What a Racket

(Saul Loeb, Agence France Presse)

That the political system is corrupt is no longer even up for debate. That the two mainstream presidential candidates are beholden to the plutocracy is a foregone conclusion. That the United States will eventually collapse from its own imperialistic weight is a matter not of if, but of when.
The torrents of daily outrage are cascading so furiously that we can barely even keep track of them. Party tribalism is so rampant that if you're a Romney fan, you psychotically believe his opponent is a socialist. If you're an Obama supporter, there seems to be nothing he can do that will not meet with your cowed, tacit approval. Drone strikes against innocent civilians? That's just your godfather president keeping you safe. Having the Secret Service arrest two third party female candidates and chain them to chairs while your guy champions the rights of women? Never mind all that, as long as your birth control pills are safe. Obama is the presidential John Gotti, the Teflon Don. And Campaign 2012 is starting to look more like a mob war than a presidential battle.

It took an independent labor journalist named Mike Elk to discover a months-old audio of Mitt Romney subtly threatening anti-union bosses to strong-arm their employees into voting for him.... or else. In his New York Times column today, Timothy Egan wrote about the real Romney coming out of the closet at Tuesday night's debate. My response:

Romney just forgot where he was on Tuesday night. He was probably having an oligarchic flashback to that conference call he had with a cadre of so-called small business owners last spring. That was when he gave his consiglieres one of those offers they best not refuse.

"I hope you make it very clear to your employees", he warned, "what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope, I hope you pass those along to your employees."

This guy doesn't want to be president. He wants to be mafia boss. Cajole, threaten, shake down, kneecap, repeat. The photo of him accompanying this article actually does look like a publicity shot for "The Sopranos."

Mitt as mob boss, however, is a ham-handed Tony Soprano-type who likes to off his victims direct and in person and then foolishly brag about it later. Barry, on the other hand, is a more circumspect capofamiglia. He subcontracts his hits out to his underlings and makes sure his Wall Street earners are well-protected by his underbosses in the Justice and Treasury branches of the hierarchy. He throws figurative block parties in the neighborhood, handing out trinkets of gay rights and temporary amnesty for Dreamers and health care for a few sick kids. He flirts with the ladies even as he has his underlings literally kidnap Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, bind them to chairs in a Long Island warehouse, releasing them only when the coast is clear and the fake debate is over.

Oh, and once in awhile people do get collaterally damaged. Shit does happen. To its credit, the New York Times ran an editorial taking both mobsters to task for not caring about assault weapon proliferation in the streets of America. My comment:

Whenever you hear politicians promising that they look forward to having a conversation on an issue, you can rest assured that it will be swept under the rug asap. Ms. Gonzalez is to be commended for asking one of the few questions at the stage-managed debate that was not bland, candidate-friendly and made for boring TV.

You expect a Republican NRA panderer like Romney to obfuscate, but there is no excuse for Mr. Obama, who'd vowed to push for a renewal of the assault weapon ban during his first campaign. What I found particularly off-putting was this remark:

"But there have been too many instances during the course of my presidency, where I've had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, actually, probably about a month, I saw a mother, who I had met at the bedside of her son, who had been shot in that theater.

"And her son had been shot through the head. And we spent some time, and we said a prayer and, remarkably, about two months later, this young man and his mom showed up, and he looked unbelievable, good as new." (page 7, debate transcript.)

It reminded me of the time when Bush blithely comforted maimed Iraq war vets with the promise of "we'll get you some new legs" and then invited them for a round of golf.

Prayers, platitudes, and bromides -- that's all our elected officials offer shooting victims. But what else can you expect in America, the biggest arms dealer the world has ever known?

If you believe the polls, Obama may win the electoral college vote and lose the popular vote, just eking out a victory that is more like a wash. But Mitt
Romney will prevail and be forever protected by the oligarchy. Paul Ryan will continue rising through the ranks, whether it be in Congress, K Street, or Fox. The rubout of democracy will continue, until the peasants and the wage slaves finally and inevitably reach the breaking point. Strikes and pitchforks are looming on the horizon.

Post-Debate Blather

Barack was all jacked up on a variation of his stump speech. Mitt was his usual smirky, stammering, gushing self. For a minute there, I thought these two one percenters were gonna get physical. But sadly, only the platitudes flew fast and furious.

