Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Black Friday, that uniquely American holy day of consumer obligation, has always depressed the hell out of me. It is the day when people all over this great land give up pretending to be thankful for family and friends. It is the annual orgy of self- indulgence. We are encouraged to partake in the twin national pasttimes of greed and competition. We pledge our retail allegiance by patriotically waiting in line for hours for the chance to jostle our fellow human beings aside in our quest for cheap crap. 

On Black Friday, whatever else is happening in the world always takes a back seat. There may be wars, there may be strife, there may be misery. But news broadcasts and front pages always lead off with the size of the crowds, the trepidation of the retailers, the pomp of the bargains, the circumstance of the cash registers.  

And we are all shocked, shocked when the inevitable and utterly unexpected tragedy occurs. There was that unfortunate $7.50-an-hour Walmart greeter who died few years ago when unruly New York shoppers broke down the doors and trampled him to death. In 2011, a deranged California woman attacked her fellow Walmart consumers with pepper spray to keep them from grabbing up the Chinese electronics.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if all that human energy could be channeled away from consumerism, and into social revolution for the greater good? George Orwell did:

He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices, women’s voices—had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another’shands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

He wrote: Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.  

Well, that was 1984. And this is so 2012. The Occupy movement just marked its first anniversary! The winds of rebellion and consciousness are finally in the air! The proles who work and the proles who shop are revolting against Big Box Empire. Minimum wage slaves are walking out of Walmart and setting up picket lines in the parking lots. The high cost of low price will be forced into the consciousness of even the non-boycotting faithful as they file into the national cathedrals of consumerism this week.

If you are willing to join the ranks of the retail heretics, here is a handy tool where you can find a Walmart non-shopping event near you. Some demonstrations will be starting as early as Thursday, given that the greedy Big Box bosses have decreed that the mad dash must start before the turkey carcass even gets cold. So plan accordingly, support your local Walmart refugees, and shop locally this year.

Retail workers make barely a subsistence wage. The average Walmart pay is only $8.80 an hour, in a corporation whose heirs own more wealth that 45 million American families. That's right. The Waltons have as much money as 40% of the entire combined population of the United States. They reside so far out in the stratosphere of prosperity that they might as well be God. Yet, they unmercifully send their employees out to apply for Medicaid and food stamps. The Waltons are not only not makers, they are those dreaded "takers" on a grand scale. They are the poster children of the corporate welfare state.

Paying their retail workers a living wage would not hurt the Walmart bottom line. To the contrary, it would benefit the entire economy. The public policy group Demos has just released a report revealing that if the retail employees could be lifted out of the crushing poverty that they now endure, we would all be lifted up. Even the Waltons would grow richer, because their worker bees would probably end up spending most of their extra money right there in Walmart! And the effect on other shoppers of a wage increase would be negligible -- mere pennies more per shopping trip, according to the Demos study.

The greed of the Waltons is not an economic necessity. It is a self-interested choice. It's time that they and their ilk realize that extreme wealth inequality is not good for them, and it's not good for the planet. Every civilization that has all its riches concentrated at the very top has collapsed. Every single one. Divide-and-conquer is also a losing philosophy. Pitting public worker against private worker, pitting oppressed worker against impoverished spender creates a giant vacuum that eventually sucks down even the gilded garbage at the pinnacle of the landfill.  

So let the banging of the pots and pans begin. Let's start jostling the plutocratic oppressors instead of each other. Let's shout about the stuff that really matters.

Let Them Eat Cake.... Or Not (Update)

 

The Twinkie obits are bloating the blogosphere, so I won't add anything further to the Dirge of the Ding Dongs. But let me take this (lazy) opportunity to repost what I wrote about the Hostess debacle last February. (The original post starts right below the Angry Twinkies pic.) You can't say you were not warned, junk food junkies of America! You've had almost a year to start hoarding. There are no bargains to be added to the Grand Bargain. Vulture capitalists are not only putting the company out of business, they are on a price-gouging rampage as well, adding insult to artery injury.

