Salmonella Nation

Remember when President Obama assured us that no Americans would ever be placed on his Targeted Kill List? Well... not so fast. If he has his way, thousands of us will get sick, even die, from eating tainted eggs, meat and poultry. Michelle Obama's Let's Move program touting healthy diets will morph into Let's Move to get to the bathroom on time.

Even though studies show that at least two-thirds of the chicken sold in this country carry bacteria, President Obama's budget is calling for an unbelievably drastic reduction in USDA poultry inspectors. He apparently thinks that the Wall Street method of self-regulation, which has obviously worked out just fine for defrauded homeowners and looted pension plans, will work just as well for factory farms. He apparently thinks that thousands or millions of  new cases of salmonella a year are the price we must pay in order to have a thriving free market. He apparently has learned no lessons from the hundreds of cases of fungal meningitis caused by that self-regulating compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts. 

It's the usual blatant pro-corporate rationale behind most of this administration's deregulatory actions. Firing federal poultry inspectors who protect the public health would actually save only a paltry amount of taxpayer money. But firing poultry inspectors who protect the public health will greatly enhance the bank accounts of the factory farms. Their profits will bloat even faster than a salmonella-infested oven stuffer roaster. The fox-guarding-the-henhouse way of doing business will be taken to a whole new literal level.

Under current procedures, teams of USDA inspectors working at America's poultry plants are now able to examine about 35 chickens a minute as they come flying down the assembly lines. Under Obama's proposal, the reduction in staff would result in a lone token inspector having to examine 175 birds in the same time frame -- a physical impossibility. As a result, the rate of production could potentially increase by five-fold.

Tony Corbo, of the public policy group Food and Water Watch, notes that a pilot program replacing government Agriculture inspectors with self-policing industry employees has already been proven dangerous. Salmonella cases actually increased, and even carcasses bearing obvious fecal contamination were being missed. In an interview with the Real News Network, Corbo said the Obama Administration is well aware of these dire statistics, but is playing fast and loose with the public health anyway:  

I mean, when the administration proposed their regulation, they had a report doing an evaluation of these pilot plants. And it showed the last two years of data that they collected, that the pilot plants had actually higher salmonella rates than the conventionally inspected plants. And lo and behold, just this past month--USDA does a monthly report on the testing that the government does in these plants to test to see if the salmonella rates are either high or low, and two of the pilot plants showed up as failing the salmonella test.

So here's the ultimate irony. The administration keeps on going around and saying that this new model, this new inspection model is going to be able to reduce salmonella, and yet all of the evidence points the other way.
 

And just as an aside: the Office of Management and Budget, largely responsible for the relentless deregulation frenzy in the Obama Administration, will now be headed by Walmart executive Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Walmart sells a whole lot of chicken. Just sayin'. 

And here we thought Chained CPI represented the ultimate in  cruelty. Not only will we be forced to eat cat food, we'll be forced to eat tainted Walmart cat food.
 
 

Being Margaret Thatcher

Barack Obama opened his oversized vintage 80s handbag this morning and dumped the entire contents on a sleepy unsuspecting public. No cash -- just a pile of IOUs payable to the Wall Street elites, to be drawn from our Social Security trust fund to go straight to their trillion-dollar tax-free offshore bank accounts and CEO pay packages.

The only shocker is that there are still a few hold-outs who are still shocked by the Great Betrayal. Happily, most New York Times reader-commenters are up in arms, with one woman (Renee of Manhattan) even suggesting that Barack be dragged bodily from the White House. I hope she does not receive a visit from the Secret Soyvice! Here is my comment:

Mr. Obama will dine with a dozen Republicans tonight, feasting on gourmet goodies as they discuss imposing a diet of cat food on a nation of struggling retirees, veterans, widowed parents and orphans, and the disabled.

Despite what the president says, his is not a balanced approach. Economist Dean Baker has crunched the numbers, and the upshot of Chained CPI will be that poorer people will be contributing at three times the rate as those making over $450,000. And those pesky tax loopholes? They'll be closed temporarily, and then lobbyists bearing scissors will descend upon Congress to let the snipping open begin anew.

But the cuts to our safety net would be permanent, and Obama's proposals represent a sneaky backdoor way to eventual privatization.

More than 80% of Americans polled do not want Social Security, which has added not one dime to the deficit, touched. If anything, we should scrap the cap on FICA contributions to ensure the program's solvency into perpetuity. In this time of chronic unemployment and underemployment, with one in five Americans living in poverty, we should actually be lowering the retirement age and raising benefits.

That a Democratic president is doing the cruel bidding of Wall Street and the deficit hawks instead of doing the bidding of the people who re-elected him is proof positive that lesser evilism is still pretty darned rotten. I hope he's ready for a fight -- because he'll be getting a big one.
 

I usually don't sign petitions, (they're just hooks for endless fund-raising appeals) but I made an exception this week, and for the hell of it added my name to 2 million other signatures delivered yesterday to the White House by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a while contingent of demonstrators. As you can tell by the contents spewing out of his Thatcher carry-all today, Obama must have cackled gleefully if he even deigned to give it a glance. Of course, when people like Sanders and the other sundry inhabitants of the veal pen preface their protests with "I am a big supporter of the president, but....", who wouldn't burst out guffawing? Also humorous are the hordes who continue to insist that the president is being "forced" to cut the safety net by all those nasty Republicans. 

But if you like gallows humor as I do, what could be more laugh-out-loud hilarious than Obama sending his new Treasury Secretary to Europe to lecture them on the dangers of austerity?  As Yves Smith writes today, it must be getting awfully hard out there for an Obamabot.

Maundering Monday (Links, Chains & Threads)

The Iron Lady: rust to dust.  

