House of Pain

Here's my problem with much of the media coverage of the gratuitous and cruel imposition of national austerity known as Sequestration -- or if you will, "The Sequester." No human faces or names are even being appended to it anymore. The generic Congress Critters gave birth in their laboratory, and abandoned the baby. And we, to paraphrase a line in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, have become the bubbles blown by the baby.

So, instead of "President Obama and hundreds of bought-and-paid-for politicians in Congress are cutting thousands of poor children from Head Start", we're being told that the Sequester Did It.

Today's Washington Post headline blares "Cancer Clinics Are Turning Away Thousands of Medicare Patients. Blame the Sequester."

The Huffington Post is running a shocking piece that lists 100 agencies already feeling the "stinging cuts" of the Sequester. Wow. That Sequester sure is one sharp-nailed beast, huh? We certainly didn't see that one coming out of the torture chamber known as Washington. And Congress is still on vacation, raising all that campaign cash.  

Words matter. Semantics matter. Media should be naming and shaming. Instead, they're allowing the politicians to not only disown responsibility for the monster they created, but to act as though there is no way to just kill the damn thing.

"They had certain Fixed Ideas implanted (by Moreau... Pete Peterson?)  in their minds which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They really were hypnotized, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute." (H.G. Wells)

Chillingly, our elected officials are now actually celebrating and embracing austerity by ostentatiously giving up some of their own perks and pennies to appease their vile creation. They pretend to suffer in order to make us feel like whiners if we're not enjoying our own suffering. 

President Obama, leading from behind even as he kicks the public in its collective behind, is playing Austerity Catch-up by relinquishing a paltry portion of his own paycheck to the Treasury in order to show "solidarity" with federal workers victimized by the Frankenstein Furlough. Instead of demanding Death to Sequester, he is helping to push austerity normalization right along. The politicians who have now disowned their monster will be falling all over themselves to Give Back in a massive outbreak of noblesse oblige. The Huffington Post will no doubt start running a tally of all the political holdouts who are selfishly withholding their paychecks from the Share the Sacrifice Cause -- much as they are doing now for the pols who are still refusing to jump on the Gay Marriage bandwagon.

And as far as sending a check to the Treasury is concerned, Obama might as well be writing a check to Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobil, G.E. or any number of tax-exempt, tax-evading corporate welfare queens who treat our national community chest as their own personal piggy bank. His gesture would mean more if he contributed to one of those community cancer centers turning away chemo patients, or to a local subsidized day nursery having to lay off its minimum-wage child care providers. 

Instead of calling for shared prosperity, the president is holding himself up as a paragon of shared austerity. For a guy who just issued a clarion call to map the human brain, he is not demonstrating too much in the way of either brains or empathy. Then again, he is more Reagan than Johnson, more Hoover than FDR, more Dr. Moreau than Dr. Schweitzer.

And his 5% contribution is not even particularly generous, let alone original. The LA Times provides some history:

Herbert Hoover put his salary in a separate account, then divvied it up, giving part to charity and part to employees he felt were underpaid, according to an interview he gave in 1937. John F. Kennedy donated his presidential salary to various charities, according to Stacey Chandler, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

George Washington refused pay during the latter part of his military career, according to researchers at Mount Vernon. He tried to refuse a presidential salary, but Congress required that the position pay $25,000.

Next up -- privatized soup kitchens, since the Sequester Creature is eating up all the goodies in the subsidized food banks and nutrition programs. Maybe they can even be funded by mobsters and drug cartels. Maybe there's a 21st century Al Capone waiting in the wings to feed hungry children. Maybe the Walmart heirs can share the sacrifice and clean up their own grisly image by volunteering to man the IV drips in the community cancer clinics.

Nah, scrub that idea. There have already been too many cheesy remakes of The Island of Dr. Moreau. 

 

Paranoia Runs Deep

I can hardly wait to see what the official Map of the Brain will look like. Because judging from the results of the most recent Public Policy Poll, the cartography of many a mind will reveal that the synapses are flashing with shreds of tinfoil along with the usual microbursts of electricity. 

