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.

Oxi To Austerity

That's Greek for the unmistakable overwhelming No to the banking cartel currently trampling all over democracy, all over the world, one nasty grind of the hyper-capitalistic heel at a time.

 The Greeks not only stood up for themselves, they just did the whole rest of the world a giant favor, too. They exercised some good, old-fashioned, bottom-up democracy. They spoke out against a group of very powerful, very sadistic people who thought that they could exercise their will through the instillation of fear and mass suffering. The pluto-sadists still do think that, but at least they've been rendered a little more uncomfortable as they bask in their pathology.

The victorious Greek referendum makes me wish that we had a parliamentary system of government right here in the Birthplace of Freedom for the Propertied Classes. How awesome it would be, for example, if the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its evil offshoots were subject to a popular referendum instead of a quickie  ratification by a corrupt Congress! How democratically old-fashioned if we could all vote "no confidence" the next time the clowns manufacture their own debt crisis as an excuse to cut food stamps and unemployment insurance! Those aristocratic Founding Fathers that some of us celebrated yesterday knew exactly what they were doing when they invented "representative" democracy.

It's still too early to tell if democracy will prevail in Greece, the birthplace of true, bottom-up democracy. After all, remember when some naifs were silly enough to predict that such corrupt regimes as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup had gasped their greedy last back in 2008 when they were caught red-handed, wrecking the global economy?

 And then, spitting in the face of all that is decent and moral and humane, these same entities and their various subsidiaries were allowed to rise up again, bigger and more gruesomely powerful than ever before? 

Never satiated, the hedge fund operators, the private equity moguls, the too big to fail banks, the oligarchs, the rentier and investor class of billionaires --  are on a rampage, bleeding their victims dry before grinding them into pulp.

The financial terrorism now being practiced on Greece is nothing new. It got its start decades ago with the "Washington Consensus" method of plundering Latin American countries under the guise of "aid" provided by the International Monetary Fund (part of the troika imposing austerity on Greece). In exchange for loans to strapped or corrupt governments, the banksters  demanded and got "fiscal discipline" to curb budget deficits; a reduction in public expenditures; deregulation of the finance sector and the economy, with interest rates determined by "the market"; trade deals that favored American multinationals over local companies and sovereign governments; promotion of direct foreign "investment" with an ironclad guarantee of property rights for corporations.

This Washington Consensus (thought to have been discredited when Argentina told it to eff off) has been duly exported to the rest of the world, which of course now also includes such Wall Street-devastated All-American cities as Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore. Can you imagine if there were a Greek-style referendum in which people could just say "Oxi" to school closings and water privatization?

Legend has it that vampires die when they're exposed to the light. Dracula Neoliberalus has become so monstrous and so strong that it probably will require multiple exposures to light (and a banshee wail of populist outrage) before finally crumbling.

It needs multiple stakes of truth through its corrupt heart. It's become so used to getting its own way, sucking up bailouts and corporate welfare with such bloodthirsty abandon that it thinks it is invincible. And it very well might be.

So there is much work to be done. The first task is to debunk the propaganda which dictates that the world is one vast open-air marketplace devoid of national legislatures and judiciaries and governments for the greater good of all. Trickle-down prosperity is a lie that won't easily die. Repeat early, repeat often: the production and sale of goods is not the heart of civilization. People are.

Rather than pursuing the public good, neoliberalism employs technocrats (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) who treat individual governments as businesses ripe for the plucking.  They treat people as consumer-workers who must pay the price whenever the bankers and the bosses (whose greed has made them terminally stupid) make their inevitable bad deals and bad choices.

Engaged, caring citizens are anathema to Neoliberalism. We must refuse the directive to become "entrepreneurs" acting in our own self-interest, clawing our individual ways up ladders of opportunity.