Eleven dead Afghan children are just a thorny issue in the American side. But a couple of Americans killed during the endless aggressive American occupation of their country? A deplorable humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions. Dead Muslim babies are a sticky wicket, having the nerve to get themselves murdered in the middle of a valiant American effort to protect American lives during American airstrikes in which Americans shockingly also get killed anyway, when they're only there to help Afghan children learn to read American books. (NY Times.)

President Obama is running out of legacy-burnishing time, probably because the American corporate media are wasting their rags and apple polish on the rotten little crab The One. He's only got 10 days to close the deal on guns, 'gration, and gutting (the safety net.)

According to Obama's former bankster-budget director-turned bankster pal Peter Orszag, chained CPI won't even save much money as it condemns millions of Americans to needless suffering and early deaths. So, sez Pete, the fact that Obama is pushing for it anyway makes him one brave crusading asshole.

The president is having second thoughts (or pretending to) on his Terror Tuesday baseball card collection. The likely scenario, of course, is that he's just resorting to more liar's poker, gushing anonymously to NY Times reporters in yet another bout of legacy-burnishing propaganda, preparatory to his much-anticipated burble to the American people on Drones. Having killed thousands of people "over there", he could well be running out of victims. Maybe the killing game is boring him. Plus, killing people is not who he is as a country. Plus, the ends don't necessarily justify the means, especially when there's plenty of domestic means-testing on his plate already.

Apparently feeling no tinglings of cognitive dissonance, let alone irony, the president is traveling to Connecticut today to shed more glycerine tears for dead American children and to deplore the civilian use of American-manufactured terrorist weapons and ammo.

When the town of Mayflower turns into the town of Oilslick, the real government of Exxon-Mobil takes over -- the water, the land and even the skies are off-limits to reporters. Deja Deepwater Horizon vu all over again. It even looks like they're cleaning up their mess with cheap Oil Baron Koch Brothers Bounty paper towels:  

The Quicker Slicker Picker-Upper

 

Asses and Asteroids

Included in Barack's Budget is $100 million for NASA to go into space and lasso a 500-ton asteroid to bring back to earth. Maybe he can use his space junk to beat the old, the young, the sick and the poor to death quickly instead of imposing slow starvation upon them through his austerity manifesto. Or else, he can pay a few McWorkers $7.50 an hour to have them sledge-hammer it into a million tiny pieces, sell them in the online Obama Store, and use the proceeds for construction of his billion-dollar Presidential Cathedral. On second thought, he'll use unpaid interns, call them grass-roots activists, and hit them up for a $5 donation.

But it gets even weirder. For some reason, Obama also wants to put an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025. I think he might be suffering from a case of arrested development, thinking that  Antoine de St-Exupéry's fable of a young prince is all about himself -- similar to Paul Ryan thinking Ayn Rand was an actual economist. Maybe Obama can find an asteroid named B-612, that has volcanoes, a baobab tree and a sexy rose. And he can go himself, right now. Because although he may not really be a prince, his deficit-cutting ideas that stick it to ordinary people are definitely on the petty side.



Sharez la Sacrifice, S'il Vous Plait

Meanwhile, back on earth, while the Obamian imposition of chained CPI for Social Security recipients amounts to snatching several meals a month from the mouths of the old, the surviving, the sick and the disabled, our government is ironically force-feeding Gitmo prisoners who are currently conducting a hunger strike. The inmates, many of whom have been ordered released, are protesting the utter and cruel illegality of being kept behind bars. They have reached the point where they just want to die. Our leaders don't want to let them go, however,  for fear that they might fall in with a bad crowd, especially in places like Yemen where the bad crowds are growing every day due to their friends and families being bugsplatted by American drones. Of course, the Obama Administration is shoving feeding tubes into them out of sincere concern for their well-being. The Obama Administration needs a kick in its ass-teroid. 

 

In other news, the esteemed sycophants of the corporate journalistic class are keeping secret the name of a CIA operative up for promotion to a top spot in the agency because she was supposedly instrumental in the destruction of evidence showing that the United States tortured prisoners at Gitmo and elsewhere. The NY Times and the Washington Post are therefore awarded this week's Ass-teroid Prize for excellence in media malpractice.

Murder, Inc.

The overseas victims of President Obama's drone attacks no longer need feel so all alone. That's because Barack has just added 330 million Americans to his Kill List. 

Make no mistake. Coupled with the festering Sequester Sasquatch, his proposed budget will cause people to die. Not only is he forging ahead with his Chained CPI formula for cutting lifetime Social Security benefits, he wants to reduce disability payments, Medicare payments, veterans' benefits and unemployment assistance. He even wants to hasten the demise of the United States Postal Service, perhaps to cut down on the well-deserved hate mail that will be flooding his corporate board offices, mansions, and billion-dollar cathedral of a presidential library for the rest of his misbegotten life.

I guess the only things more infuriating than President Obama are those few diehard loyalists who think we should cheer for the man just because he'll make the Republicans look stupid as he starves, sickens and kills us. Or pundits like Ezra Klein who labor under the theory that Obama is still playing a cute game of 11-dimensional chess. Writes Klein:

The upside of this strategy is clear: Obama gets “caught trying” on a budget compromise. House Republicans have put forward a series of extremely conservative budget proposals that show no interest in a compromise. Senate Democrats have a more modest plan, but one that doesn’t include any notable concessions to Republicans. Obama will position himself in the middle. He will include, in public, high-profile concessions to Republicans — though he will emphasize that he’ll only accept those concessions if they come with significant new revenues. No one will be able to say he isn’t trying to reach a deal, and the cries from liberals will prove that he’s forcing his base to accept very tough medicine.
 

