Making Sense of the Census

 The bad news for reactionaries is that for the first time in American history, white people are rapidly becoming outnumbered by black and brown people and people of Asian descent, but especially by those identifying as mixed race, who now represent the majority of younger people surveyed.

The good news for reactionaries is that the fastest-growing metro area in all of America is The Villages of central Florida, a planned retirement community made up almost exclusively of well-off conservative white people. They might also take heart from the rapid growth in Phoenix, an historically conservative city in an historically conservative state.

The bad news for reactionaries is that the denizens of The Villages are old, and young people in general are giving them fewer and fewer grandkids. Not because the childless all hate kids, but because they can't afford them due to education debt, low wages, unaffordable housing and lack of medical care - especially in the age of Covid.  And so, when the Villagers and their ilk die off, black and brown and Asian and mixed-race people will outnumber white people by even greater percentages.

 As far as Phoenix is concerned, the climate crisis alone ensures that the lack of water will force the denizens of the desert to move sooner rather than later.

The only thing that might keep white reactionaries still believing that they rule supreme by superficial dint of their skin color will be if elderly Florida resident Donald Trump (or, god forfend, a younger smarter reactionary) wins back the White House and a GOP Congress abolishes the Census for good and all, thus completing the disenfranchisement of black, brown, Asian and mixed race people for good and all. They can make up their redistricting maps the same way that Trump once used a black sharpie to draw a fake hurricane trajectory on a map.  If they can only stop counting inconvenient people, then maybe we will cease to exist!

From the New York Times:

The data offered the most detailed picture of race in America since the last decennial census in 2010, —and they are also the basis for redistricting, a process in which state legislatures redraw voting lines based on changes in their states’ populations.

The increase in the numbers of people who identify as Asian and Hispanic was less dramatic than in previous decades, but still much more robust than the increase in the number of Americans who checked the box for white or Black.

The good news (or so they think) for the liberal side of the gerontocracy is that will now glom on to their shallow identity politics platform with an even greater vengeance. Their challenge is to prevent increasing numbers of leftist or socialist black, brown, white, Asian and mixed-race candidates from winning seats in Congress and in state legislatures while still professing to fight against the structural racism and classism that they themselves continue to champion and perpetuate, if only by orchestrated inaction. To "moderates" like them, it doesn't matter that black and brown people comprise the majority of the unvaccinated, largely because they have no paid time off, no reliable transportation and less "access" to the Internet - not to mention the historical lack of medical care in general. It's so much easier for these political leaders and pundits to blame ignorant white anti-mask cultists for the spread of Covid, rather than their own failure to enact Medicare For All, loan forgiveness, guaranteed income/living wage of at least $25 an hour, and subsidized child care.

One snippet of good news for the poor and working class is that just like their GOP partners in crime and political theater, these corrupt Democrats are also getting older by the day. In some rare cases, they might actually retire from public service even as, thanks to their own guaranteed no-cost health care, they defy the plummeting life expectancy rate in the richest country on earth.

The bad news for the poor and working class is that red-state Florida and Texas stand to gain the most House seats in redistricting, while the blue states of New York and California stand to lose the most. 

New York and California, despite their Democratic majorities, are losing voters precisely because they have set the records for the most extreme wealth inequality in the United States. Once the eviction moratoriums expire, this juxtaposition of billionaires and homeless people will become more glaringly obvious than ever. It will be harder than ever for liberal elites to point their enlightened scolding fingers at Florida and Texas and claim moral superiority just because they ever so occasionally deign to elevate brown, black, Asian and mixed race people to their own ranks, using them as cynical token cover while the planet burns and they fly their private jets to one another's yachts and transactional birthday parties.

Perhaps the worst news of all for the historically marginalized minority communities whose numbers are growing is that they will not be able to keep their precarious communities together long enough to draw new voting districts, as the housing and eviction crises get worse by cruel design. Solidarity among people is simply not in the interests of the billionaire class. They can remain obscenely rich only as long as too many people remain obscenely poor.

