The Way, the Truth, the Life

Last night, while you were perhaps trying to decide between paying your electric bill or splurging on that long-delayed expensive medical checkup, Blessed Barack and the new Twelve Disciples of the Republican Party were stuffing themselves on terrine de foie gras and Lobster Thermidor as they mulled putting old people on a cat food diet and other creative ways to make your lives even more miserable.

The president had invited a dozen Senators to the exclusive Plume Restaurant at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington in hopes of forging a new testament to safety net cuts in order to appease the heavenly fathers of Wall Street. Far from being a Last Supper, it looks to be the first of many soirees that our demigod president will host in an effort to burnish his legacy. "Do this in remembrance of Me" appears to be the motive of Obama's longed-for Grand Sacrificial Bargain. Jesus knew that one of his own disciples would betray him. But in this perverted Biblical tableau, it is Barry and the Dirty Dozen who would just love to betray all of us. That is their way, that is their truth, that is the purpose of their political lives.

They broke the ice, they broke the bread, they preached austerity, and their zombie ideas will go forth and multiply in the corporate media churches of the nation. From The Hill:

“I think really what he is trying to do is start a discussion and kind of break the ice and that was appreciated,” said Sen. Mike Johanns (Neb.), one of twelve Republicans who broke bread with Obama. “Most of the meeting was spent on budget and [finding] a way forward. His goal is ours. We want to stop careening from crisis to crisis.”

Johanns said he is more optimistic of reaching a broad deficit-reduction deal this Congress.

“I think he’s very sincere. I think he wants to try to figure something out. Today was a good step and we’ll see what happens now,” he said.

As they gorged themselves on expensive food and slugged down wine priced as high as $1,000 a bottle, the politicians reportedly did not once mention the suffering they have gratuitously imposed on the nation's most vulnerable citizens in the latest bout of austerity known as the Sequester. Although Congress is already moving to restore cuts of the Defense Budget, the cuts to Head Start, the mother/child nutrition program known as WIC, programs for battered women, and low income housing and heating assistance will be allowed to stand. Meanwhile, Obama and his cohort haggle over the destruction of the New Deal in exchange for a few token and meaningless bits of revenue from the rich.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has already proposed such "painful" cuts to Medicare that they rival those of the Randian Paul Ryan, confirmed to The Hill that The Sequester was not discussed. The decadent dining experience was merely an appetizer for the main feast, the orgy of mass cannibalism-by-plutocrat. "I think meetings like this are helpful and I think they build relationships," Corker added. “It was as social a meeting as you would find anywhere."

And well it should be. To go with the Lobster Thermidor, the senators were treated to sides of White Wine Saffron Gllacage (menu typo, or is this an actual food product?) and Herbed Fingerlings. If they are real red meat Republicans and chose the prime rib, they got an extra helping of beef marrow to go along with it. No word about whether they picked over Skin-in-the-Game canapes. But the sound of sucking the life out of our bones was certainly echoing through the darkness of the Beltway Swamp last night.

And you thought the saga of New York City's Cannibal Cop was disgusting? He's got nothing on the flesh-eaters in suits residing in the lower depths of the Acela Corridor.

Popes & Planes & Plutocrats

The Beanie Boys have been sequestered! The Vatican has ordered the Cardinals in Rome for the Pick-a-Pope-alooza to stifle themselves. And that goes for you too, Timmy Dolan, who has brought the art of avuncular clerical schmoozing with the media to whole new heights, even inviting journalists to their own special Mass over the weekend. Dolan, always surrounded by a gaggle of reporters, has finally been gagged. Hallelujah.

And while the Cardinals are jamming in the Sistine Chapel, the Holy See has made sure that outsiders will not see or hear anything. They have installed a special jamming device in the inner sanctum. But not to worry. The whole shebang is apparently so boring that officials have not only issued a press gag order, they have also effectively muzzled the chatterboxes even within their own august company: 

Today cardinals participating in closed-door deliberations ahead of the conclave adopted a five minute rule to limit the length of speeches. So far, 51 cardinals from five continents have addressed the group.

At least one participant reportedly expressed his frustration with some of the speeches.

"No matter how brilliant you may think your speech is, do we really need it?" (a soon-to-be-muzzled) Nigerian Cardinal John Oneiyekan told the National Catholic Reporter.