Readers' comments to the New York Times's piece on the Obama slash-o-rama were almost universally scathing. But this example of good, slavering, dutiful citizenship is what the paper's Obama-friendly sycophantic team of moderators chose to showcase on the homepage:

Maybe he's making this compromise because he thinks it's better for ordinary Americans on net, or maybe he's bluffing as part of a political strategy to box in the other side. Either way, I won't pretend to know better.

One consolatory bit of news today -- a federal court has just overruled his paternalistic, misogynistic and "bad faith" ban on over-the-counter sales of the morning-after contraceptive pill to teenage girls, including to his precious Sasha and Malia.

If Obama cared anything about struggling people, he'd call for an immediate ban on the sale of over-the-counter rat poison. Some people, facing a lifetime diet of Walmart cat food, eviction from rental properties owned by vulture capitalists, bankruptcy from medical bills unassuaged by ObamaCare, will no doubt choose to take the quicker way out than suffering his death by a thousand cuts. 

House of Pain

Here's my problem with much of the media coverage of the gratuitous and cruel imposition of national austerity known as Sequestration -- or if you will, "The Sequester." No human faces or names are even being appended to it anymore. The generic Congress Critters gave birth in their laboratory, and abandoned the baby. And we, to paraphrase a line in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, have become the bubbles blown by the baby.

So, instead of "President Obama and hundreds of bought-and-paid-for politicians in Congress are cutting thousands of poor children from Head Start", we're being told that the Sequester Did It.

Today's Washington Post headline blares "Cancer Clinics Are Turning Away Thousands of Medicare Patients. Blame the Sequester."

The Huffington Post is running a shocking piece that lists 100 agencies already feeling the "stinging cuts" of the Sequester. Wow. That Sequester sure is one sharp-nailed beast, huh? We certainly didn't see that one coming out of the torture chamber known as Washington. And Congress is still on vacation, raising all that campaign cash.  

Words matter. Semantics matter. Media should be naming and shaming. Instead, they're allowing the politicians to not only disown responsibility for the monster they created, but to act as though there is no way to just kill the damn thing.

"They had certain Fixed Ideas implanted (by Moreau... Pete Peterson?)  in their minds which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They really were hypnotized, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute." (H.G. Wells)

Chillingly, our elected officials are now actually celebrating and embracing austerity by ostentatiously giving up some of their own perks and pennies to appease their vile creation. They pretend to suffer in order to make us feel like whiners if we're not enjoying our own suffering. 

President Obama, leading from behind even as he kicks the public in its collective behind, is playing Austerity Catch-up by relinquishing a paltry portion of his own paycheck to the Treasury in order to show "solidarity" with federal workers victimized by the Frankenstein Furlough. Instead of demanding Death to Sequester, he is helping to push austerity normalization right along. The politicians who have now disowned their monster will be falling all over themselves to Give Back in a massive outbreak of noblesse oblige. The Huffington Post will no doubt start running a tally of all the political holdouts who are selfishly withholding their paychecks from the Share the Sacrifice Cause -- much as they are doing now for the pols who are still refusing to jump on the Gay Marriage bandwagon.

And as far as sending a check to the Treasury is concerned, Obama might as well be writing a check to Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobil, G.E. or any number of tax-exempt, tax-evading corporate welfare queens who treat our national community chest as their own personal piggy bank. His gesture would mean more if he contributed to one of those community cancer centers turning away chemo patients, or to a local subsidized day nursery having to lay off its minimum-wage child care providers. 

Instead of calling for shared prosperity, the president is holding himself up as a paragon of shared austerity. For a guy who just issued a clarion call to map the human brain, he is not demonstrating too much in the way of either brains or empathy. Then again, he is more Reagan than Johnson, more Hoover than FDR, more Dr. Moreau than Dr. Schweitzer.

And his 5% contribution is not even particularly generous, let alone original. The LA Times provides some history:

Herbert Hoover put his salary in a separate account, then divvied it up, giving part to charity and part to employees he felt were underpaid, according to an interview he gave in 1937. John F. Kennedy donated his presidential salary to various charities, according to Stacey Chandler, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

George Washington refused pay during the latter part of his military career, according to researchers at Mount Vernon. He tried to refuse a presidential salary, but Congress required that the position pay $25,000.

Next up -- privatized soup kitchens, since the Sequester Creature is eating up all the goodies in the subsidized food banks and nutrition programs. Maybe they can even be funded by mobsters and drug cartels. Maybe there's a 21st century Al Capone waiting in the wings to feed hungry children. Maybe the Walmart heirs can share the sacrifice and clean up their own grisly image by volunteering to man the IV drips in the community cancer clinics.

Nah, scrub that idea. There have already been too many cheesy remakes of The Island of Dr. Moreau. 

 

Paranoia Runs Deep

I can hardly wait to see what the official Map of the Brain will look like. Because judging from the results of the most recent Public Policy Poll, the cartography of many a mind will reveal that the synapses are flashing with shreds of tinfoil along with the usual microbursts of electricity. 

The Truthers, Birthers, Preppers, Sovereign Citizens, Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world are not so fringe-y as you might think. (Either that, or the poll is fatally flawed because a fifth of the respondents coincidentally reside in Gooberville, Florida. Or that the people who dreamed up these wacko questions reside in Gooberville, Florida) Some of the findings: 

 Twenty-eight percent of voters believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. 34% of Republicans and 35% of independents believe in the New World Order threat compared to just 15% of Democrats.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans agree that climate change  is a conspiracy, while 77% of Democrats disagree.

Twenty percent of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ, compared to 13% of independents and 6% of Democrats who agree.

Twenty-nine percent believe aliens exist, and 21% believe the government is covering up an alien spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

But there is hope. Only 4% of us believe in shape-shifting lizard people and a mere 5% think that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966 and then secretly replaced by a look-alike so the Beatles could continue. Similar segments of the population think the government is controlling them through their TV sets and that the white jet exhaust you see in the sky is actually a chemical the government is spraying to poison people. These poor souls probably had the bad luck to be contacted by this psycho-baiter of a polling company the same day they forgot to take their meds. They probably also believe that the polling people who always call at the dinner hour are annoying evil pod people -- and they would be right.