 

 Now that the once-grand striking Teamster truckers have been reduced to effective minimum wage slaves, they can at least take comfort from the fact that they will no longer be ridiculed as the people who transport cupcakes. They will probably make more money by filing for unemployment benefits.

 

 I suppose that Hostess will now magically off-shore its brand to China. Any day now, Twinkies will be flying off the shelves at Walmart. If they taste funny, it will probably be a result of the sugary filling being replaced by the same poisonous glycerin anti-freeze precursor they put in Walmart toothpaste and Walmart pet food.

 

 

 

(Originally posted last February)

Urban legend has it that Twinkies have a shelf life of decades: not only do they contain no actual food, but one ingredient is the same chemical used in embalming fluid. Even though this claim is probably bogus, all you Hostess junkies (and you know who you are) might want to start hoarding your supplies. In what has become a tried and true tactic of vulture capitalism, the private equity firm that bought out Hostess several years ago, and already forced it into bankruptcy once, is at it again. Wonder Bread, that miracle of unhealthy enzyme-enhanced sculptable softness beloved by kids, is in danger too. Either the worker bees cave, or Hostess may shut down for good.

It seems that the debt-riddled owners (they have been predatory, many, and varied) sloppily forgot to eviscerate the union's pension plan last time around, and are heading back into court to force the Twinkie-transporting Teamsters and the factory food workers to give up their contracts. Hostess executives from the Texas HQ went judge-shopping, and finally settled on a friendly New York bankruptcy court.

The judge with the reputation for coercing concessions from unions in bankruptcies to make the capitalist vultures happy and whole is one Robert D. Drain. I am not kidding. This guy is a living legend in the world of legal union-busting for fun and profit. Writes labor journalist Robert Vail:

Between 2005 and 2009 Drain presided over the infamous Delphi auto parts bankruptcy, in which the United Auto Workers saw its Delphi membership decimated.
More recently, he has been overseeing the case of the A&P supermarket chain. Just six weeks ago, about 30,000 grocery clerks and store employees represented by the United Food & Commercial Workers union were forced into broad concessions under circumstances just like those faced by the Hostess workers.

The workers are being asked to give up $659 million in wages and benefits over three years, in addition to relinquishing their pensions. All for the good of the bottom line, of course. Management will apparently try to appeal to the employees' sense of junk food junkie grass-roots solidarity and job security. They might even stir up anti-union sentiment by threatening to raise the price of SnoBalls to $5 for the already-struggling indigent middle class. Divide and conquer -- works every time.

The union boss is not having it. He represents the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union. (Not to editorialize or anything, but the combo of Twinkies and cigs doesn't exactly inspire sympathy. On the other hand, it is pretty cruel and irresponsible for a company whose products contribute mightily to America's bloated health care costs to cut the medical benefits of its own employees. I call this the WWDBA-- the WalMart Way of Doing Business in America). Anyway, the union boss's name is Frank Hurt, and he is mightily pained:

I find it deeply offensive and highly disingenuous for the company to claim that its financial woes are the result of its union contracts and pension and health benefits obligations. We contend that the company is in dire financial shape because of a string of failed business decisions made by a series of ineffective executives who have been running the company for the past decade.

For a junk food company, you'd think they'd know better than to indulge in that no-no of snacking: the double-dip. It previously filed for Chapter 11 in 2004, when it was known as Interstate Bakeries. The company also named a new chief executive, James R. Elsessor, who had taken over as CEO for Charles Sullivan, replaced by Tony Alvarez. Confused yet? Mitt Romney, amazingly enough, is nowhere to be found in this labyrinth, but that doesn't mean he's not lurking nearby. Interstate Bakery's stock, which had been at one time $34/share, fell to $2.05/share as they declared bankruptcy.

