Austerians at the Gate

You could tell the fix was in just by the way Martha Raddatz phrased her question at the creepy veepy debate last night:

MS. RADDATZ: Let’s talk about Medicare and entitlements.

Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive, Mr. Ryan?

Social Security is not an entitlement and it's not going broke. It has not contributed one penny to the almighty deficit. It's not part of the United States budget. But Beltway insider Martha Raddatz blithely made that assumption in her question. And she is being universally lauded this morning for being the bold, hard-hitting journo who was not Jim Lehrer.

Paul Ryan predictably took the cue and waxed orgasmic with her leading question:

Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts. We've all had tragedies in our lives. My mother and grandmother blah blah blah sob blah whine slurps water blah.

And then Joe Biden did his lesser-evil part and promised he'd never turn the national retirement insurance fund directly over to Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon. So everybody breathed a huge sigh of relief. But did Joe repeat his full-throated promise of just a few short weeks ago that he'd never lay on finger on Social Security? He most certainly did not:

And with regard to Social Security, we will not -- we will not privatize it. If we had listened to Romney, to Governor Romney and the congressman during the Bush years, imagine where all those seniors would be now if their money had been in the market.

That's it. Not a word about not raising the retirement age to 68 or 70, thereby reducing lifetime benefits. No promises not to tinker with the cost of living formula and thereby reducing lifetime benefits. Nothing about means-testing the program, which would give truth to the lie that Social Security is an entitlement/welfare program. Did you notice how he stammered slightly after "we will not"? This is a guy who'd obviously gotten his marching orders from his boss.

Remember, it was only a few months ago when Joe wandered into a restaurant and a regular person buttonholed him on Social Security. The veep's famous words:

Hey, by the way, let’s talk about Social Security. Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

Biden was immediately taken to task for his "pandering" by The Washington Post editorial board, which gets it marching orders from the White House. Biden's "gaffe" made it that much more difficult for Obama to tweak the program later. It had temporarily endangered the president's legacy as the Democrat who renounced FDR and made history by dismantling of the New Deal.

It was apparent last night that grinning folksy Joe Biden had suddenly seen the light and is on the merry road to right-wing austerity with the rest of the Democratic gang. Three weeks before the Election, and the Democrats are refusing to take Social Security off the table. They're hoping the liberal class won't notice. And so far they're successful, thanks to the rank extremism of Romney and Ryan.

The Republicans will stab you in the aorta without anesthesia, and the Democrats will wait till you're napping, sneak into your room and slowly phlebotomize you. The choice the Duopoly is presenting you with is this: instant exsanguination, or insidious anemia. Either way, you'll never know what hit you. You can die quickly, or you can turn 75 and realize you no longer have enough to eat. Drip, drip, drip.

The Plutocrat-Assisted Suicide Cult

It's bad enough that the titans of finance got away scot free after tanking the economy and wiping out trillions of dollars in household wealth. It's bad enough that real unemployment is still close to 20%, one five Americans lives in poverty, 50 million of us have no access to medical care and Republicans and Democrats alike are waging war on unionized labor and public schools.

At least the odious Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons and Business Roundtables of the world used to work behind the scenes as their lobbyists wrote the laws and bribed the politicians. No more. The oligarchs are right out there in the open. They own the United States of America. They're saying it loud and they're saying it proud.
Taking the Koch Brothers' co-optation of the Tea Party movement a giant leap forward, they are urging all us proles to go marching in the streets in their behalf, in the name of populist debt reduction.

I am not kidding. The CEOs of America are blatantly conducting power-point presentations in the workplaces of America, pressuring their wage slaves to voluntarily cut their own social safety nets. They are engaging us in a campaign of corporate-assisted suicide. They are urging us to become direct parties to our own destruction.

You may have heard their rallying cry buzzword from President Obama himself. They're euphemistically calling it "economic patriotism." Basically it means you should whip yourself into a nationalistic fervor to ease the pain of your decline.

Via the Progressive Change Campaign Committee comes word of the astroturf Campaign to Fix the Debt, run by Catfood Commissioners Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and funded by billionaire capitalist Pete Peterson:

To pass this unpopular plan, Simpson and Bowles have amassed a massive $25 million war chest. As the Huffington Post just reported, it is likely that the group is being funded by the right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson; its steering committee includes billionaire CEOs like Honeywell’s Dave Cote.

If you sign up as a volunteer for the group, you’ll be e-mailed a “toolkit” that you’re supposed to use to engage in pro-austerity activism on behalf of the billionaires who run the group.

One of the instructions in the tool kit is to “bird dog” campaign events and town halls that feature Members of Congress.