On the other hand, some of the answers to the questions were way too naive for my taste.  For example, only 15% of respondents believe that pharmaceutical companies would be so psychopathic as to invent diseases in order to sell their drugs. How about that sudden unexplained epidemic of ADHD currently plaguing our nation, necessitating billions of dollars in sales of Ritalin and Adderall?

And while it is probably true, as 86% of us believe, that the CIA never distributed crack cocaine to inner city youth, how about those LSD experiments conducted by the Army and the Public Health Service's infamous syphilis experiment on black men in Tuskegee? There is a history here.

The paradox to be gleaned from the polling is that while we are afraid of nonexistent threats, we tend to scoff at the real deal. We are both too skeptical, and not skeptical enough.

Sometimes, they really are out to get you.
 

 

Legacy Lollapalooza

What's more absurd -- the national obsession over a New York Times obituary co-celebrating a female rocket scientist's domestic and professional skills, or the national obsession with the legacy of a president who's only halfway through his eight-year gig? There are tasteless obits and then there are tasteless obits. But to be frank, I find the hoopla over Stroganoff-gate to be no less silly than the endless awful offal about how every Obamian burp, tooth-flash and fart will contribute to his almighty Legacy.

Google "Obama Legacy" and you get 94,100,000 hits. Google "President Clinton Legacy" and you net only a measly 19.5 million for more than a decade's worth worth of leavings. George W. does a little better, with 23 million -- but look at all the piles of destruction he's excreted upon the body politic during and since his own eight-year reign of error.

 Of course, the Obama Legacy isn't really real. It's just an offshoot of the Obama Brand -- a product of Beltway hype, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. A product that gives the propagandists something to prestidigitate about. A product that gives that elite subset of pundits known as "Villagers" the magical ability to turn the future into the past on the Sunday talk shows.

Take Sunday's Meet the Press, for example, when Revolving Door Glider Extraordinaire David Axelrod framed the ongoing immigration reform drama in terms of.... The Obama Legacy. "He wants this accomplishment," the lobbyist/campaign manager/presidential advisor/campaign manager/paid NBC contributor told Chuck Todd. "This is a Legacy Item for him." (More so, apparently, than a perilous legacy for all the thousands of immigrants on tenterhooks wondering whether they'll be slapped into solitary by ICE, or continue to be deported in the same legacy-ensuring, record-shattering numbers since Obama took office.)

Since actual history is so passé, the celebrity historians who make the rounds of the cable news shows have established the timeless Obama Legacy into a lucrative cottage industry. Michael Beschloss and Douglas Brinkley performed a show on the Future of the Obama Brand in Texas recently. They were upfront, somewhat, about what a fraud this premature Obama Legacy discussion really is:

If we are obsessive, it’s an insider’s club of historians. I don’t think we [as a country] know enough about our presidents,” Brinkley responded to (the moderator) McKenzie’s question of whether we lust too much for presidential leadership.

Beschloss said that in order to learn fully about the country’s leaders, we have to wait for inside sources to provide “what these people are like behind the scenes.”

“Usually presidents 40 years after office look very different,” Beschloss said. Issues and “obsessions” that were escalated during the presidency often are quelled or even better understood as the country moves forward.

“It’s good to wait and read books by historians and great journalists,” Beschloss said.
 

But we live in a hurry-up culture, we Americans, and waiting 40 years simply does not pay the bills. It's much more fun to instant-analyze, said the History B-Boys as they collected their handsome speaking fees and Mr. Brinkley appeared on the Obama Channel (MSNBC) to ignore Beschloss's draconian 40-Year Rule and indulge in still more Hasty Hagiographic History, predicting to the network's blogger that Barack's Inauguration Susurration alone is enough to make him one of the all-time greats:

Theodore Roosevelt was known to “dine with novelists and poets” and had a “gaggle” of journalists and cartoonists around him at all times, FDR was known for his famous “fireside chats” on the radio, and Brinkley points to Lincolns rhetorical skill and “eloquent” speeches like the Gettysburg Address.

Brinkley sees similar stellar communication skills in President Obama as well, predicting that Obama will be famous someday for invoking Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall as three key points along the civil rights journey. He also praised his most recent State of the Union.

“Someday somebody could do the speeches of Barack Obama, whether it’s his Nobel speech or his Cairo one, speeches at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson,” Brinkley says. “He’s been an extraordinarily gifted orator.”
 

And besides mouthing platitudes and belching bromides, there are such monster Obamian achievements as the pretend-withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Brinkley ranks right up there with the quasi-withdrawal from South Korea almost 60 years ago! (see: Obama sends stealth jets to South Korea, circa 2013). The MSNBC blogger, named Morgan Whitaker, does get a bit carried away into Legacy LaLa Land at the end of her piece, though, as she gushes:

 Of course, it’ll be impossible not to remember Obama for having broken the glass ceiling, becoming our nation’s first president, but at the end of the day, that it’s the policy that will lead future historians to rank him among the greatest.
 

And people are upset about Stroganoff-gate, when such truly toxic noodle-headed fungiforms are replicating themselves all over the Blogosphere? It's enough to turn the cream sour, I tell you. And curdle it!

But rest your stomachs.There is an excellent antidote to Official Obama Legacy Agita in the form of this must-read by Gaius Publius of Americablog. Correctly describing the Second Term as The Legacy Tour, he provides ample evidence of Barack's true agenda in the next four years as being a blatant money-grubbing prelude to a very long, cushy Post-Presidency. And it isn't a very pretty sight. Either in the past, the present or the future.

