Greed: Tales of the Tolls

Austerity for the many and prosperity for the few is taking its toll, big-time.

Ask not for whom this deafening dissonant clanger of a bell tolls, proles. It tolls for thee.

Thee who drive in cheaply made overpriced cars with stuck accelerators and faulty airbags. Thee who ride the rusty rails from upstate New York backwaters in a quest for stagnating wages in the Income Disparity Capital of the nation. Thee who work and live in crumbling buildings heated by gas coming from pipes constructed, as Charles Pierce points out, during the administration of Grover Cleveland.

Ironically, those iron pipes were laid right in the middle of the last Gilded Age. Back then, of course, the Age of Excess also included manufacturing jobs. The free labor market of slavery had only recently ended, forcing the robber barons of yesteryear to either hire people, or go without their roads, bridges, railroads, newspaper chains and mansions.

The robber barons of the 19th century still had way too much, and the workers and citizens far too few protections and rights. But despite semi-regular financial panics and widespread political corruption, the economy was booming. And as the economy boomed, the labor movement began to thrive. Rights -- like the eight-hour day --  were hard-fought, but they were eventually won, despite the best efforts of the plutocrats.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the modern robber barons have amassed even more than way too much, having reaped more than 90% of the gains since the meltdown which they had an integral role in creating. The 21st century economy has been financialized, the jobs and the profits have gone offshore, and the politicians running the government at the behest of the obscenely wealthy have not put the maintenance of the commons at the top of their to-do list. Regulations, with the public safety as their quaint raison d'etre, are going the way of the dinosaur.

And so came a triple-whammy of a week of tragic news. The deadly explosion and collapse of two buildings on the poor part of Park Avenue was immediate and newsworthy. It bled, so it led.... in spite of its usually ignored locale, on the proverbial wrong side of the crumbling tracks. The irony is that the poorly maintained Metro-North line nearby had to be shut down because some debris from the blasts landed right on top of them. Decay, meet Decay.

Utterly preventable tragedies usually come at fairly wide intervals, thus making them easier for us forget and for complicit politicians to sigh "Nobody could ever have predicted that deregulated greedsters couldn't have policed themselves!" And to be sure, the two scathing reports on General Motors and Metro-North, though coming only a day apart, address a monoculture of greed whose tragic effects have been generations in the making, whose death and dismemberment tolls have been insidiously mounting in plain sight in front of blind eyes for many years.

  The reports' impact is as shocking as the cataclysm in Harlem. How much longer can we ignore the human toll that the big money-controlled Caligula Caucuses of our state and national legislatures have exacted and will continue to exact unless we radically change the Greed Culture itself? How long must we wait before we replace sadism with sanity?

If the damning report on Metro-North in the wake of December's derailment and quadruple fatality is any indication, it might be awhile. Because it turns out that the only meaning of time in the world of the railway executive -- and any profiteer worth his salt, for that matter -- is money. "Punctuality Beats Safety at Metro-North" reads the headline in the New York Times:

 The review, from the Federal Railroad Administration, found that the commuter railroad’s operations control center pressured workers “to rush when responding to signal failures,” and that workers struggled to secure the track time needed to perform essential repairs. Even policies as pedestrian as the use of cellphones have created dangers: Amid confusion about the rules, cellphone use is “commonplace and accepted” among track workers on the job.

The report is all the more stunning, says the Times, because Metro-North had been considered one of the safest railway systems in the nation. And now we find out that the workers don't attend even perfunctory safety meetings, that they work long, sleep-deprived hours, that the tracks are not maintained adequately, and that getting commuters to their stagnating-wage jobs on time trumps everything else. Everything. Remember: time is money.

It's bad enough that General Motors, whose millionaire executives were so richly rewarded with much taxpayer largesse at the expense of the auto union and its pensioners, had been deliberately hiding the effects of ignition problems in some models for over a decade. But now comes news that 303 people had died in crashes in the recalled models after air bags failed to deploy.

It gets worse. The watchdog group Center for Auto Safety has also accused the now ignorance-pleading National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of ignoring complaints about the problems for years. "The only way NHTSA could not see a defect trend," said the Center's Clarence Ditlow, "was if it closed its eyes."

Oops. There go those willfully blind eyes peering at a plain-sight spectacle again.

But, as retired NHTSA researcher and crash victim advocate Lou Lombardo observes, there has long been "a strange indifference to highway carnage" by the leaders of this country. Part of it is the revolving door phenomenon, in which government regulators and the industries they supposedly monitor become, in effect one and the same entity. And both safety regulators and the auto industry have long fought implementation of a national electronic crash notification system to better track and stop possible mechanical defects in the vehicles involved in crashes. Such a system could save hundreds, if not thousands of lives, says Lombardo. Such a system also assumes that the people in charge of safety are humane, and that car manufacturers are not letting their need for greed get in the way of the safety of their customers. It also assumes they aren't stupid, since dead and maimed drivers don't go shopping for new cars.

