Roadkill-R-Us

 You may have noticed that Joe Biden, after signaling left (or at least perceived by his tailgating fans to be signaling left) has suddenly swerved sharply to the right.

And what do you know - he's ended up precisely where's he's been stolidly parked for the entire half-century journey of his long political career: deep in the heart of Neoliberalville. His oft-quoted campaign promise last year to a group of wealthy donors ("Nothing will fundamentally change") has been proven more correct with every passing day. Still, his string of recent concessions to his donors and congressional Republicans stings all the more in the wake of his vague overtures to progressives and the passage this spring of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

His pulsating left-turn blinker light had way too many of these same progressives pretty much blinkered for the first hundred or so days of his administration. The narrative that Biden is the best thing to come along since FDR is getting increasingly frayed, if not yet completely tattered. He rips the rosy media narrative a new one practically every single day, his most recent pronouncement being that he will not fight the expiration of federal unemployment benefits come September, when most kids head back to their physical schools and their parents must therefore head back to their physical jobs, whether or not those physical jobs still exist. (I hear McDonald's franchises are offering signing bonuses, so what could possibly be your excuse for not being an economy-boosting team player?)

Biden's left turn signal was either draining all the energy and confidence from the oligarchic battery of overlords, or he himself was just getting tired of the relentlessly tinny refrain of Happy Days Are Here Again. It was finally time to disabuse his newfound acolytes of the notion and the narrative  that he was a blind St. Paul who'd seen the social democratic light and finally come to progressive Jesus in his enlightened dotage. 

 Biden's "sudden" right turn to Republican appeasement cut his followers right off. They're still so stunned by the ensuing pileup of about-faces and disappointments that they can't even believe that they're trapped in the wreckage. The adrenaline rush of the new UFO craze and the frenzied finger-pointing debates over that alleged Wuhan lab leak are, as the manufacturers of consent seem to hope, at least temporarily masking the pain of no minimum wage increase, no single payer health coverage, no new or recurring stimulus checks, no federal guaranteed jobs program, no student debt forgiveness. And the icing on the cake is Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a America's unelected and unaccountable Pope-Queen) Elizabeth MacDonough's edict that the Dems will only be allowed one more reconciliation bill this year, dashing their ever so sincere hopes to usher in a new New Deal. And then there are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to complete the bad cop triad.

Funnily enough, neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris - really no establishment Democrat that I know of - is directly challenging this latest directive. Harris, who as president of the Senate, does have the power to overrule or even fire MacDonough, is apparently otherwise occupied in Central America, trying to convince subsistence coffee growers that a new Internet app showing them worldwide market prices for their product will make them forget all about migrating to the U.S. An internet app is actually supposed to help them more than, say, being allowed to sell their coffee directly to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Don't they know that the freedom of the Free Market doesn't apply to them?

Meanwhile, according to yet another "soul-searching" effort by Democratic party operatives to discover why they barely hung on by a thread in the 2020 elections, the problem was that they recklessly assumed that black and brown voters are both progressive and anti-police. The study's authors, while decrying the notion of categorizing people into voting blocs, nonetheless assert that since there are more conservative black and brown people than there are progressive black and brown people, they must attempt more outreach to this supposed bloc of law-and-order black and brown people. The Dems have to do much, much more to fight against the GOP misinformation that slanderously insists that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a radical left-winger. Democratic candidates have to do more to convince the electorate of their own conservative and pro-war bona fides if they have a prayer of clinging to their razor-thin majorities in the 2022 congressional elections. They have to double or even triple the dosage of their fact-checking designer drugs to combat the epic epidemic of "disinformation." 

There is nothing in the report about making people's lives better. It's all about what sort of propaganda will work best to convince people that the Democrats are better than those nasty, lying Republicans.

"Our hopes for 2020 were just too high," the report summary concludes, after also blaming the pandemic, bad polling, and too much talk of wearing masks and not enough talk of "reopening the economy" for their party's bare squeaker of a victory over Trumpism. 