At the time it was the longest bankruptcy in U.S. history. During that time, it fought a 2007 bid from Mexican baked goods giant Grupo Bimbo and ex-Bill Clinton vulture capitalist pal Ron Burkle of the Yucapaipa Companies. With the leadership of Craig Jung, the company emerged from bankruptcy as a private company on February 3, 2009. The plan included a 50 percent equity stake by Ripplewood Holdings and lines/loans by General Electric Capital and GE Capital Markets, Silver Point Finance and Monarch Master Funding. Interstate's union workers made contract concessions in exchange for equity. Since declaring bankruptcy in 2009, Interstate closed nine of its 54 bakeries and more than 300 outlet stores. It also reduced its work force from 32,000 to 22,000 people and pulled out of some markets. (Wikipedia).

The next trial in New York's Southern District Bankruptcy court is scheduled for next month.

While you're waiting, do read the wonderful Charles Pierce's "In Defense of Twinkies", a masterpiece of junk food gourmandism and caloric history. An excerpt:

The Twinkie's formidable shelf life has aroused curiosity among bored undergraduates, the scientific community, and people who are, well, members of both. Most seriously, the Twinkie was subjected to a grim series of experiments eight years ago by a pair of young scientists at Rice University in Houston. They tested Twinkies for artificial intelligence (the cakes failed), electric resistivity (the filling bubbled a little, but that was all), and gravitational response, in which test a Twinkie was launched from a sixth-floor window, with the result that, upon contact with the sidewalk, only a small crack opened on the Twinkie's side. The pair also performed a solubility test, immersing a Twinkie in a glass of tap water. After 24 hours, they reported "the beginnings of a creamy ooze at the surface of the water."
"After 48 hours in the water," they continued, "the Twinkie had not changed any more in size. However, the creamy filling somehow oozed out of the center and was collecting on the surface of the water. The water itself was a very dark brown. When we attempted to pour the water out of the cup, it quickly became apparent that the Twinkie had no structural integrity at all. It ... turned into a lump of goo in the sink."
Pity. You should probably eat them if you're going to do anything with them. Or not.

Okay, I think it's time for a Twinkie run. Watch out for vulture capitalists scarfing up the supplies in the snack aisles, and attack if you must. I won't tell if you don't.

Location, Location, Location

Is anyone else noticing the irony of where the deficit hawks are pouncing on FDR's New Deal in anticipation of disemboweling it?

The apparatchiks of the plutocracy had their first Grand Guignol Bargain meet-up this morning in that historic bastion of populism known as the Roosevelt Room.  The West Wing work-space actually gets its name from both Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin.

This was akin to holding a Black Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. I live right across the river from the second Roosevelt's burying place in Hyde Park. So if I hear a rumbling from the east, I know it will be the sound of Franklin turning in his grave.

Leaders of both sides of the Right Wing Money Party emerged from the confab full of hugs and smiles and bonhomie. They expressed confidence in reaching a deal that will please their Wall Street paymasters. The big sell-out reportedly entails a few extra bucks from billionaires in exchange for the slow starvation of the rest of us. We are being told that our own destruction is why we voted them back into office. What they don't tell us is that the weighted votes of the plutocrats count a lot more than the numerical votes of the lower orders. 

Oh, and they promise we will get the details of our demise just in time for Christmas. Deck the halls and ho ho ho.

A Way With Words

As Glenn Greenwald and others have cogently pointed out, the American media have been displaying a definite neo-con/neo-liberal bias when it comes to coverage of the recent Israel/Gaza violence. Israeli casualties are always mentioned in the first graf of New York Times stories, for example, while that much worse and so unfortunate "collateral damage" inflicted on the Palestinian side gets buried deep within the sixth or seventh paragraph.

And the coverage also reflects the dawning of the new age of War by Tweet. A series of graphic AP photos showing a grief-stricken Palestinian father holding his dead child have gone viral. The Times, while posting the image, obviously felt compelled to be fair and balanced by publishing a similar photo allegedly portraying an injured Israeli baby. It just so happens to have come directly from the Twitter account of the Israeli prime minister. Bibi seemingly has all the time in the world to tweet and post YouTube videos while waging his war. 

