Gray Lady Gothic

That's the name of a whole new literary genre bursting forth from the Style pages of the New York Times. One feature, called "Vows", takes the real love stories of real rich people and makes them available for the delectation of the ravening masses in the hinterland. One such entry celebrated the spiritual journey and sexual awakening of a woman after she serendipitously and fatally struck a child with her car. 

In her most recent blog post, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan addressed the torrent of reader outrage over the piece. It was in supremely bad taste, complained the complainers, to mention the death of a child in the same column as a feel-good New Age Society wedding. Sullivan correctly noted it also seems to be in especially bad taste to celebrate the self-indulgence of the rich at the same time almost a million federal workers have been furloughed from their jobs.

But bad taste, tastefully presented, is the whole point of the "Vows" stories in particular and the Style section in general. I am convinced that these pieces are deliberately designed to piss off normal people as they purport to celebrate the shallow lives of the entitled rich. The only people apparently not in on the joke are the entitled rich, whose addiction to their own inclusion as stars of the never-ending atrocity exhibition prevents them from any real insight into their own selves. They're victims of their own toxic affinity fraud.

Lois Smith Brady, the writer of the latest target of hoi polloi wrath, actually produced a masterwork of satire with her calm evisceration of the "soul mates" of the Hamptons. She immediately lets us know what we're in for with the sharp thrust of her lead: 

People describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who has a lot of backbone in every way. She has great posture. She rarely gets upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she probably doesn’t have many.) She is sometimes stern but never shy.

Erica's brother oxymoronically gushes about how at ease she is with her own exuberance. (The privileged rich can be relaxed and hyper at the same time, unlike the rest of us.) Growing up privileged, she and her family would forage for elderberries in Central Park when they weren't surf-casting on Long Island or watching old Laurel and Hardy movies.

The new bridegroom, one Corey De Rosa, was not quite so privileged, coming from an "Everybody Loves Raymond" type family. He only got rich catering to the rich as a Yoga instructor. He was a late bloomer, it seems, a party animal who had a hard time "transitioning" from decadence to that sweet spot of total relaxation, which for him is a special room painted all red and black that he calls his Womb.

But here's the paragraph that really got Times readers so ticked off:

On Aug. 17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front of Ms. Halweil’s car. When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms. Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open demeanor. In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear road. I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.” She swerved but still hit the wagon. “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale skin and blue eyes was laying in the road. Her eyes were glazed over. I knew the spirit had left her body.”

She found salvation in Yoga and the love of her life, Womb Man. He fell head over heels because in the wake of the accident -- which the article touchingly calls a "bump in the road" --  he found her amazingly "beautiful and radiating." And ever so much "light and fun." Plus, she reminded him of Mommy.

Eventually, De Rosa and Halweil dumped their respective significant others and shacked up. When they finally made it legal -- only after Halweil gave birth to De Rosa's child with the aid of a concoction of Vodka, castor oil, baking soda and pineapple juice -- she dressed in a wedding gown she described as "pigeon-blood red."

Naturally, the happy couple humble-brags about how unpretentious they are. They are really "stripped down." And the sex is really, really good.

I had always made it a point to avoid the Style section like the plague. So thanks are due to Margaret Sullivan to alerting me to its rich satire. There are plenty of gems hidden amongst the fluff. Flannery O'Connor is alive and well in the Hamptons. And it is Absolutely Fabulous, sweetie-dahling.

Shut Down and Out

Government shutdown is actually kind of a misnomer. That is because the leaders who actually run things have not been shut down, nor will they ever shut up. The Congress critters have not gone home. To the contrary, they're boozing it up* like it's 1929. The White House is open for business and schmoozing it up. Obama is reportedly feeling pretty chipper. Because as far as I know, Terror Tuesday has not been disrupted by Shutdown.  As a matter of fact, economic terrorists Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and a whole passel of their unprosecuted little bankster buddies will be dropping by tomorrow to give their factotum in the Oval Office instructions on how best to save the world for the Masters of the Universe.

One National Zoo will be closed down, but the one known as Congress will go right on roaring its terrible roar and gnashing its terrible teeth and grazing at the corporate lobby trough. The Panda Cam is going dark, and the pandering will continue in the dark.

The troops on the battlefield will continue drawing their paychecks thanks to a laudable and "rare" show of bipartisan unity, but the troops wounded in mind or body  are out of luck. Money for their benefits will be gone by the end of the month.