It's the whimper being heard round the world of Martha's Vineyard, or wherever the neoliberal elites are out to brunch these days. 

Do I even need to mention that the report was funded by, among other oligarchic influence-peddlers, the late billionaire Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank? At least the Times, in its synopsis of the "most thorough soul-searching by either party so far this year" is finally referring to this outfit as solidly "centrist" as opposed to its previous disinformative placement as "center-left."  I'll be even happier when they start properly referring to Third Way as fascist or reactionary. But with their star reporters balking at paying higher News Guild dues, rather than show solidarity with low-wage journalists at other outlets, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know about other readers, but every time I hear the term "centrist," this grisly image immediately comes to mind:

Photo credit: Tom Garcia

Roadkill is tossed to the side, the double yellow line of centrism extending beyond the infinite horizon of What Is Pragmatically Possible and Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

 The  Republicans, of course, would simply have tossed the corpse into the ditch after running over it a few more times just for sport. The Democrats at least recognize the Roadkill by cynically adorning it with the cheery bright balloon of hope.

A popular modern interpretation of folksinger Loudon Wainwright III's own song about roadkill is that centrists themselves stink like skunks for all their wishy-washiness and devotion to a bipartisan duopoly which enriches the wealthy and powerful via their governing style of gridlock and manufactured paralysis.  Wainwright wrote the ditty in 1972, at the barely noticeable beginnings of the  Neoliberal Era, and also at about the same time that Joe Biden was winning his first election.

Wainwright said he was inspired by merely encountering a literal stinky dead skunk in the middle of the road. Those must have been different times for sure, not least because six major corporations did not yet own and control practically everything we see and hear.

Fifty years later, the ruling elites blame us for lacking enough personal responsibility for our own lives when we fall under the wheels of all their speeding luxury cars. You "shoulda looked left and you shoulda looked right" before ever presuming to cross the road outside of the narrowly defined pedestrian lines. That's because your safety as a cooperative wage slave is their biggest concern.

Can't get a job or earn a living wage or been bankrupted by medical bills even though you're insured? Then you should have been an entrepreneur or at least increased your skills at your own debt-heavy expense while saving enough money for retirement.

The only traffic signal the movers and shakers seem to know is a giant middle finger aimed at their rear view mirrors, against all the unpragmatic people who simply refuse to stay in their own lanes any longer.

Fraudulence of the Democrats

In the interests of my mental health, I've taken a break from the Nooze and the Internet and blogging for the past several days.

So I have nothing to write about the media feud between Donald Trump and James Comey, because spats between plutocrats have no bearing on how the bottom 90 percent of the American population struggles to survive day to day. I also skipped the over-hyped interview on ABC Sunday night, and I don't plan to waste my time slogging through Comey's self-serving book, let alone perusing the morning-after annotated transcripts of the George Stephanopoulos gab-fest being served up by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Comments sections are limited to readers picking a side and rooting for their favorite rich guy. Thanks, but no thanks.

As for the bombing of Syria, it is really quite amazing that the mass media aren't falling in line this time around, and calling Trump "presidential." As a matter of fact, the president has fallen so far within the approved line of expressing venom toward Russia that their whole #Russiagate narrative would be falling apart were it not for Comey keeping it on life support. (Yes, even though I boycotted the Nooze, it was impossible to completely avoid the multiple teasers of Comey saying it was "possible" that prostitutes were peeing all over each other, if not upon Trump directly.)

So at least they're finally making a stab at going after Trump's sleazy business empire by way of his "fixer," Michael Cohen. This is decades after they gave him a free pass over his sleazy gambling empire in New Jersey, for the mere fact that even in bankruptcy, he was deemed too big and newsworthy to fail on the public stage. Plus, too many corrupt Jersey politicians (in both parties) and law enforcement officials had been in cahoots with him.

 Meanwhile, centrist Democrats, through one of their favorite media spokespeople, are still doubling down on running as the true party of fiscal responsibility and thinking that they can win the midterms on the same wonkish pragmatism that cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. More likely, they're not really interested in regaining the majority at all, because raising money off the largely astroturfed #Resistance and keeping Trump and the GOP right where they can self-righteously flail at them in outrage is really their endgame. What would they possibly do without Trump to kick around? People might start realizing they're still the liberal wing of that Bird of Prey that Upton Sinclair wrote about a century or so ago.

