Enemies R Us

If Congress and its oligarchic masters get their way with their tax reform package, the ultra-rich will attach themselves like leeches on steroids to the body politic. They'll suck the poor and middle class as dry as it is possible to suck them without actually killing off too many their hosts.

There will, sadly, be collateral damage resulting as the Winter Solstice darkness approaches and gives the racketeering revelers necessary cover for their annual orgy of sacrificing the poor as an offering to the rich. But like the Democratic Party enablers always say, "we" must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good...  for the robber barons who already have way more than their share of the public goods. To say otherwise is to be unpatriotic and possibly Russian.

The ruling class racketeers simultaneously care and don't care what the poor and middle classes think of them and their greed. Therefore, regular people have been simultaneously and unwillingly cast in the dual roles of victim and enemy. Measures must be taken by the pathocrats to protect themselves from the annoying rabble.

 To that end, Congress-critters have tacked on some very sneaky companion legislation to their annual fiscal Saturnalia. Every single one of us would be subject to a new provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which would explicitly allow the US government to drastically expand its warrantless spying powers against its own citizens. We would lose all rights to appeal if and when we are ever accused of a crime in a secret FISA court proceeding. Suspicion would, potentially, be tantamount to conviction without benefit of a judge and jury of our peers.

Jason Pye and Sean Vitka write in The Hill:

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has marked up the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act, S. 2010. The bill, sponsored by Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is actually worse than existing law. It explicitly allows the attorney general to use information collected under Section 702 for domestic crimes that have nothing to do with national security and forbids judicial review of that decision.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee has marked up the USA Liberty Act, which, despite or because of painstaking deliberations, does not sufficiently protect innocent Americans from surveillance. The House version of the USA Liberty Act, for instance, has a weak warrant requirement, which would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to conduct backdoor searches of electronic communications collected by the NSA for domestic, non-terrorism investigations. Additionally, the proposed end of “about” collection, in which the government collects information that is neither to nor from a target, would sunset after six years.

All indications are that the expanded FISA reauthorization bill will pass Congress with little to no debate. And why not, since the media is doing its own complicit part and redirecting the alarm bells to the admittedly heinous sexual harassment scandals and cover-ups in that august body, for whom oversight and accountability are but quaint relics of some misty past.

Meanwhile, the lucrative paranoia stemming from the 9/11 attacks keeps right on growing, and our civil, constitutional rights keep right on shrinking. Net Neutrality looks to be dead in the water on the say-so of a cabal of unelected overseers in the Federal Communications Commission. 

If American journalists employed by RT, a Russia-owned TV station, can now be forced to register as foreign agents, so, potentially, can any writer or broadcaster or activist be decreed an enemy of the state for daring to criticize its leaders and institutions and endless wars. All the proof that the neo-McCarthyites need is to point the finger of "fake news" at anyone they deem to be a threat to their power.

The fog of totalitarianism in America isn't creeping around on little cat feet any more. It's breaking right out into the harsh light of day. It's snarling and it's slobbering like a primeval sabre-toothed tiger.

If that metaphor is too grisly for you, and because it's that most wonderful Saturnalian time of the year, maybe you'd prefer the image of Saturn eating his own children lest they grow up to be lazy poor peaceniks lolling about in their hammocks of dependency.

Hypercapitalist Holiday Greetings From Paul Ryan (graphic by Kat Garcia)

The old excuse that we must give up our rights to privacy and free speech in order to protect some nonexistent entity called "national security" doesn't hold up once we realize that we're under attack by our own leaders. The two-party system and the bicameral legislature and the corporatized media and the "intelligence community" are revealed as nothing but a smokescreen to hide rule of, by, and for the ultra-rich and their profitable wars against humanity, and the earth itself.

 "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" loses all meaning when "the good" entails tens or hundreds of millions of people losing their their health, their jobs, their very lives, just to satisfy the voracious appetites of a very tiny group of sociopathic billionaires.

In order to literally survive, it is incumbent on us to start rejecting, en masse, the limited false choices being offered to us, including but not limited to: We can either be free, or we can be safe, but we can't be both. We must support the troops and cheer for war and plunder and state aggression as the necessary price for our future peace and prosperity. The Lessers must "share the sacrifice" and barely scrape by on the empty promise of some vague, future, trickle-down leftovers from the Masters of the Universe table.

