Profiles In Ruling Class Chutzpah

The media-political complex is all abuzz that multimillionaire heiress and Boeing director Caroline Kennedy has named multimillionaire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the latest winner of the Camelot Dynasty's Profiles in Courage award. 

It's A Club & You Ain't In It

Pelosi is specifically being honored for ramming the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 and tacitly being honored for boldly going against the wishes of 70 percent of the US population by actively thwarting a true universal, single payer health care bill to replace it.

Multimillionaire former President Barack Obama, 2017's Kennedy prize winner, traveled all the way to Germany over the weekend in order to scold what he called American health care "purists" who have the crazy nerve to challenge the status quo. He called the current battle between Congressional centrists, like Pelosi, and progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal a "circular firing squad."

Winners Take All

This is a deliberate mischaracterization on Obama's part, because the centrists are the ones with the giant guns and the big corporate money, and the progressives are the underdogs with the $27 individual donations and the verbal slingshots. These two intraparty factions are as unequal as society itself. Obama refused to admit that the Circular Firing Squad within the Democratic Party is, in fact, a microcosm of the eternal Class War of the rich against the poor and working class. He instead framed the health insurance debate as a bunch of reckless extremists who unfairly attack the good, the rich, the wise, and the powerful.

Both of our establishment political parties and the transnational oligarchs who own and control them are scared to death of the social democracy and working class revolts now on the ascendant, global movements which threaten to undo 50 years of punitive austerity for the masses and record riches for themselves.

Obama made his latest antisocial remarks in Germany during a fund-raising "town hall" to benefit his own philanthrocapitalist foundation, so as not to be seen as directly interfering with party politics within the confines of the contiguous United States. He had previously met behind closed doors with Congressional freshmen to warn them against Medicare for All and to confront them with the usual "how you gonna pay for it!" bullying tactics. With a reported net worth now in the $100 million range only two years after leaving office, he made it abundantly clear that he and other wealthy people do not want to be taxed one more penny for the greater public good.

Of course, he put it a bit more delicately than that at his Berlin town hall:

“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States — maybe it’s true here as well — is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’” Obama said. “And then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.”
The former president said he believes this approach “weakens” movements, and that those that would like to see a progressive agenda “have to recognize that the way we’ve structured democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you.”

Notice how he cagily redefines "circular firing squad" as a one-sided attack by progressives against the neoliberal centrists, and how it is not the rich and the privileged side straying from our "structured democracy," but the poor and the indebted. The only weakening he fears is that of the corporate Democratic Party itself, which like any political party, exists mainly to win and adhere to power. In Obama's world, it is not Nancy Pelosi who's the shooter and the bully: it's the progressives representing the interests of the struggling majority.

Only an entitled plutocrat could call the widespread demand by the US citizenry for basic health care an issue of "ideological purity" rather than as a response to a capitalism-spawned public health crisis and threat to our very survival. In Obama's world, it is more important for the Have-Nots to respect the Haves, who very reasonably expect that tens of millions of people will have to get sick and die prematurely as a good-faith sign of their own co-equal reasonableness.

Obama ended his speech by advocating for patience and incremental change: “We have to be careful in balancing big dreams and bold ideas with also recognizing that typically change happens in steps. And if you want to skip steps, you can. Historically what’s ended up happening is sometimes if you skip too many steps you end up having bad outcomes.”

Obama gave no examples to back up his claim. Again - the only bad outcomes he has to fear are those which might require him and his ruling class cohort to cede power to the lower classes and pay higher taxes. He certainly couldn't point to any bad outcomes when Medicare passed in the 1960s, and millions of older people were suddenly yanked off their employers' insurance plans and forced into the new single payer system for retirees. He couldn't say that it was really stupid, in retrospect, for people to have become eligible as soon as they reached the age of 65 and not have to wait until 80, when the coverage could have been spread downward in pragmatic baby steps instead of skipping all those golden waiting years.

Obama dishonestly and effectively likens guaranteed universal health coverage to corporations like Boeing, which cuts corners and skips steps only to have have its airplanes crash, killing everybody on board. But he can't talk about Boeing, because for one thing, his benefactress Caroline Kennedy is now in charge of its oversight and auditing board, and the United States was the very last country in the world to, after much insane resistance, finally ground the faulty airplanes while shifting blame for the crashes to the pilots. 

