A Confederation of Muppets

The dueling duopolists of the presidential pageant are creating and fund-raising off yet another phony wedge issue. They are so desperate to take our minds off the fact that participatory democracy is a mere illusion that they're not even bothering to be original this time. It's the Second Coming of Big Bird in only one campaign season! Republicans have been threatening to de-fund PBS since time immemorial, and it's always been an empty threat by posturing phony deficit hawks. But starting today, the latest skirmish in The Wars of Sesame Street has been officially been declared. So pick a side, and let the bloody battle begin.

Suddenly jolted into action by a cacophony of Tweets after his lackluster debate performance, President Obama voiced his indignation about the loathsome Mitt before a crowd in Colorado today. Mitt, he trilled, is the anti-Muppet. Mitt wants to privatize Bert and Ernie's Medicare! (Barry will chain their Social Security cost of living increases and make them work till they drop, but that's another story.)

Now that the well has run dry on their Rush Limbaugh-enabled War Against Women defense fund, Democrats are wasting no time with the email appeals to feather their nests with the lucrative golden plumage of Big Bird. (Did you ever notice how they always have to coyly hide asking for money behind a phony petition? Just Say No to Republican vaginal wands and gimme gimme gimme.)

Sen. Jeff Merkley wrote me today, not noticing or caring that my New York locale is 3000 miles, as the bird flies, away from his Oregonian flock.

Not on our watch! Sign my petition, and tell Mitt Romney: No Ads on Sesame Street!.... My kids watched Sesame Street growing up. Like many Americans – including Mitt Romney - I’m a huge Big Bird fan. But America's children need quality, educational, advertising-free television. For 43 years, Sesame Street has led the way for our kids. Putting commercial advertising on Sesame Street won't make any difference in our national debt, and just hurts our kids. For Big Bird, Jeff.

Yeah, right. Maybe if the Democrats go all pro-Sesame Street, we'll forget that they're totally run by Wall Street. We'll forget that they screwed Main Street. It's no coincidence, after all, that the crooks at Goldman Sachs refer to their prey as Muppets. In banking circles, it's a pejorative term for easily cheated stupid people.

Next time you get a fund-raising appeal from a needy politician professing a smarmy attachment to Snuffleupagus, write back. Disabuse them of the notion that we are a Confederation of Dunces, and just tell them to stuff it upagus.

Tell Politicians: No Money from Wall Street

Battle of the Blahs

All I can say about last night's debate is that this is what happens when two right-wingers run against each other. If you're a Democrat, you knew you were in trouble when your guy's opponent actually started attacking him from the left.

Your heart sank when Mitt Romney suggested that the too-big-to-fail banks should have been broken up, and you realized your bank-friendly President doesn't have a leg to stand on. You collapsed in a heap when Barry bragged that his great insurance company giveaway of a health plan was not only copied and pasted from a conservative think tank, but that his severely conservative opponent beat him to the punch on it. You had to have shaken your head in wonder as these two Wall Street flacks argued about who likes Simpson-Bowles better, and how the whole discussion revolved around how both of them want to make us suffer. Mitt will do it fast and Obama will do it slow -- but do us they both will, with a vengeance. And the president was the one who uttered the word "deficit" first. He was probably proclaiming victory in his own head on that coup alone. It's what passes for a zinger in his world. That, and "Eat your peas."

I am enjoying the shocked liberal handwringing this morning almost as much as I took a grim pleasure in last night's debate. Romney was a big bad lying bully! Lehrer is senile and let the night slip out of his control. Obama was too nice, too professorial, too tired, too aloof. Or, he was just playing rope-a-dope, 11-dimensional chess, leading from behind. He did not want to come across as an "angry black man" in the wake of that just-unearthed old video of him speaking in a really awful imitation of Angry Black Preacher. Outside of election season, we've heard the same litany of disappointment from the phony liberal class every time the president supposedly "caves" to sheer, overwhelming Republican nastiness.

I channel surfed for a few minutes after the ordeal was finally over. The deflated crew over at MSNBC were a sight to behold. Chris Matthews' hair was literally standing on end. They expressed disappointment that the president had not even been watching his own channel to discover how to blast Mitt into oblivion.

I look at it this way. Obama approached this debate the same way he apparently negotiates. He is bipartisan all the way. He is more interested in reaching a consensus than he is fighting for the people who elected him to represent their interests. He loves to agree for the sake of agreement. He is a conservative disguised as a Democrat, and he isn't much trying to pretend otherwise any more. He didn't fight for himself last night, and he certainly didn't put up a fight for the people who are needlessly suffering every single day.

There was not one word about the crisis of unemployment and what, if anything, he plans to do about it in a second term. Just a lot of more of the same.... reaching across the aisle and to be seen as caring.

