Hilariously Tainted Politics

Winning at any cost has become so important to Team Obama that its SuperPac is openly wading into the GOP primaries, running attack ads on a candidate who might lose the nomination in his own home state to a religious fanatic. The Daily Kos, a well-known Obama veal pen website, has also launched "Operation Hilarity", which urges supporters of the president to vote for Santorum in states which hold open primaries.  This is ostensibly to make it easier for Barack to win the election: better that he run against Rick Santorum than Mitt Romney, with whom he has too much in common for comfort.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, originally had started a fundraiser to help sabotage the Republican primaries, but scotched the monetary angle when criticism came pouring in about its tainting of the political process. No matter: PrioritiesUSA is spending its own tainted cash for attack ads. The objective of the Democrats seems to be this: drag out the GOP nominating process as long as possible in order to weaken all the candidates and make Obama a shoo-in.

This is wrong on so many levels. It reeks of desperation. It reveals Democrats to be in thrall to a Cult of Personality. The only beneficiary of a drawn-out food fight among the Republicans  will be President Obama. It will not be the electorate.  The more we can be distracted by the phony culture wars, the birth control fight, vaginal probes, presidential theology... and the more we can manufacture outrage and portray the president as a victim of a smear campaign, the easier it will be for Obama to continue his own far-right policies. The more an unhinged Rick Santorum can fill the airwaves and the blogs, the less we will notice, or care, about the shadow wars, the abuses of the surveillance state, the war on whistleblowers, the war on drugs, the war on poor people, the stealth privatization of schools, that too many of us are permanently unemployed and underemployed, and that the American Dream is just so much hot air.

The presidential contest the Democrats prefer will be between a right wing corporatist and a racist lunatic -- not between two right wing corporatists.  We must not, cannot notice that the entire process is ruled by oligarchic special interests. The pretense of choice must be maintained, no matter what the cost. Here is how Moulitsas put it yesterday: 

Of course, I realize that this (voting for Santorum) makes some of you squeamish, and if you live in one of those states and don't want to participate, you don't have to! (We also stopped fundraising for it, focusing instead in message mobilizing.) But there's too much at stake to worry about idealistic notions of what democracy should be. Luckily for all of us, Team Obama isn't restraining itself based on such idealism. They're playing to win, and this latest action is essentially strategic vindication for Operation Hilarity.

The action he refers to are the Obama SuperPac ads running in Michigan against Romney, who is not even the nominee yet. This tactic of an incumbent president involving himself in another party's nominating process had been unheard of until now. Citizens United is proving to be a real radical trend-setter, isn't it?

David Sirota of Salon has written a fine piece on the dangers of focusing on the manufactured culture wars during a drawn-out Republican primary. He disagrees with the conventional wisdom of the Democratic veal pen that the longer the Republicans can duke it out, the more they will expose their awfulness to the public at large. In fact, the opposite will occur: 

Straightforward as this hypothesis is, I don’t buy it — I believe the longer the Republican primary battle continues, the more the GOP’s most extreme proposals are given a mainstream platform,  the more their ideas are granted public credibility and the more conservative propaganda is invisibly woven into our most basic political assumptions. In other words, I believe in the Goldwater Principle, which suggests that while the eventual nominee may fail to win the cycle’s general election, the elongated nomination contest —  with its news cycle dominance and hardcore ideological edge — will help permanently shift the supposed mainstream “center” of our public debate to the fringe right.

We are already too far to the right as a nation for our own comfort and our own good. It has become the acceptable new normal to have a Democrat in the Oval Office who is openly anti-union (he pulled  OFA, his official campaign arm, out of  the Wisconsin labor protests a year ago), fiscally conservative (Catfood Commission), anti-environment (he nixed his own EPA's ozone rules), pro-corporation and Wall Street, job-destroying free trade proponent, and ad infinitum. His base is left slobbering in gratitude over the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (which has yet to increase women's pay), his same-sex marriage slow evolution and other liberal tidbits.

The corporate media have fallen down on their own job, abysmally. The so-called progressive cable TV shows no longer delve into substantive issues. Even renegade Keith Olbermann has stopped questioning or criticizing the Obama Administration.  It's all about ginning up outrage at the latest antics of the GOP candidates. Citizens United has extended the process by bankrolling fringe candidates, and the TV stations are raking in the advertising bucks.  They have discovered that lunacy is a commodity and an eminently lucrative one.

You don't hear much criticism of the White House during this election season from the more popular liberal blogs, either. In fact, the fomenting of fear is on a definite upswing. Just glancing over at the headlines in this site's blogroll and elsewhere this morning tells the story: "Romney: 'Nuclear Weapons Will Be Used if Obama Elected!""; "Our Nation of Moaners"; "Forced Births in the Bad Old Days"; "Santorum Excommunicates 4500 Christians!"; "Virginia To Impose State-Sponsored Rape by Forcing Women to Get Vaginal Probes!"

MoveOn.org is having hysterics. Can you contribute $15 right away to stop the Republican "Let Women Die!" bill? $top letting the Republicans make the war on women's health a wedge issue by helping us ensure that it will continue to be a wedge issue!

