Pick Your Scandal

It's a fact that the government spies on all of us. What's that massive new data center in Utah for, anyway? But when the DOJ brazenly grabs the phone records of one of the biggest press organizations in the world, it not only makes Nixon grin in his grave, it gives him and all the paranoid autocrats who ever lived a huge dose of post-mortem Viagra. Barack Obama makes them all look like raving civil libertarians, even as he vainly tries to distance himself from his own abusive orgy.

The man is so obsessed with leaks, he's plugging the ephemeral dike holes not with a judicious little finger, but with an overkilling bushel of Tena Twists. His administration has engaged in an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, succeeding in freezing enterprise journalism into a glacier, even as he melts the hearts of media courtiers with carefully meted-out doses of glib surface warmth. Ben Smith of BuzzFeed has an interesting take on Obama's micro-targeting fetish, illustrated with a clever gif of Nixbama himself. 

The best thing about this latest First Amendment outrage is that maybe the media themselves will finally become outraged, now that the National Police State has personally affronted them. Of course, it will not affect the all-powerful infotainment industry. I don't think Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd and the rest of the sycophantic steno pool need worry about being tapped or taped. They're insiders. They only serve their masters, a/k/a Pete Peterson and the rest of the shadow government. The Obama Administration is only seeking to ensare legitimate investigative journalists, preferably Pulitzer and Peabody winners.

That is why what should be the Scandal of the Century will probably not be treated as such, since the paid corporate hacks of the plutocracy have bigger fish to fry. Such as:

Turnabout is fair play: Bloomberg news reporters have been spying on Goldman Sachs via their computer terminals. Incest in cyberspace. Or is it cannibalism. Or just a gross violation of the Affinity Fraud Doctrine. This scandal is actually pretty funny, just by virtue of the two names involved.

Benghazi: CIA is now in danger of being upstaged by IRS! OMG. Republican heads are exploding. Pundits are asking how the latest scandal placement will affect Hillary's chances in 2016. What about Obama's legacy and his bipartisan Grand Bargain budget deal? Frank Bruni has written a pretty good column on the petty politicization of just about everything.

An American diplomat was arrested by Russians on suspicion of being a CIA agent, and an inept one at that. This story was initially buried by IRS, but is now front page news. CIA has at least temporarily overtaken IRS in the Scandal Sweepstakes!  Our Man in Moscow was wearing a baseball cap -- a dead giveaway. The fact that he was also carrying "a brown and blond wig, three pairs of glasses, several stacks of 500-euro notes, and an embassy card identifying him as Ryan C. Fogle" was another red flag. 

Some scandals that are not getting their fair share of attention:

Almost two million American families are living on less than $2 a day. We have now passed the Third World finish line and entered into the fourth dimension.... otherwise known as the penultimate act in the final collapse of Empire. Rod Serling must be chain-smoking in his grave.

Speaking of which....remember that Twilight Zone episode where the airplane got caught in a primordial time warp? It's already happening. There is now so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that it's a matter of when and not if climate change ushers in the next great flood, along with mass extinctions. But since so few people are scared out of their wits by impending catastrophe, the story is already up in smoke. 

Obama may have sent Jay-Z and Beyonce to Cuba not for P.R. and Cuban cigars, but to convince the Castro regime to smoke out exiled aging radical Assata Shakur, a/k/a Joanne Chesimard, given political asylum there after escaping from a U.S. prison. The renegade Justice Department has recently re-placed her on the FBI's most wanted list, doubling the reward to $2 million, after decades of obscurity. Margaret Kimberley theorizes that Shakur will be the quid pro quo for normalization of trade with the island nation. This development may or may not be related to another recent story out of Venezuela, where hip-hop artist/filmmaker Timothy Tracy was arrested on suspicion of being an American agent provocateur, dispatched by Obama to foment some destabilization.

Nothing would surprise me at this point. The recent front pages of the New York Times read like a collaboration between George Orwell and Graham Greene. Spies and lies and impending demise are the order of the day. 
  

