Democratic Party Politicians: The Chicken Men (and Women)

By Fred Drumlevitch
cross-posted with permission

Congressman Ron Barber, "Congress on Your Corner"
open meeting with constituents, June 23, 2012

Sometimes a broad problem is best understood through a look at specific examples. So I begin by asking: Who is Congressman Ron Barber, and how does he exemplify — indeed, what is — this more general problem of vital importance to the future of both the Democratic Party and the entire United States?

Well, to answer the first part of the question, Ron Barber is the Democrat first elected in June 2012 in Arizona Congressional District 8 to fill the vacancy produced by Gabrielle Giffords’ resignation. He was then reelected in the November general election to a full term representing the new Congressional District 2 created by Arizona Congressional redistricting.

The answer to the rest of the question is of necessity much longer, taking up the remainder of this piece but getting to the heart of contemporary American political dysfunction.

I live within both the old and new aforementioned districts, and thus have a more than passing interest in the positions taken by the politicians ostensibly representing them. There are many indications that Mr. Barber has the intelligence and basic human decency desirable in a public official. With his white hair, small beard, and cane, he also bears a bit of a resemblance to “Colonel” Harland Sanders, of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, hence “The Chicken Man” nickname light-heartedly applied to him by others. Unfortunately, the relevance of that moniker extends beyond its intended allusion to an iconic purveyor of poultry, for what Congressman Barber does have cannot mask what he appears to lack: cojones, and a commitment to rational political stands even in the face of the right-wing opposition that is to be expected in early twenty-first century America. (And the Newtown murders notwithstanding, the “rational political stands” and “right-wing opposition” to which I refer are broad-based; this piece is not a polemic on the subject of gun control).

I have no quarrel with many of Congressman Barber’s votes, but some others have been so objectionable that I have been obliged to reexamine my opinion of both the man and the Democratic Party. On June 19, 2012, the very day he was sworn in as congressman, Mr. Barber would cast a vote in favor of H.R. 2578, a 14-section collection of anti-environmental legislation, one of the components of which included the gutting of, in the name of “security”, virtually all environmental regulations within one hundred miles of the entire U.S. land border. One month later, July 19, 2012, he would vote against a defense appropriations amendment that sought to freeze fiscal 2013 core military spending at 2012 levels, this assuming that sequestration did not occur. (That proposed freeze had been denounced by some as a cut because it reduced by just over $1 billion the 2013 levels previously approved by the House Armed Services Committee, though not the entire House. However labeled, the $1 billion at issue was neither the 89% cut in defense spending that occurred post-WWII, 1948 vs. 1945, which did not cause the sky to fall, nor even the 10-15% pruning and redirection urged last year by a group that included retired U.S. military officers; rather, it amounted to only an extremely thin slice (0.2%) of the $528 billion core military budget, and an even smaller percentage of true total military spending, large portions of which are “hidden in plain sight” within the budgets of other government departments. Accordingly, this amendment could not be credibly characterized as a threat to our national security, and opposition to it was patently unwarranted. See the discussion for Amendment number 1, pages H5054 - H5057 of the Congressional Record). More recently, on September 12, 2012, Congressman Barber would vote for H.R. 5949, which extended for five years the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a measure that in effect nullified many of our Constitutional protections against wide-ranging governmental search and seizure, protections that served this nation well for more than two centuries. This act, rationalized in the name of national security, has legally enabled an ever-expanding multi-faceted domestic surveillance infrastructure that spies daily on millions of ordinary law-abiding U.S. citizens.

An aside: Although not part of the above-referenced Congressional discussion on the military “budget”, it is at this point worth noting as a matter of morality and priorities that the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which seeks to collect and spend just over $2 billion during 2012-2013, found itself as of October 2012 $700 million short in contributions for that two year period. (See here for a more detailed accounting). And consider that during the January 2008 through early October 2012 time frame, U.S. governmental contributions to the GPEI totaled only one-half of the amount provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. While the money saved by a sensible reduction in U.S. military spending could fully erase the 2012-2013 GPEI shortfalls, as well as fund a multitude of other highly worthwhile projects both domestically and internationally, which would probably gain this country far more admiration, respect, security, and employment than would hundreds of billions of dollars of military expenditures, the military-industrial-security-governmental complex has had and will continue to have its own warped priorities for our tax dollars.

