Marriage Equality $tuff

I live in a small college town that has the unique distinction of being the site of some of the first same sex marriages in the country -- back when the very idea was shocking to many, and very, very illegal. The straight mayor of New Paltz, a recent SUNY grad at the time, was criminally charged for performing the ceremonies eight years ago, and he paid a heavy personal and financial price for it. He lost his bid for re-election, became ostracized by the moral majority, couldn't find a job, and was even reduced to sleeping on friends' couches.

Now Jason West is back, re-elected mayor on the Green Party ticket, and making his living painting houses. His response to President Obama's announcement that he had finally personally evolved into accepting same sex marriage? A big, fat "Meh."

"I'm happy the president finally joined the 21st century and has recognized the civil rights of these Americans. But until he starts pushing for a federal law, the various Gay-Straight Alliances in any high school in the country are doing more to advance the cause than he is. They're the ones in the front lines," West said.

Meanwhile, I have been counting all fund-raising emails coming in from various and sundry Democrats in the wake of the Obama Evolution. The first one arrived from Nancy Pelosi, not even one hour after the Robin Roberts interview aired. It asked me to sign a statement, to show solidarity with Brave Barry. I knew by signing I would be deluged, but I obliged anyway, just to see how intense the money-grubbing would get.

Sure enough, within minutes Nancy wrote back, asking for $3 for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ThinkProgress, the blog of The Center for American Progress (CAP), the neoliberal think tank with close ties to the White House, followed up, wanting me to sign President Obama's thank you card to mark the historic day. The White House itself sent a formal announcement, with video. Then  another email from Nancy Pelosi  urging me to be "part of history."  And to harvest emails by telling all my friends to be part of history too, of course.

The next day (Thursday) Jim Dean (Howard's bro) emailed me for a donation to Democracy for America, a DNC front group and asked me to tweet a thank you to the president. The White House sent a second official announcement, with video, just to remind me. Rep. Jared Polis, whoever he may be, emailed me and let me know the Republicans were already on the marriage equality attack. Contribute now!!! Another one from CAP to remind me to Tweet.

Sen. Al Franken, to his credit, did not directly ask for money. He just sent an email saying marriage rights activists should be proud and work hard to enshrine their work into law. But CAP sent a third missive titled "The Knives are Out", reminding me I had only seconds to sign my name to the Twitter message. Uh oh. I guess missed out.

MoveOn, which recently jumped on the Occupy co-optation bandwagon, asked me to "chip in" to Obama's re-election campaign because he deserves a reward for coming out so bravely. I guess the 99% money-making gimmick is a thing of the past. We liburls can just go back to drinking the kool-aid.

Meanwhile, I had to check my spam folder to see all the emails from the Obama campaign itself. I never asked, but Yahoo had started placing all the Bam Spam in the junk aisle. There is just so damned much of it, the automatic filter got it confused with the Nigerian scams and credit score alerts and porn. Let's see... I am counting one, two.... ten pleas for cash from Campaign HQ. But to be fair, one of them was based on Mothers Day. Barack wants me to wish Michelle well on her special day by sending him cash. What a stand-up guy.

Oh, here's something different and interesting. An email titled "Historic" just landed in my in-box. It's from Eric Schneiderman, the NY State Attorney General who was put in charge of the White House's mortgage fraud task force. Has he finally indicted a bankster? Nope.

Friend,

We witnessed a great moment this week as President Obama announced his support for the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples.

There is no doubt that having the President's support on this important issue will help ensure that all Americans are treated equally under the laws that govern our state and country.

And, you guessed it: Please donate to his campaign war chest. 

From BuzzFeed comes news that the Obama campaign has wasted no time ordering some gay swag to sell on its website. If you were afraid Barry was trying to co-opt OWS, just check out how he now totally owns Gaydom. Obama Pride.... sounds like a whole new brand. But still evolving, methinks, since the model is not quite ready to show her face.

.