The Truthers, Birthers, Preppers, Sovereign Citizens, Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world are not so fringe-y as you might think. (Either that, or the poll is fatally flawed because a fifth of the respondents coincidentally reside in Gooberville, Florida. Or that the people who dreamed up these wacko questions reside in Gooberville, Florida) Some of the findings: 

 Twenty-eight percent of voters believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. 34% of Republicans and 35% of independents believe in the New World Order threat compared to just 15% of Democrats.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans agree that climate change  is a conspiracy, while 77% of Democrats disagree.

Twenty percent of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ, compared to 13% of independents and 6% of Democrats who agree.

Twenty-nine percent believe aliens exist, and 21% believe the government is covering up an alien spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

But there is hope. Only 4% of us believe in shape-shifting lizard people and a mere 5% think that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966 and then secretly replaced by a look-alike so the Beatles could continue. Similar segments of the population think the government is controlling them through their TV sets and that the white jet exhaust you see in the sky is actually a chemical the government is spraying to poison people. These poor souls probably had the bad luck to be contacted by this psycho-baiter of a polling company the same day they forgot to take their meds. They probably also believe that the polling people who always call at the dinner hour are annoying evil pod people -- and they would be right.

On the other hand, some of the answers to the questions were way too naive for my taste.  For example, only 15% of respondents believe that pharmaceutical companies would be so psychopathic as to invent diseases in order to sell their drugs. How about that sudden unexplained epidemic of ADHD currently plaguing our nation, necessitating billions of dollars in sales of Ritalin and Adderall?

And while it is probably true, as 86% of us believe, that the CIA never distributed crack cocaine to inner city youth, how about those LSD experiments conducted by the Army and the Public Health Service's infamous syphilis experiment on black men in Tuskegee? There is a history here.

The paradox to be gleaned from the polling is that while we are afraid of nonexistent threats, we tend to scoff at the real deal. We are both too skeptical, and not skeptical enough.

Sometimes, they really are out to get you.
 

 

Legacy Lollapalooza

What's more absurd -- the national obsession over a New York Times obituary co-celebrating a female rocket scientist's domestic and professional skills, or the national obsession with the legacy of a president who's only halfway through his eight-year gig? There are tasteless obits and then there are tasteless obits. But to be frank, I find the hoopla over Stroganoff-gate to be no less silly than the endless awful offal about how every Obamian burp, tooth-flash and fart will contribute to his almighty Legacy.

Google "Obama Legacy" and you get 94,100,000 hits. Google "President Clinton Legacy" and you net only a measly 19.5 million for more than a decade's worth worth of leavings. George W. does a little better, with 23 million -- but look at all the piles of destruction he's excreted upon the body politic during and since his own eight-year reign of error.

 Of course, the Obama Legacy isn't really real. It's just an offshoot of the Obama Brand -- a product of Beltway hype, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. A product that gives the propagandists something to prestidigitate about. A product that gives that elite subset of pundits known as "Villagers" the magical ability to turn the future into the past on the Sunday talk shows.

Take Sunday's Meet the Press, for example, when Revolving Door Glider Extraordinaire David Axelrod framed the ongoing immigration reform drama in terms of.... The Obama Legacy. "He wants this accomplishment," the lobbyist/campaign manager/presidential advisor/campaign manager/paid NBC contributor told Chuck Todd. "This is a Legacy Item for him." (More so, apparently, than a perilous legacy for all the thousands of immigrants on tenterhooks wondering whether they'll be slapped into solitary by ICE, or continue to be deported in the same legacy-ensuring, record-shattering numbers since Obama took office.)

Since actual history is so passé, the celebrity historians who make the rounds of the cable news shows have established the timeless Obama Legacy into a lucrative cottage industry. Michael Beschloss and Douglas Brinkley performed a show on the Future of the Obama Brand in Texas recently. They were upfront, somewhat, about what a fraud this premature Obama Legacy discussion really is:

If we are obsessive, it’s an insider’s club of historians. I don’t think we [as a country] know enough about our presidents,” Brinkley responded to (the moderator) McKenzie’s question of whether we lust too much for presidential leadership.