The only thing we have to fear is corporate Democrats telling us how much we should fear Republicans. This stuff reminds me of the alien abduction craze of years ago. UFOs were kidnapping people right and left, and there were always probes involved. Forget about the looming Iran War. There is a war against women, people! It is so much more fun to be scared about imaginary things, like Rick Santorum. Heck, even I write the occasional blog post about Rick Santorum. But I don't give this marginal human being power and nonstop publicity he doesn't deserve in order to make "my side" look good.

"Villager" pundit Ezra Klein of The Washington Post and MSDNC is beginning to see the light. A little. He explains "why voters can't trust their own political party." It's because politicians care more about getting elected than they do about the needs of voters. Duh.  But it is not the media's job to explain policy to the hoi polloi, sniffs Klein.  They are, after all, just the stenographers: 

Perhaps my biggest frustration with the U.S. news media (and yes, I am a card-carrying member) is that we permit the two parties to decide what is “left” and what is “right.” The way it works, roughly, is that anything Democrats support becomes “left,” and everything Republicans support becomes “right.”
There are good reasons for this. It isn’t the media’s job to police political ideologies, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to try. But that leaves ordinary voters in a bit of a tough spot.

Well, at least he is being honest about clarifying his self-imposed limits. It is simply not in his job description to give us a crash course on substance. Klein seems to echo  New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane's infamous column which rhetorically asked if reporters should be calling out politicians on their lies. This paragraph from the Klein piece made me cringe:

Parties -- particularly when they’re in the minority -- care more about power than policy. Perhaps there’s nothing much to be done about this. And as I said, it isn’t clear that the media, or anyone else, should try. But it puts the lie to the narrative that America is really riven by grand ideological disagreements. America is deeply divided on the question of which party should be in power at any given moment. Much of the polarization over policy is driven by that question, not the other way around.

Okay, Ezra. All politicians are scum, but just keep continuing to parrot what they say, give them a free platform and wring your hands in despair. Don't call them out publicly, by name, but do write a generic column every once in awhile to ease your conscience. I guess Ezra never reads ProPublica, or learned about muckraking in college. 

Soaking the Poor

It seems so long ago and far away, now that President Obama is spinning around in an oratorical frenzy of populism. But remember last summer, when he offered up draconian cuts to the deficit hawks in exchange for allowing the nation to raise the debt ceiling and pay its bills? It could have been worse, the pragmatists insisted.  He wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare, but John Boehner refused.  We bit the bullet on that one, temporarily. The country's credit rating only tanked by one letter. And Obama proudly proved his deficit hawk cred all the same, and bragged at the time that he had cut spending to the lowest levels seen since the Eisenhower Administation. He was a fiscal conservative, and a true believer in the old canard that if the country tightens its belt just like a family does during hard times, the economy will magically burst at the seams. 
 
Then came the national protest movement known as Occupy, the looming re-election campaign, the continually tanking economy.... and Obama decided it was time to pivot back to pretend progressivism.  He fired his bankster chief of staff and hired a different bankster chief of staff who is now insisting they never were Austerians. You can't make cuts in a time of recession, they shrill. It's all the Republicans' fault. Call Congress! Pass This Bill!

So, when the White House released its budget last week to minimal fanfare, they tried to gloss over all the de facto austerian discretionary cuts. "It looks worse than it actually is," they insist, counting on nobody actually reading its thousands of pages. "The money is just being switched around.... there's a lot of waste and redundancy.... when ObamaCare finally kicks in years from now, it'll all be good."


Ha, ha, ha. I spent half an hour skimming the Osterity Budget last night. A cursory glance reveals that if you happen to be in that one third of Americans now classified as either dirt poor or teetering on the brink, Fiscal Year 2013 is not going to be very good for you. I will be blunt: this President does not give a rat's ass about poor people. The cuts may seem miniscule in the big picture, but for people who must count every penny, they are literally the difference between life and death. Here is the official White House budget-unveiling propaganda:

We now face a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it. After decades of eroding middle-class security as those at the very top saw their incomes rise as never before and after a historic recession that plunged our economy into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover, it is time to construct an economy that is built to last.
The President’s 2013 Budget is built around the idea that our country does best when everyone gets a fair shot, does their fair share, and plays by the same rules. We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending, and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building. That begins with putting the Nation on a path to living within our means – by cutting wasteful spending, asking all Americans to shoulder their fair share, and making tough choices on some things we cannot afford, while keeping the investments we need to grow the economy and create jobs. The Budget targets scarce federal resources to the areas critical to growing the economy and restoring middle-class security: education and skills for American workers, innovation and research and development, clean energy, and infrastructure.
The Budget is a blueprint for how we can rebuild an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded..

As you can tell, Obama still hasn't been able to completely wean himself from the bad habit of comparing the most powerful country on earth with a family living within its means. And he is talking only to the "hard-working folks" about getting a fair shake and fair shot. If you are poor, old or disabled, then you are not doing your fair share and this budget makes it painfully clear that you have no shot at reaching that fabled Middle Class.  Here are just a few examples of how this Democratic administration would like to punish our most vulnerable citizens:

Housing for Persons with Disabilities: a cut from $165 million to $150 million. This may seem miniscule, but if you are physically challenged and on a waiting list for an apartment outfitted with ramps, wheel-in showers and other amenities, you are going to have to wait even longer. There is a real shortage of rental units for disabled people as it is. The Obama budget assures us that current construction for special housing will go on. Just no new disabled-friendly housing units, because you have to cut the waste.


