Blowback: Greed Edition

"Where are all the customers? And where's all their money?" frets a Walmart vice president in some panicky emails revealed today by Bloomberg News.

Cameron Geiger, who runs the hilariously-named U.S. Replenishment Division at the world's largest retailer, might start looking at his own employees, whose crappy average $8/hour paycheck has shrunk even further thanks to the rising price of food and medical care and the demise of the two-year payroll tax holiday. Walmart workers are also Walmart's best customers. What's earned in Walmart is spent in Walmart. And the world's biggest retailer just had its worst quarter in seven years.

So, does this mean that the Walmart honchos are going to replenish  their workers with a pay raise to make up for that dent in their paychecks and get them spending again? Of course not. The workers have simply been directed to just try even harder to make those unaffordable cheap items fly off the store shelves into the hands of penniless big spenders. According to Bloomberg,

 Wal-Mart’s Geiger in his e-mail urged employees to improve business by "fixing something that could really make a difference to our performance." He quoted Tim Yatsko, the company’s executive vice president of global sourcing, saying:“We need to ‘stop the stupid.’”

Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Bill Simon said during a Feb. 1 officers meeting, the minutes of which were attached to Geiger’s e-mail, that the troubled economy leaves little room for internal errors.

“In an environment like this, we can’t afford to hurt ourselves,” Simon said, according to the minutes. “Self-inflicted wounds are our biggest risk and our toughest enemy.”

Of course, nothing is being said about healing their self-inflicted wound by raising that abysmal hourly wage. It might have the horrifying result of inspiring other corporations to do the same, even without the unlikely passage of the excessively stingy $9/hour minimum suggested by President Obama. No. Walmart's solution, according to the correspondence, is to grab the ever-shrinking piece of the meager consumer pie all for themselves by whatever means necessary. Who knows -- they may even figure out a way to reduce hours and wages even more and have their lawyers write a whole new tome of corporate welfare legislation. When they talk about "everybody suffering" in their emails, they are not talking about their workers or their customers. They are talking about their business competitors, such as those other go-to shopping centers for the indigent -- the Dollar Store franchises. 

Walmart has always had a ready, willing and able partner in the Obama Administration. The Justice Department recently announced there will likely be no criminal prosecution for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of those involved in that Mexican bribery scandal. Michelle Obama has long been a booster of the retail gulag's various greed-washing campaigns for hiring vets and stocking their shelves with healthier food, ignoring its anti-union stance and gender discrimination. And President Obama is now set to appoint Chief Walmart Greed-washer Sylvia Mathews Burwell as his chief budget officer.

The defacto policy of the neoliberal Age of Obama will continue to be: Work hard for less. Always the low standard of living. Always.

Meanwhile, the income gap between the richest of the rich and the rest of us is growing ever wider. The top one percent's share of the pie has risen by 11% since the recovery, and stagnated or shrunk for everybody else, according to a study by economist Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley. From the New York Times:

Excluding earnings from investment gains, the top 10 percent of earners took 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917, Mr. Saez said, citing a large body of work on earnings distribution over the last century that he has produced with the economist Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

Concern for the declining wages of working Americans and persistent high levels of inequality featured heavily in President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. He proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $9 from $7.25 as one way to ameliorate the trend, a proposal that might lift the earnings of 15 million low-income workers by the end of 2015.
 

Of course, the Walmart heirs themselves are getting richer by the minute. They now have as much wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans combined. Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute calls them "Exhibit A" in the national scandal of extreme income inequality.  

In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.

And in 2010, as the Walton’s wealth has risen and most other Americans’ wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.

It’s hardly a surprise that the economic circumstances of the Walton family and that of most Americans are moving in opposite directions, but some have attempted to quibble with the use of this particular statistic by noting that nearly 13 million American families have negative net worth—meaning that they have outstanding debts greater than the value of their assets. This is a bit of a strange objection—of course, many American families have negative net worth, but this is an economic reality, not a statistical fluke.

Walmart relies very heavily upon those negative-net worth customers. One of the reasons the retailer is experiencing such a setback this quarter is that IRS tax refunds  (including for those struggling consumers qualifying for the earned income tax credit) have been delayed due to the manufactured feckless cliff crisis and other glitches. 