Beschloss said that in order to learn fully about the country’s leaders, we have to wait for inside sources to provide “what these people are like behind the scenes.”

“Usually presidents 40 years after office look very different,” Beschloss said. Issues and “obsessions” that were escalated during the presidency often are quelled or even better understood as the country moves forward.

“It’s good to wait and read books by historians and great journalists,” Beschloss said.
 

But we live in a hurry-up culture, we Americans, and waiting 40 years simply does not pay the bills. It's much more fun to instant-analyze, said the History B-Boys as they collected their handsome speaking fees and Mr. Brinkley appeared on the Obama Channel (MSNBC) to ignore Beschloss's draconian 40-Year Rule and indulge in still more Hasty Hagiographic History, predicting to the network's blogger that Barack's Inauguration Susurration alone is enough to make him one of the all-time greats:

Theodore Roosevelt was known to “dine with novelists and poets” and had a “gaggle” of journalists and cartoonists around him at all times, FDR was known for his famous “fireside chats” on the radio, and Brinkley points to Lincolns rhetorical skill and “eloquent” speeches like the Gettysburg Address.

Brinkley sees similar stellar communication skills in President Obama as well, predicting that Obama will be famous someday for invoking Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall as three key points along the civil rights journey. He also praised his most recent State of the Union.

“Someday somebody could do the speeches of Barack Obama, whether it’s his Nobel speech or his Cairo one, speeches at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson,” Brinkley says. “He’s been an extraordinarily gifted orator.”
 

And besides mouthing platitudes and belching bromides, there are such monster Obamian achievements as the pretend-withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Brinkley ranks right up there with the quasi-withdrawal from South Korea almost 60 years ago! (see: Obama sends stealth jets to South Korea, circa 2013). The MSNBC blogger, named Morgan Whitaker, does get a bit carried away into Legacy LaLa Land at the end of her piece, though, as she gushes:

 Of course, it’ll be impossible not to remember Obama for having broken the glass ceiling, becoming our nation’s first president, but at the end of the day, that it’s the policy that will lead future historians to rank him among the greatest.
 

And people are upset about Stroganoff-gate, when such truly toxic noodle-headed fungiforms are replicating themselves all over the Blogosphere? It's enough to turn the cream sour, I tell you. And curdle it!

But rest your stomachs.There is an excellent antidote to Official Obama Legacy Agita in the form of this must-read by Gaius Publius of Americablog. Correctly describing the Second Term as The Legacy Tour, he provides ample evidence of Barack's true agenda in the next four years as being a blatant money-grubbing prelude to a very long, cushy Post-Presidency. And it isn't a very pretty sight. Either in the past, the present or the future.

Off the Wal-Mart

In case you still needed a reason to boycott Wal-Mart, hate Wal-Mart, protest Wal-Mart, picket Wal-Mart, avoid Wal-Mart like the plague, I think this might finally be the breaking point for those die-hards who still think it's worth it to stand in a sweaty line for an hour to save 10 cents on a bottle of Chinese shampoo.

Store executives, worried about recent bad sales figures and competition in the indigent consumer market from the Dollar Store franchise and Amazon, have hit upon a novel idea to suck every last bit of economic marrow from the emaciated public -- use desperate Wal-Mart shoppers to deliver online orders to the homes of other Wal-Mart customers -- and reimburse them not with a paycheck, but with store coupons that will barely cover the cost of their gas.

Just in time for Easter (and April Fools Day) Reuters has gotten the scoop on this truly rotten egg of an idea hatched in the vulture's nest of a retail board room. According to the reporter, though, the sociopathic plan is simply "radical":

Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world's largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as "crowd-sourcing," or the "sharing economy."

A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.

Such an effort would, however, face numerous legal, regulatory and privacy obstacles, and Wal-Mart executives said it was at an early planning stage.

