Cogito Ergo Sum of All Fears

For all you cynics out there who think Barack Obama was lying to Jay Leno the other night when he said he doesn't spy on Americans,  the government megaphone known as the New York Times wants everybody to just calm the hell down.

Obama was parsing, is all, counting on the possibility that most people glued to The Tonight Show were too stupid to read between his philosopher-king lines. The fact that the government is collecting all your information cannot be equated with snooping. Here, according to Charlie Savage in a controlled leak disguised as an exposé, is what they are really doing to you:

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

 While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

You see, it is only collecting those emails containing top-secret keywords dreamed up by top-secret bureaucrats that might relate to people under surveillance who live across nonexistent cyberspace borders. Therefore, if I email my friend in New Zealand (who in turn emails someone else, who unbeknownst to us, is under surveillance because her Uncle Joe's email was once flagged for talking about the Boston Marathon bombing) I will probably end up getting noticed by Big Brother. And if I made the mistake of yacking about the new pressure cooker I just bought and the latest fictional terror plot, I am in triple trouble. Oops -- since I just speculated about it here, I am very likely on The List already. I wrote to a foreigner who writes to lots of other people. I mentioned a household WMD. I mentioned the NSA. I have a name. I exist. I communicate. Je pense, donc je suis. I use the Internet, therefore I am suspect. There can be no doubt.

Naturally, the "senior government official" who spilled his guts to Charlie Savage will not be prosecuted for leaking, because this was one of those "official leaks" designed to downplay the egregious nature of the revelations before Glenn Greenwald reports on them. Because, according to the official leaker, there are safeguards in place to ensure that once a corporate Booz Allen snoop does read my stuff based on a keyword alert, he will immediately recognize the mistake, immediately report the gaffe to a "superior" whose sole function apparently is sitting around waiting to throw the billions of inadvertently-collected emails in the Bonfire of Ill-Gotten Communications. This front-page Times scoop's purpose was to reassure me that Big Brother means me no harm. It was also meant to give Barack Obama cover for his Big Leno Lie.

There can be no doubt.

The Times, of course, is not alone in giving cover to Obama, who also hilariously insisted to Leno that Edward Snowden could have gone through proper whistleblowing channels instead of seeking political asylum elsewhere. As the FAIR blog points out today, corporate media hacks are hacking in droves, defending domestic spying, fear-mongering over Al Qaeda, and Cold War-mongering over Russia.

And as NBC's Lester Holt reported last night,

 "While the cold war has been over for more than 20 years, the growing chill of late between Washington and Moscow became downright frosty today as President Obama called off his planned meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, a response to Russia's grant of asylum to accused American spy Edward Snowden..."

To be fair, the report was later "tweaked" as Holt once again downgraded Snowden to leaker status.

And conversely, civil rights icon John Lewis has now hastily retracted his glowing comparison of Snowden to Gandhi and Thoreau. He's done a complete 180, pivoting from praising Snowden for his courage to now condemning the actions that have "damaged American  international relations and compromised our national security.  He leaked classified information and may have jeopardized human lives."

Ouch. It appears that Lewis may have inadvertently been putting a damper on Obama's co-optation of the upcoming 50th anniversary of MLK's March on Washington. So -- down goes the praise, straight into Obama's bonfire of the vanities. The keywords are..... Damage Control. 
  
Do you see where the propaganda brigade is taking this whole discussion? Snowden is now spying for Russia because he exists in Russia through no fault or plan of his own. The American media-industrial complex is even concern-trolling the historic Russian anti-gay agenda as an excuse to boycott the Winter Olympics. Before Snowden, they didn't care. This is all about American chest-thumping and last-gasp hegemony. All of a sudden, our Predator President is the victim instead of the bully. All of a sudden, those Yemenis are inexplicably chattering about revenge in response to our surgically precise and anonymous drone murders.

It was very telling that the president self-protectively spilled his angst-ridden guts to a comedian on TV, rather than, say, at an actual press conference where he might have run the risk of being asked a tough question by at least one renegade reporter.

