Vomitrocities

The last thing Barack Obama wants to do is to spoil the appetites of his rich benefactors or even worse, make them throw up after an expensive meal. Vomitoria are not yet fixtures in the homes of our contemporary oligarchs, as they were rumored to be back in Caligula's day.

Obama told attendees at the fundraiser, held at the Lincoln Park home of a top donor, that he was late because of the situation developing at the military base.

According to the Associated Press, Obama's announcement drew gasps and cries of, "Oh no." 

"We're monitoring the situation carefully," Obama said, echoing a statement he made earlier in the afternoon at a Chicago steakhouse where he held the first of two fundraisers benefiting the Democratic National Committee.

Obama did not dwell on the shooting, instead telling donors that being back home was "invigorating, and it reminds you of why you got into this business in the first place — because you got a lot of people here who have taught me a lot about community, friendship and family and for that reason I'm really grateful."

"As I look around this room, I'm reminded of all the pieces of myself that are connected to individuals in this room," Obama said. "There are people here who have been friends of mine for a couple of decades now. There are folks here who were with me when nobody gave me a chance to even get to the U.S. Senate."

Once the president had determined that the shooter who'd terrorized hundreds of people in the latest massacre at Fort Hood was a mentally ill Iraq veteran and not some evil jihadist enemy of our Freedoms, he was free to continue his official function as legalized bribe taker at the home of Craig Freedman. From all indications, a good time was had by all who forked over $10,000 for a little food and a lot of political access. There are compromised pieces of Obama all over their marbled halls.

Barack Obama made no mention of Wednesday's Supreme Court decision allowing them to fork over nearly unlimited wads of cash in the future.

 Craig Freedman, decades-long friend of Obama and co-host of the event, just so happens to be one of those sociopathic poobahs selling the "skills gap" zombie idea as an excuse to pay skilled welders at his factories only $12-$15 a hour while collecting corporate welfare in the form of tax incentives. Just last February, he was on CNBC bitching about how hard it is to find good slave labor to construct his bus and truck seats, even though public money is financing the training of his workers. He also has the contract for seating for Chicago's buses, as part of a deal with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to hire the unemployed in the future, for something called "Skills for Chicagoland's Future." Notice how these public private partnerships are always about the future, and not for the calamitous reality of the present? Suck the public dry today, promise to hire a few lucky duckies tomorrow, and laugh uproariously all the way to the bank.

And just yesterday, before his private fundraisers (transportation to which was funded by public money) Obama was in Michigan, telling college students to get those skills and get that Obamacare to tide them over during their unpaid postgraduate internships. Rowdy protesters were not allowed inside, where, using his g-droppin' country twang for the occasion, he bellowed,

Now, here’s the context.  Our economy is doing better.  It’s growing.  Our businesses are creating jobs -- 8.7 million new jobs over the past four years.  (Applause.)  Our manufacturing sector, which had been losing jobs throughout the ‘90s and throughout the -- what do you call it -- aughts?  (Laughter.)  You know, the 2000 to 2010, whatever you call that.  (Laughter.)

But manufacturing had been losing jobs -- about a third of manufacturing had lost -- and obviously that hit Michigan really hard.  But we’re now seeing the manufacturing sector add jobs for the first time since the 1990s.  So that is good news.  (Applause.)

The housing market is recovering.  Obviously the stock market has recovered, which means people’s 401(k)s, if they have them, are doing a lot better.

Troops that were fighting two wars, they’re coming home.  (Applause.)   We just went through the first month since 2003 where no U.S. soldier was killed in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  (Applause.)

Oops. I guess he spoke just a couple of hours too soon in that last paragraph. But his "heartbreak" over four new soldier deaths was sufficiently healed later that day to carry on money-grubbing.

By the way, Obama did not eat with either the lesser $10,000-a-platers, or the greater $32,000 big ticket holders. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, his food was pre-tested, pre-tasted, and served by military waiters at a private soiree with Mayor One Percent Rahm Emanuel and propaganda flack David Axelrod. Even his water was brought into the restaurant separately by a Navy steward.