The NSA and the Surveillance State will lumber on, unimpeded due to their budget being secret and infinite. Keith Alexander's Star Wars chair will not be yanked out from under him, and the ribbons and medals will not be yanked off his chest. But real crime? Real terrorism?  Not being fought so much any more. Poor victims and witnesses are not being protected. And this has nothing much to do with Shutdown, but everything to do with Sequestration.... which goes on, and on.

Eight hundred thousand federal workers are being sent home, and millions more are being ordered to work without pay. But Obamacare is open for business in what is cutely known as a soft "anti-climatic" launch. Or, the opposite of a mass orgasm. Or, the letdown in the shutdown. Starting today, assuming that you still have enough money to pay your Internet bill, you are invited to log on and shop around for partial insurance from for-profit middlemen.

Let's just put it this way. The Great Shutdown of Thirteen will not inconvenience the elites and their essential services (war and wealth extraction) in any great way. The only people being made to suffer are the poor and the dwindling middle class. It's business as usual, only more noticeable. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the people will finally revolt.

* The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom and political correctitude, axed a totally tasteless comment I wrote last night in response to Joe Nocera's Those Banana Republicans. It went something like this:

More like Banana Daiquiri Republicans, judging from the Tweets of enterprising Capitol Hill reporters gagging on the legislative fumes. (Although hemochromatotic Weeper John Boehner is said to favor Merlot.)

Although it is politically incorrect to say that "both sides do it", when it comes to boozing while legislating, both sides do it. Which is why Boehner and the lesser boozers will probably never be brought up on ethics charges or be treated to an intervention by their peers. So it is up to the media. Why the NYT silence on the problem of alcohol abuse in the chambers? Those enterprising reporters could maybe cop some strands of congress-critter hair or even capture a drop of flying demagogic spittle to forward to a lab for immediate chemical analysis.

With these sloppy drunks immiserating millions of already struggling people through sequestration and shut-down and furloughs and closings of essential services, the whole nation could probably use sponsorship in an Al-Anon chapter for the constituents of sick abusive pols. If Boehner and his Caucus of Creeps won't honorably resign from their leaky ship of state, we should just kick the bums out. Let them, inebriates in the service of inebriates that they are, lurch away into the political oblivion they so richly deserve.

Remember George W. Bush? He was an untreated alcoholic, a "dry drunk". And look where he got us. 

And Ted Cruz is a whole 'nother story from a whole 'nother country. He is probably more into stimulants than depressants. Before he left Houston to begin his 20-plus hour marathon filibluster on the Senate floor, I think he must have made a detour to a certain laboratory in Albuquerque, because he came across as more of a meth-head than a drunk. Either that or he is congenitally hypomanic. Judging from his marathon glittery-eyed appearances on cable TV all week, I don't think he ever sleeps.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman blogs that it probably wouldn't be rectitudinal to post on the Times website what he considers to be the best commentary so far on the whole Shutdown Mess:

  

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The Insecurity of the Security State

The good folks of the Surveillance State are terrified that we are not afraid enough of the bogeyman. They worry that we're not comfortable with our roles as domestic targets of our own government. So, instead of scaling back the surveillance, the spooks are simply ramping up both the fear and the guilt. They are striving mightily to wipe the Snowden egg off their faces even as they cravenly try to hide their faces.

Therefore, it's no big surprise that, having slunk and lurked on the dark side for so many decades, they are N.S.A. (Not So Adept) at filling this tall public relations order in order to justify their own continued, useless, bloated and lucrative existence.

But they're trying, they really are. Just in time to respond to the news of another blockbuster of an impending revelation that the Not-So-Adepts are in cahoots with the C.I.A. over an assassination program, the Obama administration has again commandeered the Paper of Record for use as its propaganda mouthpiece of record. In a masterpiece of the genre, the N.Y. Times has relied solely upon unnamed "present and former" officials to actually blame one of its rivals, McClatchey Newspapers, for an alleged August bombing plot leak that supposedly led to the "terrorists" clamming up and preventing the USA from monitoring them. The Times, of course, has proclaimed itself innocent of such enterprise journalism, patriotically and idiotically bowing to White House demands that it sit on the story to prevent the danger of official embarrassment.

