Memorial Day Moralizing

President Obama's weekly radio address: 

This weekend, folks* across the country are opening up the pool, firing up the grill, and taking a well-earned moment to relax. But Memorial Day is more than a three-day weekend. In town squares and national cemeteries, in public services and moments of quiet reflection, we will honor those who loved their country enough to sacrifice their own lives for it.

 Ain't America grand?  Everywhere you look, regular folks are opening up their private pools and slapping juicy filet mignons on the grills. Life is so good. In between romping and rollicking in the town square, waving flags and marching down prosperous Main Streets, regular folks are piously bowing their heads in this Time of Plenty and remembering those who loved their country enough to make everybody rich and self-satisfied and free from independent thought. What Second Great Depression?

This Memorial Day, Michelle and I will join Gold Star families, veterans, and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. We’ll pay tribute to patriots of every generation who gave the last full measure of devotion, from Lexington and Concord to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Presidents indulging in muted bellicosity always co-opt their wives in order to soften the ugly reality that they and their predecessors have been directly responsible for the deaths and disfigurements of millions of people. Heck, Dubya will even be draggng Laura back to the White House this week to unveil their official portraits! War crimes? What war crimes?

Later that day, we’ll join Vietnam veterans and their families at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—the Wall. We’ll begin to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. It’s another chance to honor those we lost at places like Hue, Khe Sanh, Danang and Hamburger Hill. And we’ll be calling on you—the American people—to join us in thanking our Vietnam veterans in your communities.

Since Vietnam is but a fuzzy memory, it is now safe to acknowledge, glorify and mythologize it. It is a Golden Anniversary, a golden opportunity for nostalgic propaganda. Thank the Vietnam vets in your communities, if you even know who they are. Not a few of them died prematurely because of undiagnosed PTSD, alcoholism, drug abuse. Many are lying forgotten in VA hospitals. Chances are that your local grizzled dumpster-diver or town drunk is a Vietnam vet, neglected and despised then, and invisible now. Vietnam has been described as the first teenage war, meaning most Nam veterans are still only in their sixties or seventies, despite the golden anniversary hoopla. The average age of combatants was only 20.

Even as we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice, we reaffirm our commitment to care for those who served alongside them—the veterans who came home. This includes our newest generation of veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Depending on who you believe, the veteran unemployment rate is either well above the national average, or getting better all the time. The government has partnered with slave factories like Walmart, which pledges to give "Careers With a Mission" jobs to returning vets. They claim to match military skills to job placement. For example, an Army intelligence expert might land a job as a store security guard, or otherwise morph from protecting our freedoms to protecting corporate investors!



Walmart: Morphing Your Allegiance from One Empire to Another

The Homeland Security complex says it has manufactured 50,000 make-work jobs for vets to get them out of sight, out of mind, and to prevent any more of them throwing down their heroism medals in disgust and getting beaten up at NATO protests. We have to make room, after all, for the next generation of Afghanistan (Iran? Asia Pacific? Latin America?) veterans, many of whom will be the children and grandchildren of Vietnam and Iraq veterans. The cycle of war profiteering will never end. Thanks in part to the sacrifice of the troops, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney got a 16% raise last year, up to $23 million. William H. Swanson of Raytheon raked in $24.88 million. Contrast that with the base pay of a sacrificial Army private: $1500 a month.

We have to serve them and their families as well as they have served us: By making sure that they get the healthcare and benefits they need; by caring for our wounded warriors and supporting our military families; and by giving veterans the chance to go to college, find a good job, and enjoy the freedom that they risked everything to protect.

They will be paying higher premiums for their healthcare, in order that we can free up more money to buy weapons, predator drones, bombs, aircraft carriers, fighter jets and generally continue to enrich defense and private security contractors. We are failing to rein in the for-profit online colleges who continue to scam and indebt our returning veterans. "Enjoying the freedom they risked everything to protect" means continued prosperity for Wall Street and the military industrial complex, and austerity for everybody else.

Our men and women in uniform took an oath to defend our country at all costs, and today, as members of the finest military the world has ever known, they uphold that oath with dignity and courage. As President, I have no higher honor than serving as their Commander-in-Chief. But with that honor comes a solemn responsibility – one that gets driven home every time I sign a condolence letter, or meet a family member whose life has been turned upside down.

Many of our young men and women joined the service because they could not find a decent job here at home. They took an oath to become pawns in an endless campaign of military aggression in far-flung, impoverished corners of the world. The finest military the world has ever known is also the largest, most wasteful and deadliest military the world has ever known. It is hated and feared by innocent people the wide world over. All the letters of condolence, all the meetings with bereaved family members, have never stopped the greatest super-power on earth from waging its endless campaign for global dominance. The faux- sympathetic presidential pen is never mightier than that most profitable sword.