So the gist of David Leonhardt's New York Times column is not that deficits shouldn't matter when people are needlessly suffering and dying and struggling in the richest country on earth. What he finds outrageous is that the Republicans are fake deficit hawks, and the Democrats are the true deficit hawks.  Pundits have finally - finally - realized that media darling Paul Ryan was a con artist and a phony hawk this whole time, what with those humongous  tax cuts for the rich and all. A phony epiphany is apparently better than no epiphany at all.

Still, Leonhardt thinks the Dems aren't getting the credit they deserve for being the more honest Social Darwinists. Whenever they give crumbs to one group of vulnerable people, they always neuter themselves by taking from another vulnerable community. It's what Barack Obama often insipidly called his "balanced approach." (Too bad, according to Leonhardt, that the media also refuse to acknowledge that Obama's great failure as president was his refusal to carpet-bomb Syria's chemical weapons arsenals when he had the chance. Letting Trump claim that glorious victory is almost too much for the liberal class to bear, apparently.)

But back to the main Dollars Over the Demos theme, as Leonhardt writes:

Ever so slowly, conventional wisdom has started to recognize this reality. After Ryan’s retirement announcement last week, only a few headlines called him a deficit hawk. People are catching on to the con. But there is still a major way that the conventional wisdom is wrong: It doesn’t give the Democratic Party enough credit for its actual fiscal conservatism. Over the last few decades, Democrats have repeatedly reduced the deficit. They have raised taxes. They have cut military spending and corporate welfare. Some of them have even tried to hold down the cost of cherished social programs. Obamacare, for example, included enough cost controls and tax increases that it’s cut the deficit on net....

 So it would certainly be false to claim that Democrats are perfect fiscal stewards and that Republicans are all profligates. Yet it’s just as false to claim that the parties aren’t fundamentally different. One party has now spent almost 40 years cutting taxes and expanding government programs without paying for them. The other party has raised taxes and usually been careful to pay for its new programs.

The Dems' claim to having cut military spending on paper (due to the bipartisan Sequestration fraud of an excuse to punish regular people in the name of fiscal responsibility) was more than offset by a sleight-of-hand maneuver, appropriating billions of dollars in unaccountable "contingency" funding to the Pentagon during Barack Obama's presidency. This included half a billion dollars in 2016 alone for more of the Predator drones used in Obama's secretive and unaccountable assassination program, as well as $8 billion for the military's slush fund for miscellaneous secret programs that year.

My published comment on Leonhardt's deeply dishonest piece:

Nowhere in this column is there any mention of the bipartisan profligacy of the permanent war/surveillance state. Congress traditionally has given the Pentagon and the "intelligence" community carte blanche to do their violent unaccountable things with only the slightest levels of token oversight.

Yes, Democrats are more "fiscally responsible" regarding taxes. But during the cycles that they're in power, they're very willing to wheel and deal with the GOP on cuts to the social safety net. It was only due to the recalcitrance of the Tea Party that President Obama was unable to achieve his own "Grand Bargain" with House Speaker John Boehner, after the so-called Cat Food Commission for Fiscal Responsibility had also failed to make "sensible" cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The Democratic Party abandoned the poor and working class decades ago in the name of this "fiscal responsibility." And they wonder why millions of financially strapped people turned to the fake populism of Donald Trump in the last cycle.

Desperate people don't vote for wonks, pragmatists, fiscal hawks and a better life for themselves someday, but just not right now. If you don't believe me, look at what's happening to Gov. Cuomo in New York State. The Working Families Party abandoned him for the sole reason that he has stiffed working families in the interests of his oligarchic backers.