 As Hannah Arendt wrote in the last published collection of her essays, such choices are dangerously fallacious.

 "Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.... If we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of 'the lesser evil' -- far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite -- is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."

Therefore, what more convenient time than this season of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men for our rulers to ram through legislation which officially buries our civil rights deep within a terroristic spending package which will literally destroy the lives and livelihoods of the very people who, under the pretense of representative democracy, voted them into power? They rely, correctly, on the inability of many people to think for themselves. The media fog machine keeps belching, and American consumers keep consuming as the unhealthy alternative to active citizenship. And the fat cats keep baring their fangs.

They call it the Omnibus Bill for a very good reason. It aims to throw us right under a runaway killer bus. It aims to render us into roadkill for the voracious billionaire omnivores running the place.

Get Well Soon, America! (photo by Tom Garcia)

A Modest GOP Proposal: 21st Century Eugenics

Paul Ryan to the Plutocracy: Eat Poor Children Well

Another year, another Republican health plan. The 2017 edition of Eugenics USA Inc. is even more blatantly savage than usual, given that the GOP now controls all three branches of government. The Democrats are again reduced to feebly defending the market-based kludge grotesquely known as the Affordable Care Act. Countering the Republicans with a single payer, Medicare for All plan is apparently asking way too much of them. 

Ironically, it's the hardcore ("Freedom Caucus") conservative wing of the GOP which may end up granting a reprieve both to the middle class refugees clinging to their Obamacare plans, and to the vulnerable people who now depend on Medicaid for their very survival. According to the Hardcores, RyanCare or TrumpCare or We Don't Care, or whatever you want to call the latest hideous plan, simply doesn't go far enough. They not only don't want the government messing with our health care freedoms, they don't want the government subsidizing and enriching the rent-seeking insurance cartel, either.

Since the package keeps the most oligarch-enriching parts of the Affordable Care Act intact, the Freedom Caucus aptly calls it "Obamacare Lite." If only 19 House Republicans and only one Senate Republican nix it, the GOP bill is DOA.

Trump is therefore actively courting the holdouts, most notably his erstwhile nemesis, Lyin' Ted Cruz. They reportedly went bowling for dollars Wednesday night in the White House basement after an intimate dinner upstairs.

The worst part of the GOP's proposal, meanwhile, the one that is getting the least attention from a mainstream media more interested in protecting Barack Obama's legacy and lambasting GOP math than in advocating truly universal health care, is the proposed transformation of Medicaid into block grants. Long an Ayn Randian wet dream of House Speaker Paul Ryan, this block-granting scheme would give states the right to decide how federal Medicaid money is spent, even getting the sadistic option of rejecting this money out of pure spite.  Several red states, including Texas, have already opted out of the ACA's Medicaid expansion for the simple reason that they'd rather punish brown and black people than give their needy population, including whites, any health care at all.

Ryan's current proposal, which has received preliminary plaudits from Donald Trump, would eventually cut off all benefits to recipients after they have consumed whatever allotment of medical care that any given group of plutocracy-serving politicians deems sufficient. 

If Ryan gets his way, estimates the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, tens of millions of vulnerable people -- children, the elderly, the low-paid working poor and the disabled -- will suffer.

The  slashing of federal benefits effectuated by the block-granting means that "states would likely have no choice but to institute draconian cuts to eligibility, benefits, and provider payments.  To illustrate the likely magnitude of these cuts, an analysis from the Urban Institute of an earlier block grant proposal from Speaker Ryan found that between 14 and 21 million people would eventually lose their Medicaid coverage (on top of those losing coverage if policymakers repeal the ACA and its Medicaid expansion) and that already low provider payment rates would be reduced by more than 30 percent."