No words can ever bring back a loved one who has been lost. No ceremony can do justice to their memory. No honor will ever fill their absence.

But we keep giving speeches and holding parades and laying wreaths anyway, to feel all warm and snuggly inside and to justify our actions in our own minds. Ceremonies give meaning to the meaningless and justification for the unjustifiable.

But on Memorial Day, we come together as Americans to let these families and veterans know that they are not alone. We give thanks for those who sacrificed everything so that we could be free. And we commit ourselves to upholding the ideals for which so many patriots have fought and died.

The wars have bankrupted us as a nation. But thanks anyway to all the grunts who suffered and died so the plutocrats can maintain the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. They have become free to wreak their havoc with unfettered abandon. We commit ourselves to the ideal of sacrificing poor people, so rich people and corporations can thrive. Platitudinous speeches like this one all sound alike, because they're a dime a dozen. 

Thank you, God bless you, and have a wonderful weekend.

 Fire up the grills, play a round of golf, and jump in your pools. Your president hereby declares your uncomfortable two minutes of quiet reflection to be officially over.

*"When a politician uses the word 'folks' we should brace ourselves for the deceit or worse that is coming." --Noam Chomsky.

Dangerous New Deals

Some powerful Democrats have been trying to claim lately that are donning the austerity mantle just to prove to the country how insane and intractable the Republicans are in comparison. They won't admit that they themselves have veered right in order to please their Wall Street paymasters, and to keep that campaign cash flowing. They are pretending we are in a debt and deficit crisis and that a strict diet of safety net slashes coupled with a smidgen of new revenue will magically put some fat on the GDP.

They are buying into the tripe pushed by centrist think tanks run by corporations and talk show pundits owned by corporations. They insist that the failed Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission is still alive and well and beloved by all the world. Many of them have become full-fledged members of the cult whose prime tenet is that the government is just like a family, that fairness is defined as impoverished grannies giving up one daily meal at the same time Jamie Dimon surrenders the tax deduction on his 10th vacation home.

Latest case in point: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has just approached Speaker John Boehner about immediately and permanently extending the Bush tax cuts to people earning less than $1 million a year, rather than the $250,000 championed by the Obama Administration. This idea is nothing new. In fact, N.Y. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has been proposing the million dollar figure since forever. The sad fact, claims Chuck, is that $999,000 is just chump change when you live in New York or its wealthy 'burbs. Private school tuition is skyrocketing, property taxes on multimillion dollar mansions are out of control, and with the slight chance that the state minimum wage is going up to $8.50 an hour, the cost of The Help will go through the roof.

Chuck claimed in 2010 that the million-dollar compromise would show those nasty Republicans just how nasty they are. He predicted that his offer would make it impossible for them to say No. Guess what? They said No then, and they'll say No again. Chuck and Nancy just don't want to admit that their party's prime allegiance is to rich people, too. They have to pretend to be a bit more populist.  

Never mind that extending the tax cuts to almost-millionaires will seriously
bloat the deficit. The public interest group Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that in 2013 alone, the Pelosi-Schumer plan would cost between $60 and $70 billion. As a matter of fact, their plan would actually be more beneficial to the really, truly, filthy rich than to the merely rich: a full 50% of their tax cuts would go straight to millionaires:

This would result because under Pelosi’s proposal, a married couple making $3 million a year, for example, would continue to pay the lower tax rates (enacted under President Bush) on $1 million of their income. Under Obama’s proposal, a married couple making $3 million a year would continue to pay the lower tax rates on just $250,000 of their income.

Taxpayers with incomes exceeding $1 million would therefore receive substantially larger tax cuts under Pelosi’s proposal than they would under Obama’s proposal.

The Huffington Post quoted an anonymous Democratic aide whose name could not possibly be Nancy Pelosi as saying Nancy Pelosi's whole point is just to make the Republicans look bad by displaying how reasonable and serious she herself is:

If Republicans refuse to move on this proposal, it is clear they are standing with millionaires and endangering the economic security of the middle class," said the aide.

(snip) 

"What Pelosi is proposing is a reasonable path forward given this situation," said the aide.

Pelosi made other waves recently by signalling she would also be open to a "Grand Bargain" of social safety net cuts, leading former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold to circulate a petition against the plan. Again, she had defended herself by claiming that her aim was simply to make the nihilistic GOP look unreasonable to voters in this election year. Same game of chicken, in which she puts impoverished surrogates (real people) behind her political daredevil wheel.