But anyhow, it is gratifying to know that our politicians enjoy their gold-plated, no-deductible, no co-pay health insurance in order to pay for all the bodily harm and psychic assaults inflicted upon their sensitive selves by Vlad the Impaler and Snowden the Merciless. The casualty list is becoming quite extensive. Charles Schumer has been poked right in his beady little eyes at least a dozen times in the last week alone. Reports of penetrating back wounds among members of Congress have reached epidemic proportions. Paul Ryan has suffered the double indignity of being both knifed in the back and slapped in the face. Poor baby. Somebody get him a Medicare voucher, quick, before Babushka Putin gives our exceptional American freedoms another black eye.

Today In Kafka

One of the great traumas of early parenthood is the very first time you hear adorable little Susie or Johnny uttering the F word. Since the standard ritual of the washing-out of the mouth with soap is now considered child abuse in some locales (and for good reason -- have you read the ingredients on a bar of Irish Spring lately?) the most that Mom and Dad can do is a time-out, loss of privileges, and of course taking a good hard look at our own potty mouths.

But how would you feel if your child was under official court order to never, ever utter one particular F word again for the rest of their lives, under pain of having the family homestead taken away and the bank account seized?

 This has actually happened to a Pennsylvania couple who settled a lawsuit against a gas drilling company that polluted their drinking water supply through that most dreaded F word of all: Fracking. Under the terms of the settlement, even the two small children in the family were issued a gag order by the presiding judge, forbidding them to utter the word Fracking for the rest of their lives:

The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Ltd, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.

The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged 10 and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.

The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches.

The Hallowiches constantly worry what will happen if the two kids slip up one day and yack about fracking on the playground in a town where fracking has become a way of life and livelihood for many families. No longer can the children partake in discussions about whose water is the smelliest, or who can triple-dog-dare who to be first to test out the latest playground water fountain to see what solid, liquid, gas or flame comes spewing out.

 "They're going to be among other children that are children of people within this industry and they're going to be around it every day of their life, that if they in turn say one of the illegal words when they're outside of our guardianship we're going to have difficulty controlling that," said Mr. Hallowich.

My knee-jerk advice to the Hallowiches might have been to get the F out of town and out of Pennsylvania, where the gas lobby owns the government regulators. That hefty court award should last them awhile if they're thrifty, even if they have to abandon their polluted land and can't find new jobs. One possibility is the next state over (New York), where fracking is still banned, thanks to a strong environmental lobby. The kids could scream Fracking Fracking Fracking!!!! at the top of their lungs and blend right in with the activist crowd. To be really safe, I'd recommend Woodstock, whose town council last year actually voted to make fracking a felony.

But there's a huge catch. If the Hallowiches have cell phones or iPads, they won't be free no matter where they go. The technology now exists for police, courts, governments and probably corporations to remotely monitor the voices and movements of all of us, via the ridiculously easy secret installation of spying software on our electronic devices. They can hear us and they can see us, and that goes for our kids, too. The only solution is to get off the grid entirely. And that would be hard, given that technology has proven both addictive and necessary to our very existence. For example, without the Internet, we'd never be able to find out where they're fracking and how they're snooping.

Meanwhile, Steve Horn of DeSmogBlog has obtained documents proving that the Obama Administration is not only helping to shield fracking polluters from oversight and consequences, but that it actually censored a report establishing a clear link between fracking and the pollution of ground water in Pennsylvania. The EPA lied when it reported that the methane caused by fracking was "naturally occurring" in water and perfectly safe to drink. Two whistleblowers have now accused former EPA Chief Lisa Jackson of being the instigator of the cover-up. She was apparently acting on orders from the boss man himself, who feared that his re-election chances in that important swing state would be damaged by bad publicity. He has, after all, been a longtime booster of the gas industry and its donors. (Jackson, ironically and conveniently enough, now works for Apple, manufacturer of the iPad.)

 I assume that the Justice Department has gone into full panic mode, trying to catch the EPA truth-tellers and indict them for giving aid and comfort to the populace. Because when it comes to leakers, this administration is schizophrenic. It punishes those who help their fellow citizens, and rewards those who poison us -- be it by leaking toxins into our air and water, or by the enactment of toxic policies that have sucked the wealth of an entire nation into the voracious maw of the predatory financial class. 

 

Terrornado Week

Let's just assume for a moment that the American government's answer to Sharknado has nothing to with deflecting attention from the fact that our government is spying on us, and everything to do with some actual nefarious "chatter" among the folks who hate us for our freedoms.

Let's assume that there are, indeed, plans afoot to blow some Mid-East embassies to smithereens.

