning people to death with technological wonders from the safety of their trailers. The troops were operating from a Kill List of "militants" whom Obama himself has personally marked for pre-emptive extermination.

Anti-drone protesters who said they wanted to spotlight war crimes and connect with pilots were arrested after trying to block the entrance Friday at a US Air Force base in southern Nevada.

More than 100 people were assembled Friday morning outside the Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs near Las Vegas, officials said.The protesters attempted to block the entrance but the workers were able to come and go during the shift change between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., officials said.

 Organizers said protesters stood or laid down on the road in front of the two access gates. Others were stationed along the highway carrying photos and tombs to represent drone warfare victims....The protesters said they have been at the site for a week to speak out against remotely piloted aircraft flying armed missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Organizers said the protest drew people and advocacy groups from 18 different states. Casey Stinemetz of Veterans for Peace said the St. Louis-based organization saw the event as an opportunity to reach out to the "cogs in the machine," such as the pilots and other Creech personnel who carry out drone operations.

President Obama, for his own part, has been successful in keeping the names and other details of his drone victims -- said to number in the thousands -- a deep, dark secret from the American people. He is not about to cross that bridge. As he explained in Selma, "that’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction -- because we know our efforts matter.  We know America is what we make of it."

Predators and war criminals are magically made into aw-shucks hucksters and entrepreneurs. And speaking of entrepreneurship, the USA now leads the world in weapons sales and production, thanks to its endless war of terror and escalation of conflict in the middle East:

The annual study by IHS Inc.—which looks at military markets in 65 nations, excluding small arms, munitions, and surveillance programs—finds that the United States is behind one-third of all equipment and weapons exports world-wide.

This is no small amount: in 2014, global "defense" trade surpassed $64.4 billion, the report finds.

"Defense trade rose by a landmark 13.4 percent over the past year," said Ben Moores, senior defense analyst at IHS Aerospace, Defense and Security, in a press statement. "This record figure has been driven by unparalleled demand from the emerging economies for military aircraft and an escalation of regional tensions in the Middle East and Asia Pacific."

 The U.S., further, is the top profiteer from rising conflict across the Middle East, accounting for $8.4 billion in exports to this region in 2014, compared to $6 billion the previous year.Meanwhile, U.S. allies in the expanding war against ISIS are boosting their weapons imports significantly. Saudi Arabia blew past India to become the number one weapons importer in the world. Analysts predict that, in 2015, Saudi Arabia will account for one of every seven dollars spent on such imports.

No matter that Saudi Arabia has one of the most abysmal human rights records in the world, even going so far today as to physically bar the female Swedish foreign minister from addressing the Arab League meeting, on top of its funding of 9/11 murderers, its whippings of bloggers, its horrendous treatment of women, its beheadings of dissidents. Saudi Arabia is a respected partner in profit of the United States, you see.

And hypocrisy never stopped Barack Obama before. Just today, he declared socialist Venezuela to be a national security threat, and slapped it with economic sanctions for.... drumroll, please.... committing  unspecified "acts of violence or abuse of human rights, (penalization for or prohibition of) freedom of expression, or were government officials involved in public corruption." 

The White House said the order targeted people whose actions undermined democratic processes or institutions, had committed acts of violence or abuse of human rights, were involved in prohibiting or penalizing freedom of expression, or were government officials involved in public corruption.

"Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement.

"We are deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government's efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents. Venezuela's problems cannot be solved by criminalizing dissent," he added.

The democratically elected government of Venezuela is not involved in a drone assassination program or a high tech arms cartel that colludes with autocratic governments, nor has it invaded any of its neighbors or established a thousand military colonies around the world. What it has done is accuse American hucksters and entrepreneurs of trying to stage one of their CIA coups in the national interest of the same multinational oil companies having long, sordid histories of Latin American plunder. The Venezuelan government is in the process of expelling "State Department" personnel from the country. And the Venezuelans own a huge chunk of the world's oil reserves.

And Barack Obama possesses an outsized chunk of the world's bullshit reserves. He has earned near-universal plaudits for his most recent speech. His power to wow the crowds with his voice is seemingly invincible.

The only thing more cognitively jarring than the president's gorgeous Selma speech was the presence of George W. Bush as an honored guest at the event marking Bloody Sunday. Bush was invited because he did sign the renewal of the Voting Rights law, before the GOP went totally off the rails with the election of the first black president.