Security State-Tested, Plutocracy-Approved

As his motorcade snaked through Chicago between plutocratic events, Obama was greeted by block after block of protesters. And while the president was drinking his special water and scarfing down his special steak, one demonstrator outside grew so incensed about the relentless onslaught of vomitrocities that he grabbed a TV reporter's mic and yelled out "Obama is a war criminal!" as blue-helmeted Chicago police on their horses looked on. The video is here, with another angle here. A second reporter prematurely broke off her own live spiel because, she said, she was there to talk about Democratic fund-raising, not protesting from the riffraff. Actually, it was fairly obvious she feared that she would be next.

Occupy Redux?

That title is misleading, because despite all the post-mortems, the Occupy movement has been alive and well since the security state disbanded the last physical camp a little over two years ago. It's branched off into Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Sandy, The Fight for $15, Movement Against Monsanto and GMOS,  Anti-Homelessness and Year of The Rent Freeze Coalition, Stop/Stop and Frisk-Stop Mass Incarceration Group, End The Fed, Ban Fracking Now, People’s Power Assembly NY/NJ, Occu-Evolve(OWS), Nationalize the Fed, Money Out Of Politics, The Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street, and Golden Farm Workers, among others.

So get ready for a re-occupation of Zuccotti Park and scores or even hundreds of other sites this Friday in what has been dubbed a Worldwide Wave of Action. The date, April 4, has been chosen to mark the 48th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as he protested with striking sanitation workers in Memphis. 

Friday's events in New York City will begin with a march of the grossly underpaid airport workers and their supporters from JFK Airport to LaGuardia Airport. Later that morning, proponents of a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street will hold a sit-in. Afternoon events include a "Disobedience School" for newbies by some of the original Occupy organizers.

It should be interesting to see how new Mayor Bill de Blasio, elected on a wave of progressive populism, will react to the events. I suspect it will be positive... as long as it's a one day only affair. You may recall that Mayor Mike Bloomberg himself was initially barely tolerant of Occupy and its predecessor, Bloombergville. It was two months before the final Homeland Security-orchestrated national onslaught against peaceful protesters began. And this being a midterm election year. I imagine Democratic candidates will be jockeying for camera position to gush their support.

The Worldwide Wave of Action is set to run through July 4. You can find more information here.

Meanwhile, I'd be remiss in not reporting that this apparent resurgence of Occupy is being described as "psy-ops propaganda" by some, because some of the publicity is a little strange and the demands are a bit free-floating. I think those Anonymous masks are also freaking people out. Plus, just as in the original Occupy movement, there is a hefty dose of libertarianism and LaRouche in the mix. Michel Chossudovsky has more.

Another possible red flag is the participation of establishment types. Former MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, for example, is enthusiastically blogging about it on the Huffington Post.

So, I am keeping an open mind. Remember, it was AdBusters magazine, a commercial enterprise, that initially publicized the Zuccotti Park encampment.

Update: What exquisite timing. As expected, the Supreme Court just dealt a huge blow to democracy by unleashing even deadlier torrents of unlimited cash into the political system. The 5-4 decision on McCutcheon vs. FEC has been described as Citizens United on Steroids.

Fed Up Federal Workers

Pay freezes, pay cuts, pension cuts, benefit cuts, unpaid furloughs, the threat of prosecution if you blow the whistle on waste or fraud or worse, the threat of prosecution of you fail to turn in your co-workers as "insider threats." What's not to love about a job like that?

So a few Congressional Democrats are baffled and concerned about a survey showing that morale among federal workers has been steadily falling in recent years, and they want an investigation. Three of them have sent a strongly-worded letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) seeking solutions on how to reverse this mysterious unhappiness trend. Because somebody has got to be held accountable! And it doesn't look like that Somebody will be the guy who ordered the pay freezes, suggested the Sequester, prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Ace than in any previous administration, and transformed federal office buildings into pits of paranoia. From The Washington Post:

“Stakeholders, including federal employee organizations, have noted that federal workers have become increasingly dissatisfied with their employment, and that this may be compromising the federal government’s ability to serve the American people,” the letter said.