Today's Dog Whistle to the Plutocratic Pitbulls

We have come to expect that President Obama's weekly addresses to the "Nation" will always be cloying exercises in sticky-sweetness. The latest edition, however, takes the cake for being an exercise in pure unadulterated chutzpah and noxious mendacity. The alarm bells at fact-check sites should be ringing hysterically. But since official campaign season is over, those who are safely esconced in office can now campaign and lie with impunity.

If Rip Van Winkle had just awoken from a long coma and tuned in to the weekly blather, he would have gotten the impression that happy days are here again, that the American dream of homeownership is once more within the reach of the average Joe or Jane, that there is no chronic unemployment and wage stagnation, there is no record income disparity,  and that President Obama has always sided with regular people over the unpunished and unregulated predators of the banking industry.

Today's presidential propaganda, actually addressed obliquely to the slavering deregulated greedheads constituting the political donor class, is aptly titled Growing the Housing Market and Supporting Our Homeowners. I say apt, because the ugly reality is that a big chunk of today's home-buyers are Wall Street investors grabbing up distressed property right and left, even as much of the foreclosure inventory is deliberately being kept off the market by complicit realtors. The price of real estate, therefore, is once again being artificially inflated to bubble-icious proportions. The vulture capitalists-turned-landlords are now renting the looted homes back to their own victims, only to re-kick them back to the curb once the resale price is again right.

In case you missed Barack's soothing pat on the head to his property-grubbing pitbull paymasters -- let the parsing begin!

Hi, everybody. Our top priority as a nation is reigniting the true engine of our economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class. And few things define what it is to be middle class in America more than owning your own cornerstone of the American Dream: a home.

 

Grrrrr! How about a new speechwriter, someone who can come up with a better lead/theme than Reigniting the Middle Class Engine? That metaphor ran out of gas a long time ago. Home ownership as the cornerstone of the American dream? Not so much anymore, given that a record number of people have yet to wake up from the Great American Nightmare. Besides, people will be too busy paying back six-figure student loans while working two or three McJobs to even think about marriage and children, let alone owning a home in their lifetimes. Obama does not mention that this sad state of affairs is seizing up that middle class/family values engine of his.

Today, seven years after the real estate bubble burst, triggering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and costing millions of responsible Americans their jobs and their homes, our housing market is healing. Sales are up. Foreclosures are down. Construction is expanding. And thanks to rising home prices over the past year, 1.7 million more families have been able to come up for air, because they’re no longer underwater on their mortgages.
 

That old bubble just magically burst all by itself! Obama gives subprime lenders (including his sugar mama, Moneypenny Pritzker) a huge pass. No mention of fraudulent credit rating agencies and toxic mortgage-backed securities, followed by the double whammy of fraudclosures by too-big-to-exist banks. Our housing market is not healing. It's a festering sore covered up with a private equity bandaid. Prices are rising only because another artificial greed-bubble is inflating. People are being priced right out of the market.

From the the Wall Street Journal,

Currently, cash buyers—largely investors—make up about 32% of sales nationally, according to the National Association of Realtors. In Southern California, a favorite target for investors, absentee buyers accounted for 31.4% of purchases last month, up from an average of less than 17% between 2000 and 2010, according to DataQuick MDA, a real-estate research firm.

And incidentally, those checks being mailed to fraudclosure victims (assuming that they actually clear) are so paltry that they often don't cover a month's rent to the new bankster-landlord.

Obama, meanwhile, continues:

From the day I took office, I’ve made it a priority to help responsible homeowners and prevent the kind of recklessness that helped cause this crisis in the first place.  

Recklessness is Obamian Newspeak for unindicted epic conspiracy, fraud and grand larceny. And since the day he took office, his top priority was to screw the little guy and "foam the runway" for banksters to spread their widespread real estate theft out over time. They were given bailouts with no questions asked and suffered no consequences when they simply pocketed TARP funds instead of using them to recompense victimized borrowers. The Dodd-Frank reform law is still only one-third operative, deliberately underfunded, and rapidly being whittled away to nothingness by armies of lobbyists and complicit federal judges.