I'll leave the fact-checking to others, though suffice it to say that in this particular Comedy of Errors, Mitt did the committing and Barry did the omitting. And is it me, or did both these guys look like they were on drugs? Mitt was definitely hopped up on something, barely able to contain himself behind the podium. Lots of twitching, grimacing and muted seizure-like movements. At one point near the end he actually wiped his runny nose. So my guess is a big snort of coke before taking the stage. Barry was not only a downer, he was on downers. I diagnosed a couple of Ativan washed down with some of that designer White House home brew and a too-heavy meal.

Like the old Fred Astaire song says, too many people were building up to an awful letdown last night. Obama's defeat on the stage of manufactured democracy is nothing like the defeat the rest of us are in for in this coming season of Austerity, when the rich get richer and the poor get screwed.

Poor old Humpty Dumpty,
He got the toughest break,
And yet his fall
Was nothing at all
Like the tumble I'm gonna take!

I'm building up to an awful letdown
By playing around with you.
You're breaking down my terrific buildup
By treating me as you do.

My castles in the air,
My smile so debonair,
My one big love affair,
Is just a flash;
Will it go smash
Like the nineteen twenty nine market crash?

(The transcript of the debate which the real progressives were permitted to speak is now available here.)

Ball of Confusion

It's a truth almost universally acknowledged that since 9/11, the USA has been rapidly disintegrating into the Orwellian nation of Oceania. But it's also true that while vast swaths of data are being collected and stored on every man, woman and child on the planet, they're not serving any earthly purpose except as junk food for the insatiable maw of the Department of Homeland Security. (DHS)

Those DHS "fusion centers" are bastions of delusion sinking under the weight of their own bureacratic excess. Like the old Temptations' protest song, our spy state is just one great big Ball of Confusion. I have been saying for awhile now that as they're frantically scouring cyberspace for every last bit of information on us, they still don't know what in hell to do with it. I'd suggested copying all million pages of Remembrance of Things Past in a chain email to thousands of our closest friends just to punk them and keep them busy in their thousands upon thousands of DHS cubicles. The Fusionistas seem like an illiterate lot, with reports neglecting to include even the Basic Five: who, what, when, where and why. The average training period before they get to work culling our emails and Tweets? One whole week. I mean, we knew the government was in a race to the bottom vis a vis education, but this is de trop.

A Senate subcommittee finally did come out with a report today confirming what we already knew: while the spy state is shredding our civil liberties, the information they're coming up with is truly shredder-worthy itself. James Risen of the New York Times writes:

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation

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Even worse, DHS has "lost" more than $1 billion and even outright lied about the very existence of certain fusion centers. They're called fusion centers because they are supposed to link federal resources with local police agencies. The centers have been implicated in the coordinated national crackdown against Occupy camps last year. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information law revealed

....that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression.

DHS tried to cover its tracks over its anti-Occupy activities, which were patently illegal. The Fusion Center employees, funnily enough, had obtained most of their information on the Occupy camps from public records and blogs. They were copy-and-pasting plagiarizers as well as spies! Risen recounts several other incidents of DHS incompetence in his Times piece. They range from the comical to the bizarre to the downright frightening. One example:

Last November.... an Illinois center reported that Russian hackers had broken into the computer system of a local water district in Springfield and sent computer commands that triggered a water pump to burn out. But it turned out that a repair technician had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while he was on vacation in Russia.

Homeland, Homeland Uber Alles is being run by a gang that can't straight-talk, let alone shoot straight.

Occupy the Debates

I know you're all champing at the bit in anticipation of Debate Night this week. How many pre-approved fake spontaneous retorts will erupt from the mealy mouth of Mitt? Just how carefully is Barack Obama being trained to suppress his million-dollar grin as a charm-offensive prelude to every non-answer to every softball question?

Since the trio of presidential Q&As (they're not really debates at all) are privately planned and funded by the exclusive Commission on Presidential Debates, only the two apparatchiks of the Duopoly will be allowed to participate. There will be no Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, Virgil Goode and Gary Johnson in attendance to rock the leaky ship of state. It's unlikely that the questions most people have on their minds will even be asked.

So to give you the illusion of a participatory democracy, Occupy the Debates.org has a website that does allow you to ask those questions and generally kvetch. You can take a survey about pressing issues. Find out how you can get on Mutiny Radio to rebut the buttheads. There truly are ways to cope with the blatherfests other than drinking and doping and tuning out. It cannot be merely coincidence that our friendly DEA designated this past Saturday as "Get Rid of Your Prescription Drugs Day". As Molly Ivins so wisely said, satire is a deadly weapon when used against those in power.