It's a testament to its hard-centrist ideology that the Times dismissively characterized this rather bland offshoot of the Democratic Party (they ditched Zephyr Teachout for the thuggish Andrew Cuomo in his second campaign) as "progressive die-hards." It's also a testament to the corporate capture of labor unions that several of them ditched the Working Families Party over the weekend in order to display their own slavish Trump-like loyalty to Andrew Cuomo.

Topsy-Turvy Duopoly

The fact that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man shouldn't distract us from the naked truth that corporate Democrats and their surrogates are trying their damnedest to overthrow his election by every slimy method at their disposal. By aligning themselves with the de facto fourth branch of government alternately known as the Deep State, the Surveillance State and the Intelligence Community, they're actually accomplishing the feat of attacking a right-wing demagogue from the very far right.

You'd almost think that they were repudiating democracy (such as still even exists) itself.

So you have to ask yourself: Just who, exactly, is the fascist thug in this mix? The whiff of beer hall putsch disguised as a Champagne brunch is wafting up the Potomac.

While the "socially liberal" oligarchic faction pretends to battle the sadistic oligarchic faction (step right up and buy our chic pink Pussycat hats for the big anti-Trump march, ladies!) ordinary people schlepping to their temporary service gigs will get caught in the crossfire. 

 The ruling class racketeers on both sides of the Uniparty are ignoring social and economic problems in favor of joining forces to scapegoat a third oligarchic faction named Vladimir Putin. They accuse him, with little to no evidence, of personally ordering the "hacking" of the presidential election and costing Hillary Clinton her prize of Empress of the Free World. By gluing the national attention, once again, to an Enemy Over There rather than toward the very real class war enemies over here, they're doing nothing less than preparing our hearts and minds for World War Three. Thousands of NATO (American) troops are massing on the Russian border even as we speak. From The Guardian: 

But their arrival was not universally applauded. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We perceive it as a threat. These actions threaten our interests, our security. Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s [the US], not even a European state.”
The Kremlin may hold back on retaliatory action in the hope that a Donald Trump presidency will herald a rapprochement with Washington. Trump, in remarks during the election campaign and since, has sown seeds of doubt over the deployments by suggesting he would rather work with than confront Putin.

But on Thursday Nato officials played down Trump’s comments, saying they hoped and expected that he would not attempt to reverse the move after he became president on 20 January. 
 That prediction was reinforced by Trump’s proposed defence secretary, James Mattis, and his proposed secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who backed Nato during Senate confirmation hearings.

As we have (apparently not) learned from history, it will be much harder to get out of a war than it will be to start one. And given that both the USA and Russia are nuclear weapons powerhouses, this could indeed be the war to end all wars. By whispering in Trump's ear that his alleged pal Putin has been spying on him, the "intelligence community" and their political enablers are trying to provoke (or blackmail) him into going along with plans for corporate hegemony put in place by the "defense industry" long before his shocking victory over Clinton. It seems to matter not a whit to Democrats that military men like Mattis are supposedly not allowed to lead the "Defense" Department out of a very real concern that we might end up with a domestic military coup.

How to persecute a persecutor who flits from idea to idea to idea with no regard for facts or respect for "norms?"  How do you solve a problem like Maria? Many a thing they know they'd like to tell him (and they have certainly tried to "brief" him, given his reputed short attention span.) How do you catch a wavy comb-over on the sand?

And he's been warned, as Chuck Schumer so elegantly put it on national TV, that the Deep State will exact its revenge "six ways from Sunday" if Trump doesn't go along to get along... with his actual life.

So while the liberal corporate Democrats are aligning with the unaccountable authoritarian surveillance/war state and attacking Trump from the right, those of us with a more socialist perspective find ourselves in the weird position of defending Donald Trump from the left via our criticism of liberal overreach.

For example: why on earth would a Democratic president be gifting Trump with such unprecedented extensions of the Authoritarian State if liberals are really so terrified of him? Obama quietly signed off on creation of a global/domestic propaganda bureau just before Christmas. Its unprecedented scope and funding would make even Joseph Goebbels green with brown-shirted envy. And in his most recent weekend dump on his sprint to the finish-line, Obama signed a terrifying order allowing the NSA to begin sharing all our personal email and telephone communications with all 17 police state ("intelligence community") agencies, including the CIA and the FBI. 

