Fifty Shades of Greed

 Since so many retail behemoths are starting their traditional Black Friday sales a day early to get a leg up on the competition, what once was a shocking anomaly is now the new normal. Somebody even suggested that we do away with the whole Norman Rockwell feel-good theme, and rename Thanksgiving "Gray Thursday."

What sacrilege. It has the traditionalists seeing red while the retailers see the ever-dwindling green of the American consumer. Of course, this uniquely American holiday has long been devolving from that whole mythical over the river and through the woods scene. Because let's face it. Grandma either lives in a condo (Charlie Brown's), a nursing home owned by a lawsuit-immune consortium of Wall Street investors,  or in your basement because Wall Street wiped out her retirement account. Thanksgiving.... er, Gray Thursday, is more about the getting over on the traffic jams and through the parking lots in search of the latest piece of cheap Chinese electronics.  With underpaid workers and equally desperate consumers congregating en masse in Big Box Empire, a few purists are noticing that besides the War on Christmas so long bemoaned by Sarah Palin and the rest of the Fox gang, there's now a War on Thanksgiving too!

Remember that religious campaign to "Put Christ Back in Christmas" and stop the heresy of calling it Xmas? Well, we need to put the "Thanks" back in Giving, too. Because tragically, Thanksgiving has turned into Yanksgrabbing.  Oh come all ye faithful descendants of the Mayflower and let us restore the true meaning of the holiday! 

 

And it's not only noxious retail that is ruining Thanksgiving. The Obama administration wants you to become an unpaid salesperson for the predatory health insurance industry and talk your friends and relatives into buying health care "product" as they attempt to enjoy their food. They even supply you with a disgusting sales brochure to bring to the table. It's enough to make you hurl your pumpkin pie and go shopping at Walmart.

It goes without saying that we should boycott Walmart in solidarity with the striking workers, who seem to be finally getting under the skin of the loathsome Walton billionaires. Because they just got rid of their $11,000-an-hour CEO, and the National Labor Relations Board is bringing them to court for illegally retaliating against last year's Yanksgrabbing walkout. And have you seen their recent spate of greed-washing TV commercials, using associates to tell you how much they love working in Walmartisan? Apparently, you can get $40-a-month health insurance to supplement your Medicaid. I would hazard a guess that this junk insurance is good only for discounts on Walmart pharmacy purchases, or to partially pay for eye exams and glasses in Walmart's in-house optometry booth, or for flu shots and blood pressure checks from a moonlighting paramedic in one of those SuperCenter walk-in clinics. This is just a cynical guess on my part, mind you. Tell me if I'm wrong, and I will personally apologize to Sam Walton's ghost.


Meanwhile, the ThinkProgress War Room has put together a handy War on Thanksgiving guide for your hating and boycotting pleasure. I am not hopeful, though, that the American masses will Just Say No to Gray Thursday, Black Friday, Shoddy Saturday or even Cyber Monday. We can look forward to injuries or even death by Doorbuster. There will be at least one pepper-spraying incident over the last half-price Xbox. The scenes of desperate shoppers will be indistinguishable from scenes of desperate refugees in far-flung lands.

 

 

 

 Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell's 1984, mused that "if there is hope, it lies in the proles."

 

But in a scene that presages the Yanksgrabbing holiday extravaganza, he is quickly disabused of the notion that scarcity and poverty translate into social activism.  If only the oppressed masses "would rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies," the Party might be defeated from without.

 

Instead, one day when Smith is walking around the neighborhood and he hears a group of people wailing, it turns out to be a mob of hundreds, in despair not because of want and repression, but because there are only one or two cheap saucepans left in a bargain bin. Their faces are "as tragic as if they had been doomed passengers on a sinking ship."

 

What would happen, he asks, if all that raw human power translated into fighting over something that really mattered? "Until they become conscious they will never rebel," Smith writes in his journal. " And until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." 