As Lombardo and former Dept. of Transportation official Ben Kelley write on the FairWarning blog:

 ... Car companies still are racing to add infotainment features to new models – some of them featuring video display screens on their instrument consoles – that are bound to further divert drivers’ eyes and attention from the road. The mounting safety risk from infotainment systems seems to be widely viewed as inevitable and beyond society’s ability to control. Meanwhile, Texas has adopted an 85 mph speed limit for a soon-to-open toll road, a move likely to be copied by other states, but that would be off the table if safety was a prime concern.

 Are you detecting a pattern yet? The protection of life and limb may no longer be much of a basic human right as guaranteed by the United States government. But your leaders will protect to the death your right to possess your precious electronic gizmos. It's the American, multi-tasking, need for speed, profits-over-people way.

The tolls of greed, the tolls of privatized toll road death-traps, the tolls of political visual impairment, the tolls of the fingers on the electronic gizmos instead of on the steering wheels. Clunk, clang, crash, ka-ching.

The Spy Who Didn't Love Her

This is just pathetic.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein discovered in 2010 that the CIA was illegally tinkering with evidence about its torture program, she apparently was not upset enough to either denounce the agency publicly or to demand a criminal investigation.

She demanded an apology instead. And she got one. Case closed.

But when she recently demanded a similar apology from the CIA for spying on her own staff, a mea culpa was not forthcoming. And so, in a fit of pique,  DiFi took to the Senate floor today to express her deepest disappointment that the CIA never learned any decent manners. If only they'd personally expressed their regret to their BFF Dianne, the cheating and the serial violations of the Constitution never would have had to come to this public airing of dirty laundry.

 DiFi, who has long enabled the antics of the spook agency rather than fulfilling her own duties as chaperone of the spook dance, is acting like a woman scorned. She is not taking being ill-used "lightly."

Her belated tirade comes in the wake of media revelations that the CIA had not only illegally spied on her oversight personnel looking into Bush-era waterboarding and other war crimes, it had also had the chutzpah to accuse her people of stealing incriminating documents about the agency's torture program. Therefore, her continued complicity within the shadow state has become a tad uncomfortable  for her. Caught as she is between a rock and a hard place, she's being forced to come out of the shadows and pick a side.

Of course, this is not defined as "our side." Spying on the hoi polloi is dandy, spying on DiFi's entourage, not so much. She has not, of course, gone so far as to threaten to cut off the cash flow for her CIA. She simply wants her side of the story to get out. This is what is known in political circles as Damage Control.

So, DiFi is regretfully choosing her own employees over the spies she thought had loved her. And it hurts her to be so indiscreet about the end of the affair. It really hurts. You can hear the pain in her voice. You can feel the pain in her tortured official written denunciation:

I rise today to set the record straight and to provide a full accounting of the facts and history.

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate Floor reluctantly. Since January 15, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA’s search of this committee’s network, I have been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter. However, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

Huh? Her claim that she didn't know about  CIA malfeasance until early this year is shot down by subsequent paragraphs in her own statement:

In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that [certain] documents that had been provided for the committee’s review were no longer accessible. Staff approached the CIA personnel at the offsite location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority. And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.

After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.

This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff, and in violation of our written agreements. Further, this type of behavior would not have been possible had the CIA allowed the committee to conduct the review of documents here in the Senate. In short, this was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset.

So, she knew something was afoot for the past several years. But let's parse it: when she became aware of evidence-tampering by the CIA, possibly at the behest of the White House, she said nothing publicly. After all, they were all Democrats. It was an election year. But actually spying on her own Staff? By outside contractors, no less! And the press gets ahold of the story? Cue the outrage.

And about that evidence-tampering, or evidence theft. The White House counsel and the CIA got themselves off the hook by politely apologizing to Feinstein, promising they'd never tinker with evidence ever again. And so she thought everything was hunky dory:

I went up to the White House to raise this issue with the then-White House Counsel, in May 2010. He recognized the severity of the situation, and the grave implications of Executive Branch personnel interfering with an official congressional investigation. The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.

On May 17, 2010, the CIA’s then-director of congressional affairs apologized on behalf of the CIA for removing the documents. And that, as far as I was concerned, put the incident aside.

This is pretty stunning stuff. A sitting Senator has evidence of a crime with a cover-up possibly originating in the White House, and she covers it up.

This, from the woman who had the chutzpah to suggest that Edward Snowden is a traitor. (For his own part, Snowden sees right through DiFi's maudlin performance art, likening her display of outrage to that displayed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel upon discovering she'd been the victim of American spy state eavesdropping.

And then there's her explanation of how her staff obtained a secret report by former CIA Director Leon Panetta.... the report that the CIA is now accusing them of "stealing." DiFi even has a sneaking suspicion that her people might have innocently gotten the forbidden documents in question as a result of them being deliberately planted by an Edward Snowden-type character!

We have no way to determine who made the Internal Panetta Review documents available to the committee. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower.

In fact, we know that over the years—on multiple occasions—the staff have asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times, the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee. And while this is alarming, it is also important to note that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.

So if evidence of crimes came through, the only fault lies in the fact that evidence spans over 6.2 million pages. It's hard out there for a stonewaller, I guess. Who can possibly read all that incriminating material and make it safe for bureaucracy?