My housing plan has already helped more than two million people refinance their mortgages, and they’re saving an average of $3000 per year.
 

Lies, lies and more lies. His initial HAMP housing plan was never implemented. And wasn't that the whole plan, right from the get-go? To be seen as trying, but passive-aggressively doing the exact opposite. ProPublica investigated:

The program was launched with President Obama’s promise to help three to four million homeowners avoid foreclosure. Three and a half years later, the program is only approaching 1.1 million modifications. It’s spent just $4 billion [6] of its original $50 billion budget.

A recent study found a big reason for the program’s failure was that, despite all its rules, it didn’t change the behavior of the biggest banks [7]. The banks did a poor job of modifying loans before HAMP was launched and weren't much better after.

Oops. But President Obama glides glibly on:

My new consumer watchdog agency is moving forward on protections like a simpler, shorter mortgage form that will help to keep hard-working families from getting ripped off. 

Notice how he arrogantly calls it "his" consumer watchdog agency rather than ours, failing to give credit for its existence to Elizabeth Warren. And if you're unemployed or retired or disabled, forget about it. Obama does not even deign to acknowledge your existence, let alone your rights against ripoffs if you are not a "hard-working family".

But we’ve got more work to do. We’ve got more responsible homeowners to help – folks who have never missed a mortgage payment, but aren’t allowed to refinance; working families who have done everything right, but still owe more on their homes than they’re worth. 

"We've got more work to do" is another overused weasel phrase which translates into "We have done jackshit." And the above paragraph again inserts the typical moralizing against those families (victimized by the likes of mega-donor Penny Pritzker), who were steered into subprime mortages with ballooning payments, or had the poor taste to lose both a job and the roof over their heads. "Working folks" and "responsible homeowners", on the other hand, can be translated into upper middle class professionals in the monied 'burbs who never once missed a payment. Unlike those marginalized wrong-doers, they did everything "right."  Obama's Romneyesque "taker v. maker" libertarianism and subtle racism are glaringly put on display in the paragraph above.

Last week, I nominated a man named Mel Watt to take on these challenges as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Mel’s represented the people of North Carolina in Congress for 20 years, and in that time, he helped lead efforts to put in place rules of the road that protect consumers from dishonest mortgage lenders, and give responsible Americans the chance to own their own home. He’s the right person for the job, and that’s why Congress should do its job, and confirm him without delay.
 

Mel Watt? As a congress critter from Wall Street-South and Financial Services committee member, he's raked in more than $5 million in campaign cash  from such stand-up deregulated institutions as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Obama no longer even has to pretend,  because the clock has just about run out on the statute of limitations for bank prosecutions. Maybe he'll recess-appoint Mel Watt. Maybe the GOP will overlook Mel Watt's race in deference to their common allegiances. It's a toss-up.

And they shouldn’t stop there. As I said before, more than two million Americans have already refinanced at today’s low rates, but we can do a lot better than that. I’ve called on Congress to give every responsible homeowner the chance to refinance, and with it, the opportunity to save $3,000 a year. That’s like a $3,000 tax cut. And if you’re one of the millions of Americans who could take advantage of that, you should ask your representative in Congress why they won’t act on it.
 

All well and good, but this ephemeral tax cut is already more than wiped out by failure to extend the FICA tax holiday for working Americans. And if Obama's chained CPI method of reducing earned benefits goes into affect as part of his Machiavellian Grand Bargain with Republicans, it will constitute yet another stealth tax hike on what's left of his vaunted middle class. He doesn't want to reignite any middle class engine at all. If anything, he's pouring sugar into it and stalling it out.

Our economy and our housing market are poised for progress – but we could do so much more if we work together. More good jobs. Greater security for middle-class families. A sense that your hard work is rewarded. That’s what I’m fighting for – and that’s what I’m going to keep fighting for as long as I hold this office.

