Was your whole weekend ruined by the weekend news dump that the Obama Administration had nixed the trillion dollar platinum coin and is opting instead for more Debt Ceiling Crisis drama? Don't despair. While you're waiting for Austerity to kick in, the president wants you to go on a spending spree on the off-chance that you still have any actual money to burn. Just go ahead and plunk it down on a set of three Obama Coins. You heard it right. Although the Treasury declared that minting a coin to stave off national default is illegal, unethical, unfathomable and undoable even though it's constitutional, the president has minted a whole mint of gold, silver and bronze coins to help defray the cost of his second inauguration.
Okay, so they're pretend coins. But they do have value. They will pay for somebody else, not you, to attend one of the Gala Inaugural Balls Or maybe they will pay for the tons of lobster and bison destined for a thousand slavering maws at the Congressional Inaugural Luncheon. My own senator, Chuck Schumer, is in charge of the menu, which includes pie made of apples from my very own Hudson Valley. He invited a New York Times food critic, not you or me, for a food-tasting binge to decide the ultimate party fare:
"I was hopeful of having Long Island duck, but unfortunately the tasters and I said the dish doesn’t quite work — where the bison was wow,” Mr. Schumer said, hastening to add that “the duck was not at fault,” but rather the preparation.
At 10:30 in the morning, the senator was sampling and praising the Tierce 2009 Finger Lakes Dry Riesling, to be served with the first course of lobster with clam chowder sauce, as well as the award-winning Bedell Cellars 2009 merlot from Long Island that will be served with bison. By 10:45, he declared that the lobster would be his lunch, with a few bites of the bison, a few sips of the Bedell and a sampling of dessert, a pie made with Hudson Valley apples.
Go ahead. You know you want to. Buy the freaking coin set so Chuckie and the gang can have more than a few bites of bison. Let them devour the near-extinct national animal that is no longer even on the nickel before they nickel-and-dime the rest of us to death. It is called Sharing the Sacrifice. It is called Economic Patriotism.
And by the way, where in the Constitution does it state that the Senate may provide itself with official food tasters? Of course, it is understandable that elected officials with a 9% public approval rating might find a food taster necessary to vet their victuals. Even Obama has been known to bring along his own personal food tasters to dangerous plutocratic fund-raisers and on official trips. Leaders of Empire can never be too austere when it comes to budgeting for the personal protection of their palates.
Meanwhile, take another close look at those coins. They look like they were inspired by the Little Orphan Annie comics. Obama's eyes are vacant circles! They forgot to etch in any pupils! And get a load of Biden in profile. He looks like the "before" image in a Lifestyle Lift commercial, what with the double chin and the sagging jowls. I think that $7,500 price tag is way too steep if they can't even idealize our politicians. As Annie would say, "Gee Whiskers!"
Flu-y Hooey: it's the big one, folks. Hope none of you is suffering, but if you are, that you were able to score some Tamiflu or other anti-viral meds that temper the vile effects, and are otherwise being well cared for. If you haven't yet had your fill of Flu Lit, you can find some here, here, here and for comic relief, here. (hint: it's another Rush Limbaugh conspiracy theory.)
In New York City, officials don't think the flu is making people cough enough. They have begun mass, 24/7 open-air burning of the tons and tons of Superstorm Sandy debris, despite protests from the American Lung Association and other environmental groups. As you may have guessed, the pollution is being perpetrated in a non-affluent section of the city, so the plutocrats will have no need to don their monogrammed gas masks. More here. (h/t WestVillageGal.)
While current mainstream media coverage of education has devolved into whether we should arm teachers and turn schools into militarized zones, a brave group of Seattle teachers is choosing to fight back. Not with guns, but by unanimously refusing to administer those odious state-mandated standardized tests this spring. (h/t Barbara Madeloni.)
