Good Stalker/Bad Stalker

Did you know that the same federal government which just renewed its intention to spy on you with impunity, and re-declared its right to arrest you without ever charging you, and jail you forever for reasons it never even has to divulge, has declared January to be National Stalking Awareness Month?

Although it is widely acknowledged that the National Security apparatus eavesdrops on, and collects the emails of, millions of American citizens, and is even building a new $2 billion facility in Utah to store all the data, the government still pretends to need to hear from you personally about what you are doing to commemorate Stalking Awareness Month.

"Post, Tweet, or update your status using our 31 days of updates!" the Department of Justice site cheerily and disingenuously advises. "Watch Stalking: Real Fear, Real Crime! Take the Stalking Quiz!"

President Obama just signed another extension of the FISA pro-stalking act into law, personally opposing an amendment by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) which would have required federal stalkers to divulge information on how many people they have victimized. The White House even supplied Senate leaders with talking points to quash the amendment. The surprisingly unclassified list was later obtained by the Tech Dirt website. (You may have to click "refresh" to get the list to show up, for some reason.)

"The Administration opposes this amendment. The goal of this amendment is to obtain an estimate of the number of U.S. persons' communications that may have been collected. Two inspectors general have determined, and reported to Congress, that it is not feasible to provide actual numbers or estimates. They also found that an effort to provide such numbers by delibertely trying to identify U.S. person information would adversely affect the privacy of any U.S. persons whose incidentally collected communications may exist within the collected data."
 

The president says that he doesn't want to admit that your privacy is being invaded because that would be an invasion of your privacy. Which more than qualifies for a whole chapter in Orwell for Dummies, don't you think?

But back to the Stalking Awareness Month quiz. One multiple choice question asks if you know how many Americans are stalked every year. Of course you don't, because that would be an invasion of your privacy. But the official government answer is more than three million -- unsanctioned creeps only, of course. And did you also know that stalking is a crime in all 50 states? You could have fooled me! What about the New York City police department's Muslim-stalking, and all those stops and frisks of thousands of people of color every single year? And then there's that little matter of the FBI stalking Occupy protesters with the help of the too-big-to-jail banks. In most, if not all, 50 states!

According to the government, most victims never report stalking to police, thinking that the police will not take them seriously. Ya think? The government also quite hilariously defines "monitoring computer usage" as criminal stalking behavior. And, it admits that computer stalkers are not necessarily tech-savvy. Duh again.

I am embarrassed to admit that I only scored a 70% on the quiz. I did get the question about the mental health of stalkers correct, though. I won't spoil things for you any further by telling the answer, in case you want to take the test yourself. And you know that you do! Just imagine Big Brother watching your every keystroke as you click through your choices, and reporting back on whether you're reporting back, and stalking the stalkers who stalk the stalking website.

A New Wave of Obama Apologists

Let the Great Spin Begin. Now that what's left of the left is almost universally lambasting the Great Feckless Cliff Aversion Act as a huge gift to the rich rather than the rescue of the middle class that the White House wants you to believe it is, the usual pseudo-liberal suspects of the corporate media are out in droves.

Via Naked Capitalism comes a valuable tutorial cutting through the propaganda which, according to Yves Smith, is aiming to soften up the public for "entitlement reform." They're attempting to trick us into thinking we're getting a fantastic deal, and that the rich were screwed, and people concerned about their Social Security are radical lefty wack-jobs who also believe in fairies.

Those who question the Beltway blather are being made to feel like ingrates. Perhaps the most odious bit of Obama apologium I've read this week is a piece in The Daily Beast by Michael Tomasky. At 52, he doesn't really qualify for admission to that elite group of young media pundits who arrived on the national scene fully-formed and famous, apparently never having had to slog their way up through the ranks of crappy, low-paying local jobs at obscure papers or stations, covering zoning board meetings and cats in trees. Ross Douthat of the New York Times and Luke Russert of NBC are typical examples of what Charles Pierce calls the Young Fogeys. These are the people who can spew about "entitlement reform" because they will never have to rely on Social Security for their basic subsistence. If it's not there for them in their dotage, what do they care?