The tortured explanation goes on and on and on. What really shines through is her persistence in believing that if only current CIA Director John Brennan had  kept her in the elite loop instead of giving her the cold shoulder and ignoring her letters, she would never have gone into public accusatory mode. And that is perhaps the scariest aspect of this whole scandal.

Johnny & Di in Happier Times

It will be interesting to see anybody demands an investigation of the subterfuge, given how many people seem to be in it up to their eyeballs. I  tend to doubt it. Real scandals that affect real people have a way of never becoming official scandals in official Washington. 

Meanwhile, in denying that he ever spied on Di, John Brennan expressed supreme confidence in his own continuing job security.  "I will be the first one to say we need to get to the bottom of it," he told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "And if I did something wrong, I will go to the president and I will explain to him exactly what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go."

As of this posting, the president had not yet asked Brennan to stay or go. As a matter of fact, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made it perfectly clear: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan, and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA."

So if I had to predict Obama's non-answer in a press briefing (or, more likely, in one of his serial performance art performances on a daytime talk show or comedy webcast), it would go something like this: "I have the utmost regard for both Senator Feinstein and my CIA director.  These people are dedicated public servants. I call both of them friends. Therefore, I will be calling a meeting in the near future, in order that these minor differences and misunderstandings between two good people can be worked out to everyone's satisfaction."

And swept under the rug, right along with the tattered remains of the Bill of Rights.

Deadly Times Ahead

Welcome to Daylight Saving Time, a.k.a. Nighttime Stealing Time.

Since most of us don't need that fake extra hour of daylight to plow the fields and bring home the cows after supper, time theft is exactly what the annual abomination of Daylight Saving Time is. No benefits are accruing to those being ordered to save. To the contrary: the first Monday of DST has been scientifically proven to be the most dangerous day of the entire year. Chances are that you might not even live to see another night because of all that pretend extra sunshine being inflicted upon you. Heart attacks and fatal car accidents and workplace mishaps reach their annual peak Monday, the intensity decreasing slightly for the rest of the week. Night-owls suffer more than day-owls. Outbreaks of workplace cyber-loafing are not uncommon.

Calling something 'saving' is SOP to make you feel resigned to being abused without your permission. (see: Republicans' "health savings accounts" to replace Medicare, and Obama's MyRa "retirement savings accounts" to maybe someday replace Social Security.)

The Turn of the Screw Clocks is tantamount to mandated sleep deprivation in an already sleep-deprived society. Sleep deprivation has, after all, been deemed torture by the Geneva Convention. Hyperbolic to call Daylight Saving Time torture, you say? Well, not so much, when studies show that even occasional or "minor" sleep deprivation has a cumulative effect, permanently altering brain chemistry and damaging health. You cannot catch up on lost sleep. For some, that one mandated lost hour could be the difference between life and death.

Sleep deprivation has been blamed for the Chernobyl meltdown, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger disaster.  Most recently, the engineer of the ill-fated Metro-North train that killed four people in New York reported "zoning out" as a result of his work schedule having recently shifted from late night to early morning.

Factor in our chronic lack of sleep with the exhaustion pinnacle that is Nighttime  Stealing Week, and you've got a recipe for a whole bunch of tragedies.

 The irony is that the whole time-altering scam started out as a joke by none other than Ben Franklin. He facetiously suggested that colonists could save money on candles if they advanced their clocks ahead by an hour in the warmer months. And the rest, like most of ironic American history, is history. The Gothamist has 21 more reasons why the Great Time Robbery sucks, as if you needed any more.

Meanwhile, if you are you feeling tired and cranky after being forced to set your clocks ahead, try not to smash stuff as the chipper TV news mannequins urge you to just put on your happy face and dress yourself in sunshine and indulge in that horrible, neoliberal-sounding Power Nap after your Power Lunch. Try some blood pressure-reducing Ohhhhhmms between the Yawwwwwns.  There might still be a foot of grimy gray snow on the ground where you live, but try to visualize all those hopped-up horny Easter Bunnies "springing ahead" wherever you look. Don't be a downer. Take an upper. If you're not into drugs, just raise up the curtains and greet the glorious dawn! It's empowering. Which is pretty stupid, since DST actually means it's still dark outside at 6 a.m.; Dawn is dawning a whole hour later now. So, scratch that. Stay up a whole hour later instead, and watch the romantic sunset.  Your body clock may be screaming in protest, but those diurnal rhythms are just so yesterday. We live in an artificially lit, techno-connected 24/7/365 brave new world of higher worker productivity and stagnating wages. Get used to it, plebes, because there's always another poor slob waiting to take your place, willing to get by on less sleep just for the chance to survive another day-lightful day.

So let's keep a lousy idea that was lousy when they dreamed it up in those mythical, simpler, agrarian times for no other reason that it exhausts us. Sleep, as a universal, equal opportunity, no-cost phenomenon, is profitable only for the sleepers. The global economy is not making any money while you're snoozing, folks! The world cannot be made safe from terror with a country full of lazy snorers strung out in their hammocks of dependency. And in a hyper-capitalistic world that commodifies everything from drinking water to health care, if it's not profitable, then we must get rid of it. The plutocracy's answer is not more sleep for better health, but less sleep for us translating into more money for them.

