Happy Happy Joy Joy

Okay, out with the snark of creepy plastic peeping elves and in with the true meaning of Christmas: carols with just the right touch of snark, self-deprecation, levity and irony. First, the Roches do the Brooklyn honors.  Or maybe it's De Bronx. Whatevah.

 

And what would the Decade of Extreme Income Inequality be without indulging in a little feudalism nostalgia? Let's all go a-Wassailing from here to Twelfth Night and beyond, to demand our share of the wealth. We definitely aren't going to wait around for any of that phony Trickle Down. Read these lyrics and see if they don't sarcastically but politely demand a living wage, food stamp and unemployment insurance restoration and universal health care:

 

We are not daily beggars That beg from door to door;

But we are neighbours' children, Whom you have seen before.

We have got a little purse Of stretching leather skin;

We want a little of your money To line it well within.

 

Bring us out a table And spread it with a cloth;

Bring us out a mouldy cheese, And some of your Christmas loaf.

 

Good master and good mistress, While you're sitting by the fire,

Pray think of us poor children Who are wandering in the mire.

 

You can listen to a nice version here, minus the threatening tone I would sing it in if I could sing. The thought of wandering in the muck with a belly full of discarded rancid cheese is starting to make me irate, truth be told.

 

So let's move on. I think my favorite all-time tune has got to be this anti-war classic by John McCutcheon: Christmas in the Trenches.

 

Here's wishing all of you peace and good health no matter how you celebrate, what you celebrate, or even if you celebrate.

Have Yourself a Creepy Little Christmas

It's bad enough that there's a Grinch who steals all your Christmas presents when you're not looking.  But how about a character who steals your very soul because he is constantly looking?

Welcome to Christmas in the United Stasi. With an unacceptable 40 percent of us still rebelling against  Big Brother, the murketers of the Surveillance State realize that if they're to gain total control, they have to get to us early in our lives, when our psyches are still malleable. I just hadn't realized the depth of the indoctrination until I came across this blurb in my local rag:

It’s December, and that means the Elf on the Shelf is in children’s homes, watching their behavior and reporting back to Santa.

You never know where he’ll pop up, or what type of props will surround him.

Send us photos of your most creative Elf on a Shelf (or Mensch on a Bench) scenes. Recordonline readers will vote for their favorites; the winner will get a $50 Amazon gift card.

I realized, to my chagrin, that I've been so busy lambasting the murketing of Obama's health insurance product I have been completely out of the Elf on the Shelf loop. A whole new corporate post 9/11 kiddie spy mythology has grown up around me without my even noticing! I'd even missed a TV holiday infomercial (animation outsourced to India) on the ubiquitous little creature. But my local rag linked me the official page, and thus was I enlightened about the Legend (TM).

The Elf on the Shelf® is a special scout elf sent from the North Pole to help Santa Claus manage his naughty and nice lists. When a family adopts an elf and gives it a name, the elf receives its Christmas magic and can fly to the North Pole each night to tell Santa Claus about all of the day's adventures. Each morning, the elf returns to its family and perches in a different place to watch the fun. Children love to wake up and race around the house looking for their elf each morning.

There are two simple rules that every child knows when it comes to having an elf. First, an elf cannot be touched; Christmas magic is very fragile and if an elf is touched it may lose that magic and be unable to fly back to the North Pole. Second, an elf cannot speak or move while anyone in the house is awake! An elf's job is to watch and listen.

Okay, so now I get why the goons at the NSA are so riled about being exposed by Ed Snowden. They are fragile creatures whose very survival is dependent on the fomentation of fear. If you dare even touch them, they will lose their magical powers. Once they're exposed, their billions of dollars of funding might just go Poof! through one little act of Congress.

But back to Elf on the Shelf. Just like Murketer-in-Chief Barack Obama, the elf flacks assure consumers that Shelfie's spying on them will be carefully balanced against their quaint need for privacy. This trollish little pathogen even has a special Privacy Statement on his webpage! Although he admits he will steal your personal information and your children's personal information, share it with third parties, even track your movements, he will keep the data safe (presumably in an ultra-secret multibillion-dollar storage facility at the North Pole.)

Much to my daughter Kat's disappointment, we just missed the deadline for our local Elf on the Shelf contest. But she has her entry for next year all ready:

Clapper on the Crapper

Reach out and touch him.... I triple-dog dare you!

The Big Chill

Why, asks Lewis Lapham, are there no 21st century Mark Twains around to lambast the malefactors of great wealth and the corrupt politicians enabling them, making us collapse with laughter as we revel in the skewering?