The Times piece, homophonically and homogeneously written by a couple of reporters named Schmitt and Schmidt, is actually quite hilarious in places. For example, it takes seriously a complaint by Obama officials that the only chatter they've been able to pick up from Al Qaeda lately is terrorist gossip about the Snowden revelations! How dare they, when it is the duty of bad guys everywhere to broadcast their actual plans for mayhem. Idle chit-chat has no place in Spookville. As we all know, the Mid-east miscreants always, always stupidly allowed the American spooks to listen in, until Snowden and journalism happened along to spoil all the fun. Come on.

But the Times dutifully forges ahead anyway:

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.

In other words, the "terrorists" are rubbing their faces in it. A lot like the American citizens who, suddenly made privy to state secrets, are now sending greetings to eavesdropping N.S.A. cubicle dwellers who might be feeling left out from the conversation, or who've run out of LoveInt targets to peep upon.

The data hoarders are also theorizing that since newspapers sometimes publish news, the terrorists have now discovered how read newspapers. The subliminal message, of course, is that information presents a clear and present danger. Ignorance is good. We must not know things, lest the Bogeyman tap into our knowledge:

“We have seen, in response to the Snowden leaks, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups seeking to change their tactics, looking to see what they can learn from what is in the press and seek to change how they communicate to avoid detection,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., in July.

And worst of all, the terrorists might stop using the Internet and communicate in person! And just when the Surveillance State had finally built its multi-billion dollar Data Resort out there in the Utah desert:

The government’s greatest fear concerning its counterterrorism operations is that over the next several months, the level of intercepted communications will continue to fall as terrorists most likely find new ways to communicate with one another, one senior American official said. It will likely take the government some time to break into that method and monitor communications.

One way the terrorists may try to communicate, the official said, is strictly through couriers, who would carry paper notes or computer flash drives. If that happens, the official said, terrorists will find it very difficult to communicate as couriers take significant time to move messages.

There's only one thing for it. Yank the cubicle-dwellers away from their computers and send them out on the trail of the paper-pushers. Commandeer the thousands of courier bikes from the streets of New York City and start an international counter-courierism campaign. The Tour du Yemen can be filmed from above by Reaper drones for our viewing pleasure. Where there's an insatiable will for the corporate suits of the Surveillance Industrial Complex to make a stash of loot, they will always find a way. 

Lowdown on the Countdown to the Showdown

With government shutdown Armageddon only days away, is the stock market  freaking out? Will brokers be jumping out of windows if the contrived debt ceiling isn't raised? Well, apparently not. Fear is only for the little people. The Market is cool, calm, and collected.... and collecting, extracting, counting and hoarding.

Despite the crisis atmosphere whipped up by the concentrated ownership media conglomerates, those in power, those with all the wealth, those in the know, are apparently not panicking -- either over a looming government shutdown if Congress fails to pass  a CR by Tuesday (continuing resolution to keep the bureaucracy humming)  or later next month, when its failure to pay the nation's bills would breach the imaginary debt ceiling.

Pay the Damned Bills and Let Me Outta Here!

That is because The Market (whom, we have been led to believe, is a living, breathing entity not controlled by mere greedy humans) fully expects the two right wings of the Money Party to come together in the usual series of last minute negotiations. The plutocrats have seen this movie before. It always ends well for them. They expect to make a ton of money by the time all the manufactured dust has settled. The more it comes right down to the wire, the more profitable it will be for them. It's how disaster capitalism always works. Create a crisis, cash in while the freak-out is in full throttle, and the stunned populace will never know what hit them. All they will know is that the crisis has been averted and the world has been saved.

In the event of a government shutdown this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not be able to issue its Friday jobs numbers, the abysmal nature of which usually causes a slide in the market. Therefore, what can't be told will not endanger the bottom lines of the investor class. Our ignorance is their bliss.From Reuters:

In a second explosive Washington cliffhanger, Congress must agree to increase the $16.7 trillion limit on federal borrowing, which the administration says will be reached by October 17. If Capitol Hill fails to act in time, the unthinkable could happen and the United States could default on its debts.

But even in the options market, which is often seen as the place to offset risk and make protective bets against a decline in the stock market, there is little or no volatility premium priced in for the debt ceiling debate.

A growing number of market participants are even viewing the battle in Washington as an opportunity to jump into equities.