Results from the annual federal-employee viewpoint survey and the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government report, which ranks federal agencies based on their survey scores, show that government-wide job satisfaction has declined for the past three consecutive years.

The letter calls on the GAO to report on root causes of worker discontent and how dissatisfaction affects retention, performance and productivity. It also asks the watchdog to identify the best practices that have helped certain agencies buck the trend and improve morale in recent years.

I'm surprised that workers even mustered up the courage to openly broadcast their disgruntlement in a survey. As McClatchy Newspapers revealed last year, President Obama had deemed disgruntled workers to be potential terrorist threats even before Ed Snowden rattled his cage. Failure to do one's ergonomic duty and spy on co-workers is grounds for punishment. Managers who fail to punish the underlings who refuse to report suspicious cubicle dwellers and bedpan emptiers could themselves be brought up on criminal charges under Obama's executive order. If the woman handling your Social Security application over the phone is having marital problems, the guy at the next desk is mandated to snitch on her. If the poultry inspector down the line is late on the rent, you'd better turn him in. You never know when he might snap and declare jihad. Or worst of all, leak something that might ruffle the feathers of the president.

According to McClatchey the worst place to work is the Defense Department. Working past quitting time, and reading The Onion and Salon on lunch breaks are potential threats and must be brought to the immediate attention of superiors.

And morale is going down? I am surprised more federal workers haven't quit their jobs using the Chinese factory worker method: jumping out of windows.

Conservatives want to drown government in a bathtub. Centrist Democrats like Obama prefer to shrink government through a sneaky program of human attrition. Make unionized government workers rattled and unhappy, and then point to their decreased performance and efficiency as an excuse to privatize everything, enrich your plutocratic friends, and drive down wages to subsistence levels.

Neoliberalism is on the march.

Earth Calling...

... With bad news. Via the Gray Lady:

Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported on Monday, and they warned that the problem was likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.

But some geniuses are having the bright idea to reconstitute the dodo and a couple dozen other extinct species while we're waiting for current populations to die. If, as some are suggesting, a new ice age is set to envelop Northern Europe, maybe they can evacuate the polar bears from the melting ice caps and let them duke it out with wooly mammoths among the glaciers in what is now merrie olde England.

This is beyond depressing. It is downright terrifying. But other geniuses in high places are balking at the UN's suggestion that rich nations had better start sending massive amounts of cash to poor nations, who will be especially hard hit by the climate change they had no hand in causing.

The poorest people in the world, who have had virtually nothing to do with causing global warming, will be high on the list of victims as climatic disruptions intensify, the report said. It cited a World Bank estimate that poor countries need as much as $100 billion a year to try to offset the effects of climate change; they are now getting, at best, a few billion dollars a year in such aid from rich countries.

The $100 billion figure, though included in the 2,500-page main report, was removed from a 48-page executive summary to be read by the world’s top political leaders. It was among the most significant changes made as the summary underwent final review during an editing session of several days in Yokohama.

Hmm.... I guess those geniuses who had a hand in censoring the report think their own ivory towers will be immune from catastrophe.  We should have learned by now that under no circumstances must one offend rich people for any reason, as the mere thought of parting them from their money to help the less fortunate sends them into paroxysms of rage and shrieks of class envy.

The edit came after several rich countries, including the United States, raised questions about the language, according to several people who were in the room at the time but did not wish to be identified because the negotiations were private. The language is contentious because poor countries are expected to renew their demand for aid this September in New York at a summit meeting of world leaders, who will attempt to make headway on a new treaty to limit greenhouse gases.

Many rich countries argue that $100 billion a year is an unrealistic demand; it would essentially require them to double their budgets for foreign aid, at a time of economic distress at home. That argument has fed a rising sense of outrage among the leaders of poor countries, who feel their people are paying the price for decades of profligate Western consumption.

I want the names of those Americans and I want to know who is bankrolling them. Rupert Murdoch? Jamie Dimon, the skills gap guru? On that topic, I also want to know why our normally stingy Congress is so eagerly sending a $1 billion aid package to Ukraine. What's that you say? That the money is going straight to the oligarchs who took over in that right-wing putsch? That it could be a way to undercut Russia and grease the skids for some all-American polluting fracked gas and oil to be exported? And that the poor people of Ukraine will take the blame for the crimes of the elites, and be forced into austerity?