The League of Women Voters, you may remember, used to run the presidential debates. But that all ended during the 1988 Bush I-Dukakis race, in which those particular duopolists reached a "gentleman's agreement" to throw democracy out the window. They demanded control over the stenographers asking the questions and the height of podiums as well as a new rule making it impossible for third party candidates to share the stage. The League refused to go along and thus was born the corporate Commissariat on Presidential Debates.(CPD)

To give you an idea of how contrived Debate Theatre is, the New York Times ran a puff piece in its Sunday Review section profiling the CPD's executive director, DC socialite Janet Brown. As the candidates over-prepare for their roles in the optical illusion, Ms. Brown is concentrating solely on the optics:

Lately it’s mostly debate set diagrams, which are more like architectural renderings than anything else. They describe the sets, where the candidates are positioned, where the moderator sits, where the eight cameras are placed. They are very detailed and specific in terms of dimensions, the lighting grid and camera placement for exact coverage and clarity of the candidates.

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We also get the earthshaking scoop that Janet Brown adores Marvin Hamlisch tunes (she and hubby Michael Brewer, former Harvard VP, former Wall Street executive, venture capitalist, president of the National Symphony Orchestra, knew him personally!) and eating littleneck clams and Oreo milkshakes, but not together. The Times kindly provides us with a link to the restaurant where the elites get their eats.

And that's about all we unwashed masses apparently need to know, as far as The Times is concerned. But my further research reveals that Janet Brown's Washington socialite mother was the model for a Jeffrey Archer novel. She was not only a member of Nelson Rockefeller's inner circle, she became even more fabulously wealthy marketing a product that resulted from the experimental dipping of her brittle manicured fingers into a concoction of preserved fruit. Those maligned nails ladies made famous by a snobbish attendee at a Romney Hamptons fundraiser could very well be using product invented by the ancestress of the directress of Presidential Propaganda Theatre, Inc.!

Still hoping there will be a lively discussion on the class war and the evils of free market capitalism Wednesday night, or any night? Think again. Just keep track of all the "My Name is Beavis and I'm An Energy Voter" pro-fracking/drilling ads paying for the propaganda, and you'll soon get the drift... the drift to the Far Right. The only cliff we have to fear is the the make-believe cliff where all hope teeters and tumbles down to oblivion.

** Update: The CPD is still mum on the exact terms of the contract Rombama hammered out to ensure each side looks good and remains protected from all scrutiny. A few advertisers have even decided to boycott the event in protest of its anti-democracy format.

Blaming the Victims

Little more than a month before Election Day, Barack Obama today played yet another off-key rendition of Ronald Reagan's Welfare Queen Concerto. Crooning the tired old refrain of "Blame the Victims", he has feebly serenaded the ignored and still-ongoing American housing crisis.

While Mitt Romney is a ham-handed plutocrat stupid enough to shrill his hatred for the underclass in an unsecured fund-raiser, Barack Obama is more deftly circumspect in his disdain for poor people. Instead of placing the blame for the housing mess squarely where it belongs -- on the too big to fail banks and the complicity of his own administration and past administrations -- Obama spreads the guilt around like thin centrist gruel, ascribing it equally to fraud conspirators and banking thieves, lenders, borrowers and property flippers -- carefully dog-whistling to his backers his wink-nod belief in those largely mythical hordes of greedy, low/no-income, speculating McMansion addicts who went on an orgiastic binge of home-buying. Never once does he mention that even qualified buyers often had subprime adjustable rate loans foisted on them. Never once does he mention the Clinton-era enactment of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which turned banks into unregulated gambling casinos. Mr. Clinton, after all, just gave the current president a huge bump in the polls. So let's just shove that little inconvenient factoid down the memory hole, shall we?

From Obama's address:

Millions of Americans who did the right and responsible thing – who shopped for a home, secured a mortgage they could afford, and made their payments on time – were badly hurt by the irresponsible actions of others. By lenders who sold loans to families who couldn’t afford them – and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. By speculators who were looking to make a quick buck. And by banks that packaged and sold those risky mortgages for phony profits.

When the party stopped, and the housing bubble burst, it pushed our entire economy into a historic recession – and left middle-class families holding the bag.

He then went on to the tout that sham of a Mortgage Fraud Task Force headed up by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, with its bank-friendly settlement that did not include one single criminal subpoena. And since "Congress" (including his own party)has selfishly gone on vacation, it's all their fault for not acting on his tepid legislation to help "responsible" homeowners in his voting demographic to save a few grand on their mortgage payments.

The latest Obama address is simply a classier, toned-down version of the infamous Rick Santelli rant of 2009 before the Chicago Board of Trade. That's the speech that blamed unqualified (read minority) people for the whole meltdown and launched the corporate Tea Party movement. Only a small fraction of the billions of dollars in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money set aside for struggling homeowners was ever disbursed by the Obama Administration in the wake of pushback against the White House. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general of TARP, subsequently revealed that HAMP was simply a ploy to "foam the runway" to benefit the banks, spreading out foreclosures more evenly so as not to endanger Wall Street's bottom line.