Perhaps the latest Profiles in Courage winner, Nancy Pelosi, will now even have the courage not to haul Boeing executives before Congress to face any real consequences.

Even if they do get hauled before Congress, it will be for the purpose of individual congressional showboating and tongue-lashings and slaps on the wrist. For in the just the last year alone, Boeing spent more than $130 million lobbying, wining, dining, schmoozing and arm-twisting these same members of Congress. Its board, besides Caroline Kennedy, is a veritable who's who of the oligarchy, mainly tycoons from the extracting industries of Big Oil, Big Finance and Private Equity.

The trouble is that Barack Obama, designated celebrity ambassador of global neoliberalism, simply does not lie or dissemble well. Neither does Nancy Pelosi. Just before Caroline Kennedy tapped Pelosi as the latest plutocratic Profile in Chutzpah, Madam Speaker again lied through her teeth in an interview about single payer health insurance and why tens of millions of poor people will simply have to grit their failing or missing teeth and suffer pragmatically in service to their greedy overlords.

As Matt Breunig reports, the big lie that neoliberal centrists keep tellng is that "people" love their employment-based private insurance plans. It's a lie, because private predatory insurance "is a complete nightmare" for those trapped within the market-based, for-profit system.

Among those (in Michigan) who had employer-sponsored insurance in 2014, only 72 percent were continuously enrolled in that insurance for the next twelve months. This means that 28 percent of people on an employer plan were not on that same plan one year later. You like your employer health plan? You better cross your fingers because one in four people on employer plans will come off their plan in the next twelve months.
The situation is even worse for other kinds of insurance. One thing opponents of Medicare for All frequently say is that poor people in the US are already covered by free insurance in the form of Medicaid and that Medicare for All therefore offers them relatively little net benefit while potentially raising their taxes some. But what this argument misses, among other things, is that people on Medicaid churn off it frequently, with many churning into un-insurance.

And that churning is a feature and not a bug, because what is capitalism but constant, cutthroat competition? What are citizens but consumers of whatever the ruling class racketeers deign to dish out to us in the form of spectacle politics and cheap electronic gadgets to merge with our bodies as virtual biological appendages and tracking devices? 

Let's face it. The modern-day robber barons view the population as raw material and commodities which exist not for our own well-being and happiness, but for their voracious, relentless, inhumane profit.

More people than ever, especially younger people, are on to their con. The Profiles in Chutzpah are afraid.

And the best they can do is give each other glitzy prizes in televised galas which they sometimes allow us to gawk at in supposed admiration. 

Health Care Head Fakes

As I guessed that it would a week ago, President Trump's threat to kill Obamacare via some reactionary judges went nowhere fast. It was a diversionary tactic designed to make us forget about the still-secret Mueller report, of which he no doubt has gotten an exclusive sneak peak. Though exonerating Trump of plotting an electoral conspiracy with Russia, it is reportedly none too flattering to him.

Trump's bluster was bound to be short-lived, because the Republican senate majority doesn't want to risk trashing the Affordable Care Act so close to the 2020 election. In their heart of hearts, they love this plan, massive giveaway to the private insurance industry that it is. Moreover, Trump's own in-laws have their own huge stake in the grift, with the crown jewel of the Kushner brothers' financial empire being a multi-billion dollar online insurance company which depends on the ACA to survive.

Of course, the biggest beneficiary of Trump's short-lived health care head fake was the Democratic Party, which pounced on his threat as a means to raise campaign money while defending Obamacare in lieu of introducing Medicare For All legislation in the lower House. As a matter of fact, Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health care henchman, Wendell Primus had personally reassured insurance industry executives right after the November midterms that their capitalistic system would be living long and prospering under Pelosi's watch.

The secret meeting, originally reported by The Intercept in February, got renewed attention this week with some new reporting in Politico. Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Pramila Jayapal, chief author one of the single payer bills (HR 1384) confronted Primus directly over his undemocratic subterfuge.

This confrontation came only one day after Trump abruptly reversed course on his Obamacare offensive. His latest head fake has left Pelosi and her minions suddenly deprived of the fear-based rationale for keeping the neoliberal "there is no alternative" ACA alive. They find themselves forced to feebly deny the reports that they are actively trying to kill the universal care legislation supported by at least 70% of the electorate, including Republican voters. However, neither she nor Primus apologized for meeting secretly with insurance industry lobbyists in the first place.