$urvival of the Fittest

By Jay - Ottawa

Stiff fingers tap out the first sentence on my keyboard, but the spell checker redlines the word 'dystopia.'  Hmm…it IS a word and I DID spell it correctly.  Was the Microsoft programmer who worked on this feature clueless about Orwell's "1984," or was the programmer directed to send unpleasant concepts and their exemplars down the memory hole?

Cormac McCarthy is the next to get redlined.  Well, OK.  His first name is rare this side of Dublin.  Despite the laurels placed on McCarthy's brow late in life, few people other than English majors read his troubling novels "Blood Meridian" and "The Road."

Actually, "The Road" is not dystopian literature.  It is more often categorized as post-apocalyptic realism, a giant step beyond dystopia to where the entire globe has been despoiled.  You might, if you behave, be allowed an ice-cream sundae in a dystopia.  The best you can hope for in a post-apocalyptic world is rancid ice cream under stale whipped cream and a rotting cherry on top.

Chris Hedges, a very serious man, also writes about dystopias but under the category of nonfiction.  He describes realities so dismal and hopeless you wish they were fiction.

As if we didn't have enough gloom from the Dark School of fiction and nonfiction, we now discover their disciples multiplying like bats out of a cave.  The newest dystopian writers obtain better material just by looking around.  The latest dark spirit to connect the available dots of politics, economics, climate change and human nature is a French philosopher, Bruno Latour.

Latour writes as though he was able to plumb the minds of the super rich.  Forget their supposed attraction to capitalism and avarice.  Something else is afoot, a plot, an altruistic conspiracy.  It goes like this.  Billions of people are accustomed to a standard of living the globe cannot support.  Recycling and cutbacks in carbon use are absurdist diversions for the masses.  The Greens are kidding themselves, not to mention the rest of us, with their solar panels and low-flush toilets.  The Paris Agreement of last year, signed by 195 nations, is an empty gesture to assure their populations that something is being done to push climate change out of sight.  However, the elites know better; the globe is long past the tipping point of climate apocalypse.

Something several orders more severe than alternate energy development is needed, and immediately, to pull back hard from the Sixth Extinction.  The elites are fully aware of the stakes.  They also know that the billions of people who make up the modern world cannot be encouraged, or even forced, to scale down sharply to a lifestyle from the Middle Ages.

What's the alternative for elites who appreciate these facts and exercise power?  It is twofold: to become billionaires and to head for the hills after amassing everything needed for survival.  Big money––not asceticism, virtue and fairness for all––will buy the few tickets available for survival of the few.  Here's Latour explaining why we must have deregulation, welfare cutbacks, climate denial and income disparity:

"If this plausible fiction is correct, it enables us to grasp the 'deregulation' and the 'dismantling of the welfare state' of the 1980s, the 'climate change denial' of the 2000s, and, above all, the dizzying increase in inequality over the past forty years.  All these things are part of the same phenomenon: the elites were so thoroughly enlightened that they realized there would be no future for the world and that they needed to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible …; to construct a kind of golden fortress for the tiny percent of people who would manage to get on in life …; and, to hide the crass selfishness of this flight from the common world, to completely deny the existence of the threat [of] climate change."

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/ 

It is we, the billions of nobodies, who are the grasshoppers in Aesop's fable.  We plague the earth with our great numbers and boundless appetites.  The monied elites are the farsighted ants.  There is a noble purpose behind the surface chaos over which they preside.  For the sake of the human gene pool, lifeboat ethics must prevail.  The elites are laboring to cull our species as efficiently as possible.  They must act fast and remain steadfast in their purpose.  Ultimately, the preservation of humanity depends on the billionaires, "the tiny percent," in their "golden fortresses."  Think of that next time you are tempted by selfishness to protest against their deconstruction of society as we know it.

* Those of you under 70 years of age are advised not to read this essay.