 

Fast forward to 2013, and the crowds are still fighting for the wrong things. And it's even more Orwellian than Orwell, because  those coveted "smart TVs" will be spying on the lucky consumers who out-stampeded their fellow shoppers to own one just in time for Xmas. (h/t Fred Drumlevitch.)  As Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism puts it in her regular Links feature, Big Brother Is Watching You Watch. Even if you turn off the TV's digital collection mechanism, it will continue transmitting information and data on your viewing habits. So watch what you watch. (Or do what I do with Netflix, which does share your viewing habits. Tune in to stuff you hate, mute the sound, and go to sleep while Big Brother confusedly calculates all your hopes and dreams. In my case, it's a marathon of Deadly Women  interspersed with a binge of Extreme Couponing and a few old episodes of My Little Pony.)

 

On that cheery note.... Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! And joyful Hanukkah too.

 

Democracy Hypocrisy

The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws. And what I’m proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal that you want to achieve — but it won’t be as easy as just shouting. It requires us lobbying and getting it done. -- Barack Obama, 11/25/2013, explaining to a heckler why his immigration dragnet and record number of deportations will continue unabated under his watch.

Okey dokey. So, Barack, either you weren't paying attention when Richard Nixon announced that "when the president does it, it's not illegal" or you're just making excuses again, scapegoating Congress when gridlock serves your purposes all too well. And please explain how your weasel-worded sanctimony on the rule of law squares with what your henchman Eric Holder told the nation last year about you and your extra-legal Kill List. (parentheses mine):

Let me be clear: an operation (the president says is) using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against (anybody) a U.S. citizen who (we say) is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces, and who (Obama proclaims) is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: First, (a politician and his minions) the U.S. government has determined, after a ( boys' club Terror Tuesday meeting) thorough and careful review, that the (fuzzy images seen from computer screens afar, of people we don't know) individual poses an (opportunity to use our military might and hardware) imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not (as easy as the path of droning) feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with (whatever we say at any given moment) applicable law of war principles. (our Orwellian definitions.)

And about that rule of law --  the shadow government known as the National Security Agency has dispensed entirely with the verbal gymnastics and stopped pretending that the law even applies to them. That whole Constitution thing? Whether it gets in Obama's way, or whether it gets their way, there is just no stopping them. From the recently-leaked Surveillance State Manifesto:

For SIGENT (the State) to be optimally effective, legal process and policy authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we seek to exploit. Nevertheless, the culture of compliance, which has allowed the American people  to entrust NSA with extraordinary authorities, will not be compromised in the face of so many demands, even as we aggressively pursue legal authorities.

They want your info and your data. They want everything from everybody. Anywhere, any time, anyhow. They want it all. And they want it now. And the Department of Cultural Compliance assures that they're getting it.

 

When Barack Obama mentioned his "pursuit of the harder path" at his immigration speech, he was once again confirming that the rule of law applies only when its purpose is to suppress and control ordinary people. Obama always uses the "hard" word when it comes to inflicting pain on regular people, have you noticed? When he wants to cut Social Security and proceed with austerity for the masses, for example, he's making those "hard choices" on our behalf.

And if the law won't do the trick, the law will be ignored. He admitted that money ("lobbying") trumps the voice of the people ("yelling out") Extraordinary people --  plutocrats, and the politicians and bureaucrats operating in their interests -- get extraordinary treatment. When generals lie, it's not perjury. When Wall Street financiers rob the country blind, they pay their paltry fines with more bailout money robbed from the same people they already victimized. And when presidents do whatever the hell they want, it's never illegal. Because their extraordinary successors will always give them cover.

Rush Limbaugh, Liberal Trailblazer

An economist from UMass-Amherst (that storied home of austerity debunking) posits that the latest right wing conspiracy theory may be having the serendipitous effect of giving Single Payer health care a much-needed shot of adrenaline.

Writes Nancy Folbre in today's New York Times Economix blog:

Rush Limbaugh’s take on the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act could, ironically, warm the hearts of those at the other end of the political spectrum. He contends that President Obama knew all along that the Affordable Care Act would crash and burn, but pushed it through so that the conflagration would clear the way for single-payer health insurance.