"Every situation we've had like this over the past few years has been a buying opportunity. This is just another wrinkle, not a time to change your strategy," said Andres Garcia-Amaya, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds in New York with $400 billion in assets under management.

During the federal government shutdown from December 15, 1995, to January 6, 1996, the S&P 500 added 0.1 percent. During the November 13 to November 19, 1995, shutdown, the benchmark index actually rose 1.3 percent, according to data by Jason Goepfert, president of SentimenTrader.com.

An unthinkable tragedy of epic proportions if we default on our debts and merely threaten to drown government in a bathtub is a tried-and-true buying opportunity for the chosen few. Welcome to the feudal states of America.

Meanwhile, the official story from the Paper of Record is that the House of Reprehensibles is meeting in one of those increasingly common "rare Saturday sessions" (the crisis atmosphere is immediately ramped up just thinking of the spectacle of politicians working on weekends. It seems like only six months ago that Congress was meeting in a whole series of rare weekend, middle-of-the-night sessions, the better to screw us as we slept unaware in our beds.)

And President Obama, in his all-too-common Saturday dose of pabulum, proclaimed that "the American people have worked too hard to recover from crisis to see extremists in their Congress cause another one.”

Huh? I was not aware that the American people had actually recovered from anything. Most of us are hardly working, through no fault of our own, thanks to the real crisis: a decades-long unraveling of the social safety net and government for the common good that culminated in an epic crash and burn and the opening of the most extreme wealth chasm in American history.  Even during the times of outright slavery, the income inequality was not as bad as it is now.

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Here are reprints of my New York Times comments from yesterday and today. First, from Charles Blow's excellent piece on a Congress full of demented Ahabs stalking the whale of an Obamacare law:

Take a 2,000-page law that nobody's read, in large part because the average American reads about a book a year. Throw in ownership of 90% of all media outlets by six conglomerates. Add a coup d'etat by a minority faction owned by the Koch cabal, with its billionaire-bloated tentacles winding and squeezing their way around the Supreme Court to the halls of Congress, to the state houses, to K Street, cable, the hinterland, and beyond -- and you've got yourself one epic mess, a tragedy in its final act.

And yes, right along with the pathological greed of the plutocrats, racism in the Age of Obama has blown up like a tempest in a Tea Pot.

Those Koch-funded alien abduction probe ads seem to be doing the trick. Because, according to another poll, while 46% of Americans view Obamacare negatively, only 37% view the Affordable Care Act negatively. Another 30% had no opinion, because explaining things is not in the pollsters' job description. Nor is it the job of the media, according to NBC flack Chuck Todd. They aim to please their sponsors by mastering the script.

In a sane world, in a real democracy, our politicians would be hounded daily over the fact that the vast majority of us want Medicare for All.

Just think. The law that created the Canadian single payer health plan is all of 13 pages long. But that is way too complex, when the continued spin of the closed feedback loop -- wealth begetting power begetting wealth -- depends upon keeping us simple, stunned and quiet.

And from yesterday's editorial on the Republican Ransom Note, in which the unnamed writer warns against a possible Democratic cave to extortion:

Here's how Disaster Capitalism kabuki always works (unless the Tea Party crashes the party again.)

The GOP submits its usual laundry list of impossibly outrageous demands. The Democrats, rather than countering with demands of their own, such as a Robin Hood transaction tax on Wall Street trades, a living wage bill, lifting the contribution cap on Social Security taxes -- whine and complain and waffle. And then, phony disaster looming, they begin to capitulate, bit by teensy bit. Because they're the adults in the room. Also because the plutocrats of Fix the Debt are back in town, clamoring for Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Republicans want to slash $40 billion from SNAP? The Senate, bless their little adult hearts, already agreed to "snip" $4 billion, on top of the planned expiration of the increase in the program that was put into effect under the 2009 stimulus package and that nobody even dreamed of renewing. And the Dems are willing to cut even more. They haven't a clue or a care about the millions of people who might miss a few meals because of their grand bipartisan horse-trading.

As Gore Vidal observed, this country boasts one political party with two right wings. And we're drifting ever closer to the bipartisan-manufactured, plutocrat-approved point of no return from de facto feudalism.

It could be avoided if the president did his constitutional duty and invoked the 14th Amendment, simply ordering the government to pay the bills.