Thank you. And have a great weekend.

Poised for progress the way the burnt-out wreckage of the Hindenburg is poised for flight. How many more weekends of this drivel can we stand, until Hillary or Chris Christie come to the rescue, to seamlessly continue in the grand bloviating tradition?

i-Spy With My Little FBI

When I compared President Obama to James Bond and their two beloved Moneypennies in a recent post, I was half-kidding. But isn't it a coincidence that the title of his latest West Wing Week propaganda video is called "Nobody Does It Better" -- the theme song of The Spy Who Loved Me? Check it out. It's just as overblown and satiric as the typical 007 movie. Every time the camera pans to the White House press corps, for example, they're frantically transcribing every golden Obamian word on their steno pads. There are multiple shots of Obama in such an exalted state of being that the videographer had to have been groveling at the president's feet in order to capture all those precious moments:



Official White House Propaganda Photo

And speaking of the dark side, now comes word that Obama wants to force  social media and internet service providers to make it easier for his domestic goons to eavesdrop on the internet communications of every man, woman and child in the USA, the world, the universe, and points beyond. After all, the American Empire needs literally tons more data to fill the vast empty spaces of the newly-constructed super-secret Orwellian storage facility in Utah. (check out this site if you prefer your dystopia with a side of parody.)

According to yesterday's New York Times, the president is finally "on the verge" of submitting to the seductive FBI, which is apparently growing tired of the same old, same old-fashioned wiretapping. Those land lines are going the way of the dinosaur (or the faithful but aging first wife) . The much sexier Facebook, Twitter, Skype and the like are ripe for predatory Bondian picking.

It's not that the FBI doesn't already record our conversations, spying at will and without a warrant. It just figures it could use some of that good old retroactive cover from the executive branch. But the creepy part is that Obama is considering actually punishing large service providers if they, unlike him, do not swoon at the chance to act out Peeping-Tom fantasies and become full partners in government crime:

While the F.B.I.’s original proposal would have required Internet communications services to each build in a wiretapping capacity, the revised one, which must now be reviewed by the White House, focuses on fining companies that do not comply with wiretap orders. The difference, officials say, means that start-ups with a small number of users would have fewer worries about wiretapping issues unless the companies became popular enough to come to the Justice Department’s attention.

Still, the plan is likely to set off a debate over the future of the Internet if the White House submits it to Congress, according to lawyers for technology companies and advocates of Internet privacy and freedom.

(snip)

Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not. The shift in thinking toward the judicial fines was first reported by The Washington Post, and additional details were described to The New York Times by several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Under the proposal, officials said, for a company to be eligible for the strictest deadlines and fines — starting at $25,000 a day — it must first have been put on notice that it needed surveillance capabilities, triggering a 30-day period to consult with the government on any technical problems.

Such notice could be the receipt of its first wiretap order or a warning from the attorney general that it might receive a surveillance request in the future, officials said, arguing that most small start-ups would never receive either.
 

As Philip Bump of The Atlantic points out, the White House proposal does not take into account that those small, temporary or start-up service providers with few users could easily bypass the new rules for allowing back-door i-Spying:

Which brings us to the most obvious way for terrorists or drug dealers or law-breakers or, yes, privacy puritans to avoid the FBI's proposed wiretapping ability: if you want to reduce the likelihood that your communications will be observed, check out what will hereafter be known as "burner" companies — new shops that enable the sort of communications you want to do but are unlikely to have enough users that one draws the attention of the FBI. Become a TechCrunch afficianado! When a company announces it's "a new way to connect people," that's your best bet, as long as it doesn't become too popular. (The "burner" analogy to cheap cell phones — you've seen The Wire, right? — is flawed, of course; that would be more like creating new Facebook accounts to send messages for a day or so.)