Such, Such Was the Mitt

Many if not most politicians are sociopaths -- otherwise, how could they even live with their own lying, scheming selves? But the story of Mitt Romney's scissor-wielding assault on a fellow prep school student when he was 18 years old goes far beyond the merely nauseating. It reaches the ultimate point of true vomit-worthiness.


 Jason Horowitz of The Washington Post has written an excellently-sourced article about Romney's serial bullying in his teen years, which included playing incessant pranks on a blind teacher, and sneaking up on necking couples in a lovers' lane. But the worst of it was the attack on a gay student who had just dyed his longish hair blond. One day, Romney became so aroused that he formed a posse of preppies who held the kid down as Mitt hacked at his hair with a pair of scissors. This amounted to a criminal assault, and would additionally have been prosecuted as a hate crime today. But Mitt was never even reprimanded, let alone charged.


The victim, however, was later expelled after a group of elite tattle-tales turned him in for sneaking a cigarette. He died several years ago, and never forgot the incident, as one of the tormenters who encountered him in later life remembers. Mitt Romney, when confronted with the story today, at first semi-denied it, chuckled inappropriately, then apologized "if anyone was offended". A little late for the victim.


The WaPo story also has a lot of background on the elite Bloomfield Hills, Michigan school that was the scene of the crime(s). Cranbrook, the article says, was/is every inch a snobbish institution modeled after the British all-male boarding schools. I immediately thought of Christopher Hitchens' memoirs of his own school-day experiences at the hands of older boys and the rampant consensual homosexual experimentation amongst the pupils. And I was also reminded of George Orwell's classic indictment of boarding school cruelty and perversion, titled Such, Such Were the Joys.


Young Eric Blair (Orwell) was regularly beaten by the adults in the school and to a lesser extent, bullied by his peers. But there is another parallel to Cranfield and Orwell's alma mater, Crossgates -- and that is the extreme snobbery. Physical cruelty was matched only by Class War juvenilia. From the WaPo piece:

Lou Vierling, a scholarship student who boarded at Cranbrook for the 1960 and 1961 academic years, was struck by a question Romney asked them when they first met. “He wanted to know what my father did for a living,” Vierling recalled. “He wanted to know if my mother worked. He wanted to know what town I lived in.” As Vierling explained that his father taught school, that he commuted from east Detroit, he noticed a souring of Romney’s demeanor.

Orwell recounts an eerily similar incident:

I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year before I left Crossgates. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than myself, was questioning me.

'How much a-year has your father got?'

I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a small notebook and made a calculation.'My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,' he announced with a sort of amused contempt.

Orwell's hellish school-days occurred at the very beginning of the 20th Century, when ingrained class distinctions still reigned supreme. He didn't write his essay until after World II had served to erase class lines, if not cruelty to children. Or so he thought: "The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society that nourished it is dead," he concluded.

No, not dead. Merely asleep and destined to cross the wide Atlantic to further wreak its cruel, prurient havoc in the New Gilded Age. Welcome to Mitt Romney's America, Mr. Orwell.

President Nano-Nibbler

Okay, so most experts now agree that we are in a full-fledged Depression/Long Recession, and the jobs are never coming back. Real unemployment is at least 20% when you factor in the forgotten people who have just given up looking out of pure despair. Underemployment doesn't count in the official stats either: most of the new jobs are in the low-paying service and retail sectors. The working poor are the new normal. We may not be as officially austere as the Eurozone, but we are being subjected to a de facto austerity, with more cuts to the safety net looming on the horizon.

Yet even the phony deficit hawks who insist the country is broke have no problem recklessly spending billions of dollars of borrowed money on one acknowledged war that nobody supports, and more billions on secret narco-wars and drone strikes. And nobody knows the true cost of the bloated Homeland Security boondoggle in which everybody and his brother are considered potential enemies of the state. It has to have been trillions since 9/11 changed everything -- including the Constitution.