And how about the other phony crisis known as the Sequester, which is designed to make poor people share the sacrifice with the military industrial complex?  Congress is dealing with it by blowing town for an entire week for an extended Presidents Day seven-day weekend. The president and the missus will be taking their own separate vacations, golfing and skiing respectively.

So that should answer the burning question I know has been on all your minds lately: Where are all our politicians? Where's all our money?
 

Shorter SOTU

From deep within the Beltway Bubble
I now will take the time and trouble
To regale you with some slick Talk-Double.
Pretend we're climbing from the rubble.

Now here's some rank hilarity,
Designed for my posterity --
I'll serve up cruel Austerity
And call it shared Prosperity!

My cuts to social safety net
Will please the folks at Fix the Debt
The plutocrats I will abet,
No matter how you fume and fret.

But I'll pretend to love your kids
I'll sell Pre-K to corporate bids
Republicans can flip their lids
Democracy can hit the skids.

And how about that minimum wage
To foment up some Teabag rage?
My liberal base I will assuage
As they give three bleats from their ovine cage.

By scoffing at the Bill of Rights
I'll take my power to new heights
I'll send my drones on endless flights
We've got the whole world in our sights.

We'll do free trade with far-off lands
And bow to corporate demands.
Climate change is in my hands -- 
So let's frack for more gas and flow those tar sands.

My gun control ending dazzles with luster
But thanks to the Dems, it'll never pass muster.
There's no reform of the filibuster,
So my call for a vote is so much bluster.   

God Bless America and keep her free,
Give up your rights, call it liberty,
Give up your wealth to Plutocracy,
God Bless America, and God Bless Me.

You've Been Warned

I don't put much stock in State of the Union addresses. They are an annual theatrical exercise in pomp and circumstance. Or pomposity and circumlocution. Remember the mortgage fraud task force rolled out last year, for example, and how it was never fully staffed or funded and how it was just a smokescreen to reward the criminal behavior of banksters?

And if this preview just released by the White House is any indication, President Obama will again go full-bore humane Republican in tonight's demagogy:

 “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.

It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country – the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.
 

There he goes again with the personal responsibility narrative so beloved of the ruling class. We are warned that only by responsibly working our asses off for the Big Boss can we possibly thrive. The implication is that the weak, the infirm, the elderly, the chronically unemployed, the marginalized, the servant class and the mentally challenged do not deserve a place in our great exceptional meritocracy. This homage to  Horatio Alger feeds right into the GOP mythos of Makers vs Takers. The nod to gay rights is meant to appease the pseudoliberals.

It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours.”
 

This is pure Obama doublespeak. The government will work on behalf of the many and not just the few, as has been its wont. But, but, but -- you have to be an entrepreneur and make it on your own, because traditional employment no longer really exists. Don't even think of relying on direct hiring by the government, either. If you don't have what it takes for a corporate hoarder to give you a job due your own lack of "individual initiative", fuggedaboutit. If you are feeling mentally depressed, your president wants you to snap out of it by sheer force of will.  Obama has already cut the federal government workforce, and has actually frozen the pay of all federal employees.

Re-reading this segment of his speech actually makes me suspect it was plagiarized from any one of 1000 identical Thomas Friedman columns. To wit: only the above-average children of Lake Woebegone will succeed, because the only way to succeed is get high-tech, get on the Intertoobz and start your own start-up. Lift yourself up by your bootstraps, people! The guvmint will cheer you on from the sidelines. You may even become a prop in a presidential campaign-style speech as he travels the grand landscape of Amerika.

“A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs – that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?”

Uh-oh. Whenever a politician mentions a guiding star, it's like the Bible. He doesn't intend for you to take him literally. The way to attract more jobs to our shores smells like a ploy for the tax- evading, deregulated corporations to repatriate their overseas profit stashes at little to no cost to themselves. It sounds like the corporations are going to get even more government subsidies to train more American wage slaves, get Obamacare waivers and the like. I am anxious to hear how he will ensure that "hard work" (laboring till you die? 60-hour work weeks?) will translate into a decent living. Will he propose a federal minimum wage? I am waiting with baited breath.
…

“Tonight, I’ll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat – nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It’s not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.”
 