Part of the reason is that independent newspapers, for which Twain once wrote, have been subsumed by six media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we see, hear and read. And so, Lapham observes,

We have today a second Gilded Age more magnificent than the first, but our contemporary brigade of satirists doesn’t play with fire. The marketing directors who produce the commodity of humor for prime-time television aim to amuse the sheep, not shoot the elephants in the room. They prepare the sarcasm-lite in the form of freeze-dried sound bites meant to be dropped into boiling water at Gridiron dinners, Academy Award ceremonies, and Saturday Night Live. “There is a hell of a distance,” said Dorothy Parker, “between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it.” George Bernard Shaw seconded the motion: “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”

And the other elephants in the room are, of course, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and all the other incestuous initialized members of the surveillance state family. There are no Twains, because  writers report feeling a chill pervasive enough to impede the free flow of their thoughts. It's hard enough to be truthful, let alone bitingly humorous, with the constant specter of Big Brother peering over your shoulder.

The American Surveillance State is driving writers to self-censor.

 Even though Barack Obama, and the crypto-fascist spymasters that he only pretends are his minions, have on the surface spared the First Amendment from their wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights, the suppression of free speech is well underway through the process of intimidation. So while the president grinned his wolfish grin, cracked his lame jokes, and strove mightily at his press con yesterday to assure us that American surveillance is benign,  warm and cozy, we are neither reassured nor amused. And that especially goes for writers.

The PEN American Center for human rights and literary expression put it this way:

We know—historically, from writers and intellectuals in the Soviet Bloc, and contemporaneously from writers, thinkers, and artists in China, Iran, and elsewhere—that aggressive surveillance regimes limit discourse and distort the flow of information and ideas. But what about the new democratic surveillance states?

The question of the harms caused by widespread surveillance in democracies, like the surveillance being conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency, is underexplored. In October 2013, PEN partnered with independent researchers at the FDR Group to conduct a survey of over 520 American writers to better understand the specific ways in which awareness of far-reaching surveillance programs influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing.

While only 44% (and that figure is slowly creeping up with every new Edward Snowden "leak") of the general public disapproves of the NSA sweeping up phone records and emails, fully two-thirds of the writers surveyed think the government is overreaching. More than one in four of them is now avoiding social media for fear of being tracked by the government. One in four is avoiding discussing certain topics in their emails and phone conversations. Most automatically assume that Big Brother is watching everything they say or write. Among the topics they're avoiding, both in their writing and their Internet searches, are mass incarceration, Middle Eastern affairs, drug policies, the Occupy movement, and pornography. The PEN report adds,

Part of what makes self-censorship so troubling is the impossibility of knowing precisely what is lost to society because of it. We will never know what books or articles may have been written that would have shaped the world’s thinking on a particular topic if they are not written because potential authors are afraid that their work would invite retribution. We do know that our studies of the private papers of generations of past luminaries have yielded valuable information that aids not only our understanding of their work and lives, but also our own thinking on contemporary problems. As one writer noted, “As a professor of literature, I lament that contemporary writers’ papers (hard copy and electronic) will potentially be less useful to future scholars because of self-censorship in the face of these governmental surveillance programs.” If today’s writers, many of whom do much of their work on computers and online, hesitate to put their thoughts in writing because of the fear of surveillance, we will lose these valuable wells of information, and future generations of scholars will find the sources available to them much impoverished due to concerns about surveillance.

One of the best American writers working today is not cowed. Dave Eggers, whose most recent novel ("The Circle")  chronicles the death of privacy via the Silicon Valley data-vacuuming industry, writes that Democrats, "caught in a web of cognitive dissonance"  are all too willing to give Barack Obama a free pass. For, despite his dwindling popularity, the personality cult persists -- as evidenced this week by a cringe-worthy op-ed in the New York Times celebrating Obama's "cool" demeanor, singing abilities and talent at strutting his bod.

A writer's job, Eggers counters, is to look for trouble. That goes hand in hand with my own personal favorite journalistic motto: afflict the comfortable. But President Obama, judging from his latest act of performance art depravity before the White House press corps yesterday, is not discomfited nearly enough yet. He ingratiates himself with the access-seeking media, who prefaced almost every softball question with "Merry Christmas, Mr. President!" and laughed appreciatively when he said his New Years resolution was to be nicer to them. He'll be taking recommendations to stop the NSA dragnet on vacation with him for some leisurely beach reading. So relax.

And thus does the latest Times editorial proclaim itself merely "disappointed" in the president. If anybody knows how to self-censor, it's the Gray Lady.

We need outrage. We need resistance. And yes, we need to laugh at them. Because when you take away their toys, their security details, their trappings of wealth, they are merely thin-skinned human beings in need of a good swift kick in the ass. Followed by a rapid repeal of the Patriot Act and a derailment of their money train.

