Out, Out, Damned Year

Stuff to make the coffee burble out of your nose on a gloomy Monday morn:

Americans named President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the world's most admired living man and woman in 2013, according to a Gallup poll released on Monday.

OMG, you declare in disbelief? Be heartened, Sardonickists. Because they only asked a thousand people out of a population of 300+ million. Because despite winning this dubious popularity contest, Barack is fully 16 percentage points less popular with a thousand people than he was a year ago. Even Hillary, who has been winning the Beloved Sweepstakes for a dozen years running, is not quite so loved as she once was.

The Prom King and Queen are in good company.  Runners-up in the Court of Popular Opinion include Sarah Palin, Oprah, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Ron Paul and Clint Eastwood.

Oh, but miracle of miracles: Pope Francis managed to make the cut, too. So all is not lost in Poll World, where you are given a preapproved list of people to admire rather than being allowed to blurt out, say, Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges or Ed Snowden or Glenn Greenwald.

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If you are a New York Times columnist named Charles Blow, and your New Years resolutions include holding politicians accountable, resisting the coverage of politics as a sporting event, and becoming a voice for the voiceless, then that makes you the Worst Purple Proselytizing Hack Ever, according to The New Republic. Worse than Frank "Foodie" Bruni, even!

 

Because, when you are bestowed with a valuable plot of establishment journalism real estate, then you must write for those who live on valuable plots of establishment real estate. Such as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, who make comforting the comfortable their whole raison d'etre. I get that Blow sometimes veers off into self-conscious overwrought schmaltz, and is often all too willing to give Obama a free pass, but at least he is not as smarmy as Ross Douthat or as shallow as MoDo.

So let's hear it for New Republic: celebrating the New Normal of mass immiseration by trashing the polemic of its critics.

 

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Meanwhile, the paper of record itself persists in covering the politics of mass immiseration as a horserace rather than a humanitarian crisis. Today's headline declares that minimally raising the minimum age to a paltry ten bucks and change is a "winning strategy" for the same politicians who just cravenly voted another austerity budget into existence:

Democratic Party leaders, bruised by months of attacks on the new health care program, have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage. 

The effort to take advantage of growing populism among voters in both parties is being coordinated by officials from the White House, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups.

Cry me a river for those multimillionaire Democratic leaders covered with their boo-boos and needing to lift their own fortunes by pretending to care about poor people. They are taking advantage, for their own political gain, of a horrendous situation that they themselves were instrumental in creating.

Which brings me to Paul Krugman, who today declares that the "fiscal fever" of the Beltway deficit hawks has broken -- that Austerity Is Dead, Long Live Sanity. Uh... not so fast. My comment:

Just because the Fix the Debt crowd have been discredited doesn't mean they're still not out to get us. They're in temporary retreat, is all. A pope with a social conscience was elected, a progressive-talking NYC mayor was elected, and Elizabeth Warren finally has the power to take on the banking Mafia with the righteous indignation that they so sorely require.

Deficit fever hasn't broken. Like malaria, it rests between strikes. Our millionaire leaders certainly aren't breaking a sweat about the jobs crisis. Little do they seem to care about the shaking chill running up and down the spines of terrified ordinary people on a daily basis.

Nancy Pelosi, for example, told her colleagues to "embrace the suck" and pass another domestic austerity budget. And then both parties eagerly appropriated another $633 billion for the war budget (euphemistically called "defense.")

And while the unemployed are condemned to poverty, and nearly 50 million families with children to hunger, the welfare program known as Q.E. will continue to pump a free $75 billion a month to the banks. Jamie Dimon celebrated by sending out Christmas cards of his own family carousing and playing tennis in their palatial art museum of a home. The stock market is soaring.

Yes, the intellectual case for austerity has collapsed. But who said any of its instigators are intellectuals? They are true believers in a noxious cult of greed. And they're in dire need of some forced deprogramming therapy by the masses.

As one reader pointed out, my statement implying that Q.E. sends money to "the banks" was misleading, since the Fed is in reality buying up bonds and other financial products rather than writing checks to JP Morgan, Citi, and Goldman Sachs. As such, he said, I am only giving more credence to the ravings of the Tea Party, which claims the Fed is printing money and driving the country into inflation. 

So, I stand corrected. I should have written that the Fed is artificially propping up the bloated head of a diseased monstrosity (the financialized economy), which is comprised of Wall Street, the big banks, and corporations. Even a former official of the Fed admits that Q.E. has been nothing less than a backdoor bailout of the market.