A Confederation of Muppets

The dueling duopolists of the presidential pageant are creating and fund-raising off yet another phony wedge issue. They are so desperate to take our minds off the fact that participatory democracy is a mere illusion that they're not even bothering to be original this time. It's the Second Coming of Big Bird in only one campaign season! Republicans have been threatening to de-fund PBS since time immemorial, and it's always been an empty threat by posturing phony deficit hawks. But starting today, the latest skirmish in The Wars of Sesame Street has been officially been declared. So pick a side, and let the bloody battle begin.

Suddenly jolted into action by a cacophony of Tweets after his lackluster debate performance, President Obama voiced his indignation about the loathsome Mitt before a crowd in Colorado today. Mitt, he trilled, is the anti-Muppet. Mitt wants to privatize Bert and Ernie's Medicare! (Barry will chain their Social Security cost of living increases and make them work till they drop, but that's another story.)

Now that the well has run dry on their Rush Limbaugh-enabled War Against Women defense fund, Democrats are wasting no time with the email appeals to feather their nests with the lucrative golden plumage of Big Bird. (Did you ever notice how they always have to coyly hide asking for money behind a phony petition? Just Say No to Republican vaginal wands and gimme gimme gimme.)

Sen. Jeff Merkley wrote me today, not noticing or caring that my New York locale is 3000 miles, as the bird flies, away from his Oregonian flock.

Not on our watch! Sign my petition, and tell Mitt Romney: No Ads on Sesame Street!.... My kids watched Sesame Street growing up. Like many Americans – including Mitt Romney - I’m a huge Big Bird fan. But America's children need quality, educational, advertising-free television. For 43 years, Sesame Street has led the way for our kids. Putting commercial advertising on Sesame Street won't make any difference in our national debt, and just hurts our kids. For Big Bird, Jeff.

Yeah, right. Maybe if the Democrats go all pro-Sesame Street, we'll forget that they're totally run by Wall Street. We'll forget that they screwed Main Street. It's no coincidence, after all, that the crooks at Goldman Sachs refer to their prey as Muppets. In banking circles, it's a pejorative term for easily cheated stupid people.

Next time you get a fund-raising appeal from a needy politician professing a smarmy attachment to Snuffleupagus, write back. Disabuse them of the notion that we are a Confederation of Dunces, and just tell them to stuff it upagus.

Tell Politicians: No Money from Wall Street

Jaws

Attacking Mitt Romney is like shooting caviar in a barrel. The Obama campaign TV ads chewing him up and spitting him out are a hoot to watch and satisfy our great national craving for plutocratic blood. But let's face it. Picking apart one little rotten fish larva out of the whole slimy pile is not enough, when there are schools and schools of sharks circling in churned-up waters, waiting their voracious turn in the continuing feeding frenzy on what's left of our democracy.


Just because President Obama is going full-bore Captain Ahab on Mitt the Minnow does not mean he intends to harpoon the Moby Dicks of free market global capitalism. To the contrary, he is their keeper and protector. Look no further than his Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, described as "NAFTA on steroids". Actually, you can't look further because the negotiations are being conducted in so much murky secrecy that even United States senators are not allowed access to the details.



Corporate Feeding Frenzy -- Exposed!


But thanks to the Public Citizen consumer advocacy group shining a light into the murky depths, we are learning anew that although President Obama is attacking the offshoring and outsourcing of the man who wants his job, he is not attacking offshoring and outsourcing in general. In fact, he is a champion of sending our jobs overseas. We already got a hint of that when he signed the South Korean trade deal last year. That measure is estimated to cost 159,000 American manufacturing jobs. And the Panama part of the deal actually makes it easier for tax evaders like Romney to hide their millions offshore. And the Colombia part of the package allows us to ignore the worst record of labor and human rights violations on the entire planet. In effect, Obama has helped destroy more American jobs than Romney ever imagined in his most vivid vulture capitalist dreams. As a matter of fact, Obama got so much criticism from his base over his capitulation to transational corporations that he signed the final bill in secret. Only a few applauding oligarchs attended the Oval Office ceremony, as this noir-ish AP photo of the event attests:



Barry and the Barracudas

Ironically, the Obama camp's Mitt attacks are having the unintended consequence of attracting a lot more needed attention to the latest ongoing trade negotiations. There were demonstrations at last week's round of private talks in San Diego, along with petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures and letters of protest from legislators and activist groups in all 50 states. According to Public Citizen's Lori Wallach,

U.S. negotiators have tried to keep TPP negotiations totally below the radar, but even so opposition to the current "NAFTA-on-steroids-with-Asia" approach is escalating, which is good news for the public but a serious complication for the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney as a U.S. job offshorer.... President Obama is facing a growing chorus of opposition to what his trade negotiators are up to on the TPP from his base and from other Democratic elected officials, and given that his campaign seems to be honing in on job offshoring as a winning theme, he needs to redirect his negotiators from their current TPP agenda of NAFTA-on-steroids with all of Asia.

The TPP is a lot more than the usual government give-away to the oligarchs. If passed, it will free the global banking Mafia from even the limited oversight they currently enjoy, severely limit access to medicines by the countries that need them the most, make it easier for unsafe products and chemicals to flood into the United States, and absolve multinationals from adhering to domestic environmental and health policies. Even the legal system will be subverted by star chambers run by corporate judges. According to Public Citizen, it's nothing but a global corporate coup, a power tool for the One Percent. (h/t Kat.)

You obviously won't be seeing any Rombama attack ads about TPP on your TV, from either side. That's because Mitt Romney wants this deal as much as Barack Obama does. It's one more indication of it not really mattering, in the long term, which one of these apparatchiks of the Duopoly wins the election. For another great overview of what TPP means for regular people, do read this Truthout piece by Brian Moench, titled "America the Beautiful: A Fire Sale for Corporations." If this doesn't send a chill right down your spine, nothing will. An excerpt:

TPP is much worse than NAFTA, which eviscerated middle-class jobs and wealth in the US. And this sellout to foreign corporations is not just a rogue brain cramp of President Obama. Mitt Romney demanded this agreement be signed months ago, and the notorious "climate change denying" US Chamber of Commerce can't get it signed fast enough. Romney has called Obama's the most hostile administration to business in recent history. If the TPP trade agreement is "hostile" to business, god help us if we have an administration, presumably Romney's, "friendly" to business.

If you thought that with Citizens United we had hit rock bottom in surrendering our democracy to the power of money, this TPP "trade agreement" would throw our democracy into free fall. Foreign corporations will be allowed to feast like termites upon America's natural resources, trash our environment and public health, violate our rights as American citizens and make us pay them if we try to protect ourselves.

With enough public outcry, maybe we can buy some time. Although TPP had been scheduled to go into effect this year, it looks like it might be delayed until 2013 because of... you guessed it... the feeding frenzy of the presidential campaign. Plus, the Japanese are not yet part of the talks, and the plutocrats want them to get on board the corporate gravy train too. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ever the mega-lobby of unfettered capitalism, is keeping its fingers crossed. The elites are couching their crime against humanity in spin designed to foment fear of Chinese competition, making it easier for the gullible hoi polloi to swallow their poisoned bait -- hook, line and sinker.

Cookie Monster Stalkers

We're all accustomed to politicians throwing out pitiful crumbs to the common folk, while they allow the highest corporate bidders to feast and gorge at public expense. And now it turns out they're tossing us fancy cookies, too. It's bad enough that they're constantly projectile-vomiting emails into our overflowing spam buckets. But internet cookies? Say it ain't so!  Barry and Mitt are cyberstalkers!

Um-Num-Num-Num-Num.... Don't Block Me, Bro!

Well, it is so. In case you were wondering how it is, no matter what web page you visit, that the same feel-good cheesy photos keep popping up urging you to "Help the Obamas Stand Up for Working Families" and "Tell Michelle You're IN" or "Grab a Bite with Ann", it's all the fault of cookies. If you have ever clicked on a link to their campaign websites or ads, a little gizmo is activated that will not only follow you wherever you go, but will gather information about you based on where you troll on the Internet. We knew it was happening with the Obama machine months ago, when ProPublica figured out that his campaign nerds customize their money-grubbing email appeals based solely on your browsing history.  

Romney is now playing catch-up. ProPublica reporter Lois Beckett was decidedly creeped out when Mitt started stalking her across cyberspace recently. As a reporter, she spends a "fair amount of time" on his campaign website and as a result, she became fodder for a slew of ads urging her to "learn more" and donate, donate, donate.