The banksters running the world have three distinct Washington Consensus-spawned policies that perpetuate their reign of error and terror: deregulation, corporatization via "free trade," and privatization of public goods and services. Social safety nets are slashed in favor of welfare-to-work schemes paying subsistence wages. Interest rates are kept artificially low to keep the non-existent inflation "bogeyman" in check. Offshore tax havens sheltering trillions of dollars in hoarded wealth are set up. All of this is done with the cooperation of "think tanks" and a media-political conglomerate that broadcasts the neoliberal agenda in forms designed to alternately tease, appease and enrage a victimized, exhausted public. (Things will get better someday.... but here's some health insurance for a lucky few to "consume".... we must close our borders to "those" people, but not ever to profits....  meanwhile,watch TV,  make friends on Facebook, drink, take brand-name prescription drugs at a 1000% markup.)

The Greeks said Oxi. Not only do they deserve debt relief, we owe them a huge debt of our gratitude. 

Democracy is catching on. Plutocracy is trembling in Dracula's Castle.

Here, for example, is what happened at a Brussels conference promoting the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership:

Opportunity Is the New Austerity

President Obama took a theatrically brave stance last week when he lambasted Fox News for using the horrible word "leeches" to describe poor people. 

Unfortunately, despite his indignant verbiage, this is not exactly the same thing as directly advocating for the poor themselves. Obama's words are a way to make liberals and MSNBC feel vindicated. It's a way to deflect our attention from this government's de facto war on the poor, and frame the media narrative into just one more he said-she said bickerfest between the two legacy parties. Just who on Fox called them leeches, and when, where, how, and why did they utter their foul words?!?! Fact-checkers immediately got to work. The score is Obama 1, Fox/GOP 0.

"Our" side won! Hooray for the Dems!

Barack Obama's staged concern-trolling during a panel discussion at Georgetown University succeeded unadmirably in turning a true national humanitarian crisis into a battle of personalities between Barack Obama and Bill O'Reilly. Both are multimillionaires, of course. Obama called out Fox pundits for poor-hating anyone owning an ObamaPhone. Fox pundits denied ever calling "the least among us" (Obama's folksy Biblical term for the lesser people) any such thing.

And lost in the shuffle are the actual suffering people "out there," beyond the Beltway. Lost are the Detroit residents who are getting their water shut off again this week because of their inability to pay. Lost are reports from myriad sources showing that the richest country on earth ranks near dead last in nearly all measurements of human well-being. According to the OECD, the US poverty rate is the highest in the developed world. And it has the most billionaires.

Yet what we heard about in the mainstream media was how Obama took umbrage over Fox taking umbrage over poor people's Obamaphones. No actual poor people participated, either by phone or in person with a seat at the round table.

Moreover, as is all too wearily typical of our pivoting president, Obama immediately cancelled out his righteous refreshing criticism of Fox News and greedy hedge fund managers by repeating some of the same right-wing talking points beloved of reactionaries and plutocrats and professional Beltway narrators (aka journalists.) 

For, despite glaring evidence that bipartisan neoliberal policies have been hollowing out the middle class and further immiserating the poor for decades -- while allowing the rich to get more bloated by the day -- he didn't actually criticize such concrete items as food stamp cuts and the end of long-term unemployment insurance....  or heaven forbid, his own job-destroying secret corporate coup attempts masquerading as trade treaties. He didn't actually call for taxing the rich, expanding Social Security or prosecuting the Wall Street crooks sucking us dry.  Because while throwing a bone to the populace over how incensed he, too, is over Fox Noise and the greed of CEOs and hedge fund managers, he also gave undeserved credibility and respectability to right wing sadists:

And there are a lot of folks here who I have worked with -- they disagree with me on some issues, but they have great sincerity when it comes to wanting to deal with helping the least of these.  And so this is a wonderful occasion for us to join together.

Yes, those folks from the Kochs' American Enterprise Institute, like panelist Arthur Brooks, are indeed greatly sincere in wanting to "deal with" helping the leastiest. The conservative elites are so damned noble for deigning not to deny that there are Lesser People breathing the same air as them. Wunnerful, wunnerful. Come together and let's give each other a great big hegemonic group hug, okay? And let's be careful not to jab each other with our American flag lapel pins.