I am not privy to Congressman Barber’s thought processes, and I can only speculate about what motivated his votes for the abominable anti-environmental H.R. 2578, against even a freeze in our bloated military spending, and for the H.R. 5949 extension of the totalitarian-style FISA amendments. Perhaps he genuinely believed that these absurd and dangerous positions were desirable; in that case, he is at minimum badly mistaken, and this will call into question his judgment in all future matters. On the other hand, perhaps his votes were simply crass political maneuvers, attempts to establish political “street cred” with the conservative portions of his district, or the corollary, due to fear of being tarred by future conservative charges of being soft on border enforcement specifically or national security in general. That last possibility is perhaps the most insidiously dangerous of all motivations, for it represents a continuation of the Democratic Party’s fear-driven political behavior of the past three decades, which, above all else, has been marked by a nearly-complete failure of political nerve at the first insinuation of weakness. Such fear was a major motivation for Democratic support of the Congressional resolution that authorized the insane U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for the passage and subsequent expansion of the liberty-destroying, perversely-named Patriot Act. However, the adverse impact extends much further; in countless other areas, the absence of adequate Democratic advocacy for reason and social justice has allowed Republican politicians to frame the debate, and these Republicans have thereby successfully dragged the political center far to the right of any rational location for it.

Congressman Ron Barber, news conference, June 23, 2012.

Partly in fairness to Mr. Barber, but mostly because of its wider and more fundamental implications, I must emphasize that this positive-feedback loop of deficient advocacy and constrained or faulty action is apparently a significant affliction among Democratic politicians. With regard to H.R. 2578, 16 Democrats joined 216 House Republicans in voting for it, and 6 Democrats failed to vote. On the amendment to freeze defense spending (sponsored by Republican Mick Mulvaney and Democrat Barney Frank), 21 Democrats voted no, while 12 did not vote. Often, even greater numbers of Democrats cast their votes in favor of (usually Republican-originated) bills that, at best, rate as political scat, or against (usually Democratic) bills that constitute the mildest of necessary reforms. In the case of H.R. 5949, 74 Democrats voted in the affirmative, supplementing the 227 Republicans who voted for passage.

But a high incidence of such political cowardice in no way excuses or mitigates it; indeed, in such a situation, every increment of cowardice weighs ever more heavily, greatly reducing the likelihood of a favorable outcome for the nation. A large number of insane ideologies course through the veins of the contemporary body politic, including: a belief in American exceptionalism (despite our inferior rankings by a multitude of measures); a desire for worldwide military supremacy (and a blank check for the vast military spending that accompanies our futile pursuit of it); a worship of unfettered capitalism and some imaginary “free market” (all the while enabling anti-competitive corporate behavior and socializing the losses of corporate speculators and incompetents); an opposition to planning, regulation, and the moral use of national resources (never mind that the “wisdom of the market” is often antithetical to the true long-term interests of the people); and a rationalization of poverty and insecurity for a large portion of the populace (while aiding the accumulation of extreme wealth by those at the top). The unvarnished truth is that the successes of the Republicans and the gains of their worse-than-Social-Darwinistic agenda are not due to Republicans alone — Democratic unwillingness to boldly challenge these delusions has inexorably led to the national ascendancy of such views.

Additional local evidence of such Democratic deficiency comes via the Arizona Congressional District 2 primary election held in late August. Consider newspaper coverage of the positions of the two Democratic (and two Republican) candidates (Arizona Daily Star, August 7, 2012, page A4, “Candidate Q&A: US Congressional District 2” -- CD2 candidate bios sidebar). Asked their “top priority”, all candidates unsurprisingly listed multiple items. However, for Congressman Barber, who would win the Democratic race, the first item was “bipartisan problem solving for Southern Arizona”, while for his Democratic opponent Dr. Matt Heinz it was the similar “build consensus”. Whether evaluated abstractly or morally or strategically, those are highly flawed top goals, mealy-mouthed conflations of process with concrete objectives. (And it should be noted that like most Republicans already in office, neither of the two Republican candidates gave even a hint of willingness to compromise or work with the opposition). A further look, to Dr. Heinz’campaign website [dead link], saw him referring to his time in the Republican-dominated state legislature and speaking of “building consensus… working diligently to find common ground with other representatives”. As for Congressman Barber’s campaign website, it originally showed his stated desire “to put politics aside … lead with civility… ”. Those phrases were later removed, prior to the general election. Did the congressman have an epiphany, or was the change simply one of election strategy? What positions will he take on the extraordinarily-important matters to be addressed during the remainder of this term and in the one beginning January? Support for a “Grand Bargain” that largely protects our bloated military spending, barely imposes on the wealthy, but shafts the remainder of the people — and all arrived at with the utmost of “civility” of course? What will your moral legacy be, Congressman Barber?