(snip)

Wal-Mart currently uses carriers like FedEx Corp for delivery from stores - or, in the case of a same-day delivery service called Walmart To Go that is being tested in five metro areas, its own delivery trucks.

"I see a path to where this is crowd-sourced," Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com in the United States, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Wal-Mart has millions of customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off packages for online customers who live on their route back home, Anderson explained.

Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.
 

Even though Joel Anderson lives inside a bubble within the rotten egg gilded with gold plate, Bloomberg News thinks he deserves credit for thinking outside the Big Box by using slaves with cars and rusted-out pickup trucks to augment Wal-Mart profits and his own multimillion-dollar pay package. Still, will Walmart shoppers be willing to work for nothing?  Will they actually even deliver packages instead of stealing them?What if they cause an accident while clunking across town with loads of guns and ammo, tainted toothpaste, and Chinese dog food? The experts in Brooks Brothers suits with Harvard MBA degrees are at least admitting that their toxic germ of an idea is "fraught." How will people react, for example, when a random Wal-Mart shopper suddenly shows up at their door with their internet order?

 Well, I guess if they're that scared of the Wal-Mart volunteers, they can always call 911, and a volunteer cop will show up at their door. Up in my Ulster County neck of the woods, the cash-strapped town of Saugerties is copy-catting Wal-Mart and and has just started advertising for unpaid police volunteers to write tickets, direct traffic, answer the phones and otherwise free the paid police from such humdrum scut work as minding an army of Wal-Mart couriers.

As I wrote in a previous post, the American plutocracy is yearning for the glory days of feudalism, if not downright slavery. Leave it to the world's largest retailer, whose heirs own more wealth than 40% of all Americans combined, to lead the charge back to the future. 

Pay to Play, Peasants!

Stung by recent criticism from public interest groups and editorial boards that it was operating a bribery-intensive astroturf slush fund, Organizing for Action has now switched gears in an effort to stay viable. No more acceptance of anonymous, unlimited corporate money -- officially, that is. In a transparent ploy to deflect attacks of corruption and elitism, OFA is mounting a brand-new PR offensive to spread the delusion that regular people are just as important to President Obama as his millionaire donors. And to prove it, he'll make you a very special Founding Member of his legacy-burnishing club. You, too, can pay to play!

Just found this choice little nugget in my spam bucket:

 Karen --

Organizing for Action is staring down our first quarterly fundraising deadline -- ever.

After March 31st, we'll have a record of the founding members who helped build this organization from the start.

You should be one of them. Chip in $5 or more right now to get in on the ground floor. No one has ever done what we're trying to do: restore the balance of power to ordinary people by countering the special-interest groups with the most powerful grassroots movement ever built.

Chip in $5 or more and make sure you're one of the folks* who will make history: (web address redacted for the protection of Sardonicky readers.)

Thanks,

Jon 

Jon Carson, Executive Director

Organizing for Action
 

I don't know whether to howl or to puke. Restoring the balance of power by declaring all money is equal? Will grass seed take root in a pile of toxic sludge? Forget record levels of income disparity. Forget the regressive tax policies at work in this country. Forget 50 million uninsured people trying to stay alive within the most expensive, predatory health care system on the planet. Forget massive unemployment and underemployment and stagnating wages. No mention of overturning Citizens United to get the money out of politics. To the contrary -- you can only aspire to be a member of our thriving democracy if you start at the bottom of the pile and give to Barry. Does it get any more egalitarian than that, people?

It's the Feudalism Nostalgia movement -- the serfs paying tribute to the lord of the manor right along with the overseers, as we all toil merrily on our little patches  and hope for a better tomorrow, tomorrow, and feel like we're equal belongers. And when we hand over our meager coins, we will be protected by such Obamian initiatives as a Grand Bargain of "superlative" chained CPI adjustments to further reduce the payout on our Social Security earned benefits. Our contributions will make political corruption all balanced and good and equitable and, Obama hopes, impervious to further complaints by such pro-democracy groups as Public Citizen and Common Cause. It's historic, all right, but not in the good way the Obama machine wants you to think it is.