Given the current Democratic establishment's posturing over FBI Director James Comey's own alleged coup against Hillary Clinton, you'd think they'd be enraged by Obama's action. However, this latest blockbuster of a power grab has basically gone under the radar, thanks to the current epidemic of Russophobia making all the important people break out in a total body rash. So, do be sure to read Glenn Greenwald's piece on it at The Intercept if you haven't already done so.

Meanwhile, I have a sinking feeling that people are still making the mistake of underestimating Trump. He will no doubt use the ongoing manufactured mass hysteria to his own distinct and powerful advantage. After all, if even thinking people believe that he's got a valid point about being persecuted by a corrupt surveillance state, he's won half the public relations battle already.

Although some if not most of the comparisons of Trump to Adolf Hitler are overblown, there are eerie similarities in the political climates of both Weimar Germany and End-Stage Capitalistic 21st Century America. People are out of work or underpaid. Xenophobia is simmering while global demagogues suddenly made hate not only politically correct, but something to be encouraged. Democratic political systems institute austerity for impoverished people in order to pay off onerous IMF/World Bank debt and bail out banksters and CEOs, while billionaires off-shore their record wealth in hidden tax-free accounts. Income disparity soars to unprecedented levels.

 The left wing becomes the whipping boy of both right-wingers and corporate centrists. "Moderate" leaders in both Weimar and America barred leftist candidates from public discourse and coverage before the elections, of Hitler and Trump respectively. Intellectuals and pundits nearly all prophesied, regarding both Trump and Hitler, that such an extremist clown would never last. They yawned when Hitler became chancellor. They similarly predict that Trump will be impeached and kicked out of office before the year is over.

All it took for Hitler to gain sole dictatorial power after a series of perfectly legal democratic victories was one traumatic event: the burning of the Reichstag in his first year as Chancellor. He was able to unite all of Germany against one scapegoat. You guessed it: Communist Russia. Jews had always been the enemy, but blaming the arson on a Marxist, with absolutely no evidence, was pretty much the same thing in Adolf's fevered little brain.

All it might take for Trump to, if not seize dictatorial power, at least enjoy a mass uptick in his public approval ratings and the strengthening of his personality cult, would be for a terrorist attack or other catastrophe to occur within our borders. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have certainly paid forward some of the most extreme and violent executive/deep state powers in American history for him to play around with and shoot up with his own designer steroids. Americans have been programmed all too well to see threats and dangers wherever we're told to look.

It certainly hasn't helped the weakened Democratic Party's cause to continue demonizing both the Sanders/Warren wing and the independent leftist media as being just as dangerous and extremist as Trump. They're ironically employing the same tactics as Joseph Goebbels did in Nazi Germany. In their fevered campaign of equating fascism with socialism, they are only stifling dissent and solidifying further our pre-existing condition of obedience, repression, and fear. 

Influential centrist pundit Jonathan Chait is a case in point. As Timothy Shenk describes Chait's "dead center" Cold War 2.0 straw-manning worldview,

Chait has been less successful at interpreting the left, which in his analysis becomes an undifferentiated mass of rabid Marxists, politically correct ideologues, and postmodern academics. Rather than attacking these distinct factions at their strongest points, he lumps them together as products of the illiberal left, and then takes fire at the caricature he has drawn. “Marxist theory does not care about individual rights,” his readers learn, while, “Political correctness borrows its illiberal model of political discourse from Marxism”—as if Marxist theory and political correctness are buddies who meet up for drinks to plot the demise of free speech.

 Such topsy-turvy "right is left, and left is right" centrist propaganda tactics have historically not ended well.

Miss Manners' Guide to Massacre Debate Etiquette

Mrs. Alan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell) is all upset that Donald Trump is using the San Bernardino shooting to boost his candidacy. "Incredibly, his response is poll-driven," she groused to MTP Daily host Chuck Todd on MSNBC last night. "He said, twice, that 'every time there's a tragedy, my poll numbers go up!'"