 Ryan wants to do with Medicaid reform what Bill Clinton accomplished with welfare reform more than two decades ago. The repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children forced poor mothers receiving cash benefits to go to work for next to no pay, thereby suppressing wages for everybody, and having their cash benefits cut off entirely after a few years. As a result, Clinton and the then-GOP majority in Congress condemned millions of mothers and children  to lives of abject poverty. It's no accident that the death rate for indigent American women has gone up over this same time period. Hillary Clinton's boast that "by the time Bill and I left office, the welfare rolls had been reduced by 60%" has had the desired effect. The number of Americans living on less than $2 cash a day has doubled since welfare reform was signed into law.

(And they wonder why not enough struggling, depressed people turned out to give the Clintons another chance at governing as "progressives who can get things done.")

Many states, moreover, have used the matching federal block grant money granted by Clinton reform (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) for programs deliberately aimed at shaming and controlling the poor. Rather than receive direct cash aid, mothers are forced to attend parenting seminars and other mandated self-help programs on the supposition that poverty and ignorance and immorality go hand in hand.  A 2012 study conducted by the Center reveals that only 30% of the TANF block grants is spent directly on poor families. And since the start of the recession, this money is increasingly used by cash-strapped state governments for other services, such as policing poor people.

The ultimate core philosophy of the block grant scheme is unaccountability. The federal government would have no say on how the Medicaid money is spent. Rent-seekers are cordially invited to the free-for-all.

And if the Reform and Repeal of Obamacare does get through Congress and is signed by Donald Trump, the predatory class will have a trillion more dollars in tax breaks to burn. Less generous tax credits to middle class citizens to use for the purchase of private health insurance policies is a bait and switch tactic, because even the relatively better off will eventually become poor enough, sick enough and old enough to quickly deplete any "savings" gleaned from these tax breaks. This is inevitable, since the GOP plan does nothing to control the skyrocketing costs of medical care. The costs of both health care and insurance will only continue to rise, because the reform package also does away with the individual mandate to purchase the insurance, as well as remove limits on co-pays and deductibles.

"They may be able to afford low actuarial value coverage with the tax credits the bills would provide them" says Timothy Jost of Physicians for a National Health Plan, "but they are unlikely then to be able to afford the cost sharing that coverage will impose."

James Kwak of Baseline Scenario puts it even more succinctly:

  There are more details, but the basic outlines of the plan are simple: Cut taxes on the rich, cut spending on the poor, and expose more families to rising health care costs. The thing is, we’re talking about health care here. People will need the same amount of health care no matter what Congress does. If the government pays less for health care, poor people will have to pay more. If they can afford it, Trumpcare is effectively the same as a tax on the poor. If they can’t afford it, it’s even worse. This is as naked an example of class warfare as you’ll see today.

Little Mary Sunshine vs. Donnie Darko

The poor corporate Democrats are not only stuck between a rock and a hard place, they're mired in the swamp, they're swirling in the maelstrom, they're choking on their own happy-talk effluvia.

They proclaim themselves utterly dismayed by the dark, dismal, depressing acceptance speech of Donald Trump the other night. Sunshine Superman he definitely is not. And that he didn't make God a centerpiece of his diatribe is only more proof of how un-American he truly is. Failure of a politician to constantly mention a supernatural character is a direct slap in the face to our official national motto: In God We Trust.

Trump only mentioned God once in his speech, and that was in the final sentence. Even then, he committed the ultimate faux pas, uttering "God bless you" rather than "God bless America." Kate Smith must be rolling in her grave.

Superstition has been the glue holding the bipartisan military-industrial complex together since the dawn of the Empire, and Trump threatens to turn that neocon propaganda of exceptionalism right on its overstuffed puritanical head. He wears his xenophobia on his sleeve, willfully ignoring the code of etiquette which holds that politicians' foul cores must always be masked by pretty, soothing, humanitarian words.  

  In the annals of presidential politics, the Trump horror show is making Dick Cheney look about as anodyne as folksy misanthrope Mike Pence.

Rather than agree with Trump that most people are more down and out than ever, the Democratic Party is choosing instead to shoot the messenger. They're blasting away at Donnie, that nasty brutish short-fingered authoritarian messenger of gloom and doom. Because to acknowledge the terrible reality of Dystopian America would be to unconscionably betray the last seven and half years of the Obama presidency itself.