Part of the reason I thought this venue would be useful and I wanted to have a dialogue with Bob and Arthur is that we have been stuck, I think for a long time, in a debate that creates a couple of straw men.  The stereotype is that you’ve got folks on the left who just want to pour more money into social programs, and don't care anything about culture or parenting or family structures, and that's one stereotype.  And then you’ve got cold-hearted, free market, capitalist types who are reading Ayn Rand and -- (laughter) -- think everybody are moochers.  And I think the truth is more complicated.

Did you get the little false equivalency there? If leftists who just want to insanely pour the entire US Treasury down the gullets of the poor are straw men for the Right, then so too are Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and the entire Republican clown car naught but straw men for the Left! Paul Ryan's actual existence, his actual devotion to Ayn Rand, his actual belief that "everybody are moochers" (sic) are fantasies dreamed up by a bunch of crazy hippies who have no earthly idea what we are talking about. Bad progressives. Bad, bad progressives to not believe in the "culture" of willful poverty!

I think that there are those on the conservative spectrum who deeply care about the least of these, deeply care about the poor; exhibit that through their churches, through community groups, through philanthropic efforts, but are suspicious of what government can do.  And then there are those on the left who I think are in the trenches every day and see how important parenting is and how important family structures are, and the connective tissue that holds communities together and recognize that that contributes to poverty when those structures fray, but also believe that government and resources can make a difference in creating an environment in which young people can succeed despite great odds.

The dream of false equivalency must never die. Even the rabid billionaire Murdochs of News Corp are forking over a few token hate-spawned millions to Obama's My Brother's Keeper philanthro-capitalist "initiative." Maybe it's because they interpret "keeper" as someone who owns other human beings and gets to keep them forever. More likely, it's to get a big fat Treasury refund check for make-believe profits temporarily lost in the corporate charity recycle bin.

But I digress. It seems to me that Obama is again calling for more public-private partnerships to substitute for a progressive reprise of such New Deal programs as the CCC and the WPA, and such Great Society programs as the Job Corps, whose budget he's recommended cutting. He agrees with the reactionary canard that dysfunctional families are just as much the causes of poverty as they are the victims of it. As David Brooks and the conservative punditocracy love to moralize, we have to get those indigent parenting skills improved!  Maybe government has some role, but not the whole role. The Free Market has already taken over education, infrastructure "maintenance", incarceration, pension funds, international aggression, even water supplies for the thirsty poor here at Home. Look how well that is working out.

 There will be no wealth redistribution on Obama's watch.(just in case you were still hoping, given the surge of the Warren Wing and the Pope's upcoming visit.)

But back to Obama's roundtable remarks. Here is that buzzword moment that I know all of you have been waiting for:

Now, that does not lessen our concern about communities where poverty remains chronic.  It does suggest, though, that we have been able to lessen poverty when we decide we want to do something about it.  In every low-income community around the country, there are programs that work to provide ladders of opportunity to young people; we just haven't figured out how to scale them up.

He should have just come right and said that the filleting of human flesh in a back room is fraught, with his main challenge being putting some anesthetizing freshness back in the stale populist rhetoric.

That is disingenuous to the EXTREME ( the extreme center). Obama, besides his failure to give up his addiction to buzzwords, hasn't figured out how to arm-twist Congress into appropriating more cash for the downtrodden as well as he does for re-appropriating the cash upwards, straight up into the pockets of the One Percent -- the political donor class. He's been working overtime to get fast track for the oligarchy through the Senate, even if it takes trashing the Warren Wing of his own party. Because the only party that counts is the Plutocratic Orgy.

And so one of the things I’m always concerned about is cynicism.  My Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough -- we take walks around the South Lawn, usually when the weather is good, and a lot of it is policy talk, sometimes it’s just talk about values. And one of our favorite sayings is, our job is to guard against cynicism, particularly in this town.  And I think it’s important when it comes to dealing with issues of poverty for us to guard against cynicism, and not buy the idea that the poor will always be with us and there’s nothing we can do -- because there’s a lot we can do.  The question is do we have the political will, the communal will to do something about it.