News flash, Mr. Barber, Mr. Heinz, and Democrats everywhere: Those goals of procedural harmony, admirable though they might be in a perfect world, are unattainable in this one — except at the cost of a surrender of most substantive Democratic principles. When the overwhelming majority of your Republican opposition is malevolent, obstructionist, and seeks to take this nation into a social-political-economic structure reminiscent of Dickensian England, no rational bipartisan consensus is possible, and it is fundamentally counterproductive for Democrats to either believe or pretend otherwise. Any possible political gains among independent voters produced by Democrats making conciliation with Republicans a high priority are more than offset by that preoccupation’s destructive impact on Democratic ideology and self-respect, and its communication of weakness to the opposition. Democrats, striving ever harder to demonstrate their accommodating reasonableness, have over the past several decades ceded not just the hair and hoof trimmings of a Democratic Party symbol, they have surrendered the muscle and vital organs of a once proud ideology of social justice. It came as no surprise when the Democratic Party in 2010 abandoned the kicking donkey as its logo. All that remained was a skeleton stripped nearly bare, with the predatory wolf packs of the Republican Party howling in anticipation of their next meal.

Perhaps Democratic politicians should take a cue from the natural world (especially since they have ignored the lessons of the political one). David J.T. Sumpter (Collective Animal Behavior, 2010, Princeton University Press) describes the process by which a honeybee swarm chooses a new home: Scouts explore and return to the resting swarm, dancing in support of potential new locations; additional trips are made, competition for viewers and fading of the dance intensity over time occur. “Mathematical models of this process predict that the site at which the bees give up dancing for most slowly is eventually the focus of all dancing” (Sumpter, p. 214).

With regard to the human political environment, no biologist’s empirical description or mathematical model should actually be necessary. It is obvious to any sentient observer (even if not to the Democratic politicians seeking votes) that a political position with inferior advocacy is unlikely to prevail. Progressive advocacy shouldn’t be confined to the few days of a highly-scripted quadrennial presidential nominating convention, or even to the months of campaign season. All Democratic politicians — from the President on down to the lowliest local office-holders — need to strap on their balls, every single day unabashedly make the case for progressive positions, and then — because advocacy is a necessary but insufficient condition for favorable political results — act courageously in the spirit of that advocacy at every executive, legislative, and judicial opportunity. Within the system, only that course will reverse the decades-long deterioration of this country and improve the future for the people; only that course will halt the accelerating slide towards a plutocratic national neo-fascism, prevent the eventual appearance of the well-justified but unpredictable pitchfork brigades, and ensure preservation of the Republic.

The perceptive reader will have noticed that in focusing on a Democratic failure of courage, my critique of Democrats has been much narrower in scope than it could have been. Considerably more damning assessments equating them to Republicans and attributing their political behavior to a complete sellout to corporatist, plutocratic, and/or military-industrial forces have been made, backed by substantial evidence. But while the influence of these corrupting forces is certainly large and sometimes even dominant, I believe that the situation is frequently more nuanced, with a mixture of mutually-reinforcing causes at work. The outrageous cost of campaigns, the human tendency to follow the path of least resistance, the political careerism of those who hold political office, coupled with their egotistical tendency to see themselves as indispensable, thereby rationalizing any action in order to retain such office — all contribute to the current situation.

But whatever else may have contributed, the failure to demonstrate political courage in support of rationality and social justice has played a significant role. Notably, a dearth of courage is potentially the most easily remedied factor, ultimately dependent as it is only upon oneself. Such political courage (or lack thereof) from current and future politicians — and if necessary, directly from the downtrodden ordinary citizens who may yet bring us a transformative “American Spring” — will ultimately be decisive in determining the future of this nation.

Copyright: Fred Drumlevitch. Permission hereby granted to any registered voter (but not a commercial website or publication) to copy this post in whole or in part for the express purpose of directly transmitting it to one or more Democratic Party politicians, provided that attribution, a link to the original complete post, and notice of any excerpting are all included.

Fred Drumlevitch blogs irregularly at www.FredDrumlevitch.blogspot.com

He can be reached at: FredDrumlevitch12345(at)gmail.com

Sadist in Chief

Poor Barack. He is all upset because the Slaughter of the Innocents has failed to achieve its disaster capitalism purpose -- inspiring his fellow politicians to bargain away the social safety net just when the national attention is conveniently focused on marathon funeral processions in Connecticut.  Those selfish Republicans have disobeyed a cardinal rule of the Shock Doctrine, which is that you never let a good crisis go to waste.The optimal time to pounce and ram through programs that hurt people is when people are already hurting too much to notice or care.

 Barack Obama actually mouthed that precept right out loud at his press conference yesterday:

But, goodness, if -- if this past week has done anything, it should just give us some perspective. If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.... And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months -- a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory, the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense. So I remain, not only open to conversations, but I remain eager to get something done. I’d like to get it done before Christmas.
 

This is what Obama's Nightmare before Christmas would look like: the sneaky “chained” Consumer Price Index would cut as much as $225 billion in spending over the next ten years, half of it from retirees collecting Social Security and the rest from the pensions of retired federal workers, and other undisclosed benefit payments. The expiration of the "Bush" tax cuts would now be extended to families earning above $400,000 a year, an increase from his previous $250,000 line in the quicksand. The partial payroll tax holiday will expire regardless of whether a deal is reached, thus adding a few thousand more in deductions from the average paycheck. The tax on wealthy investors' dividends would decrease from 39.6% to 20%.