Off the Wal-Mart

In case you still needed a reason to boycott Wal-Mart, hate Wal-Mart, protest Wal-Mart, picket Wal-Mart, avoid Wal-Mart like the plague, I think this might finally be the breaking point for those die-hards who still think it's worth it to stand in a sweaty line for an hour to save 10 cents on a bottle of Chinese shampoo.

Store executives, worried about recent bad sales figures and competition in the indigent consumer market from the Dollar Store franchise and Amazon, have hit upon a novel idea to suck every last bit of economic marrow from the emaciated public -- use desperate Wal-Mart shoppers to deliver online orders to the homes of other Wal-Mart customers -- and reimburse them not with a paycheck, but with store coupons that will barely cover the cost of their gas.

Just in time for Easter (and April Fools Day) Reuters has gotten the scoop on this truly rotten egg of an idea hatched in the vulture's nest of a retail board room. According to the reporter, though, the sociopathic plan is simply "radical":

Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world's largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as "crowd-sourcing," or the "sharing economy."

A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.

Such an effort would, however, face numerous legal, regulatory and privacy obstacles, and Wal-Mart executives said it was at an early planning stage.

(snip)

Wal-Mart currently uses carriers like FedEx Corp for delivery from stores - or, in the case of a same-day delivery service called Walmart To Go that is being tested in five metro areas, its own delivery trucks.

"I see a path to where this is crowd-sourced," Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com in the United States, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Wal-Mart has millions of customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off packages for online customers who live on their route back home, Anderson explained.

Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.
 

Even though Joel Anderson lives inside a bubble within the rotten egg gilded with gold plate, Bloomberg News thinks he deserves credit for thinking outside the Big Box by using slaves with cars and rusted-out pickup trucks to augment Wal-Mart profits and his own multimillion-dollar pay package. Still, will Walmart shoppers be willing to work for nothing?  Will they actually even deliver packages instead of stealing them?What if they cause an accident while clunking across town with loads of guns and ammo, tainted toothpaste, and Chinese dog food? The experts in Brooks Brothers suits with Harvard MBA degrees are at least admitting that their toxic germ of an idea is "fraught." How will people react, for example, when a random Wal-Mart shopper suddenly shows up at their door with their internet order?

 Well, I guess if they're that scared of the Wal-Mart volunteers, they can always call 911, and a volunteer cop will show up at their door. Up in my Ulster County neck of the woods, the cash-strapped town of Saugerties is copy-catting Wal-Mart and and has just started advertising for unpaid police volunteers to write tickets, direct traffic, answer the phones and otherwise free the paid police from such humdrum scut work as minding an army of Wal-Mart couriers.

As I wrote in a previous post, the American plutocracy is yearning for the glory days of feudalism, if not downright slavery. Leave it to the world's largest retailer, whose heirs own more wealth than 40% of all Americans combined, to lead the charge back to the future. 

Pay to Play, Peasants!

Stung by recent criticism from public interest groups and editorial boards that it was operating a bribery-intensive astroturf slush fund, Organizing for Action has now switched gears in an effort to stay viable. No more acceptance of anonymous, unlimited corporate money -- officially, that is. In a transparent ploy to deflect attacks of corruption and elitism, OFA is mounting a brand-new PR offensive to spread the delusion that regular people are just as important to President Obama as his millionaire donors. And to prove it, he'll make you a very special Founding Member of his legacy-burnishing club. You, too, can pay to play!

Just found this choice little nugget in my spam bucket:

 Karen --

Organizing for Action is staring down our first quarterly fundraising deadline -- ever.

After March 31st, we'll have a record of the founding members who helped build this organization from the start.

You should be one of them. Chip in $5 or more right now to get in on the ground floor. No one has ever done what we're trying to do: restore the balance of power to ordinary people by countering the special-interest groups with the most powerful grassroots movement ever built.

Chip in $5 or more and make sure you're one of the folks* who will make history: (web address redacted for the protection of Sardonicky readers.)

Thanks,

Jon 

Jon Carson, Executive Director

Organizing for Action
 

I don't know whether to howl or to puke. Restoring the balance of power by declaring all money is equal? Will grass seed take root in a pile of toxic sludge? Forget record levels of income disparity. Forget the regressive tax policies at work in this country. Forget 50 million uninsured people trying to stay alive within the most expensive, predatory health care system on the planet. Forget massive unemployment and underemployment and stagnating wages. No mention of overturning Citizens United to get the money out of politics. To the contrary -- you can only aspire to be a member of our thriving democracy if you start at the bottom of the pile and give to Barry. Does it get any more egalitarian than that, people?

It's the Feudalism Nostalgia movement -- the serfs paying tribute to the lord of the manor right along with the overseers, as we all toil merrily on our little patches  and hope for a better tomorrow, tomorrow, and feel like we're equal belongers. And when we hand over our meager coins, we will be protected by such Obamian initiatives as a Grand Bargain of "superlative" chained CPI adjustments to further reduce the payout on our Social Security earned benefits. Our contributions will make political corruption all balanced and good and equitable and, Obama hopes, impervious to further complaints by such pro-democracy groups as Public Citizen and Common Cause. It's historic, all right, but not in the good way the Obama machine wants you to think it is.

It was only a few weeks ago that OFA set the bar for Founding Member status at a whopping $50,000. But the elites evidently were not nibbling at the Barry Bait, and attendance at an exclusive Founders Dinner in Washington earlier this month was reportedly sparse. The poor millionaires are all tapped out when it comes to Barry-bribery, it seems. Apparently, there are no lines forming for private meetups with POTUS in exchange for $500,000. Thus, the bottom barrel-scraping evident in today's email blast to the hoi polloi. 