If that is the case, then we must acknowledge that the so-called terrorist folks have every right to be irate. Any plot they might be hatching would be in the realm of counter-terrorism. Take your pick of atrocities:

Drone strikes are increasing, Obama's impassioned public promise to taper them down notwithstanding. People are still being obliterated. In the days immediately preceding the Terror Alert, the State Department blithely proclaimed: "In no way would we ever deprive ourselves of a tool to fight a threat if it arises.”

So, Obama will continue to bomb the residents in "tribal regions", where marginalized populations risk death for simply failing to pledge allegiance to any of the nations under American control and for occasionally allowing "militants" to camp out in their neighborhoods because hospitality is an integral part of their culture. (See: Yemen, Waziristan, Somalia). It is therefore very easy to envision the relatives of the "collateral damage"  chattering up a storm in between bouts of crushing grief for their crushed children.

In the days immediately preceding the Terror Alert, the Center for Investigative Journalism reported  that the CIA was actually targeting rescue personnel ("double-tapping") in the aftermath of drone fatalities as recently as two years ago. This is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The people who hate us for our freedoms are very much aware of the fact that past and current administrations are never prosecuted for war crimes. I imagine that the deliberate killing of medical personnel by Predator drone caused quite a bit of renewed chatter in the tribal regions.

The continued operation of Guantanamo Bay. It's still there. Inmates are still being force-fed, in violation of both their civil rights and religious beliefs during this holy season of Ramadan. It's a violation of internationally recognized medical ethics. It's torture. Outraged chatter has been busting out all over.

Revelations that Benghazi was the site of a secret CIA operation keep coming. The Susan Rice "talking points" scandal might have been a double contrivance -- both in the lies she told about possible motivations, and in the wrong reasons for Republican outrage and ensuing investigation. If Benghazi was an illegal black site prison, as David Petraeus's mistress once alleged, look for the GOP to shut up about it forthwith. When it comes to endless war, they will protect President Obama. Impeachment will be off the table. Domestic chatter will cease as partisan mouths clamp shut in solidarity.

There have been a series of apparently coordinated prison breaks, including from the infamous Abu Ghraib in Iraq, scene of inmate torture by the American military. I imagine those newly-freed inmates are chattering up a storm, especially if they were locked up for political reasons, at the behest of the American security apparatus.

So, although I'm leaning toward the theory that the surveillance state bureaucrats announced a new terror plot simply because they're terrified that their lucrative operations are about to be defunded by Congress, there may be some truth in it. If there's a plot, it was provoked by our own government. And very possibly aided and abetted and even orchestrated by our own government in order to keep us compliant and quiet. In other words, they are operating on the conventional wisdom that any terror attack represents an ensuing cash cow for the security state. A little human collateral damage in the name of disaster capitalism has never stood in their way before. Their cynicism has always been beyond breathtaking.

 Just look at how President Obama himself cynically spent his weekend. He played golf and partied hearty with a "This Is Your Life" cast of characters from the last 52 years of his storied existence. He was not "huddled" in the Situation Room with his national security team.

The fact that CNN pre-empted its regular programming to dust off the terror graphics and 9/11 doomsday music to broadcast a marathon special report consisting of vague threats is another huge hint that the alleged threat is a wholly fictionalized, Homeland Security theater production. Did you notice how all their paid defense industry and ex-CIA consultants magically appeared in the studio, all at once, to parrot identical government talking points? It reeked of pre-arrangement. Wolf Blitzer is still around to cry Wolf.

Meanwhile, Congress  unconcernedly flew home in their unsequestered jets to raise money and hide from their constituents, getting richly rewarded for fake gridlock. They're also falling all over themselves to preen before the TV cameras, moaning about how many ways Russia and Putin and Snowden are physically inconveniencing them. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has been poked right in his beady little eyes! Paul Ryan (R-Gerontophobia) complains of being both slapped in the face and stabbed in the back. It's a good thing these gold-plated government leeches won't have to shop on the ObamaCare exchanges to get taxpayer care for their myriad wounds and maladies. The co-pays for the treatment of Putin poisoning alone would bankrupt them otherwise.

If these people were truly in panic mode, they'd be hunkered down in undisclosed locations. But they're right out there in the open, jaws flapping, freely chattering and scarifying and looking rather clownish while doing so.  So, as far as I can tell, the only thing we have to fear is fear-mongering itself.