Right before Trump inconveniently nixed his threat and left the Democratic leadership scrambling, the New York Times' Paul Krugman penned an exquisitely timed column about the latest nasty Republican plan to yank health care away from tens of millions of people. Being a victim of Trump's chronic head fakes is a terrible thing. This is despite the fact that Krugman dutifully inserts the latest tally of Trump's lies right at the beginning of his piece. As of Monday, at about the same time Trump was changing his mind via Twitter, he had lied a grand total of 4,682 times! He also happened to conduct his head fake reversal on April Fools Day.

Krugman writes:

Republicans just keep telling the same lies, over and over. Again and again they have promised to maintain coverage and protect pre-existing conditions — then offered plans that would cause tens of millions to lose health insurance, with the worst impact on those already suffering from health problems.....
ut Republicans cannot admit that the only way to protect pre-existing conditions is to emulate Democratic policies. The party of Eisenhower, or even the party of Nixon, might have been able to do such a thing, but the party of Fox News cannot.
Nor, however, do Republicans dare admit that they have no interest in providing protection that a vast majority of voters demands. So they just keep lying.

In other words, Krugman hews steadfastly to the corporate Democrat plan, sold to a scared public during the latest Trump Threat Week,  to merely protect coverage for pre-existing conditions as well as increasing federal subsidies for private insurers --  including, but by no means limited to, the very same Kushner family that liberal corporatists only pretend to hate.

My published response to Krugman:

How often do Republicans lie? How much do they despise everyone except rich people, preferably male and white? Let us tally up the totals and feel alternately angry and smug. Because hey, at least the Dems will fight for our inalienable right to pay hefty premiums to insurance companies and force them to cover the pre-existing conditions of some of us! After all, they're protecting a GOP plan, which leaves the GOP nowhere else to go but off the Social Darwinist cliff.

If we keep shooting stinking GOP fish in a barrel, maybe we can take the uninsured and underinsureds' minds off the fact that the US is the only civilized country lacking universal health coverage, and that the life expectancy of US citizens has dropped for a third straight year.

Anything to avoid informing people that contrary to centrist propaganda, any extra taxes they'd have to pay for Medicare For All would be far, far less than the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out of pocket medical expenses they now pay to our cutthroat market-based system.

 And that includes the cost of an ever-increasing number of premature burials.

Put another way, although 23 million people would lose coverage if the ACA is killed, another 29 million desperate people currently lack any coverage at all. But somehow, these have-nots aren't mentioned when pundits warn us not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Instead, we're told to feel guilty about the great national tragedy of jobless insurance adjusters.

*****

Here's more excellent input from Dr. Adam Gaffney of Physicians for a National Health Plan:

Pelosi: Leggo My PayGo!

As expected, Nancy Pelosi won the House Speakership this week and has thereby solidified her position as chief Democratic Party austerian in service to the rich.

Widely praised as a genius at extracting campaign cash from wealthy oligarchs for her members and for deftly co-opting their loyalty in the process, one of her first orders of business was reinstating the so-called PAYGO rule, which requires that all new spending be offset either by new taxes or by cutting funds from other programs. Critics say the move - which passed on Thursday with only three Democrats dissenting - is a deliberate attempt to prevent such progressive policies as Medicare For All from ever reaching the floor for debate, let alone a vote for actual implementation.

It's also an ideological return to the Obama era austerity politics that immiserated millions of people and paved the way for the Donald Trump victory.

Defenders of the rule point out that it is actually only a toothless little offshoot of the real PayGo law, and that this law, enacted in 2010, can be waived at any time and indeed, has been waived in the past. Of course, the most recent waiver benefited only the richest of the rich, via Trump's deficit-ballooning tax package.

And that leads skeptics to ask why Pelosi would insist on such a redundant rule in the first place. 

Even Paul Krugman of the New York Times, while gushing that Pelosi is "the best House speaker of modern times," observes:

In fact, even the deficit scolds who played such a big role in Beltway discourse during the Obama years seem oddly selective in their concerns about red ink. After all those proclamations that fiscal doom was coming any day now unless we cut spending on Social Security and Medicare, it’s remarkable how muted their response has been to a huge, budget-busting tax cut. It’s almost as if their real goal was shrinking social programs, not limiting national debt.