On that note, have a happy Solstice, everybody! (It's always darkest right before the Enlightenment.)

A Big Money Cabal of Bench-Slappers

Vindication is sweet today for fans of the Fourth Amendment. But let's be realistic. With billions and billions, even trillions, of dollars at stake, the NSA and the private contractors enriched by the fascistic Deep State will not be going gently into that good night.

I imagine that the Obama administration is busily judge-shopping even as we speak, and will find some compliant fellow or lady to knock down the somewhat passive-aggressive (delayed, pending Obama judge-shopping)  ruling yesterday against the mass collection of phone records of United States persons.

Because, let's  remember what happened when another federal judge issued her own preliminary injunction last year which knocked down the supreme right of Temp Emp Obama to detain anyone, anywhere without benefit of charge or trial.

He went judge-shopping. And so, the National Defense Authorization Act still stands as a monument to totalitarianism. Both right wings of the Money Party are ready and willing to renew it once again during this joyous holiday season when nobody is paying much attention. Obama will again robo-sign it into law from the safe distance of his Hawaii vacation abode.

Let's remember when still another judge ruled against the illegal stop and frisk campaign of departing NYC billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He went judge-shopping. Not only was her ruling overturned, but Judge Shira Sheindlin was kicked off the whole case by a three-judge state appellate panel.

And then there was the case of Judge Jed Rakoff, who threw out a cozy mortgage fraud settlement between Citigroup and the SEC, and demanded that banksters be held criminally accountable. And predictably, Rakoff soon joined the ranks of the bench-slapped. But sweet vindication does abide, because he just penned a scathing indictment of the Obama administration's coziness with the malefactors of great wealth.  

We still have the First Amendment. So far.

I'm sure there are plenty of other similar cases out there in the great marketplace known as the American Judicial System. A long time ago, I got a parking ticket and decided to fight it in court because the return envelope requesting my ten bucks (I told you it was a long time ago!) gave no instructions about how to fight it in court. Not only did the late great Newburgh City Judge Albert S. MacDowell throw out my ticket, he declared the whole municipal parking ticket system unconstitutional because it denied due process. And guess what? A couple of years later, he was removed from the bench on grounds of mental instability and insulting lawyers.

So the handwriting is probably on the wall for Richard J. Leon, the judge who slapped down the NSA and the president in public yesterday. The whisper campaign is already beginning. Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times wrote a fun personality profile, characterizing him as a feisty old coot representing a "thorn in the side" of the government:

With his use of exclamation points (“How utterly disappointing!” he once wrote, excoriating the Food and Drug Administration) and cultural references (he mentioned the Beatles and Ringo Starr in a footnote in Monday’s ruling), Judge Leon does not seem bound by judicial sobriety.

And how about his metaphors, "so devastating to the government?" Uh-oh. The handwriting's not only on the wall, it's permanently engraved. The inevitable bench-slap is coming. If not from the Supreme Court, then from some Supremely Secret Court which has probably already declared the Fourth Amendment itself unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Temp Emp Obama is meeting with telecom and Internet CEOs today. Marcy Wheeler thinks The One will try mightily to divide, conquer, and co-opt them into compliance for the Greater Good of the Big Money Deep State. Sounds about right to me.

***

 

David Brooks looked in the mirror and actually wrote a pretty amusing takedown of that sleazy group of marketing pros calling themselves "Thought Leaders." My comment:

 

I have to admit that this column about thought leaders initially gave me brain freeze. Then I realized my mind had gone blank because the first time I'd heard this Orwellian term, it was in reference to Lloyd Blankfein.

This past fall, there was a slight uproar when NBC dubbed Blankfein a Thought Leader for its Education Nation forum. Actual educators were incensed that the CEO of a too big to fail or jail bank would have anything constructive at all to say about educating kids.

Because, besides being coated with Teflon, Blankfein's other claim to fame had been acting as a spokesman for the billionaire deficit hawk cult called Fix the Debt. That is the group dedicated to the creative destruction of the New Deal. He was going on TV telling us we'd better lower our expectations about collecting Social Security and start tightening our belts for his future. He was a big cheerleader for the Sequester, which kicked 57,000 kids out of Head Start.

Blankfein also spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative as a Thought Leader, later paying Hillary Clinton several hundred thousand dollars for her own thoughtful and leaderly assurances that their fears of a populist uprising were merely bad thoughts in their thoughtful little heads.

Oh, and speaking of Orwell -- the term "thought leader" was invented by PR guru Joel Kurtzman when he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. That outfit, you may remember, is the NSA contractor that once employed a fine and thoughtful patriot named Edward Snowden.