Either Nancy Pelosi is trying to out-Obama Obama in the Negotiating With Oneself department, or she is getting old and befuddled, or she is giving needed cover for Obama to "cave" in an election year/lameduck session, or she has been a corrupt phony all along and it's just beginning to dawn on people. If I had to cast a vote today, I would opt for all of the above.

As the sixth wealthiest member of the House with a reported net worth of almost a quarter-billion dollars, Pelosi ranks right up there with Mitt Romney in the riches department. Maybe her California constituents should consider throwing her a retirement party, sooner rather than later.

Moon Struck

The Senate usually moves with all the deliberative speed of a snail on Valium, so everybody perked up when all of a sudden it voted unanimously to strike the word "lunatic" from the federal code. Since the bill must now go to the House for final approval, it's still quite possible that lunacy will remain official in The Homeland for eons to come. After all, the Senate did its usual half-assed job by allowing "idiot" to remain on the books.

Sen. Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, introduced the bill last month after it came to his attention that calling mentally disabled people lunatics is insulting. It is also outdated by about a century. The British Parliament, after all, got rid of the term way back in 1930, replacing it with "person of unsound mind."

The word "lunatic" appears in the U.S. Code in Title 1, Chapter 1, which covers rules of construction. Chapter 1 holds that when determining the meaning of any law, "the words 'insane' and 'insane person' and 'lunatic' shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis."

According to Conrad's bill, it also appears in laws related to banking that deal with the authority to take receivership of estates.

Lunatic (derived from lunaticus) literally means "moonstruck" and despite its current political incorrectness, may actually have a basis in fact. From Wikipedia:

Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced insanity in susceptible individuals, believing that the brain, which is mostly water, must be affected by the Moon and its power over the tides, but the Moon's gravity is too slight to affect any single person, Even today, people insist that admissions to psychiatric hospitals, traffic accidents, homicides or suicides increase during a full Moon, although there is no scientific evidence to support such claims.

In a 1999 Journal of Affective Disorders article, a hypothesis was suggested that the phase of the moon may in the past have had an effect on individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation. With the introduction of electric light, this effect would have gone away, as light would be available every night, explaining the negative results of modern studies. The authors suggested ways in which this hypothesis might be tested.

I confess, having worked in both the journalistic and medical fields, to somewhat believing the theory that the full moon brings out the craziness in people. Ask any emergency room nurse, cop, or beat reporter if they don't agree. It just seems that after any given night of mayhem, it turns out that the moon was full. But actually testing the hypothesis as suggested by the above experts? Sounds like something the CIA may already have done.

Going Negative, Nicely

So, Newark Mayor Cory Booker felt all pukey inside when he saw that anti-Romney ad comparing Bain Capital to a blood-sucking vampire. And then the pundits said his career was toast, and then the Obama campaign staunchly defended the bloody verbal imagery in the commercial.

But lo and behold, other Democrats have begun slithering out of their own corporate closets in nauseous solidarity with Booker. Leave capitalism alone, they plead. For this is the week that the party of FDR, the party of labor and civil rights, the poor and oppressed, is very publicly acknowledging that it is indeed just the other half of the Money Party.

But other Dems remain closeted, "privately worried" that their Wall Street blood money is going to dry up because of presidential negativity. And, going full circle, the ever-skittish Obama campaign is now pushing back against the pushback against the pushback:

In an indication of how rocky the day was for Obama, however, one surrogate for the president generated controversy in his defense of the ad against Romney.

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, said Romney’s business practices amounted to “raping companies and leaving them in debt” for his own profit.

The Obama campaign quickly distanced itself from those remarks, telling media outlets it “strongly disagrees with Congressman Clyburn’s choice of words — they have no place in this conversation.”

Okay, everybody got that? Bain did indeed sink its cruel lecherous fangs into  tender flesh, sucking and sucking away in a frenzy until the victim was drained dry and fell down in a dead heap. But it absolutely did not have forceable sexual relations with that company. 

Acceptable

Unacceptable

Congress Talk Pretty One Day

Attention again, all grammarians, armchair psychologists and nitpickers. Somebody with a lot of time on his hands has come out with a study showing that Congress critters cannot string a coherent sentence together as well as they used to. Our lawmakers have actually been rated according to grade level, and the results are not pretty. Does it surprise anyone that the newest, most right wing extremist members also rank the lowest in the elocution department?

The Sunlight Foundation, using its own Capitol Words invention, arrived at the conclusion that Congress has sunk a full grade level in the past seven years. My first reaction was, only one notch? And if you've also been wondering how it is that Americans consistently vote these clowns back into office over and over again, against their own economic interests, the answer is that Congress is still smarter than the average shlub, who reads at late 8th grade level:

Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11^th and 14^th grade level. (You can find more comparisons here)

All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing.