But Tomasky absolutely shares the Young Fogey style. He uses that annoying, cloying combination of scolding and Charles Boyer-like gaslighting techniques and cool pundit-speak with some mild, hip swear words thrown in for good measure in his role as a middle-aged Young Hippie-Punching Turk for Obama. His piece is ever so originally and predictably titled Dear Liberals: Stop Complaining. It makes the whining tone all the more ironic:

But if there’s a style of criticism that really bugs me, it’s that which reproves him for failing to be Captain Liberal while refusing to recognize that the guy has to be Mister President. Here’s what I mean. (a variation of "he's not the king and he never promised you a unicorn.")

(snip)

I will readily confess that the logic (of letting us go over the Cliff) is, if not impeccable, only mildly peccable. The Republicans would have been over a barrel. Of course predicting what those people will do and how they’ll respond to any given situation is risky business, but presumably they would not have wanted to be blamed for middle-class tax rates going up, so they’d have done something vaguely rational.

I get it. But here’s what I think proponents of that argument don’t get. Obama isn’t some co-speaker. He’s the effing president. (cue the young, hip, daring yet genteel outrage) People want the president to lead. They may blame Republicans more than Democrats for obstruction, and that’s a good thing. But they still want the president to Get Things Done, and, however naively, they still think he ought to be able to just assert his will and Get Things Done. (okay, I'll cut him some slack on the Gratuitous Capitalization To Make a Point, because I often do it myself. See above.) 

But the president—he’s supposed to do stuff. Obama really and deeply understands this—perhaps to a fault, but better that than believe he only has to represent the third of the country that loves him. (the same tired old canard that just because a liberal base elected him, his first duty is to the Neo-Cons. He is president of all the people. The only mandate he thinks he got was deficit reduction, championed by a whopping 15% of all the people )

Obama Is Not The Leader of a Movement -- He's the Head of a Country. (his bold, not mine.)

Now they tell us. I mean, both his campaigns have always been framed as grass-roots movements.  Practically every email I received from Obama for America urged me to become part of the movement. Googling "Obama Movement" gets you 160 million hits. But according to Tomasky, you now need to have your head examined for being so naive as to actually believe their movement crap. That was the wilfully shameless then. This is the pragmatic now, people.

Only slightly less odious, stylistically anyway, is this front-page story by Annie Lowrey in today's New York Times. Lowrey, who recently wrote another monumentally odious puff-piece about deficit hawk Maya McGuineas, today informs us that President Obama is making those poor rich people suffer, by golly! Contrary to what our lying eyes and brains may tell us, our tax rate is now the most progressive in a generation! It "squeezes" a whopping $600 billion from the wealthy in the next..... um, decade. (that is peanuts, by the way.) It raises the capital gains tax from 15 to 20%! (even though it should have gone much higher, at least to 35% as originally suggested.) Not until deep into the story does Lowry admit that the progressive taxation she propagandizes about is actually only in the eye of the beholder. She acknowledges, for example, that a well-off physician still pays a higher effective rate than a hedge fund manager. Mitt Romney, despite all the anti-vulture capitalism rhetoric of the Obama campaign, is still making out like a bandit.

On further reflection, calling Lowrey's article a propaganda piece is being way too kind.  Since the top marginal tax rate in 1970 was 70%, she is committing a blatant lie of omission. On the front page, no less.*

 Just as an aside, this 20-something Harvard lit major came to The Times as a fully-formed economics expert directly from a blogging  gig at Slate, and as the new bride of that most famous of all pseudo-liberal young pundits, Ezra Klein. Klein, who is not yet 30 years of age, has been named the most influential wonky wunderkind blogger in Washington (by, who else, The Daily Beast). Klein and Lowrey have also been named to the incoming class of media power couples by the New York Observer. Also, too (another gratuitous bit of redundant cool phraseology used by hip bloggers) they join Tina Brown of The Daily Beast and Sir Harry in The Varsity Line-Up. I just thought you should know.

The Daily Beast, as you probably already know, stole its name from that scathing satire of the journalistic class by Evelyn Waugh, titled Scoop. There sure ain't nothing like effing self-parody, and other peccable Stuff, huh?

* A new headline amends the claim to "most progressive rate since 1979."
 