Meanwhile, since that other Sequester is predicted to engender miserable long lines at TSA-depleted airports, the TSA has finally decided to just admit defeat. You are now invited to bring your small knives onto planes, as well as those other travel essentials -- hockey sticks and toy baseball bats, pool cues and golf clubs. Flight attendants are said to be ticked off because space on planes is so limited to begin with. Just imagine how hard it will be to practice your drives and line up your billiards shots in those crappy cramped aisles in business class.

So thank god that shaving in airplane bathrooms will still be impossible, due to the continuing ban on razors. Ditto for box cutters. In the best tradition of Newspeak, TSA has provided a perfectly cogent, clear and sensible explanation of its thinking processes for you:

TSA continues to evolve and strengthen its multi-layered approach to aviation security – through better technology, expanded data analysis capabilities and an enhanced understanding of current intelligence. The decision to permit certain items in carry-on luggage was made as part of TSA’s overall risk-based security approach and aligns TSA with International Civil Aviation Organization Standards and our European counterparts.

If it's more luxuriously spacey travel that you crave, reservations will soon be accepted for the maiden voyage of the Titanic II, brainchild of Australian billionaire Clive Palmer. Rest assured that class divisions will prevail as the Chinese-manufactured exact replica of the ill-fated luxury liner sets sail. According to The Guardian,

Palmer's current plans seem aimed at creating an Edwardian theme park on the waves where passengers will have the option of wearing period dress. In an odd move, Palmer aims to replicate the class structure of the Titanic – right down to the steerage class inhabited by poor immigrants on their way to a new life in America.

But then you realise that Palmer – who is the son of Australian silent movie star George Palmer – appears to be in love with James Cameron's movie Titanic as much as the historical ship. Instead of talking about the Titanic disaster, with its class-ridden horrors as the rich saved themselves and the poor drowned, Palmer speaks of Titanic II as a symbol of love and togetherness as if Cameron's doomed movie lovers Rose and Jack were real people.

"Titanic II is an opportunity for people all over the glove to come together with an idea. That idea of course is one of love and understanding. It emphasises the things that we have got in common, rather than our differences. A family, you know, someone to fall in love with in our lives as we travel together through time," he said.

Just like in the movie, first class passengers will be encouraged to go slumming in third class, but only if they first purchase a special golden ticket. They can even mingle in Second Class amongst the dwindling middle. But the steerage peasants, in fantasy as in reality, will not be allowed to bother the plutocrats. And now as then, they will remain huddled, since Titanic II will provide only narrow, hard single occupany bunks.

Update: via Jim Romanesko, via Barry Blitt, comes this New Yorker cover of Joe Ratzinger lolling in the entitled hammock of ecclesiastical retirement: 

 

Look closely at the placement of Joey's right hand, advises an astute tipster. He seems to be holding on to something other than his copy of L'Osservatore Romano, no? Asked for comment, Blitt remarked: "Oy vey!"

Sequestration: SVU

There's a new crime show playing in America. It's called Sequestration: Special Victims Unit.

It incorporates a trite Good Cop/Bad Cop gimmick so unoriginal that it should have lost its ability to fool people by the time Dragnet went off the air last century. But since this hackneyed device retains its uncanny ability to fool most of the people some of the time, or at least some of the people all of the time, the propaganda hacks will only give up their tried and true technique over your dead bodies.

Here's the newest version of the stale corporate plot:

President Obama and his boys and girls in blue (as in Dog) join forces with a group of out-of-control, sadistic, and eminently useful Republican renegades to sweep up a huge swath of the tired, the poor, and the massively huddled in an indiscriminate budgetary dragnet.

Obama and the Democrats then play Good Cop, pretending to want to help the same people they've just arrested, bringing them a rickety folding chair to sit on, a few liberal crumbs from the rusted-out vending machine down the hall, promises of a better tomorrow, tomorrow -- if they will only cooperate with the authorities, and give up Grandma and Grandpa as part of a Grand Plea Bargain. It seems the ultimate goal of Sequestration was always to forcibly wean people from their anti-capitalist addiction to Social Security and Medicare.

Obama lieutenant Gene Sperling admitted as much on the Sunday talk shows. The kids being kicked out of Head Start are the unfortunate but necessary decoys being used to entrap the real criminals: seniors greedily sucking up all that medical care, and daring to collect on the retirement insurance programs they've paid into all of their working lives. Regular people could be rendered so much more lucrative if only Wall Street could get its lunch-hooks onto the great social programs of the 30s and 60s. 