So in other words, if Michele Bachman utters a sentence like: "As the mother of 260 foster children, I consider myself a huge fan of antidisestablishmentarianism" she would score off the congressional charts? Sorry, but this measuring tool is just screaming out to be gamed by stupid cheaters to make themselves look good. But to be fair, according to the Congressional database, Bachmann actually scored above the average shlub, speaking at a mid-9th grade level, or approximately the degree of difficulty of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

What a nightmare. Somebody wake me up.

What's Wrong With This Sentence? (and everything else)

Attention all grammarians, armchair shrinks, and nitpickers. This was the last sentence in an article by Helene Cooper in today's New York Times:

“As the wealthiest nation on earth, I believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and nutrition and to partner with others,” Mr. Obama said Friday morning in remarks in Washington.

a) The professorial prez has used a dangling modifier. President Obama inadvertently refers to himself as the wealthiest nation on earth. He should have said: "As the wealthiest nation on earth, the U.S. has a moral obligation...."  I,yi yi, yi yi! (I just never got over my eighth grade sentence-diagramming days in Catholic school.)

b) He said we have a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and nutrition. Does this guy like to always have it both ways, or what? If I were a Freudian, I would call this a slip. Our president satiates our hunger with his populist speeches, yet fails to follow through on actual policies that would nourish the body politic. He calls Jamie Dimon the greatest banker of all time at the same time he says we need to rein Jamie Dimon in. He brags about the Volcker Rule now, even though his team of banker enablers has been working to delay it until 2014 or later. 

 We are all, of course, keeping a close watch on the happenings in the Chicago Police State, where the paramilitary thugs have already pre-emptively arrested some demonstrators in front of Obama's campaign HQ and elsewhere, and even charged a group of OWS protesters with being terrorist threats. I think that after this week, the meaning of NATO might be changed to "New Austerians Tase (Terrorize? Torture? Threaten>) Occupy". Most of the international bellicose bubbleheads gathering for the power elite confab are calling for the hoi polloi  to share the sacrifice. But somehow, money is never an object when it comes to perpetuating the military-industrial complex. Except for Francois Hollande, who is still too much of a newbie to have been co-opted, the NATO apparatchiks and their guests are there to celebrate the hegemony.

Meanwhile, the judge who just declared the indefinite detention clause of the NDAA unconstitutional wisely listened to Chris Hedges and his co-plaintiffs, who'd asserted the intentionally vague law was having a chilling effect on their writing and their activism. Would merely having a conversation with someone the administration arbitrarily calls a terrorist make the interviewer also a terrorist in the government's eyes, and thus subject to detention without trial? Since the government left that question dangling by refusing even to answer, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. That, of course, did not prevent the House from voting for indefinite detention yesterday. And not only that, the phony deficit hawks also proved their austerity rhetoric a sham once again by approving expenditures for useless military hardware and the construction of a massive East Coast anti-missile system. This, from GOP pod-people like Eric Cantor and John Boehner, who keep insisting the debt is destroying the country.

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, not so much because of the money or the indefinite detention clause (which he is totally for, as the wealthiest nation on earth) -- but because of the clause banning same-sex marriages on military property. Far from being concerned about the death of due process and free speech and assembly, the White House worries that the anti-gay clause might be illegal:

 The defense budget would also prohibit same sex marriage ceremonies on any military installation. The White House described the provision as a “troublesome and potentially unconstitutional limitation.”

And it might really get sticky if two gay Occupiers want to get married at West Point and have as their witnesses journalists who once interviewed suspected Yemeni militants. But as an obscure blogger, this scenario may probably never cross the president's mind. Like that clumsy sentence and the one at the top of this post, vague statutes are deliberately kind of left dangling, open to whatever interpretation any future leaders care to give them. In the meantime, Obama can indeed get away with claiming "L'état -- c'est moi."

Scandal Within a Fraud Wrapped in a Theft

Remember how each of the homeowners unfairly foreclosed on was supposed to get a paltry thousand or two dollars out of that pathetic sweetheart deal the Obama Administration put together with the criminal banksters earlier this year? The total settlement amount came to a mere $2.5 billion. And the bulk of it, theoretically, was supposed to go directly to the affected residents. At the very most it would have paid maybe a month's rent, or the cost of a moving truck, for each victim. There was also money put aside for general housing relief for the states. 

The upshot was, that after stealing billions and creating untold misery for millions, banks once again got away with murder*, or at least with fraud, conspiracy, perjury and grand larceny. It can't get any worse than that, right?