And, in keeping with the theme of government of, by and for the plutocracy, the new rules will also make it easier for corporations to use the backdoor technology to hack into our private communications. One more reason not to use Facebook. And forget about Twitter. Whoever doesn't already realize that your every Tweet is out there for public consumption is a twit. Even deleted Tweets linger in cyberspace forever.

The FBI doesn't even need a back door when most of our lives are already an open book. Nobody Does It Better. The Homeland Security state is De Best!

We weren't looking, but somehow they found us. We tried to hide from their love light. But like Heaven above us, the spies who loved us are keeping all our secrets safe tonight. 

Not.

Rampant Rape in the Military: Who Knew?

He is shocked, shocked that raping is going on in this establishment. Commander in Chief Obama, along with the Congress, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and all the ships at sea are floundering. How in the name of almighty empire could this be happening to the greatest military force the world has ever known?

Let the annual bromides begin.

He wants it rooted out, pronto. Same as he wanted it rooted out last year, and the year before that. And just to show how much he cares, he's punted the scandal of a 37% increase in military sexual assaults in one year over to yet another wishy-washy defense secretary to sweep under the rug deal with:

I’ve … indicated to him that we not only have to step up our game but exponentially go after it,” Obama said.

It is never a good sign when the big boss frames dealing with a rape epidemic among his troops in terms of a sport. Women being beaten to a pulp in the good old boys' club? Just step up your game, fellas; shoot a few hoops, have a few beers.

And you know it's a bad sign when even one of the Senate's most outspoken feminists frames her outrage in jingoism. My comment to Maureen Dowd's column today: 

Sen. (Kirsten-NY) Gillibrand said, "Obviously, there's a failing in training and understanding of what sexual assault is and how corrosive and damaging it is to good order and discipline and how it's undermining the credibility of the greatest military force in the world."

How about undermining the rights of the victims? I'm hearing echoes in American officialdom of the Vatican response to the child sex abuse scandal. How awful that the failure of a few sickos damaged the rep of the Church, what with its grand history of inquisitions and crusades and extermination-by-disease of native peoples. How terrible for American Empire that serial rapists are now harming the "good order" of the biggest war machine on the face of the earth, interfering with our capacity to invade, bomb, occupy and operate an obscene 1,000 military bases abroad, even as our leaders impose cruel austerity here at home.

It's not a lack of training. It's too much training. It's training generation after generation how to kill, and rewarding them for it with stars and bars and perks. Rape has been a feature, not a bug, of military cultures since the dawn of time.

That it's so rapidly escalating in our own armed forces is an indication that our military itself has grown too large to control, just as our banks have become too big to fail. We have entered the new age of American feudalism.

Restore good order and discipline. Cut the Pentagon budget, stop the wars, heal the corrosion right here at home.
 

 

Obama's Sugar Mama

What do James Bond and Barack Obama have in common besides suaveness, subterfuge, stealth, and secrecy? 

 

 

 

Moneypenny!

While Ian Fleming named his fictional character ironically, she being a mere secretary, Barack wouldn't know irony if it bit him in the tush. (example: his standard "This is not who we are" verbal vs. defacto policies for drone strikes, Gitmo, a record number of whistleblowing prosecutions, a record number of deportations, a record amount of campaign contributions, a slew of unregistered lobbyists in his White House, restriction of Plan B contraceptives only hours after gushing to Planned Parenthood that he'd forever honor the freedom of the uteri of America, etc.)

Another difference is that the fictional Moneypenny is smitten with Bond. In real life, MoneyPenny is smitten with power, and Obama is smitten with MoneyPenny's money.

But speaking of irony -- the socialite parents of Obama's Commerce Secretary-designate and mega compaign bundler Penny Pritzker must have had it in spades, what with hilariously naming their privileged spawn after a one-cent piece. And Penny Sue, no less, after the Mom who died tragically young in 1982, having inexplicably flung herself from a tow truck hauling her broken-down car. Penny's father also died young, of a heart attack at age 39.