Uh-oh again. It is the knell of doom that he mentions The Deficit at a time where there is a humanitarian crisis of unemployment, underemployment and downright poverty. I can't wait to hear about this jobs program that is not paid for and conforms to the cruel austerity package laid out in the recent hostage-taking negotiations. He again embraces the Republican credo of Small Government. Nope -- it does not appear that the federal government will be doing any hiring. Nor does it appear that your father's Democratic Party will be making any great comeback tonight.

Hope I am wrong. But unless he suggests stuff like scrapping the cap on Social Security FICA contributions and imposing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street trades, tonight's speech will just be more droning on and on and on. And if he suggests "entitlement reforms" such as chained CPI, that impose even more suffering on already struggling people, I am going to throw my sock at the TV. I am not so stupid as to actually throw a heavy object at my TV, because then I might miss out on all the talking heads talking up The New Improved Aggressive Obama.

Suggestions for fun: take a drink or throw a sock every time he mentions Middle Class, Deficit, Fair, Responsible, Balanced Approach, and Future.

The Age of Obushma

Ronald Reagan was known as the Teflon President,and John Gotti's moniker was the Teflon Don. No matter how toxic these guys were, they were untouchable for most of their lives -- until the imprisonment of mind or body finally got them.

 Until this past week, President Obama seemed to wearing the Teflon mantle himself.  Nobody was paying much attention to the fact he's been on a detached rampage of drone assassinations, and prosecuting whistleblowers, and spying, and claiming he could imprison people without charge or trial. Because nobody was paying much attention, he's been virtually untouchable in this regard, even by his Republican frenemies. They agree wholeheartedly with his evisceration of the Bill of Rights. He is only finishing what they started, after all.

But now that the mainstream media are finally taking a long-overdue look at his unprecedented powers, they're actually starting to compare Obama to The Worst President of All Time -- George W. Bush. An Obushma is born, and he walks among us.

The New York Times ran a front page story on the topic in its Sunday edition. Even such Obama-friendly media stars as Melissa Harris-Perry and Rachel Maddow have suddenly awoken from their self-inflicted partisan comas and joined the bandwagon of noticing that the president has morphed into an emperor. And what a difference a week makes in the polls:

A majority of voters believe President Obama has been no better than his immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, when it comes to balancing national security with the protection of civil liberties, according to a new poll for The Hill.

Thirty-seven percent of voters argue that Obama has been worse than Bush while 15 percent say he has been “about the same.”

The results cannot be fully explained as party line responses. More than one in five self-identified Democrats, 21 percent, assert that the Obama administration has not improved upon Bush’s record. So do 23 percent of liberals.

The results are especially striking given the liberal hopes that attended Obama’s election, the opprobrium he heaped upon Bush’s national security policies during the 2008 campaign and his early promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
 

The majority, however, still approve of the drone program itself. But give them time. They'll no doubt change their tunes when they see, or more likely hear, their very first drones in the friendly skies above their own little chunks of real estate. 

The majority also very likely have no idea what it is, exactly, that they approve of. David Carr of the New York Times today joined Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in criticizing the lack of media attention to the New Age of Orwell, but he also blamed the paranoid secrecy of the Obama Administration coupled with an apathetic Congress and an apathetic public for the perpetuation of the vicious cycle of ennui in the face of the destruction of our own civil liberties:

If the Congress — and perhaps the public — doesn’t know about the drone program, it isn’t for lack of coverage. Perhaps the reason so many people are in the dark is because they want it that way. After all, if the bad guys are on the run without risking legions of boots on the ground, what’s not to like?

For many people, of course, there is plenty not to like. Michael Isikoff of NBC News obtained a 16-page white paper outlining when the government contends that it is legal to kill Americans who join Al Qaeda. His reporting helped make the drone issue part of the confirmation hearings, leading to this statement on Thursday to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Mr. Brennan, which sounded like a parody of Washington doublespeak: “What we need to do is optimize transparency on these issues, but at the same time, optimize secrecy and the protection of our national security.”

Congress, in spite of the pointed questions aimed at Mr. Brennan last week, has been remarkably incurious since the program began.

“Some 3,500 people have died in 420 strikes, and Congress has yet to hold a single public hearing on this issue,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It has happened in the dark because we have allowed it to, and the press has far and away been the lead actor in surfacing this issue.”

