Obama's Other Kill List

As some of us* are still trying to get our heads around the shocking news that the president has added the title "Lord High Executioner" to his list of accomplishments, let's not forget that a) this policy is only news if the New York Times is your only source of info; and b) there are plenty of other ways that the neo-lib/neo-con White House team is killing us softly, stealthily and with nary a blink from the chattering class.

In the frenzied presidential TV show known as RomBama, we have two right-of-center corporatists trying to cancel each other out by neutering each other's conservative machismo. Romney accuses Obama of being a big socialist spender. Obama counters by bragging that he has been the biggest tightwad austerian in presidential history. Romney charges that Obama is a job-killer by virtue of being the biggest anti-business regulating Marxist in the history of the free market. The president disabuses Mitt of that notion, righteously pointing to the inconvenient truth that George Bush pushed through more regulations benefiting public health and well-being than he ever did. 

Why does Barry even bother? Right-wingers just refuse to give him the respect he deserves. The best they could offer on his Secret White House Death Panel controlled leak to the Times stenographers was a stony silence. Donald Trump, though, miraculously started getting unfettered TV time in a resurgence of birtherism and its accompanying manufactured outrage from the shills on MSDNC. 

Instead of championing the rights of the people to breathe clean air and drink clean water, the president is trying to paint himself as every bit as corporation and pollution-friendly as Mitt Romney. So Romney has no choice but to paint himself as a slash-and-burn nihilist, who would dismantle the EPA entirely on Day One. The political one-upmanship gets more gruesome by the day.

And the White House is crying foul over being falsely portrayed as pro-environment and public health when it is no such thing! As Andrew Zajac and Hans Nichols of Bloomberg wrote today:
  

Savings identified thus far include more than $5 billion from loosened reporting requirements for health-care providers, $2.8 billion from changing the labeling and classification of hazardous chemicals, and $1.8 billion from overhauling inspection rules for poultry slaughtering operations.

Many of the regulatory changes have been recommended by business leaders on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Moira Mack, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in an e-mailed statement.

“The Obama administration has aggressively reformed regulatory policy to eliminate unnecessary burdens on America’s families and businesses while utilizing smart rules to protect lives, safety and the environment,” she said.

But the "unnecessary burdens" the president is so proudly and pragmatically removing from the shoulders of all those stressed-out families (read: corporations are indeed people, my friend) are actually killing us every bit as dead as those precise drone strikes aimed against our fellow humans residing in Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Somalia. Just a little more insidiously. The public interest group Center for Progressive Reform is blunt in its assessment:

 For all intents and purposes, the Administration seems to have shut down its regulatory machinery, evidently unwilling to advance significant regulatory initiatives for fear that they could adversely affect the President’s chances of being reelected. Although presidents are typically sensitive about endorsing controversial rules during the summer and fall immediately preceding an election, two aspects of the Obama Administration’s behavior are unusual. First, the Obama Administration’s effective “moratorium” on controversial rules seems to have begun months earlier than it has during past administrations, and in certain notable cases--for example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposals to curb ozone pollution and make coal ash disposal sites safer--took hold as much as a year before the national election. Second, the list of rules bottled up by the Administration’s over-cautiousness includes long-overdue and relatively straightforward proposals--for example, a rule to mandate safe manufacturing practices for infant formula.

The price Americans are paying for the Administration’s unwillingness to proceed apace is high, both in the near and long term. The Administration’s failure to meet its own deadlines on just two of the rules (one regulating toxic air pollution from industrial boilers and process heaters, and the other restricting ozone pollution) will cost an estimated 6,500 to 17,967 premature deaths, 9,867 non-fatal heart attacks, 3,947 cases of chronic bronchitis, and more than 2.3 million lost work and school days. Those are the costs of projected delays the Administration now acknowledges. If the rules fall further behind schedule, the toll imposed by delay will mount. And if the rules are eventually scuttled or significantly weakened, even more people will die prematurely or suffer ill health, and an even greater cost will be imposed on the economy.

You can read the whole CPR report, along with the chilling chart of statistics, here.

Obama apologists don't have a leg to stand on if they try to blame nasty Republicans or a recalcitrant Congress for the president's inaction when it comes to our health and safety. A stroke of his executive pen would put the plans into action. His failure to act can only be the result of pure, self-interested, sleazy politics, notwithstanding the fact that the GOP has tried to starve the regulatory agencies of resources over the years. That "fierce urgency of now" that Candidate Obama trumpeted during his first campaign has morphed into the bland passive aggression of Sometime/Never.

* If you were hoping for a small puff of blowback from the populace over this news, you are doomed to disappointment. Glenn Greenwald explains how extremism has now become normalized. We have lost our capacity to be outraged. We have been shocked and awed into numbed apathy.

The Vigilante President

The New York Times finally got around to revealing today that President Obama has given himself the right to kill people in foreign countries by targeted drone strikes. He and his henchmen apparently get together every week for "Terror Tuesdays" to decide who lives and who dies in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and any number of countries with whom we are not at war. I guess "Manic Mondays" would not have been in keeping with what The Times calls the cool, yet compassionate, way that Obama ultimately decides who will be executed.

From The Times piece:

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.

It's hard out there for a vigilante. Just think how George Zimmerman must have felt when he noticed a black kid in a hoodie walking around his neighborhood. As he noted in his 911 call, "there's a real suspicious guy at Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he's up to no good."

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.