It was only a few weeks ago that OFA set the bar for Founding Member status at a whopping $50,000. But the elites evidently were not nibbling at the Barry Bait, and attendance at an exclusive Founders Dinner in Washington earlier this month was reportedly sparse. The poor millionaires are all tapped out when it comes to Barry-bribery, it seems. Apparently, there are no lines forming for private meetups with POTUS in exchange for $500,000. Thus, the bottom barrel-scraping evident in today's email blast to the hoi polloi. 

Oh, and about OFA's humble-bragging pledge of transparency on the source of its fund-raising? Um, how do you spell work-around? Even though its website requires donors to declare such data such as place of business and occupation and employer, this information will be kept secret from the public. If, for example, a Bill Smith of New York gives $500,000 in exchange for four annual meetings with Obama, we'll never find out if this particular Bill Smith happens to work for G.E., Honeywell, Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics.

Something is rotten in the Beltway Swamp. So, what else is new, you may ask? Only the myriad novel ways, such as insulting emails to unsuspecting victims, in which it's being bottled and packaged for our every-day consumption. 

* "When a politician uses the word 'folks', get ready for the next series of lies" -- Noam Chomsky. 

Roll Over, Roll On

Whether it's giving a pass to war criminal sadists, or kicking tens of thousands of kids off Head Start in the name of political sadism, President Obama always stays true to his political mantra: You gotta look forward, not backward.

So it is with great fetishist fanfare that the White House has just announced that the endangered Easter Egg Roll will now go on as planned. The Head Start evictees may not have been lucky enough to score a ticket in the lottery, but the Obama Administration thinks they can still take comfort watching a video of Bo the Dog pimping out the festivities. That is, if their homes even have an internet connection.... which, given that a fifth of all American children now fall below the official poverty level and electric lights are often a luxury, is kind of an iffy proposition.

Only Romania beats the United States for child poverty in civilized countries. As Sheldon Danziger, director of the National Poverty Center, puts it: "Among rich countries, the U.S. is exceptional. We are exceptional in our tolerance of poverty."

But hey. The First Family wants kids from all classes and income levels to have a blast anyway. Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag and smile though your heart is breaking. Get with the program -- Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!!!!!!!

In addition to all the fun and games, the day's activities — which will include sports courts and cooking demonstrations — will help educate families on smart ways to incorporate healthy eating and exercise choices into their daily routines, which are key pillars of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative.

So pay no attention to the reality that it truly is Obama's hand that will sign into law those cruel, needless, draconian cuts to Head Start and other anti-poverty programs. One day of noblesse oblige for a handful of families will salve their consciences. But how about that irony of touting the expansion of early childhood education at his State of the Union speech in January, only to have to slash it to ribbons two months later? The Washington Post explains the glaring cognitive dissonance thusly:

Historians note that presidents sometimes get what they want, as Obama did with health-care reform, or they are rebuffed, as George W. Bush was in attempting to privatize Social Security. But rarely do presidents find themselves enacting major policies they fundamentally oppose. (or just say they oppose)

Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Obama shoulders part of the blame. Since 2010, he said, Obama has spent too much time focused on the debt, including agreeing to significantly shrink domestic spending as part of his own budget proposals.(you can say that again!) 

“I think they brought it on themselves to the extent that they validated the deficit issue,” Mishel said. “It was always the case that the actual budget policy being pursued contradicted the rhetoric in the campaign. Now it’s even worse.” (when the divergence of his words and deeds comes back to bite Barry in the ass)

White House officials say they will continue to press forward on proposals that would not require new federal funding, such as raising the minimum wage, opening manufacturing institutes, revamping housing policies and overhauling immigration laws.(to be continued to be perceived as trying to do good things and at the same time lick the boots of billionaire lunatic sadist Pete Peterson and the Austerian Shadow Government.)
 