The nearest thing to controversy about Bush's presence, as far as the New York Times is concerned, is that Bush was "cropped out" of their front page photo showing the Obamas marching across the bridge. The award-winning Times photographer claims he inadvertently "super-overexposed" Bush.

That's irony for you. The real sin of the Times is that they never exposed George enough while they had the chance, and when it could have made an actual difference. They planted phony stories on nonexistent gold cake uranium and Iraq WMDs, greasing the skids for an illegal invasion. Bending to White House pressure, they'd withheld James Risen's blockbuster story about illegal government eavesdropping on everyday Americans, helping Bush sail to a second term.

 So many hucksters, so little time.

The Times They Are A-Changing

 In honor of the annual idiocy known as Daylight Saving Time, I thought I'd save myself some time and re-post what I wrote a year ago on this fraught subject.( A more timely update is below.)

Welcome to Daylight Saving Time, a.k.a. Nighttime Stealing Time.

Since most of us don't need that fake extra hour of daylight to plow the fields and bring home the cows after supper, time theft is exactly what the annual abomination of Daylight Saving Time is. No benefits are accruing to those being ordered to save. To the contrary: the first Monday of DST has been scientifically proven to be the most dangerous day of the entire year. Chances are that you might not even live to see another night because of all that pretend extra sunshine being inflicted upon you. Heart attacks and fatal car accidents and workplace mishaps reach their annual peak Monday, the intensity decreasing slightly for the rest of the week. Night-owls suffer more than day-owls. Outbreaks of workplace cyber-loafing are not uncommon. 

(from National Lampoon's Vacation)

Calling something 'saving' is SOP to make you feel resigned to being abused without your permission. (see: Republicans' "health savings accounts" to replace Medicare, and Obama's MyRa "retirement savings accounts" to maybe someday replace Social Security.)

The Turn of the Screw Clocks is tantamount to mandated sleep deprivation in an already sleep-deprived society. Sleep deprivation has, after all, been deemed torture by the Geneva Convention. Hyperbolic to call Daylight Saving Time torture, you say? Well, not so much, when studies show that even occasional or "minor" sleep deprivation has a cumulative effect, permanently altering brain chemistry and damaging health. You cannot catch up on lost sleep. For some, that one mandated lost hour could be the difference between life and death.

Sleep deprivation has been blamed for the Chernobyl meltdown, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger disaster.  Most recently, the engineer of the ill-fated Metro-North train that killed four people in New York reported "zoning out" as a result of his work schedule having recently shifted from late night to early morning.

Factor in our chronic lack of sleep with the exhaustion pinnacle that is Nighttime  Stealing Week, and you've got a recipe for a whole bunch of tragedies.

 The irony is that the whole time-altering scam started out as a joke by none other than Ben Franklin. He facetiously suggested that colonists could save money on candles if they advanced their clocks ahead by an hour in the warmer months. And the rest, like most of ironic American history, is history. The Gothamist has 21 more reasons why the Great Time Robbery sucks, as if you needed any more.

Meanwhile, if you are you feeling tired and cranky after being forced to set your clocks ahead, try not to smash stuff as the chipper TV news mannequins urge you to just put on your happy face and dress yourself in sunshine and indulge in that horrible, neoliberal-sounding Power Nap after your Power Lunch. Try some blood pressure-reducing Ohhhhhmms between the Yawwwwwns.  There might still be a foot of grimy gray snow on the ground where you live, but try to visualize all those hopped-up horny Easter Bunnies "springing ahead" wherever you look. Don't be a downer. Take an upper. If you're not into drugs, just raise up the curtains and greet the glorious dawn! It's empowering. Which is pretty stupid, since DST actually means it's still dark outside at 6 a.m.; Dawn is dawning a whole hour later now. So, scratch that. Stay up a whole hour later instead, and watch the romantic sunset.  Your body clock may be screaming in protest, but those diurnal rhythms are just so yesterday. We live in an artificially lit, techno-connected 24/7/365 brave new world of higher worker productivity and stagnating wages. Get used to it, plebes, because there's always another poor slob waiting to take your place, willing to get by on less sleep just for the chance to survive another day-lightful day.