Community Block Grants: funding was already drastically cut last year, leading to a nationwide protest by mayors serving inner cities. Now, President Obama proposes to cut 2013 aid to poor neighborhoods nearly in half, from $679 million to $350 million. The reason? The Government Accounting Office and Health and Human Services have determined that there has not been enough "oversight" of entities receiving the grants.  Hmmmm... I guess all those paper bags full of cash being dropped on ghettoes are finding their way into the wrong hands. Drug Lord Hamid Karzai needs it more in Afghanistan, and God knows there is no oversight on the forever wars.

The Job Corps: being cut from $1.703 million to $1.650 million. Another seemingly miniscule, gratuitous cut, from a program designed to train disadvantaged youth. Again, without going into any details or providing one iota of evidence, the White House explains that it's cutting this program in order to launch a "bold reform effort to improve outcomes and strengthen accountability."  Uh-huh. Spend less money to improve something. This is very Paul Ryanesque, using the rationale that youmust destroy something (Medicare) to improve it. Reforming the Job Corps smells like another privatization scheme to me.

Children's Mental Health Services: being cut from $117 million to $84 million. No new grants will be issued, and no needy children newly diagnosed with emotional disturbances will be accepted into existing clinics. No explanation. It is now estimated that a quarter of all children fall below the poverty level. Since economic hardship is a known causative agent in depression and other mental illnesses, it is stunning to me why this budget has not been quadrupled. More totally gratuitous, deficit hawk chest-thumping.

Low Income Home Energy Assistance: there was shocked disbelief last year when the president cut this funding. He is doing it once again, with another cut from the already low $3.472 million to $3.020 million. Luckily, this winter was fairly mild and there are no known cases of people freezing to death because they couldn't afford heating oil. Congress actually restored some of the money Obama had cut last year.

If you thought that the government's fraudclosure settlement with the banks was a kick in the teeth, they are now planning to kick some of the hardest hit victims while they are still down. Obama, while bragging on how he will help upper middle class people adjust their mega-mortgages in exchange for letting the banks get off scot free, wants to make severely poor people contribute a bigger chunk of their meager resources to their subsidized rent payments. I was happy to see an editorial in today's New York Times critical of this heartless plan:

Affordable housing advocates are rightly alarmed by proposals in the White House budget and in Congress that would drive up rents for the nation’s poorest public housing residents, many of whom are in households that subsist on less than $3,000 a year. If the federal government raises rents in housing subsidy programs that shelter about 4.5 million households, it must do so in a way that shields the poorest from eviction and homelessness.

Under current federal law, housing authorities have the option of setting a minimum rent of $50 per month. About a quarter of public housing agencies around the country have set the minimum below that number, allowing some of the poorest families to pay $25 or less. A bill in the House would require that the minimum rent in public housing be raised to $69.45. The White House budget would raise it to $75.

These may seem like small amounts, until you consider households where single parents with two children might be subsisting on food stamps and about $250 in cash payments from the federal public assistance program. Many of these families are already teetering on the verge of homelessness. Some in Congress support raising the minimum rent as an adjustment for inflation, but the resources of poor families generally have not increased.

In the adding insult to injury category, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner this morning rolled out a brand new plan to cut corporate tax rates in exchange for maybe sewing shut a few of those pesky loopholes with some very cheap thread. Oh, and it's too hard to really fix the Tax Code in less than several years. But it is good politically to say that you'd like to, because it will make the Republicans seem anti-business if they don't agree to it during this election season.

I am feeling shaken. I feel like this country's citizens are being lined up in front of a firing squad and shot. And it isn't fair.

Alternative Presidents Day

Happy Presidents Day, everybody. It's the dregs of yet another three-day weekend in the guise of a VIP un-birthday. Last month it was MLK Jr., celebrated a day late and five decades of civil rights struggles and anti-war activism short. Today, we are required to revel in the February Happies of Washington and Lincoln, owner and freer of slaves respectively. But I don't feel like giving respec', as Da Ali G used to say, even though Abe is one of my faves.

Instead, let us honor three people who are daring to run for the highest office in the land, although they probably don't have a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning or even coming close. That isn't really the point, though, is it?  In this age of Citizens United, money rules politics, and voters are rapidly becoming superfluous.  We are but the warm bodies expected to do our duty and pull the lever for one of the two vetted and pre-approved candidates of the oligarchic duopoly.  But last I checked, we still have our first amendment rights, even though privacy is dead and the right to assemble is pretty much at the whim of the individual municipality and police force.

What alternative candidates and third, fourth, fifth parties are achieving right now is raising public awareness of what is possible, and what we deserve and what abysmally low standards we have set for ourselves as a putative Democracy.  According to polling, most self-identified conservatives actually support progressive causes, such as single payer health care and taxing the rich and ending the wars. Yet, the two sides of the Money Uniparty no longer answer to the will of the electorate.