The premature and perpetual burnishing of Obama's legacy - and the party's retention of political power - seem more important to Democratic elders than addressing such inconvenient social ills as poverty and homelessness and drug addiction and suicide and premature death rates, and past, present and future corporate malfeasance and war crimes.

 In the view of elite eyes peering out from behind their rose-colored glasses, killing the messenger certainly trumps (sorry!) killing the legacy of Barack Obama in particular, and the Neoliberal Project in general. The Democratic Party cannot possibly admit that the wealth gap has increased under Obama, that the poverty rate has increased under Obama, that the jobs created under Obama have mostly been of the low wage, service sector, temporary and precarious variety.

So instead of espousing a new New Deal and a government-sponsored jobs program for every citizen wanting employment, they're holding their ears and insisting that the kids are all right - even in lead-poisoned Flint, Michigan. They gave out free plastic filters to everybody, didn't they? So they won't even bother to sing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow at their convention this week. As far as they're concerned, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and for that matter, in every other corner of its inclusive, diverse Big Tent of the Free. 

Sure, they grudgingly allow,"there's still work to be done." Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight (against her own neoliberal policies?) from Day One, ensuring that every last shlub will get the chance to live up to his or her "God-given potential."

Just like Little Mary Sunshine, the Clinton party is a subversive parody of the Pollyanna genre, though unfortunately not in a feel-good, funny way.

You're Either With Her, Or You're Secretly With Donnie

You gotta believe... in incrementalism. Hope is so yesterday, and so Berniebro-ish. (just look at the DNC's leaked Sanders-trashing emails in case you still had any doubts. These flacks sound just as depraved as the "Sunny in Philly" cast. Is it too late for Bernie to still take the fight all the way to the convention?)

Donald Trump might be a fascistic strongman and a false idol, but the Sunshine Love Party of Hillary isn't exactly winning friends either, what with trying to convince us that everything is hunky-dory, and that the hunky-doryness will continue into the foreseeable future. The only influencers they seek to impress are their donors and the comfortable believers of the professional class. And that includes Republicans who are just as horrified at Trump's dark material as the establishment Dems.

 The Clintonites aren't interested in wooing hippies and lefties and poor people, and they never have been. Why else select Wall Street and TPP-friendly Tim Kaine as Clinton's running mate, and then add insult to injury by colluding with the New York Times to cynically cast him as a "progressive?"

(Now, to  be perfectly catty about the whole thing, I think that one reason she picked him is because he makes her look ten years younger.) 

 Slim,Trim,Grim, and Brim-full of Vim With Tim

New York Times columnist and Democratic factotum Paul Krugman, long a Panglossian defender of the neoliberal Obama regime, wrote a hilarious blog-post the other day, assuring his readers that because New York City's tony Upper West Side (where he owns a fortified $1.7 million co-op) is safe and secure, fear-mongering Donnie Darko has no idea what he's talking about, claiming that America is not strong or great.

If you listen to Trump, shames Krugman, it probably means that you're paranoid and delusional and perhaps even just as racist and misogynistic as he is.

Krugman writes,

If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere is friendly – New Yorkers tend to be rushed, but they’re not nasty – and, well, nice.

Yes, the Upper West Side is affluent. But still, I’ve seen New York over the decades, and it has never been as pleasant, as safe in feel, as it is now. And this is the big bad city!

The point is that lived experience confirms what the statistics say: crime hasn’t been lower, society hasn’t been safer, in generations. Which, of course, leads us to the Trump gambit from last night. Can he raise 1968-type fears in a country that looks, feels, and is nothing like it was back then?

Krugman is an intelligent guy, so it's painfully, transparently obvious that his piece is simply a desperate liberal counter-gambit as well as an ode to the wellness regimes of the wealthy.

My published response:

Well, if all is right in Krugman's privileged world, then it naturally follows that all should revel in his self-satisfaction.

This post creepily (and hilariously) reminded me of a Patricia ("Strangers on a Train") Highsmith novel called "A Dog's Ransom." An upper middle class guy goes for an innocent stroll in Riverside Park - and everything is, well, nice. It's so perfect, in fact, that there isn't one homeless person around to blot the landscape. There are even some frisbee-throwing black and brown people on hand to lull the open-minded passer-by into thinking that bad things can never happen to good and well-off people.