Oh, and about OFA's humble-bragging pledge of transparency on the source of its fund-raising? Um, how do you spell work-around? Even though its website requires donors to declare such data such as place of business and occupation and employer, this information will be kept secret from the public. If, for example, a Bill Smith of New York gives $500,000 in exchange for four annual meetings with Obama, we'll never find out if this particular Bill Smith happens to work for G.E., Honeywell, Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics.

Something is rotten in the Beltway Swamp. So, what else is new, you may ask? Only the myriad novel ways, such as insulting emails to unsuspecting victims, in which it's being bottled and packaged for our every-day consumption. 

* "When a politician uses the word 'folks', get ready for the next series of lies" -- Noam Chomsky. 

Roll Over, Roll On

Whether it's giving a pass to war criminal sadists, or kicking tens of thousands of kids off Head Start in the name of political sadism, President Obama always stays true to his political mantra: You gotta look forward, not backward.

So it is with great fetishist fanfare that the White House has just announced that the endangered Easter Egg Roll will now go on as planned. The Head Start evictees may not have been lucky enough to score a ticket in the lottery, but the Obama Administration thinks they can still take comfort watching a video of Bo the Dog pimping out the festivities. That is, if their homes even have an internet connection.... which, given that a fifth of all American children now fall below the official poverty level and electric lights are often a luxury, is kind of an iffy proposition.

Only Romania beats the United States for child poverty in civilized countries. As Sheldon Danziger, director of the National Poverty Center, puts it: "Among rich countries, the U.S. is exceptional. We are exceptional in our tolerance of poverty."

But hey. The First Family wants kids from all classes and income levels to have a blast anyway. Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag and smile though your heart is breaking. Get with the program -- Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!!!!!!!

In addition to all the fun and games, the day's activities — which will include sports courts and cooking demonstrations — will help educate families on smart ways to incorporate healthy eating and exercise choices into their daily routines, which are key pillars of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative.

So pay no attention to the reality that it truly is Obama's hand that will sign into law those cruel, needless, draconian cuts to Head Start and other anti-poverty programs. One day of noblesse oblige for a handful of families will salve their consciences. But how about that irony of touting the expansion of early childhood education at his State of the Union speech in January, only to have to slash it to ribbons two months later? The Washington Post explains the glaring cognitive dissonance thusly:

Historians note that presidents sometimes get what they want, as Obama did with health-care reform, or they are rebuffed, as George W. Bush was in attempting to privatize Social Security. But rarely do presidents find themselves enacting major policies they fundamentally oppose. (or just say they oppose)

Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Obama shoulders part of the blame. Since 2010, he said, Obama has spent too much time focused on the debt, including agreeing to significantly shrink domestic spending as part of his own budget proposals.(you can say that again!) 

“I think they brought it on themselves to the extent that they validated the deficit issue,” Mishel said. “It was always the case that the actual budget policy being pursued contradicted the rhetoric in the campaign. Now it’s even worse.” (when the divergence of his words and deeds comes back to bite Barry in the ass)

White House officials say they will continue to press forward on proposals that would not require new federal funding, such as raising the minimum wage, opening manufacturing institutes, revamping housing policies and overhauling immigration laws.(to be continued to be perceived as trying to do good things and at the same time lick the boots of billionaire lunatic sadist Pete Peterson and the Austerian Shadow Government.)
 

American Eggceptionalism

Dewey Cheatham & Howe: Cyprus Edition

Do the outrages never end? While Cypriot working stiffs are at least temporary spared from having their bank accounts seized by the Eurozone Austerity Brigade, and nobody really cares whether the murderous Russian oligarchy has to take a haircut, stuck right in the middle are the countless innocent victims in the international tax-evading business community. The world's off-shorers have been swept up in the massive financial tsunami hitting this island Club Med of Sheltered Wealth.

Poor expatriates. They thought they came to Cyprus for the waters. But like Rick in Casablanca, they were misinformed. Wave or no wave, they're in the desert now. And there's no chartered plane waiting to rescue either them or their wads of cash hostages.

Ironically, among the tax-evading conglomerates set to be cheated out of millions is the internet dating site called Ashley Madison which specializes in extramarital hookups. The Avid Life Media transglobal pimping outfit is, for whatever reason, being featured prominently on the New York Times homepage as a poster child for hapless tax-evaders marooned on Cyprus. (Maybe because multinational accounting firms aren't sexy?) From the article:

Only a few weeks ago it set up an office here as a base for its international operations, attracted to Cyprus — as hundreds of other foreign businesses have been — because of its reputation for financial stability, a low corporate tax rate, a friendly banking environment and most of all, a strong rule of law.

Sure, the Avid Life Media executives were aware that a banking crisis was brewing, but they had ventured ahead. They were assured in part by a promise from President Nicos Anastasiades when he was elected in February that he would soon arrange an equitable bailout with the international organizations that have guided the euro zone through four previous bailouts while keeping bank depositors whole.

“We went from paradise to hell in a minute,” said Keith Lalonde, Avid Life Media’s top executive here. He recounted the cellphone call he got from his financial adviser a week ago Saturday while strolling under a bright sun on Limassol’s fine white beach.

“We have a problem,” the adviser told him. The Cypriot government had just declared it would seize nearly 10 percent of the €2 million, or $2.6 million, the company had on deposit in Cyprus — and about 7 percent of Mr. Lalonde’s personal funds — to help secure its bailout.

International adultery has taken a huge hit, thanks to the greed of the international plutocracy. The skimming of depositor accounts has been heretofore unheard of. There hasn't been this much cheater-on-cheater outrage since Bernie Madoff had the chutzpah to scam a slew of fellow millionaires out of their life savings. And now, this. Avid Media's 18 million members worldwide will be left hanging, the company's whole world crumbling. They may even have to pull up stakes from Cyprus, even if there's no letter of transit for their cash. 