I am sure there are more outsider parties and people (I am leaving out the Libertarians and Communists, although I may come back to them in a later post), but here is today's trio of independent candidates (links go to their official websites) : Rocky Anderson of the American Justice Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and Jerry White of the Socialist Equality Party.

Jerry White

Jill Stein

Rocky Anderson

First, Rocky -- he has the biggest organization of any declared leftist independent thus far.  Former three-term mayor of Salt Lake City, Anderson is an unlikely progressive from a traditional rock-solid conservative state. He ranks as one of the strongest environmentalists who ever held public office.  Unlike the corporatist deficit hawk DINO Barack Obama, Anderson embraced the ideals of Occupy before there even was an Occupy. From a profile of him in The Guardian:

His agenda is a familiar one on the left. Broadly speaking, he wants to break the hold of corrupting corporate influence on the two main parties and give a voice to ordinary working people. It also chimes with the general thrust of the Occupy movement, even though the latter has steered clear of engagement with electoral politics.

"The more time has gone on, the more it has become clear that we're not going see change in this country with these two parties," he says. "There are lots of good individuals in the Democratic party, [but] without Democrats voting the way they did in Congress, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. We wouldn't have suffered as a nation because of these Bush tax cuts.

"Obama received more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate ever. And they got a great return on their investment."

This would represent the first attempt to apply the principles of the Occupy movement within the electoral area. Anderson points out discussions about launching the party preceded the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street. But while there are no organisational links, he says there is plenty of common ground. "There is clearly a convergence of interests regarding the concerns we have and the concerns of Occupy Wall Street. There's little I've heard from the Occupy movement that I would disagree with and I think there's little we support that they would disagree with."

Anderson thinks Obama's neopopulism is fraudulent. "How does he, with a straight face, talk about getting jobs back to the U.S. without even mentioning free trade agreements and the need to significantly renegotiate those agreements to put them in better balance in terms of worker rights and environmental protections?" (Anderson has a point -- everybody has conveniently forgotten that textile jobs are headed to South Korean factories peopled by North Korean guest slaves, and that Colombian farmers are still getting beaten up and worse by thugs in the employ of multinational corporations.)

Next up: Jill Stein is a physician from Massachusetts and this election cycle's Green Party candidate. An avid Occupy supporter, she is running on a platform for a "Green New Deal" --

the objective of which would be to employ "every American willing and able to work" to address "climate change...[and the] converging water, soil, fisheries, forest, and fossil fuel crises" by working towards "sustainable energy, transportation and production infrastructure: clean renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, “complete streets” that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing of the goods needed to support this sustainable economy". The initial cost of the Green New Deal would be funded by various mechanisms, including "taxing Wall Street speculation, off shore tax havens, millionaires and multimillion dollar estates" as well as a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget.

The four points of the Stein Green New Deal are the right to a job at a living wage; the transition to a sustainable, green economy; a financial sector serving Americans; and citizen empowerment. Sounds eminently logical and simple and refreshingly socialistic.

Which brings us to our third candidate and party, which you may not be as familiar with, although the principles of all three overlap.  The Socialist Equality platform stresses a strong labor movement, as originally advocated by Karl Marx, and is unabashedly anti-capitalist. If nothing else, it should demonstrate to the audiences of Romney and his ilk that Barack Obama is about as far right to socialism as it's possible to get without plummeting off a cliff.

White also ran on the Socialist Equality ticket in 2008 against Obama and McCain. A labor journalist, he is a long-time union organizer and strong proponent of the Auto Workers movement in Michigan. He is not at all impressed with Obama's auto industry bailout, which resulted in a draconian reduction in wages and benefits and record profits for the industry.  Here is what he has to say about Obama's playing of the populist card for purposes of his own re-election:

Yet under his watch, not a single banker, hedge fund manager or financial regulator responsible for the economic catastrophe has been prosecuted, let alone convicted. On the contrary, the president has handed them the keys to the national treasury and tailored his policies to enable them to continue their speculative activities and make more money than ever.

The fury of the state has been reserved for those who have sought to protest against the plundering of society by the financial elite and the resulting growth of poverty, unemployment and inequality. They, for the most part student youth, have been assaulted by baton-wielding police in riot gear, packing rubber bullets and using pepper spray. The protesters have been arrested in the thousands. Obama, with his silence, has signaled his support for these attacks, carried out for the most part by Democratic mayors.

The SEP platform includes an international working class movement (as opposed to one limited to the United States) and public ownership of banks and other institutions. Writes White: "There are some who say this is unrealistic. But what can be more unrealistic than maintaining a system that perpetuates the wealth of the few at the expense of the many? Is it more realistic to tell workers that they must accept a 50 percent wage cut to keep their jobs, or to tell the elderly that they must go without medical care, or to tell the young that they must go without an education?"

On this Presidents Day, depressed as you may be by the corrupt status quo, rejoice that there are people who refuse to lie down and take it. Activism lives. The left is resurging because there is no other choice. Rumors of the demise of the Occupy movement are grossly exaggerated. We don't have to settle for Rombama or Bamtorum. Go ahead. Spoil their day.

