Links / Open Thread

Holy Ratched! Chris Hedges likens the two presidential candidates to nasty nurses forcing noxious medicine down our throats in behalf of Austerity Asylum, Inc. He tells us how we are doomed in his uniquely brilliant way -- profound depression is countered with a healthy dose of anger. Like Randle McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" we won't stop fighting until the lobotomizer strikes. From the latest Hedges column:

You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

And tough luck, maybe, for all the disappointed consumers who didn't score the new iPhone before they ran out. The wage slaves at Foxconn have finally had enough and rioted. The Chinese plant has been shut down. A company spokesman said only certain components of the the iPhone were made at the smashed up factory. Maybe the map components that cheerfully misdirect users looking for directions and show crumbling infrastructure instead of shiny new buildings?

Despite what President Obama likes to brag about, the mortgage industry and the banks have not been reined in. Elderly homeowners are being disproportionately foreclosed on by predatory lenders. These are people who have lived in their homes for decades and always worked hard and played by the rules and deserve a fair shot at a better couple of tomorrows. These are the people, the president assured us, that would be helped by his housing program. The question remains -- what housing program?

Voting fraud is a fraud perpetrated by the fraudsters who are backing the Republican candidates. "In a close election" writes Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books, "the Republican plan could call into question the legitimacy of the next president. An election conducted on this basis could lead to turbulence on election day and possibly an extended period of lawsuits contesting the outcome in various states. Bush v. Gore would seem to have been a pleasant summer afternoon. The fact that their party’s nominee is currently stumbling about, his candidacy widely deemed to be in crisis mode, hasn’t lessened their determination to prevent as many Democratic supporters as they can from voting in November."

This begs the question -- if, as Drew writes, the voter ID scandal is "worse than Watergate", where is the Obama Justice Dept? Oh, I forgot. They're busy not prosecuting banksters and defending indefinite detention.

Kinky Campaigning

I think Paul Ryan got me mixed up with an escort service. He is really taking all the press puffery about his buff bod way too seriously. This is what he propositioned me with today:

Mitt and I will be touring the great state of Ohio on Tuesday and we are looking for some company.

Hubba hubba.

The only catch is, I have to let him know by midnight tonight whether I'll be available for the three-way. Do you think the wives know, or care? After all, Ann Romney is the one who petulantly suggested we should all get in the ring, because "this is hard." Should I notify the Obama Truth Squad? The president has pointedly gone out of his way to call Paulie a fine family man, and I would hate to disabuse him of this notion. Moreover, Ryan will still be a useful idiot in Congress once Mitt loses. Assuming, of course, that the progressive running against him (Rob Zerban) loses too. Ryan and his Blue Dog dem buddy Steny Hoyer are already making plans for a Grand Bargain of cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The president has signalled he can't wait till this Kabuki campaign season is over and he can get into some real serious makeout sessions with his frenemies across the aisle.

One more thing about the Ryan email solicitation. It includes two nights in a hotel at an undisclosed "Destination". Uh-oh... in the fine print it says if I am an illegal immigrant, they won't be touching me with a ten foot pole or any size pole. But as long as I have a Green Card, it's all good. How about a Green Party card?

Mayor Shrillionaire Strikes Again

It's really too bad that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not running as a third party presidential spoiler, as had once been threatened. That is because he makes Mitt Romney look like St. Vincent de Paul.

In a parody of an FDR fireside chat, Bloomberg went on the radio yesterday to advise the burgeoning ranks of the destitute to just wait it out. The sun'll come out tomorrow. You can bet your bottom dollar, but not his 25 billion dollars:

You should not be that depressed, we grow out of these things, we have been through these cycles many, many times before zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

"We don't walk away from the poor," Bloomberg intoned.

He can say that again. Bloomberg dares look poverty straight in the eye. Unfortunately, he throws the baby out with the bath water. He helped close down the city's largest charity hospital a few years ago in order to turn the prime real estate into luxury condos for millionaires. You may remember that place. It was named after St. Vincent, patron saint of the poor. He criminalized food stamp applicants by fingerprinting them. And when Gov. Andrew Cuomo nixed that plan, Bloomberg vowed to make hungry people wait even longer by conducting criminal background checks on them. And if they were so unlucky to live in a homeless shelter, he banned food donations from outsiders. The mayor, we know, is concerned about unseemly levels of salt and sugar in the diets of his indigent subjects.

This is why Mike Bloomberg makes Mitt Romney look merely clueless. Mitt is not all that concerned about the very poor and would simply ignore them. Bloomberg is passionately concerned enough to rub their faces in it.

