Hillary Clinton's Malpractice

Last week, a Michigan physician named Farid Fata was sentenced to 45 years in prison for prescribing unnecessary chemotherapy to hundreds of patients he had deliberately misdiagnosed with cancer. The motive was the usual one: pathological greed.

Four years ago this month, an American secretary of state named Hillary Clinton traveled to Greece to prescribe what she called "chemotherapy" to millions of otherwise healthy Greeks. She deliberately misdiagnosed their economic suffering at the hands of Eurozone leaders as a disease to be cured, paradoxically enough, by those same banksters and their partner in malpractice, the USA-centric International Monetary Fund. The motive for their toxic prescription of austerity was, and is, the usual one: pathological greed.

Even though Hillary Clinton's Rx has proved ultimately deadly -- both literally and figuratively -- she is living proof that the love of finance capital means never having to say you're sorry. Hillary, of course, isn't going to jail, or even being scorned by the Establishment for proclaiming that austerity is good medicine which fosters fiscal growth and healing. She is running for president. And she has a good chance of winning office, thanks to voter apathy and unlimited bankster money, and the GOP opposition being even more pathological than she is.

Her good friend Donald Trump has already served his own usefully idiotic purpose: that of being so vile that the other vile Republicans in the race are beginning to look vaguely, miraculously human. Hillary must run against someone who appears vaguely human -- otherwise, people might notice that this so-called democracy of ours is a big fat sham. 

The reason that I'm bringing up Hillary Clinton's relatively recent visit to Athens in July 2011 is because of the frenzied "apology war" currently being waged on her behalf by the usual liberal suspects and proxies. They're claiming that the 90s years of Clintonian right-wing neoliberism are so far in the distant past that it is patently unfair to blame her for the tragedies that her husband's malpractice (Wall Street deregulation, his criminalization of poverty via welfare "reform", his embrace of globalization/NAFTA) have spawned in the interim. Now that she is verbally repudiating "Third Way" centrism in her stump speeches, we are supposed to believe that she has evolved into the progressive she has always wanted to be. The ultimate proof of her good intentions, supposedly, is in The Speech she gave last week, vaguely and feebly echoing Elizabeth Warren's populism. (see my previous post, The Extreme Centrism of HC.)

But four years ago -- seems like only yesterday because essentially, it was  -- Hillary Clinton, like a reanimated Maggie Thatcher, was lecturing the world on the therapeutic benefits of free market unregulated capitalism and the necessity of punishing "ordinary" people with toxic chemo. She promised the austerity cure, yet the disease of wealth inequality spread.

It gets even worse. When Hillary Clinton traveled to Athens only four years ago this month, she also congratulated the unpopular Greek government for preventing a ship called The Audacity of Hope from joining the humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza, then under cruel lock-down by the Israeli government. As people demonstrated in the streets against neoliberalism, she congratulated the unpopular Greek government for joining her misbegotten air war on Libya, even as the Troika's imposition of economic martial law on ordinary citizens sent them reeling. Belt-tightening orders from non-elected banksters did not prevent NATO (aka the American War-for-Profit Industry) from ordering Greece to use its American-made weaponry get involved in Hillary's war on Libya while Greek citizens were going without food and medicine.

Bill Clinton felt your pain. Hillary Clinton, just four short years ago, wanted the pain to be felt -- with a vengeance. From her July 2011 press con with former Foreign Minister Stavros Lambrinidis:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

"Hmm... I wonder if our chemo line will fit in that bottom?"

How is the Neoliberal Project which Hill and Bill helped rev up into overdrive back in the roaring 90s any less evil than the sadistic project of the gruesome Michigan cancer doc? Farid Fata left his patients suffering from brittle bones and fried organs...  and in some cases, he literally killed them. The neoliberal chemo inflicted by Hillary Clinton and her cohort has left Greece with an unemployment rate worse than that of the Great Depression, an increase in suicides and premature deaths due to lack of proper medication, and the transformation of a sovereign nation into a colonial client state run by an organized crime cabal of bankers and technocrats. 

Where's the justice?