Rick Transit Gloria Mundi



Unintelligent Design

 Try as I might, I have been unable to escape the voice and visage of Rick Santorum, the overgrown Boy Scout engaged in a futile struggle to contain the psychosis bubbling just beneath the surface of his prim sweater vest. The guy even has his name creepily embroidered on his trademark couture. Why? Does he have parochial school flashbacks of getting lost after being left off at the wrong bus stop? I wouldn't be surprised if he had his phone number Sharpie-marked on an Opus Dei sackcloth undershirt too.

Just when we thought the Republican freak show had reached its apogee with Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has burst forth in all his glory, fire and brimstone, spiked garter belts and chains. Even his own daughter inadvertently admits that he is demented. "So, here we go", she blogged last summer on Backstage with the Santorums. "We are out of the gates and into the race … and what a crazy journey it will be!"

Actually, Daddy did not so much decide to run for president, as he was called by God. In the same blog entry, Elizabeth Santorum writes that it took "months of discernment" for "Our Father", as she calls him, to announce. Not discussions with the family, nor talks with think tanks and pollsters. Discernment is a Catholic theological term, a form of soul-searching and meditation so intense that one can reach the point of literal arousal by the Holy Spirit. It goes way beyond prayer. It's what happens when a religious person is "called" by God to a vocation as a priest or nun. I think it is fairly obvious that Rick Santorum is not so much running for public office as he is on a one-man crusade to impose his medievalist oddball fantasies on an unsuspecting body politic.

Direct from the Eldest Daughter of the Santorum Cult/Clan:

Yesterday was a big day in the Santorum household. After long months of discernment, my father has decided to run for president of the United States of America. This morning, as I drove my sister Sarah Maria to school, she looked over at me and said, “Wow. I think I’m still absorbing how important yesterday was!” I had to agree.  
So, I’ll give a recap of yesterdays “behind the scenes” excitement. My Dad spent the morning doing radio and television interviews, while my Mom and I got all six of my siblings ready to go. As you can imagine, getting everyone ready is never an easy task. From “Oh no, did you pack the hairbrush?” to “Patrick, those had better not be grass stains on your khakis,” let’s just say that we averted several minor crises. Bella is often the easiest to get ready because she always looks adorable in whatever she’s wearing. Her sweet smile and peaceful demeanor are a constant source of joy for our family.   

What a typical family, right down to the authentic dialogue, huh? But I have one quibble. Elizabeth says she drove her younger sister to school. Aren't the Santorum spawn all supposed to be home-schooled by the parents? At least, that is what Dad brags about. Or are the kids driven around the block a few times before they are dropped right back at Home School?  Is Home School the name of an elite private academy nestled amidst the Homeland Security complex in Northern Virginia, where the Santorums have a home and initially got Pennsylvania state funding for their Home School? I emailed the campaign to ask, but they have not yet replied. Do I discern a brush-off?

 (The Santorum sons did go to an all-boys Catholic school in Washington, DC for a time -- see above Opus Dei link. The place was so insulated that rumor had it that secular mothers put condoms in their son's Christmas stockings.)

The Ricktus (he has the preternatural grin of a surprised corpse) was all over the TV this morning, rantsoruming about Obama's "phony ideology." Unfortunately, he is not complaining about  presidential corporatism or crony capitalism or even the usual straw-man socialism, because Rick unabashedly adores the One Percent God. Monuments and statues are erected in honor of the titans of industry and finance, says Rick, who probably missed the chapters on heresy and idol worship in Catechism Class. It is the Gospel of Inequality Rulz!

He also seems to take the story of Adam and Eve quite literally. He sunk even deeper into his own primordial ooze when he told one TV interviewer that Obama is wrong to put the fate of the earth before Man, who shall have dominion over it:

"I wasn't suggesting the president's not a Christian. I accept the fact the president's a Christian. I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the world above man, and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth by things that are frankly just not scientifically proven, like for example the politicization of the whole global warming debate, I mean this is just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government. This is not questioning the president's beliefs in Christianity. I'm talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth, and have dominion on it, and be good stewards of it."

The anti-Environmental Protection Agency crowd must have loved this. The checks from the polluting Koch Brothers are in the mail even as we speak.

Rick, along with alcoholic Arizona Governor Jan Drinkwine Brewer, also seems to have a severed head fetish. In his Saturday column, New York Times writer Charles Blow recounts how Santorum has actually foretold the Second Coming of the French Revolution:

Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

Obama as Robespierre. Ohhh-kay. Somebody needs to stage an intervention. Or a casting call for The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade!

Cutting the Crap

Have you heard about the special face armor that Chicago police will be wearing this spring at the G-8/NATO summits? Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is afraid that Occupiers will fight back against oligarchic bullshit by hurling some shit of their own. They may even retaliate against pepper spray attacks by splashing urine into the faces of the fuzz! --

Fraternal Order of Police President Mike Shields demanded the new shields to prevent officers from being blinded by bags of urine and feces thrown at them by “anarchists” and other hard-core protesters....

“We have 9,500 patrol officers. Every one of them needs a new shield because every one of them has the old one and it’s completely ineffective. It’s a very thin plexi-glass. If you press on it with your thumb, it would crack. If you threw a rock at it, it will pop off. Water can seep right through. Any liquid can seep right through,” Shields said.