The surviving and thriving Penny and her entire multi-generational clan make the dreaded Greater Evil Mitt Romney look like St. Francis of Assisi. Patriarch Abram, who lived to be 100, deliberately modeled his dynasty after the banking Rothschilds. The Pritzkers were stashing their billions in offshore accounts when Mitt was still in diapers, long before it became fashionable to do so.

MoneyPenny was a pioneer in the economy-destroying subprime mortgage industry, an institutional racist who helped evict poor black Chicago families from their homes. The multimillion-dollar fine the Pritzkers paid in restitution for losing millions in Superior Bank depositor accounts was just the cost of doing business. A friendly judge actually barred the victims from suing the Pritzkers, who personally recouped and pocketed part of the FDIC payout after their bank collapsed under the weight of its own greed.

In their heydey, which culminated in the roaring 90s, the Pritzkers leveraged buyouts of such stalwarts as Eastern Airlines, the biggest private hospital chain in Britain, and Royal Caribbean. The medical school at the University of Chicago is named after them, as is the prestigious architecture prize. All told, the number of the extended family's vast holdings was at one point in the 10,000 range. Afterward, the clan began an orgy of self-cannibalization, becoming embroiled in a generation-spanning slew of lawsuits reminiscent of Dicken's Bleak House.

Right up until the time Obama dropped his last vestige of pretend-populism last week and nominated her to his cabinet, MoneyPenny had been serving on Rahm Emanuel's Chicago school board. She rubber-stamped the firing of hundreds of unionized teachers and the closing of more than 50 schools in poor, mainly black neighborhoods. Did I mention that she is a big fan of for-profit charter schools? And why not -- she owns one of them. She also owns creepy credit reporting agency Trans-Union. Don't like mistakes on your credit reports? MoneyPenney blames you for not regularly checking them. So (Penny) Sue Her! Plenty of people have. But no matter. Her family has its own in-house law firm, which does nothing but defend these predators, 24/7.


A few years ago, during Chicago's record heat wave, her Hyatt hotel management team ordered heat lamps turned on striking workers. She has resisted calls to include the hired housekeeping help on the Hyatt board. She's cashed in on every local, state and federal tax loophole on the cooked books. She's successfully and serially protested against the property tax levies on her Chicago estate. 

MoneyPenny had to keep a low profile as Barack's Sugar Mama throughout his first term, when his re-election hopes hinged on differentiating himself from that other vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney. It might not have sat well with the base had he openly canoodled with the feminine version of Mitt. He did give MoneyPenny a secret ride on Air Force One last summer after she'd raised some secretive millions at a closed-press fund-raiser in San Francisco.

(Another bit of irony: one of MoneyPenny's nieces, Liesel Pritzker, was a child actress who had a role in the Harrison Ford blockbuster Air Force One. She also starred in A Little Princess. Liesel later sued MoneyPenny and her uncles and her cousins and her aunts for looting her trust fund. The Pritzkers make the Dynasty and Dallas TV soap opera famiglias look like The Waltons. The wholesome TV Waltons, not the real Waltons, whom they actually do kind of resemble)

Mitt ultimately lost because his operatives, unlike Barack's, failed to confiscate cell phones at fundraisers. One disgruntled bartender took aim in Boca, and the 47% takers/makers speech went down in history. The plutocratic cell phones at the Obama pay-to-play soirees were all safely stashed in garbage bags for the duration. No more Clinging to Guns and Religion moments for Obama! He bit the bullet to live another term as placeholder for the interests of the oligarchy.

From all indications, an honest to goodness 21st century robber baroness will be confirmed as our Commerce Secretary and end up having nominal jurisdiction over such entities as NOAA. Which is ironically fitting, given that we're long overdue for both climate and financial cataclysms, occurring solely because of the negligence and corruption and greed and deregulatory frenzies of the powers that be.

We don't need a MoneyPenny. We need a HennyPenny. Because in actuality, the sky is falling.