Still, it was edifying to learn that both contenders are such staunch defenders of a tenth of the Bill of Rights (Second Amendment.) We absolutely need more armed militias. The president told a heartwarming story of how one survivor of the Aurora mass shooting who took a bullet to the head is now good as new. You wouldn't even know he'd been shot to look at him today! So it's all good, even though a few unlucky duckies died. Mitt bragged that back in Massachusetts, the AK-47 lovers and the AK-47 haters made nice and compromised. He did not say how, but maybe they split the difference and agreed on AK-23.5's.

Both of them want to deport the foreign gang-bangers made possible by the government's criminally misguided War on Drugs. The undocumented folks who want to stay here may be able to score green cards if they first demonstrate willingness to spill their blood for the sake of American Empire. Mitt said one solution is for them to self-deport, because there sure as hell aren't many opportunities left here.

Barry name-dropped Lily Ledbetter as proof that he likes females. That law he signed, by the way, does not guarantee equal pay for equal work. It guarantees women the right to find out how much more their male co-workers are making compared to them, so they can try and find a pro-bono lawyer to sue in their behalf. Mitt bragged that he used to hire whole "binders-full"of women. He said he is different from George Bush. If elected he will complete the BTK Trifecta of the presidency. Bush tortured, Obama killed, and Mitt will bind. The serial imperial presidency writ large, skewed and disordered.

If you're a Romney fan, then Romney won. Obamabots are just orgasmic that their guy didn't nod off again. Except for the woman who asked about gun control, the questions were soft as a baby's butt, designed to pit the two preapproved duopolists against each other in a way that was vapidly devoid of all meaning. Both the wives wore hot pink, and the pundits pontificated how awwwwkward that was. Awwwwwgh.

Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, the Green Party candidates, were arrested before the debate as they tried to get in. Even though they are on the ballot in 85% of the states, they were barred from participating. The corporatists have decreed that third party candidates have to be polling at least 15% to get invited. And since none of the pollsters include the Green Party in their surveys, the results were preordained. When the Quinnipiac people called me a few weeks ago, for example, asking if I wanted Romney or Obama, I said Jill Stein. And they said she wasn't on the list, so they were putting me down as "undecided". What a democracy.

Pre-Debate Blather

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama may be Harvard Law School grads, but you wouldn't know it based on their abysmal understanding of basic contract law. The two campaigns had signed a "memorandum of understanding" in which they decreed that Candy Crowley's moderation role would be limited to introductions and enforcing time limits. The only problem is, they didn't tell her their rules and she isn't agreeing to them. She's been going around threatening to ask follow-up questions of the candidates if they don't come clean with their citizen-subject inquisitors. And Mitt and Barry are in panic mode over this unprecedented show of journalistic independence.

Both campaigns have now appealed to the corporate-run Commission on Presidential Debates, demanding that Ms. Crowley stick to her preordained role as factotum for the staged travesty. But since you can't sign a contract enforcing conditions on a third party without that party's consent, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. Not that it really matters, of course, when you are running for president. The unitary executive job description has long been exempt from the pesky rule of law. If Candy Crowley asks a tough question on the illegality of targeted assassinations on American citizens, she could be declared a terrorist sympathizer and end up on a presidential kill list. Very theoretically, of course. The law is that dangerously and intentionally vague. A federal judge just ruled as much, before her ruling was overturned by a higher court based on a panic-stricken appeal by the White House.

The two sides did, however, deign to grant Ms. Crowley the power to shut off the microphones of audience questioners if they happen to go off-script from their pre-approved queries. Participants reportedly have been chosen from among undecided Long Islanders as determined by a Gallup poll.

And this whole canard about there being gridlock in Washington based on the insane polarity between the two sides of the Uniparty is just that -- a canard. Bipartisanship is alive and well when it comes to waging forever wars, and protecting the interests of the elites, and keeping the hoi polloi in their places. Here is the joint statement put out by the Rombama and Obamney people:

As stated in the document: “In managing the two-minute comment periods, the moderator will not rephrase the question or open a new topic … The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates, as I've previously outlined, is run by lobbyists and corporate CEOs, for lobbyists and CEOs. Until Time Magazine's Mark Helprin leaked the "gentleman's agreement" the CPD had very undemocratically refused to divulge the terms and conditions whereby predigested drivel would be spewed into the undecided living rooms of the Banana Republic States of America. The document is really kind of a yawn. Mitt and Barry, prima donnas that they are, are allowed to bring their own make-up artists. (nothing about nails ladies, though). The "green rooms" where they will hover while awaiting their big entrances will be close enough to the stage so they won't be sweating like pigs from a too-long walk into the limelight. Panning camera shots of dismayed spouses and nose-picking spawn in the audience are verboten. Each man will be allowed to bring along his own own still photographer for posterity. No Leni Riefenstahlish documentarians allowed, though. All camera angles will be flattering. The mics will be wireless so as to avoid accidents. The little tables holding their designer water will be close enough to avoid any untoward stretching or embarrassing spills.