“Rioters known to attend NATO and G-8 meetings have been known to throw bags of urine and bags of feces at police. Chicago Police officers need a shield that can adapt to what is being thrown at them.”

Wow. It seems we just cannot escape from nightmare scenarios of flying feces. Rick "Google-It" Santorum's SuperPac is running an ad in which Mitt Romney shoots brown stuff from a rifle at the poor hapless sweater-vested Rick. It is supposed to be mud, but I don't buy it. It looks suspiciously like projectile doggie doo to me, the kind that poor Seamus suffered from during his nightmare ride on the top of the Romney hellwagon. You decide -- check it out here.

If anybody needs protection from all the crap, it's us -- you know, the regular people. We're the ones who need face shields, brain armor against all the propaganda. The effluent flies fast and furious, it clogs up the toilet of political discourse, and it tends to stick. There is just way too much of it to cut through every single day, but let's give it a try anyway.

First of all is the fiasco of fraudclosure fecklessness. It leaked out today that this is indeed just one more bailout for the banks, and that the penalties they will pay, such as they are, in reality will be coming from taxpayers and investors. This is solidly crappy. Since when is it legal for a rapist to force his victim to serve his sentence?  Or say that you go to court, you win a judgment, but the loser is then allowed to freeze your bank account instead of the other way around? That is pretty much what the newest bailout does. Read more about it here and here. (H/T to readers Neil and Denis).

Oh, and that bipartishit payroll tax holiday stinks too. Instead of taxing the rich to help the poor middle class as Obama pretended to promise, they'll be taxing the middle class to throw a crumb to the middle class. The length of time you can collect unemployment benefits will be reduced. Applicants may have to undergo drug testing, even though statistics show that only about 2% of the newly jobless have a substance abuse problem. (You need to feel guilt-ridden and demonized to collect on an insurance policy that you paid into, because this way, the lie that it's an "entitlement" is more easily swallowed by voters. Divide and conquer!) In certain locales, you will be required to work for no pay in order to collect on your own insurance. Federal employees will be forced to contribute more to their pension plans. (another example of divide and conquer: placate the red-state masses by making the unions pay!)  Congress will actually auction off the public airwaves to the highest bidders. In exchange for partially funding the FICA holiday,  the telecoms may well be given carte blance to screw us into perpetuity, via rate hikes and monopolies. Privatization continues apace.

But what, inquiring minds want to know, about the Buffett Rule?  You know, the Rule that Obama has made the centerpiece of his An America Built to Last re-election campaign. This latest hurling of jingoistic bullshit says that everybody should have a fair shot, and do their fair share. The Rule is personified by Warren Buffett's secretary, who pays a higher effective tax rate than her billionaire boss. Obama was so sincere about it that he even used her as a prop in the First Lady's box during the State of the Union speech.

Well, not so fast. It turns out that the Buffett Rule is merely an aspirational thing. Obama did not even include it in his own budget! From Annie Lowrey of the New York Times:

But the White House says it is a “guideline,” rather than a legislative initiative. And it says it prefers not to establish the Buffett Rule without a broader overhaul of the tax code, though it would support a Congressional effort to carry it out alone.

“This is the guiding principle of tax reform,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council. “To some degree, it’s a specific policy, where we set a floor, a minimum rate. And to some degree, it is a statement of principle of how you would like to design the tax system.”

So, in effect, Obama punted it over to the same Congress which he purports to disdain because of its chronic gridlock. This is pure unadulterated presidential bullshit, and I am surprised this story is not getting more outraged play. Timothy Geithner, meanwhile, says an overhaul of the corporate tax code will take "years." 

One more calling out of crap and I'm done. Remember how Team Obama defended their slinking into SuperPac territory this week by saying the Republicans are outpacing them in campaign money? The January results are in, and Obama raked in a record $29.1 million. In only one month. Romney has yet to post his figures, but they are expected to be much less. And this does not, of course, take into account the millions the president is raising during a two-day marathon fundraiser on the West Coast, nor the back-to-back Wall Street cash orgies planned on March 1. Obama, apparently, is playing the age card as part of his plea to wealthy donors:

Obama was concluding a three-day swing of California and Washington that included eight fundraisers, where he was expected to raise more than $8 million.
Obama repeatedly tells his audiences that this election will be more difficult.
"And that's not going to be easy because, first of all, I'm older and I'm grayer," he told about 70 high-dollar contributors in San Francisco on Thursday night.

It's nice to know that Obama is an equal opportunity bullshit artist, anyway. Gullibility knows no class boundaries.