From the transcript of the Santelli rant(or more likely, plant):

How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand. (traders boo; Santelli turns around to face CNBC camera) President Obama, are you listening? (Trader goes to Santelli's mike and suggests "how about we all stop paying our mortgage? It's a moral hazard.")

Santelli's words must have never stopped ringing in our conservative president's head. Obama seems never to miss an opportunity to slam the victims of predatory lenders in the same breath that he pretends to slap the wrists of predatory criminal banksters. He implies that the subprime borrowers are sub-"middle class". He subtly uses the typical right wing ploy of pitting the lazy Takers against the hard-working Makers, when the real war is of the top .01% against the rest of us. It seems that the Occupy-inspired theme of gross wealth inequality no longer holds much attraction for the current occupant of the Oval Office. After all, he is pretty much running unopposed. The only mystery is why he is still only ahead by a relatively few percentage points.

This ongoing "blame the victim" mentality has a racist as well as classist origin. The prime targets of predatory subprime mortgage lending have been poor black and Hispanic people -- the "irresponsible" demographic of the president's self-serving phony centrist radio address.

President Obama himself is a master of the false equivalence he and his supporters so passionately declaim. In his centrist world, Goldman Sachs and the poor slobs who signed fraudulent documents on the dotted line and were kicked to the curb when the payment came due are equally guilty complicit partners in crime. The only blameless players reside in the increasingly dwindling monied burbs -- those fine folks who never lost a job, never missed a mortgage payment, never had to declare bankruptcy because of an illness or uninsured emergency room visit.

Obama is setting the stage for the Age of Austerity, in which unnecessary sacrifice is foisted upon the poor, and the rich may temporarily have to forgo a tax loophole or two to make everything seem even-steven. This is what our president means by a fair shot at a fair share, and everybody playing by the same rules.

Diet for Your Country

The Global War on Terror cannot be effectively fought with our young people becoming too globular themselves. Corpulent Millennials just end up bloating the corporate defense budget. Fat people can't fight.

So, the military industrial complex has a message for all you critics of government programs which fight childhood obesity. Forget about the terrible toll that a bad diet is taking on our increasingly impoverished population. We get that you don't care about people living longer, healthier lives just for the sake of living longer, healthier lives. But have you ever stopped to think about the awful truth that our young people are becoming too fat to keep the plutocracy safe and secure?

"Still Too Fat to Fight" is the title of a chilling new report funded by a mish-mash of health care think tanks and defense/homeland security contractors called Mission Readiness. It is apparently a follow-up to that other blockbuster called "Too Fat to Fight" which I had somehow missed. And in keeping with the current fad of blaming public schools for everything that is wrong with our society, the military mavens are putting the onus of obesity right on the public school system.

One in four Americans of military age is now too fat to join up, moan the generals and the admirals. And combined with poor education and crime, that means a whopping 75% are totally unqualified to fight and die for the oligarchy! From the report:

Finding ways to reverse our epidemic of obesity is crucial because the U.S. Department of Defense alone spends an estimated $1 billion per year for medical care associated with weight-related health problems.In a dramatic move to address this problem, the military is bringing healthier foods to its schools, dining facilities, and vending machines, but it cannotwin this fight alone. The civilian sector needs to do its part.

Look at this way, the bigwigs continue. If you counted up all the calories these kids consume and converted them into candy bars, the sweets would weigh more than the aircraft carrier Midway! Without a lean mean fighting machine, our ship of state will sink from the excess weight. Our progeny will have become a sorry nation of Colonel Blimps.

The report also inadvertently acknowledges that our economic recession has actually been a good thing when it comes to desperate unemployed young people joining up as a last resort. And OMG, what'll happen if and when times get better? Who will fight our forever wars then?

The childhood obesity epidemic is still threatening our national security. In fact, the rate of obesity is still climbing among boys age 12 to 19 years. When the impact of the recession is over and fewer people seek to join the military,or if America is drawn into a new conflict, our military could again have trouble finding a sufficient number of well educated recruits without serious criminal backgrounds, or
excess body fat. Even among those who can be admitted, if they are physically unfit from a lifetime of nutritionally weak diets and lack of exercise, they will be more prone to injuries.

The Pentagon retirees urge Congress not to dismantle public education and defund the free healthy meal programs for our impoverished youth. We need to keep them healthy enough to lose their limbs. We need them healthy enough to lose their minds. We need them physically fit so that when they die they can fit more easily into our assembly line of coffins.

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.