Epic crisis, right? Not if you listen to what passes for political discourse in this country, in which bickering and vague platitudes and bellicosity abound, and junior-size bandaids are being prescribed for gaping economic wounds. Take the presidential campaign. Instead of forging ahead with bold plans to fix things, President Obama's strategy is comprised of a weak two-pronged plastic fork attack: shoot (er -- jab) the Mittfish in the barrel, and double-dog-dare Congress to work with him on niblet corn initiatives.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Barry was in Albany yesterday, nano-campaigning at a "nano-scale" college. He sounded like an inept hand-wringing parent whose only solution is to complain about the misbehaving brats instead of exerting authority. Here's one line that got a lot of laughs from the audience:

"The only time Government employment has gone down under a recession has been under me."  Hysterical, right?

And the Republicans have the nerve to call him a big-spending socialist, right? Well, he'll show them how small he can be!

So today I’m announcing a handy little “To-Do” list that we’ve put together for Congress. (Laughter.) You can see it for yourselves at whitehouse.gov. It’s about the size of a Post-It note, so every member of Congress should have time to read it — (laughter) — and they can glance at it every so often. And hopefully we’ll just be checking off the list — just like when Michelle gives me a list, I check it off. (Laughter.) Each of the ideas on this list will help accelerate our economy and put people back to work — not in November, not in next year, but right now.

Oh my God, my sides are just splitting. (Just a little aside: Albany is one hell of a depressing place, so cornball presidential speeches must be laugh riots.) But let The Nibbler continue:

  First, Congress needs to help the millions of Americans who have worked hard, made their mortgage payments on time, but still have been unable to refinance their mortgages with these historically low rates. This would make a huge difference for the economy. (Applause.)

(Umm... here we go again with separating the hardworking Americans who pay their bills from those dreaded greedy homeowning slackers who are totally to blame for their own foreclosures. No mention of that vaunted financial fraud task force, no mention that banks are balking at refinancing and still foreclosing illegally,  or that the president has the power to enforce the rules and actually tell Justice to indict some of these bastards). 

Second, if Congress fails to act soon, clean energy companies will see their taxes go up and they could be forced to lay off employees. In fact, we’re already hearing from folks who produce wind turbines and solar panels and a lot of this green energy that they’re getting worried because there’s uncertainty out there. Congress hasn’t renewed some of the tax breaks that are so important to this industry. And since I know that the other side in Congress have promised they’ll never raise taxes as long as they live, this is a good time to keep that promise when it comes to businesses that are putting Americans to work and helping break our dependence on foreign oil. (Applause.) So we should extend these tax credits. That’s on the “To-Do” list. That’s number two.

(I have nothing against green energy and tax breaks for the worthy small business owner, but wouldn't you rather hear him call for scrapping or at least raising the FICA cap on Social Security contributions above the first $106,000? Congress isn't even going to do small shit, so why not just go for it and demand they do big shit? Maybe because he doesn't really want to, either?)

Number three, Congress should help small business owners by giving them a tax break for hiring more workers and paying them higher wages. (Applause.) We believe small businesses are the engine of economic growth in this country. We should not hold them to a situation where they may end up having to pay higher taxes just by hiring more workers. We should make it easier for them to succeed. So that’s on our “To-Do” list. That’s number three.

(Actually, in a Depression, government is the only  proven driver of economic growth. Obama obviously pays more attention to David Brooks than to Paul Krugman. He is more Herbert Hoover than FDR. Instead of making it easier for "small businesses" to succeed, he should ensure that ordinary people succeed. How about supporting the Living Wage Bill? How about that 2008 campaign promises for a federal minimum wage? But first, he should promise that regular people will just freaking survive this shitstorm. Where is his outrage over the GOP plan to cut food stamps, unemployment benefits, health care?)

Number four, Congress should help our veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan find a good job once they come home. (Applause.) Our men and women in uniform have served this country with such honor and distinction — a lot of them come from upstate New York. Now it’s our turn to serve them. So we should create a Veterans Job Corps that helps them find work as cops and firefighters, employees at our national parks. That’s on our “To-Do” list.