Murder Ruins Christmas for One Percenters

 A guy gets shot to death at an upscale mall, and the ensuing investigation is interfering with conspicuous consumption at the only emporium in Jersey that caters to the obscenely wealthy. Oh the humanity.

This was the actual headline in today's New York Times:

Fatal Carjacking Makes Christmas Shopping at US Mall a Nightmare 

Police on Monday were seeking an armed pair of suspected carjackers who a day earlier shot to death a man Christmas shopping with his wife at a high-end New Jersey mall and then fled in the couple's luxury SUV, prosecutors said.  

Never mind a lifetime of nightmares for the young widow who had to witness the carnage. But the article goes on to explain that murder in their midst presents a real dilemma for shoppers, because the only other Giorgio Armani and Cartier outlets are an unseemly 40 miles distant, in New York City. That yellow police tape is just too, too tacky. What a bore. And how about the Christmas retail stats, which would have been artificially pumped up via purchases by the One Percent and used as a propaganda tool by the corporate media to inform the rest of us slurping our Yule Gruel that the economy is just booming right along and this was the best Season evah?

***

Sorry about the light posting the past few days.... been battling a head cold, which has put a damper on the enraged output.

I did manage to post a comment last night to Paul Krugman's column on Inequality, in which he asks (purely as a rhetorical exercise) if there is anything we can do about it. Well.....

Respondents in the Very Wealthy Survey report enjoying a lot of private face time with the politicians, the better to whisper sweet deficit-hawk nothings in their ears.

Until we get the money out of politics, the grotesque inequality will only get worse. The Forbes 400, with more wealth than the bottom half of us combined, are our de facto masters. The CEOs of the Business Roundtable have an average of $14.6 million in their retirement accounts, enough to pay out $86,043 a month. And then there's David Cote of the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission, who holds a cool $134.5 million in his Honeywell account. That's $795,134 a month. Yet it seems he's on TV all the time, begrudging retirees their own meager $1200 Social Security checks.

So how do we break this pathological cycle of money begetting power begetting more money begetting more power? Term limits. And Citizens United could be overturned if we had rotating Supremes.

Tax the rich. Tax their capital gains, their carried interest, their high speed Wall Street trades, their offshore stashes. Scrap the cap on FICA contributions.

People are getting more enraged by the day, so the elites are eagerly making income inequality all the rage. By giving speeches. By passive-aggressively "studying the issue," pretending to be confused at how this ghastly turn of events could ever have come to pass in the Feudal States of America.

Oh, and by passing another budget that further enriches the wealthy on the backs of the poor.



Face Time Sweepstakes: David Cote and What's His Name Share Intimate Moment

 
 

Shocked, Shocked, I Tell You

As the outrages pile up, so does the outrage fatigue. So I'll be brief:

Rich people get away with it.  When plutocrats misbehave, they get special meetings with the attorney general and set the terms for their own deferred prosecution agreements. When garden variety rich people and spoiled brats misbehave they either go to celebrity rehab, or get off on a novel defense called Affluenza.

So here's an idea for all you poor slobs out there. Next time you get arrested for robbing a bank because your unemployment and food stamps got cut off, try pleading not guilty on grounds of Indigentsion.

***

 

The Affordable Care Act is an oxymoron. The worst lie of 2013 was not, as Politifact proclaimed, "If you like your insurance, you can keep it." The worst lie is Obama's continuing insinuation that going bankrupt while sick will be a thing of the past once you get your magical O-Care card. The website glitches are nothing compared to the eruption of Sticker Shock Mayhem coming down the pike. Who knows -- National Outrage Fatigue Syndrome might even have a chance of being cured because of the ACA.

***

The Obama Selfie to end all Selfies: out of pure sleazy political self-interest, the president delayed a whole bunch of regulations designed to protect the health and well-being of the American people.  Anonymous administration sources are spilling their guts to the Washington Post about a creepy "Mother May I" procedure that weighed the right of citizens to drink clean water and breathe unpolluted air against Obama's re-election chances. I imagine that the president will now order his "Insider Threat" program ratcheted up into high gear to catch out those disloyal leakers.

***

 

Big Brother sucks at navel-gazing: the NSA has no idea
what Edward Snowden took because they forgot to spy on themselves.

***

 

 

On the Good Ship Lollipop

The Democrats are taking their We Suck Less 2012 campaign slogan to the next level:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Democratic House members at a meeting Thursday morning to “embrace the suck” and encouraged enough members to back the budget deal on the floor to allow passage, according to an attendee of the meeting. 