 

 Even as the Israelis bombed the head of the Hamas military into oblivion, it was conducting a parallel pre-emptive propaganda strike in social media. We saw it almost in real time. We Were There.

Meanwhile, the Times headlines today are again reeking of bias. We are told that Israel is "girding itself" for a ground assault. The connotion of "gird" is a positive and honorable one. Old Testament heroes girded their loins. Knights girded themselves in shining armor to do battle against dragons. Crusaders girded themselves to vanquish the infidel. And so it goes.

Hamas, meanwhile, in a much tinier subhead is "emboldened." This word has a negative slant. It connotes an articially fueled chutzpah or bravado, rather than bravery. The Oxford online dictionary give us this sentence as an example:  "Emboldened by the claret, he pressed his knee against hers."

Such not-no-subtle language is in perfect keeping with the Gray Lady's role as quasi-official White House propaganda flack. As Greenwald points out, it behooves the United States to take Israel's side in the conflict:

US policy always lies at the heart of these episodes, because Israeli aggression is possible only due to the unstinting financial, military and diplomatic support of the US. Needless to say, the Obama administration wasted no time expressing its "full-throttled support" for the Israeli attacks. And one can't help but notice the timing of this attack: launched just days after Obama's re-election victory, demanding an answer to the question of whether Obama was told in advance of these attacks and gave his approval.

(snip)

 Extra-judicial assassination - accompanied by the wanton killing of whatever civilians happen to be near the target, often including children - is a staple of the Obama presidency. That lawless tactic is one of the US president's favorite instruments for projecting force and killing whomever he decides should have their lives ended: all in total secrecy and with no due process or oversight. There is now a virtually complete convergence between US and Israeli aggression, making US criticism of Israel impossible not only for all the usual domestic political reasons, but also out of pure self-interest: for Obama to condemn Israel's rogue behavior would be to condemn himself.
 

And that, of course, will never come to pass. Full-throttle, after all, means unrestrained, no holds barred, full speed ahead, Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, earsplitting loudness and machismo. It's the American way.  

Moo, Slurp, Snooze, Repeat

The usual faux-liberal suspects have all been herded into the White House Veal Pen for their periodic branding. The sounds of suckling are echoing through the blogosphere.

I wrote before the election that so-called progressive and labor groups working hard for the president's re-election were going to give him a brief honeymoon before launching a concerted effort to hold his feet to the fire on taxing the rich and protecting Social Security and other traditional New Deal stuff.

Oh, dear. I expected them to be cowed -- but to turn a negotiating session into a pep rally for Dear Leader? Say it isn't so!

Obama and the participants largely focused on areas on which they agree: in particular, the need to extend low tax rates for the middle class while letting them expire for wealthier households, according to people who attended the 45-minute meeting.

There was much less talk about possible areas of disagreement between Obama and his progressive partners, such as on cuts to entitlement spending.

(snip)

“It was a great meeting. The president was really standing firm on taxes. Everyone talked about how much they have the president’s back in this fight,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said afterward.

The Center for American Progress, truth be told, is only a quasi-independent group. It has direct ties to the Democratic Party. Liberal, it is not. Tanden herself came to her think tank job directly from the Obama Administration. Founded by Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, CAP is the primary conduit for controlled White House leaks and major source of the hot air used to float White House trial balloons. Podesta now runs a big lobby shop in Washington. No surprises there. What is shocking, though, is the blatant transparency with which the veal pen occupants are jumping onto the austerity bandwagon.  They are directly skipping the part where they pretend to hold Barry's feet to the fire, then sigh in defeat down the road, when they whine that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of good. Better to starve slowly under Obama than to have your guts ripped out by Romney.

And today is the day the president will be closing the deal with the billionaires -- all of whom, of course, want to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in order to boost the confidence of the markets. (translation: inject a giant bolus of publicly-funded financial testosterone directly into their own over-clogged arteries.)