One "bright side" in the United Nations climate report is mentioned by the New York Times, however. Because this is America, where we must always look the bright side because it's always darkest right before it goes totally black:

 Since the intergovernmental panel issued its last big report in 2007, it has found growing evidence that governments and businesses around the world are making extensive plans to adapt to climate disruptions, even as some conservatives in the United States and a small number of scientists continue to deny that a problem exists.

 “I think that dealing effectively with climate change is just going to be something that great nations do,” said Christopher B. Field, co-chairman of the working group that wrote the report and an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. Talk of adaptation to global warming was once avoided in some quarters, on the ground that it would distract from the need to cut emissions. But the past few years have seen a shift in thinking, including research from scientists and economists who argue that both strategies must be pursued at once.

Translation: yack while you frack. Pursue an all-of-the-above strategy. Transport flammable Bakken shale oil by rail instead of by pipeline. Choose between polluting water and polluting dry land. Well, I hope that is not what they're talking about when they talk about a "shift in thinking". Like the shift in a deforested mountainside that resulted in a deluge of mud burying an entire housing development.

Is anyone taking bets about when CNN will break into its marathon coverage of the missing plane and the unbelievable amounts of garbage in the oceans, and give us some brief coverage of the Washington state disaster and all the impending disasters on our global plate?

Never mind. Because oil and gas is a big sponsor of cable news shows. Because the earth will have the unmitigated gall to ignore the mindlessness of its human inhabitants as it takes its natural and inevitable man-made course. 

Nan Socolow said it best in her recent comment on the Times:

 In due course, the tragic truth of what happened to that Boeing 777 Dreamliner will be known to all of us. This is not a wild goose chase in the South Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart whose bones lie, undiscovered as yet on Nikumaroro Island not far from Howland Island where she crash-landed with her co-pilot Fred Noonan on 1 July 1937. But it's a needle in a haystack search for the floating debris from the 777 thousands of miles off Australia, in the gyre of the Pacific Ocean. The Roaring Forties is where that Malaysian plane with 239 innocent souls aboard may be found. The talking heads and "experts", who don't know a whit more than you and I about what happened, what Is happening and are fouling the airwaves with their nattering, codswallop and bumf. The remains of the plane will be discovered - maybe not the black boxes, but the tale will be told on the waves of the Pacific Ocean. A tale of immeasurable grief that greeted those who were lost on Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie, on TWA 800, on the 4 jets of 9/11, on so many other tragic air mishaps dating back to the Hindenburg. Tears will be shed. There will be no such thing as "closure" as we have been scalded mercilessly by nature, by man's invention of flight, and by know-nothings, belabouring us with their jabber on our cyber-widgets from pcs to iphones to tablets to TV. We are small and ignorant, filled with folly.

Chills, Thrills, Skills & Shills

The scams just keep on coming. But as they say in the trade, grifters gotta grift.

It seems like only yesterday when austerity was all the rage, and we were being told by our president to tighten our belts and share the sacrifice with Richie Rich and Warren Buffett so as to "win the future." But then, this being a fake populist midterm election year and all, along came the inequality craze. However, that phrase freaked out the rich people so much that in less than a week, it was bowdlerized into the opportunity gap. And now it's been even further watered down into the previously debunked "skills gap."

Grifters gotta grift. The plutocrats and the politicians and the pundits need to constantly come up with old-new ways to blame regular people for the horrible economy they had no hand in creating. And so, we have been officially diagnosed with another outbreak of the dreaded Skills Deficit Plague.

As he has done so often, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman again finds himself battling elite propaganda while neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in same:

This (the skills gap) is very much a zombie doctrine — that is, a doctrine that should be dead by now, having been repeatedly refuted by evidence, but just keeps on shambling along. EPI presents some very interesting evidence from a survey of manufacturing, but they’re hardly the first to show that the data don’t at all support the skills-shortage hypothesis. And it’s not just labor-associated think tanks or progressives who have rejected the skill shortage story based on the evidence.