Not greed, not corruption. Cynicism. The image of Obama strolling around on a manicured sunshine-y lawn with the same guy who tried to keep the Senate Torture Report a secret from the public and strong-armed Congress to get the necessary redactions and protections for torturers, schmoozing about cynicism and values brings a tear to my eye and the bile up my throat. "Values" is another one of those neoliberal buzzwords designed to obscure rather than address actual issues. The president and his consigliere didn't plot, I gather, about how to raise teacher pay or strengthen labor unions. They talked about everybody's attitude problem.

Obama continued his poverty concern-trolling in his Weekly Address to the people, aka his weekly dog-whistle to Wall Street. I'm not going to parse the whole thing, just highlight the telltale buzzwords masking the true intent. "Creating Opportunity for All" is code for perpetuating austerity for the many and prosperity for the few. I'll point to more evidence after this partial parse-a-prez. The bolds are mine and meant to signify cynical dog-whistle meanings, or just outright meanness. Take your pick.

Hi, everybody (fellow insiders of the Permanent Political Class). Everything we’ve done over the past six years has been in pursuit of one overarching goal: creating opportunity for all. (all rich people and political donors)

That sense (it's all in their heads of course) of unfairness and powerlessness has helped to fuel the kind of unrest (righteous rage) that we’ve seen in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, and New York. It has many causes -- from a basic lack of opportunity to groups feeling unfairly targeted (what whiners; the beatings are all in their heads) by police – which means there’s no single solution. (how do you solve a problem like Maria, the flibbertigibbet!) But there are many that could make a different (sic) and could help. And we have to do everything in our power to make this country’s promise real for everyone willing to work for it. (promise is meaningless and undefined, but even so, the moochers will have to work for ephemera until they drop.)

Oh, That Towering Unfairly Targeted Feeling

  That’s why last Tuesday, at a summit organized by Catholics and evangelicals, I sat down with a conservative scholar and a poverty expert for a discussion on what it takes to open more doors of opportunity.(precursors to the ladders of opportunity leading to Heaven.)

 We know our efforts matter: since 1967, we’ve brought poverty down by about 40 percent, thanks in part to programs like Social Security and the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families. (mention of income inequality is studiously avoided)  And we know that there are folks from all faiths, and across the ideological spectrum, who care deeply about “the least of these.” So I hope this conversation continues, not as a question of whether, but of how, we can work together to grow opportunity. Because it’s not words, but deeds, that make a difference. (So let's continue conversing amongst our elite selves and forget about the deed-doing for the time being. Sheesh)

 Of course, lack of opportunity is not the only barrier between too many of our young people and the kind of future they deserve. On Monday, I’ll travel to Camden, New Jersey, a city that has faced one of the highest violent crime rates in America. I’ll highlight some of the innovative things they’ve done to help police do their jobs more safely and reduce crime in the process. And I’ll highlight steps all cities can take to maintain trust between the brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line, and the communities they’re sworn to serve and protect.(insert your own &$^)*^%???!!! here).

The reason that I slugged this post Opportunity Is the New Austerity is because notorious deficit hawk billionaire Pete Peterson (known for the Fix the Debt campaign for Social Security and Medicare cuts and for funding Obama's infamous and discredited Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission) is hosting his annual austerian Fiscal Summit in This Town on Tuesday. Guess what this year's theme is?

The usual plutocratic cast of usual suspects will meet to converse about what a shame it is to be poor, but that does not take away from the serious fiscal "challenges" that the indigent must and will face so that the rich may prosper and tinkle down all those golden drops of delight. Apparently, there are many doors to be entered, many ladders to hoist ourselves up on. But not for them:

 Opportunity for America will focus on the need and the opportunity to strengthen America’s fiscal foundation, in order to ensure we have the resources to invest in our own future and build a prosperous and inclusive economy for the next generation. (our trust fund kids) This is the opportunity for America.

Wow. Opportunity will focus on Opportunity will focus on Opportunity. Godzillionaire ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg will take the opportunity to be there. So will Ayn Rand fanboy and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. So will former Bush chief of staff Andy Card and former Obama chief of staff William "Morgan Stanley" Daley. A Who's Who of simpering Washington Press Corpse hacks will be on hand to moderate The Conversation (TM), live on C-Span. But strangely absent, for the very first time in the Summit's history, will be Mr. Welfare Reform himself, the one and only Bill Clinton. I wonder why he'd skip a confab extolling the virtues of rich people and bemoaning the absence of values in poor people while importuning them with all his opportunistic goodness?