And finally, my comment on Paul Krugman's Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted:

If the malignant rich had as many brains as they do dollars, they'd know better than to whine and complain. The magnates have become magnets -- for the seething anger of the great unwashed masses.

They feel compelled to rub our noses in it, with their insatiable need to criminalize poor people every bit as compelling as their endless craving for yet another financial fix. The extraction of rents, the extraction of 350 times the income of the average worker is not enough, nor is their reaping of 90% of all the gains since the collapse that they themselves instigated. 

The thing about this new breed of plutocratic class warriors is that they ain't got no class.

Take the Extell Corp. of NYC, income disparity capital of the world. Developers (big political donors) wanted to get some special state subsidies for themselves, and tax deductions for the purchasers of luxury condos in their new high-rise. So, they grudgingly agreed to include some affordable apartments in the same building. The tenants, who already pay regressive tax rates on their own labor in order to fund the rich, are thus double-dipped through their rent payments. Oh -- and they must use their own special back door to get in. Plus, they're barred from using the pool and the full-sized basketball court.

Economic apartheid is now the de facto policy of the feudal states of America. We are subsidizing our own serfdom and perpetuating our own inequality, just so that the rich may be quantitatively eased.

America the Exceptional

I owe my readers an apology. I neither watched nor read Obama's sermon at the United Nations yesterday. I did not savor his appearance at the Clinton Greed-Washing Rich People Confab. I am not joining the required liberal mock-fest of Ted Cruz's phony filibuster. I did not and do not eat Green Eggs and Ham. (the progressive blogs are reverse-orgasming over the Cruzian rape of Dr. Seuss. I imagine Gail Collins will devote a full column to it)

Okay. So my denial of watching the latest American Atrocity Exhibition is a fib, kind of. Because, although I did turn on CNN yesterday, I  kept the mute button on my remote firmly in the ON position the entire time. Did you ever watch Obama speechifying with the sound off? Let me tell you, the body language was a pretty scary sight to behold. It was a non-stop hodgepodge of  ambidextrous scolding, defiance, self-righteousness and barely disguised surliness. 

 

 

 

His facial expression was a contorted mélange of sanctimony, prissiness, and general aggrievement. Watching with the sound off sort of reminded me of the old films of those World War II despots that Walter Cronkite used to show on his 21st Century TV show. My fondest memory of childhood Sunday nights is being curled up in the den with my dad, watching Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin gutterally bloviate. Of course I didn't understand a word they said. And what really baffled me was that they always seemed so consumed with rage. They really seemed to hate the whole human race. And yet, there were those infinite throngs of people, cheering their every word!

But back to Obama. I did read the New York Times version of the United Nations event. Some editor, I suppose out of a sense of smarmy fairness, inserted one token dismissive paragraph of Dilma Rousseff accusing America of criminal behavior deep within the body of the Obama hagiography. Talk about burying the lead! When the seventh largest economy on Earth calls out America for breaking international law, you'd think there would be banner headlines. The gratuitous Times mention so jarred with the whole tone and gist of the piece that it was obviously a last-minute decision, lest the wrath of the Public Editor be evoked. And nobody managed to call out the president for being for war before he was forced to be for diplomacy. Or, how much he seemed consumed by the Cheney borg, trumpeting American Exceptionalism. Or, as a precious few journalists noted, how he took his allotted 15 minutes of fame and tripled it without so much as a by-your-leave from the Lesser Countries.

It was apparently a Big Lie-a-Minute extravaganza. See David Swanson's excellent deconstruction here.

Maureen Dowd, meanwhile, waxed vituperative about the photo-op of Barry shaking hands with the successor of the "provincial Iranian fruitbat" never coming to fruition before he fled into the "sweaty and freighted embrace of the Clintons". And by the way, I think Dowd is getting a bad rap from the commentariat. She is an equal opportunity abuser. Her schtick is the display of the Inside-the-Beltway Shallowness in all its atrocity, for which she herself is accused of being shallow. She has the gift of showing, not telling. She is increasingly a parody of herself, and she does it exceedingly well.

Most readers of her latest column were incensed over her shockingly mean-spirited lead, in which she wrote that "The One" had once been heralded as the Messiah. Nobody seems to remember that, yes indeed, he and his handlers did actually embrace the Barack as Christ meme. It was Oprah who called him The One, saying that "we need politicians who know how to Be the Truth." (as opposed to a mere mortal who might only be expected to tell the truth.) Michelle promised Americans that he could heal "the hole in our souls." At one campaign speech, Obama himself intoned in response to the cheering crowd, "I give all praise and honor to God. Look at the day the Lord has made." 