But let's face it. The media approach to terrible truths resembles a cat walking across a wet floor. (h/t Raymond Chandler) As I pointed out in a comment in The Times yesterday, the paper of record, for example, still squeamishly softens torture into "harsh interrogation techniques."

 Euphemisms are the enemy. They are the words of propaganda that enable tyrants to literally get away with murder.

The victims of drones are invariably declared to be "militants" by both government and journalists. Or, if they're really lucky, "suspected militants." The White House definition of militant is any male in the prime of his life.

Homicides by presidential fiat become bland "signature strikes." Ordering a hit is rendered as innocuous as the president putting his signature on a piece of legislation renaming a post office.

A relentless campaign of state-sponsored American terror so severe as to border on potential genocide becomes the "disposition matrix". (John Brennan coined this Philip K.Dick-ish term.)

Maybe we'll get lucky and the United Nations will accuse this administration of war crimes. Maybe we'll get even luckier and the 70% of Americans who are still just fine with drone strikes will wake up, smell the burning of the Constitution on its funeral pyre and rescue it through the sheer strength of our numbers.
 

And speaking of Obushma, wasn't it a striking coincidence that a whole slew of Bush Famiglia emails was hacked by a guy named Guccifer, and made public the exact same week as the infamous White Paper was released? If you're going to compare Obama to Bush, then it's just about the right time to rehab The Worst President's image, don't you think? It would not surprise me if the so-called hacking -- complete with humanistic (albeit primitive and narcissistic) self-portraits of George in the bathroom was not a deliberate leak by the Bushes themselves. (prepping for a Jeb run in 2016). Here's what I wrote in response to Maureen Dowd's column yesterday:

 I wonder if Guccifer might really be Dubya. The hacked emails do show this rather unpopular plutocratic bunch in a surprisingly human light. The self-portraits are too suspiciously flattering. Bush has actual feet instead of the cloven hooves we suspected were hidden in his Gucci cowboy boots! (Lucifer>Guccifer) The image of his buff torso looks to be an homage to his bromance with fellow shirtless despot Vlad Putin.

Where are the emails where Babs disses the poor victims of the latest natural disaster? Where's the lowdown on the off-shore bank accounts, the military service and drug cover-ups, the efforts of Jeb to sell out Florida education to the highest bidder? What a downer. I smell a rat.

I also smell a rat around the white paper leaked right on the eve of John Brennan's senatorial love-fest on drone assassinations. I wouldn't be surprised if the so-called leak came from the White House itself, to take the shock and awe right out of the proceedings. By the time Brennan appeared, the American public was already bored with the novelty of having a hit squad in the Oval Office. Presidential assassinations are already the new normal. The parallel humanization of a protected war criminal painting self-portraits in bathrooms reeks of propaganda to make us forgive and forget. The PTBs desperately want us to be so numbed that we accept that the Constitution, except for the 2nd Amendment, is just a piece of paper. There will be no prosecutions of torture, murder or banks.
 

Let's not forget that more Americans believe in the devil than believe in Darwin. Two-thirds believe that Satan is an actual living being. The Devil made Barry and Bush and Reagan and Nero and Caligula do it. And the Devil Wears Prada. So does the soon-to-be ex-Pope, who at least has enough sense to quit as the mental and physical bars of fate finally begin to close around him.



Bathtub Justice... Or Not

Barack the Unbalanced

Millions of people are stranded or without power and heat today in the aftermath of the fifth or maybe sixth Storm of the Century to have hit in the past year, the direct result of a stunning lack of attention to climate change on the part of our leaders. Millions of us remain unemployed and underemployed, a fifth of us are in poverty, with almost half us in danger of becoming destitute within three months of a job loss or other catastrophe. Fifty million still lack basic health care. And millions of those who do have insurance still can't afford to see a doctor because of high copays and deductibles. We cannot afford to retire because our savings and pension plans have been wiped out by financial criminals who not only caused the economic collapse of 2008, but who now continue to rob, cheat and steal with impunity thanks to the complicity of our bought-and-paid-for public officials.