But Highsmith being her usual misanthropic self, we soon learn there's a dark side to that walk in the park. She's about to do a real satiric number on affluence, the class war, and consumerism.

Little does her open-minded professional dude know that there's an urban (white) psychopath lurking nearby, and that his whole privileged world is about to crumble.. In the process, he discovers there's a world beyond the Upper West Side.

It's dawned on me that Krugman is addressing the top 10 percent of the readership as well as his own professional cohort. Little does he seem to realize, or care, that the more he contributes to the class-blind liberal classism genre, the more that right-wing populists will gleefully and correctly pounce on the elitism of the media in general and the Clinton Dems in particular.

Brace yourselves for the Talented Mr. Trump.

I didn't have room to add the text of a letter from the disaffected guy in the Highsmith novel to his particular Upper West Side target. But since it's apropos of Krugman's own clueless mind-set juxtaposed with seething working class resentments, I'll include it here, minus the annoying ALL CAPS beloved by the various and sundry angry people you meet on Yahoo comment boards, at Trump rallies, in Highsmith books, and in your own neighborhood: 

Dear Sir or "Gentleman"

I suppose you are pretty pleased with yourself? People like you disgust me and not only me but a hell of a lot of other people in this world. You are smug, you are self-suficiant (sic) you think superior to everyone else. You think. A fancy apartment and a snob dog. You are a disgusting little machine, nothing else. Your days are numbered. What right have you got to be 'superior'?

Anon (as in see you anon - HA!)                                                                           

I don't want to be a spoiler, but I do want to reassure readers that the rich assholes in the novel do survive, despite being ripped a new one or two. Evil usually triumphs in the realistic dark world of Patricia Highsmith. But it never triumphs unscathed.

This novel and others in the Highsmith oeuvre were long out of print, but are again popular thanks in large part to the film adaptation (Carol) of her early novel, "The Price of Salt."

One of them, a collection of short stories called "Little Tales of Misogyny" is especially apt in this Age of Trump. I recommend all her books, especially "The Talented Mr. Ripley," which was also made into a well-received film.

Tom Ripley was actually a more perfect psychopath than Donald Trump, who is also a clinical narcissist with a monstrous id competing with an equally monstrous ego. He is neither charming, nor literate, nor polite, nor classy.

To be a true member of the tribe of refined psychopathy, one must be the opposite of Trump, capable of oozing empathy in public and acting callously in private.

And that brings me back to (at least) one of the other major characters in this blog-post, who's managed to fool enough of the people enough of the time to earn public approval ratings above 50 percent.

But sometimes even the best of them slip up, including the law enforcement officials in the audience who laugh along appreciatively and ghoulishly:

 
If you prefer more unabashed ghoulishness:

As far as garden variety mendacity goes, Hillary still needs a lot - a whole, whole, whole lot - more practice in fooling at least some of the people some of the time:

But look over there! It's Trump, baring his bottom teeth.

Joyeux Quatorze Juillet

That's French for Happy Bastille Day.

July 14th marks the day in 1789 when angry crowds stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, sparking the French Revolution.

Wall Street obviously does not celebrate Bastille Day. However, if you're in the vicinity, the New York Times suggests that rather than storming The Tombs or Rikers Island, you ponder the statue of Joan of Arc in Riverside Park and then float by the Statue of Liberty, which was donated by the French people. As much as Donald Trump would love to replace it with a Wall, and as much as Barack Obama continues to deport Latin American migrants and refugees in record numbers, it remains a potent symbol of the time when we accepted -- actually, when our forebears were -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.

The contemporary masses are also urged to eat out during French Restaurant Week. The Times helpfully links you to some of the participating eateries -- where, for this one week only, you can score lunch at the amazing prix fixe of $17.89. Since this price represents approximately one half of the weekly food stamp allowance for the average struggling peasant or Walmart worker, don't forget to ask for a doggie bag on the way out. And as ever, the city's homeless are advised to use caution when dumpster-diving for any of the culinary leftovers.