While The Times skims over the actual nature of Avid Life's business model, the piece is rife with humor, recounting the escapades of a billionaire pimp scurrying from cash machine to cash machine to withdraw money while he still can, expressing shock that any government would dare cheat him out of millions of Euros. Just like every other greedy, plutocratic job-creator on the planet, Avid Life CEO Noel Biderman is bemoaning the "lack of confidence" that the extraction of wealth has instilled in his sensitive psyche.

Serves him right, though. A former entertainment lawyer, Biderman once boasted to the L.A. Times  of milking the financial meltdown of America for all it was worth. Since Wall Street greed destroyed jobs and homes and families, but left people too broke to get a divorce, he just promoted his cheating website as an alternative:

The money-saving solution? Seek carnal comfort in others. He also made an analogy between his extramarital dating service and handing out condoms to teens.

"Some people say it promotes promiscuity," he said. "But if you don't do it, you get behavior that's way more harmful to society. Infidelity has been around a lot longer than Ashley Madison."

He believes that hearing about the service in a commercial is not going to persuade anyone to have an affair. "It's a decision they've come to already. All I'm saying is, don't do it in the workplace where it could result in someone losing their job, don't go to a singles dating service and lie about your status, don't hire a prostitute. Given that affairs are going to happen no matter what, maybe we should see Ashley Madison as a safe alternative."
 

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Ashley Madison does not even exist. She's a made-up marketing ploy -- kind of like Betty Crocker, the Sunmaid Raisin Girl, Marie Callender and Mrs. Butterworth.

Oh well. As Ashley says, "Life is short. Have an affair."

We'll always have Cyprus.

Links / Open Thread

Oh dear. The doomed assault weapons ban vote in the Senate is leaving the poor Dems vulnerable. To say nothing of all the incipient victims in classrooms, malls, theaters and other community gathering spots. But never mind. The recent lack of filibuster reform by Harry Reid is having the desired effect. Popular bills backed by the majority of the citizenry will die by preordained plan, but the Dems will still be seen as having "tried." So sit back, wait for the next massacre, and then watch amazed as the politicians cry on cue before the TV cameras, and your inbox fills up with fund-raising appeals to demonstrate just how much the Dems differ from the Repellicans.

It turns out that besides being a lovely island paradise, Cyprus is the unregulated paradisical parking lot for the money of the Russian oligarchy -- much like the Caymans are for the American oligarchy. Paul Krugman has the best and pithiest encapsulation of the whole mess that I have yet read. He can even say FUBAR in the title and not get censored the same way he censors himself by never calling out President Obama for being a member in good standing of the Clan of the FUBAR Social Security-Hating Deficit Scolds. 

As Cyprus goes, so goes Detroit, another recent victim in the bankster war against civilization. The "manager" being brought in to deliver the coup de grace to the Motor City is actually a bankruptcy lawyer at a firm which boasts a veritable who's who of Fortune 500 companies as clients. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report has the lowdown. With any luck, this massive privatization scheme could be the tipping point that actually gets the people out in the streets.

A Tree Doesn't Grow in Jerusalem: Barack's Department of Horticulture has apparently committed a diplomatic faux pas, and the magnolia tree the president so lovingly planted may have to be dug up for not having going through the same sequestration procedures being bipartisanly imposed here at home against poor and unemployed people. In another gaffe, the president's armored tank-mobile had to be towed away for repairs after a Secret Service agent (accidentally, of course) filled it with regular instead of diesel. These stories will no doubt spark a whole new slew of conspiracy theories and right-wing blog plants by gasbags. And then stay tuned for more Democratic fund-raising emails, because nothing makes you open your wallet for politicians like some trumped-up outrage. 

Fat, and Proud of It: Mississippi, which ranks tops in gun deaths and probably all kinds of avoidable deaths, has just passed an Anti-Bloomberg Law, which will ban politicians from banning stuff that is bad for you. Mike Bloomberg, the New York mayor whose ban on supersized drinks was just overturned in court, scoffed at the new law and suggested that the state to his south just be renamed Mississgulpi. No, he didn't it. I made that up.

Sympathy for the Devil

For all who were justifiably outraged by the empathetic coverage of the two Steubenville rapists by a couple of CNN hostesses reporters actually named Poppy and Candy, I have one question: What else did you expect?

This is a country with a corrupt media machine that has long shown undue deference to predators of all stripes. We must half-admire our criminal athletes, we must show a grudging respect for the financial miscreants who've raked in 100% of all the wealth regained since they themselves brought the world economy crashing down in 2008, we must give a wink and a nod to the antics of all those rascally politicians whose power just unaccountably went straight to their heads.(and loins)

Everybody loves a winner, and if our movers and shakers and celebrities are caught misbehaving or worse, we tear them down, only to build them back up again, cheering them on in their pursuit of even greater riches and fame under the shiny patina of false regret and rehabilitation. Look at Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, David Vitter, Bill Clinton and pretty soon, Anthony Wiener, Jesse Jackson Junior and Blago. (Do not look at Dick Cheney and his band of merry neocons, however, since they skipped the part where they were punished and have not one regret for their proxified mass murder, torture, rape and sexual abuse, and maiming of millions of innocent people. Cheney is still being invited on the Sunday talk shows simply to show off his serene immunity as a new heart is beating, trapped and helpless, within his soulless chest.) 

But were you surprised that two female reporters (Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow) went all weepy over two rapists? Don't be. Crowley, you may remember, hosted the town hall-style debate between the two vetted presidential candidates of the predatory plutonomy last fall, staying silent as two female Green Party candidates were kidnapped, bound and gagged by President Obama's security detail. She did her duty by the elites running the show. Among them was multimillionaire misogynist Alan Simpson, who once chauvinistically referred to Social Security as "a milk cow with 300 million tits" in a letter to a female advocate for older women. 