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, fresh from being not prosecuted for fraud by the Department of Justice, now has the freedom to dictate his own terms. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he announced that he needs more assurance that he can keep hoarding his billions. He is willing to pay a bit more in revenue, but only if he is first allowed to steal money from the poor, the old and the sick. "We are all ready to roll up our sleeves and work with the Obama administration and Congress to help fulfill America's enduring promise," he wrote.

I hope he chokes on his diamond-encrusted cufflinks as he rips them off with his teeth in preparation for rolling up his sleeves.

So, now what do we do? Occupy is back in the limelight with its humanitarian successes in the wake of Sandy. It even garnered front-page headlines in the New York Times for its novel Occupy the Debt campaign. What Barry and the Banksters refused to do -- wipe out household debt the same way they rescued Wall Street -- the new group aims to do by buying it up at a discount and then forgiving it.

Barry, safe for a final four years as temporary emperor, is a lost cause. Now is the perfect time to start harassing your down-ticket reps. Either they promise to protect the New Deal now, or they are out in two, four or six years. Now is also the perfect time for the rising of third, fourth and fifth parties.

It's a perfect storm. As long as the physical climate is changing, we might as well change the political climate, too. So much pollution on so many levels.
 

Bonfire of the Peaches

Before femme fatale Paula Broadwell sends me one of her anonymous Glenn Close-y emails, let me hastily confess that my relationship with David Petraeus is purely of the six degrees of separation type.

David grew up in the same little New York backwater where I spent most of my adult life. My kids went to the same schools he did, even had some of the same long-lived teachers, went to nursery school at the same Presbyterian church where he had once worshipped. My parents owned a house right around the corner from his parents'. (Scarily, the name of our street was Homeland Avenue!)

David's high school sweetheart was the daughter of the realtor who sold me and my husband our house. The same year David graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, I'd gotten got my first newspaper job, with West Point being part of my shared beat. Just missed him, before he went on to his storied career of doing 1000 pushups an hour after being shot. I exaggerate, but not by much. The legend was already beginning.

(I hated doing stories at West Point. I couldn't stand, as a 20-something, being called "Ma'am" by 20-something cadets. Besides, I was still a hippie just coming off a college career of Vietnam protests. Don't get me started on having to cover William Westmoreland giving a speech. I cringe whenever I think of it.)  

I never flirted with Peaches, as he was called in high school. If I ever crossed paths with him, I don't remember him. I didn't go to school there, since my family didn't set down new roots in a smaller house till my sister and I were already in college.(But I ended up staying, long after my family had departed.) In a town of only 3,000 people, it seems likely that I must have passed him on the street.

High School Peaches

 I did end up flirting quite a bit with his father, though. The late Sixtus Petraeus used to make weekly visits to the local newspaper where I worked, to buy the paper and shoot the breeze. He was a nice man who never talked about his kid, at least not to me. Of course, I never asked! My son later worked for the same utility company that Petraeus Sr. had before his retirement. 

One of Peaches' elementary school teachers, Miss Janet Dempsey, became a regular volunteer at the local library used book store when she retired. She took a shine to my son, and used to set aside all the old National Geographics for him. Miss Janet Dempsey was quite impressed with my son's passion for National Geographics! But when the New York Times tracked her down as part of their Hometown Boy Makes Good hagiography, she was blithely unaware of the burgeoning Petraeus Cult of Personality. She went off script, telling them she hadn't been all that impressed with young David. His sister, she said, had been much smarter in class.

So, that made me feel good. She was more impressed with my kid than she was with King David. 

David first became a hometown hero when Bush appointed him the chief general of the Iraq war, and his national reputation soared. He had not always been thus regarded by the locals. As a matter of fact, when Cornwall Central High School decided to start recognizing its famous alumni back in the 90s, Petraeus was overlooked in the first round of honorees. Back then, the most famous grad was actor Armand Assante, who at the time was starring in a whole slew of  made-for-TV movies. Among his many character roles were Odysseus and Jack the Ripper. But poor Armand soon faded from the limelight, going through a bankruptcy and foreclosure even as the Petraeus star rose higher and higher in the skies above Cornwall.