American Eggceptionalism

Dewey Cheatham & Howe: Cyprus Edition

Do the outrages never end? While Cypriot working stiffs are at least temporary spared from having their bank accounts seized by the Eurozone Austerity Brigade, and nobody really cares whether the murderous Russian oligarchy has to take a haircut, stuck right in the middle are the countless innocent victims in the international tax-evading business community. The world's off-shorers have been swept up in the massive financial tsunami hitting this island Club Med of Sheltered Wealth.

Poor expatriates. They thought they came to Cyprus for the waters. But like Rick in Casablanca, they were misinformed. Wave or no wave, they're in the desert now. And there's no chartered plane waiting to rescue either them or their wads of cash hostages.

Ironically, among the tax-evading conglomerates set to be cheated out of millions is the internet dating site called Ashley Madison which specializes in extramarital hookups. The Avid Life Media transglobal pimping outfit is, for whatever reason, being featured prominently on the New York Times homepage as a poster child for hapless tax-evaders marooned on Cyprus. (Maybe because multinational accounting firms aren't sexy?) From the article:

Only a few weeks ago it set up an office here as a base for its international operations, attracted to Cyprus — as hundreds of other foreign businesses have been — because of its reputation for financial stability, a low corporate tax rate, a friendly banking environment and most of all, a strong rule of law.

Sure, the Avid Life Media executives were aware that a banking crisis was brewing, but they had ventured ahead. They were assured in part by a promise from President Nicos Anastasiades when he was elected in February that he would soon arrange an equitable bailout with the international organizations that have guided the euro zone through four previous bailouts while keeping bank depositors whole.

“We went from paradise to hell in a minute,” said Keith Lalonde, Avid Life Media’s top executive here. He recounted the cellphone call he got from his financial adviser a week ago Saturday while strolling under a bright sun on Limassol’s fine white beach.

“We have a problem,” the adviser told him. The Cypriot government had just declared it would seize nearly 10 percent of the €2 million, or $2.6 million, the company had on deposit in Cyprus — and about 7 percent of Mr. Lalonde’s personal funds — to help secure its bailout.

International adultery has taken a huge hit, thanks to the greed of the international plutocracy. The skimming of depositor accounts has been heretofore unheard of. There hasn't been this much cheater-on-cheater outrage since Bernie Madoff had the chutzpah to scam a slew of fellow millionaires out of their life savings. And now, this. Avid Media's 18 million members worldwide will be left hanging, the company's whole world crumbling. They may even have to pull up stakes from Cyprus, even if there's no letter of transit for their cash. 

While The Times skims over the actual nature of Avid Life's business model, the piece is rife with humor, recounting the escapades of a billionaire pimp scurrying from cash machine to cash machine to withdraw money while he still can, expressing shock that any government would dare cheat him out of millions of Euros. Just like every other greedy, plutocratic job-creator on the planet, Avid Life CEO Noel Biderman is bemoaning the "lack of confidence" that the extraction of wealth has instilled in his sensitive psyche.

Serves him right, though. A former entertainment lawyer, Biderman once boasted to the L.A. Times  of milking the financial meltdown of America for all it was worth. Since Wall Street greed destroyed jobs and homes and families, but left people too broke to get a divorce, he just promoted his cheating website as an alternative:

The money-saving solution? Seek carnal comfort in others. He also made an analogy between his extramarital dating service and handing out condoms to teens.

"Some people say it promotes promiscuity," he said. "But if you don't do it, you get behavior that's way more harmful to society. Infidelity has been around a lot longer than Ashley Madison."

He believes that hearing about the service in a commercial is not going to persuade anyone to have an affair. "It's a decision they've come to already. All I'm saying is, don't do it in the workplace where it could result in someone losing their job, don't go to a singles dating service and lie about your status, don't hire a prostitute. Given that affairs are going to happen no matter what, maybe we should see Ashley Madison as a safe alternative."
 

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Ashley Madison does not even exist. She's a made-up marketing ploy -- kind of like Betty Crocker, the Sunmaid Raisin Girl, Marie Callender and Mrs. Butterworth.

Oh well. As Ashley says, "Life is short. Have an affair."

We'll always have Cyprus.