Now, don't be cynical, hear? If we're going to Win the Future, we have to put our big boy/girl Opporsterity pants on. Made in a sweatshop not near you.

Throwing Us a Beaner in His Opporsterity Jeans: Nike/TPP Designer Edition

Big Scary Money

The wealthy are not only powerful, they can frighten otherwise sensible people into a state of blubbering impotence. Take Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the 12th richest ($20 billion) person in America. How does he get away with his autocratic program of police brutality on Occupiers, stopping and frisking minorities, spying on Muslims both inside and outside city limits, and until recently, making food stamp applicants get fingerprinted as though they were common criminals?

 Not only does he run New York City as his own private fiefdom, he owns a vast media empire -- and he is constantly threatening to expand it. Journalists are afraid to cross him, lest he own them one day -- say, at The New York Times. David Sirota of Salon lays it all out, and suggests we just stop sucking up to the sanctimonious prick.




Money Honey


Easier said than done. Bloomberg  also wields his influence inside the Beltway and inside the White House, where after a long lunch with the president earlier this year, he was reportedly offered the presidency of the World Bank. He turned down the job, because he already owns the World. And his World View happens to revolve around the cult of centrism -- an elite world in which the little people must sacrifice a lot and the plutocrats pay only a little, and where the meltdown of '08 was caused not by Wall Street psychopaths, but by the government making it too easy for greedy people to buy homes they couldn't afford. President Obama gratefully sucks up to this sanctimonious little prick and the rest of the oligarchy by fully embracing Grand Bargainism and pretending that the Deficit is the original sin. He and Bloomberg are on the exact same austerian page in calling for trillions of dollars in cuts to government programs, and raising the retirement and Medicare eligibility ages.

Ordinary people do not care about the deficit, and outright reject the austerity meme. A recent Ipsos poll reveals the majority of Americans (including Democrats, Republicans and independents) want more, not less, government spending in such areas as food safety, veterans' affairs, and medical device and drug safety. The same poll also revealed that most people were not only unaware that federal employees have been subject to a wage freeze for the past two years, but that the president has just extended it indefinitely. The majority believe that the rich should be taxed to pay for government agencies that serve and protect everyone. We're all a bunch of raving socialists.

Meanwhile, the middle class is shrinking. A new report by Pew grimly lays out the facts -- America is in a Lost Decade. I don't think we needed another poll to tell us that. 

And Mayor Bloomberg gets invited to the White House and liberal think tanks even as he gets away with criminalizing hungry people. He would sooner spend millions of dollars investigating them than feeding them.

Money rules. The class war is real. It's them against us, and as Uncle Warren Buffett famously said, they're winning.

The Other Wars on Women

While we're all being Akinized (the latest method of torture in the eternal presidential campaign of the muddled mind), there's been hardly a riffle of angst over President Obama's announcement yesterday that he will extend the federal wage freeze at least into next year. At the same time the Democrats are casting themselves as staunch defenders of our fallopian tubes, the leader of their party is sending our economic well-being right down the tubes.

By now, that two-year-old pay freeze is amounting to a draconian pay cut for federal workers, whose health insurance and pension contributions have continued to increase. It's a tough choice he had to make, said Obama, but everybody has to share the sacrifice. Except, of course, rich people. They're still waiting for their turn. His exact words:

Civilian federal employees have already made significant sacrifices as a result of a two-year pay freeze. As our country continues to recover from serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare, however, we must maintain efforts to keep our nation on a sustainable fiscal course. This is an effort that continues to require tough choices and each of us to do our fair share.

Translation: since the real culprits won't own up, the whole class will be punished. Needless to say, the scapegoated workers (nearly half of whom are women) are incensed. David Cox of the American Federation of Government Employees is calling Obama's decision "unconscionable." He said the real loss in wages for an employee earning $30,000 is $2,000 when health care premiums are factored in. The president is again demonstrating his austerity bona fides to an electorate he seems to think cares about something called the deficit. No, scratch that. He is demonstrating his austerity bona fides to his unindicted Wall Street masters (contrary to common wisdom, they're still contributing to his campaign coffers, albeit at lower levels than to Rmoney.)