I sincerely doubt that any mythical Obamian eleven-dimensional chess tactics played into the backroom deals he forged with Big Pharma and Big Insurance, sweeping the public option right off the table. But if the latest right wing paranoia is having a positive effect, who am I to deny the prez his undeserved credit should the ACA prove to be naught but a noxious designer gateway drug to true Single Payer nirvana?

In his column today, Paul Krugman points to the relative success of the Obamacare rollout in California, home of Governor Moonbeam and a solid Democratic legislature. Krugman contends that this bodes well for the eventual success of the kludge nationally. But my response is more along the lines of Dr. Folbre's thinking:

If the botched rollout of the ACA proves anything, it's that public-private partnerships are deals made in free-market hell. Corporations whose motives are profits over people have shown that they can't be trusted with either our wallets or our well-being. Let the problems with a law that is essentially a mass giveaway to predatory private insurance be the death knell of neoliberalism.

But let us also rejoice that John Boehner is now the proud owner of an ACA policy himself. Kinda puts the kibosh on their whole government-is-the-problem canard, doesn't it? Even a few GOP governors appear to be tiring of their roles as Scrooges for refusing to cover their most vulnerable citizens under expanded Medicaid. The political reality is that even sadists have their limits when their own jobs are at stake.

And speaking of success stories -- what about Vermont? Having just announced plans to cover 100% of its citizens under true single payer by 2017, this is the real state to emulate. People will be green with envy when they look at the Green Mountain State and notice the plummeting medical costs and great service and democracy in action.

A website is the least of it. Because even had it worked perfectly from Day One, some 30 million people were still going to be left out of any coverage at all. And that is unacceptable.

 Medicare for All would save $592 billion in the first year alone, as well as millions of lives. So what are we waiting for? Single payer, here we come!

And, to clarify once again, the "Medicare for All" bill now mouldering in the House is not the same thing as Medicare As Usual without the age discrimination. It does away entirely with the whole for-profit wasteful way in which American health care is currently delivered. Unlike current Medicare, there are no co-pays and no premiums. Everything except elective cosmetic surgery will be covered.

Vermont, meanwhile, is leading the way in un-Americanism with the notion that health care is a right and not a privilege. Already, 91% of the state's population has health insurance, and none of its hospitals operates for profit. A true sense of community, and the idea that government's task is doing the greatest good for the greatest number.... multiply it by 50, and we might get ourselves a functioning democracy if we're not real careful.

November 22, 1963

It's not a cliché to say that if you were above the age of reason 50 years ago on this day, you remember with a preternatural clarity where you were and what you were doing the moment you got the news that John F. Kennedy was dead.

I was in my seventh grade art class at Assumption School in Westport, CT making a collage out of construction paper when Sister Superior of the Order of Notre Dame announced over the loudspeaker in her inimitable Boston accent that the president had been shot and killed.  

Here are some links:

Art Buchwald's memorial poem.

Michael Winerip of the New York Times on a reunion of Kennedy's honor guard and body bearers.

A sampler of Kennedy's speeches.

Kennedy and Obama and the March of Folly by Alexander Cockburn.

Nukie Kabuki

Kaboom!

The United States Senate just went all radical and decided to experiment with majority rule, toying with the concept of democracy for a change. Awesome.

Mind you, the filibuster reform only pertains to Obama's judicial (non-Supreme) and executive appointments. Super-majorities will still be required for such goodies as extending unemployment insurance, background checks for gun purchases, restoring food stamp cuts and other stuff benefiting ordinary people. Don't get me wrong -- the federal judiciary was getting top heavy with ultra-right wingers willing to yank the last rotting incisor out of the toothless Dodd-Frank act, so it is of utmost importance for some pro-business centrists to get their chance as well.

Today's action will also, for example, allow the nomination of  Mel Watt to head Fannie and Freddie to go forward. Watt represents Charlotte, NC, home of Wall Street of the South.  Bank of America, foreclosure fraudster extraordinaire, was one of Watt's top campaign contributors in 2012. When Obama nominated Watt to be housing watchdog this year, the contributions suddenly dried up. Optics, you think? Watt's former chief of staff now lobbies for Goldman Sachs. And when  disgraced JC Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon showed up to defend himself on the Whale Fail scandal before his financial services committee, Watts conveniently found something better to do that day, and never asked Dimon a single question.