The sound of Marley's ghost dragging his chains across the floor was the start of Ebenezer Scrooge's nightmare. But old people bound in chains and strangling on cat food seems to be fodder for an Obamian wet dream. While Scrooge was scared into developing a conscience, Obama will only evolve the semblance of one if it is politically expedient for him to do so.  

The only thing saving us from his grandiose bargain, for the time being anyway, is that John "Plan B" Boehner is still as crazy as he ever was. The frenemy of our imaginary friend is our friend.  

Coldly Sadistic Passions

I knew we were in trouble the minute I read this New York Times headline:

Newtown Shooting May Cool Washington’s Partisan Passions
 

White House mouthpiece correspondent Jackie Calmes writes that the slaughter of 20 first graders has a miraculous silver lining! It seems that mass infanticide is magically greasing the skids of the Two-Man American Catfood Team. Boehner and Obama may be coasting to the finish line* in the Grand Bargain Olympics! They're putting the brakes on just in time to avoid that terrible horrible plunge down the pretend Fiscal Cliff.

 

BobamaRama DingDongs

 

Other players on the corporate media's Trial Balloon Team are signalling that our Social Security benefits will be cut after all, thanks to that sneaky cost-of-living adjustment known as chained CPI. It's sneaky, because not only will our lifetime benefits be cut, but middle income people will actually end up paying more in taxes now for less generous monthly checks when they retire. Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post explains the horror so I won't have to:

 

The group getting the biggest tax hike is families making between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. Their increase is almost six times that faced by millionaires. That’s because millionaires are already in the top bracket, so they’re not being pushed into higher marginal rates because of changing bracket thresholds. While a different inflation measure might mean that the cutoff between the 15 percent and 25 percent goes from $35,000 to $30,000, the threshold for the top 35 percent bracket is already low enough that all millionaires are paying it. Some of their income is taxed at higher rates because of lower thresholds down the line, but as a percentage of income that doesn’t amount to a whole lot.

 

Meanwhile, consummate centrist cheerleader Jackie Calmes is framing this as a great victory in her news analysis. You may remember that she'd dutifully helped get the austerity ball rolling with her recent puff piece about the Catfood Duo of Simpson & Bowles. The Chained CPI Plan of Death comes direct from their shriveled little reptilian brains.

 

 Think about it this way -- two other political hacks named Obama and Boehner are actually using the slaughter of children as cover for slaughtering old people. In the stifling world of Jackie Calmes, anyway, children's deaths are having a "salutary effect" on the deal made in hell. Her nauseating analysis:

While seemingly unrelated — the emotionally wrenching holiday-season massacre of 20 first graders and six of their guardians, and Washington’s mind-numbing fiscal fight to reduce deficits — the first cannot fail to have a salutary effect on the latter, say veterans of Washington’s partisan wars from both parties.  (I am taking bets on whether the initials of these "veteran insiders" are B&S).

 (snip)

For all their dissimilarities, past horrors — like the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, the 1998 killings of two Capitol policemen, the Columbine school murders the following year in Colorado and certainly the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — at least for a time cooled partisan passions that had been high beforehand, and in some cases prompted bipartisan actions on unrelated matters. (The two factions of the Money Party came together in a wondrous Kumbaya moment to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act just a few months after the massacre at Columbine High School. And who could forget the way they joined forces to kill the Bill of Rights after 9/11? Ain't disaster capitalism da bomb?)  

Yeah, put the emphasis on the "unrelated matters." If you were thinking, as I was for about five minutes, that Obama meant what he said at last night's memorial service and would be bully-pulpitting on gun control today, you were sadly mistaken. To the contrary -- the White House is already tamping down any great expectations. Spokesman Jay Carney was characteristically mealy-mouthed:

 "I think we all recognize that this is a complex problem and there are obstacles to taking action coming from a variety of places. What the president hopes is that everyone steps back and looks at the situation that has to be addressed and thinks broadly and thoughtfully about how we can move forward."

Carney suggested that the most Americans can immediately expect to see out of the White House will be an effort to engage the public "in the coming weeks." (wait till after Christmas when low attention spanned citizens will have forgotten all about Newtown.)
 

But back to our looming diet of cat food. Paul Krugman is on the fence about it, agonizing over whether we should agree to a bad deal in order to save the most vulnerable from an even worse deal. His commenters (me included) are understandably gobsmacked. This is just one more chapter of lesser-evilism in the 50 Shades of Sadism series of schlock that we are being forced to listen to, day in and day out.