So, I says to the embattled Maureen, who I am sure reads all the comments:

But didn't you know America is exceptional? It was announced at the U.N., as the whole world listened ever so politely. With the refreshing exception, of course, of Dilma Rousseff. And Ted Cruz in his ostrich Keds, filiblustering his heartless heart out. 

We have the most billionaires, paradoxically coupled with the highest wealth disparity ranking on earth. We're 24th in both life expectancy and per capita income. We imprison more people than any other country on earth. And why not? We have more prisons than the lesser countries. 

The USA ranks a dismal 19th in retirement security, yet the Serious People all agree we need to cut Social Security. Our kids, a shameful quarter of them poor, scored 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading. Ergo, they're closing schools and firing teachers. 

We have the most expensive health care system in the world with some of the worst outcomes. Seven people get shot every hour -- but six are lucky enough to live another day!

So God Bless Us. With our 1,000 military bases and our long history of doing the greatest good for the fewest number, we are truly exceptional. 

And God Bless Hillary. Looking toward 2016, which began for the pundits In November 2012, she actually makes me glad that Obama is still president. Because the only thing worse than a potential prez bragging about American exceptionalism is a politician telling a magazine that she loves elephants, stupid movies, laughing at dogs, and going for walks. 

God help us.

It's official. Running for president is now just like auditioning to be the new Miss America. Hillary (whose resume-padding State Department stint Maureen rightly castigated as being nothing but a marathon international good-will tour) is starting to sound like a better-educated version of that hapless beauty contestant from a few years ago:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Are you there, God? It's us, the holey-souley United Statesians.

Good Cop/Bad Cop Kabuki

You know that this country is in deep doo-doo when the latest annual Census report on poverty in America bears the ironic imprimatur of that Forbes billionairess/ heiress/ Obama patroness, fondly known here on Sardonicky as Moneypenny.

That would be Secretary Penny Pritzker, anti-heroine right out of Dickens, she of Hyatt Hotel heat lamp torture of striking chambermaids fame, she of gentrification of Chicago through urban renewal real estate scams and evictions made easy through failure of her family-run subprime bank. Pritzker, you may remember, was just recently anointed by a grateful Barack to lead the commerce of our great nation, because he no longer has to run for re-election or pretend to care what voters might think.

Of course, she didn't write the Census report, despite the fact that her name is prominently displayed at the top of the Intro. We don't know that she has even bothered to read it, given how busy she must be with the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific "free trade" negotiations, which will amount to the most massive Trans-fer of global wealth in history to a handful of multinational corporations. Obama is scrambling to get carte blanche Congressional approval of the still-secret pacts, lest somebody actually sit down and read about how, for instance, he will allow Big Tobacco to sell cancer sticks to children in third world countries.

In our own third world country, according to the Census Bureau, about a fifth of the population remains mired in poverty, while people like Penny Pritzker have reaped more than 90% of all the gains since the Collapse of Aught-Eight.

But I digress. The big news this week, that the corporate media really, really wants you to pay attention to as you quake in your boots, is the Battle Royale between the elites of the two right wing factions of the National Money Party. A piece in The Hill this morning -- Strained Relationships Increase Likelihood of Fiscal Calamity!!!!!! --  is typical of the "framing":

President Obama and Republicans have clashed repeatedly on many fiscal matters. But this fall’s showdown is more personal than prior battles. Trust and respect for the other side of the aisle have deteriorated to the point of being non-existent. (Oh No-o-o-o-o-o!)

Both parties have scars from the 2011 debt limit fight as well as a slew of other economic disputes. It remains to be seen if they can put aside their differences in the coming weeks.

Dueling Duopolists

So, I guess the actual citizens of Ameriguh, those whose real festering wounds have yet to heal, are superfluous to this discussion. The only people who matter are the actors on the Beltway stage. Beleaguered Barack "The Republicans keep messin' with me!" Obama, whose "frosty relationship" with John Boehner has prevented the two from golfing together for an unbelievable, anti-consensual, two whole frigid years! Nancy Pelosi, the damsel in distress of the Eternal Triangle, trying vainly to rally her troops to support a Grand Bargain for the Grandees! Barack and Mitch have outrageously never even had a drink together for the good of the reaching across the aisle!