When the magical pixie dust settles after Harry Reid's ballyhooed nuclear explosion, I have a feeling that the Senate landscape will have survived relatively unscathed.

Update: The dust is settling as the giddiness subsides. See this. Gridlock in the financial interests of the plutocracy shall continue unabated.

And as if to make that point, the president made a statement in the aftermath of the vote, making it plain that the filibuster reform would be narrowly limited to his Constitutionally-mandated appointments, and not be used to pass things people actually want -- like single payer health care.

He has yet to find a cure for his chronic obfuscation. There was this piece of nonsense:

Now, I want to be clear the Senate has actually done some good bipartisan work this year. Bipartisan majorities have passed common- sense legislation to fix our broken immigration system and upgrade our courts -- our ports. It's passed a farm bill that helps rural communities and vulnerable Americans. It passed legislation that would protect Americans from being fired based on their sexual orientation.

The Democrat-led Senate actually passed a farm bill that cut an unconscionable $4 billion from the food stamp program over the next decade, on top of the expiration of $5 billion in stimulus funds allocated to the program in the wake of the financial collapse. So for Obama to glibly fib that vulnerable Americans are being helped by losing an average of a week's worth of meals is a testament both to his own sociopathy and to the complicity of the corporate-owned mass media.

The only story they and the "progressive" veal pen are spinning is that Give Em Hell Harry Reid finally grew a pair, and so now the Republicans are out in force with their castration gear.

Hard Times in Walmartistan

The only thing more amazing than Walmart holding a Thanksgiving food drive for its indigent employees is the fact that they're even allowing one to be held at all.  Because according to one Walmart propaganda flack,"we provide good jobs and unparalleled opportunities for our associates!"

These matchless opportunities include an average hourly wage of $8.80, even after many years of toiling away at the giant retailer. Other opportunities include the ability to get food stamp assistance and Medicaid on the taxpayer dime, while the Walton family continues to amass its own unparalleled wealth. You've heard all the disgusting stats by now: the six Walton billionaires possess as much wealth as the bottom 42% of all Americans combined. They're so rich that they craft their own legislation at both the state and federal levels in order to avoid paying taxes on any of it. Their tax liability is actually in the minus category, given all the corporate welfare they rake in.

So naturally, the Thanksgiving season is an unparalleled opportunity for poor workers to experience the joy of spreading the penury. The Waltons themselves are not believed to be participating.

The Thanksgiving food drive is necessary because the average food stamp recipient is now losing a week's worth of meals due to recent cutbacks in the SNAP program. This means the average Walmart employee is probably feeling hunger pangs right this very minute, having just spent her entire month's SNAP allotment. Store execs are probably worried they'll be fainting at the registers, the thumps of falling human bodies muting the merry ka-chings in the checkout lines. And if pickings are slim this week, they'll be nonexistent next week, when Norman Rockwell legend has it that every family in America will gather together at their bountiful tables.

And for those less fortunate, not to worry: rich people and celebrities will jump into the fray for photo-ops of themselves "giving back" to poor people at Thanksgiving soup kitchens. Assuming they're not working the Turkey Day Walmart shift.

You'll never see a Walton even pretending to love the poor. They've made their careers on cheapness and hatred for working people. The clan's patriarch, Sam Walton, made paying less than minimum wage his business model when he first started the chain.

Last spring, when Walmart experienced less-than-stellar sales because even their own employees can't afford to buy their crap any more, their execs came up with a novel idea. Why not enlist volunteer shoppers to deliver packages to their internet  customers? No pay, of course -- just a voucher for discounts at some later date. The idea never got off the ground. Apparently there were liability issues, since volunteers were expected to use their own cars.

And speaking of cars and liability.... when heiress Alice Walton struck and killed a farmer's wife many years ago with her Porsche, she never offered the survivors any compensation beyond what her insurance paid, plus $2,500 for funeral expenses. She was also never charged, despite being allegedly drunk. You can read Alice's whole sordid history here.

Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board is reportedly planning to sue Walmart for retaliating against workers who spoke out or walked out for being forced  to work last Thanksgiving. Negotiations for a settlement are ongoing.