Holder & Donovan Open Comedy Act in Vegas

The editorial in yesterday's Las Vegas Sun might have been titled "Moving Forward, Stabbing You in the Backward". Allegedly co-written by Attorney General Eric Holder and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, it's a cringe-worthy, craven apologia shamelessly directed at residents of one of the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

You have to read it to believe it.  I'm posting a somewhat condensed version, with translation (you can peruse the whole slimy thing here. And the daffy duo also crossposted their self-parody at the Obama-friendly Daily Kos for the even greater convenience of the koolaid-bloated masses) --

Too often, real progress in Washington can be stymied by bureaucratic red tape, turf fights, or conflicts between federal and state authorities. Unfortunately, it has become a place where partisan deadlock and political games can threaten to crowd out substantive debate.
In times of crisis – when people’s livelihoods are in jeopardy and families are losing their homes to foreclosure – they deserve better than intransigent bureaucracy. They need and deserve a government that actually solves problems.
This past week, the Obama Administration and a bipartisan coalition of 49 state attorneys general demonstrated what can be accomplished when people put aside turf wars and focus on what they can do to make things better. By working closely with one another across federal agencies, state boundaries, and party lines, we reached a historic mortgage servicing settlement on behalf of American homeowners.

(Translation: We have been putting pressure on a few recalcitrant Attorneys General for well over a year now, trying to get them to cave to a sweetheart deal letting the banksters off the hook. We are absolutely blaming the AGs for their altruistic foolishness -- and we are also accusing them of allowing even more homeowners to be foreclosed on while they diddled about trying to do the right thing instead of the expedient thing. We finally co-opted them through our sheer brute force. We worked closely with them by getting right in their faces. We are disdainfully reducing their bravery in the face of an overreaching federal government to a political "turf war.")

The need for a settlement on this scale has long been clear. Some five years after the housing bubble burst, America continues to pay a steep price. Lenders sold loans to people who couldn’t afford them and packaged mortgages to make profits that turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. Their actions hurt millions of families who did the right thing, but still lost their houses or saw their home prices drop. And, unfortunately, as our extensive investigations found, abuses continued long after consumers bought their homes.

(Translation: we were well aware this whole time of massive fraud and conspiracy. Even though our "extensive investigations" uncovered abuses, we did nothing. How unfortunate. We are not mentioning in this editorial that the crimes continue to this very day. Because we are corrupt, do-nothing political hacks. We are also throwing minorities under the bus by putting equal blame on some of the victims who were snookered into signing fraudulent documents. They rose above their station by buying into our American Dream malarkey. Even though many are uneducated and barely literate, we brazenly claim that they knowingly bit off more than they could chew. We continue to insinuate that poor black and brown people hurt the "responsible" homeowners just as much as the mega-banks did.)

In response to thousands of mortgage servicing complaints fielded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), state attorneys general, and banking regulators across the country, HUD initiated a large-scale review of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) 10 largest servicers in the summer of 2010. Devoting some 6,000 hours to reviewing servicing files for thousands of FHA-insured loans, the scope of this review soon broadened to encompass a long list of mortgage servicing issues, including lost paperwork, long delays, and missed deadlines for loan modifications. The Justice Department’s U.S. Trustees Program reviewed more than 37,000 bankruptcy claims and motions filed by the top five servicers. And HUD’s Office of the Inspector General, the Justice Department, and state authorities discovered that the country’s five largest loan servicers routinely signed foreclosure-related documents without knowing whether the facts they contained were correct.

Some have asked why we don’t address these actions by taking the banks to court. But rather than pursuing hundreds of lawsuits with varying degrees of success, the goal of this settlement has been to benefit struggling homeowners and to do so now – not sometime in the future, when it may be too late to help many families. 

(Translation: our chutzpah knows no bounds. We started this huge investigation a year and a half ago, spent 6000 hours reviewing files, looked at 37,000 pieces of paper filed by mortgage servicers and banks. We chose not to prosecute, because the success would only have been "varied". So we decided to give up while we were ahead, sweep the whole thing under the rug, and throw a few pennies at the victims before they die and it's too late.  Why we are not being investigated ourselves for legal malpractice and dereliction of duty is beyond the scope of this editorial and may be chalked up to our unbridled arrogance.) 

This settlement also forces banks to clean up their acts – and to fix the problems covered during our investigations – by committing them to major reforms in terms of how they service mortgage loans. This is significant, given that these banks service nearly 2 out of every 3 mortgages. And these new customer service standards are in keeping with the Homeowners Bill of Rights recently announced by President Obama – a single, straightforward set of commonsense rules that families can count on, requiring lenders and servicers to honor a long list of rights for those facing foreclosure.

 (Translation: We choose to call the crimes of the banksters "problems" in order to further absolve them and us, their willing and able co-conspirators and accessories during and after the fact. Slapping them on the wrist will scare the bejesus out of them and make them honest. They need a dose of common sense, not a jail term.)

 While this historic settlement isn’t designed to address all the issues of the housing crisis, it will offer significant help to those who suffered the most harm. Alongside the broad-based refinancing plan President Obama announced to help homeowners, it provides a path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy. And, by ensuring that banks and mortgage servicers fulfill their essential obligations – and taking major steps to hold these institutions accountable – it proves that we can make real progress, and achieve extraordinary results, when we work together.

(Translation: A path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy is simply doublespeak for more profits for the banks and a surge in their stock prices. This travesty proves that not only can they get away with murder, they can always count on us, their 'umble servants, to help them and cover up for them as they continue their stranglehold on the entire planet. They own us lock, stock and barrel; they pay us and keep us exactly where they can see us.)