To add insult to injury, we have a president who has given himself the power to imprison or even kill us without charge and without trial. And what's even more chilling is that the vast majority of Americans are totally fine with this state of affairs. They reassure themselves that they will never be put on a Terror Tuesday kill list, or have their movements monitored, or be thrown in prison because of their ethnicity or journalism. They have given their president a 60% approval rating.

But maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of us will not be complacent for very much longer if Barack Obama gets his way. This morning in his weekly radio address, he finally delivered what is essentially a coup de grace to the American people. You may not yet be in danger of drones, but you're definitely on a Kill List. He starts out with a huge whopper of a Big Lie right in his very first paragraph. And he never lets up. Rather than comforting the victims of the many storms assailing us, he foments the fear. He presents a Code Red Threat Level:

Hi, everybody. Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. That’s more than halfway towards the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists and elected officials from both parties say we need to stabilize our debt.

This deserves a Pinocchio nose the length of three football fields. Obama agreed to 100% cuts and zero revenue during the Debt Ceiling manufactured crisis of 2011. The second round, during Feckless Cliff Theater, gleaned only 30% revenue to 70% cuts. (see chart below). Moreover, not one legitimate economist has ever espoused reducing the deficit by $4 trillion, especially in the midst of an economic downturn. That toxic idea comes straight from Wall Street, straight from the plutocrats of the Fix the Debt campaign, and it's being kept alive by the echo chamber of inside-the-Beltway corporate media hacks. Barry the Unbalanced either needs some remedial 'rithmetic or an extended stay in an ethics rehab facility. 

Pies Don't Lie, Barry!

I believe we can finish the job the same way we’ve started it – with a balanced mix of more spending cuts and more tax reform. And the overwhelming majority of the American people agree – both Democrats and Republicans.

He doesn't so much want to finish the job as he wants to finish you off, as per his presidential candidacy audition, way back in 2006, to the Rubinites of the Goldman Sachs-funded Hamilton Project. The only reason that deficit reduction is the Number Three concern of those polled is because of that concentrated, relentless media propaganda campaign convincing them we have a fiscal crisis. Barry fails to mention that the top concern of all Americans happens to be JOBS.

Now, my preference – and the preference of many Members of Congress – is to do that in a balanced, comprehensive way, by making sensible changes to entitlement programs and reforming our tax code. As we speak, both the House and Senate are working towards budget proposals that I hope will lay out this kind of balanced path going forward.

"Sensible" changes for the continued enrichment of the plutocracy equal cruel changes for everyone else. The raising of the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and the chained CPI method of impoverishing already struggling retirees and veterans and disabled people remain on his table. The reformation of the tax code, rather than the scrapping of the FICA contribution cap or the imposition of a Wall Street transaction tax, is the exact same policy that Mitt Romney campaigned on. Rombama lives. Or is it Obamney? 

But the budget process takes time. And right now, if Congress doesn’t act by March 1, a series of harmful, automatic cuts to job-creating investments and defense spending – also known as the sequester – are scheduled to take effect. And the result could be a huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole.

Time's a wastin'. Billionaire Shadow President Pete Peterson of the Third Way, the Council on Foreign Relations and Fix the Debt, is getting antsy. Ergo, Obama is sounding more and more like the trickle-down Reaganite he truly is. "Job-creating investments" and defense spending will help the middle class. Uh-huh. When Obama refers to "our economy" he is of course referring to the unregulated, reckless, and feckless free market -- not you. So now, it's time for him to pivot to some heavy-duty fear-mongering: 

If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off. Firefighters and food inspectors could also find themselves out of work – leaving our communities vulnerable. Programs like Head Start would be cut, and lifesaving research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s could be scaled back. Small businesses could be prevented from getting the resources and support they need to keep their doors open. People with disabilities who are waiting for their benefits could be forced to wait even longer. All our economic progress could be put at risk.

You're all gonna DIE. America will become Max Max's Thunderdome. Your kids will turn stupid as they wander the filthy streets, your houses will burn down, a plague of disease and senility will descend upon this great land, only Walmart will be left standing to squeeze every last nickel out of you, people will thrown out of their wheelchairs and rendered incapable of even reaching a dumpster for their next meal, which will have been poisoned anyway owing to layoffs of food inspectors. Oh, and Wall Street will get the vapors. All because of a crisis manufactured with the full cooperation and connivance of the executive and legislative branches, for the sole purpose of providing a fig leaf for no less damaging (because they will be permanent) cuts to social programs.