Not only is Hillary able to transform herself into a progressive heroine with the help of the fawning corporate media owned by the same oligarchs that own her, but her family's slush fund charity actually continues to accept money from a couple of Greece's (and the world's) richest oligarchs. They are shipping and steel magnate (and UBS banking official) Theodore Angelopoulis and his lovely wife Gianna, Greece's "ambassador at large." 

The Theodopoulis' Super-yacht Okto

 
Like Hillary, Gianna "evolved," once having served as a right-wing member of Parliament, but now purporting to be a born-again afficionada of the Syriza political establishment. Gianna had been hoping to host the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) for its annual confab in Athens this spring, but the event was cancelled out of concern for Hillary's election chances.

These people are not stupid. They know they're flim-flam artists who need to hide their fraud during campaign season. They know full well that austerity is not a growth industry for anyone but the plutocrats.

Gianna recently ran a contest through the CGI for suffering Greek youth. Among the "entrepreneurial" winning entries were a website curating freebies for unemployed young people, and a scheme for delivering discarded restaurant food to the hungry. While apparently not espousing the idea that Greek oligarchs actually pay their back taxes out of their bloated offshore bank accounts, or that her family bail out Greek working people, Gianna has donated millions to the Clintons themselves. She has a website called, appropriately enough, My Greek Drama. (And not to be outdone is a site devoted to her hubby's yachts.)  Rumor has it that she would like to run for president of Greece someday, under a new Clinton-inspired party called the Democratic Party.

Go figure.

Barack in the Big House

The use of a real prison in on-location filming of blockbuster Netflix series Orange is the New Black must have inspired Barack Obama's own savvy media shop. The president himself now has a starring role in his very own prison-based special. He traveled all the way to the federal pen in El Reno, Oklahoma to play the part of celebrity chaplain-for-a-day.

It helps that Alyssa Mastromonaco, the new COO of VICE ( the media company filming the documentary) is former deputy chief of staff for strategy in the Obama administration. Barry didn't even have to audition for the part of earnest concern-trolling mentor to the incarcerated.

It's all part of his latest public relations gimmick --  feigning concern for mainly black, mainly male, inmates locked up in the War on Drugs. Out of more than 5,000 federal inmates currently serving long terms for non-violent, crack-cocaine drug convictions, Obama recently commuted the sentences of a mere 46 of them to show what a caring guy he is. (And what a coincidence that one of them just happens to be the mother of a millionaire star athlete.) The other 4,950 or so, sentenced before a 2010 change in the law forbade such draconian prison terms, will continue to rot in prison. As a matter of fact, the administration successfully appealed a federal court ruling that would have allowed those 4,950 to challenge their sentences.  Obama continues to wage his "war on drugs" while he cynically bestows the very occasional symbolic favor for his own legacy-burnishing purposes.

 It was only this past week, for instance, that the FBI raided a medical marijuana operation on Indian tribal land in California. Obama still means business.

That he chose Oklahoma as the venue of his star turn is all the more cynical, given that it was the recent botched executions in that same state which led to the failed Supreme Court challenge to the death penalty this year. Obama refused to get involved in that case, refused to budge from his longstanding support of capital punishment. When the Court ruled against the plaintiffs, who claimed that the use of untested tranquillizers for executions amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, the complicit mass media were mainly silent on Obama's own passive-aggressive role in the case.

It was last fall, also cynically enough, that the Obama Labor Department summarily shut down the Treasure Lake Job Corps training site in nearby Indiahoma. Job Corps, a direct offshoot of FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, exists for the express purpose of keeping young people out of places like El Reno. Obama has cut funding for Job Corps in each succeeding year of his tenure, thus greasing the skids for closures based on "inefficiencies" and "poor performance" that are the precise, planned results of his draconian cuts. As I wrote last year, 

Obama has proposed a permanent reduction in the Job Corps' "slot capacity" in his 2015 budget. Translated from Orwellian Newspeak, this means that about 10,000 at-risk youths will be left with no place to go. Since Job Corps centers feed and house participants as well as train them for careers, this will mean 10,000 more at-risk youths on the streets in such dystopian locales as Chicago and Ferguson.