* The Times is now reporting that Obama made the latest counter-offer. Obama put Social Security on the table. He didn't cave, he didn't capitulate. He is simply making good on his promise to piss off his base. Now we have to hope that the Republican wingers will give it a thumbs-down and we can all merrily sled down the slippery slope.
  

The Normalization of Tragedy

Will the massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut go down in history as the tipping point when a nation finally regained its sanity and just said no to the gun culture and the politicians who enable it?

It's too soon to tell about our rulers and their incestuous bedmates in the mass media. After all, when Gabby Giffords was shot, predictions were that the shooting of a congressperson would finally knock some sense into some thick congressional skulls. It did not. But it does appear that regular people are now speaking out with an outrage, indignation and anguish that we have heretofore not heard. We may finally have had enough of the crocodile tears of politicians who send their prayers and their hugs and their rah-rah stories of our exceptional American resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy, how we are a good nation at heart, and how we always come together at times like these.

The execution-style murders in an upper-middle class bucolic Connecticut town bear a chilling similarity to the massacre in Afghanistan last spring, when Sgt. Robert Bales took a walk and methodically slaughtered 16 people, more than half of them children asleep in their beds. Official reactions, of course, were chillingly dissimilar.

President Obama, on the Afghanistan mayhem: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

President Obama, on the Connecticut mayhem: "We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would — as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do."

I got the transcript of Obama's remarks from his favorite neo-liberal think tank -- the Center for American Progress. The heading for this message of heartfelt paternal condolence was, unbelievably, War Room. That a president who claims to speak as a parent has his PR outfit send out a copy of his speech as though it came from a bunker under siege is proof positive that the imagery of weapons and killing and death and paranoia pervades our culture from top to bottom.

When children are killed abroad by sanctioned military terrorists, we throw bags of money at their families to make them shut up.

When children are killed in the Homeland by unsanctioned domestic terrorists, we throw bags full of prayers at their families to make them shut up.

When children are killed in "tribal areas" by robotic terrorists, we simply deny that they ever even existed in the first place. 

And if all else fails, we blame the children themselves for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's really not much difference between Mike Huckabee stupidly blaming lack of prayer in the classroom for Friday's carnage, and American imperialists blaming dead Muslim children for picking the wrong parents. Just last week, news broke that American and British troops are deliberately targeting children in Afghanistan, because by their very existence in a war zone, they demonstrate "hostile intent." Wow. I must have missed the outpouring of regret from the generals and the outpouring of grief from the commander in chief.

The corporate media coverage of child murders here and child murders there is also markedly different. The lead paragraph in the New York Times story on the Afghanistan massacre:

Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.
 

And the lead paragraph from the Times story on the Connecticut shootings:

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

The Times didn't get around to adding the horrific scenes and eyewitness accounts of the Afghanistan murders until deep into the article -- and then, only after quoting the president and the generals about what an "isolated incident" it was, after more than a decade of cumulative isolated incidents resulting in the deaths of thousands of Muslim civilians.

What if the Connecticut story had been framed like this: "A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people -- 20 of them children -- igniting fears of a new wave of anti Second Amendment hostility?"

People would have called it tasteless, and worse, to dwell upon the plight of official reputations and special interest groups instead of on the victims and their families. But for all their platitudinous blather, that is just how the White House and all but a handful of our politicians are squeamishly trying to protect their own reptilian hides. Spokesman Jay Carney was rightly castigated for his whimpering that "today is not the day" to discuss gun control.

Roxana Green, whose young daughter was killed in the Tucson shooting that wounded Gabby Giffords, has had enough. As one of the many victims of lax gun laws and presidential prayers, she points out that the day to discuss gun control was yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, 10 years ago. In an accompanying email to  a petition for stricter gun laws, she writes

I've heard a lot of promises from politicians since my daughter was murdered in Tucson, Arizona, including President Obama. But I am still waiting for them to act.

And I'm not alone in my frustration. As horrible as it sounds, mass shootings have become common in our country, and 34 Americans are murdered with guns every single day. That means 48,000 people will be murdered with guns in the president's next term. Yet our broken laws remain broken, and our leaders have yet to step forward with a plan to end gun violence.

A petition seeking new gun control legislation has been posted on the White House website and garnered 25,000 signatures in the first hour.

Politicians who urge prayer and forebearance instead of acting to protect the citizenry should just resign and ponder their hypocrisy somewhere else. And that includes the paternalist in chief, who recently signed legislation allowing people to carry concealed weapons in national parks and on Amtrak trains. If he can't stand the heat against packing heat, he should just get out of the kitchen.

Cutting Throught the Biparticrap

Now that the gossip rag known as Politico no longer has the Contest Between Two Evils to slobber over, they've taken to slobbering over the imminent bipartisan gutting of the New Deal. Read between the lines of Crafting a Boom Economy by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, and you will get a frightful peek at the slimy greed creature lurking just beneath the surface of the Beltway Black Lagoon.