(Homeland Security is already inventing tens of thousands of jobs for returning vets, many of whom suffer from traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and other physical and mental problems. Their suicide rate is astronomical. How about we just bring them all home right now and get them the medical help they need before they are forced into even more stressful jobs as cops and firefighters? And yeah, upstate New York is indeed prime real estate for plucking up impoverished young people and convincing them that a military life of endless soul-destroying deployments is a cool career choice.)

Then the last item, the fifth item, which bears especially on what’s going on here — the last item on our congressional “To-Do” list is something that will help a lot of you in particular. You know better than anybody that technology has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few decades. And that’s a great thing. Businesses are more productive; consumers are getting better products for less. But technology has also made a lot of jobs obsolete. (shades of David Brooks's structural unemployment canard)  Factories where people once thought they’d retire suddenly left town. Jobs that provided a decent living got shipped overseas. And the result has been a lot of pain for a lot of communities and a lot of families.
There is a silver lining to all of this, though. After years of undercutting the competition, now it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Wages are going up. (the horror!) Shipping costs are going up. And meanwhile, American workers are getting more and more efficient. Companies located here are becoming more and more competitive. So for a lot of businesses, it’s now starting to make sense to bring jobs back home. (Applause.)

(People are working longer hours and getting paid less. Skilled factory workers are paid only about half the going rate, adjusted for inflation, of a decade ago. Unions are being destroyed like crazy, but that's OK. Obama's got Big Labor in the bag. Of course, companies are more competitive when they can get away with cutting benefits and hoarding profits. CEOs pocket about 1000 times what their employees earn through honest labor.)

So that’s the fifth item. That’s all on our “To-Do” list. I’m not trying to overload Congress here. (Laughter.)

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to be talking about this “To-Do” list when I’m on the road. I’m going to be talking about all the things that Congress can do right now to boost our economy and accelerate even more job growth. Of course, it’s not enough just to give them the list — we’ve also got to get them to start crossing things off the list. And that’s where all of you come in.

I’m going to need you to pick up the phone, write an email, tweet, remind your member of Congress we can’t afford to wait until November to get things done.

So there you have it, folks. That is the answer to the Second Great Depression. Speak loudly and carry a small plastic fork. Make corny jokes and be amazed that audiences still exist who can laugh at and applaud this crap. Don't expect Barry to go all LBJ and go to Congress himself and twist some arms. That is not his cool cerebral style, and besides, he's got a lot of canoodling with rich donors on his plate. So Tweet your member of Congress and if you're lucky, your message will not be caught up by the Homeland Security dragnet. Just make sure you don't bring up how nauseated you feel about the bipartisan funding of war, the spy state, corporate welfare, and Citizens United.

Breaking Up with BofA

Chances are that no matter how small your home town is, it contains a Bank of America branch. This heartless financial behemoth has blotted the landscape from sea to shining sea. Your friendly neighborhood bank was there one day, gone the next, in a stealth takeover by one insatiably greedy and lecherous corporate crime family.


Bank of America has a long list of dubious distinctions:

#1 forecloser of homes in the US,

#1 funder of the US coal industry,

Job killer by letting go of nearly 100,000 workers over the past several years,

Bonus Buster paying its top five executives over $500 million in bonuses,

Saddling students with a lifetime of debt, and

Financing the war machine.

But there is hope on the horizon. In its never-ending quest to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, the Occupy movement will be converging on corporate HQ in Charlotte, NC tomorrow for the bank's annual shareholder meeting. Smaller protests are being held at branches throughout the country. For an anti-BofA event near you, check out this site.


It's painfully obvious that the Obama Administration is never, ever going to clamp down on this monstrosity of a financial institution. The president will even be rubbing our noses in it by giving his DNC acceptance speech at Bank of America stadium this September. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has assigned a measly 55 investigators to pretend to look into the malfeasance of BofA and the other too big to exist financial crime cabals.