Ellen Kelly, his high school girlfriend, took over her daddy's real estate biz and sold a ton of overpriced houses just by bragging that she used to date David Petraeus. It was really getting weird in my little town. It seemed that Cornwall was morphing into Petraeusville.

Anyway, he certainly made a whole series of Hail the Conquering Hero visits back home in the past couple of years. When I read that he included a publicity stunt of himself visiting Miss Dempsey in the library, presenting her with four custom-upholstered Petraeus memorial chairs, I cackled inwardly. By this time, my kids had grown up and I'd moved further north. I resisted the temptation to join the thundering hordes of P-worshippers for these staged events. The townsfolk basked the glow of national attention, soaking up the second-hand Petraeusosity with each succeeding visit. This was definitely a man on a mission to establish some good old fashioned civilian political cred.

They even renamed a street after him last year. No, it was not the obvious choice -- Homeland Avenue! It was much, much worse. The town fathers took a stretch of Quaker Avenue, named after the town's historic early 18th century meeting house, and christened it David Petraeus Drive! What rich and nauseating irony. There is no word yet on whether they'll un-rename it, so as to finally stop the anti-war Society of Friends from turning in their graves, right next door. One of my old Cornwall neighbors, a Quaker activist who'd  been arrested a few times for protesting the Stealth fighter and other military adventurous hardware at Stewart Airbase, was quite upset about the renaming. In tastelessness, it ranks right up there with awarding Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before the David Downfall, Paetriotic fervor had gone so far that some residents had even been calling for the removal of the plaque honoring Olympic speed skater Bonnie Blair from the town park, and replacing it with a Petraeus shrine. After all, Bonnie was only born in Cornwall and had left when she was two. When she came back to speak after winning her five gold medals, she admitted she didn't even remember the place. Still, I think her plaque may be safe now.

The Cornwallians are still apparently in a state of stunned disbelief over the scandal. There have been only terse announcements of his resignation in the local newspaper and online news sites. If they feel they have been the victims of a massive scam perpetrated upon them by David Petraeus, they're not saying.

Michael Hastings, one of the great journalists of our generation, has always had Petraeus pegged. He writes in Buzzfeed: 

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."

Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.

Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job.
 

President Svengali

If you believe the piece in today's White House propaganda bullhorn (a/k/a the New York Times), President Obama thinks the reason he lost the Grand Bargain last time around was because he didn't do a good enough job selling "folks" on the idea.

His place in history in danger, Barry will first have a meet-up with a group of corporate fat cats to ask them what they want. He will later hit the road and do what he does best: hold rallies, and campaign, campaign, campaign. He will persuade crowds of adoring fans to pressure Congress to just get along and shovel the bipartishit. I am not kidding. Here is exactly what the Gray Lady is spewing this morning:

And with the election campaign over, the campaign for the Obama legacy begins: Mr. Obama will keep his grass-roots organization in place to “have the president’s back,” as its members like to say, on the budget negotiations and other issues in the second term.

(snip)  

Some of the business leaders the president will meet with on Wednesday are members of the new Fix the Debt coalition, which has raised about $40 million to urge lawmakers and their constituents to support a plan that combines spending cuts with new revenue. That session will follow Mr. Obama’s meeting with labor leaders on Tuesday.

His first trip outside Washington to engage the public will come after Thanksgiving, since Mr. Obama is scheduled to leave next weekend on a diplomatic trip to Asia. Travel plans are still sketchy, partly because his December calendar is full of the traditional holiday parties.
 

This is so sickening, on so many levels. First, his campaign operatives persist in falsely portraying him as a hapless warrior prince. We, his loyal subjects, must give him cover as he battles the dark knights of the Republican Party. But as temporary Emperor, he must first travel to the Far East to extend the American realm, chest-thump at the Chinese, and negotiate trade deals for the creation of more wage slaves. Then, he will sacrifice his precious time in order to mass-hypnotize regular people between rounds of holiday parties to which only the elites are invited. What a busy, busy man. So much to creatively destroy, so little time.