And what better place to study how to reduce sleep than the taxpayer-funded Eternal War Complex? From ABC News:

By devising superhuman ways of staying awake for up to seven straight days and nights, military officials hope to lend U.S. soldiers a strategic edge in future conflicts.

"Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation … will create a fundamental change in war fighting and force employment," says a recent statement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.

"This program is really out of the box," says John Carney, director of DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance program. "We want to look at capabilities in nature and leverage it so we can apply it in ways that no one thought possible."

Just what we need: bird brains studying bird brains for fun and profit and death. No word if there are mass suicides among sleep-deprived birds to correlate with the suicide epidemic of returning "tinkered" troops. But whatever. Stop kvetching about your precious hour of lost sleep, civilians!  If our Troops can go without sleep to keep you safe, think of the endless possibilities for an army of round-the-clock worker bees here in the Homeland!

Actually, that is already happening. As journalist Nick Reding reveals in his excellent investigative book Methland, the way that the low-paid, multi-shift workers at an Iowa meatpacking plant stayed awake was massive quantities of .... well, meth. The feds and the corporations didn't care, because the cost of the labor stayed low, and the profits flowed in, and people are ultimately disposable anyway. One more reason the War on Drugs sucks, as if you needed another reason.

I've told the story before about how I got my own personal, albeit short-lived revenge  on Dimwit Saving Time. One of my first assignments as a cub reporter was to write a story on it. Silly me, I (mistakenly of course) advised readers to set their clock back an hour instead of forward. I awarded folks with two extra hours at no cost to them. When the story zoomed past the sleepy editor and got into print and I realized my mistake while reading the front page at home that Sunday, I felt sure that the next day at work would be my last. But much to my surprise and relief, the newsroom was erupting in laughter. Turns out the only readers who called to complain were ladies who'd missed church. And since my editor was both an atheist and a misogynist, it ironically worked out very well for me at that brief moment in Time.

And it turns out I am in very good company. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford used his Twitter account to advise 130,000 people to set their clocks back Saturday night. No word if he was smoking crack at the Time, or if he can't remember because he was plastered when he Tweeted. Like a sleep-deprived migrating magpie.

Maybe the Army can study him.

CIA = Caught in Act

So what's more horrendous -- that the CIA was caught spying on United States Senators, or that the CIA appears to be getting away with it, gleefully thumbing its nose at all of us because it enjoys the full faith and protection of elected officials past, present, and future?

Just who was caught, and who has already been captured? (Hint: every compromised elected official with a past, a cell phone, and a computer)

When even Rachel Maddow, who normally makes me cringe because she is normally such a shill for the Obama Administration and the Democrats, calls the spying scandal "the death of the Republic stuff," you know this is pretty serious stuff.

“The whole separation of powers thing almost pales in comparison to the seriousness of the allegation that a nation’s own spy services have been turned against its own government. Particularly, where that government is supposed to be overseeing the spy services," said MSNBC's Maddow this week.

The news that the CIA monitored members of the Senate Oversight Committee, who are supposedly overseeing the CIA, is rendered even more shocking with the further revelation that those doing the spying were outsourced independent contractors. Talk about the chicken of privatization coming home to roost!

But wait, it gets even worse. Kevin Gosztola reports, via Time, that Obama's Justice Department is now investigating the Senate staffers who had the nerve to look at CIA torture documents and possibly remove evidence of CIA crimes from the permitted premises! And here we are, fretting about the coup in Ukraine when there's a coup in the USA going on under our very noses.

McClatchey News Service, in breaking the original story, explained that the spying on the overseers revolves around the long-delayed release of a Senate report on torture and other abuses during the Bush Administration. Confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director last year was predicated upon his promise to release the report pending his agency's own perusal of it. That was a year ago. So either the spies are very slow readers, or they've got "stuff" they want to hide. Of course, Brennan's name is most likely in the report at frequent intervals, seeing how he'd also worked for Bush. He has long claimed to have known nothing about Bush era war crimes.

Brennan had originally been Obama's pick to direct the CIA in his first administration, but had to withdraw the nomination because the country was still reeling from Bush. Instead Obama appointed him his national security advisor, and together they devised the "Terror Tuesday" lists of pre-criminals to kill by drone. By the time the second term began, abuses by Obama had become acceptable to the polled majority of his "liberal supporters". Better to have a Killer Obama than a Killer Romney, doncha know. Rachel Maddow certainly never characterized Obama's various rampages against the Constitution as potential "death of the Republic stuff" in any case.

  From McClatchey:

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the report's findings.

White House officials have closely tracked the bitter struggle, a McClatchy investigation has found. But they haven’t directly intervened, perhaps because they are embroiled in their own feud with the committee, resisting surrendering top-secret documents that the CIA asserted were covered by executive privilege and sent to the White House.

(snip)

In question now is whether any part of the committee’s report, which took some four years to compose and cost $40 million, will ever see the light of day.

The report details how the CIA misled the Bush administration and Congress about the use of interrogation techniques that many experts consider torture, according to public statements by committee members. It also shows, members have said, how the techniques didn’t provide the intelligence that led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs.