Funny, that "progressive" rejection. Because running right now on Politico is a "sponsored content" story by Melody Barnes, late of the Democratic White House. She absolutely accepts the skill shortage meme that blames the victims and absolves the thieving oligarchy for its own greedy role in making the terrible economy so terrible. Could it be that her continuing employment as a Thought Leader for an elite think tank (Aspen Institute) -- funded by such oligarchs as Dem-designated bad guy David Koch and Dem friend Jamie Dimon -- depends upon her acceptance of crap? Or, given Obama's own neoliberal belief in structural unemployment, has she always sincerely bought into what she's selling?

Follow the money, and examine just who is bankrolling this truly bipartisan skills gap zombie plague. JP Morgan Chase, headed by unindicted Whale Fail banker Jamie Dimon, is the actual sponsor of the "native ad" disguised as a news story on Politico (where else?) To give the propaganda the patina of credibility, the piece bears the byline of Barnes, who is only one in a long line of lackeys who've spun through the revolving door to cash in on the Obama Brand.

Barnes is glib as she lurches on: "The skills gap plays a significant role in our unemployment picture right now. We know from an analysis by the International Monetary Fund that about one-third of those who are unemployed in the United States are unemployed because they don't have the necessary skills."

(Of course, the IMF is run by the self-same oligarchic banking cartel for whom Barnes now shills. They are best known for imposing austerity on such bankster victims as Greece, with the tragic results still playing out.)

 Barnes then goes on to plug the "National Fund for Workforce Solutions".... administered by her partner, too big to fail/jail JP Morgan Chase. Add this to the recent Brookings report that subtly denigrates the chronic unemployed who are impeding the "recovery" by "exiting" the work force, and you've got the perfect recipe for Paul Ryan and his band of sadists to deny extension of jobless benefits. Can't have those skill-less Marginals wasting away on their hammocks of dependency when all they need is some philanthropic STEM training!

As a matter of fact, the Republican House has already passed cynical legislation called the SKILLS Act (Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills) as a substitute for temporary insurance benefits that would actually help sustain life. Its purpose is to pit the jobless against each other, making them fight over plutocratic crumbs.

But back to JP Morgan Chase and its partnership with Democrats. It brags that it's "committing" $250 million over five years to JobsJobsJobs!!! (a piddling drop in the bucket, considering it has assets of well over 2 trillion -- a GDP bigger than most countries)  Because, according to its own philanthropy website, more than half of the world's overpaid CEOs are growing ever more concerned that stupid proles will stifle their profits. And ergo, the taxpayers had better fork over "matching" money to train people so as to enable the CEOs to become confident enough to hire a lucky handful of them to work longer hours for less money. Of course, they don't put it quite that way. They put it like this:

The numbers seem to contradict each other: unemployment is high across the globe, while recent data reveals that employers are having trouble finding workers who are trained for the jobs that are available, particularly in skilled labor and professional positions. And more than 50% of global CEOs are concerned that a key skills gap could limit their growth prospects. What can we do to ensure that people are trained and competitive for the skilled jobs of the 21st century?

 Through New Skills at Work, JPMorgan Chase will use its resources, expertise, and global reach to help inform and accelerate efforts to support demand-driven skills.

That last bit sounds downright ominous. It reminds me of Matt Taibbi's gloriously gruesome "vampire squid" metaphor, with those banking tentacles reaching across the globe to suck the assets out of every last man, woman, and child. For appetizers to their human feast, the financiers will be munching and crunching their cherry-picked data. Which are suspiciously fuzzy, by the way. Kind of like a plague of fungus after a heavy rain.

The real problem is not a skills gap, but a wage and jobs gap. If anything, worker skills have improved while wages have stagnated and jobs disappeared because of lack of demand. Employers like to complain about the unavailability of good help, but their real gripe is that the help doesn't want to work for the slave wages they're willing to pay. If there were truly a skills gap, the allegedly dwindling skilled labor pool would getting higher salaries. And of course, they are not.