Not that it will do any good, but I did write a response to the White House press release. Here it is:

Let me get this straight. President Obama is going to "rally the public" by first making nice with the deficit scold/corporate crowd.Then he will essentially fall back into endless campaign mode, somehow convincing us that cutting Medicare and Social Security will be good for us.

What's he going to say? "Call Congress and tell them you can make do with a smaller retirement check if Warren Buffett pays a few dollars more in taxes! Tell them it's not fair to ask you to cut back on your medical care without first asking Jamie Dimon to give up the tax loophole on his corporate jet". That will go over very well at public rallies, I'm sure. 

Oh, he'll use more subtle phraseology. Words like "shared sacrifice" and "economic patriotism" and "the wealthy should be asked politely to pay a little more" will flow like honey from his lips.

The president should get a clue, pronto. A lot of people voted for him only because Romney would have been worse. If Barack Obama thinks he's Svengali, and we are a nation of Trilbys who will sing for our own destruction, he'd better think again.
 

Lo-o-o-o-k Into My Eyes, Sh-a-a-a-re the Sacrifice

 
Paul Krugman wrote a follow-up to his last column, warning the president not to listen to deficit hypocrites Erskine Bowles (rumored to replace Tim Geithner) and Alan Simpson. Uh-oh. Too late. Krugman's paper just informed us that Obama will indeed be listening to them, real hard, this coming week. But the good professor in certainly right about the nefarious methods to their madness:

It’s not just the fact that the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far. Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. And letting that happen wouldn’t just be bad policy; it would be a betrayal of the Americans who just re-elected a health-reformer president and voted in some of the most progressive senators ever.

But, same as last time, he stopped just short of mentioning that it was President Obama himself who dreamed up the Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission. He does not mention that the president himself is taking a leading role in the slashing of the safety net. My response: 

The only thing scarier than appointing Erskine Bowles to replace Timothy Geithner is appointing Geithner to replace himself. BFF to the banksters that he is, he agreed to stay on at least through January to steer us through the fiscal bluff -- oops, "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

Cutting Social Security and Medicare is so unpopular that every politician who ran on a platform of deficit reduction based on the Bowles-Simpson plan was defeated last week. Every single one, that is, except President Obama. He made his wish for a B-S grand bargain a highlight of his acceptance speech. He mentioned it frequently during his campaign. Far from being pressured, he himself is pressuring "the party of regular folks" to join him in the dismantling of the New Deal.

Editorial boards and centrist think tanks and greedy CEOs are in bandwagon echo chamber mode. They're clamoring for safety net cuts right in the middle of this humanitarian crisis of unemployment and plummeting wages. The other looming catastrophe of climate change coupled with crumbling infrastructure is ignored, while B-S trial balloons are soaring through the stratosphere.

Former OMB director Peter Orszag (now a Citigroup vice chairman), just wrote a piece suggesting that Social Security needs to be cut, despite admitting that it has zilch to do with the deficit!

Something is rotten inside the Beltway. Mitt may have lost, but this whole thing is beginning to smell like the Bain method of creative destruction.
 

The other reader comments, for the most part, fall along the lines of "gee, I hope the president gets a backbone and fights back this time." The kool-aid opiate has a long half-life. I reckon. It's going to take some time for them to emerge from the post-election euphoria in order for the full impact of the Barack Smack to register. 

The readers who responded to my comment were right on the mark, though. To view those, scroll down to mine, the seventh comment under "Oldest". Robert Sadin of Brooklyn thinks we need to Occupy Obama. The trick, of course, will be getting past that new law that protects elected officials from having to actually hear the voices of citizen demonstrators. 

President Obama, you remember, signed H.R. 347 last spring to make sure that protesters at the NATO summit in Chicago were neither seen nor heard by his invited guests and global dignitaries.

He doesn't really need the law, though. The few hecklers at his campaign speeches all tend to get drowned out without the help of the Secret Service. As if on mass hypnotic cue, the crowd roars.

"Four more YEARS. Four more YEARS. Four more YEARS."