If you have not yet read the seminal takedown of BofA by Matt Taibbi, you can find it here. An excerpt:

So what does the government do about a rogue firm like this, one that inflates market-wrecking bubbles, commits mass fraud and generally treats the law like its own personal urinal cake? Well, it goes without saying that you rescue that "admitted felon" at all costs – even if you have to spend billions in taxpayer money to do it.


In fact, the real bailouts of Bank of America didn't even begin until well after TARP. In the years since the crash, the bank has issued more than $44 billion in FDIC-insured debt through a little-known Federal Reserve plan called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The plan essentially allows companies whose credit ratings are fucked to borrow against the government's good name – and if the loans aren't paid back, the government is on the hook for all of it. Bank of America has also stayed afloat by constantly borrowing billions in low-­interest emergency loans from the Fed – part of $7.7 trillion in "secret" loans that were not disclosed by the central bank until last year. When the data was finally released, we found out that, on just one day in 2008, Bank of America owed the Fed a staggering $86 billion.

(snip) 

That means that when you take out a credit card or a mortgage or a refinancing from Bank of America, you're essentially borrowing from the state; the "private" bank is simply taking a cut as a middleman. "For banks, the cost of capital is the key to success," says former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. "So by lowering their cost of capital to almost zero, the Fed has almost guaranteed that the banks will make big profits."

European governments are actually starting to fall because of the austerity measures imposed on the victims of  global banking rapacity. The Profits over People meme is universal and is being rejected on a worldwide scale. We have, it seems, reached the tipping point.


Meanwhile, while Bank of America has been the cause of a whole series of unfortunate events, the City of Charlotte has declared its Shareholder Meeting an "extraordinary event" -- meaning that the cabal-coddling government is making sure that bank execs don't get their feelings hurt by irate protesters. Writes Allison Kilkenny of The Nation:

 ....the city plans to restrict free speech and expand the ability of police and security forces to target and profile the homeowners, worker, community members, students and immigrants who plan to demand justice from one of the largest banks in the country.

The label tightens restrictions on what protesters are allowed to do at such events and gives police more power to search people's property (backpacks, coolers, etc.) in the vicinity. Certain items, such as scarves, are now banned from the event, and the possession of items like markers, hammers and spray paint is now grounds for arrest.

The extraordinary event tag's origins date back to a city ordinance enacted in January in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Charlotte in September.

Thus far, it seems like the unprecedented measure adopted by the City Manager has done little to ebb the tide of protester enthusiasm.

Bank of America obviously thinks it is impervious. Right in the middle of the national uproar over its corrupt practices, it just started sending out letters to homeowners offering financial relief on properties it probably doesn't even own. This is to game the recent terms of the financial settlement with the Attorneys General, reducing the amount of the paltry fine it agreed to pay in lieu of prosecution of its rampant foreclosure fraud. Dave Dayen of Firedoglake has the whole tawdry tale.

Obama Biden His Time on Gay Marriage (*Updated)

I don't usually watch the Sunday morning blatherfests. I just read the recaps, starting with Jason Linkins' hilarity and then I go on to the Bobbleheads. If any of the segments seems especially entertaining, I might catch a few clips later in the day on the Internet.


Well, it looks like the Osama retrospective is winding down at least, because as Joe Biden did the musical chairs talk show circuit and plopped down at MTP, he only mentioned one time that Bin Laden is still dead. (As far as I know, that is. I mean, he may have repeated himself for all I know, but I have not been able to bring myself to actually watch. It's not that I don't not know, or still can't believe that Osama really is kaput, y'understand.)