In a related development sure to be swept under the rug as soon as the Obama Administration can make them an offer they can't refuse, San Francisco officials discovered that of the 400 foreclosures they audited recently, nearly all of them were fraudulent at worst, suspicious at best. The intrepid Gretchen Morgenson broke the story in today's New York Times. You can read it here. 

Donovan & Holder Share a Conspiratorial Chuckle At Our Expense

Bootlicking for Dollars

Enough with the Robin Hood shtick he's been forced to perform in Washington lately, co-opting the language of Occupy and presenting a lukewarm budget that pretends to take a little from the rich to give even less to the poor. It's time for President Obama to devote some attention to his neglected day job: crisscrossing the country in Air Force One to mingle with the fabulously wealthy at multimillion-dollar fundraisers, and do some old-fashioned political wheeling, dealing, and groveling.


Forget about the phony baloney nonsense of how Populist Obama is siding with the middle class against the rich. His real business is playing Silicon Valley off the movie industry, doing the bidding of Wall Street in private as he chides it in public, talking the 99% talk while walking the 1% walk.


Today he's off to Hollywood to placate pouty entertainment plutocrats like Senator-turned-lobbyist Christopher Dodd, who vowed last month to cut off the Obama cash because of the president's failure to support SOPA and PIPA.  If you were hoping to catch TV footage of the president crooning with the stars in the next few days, you're out of luck. All the events will be private, unless a millionaire Occupier manages to sneak in and get video.


And now that the paltry foreclosure fraud settlement is apparently a done deal, and Campaign Director Jim Messina has met with banksters to assure them that Obama has no beef with them, the president will go to four back-to-back Wall Street fundraisers in New York on March 1.  This is where it gets interesting.


It turns out that one of the $35,800-a-plate soirees will be hosted by regular Obama bundler Ralph Schlosstein, a hedge fund manager who is among a whole slew of financial overlords going public with opposition to the looming Volcker Rule. He is also among the money men whom Messina soothed last week, promising that the president will not be demonizing Wall Street in campaign speeches.


The Rule, which is set to go into effect in July, will ban proprietary trading by banks -- in other words, it will prevent them from trading with their own money rather than for clients. A centerpiece of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, it says that banks should not make risky wagers while the government guarantees their deposits. It's designed to prevent the kind of bubble which caused the Crash of 2008. Or the kind of unpunished theft allegedly committed by former Senator and Obama Bundler Jon Corzine. But since these kinds of bets are so lucrative for banks, they are howling at the prospect of their profits being reduced in the interest of honesty, fairness and the public good.


Regulatory agencies only have four months to further tweak the Volcker Rule here and there and everywhere. They are being beset from all sides as they decide to either water down an already watered-down bill, or stand firm against the banks. From the L.A. Times:

The passion on both sides of the issue — and the big money that is at stake — are evident in the 14,490 public comments that the SEC had received and posted on its website as of Tuesday. Thousands of those were from private individuals expressing their support for cracking down on Wall Street's risky trading practices.

For banks, the debate comes at a particularly sensitive moment. The last few months have been filled with news of layoffs and pay cuts on Wall Street as banks grapple with a raft of newly proposed regulations and continued economic turmoil in Europe.

The proposed Volcker rule puts a number of new limitations on the financial industry. Big banks would be able to own only small stakes in private equity and hedge funds and they would have to do away with any trading desks that trade solely for the profit of the bank.

Schlosstein has gone on TV to signal publicly what he will no doubt be whispering privately in the presidential ear as he tantalizingly waves his bundle of cash. 

"Its (the Volcker Rule's) intent is to reduce risk in commercial banking and investment banking,” Schlosstein said today (2/14) in a Bloomberg Television interview with Betty Liu. “But the line between proprietary trading and market-making is almost impossible to draw. You wind up with this incredibly complex regulation with incredibly complex enforcement, all of which will really increase costs for investors and for companies in the U.S.,” Schlosstein said. (waaaaah)

The United States Chamber of Commerce has also bundled up corporations to stand in solidarity with Wall Street to protest the Volcker Rule. It may have unintended consequences for profit-hoarding "job creators", they fear. Corporations are people, my friend, etc.

But others, such as pension fund managers, individual citizens and even a few bankers, say the Rule -- even in its current un-tweaked, pre-Schlosstein influenced state -- does not go nearly far enough in reining in the big banks. It is one more weak, and delayed, and meagerly-funded part of the already limp Dodd-Frank financial "reform" bill (yeah, the same Dodd to whom Obama must also now kowtow for even more cash). One former banker who disagrees with Obama's bundler buddy is:

John S. Reed, who ran Citigroup from 1984 to 2000 and has been an outspoken proponent of financial reform, cited the recent cases of MF Global and UBS in his comment letter to make his case for tougher regulation, writing, "When a firm is focused on market gain, it will employ every available device to achieve those gains -- including taking advantage of clients and putting the firm at risk."

In his own way, Reed was a victim of the deregulatory environment on Wall Street that the Volcker rule aims to rein in. He was ousted soon after Citigroup was created in the wake of the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, allowing banking, securities and insurance firms to merge.

(See Reed's suggestions for improvement at the above link).


And this from Occupy the SEC, via Firedoglake.


Space is Limited, but the 1% Possibilities Are Endless