New York is the income disparity capital of America. More than a fifth of its residents now live below the poverty level, while Bloomberg's own wealth has mushroomed by an estimated 800% since he took/bought office over a decade ago. He won 10th place in this year's Forbes 400 plutocratic beauty contest, up two notches from last year.

Just thinkin about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow. Win the Future. Forward. Yes We Can. Just Stick Out Your Chin and Grin. No War but the Class War. Eat the Rich.

i-phone irony

If the sight the other day of global throngs of greedy humanity lining up to grab the latest i-Phone have you feeling disheartened, take a little subversive comfort. The very first consumer in the Big Apple to score the latest Apple gadget also happens to be the inventor of an app that lets people who still cherish their privacy anonymously send messages to their fellow human beings. Big Brother will still be watching you, but he won't be able to track you down to serve you a subpoena.

Capitalism, meet Occupy.

Hazem Sayed invented the Vibe app in March 2011 after observing one of those pre-Occupy marches on Wall Street that got zero corporate media attention even though thousands of protesters attended. So it's nice to know that while he is helping make an obscenely wealthy outsourcing corporation even richer, he is also doing his bit to fight obscene wealth and social injustice. Twitter does not work well for demonstrators, since prosecutors have successfully been able to wrest the IDs of users from the company. Even though the Vibe app is not encrypted and police can easily monitor communications, anonymity is preserved. At the height of the Occupy protests last year, more than 1000 messages a day were broadcast using Vibe. Sayed was there with his iPad and a projector to magnify all the messages on walls for everybody to see.

Sayed had waited in line for days to purchase the i-Phone 5 at a cost of about $800. As the first person to possess the latest piece of electronic gadgetry, he was immediately declared celebrity du jour and thronged by reporters. The crowd roared every time a new person emerged clutching the piece of plastic made for relative pennies at various Asian sweatshops.

You'll be happy to know that no arrests were made during the relentless march of commerce. Free speech was protected, happiness was pursued, as millions of dollars flowed.

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iNSANITY

The False Equivalency Blues

Everybody's getting all bent out of shape from the latest eruption of false equivalency. In the wake of the Mitt Romney odium, conservatives like Ross Douthat can't resist tying Mitt's remarks to those of then-candidate Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008.  Rust Belt types of folks, Obama had been recorded saying, are bitter clingers to their guns and religion. The critics are right -- this particular comparison is false equivalency, because Obama tempered his remarks with a modicum of sympathy for the poor and downtrodden of Swing States, USA. Unlike Mitt. Well, we all know what a crass, clueless, "inelegant" guy he is.

For a better example of how both men hold the hoi polloi in utter contempt for the purposes of point-scoring with their wealthy donors, here's a gem from a 2010 $30,000-a-plate Obama fundraiser held at the home of banking and real estate tycoon Richard Richman in tony Greenwich, CT. Said the President:

Now, the second reason I'm telling you this is because Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)

Those remarks, dissing his own base as genetically disenfranchised malcontents, were officially released by the White House! So I guess Romney doesn't hold exclusive title to cluelessness, after all. Of course, what Obama later individually told the VIPs at the fundraiser, we will never know. His minions make them check their recording devices at the door, just in case.

The point is that both Romney and Obama suck up to thin-skinned Richie Riches (literally.) They persuade them to open up their wallets by appealing to their snobbishness. Romney used the half of the population which receives some sort of government assistance to make the thin-skinned elites feel superior. Obama makes fun of his own uninsured, bank-victimized, anti-war supporters, making the coddled elites feel superior. The pragmatist kids are so much cooler than those purist nerds, dontcha know.

The true equivalency is in the pandering for elite weighted votes, and the snob appeal. These candidates are not really all that far apart. One of them just happens to be a lot more talented in charm offensive and tasteful contemptuousness. 

We Are Deeply Offended

The royal British bosom is almost getting out-trended by the royal American boob commonly known as Moochie Mitt. He is managing to offend whole swaths of the population today, thanks to that viral video that has him accusing Obama voters of being moochers. Even staid columnist David Brooks is faux-fended. Actually, Brooks is miffed that Mitt finally got caught voicing the derision with which the upper crust holds the rest of us. It is always better for Republicans to speak in code to get their points across. Such as, always refer to the common folk as being "trapped in the culture of dependency" when what you really mean is why can't the wastrels just all die, already.

What with all the recent bad press about an upstart judge slapping him down over his unconstitutional detention policies, President Obama must be breathing a huge sigh of relief today, now that Mitt is grabbing more than his fair share of negative attention. Obama fans are gloating with outrage over the Inept Evil that is Mitt Romney. I love how some of them are fighting back against the slander. Rather than expressing annoyance that Mitt is unfairly castigating the poor and the downtrodden, they're miffed that Mitt is accusing them of being the poor and downtrodden. These people belong to the well-heeled, upper middle class subset of the Obama demographic. It's reverse snobbism. "All of the people I know who are voting for our president are professionals with excellent incomes," sniffed one Times commenter. Harrumph.