And speaking of odium, is it me, or are President Obama and his band of crony capitalists now going out of their way to provoke unprecedented levels of disgust? I've reached the point where the very sound of his voice affects me in an unpleasant, visceral way. I am just grateful that those smirking images of him have ceased following my every Internet click (the following is now covert, of course.)
No, it isn't just me. One of his own former national security advisors is now publicly calling him "as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor".
But sadly, even so-called progressives still support the man despite all the damning evidence of his corruption staring them right in the face. Sen. Bernie Sanders, self-described independent socialist, is a prime example of somebody who can rail and rage against the Boss Man's behavior, but never quite take that ultimate denouncing step. Bernie's statement that he will not vote for Treasury nominee Jack Lew begins "As a supporter of the president, I remain extremely concerned that virtually all of his key economic advisers have come from Wall Street."
Huh? How about withholding your support of the president, Bernie? How about leading a contingent of Progressive Congress Critters to the White House to protest?
Better yet, listen to what Bill Black has to say about Loopy Lew, whom Bernie apparently can't help smarmily calling "intelligent" despite massive evidence to the contrary. Black just goes for it, and calls him a dumb-ass and a crook and an epic fail, and thus an ideal and extremely useful idiot for the PTBs.
At least when Bush was around, people used their brains and expressed their disgust in greater numbers. But for some reason, Barack is sheathed in so many layers of protective teflon that Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave with jealousy. Obama has got to be a master hypnotist with the 50% approval rating he currently enjoys.
You've heard of those Good Christian Bitches, and have probably had the misfortune to meet or even be related to one. But at all costs, avoid the League of Minnesota Granny Obamabitches, who make it their business to spy on their neighbors, troll comment boards,monitor dinner table conversations, and send all their findings to state and national Democratic Party databases. Buttinskyism has been taken to a whole new level. Crones & Drones are now vying for your personal space. It's getting a little cramped out there in Amurika.
Feel free* to join the National Conversation on these or any other issues that are striking your fancy or pushing your own personal odium button. Happy Weekend.
*Update 1/13: This does not include the freedom to call for armed rebellion and other violence. I just deleted several inflammatory comments along those lines which were posted overnight. I recently removed the comment moderation feature and the honor system thing had been working very well until now. But if this kind of crap continues, I will be forced to start holding and previewing everybody's comments again.
Additionally -- as I have stated in the past, I don't mind the occasional (and respectful) anonymous comment from the casual visitor to this site. But if you want to engage with other contributors, you're going to have to identify yourself a little better than "Anonymous."
It looks like a demented ferris wheel from hell. But what it really depicts is the tangled corporate media web emanating from that exclusive, yet bloated, think tank known as the Council on Foreign Relations. For even more detailed CFR intertwinements, be sure to visit the Muckety site, which is running a series of special reports on the dizzying incestuousness that exists within the Beltway and beyond. The Hollywood bone's connected to the Wall Street bone, the Wall Street bone's connected to the government bone, the government bone's connected to the pharmaceutical bone, the pharmaceutical bone's connected to the defense contractor bone, and on and on, ad infinitum. It all adds up to one big metastatic blob of public-private cells, occasionally throwing off their toxic by-products for consumption by we, the peoples.
Even though such scions of the corporate media as the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and CNN's Fareed Zakaria are CFR members in good standing, what happens in the Council stays in the Council. The government can trust them implicitly with its top secrets, says this think tank, because the revolving doors of influence peddling swing wide and swing fast and swing both ways. In the Council's own words:
There sometimes lurks among experts in high office a sense that they need not respect the opinions of those lacking access to the detailed information available within the “classified” preserves of government. The Council has never offered itself as a repository of classified diplomatic or military files. But those on bureaucratic staffs who base their actions on information that cannot be shared (in some form) with the public have learned over the years that they do so only at the peril of their policy goals. Discussions at the Harold Pratt House remain confidential—not because they deal with secret information, but largely because members and invited guests often use the occasions to test tentative opinions they have not yet fully thought through and developed.