And then there’s the impact on our military readiness. Already, the threat of deep cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. As our military leaders have made clear, changes like this affect our ability to respond to threats in an unstable part of the world. And we will be forced to make even more tough decisions in the weeks ahead if Congress fails to act.

He won't be able to kill as many people or occupy as many countries or drone as many drones? His Kill List will resemble a frayed baseball card collection that loses all its value? Well.... okay.

The good news is, there’s another option. Two months ago, we faced a similar deadline, and instead of making deep, indiscriminate cuts that would have cost us jobs and slowed down our recovery, Democrats and Republicans came together and made responsible cuts and manageable changes to our tax code that will bring down our deficit. This time, Congress should pass a similar set of balanced cuts and close more tax loopholes until they can find a way to replace the sequester with a smarter, longer-term solution.

See above charts. The Feckless Cliff Aversion Act punished the poor and gifted the rich. We let the Social Security tax holiday expire for no apparent reason. People have less money to spend. People still have no jobs, no health care, no retirement savings. Nonetheless, Obama wants you to feed what little you do have into the voracious maw of the ruling class. Work till you die, if you're lucky enough to still have a low-wage job, so that your betters can maintain, even improve, the lifestyles to which they are accustomed. Be placated as they close the tax loopholes of the wealthy with their flimsy thread, be ignorant as they wait thirty seconds before sewing them all up again.

Right now, most Members of Congress – including many Republicans – don’t think it’s a good idea to put thousands of jobs at risk and do unnecessary damage to our economy. And yet the current Republican plan puts the burden of avoiding those cuts mainly on seniors and middle-class families. They would rather ask more from the vast majority of Americans and put our recovery at risk than close even a single tax loophole that benefits the wealthy.

Republicans want you to suffer. Your president wants you to suffer too, but only when he can call it even by easily making Lloyd Blankfein give up the tax deduction on his Lear jet. Temporarily, that is. Because once the retirement and Medicare age goes up, there will be no givebacks to poor people, who don't have lobbyists at their beck and call.

Over the last few years, we’ve made good progress towards reducing our deficit in a balanced way. There’s no reason we can’t keep chipping away at this problem. And there’s certainly no reason that middle-class families and small businesses should suffer just because Washington couldn’t come together and eliminate a few special interest tax loopholes, or government programs that just don’t work. At a time when economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress, we shouldn’t allow self-inflicted wounds to put that progress in jeopardy.

 

There is no good reason why we should be worrying about the deficit at all. Chipping away at it serves no useful purpose and will, in fact, make recovery even more difficult. Barack the Unbalanced disingenuously does not admit that the very austerity he is espousing is a self-inflicted wound. Actually, that is not quite right. The wound he is inflicting is on us, not on him or his Wall Street backers. And anyway, Congress could repeal the self-inflicted wound of sequestration any time it wants to. It obviously does not want to, preferring instead to use it as a manufactured crisis to give cover for austerity and the continued unraveling of our social safety net. 

So my message to Congress is this: let’s keep working together to solve this problem. And let’s give our workers and our businesses the support they need to grow and thrive. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Psssst! Hey, Congress and fellow plutocrats. Let's work together to gin up another phony crisis and the rubes'll never know what hit them. Together we will grow and thrive. See you on the slippery slopes.

Share the Sacrifice

A Whole Heep of Obama

President Obama has been getting plenty of heat in the past couple of days for that leaked memo that confirms once and for all that yes Virginia, he really does have the chutzpah to actually kill people at whim. Calls for his impeachment or maybe a trip to The Hague have even started popping up on liberal internet sites.

Obama is experiencing a rare, for him, moment of back-against-the-walldom. In the past 24 hours he has resorted to two defense strategies. First, he humbly announced that he is inviting a select group of senators for a privileged peek inside the workings of his own head, that they may become privy to the arcane musings of a homicidal philosopher king. And just this morning, he invoked his own exalted humility at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.