But Biden still managed to make front page news on the New York Times homepage. He announced that he, personally, feels "comfortable" about gay marriage. This Bidenism was no doubt initially calculated to send a signal to all the people disappointed in President Obama's "evolving" stance on the issue. Psssst.... the Prexy is down with all you LGBT rich donor people and the 80% of the country in favor of same sex marriage. But it is not yet politically expedient for him to say so during this election year. He might have to spend some of his hoarded political capital. Karl Rove and Fox and the gang might gang up on him and call him anti-family and stuff. From The Times: 

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Mr. Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

(snip) 

Gay and lesbian voters, while generally supportive of Mr. Obama, have grown frustrated with his reluctance to take a clear stance for same-sex marriage. He has come under increasing pressure to do so from gay donors, one of his more lucrative fund-raising sources.

Even sending a minion out to telegraph the president's lukewarmth apparently has Team Obama second-guessing itself. Aides hastily released a statement insisting that gaffe-happy Biden's views are purely his own and that moreover, he is marching in evolutionary lockstep with The Boss:

“The Vice President was saying what the President has said previously – that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to rollback those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it. Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.”

 Talk about threading the needle! Jeeze. Though, when you close-read what Biden actually said, he parsefully means that once same-sex couples have actually tied the knot without the blessing of the federal government, who is he to say they are not thereafter entitled to the same civil rights as everybody? I mean, barn door and spilt milk and all.


Whatever. The circular meanderings, the craven calculating caution of this slow-jammin', market-driven, evolving dissolving president know no bounds. And that is a real no-no for Brave New World Warrior Prince.

*Update, 5/9: Congratulations to the LGBT community and amazingly too, to the mainstream press corps, for hounding the president into personally coming out in favor of marriage equality. Credit due to Obama for risking battleground states early in the campaign season. It was a careful juggling act of principle, expediency, optics, and the potential loss of millions of gay donor dollars. All those old homophobes from North Carolina were so going to vote for him before the Coming Out Party, right? One evolution down, a hundred more to go. Let us now force him to evolve into ending the wars, the drone strikes, the warrantless wiretapping and cyber-spying, the war on whistleblowers, beginning to prosecute the banksters, to strengthen Social Security and the safety net, to develop nausea at the mere sound of the words "bipartisan" and "Reagan".... yeah, yeah, I'm wasting my breath. 

The White House Gay Marriage Evolution Chart...Is Now Complete!

Poison Now, Disclose Later

Another day, another cave. The Obama Administration has just verified the unbelievable rumor that it would be granting a huge concession to the oil and gas industry -- instead of being required to disclose the chemicals used to hydrofrack new wells 30 days in advance, drillers will be able to blast the earth with all the cancer-causing chemicals they want without telling a soul what they are using. Our government trusts them to report back to the victims later. On a self-serving website called FracFocus.

Of course, this new rule applies only to 700 million acres of federal lands. So if you live near federally-owned property, tribal lands, national parks, national forests, national seashores, national monuments -- and your tap water suddenly smells bad, turns color or catches fire,  or your hair and teeth start falling out, or you think you feel faint quakey rumblings under your feet.... you might have been permanently fracked. But never fear.  Maybe next month, maybe next year and maybe after you're dead, the government will act in your best interest and let you know you have been bathing in benzene. And that it's good for your complexion.

Naturally, the Department of the Interior will be accepting "public comments" before actually implementing its pollution-friendly new rules. And it actually admits what I wrote the other day: that the self-serving FracFocus site is abysmally out of date and hard to use. It does bupkis to inform you how you are being affected by that eyesore of a gas well next door. The Bureau of Land Management, however, "understands that the database is in the process of being improved and will in the near future have enhanced search capabilities and allow for easier reporting of information." (italics mine.)

Reading between the lines of 80 pages of bureaucrat-ese, it does appear that the Interior Department will follow its long tradition of allowing energy companies to police themselves. The government will take their word for what they are doing and not necessarily verify any of it. We all know how well that laissez-faire policy worked out since the Deepwater Horizon explosion two years ago. No new oversight, no new laws, no criminal prosecutions. "The BLM will rely on the operator's certification that it has complied with all the laws and regulations that pertain to its operation."