But Since Terror Sells, They'll Never Shut Up

Lies & Whispers

Edward Snowden may be free, but we, his grateful compatriots, remain forever in chains. Thanks to the double-shredding of both Rousseau's Social Contract and the Magna Carta, American feudalism continues apace. What an irony that Russia, that bastion of repression, is now sheltering an American from the freedoms he could enjoy if he ever set foot in the Homeland again. It's just too bad that Putin's public relations coup is spoiled by his recent criminalization of gay pride. Hypocrisy, it seems, is an equal opportunity international personality trait wherever you look. 

Is it me, or has the pace of the disintegration of this country been ratcheted up a notch? Even if we aren't hurtling toward destruction at Mach speed, there's enough regression in the air to unequivocally prove that we are at least sliding backward. Even former President Jimmy Carter recently acknowledged that we no longer live in a functioning democracy.

Take the latest Washington soap opera, in which the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve has now been elevated (or sunk) to the level of palace intrigue, circa 1787. Obama -- he who so righteously scoffed at Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" remarks, even as his hypersecurity forces were literally binding a couple of Green Party female political opponents to metal folding chairs lest they interrupt his bullshit -- is now openly embracing perhaps the worst caricature of misogyny and greed ever dreamed up by a Dickensian brain. That, of course, would be Larry Summers. Larry, one of the chief architects of the 2008 collapse, has been rightly lambasted throughout the blogosphere after word leaked out (official, cowardly, and unprosecuted) that Obama wants to appoint him to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve over the much more qualified and populist-leaning Janet Yellen. Barry became so incensed at the blowback to his wishes that he quickly morphed from simply whispering his desires to "full-throatedly" endorsing his pal behind closed doors to some Congressional Democrats, while lambasting the "liberal media". So much for that much-vaunted transparency and phony populism. I think the best we can hope for is translucency, filtered through a fog of propaganda, lies and doubletalk.

In his pro-Janet Yellen column today, Paul Krugman managed to skewer the White House whisperers without even once mentioning Obama by name: a true achievement by any journalistic measure. According to Krugman, there are two factions at work: the subtle VSP ("New Democrat"/ Wall Street/Gravitas) whisperers, and the more blatant and unhinged GOP misogynist whisperers who are equating a possible Yellen appointment with the feminization of the dollar... whatever that might be:

The point is that while the gravitas types like to think of themselves as serious men (and I do mean men) who are willing to do what needs to be done, recent history suggests that they’re actually men who are eager to prove their seriousness by doing what doesn’t need to be done, at the public’s expense.

Also, there was a time not along ago when almost everyone in the gravitas crowd, if asked who possessed that mystical quality in its purest form, would surely have answered “Alan Greenspan.” How well did that turn out?

So is Janet Yellen the only possible candidate to be the next leader of the Fed? Of course not. But the case for someone else should be made on the merits — and, so far, that hasn’t been what’s happening.

Since Krugman did not mention He Who Must Not Be Named by name, I did the honors in my Times comment: 

Sexism has been festering in the White House ever since Barack Obama took office.

His problem with women, combined with his groveling to rich and powerful Wall Streeters like Summers, is well-documented. As told in Ron Suskind's appropriately titled "Confidence Men," chief White House economist Christina Romer was quickly forced out. Elizabeth Warren, along with her consumer protection bureau, was duly marginalized by Timothy Geithner. Janet Yellen already belongs to a very special sisterhood.

According to Ezra Klein, the White House remains paranoid about the possibility of another economic collapse. Should that occur, the Fed Chair would become the go-to savior. The alpha males deferring to a woman? The very thought must be making the testosterone drain right out of their bodies. They're reduced to anonymously whispering their angst to obliging media stenographers.

Still, the president had no problem loudly touting infrastructure investment in Florida, where a tiny percentage of the privatized profits could magically trickle down from contractors to "that waitress wanting to buy an iPod." (I wish I were kidding. He really did say that.)

Then, it was on to an Amazon "fulfillment center" where struggling Americans with "grit and resilience" can order protein powder from middle-class careerists earning a whole 12 bucks an hour.

Reaganomics, sexism, and obscene wealth disparity posing as prosperity. A trifecta for the One Percent, and a triple-whammy for the rest of us.