But marchons, citoyens, because it turns out that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now in a dead heat in the plutocratic presidential sweepstakes. More than two-thirds of respondents in a new Times/CBS News poll say that in the wake of her email scandal, Clinton is simply not to be trusted. Nonetheless, the mistrusters think that she is still very qualified to be president. In other words, we prefer our corrupt politicians to be competently careless rather than just carelessly careless.
 
Trump is mistrusted only very slightly less than Clinton. This is partly because loathing of him has been holding fairly steady, while the Hillary hatred might simply be a temporary crater in the killing fields of competence.

I rather suspect that we won't be hearing any Happy Bastille Day Tweets from either member of this Dynastic Duo.

***

I never thought I'd hear myself write this, but President Obama actually nailed it the other day with this statement about police violence:

“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book. And then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker; you’re the parent; you’re the teacher; you’re the drug counselor.’ We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience; don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when periodically the tensions boil over.”

If only he espoused policies to counteract those true words -- if only he fought for policies and took executive actions that would tamp down the awful reality -- what a halfway decent country and world this might be.

Times columnist Charles Blow also finally addresses the class war aspect of aggressive policing policies in today's op-ed:

We choose to be blind to the policy choices our politicians have made — and that many have benefited from, while others suffered — while simultaneously holding firmly to the belief that all of our own successes and comforts are simply the result of our and our families’ drive, ambition and resourcefulness. Other people lack physical comforts because they lack our character strength.

It is from this bed of lies that our policing policies spring. When the president says, “We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs,” who is the “we”?

It’s not the blue-collar civil servants in law enforcement or the working-class and poor communities, which are aggressively patrolled. No. The “we” is the middle and moneyed classes.

My published comment:

 The president's statement about the impossible roles we expect of police officers in this increasingly dystopian country of ours was one of the truest things he's ever said.

This is about classism as well as racism. Very much the product of capitalism, racism only got worse after the abolishment of slavery, since the subhuman wages paid to freed blacks also served to drive down the pay of whites. Dividing and conquering working people has always been the battle cry of plutocratic freedom.

The rich are still too big to jail, and there are now more black people in prison than there were slaves during the mid-19th century. Prisons for profit are just one of the many ways that the rich exploit the poor.

 And cops are stuck in the buffer zone. They ARE the buffer zone.

Wall Street is looting their pension funds, too. Their pay stinks, too. Working in swing shifts, they're sleep-deprived. When they get subpoenaed to testify in court during the day, they still have to go to work at night. When they arrest somebody on illegal weapons charges, too many politically appointed or elected right-wing judges promptly let the culprit go on low or no bail.

Cops are human too. Every time one of them overreacts, they endanger their co-workers.

Besides protesting police violence, we should direct our wrath at the sadistic (mainly GOP) policy-makers who created the Gestapo security state in the first place. Confront them right where they work. And fire them on Election Day.

Cordially Yours, Jeb Bush

Flailing presidential candidate Jeb Bush has apologized for his odious suggestion that only Christian refugees be allowed sanctuary in his America.

"This was a horribly insensitive gaffe on my part," the scion of one of the country's premier crime families was heard to sheepishly admit on Tuesday. "What I meant to say was, only conservative folks with money, dynastic connections, elite degrees and professions or trust funds have an absolute guarantee of asylum in these, my United States. It's just a plus if they're High Church Christians, is all I'm saying. I didn't mean all Christians, fer chrissake. Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, especially, might be sadly out of luck when it comes to the political vetting process. Do you hear me, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson? And forget about the secular humanists. I'm handing those atheist folks a one-way ticket to the hell that my born-again brother created to keep y'all safe."

OK, so I made that quote up. Despite his attempted dehumanization of refugees as pesky "challenges of the world," Jeb Bush did not verbally condemn them to hell based solely upon religion or lack thereof. All he said is that Syrians and Iraqis should present some sort of Christian I.D. prior to crossing the border into Exceptional USA. 