The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

As Dan Froomkin of The Intercept reports, senators are not so much demanding to know what the hell is going on, as they are reduced to issuing a plaintive cry for help:

In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) referred to what he called “unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review,” and described it as “incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy.”

The allegation comes on the heels of a fruitless quest by members of the House and Senate to get NSA officials to confirm or deny whether information on phone calls by members of Congress has been swept up in the agency’s metadata dragnet. (Since it’s so indiscriminate, presumably they have, but the NSA won’t say so.)

Luckily for Obama, he is so embroiled in Ukraine-o-Mania, itself probably spawned by a CIA coup, that his non-answer to Udall has not yet been called into question.

This "death of the Republic stuff" is so extreme that I think it's also fair to ask, again, exactly what the president's function in our country really is. We all knew that he was the factotum of Wall Street, but does he also pledge his primary allegiance to the CIA? It has been confirmed that upon graduating Columbia, Obama worked for a CIA front group and had previously spent time traveling through Pakistan on an extended tour, "visiting friends." Such extreme conspiracy theorists as Alex Jones have long accused the president of being a CIA plant. You have to wonder if there's the tiniest grain of truth in any of this, given the president's apparent disinclination to order that torture report released. Or is this just another example of egregiously misplaced loyalty? Maybe he's just trying to protect his pal John Brennan.

But more likely, he's probably protecting his own rear end against the day another report is written on his own tortuous tenure of forced Gitmo feedings, continued extraordinary renditions of "terrorists," drone killings, whistleblowing prosecutions and his paranoid Insider Threat program, bankster protections, and unprecedented secrecy. He gave Bush a pass, so he expects Hillary or Jeb to continue the fine old pardoning tradition handed down for generations, and give him a free pass, too.

Sounds like the first order of business is to repeal the Patriot Act, if we have even a prayer of wresting what's left of our "representative democracy" from the hands of the surveillance state. Sounds like just the re-election litmus test for our corrupt, complicit and compromised politicians. I am waiting for the first brave soul willing to fight back instead of helplessly whining, to risk exposure for some past crime or embarrassment in order to save the moribund Republic stuff from itself.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/04/220161/cia-monitoring-of-senate-computers.html#storylink=cpy

Paul Ryan's Anthem

Big Ego, Small Bulk (graphic by Kat Garcia)

Paul Ryan emerged from the ancient subway tunnel of his mind this week and unleashed his latest attempt at Ayn Rand fan fiction upon the World Council of Scholars. It was a literary hissy fit, largely and blessedly ignored because of the Ukraine crisis.

At CPAC the other day, he told the bone-chilling story of a little boy inflicted with the pain of free school lunches. And all the tyke wanted was the thrill of brown-bagging a homemade meal! The subtext, of course, is that the stereotypical Single (blah) Mom on food stamps is too strung out in her hammock in Moochville to be bothered to get up and slap some peanut butter on that wholesome,white Republican bread.

Paul Ryan has perfected the art of the dog whistle. In cynically presenting his Randian Poverty Anthem to coincide with the 50th anniversary of LBJ's War on Poverty, Ryan blew his icy cold breath all over the candles, trying to poison the whole cake in the process. It took him 200 pages and a thousand fancy footwork notes to simply proclaim that one-sixth of our population is disposable. 

(In case you hadn't already guessed, his CPAC attempt at concern-trolling poor folks was also a total fake. Wonkette took the trouble of outing him for your amusement, anyway.)

As a member in good standing of the Useful Idiot Club, Ryan enjoys immunity from peer/press oversight and accountability. He represents the far right, so the centrist "New Democrats" can represent the moderate right. And then they split their differences, as they did lately with that bipartisan $9 billion in additional food stamp cuts. With Ryan around, the corporate Dems reckon they can simply run on feebly defending the safety net rather than doing the right thing and expanding it.

Cui bono? Follow the money, all the way to the deregulated hypercapitalists running this show.

By this time (if we were living in sane times) Paul Ryan should have become a laughingstock, he is such a parody of himself And since his whole agenda was always a cruel joke, that is saying something. But since it's his Party, he can cry if he wants to, expecting everybody in the political-media complex to cry right along with him. Not the poor though, without whom there would be no distasteful Poverty and no need for the anti-poverty programs that in Paul Ryan's world are only making poverty worse for the poor. At a mere 204 pages long, his War on Poverty:50 Years Later is reportedly only a precursor, a mere novella,of the much more explicitly Galtean blockbuster expected out later this publishing season. The real drama-- boldly slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps -- is yet to come.

It took Paul Ryan (or an unpaid intern) 204 pages to cherry-pick from various economic reports and academic papers to arrive at the conclusion that although some government programs help needy people, the statistics are so confusing, and the road out of poverty so deceitfully web-like, that we just can never know for sure. So let's blast the whole thing to smithereens and have a debate.

The reviews are in, and as unsurprisingly usual, they are mixed. The New York Times editorial board passive-aggressively called Paul Ryan's Anthem fan-fic "small and tired."