The  government report blithely assumes that frackers will voluntarily reduce the amount of their chemicals and use safer formulae, knowing they'll have to eventually own up to Uncle Sam. Transparency after the fact is so beneficial to the public, too! (see page 38 of the report.) And the better-late-than-never disclosures will help the government respond to "incidents", such as those inevitable well poisonings. Cooperation from the industry will ensure that the government can stock up on gazillions of gallons of drinking water furnished at great public cost by Coca-Cola and other for-profit beverage providers, too. It is win-win-win all around for the Great Public Private Partnerships in the great nation of Homelandia.

This sudden and sharp about-face on strict fracking rules just gives lie to the usual political canard that "change takes time" and we all just have to be patient when it comes to a progressive tax system, an improved economy and the like. When corporations want something, they can usually get it in record time. The easing of fracking rules comes mere months after industry big shots met with the Obama Administration to complain about regulations costing them too much time and money. From the New York Times:

The weakening of the rule followed a series of meetings at the White House after the original regulation was proposed in February. Lobbyists representing oil industry trade associations and individual major producers like ExxonMobil, XTO Energy, Apache, Samson Resources and Anadarko Petroleum met with officials of the Office of Management and Budget, who reworked the rule to address industry concerns about overlapping state regulations and the cost of compliance.

(snip)

President Obama has strongly endorsed the new production as a boon to the economy and energy security. And the president, facing re-election under intense criticism of his energy policies from Republicans and oil industry officials, has recently taken steps to ease government regulation of oil operations.

In its original proposal that oil companies disclose the chemicals they intended to use in drilling at least 30 days before starting a well, the Interior Department was seeking to address the concerns of landowners about potential pollution of groundwater.

Industry complained, Obama listened. Just weeks after announcing a task force to make life easier for Big Oil and Gas, his Administration has accommodated these very important constituents. Landowners and consumers of water be damned. Why, the EPA even arranged for the firing of one of its fracking inspectors who actually had the nerve to insult polluters while he was doing his job.

The gas and oil industry has declared itself well-pleased with its government puppets. You can bet it is smiling a big old corporate-person smile as it scores yet another victory in the War Against People.

Occupy "The Scream"

The huge turnouts for Occupy May Day seem to have stunned the corporate media, which had assumed the movement was dead because they had stopped paying attention to it. Now, they are trying to marginalize OWS even further by calling the day's events a one-off piece of national street theater. Nothing to see here, move along, let's get back to the Rombama Death Match and the Osama Assassination retrospective.

Well, not so fast! Occupy is alive and well and living in the rarefied world of obscenely overpriced art and the obscenely wealthy oligarchs who have nothing else to do with their money than invest it in priceless masterworks, only to hide them away from public view. Today is "Shut Down Sotheby's" Day in New York City to protest against the auction of one of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" paintings. (he painted more than one version.) From the OWS website:




Tonight, at an exclusive 7pm auction, Sotheby's is expected to sell Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream" for $80 million dollars*. Outside, Occupy and labor allies will protest the Upper East Side art auction house in solidarity with 43 locked-out art handlers who have been replaced by Sotheby's with low wage temporary workers with no benefits.
Catering exclusively to the mega-rich (by providing a service that makes them richer and more exclusive,) Sotheby's is perhaps the most quintessentially 1% institution there is. Founded before the industrial era, it was the first company ever listed on the NY Stock Exchange, and today (despite the current "recession") is more profitable than at any other time in its 260-year history. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's workers who make those profits possible are given the shaft. Enough is enough. The 99% will not stand silent as union-busting companies like Sotheby's wage class war against us.
Making it even more interesting is the fact that Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend, former NY Banking Commissioner Diana Taylor, is on the board of Sotheby's. She has actually threatened to quit should Sotheby's CEO accede to the demands of the shut-out Teamsters. "MiDi" has got to be a match made in heaven, given Bloomberg's own disdain for the working class and poor. With a net worth of almost $20 billion, he is adamantly against raising the minimum wage, and insists that food stamp applicants in his fair city get fingerprinted lest they steal crumbs from the maws of the plutocrats. And when it comes to the unemployed and underemployed Occupiers, he is Marie Antoinette in smirky billionaire drag: instead of eating cake, says Hizzoner, they should just go out and become entrepreneurs.