Links/Open Thread

Not Everyone Hates Citizens United, particularly local TV stations, pithily writes Michael Socolow in Slate:

For local broadcast channels and their it-bleeds-it-leads newscasts, the Supreme Court might as well be that mythic relative who leaves you an unexpected fortune in his will. The cascade of political money to your local channel began for real in 2012. That year, according to the Pew Research Center, local television stations received $3.1 billion in political advertising revenue. That was 48 percent more than was spent just two years earlier (before Citizens United) and represented more than double the amount raked in during the previous presidential election in 2008.

Read the whole thing. In case you were still wondering why you keep getting that queasy feeling whenever you unwittingly morph from Judge Judy berating the poor and marginalized into local news berating the poor and the marginalized, Socolow lays it all out for you.  My own local news fare lurches between lambasting "progressive" Mayor De Blasio for his un-tough on crime demeanor, to ads for charter schools produced by anonymous dark hedge fund money, to big bank lobbies honoring recently re-elected NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo (whose administration is currently under investigation for alleged corruption) for his support for Wall Street. These local propaganda mills make the national network news conglomerates actually seem journalistically responsible, even with their feel-good animal videos and their hideous Viagra and Big Oil ads. Cancelling my cable is looking more and more like a treat to be savored, rather than a deprivation in my infotainment diet. Plus, all those books that must be read before one dies are piling up on my nightstand.

*

Where were you when you discovered your own personal political and moral conscience? Was it a book, a friend, a teacher who opened your eyes? Henry Giroux tells his own personal story in a heartfelt Truthout essay about his simultaneous embrace and transcendence of his working class roots. He recounts the epiphany that the dreck that the ruling class sells us day in and day out is not only harmful to our health, it is pure poison:

 The struggle to redefine my sense of agency was about more than a perpetual struggle between matters of intelligence, competency and low self-esteem; it was about reclaiming a sense of history, opening the door to dangerous memories, and taking risks that enabled a new and more radical sense of identity and what it meant to be in the world from a position of strength. I found signposts of such resistance in my youth in Black music, stories about union struggles, the warm solidarity of my peers, and later in the powerful display of public intellectuals whose lectures I attended at Brown University. The people who moved me at those lectures were not academics reading papers I barely understood, or intellectuals who seemed frozen emotionally, spewing out a kind of jargon reserved for the already initiated, smug in their insularity and remoteness.

 ***

Speaking of stories on union and class struggles, one of the great influencers of my own youth was the folk music group The Weavers. Ronnie Gilbert, the female voice of that quartet, died this week at the age of 88. From Rolling Stone:

The Weavers' first concerts were often free performances at union meetings and on picket lines. In 1949, about to break up, they were offered a two week residency at the Village Vanguard in New York City that proved so successful they stayed for six months. The stint earned the Weavers a deal with Decca Records, which led to television and radio appearances, and extensive touring.
Amidst their success, the group maintained their progressive and leftist politics, which drew the eye and ire of those in the anti-communist movement of the 1950s. In 1951, the Weavers were investigated by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which sought to probe potentially subversive citizen threats, and soon they were blacklisted from performing and recording.

The daughter of Russian/Ukrainian immigrants and labor activists, Gilbert was inspired in her own youth by the voice of Paul Robeson. Her activism was her music. And luckily for us, she also wrote an autobiography before she died, to be published posthumously this fall. While you're waiting, here's a link to one of my own Weavers favorites -- Which Side Are You On?

***

Which side is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on? Well, we know it is not the crazy Republicans. Nor is it the crazy leftists, whoever they may be. They certainly do not exist within the moneyed realm of the ironically named Democratic Party. To his credit, unlike other pundits, Krugman rarely delves into the river of false equivalency in his columns. But he really stuck a big toe into it in yesterday's effort, cutesily titled Fighting the Derp. For the uninitiated unhip readers out there, Krugman helpfully explains that "derp" is a South Park cartoon neologism defined as repeating the same lies over and over and over again to give them legitimacy and currency. In other words, "derp" is another way to describe Goebbels-style propaganda.

Here's the "both sides do it" part of the column that really pissed me off:

Thus, if you’re a conservative opposed to a stronger safety net, you should be extra skeptical about claims that health reform is about to crash and burn, especially coming from people who made the same prediction last year and the year before (Obamacare derp runs almost as deep as inflation derp).