According to the CFR, you have to be an insider to even get in their door. "With nearly 4,700 members and term members, CFR's roster includes top government officials, renowned scholars, business leaders, acclaimed journalists, prominent lawyers, and distinguished nonprofit professionals" their web page gushes. They forgot to mention they also include movie stars, such as Michael Douglas and George Clooney, and unindicted banksters such as Lloyd Blankfein. And if you're a discredited ex-New York Times reporter named Judith Miller -- well, they won't kick you out for a little old transgression like lying about WMDs in Iraq.
Would you be surprised to learn that Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, he of the centrist Third Way anti-FDR cult and the austerity-mongering Fix the Debt Campaign, is also Chairman Emeritus and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations? Follow the tentacles: the ongoing propaganda campaign designed to soften up the public for New Deal safety net cuts by fomenting deficit hysteria has Pete Peterson written all over it. Every centrist Tom Friedman column you'll ever read was no doubt hatched over cocktails with some poobah from the Council on Foreign Relations. That explains a typical muddled Friedman column, because as the Council itself admits, their members' "tentative opinions are not fully thought through". It's the influence that counts -- and whether it's half-baked, spoiled, or stunted matters not in the grand scheme of things. The scheme is power-brokering for the sake of lucrative power-brokering.
Fareed "Plagiarism Schmagiarism" Zakaria, meanwhile, uses Petersonian deficit scold talking points in a piece eerily called "Can America Be Fixed?" that is now running in Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations.* Can't guess one of the ways Zakaria will "fix" America? Here's a clue:
The continued growth in entitlements is set to crowd out all other government spending, including on defense and the investments needed to help spur the next wave of economic growth. In 1960, entitlement programs amounted to well under one-third of the federal budget, with all the other functions of government taking up the remaining two-thirds. By 2010, things had flipped, with entitlement programs accounting for two-thirds of the budget and everything else crammed into one-third.
(snip)
Reform and investment would be difficult in the best of times, but the continuation of current global trends will make these tasks ever tougher and more urgent. Technology and globalization have made it possible to do simple manufacturing anywhere, and Americans will not be able to compete for jobs against workers in China and India who are being paid a tenth of the wages that they are. That means that the United States has no choice but to move up the value chain, relying on a highly skilled work force, superb infrastructure, massive job-training programs, and cutting-edge science and technology -- all of which will not materialize without substantial investment.
The U.S. government currently spends $4 on citizens over 65 for every $1 it spends on those under 18. At some level, that is a brutal reflection of democratic power politics: seniors vote; minors do not. But it is also a statement that the country values the present more than the future.
Doesn't that sound eerily like a typical gerontophobic David Brooks column? Well, maybe it is a David Brooks column, for all I know. They all get their talking points and marching orders from the same sources, no? There are only so many creative ways to say we have to kill off all the brutal old people in order to afford more endless wars, more gifts to rich people, more freedom to scam people via "cutting-edge investments" for private profit at public expense. The worker bees have to be beaten into the same submission currently enjoyed by Chinese factory workers and Bangladeshis slaving away in Walmart fire traps in order for America to stay competitive.
But do check out the Muckety series. You'll feel right at home, meandering through the sticky spiders' webs, alternating between outrage and laughter. If you're not up for a virtual parody of Who's Who at the Zoo, though, you'd better just skip it.
* In an earlier version of this post, I mistakenly referred to another publication as being affiliated with the CFR. Thanks to an anonymous tip, I corrected the error.
I just couldn't get the plaintive trademark whine of the late Andy Rooney out of my head this morning as I mulled the question: "D'ja ever wonder what a national conversation is? Does a national conversation happen when 330 million people rush to their kitchen tables and all start babbling at once? Or is a national conversation limited to what the ruling class decides it is, and only the pre-approved big shots are allowed to do the talking? How does a National Conversation become declared a National Summit? When the big shots go to the mountain-top, will the hoi polloi remain down below, out of mind and out of earshot? And what are the requirements for a Task Force? Does it spring fully formed from a National Conversation, or does there have to be a Summit first?"