Gimme Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses!

 

As Jonathan Chait* points out, the authors have actually written an exposé of oligarchic-political incest without even realizing it, seeming to dwell instead upon the thrill of getting inside access to all those movers and shakers. It's a veritable Who's Who of the Ruling Class and what makes them tick. It gives a blow-by-blow account of how they plan to blow us to smithereens. Some excerpts:
 

Most politicians in the most powerful positions in Washington agree in private that there are a half-dozen or so big things they could and should do that could put a rocket booster on the U.S. economy — but they are too timid to say it in public. (translation: they want to steal from the poor and give so much to themselves that they'll explode with their own gaseous excess. The only thing holding them back is the thought of pitchforks and torches.)

This is the clear takeaway from conversations we have had over the past three months with top lawmakers, officials, their senior aides and the CEOs who advise and lobby all of them. Many of the conversations were private but many were not. (translation: public officials and CEOs are in it together up to their piggy little eyeballs.)

The current tax-and-spending debate only flirts with what these insiders say needs to be done. Instead, top White House and congressional leaders talk privately of the need for tax reform that goes way beyond individuals and rates; much deeper Social Security and Medicare changes than currently envisioned; quick movement on trade agreements, including a proposed one with Europe; an energy policy that exploits the oil and gas boom; and allowing foreign-born students with science expertise to stay here and start businesses. (The Fiscal Cliff is naught but a cynical  smokescreen. The hysterical back and forthing  over the Bush tax cuts is just cover for the planned looting of the Social Security trust fund and the raising of the Medicare age. The private insurance leeches must be further enriched.  The plutocrats want those American job-killing free trade deals, and more outsourcing for cheaper labor and production costs. But they can't admit it out loud, especially the Democrats. Both parties want the tar sands pipeline and unlimited fracking. There's a growing doctor shortage, thanks to the dearth of American medical schools. Rich people, even though they're perfectly willing to cut medical care for others, are paranoically concerned about their own healthy old ages. So bring on the whip-smart immigrants trained at another country's expense, in order to benefit the American Elites.) 

“Both Democrats and Republicans privately agree,” Warren Buffett told us. “They just don’t want to be the first to speak out on their side.” Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who meets regularly with officials at the White House and in Congress, said lawmakers often plead to him: “Save us from ourselves.” ( Blustering Billionaire Bullies Buffett & Bowles Bloviate: "It is the job of the Patriotic Plutocracy to wipe the original sin of acting in the interests of regular people right off the timorous little souls of the politicians.")

The country’s most influential CEOs, who have been meeting with Obama and congressional leaders on these very topics, are telling them if they do some or all of this, investment, market growth and jobs will quickly follow. (Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down. If we throw enough of our crap, maybe some of it will stick to the walls of their minds, before it inevitably trickles down to drown the people at the bottom.) 

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said long-term commitments to measures such as tax reform and trade would provide a “certainty premium” that would help bring corporate cash off the sidelines. “If we can just allow people to keep their confidence up by getting some of these issues off the table,” he said, “you would see the economy grow and momentum continue to build, and unemployment continue to ease down, and housing starts [go] up and housing prices [go] up. All that will continue to build on itself.” (Repatriate that trillion-dollar stash we've been hiding in offshore bank accounts -- and don't tax it! Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down. The more we can hoard, the more we can lord. You're makin' us noyvous, see, and noyvous bankstahs make dangerous bankstahs. We'll keep up the shakedown, make you an offer you can't refuse because we're God. We can create a world of jobs in seven biblical days.) 

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is pushing immigration and tax reform. “America is poised to grow faster if we have good policy,” he said. “[Businesses] have capacity, they have liquidity, they’re well capitalized. Housing has turned. The table is being set pretty well. If we add good policy to that, it can lift off.” (Hedge funds are buying up foreclosured homes at bargain basement prices to rent them to the same people who were swindled out of them in the first place. Their elite table is set with the dregs of humanity. But they're still not satisfied. They want to extract every last ounce of blood and treasure as rocket fuel to go to that planet made of diamonds, leaving everybody else spinning without a tether in space, to be inexorably sucked into the Great Black Hole.)

By no means are any of the policy issues easy to resolve. But in almost every case, they are not new — and hardly exotic. They have been litigated by committees, commissions and think tanks for years. Next year represents the best opportunity in decades to do something about some or all of them, according to those in the trenches. ( Please see this 2006 clip of then-Senator Barack Obama pledging allegiance to the Rubinites at the Brookings tank. He will provide the perfect Democratic cover to mundanely destroy the New Deal, beginning next year. Oh, and the thought of millionaires and billionaires sweating in the trenches.... doesn't it make you want to shovel their bipartishit right back on top of them?)