You can see video here of locked-out Sotheby's workers asking Diana Taylor to stand up for them and their families. Her response has all the passion of a bored, pre-guillotine Louis XVI in drag.

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Odd Couples, Then and Now 

And it's not just the Teamsters giving Diana Taylor some righteous indignation. Investors are planning to demand that she and others resign from the Board at the annual shareholder meeting on May 8, for "gross mismanagement" in wasting money to punish middle class workers, and also for the mishandling of James Murdoch's embarrassing position on the Sotheby's board. The auction company has had its share of scandals over the years, and if there's one thing fabulously wealthy oligarchs don't want now, it's even more bad press and class resentment. This is one thin-skinned crowd. They have not had an equal opportunity to develop life's little calluses.

Even the Ivy League has had it with Taylor and her cadre of plutocrats. Dartmouth students have teamed up with the Teamsters, and are demanding their own college board of trustees cut all ties with the auction house, given its blatant class warfare against working families:




Despite grossing over $700 million in 2010, Sotheby's hired the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to attack its workers. More than seven months ago, Sotheby's locked the art handlers out of their jobs, depriving them of their paychecks. On Jan. 1, the art handlers and their families were stripped of their health care coverage. Sotheby's continues to demand that all union positions be phased out and replaced with low wage non-union temporary positions with no benefits.
"Taylor's open hostility to the bargaining process, and refusal to end this awful lockout is an affront to my College's values," said Janet Kim, a Dartmouth junior who participated in Saturday's action. "Dartmouth has always been committed to being a socially responsible institution, but Taylor's actions totally fly in the face of that."
Sotheby's reckless behavior has harmed its shareholders. In a recent filing with financial regulators, the auction house disclosed that it had spent $2.4 million in "extra expenses" associated with the first three months of the lockout. (The entire cost of the art handler's contract is $3.2 million.) The lockout has also caused several organizations, including a group affiliated with Oberlin College, to cancel events originally scheduled to be held at Sotheby's.

"Diana Taylor's refusal to publicly use her influence to try to end this lockout not only speaks volumes about how she feels about America's working families, but it should raise serious questions about her stewardship as a board member," said Jason Ide, President of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents the workers.
I guess it is also no coincidence that Diana Taylor lounges on the board of Brookfield Properties, the quasi-owners of Zuccotti Park, original camp of the Occupy movement. This is another one of those neo-liberal public private partnerships in which taxpayers foot the bills of the ruling class.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that Sotheby's will profit mightily from the sale of "The Scream", an iconic painting that captured the angst and despair and outrage of people buffeted by a cruel authoritarian system over which they have no control.

Munch and other painters in the Expressionist movement wanted to express a new internal, psychological form of reality. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson says the image touches on something primitive within all of us, because we were all once young and helpless like the hairless creature in the picture, wordless and afraid. She says Munch managed to convey something all human beings have felt at some time: "I am overwhelmed. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do and when I try to convey it, in some way, whether I am screaming or expressing some of what nature is screaming at me, other people ignore it."

Why would some master of the universe even want to own this painting, given that it symbolizes the pain of the downtrodden?  Hmm.... Sadism. Control. Evokes fond memories of crashing an entire economy and the hopes and dreams of  an entire generation. Or, alternately: wealthy new owner identifies with the painting because it symbolizes the fact that he is only a multimillionaire and not yet a member of the Forbes 400. It is so unfair that the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined. It's enough to make one Scream.

Update: The Scream has sold for a record-breaking $120 million, the highest ever price paid for a work of art at auction. The bid was done privately, by telephone. No word on the identity of the new owner, who may be in the Forbes 400, after all.