Of course, she couldn't leave it at that, because whenever Beltway insiders get together for a chat, etiquette dictates that for every right-wing idiot, there has to be a left-wing counter-idiot.Therefore Mitchell went on to complain, "It's just that there's a creepiness going on on both sides, the fact that there was, you know, prayer shaming going on and the bloggers!"

Chuck choked out something like "prayer, for crying out loud, now they're attacking prayer of all things?" National Journal pundit Ron Fournier added that the partisan debate over the San Bernardino massacre has become as radicalized as the shooters themselves. The debate is irresponsible, he said, because both sides are attacking each other while cravenly ignoring the real threat(s). If they were serious adults, they would be bipartisanly selling the fear and the terror that every concerned citizen should be experiencing.

Fournier: He (President Obama) knows where this is headed and he knows his party is headed in the wrong direction ... In a sane political environment, if you have one party doing prayer shaming and another party demonizing and profiling Muslims, they'd be laughed out of politics. They would be marginalized. We wouldn't write about them [crosstalk] We have two very dysfunctional parties and a media now that is not even [crosstalk]

Mitchell: This is not a serious political debate.

Todd: No.

Fournier: It's dangerous.

Both sides do it! There is a serious Permawar going on here, yet Trump is demonizing Muslims for his own gain, and libruls are demonizing prayer for theirs. Oh, the humanity. Oh, the false equivalence.

What Andrea Mitchell ludicrously calls "prayer shaming" is nothing more than calling out politicians who Tweet their maudlin "thoughts and prayers" after every mass shooting, rather than Tweet out their demands for immediate gun control legislation. This has nothing to do with shaming religious people who pray. This has everything to do with exposing hypocrisy.  

Fournier is right that the "debate" has become radicalized. The chattering class is radically stupid and irresponsible for framing everything around partisanship, politics, and the interests of the ruling class in keeping us all afraid, very afraid. While complaining about partisanship trumping (sorry) terror, they're continuously wallowing in partisanship themselves. Heaven forbid that they examine their own alleged consciences for some insight in how they themselves are muddying the "debate" by churning up militaristic fever even as they champion horse-race politics.

The term "prayer shaming" has actually been around for awhile.  The Atlantic ran a piece by Emma Green, suspiciously published immediately after the California shooting. It was as though they had it on file and ready to go. This is obviously what gave Andrea Mitchell her convenient talking points: 

There’s a clear claim being made here, and one with an edge: Democrats care about doing something and taking action while Republicans waste time offering meaningless prayers. These two reactions, policy-making and praying, are portrayed as mutually exclusive, coming from totally contrasting worldviews. Elsewhere on Twitter, full-on prayer shaming set in: Anger about the shooting was turned not toward the perpetrator or perpetrators, whose identities are still unknown, but at those who offered their prayers.

 (snip)

There are many assumptions packed into these attacks on prayer: that all religious people, and specifically Christians, are gun supporters, and vice versa. That people who care about gun control can’t be religious, and if they are, they should keep quiet in the aftermath of yet another heart-wrenching act of violence. At one time in American history, liberals and conservatives shared a language of God, but that’s clearly no longer the case; any invocation of faith is taken as implicit advocacy of right-wing political beliefs.
The most powerful evidence against this backlash toward prayer comes not from the Twitterverse, but from San Bernardino. “Pray for us,” a woman texted her father from inside the Inland Regional Center, while she and her colleagues hid from the gunfire. Outside the building, evacuated workers bowed their heads and held hands. They prayed.

This is missing the point, I think. Nobody is "prayer-shaming" or making fun of religion in these Tweets. As a matter of fact, the prayer-shamer shamers and PC police should also probably alert us to the fact that actual thought-shaming is  going on here, too, since the more secular Thoughts invariably precede Prayers in these hypocritical Tweets. We should know that no alleged prayer can ever sail through the air without first attaching to itself the propaganda rocket booster known as magical thinking.