The Republicans, meanwhile, perform their role of Bad Cop with abandon. They offer no deals. Instead, they flagrantly wield their whips, their chains, their brass knuckles, their vocal derision. They don't even bother pretending they're not under the direct control of the plutocrats. They don't attempt to hide the relish with which they will grind the poor, the tired, the huddled masses into one giant steaming puddle of bug-splat.

Obama and the good cops, of course, are not taking the humane course of simply letting their special victims go free without any punishment or further ado. For the foreseeable future, the collateral damage will remain sequestered in the holding cell of austerity.

As the New York Times reports, the Good Cop Democrats and the Bad Cop Republicans have agreed to extend funding for the federal government at the post-sequester level, i.e., minus $85 billion, until the end of the current fiscal year (Sept. 30) “most likely allow(ing) the across-the-board spending reductions to remain in place for months if not years.”

In other words, an open-ended jail sentence for those caught up in the indiscriminate dragnet, with only the faintest hope for parole. Meanwhile, the too-big-to-fail banks are not only immune from prosecution, they are still being gifted with billions of dollars in backdoor bailouts, paid for by the very same people who are being victimized all over again by Sequestration.

So, where is the outrage? Oh, I forgot. Good Cop Obama really, really feels for the victims. He calls their punishment "dumb" at press conferences far away from scene of the crime. He is not, he says, a dictator, so what can he do? But meanwhile, you can donate to his legacy-burnishing slush fund social welfare group known as Organizing for Action. If you can raise $500,000 he will even grace you with four private chitchat sessions a year. And it's all perfectly, corruptly, disgustingly legal.

Meanwhile, freeze!  Put your hands in the air, legs wide apart, anything you say or do will be used against you, and if you don't have a lawyer or a lobbyist, tough shit. You're all under arrest.

Choking on Apathy

According to a new study, people the wide world over have suddenly stopped giving a damn about the filthy air they breathe and the contaminated water they drink. Concern levels are at their lowest in 20 years.  Smog, schmog. We are suffering, according to the New York Times, from a mass outbreak of Environmental Warning Fatigue (not to be confused with the Outrage Fatigue Syndrome I've discussed in recent posts.)

Hmmm. Isn't it ironic that the paper of record is publishing the results of a new study on Environmental Meh at the exact same time it decided to ditch its popular Green Blog, close on the heels of the trashing of its entire Environmental Desk? Like Kermit the Frog, the Gray Lady apparently does not find it easy being green. So she's just being mean.

First, the phenomenon of environmental brain fog. The reason I'm calling it brain fog is because people don't seem to be connecting pollution with climate change. From the GlobeScan report cited by the Times:

Asked how serious they consider each of six environmental problems to be—air pollution, water pollution, species loss, automobile emissions, fresh water shortages, and climate change—fewer people now consider them “very serious” than at any time since tracking began twenty years ago.

Climate change is the only exception, where concern was lower from 1998 to 2003 than it is now. Concern about air and water pollution, as well as biodiversity, is significantly below where it was even in the 1990s. Many of the sharpest falls have taken place in the past two years.

The study, the Times article and the discontinuation of its environmental coverage also conveniently coincide with the Friday night dump of the State Department's preliminary report on the environmental impact of the filth-producing Keystone tar sands pipeline. Hint: our corporate-controlled government says the free flow of one of most polluting substances on the planet will be minimal to non-existent. What a shock.

Also, as an aside -- while there is no evidence that the GlobeScan survey itself was skewed in any way, I think we have to be wary about the use to which it may be put by the moneyed elites. Will the Keystone XL pipeline boosters point to generalized public ennui as the perfect excuse to grant final approval over the protests of the increasingingly marginalized environmental groups? The company's corporate client roster has, after all, included such global heavy-hitters as Goldman Sachs, BP, Citigroup and Royal Dutch Shell. According to Wikipedia, it is a public research consultant which relies on "the wisdom of crowds". So far, I have been unable to discover on whose behalf they commissioned the survey on environmental ennui. But it'll be interesting to see how the PTBs put the findings to use (or misuse). 

Still, I give GlobeScan props for pointing out in a separate blogpost by Sam Mountford that global public apathy about the environment is closely tied to the global economic meltdown:

The timing of this fall in concern (in public concern about the environment) is no coincidence. The period since 2009 has witnessed the most sustained period of economic strife in most of the world’s major economies for the better part of a century. All our polling suggests that, while alarm about the economic situation and jobs has retreated from the stratospheric levels it reached in 2008, it has stabilized at a much higher level than before the crisis. The full ramifications of the banking collapses, ensuing government bailouts and cripplingly high levels of public indebtedness that have resulted have only slowly become apparent. And bluntly, for many citizens, these appear to pose a much clearer and more present threat to their well-being than environmental jeopardy, which for most people remains hidden from view.