Also, employers don't want to invest in on-the-job training. They want people fresh from their last job doing the exact same tasks as they're expected to perform perfectly from day one on the new job. And since there are fewer and fewer "last jobs" out there, the immediate proficiency the bosses expect as their god-given right is not forthcoming. So the jobs stay vacant. Employers also expect new hires to multi-task to a degree bordering on the ridiculous.

Labor economist Peter Cappelli tells a blackly humorous story about another real problem: the truly outlandish expectation gap plague that is afflicting employers:

One of my favorite examples of the absurdity of this requirement was a job advertisement for a cotton candy machine operator – not a high-skill job – which required that applicants “demonstrate prior success in operating cotton candy machines.”  The most perverse manifestation of this approach is the many employers who now refuse to take applicants from unemployed candidates, the rationale being that their skills must be getting rusty.

Meanwhile, Melody "I Walked With a Zombie" Barnes is using her Obama connection and her own tried and true "up by her bootstraps" hardscrabble autobiography (she grew up near "dried out" tobacco fields) to lend that sweet liberal glow to Jamie Dimon's get-out-of-jail PR campaign. His bank recently settled with Obama's friendly Justice Department for a slightly more piddling $13 billion for the fraud that collapsed the economy and threw all those unskilled Marginals out of work in the first place. Dimon was awarded a bonus for his malfeasance, and the fine itself will be largely whittled down through tax deductions and charitable donations and greed-washing in partnership with friendly Obama officials, both past and present. When Dimon found out about Eric Holder's criminal investigation of his establishment, he demanded and got an unprecedented face-to-face with the attorney general in order to hammer out the terms of the pretend punishment.

And the next thing you know, he's concern-trolling the unemployed with Obama's minions openly beaming by his side, secure in the knowledge that the president will never have to campaign for public office again, and that the president views financial high crimes and misdemeanors as fleeting public relations glitches.

What else did we expect? I will never forget reading that chilling chapter in Confidence Men in which Ron Suskind chronicles the new president's 2009 meeting with the big bankers, post-bailout and pre-Tea Party explosion. Their aggrieved victimhood was apparent even then; they were actually bitching about the possibility that their bonuses would be curtailed:

Obama cut them off.

"Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn't buying that," he said. "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift:
the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

The storm of public anger, of course, never did abate. Rather, it was cleverly deflected away from the banking cartel with a little help from the Koch Brothers, and aimed directly at a Marxist Socialist Obama straw man. Instead of blaming the banks, people blamed the government, which had forced all those lazy Blah people to buy homes they couldn't afford. Rick Santelli issued his famous racist dog whistle of a rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and thus was the right wing Tea Party movement born.

Oh, and speaking of Chicago, I almost forgot. It turns out that one of the very first recipients of Dimon's largesse will be Mayor One Percent himself, former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The money will not necessarily go toward training actual people, in case you still thought it would be. From the New York Times Dealbook:

Mr. Emanuel will have a “key role” in how the initiative unfolds in Chicago, one of the first cities the program will target, although his official position within the effort is not yet clear.

The initiative will include a heavy research component, drawing on the bank’s internal market data as well as data from outside analytics firms.

 The program is part of the bank’s larger push to focus its charitable giving on areas that have more to do with its own businesses. In 2014, the first year of the program, it plans to donate $225 million, a figure that will likely include some cuts to the bank giving for the arts and culture. Last year, JPMorgan donated $183 million in total charitable giving.

Okay, now I understand. This is more robbing from the poor to give to the indigent... but with a twist. Because this time, the money first winds up in the pockets of the protection racket.  Even the bank's pitiful pittance for charity Arts & Crafts is subverted into the Art of Graft.

And you thought Chris Christie had cornered the market on political corruption? These people not only don't bother hiding the fingerprints all over the messes they create. They're openly flaunting the huge, purple, inflamed knuckle-marks inflicted daily on the vulnerable body politic of a moribund nation. 

Dick Cheney isn't the only character who has no regrets over torture.

Those revolving doors must be spinning so fast because they want us to get dizzy trying to watch them -- and too stunned and wounded to have even a hope of stopping them.