So let's keep a lousy idea that was lousy when they dreamed it up in those mythical, simpler, agrarian times for no other reason that it exhausts us. Sleep, as a universal, equal opportunity, no-cost phenomenon, is profitable only for the sleepers. The global economy is not making any money while you're snoozing, folks! The world cannot be made safe from terror with a country full of lazy snorers strung out in their hammocks of dependency. And in a hyper-capitalistic world that commodifies everything from drinking water to health care, if it's not profitable, then we must get rid of it. The plutocracy's answer is not more sleep for better health, but less sleep for us translating into more money for them.

And what better place to study how to reduce sleep than the taxpayer-funded Eternal War Complex? From ABC News:

By devising superhuman ways of staying awake for up to seven straight days and nights, military officials hope to lend U.S. soldiers a strategic edge in future conflicts.

"Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation … will create a fundamental change in war fighting and force employment," says a recent statement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.

"This program is really out of the box," says John Carney, director of DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance program. "We want to look at capabilities in nature and leverage it so we can apply it in ways that no one thought possible."

Just what we need: bird brains studying bird brains for fun and profit and death. No word if there are mass suicides among sleep-deprived birds to correlate with the suicide epidemic of returning "tinkered" troops. But whatever. Stop kvetching about your precious hour of lost sleep, civilians!  If our Troops can go without sleep to keep you safe, think of the endless possibilities for an army of round-the-clock worker bees here in the Homeland!

Actually, that is already happening. As journalist Nick Reding reveals in his excellent investigative book Methland, the way that the low-paid, multi-shift workers at an Iowa meatpacking plant stayed awake was massive quantities of .... well, meth. The feds and the corporations didn't care, because the cost of the labor stayed low, and the profits flowed in, and people are ultimately disposable anyway. One more reason the War on Drugs sucks, as if you needed another reason.

I've told the story before about how I got my own personal, albeit short-lived revenge  on Dimwit Saving Time. One of my first assignments as a cub reporter was to write a story on it. Silly me, I (mistakenly of course) advised readers to set their clock back an hour instead of forward. I awarded folks with two extra hours at no cost to them. When the story zoomed past the sleepy editor and got into print and I realized my mistake while reading the front page at home that Sunday, I felt sure that the next day at work would be my last. But much to my surprise and relief, the newsroom was erupting in laughter. Turns out the only readers who called to complain were ladies who'd missed church. And since my editor was both an atheist and a misogynist, it ironically worked out very well for me at that brief moment in Time.

And it turns out I am in very good company. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford used his Twitter account to advise 130,000 people to set their clocks back Saturday night. No word if he was smoking crack at the Time, or if he can't remember because he was plastered when he Tweeted. Like a sleep-deprived migrating magpie.

Maybe the Army can study him.

Update: Of course, President Obama's retirement savings accounts took off like a shot (a fair shot at a fair share, but only after climbing the ladders of opportunity to a mythical level playing field, where everybody who works hard and plays by the same set of rules has a fair shot at a fair share after closing the mythic education and skills gaps, that is.) And Rob Ford, poor guy, is no longer mayor because of illness.

But everything else is the same old, same old. The biggest sleep deprivation story of the year is still that of the Metro-North engineer, whose undiagnosed sleep apnea and unhealthy swing shift schedule caused him to literally fall asleep at the switch as his early morning train sped around a curve, derailed, and killed several passengers. 

Another tragedy involved a woman who was killed by carbon monoxide as she fell asleep in her car between low-wage shifts at Dunkin Donuts.

Neither of these had anything to do with Daylight Stealing Time per se, but everything to do with how the Precariat is not getting enough sleep at any time of the year, no matter what time of year it is. Human rest does not jibe well with capitalist pursuits. Productivity grows, profits grow, while wages stagnate and plummet. You have to work longer hours just to squeak by.

When Paul Krugman wrote about the "Pizza Lobby" in his last column and noted that Big Ag and Fast Food potentates give mainly to Republican politicians whose states are contained within the so-called Diabetes Belt, he concentrated mainly on anti-science partisanship, while glossing over the connection between libertarian policies and the increased morbidity and mortality rates of poor people throughout the country. He also didn't mention that chronic sleep deprivation and the literal stealing of our time is a crushing feature of the New Economy.

My published comment:

The only pie we have to fear is the chart showing that the world's 80 richest billionaires own as much wealth as half the global population. Or the one showing that the Waltons have as much money as the bottom 40% of American families. Or the fat cat CEO scarfing down the deluxe topping, forcing the workers to compete for their 1/300th share of leftover crust.