Meanwhile, New York Times environmental blogger Andrew Revkin has written a scathing dirge on the demise of the Green Blog, adding that the paper will still blithely and profitably continue publishing its nine fashion, dining and lifestyle blogs, its four business blogs and its four or five technology blogs. He snarkily warns that if you care to complain to the Gray Bitch (my appellation, not his), you'd better make sure your subscription is up to date first. We can't have "you environmentalists" stealing valuable corporate information, y'know? It might put a microscopic dent in the bloated profits of the One Percent. It might poke a hole in the Fog of Bore.

Madness In High Places

Can the Obama machine get any more crazy-cynical? I just found this email from campaign hack Jim Messina in my spam folder:

Karen,

Brace yourself.

If congressional Republicans don't act by tomorrow, we're going to be hit by a series of devastating, automatic budget cuts called the sequester.

It's a sledgehammer to the budget, our economy, and millions of Americans across the country -- and the most frustrating part? It doesn't have to happen.

The majority of Americans support President Obama's balanced approach to deficit reduction -- add your name if you do, too.

So far, congressional Republicans are refusing to compromise -- all because they don't want to close tax loopholes for millionaires, billionaires, vacation homes, and corporate jets. Seriously.

This has very real consequences.

On the chopping block are 10,000 teaching jobs, more than 70,000 kids' spots in Head Start, $35 million for local fire departments, $43 million to make sure seniors don't go hungry, and access to nutrition assistance for 600,000 women and their families. That's just a few of the things we'll lose.

President Obama has put forth a balanced deficit reduction plan with smart spending cuts that protect the critical investments needed to strengthen middle-class families and our economy.

We need to send a strong signal about where Americans stand on this issue.

Add your name today:

http://mybarackobama.com/Tell-the-GOP-to-Act

Thanks,

Messina
 

Incidentally, when I clicked on the (disabled by me) link at the end, one of those warning messages popped up about there being a problem with the Obama website's security certificate. Access was denied, to what I can only assume would be a shameless plea for cash for the presidential slush fund. So enter at your own risk. At the very least, they will install a big fat tracking cookie on your computer to follow your every keystroke.

But anyway -- the email was already outdated by the time I got around to reading it. John Boehner is refusing to engage in any more Grand Bargain talks with Barry. The White House is also apparently putting the kibosh on any more fear-fomenting. That is because the whole idea behind the contrived sequester was to make the defense cuts so unpalatable that the Republicans would be forced to give Obama needed cover for his long-planned gutting of the social safety net. The disease to please the Wall Street titans who vetted and approved his candidacy in the first place is still festering. Stayed tuned for another three years of one manufactured fiscal crisis after the other until Obama gets his way. 

And meanwhile, they're using a sophisticated internet campaign to lie about it. Lie Number One: The presidential minions are telling supporters that the only way to avoid the sequester is to forge that much longed-for grandiose bargain with the GOP. Not true. They could nullify sequestration, repeal the law that spawned the whole austerity stupidity. Obama is not suggesting the actual cancellation of the sequester. Not by a long shot. Lie Number Two: In poll after poll after poll, the majority of Americans want to strengthen the safety net. They want jobs. People do not care about deficit reduction. And to the extent that they do, it is only as a result of the contant barrage of deficit hysteria propaganda being spewed by the corporate media with the unlimited billions of Pete Peterson's Fix the Debt astroturf cabal. Lie Number Three: President Obama wants to implement the Pete Peterson/Simpson-Bowles chained CPI for reducing lifetime Social Security benefits. So, for Messina to moan in an email that he cares about seniors suffering under the sequester,  is not only beyond hypocritical, it is downright cruel. Lie Number Four: most sequestration cuts will unfold gradually, not "hit us with a sledgehammer" overnight.

President Obama is insulting our intelligence. He is trying to fool us into participating in our own destruction. He is using a mendacious email blast like a shot of anesthesia to prepare us for his scalpel. By  fooling people into signing a consent form for "smart" surgery they don't even need and will end up hurting them, he is committing some mighty egregious malpractice. The austerian medicine he's peddling during this time of economic stagnation and joblessness and the most severe income inequality since the Gilded Age is pure poison.