The Labor Department report actually pointed to the need for at-risk youths to share the sacrifice in order to boost America's "global competitiveness." Apparently, one way that they can help American innovation is to move from Job Corps sites into privatized prisons, which by Congressional fiat must maintain a steady population of inmates in order to remain "competitive."

Thankfully, the medium security El Reno facility is not yet privatized and also doesn't (directly) kill people, as does the nearby state penitentiary in McAlester, site of the horrific makeshift executions.

 After an off-label drug cocktail led to the prolonged agonizing deaths of three convicted murderers, Obama could have issued a moratorium on the federal death penalty as a signal of his disgust. He could have used his bully pulpit to inspire the 36 states currently grappling with their own capital punishment laws to repeal them and thus gain humanistic parity with the rest of the advanced world. He could have dispatched his solicitor general to the Supreme Court to argue on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case, perhaps influencing the decision.

But he preferred not to. The Drone President ("I'm really good at killing people") really likes the death penalty, even though a poll conducted by Lake Research Partners shows that two-thirds of Americans favor life in prison, with no possibility of parole, for convicted murderers.

Although Obama did order former Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct an "investigation" of death penalty policies last fall, the administration later wimped out for the usual craven political reasons:

Advocates in particular worried that having Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder as the faces of the anti-death penalty movement would stoke conservative support for capital punishment at a time when some libertarian-minded Republicans, Christian conservatives and liberal Democrats appeared to be finding common ground in opposition to it.

One of Obama's Harvard law professors opined that the president needs to be "pushed" into changing his tune on the death penalty, much as he was forced to evolve on marriage equality. So I guess only two thirds of the public not wanting to kill prisoners is still not enough for him.

Although whites on death row outnumber blacks, 55.5% to 34.7%, more than 75% of actual executions are performed on murderers of white people. Only 15% of executions carried out are for the murders of black people. This is despite the fact that 50% of murder victims are black. The racial identity of the victim is the determining factor in who gets put to death in America.

But these realities took a back seat in the media coverage, which concentrated heavily on the made-for-TV optics of a handful of Confederate flag-waving yahoos heckling Obama's armored motorcade as he arrived in Oklahoma for his combination Democratic fundraiser/prison gig. As his supporters go into outrage mode over the first African-American president being exposed to such ugly racist symbolism, Obama himself becomes magically exempt from his own complicity in the ever-burgeoning punishing/exterminating state. He is cosmetically and hypocritically able to establish solidarity with his own victims. He couldn't have asked for a better propaganda coup. The right-wing hate machine paradoxically advantages him, much as it has advantaged Bill and Hillary Clinton over the years. It tends to silence the legitimate criticism.

The VICE documentary in which he stars will no doubt be playing in an endless loop at his Chicago library shrine, virtually revising history as it paints Obama as a hero to the oppressed rather than the oppressor of such heroic prisoners as Chelsea Manning and other victims of his war on whistleblowers, and his war on poor people in general. Forty-six sentence commutations do not a criminal justice overhaul make. Not by a long shot.

This entry for the Obama library design contest unfortunately only got an honorable mention (it was judged distinguished, yet disturbing) probably because it adheres a little too closely to the president's real legacy:

The Extreme Centrism of Hillary Clinton

Despite a speech being touted as "sweeping" and populist, Hillary Clinton's ingrained market-based approach to governance kept shining through like high beam headlights aimed at the yellow line in the middle of the road.

 She outlined her economic agenda on Monday in a talk at the carefully chosen progressive bastion known as the New School.

Reciting the standard litany of ills -- erosion of the middle class due to globalization, crushing student debt, increasing wealth disparity, lack of child care for working mothers, and Wall Street malfeasance --  she managed to totally ignore how Clintonian neoliberal policies themselves accelerated our race to the bottom and contributed to the pain of what she calls "everyday Americans."  Hillary Clinton can deny reality every bit as glibly as her fellow neolibs and neocons across the aisle:

“Twice now in the past 20 years, a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess. I think the results speak for themselves.

“Under President Clinton – I like the sound of that - America saw the longest peacetime expansion in history … nearly 23 million jobs… a balanced budget and a surplus for the future. And most importantly, incomes rose across the board, not just for those already at the top.