To steal a phrase from the estimable Charles Pierce, all this talk of frigidity is enough to make you guzzle antifreeze.

So, to save your sanity, skip The Hill and The Times and Politico and go directly to this bracing antidote to bullshit by Joe Firestone, in which he cogently explains how the latest manufactured fiscal crisis is one more great big steaming pile of manure, and how the many  ways it can and should be avoided are being ignored by the mainstream media. For unless the drama is kept alive, the important people cannot be enriched, and the regular people can't be screwed in their sleep.

 Dean Baker writes on how even Paul Krugman has been trapped in the partisan veal pen. Through the magic of facts, he explains how even the best newspaper in the world is complicit in obfuscating basic truths.

Only through obfuscation might the longed-for, eleventh hour Grand Bargain be sealed. Obamacare, in all its intact insurance predator-enriching glory, will be traded for enforcing chained CPI on veterans, retirees, the disabled, widows and orphans. The oligarchs must be vindicated. The contrived skirmish over Food Stamps is a distraction, designed to elicit outraged boos and cheers from the throngs of the unwashed.

Of course, if you use your New York Times commenting privileges to point all this phoniness out, you are immediately attacked by the corralled herd. I was soundly chastised for this response on Saturday to Gail Collins' latest, on "Knowing When to Worry":

 I wouldn't worry about the latest Disaster Capitalism kabuki if I didn't already detect the noxious smell of yet another last-minute Grand Bargain for the Grandees wafting from the Capitol swamp.

The president has appealed directly to the plutocrats at the Business Roundtable. We have to face our long-term "challenges on entitlements," he said. Meaning: let's cut Social Security and Medicare now, because we might have a shortfall in half a century. And reduce those corporate tax rates! Why won't the GOP grab a deal made in Rich People Heaven when they see it? 

And here was Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on MSNBC today, dishing to Mrs. Alan Greenspan on the cruelty of the GOP, and just how hard the Dems plan to fight back for the common folk:

"We've ALL got to set rigid ideology aside and sit down and find common ground .... I know, look I'm the chair of the DNC, I know it can't be my way or the highway. I'm willing to put my vote on the line and go back to my constituents and explain why I didn't do it exactly the way they wanted me to. "

If you're as sick as I am of Dems whining and pleading and being complicit in the continued immiseration of millions of struggling people, just withhold your support and explain why you won't vote exactly the way they want you to.

Instead of sending them donations, give money and supplies to your local food bank. Neighbors must help neighbors. Because the politicians surely won't. 

Janet Ellingson of Salt Lake City was having none of this. My words must have been like fingernails scraping across the blackboard of her brain, seeing that I am as "obnoxious as the Tea Party." And Stu of Brooklyn surmised that I probably voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, thereby becoming personally responsible for all the atrocities of the Bush administration. But at least they didn't call me a fascist, as did my other regular troll, Dave the Pain of North Strabane in a recent Maureen Dowd column on Barry's ham-handed speech on the economy within hours of another mass shooting. 

By the way, here's Debbie Wasserman-Schultz again, vowing to prove her adulthood by agreeing to cut "waste" in the SNAP program, even though, as Dean Baker says, it accounts for only the tiniest fraction of a percentage point of the entire federal budget, and is a totally gratuitous showboating gimmick solely designed to rev up the partisans. Making a political point on the backs of the most vulnerable to show how bipartisan you can be. Cruelty stretches its claws right across the aisle.

Wake up and smell the Good Cop/Bad Cop Kabuki.

Legends of the Fall

Happy First Day of Fall, Y 'all! (It's not till Sunday, but better early than never.)

The seasons may change for most of us, but the  manufactured fiscal crises dreamed up by our leaders for the sole purpose of scaring us and screwing us always seem to remain the same. Our political system, ruled as it is by the moneyed interests, has all the seasonality of Antarctica: forever frozen in phony bipartisan gridlock, the better to attract the campaign and lobbyist cash while they pretend to fight over war, citizen surveillance, immigration reform and gun control.

Or conversely, (as long as I'm gridlocked into seasonal metaphor mode) another way to look at the American political machine is to compare it to the enervating climate of the equatorial regions, where there are only two kinds of weather -- Dry and Wet.