'Tis a puzzlement. But Krugman just can't bring himself to accuse the neoliberal governing cabal, of which the Democrats are in integral moving part, of subterfuge and actual corruption.

So I did, in my published comment:

As Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page established in their studies of affluence and influence, wealthy donors get what they want from their politicians: a big return on their investment.

And what they don't want is Medicare For All, free public college, expanded Social Security, living wage legislation, a Green New Deal, or just about anything that improves the lives of ordinary people.

The Democratic leadership can't come right out and admit this, so they set up their convoluted PayGo gimmick while glibly assuring their members and constituents that they can waive their silly old rule any time they feel like it.

 Maybe they'll feel like it in another several decades, by which time tens of thousands of the uninsured and underinsured will be conveniently dead, or the ignored climate catastrophe does us in whether we have platinum plans or not.

Right now, they just don't have time to feel like it. If returning and new members accepted money from the DCCC, they'll be forced to spend half of each working day raising more money for the party coffers. (Since the DCCC never funded Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's run for office, she has the rare luxury of serving her constituents rather than the party.)

When the Democrats took back the House in November, most people assumed Nancy Pelosi misspoke when she crowed "Let's hear it more for pre-existing conditions!"

 Not likely. She will indeed go down in history as one of the most effective Speakers our Banana Republic has ever had.

Of course, it's way too early to predict whether "AOC" and her progressive cohort of newbies will develop any real clout within the hallowed halls of Congress. As Bill Scher writes in Politico, she is so far zero for two in her nascent battle against Pelosi, losing in her demand for a climate committee with real teeth and subpoena power, and only enlisting two other Democratic members in the "just say no to PayGo" rebellion.

Pelosi has not exactly hidden her disdain for those on the activist left who push proposals she considers foolish. In a New York Times interview conducted before the midterm elections but published shortly afterward, she sarcastically said, "I have those who want to be for impeachment and for abolishing ICE... two really winning issues for us, right? In the districts we have to win? I don't even think they're the right thing to do."

That's what distinguishes Pelosi from Republican speakers. She does not hesitate to keep her party's idealogues in check.

So the Times, whose hagiographic treatment of Pelosi rivals that of their fawning coverage of the Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsberg personality cults, voluntarily refrained from publishing Pelosi's disdain for ordinary people until her party and herself were safely back in semi-power. Since her Speakership victory, she has had nothing to say about American border patrols firing tear gas across the border at Central American refugees. But she has been inordinately hasty to say that impeaching Trump is as much as off the table, as is the Democratic House's issuance of a subpoena for his tax returns.

To be fair to Pelosi and as evidence of her true devotion to even-handed bipartisanship, she similarly had nothing to say when Obama's border patrol agents also regularly deployed tear gas against immigrants and refugees. Nor, when the Democrats took back the House in 2006, did she move to bring articles of impeachment against George W. Bush for his illegal invasion of Iraq and for his illegal torture program. In fact, she has joined the rest of the Democratic Party in rehabilitating Bush's bumbling war criminal image by proclaiming a wistful nostalgia for him.

The Nancy and Donald Show is being hyped by the media as a Dancing With the Stars battle of the sexes tango between two aging factions of the Ruling Class Racket. It promises to get huge ratings and lots of clicks as it engenders globs and globs of manufactured outrage and cheers from the populace, who have been carefully taught to define themselves mainly by their party allegiances.

Don't forget to root for your favorite, and be sure to call in or text your uncounted votes before the end of the latest episode.

The Wall Plus Russiagate Equals Distraction

Donald Trump is rattled about the Mueller investigation. Therefore, the Democrats colluded with him on Tuesday to change the subject from his legal woes to The Wall and the usual pre-Christmas government shutdown threats. The only thing they have to fear is that their marketing of Fear to the rabble is less successful than it used to be.

So Trump once again played his grotesquely seductive spider part to perfection as he sent his always-irresistible invitation to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to join him in his sticky oval-shaped web of a parlor.

The House Speaker-in-waiting and the Senate Majority Leader played their own supporting roles reasonably well, mawkishly casting their desperate gazes and pleadings toward the whirring TV cameras in the room as often as they directed them at their arachnoid host. 