Another commenter (male) took issue with my view of Obama as  sexist, saying it could not possibly be so because he likes and respects the women closest to him:

Obama fought for and got Susan Rice and Samantha Power. His closest adviser has always been Valerie Jarrett. His first Secretary of State was Hillary. He is close and respectful to a very strong wife. His is entirely wrapped around the fingers of his girls.

I just do not see sexism in him. Nor do I see him permitting it around him.

Now his economic policy does not at all please me, and the bums he has chosen to listen to are all men. But I don't think that is sexism. That is something else.

My response:

 Obama's is the "benevolent" brand of sexism. Of course it's not even close the misogyny-as-policy openly embraced by Republicans. But it's there, and it rankles. Examples:

"As the father of two daughters" he ordered his female HHS secretary to ban the Plan B contraceptive for teenage girls, who he predicted would be bopping into drugstores buying up birth control like it was gum. Sexist much?

He made public remarks about Kamala Harris being the best looking attorney general in the country. Many women found this demeaning, as "well-intentioned" as it may have been.

We should begin comparing what John Kerry is doing as Sec of State to what Hillary did. Obama seems to be giving him much freer rein in the Middle East peace talks. We'll see how this develops. Hillary, you may remember, was deemed "likeable enough" by Obama during the primary debates. Benevolently dismissive and criticized as sexist by many women.

According to the female White House staffers interviewed by Ron Suskind for his book, the hostile workplace atmosphere was such that in the private sector, it would have amounted to grounds for a sexual harassment suit. A lot of this had to do with Larry Summers. Larry Summers is definitely a misogynist. So if the president loves Larry, what does that make him?

I guess you have to be a woman to "get" this. A few isolated gaffes are one thing. But then a pattern emerges. Combined with the economic policy, it just adds to the toxicity. And the annoyance.

To which more hilarity ensued, including the usual redundant cut-and-paste jobs from the dregs of the Obama Truth Squad: accusations of "hatchet job" and  "Obama can never do right by Ms. Karen!". Good to know there are still a few die-hards left out there.

Meanwhile, if 1787 all over again is getting you down (nostalgia just ain't what it used to be) then fast forward to 1984 this weekend for an anti-surveillance celebration in a city near you. Big Brother has seen enough, and we've had enough. Marchons.

The Manning Verdict

 Bradley Manning dodged the "aiding the enemy bullet" and life imprisonment. What a relief it must be to him as he relishes spending only the next 136 years of his existence in the slammer for the offenses of embarrassing the power players of the United States of America and lighting the democratic spark for the Arab Spring.

Let's see.... President Bush immediately commuted the sentence of convicted felon Scooter Libby, who actually did endanger lives through his lies and leaks. And only a week or so ago, President Obama quietly arranged for the safe passage of a CIA agent who'd been convicted in absentia by an Italian court for "renditioning" a Muslim cleric to a black site prison. The spy was flown back to American safety after being detained in Panama. So it's not like there hasn't been a long history legal precedents of politicians cutting people some slack.

In a just world, the officiating judge in Manning's court martial would sentence him to time served, apologize profusely for the state-sponsored torture he has endured, and set him free.  Or, barring that gesture of humanitarianism,  President Obama could always commute his 136-year sentence. He could even give one of his folksy speeches, pledging that if Bradley Manning promises to work hard and play by the same rules, then he too can aspire to become a member of the great American middle class.  

By so doing, Barack Obama could regain some of the goodwill he has lost through five years of serial betrayals and half-measures. At this point, I don't think he cares. I don't think he ever cared.

The Manning verdict, in which an idealistic young man is declared guilty for revealing a panoply of state secrets, ranging from obscene war crimes to the boring petty intrigues of the satellites of American Empire, will only serve to widen the gap between the political power structure and the citizens who remain at its mercy. 

Our consolation is that Bradley Manning is getting wider attention than would normally have been the case, given the renewed glare of negative publicity shone by Edward Snowden on our deadly surveillance state. The evidence of public-private abuse against the citizenry is so rampant and egregious that even complicit members of Congress have nowhere to hide any more. There will be hearings tomorrow. Leaders will squirm, and truth-tellers will finally be given a voice.

The victory is moral, and it is ours.

From Loving Your Pain to Feeling Your Pain

How does President Obama telegraph his contempt for the working class?