Bombs and Monsters

Sorry about the lack of posts this week. The year may be new, but it's already getting old. I can't remember ever feeling so overwhelmed. At least the last Congress is history, the lame duck session particularly having been overrun by the one of the most bizarre bunch of political quacks in recent memory. Some of them are back, their feathers ruffled, for another paddle in the scummy Washington pond. F-bomb boy Boehner with cheek of tan is still around, though having barely squeaked through for a new stint as the Weeper Speaker.

The new year promises more of the same old, same old with a vengeance. We are being inundated with one episode of Shock Doctrine Theater after another. The Feckless Cliff Aversion Act was just signed by long distance presidential robo-pen, giving us a clue of how utterly contrived the crisis was in the first place. Now we're getting previews of Sequestration Saga and Debt Ceiling Drama Redux. Will Obama cave again, or will he stand firm for the principles he really, truly, deep down inside believes in? is already on the pseudoliberal marquees. Unbelievably, the narrative still revolves around this being a Democratic vs. Republican battle, rather than the Class War it truly is. Here's how I responded to Paul Krugman's column today, about the coming Battle of the Budget:

The trick to using disaster capitalism tactics is to use them sparingly, in order to keep us from noticing how our leaders are shafting us. But here we are, the targets of a marathon assault of clumsily epic proportions. We're just now finding out how narrowly we dodged the initial barrage of New Deal-destroying dummy bullets, with the news that Harry Reid tossed the president's most recent Bargain for the Grandees into his fireplace. 

But like a demented phoenix, the austerity monster keeps rising from the ashes. The president said he still wants to "improve" Medicare, calling it our greatest deficit driver. He still seems perfectly willing to cast himself as the great appeaser in the pursuit of an awesome deal that Wall Street will cheer about. He said nothing, of course, about such deficit cures as dismantling our trillion-dollar war machine, or phasing out private insurance to bring health care costs down, or raising the FICA cap to protect Social Security, or a living wage law, or a financial transaction tax. But the Chained CPI monster is still on the loose, with various and sundry allied threats of less food, less heat, less housing assistance, and less medical care.

Meanwhile, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the top 100 plutocrats added a combined $241 bn to their kitty last year, for a total aggregate net worth of $1.9 trillion.

The new anthem of the oligarchs is playing loud and clear: They can never be too rich, or the lesser people too thin.

Another Year, Another Deal

So, did you have an exciting New Year's Eve? I sure did. I wore a tacky necklace made out of purple beads and a plastic shot glass, watched a bit of Twilight Zone marathon, switched over to CNN to watch the orgy, and switched off the TV the minute the ghoulish ricti of Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his union-busting, Occupy-evicting girlfriend Diana Taylor appeared. It could always have been worse. At least he wasn't tonguing Lady Gaga this year.

"It could always have been worse" is the conventional wisdom of the Great Fiscal Cliff Averting deal apparently reached last night when I was all wrapped up in little Billy Mumy turning people into jack-in-the-boxes. At least we are waking up to a temporary continuation of unchained Social Security checks, and another measly year of subsistence unemployment benefits for a handful of jobless people, and not being turned into jack-in-the-boxes. So who can really begrudge the rich for getting their permanent tax cuts on their first half a mil, and the spawn of millionaires never having to pay a single penny of tax on the first many millions of their inheritances? It's a balanced approach. That is, if you equate pensioners eating a third meal with Paris Hilton being able to buy a third Porsche. Or conversely, pensioners scrimping on medication at the same time Paris Hilton writes out a check to the IRS on the petty mad-money million not stashed away in an offshore account. 
 
Paul Krugman has a cogent rundown of What It All Means. My response: 

Look at this way. The Republican-spawned phrases "fiscal cliff," "kick the can down the road," "job creators". and "double down" have now all been banned from the lexicon by Lake Superior University. Of course, the GOP will balk at this list, accusing the college of elitism because of its very name, and because it makes fun of rich people.

But to be serious (they should also have banned that one, along with "grand" and "bold"), the worst thing about this deal is that the gifts to the wealthy are permanent, and the crumbs thrown to the poor and middle class will be gone in a few years at most. As far as I'm concerned, this is political malpractice. It's a crime that the crisis of unemployment is not being addressed, other than to sustain a minimal standard of living for the chronically jobless for a maximum of only one more year -- and for only relatively small group of people.