Wrong. The New York Times has published an article revealing that the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for housing relief for the states is being used for other purposes. The states are in budget crises from coast to coast, thanks to the de facto austerity policy that is in place here in the Corporate Homeland. Thanks are also due to the same big banks, whose recklessness crashed the economy in 2008, leading to an unemployment crisis and business closings and the resulting shriveling of local tax bases. Regular federal aid to states has dried up too, thanks to the machinations of the phony deficit hawks posing as responsible people in Washington. Dozens of states are, in effect, robbing Peter (the settlement funds) to pay Paul (everything else.) In the best case scenarios, they're robbing from the poor to give to the poor. In the worst case scenarios, they're robbing from the poor to give to the corporations and the rich. Perhaps the worst case of all is in Arizona, where the AG wants to use half the settlement money for (private) prisons. Well, they argue, prisons are considered housing too! You have to put a roof over the heads of all the marijuana smokers and undocumented folks! Luckily, a civil rights group has already sued to try to prevent this particular outrage. But how about Georgia, which will use its $99 million share to "lure job-creators" to move into their state?

Even in my home state of New York, whose attorney general was one of the big holdouts against the Obama Administration's mortgage fraud settlement until he was co-opted into running a non-existent mortgage fraud task force, admits New York's $15 million share will be used to fund legal clinics to counsel homeowners facing foreclosure rather than repay the people who were wrongly foreclosed on. The funding for the legal program was drying up, and the decision was made to use the money proactively rather than retroactively. So the people already out on the street or living in a relative's basement can probably kiss their thousand bucks goodbye. 

Texas, of course, never had any notion of using its share for the purpose intended. This is a state, remember, that was threatening to secede a few years ago. What else do you expect when you hand crooked Governor Goodhair (Rick Perry) a fat check from Washington? He'll either pretend to refuse it or find a sneaky way to funnel it to his rich friends. In the case of the fraudclosure settlement, it just went straight to the General Fund with no accountability even offered.

In cash-strapped California, where A.G. Kamala Harris was another diehard holdout on the puny bank settlement, Gov. Jerry Brown has announced his state's $400 million share will go directly toward closing the budget gap:

 (Harris was) holding out until the very end for a deal guaranteeing that a large share of the benefits would go to California, and then trumpeting her success in a news conference and a flurry of interviews with national news outlets. So Mr. Brown’s revised budget put her in an awkward position.

“While the state is undeniably facing a difficult budget gap,” she said in a statement, “these funds should be used to help Californians stay in their homes.” Both officials are Democrats.

When asked if Mr. Brown could legally appropriate the money, which is supposed to be held in a special fund “for the benefit of California homeowners affected by the mortgage/foreclosure crisis,” a spokesman for Ms. Harris declined to comment.

Just last week, Ms. Harris announced plans to give about half the money to groups that provide housing counseling and legal assistance to homeowners — groups whose budgets have shrunk while demand for their services grows. The other half would be used primarily for investigation of mortgage-related crime.

The Obama Administration apparently never saw this diversionary development coming. They are quietly, even desperately, begging the states to use their sudden mini-windfalls for the intended purpose. Fat chance. It's like giving a starving man $100 and telling him to use it to pay his electric bill.

The $2.5 billion was intended to be under the control of the state attorneys general, who negotiated the settlement with the five banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally. But there is enough wiggle room in the agreement, as well as in separate terms agreed to by each state, to give legislatures and governors wide latitude. The money can, for example, be counted as a “civil penalty” won by the state, and some leaders have argued that states are entitled to the money because the housing crash decimated tax collections.

Shaun Donovan, the federal housing secretary, has been privately urging state officials to spend the money as intended. “Other uses fail to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the settlement to bring real, concerted relief to homeowners and the communities in which they live,” he said Tuesday.

Yeah, Shaun. That ridiculous settlement sure would have changed the lives of all those victimized homeowners and their entire communities overnight. But here's the thing: what goes around, comes around. You force through a joke of a settlement, and guess what? The joke turns out to be on you.

Meanwhile, the Administration is trying to save face by launching an FBI investigation into that mysterious $2 billion ($4 billion? $14 billion?) Whale Fail loss over at mortgage fraudster JPMorgan Chase (one of the Big Five banks slapped on the wrist in the settlement.) The number of people believing there is going to be an actual probe is approximately zero.

* There is a case to be made that banks are literally killing people. Job loss and health insurance loss and home loss caused by the bankster-induced economic crash cut years off lives.  Bank-assisted suicide is another cause of premature death.