It's easy to find flaws or waste in any government program, but the proper response is to fix those flaws, not throw entire programs away as Mr. Ryan and his party have repeatedly proposed. It might be possible, for example, to consolidate some of the 20 different low-income housing programs identified in the report, but Congressional Democrats have no reason to negotiate with a party that fundamentally doesn’t believe government should play a significant role in reducing poverty.

Um... the Democrats have not yet gotten that message, judging from their recent compromise with Paul Ryan on those food stamp cuts and throwing another three million long-term jobless people into the gutter, just so they can use them for props in their re-election bids.

Paul Krugman, widely acknowledged as the first expert to call Ryan out on his honesty problem, is similarly unimpressed with his latest potboiler:

I took Paul Ryan’s measure almost four years ago, back when everyone in Washington was determined to see him as the Serious, Honest Conservative they knew had to exist somewhere. Everything we’ve seen of him since then has confirmed that initial judgment. When you see a big report from Ryan, you shouldn’t ask “Is this a con job?” but instead skip right to “Where’s the con?”

Krugman notes that Ryan's literary style has changed somewhat with his latest flim-flam, because this time around he uses actual footnotes instead of simply spewing undocumented assertions. Of course, the con involves the research papers being cherry-picked at best, irrelevant at slightly better, and totally mispresented at worst. He's counting on folks not reading the footnotes. But unfortunately for Ryan, some people are having the chutzpah to not only read the footnotes but unsportingly notice the disconnect from reality.

Despite it all, Paul Ryan still has his legions of fans. Take The Washington Post, still grieving over the temporary shelving of a Grand Bargain of safety net cuts in Obama's own politically expedient campaign year version of a budget. In a report presented as a straight news article rather than an editorial, Robert Costa apparently found the task of actually reading Ryan's footnotes too onerous (or too scary to contemplate):

Ryan and his aides are unsparing in how they take the hammer to current federal policies. On page after page, the report casts a critical eye on how the government administers money to the poor and related bureaucracies, using a bevy of academic literature and federal studies as evidence.

Ryan said the crux of the report is the conclusion that federal programs need to be entirely reimagined, with more than tweaks or axed appropriations, and that legislation this year should move toward broader solutions that solve what he thinks are structural weaknesses in how the government supports the poor.

Costa is unsparing in his wholesale swallowing of Ryan's specious claims. Take, for example, this terse encapsulation of Caligula Caucus talking points:

According to the report, Head Start, a federal program for early-childhood education and nutrition, is “failing to prepare children for school,” and “a consolidated, well-funded system would be better.”

Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income families, is the object of a sharply worded review. “Medicaid coverage has little effect on patients’ health,” the report says, adding that it imposes an “implicit tax on beneficiaries,” “crowds out private insurance” and “increases the likelihood of receiving welfare benefits.”

The report also suggests that the “breakdown” of the family is one of the main reasons that poverty afflicts so many Americans.

“Perhaps the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure,” the report says. “Poverty is most concentrated among broken families.”

Costa didn't even have to look at the planted footnotes to notice the inherent "bevy" of inconsistencies  in Ryan's own report. Headstart is federally funded and therefore does not prepare children for school. So, says Ryan, let's federally fund it and prepare children for school! Also, Headstart does not prepare children for the labor force. Then again, it offers significant incentives for kids to grow up and join the work force!

If they ever decide to award a Pulitzer for "best synergy in a political novel" Paul Ryan will be the hands-down favorite.

 Ryan naturally failed to mention income disparity as a driving force in rising poverty levels, preferring instead to blame the victim instead of the predator -- especially those repugnant "broken families."  But, as Sharon Parrott of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities writes,

The poverty story over the last half-century in the United States is mixed for several reasons.  A much stronger safety net along with factors such as rising education levels, higher employment among women, and smaller families helped push poverty down.  At the same time, rising numbers of single-parent families, growing income inequality, and worsening labor market prospects for less-skilled workers have pushed in the other direction.

Today’s safety net — which includes important programs and improvements both from the Johnson era and thereafter — cuts poverty nearly in half. In 2012, it kept 41 million people, including 9 million children, out of poverty, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).  If government benefits are excluded, today’s poverty rate would be 29 percent under the SPM; with those benefits, the rate is 16 percent.  Most analysts view the SPM as a better poverty measure than the “official” measure because it’s more comprehensive.  The SPM counts not only cash income but, unlike the official measure, also non-cash and tax-based benefits, such as SNAP (food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and rental vouchers.  Also unlike the official measure, it accounts for income and payroll taxes paid, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and child care expenses, and it adjusts the poverty line to reflect geographic differences in living costs.

Even with the remedies of the increasingly endangered New Deal and Great Society programs, the United States ranks low on the global social welfare scale. As Sharon Parrott notes, nearly 50 million Americans, or at least one-sixth of the population, are now living below the poverty line in the richest country on earth. Of those, nearly 50 percent live below half the poverty line. In other words, they are downright destitute. Six out of every 10 children live in families that experience at least one financial crisis a year. According to Paul Ryan and his ilk, these children and their families are trapped in a "culture of dependency."