Random Thoughts on Greece

The truth is finally out there: the German hegemon is a Frankenstein monster sewn together with the body parts of every Batman and James Bond villain ever dreamed up by a Hollywood nightmare factory.  Now that Angela Merkel and her henchman Wolfgang Schauble have turned Greece into a German colony, with global hedge funds and too-big-to fail banks its de facto occupying force, will this tiny country now be officially known as Griechenland? Will the Acropolis be transformed into the latest Goldman Sachs bank branch?

The Neoliberal Monster: Die Slowly or Die Quickly, Just Surrender Already

Puppetized Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is either being hailed as a steely pragmatic operator, pitied as a pathetic beaten dog, or damned as a rich phony who brought a latte to a knife fight.

The New York Times is certainly confused. Juxtaposed with a stunning front-page photo of a starving woman collapsed on the street is a Panglossian, even cheery, article about Greeks sipping their lattes and waxing rueful-to-hopeful:

Jubilation, almost immediately followed by wariness, filled the streets as Greeks learned of the agreement in Brussels early Monday.

Many people were having their midmorning cafe frappé, while others were standing in the ubiquitous bank lines, as the news spread that after a week of agony — a tense referendum, sparring political rallies, bank closings — and a weekend of all-nighters in the Greek Parliament and among the eurozone leaders, a deal to address the country’s debt crisis and keep it in the eurozone had been reached.

(Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press)

 Wait till they find out that they can't use their dwindling Euros to make online purchases any more, and the wariness will escalate faster than they can order a double latte or collapse on the street from illness or hunger. Will Starbucks establish a concession next door to the Goldman Sachs Acropolis? Will American fast food multinationals start a greedwashing campaign urging euro-an-hour baristas to tell customers to embrace the multicultural suck as they help drive locally-owned tavernas out of business?

 This is a nation in numbed shock. Is it proper even to call it a nation any more?  It's sort of a hybrid between a failed state and ripe, paralyzed prey for Romneyesque vulture capitalists. Think of Greece as a Staples chain with a lot of soon-to-be privatized beaches for the pleasure of the oligarchs.

Given that the marathon negotiating session leading to the deal has been likened to a mental waterboarding of Tsipras, I wonder if the corrupt American Psychological Association was brought in as an enhanced sadism technical adviser. You really have to hand it to Tsipras, though: he exhibited no outward, physical signs of cracking as he capitulated to the demands of the global oligarchy. 

Meanwhile, more people are starting to talk about the Goldman Sachs connection. MoveOn, that erstwhile smarmy veal pen for Democrats, is even starting an ad campaign lambasting Wall Street's role in the manufactured Greek crisis. Robert Reich writes,

People seem to forget that the Greek debt crisis—which is becoming a European and even possibly a world economic crisis—grew out of a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein.

Several years ago, Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt—and in the process almost doubled it. When the first debt deal was struck in 2001, Greece owed about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it had borrowed. Goldman then cooked up an off-the-books derivative for Greece that disguised the shortfall but increased the government’s losses to 5.1 billion euros.

Reich didn't mention that Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, a Goldman alum, is in the cabal of hedge fund predators which stands to profit from the most recent bailout (of creditors and investors, not ordinary Greek citizens.) He didn't mention that Hillary Clinton has collected huge speaking fees from Goldman or that her family's slush fund charity has humanized Blankfein as an honored "thought leader."

Hillary was slated to deliver her own populist economic manifesto today, albeit with little to no mention of either Wall Street or the economic coup against Greece. I'll write more about her verbiage later.

Lloyd and Hillary Share a Tender Cackle

Links/Open Thread

Wall Street Powers Higher on Greece Hopes: because The Market is a sadist.

Greek crisis worse than the Great Depression: Plutocrats of the World, unite!