Of course, we'll be called purist ideologues for not falling in line with the "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good" pragmatism that is trying to disguise itself as the new progressivism. But this time around, I do see some of the Obama personality cult being chipped away, which is a hopeful sign as far as citizen resistance is concerned.

Meanwhile, our elected leaders will have to be watched like hawks (they forgot to remove "deficit hawk" from the lexicon, too!) as they try to bargain away the New Deal under the auspices of yet another manufactured crisis.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Bargaining Chips and Chomping Chains

How can I put this delicately? If you are old, or if aging is in your future plans, your president just doesn't seem to think your life is worth very much. That average $1200 monthly Social Security check you've been counting on?  Way too extravagant for Barack Obama's refined sensibilities.

In the past, he has been more circumspect about his plans for a "balanced approach" in which the little people share the sacrifice are sacrificed to the predators of the financial class. But yesterday, he got his machismo up. It probably had a lot to do with being mere inches away from fellow corporate apparatchick and gerontophobe David Gregory. Familiarity breeds contempt.... for people beneath their exalted class. Bullies are often too cowardly to work alone. They need at least one flattering sycophant close by.  From yesterday's Meet the Press: 

DAVID GREGORY: You’ve got to talk tough to seniors --

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:But–

DAVID GREGORY:–don’t you about this? And say, something’s got to give?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:–but I already have, David, as you know, one of the proposals we made was something called Chained CPI, which sounds real technical but basically makes an adjustment in terms of how inflation is calculated on Social Security. Highly unpopular among Democrats. Not something supported by AARP. But in pursuit of strengthening Social Security for the long-term I’m willing to make those decisions.

Much is being made of how Harry Reid and his minions "stood firm" against chained CPI being part of the Feckless Cliff negotiations. But people are missing the point that when the Democratic leadership balked at putting Social Security on the table now, it merely means they don't want to waste this valuable bargaining chip in a game of penny ante. They won't add Chained CPI to the kitty until the high stakes game of poker known as The Grand Bargain takes place in the Debt Ceiling Casino next year.

"The idea was if you are going to do debt ceiling, you would then do chained CPI," (a) Democratic aide said, speaking anonymously because talks are ongoing and extremely sensitive. "They can only ask us to make that concession in that pairing. We are not going to do anything with chained CPI now [without a debt ceiling deal]. That's a poison pill.

It has come to this. The lives and livelihoods of America's most vulnerable citizens have been reduced to political concessions. Our monthly retirement checks are something that millionaire political hacks "do" the same way they do lunch, do cocktail parties, do the revolving door shuffle. They're doing us. But even though they're bold and serious and macho, they pride themselves on being very sensitive lovers. They wield their whips and chains discreetly, out of public view. Once we start feeling the lashes, we won't even remember who it was that actually beat us to a pulp. We'll just keep inviting them back for seconds.

The Better to Tweak You With, My Dear

Richard Eskow of Campaign for America's Future has written a far more serious and sensible prescription for how we can address the almighty deficit without torturing innocent people. There are plenty of ethical and more effective solutions out there than Chained CPI. The problem is that there are no ethics left in Washington. And being ineffective in the Beltway Bubble doesn't ever get you fired, especially if you're a member of Congress. The president just rewarded the do-nothingest legislature in history with a pay raise. Seriously.

Gridlock Theatre is good. Just ask the lobbyists and the corporate advertisers funding the corporate media perpetuating the gridlock. Action delayed means the serious people get paid. Lots and lots of cash:

  Washington is getting richer because the intensity of the struggle for influence at the centre of power has a natural tendency to keep spiraling upwards, and influence groups have to spend more on their struggles in the capital just to stand still. This isn't a conspiracy by a unified ruling class of takers against the far-flung makers, as in the Capitol of "The Hunger Games". It's an unavoidable, never-ending political battle between powerful clans to protect their interests at court, as in King's Landing in "Game of Thrones".... Gridlock between powerful vested interests can be very profitable for experienced, well-connected court players who can promise to preserve the gridlock.

So when the deficit scolds blame the "dysfunction" in Washington for all our ills, don't believe it for a minute. It's not dysfunction that's killing us. It's the corruption. It runs wide, it runs deep, and the stain just won't come out. 
 