The Politico pundits finally cut to the chase toward the end of their screed:

The critical problem is entitlement reform, and if taxes even have to go up to get an entitlement deal done, that still solves the vast majority of the issue,” said Kenneth Griffin, who founded Citadel LLC, a hedge fund, and is worth an estimated $3 billion. He is a Republican. (If we have to pay a few dollars more for a few years more, so be it. It's well worth the price of admission to the spectacle of watching old people starve to death in the richest country on earth.)
 

* Chait, who recently suggested that the Medicare age be raised to 67 simply to display how magnanimous Obama and the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party can be, actually agrees with the policies of the plutocrats. He declares himself astounded, however, at the clueless insularity of the elites who don't factor in the labor and environmental costs of their selfishness. In other words, if you're serious about being an unmitigated greedhead, the least you can do is pretend to care about how your psychopathy will look to outsiders. And above all, be wonkish, for cryin' out loud. Give us specifics and rith-ma-tic.
  

Parasites on Parade

All you have to do is part with one million George Washington smackeroos, and your corporation people will get exclusive access to the festivities at the Second Coming of Obama next month. This means that all the little people will be excluded and will not be around to breathe on you or otherwise disturb your VIP exclusivity during your foray inside the Beltway.  

If you didn't get your invitation yet, don't despair. They were delivered, en masse, via email, and merely give the illusion of being engraved. They are actually kind of cheap and tawdry-looking. And the spelling skills of whatever Social Secretary of Snobbery designed them leave something to be desired too. For example, the ultra-exclusive George Washington Premium Partner Package includes Inaugural Parade "bleecher" seats. Not only is the lack of custom-upholstered seating de trop, the offer is downright insulting. It sounds like they're going to stuff the corporate welfare leeches up in the nosebleed section.

The only surprising thing about President Obama shilling for tax-shielded corporate money to fund his extravaganza is that a lot of people are actually surprised about it. After all, this is the guy who sold exclusive access to his corpus throughout his campaign, for a grand total of a billion dollars. The proceeds from his Inaugural balls will be mere chump change in the grand scheme of things. 

But I guess you can't blame the victims of the Surprise. After all, in 2009, Team Obama made a big righteous deal about not taking any corporate lucre for the swearing-in festivities. Those were the days when our president was still fresh from his victorious marketing campaign based on a "grassroots movement." One of his PR flacks, a guy oxymoronically named Josh Earnest, sincerely joked at the time that the banning of corporate money was only the beginning to changing "the way business as usual is done in Washington."

 The pretense at pretense is all gone now. Still, as Public Citizen puts it, we the people should have the right to not have "our" inauguration brought to us by the likes of Bank of America:

 That the corporate-funded inaugural festivities will fall on the anniversary (Jan. 21) of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, is not just ironic given President Obama’s stated support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision holding that corporations can spend unlimited amounts on elections, it undermines the case for corporate-free elections.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has stated that it will not accept funds from lobbyists, foreign corporations, TARP recipients that have not repaid their government loans or others that do not pass its vetting process. But every corporation’s donations create a conflict of interest, because they all have business before the government in one way or the other. The problem with donations from lobbyists is that they expect something in return for their contribution. The situation is exactly the same with corporate contributors, virtually all of whom employ lobbyists.
 

Of course, it has long been known that the Obama Administration has a nifty work-around to its anti-lobbyist rule. Either the lobbyists don't even bother registering as lobbyists, thereby gaining unfettered access to the White House, or the Obama people just meet with the influence peddlers across the street at the Caribou Cafe. From the New York Times:

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”
 

So it's not so much the graft and corruption --  we have cynically come to expect that in our politicians. It's the continuing hypocrisy of a president who lectures the country on the need for austerity at the same time he wines and dines with the elites. Those "bleechers for leechers" -- the seating arrangements for the exclusive corporate rumps -- are being constructed at taxpayer expense, by carpenters who now may have to wait a few more years to retire and collect Medicare. Those people cannot afford tickets to Candlelight Receptions and Benefactors Brunches and Children's Balls.

Writes John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation,

Even if Sheldon Adelson doesn't throw a casino-themed gala in Obama's honor, there's a whole machinery in DC built on brokering wealth and influence, and a good party feeds the scene. Neither defending the celebrations nor priming the check-writers presents a good public interest case for this move.

(snip)

The Obama administration is likely to, again, justify their behavior by saying that they're following the law. Whenever their accountability policies have loopholes or problems, rather than fixing them, the administration asks to be judged in comparison to Bush, saying their record speaks for itself. At some point, though, it's time to judge Obama in his own words. Obama said unlimited donations sully our democracy, threaten public service, and weaken representation -- and has now chosen to embrace them.
Maybe Obama's setting the tone for his second term: we're not worried about whether we look like reformers at all.
 