Tsipras Just Destroyed Greece: It seems that the popular referendum against neoliberalism was just a head fake, and that the Syriza leader never really expected hoi polloi to reject austerity. Perhaps the lefties over at the World Socialist Website were right about Tsipras being an Obama clone all along. I hear tell that the Masters of the Universe might even give him a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes, using the leftover confetti from today's World Cup festivities. Only kidding, of course. But at the very least, he can probably expect a commiserating congratulatory phone call from Obama, whose own bank-protecting economic policies he says he greatly admires. If, that is, the Troika doesn't pull a fast one and reject an austerity offer even better than the last one. The lunatics have definitely taken over the capitalistic asylum.

I nominate the people of Greece for the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite their own hardships they are welcoming refugees with open arms, feeding and clothing them and sharing their dwindling medical supplies. Over here in the USA, meanwhile, the corporate media give Donald Trump unlimited air time to vomit out his xenophobia, while the Obama administration has quietly imprisoned Central American women and children in privatized border internment camps. As Hillary Clinton has so hawkishly proclaimed, we have "to send them a message" that this land is not their land.

Down with the Confederate Flag, that odious symbol of racial oppression and slavery.

But, up with actual slavery: President Obama plans to deny the existence of human trafficking in Malaysia in order to grease the skids for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As long as slave-owners promise to tone it down a tad, maybe even abolish it by the next century, Obama can live with it. I somehow doubt that Michelle Obama will be holding up another one of her "Bring Back Our Girls" signs in solidarity with the kidnapped victims being smuggled through Malaysia. The Market could not bear it.

If the ruling class can declare victory over racism by simply taking down a flag, how easy it then becomes to declare victory over slavery the wide world over by a simple stroke of the pen. Orwellian possibilities for blanket deniability in the name of profits for The Market are legion, and they are endless. 

As Pope Francis saliently observes, unbridled capitalism is "the dung of the devil."

And he also took a swipe at Obama's "free trade" deals and the finance cartel's assault on the Greek people while he was at it:

The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers
and the poor," he said.

Wealthy Crime Pays, Even When It Doesn't

Goldman Sachs, the banking behemoth aptly described by Matt Taibbi as a giant vampire squid, has made big suckers out of the clients it grotesquely advised to bet on how long youths caught up in New York City's criminal justice system could stay out of jail after their initial releases.

A mere seven million dollars out of the trillions of Goldman's money was spent on privatized counseling services to young Rikers inmates in an effort to help them become responsible members of society. No Goldman money was spent on a jobs program to help them become responsible members of society once they were released. No Goldman money was spent on housing for young offenders or their families, many of whom who lost their homes and jobs when Goldman helped wreck the economy during its previous betting spree on subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations.

Nobody at Goldman has ever paid his debt to society by going to prison. Even rare criminal convictions have a way of eventually getting overturned.

And now Goldman's social impact scheme, placing odds on youthful recidivism rates, has been blessedly shut down one year early by the city. Not because cynically betting on the desperation of indigent people is morally wrong, mind you -- but because a couple of rich investors are said to have lost money on the deal. The black and Latino kids kept getting arrested and sent back to Rikers despite the Goldman-subsidized jail counseling sessions.

Knock me over with a feather.

As is typical for Goldman, though, it will recoup most of its own losses based upon a loan guarantee from Michael Bloomberg, Forbes godzillionaire and mayor of New York at the time the scheme was hatched.

Also as is typical for Goldman and other too big to fail/jails, the early shutdown of their gruesome scam is actually being touted as a resounding success story. That is because the rich were not taxed to pay for it! The paper losses by a banking casino using Rikers inmates as chips will in no way discourage the billionaire class from continuing to bet on the misfortunes of the poor. Social impact bonds will be part of the dystopian landscape as long as neoliberalism lives. The hyper-rich will always find new ways of extracting blood from the masses.

Because when you are obscenely rich, nothing succeeds like the failure of others. Or, as the Dowager Duchess of Downton Abbey was wont to say,"Nothing exceeds like excess."

The house never loses.

Social impact bonds are beginning to actually replace the government safety net as a means of "helping" the poor. From the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Pay-for-success efforts, also known as social-impact bonds, involve private or philanthropic investors funding new approaches to social issues, with an opportunity to earn returns if programs meet preset targets and governments take them over. Goldman Sachs ended up spending $7.2 million on the Rikers effort but will recoup $6 million from a loan guarantee offered by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The model "can unlock new pieces of funding, private capital especially," said Jim Anderson, who leads the Bloomberg foundation's government-innovation program. "Even though we didn't get the result with the [recidivism] program that we all wanted and hoped for, we now know that definitively, thanks to the social-impact bond structure that we put in place."