Irritable Bipartisan Syndrome

Whoever keeps saying that Congress is gridlocked is wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course, they become chronically constipated whenever they need to pass legislation that benefits regular people. But when it comes time to reward the defense contractors and the corporate sugar daddies, the diarrhea part of political Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) always kicks in. The money and the bullshit both flow freely.

Just today, for example, the Senate overwhelmingly approved continued warrantless wiretapping/internet spying on the inhabitants of the global battlefield of make-believe terror. In other words, everyone. (You can find out how your own rep voted by clicking here.) Less than a quarter of all senators believe that domestic spying under the guise of anti-terror is unconstitutional. Not only that, we now officially have no right to know whether we're among the countless lucky duckies who've already been sucked up into the voracious maw of the Homeland Security behemoth.

Before final passage, the Senate voted against an amendment from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which would have required the Director of National Intelligence to report to Congress on whether any U.S.-based email and phone communications have been picked up in the process of conducting overseas surveillance, and whether any wholly domestic U.S. communications have been swept up under the program.

Wyden said intelligence officials have so far failed to provide such an estimate.

There's more. The goons are also refusing to even confirm or deny whether a list of millions or billions or trillions of victims even exists. The money may flow, but the info it pays for is bound up deep within the bowels of the secrecy fetishists. Talk about anal retention! And the complicit Senators are not about to administer a massive dose of Ex-Lax, either. The constipation part of Irritable Bipartisan Syndrome will continue for another five years, at least. And the gasbaggery, needless to say, will be infinite.

Chief FISA Scold Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who has never met a Homeland Security sub-agency bureaucrat she didn't like, testily insists that any illegal spying on Americans has been sparse and inadvertent, so there is no way in hell that we will ever be allowed to see if our names are on any list. Because, like President Obama's Kill List, the Spy List has never been officially confirmed. The lists exist, but mainly in the mist, is the gist.

Glenn Greenwald has written an excellent smackdown and back-story on the latest bipolar bipartisanship. An excerpt:

In doing so, the new 2008 (FISA Amendments) law gutted the 30-year-old FISA statute that had been enacted to prevent the decades of severe spying abuses discovered by the mid-1970s Church Committee: by simply barring the government from eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from a court. Worst of all, the 2008 law legalized most of what Democrats had spent years pretending was such a scandal: the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program secretly implemented by George Bush after the 9/11 attack. In other words, the warrantless eavesdropping "scandal" that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times reporters who revealed it ended not with investigations or prosecutions for those who illegally spied on Americans, but with the Congressional GOP joining with key Democrats (including Obama) to legalize most of what Bush and Cheney had done. Ever since, the Obama DOJ has invoked secrecy and standing doctrines to prevent any courts from ruling on whether the warrantless eavesdropping powers granted by the 2008 law violate the Constitution.

When it comes to serving the regular people who elected them, senators are famous for obfuscation, delays and can-kicking. But when it comes to wars, and weapons, and national security, and keeping fear alive, and doing pretty much whatever President Obama wants in the way of destroying the Bill of Rights, they always manage to get a massive jolt of bipartisan adrenaline:

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) urged his colleagues not to support any amendments because he said the bill would then have to be reconsidered by the House. He said unless the House version passed, surveillance would halt after Dec. 31, posing a threat to national security.

“We’ve got to get this bill on the desk of the president by Dec. 31,” Chambliss said on the floor Friday.

Or else, what? We go off the FISA Cliff and millions of spy state listening posts go dark?

We will never know. It's been officially decreed as none of our business. And if you complain about it, you're supporting the terrorists. More than three-quarters of the Senate has just declared: "We are all Dick Cheney now."

This reminds me of Rick Sanchez of CNN, who used to run a segment called The List You Don't Want to Be On. Then he got fired. 

NYT Editors Asleep at Switch

27 minutes ago

Obama Returns to Washington, With Bo By JACKIE CALMES President Obama returned to the White House on Thursday to resume efforts to end a partisan fiscal impasse with the family dog, Bo.   (Bo refuses to stop pooping under the White House Christmas trees until he gets a raise in his chewy toy allowance. Obama has drawn a firm line in the sand.  Threatens to switch Bo to cat food. Stay tuned.)