By traveling to an Amazon distribution warehouse full of temporary wage slaves and calling for a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28%. And on top of that, bestowing our financial overlords with even more monetary incentives via training, at government expense, the workers for those low-paying jobs, and then rewarding the freeloading CEOs with even more financial perks when they then deign to hire the trainees. It's a trifecta for the plutocracy, a triple whammy for the rest of us. It's a perfect example of privatized profit at public cost. Or, if you prefer, corporate welfare.

The little guy pays the higher effective tax rate. The tax revenues, in turn, get sucked out the Treasury door by the corporate tax evaders. Most of it stays in their pockets, and only some of it goes to hiring a token number of laborers on the cheap. The already-manipulated unemployment rate will drop by a few points and politicians will make themselves look good for doing something that is actually quite bad. And that is the enablement of the closed feedback loop where money begets power begets more money begets more power. Ad infinitum.

And all this will be accomplished as President Obama purports to be concerned about the widening wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots. We are not supposed to notice that ever-widening gap between his words and his actions. Amazingly enough, there still appears to be a sizeable enough segment of his personality cult remaining willfully and faithfully blinded to how badly they are being had. I think this may have something to do with his recent guilt-inducing trip down racial-profiling memory lane. Gifted orator and social identity politics liberal that he is, he still enjoys an approval rating just south of the 50% mark. Not bad for the leader of a country ranking a dismal 27th in per capita income, 27th in life expectancy, and where four out of five people are now threatened with imminent poverty.

So I am now taking bets on how many times he will utter "middle class" at his speech today in Tennessee. Along with his usage of the word "folks," we should probably take Noam Chomsky's advice* and, Run Forrest Run! like a million desperate Gumps.

My only consolation is that many, many folks are taking sharp notice of the locale of his latest outburst of demagogy. Amazon was elevated to the ranks of history's most notorious employers a couple of summers ago when word leaked out (call the NSA!) that the company had actually stationed ambulance crews outside their buildings because workers by the dozens were passing out from the intense heat.  According to one investigative report, Amazon actually plucks its workers from an outside agency taking its own pound of flesh and rarely elevates them to permanent positions.  A story in the Huffington Post recounts how workers are forced to wait in line at warehouse security checkpoints for up to half an hour -- without pay -- to make sure they haven't stolen any merchandise on the way home.

And it's not just critics of Amazon's working conditions who are disgusted with Obama's choice of venue. The American Booksellers' Association has protested the visit, claiming that Amazon hurts small businesses by flouting sales tax laws and putting small independent bookstores out of business through predatory pricing.

Obama, meanwhile, will laud the fact that Amazon workers get health insurance cards, benefits not specified, as temporary, part-time and low-wage as they may be. It's called lowering expectations and calling it a win. Or, if you like, peeing on my leg and telling me it's raining.

I also got to wondering whether New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had anything to do with the president's choice of Chattanooga as the locale for another stop on his Magical Mystery Tour. Friedman, who has been described as one of Obama's favorite media mavens, did after all write a piece last fall that he dubbed Obama's Moment. He waxed rhapsodic about that Tennessee City being a hub of IT nirvana and thousands of crappy factory jobs and the perfect geographical symbol of Centrism. Or, if you prefer, untold riches for the few and immiseration of the many.

There is a huge amount of innovative thrust building, bottom-up, in the U.S. economy today. If Washington could just get the macro picture right, you could see a real growth surge in America. We’re just a couple of grand bargains away from something big.

And that brings me to the news. It’s good to see the budget talks between President Obama and the Republicans getting off to a solid start, but we know there will be plenty of partisan fireworks before any deal is cut. With that in mind, I hope the president will reframe and elevate the debate. It is vital that he not frame this as a discussion of just new taxes and spending cuts. His guiding principle should be “growth.” Right now, the whole budget discussion reeks too much of castor oil — and which side will have to swallow the biggest spoonful.

 And that brings me back to Chattanooga, where, Mayor Ron Littlefield says, city elders looked themselves in the eyes 15 years ago and realized that “we were a dilapidated city going the way of the Rust Belt.” But, by coming together to make the city an attractive place to live and getting both parties to agree to invest in a fiber-to-every-home-and-business network in a 600-square-mile area, Chattanooga replaced its belching smokestacks with an Amazon.com fulfillment center, major health care and insurance companies and a beehive of tech start-ups that all thrive on big data and super-high-speed Internet. “We’ve gone from being a slowly declining and deflating urban balloon, to one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee,” said Littlefield. The fiber network now attracts companies that “like to see more and more of their employees able to work some of the time at home, which saves on office space and parking,” the mayor said.