 Discrimination, which they grotesquely call "compassionate conservatism," has always has been an integral part of the Bush Family's ideological DNA. Simply read his bogus trickle-down platform and listen to his speeches, and you will discover that Jeb has devised a hell on earth for all poor atheists, all poor agnostics, all poor Catholics, all poor Jews, all poor Protestants, all poor Muslims, all poor Hindus, all poor Sikhs, all poor Jains and all poor Buddhists, regardless of where they come from, no matter whom they love.  He is an equal opportunity plutocratic class warrior. Muslims and immigrants are among the more recent convenient scapegoats for the rabid right wing, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks in France.

Jeb and his cohort simply feel a little freer to spew the fear and the hatred and the sanctimony these days. All he has to do is open his mouth and cable news is there in a flash to give him endless campaign air time at no cost to Jeb and much cost to the refugees.

And not to be outdone on the domestic front, even by himself, Jeb also just managed to mangle the fable that illustrates precisely why most poor, doomed, white, angry voters still get fooled most of the time by the likes of him, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Responding to a question at a campaign event about Bernie Sanders' call for free college tuition, Jeb lit right up. "This is a great question, I’m glad you brought it up! Because this notion that earned success in life, that the government can just take care of us, if we keep taking steps down that path, we’re in danger. And it’s insidious, because you don’t see it until it’s over. That’s the problem with this. It’s like the crabs in the, you know, whatever —the crabs in the boiling water."

(To be fair to Jeb, he was probably suffering from the congenital Bush family trait of not being able to maintain more than one picture-bubble in his head at a time. He was probably seeing the corporate media's cartoon caricature of "Crabby Bernie" as he struggled in vain to answer yet another unfair liberal "gotcha!" question.)

Luckily, a sympathetic audience member heard his silent cry for help, and yelled out: "Frogs!" 

(To be fair to Jeb, he probably didn't want to bring up frogs in his mangled metaphor, lest it dredge up memories about how W. used to stick firecrackers up frogs' butts just to watch them explode, a juvenile prelude to his blowing-up of the entire Middle East.)

But to further outdo even himself, Jeb gamely lumbered on with his gruesome tale:

“The frogs. You think it’s warm, and it feels pretty good and then it feels like you’re in a whirlpool—you know, a Jacuzzi or something. And then you’re dead. That’s how this works.”

Translation: Subsidized higher education for the masses is a clear and present danger to the Republican Party. Beware the functioning brain and the independent thought. Look at the Bushes, for whom congenital intellectual and moral deficits are worn like badges of honor and they got filthy rich anyway. If they can do it, you can do it. And if you still insist on college, debt peonage till the day you die will be your lot and your loss, and their gain.

Jeb might not be the Smartest Bush. But when it comes to disclosing the Right's true fascist agenda, he is at least an inadvertently Honest Bush. They make you feel all warm and wet and turgid, and then zap. They do you.

That's how it works, crabby frog-people. The oligarchy is tossing you into an epic maelstrom right out of Edgar Allan Poe. Life sucks, and then you die. That's exactly how it works. That's the Republican plan for America. 

GOP Jacuzzi for the Poor

Links/Open Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hard War Against Disposable Youth

This is shocking but not really surprising: Baltimore teenagers appear to have been deliberately set up by government officials and cops on Monday for purposes of accelerating the school-to-prison pipeline, transforming it into a virtual downhill luge event of Olympic Malthusian proportions.

The ruling cartel seized upon a rumor of a "purge" of the police department by roving street gangs in the wake of Freddie Gray's funeral, and got the bright idea of closing the schools early and cancelling the public transportation that is the only way home for many of the kids. Instead of being greeted by school buses, students were greeted by a phalanx of cops in riot gear.

And what a surprise when the kids reacted by fighting back and breaking stuff. It's been a made-for-cable TV spectacle to make the rest of the world forget that a man had died in police custody for the crime of making eye contact with cops and then having the audacity to run away from them. It made the rest of the world forget that city and state officials have stalled on releasing an autopsy report, lest it foment further unrest. Lest it make them look bad.

Baltimore is only the latest, and so far the largest, front in the ongoing "hard war against disposable youth," as explained by writer and social critic Henry Giroux of McMaster University. Just days before the latest outbreak of state-instigated urban violence in Maryland, Henry had sent me a link to a recent CBC radio interview and SPUR talk he gave in Toronto. Listen to the whole thing in the context of Baltimore, and everything becomes disturbingly crystal-clear.