Vice President Mike Pence had even less of a supporting role, because his non-speaking function as Chief Toady consisted entirely of swiveling his little white metronome of a head at the Democrats to Trump and then back again. To his credit, though, he was able to maintain a stolid manspreading pose throughout the skit that had him glued in the chair next to his more voluble manspreading boss. 

I don't know who was in charge of the sound system for this latest episode of the Trump Reality TV show, but somebody certainly neglected to give Pelosi a proper working microphone. Trump boomed out his incoherence, and even Chuck came through loud and clear as he vied with Trump for the opportunity to interrupt Nancy at every turn. Pelosi sounded like she was talking through a mask of cotton wool as she wonkishly and patiently and ineffectually attempted to lecture Trump on the mechanics of legislation.

It was a performance designed to show Trump at his bullying superior best next to the schoolmarm persona dreaded by many an American male even long after he's escaped the physical classroom. Trump succeeded mightily in showcasing the Democratic leaders as the hapless weaklings they are. Schumer was reduced to sputtering that Trump had lost two states, when he should have used his TV time to wax indignant over the very xenophobic idea of a Wall to keep out refugees and immigrants.

For her part, Pelosi carefully saved her (strategically leaked) anti-Trump vitriol until after the meeting, when it would be least effective. If only she had questioned his manhood right to his manspreading corpus and right to his sneering face, then it might actually have meant something. 

But that's not what Democrats do. They portray themselves as emotionally and intellectually superior victims in a futile attempt to create some space between GOP corruption and Democratic corruption. The maintenance of their smugness is more important to them than, say, agitating for Medicare for all and a federal jobs program. 

The Wall and the Shutdown of Doom episode momentarily deflected attention away from Trump's legal woes for the space of one more Trump-orchestrated 24 hour news cycle. With the corporate media and their talking heads so busily talking among themselves about impeachment and Oval Office manners and the "unprecedented" bicker-fest among America's top political leaders, there simply have not been enough resources left to cover matters of more pressing concern to the ordinary people who have been co-opted into giving these chronically weak people their very powerful jobs.

There certainly hasn't been enough time to cover the immensely popular Yellow Vests movement in France, other than for the occasional editorial bemoaning of President Emanuel Macron's imperialistic style and his failure to tamp down the discontent as ably and as glibly as his neoliberal pro-bank American counterpart, Barack Obama, so recently did.  

Austerity Addicts of the Democratic Party

Billionaire deficit hawk and Catfood Commission funder Pete Peterson may be dead, but that hasn't stopped House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi from continuing to gorge herself like a zombie on his ideological corpus.

Pelosi, who once infamously urged her fellow Democrats to "embrace the suck" and abolish long-term federal unemployment benefits during the height of the Wall Street-manufactured recession, now vows to re-implement noxious "pay-go" rules if her party wins back the majority in November.

In light of the revelation just published by Politico, that the campaign arm of the House minority party has expressly forbidden candidates to utter the words "single payer" in midterm campaign ads, her twisted logic actually starts to make some grotesque sense. She could have and should have come right out and admitted that the wealthy corporations and plutocrats who run the party don't want true universal health care. "We" can't afford it actually means that "they" don't want to help pay for it. Never mind that the government is not like a family, and can never run out of money. After all, there's always plenty of money to maintain the trillion dollar-plus war machine.

The reanimation of Pay-Go deficit hawkery is a dog whistle to donors: although Pelosi's Democrats will "look at" Medicare For All, it will never make it out of committee on her continuing watch.

That the erstwhile "party of the people" is fully owned and operated by what Bernie Sanders castigates as "the billionaire class" is more glaringly obvious than ever. These party leaders, despite all their happy talk of a Blue Wave in November, really don't seem to care whether they win or lose. The rich, after all, already got their grotesque tax cuts under Trump, and there is no way they're going to break out of their mold and agree to part with even a small portion of their windfalls to ensure that their fellow citizens get health care, from the cradle to the grave.

No deficit spending in the public interest will be a top negative 2019 priority if her party wins, bragged Pelosi, whose own net worth ranges upwards of $29 million.