Friedman spoke, and the president listened. That Big Data part especially had to have been a turn-on. NSA-Amazon Partnership, here we come! Obama put Chattanooga on his calendar, post-haste. After all, it's only a short verbal technocratic hop from Friedman's ridiculous Bottom-Up bromides to Obama's latest Middle-Out catchphrases. I'll be paying attention to Obama's words today just to see how many Friedmanisms (along with middles classes and folks and dropped Gs)  manage to worm their way into his rhetoric.

Meantime, here's my comment to the Friedman column as published last year:

So, Mr. Friedman is advocating a massive government propaganda campaign to convince the proles that cutting back on our Social Security and Medicare and other "middle class" goodies will be fun for us. Something like a Mary Poppins for grown-ups. A spoonful of sugar in the form of better internet connections will help the medicine of retiring at 70 go down. Or some such nonsense.

CEOs and pundits throughout the land are serenading us with the same tired old tune called "Love the Pain." And Friedman's use of such words as "thrust-building" and "bottom-up" even add a sexy new slant to the genre of fiscal S&M. The plutocrats wield the whips, and we will swoon under their lashes. The president will do his part by making austerity excitingly patriotic. Friedman's multimillionaire financial guru is at the ready to impart some economic Viagra, keeping that dreaded deflation at bay.

Risky start-ups, here we come! But, if the addition of an Amazon warehouse to the Chattanooga landscape is your idea of boom-time, think again. These fulfillment centers have a less than stellar reputation in how they treat their poorly paid, no-benefit workers.

You know what would really stimulate the economy? A national living wage law to lift retail and warehouse workers out of poverty. Scrapping the cap on FICA Social Security tax contributions to make the trust fund solvent for generations to come. Medicare for All.

Forget the shared sacrifice. We should be demanding some shared prosperity.

Keep in mind that Obama's latest new and improved "Grand Bargain", while purporting to be a call for jobs, is simply Austerity by another name. Obama's offers of chained CPI as a method of cutting Social Security, along with other safety net cuts, are still very much on the table. He is not calling for taxes to pay for infrastructure and a government jobs program. He is calling for we the taxpayers to keep funneling our dwindling resources straight to the top.

He is advocating pure Trickle-Down Reaganomics. He always has. Only the weasel words have changed due to circumstances that were never beyond his control at all. (see: Geithner, Rubin, Summers) The natives are restless, so now he is pivoting, out of pure political necessity, from Tighten Your Belts to Feel Your Pain mode. But make no mistake. Those belts are still being tightened. Or, if you prefer, the nooses are being finessed.

And that, said Forrest Gump, is all I have to say about that.



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

Hypocrisy In the Age of Obama

You know that letter Eric Holder wrote to Uncle Vlad promising that he will neither kill nor torture Edward Snowden if Russia sends him back? I suspect it was nothing more than a cute public relations ploy meant for the consumption of mere citizens. It's the Obama Administration's way of telling us that we're a bunch of paranoid sillies for thinking that America is anything but a big old cuddly teddy bear. And to prove its point, the White House immediately and magnanimously released two whole Guantanamo prisoners on the very same day! Scratch that -- it cleared them for transfer. They are not actually free yet, after years of being not-tortured. Torture American-style does not include force-feeding, mandatory nudity, crotch-groping, solitary confinement and all the various and sundry pleasantries used to enhance the lives of our guests.

The Holder letter is small potatoes, coming as it did right on the heels of some truly monumental White House hypocrisy, with Obama's insistence that Congressional debate does not count as debate when it comes to impeding the ability of the police state to police us. Voting to take money away from the surveillance-industrial complex is just way too blunt. (in other words, way too public.)
 
Want more hypocrisy? A son of one of the most self-serving philanthropists on the planet has written an op-ed skewering the emergence of what he calls the Charitable-Industrial Complex. This is the bait and switch scam in which the warts of the greedy right hand are hidden beneath the pristine softness of philanthropic left hand. I was happy to see this piece, because it exposes the growing and nefarious substitution of private guilt-washing for a strong government safety net. Writes Peter Buffett:

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.”