Fresh healthy food is expensive. Despite decreasing costs of petroleum, which is used for food production and packaging, you don't see your grocery bill coming down, do you? If you rely on food stamps, which were cut yet again in another "bipartisan" deal by the millionaires of Congress, you quickly find that frozen pizza or mac n cheese fills hungry bellies better than a couple of sacks of applies and oranges sold at the same price.

And it's not just junk food that causes weight gain. It's lack of sleep. People working unsteady shifts might have to close late and open up early. Or they have to feed their kids on the fly because they work two or three jobs. The sleep-deprived have higher cortisol levels, which stimulate appetite. This makes them less sensitive to insulin, putting them at risk for Type 2 diabetes. Workers forced to stay awake just to stay alive tend to eat cheap foods that help them function.

It's the plutocratic Domino effect: precarious jobs, low wages, no time, no hope... and a big smirking goodbye kiss from the GOP to all the tumble-down disposable people.

Don't look for our millionaire congress critters to pass a bill outlawing Daylight Savings Time any time soon. Nobody can even agree on who is even to blame for it. It seems that farmers have gotten a bad rap for it all these years, when they actually were among its most vociferous opponents back in the day. And Ben Franklin's input seems to have been a myth as well, just like the mythical level playing fields and ladders of opportunity.

 Sleep itself is the enemy of neoliberalism and cancerous profits. As Jonathan Crary lays out in "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep," since the Free Market never sleeps, nor should we be allowed to. Every moment that we slumber is a moment that we don't supply our labor, a moment that we're not connected to a device, a moment that we aren't purchasing and consuming goods or health insurance or "content" in the marketplace of things and ideas. Restful sleep is a literal and physical slap in the face to capitalism, and the Market refuses to tolerate it. So up and at 'em.

I'm exhausted just thinking about this hellishness. I think I'll go take a nap. I'll dream about a million tired people giving a group middle finger to the predators of the free market. I'll dream that a mass uprising will scare the living daylights out of all of them and they'll writhe in defeat, and return to us all those stolen hours and stolen lives and destroyed livelihoods.

Dreaming and breathing may be limited, but they are still free, despite the best efforts of the Free Market. On second thought...been to an Oxygen Bar or shopped oxygen product lately?

 

Police State Within a Police State

(*Updated below)
 
Ferguson, MO officials were so totally rattled by the Justice Department's scathing screed that right after giving a press conference promising to curb their racist enthusiasm, the police promptly arrested a few people who had the gall to be standing around on a public street, listening to them talk.

Why Attorney General Eric Holder and his minions didn't throw the book at this corrupt town without pity instead of issuing a strongly worded warning to them is anybody's guess. But I suppose it would be too hard for Eric Holder to immediately sue* to disband a small town police department that seems to have gotten its training in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It would have been too hard for Eric Holder, who wracked his brain to successfully figure out an extra-legal rationale for extrajudicial assassinations-by-president, to figure out a way to criminally indict elected officials for gross dereliction of duty, fraud, theft, assault, and violations of probably every penal code devised by a state or federal legislature.

Punishing the Ferguson power structure turns out to be just as hard as punishing the Wall Street banking cartel and the torturers of the CIA. Because each in its own way functions to turn the wheels of neoliberal capitalism. Ferguson is just one tiny wheel within the larger corporate wheel that grinds regular people to dust as it churns along. And the greasing of the wheel of neoliberal capitalism is the whole raison d'etre of the American government.

The best that the Obama administration can do in a police state which it enables, controls, militarizes and funds is to perform periodic whitewashes when situations become fraught and the rabble rouses itself, as it did in the wake of Michael Brown's death and emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Plus, Barack Obama needs some timely public relations cover for when he travels to Selma this weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of the march for voting rights.

From the New York Times:

The Justice Department on Wednesday called on Ferguson, Mo., to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight.In one example after another, the report described a city that used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics.

The report gave credence to many of the grievances aired last year by African-Americans in angry, sometimes violent protests after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. Though the Justice Department separately concluded that the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white, violated no federal laws in that shooting, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said investigations revealed the root of the rage that brought people into the streets.