Or, so they hope.

Here's Sand in Your Eye, America

"How many times do I have to tell you!" HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius impatiently fumed the other day. "When I say bed, I mean bed. Lights out on March 31st. No ifs, ands or buts!"

Um.... what's that you say? You need one more drink of water? You forgot to brush your teeth? You didn't do your homework? You're stoned? Well.... never mind. You can stay up just a few more minutes, but only until April, mind you! And no more excuses after that. I really mean it this time.

Another day, another Obamacare deadline extension in the ever-shifting sand. Another day to shop till you drop within the nightmare maze of the virtual predatory insurance marketplace, ignoring the grim reality that destitution is only a paycheck away. I mean that quite literally. Nearly half of us have so few liquid assets that coming up with the first premium --  and worst case scenario, having to come up with the first co-pay and deductible --  will absolutely wipe out our checking accounts.

But anyway, join the 6 million (out of more than 48 million uninsured) of your fellow citizens who reportedly have signed up so far, and try wending your way through the O-Care Funhouse in the Mall of America. As the lottery commercial says, you gotta be in it to win it. You gotta "sign up" -- that is, enter for a chance to win:

(graphic courtesy Kaiser Health News)

To accommodate the alleged last minute crush of contestants, the Obama administration, all the while screeching that "America Needs a Raise" has just added one more passive-aggressive layer of sludge to the incomprehensible kludge known as Obamacare. From the Washington Post:

Federal health officials say March 31 is still the deadline for enrolling in health coverage and that they're only making sure anyone who tried to apply by the deadline can get coverage.... The Obama administration has been adamant that the latest enrollment announcement isn't a deadline extension.

If you made an honest effort to go up to your room, but tripped or passed out on the rickety stairs,  you will not be punished. We'll pretend that you made a good faith effort to comply with our curfew. Your trip to the woodshed will be delayed because otherwise we'd look like ineffectual meanies instead of simply ineffectual.

CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services_ is going with the honor system. People submitting their applications on HealthCare.gov or through a call center after March 31 "attest" that they had trouble enrolling before the deadline.

So, will CMS make any effort to verify a person's attestation? CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille fielded that question multiple times during a Wednesday afternoon press call before she was eventually asked straight up whether the agency is relying on the honor system. Her response: pretty much, but people don't like lying to the government

Are you kidding me? Lying to parents and other authority figures to save their own hides is an essential survival skill learned early in life by all normal people. That whole George Washington and the cherry tree tale is a big fat scam to instill guilt into little liars. Humans lie because they want to protect their butts. Politicians, of all people, should realize this. As it is, there are so many winks and nods breaking out in the Beltway that platinum Obamacare coverage for treating elite puffy eyelids and stiff necks can't come soon enough.

Oh,and there has been such a surge of pliable little citizens rushing to comply with Lights Out that a totally unexpected gridlock of bodies is occurring in the virtual queue. Ergo, CMS is providing a "window of opportunity" within the Mall Maze for the folks to jump through in order to comply with the curfew rules. This, no doubt, is at the top of the "ladder of opportunity" envisioned by Obama to span the income chasm and lift people out of poverty through the magic of their grit, determination, and bootstraps.

Surge, my butt. Six out of ten Americans didn't even know about the March 31 deadline, according to a recent poll, and half of them (coincidentally, the same segment teetering on the brink of poverty) say they plan to stay uninsured.

In the past six months, 33 percent of the uninsured said they tried to obtain health coverage, either through an exchange (18 percent), Medicaid (14 percent) or directly from an insurer (13 percent). The poll didn’t say what prevented them from getting coverage.

Maybe because the pollsters didn't bother asking them? How about that whole "we ain't got no jobs, we ain't got no money!"impediment to a shopping spree in the virtual insurance predator marketplace? How about the fact that quite a few people are hesitating to sign up for coverage for fear that their undocumented family member would be deported?