It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

 The Obamas are huge aiders and abettors of the conscience-laundering industry. Michelle, for example, recently parachuted into Chicago to Empower Black Youth by boosting a charity of tycoons that uses poor black youths as poorly-paid interns. It was on the very same day that Mayor Rahm Emanuel had fired over 2000 teachers from the schools attended by the same poor black youths.

Barack, meanwhile, started a new White House task force on community service of, by and for philanthropists just days after the House of Representatives decoupled food stamp funding from the Farm Bill. There's a word for this state of affairs. It's called feudalism. But  in 21st Century noblesse oblige America, they prefer to call it Empowerment.

Which brings us to yet another piece of White House propaganda. I got an email yesterday with this headline: "Michelle Obama Empowers Latino Community!" Say what? With enemies like Steven King (R-Xenophobia) accusing Hispanics of having "cantaloupe calves", who needs friends like the first lady telling a roomful of mamacitas to stop stuffing their offspring full of tacos? Of course, it's totally up to the women working two or three minimum-wage jobs -- not Big Ag or Big Retail -- to do the stepping up. (another weasel phrase used by the powerful to instill guilt into the souls of the hopeless.) Thus spake Michelle:

Today, the Latino community’s buying power is more than one trillion dollars – you hear me? Trillion with a “t” – and it’s expected to increase to $1.5 trillion by 2015. So make no mistake about it, with the choices that you make, you all could completely transform the marketplace…you all have the power right now, today. So when companies step up and provide healthy choices…we all need to step up and actually take advantage of those choices.”  

Highlighting the influence of the growing Latino community, she offered these final words of advice to attendees: “In the end, we create the demand for these [healthier] products…and it’s up to us to demand quality."

That was a sneaky way of saying it's really no longer "on" Walmart. According to a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times, Michelle Obama has quietly abandoned her passive-aggressive effort to cajole the biggest corporate welfare recipient on the planet to sell healthy food at affordable prices. Walmart, it seems, is not "stepping up." Even after she gave them a whole bunch of guilt-washing publicity when rolling out another one of those public-private partnerships with the Walmart CEO last year. (Who, by the way, makes more than a thousand times the salary of the average Walmart employee.) According to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, the first lady has gotten cold feet when it came to going to the extreme of actually holding Walmart and other corporations up to public scorn for continuing to market unhealthy food to children.

Mrs. Obama also failed to note in her speech that one of the other main causes of obesity in poor children is the de-funding of physical education in poor neighborhood schools. She neglected to mention that the Latino community does most of the low-paid crop-picking of the food that ends up on Walmart store shelves. And that her husband's White House last year even killed a regulation that would have protected the children of migrant farm families, so as not to eat into the profits of Big Ag -- and that also includes the toxic tobacco industry.

One final entry in today's Hypocrisy Sweepstakes: the much ballyhooed national boycott of Florida over its Stand Your Ground law appears to be running out of steam before it even got started. Celebrities who initially joined the cause are backing out in droves. Their excuse is that you can't punish the masses by withholding their entertainment. Disneyworld trumps Trayvon. Capitalism rules.

President Obama himself never dreamed about cancelling his own trip to Jacksonville on Thursday in order to pimp out yet another public-private partnership to improve the port system. He lent his star power for the continued taxpayer enrichment of billionaire industrialists, while once again couching it in terms of helping the middle class. His proposal would deepen a channel, enabling more supertankers to come in from Asia via the Panama Canal as part of the very top-secret Trans-PacificTrade Partnership.

Obama did not even try to disguise his contempt for working people while spewing the same old trickle-down theories so beloved of his idol, Ronald Reagan: 

Bringing in more supertankers "works for everybody,'' he said, because it means "more contractors are getting jobs" and have more money "to spend at the restaurant," which brings more money for the waitress "to buy her iPod."

He noted that manufacturing jobs are the cornerstone of the middle class, as are investments in education, science and research, but "too many folks in Washington have been cutting these investments."

Isn't that sweet? All that trickle-down tip money from rich folks will help a lovely little wage slave of a waitress buy herself a cheap iPod arriving on a Chinese supertanker. Your money will continue to flow into the Sunshine State, the secretive free trade deals will continue to flood the globe, and the Stand Your Ground law will be laughing all the way to the bank. So shut up and step up so your leaders can empower you.