The president ordered the pay freeze only a month before he "caved" on the Bush tax cut extensions in late 2010. Therefore, the $5 billion saved off the backs of federal workers was more than wiped out by deferring to the Republicans and their mega-rich sugar daddies. Obama sweetened the pot even further by getting rid of the estate tax, ensuring that Paris Hilton won't have to pay a penny more. Those were the good old days, when progressives could still get outraged by their president derisively calling them whining purist ideologues, when it was still considered not only permissible, but essential, for the citizenry to dissent and criticize. A year later, the Occupy movement would be born, and the national repressive police state would become apparent.

So this is what we have to look forward to in a second Obama term. This is the face of lesser evilism: holding ordinary working people hostage unless and until a recalcitrant Congress agrees to a grandiose bargain of trillions of dollars in cuts to programs benefiting regular people and maybe but not really the Pentagon. At his impromptu press conference Monday, the president reiterated his burning desire for drastic cuts "balanced" by a polite request that the rich pay just a tad more in taxes. This guy, whose re-election hopes hinge upon his championing of the so-called middle class, is actually putting Medicare and Social Security on the table while he is running for office. And here you thought the Republicans were insane. Again, in his exact words:

  I continue to be open to seeing Congress approach this with a balanced plan that has tough spending cuts, building on the $1 trillion worth of spending cuts we've already made, but also asks for additional revenue from folks like me, folks in the top 1 or 2 percent. That would give more "certainty" to families and small businesses.

Notice how the president skillfully makes the cuts palatable to supporters by always reminding us that "folks like him" will have to share the sacrifice just as much as the impoverished widow who'll see her lifetime Social Security benefits decrease because of his chained COLA plan, or the 65-year-old unemployed and unemployable woman who will now try to stay alive just a few more years till her Medicare kicks in.

With friends like Obama, who needs enemies like RomRy? 

What? Oh, I forgot. The Democrats will protect us from coat hangers in back alleys. So be afraid-very-afraid, shut up, and eat your birth control pills.

And pay no attention to the fact that under a Democratic commander in chief, rapes and sexual abuse of women in the military have reached staggering new levels. (19,000 cases a year) These crimes go largely unprosecuted, and the victims themselves are regularly blamed, even discharged. Rep. Jackie Speier, who's been a lone Congressional advocate for military rape victims, writes:

Despite admonitions that the military has zero tolerance for rape, the military system supports a culture that values "military character" over justice for victims. Unlike the civilian system, the defense may cross-examine victims and previous sexual conduct is admissible evidence. It's no wonder so few victims report the crime.

And if a female soldier becomes pregnant as a result of rape, the armed services will not provide an abortion.  She is on her own, on any of the 1,000 (!) American military bases scattered around the world. Tell me again about the war against women.

Going for Gold at the Austerity Olympics

In the spirit of profit-driven global fellowship with such outsourcing, tax-evading and polluting corporate sponsors as G.E. and BP, Barack Obama is taking a break from attacking his outsourcing and tax-evading fellow candidate on TV this week. Instead of hosting Mitt's off-key rendition of "America the Beautiful" with those dystopian scenes of abandoned factories, the president is relaxing in a tastefully decorated living room, soft music playing in the background. He discreetly interrupts the endless commercial of NBC tape-delayed Olympics to bring you the following very serious message:

I believe the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class. Asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way. So that we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing and home-grown American energy for good middle-class jobs. Sometimes politics can seem very small. But the choice you face? It couldn't be bigger.

That, in a nutshell, is Barack Obama's agenda for a second term. The wealthy will be politely asked, but not forced, to pay a wee token smidgen more. There will be no scrapping of the FICA cap in order to make the Social Security trust fund solvent for generations to come. The "debt" (new-speak for what little of the nation's wealth is still in the hands of the underclass) will be "paid down" (transferred up) in a "balanced" way, meaning that the Grand Bargain of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security cuts is still very much on the table. Grandma will have to go a little cold and hungry at the same time Jamie Dimon might have to give up the tax deduction on his corporate jet, at the same time "entitlement" cuts will mean he gets another raise and buys a tenth vacation home. That is what is meant by the "balanced approach" by the centrist cult of the Third Way.