First, do no harm, said the wise Hippocrates. Oops. Never mind. They don't even make real doctors swear that little oath any more.

But I was heartened to receive one very wise and true email this morning from my friend Peter S., who was responding to my comment about money running politics on Paul Krugman's column last night. He shares this quote from Guy Debord:

"For the first time, the same people are the masters of everything that is done and of everything that is said about what is done. And so Madness 'hath builded her house in the high places of the city.' "

When Progress Means Regress

I treated myself to a teensy bit of misguided hope a few weeks ago when I read that more than 100 Congressional Democrats had written a letter to President Obama urging him to remove Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid from the chopping block in the latest installment of manufactured brinkmanship.

Of course, if you'd paid attention to the actual semantics of the letter, you might have noticed that these congress critters didn't actually say they would vote against any such Grand Bargain Obama hopes to negotiate with the Republicans. And now that a few real Progressives have written another letter vowing they will buck Obama and vote against the planned cuts, a pretty astounding 54 of the 70 members of the House Progressive Caucus have refused to sign on. Three-quarters of the caucus membership have wimped out, regressed, caved, been bribed, brainwashed, paid off, personally seduced by Obama. Pick your poison.

 I was actually pretty surprised that even Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who up until a few months ago had been a most outspoken champion of New Deal and Great Society protections, is now among those unwilling to go so far as to defy the president.

Norman Solomon of the RootsAction advocacy group writes:

What about the other 54 members of the Progressive Caucus? Their absence from the letter is a clear message to the Obama White House, which has repeatedly declared its desire to cut the Social Security cost of living adjustment as well as Medicare. In effect, those 54 non-signers are signaling: Mr. President, we call ourselves “progressive” but we are unwilling to stick our necks out by challenging you in defense of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; we want some wiggle room that you can exploit.

In contrast, the House members on the short list of the letter’s signers deserve our praise for taking a clear stand: Brown, Cartwright, Conyers, DeFazio, Ellison, Faleomavaega, Grayson, G. Green, Grijalva, Gutierrez, A. Hastings, Kaptur, Lee, McGovern, Nadler, Napolitano, Nolan, Serrano, Takano, Velazquez and Waters.
 

President Obama remarked during the Democratic convention that he was confident he would eventually be able to bring the bulk of erstwhile Progressives on board with his Catfood Commission austerian approach of raising the Medicare age and initiating the chained CPI method of reducing Social Security benefits. He certainly got Millionaire Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on his side more than a year ago. See if these other Congressional Quislings who still dare call themselves Progressives serve your particular district:

Karen Bass, Xavier Becerra, Earl Blumenauer, Suzanne Bonameci, Michael Capuano, Andre Carson, Donna Christenson, Judy Chu, Yvette Clarke, William "Lacy" Clay, Emanuel Cleaver, Daniel Cicciline, David Cohen, Elijah Cummings, Daniel Davis,  Rosa DeLaura, Donna Edwards, Sam Farr, Chaka Fatah, Lois Frankel, Marcia Fudge, Janice Hahn, Jared Huffman, Rush Holt, Michael Honda, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Hakeem Jeffries, Eddie Bernice Jackson, Joe Kennedy III, Anne McLane Kuster, John Lewis, David Loebsack, Ben Ray Lujan, Carolyn Maloney, Ed Markey, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Gwen Moore, Jim Moran, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Frank Pallone, Ed Pastor, Chellie Pingree, Mark Pocan, Jared Pollis, Charles Rangel, Lucille Roybal-Allard,  Linda Sanchez, Jan Schakowsky, Louise Slaughter, Bennie Thompson, John Tierney, Mel Watt and Peter Welch. 

You can contact them here. Demand that your campaign contributions be returned. Threaten to join the Tea Party. Do whatever it takes to make them feel more afraid of you than they are of the Wall Street branch of the Democratic Party -- which, come to think of it, now amounts to the whole damn blighted trunk. The progressives have shrunken to a mere twig, hanging on for dear life, blowing in the toxic wind of our corrupt politics.  

Even so, a recent blind poll conducted by Business Insider reveals that nearly half of Republicans support the Progressive Caucus's own plan to avert the sequester over that of their own blighted party.This plan, naturally, is not getting any attention from either Obama or the corporate media hacks now in thrall to the Centrist Cult's astroturf Fix the Debt propaganda campaign being funded by Wall Street tycoons with the complicity of self-described Democrats.