Actually, there is not much thought or insight of any kind in evidence within the mainstream media. There are, though, lots of buzzwords passing as mentation in an echo chamber, an embarrassment of bromides passing as political courage and will.

I nominate the term "platitude-shaming" to replace prayer-shaming. Or is that too radical?

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.

Dangerous New Deals

Some powerful Democrats have been trying to claim lately that are donning the austerity mantle just to prove to the country how insane and intractable the Republicans are in comparison. They won't admit that they themselves have veered right in order to please their Wall Street paymasters, and to keep that campaign cash flowing. They are pretending we are in a debt and deficit crisis and that a strict diet of safety net slashes coupled with a smidgen of new revenue will magically put some fat on the GDP.

They are buying into the tripe pushed by centrist think tanks run by corporations and talk show pundits owned by corporations. They insist that the failed Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission is still alive and well and beloved by all the world. Many of them have become full-fledged members of the cult whose prime tenet is that the government is just like a family, that fairness is defined as impoverished grannies giving up one daily meal at the same time Jamie Dimon surrenders the tax deduction on his 10th vacation home.

Latest case in point: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has just approached Speaker John Boehner about immediately and permanently extending the Bush tax cuts to people earning less than $1 million a year, rather than the $250,000 championed by the Obama Administration. This idea is nothing new. In fact, N.Y. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has been proposing the million dollar figure since forever. The sad fact, claims Chuck, is that $999,000 is just chump change when you live in New York or its wealthy 'burbs. Private school tuition is skyrocketing, property taxes on multimillion dollar mansions are out of control, and with the slight chance that the state minimum wage is going up to $8.50 an hour, the cost of The Help will go through the roof.

Chuck claimed in 2010 that the million-dollar compromise would show those nasty Republicans just how nasty they are. He predicted that his offer would make it impossible for them to say No. Guess what? They said No then, and they'll say No again. Chuck and Nancy just don't want to admit that their party's prime allegiance is to rich people, too. They have to pretend to be a bit more populist.  

Never mind that extending the tax cuts to almost-millionaires will seriously
bloat the deficit. The public interest group Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that in 2013 alone, the Pelosi-Schumer plan would cost between $60 and $70 billion. As a matter of fact, their plan would actually be more beneficial to the really, truly, filthy rich than to the merely rich: a full 50% of their tax cuts would go straight to millionaires:

This would result because under Pelosi’s proposal, a married couple making $3 million a year, for example, would continue to pay the lower tax rates (enacted under President Bush) on $1 million of their income. Under Obama’s proposal, a married couple making $3 million a year would continue to pay the lower tax rates on just $250,000 of their income.

Taxpayers with incomes exceeding $1 million would therefore receive substantially larger tax cuts under Pelosi’s proposal than they would under Obama’s proposal.

The Huffington Post quoted an anonymous Democratic aide whose name could not possibly be Nancy Pelosi as saying Nancy Pelosi's whole point is just to make the Republicans look bad by displaying how reasonable and serious she herself is:

If Republicans refuse to move on this proposal, it is clear they are standing with millionaires and endangering the economic security of the middle class," said the aide.

(snip) 

"What Pelosi is proposing is a reasonable path forward given this situation," said the aide.

Pelosi made other waves recently by signalling she would also be open to a "Grand Bargain" of social safety net cuts, leading former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold to circulate a petition against the plan. Again, she had defended herself by claiming that her aim was simply to make the nihilistic GOP look unreasonable to voters in this election year. Same game of chicken, in which she puts impoverished surrogates (real people) behind her political daredevil wheel.

Either Nancy Pelosi is trying to out-Obama Obama in the Negotiating With Oneself department, or she is getting old and befuddled, or she is giving needed cover for Obama to "cave" in an election year/lameduck session, or she has been a corrupt phony all along and it's just beginning to dawn on people. If I had to cast a vote today, I would opt for all of the above.

As the sixth wealthiest member of the House with a reported net worth of almost a quarter-billion dollars, Pelosi ranks right up there with Mitt Romney in the riches department. Maybe her California constituents should consider throwing her a retirement party, sooner rather than later.