“We need to get this off the table so we can go forward,” Pelosi told her members, according to someone inside the closed meeting of the caucus.

Pelosi pushed for including in the budget deal an extension of the unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the month. While she expressed a continued unhappiness that there will be no vote on those benefits before the House heads home Friday, she said that it wasn’t worth holding up the deal.

Pelosi (net worth $35.5 million) is at least honest in admitting that more than a million chronically jobless people getting thrown to the curb to be ground into mulch like discarded Christmas trees are not worth holding up a deal that restores Pentagon funding and continues austerity for all but the obscene rich. Not worth letting poor kids back into Head Start. Not worth protecting veterans' benefits.

Although she is, on the surface, loyal to Barack Obama's Bush war crime-enabling mantra of Look Forward, and MSNBC's corporate slogan of Lean Forward/don't question authority, and Obama Jobs Council tax-evading billionaire feminist Sheryl Sandberg's cloying Lean In, what Pelosi essentially just announced is that from here on out, the Dems will be Bending Over.

Embracing The Suck is also another way of saying if the vampire elites are determined to bite us, we should simply proffer our throats and get it over with. People who need suckers are the luckiest suckers in the world. Nancy neglected to mention that if you eat devils food cake you'll awake with with a tummy ache. Ooh, ooh.

 
So here's an idea. You know the guy who's getting all the bad press for his fake sign language "gibberish" during the Nelson Mandela death rally? Give him a job right here in America. Put him next to all the speechifying politicians, turn down the sound, and let him rip. His interpretations are guaranteed to be perfectly accurate. Because flailing and posturing is all they've got.

***

 

Naturally, the corporate media are falling all over themselves to praise the Stars of the Deal: Patty Murray and Paul Ryan and their improbable bipartisan romance. Gail Collins even thinks that the rapprochement between the Sadism Wing and the Masochism Wing of the Money Party represents a victory for female politicians. Read her column. It's a masterpiece of insider-y identity politics, perhaps unintentionally revealing how these jokers are as thick as thieves, merely pretending to hate each other's guts when they're in front of the cameras, flailing and posturing and appealing for money money money.  My comment: 

This column touched upon the main problem in the insular world of Washington: bipartisanship and camaraderie amongst politicians trump the common good of this country. 

Nita Lowey and Paul Ryan are bosom buds? He calls her Mom and she calls him Naughty Boy? That has got to be the worst dollop of Oedipal depravity I've heard all day. 

But what's even sicker than these "frenemies" regaling each other with mutual high-fives, (and worse) when they overcome their phony gridlock for a minute, is who really pays for these bipartisan deals from hell. It's the unemployed. It's the poor. It's federal workers already suffering under a wage freeze being forced to contribute more of their wages to the pension plans that may or may not be there when they retire. It's Medicare providers' reimbursements being cut (translated into higher bills for health care "consumers.") It's veterans whose own benefits will be cut under chained CPI. It's airline travelers slapped with a surcharge and effectively having to foot the bill for being groped by the TSA. 

Who doesn't pay? Rich people and the eternal war machine. 

It's pretty sad that Patty Murray is being praised for being the patient adult in the room who lets the spoiled brats blather their way to exhaustion and still get most of what they want. I nominate Elizabeth Warren to take her place. Paul Ryan would be more than pooped when she got done with him. He'd be writhing on the floor, begging for mercy.

Charles Blow, meanwhile, again spoke up for the poor and blasted Republican callousness while pretty much giving the Suck-Lovers a pass. My response:

The GOP myth that people falling on hard times become trapped in a "culture of dependency" is as old as the bigoted hills from whence it sprang. From Reagan's welfare queen, to Paul Ryan's hammock for deadbeats, to David Brooks's latest column insinuating that jobless people lack a moral compass, the song remains the same.

What's really scary is the sangfroid with which some Democrats (including the president) greeted this latest bipartisan proposal that punishes the poor and rewards the rich. They see the partial and merely temporary reversal of the Sequester as "a step in the right direction." Of course, most Pentagon cuts have been restored, to be offset by reduced benefits to veterans, increased pension contributions from federal workers already suffering under an effective wage freeze, cuts to Medicare providers, and a surcharge on airline travelers who must now pay for the privilege of being groped by the TSA.

The rich, meanwhile, pay nothing. So much for the battle against extreme wealth inequality.

The nauseating self-congratulations by both corporate parties for their assault on struggling people is just the latest proof that these politicians live a world divorced from reality. They exist to serve somebody, all right, but that somebody is definitely not us. If any one of them is demanding the restoration of food stamp cuts and low income heating assistance rather than trying to find the compromise between a machete and a scalpel, I haven't heard about it.