Hmmm... d'ja ever have a sneaking suspicion that the National Conversation was created to replace that other gimmick known as "Kicking the Can Down the Road"? Comparing political procrastination to a childish game has just been officially banned from the lexicon by Lake Superior State University, anyway, along with such gems as "job creators" and "double down."
There are so many National Conversations going on all at once that I can barely hear myself thinking like Andy Rooney. The loudest official gab-fest today, now that the planet is simultaneously drowning and going up in flames, is the National Conversation about Climate Change. The situation is so dire that President Obama is already mulling a National Summit on it. It will then be only a matter of time before "Summit Like It Hot" morphs into a special re-mulling Task Force.
Joe Biden will not be available to "do" climate change, since he is already tasked with doing gun control. That issue quickly evolved from a desultory can-kicker of a conversation during the campaign to a must-do-now issue in the wake of the Newtown massacre. I can foresee gun control morphing into a 2,000-page mess of a bill, replete with pork and corporate welfare. It bodes ill that the National Rifle Association has inexplicably been invited to meet with the Task Force. And you know what their knee-jerk response to "force" is: More force. Force in schools, force in neighborhoods, force in malls, force in movie theaters. We all remember what happened when the insurance leeches and pharmaceutical industry were invited to a seat at the table during health care reform negotiations. They ended up writing the law themselves, to enrich themselves.
And speaking of the NRA, did you (I mean, d'ja) ever wonder why ObamaCare protects gun rights? Were you even aware that it did? I sure wasn't. It turns out that the NRA, along with the usual suspects, was also inexplicably invited to help craft the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it is now against the law for doctors to ask patients about their firearms during intake screenings. Theoretically, a disturbed individual who has a hankering to commit mayhem can seek psychiatric attention and rest assured that any information about the arsenals he has squirreled away at home can never be part of his permanent medical record. It's the Don't Ask, Don't Tell clause of ObamaCare. Page 2,037, to be exact.
It's only a matter of time before the NRA is asked to join the Climate Change Task Force. There will probably be new laws enacted requiring all citizens to pack heat in their Hurricane Emergency Preparedness Kits, and to fight fire with fire power.
Of course, there are certain topics that will remain indefinitely stuck in the mire of the National Conversation, probably never evolving past that stage to actually become a summit or a task force. Marijuana legalization falls into that category. A petition on the White House website for pot legalization finally got enough signatures to force an official response. It comes from top Drug Thug Gil Kerlikowske:
Thank you for participating in We the People and speaking out on the legalization of marijuana. Coming out of the recent election, it is clear that we're in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana.
(snip)
(and here he quotes President Obama talking to Barbara Walters)" …this is a tough problem because Congress has not yet changed the law. I head up the executive branch; we're supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we're going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it's legal."
Meanwhile, I may be wrong in my notion that "having a conversation" is at the bottom of the prioritization totem pole. I forgot about the real pit of despair, which involves our elected officials just holding their ears and ignoring stuff. Tom Angell, a marijuana legalization advocate told The Huffington Post:
"From 'legalization is not in my vocabulary and it's not in the president's,' as Gil Kerlikowske often used to say, to 'it is clear that we're in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana' is a pretty stark shift," he said. "Of course, what really matters is to what extent the administration actually shifts enforcement priorities and budgets, but I sure do like hearing the U.S. drug czar acknowledge the fact that marijuana legalization is a mainstream discussion that is happening whether he likes it or not."
Of course, there's a very familiar monkey wrench in the works when it comes to legalizing pot. You guessed it: the NRA. The War on Drugs is a lucrative enterprise, requiring lots of weapons and ammo for both the cops and the drug cartels themselves. The Obama Administration has not made weapons trafficking enforcement a huge priority. D'ja ever wonder why? Should we be having a Conversation about it?
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.
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."
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.