Just as the oligarchy operates in the wider world -- by plunder -- so does the Ferguson Police Department.  "Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the City's focus on revenue rather than public safety needs," reads the report, thus instantly creating distrust between the cops and their plundered and oppressed clientele.

This is what happens when austerity is dictated from on high, from the federal and state governments. This is what happens when the rich are coddled at the expense of the poor. The poor will be soaked. The only possible trickle-down is punishment.

The Department of Justice concludes that Ferguson's illegal police and court practices impose crippling hardship on victims, and that citizens are even confined to debtors' prisons for their inability to pay fines on trumped up charges. People lose their jobs and their housing. They are, in effect, being culled from the herd. They are predominantly black.

The DoJ report lists incident after incident, assault after assault. And so far, the only resignations tendered have been from town employees who wrote racist emails about the Obamas. The woman who was jailed for failing to pay for parking tickets gets no recompense. A man who lost his federal government job because he was charged with falsely telling a cop his name was "Mike" instead of Michael is not getting his position back.

Even when people dared question unconstitutional orders from police, the reply was often an arrest on a charge of resisting arrest, sometimes accompanied by a stun gun blast.  “Supervisors seem to believe that any level of resistance justifies any level of force,” investigators found.

As the Times recounts, 

Blacks in Ferguson accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests over a two-year period studied by investigators. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of those charged. A black motorist in Ferguson was twice as likely to be searched, according to the report, even though searches of whites turned up drugs and other contraband more often.

The Justice Department’s analysis found that these disparities could not be explained even when correcting for crime rates and demographics. “These disparities occur, at least in part, because Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias,” the Justice Department concluded.

Meanwhile, the White House has come out with its own companion piece, authored by the police state apparatus itself, which concludes that this country has a police-community relations problem. All that Ferguson, and the overweening wider police state, need are more black and brown cops, better training, more public relations gimmicks like police athletic leagues, and a toning- down of the militaristic couture if not the actual military hardware. The practice of handing out surplus Pentagon equipment, like tanks and Humvees, will continue because the wheels of capitalism must continue to spin. Now that brutality and racism have been officially proven to exist, the government will kindly give the sadistic racists themselves first dibs at cleaning up their own acts.

The gist of the Obama/Holder Doctrine: "Psychopath, heal thyself".

And all you victims out there? Obama and Holder feel your pain, but it's also on you to improve relations with your oppressors. Because what it really boils down to are "perceptions" and feelings. From the introduction to the White House's Task Force on 21st Century Policing report, released this week:

In establishing the Task Force, the President spoke of the distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities -- the sense that in a country where our basic principle is equality under the law, too many young people, particularly young people of color, do not feel as though they are being treated fairly.

"When any part of the American Family does not feel like it is being treated fairly, that is a problem for all of us," said the President. "It means we're not as strong as a country as we can be. And when applied to the criminal justice system, it means we're not as effective at fighting crime as we should be."

Obama effectively cancelled out the entire Ferguson report. It's not a criminal abuse problem. It's a distrust problem. There are too many disgruntled kids out there who don't "feel" like they're being treated well when they're tasered or ticketed for no good reason. The abused minority people are in the same cloyingly inclusive "American family" as the cop bullies, after all, so Papa has to convene a therapy session and urge them to just get along.

 Obama upholds the neoliberal tenet that police departments exist not to protect and serve communities, but to "fight crime." The militarism will continue, although they suggest that maybe the blatant enjoyment of the sadism should be toned down until they can find a new scapegoat, like ISIS, to command our attention. People are more apt to fall in line when they are convinced that the police state keeping them in line acts with legitimacy and professionalism rather than with the amateur-hour impunity of a Ferguson.

In a nutshell, the Obama task force is calling for a better police state through better propaganda. No rogue cops, crooked politicians or larcenous banksters will actually go to prison. Incarceration will continue to be the purview of low level drug offenders and traffic scofflaws, for the continued profit of private jailer-landlords.

Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report lists solutions that were deliberately excluded from Obama's task force report:

• Decriminalizing drug use, homelessness, sex work and mental illness, so as to take armed and violent cops out of many of the situations in which they brutalize and murder civilians;
  Removing all financial incentives police departments now have to make low-level drug arrests and ending the use of confiscated assets by police departments;
• Federal legislation to require police departments to report all cases of excessive force against civilians and funding for the Department of Justice to gather and maintain those statistics. Right now the only figures on police killings are assembled by private entities;
  Curbing police and prosecutorial misconduct by means including the establishment of special prosecutors to go after district attorneys and cops;
• Granting automatic reparations in the form of monetary settlements, medical, housing and tuition assistance to the families of the falsely convicted;
• Immediate banning of the imprisonment of juveniles with adults and the swift phasing out of juvenile prisons in favor of healing, educational and therapeutic institutions.
• Instituting meaningful education, self-improvement and skills programs for all those confined in prisons and jails, and decent health care for all those in the nation's prisons and jails;
• Stopping the racist profiling and roundups of immigrants and the legislation that requires it.
• Abolition of mandatory sentences for various offenses and requirement of racial and ethnic impact studies before passage of laws creating new felony offenses;
• Full transparency in the fines and punishments levied upon inmates in prisons and jails;
• Subsidizing visits and phone contact between the incarcerated and their families on the outside, as family ties are one of the main determinants of successful integration of ex prisoners into society, such as it is.

And meanwhile the beatings will continue until morale improves. There will no reparations to victims -- only hope for a better tomorrow, in the far distant future.

It's up to all of us to continue taking to the streets when justice continues to be denied, and injustice continues to fester beneath the band-aids of government reports and platitudinous speeches by corrupt politicians.

* Update, 3/6: Reuters reports that Eric Holder vowed to "look into" breaking up the Ferguson P.D. if the racism doesn't miraculously get better of its own accord.

"We are prepared to use all the power that we have ... to ensure that the situation changes there," Holder told reporters.

Asked if that included dismantling the Ferguson Police Department, Holder said, "If that's what's necessary, we're prepared to do that."

Too Big For Their Breaches

Peaches and Hill: Reunited And It Feels So Good

Hillary Clinton probably knew the vast right wing conspiracy would be gunning for her official State Department e-correspondence sooner or later. She probably knew that mixing the business of diplomacy with the pleasure of her family's slush fund would inevitably turn up a couple of smoking guns or toxic nuggets once she started running for president. She knew that despite her vaunted position in life, the Freedom of Information law might eventually apply, even to her. Therefore, she never bothered to avail herself of an official government email account, choosing instead to conduct all business, public and private, from her personal email address. The New York Times has the scoop:

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

And then there's Hillary's former colleague, David Petraeus, late of the Pentagon and the CIA. The general didn't have the Hillary-sense to privatize or encrypt his email correspondence before dumping state secrets on his paramour. He did, however, have the Hillary-sense to cash in royally upon leaving government. Therefore, as a Too Big To Fail, he is making a misdemeanor plea deal with the Department of Justice without ever being publicly indicted on espionage or other charges. The Breaches of "Peaches" (his high school nickname) will resemble those of a money-laundering bank. Any fines or legal fees will be ripe for claiming as deductions on his taxable income. And his powerful government friends will have the chutzpah to brag that this is proof positive that the law applies to rich people too. The Times also scored this scoop: 

 David H. Petraeus, the best-known military commander of his generation, has reached a plea deal with the Justice Department that will allow him to avoid an embarrassing trial over whether he provided classified information to a mistress when he was the director of the C.I.A.

Mr. Petraeus will plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Mr. Petraeus has signed the agreement, said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.

 The plea deal completes a spectacular fall for Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who was once discussed as a possible candidate for vice president or even president. He led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the architect of a counterinsurgency strategy that at one time seemed a model for future warfare.

It should be noted that when powerful people like Petraeus fall, they fall all the way to the top. Peaches is currently raking in the mega-bucks as an international mover and shaker for a hedge fund, despite having no financial experience. He also commands Hillary-level fees for his public speaking gigs. He is still esteemed enough to forcibly silence critics having the effrontery to call him out for war crimes and worse. One critic, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, was roughed up and arrested and charged with criminal trespass for buying a ticket to hear Petraeus speak in New York City last fall. McGovern compared his punishment to what Petraeus and CIA torturers have been forced to endure. He recently wrote an open letter to Petraeus:

You may not be surprised to know that, try as I might to feel some empathy for you, Schadenfreude at your misfortune is winning out, since I am convinced that you had a lot to do with other far-more-serious offenses, including aiding and abetting illegal “aggressive war.” And, I suspect you also many have aided and abetted the circumstances that gave rise to the bizarre charges against me.

