Crises, Real and Imagined

This week's edition of inside-the-Beltway angst centers around the pressing question:

Is Temp Emp (temporary emperor) Obama ignorant, detached, or just plain mendacious?

Look at the following four crises, and examine how they are affecting you personally in your own daily slog. What did you know about them, and when did the corporate media let you know it? (hint: #4 has not yet been deemed officially pressing) Look into your souls, Proles, and decide whether, in the grand scheme of things, the resolution of any of these crises would make your lives even one smidgen better.

1) Barack Obama was either aware or he wasn't that the renegade NSA is a shadow state unto itself before Angela Merkel called to complain. Reports that he initially couldn't hear what she was kvetching about because of the annoying echo feedback effect from those hidden Oval Office speakers could not be confirmed. But we can confirm for you that while not upset that the NSA is vacuuming up billions of our phone call records and emails, Intelligentrix Dianne Feinstein is hopping mad that the crème de la crème is being unfairly targeted. She could be next, heaven forfend.

2) Despite millions of subscribers getting cancellation notices, Barack Obama is still out there telling people that if they like their health insurance, they can keep it. Pundits are divided as to whether he's deliberately lying about this, or is simply as dumb as a box of rocks. Worst of all, are his handlers giving him plausible deniability on this too? The White House insists that he meant that if you like the insurance provided by predatory profiteers, you will never, on his neo-liberal watch, be forced into Medicare for All or even given the option of a public option. Also, who'd want to keep crap insurance anyway since O-Care forces some of the crappiness out, like kicking you off for getting sick. Plus, incisive legal eagle that he is, Obama also could have meant that if you like the way your shiny Blue Cross card looks in your wallet, by all means keep it for old times' sake. The plastic card police will not be raiding your house with scissors to make you cut it up into a million tiny pieces. As he has stated time and time again, your need for privacy is extremely important to him. Keeping a crap insurance card does not interfere with national security, after all. (defined as the overweening need for corporations and plutocrats to feel secure in their personhoods and their own wallets.

3) The White House is blaming the Republicans are blaming Kathleen Sebelius is blaming the contractors are blaming the White House for Obamacare website glitches. (The estimated 31 million Americans potentially being left out of the ACA? They are not part of the official circular firing squad, as far as the corporate media are concerned. Are you among the 8 million denied entry to the segregated Obamacare Pool in red states just because you're poor enough to qualify for expanded Medicaid? What do you know about this, and when did you know it? Or, are you so glued to your electronic gadgets and TVs, that you remain still blissfully unaware of your own slow boil in the simmering neo-liberal pot?)

4). Beginning Friday, almost 50 million people receiving assistance under the SNAP (food stamp) program will automatically lose the equivalent of 18 meals a month because neither right wing of the Money Party gives a flying f**k. Most importantly, the corporate media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything that you see and hear do not even consider the imminent starvation of a fifth of the population in the richest country on earth a crisis of the magnitude of Dianne Feinstein's angst, or Glitchgate, or even Benghazi. It's not on the Times' homepage anyway, where Beltway heartburn over Obama's personal remoteness trumps the hunger pangs of the masses.

Snatching food from the mouths of real people is the real crisis, people. The reason you're not hearing about it is the media are just having a hard time framing it around the needs and wants and interests of the rich. They can't frame it around political personalities. It's not a contrived Dem vs. Pub thing amenable to dueling talking heads.

 And there's a reason that the Temp Emp himself is stonily silent about it, and that very few Democrats are bothering to raise a stink about it. They're complicit. You see, part of the stimulus funding allocated for SNAP after the financial crisis was later "borrowed" to help pay for Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative of healthier school lunches. It was Democrats robbing one poor segment of the population to give to another. And it's a given that the poor themselves always end up paying in the end.

And here's a scandal on top of a crisis. Guess who else is benefiting mightily from the first lady's healthy choices public relations campaign? Big business and corporate lobbies. As I have written about before, Flotus's current public-private partnership spiel is telling "folks" to drink more water -- preferably bottled water that you purchase from such corporate welfare giants as Coke and Pepsi. (their soda sales are down.) Go to the grocery story looking for beverages, and you're immediately assaulted by the sight of Evian and Poland Spring in toxic petroleum-based bottles bearing Michelle's Drink Up! imprint.

Apparently, testifying before Congress on national TV for the purpose of publicly shaming them into restoring food stamp funding is not on her neo-liberal agenda. Let Them Drink Water, meanwhile, is a recipe for a reprise of 1789.