There's been quite an uproar in the media recently over Walmart's plans to start its Black Friday sales even earlier this year, on Thanksgiving Eve itself. But as CJR's Ryan Chittum points out, what they're missing is that Walmart has always been open on Thanksgiving, tearing workers away from their family dinners. The only day they close is Christmas. For the time being anyway.

Always the purveyor of worker oppression and cheap imports. Always.
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Hellzapoppin?

With visions of stagnant swamps and bubble economies dancing in my head after reading Paul Krugman's column, I wonder if this morning's news is indicative of the next toxic carbuncle fixing to pop any minute now, spreading its poison all over the globe:

In early trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index crossed the 1,800-point mark for the first time, and the Dow Jones industrial average surpassed 16,000 points for the first time. By midmorning, the S.&P. was flat, at 1,798.46 points; the Dow was up 0.3 percent, at 16,003.86; and the Nasdaq composite was off 0.1 percent, at 3,981.85 points.

The stimulus will keep jazzing the "folks" at the very tippy top. The rest of us keep looking skyward for all those golden drops to shower us with beneficence, and we wait in vain.

 With intervention from the Fed seen keeping interest rates near zero for the foreseeable future, equities are expected to continue to attract yield-seeking investors even after the Fed begins to slow down its monthly asset purchases. More clues to the Fed are expected with the release of the Federal Open Market Committee’s meeting minutes on Wednesday.

(snip) 

“Interest rates are not going to go anywhere for the next year and a half or two,” he (Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York)  said. “As we approach 1,800 on the S.&P., that’s going to see some resistance,” he added, but noted that “all the ingredients are there for the market to go higher.”

And higher and higher and higher.... till what? They don't tell us. All they tell us is that SONY sold a million X-boxes in the first 24 hours they were on sale in the USA. As long as there are still people who can afford overpriced electronic gizmos, everything's hunky-dory. Luxury for the few, austerity for the many. Bubble bubble for them, toil and trouble for us. And they never see it coming. And when it comes, the  plutocrats appoint themselves as the only experts able to "fix" what their greed wrought by inflicting even more pain and extracting even more blood and treasure from the body politic so as to "grow" the economy.

And all this ties in so pleasantly with the news that Obama Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner is becoming president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, even though he has no experience in actual banking. Scuttlebutt has it that Geithner was hired purely for his name value. His role, according to the New York Times, will be to act as a human magnet for all that hoarded stimulus money just hanging around doing diddly-squat while it's being kept from actually doing the greatest good for the greatest number. OK, so I'm paraphrasing. The VIPs themselves are much more circumspect:

While Mr. Geithner has been given the lofty title of president, several private equity executives questioned whether he would be much more than a prominent name who would help Warburg Pincus open doors on the fund-raising side, especially with foreign investors like sovereign wealth funds.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Anyway, here's my comment on Krugman's depressing piece, specifically about the "easy money" of the continuing backdoor bailout of Wall Street:

If easy money will be with us for a very long time, it sure isn't landing in the right place: the pockets of real Americans. None of that monthly $80 billion of corporate welfare known as quantitative easing ever trickled down.

Wealth disparity is now so extreme that a former Fed official named Andrew Huszar just publicly apologized for Q.E. in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The richest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth of the bottom 150 million, or half the population. Yet they even begrudge us the crumbs of extended unemployment insurance. a living wage, and decent SNAP benefits for hungry kids.

So -- how about just writing monthly checks to every American to help end the stagnation and kick-start the job-creating cycle? Send the Q.E. where it will do some good. Memo to Janet Yellen: Pump it up, cure the slump X 330 million. Citigroup need not apply.

Better hurry up, because change is in the air. Revolutions start in dribs and drabs. Wage slaves are walking out of Walmart and fast food gulags. Teachers are marching with immigrants on the streets of Chicago to protest the neoliberal takeover of schools and infrastructure. When United (sic -- should be U.S.) Airways kicked a blind man off a plane last week because of an "unruly" guide dog, every single passenger walked off the flight in solidarity.

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” -- Frantz Fanon.