I refer, of course, to my violent arrest, causing pain of my fractured shoulder, and my jailing in The Tombs, simply because I wanted to hear you speak last fall at New York’s 92^nd Street Y and possibly pose a question from the audience.

 You can rest assured that Petraeus is being "punished" (two years' probation) only for embarrassing his elite friends, not for the deaths of innocents in misbegotten wars. He is helping President Obama to avoid looking like a hypocrite for his unprecedented assault on low-level whistle-blowers and journalists. As a protected member of The Club, Petraeus is taking one for the team, helping both his former boss and departing AG Eric Holder to burnish their legacies as statesmen.

Petraeus is not only too big to fail and jail, he is too big to embarrass. The Times:

A plea deal would spare Mr. Petraeus a high-profile trial where embarrassing details about the affair would have been presented to the jury and made public. Mr. Petraeus is still married to Holly Petraeus.

Mr. Petraeus received most of his accolades for his service in Iraq. He was credited with directing the so-called surge of American forces in 2006 that pushed militants of Al Qaeda, who had taken control of several major cities and provinces, out of the country, stabilizing Iraq and allowing the withdrawal of all American forces about five years later.

Petraeus will not be charged with war crimes, nor does he stand accused by either the two-tiered justice system or the corporate media-war complex of destabilizing the entire Middle East and helping fuel the rise of ISIS. As a matter of fact, he is still  slavishly revered by both political parties. Like fellow hawk Hillary, he was even once considered Presidential material. Maybe he will once again be considered presidential material.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen an inch and will rise again, and again, and again.

It Blows

(source: Project Gutenberg)

I'm talking about the windy month of March, coming in like a bitch today. But to be perfectly accurate, in my little corner of the Homeland anyway, it'll be snowing instead of blowing. As I write this, it is a calm, tropical 8 Degrees F outside, with an advisory out for up to six inches of flakes by tomorrow morning. As a matter of fact, snow is forecast for all 50 states this week if you believe The Daily Mail. And if you believe the New York Times, the waves are freezing on Nantucket.

But back to February.  I have a bone to pick with T.S. Eliot, because February is, hands down, the new abnormal cruellest month, notwithstanding the inclusion of Valentines Day, which in itself is the cruellest day of the entire year for many people. It was supposedly the coldest February on record. It was a 28-day "brown fog of a winter dawn." So good riddance to February, which was at least polite enough to keep its visit short.

I don't have a specific topic for today, so I'll just let my mind wander in the wasteland, if you don't mind. 

So, did you hear that Pope Francis essentially just delivered a major speech against the Trans-Pacific Partnership? (well, he actually railed against global predatory capitalism, but that is exactly what the TPP is.)

If only he were coming to speak this week, instead of next fall, before a joint session of Congress, which is set to vote on granting President Obama fast track authority to hand over what's left of sovereign democracy to a cabal of global corporate parasites. From Reuters, the Pope speaks:

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the "throwaway culture" of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society.

In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the "dizzying rise in unemployment" and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs.

For those living "at the existential margins" the current social and political system "seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats," he said.

The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and inequality, said people were forced to work long hours, sometimes in the black economy, for a few hundred euros a month because they were seen as easily replaceable.

"'You don't like it? Go home then'. What can you do in a world that works like this? Because there's a queue of people looking for work. If you don't like it, someone else will," he said in an unscripted change from the text of his speech.

"It's hunger, hunger that makes us accept what they give us," he said.

It blows, for sure. The closest thing we have to Francis here in the Homeland is Elizabeth Warren. She explains the essential corruption that is the TPP better than anybody I've yet read -- specifically the part euphemized as "Investor State Dispute Settlement." The predators must have their prey in one form if not another. Warren explains it colorfully in a Washington Post op-ed:

ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.

 If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the judge’s seat?

Read the whole thing. It's even getting the White House's attention, unlike most opposition to the TPP thus far. It looks like Obama might be starting to lose his propaganda war for the corporate coup. As well he should, given that he is refusing to divulge the gruesome details. If a congress critter wants to look at it, he or she is not allowed to bring staff or take notes because of "national security" concerns. So at long last we have incontrovertible proof  that national security and corporate protection are the exact same animal.

The corruption is so widespread that we need constant blasts of fresh air and some extra strong sunlight to make even a dent in the wall of stench.