Dry season just ended. Nothing much happened, because the congress critters were all on vacation, soaking up the sun and the cash, as were the star nattering nabobs of corporate media land. The exception, of course, was War or Not To War. That was then.

Now comes the utterly predictable phony budget crisis deluge. The monsoon of disaster capitalism is upon us once again. The tainted money will flow, the fast-revolving doors between government and corporations creating their own virtual whirlpool of graft and corruption.

The inquiring little minds of the self-important poobahs all want to know: will we sink into the manufactured quagmire, or will we swim toward those happy bipartisan shores, celebrating from afar the continued pleasures of the entitled rich? Will President Obama cave to the Republicans, or will he allow the government to shut down, endangering the treasured family values of the NSA, now "weathering" their own storm of bad publicity? Will Obama pretend to fight back, only to sign his long-desired backroom Grand Bargain deal that saves Obamacare at the expense of Social Security and the rest of the safety net? Do Americans stupidly and paradoxically think that Congress should both refuse to raise the debt ceiling, but also pay the government's bills on time? (unfortunately, that last one is a definite Yes. Forty-four percent of Americans have no idea how the economy works.)

And that reminds me. I've been reading an excellent book on the French Revolution by Simon Schama, called Citizens, and I just learned something rather shocking. I had no idea that the literacy rate in late 18th century France was higher than it is in present-day America the Exceptional. Even peasants and servants, denied the right to vote, could read. Education combined with anger and hunger made that revolution possible. Not to mention their vibrant versions of blogging and social media, composed of a wealth of newspapers, broadsides  leaflets and pamphlets readily available on every street corner. The hurling of invective became an art form. Even the aristocrats were scrambling to save themselves by joining the ranks of the oppressed vocal majority.

So, it's really no wonder that the leaders in both American political parties want to transform our public schools, with their qualified, unionized teachers, into dumbed-down charters run by testing companies and staffed with low-paid freshly minted instructors with an online diploma. The revolution may or may not be televised, may or may not be coming to pass at all. But stay tuned.

In that vein, here are my two New York Times comments from today.

Paul Krugman, The Crazy Party:

If you turned on CNN Thursday, the big news was that the Grand Guignol Party is now eating its own. And not only that. According to Dana Bash, rumors are swirling on Capitol Hill that Ted Cruz has no gonads! That clip was played all day, in between those annoying ads for Norfolk Southern, which keeps America running, hauling all that fracked oil along our crumbling rail lines.

When the corporate media starts mocking the GOP, a faint ray of hope emerges. Unless you're careful, your imagination may start running wild. You picture a time when the "right" will consist of a fusion of repentant old-style Republicans and insipid centrist Dems, strongly countered by a progressive faction of humanists going full steam ahead (due left) and not stopping until we have Medicare for all, expanded Social Security, a huge jobs program, restoration of Glass-Steagall, punitive taxes for profit-hoarding corporations, living wages, a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street trades, strong gun control laws, a drastically reduced military, an eviscerated surveillance state, the repeal of Citizens United, and federal funding for public schools.

In other words, majority rule and people over profits.

Yes, my imagination may be out of control. But not as out of control as the sorry bunch of nihilists in Congress. With their sadistic votes against both Obamacare and food stamps, they are now officially on record as wanting to starve, sicken and kill people.

They've finally gone too far, even for them.

And, in response to an editorial called Another Insult to the Poor (on the $40 billion in food stamp cuts approved by the House yesterday):

Calling the Republican vote against food stamp funding an act of supreme indifference is being a bit kind. When you willfully snatch the sustenance right out hungry people's mouths, it's more akin to pathological hatred.

Rather than simply barring the action from a Senate vote, rather than simply threatening a presidential veto, now is the time for the Democrats to go into full attack mode. The Senate has already done the unconscionable, agreeing to cut a "reasonable" $4 billion from the SNAP program to appease the GOP. They should rescind that pathetic compromise immediately, and insist that funding be increased, rather than cut by a single penny. That is, if they still want to retain their credibility as the party of the poor and working classes.

The time for compromising with the GOP nihilists on anything is over. The time for standing up for suffering people has never been more urgent. The time for strengthening the entire social safety net is now.

We must refuse to sustain luxury for the few by perpetuating poverty for the many.