To give you an idea of their idea of a balanced approach, David Cote has suggested raising the retirement age to 75 and doing away with corporate taxes altogether. Since billionaires like him are living longer, laborers and nurses should work an extra ten years. (Cote is an Obama pal and another member of his Catfood Commission.)

If you were still wondering why the president mentioned at the debate that he and Mitt Romney have similar ideas on Social Security, it's because they really do have similar ideas on Social Security. Alan Simpson also helps run the Commission on Presidential Debates and he is making sure the presidential candidates are cool with cutting the retirement program. As a matter of fact, the plutocrats were crowing with glee on their own website that both Romney and Obama fell into line during the debate. It is so, so cool to have bipartisan support in the campaign to fool the muppets into slitting their own wrists!

Something remarkable happened Wednesday night in the first Presidential Debate:

The candidates actually started discussing their plans for how they will bring down our deficits and deal with our debt!

We didn’t get an entire debate about the debt as we’d asked, but the major focus of the evening was on our most important fiscal issues – and that’s a major victory.

It means they’re hearing us!

Something really special is happening as this movement grows. Ten days ago we said our goal was to get 250,000 signers of the Citizen’s Petition to Fix the Debt, and we’ve already reached that goal. That’s more than 100,000 in only a matter of days!

We also saw something pretty incredible start to happen last night in Denver where the debates were taking place: local citizens took photos of themselves holding a tin can with the word of something that mattered to them – like healthcare or education – imploring our leaders in Washington:

“DON’T KICK MY CAN DOWN THE ROAD.”

It was so cool. And it’s something we can all do. So, to get started, we’ve added a new section of our website to make it easy for you to look your representatives in the eye and tell them why we care about fixing the debt. Simply visit this “Why I Care” page, and upload your photo.

The only thing that prevented President Obama from successfully completing his Grand Bargain last summer was the recalcitrance of the Tea Party and Grover Norquist. So now, billionaires like Lloyd Blankfein are getting directly involved, hoping to give their Congressional puppets needed cover in the Billionaires' Bipartisan Battle for Balance. From today's Politico:

While many on the Hill are skeptical that even the clout of the Wall Street could force a deal, optimists believe that the outside help would pressure lawmakers to sign onto a deal, or at least to give them political cover if they do. The logic: If business says a deal will help jump-start the economy, how could Congress and the president be against it?

“I just think that if we’re going to end up in a place where we’re actually going to be able to compromise, move off their positions and get to a comprehensive deal, we’re going to need external forces that are helping us do that,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), one of the so-called Gang of 8 senators who have been working for more than a year to fashion a deficit-reduction compromise. “The business community is one of those groups that we’ve got to get involved, and there are lots of other groups as well.”

But he stopped short of predicting New York money would make a difference. “Hope so,” he said.

If there is any consolation to be gleaned from all of this, it's that mainstream outlets are actually covering the fascist coup in all of its glaring corruption.

Capitol Hill is turning into Hemlock Hill. But we must not go quietly into that good night.

Update: And Big Bird refuses to be co-opted by either of these phony candidates. Sesame Street has demanded that Obama pull the campaign ad touting his fake populism. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the ad uses crooks prosecuted under the Bush regime as examples. Lloyd Blankfein not only will not be prosecuted, he's running the show.

Panhandlers for Romney

Mitt Romney will give you money. You don't even have to ask. If he sees you on the street and your hand is outstretched, he will put cash into it. He said so himself. Watch this clip of a 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial debate. About 50 minutes in, he'll tell you about his one-man campaign of charitable giving.

If you don't feel like looking at his smirky face any more, here's the quote: "I made a commitment when I was 19 years old that I would not pass a person with their hand out without putting money in that hand. This is something I continue to do."

Mind you, this was 10 years ago, before Romney became a household name... specifically, that dark part of your household under the sink, or wherever your toxic cleaning products and insecticides are stored. And despite the humblebragging, he still managed to show his true colors by whining that he couldn't deduct his charitable donations on his state income tax returns.

What I found intriguing was that Jill Stein was talking about income disparity, "the one percent" of elites hoarding all the wealth, the class war, and a living wage a whole decade ago, long before the Crash of '08 and the Occupy movement brought the topics into the national lexicon.

Stein, the current Green Party candidate for president (and three other women candidates) were pitted against Romney, who ultimately won the office. I wanted to watch the clip, because the private corporatized Commission of Presidential Debates of course has barred her and other candidates from participation. The state debate was lively, yet civil, and extremely well-moderated. More than two people on the stage tends to discourage any one person from being rude and boorish, lest the incipient bully in turn become the bullied.

Meanwhile, if you're short on cash you have only one more month to head for the Romney rope lines. Stretch out your hands, palms up. Stretch early, stretch often.

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

.

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.

.

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.