Not once did the philanthrocapitalists question why black youths failed to stay out of prison. Not once did they ponder whether crushing poverty, police brutality, the racist war on drugs, stop and frisk policies and other forms of racial profiling contribute to the prison recidivism rate. Never once did they condemn the culture of cruelty at Rikers itself. All they care about is making money and "unlocking the potential" of capital as more and more people are locked up in the increasingly privatized American prison system.

As I have written about before, President Obama's own "Brothers Keeper" scheme is also modeled upon the social impact bond structure. When he first announced his initiative, he pointed to Bloomberg/Goldman's Rikers Island program as one of his inspirations.  Under Obama's version, corporations will be given government money (tax breaks) in order to study social problems and "invest" in black youths, while the black youths themselves will not receive any direct cash aid at all. It was under the 90s Neoliberal Bill and Hillary Clinton regime, after all, that direct cash aid for the poor was triangulated right out of existence. And then came their own personal version of Social Impact on Steroids, aka the Clinton Foundation. There is so much money in poverty. It's a most ingenious paradox.

A few experts, though, have questioned the ethics of using social impact bonds as a means of profiting from social ills while purporting to cure them. From an August 2012 New York Times article on the Rikers scheme: 

“I’m not saying that the market is evil,” said Mark Rosenman, a professor emeritus at Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, “but I am saying when we get into a situation where we are encouraging investment in order to generate private profit as a substitute for government responsibility, we’re making a big mistake.”

Rosenman is too kind. The market is indeed evil when it's unregulated. It's not that mistakes are being made, it's that crimes are being committed... by the wealthy investor class and the political system that enables it.

You Cruise, You Schmooze

How would you like to be a passenger on an Impact Cruise Ship run by the dicey Carnival line? 

No, it isn't a thrill-ride replica of the Costa Concordia experience or even a remake of the Poseidon Adventure. It's a whole new way of vacationing --  the neoliberal, philanthrocapitalist way. It's the Peace Corps for people who are too busy or too important to spend two whole years of their lives actually living and working in the harsh conditions of a third world country.

Starting next year, and for only a couple thousand bucks, give or take, and only one week out of your busy schedule, you can become a "Voluntourist" to the Dominican Republic or Cuba, where residents are said to be waiting with bated breath for the great American Barging-In.

 The whole idea behind impact cruising is to make you feel better about your privileged, selfish life.  Now you, too, can be Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Bono, and Chelsea Clinton all rolled into one self-satisfied do-gooder. And the beauty of it is that you need never even unpack for your impacting experience. Hedonism will still prevail. You will still gorge on multi-course Carnival meals served by The Help. You will still sleep the sleep of the just in a soft, clean, oversized bed in your exquisitely appointed, ocean view Carnival state room. You will still be entitled to spa treatments and laps in the onboard pool. You will spend more time floating (four days) with like-minded tourists than you will engaging with actual poor people on actual land (three days.)

The SS Impact: Neoliberal Ship of Peace

Needless to say, the New York Times travel desk is on it:

The cruises to Cuba, approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Treasury Department, fall under the rules that allow licensed travel companies to bring in visitors who will spend their time doing activities that support the Cuban people. Carnival is in talks with Cuban officials to finalize the deal, the company said in a release.

“We know there is strong demand from travelers who want to immerse themselves in Cuban culture, so this is a historic opportunity for us to enable more people to experience Cuban society,” said Arnold Donald, president and chief executive of the Carnival Corporation.

In other words, altruism must be seen to trump co-optation and plunder -- at least for now. The Times doesn't tell us exactly what activities the American voluntourists will be doing to "support" the  Cuban people. But I suppose if they were honest and said the support will involve throwing a few American dollars at people living in poverty while scoping out the distressed real estate landscape for future development, it might look a bit too crass. Naturally, voluntourists will not be required to sign a pledge attesting to their well-intentioned bona fides. Donald Trump himself could theoretically strut up the gangway claiming to be a missionary and nobody would throw him overboard.