As the Sequester Festers

Denying Republican claims that she is out to frighten people with scare tactics, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano today warned that we are at horrible risk of a terror attack unless we continue pouring money into the voracious maw of the Orwellian surveillance state (a/k/a the tax-immune defense/spy industry.)

And almost as if reinforce that salient point, her published remarks on The Hill blog were accompanied by this cookie-generated advertisement from Boeing -- showing a menacing predator drone about to swoop down at you at the stroke of twilight:  

 

You may or may not see this particular ad when you visit the page, because of the constantly evolving nature of the Google-generated marketing beast. The words "sequester", "terror" and "the economy" were also spawning a half-page blurb from BP, about how much it cares about the Gulf and all of America, as it strives to cut a pre-trial deal with Uncle Sam, to get out of paying any more millions than it absolutely has to in order to cover its Deepwater Horizon pollution liability.

Like the drone ad says, the corporacracy is always dreaming up new ways to innovate and endure.

But I digress. As I started to tell you, Janet Napolitano is trying to scare reassure Americans that the self-inflicted sequestration cuts of $85 billion "will make it awfully, awfully tough to mitigate threats." Of course, she was really talking about the ephemeral threats of outside terrorists, rather than the very real threats imposed by our own homegrown domestic policy makers -- to wit, Congress and the White House.

Napolitano warns that sequestration will force the furloughs of those friendly TSA agents who pat you down at airport security checkpoints! It will tragically reduce the number of beds for the record number of undocumented immigrants currently being housed in for-profit privatized prisons! Oh, the humanity. Oh, the terrible horrible no good very bad day at DHS!

Meanwhile, as Napolitano and other cabinet minions do their fear-fomenting duty on the complicit cable TV news shows, President Obama is showing his own true cynical colors. Rather than simply urging Congress to nullify the whole stupid sequester, he is once again calling for a Grand Bargain of safety net "reforms" in order to avoid the horrific specter of cuts to Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and all the other monoliths of the endless war industry. Their job is to keep us cowed and themselves secure with the endless stream of corporate welfare dollars.

And, coincidentally, Obama will glibly regret the coldly prearranged cuts in day care subsidies, AIDS treatment and prevention, shelters for battered women, home heating and low-income housing assistance, and myriad other programs reserved for those in such dire need that they cannot possibly afford a lobby or even an Internet connection in order to advance their own causes.

Obama hopes to accomplish the unraveling of the New Deal by utilizing the David Brooks formula of intergenerational warfare. As he said in one overlooked section of his State of the Union speech,

Yes, the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population. And those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms -- otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations.

Actually, Medicare spending is slowing down. But never mind facts. This is the same tired old refrain constantly droned out by right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and centrist cults like Pete Peterson's Third Way: that allowing old people to live out their lives comfortably is tantamount to sucking the life out of the grandkids, not to mention all the incipient fetuses and zygotes of the future. Of course, when Obama sings it, this silliness is magically transformed into a soaring progressive anthem called "Oh Beautiful for Balanced Approach, for Equal Waves of Pain."

One of the programs conveniently placed on the sequestration chopping block is Head Start. So what more perfect way to save all the poor preschoolers than to guilt-trip the geezers into "sharing the sacrifice" via the Chained CPI method of cutting lifetime Social Security benefits?

As economist Bill Black so succinctly puts it, "The only logical inference that can be drawn is that Obama remains committed to inflicting the 'Grand Bargain' (really, the Grand Betrayal) on the Nation in his quest for a 'legacy' and continues to believe that the Sequester provides him the essential leverage he feels he needs to coerce Senate progressives to adopt austerity, make deep cuts in vital social programs, and to begin to unravel the safety net." 

Obama's vaunted "balanced approach" is, in fact, skewed heavily toward cuts: a ratio of two-thirds cuts to one-third "revenue", to be exact. This, despite the fact that austerity is already shrinking the deficit, despite the fact that underemployment and stagnating wages are becoming the new normal in the Dystopian States of America

I don't know about you. But these constant re-runs of Disaster Capitalism Theater are getting a tad stale. It's gotten to the point where we can't even escape into the mindless never-land of Oscar Night without FLOTUS crashing the show with some Banana Republic noblesse oblige. Complete with a dressy militaristic backdrop, just to give you that warm and fuzzy Homeland-y feeling.

And the Winner Is.... Not You!