So how does a serial prevaricator like Ryan even survive on the national stage, let alone handily win re-election over and over again in his own financially strapped Wisconsin district?

In a nutshell, he is the Very Useful Idiot (cousin of Krugman's Very Serious Person) of the Congressional leadership and keeper of the status quo. Take away the footnotes, and his poverty manifesto is Social Darwinism presented in pulp fiction style.

Of course, his propaganda serves the purpose of making the president's own neoliberal budget look downright progressive in comparison, what with those earned income tax incentives for poor single workers balanced against means-testing Medicare recipients and reducing the benefits of disabled unemployed people. President Obama may not be calling for an expansion of Social Security, a tax on Wall Street trades, a rescinding of the sadistic bipartisan cuts to the food stamp program, but by golly, his less-cruel proposals sure do beat the swift death that Paul the Hammock Man is prescribing!

Back in his home district of Racine, Ryan's approval rating has now slipped below the 50% mark, and his one-time Democratic opponent is vowing to challenge Golden Boy once again. Ron Zerban lost the race by a slimmer margin than predicted in 2012, despite the best defunding efforts of the DCCC. 
(Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee)

As Down With Tyranny reports, the DCCC actively protects Republicans like Paul Ryan, John Boehner, and Eric Cantor who enjoy House Leadership positions by deliberately withholding campaign cash from any potential "progressive" challengers. Rep. Steve Israel (New D-NY) was appointed by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as campaign bagman for the party because he possesses the "sufficient reptilian tendencies" to make sure that only the right corporate Dems get elected. Gaius Publius of Americablog has more on the machinations.
Paul Ryan survives precisely because of the rampant complicity of all (the media political complex)  concerned.

But who knows? Maybe all those Lonesome Rhodes moments will eventually catch up with him. The $350 bottles of wine, the serial begging for funds from the very programs he pretends to oppose.

And maybe, just maybe, the serial bipartisan hypocrisy and corruption will eventually catch up with the whole lot of them. All we can do is keep shining a light.

Ukraine-O-Mania: Kerry Does Kiev

So on Tuesday (a.k.a. Kill List Day in the White House) John Kerry did the helicopter hustle in Kiev (cue the Pictures at an Exhibition music in the previous post), a bag of bribery cash in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other. Nobody does subtle like the secretary of state:

 

And nobody does propagandistic bathos like the New York Times:

Trudging through a damp mist, Mr. Kerry stopped first for an emotional visit to improvised memorials where protesters were gunned down last month as they voiced opposition to what was then Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin government.

Mr. Kerry placed a lighted candle at one of the shrines, which were draped with flowers and photographs of some of the victims; met with religious leaders; and listened to Ukrainians who beseeched him for help.

Later, warm and dry, the mist wiped from his eyes, Kerry yawned out the bland indignation that makes him so famous, sure to strike fear into the hearts of fellow authoritarians who would never dare tell other nations what to do, let alone invade their countries and drone their citizens to death without so much as a by-your-leave:

"It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve,” Mr. Kerry said. “That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior.”

The centerpiece of the American aid package is the $1 billion loan guarantee. It is intended to cushion Ukrainian households as the new government undertakes wrenching economic changes that are expected to be demanded by the International Monetary Fund, and as it contends with the reduction of energy subsidies from Russia, which has challenged the new government’s legitimacy.

A billion bucks is mighty cheap, when you factor in the Ukrainian population of 45.6 million souls. So let's see.... that amounts to about $20 a person. It certainly would tide them over... right into the drowning pool, while the IMF imposes those Greek-like "wrenching economic changes" designed to crush the regular people caught in the middle of this epic battle of oligarch vs. oligarch, corporation vs. corporation. It's the same old neoliberal song: heads they win, tails we lose. So yes, we are all Ukrainians now, just not in the way that war-mongering friend to war-mongerers John McCain means.

And Kerry really looks like a cheap date with his IOU and his dripping flowers today, now that the EU just upped the bribery ante and offered the Ukrainian "people" $15 billion in aid. The Ukrainians are holding out for $35 billion. Do I hear $20 billion? Somebody call Christie's so we can auction off another 45 million disposable people!

Okay, so now that F-bombing Neocon Victorian Nuland and her pals at least partially succeeded in their "destabilization" efforts by fomenting the coup, it's now on to Act Two in Disaster Capitalism Theater. The global banking plutocrats will generously proffer a "stabilization" loan and demand such "hard changes" as making it too expensive for the average Ukrainian to drive. The unseemly lavish lifestyles of the hoi polloi must end, forthwith!

Meanwhile, Kerry jetted off to Paris to meet with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. It seems there were no five-star restaurants open in Ukraine. No word yet if Chicken Kiev was on the Paris menu.

I guess the folks from the IMF were not invited to the Paris dinner. They're still in Kiev, whetting their appetites, "poring over the menu books" to determine the who, what, when, where -- but never the "why" -- of massive pain infliction. The mystery cure of austerity dies hard, even after it's been exposed as snake oil.

A team from the International Monetary Fund is in Kiev to study the books and consider a stabilization loan. The fund is expected to demand difficult changes, including the reduction of lavish subsidies on gas prices, so the American and European money is intended in part to help cushion the blow to Ukrainian voters before new elections in May.