Like I said -- they're giving up pretending at pretending. I wonder if the crowds in the exclusive bleechers (sic) will cheer when the president praises the free market in his Second Inaugural Address?  I wonder if they'll send me an email asking me to donate $3 for a chance to win one of the nosebleed seats?

One thing's for sure: if Barack Obama channels FDR and says "I welcome their hatred", he won't be talking about banksters. He'll be talking about his own base.

The Class War Ain't Got No Class!

 

Your Weekly Dose of Austerity Propaganda

The latest presidential side of non-fiery chat: (rough draft rescued from a White House dumpster.)

Hello, everybody. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of bullshit talk about phony deadlines we’re facing on how to steal from the poor and let my donor class take whatever they want jobs and taxes and investments. But with so much manufactured fear-mongering  noise and so many opinions flying around, it can be easy to fool most of the people some of the time lose sight of what this debate is really about. It’s not about which political party comes out on top, or who wins or loses in Washington. It’s about making sure the top one percent keeps sucking up all the wealth of our great nation smart decisions that will have a real negative impact on your lives and the lives of Americans all across the country.

Right now, middle-class tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. Time is running out because we are pretending there is a fiscal crisis and not a jobs crisis.  And there are two things that can happen.

First, if Congress does nothing, every family in America will see their income taxes automatically go up on January 1^st. A typical middle-class family of four would get a non-immediate $2,200 tax hike. That would be temporarily inconveniencing bad for families, it would be bad for businesses, and it would drag down our entire economy. Of course, since we could easily and retroactively restore the deductions early next year, it would actually not have an immediate effect at all. It would take at least a year for the economy to slide back into recession. But nobody, especially me, is mentioning that. I need cover to slash the social safety net, and this kabuki debt crisis theatre is giving it to me.

Now, Congress can avoid all this by passing a law that prevents a tax hike on the first $250,000 of everybody’s income. That means 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses wouldn’t see their income taxes go up by a single dime. Even the wealthiest Americans would get a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income. And families everywhere would enjoy some peace of mind. Through this bit of weekly propaganda, I will make sure that your peace of mind is becoming upset, just in case it wasn't already. 

The Senate has already done their part. Now we’re just waiting for Republicans in the House to do the same thing. But so far, they’ve put forward an unbalanced plan that actually lowers rates for the wealthiest Americans. Ironically, if they fail to deal with me, your Medicare and Social Security will be safe for now!  If we want to protect the middle class, the best possible thing would be just to go over the fiscal cliff then the math just doesn’t work.

We can and should actually be representing the people who elected us do more than just extend middle class tax cuts. I stand ready to fuck you over work with Republicans on a plan that rewards multinational corporations spurs economic growth, creates McJobs jobs and reduces our deficit – a plan that gives the rich both sides some of what they want. I’m willing to raise the Medicare age to 67, thus giving even more profits to the private insurance leeches find ways to bring down the cost of health care without letting on that I will be hurting seniors and other Americans who depend on it. And I’m willing to make more earned benefits entitlement spending cuts on top of the $1 trillion dollars in cuts I signed into law last year. That means adjusting the formula by which we figure increases in the cost of living for Social Security recipients. We already don't factor in food and medical care; now we have to find even more cruel ways to make sure middle class refugees share the sacrifice, work longer, and die sooner.

But if we’re seriously beholden to Wall Street about reducing our deficit while still investing in things like privatized, for-profit education and research that are important to enriching the plutocracy growing our economy – and if we’re seriously pretending to care about protecting middle-class families – then we’re also going to have to grovel ask the wealthiest Americans to pay only slightly higher tax rates. That’s one principle I won’t compromise on in order to give credence to my shared sacrifice meme and keep some of the people still stupidly believing that I actually care about them.

After all, this was a central question in the false choice election between two evils. A clear majority of Americans – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – agreed that jobs are the most pressing issue with a balanced approach totally contrived by me that asks ignores the poor and longterm unemployed something from everyone, but a very temporary, paltry, miniscule little more from those who already grabbed more than their fair share can most afford it. I am ignoring the fact that only 15% of those polled said the deficit is their primary concern. It’s the only way to give the richest of the rich who spent a billion dollars to re-elect me their way put our economy on a sustainable path without asking even more from them the middle class. And it’s the only kind of plan I’m willing to sign.

Everyone in the elite financial, media and political class  agrees the rich can never have too much we need to bring down our deficit and strengthen our economy for the long-term. The question is whether we can do it in a an opaque responsible way that allows us to keep fooling you investing in the military industrial complex things that have always made America an imperialistic bully and a banana republic strong. I’m convinced we can keep up our charade. And if both sides of the Money Party are willing to compromise, I believe we can give businesses and families a false sense of security going into the New Year.

Thanks for swallowing this crap, and have a great weekend.