What a totally preventable mess. What a monument to neoliberal greed and political malpractice  -- all so that a relatively small percentage of the uninsured can get partial subsidies for their medical needs. Had our political leaders followed the will of the majority back in 2009, when Obama had majorities in both Houses, everybody in America would have had a Medicare card in their ever-thinning wallets by now. The Democrats would not be fretting over their diminished re-election chances. The Tea Party might never have seized power in the first place. The phrase "death panel" would be permanently stuck in Sarah Palin's craw.

Physicians for a National Health Program estimate a Medicare for All plan would save the American people $350 billion in the first year of implementation, not to mention untold thousands of lives and millions from the specter of bankruptcy and depression and preventable illnesses. The proposal (HR 676) would actually expand upon and improve the current Medicare program by eliminating co-pays and deductibles. It would be financed through progressive taxation and not be means-tested.

Do you have a pounding headache? Is your chronic fatigue the result of an O-Care murketing campaign hangover? If so, here's a refreshing video antidote.

No shopping is necessary. No paper, plastic, bronze, silver, platinum or gold is required. Everybody's in, nobody's out. Because health care should be a right, not a neoliberal lottery. 

Barack, the Scrivener

As commander in chief, Barack Obama ostensibly has the power to order an immediate halt to the unconstitutional bulk collection of our domestic phone records by the National Security Agency. But, like Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, it seems he would prefer not to.

So much for his boast that this would be a "year of action" and that with his pen and his phone, he would bypass a gridlocked Congress to get stuff done.  When it suits the interests of the deep state, Obama prefers to punt the NSA controversy right over to Congress, whose lower House is, ever so conveniently, mulling an expansion of bulk surveillance capabilities.

And thus does Barack continue to lead from behind, governing by preference and passive-aggression rather than by any exertion of personal leadership.

The headline in today's White House propaganda mouthpiece is misleading to the extreme: "Obama Calls for an End to N.S.A.'s Bulk Data Collection."

He is doing no such thing. He is not ordering an end to it, he isn't even really "calling for" an end to it. Writes the New York Times' Charlie Savage:

Under the proposal, they (anonymous mealy-mouth White House source) said, the N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order.

Translation: the spook agency (ies) could still easily obtain millions of specific records by a compliant rubber stamp judge under a new kind of sweeping, blanket court order if they so chose. 

As part of the proposal, the administration has decided to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to renew the program as it exists for at least one more 90-day cycle, senior administration officials said. But under the plan the administration has developed and now advocates, the officials said, it would later undergo major changes.

Translation: the deadline for renewal is looming this Friday, and Barack is besieged from all sides -- by privacy groups and telecoms and media. So he will be renewing the bulk collection he now pretends to abhor for P.R. purposes.... for at least 90 more days. Not right now. He would prefer not to. By early July, if all goes well, the brouhaha will have died down and maybe even a new terror threat fabricated to stun the citizenry back into the compliance to which he had been accustomed before Ed Snowden shook things up.

The administration’s proposal will join a jumble of bills in Congress ranging from proposals that would authorize the current program with only minor adjustments, to proposals to end it.

In recent days, attention in Congress has shifted to legislation developed by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. That bill, according to people familiar with a draft proposal, would have the court issue an overarching order authorizing the program, but allow the N.S.A. to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without prior judicial approval.

Translation: Obama's preference will, by cynical design, get lost in the shuffle. The objective is to be seen "doing stuff". His proposal appears to be purely cosmetic.

The administration’s proposal would also include a provision clarifying whether Section 215 of the Patriot Act, due to expire next year unless Congress reauthorizes it, may in the future be legitimately interpreted as allowing bulk data collection of telephone data.

The proposal would not, however, affect other forms of bulk collection under the same provision. The C.I.A., for example, has obtained orders for bulk collection of records about international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union.

Translation: the president will, at his discretion, decide if he is required to pay attention to his own public relations bullshit. Additionally, he may at his preference or discretion allow the same illegal crap to continue under a different acronym. Or maybe not. Like Melville's Bartleby, he is a cipher, a bundle of contradictions and ambiguities.

I'd prefer not to waste any more time examining his psyche or motivations. Just pay attention to the actual enfolding plot, rather than the muddled official synopsis of it, and the rave reviews by Obama's muddled defenders.