But, as The Hill reports,

The idea is already prompting howls from some liberals in the caucus, who want to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda next year — including costly, big-ticket items such as expanding health-care access, subsidizing education opportunities and boosting infrastructure projects — and fear pay-go might be too confining.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), said the Democrats would be foolish to adopt the fiscal restraints, especially in light of the Republicans’ newly adopted tax-reform law, which is estimated to add almost $2 trillion to the debt over the next decade. 
“The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Grijalva said.

Nevertheless, centrist Democrats like Pelosi are persisting, insisting that being the "party of fiscal responsibility" is a sure winner, guaranteed to drag at least the richest 10 percent of liberals and recovering Republicans away from MSNBC and RussiaGate and #TheResistance long enough to cast their ballots for moderate, heavily bankrolled Democrats.

So what if it was this same insane reasoning that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016? Remember - this is not about winning elections. This is about a certain segment of career politicians and consultants staying in business as "loyal opposition" apparatchiks, and increasingly, fellow travelers in neoconservatism and proponents of endless violent wars for democracy.

We all have responsibility for reducing the debt for our children,” Pelosi said last month at a forum hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates for reducing the national debt. 
“Democrats believe that you must pay as you go. Whatever you want to invest in, you must offset.” 
The Democrats have a long history of supporting pay-go, which was first adopted as a platform item at their 1982 convention. In 2007, after Democrats took control of the House, they adopted a pay-go rule, which governed legislation moving through the lower chamber while Pelosi held the Speaker’s gavel. Two years later, with more Democrats in the Senate and President Obama in the White House, the Democrats went even further, enacting a statutory pay-go rule applying to both chambers.

Translation: if you want to invest in Pre-K, you must reduce college aid and ax loan forgiveness for adults. If you want to invest in infrastructure, you have to make cuts in food assistance programs. And if you don't like eating those shriveled peas, you can always watch Obama's upcoming inspirational Netflix series about people hoisting themselves up by their bootstraps. These inspirational people won't get rich, but the Obamas themselves will haul in an estimated $50 million to ensure that the lesser inspirationals at least get their 15 minutes of fame.

Even Rep. Barbara Lee, considered one of the most liberal members of Congress, is drinking the koolaid when she says Democrats can still "pursue a progressive agenda" without eating into the Trump-generated, oligarch-enriching deficit.

  “This government has the resources to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to move into the middle class,” Lee said. “It’s the priorities and who we believe should have access to the American dream is the question.”

(The neoliberal buzzwords are in my bold.)  Maybe you can't eat three meals or see the dentist today, but they'll fight to get you that opportunity someday, in the future. So stop complaining that you don't earn enough money or have even $200 in savings to pay for an emergency car repair. Go to sleep, and if you are really, really lucky and really, really optimistic, you might even get access to pleasant dreams as an antidote to your hunger, joblessness and despair.

As the late George Carlin said of that amorphous American Dream, "They call it that, because you have to be asleep to believe in it."

Speaking of despair, the American suicide rate has shot up in nearly every state. As revealed in a new report by the Centers for Disease Control, it has increased by a whopping 30 percent in the last 16 years. People began taking their own lives in these increasing numbers in 1999, just after the Clinton administration colluded with Republicans to slash welfare and deregulate finance capital.

And as a rejoinder to all those duopolistic politicians who murmur platitudes and call for "more mental health treatment" to prevent these suicides, the CDC points out that only about half of the people who took their own lives in 2015 were known to be suffering from mental illness. The other half were having relationship problems, job problems, money problems and unspecified "impending crises" in their lives.

In other words, half the people who died from suicide took the only logical step they thought was left open to them. They were not deranged.

Suicide is not just a mental health crisis. It's a public health crisis. It's indicative of the extreme wealth disparity that has been increasing in America for the past four decades.

But to hear Nancy Pelosi and her Republican co-conspirators tell it, if you can't pay, then you just might as well go.

And if you want to live, don't pin your hopes and dreams on either right wing of the Money Party - unless, of course, you're in the top 10 percent of earners or heirs, and have plenty of money to burn.

Since we're in the midst of a perpetual class war, and our two-party system keeps denying that there is even such a thing, what we obviously need is a new working class party in this country. 

Although Donald Trump may be the most irresistible -and oh so convenient - outrage magnet ever presented to us by the media-political complex, he really should be the least of our worries. As much as he loves to distract, he himself is the major distraction in a dying American empire.  

Here's to life.

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.