President Obama kept him on the Deficit Reduction ("Catfood") Commission anyway, despite an outpouring of protest similar to the outpouring of protest to CNN this week. The Commission on Presidential Debates kept him on board, too. Candy Crowley did not make a peep then and (so far) she is not making a peep now.

And then there's Poppy Harlow, who very naturally ended up covering a juvenile rape trial after years of covering the predatory financial sector. Her shocked weepiness over the weeping young convicts had to have been a knee-jerk reaction, given that her previous story subjects have always enjoyed immunity with impunity. Harlow, moreover, is a meritocrat all the way, having risen through the ranks of private schools, the Ivy League, Forbes video, CBS MarketWatch and CNN Money. No wonder her first reaction to the conviction of the teenage boys was regret that their own economic potential is down the tubes. However, given the stories of Vick and Roethlisberger, these youngsters may be redeemed by the National or American Football Leagues, or even a college that is not too picky about doing background checks on its athletic recruits.

Stay tuned, too, for the lucrative interviews from Juvey Hall on Dr. Phil  (I'm betting on next week), then the usual solemn, probing and tough but fair profiles soon thereafter on 60 Minutes and Dateline.

But let's cut Poppy Harlow some slack. In case you thought she had zero empathy for the victim in this case, Poppy herself has been a victim of that most egregious and increasing crime against wealthy elites: Invasion of Privacy by Internet! In a daring act of true confession, Poppy recently revealed right on teevee that somebody had surfed the web and revealed her outrageous salary. And not only that, they got her net worth all wrong. Poppy was violated. They even hacked into public records and found out that she's single and Episcopalian. Eau de humanity!

And in case this still isn't enough parody for you, The Onion has thoughtfully dug out a pre-Steubenville prequel that uncannily mirrors the coverage of the real case. You can savor both the Poppy Candy and the Onion at Truthdig. Then swig some Alka-Seltzer.

Campus Crusade for Austerity

It's bad enough that college students are getting crushed with debt before they even graduate to a lifetime of wage slavery. But now, insult is being added to injury. On campuses throughout America, kids are getting inundated by a flood of class war proselytizers. The missionaries, unfortunately, are not the remnants of the Occupy movement or the labor movement. They're the One Percent Meritocracy, spreading the addictive dogma of austerity to their peers. The message: Wall Street is not robbing you blind. Grandma and Grandpa are. Stop them, starve them now, before it's too late!

And just who do you think is behind the innocuously-named "Up To Us" propaganda campaign? It's the Clinton Global Initiative University! Already spreading its tentacles across authoritarian-ready campuses throughout the nation, this traveling college-within-a-college is much more than a neoliberal greed-washing racket purporting to fight global hunger and disease. It aims to be a full-scale evangelical Campus Crusade for Austerity, in which well-off, well-scrubbed, well-dressed and annoying young things corner their unsuspecting peers in order to hammer home the Gospel of Voluntary Safety Net-Shredding. The aim is to create the next generation of greedsters, get them before their social idealism permanently alters their psyches.

Not surprisingly, the Department of Deficit Hawkery at CGI University is being partially funded by billionaire vulture capitalist Pete Peterson's greed foundation. It's even sponsoring an "Up to Us" essay contest in which the  college team coming up with the best idea on how to make the rich richer and the poor poorer "Fix the Debt"  will be awarded a relatively paltry $10,000 grand prize (which will just about pay the interest on the typical six-figure student loan.) 

Among the essay contest judges will be (shock) Chelsea Clinton, who, having just plunked down over $10 million on a new luxury apartment for herself and her hedge fund hubby, is now a deficit hawkette in good standing, sincerely worried about how retirees, war widows and orphans, and veterans will eat into her tax-exempt trust fund. Also judging will be ABC/Disney Sunday plutocratic coffee klatch host/Clintonite George Stephanopoulas. George, apparently, sees no conflict of interest between openly shilling for billionaires and hosting a news program in which he uncritically swallows the dogma of the same wealthy deficit cultists, projectile-vomiting it back out at you, the victimized audience.

(In case you were wondering if there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats, it's this: the Romneys and their ilk openly bash the 47%, the "You People." The Clintons smarmily feel your pain, and will pose for pics with you while you slave away in their kid's new digs. Oh, and let's not forget the culture war wedge issues to make you believe there's a difference between the two halves of the Money Party. Hillary finally comes out in favor of gay marriage today, even though her kid is not gay, thus one-upping R-Coming Out Rob Portman, who is, libs say, a total hypocrite because his son is gay. Plus, she publicly comes out to the Human Rights Campaign lobby, big funder of Democratic candidates, supporter of past efforts to privatize Social Security, and instigator of Barack Obama's own coming-out evolution extravaganza. Wealthy LGBT groups also have been corraled in the Pete Peterson deficit reduction veal pen. Are we sensing a pattern yet?) 

But I digress. Getting back to Clinton Initiative University -- just to show that CGI U. is totally down with that all-important "balanced approach" beloved of Obamians and Clintonites everywhere, the other two judges of the Save the Rich contest will be (you guessed it!) those beloved greedy geezers Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson of Obama's Catfood Commission. These guys definitely put the cool back into cold-hearted cruelty.

Pete Peterson and the Clintons have even managed to corral Comedy Central host and youth idol Stephen Colbert and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey into their veal pen of celebrity spokespeople. The participants are a veritable who's who of Fortune 500 CEOs and Hollywood moguls -- in other words, the Democratic Party donor class. Eat, Pray, Love, Profit. I bet they all huddle under their covers at night, reading Ayn Rand by a flashlight powered by environmentally friendly batteries.

I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls, or Chelsea's Bathroom