They were also incensed at another Times article outlining how President Obama is callously denying health coverage to the young "Dreamers" recently bestowed with deferred prosecution by His Coolness in order to get out the Hispanic Vote. It turns out that just because he's letting young Latino folks stay here till after he's safely re-elected doesn't mean he wants them to be health care moochers, too. The White House has decided that even though they're allowed to stay, they're still here illegally. His Royal Parse-imony has spoken. From Robert Pear's article:

Immigrants granted such relief would ordinarily meet the definition of “lawfully present” residents, making them eligible for government subsidies to buy private insurance, a central part of the new health care law. But the administration issued a rule in late August that specifically excluded the young immigrants from the definition of “lawfully present.”

At the same time, in a letter to state health officials, the administration said that young immigrants granted a reprieve from deportation “shall not be eligible” for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Administration officials said they viewed the immigration initiative and health coverage as separate matters.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in the Federal Register that the reasons offered for the immigration initiative “do not pertain to eligibility for Medicaid,” the children’s health program or federal subsidies for buying private health insurance.

Pear tells the story of a young Dream Act candidate named Ricardo Campos who will not qualify for coverage under the Affordable Care Act for ongoing cancer treatments while he's here attending college. Immigration rights organizations are appalled that President Obama is denying health coverage to the same young people he so recently praised.

But here's a sampling of the most highly recommended reader comments from some of the same liberal Obama supporters who are shocked and appalled at Romney's lack of compassion:

The fact is, these "children" are STILL ILLEGAL ALIENS. Obama's policy change doesn't change that. They're still deportable and still don't have a route to legal status that they didn't have before. They are NOT members of this society--their parents and then they saw to that by avoiding the routes to become legal members of this society. (Ali, Michigan)

If a young immigrant is taking advantage of our President's compassion by not pursuing a legal citizenship, I do not believe they also deserve their health care wholly subsidized by the federal government. Let them become a citizen before they gain that advantage. (Jeff T., Portland ME)

By the way, Mr. Campos has still spent more than half of his life in his home country, the formative early years at that. He had only been here 7 years when at age 18 he made his own decision to remain here illegally. (Ali again, echoing the conservative "self-deport" mantra.)

But then there's this snippet of truth, from Mookie of Brooklyn:

Here is the real Obama. He's all for unions until Wisconsin happens or the Chicago teachers go on strike -- then he's nowhere to be found.

He offers young illegals a chance to stay in the US then denies them benefits.

This President who loves the sound of his own voice is once again silent when it comes to taking a clear stand on an issue.

Incidentally, don't count on a viral video or audio surfacing of President Obama sucking up to rich people. His campaign wisely confiscates cell phones and other recording devices at the fund-raising door. What happens in Jay-Z's bar tonight will stay in Jay-Z's bar.

Happy Birthday, Occupy

The theme today is Resistance. It's being practiced in New York City, as Occupiers have retaken Zuccotti Park and planned to form a human wall around the Stock Exchange.  It's being practiced in Chicago, where teachers are refusing to rubber-stamp a contract without having a chance to read it first. It's being practiced in Spain and Portugal, where thousands of people have rallied against the austerity being dictated to them by the very same financial cabal that destroyed the economy in the first place. It's being practiced in the streets of the West Bank where crowds of people are protesting the high cost of living in a region where the average wages are only $500 a month. And people in scores of Muslim countries have finally had it with the exceptional states of America's puppet regimes and occupations and drone strikes and military bases. And oh yeah, with cheesy movies dissing their religion.  

If there is one country on the planet where people aren't fighting oppression today, I wish somebody would tell me where it is. It's as though everybody suddenly woke up at the same moment in time and realized they'd finally had enough.

Quite a few experts in government and media appear to be in shock that these resistance movements have not met their official expectations and quietly caved. The paramilitary police forces broke up the Occupy camps but they didn't break human spirits. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has just found out that Chicago teachers are willing to keep schools shut a few more days in order to prevent him from closing down hundreds of them forever. His nefarious plan to privatize education and enrich his cronies has been exposed for the world to see.

The global upswelling of outrage is continuing. The contagion of mass revolts, first made apparent in modern times with the Arab Spring and later with the Occupy movement one year ago, appears to be entering yet another phase. As Cornell University historian Ziad Fahmy puts it in a DiscoveryNews piece, each new revolt provides a template for the possible, and chips away at the fear people might have had of speaking up and taking to the streets.

"When people are oppressed," he says, "they will revolt."