But if you’re a liberal who believes that we should reduce inequality, you should similarly be cautious about studies purporting to show that inequality is responsible for many of our economic ills, from slow growth to financial instability. Those studies might be correct — the fact is that there’s less derp on America’s left than there is on the right — but you nonetheless need to fight the temptation to let political convenience dictate your beliefs.

My published response:

  "Liberals" are admonished to also be careful of studies purporting to show that income inequality is responsible for many of our economic ills. And then PK neglects to mention any alleged lefty studies.

Is he referring to Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz's work on inequality, which shows that the wealth gap, deliberately manufactured by financial deregulation and political malfeasance, is indeed responsible for a tepid economy and slow recovery due to stagnant wages? Or is he referring to Barack Obama, who's been acting more like a Reaganesque supply-sider lately with his shilling for the Trans-Pacific Partnership "trickle-down" power grab by the ultra-rich?

I'll do my civic duty and read Stiglitz and others, like Bill Black and Michael Hudson, who rightly point to blatant corruption and rule by the plutocracy as a prime cause of economic inequality. I'll put my faith in my fellow citizens, 61% of whom believe, according to a recent NYT poll, that this inequality is getting worse. We believe, along with Sens. Warren and Sanders, that the whole economic system is rigged against us. I'll also put my faith in the most recent OECD figures showing that the US ranks near dead last in all Western measures of social and economic health.

There may be a derp problem, but the real problem is that of the insatiable greed of the pathocrats and the influence of their unlimited dark money in what is still quaintly called a democracy.

To be fair, Krugman did follow up his column with a blogpost/chart purporting to debunk a causal relationship between inequality and a bad economy. He first conveniently tossed out the widely used and respected Gini co-efficient measurements of wealth inequality because they apparently do not fit with his own theory. His argument was rather too technical for a layperson like me, but do read the comments. People with obvious economic backgrounds and expertise were not impressed.

***

 As an antidote to Krugman wishy-washiness, be sure to read Thomas Piketty's review of a truly radical economist's prescription to heal the scourge of historic and global wealth inequality. And then get a hold of the book (Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson) if you can. I got so excited that I plunked down an outrageous 16-plus bucks to download it from Amazon, but it's been well worth it so far. He addresses mere laypersons! In just the first few pages he tears apart the neoliberal metaphors that I love to hate -- level playing fields and ladders of opportunity! -- and gets right into how politicians and pundits avoid talking about how people often stumble and fall on those level playing fields and how "we" avoid talking about actual equal outcomes.

Piketty writes,

He also argues for guaranteed public-sector jobs at a minimum wage for the unemployed, and democratization of access to property ownership via an innovative national savings system, with guaranteed returns for the depositors. There will be inheritance for all, achieved by a capital endowment at age eighteen, financed by a more robust estate tax; an end to the English poll tax—a flat-rate tax for local governments—and the effective abandonment of Thatcherism. The effect is exhilarating. Witty, elegant, profound, this book should be read: it brings us the finest blend of what political economy and British progressivism have to offer.

In other words, Atkinson is even more radical than Bernie Sanders. And the fact that he concentrates on Britain should not at all dissuade us from translating his Rx to our own shores. After all, it's a global economy. The City of London and Wall Street are one and the same entity. Obama's consigliere Jim Messina just helped re-elect austerian David Cameron to another term as prime minister.

But as Atkinson cheerily writes in his intro: "The world faces great problems but collectively we are not helpless in the face of forces outside our control. The future is very much in our hands."

Like I said, quite the antidote to learned helplessness, one of the many neoliberal toxins being poured down our political gullets to induce the chronic condition known as Panglossitis. Things could always be worse in this best of all possible worlds, of course. But why not demand better? The only thing holding us back is the propaganda of the fear-mongers.

Give up that dark money-driven cable infotainment and embrace your inner Henry Giroux and Ronnie Gilbert. Life is too short not to.

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