There is both a soft war and hard war against youth. The soft war, waged by the free market and the advertising industry, is an insidious way to infantilize young people, teaching them to become consumers instead of socially responsible citizens.

The hard war is a means of trapping them in the Youth Criminal Control Complex -- "a site of terminal exclusion" --  when they are deemed by cruel design to have become "failed consumers." This is not hyperbole. Every year, 500,000 young people are imprisoned, out of the 2.5 million who are arrested. By the time they reach the age of 23, one-third of Americans are arrested for a crime.

Using the tried and true neoliberal tradition of never letting a crisis go to waste, Maryland Gov. Larry "Law & Order" Hogan promptly suspended Habeas Corpus in the name of protecting the public from the public. More than 200 protesters arrested for disorderly conduct and other relatively minor offenses are being held on high bail that they can't possibly meet. One youth charged with theft, rioting and disorderly conduct is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. Others, including first time offenders and even journalists, remain jailed because they are unable to pay a cash bond of $100,000. This, while the police officers temporarily suspended from duty while the death of Freddie Gray is being investigated, remain free while drawing their paychecks.

Once the Republican governor eventually rescinds his emergency order, the backlog of defendants awaiting bail hearings and arraignment will be a feature, not a bug, of how punishment is meted out to poor people.

"The plight of the outcast has expanded to include a whole generation," Giroux observes in the CBC program. 

And the race to the bottom (or off the rails) of the Malthusian Luge Run is proceeding at breakneck speed, with the US going for the gold for highest death rates and most rampant child poverty in the civilized world. Eduardo Porter lays out the grisly details:

American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young.

Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way.

It's not just globalization and horrific trade deals like NAFTA and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership and its grotesque cousin, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It's the fact that "government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together."

 Reactionary right-wing moralizing from the likes of Charles Murray and David Brooks notwithstanding, America is not a welfare state. At least, it's not a welfare state for its people. It is, however, a full-fledged corporate nanny state giving non-stop succor to the plutocracy, multinational businesses, and the permawar industry.

Meanwhile, the poobahs of the media-political complex persist in calling an abused urban population with a youth unemployment rate of over 80% a bunch of "thugs." It's made to order divide-and-conquer propaganda for the One Percent. Pit the poor whites and the poor browns and blacks against one another so that plutocratic power can remain entrenched. It worked for Tricky Dick Nixon and his Silent Majority, and it's working again. Archie Bunker lives, even in the elite educated reader comments section of the New York Times. Instead of police brutality and crushing poverty, we hear the same old themes of black-on-black crime and drug use that are the remnants of a slavery society. The Civil War never really ended.

 It's been only a few generations since the phony truce was signed between a couple of generals.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is announcing a presidential challenge (unfortunately within the cloying confines of the Democratic Party) to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, that self-styled Boudica of the hard-soft wars, gave a rousing speech for social justice. But she has also just hired Charlie Baker, whose lobby shop helped orchestrate billionaire austerian Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt." That's the astroturf campaign against the already too-thin social safety net. Besides acting as her new chief administrative officer, says the New York Times, Baker will also coordinate slush funding for other Democratic candidates.

The truly damaging burning and looting -- and partisan rooting, and own-horn tooting -- continues unabated at the very highest levels. 

The corporate media celebrate the concern-trolling elites at the same time that they force our glazed eyes toward the shell of a chain drugstore within the shell of a city neighborhood that itself has been smoldering and collapsing for decades. Visuals of destruction are engineered for blame-the-victim purposes. How dare the lower classes destroy a monolith of commerce erected just for them by their betters? 

It's no accident that CNN was prominently looping film of a Newt Gingrich-inspired volunteer janitorial crew cleaning up the mess at "their" store as though it is a worker-owned cooperative and CVS isn't hoarding its insurance check. These are the "respectable" poor people told to be patient while the leaders engage in another National Conversation. 

Meanwhile, for all those at the bottom, still resisting and calling out respectability for the sham it is, here's Bob Marley:

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too
 Could not recognize the faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.