 Speaking of dents, Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote another good column today, on the failure of the mass media to do their jobs:

Oh, how we’re hated. And as another presidential race takes shape, that hatred gathers force. Hillary Clinton’s protectors cast us as bloodthirsty raptors intent on finding flaw where none exists. Chris Christie was asked what he’d given up for Lent and said that it would have been The New York Times, but then his priest told him he had to forswear something he’d truly miss.

Scott Walker thinks we’re laying an elaborate trap for him, and after The Washington Post inquired if he regarded President Obama as Christian, he not only punted but also bellowed about “gotcha” questions, griping: “This is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press.”

Dislike? Increasingly? Either he was being charitable or he hasn’t read the polling. The public’s esteem for us has been abysmal for a good long while.

And if we’re honest, we’ve brought much of it on ourselves. We play petty games and barrel down pointless roads.

And boy, can they ever blow wind. Bruni suggests that as Lenten penance, the press stop covering Iowa and New Hampshire, candidates' spouses, circus acts starring Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, that they get some help for their addiction to horse races, resist covering political polls as though they were  national emergencies, and stop pontificating on the "national mood." (Only the good Pope Francis is allowed to pontificate on the bad moods of people, largely brought on by capitalist predation.)  My published response:

Laudable prescriptions, Mr. Bruni.

The thing is, there's too much money to be made in "covering" horse race/personality politics.The perennial antics of the GOP Clown Car are too tempting for the corporate media to pass up. Reporters don't so much "cover" these actors as give them cover, even as they ridicule them. The right-wingers thrive on negative attention, because it proves to them and to the disgruntled people composing their base that "See? the elites really are out to get you!"

The issues that people care about -- Social Security, jobs and the unemployment crisis, universal health care -- don't get discussed much because they don't mesh with the interests of the ultra-wealthy donor class owning our politics. That's why, when we aren't hearing about Scott Walker's gaffes or Rudy Giuliani's buffoonery, we get fed tired meaningless bromides like "ladders of opportunity" and "level playing fields". The way the Beltway crowd talks, you'd think that all an underpaid part-timer in the Uber economy cares about is gridlock and bipartisanship.

 The presidential campaign (which began before Obama even started his second term) is forecast to give the TV networks record ad revenue, while the hacks and the PACs and the SuperPacs and the strategists and the fixers and the fundraisers are all skimming their greedy shares off the top in a frenetic race to grind what's left of our democracy into the ground.

So yes, hold their feet to the fire. And stop feeding the trolls!

Over on the other side of Grey Lady Op-Ed Wasteland, Maureen Dowd regales us with a laundry list of nouveau-raunch outtakes by a group of cool, liberated Hollywood starlets. It is pretty graphic stuff by normally prudish Times standards; comedy has declined to an Ayn Rand cult of selfie absurdism in this age of human disposability. Horny young moms find sexual satisfaction with their toddlers' teddy bears, and bored matrons get turned on by the Jodie Foster rape scene in The Accused.

She ("comedienne" Whitney Cummings) said, “When a guy writes a scene where a woman does a deviant sex act on camera, it’s objectifying. But when a woman writes it, it’s feminism. When girls write it for themselves, it’s extra taboo because it’s like, ‘Women have all these ideas, too! We thought men were making them do all this dirty stuff!’ It becomes raunchy all of a sudden when women like it. It’s in the zeitgeist because there’s a bunch of female writers and creators now, and, by a bunch, I mean, like, four.

Where does one even begin? My published response:

 Yeah! More power to the women who feel empowered by acting as gross as the guys, even if they must work for a studio or TV network owned by the predatory, male-dominated Wall Street and corporate plutocracy.

If they ever stop to think that there are millions of boys and men out there getting off watching them get off, they obviously don't give a bleep. Why should they? They live in gated communities with private security guards.

But here's what I want to know: does a woman actress who makes it with a stuffed animal get paid the same amount of money as a man who makes it with a stuffed animal?

I can see the landmark Supreme Court case now. Old Clarence will gift us with one of his rare verbal ejaculations, Scalia will go limp with shock, Sammy will withdraw from the case entirely, John Roberts will prematurely recuse himself and Kennedy will just waggle back and forth, keeping us all in hot unbearable suspense.

And then Notorious RBG will whip them all into shape with her usual scathing review. Bring it on.

Or as Tough Shit Eliot more elegantly put it,

“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.	120
“Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”