In his kinder, gentler campaign ad, the president does not mention that deficits should not matter in recessions. He chooses not to tell us that borrowing costs are now so low we could actually profit by borrowing more. Profits will continue to be privatized at the very top, and the costs will go on being socialized.


And forget about legislation for a living wage to lift Americans out of poverty. The short-lived middle class jobs of the future are in fracking and deepwater drilling and construction of the tar sands pipeline -- "home-grown" energy projects tantamount to a Garden of Earthly Delights. He does not mention climate change, pollution of air and water, or the health hazards of his folksy panacea for middle class angst. He euphemizes fracking as though it were a horticultural project.


You have to give the guy credit, though. He is not lying. He is not bothering to make campaign promises he has no intention of keeping. He has been there, done that, and lived to suffer the onslaught of disappointment from the Professional Left.  He is telling us exactly what he plans to do --which is to preserve, protect and defend the interests of the One Percent. He just does it more circumspectly, classily and charmingly than that plutocratic parody named Mitt Romney. 


The choice you face? It couldn't be smaller. Pick between the personable technocrat you know, and the robotic technocrat you don't know. Take your fourth Bush Term as a main course of corporate Clintonites with a side of Wall Street transplants, and some national security Bushies for dessert. Or choose as your Bush Fourth Term entree some aged corporate Cheneyites with a side of Wall Street transplants, topped off by national security Bushies for dessert.

As Matt Stoller wrote on Naked Capitalism over the weekend, this presidential election is probably the least important contest of the past half-century. Neither Romney nor Obama is really all that into us:

As an experienced political hand told me, the two candidates are speaking not to the voters, but to the big money. They hold the same views, pursue the same policies, and are backed by similar interests. Mitt Romney implemented Obamacare in Massachusetts, or Obama implemented Romneycare nationally. Both are pro-choice or anti-choice as political needs change, both tend to be hawkish on foreign policy, both favor tax cuts for businesses, and both believe deeply in a corrupt technocratic establishment.

(snip)

It’s useful to remember, this election season, that the way the debate is framed matters. That Obama isn’t choosing to discuss in public what he will do to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and that Romney isn’t specific about it either, should show you who this election is for. But in addition, that both Bush, Clinton, and Obama (in his first term) failed at cutting Social Security means that an aroused public can stop austerity, when politicians feel their office is at risk. Clinton chose to abandon his plans to gut entitlements when facing impeachment and Bush chose to stop when his plan threatened the Republican Congress.

So, how to stop austerity this time? Despite what the mainstream media would have us believe, the Occupy Movement is not dead. Its first anniversary is less than two months away, right after the political conventions, when campaign frenzy will be in full swing. That the government is still taking desperate measures to suppress dissent should be cause for encouragement, not despair. It shows they're worried about the real anger of real people.That the United Nations, and the rest of the civilized world, are noticing that the American police state continues its crackdowns on protesters should theoretically keep the political elites on their best behavior, at least until November. Neither Obama nor Romney want a repeat of '68 Chicago at their little shindigs. And we can always dream that at least one of the debate moderators will ask them how they will protect the social safety net, demanding substance over the current empty posturing.

We are the richest nation on earth, yet the One Percent would have us become a country of serfs. The politicians give us bland promises of a fair shot and a fair shake at a fair share. What is true is that we have a fair chance of actually getting shot, thanks to the shadow government of the NRA and 300 million weapons for anyone with a pulse. Fair share is more like the big short. Shared sacrifice is a euphemism for the most blatant wealth disparity in American history. We are shaken, and we are stirred. History, as well as the laws of physics, have proven that too much weight at the top always causes the whole structure to collapse.

Keep Sept. 17th open on your calendars, and keep making them sweat even more in this climate-changed summer of our discontent. What else have we got to lose?