Can't you see the ladders of opportunity already? Working in tandem with the IMF, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and the gang are no doubt feverishly working on manipulating gas prices and hoarding stockpiles for fun and profit even as the shadow governments speak and the plebeian pawns weep.

Update: Who could ever have predicted? Fracktopolis now rears its ugly head instead of Sarah Palin's idea of Putin: 

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and major oil companies have urged the Obama administration to speed up the nation’s first exports of natural gas. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush to export the gas.

At the State Department, an initiative to harness a natural gas boom in the United States as a lever against Russia, underway since 2011, intensified this week as Gazprom, Russia’s state-run natural gas company, said it would no longer provide gas at a discount rate to Ukraine. Russia supplies 60 percent of Ukraine’s natural gas, and the move was reminiscent of Russia’s previous moves, in 2006, 2008 and 2009, to shut off natural gas supplies to both Europe and Ukraine.

Before you know it, we'll be undercutting Madura and sending fracked gas down to "unstable"Venezuela, and John McCain can proclaim "We are all South Americans now!"

Nobody ever said that you had to be smart and circumspect to succeed at greed. As a matter of fact, it's surprising how utterly and publicly grasping and brazen they are about their real agenda. I guess because nobody ever said the American people had to be paying attention to the world outside. Bare survival is keeping most of us busy enough.

Ukraine-o-Mania: The Worst of Times

Like many of you, I'm confused about the situation in Ukraine. Who and what to believe? Oligarch A, Factotum B, Pundit C, or Politician D?  After immediately scratching all the bloviators appearing on the corporate-sponsored Sunday shows, I turned to the Paper of Record for some much-needed insight. Here's Peter Baker keeping us informed with today's headline about Obama the bronco-buster trying to break Vlad the Stallion:

Pressure Rising as Obama Works to Rein In Russia (accompanied by the standard artistic photos capturing the dark night of the soul that only a man shouldering the full weight of American exceptionalism can ever hope to fully comprehend and stoically endure.)

 Working the telephone from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama rallied allies, agreed to send Secretary of State John Kerry to Kiev  and approved a series of diplomatic and economic moves intended to “make it hurt,” as one administration official put it. But the president found himself besieged by advice to take more assertive action.

(You may now imagine John Kerry triumphantly marching through the gates of Kiev, whip in hand, with this optional musical accompaniment, courtesy of Modest Mussorgsky). Baker continues:

“Create a democratic noose around Putin’s Russia,” urged Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Revisit the missile defense shield,” suggested Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “Cancel Sochi,” argued Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who leads the Intelligence Committee, referring to the Group of 8 summit meeting to be hosted by President Vladimir V. Putin. Kick “him out of the G-8” altogether, said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip.

What reportage! Baker watched the TV bloviators so we wouldn't have to, and dutifully stenographed every precious little bellicose word, never once stopping to question their tenuous at best grip on reality. Inquiring minds want to know in vain: can one buy a democratic noose on eBay? Where does one go to pay a call on the Missile Defense Shield? Is Dick Durbin the scold that Kerry is bringing with him to Kiev?

The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin? It is no easy task. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. “In another world,” she said.

Oh God. Answering the questions of the aforementioned pols, Baker pretends to cast doubt on Obama's testosterone level. But wait --  some higher-up (probably Obama) leaked to Peter Baker that Angela Merkel confidentially told Obama that not only has Putin lost his grip on reality, he's living in outer space. This is what authoritarian-controlled media outlets do when their handlers are caught in a bind. They cast doubt on the mental health of the enemy, and the machismo and competence of the "good guy" survives. Nobody can fight a lunatic, after all.

 That makes for a crisis significantly different from others on Mr. Obama’s watch. On Syria, Iran, Libya and Egypt, the political factions in Washington have been as torn as the president over the proper balance of firmness and flexibility. But as an old nuclear-armed adversary returns to Cold War form, the consequences seem greater, the challenges more daunting and the voices more unified.

Two choices, and they're both as sexy as hell. Firmness is the opposite of flexibility in this particular framing, and they're both ego-savers. In another world, outside the propaganda orbit of the Times-White House solar system, the opposite of firmness might be a limp noodle. But that contrast is not allowed in the official narrative as dictated to Peter Baker.

This is the New York Times at its most pandering, obfuscatingly disgraceful worst.What we're subjected to is an unintentional parody of House of Cards, itself a satire of Washington group-think and self-serving malfeasance and media complicity.

I've done as much reading as I can on the Ukraine situation, and so far, nothing beats the journalism of Pulitzer-winner Robert Parry for background, clarity and analysis. (His independent site, Consortiumnews, is now listed on my blog roll.) His take: our foreign policy is still largely run by Bush-era neocons, held over for whatever baffling reason by President Obama. He should have purged f-bombing Evil-Eyed Cookie Lady Victoria Nuland while he still had the chance. A little late now, says Parry.

Moon of Alabama and Counterpunch, also on the Blog Roll, are two more must go-to sources for a wealth of opinions and cogent analyses.

Back to reading now, and trying to stay informed to keep you informed.