Maybe Carnival's "fathom" website itself can give us a few more clues about what the "activities" of American voluntourists might be. Then again, maybe not.

According to the online brochure, voluntourists will spend much of their impactful cruising time in a crash course of Spanish in order to teach English to the Spanish-speaking. While the Cuban agenda still remains shrouded in mystery (you will somehow "immerse" yourself in their culture and thereby magically improve their world) the Dominican experience centers around  harvesting cacao with the locals. Otherwise, it is an a la carte menu of philanthropportunism, the cost of each extra impact payable by you, the voluntourist. So don't leave home without a valid credit card.

But included at no extra charge in the Voyage Out:

During your outward journey, workshops and other on-board activities will help prepare you for your impact experience and help you learn how to apply your skills and talents in the most effective way. For example, you could learn about water shortages in developing countries and put yourself in the role of an aid worker to improve access to clean water. When it’s time to begin your chosen impact activity in earnest, this kind of on-board training will enable you to hit the ground running.

In other words, although you will not become an actual career aid worker, you will get to play one for three days. The schmooze-cruise will get you all fired up and ready to go... just like the politician who once played Community Organizer in order to prepare the way to his own glorious, impactful, and very rewarding career.

Carnival's "fathom" voluntourism subsidiary is the brainchild of one Tara Russell, self-proclaimed "social entrepreneur" and  alumna of such multinationals as Nike, General Motors and Intel. (I am dying to know how she impacted the 40 cents-per-hour  lives of the Vietnamese children making $100 sneakers for rich Americans who take cruises, but that's a story for another day.) A Davos woman, Russell last year was invited by the World Economic Forum to become the founding curator of something called the Global Shapers Community.

More like Global Shape-Shifters, if you ask me. Because it has been only a plutocratic hop, skip and jump to improve the tattered image of Carnival by turning one of their smaller, less popular cruise ships (the Adonia) into a floating neoliberal Peace Corps. Carnival's venture has the value-added, admitted goal of attracting liberal millennials and baby boomers with disposable incomes back into the cruising lifestyle -- which has taken quite the impactful economic hit in recent years, what with on-board crime, food poisonings and various other disease outbreaks, and massive infrastructure failures resulting in near disasters and backed up sewage. You can pretty much rest assured that the riffraff will not be lining up to become voluntourists. The Adonia doesn't even have a casino or a stage show.

So what better way to alleviate your own guilt and contribute to the bottom line of a great multinational corporation fallen upon public relations hard times than becoming a voluntourist?

Life is a carnival. Life is a cabaret, my friend.  As Tara Russell explains, as she invites you to send in your $600 deposit right now:

Like you, I want life abundant – I want my and your heart and soul to sing.  I believe that humans deserve the opportunity to flourish, and I believe that when we unleash our personal gifts, talents, and passion in a way that serves the needs of others, we achieve a beautiful sweet spot and flow.
I’m addicted to this incredible high of finding energy in serving the needs of others – and I invite you to join our fathom journey and discover how to unleash your greatness in simple, meaningful ways that bring you joy and delight every day.
You can’t change the world in seven days, and we don’t expect to – but we do believe that our holistic impact experiences before, during and after the trips, combined with our long-term systematic approach to holistic transformation in our partner communities will allow for impact on a scale the world has never seen.  We know the journey will be as meaningful for our travelers as it will be for the places we visit.

Even God didn't change the world in seven days. He only made it in seven days. And if God can make it, you can make it. That, fellow travelers in neoliberalism, is the American way.Never do for free out of the goodness of your heart. Do unto others while also paying a rent-seeking corporation its own tribute in the process.

"We believe in building bridges, relationships, and strong teams that have the talent and focus necessary to deliver results. We believe in managing well. We believe in transparency. And we believe in impact – impact on behalf of the American people we serve". --- HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell (alumna  of Walmart, the Gates Foundation, Robert Rubin's Glass-Steagall-killing Citigroup Treasury Dept. and McKinsey) on the gospel of free-market Neoliberalism.