Merchants of Death

The privilege of gaping at piles of twisted metal and gawking at long-suppressed videos of people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers will not come cheap. So decree the people running the Atrocity Exhibition 9/11 Museum at the site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Tickets will go at about $25 a pop. It's the high cost of fetishization. It's the overhead of building in the underground. Touring Ground Zero cannot come at zero cost to the public. This is America. The site, after all, is adjacent to Wall Street and Club Cipriani, home of the $25 hamburger.

Profound sanctimony and solemnity also become very expensive when the people in charge of perpetuating it are earning six-figure salaries, and the billionaire shrillionaire named Bloomberg is only lending -- not donating, mind you -- a few million of his own stash to the museum. First responders may have paid with their lives, their blood and their health. But everybody will be paying Hizzoner, with interest.

The profit motive and ticket info were not mentioned in a 60 Minutes puff-piece ("Curating Moments of Terror and Tragedy") that aired last weekend, in which Lesley Stahl got the grand tour of the Grand Guignol. Making horror tasteful, making necrophilia seem like respect.... it's hard out there for people profiting off the mass murder of others. But Alice Greenwald, museum curator, is experienced, having just come to 9/11 from the Holocaust Museum. Here's a maudlin sampling of the transcript:

Alice Greenwald: Welcome to Foundation Hall.

Lesley Stahl:...that takes your breath away.

Alice Greenwald: It's haunting and a little chilling knowing you're in the belly of ground zero. In the place where so many innocent people lost their lives.

Lesley Stahl: So here we are, we're right where the buildings collapsed. We're in it.

Alice Greenwald: Most museums are buildings that house artifacts. We're a museum in an artifact.

Lesley Stahl: Where we are is almost sacred.

Alice Greenwald: I think you are become super conscious of where you're standing. And that's a powerful thing. It's a very powerful thing.

It devolves from there -- trust me. But watch if you must.

Even though Stahl managed to scrounge up a few survivors to shill for the museum, other family members are not so sanguine. Sally Regenhard, mother of a firefighter who died in the attack, calls the for-profit mausoleum a "pay-to-grieve national disgrace". She just penned a scathing New York Daily News op-ed:

None of the 9/11 family members that I have worked with ever wanted a billion-dollar money pit; all we hoped for was a simple, uplifting, honorable and patriotic memorial for all who were lost that terrible September day.

Instead, we have a “money is no object” monstrosity inflicted upon us — a design we did not choose, and which we bear no responsibility for — that was incredibly expensive to build and even more logic-defying to maintain.

(snip) 

How dare they charge visitors to pay respects to those lost on 9/11, including my son, a firefighter and recon Marine sergeant?

If his USMC brothers and friends from all over the country want to pay him respect, they have to pay Bloomberg & Co. $25 first.

What a crime! How many families could afford to pay that?
 

Answer: judging from the ever-increasing income gap between rich and poor in America generally and in New York City particularly, not very many. In the Big Apple, the poverty rate has reached its highest point in more than 10 years. Median earnings for working people fell to $32,210 from $33,287 — much more than the national decline, according to the Census Bureau. The bottom lost ground, while the top gained. That includes Mayor Bloomberg, whose net worth of $25 billion climbed by another $3 billion just in the past year. He wants every penny of that $15 million museum loan repaid, by the way.  

The CEO of the 9/11 Museum, who is paid a relatively modest  $400,000 a year to decide such things as how much to charge the public, also came under criticism last year when he ditched the ceremony commemorating the 1993 WTC bombing to go on a Colorado ski trip with his tycoon father. Joe Daniels, a former private equity manager, had previously blamed his absence on a personal obligation. But when he was caught out, he just shrugged. "I have one of the best dads in New York," he gushed to a local reporter, adding that the unpaid volunteers had it all under control anyway. You really can't make this stuff up. The rich really are different than you and me. If there is such a thing as a gene for shame, it seems to be sorely lacking from the DNA of the pampered wealthy. The plutes are brutes.

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Postscript:

I was curious about other atrocity exhibitions/mausoleum museums and whether they, too, are run by the Grifters of Grief. Some results:

Oklahoma City Memorial: ticket prices range between $10 and $12. I found this surprising.