Amazingly enough, the Debate police will ensure that neither Mitt nor Barry sneaks any electronic device, prop, or other "tangible thing" to the stage with them. Whether they will actually be frisked or body-scanned is not known, but the agreement does allow Candy Crowley to interrupt the whole shebang if she discovers either one of them cheating in any way. We can only hope. We can also hope that one of the pre-approved, "undecided" citizen questioners launches into a tirade against war, unfettered capitalism and the corruption of politics by the monied interests before the microphone is turned off. That is the only reason I'll be tuning in.

Suppress the Truth, Feel the Fear

Why don't more corporate media outlets challenge President Obama on his criminal drone strike assassination policy? New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan not only asks that question in her Sunday column -- she challenges her own newspaper to step up to the plate and actually do its job, and become relentless in demanding accountability from our increasingly secretive government.

Taking her cue from the recent Stanford/NYU report that used interviews with Pakistani civilians in order to disprove White House claims of little to no "collateral damage", Ms. Sullivan posits that the lack of citizen outrage at the American killing campaign is at least partly attributable to the lack of hard-hitting coverage by the paper of record:

With its vast talent and resources, The Times has a responsibility to lead the way in covering this topic as aggressively and as forcefully as possible, and to keep pushing for transparency so that Americans can understand just what their government is doing.

The Sullivan column was published in tandem with a just-released report from the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, which points out the flaws in the tracking of civilian deaths from drone strikes. It notes that a "non-partisan" think tank called the New America Foundation has underestimated civilian casualties, as has the aptly creepy and presciently-named Long War Journal. On the other hand, the NYU study results jibed with those of the independent London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which had effectively broken the American campaign of death-by-drone story wide open. Of course, says the NYU report,

The discrepancies in counts by the tracking organizations—credible and well-resourced institutions—underscore the difficulty of gaining an accurate understanding of the impact of drone strikes from media reports alone. The public and some policymakers are compelled to rely on these estimates to judge the impact of drone strikes because the U.S. government has not officially provided information on drone strike deaths. While touting the success of the drone program and particular high-profile strikes, U.S. officials have avoided providing specifics—and cited national security. The public has no information on how and whether the U.S.
tracks and investigates potential civilian deaths.

But about those "credible, well-sourced institutions" -- The Long War Journal is run by an outfit called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It touts as its vague goal "fighting terrorism and supporting freedom." Its contributors form a veritable laundry list of current and former members of the military/industrial/spy state/corporate media complex -- a who's who of those inside-the-Beltway national security pundits who go on cable TV and spew propaganda, provide quotes to reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere. The Foundation was spawned in the wake of 9/11 by a group of "visionary philanthropists" for the sole purpose, apparently, of keeping fear of The Other (a/k/a Muslims) alive amongst the American populace. This includes conducting "studies" serving to dehumanize the victims of drone strikes, ensuring that we never see the torn bodies or learn the names of the innocent women and children are being killed in our name by the hundreds or even thousands.

The New America Foundation, besides taking it upon itself to undercount victims of the targeted assassination program, also imparts wisdom on asset-building, the economy, education, health... you name it. It's run by Steve Coll, a former editor at The Washington Post. CNN National Security reporter Peter Bergen is the expert on foreign policy. Would it surprise you to learn that the New America Foundation also is in the forefront of the Beltway centrist cult of deficit reduction? Connect the dots, people! Your information is being provided to you courtesy of the shadow form of government known as the Corporatocracy. You are being made to Feel the Fear in preparation for Sharing the Sacrifice (a/k/a willingly forgoing Social Security cost of living increases, cutting back on health care, privatizing education and demonizing labor unions so that your tax money can go for financing endless war and endless profits for Superpower USA.)

It really is quite remarkable that Margaret Sullivan's column even made it into print. The online version, of course, is conveniently buried at the very bottom of the Opinion Page where nobody will see it.

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.