 This is the same kind of online targeting  used by sites that sell airline tickets or shoes. If you visit Zappos, advertisements for the sneakers you looked at will sometimes follow you around the web. Romney's campaign was sending me a "donate" button instead.

But the fact that I was being targeted based on my visits to the campaign site wasn't at all clear from the ads themselves.

Each of the ads had a teensy blue triangle in the top right corner. Because I report on online advertising, I know that the triangle means I've been targeted. Many online ad companies have agreed to give consumers a heads-up that they're seeing a message that's been personalized to them. They mark targeted ads with a blue triangle icon or the words "Ad Choices."

When I clicked on the blue triangle on one of the Romney ads, a message popped up saying that a company called ShareThis had "determined that you might be interested in an ad like this." The ad had been "selected for you based on your browsing activity."

If you're interested in more of the technical details of how ShareThis does what it does, do read the whole article. ProPublica also wants to hear from you about your own experiences with political cyberstalkers and asks that you send a screenshot of the ads targeting you to: mailto:targeting2012@Propublica.org.

But if you'd rather not be part of a survey, or if the idea of being stalked by Barry and Mitt makes you queasy, take out a restraining order. No, you don't have to sue or go to the People's Court. You can make all the ads go away, forever and completely, just by downloading an ad-blocking program. I installed AdBlock (the simple version) a few weeks ago and it made every single ad disappear immediately. No more opening an ad strategically placed to be accidentally clicked while I scroll down a page. No more ads that have to be "rolled" off the page before I can read an article. It has been rated completely safe and effective, and I can attest to its sanity-preserving virtues. There are different versions adapted to different browsers, so just Google to find the right one for you.

Of course, advertisers hate it because they're still paying for ads people are not seeing. And some people are ticked because most versions of AdBlock can't always distinguish between good ads and bad ads, annoying ads and helpful ads. It's all or nothing. You can't decide you want to see the Obama ads and block the Mittster. You have no choice between Greater Evil and Lesser Evil. You can't block Walmart ads and allow Bergdorf Goodman ads. Oh, the humanity.

While AdBlock and similar programs prevent the annoying messages from reaching your screen, they do not block tracking cookies. To foil the internet spies, clear out your browser on a regular basis. (I clean mine once or twice a day. This measure has the added perk of allowing you to access sites with paywalls by erasing your "footprint history.")

As far as the annoying emails are concerned, "unsubscribing" may or may not work. You may simply find yourself engaging in a futile game of whack-a-mole. As an experiment to determine the exponential grasp of political email lists, I signed a "thank you" card to President Obama on his gay marriage evolution, sent to me by Nancy Pelosi. Sure nuff, the fund-raising emails came barfing out almost instantaneously. They came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DNC, congress critters from thousands of miles away that I never even heard of. To make it all stop, I had to unsubscribe from each person individually -- a fraught and time-consuming process. This barely put a dent in the torrent. But I think it's finally starting to dwindle down.

I tried the same experiment with the right-wingers, having signed up for alerts from the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity (a/k/a Rich People for Rich People.) The nefarious koch-heads promptly gave my email address to every right wing nut job in Nutland. Herman Cain writes often, including all those videos of stuffed animal abuse. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer offered to send me an autographed copy of her book "Scorpions for Breakfast" if I sent her 50 bucks first. (I passed). Now, of course, they're going crazy with the Down with Obamacare missives that are truly hilarious in their insistence that government medical care will kill us all. No way am I unsubscribing from that crap. It is way too entertaining.

Update: This just in from Herman Cain. It's a teaser about "Cain TV", supposedly coming soon to a cable channel near you. I can guarantee it will also play in an endless loop on MSNBC, the liberal outrage channel. From the preview, it appears to be a hodge-podge of paranoid apocalyptica coupled with slapstick comedy with a racist-misogynist slant (there's a segment with a black comedian doing a minstrel routine--hard to figure out if it's satire, or the blatant hurling of red meat to bigots and militia groups. For now, I'll choose the latter.)  At the end, Herman himself appears, telling us: "Hello. I'm Herman Cain. They think we're stupid."  And he concludes with "Let's give a lamb a gun. I am Herman Cain. We are not stupid."

This has all the makings of a summer hit.