Holocaust Museum, Washington: free admission.

Auschwitz Holocaust site, Poland: free admission.

Arlington National Cemetery: free admission.

Gettysburg Civil War Battlefield: admission is $12.50 for adults.

Dresden Cathedral museum, site of World War 2 bombing: one low-priced annual ticket gains you admission to all German museums.

Wounded Knee massacre site, South Dakota: adults are charged $5 admission.

Tiananmen Square Massacre museum, temporarily located in Hong Kong: free admission.

Moro Crater in the Philippines, site of the slaughter of more than 500 Muslim civilians by the United States Army under the direction of Gen. Leonard Wood: Admission is free, because no memorial was ever built.

Museum of Chemical Weapons (yeah, there is such a place) and other Army tourist traps at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri: admission is free, but photo ID, vehicle registration and proof of insurance (!) are required. That pretty much leaves out non-drivers and un-Americans. And if you're disabled, forget about going as well, since the exhibits are not wheelchair-accessible. Some parts of the military-industrial complex apparently are exempt from the Americans With Disabilities Act as well as from the Geneva Conventions article against torture.

Party on.

Wonky Wankers

Oh, no! A randomized controlled trial reveals that when poor people get medical insurance because they won a lottery, they don't instantaneously shed their ravaged, neglected bodies and become pictures of robust good health overnight. The wonkosphere is going nuts. Pseudoliberals worry that the "bombshell" results of an Oregon study on insured and uninsured poor people could put a damper on Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. Republican nihilists are crowing "we told you so" -- you give a bunch of takers gummint health care and they still get sick, so why waste money on them?

No matter that 10,000 lucky ducky Medicaid sweepstakes winners reported feeling a whole hell of a lot better mentally, just knowing they no longer had to pick between going to a doctor and eating. They may feel better, but they still have diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. The punditocracy is shocked, shocked that after lifetimes of living on the edge of mortality, the Medicaid study group did not immediately regain its health when accessing health care. These policy experts are not taking into account the continuing poor diets of the poor, that often the only food affordable to them is laden with sugar, salt, fat and chemicals. They're not taking into account the irreversible effects of environmental pollution on people. They're not taking into account the lingering, unaddressed scourge of income disparity. They are of the exceptional American mindset that a pill and a doctor visit should cure everything, overnight.

Zeke Emanuel, former health care advisor to the Obama Administration, calls the study results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, "disappointing" -- not inconclusive, mind you! --which means they'll have to tinker with "the system." (code, probably, for privatizing it.) This is what happens to physicians when they turn into deficit-obsessed technocratic policy wonks, controlled by numbers instead of focusing on real people.

Slate's Ray Fisman writes:

Now that the clinical results have started to come in, it’s time for liberal media types like myself to eat some humble pie. Today’s New England Journal article presents a set of findings showing that Medicaid had no effect on a set of conditions where you would expect proper health management to make a difference. There are effective treatment protocols for hypertension, cholesterol, and diabetes, yet insurance status had no effect on blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or glycated hemoglobin (a measure of diabetic blood sugar control).

(Liberal media types like Fisman obviously buy into the insta-cure messages spewed over cable by Big Pharma snake oil salesmen.)

Conservatives, of course, are gleefully twisting the study results into their own toxic pretzels. They argue that since expanded Medicaid coverage means more people will finally be diagnosed with disease, it naturally follows that Medicaid actually makes people sick! The Cato Institute's Michael Cannon writes that the Oregon study should throw a huge stop-sign in front of Medicaid expansion:

There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees.
 

The study itself is unfortunately behind a paywall. But the lead author does caution about reading too much into it, suggesting we need to take the long view, that other studies show that people's health improves over time when given adequate medical care.

Tell it to the politicians. One side of the duopoly panics and caves, the other side smirks, and the private insurance predators controlling both parties laugh all the way to the bank.