There is no transcript yet available of his remarks before the motley crew of unregistered foreign lobbyists, CEOs and slimy politicians all hiding behind the protective cloak of religion in order to advance their questionable agendas. But his overarching theme in the face of his exposure as a cruel psychopathic dictator was humility. He uttered the word so many times I expected him to sprout a carrot-top and start speaking in Cockney, just like that other famous predacious 'umblebragger -- Uriah Heep from David Copperfield.

“‘Umble we are, ‘umble we have been, ‘umble we shall ever be,” became "We must keep humility. That is the core of our leadership" and "My hope is that humility carries us over every day" at the breakfast. He then humbly and obliquely compared himself  to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Their magic Bibles have touched him with prideful humility. Obama, too, reads scripture every single day. Actually, just "snippets" of scripture that are personally selected and emailed to him by his own personal in-house spiritual White House adviser, who apparently just up and quit, according to Barry himself.

If Pride Goeth Before a Fall was among the snippets, he did not say. And anyway, the umbleness does not extend to his own immediate clan. He just couldn't let the standard line of "gosh oh golly, how your lovely girls have grown"  by the M.C. go by with just a simple nod of thanks. He opened his own remarks with "It is true that my daughters are gorgeous."

Then he went on to humble-mumble a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo, such as: "All Americans, whether religious or secular, have a deep abiding faith in this nation" yet at the same time, we persist in seeing our lives "through a glass darkly." Tell it, Son of Cheney!

I was half-expecting him to repeat the infamous remark to the Jonas Brothers made at the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner to this latest confab of corporate zealots : "Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming."

I bet he was thinking it, though. Actually, I don't want to know what he thinks, when what he does is scary enough all by itself. The  thought of a visit to the inside of that man's head sends a shiver right down my spine.



Keeping It 'Umble

Cocktails With a Twist of Logic

This is beyond schizophrenic. The same president now leading the national charge to keep disturbed people from using lethal weapons finds nothing too terribly disturbing about exempting himself from any guidelines at all. Whether there are rules about presidential homicide written down somewhere, or if they're just floating around in his head, he is not sharing his thought processes with the likes of you, the people he was hired to represent.

According to an Obama Administration "white paper" sent to Congress and leaked to NBC News last night, the president or some other unnamed high-ranking official (probably CIA nominee John Brennan) get to decide when, where and why they can kill you. They just don't want to get too specific, because your death is really none of your business. Their twisted logic is based on an amorphous free-floating imminence, not to be mistaken for its right-now-this-very-minute cousin known as imminent threat. There is hoi polloi self-defense and executive self-defense, which can mean anything that the president wants it to.

This is disturbing. The guy pleading the national case for gun control has dirty hands. The guy should probably recuse himself from the debate forthwith. The guy has no moral standing. He's under investigation by the United Nations for possible war crimes, for crying out loud.

We may not be able to prevent every massacre or random shooting. No law or set of laws can keep our children completely safe. But if there’s even one thing we can do, if there’s just one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try. -- Barack Obama, Minneapolis, Feb. 4, 2013.
 

Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who might have rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourth Amendment, that individual's citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation.... we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person's interest in his life. But that interest must be balanced against the United States' interest in forestalling the threat of violence to other Americans. -- Obama Administration memo to Congress, leaked Feb. 4, 2013.

So, Barack Obama meant what he said yesterday about not being able to prevent every massacre. That "balanced approach" shtick keeps rearing its ugly head, doesn't it? We must weigh the survival of impoverished old people against the equal needs of obscenely rich plutocrats. We must annihilate brown-skinned children over there, so that the affluent parents of white children over here can maintain an illusion of safety. We must honor the agendas of hate groups like the NRA by not banning outright the purchase of assault weapons, but at the same time make it a little harder for a mass murderer by reducing the size of his clips.

Although the assault weapons ban itself is widely considered DOA, it is still scheduled for a vote this Thursday -- coincidentally, on the very same day that John Brennan will be "grilled" over both his complicity on Bush-era torture and the targeted assassinations by drone before being confirmed and then advised, by bipartisan consensus, to Carry On Jeeves.

Senators can thus pretend to be against letting ordinary people possess military weapons, and then they can pretend to rail against both the secrecy of targeted killings and the targeted killings themselves. Stay tuned for a rare exciting double feature in C-Span's continuing soap opera series known as Congressional Kabuki.