Always Something New Under the Sun

It's an established fact that a tiny cadre of humans, nearly all of them men, own most of the world's wealth and resources. About 85 people have more money than half the population of the entire planet combined. So, what's not to tax? (besides your patience, that is.)

Perhaps even more odious than the wealth dynasties accounting for much of the record income inequality is the rise of the hyper-rich hedge fund manager. Paul Krugman takes on this new breed of predatory billionaire in his latest column, pre-empting the standard jaded response of "So, what else is new?" and refuting the standard right-wing apologia that the speculating rich deserve every penny they're able to extract:

The goal of this misdirection is to soften the picture, to make it seem as if we’re talking about ordinary white-collar professionals who get ahead through education and hard work.

But many Americans are well-educated and work hard. For example, schoolteachers. Yet they don’t get the big bucks. Last year, those 25 hedge fund managers made more than twice as much as all the kindergarten teachers in America combined. And, no, it wasn’t always thus: The vast gulf that now exists between the upper-middle-class and the truly rich didn’t emerge until the Reagan years.

Being nothing more than glorified gamblers playing with other people's money, writes Krugman, the hedge fund operators are actually causing dangerous economic instability:

 More broadly, we’re still living in the shadow of a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. Total catastrophe was avoided by bailing out banks at taxpayer expense, but we’re still nowhere close to making up for job losses in the millions and economic losses in the trillions. Given that history, do you really want to claim that America’s top earners — who are mainly either financial managers or executives at big corporations — are economic heroes?

Not really. And as a wise man observed way back when, "I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."

And what Krugman calls "the avoidance of total catastrophe" really is in the eye of the beholder -- and the myriad victims of the wealth mafia. Living in the shadow of a crisis? It's more like holding on for dear life within a raging tornado if you're still out of a job, lost your home, got your food stamp benefits cut by a cadre of bipartisan congressional millionaires, owe more in student loans than you could ever hope to repay in one low-wage lifetime.

My response to Krugman:

It's a runaway financial industry, all right, and it's still running wild, running roughshod over everything in its path. (That would be us.)

As former bank regulator and white collar crime expert Bill Black points out time and time again, not one Gordon Gekko clone on steroids has gone to jail since the crisis erupted.

At best, the regulatory and law enforcement race course stewards (Mary Jo White of the SEC, Eric Holder of the DOJ) are cowed and inept. At worst, they're complicit enablers, champing at the bit themselves to remount the funhouse carousel for the ride back to Wall Street.

Look at Timothy Geithner. He galloped from the N.Y. Fed to Treasury, leading the bank bailouts at taxpayer expense. And now, big surprise, he's grazing on untold millions in the green pastures of Warburg Pincus as a private equity stud.

Even ex-CIA General and Iraq surge-meister David Petraeus (who also has no financial acumen or credentials to speak of) got a gig telling other obscenely rich men what they want to hear. His luxury stall is located at the KKR private equity firm. (Because the multinational financiers have made a killing from our trillion dollar wars.)

Enter Elizabeth Warren, a national treasure if there ever was one, who's finally giving the elites a real run for their money. Her recent impassioned tirade against the Citigroup infiltration of the White House is one for the record books.

If anyone can hobble the lot of them, she can.

And no, she does not necessarily have to accomplish this from the Oval Office. Simple verbalization can work wonders. Her very existence within the closed media propaganda establishment is actually kind of miraculous all by itself. And that being said, I would love nothing more than to see a vibrant Democratic primary. Let Hillary face Warren, Bernie Sanders, even Howard Dean. 

But the political-media industrial complex would probably allow that spectacle to continue only for a finite period, until we've been sated on false hope, and Hillary's challengers are kicked to the curb. That would happen after the billions in ad revenue from a series of televised debates and SuperPac fund-raising has filled the establishment's coffers to bursting. What worked for the Republicans (the Tea Party "crazies" vs. Mitt Romney) can also work for the other wing of the Big Business Party.

 Remember: there's the ruling class, and then there's the rest of us.

 

The Biosphere of Citigroup Infiltration

Oh What a Tangled Web We Freeze

If you're a blogger in Russia, a new law says you have to register with the government. 

If you're a blogger in America, there's no need to register with the government. The government, along with its corporate sponsor-partners, already has your name, your number, your address, your whereabouts, your movements in both geography and cyberspace. This is accomplished at no inconvenience to yourself, so as to give you the illusion that your freedoms are still being protected and respected. It's a balance between your privacy and their security, you see.

Being forced to divulge your identity at Bloggingrad Central seems so unnecessary, so ham-handed. With several journalist murders already under his belt, Putin's new requirement smacks of paranoia. Russia already ranks a dismal 148th in Reporters Without Borders' annual report on world press freedoms. But since the ranking hasn't budged an inch since last year, maybe Vlad is aiming to surpass North Korea, Iraq and Eritrea in the race to the bottom of next year's list.

And although the USA ranks much higher than Russia, at Number 48, it slipped a whopping 13 places from last year's ranking. From the report's summary:

Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.

Among reasons for giving the USA its terrible score, the journalism rights group pointed to the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers as sources of leaks; the trial and conviction of Chelsea Manning; the ruthless pursuit of Edward Snowden; the Department of Justice's seizure of Associated Press phone records; the hounding of New York Times reporter James Risen to try to force his testimony against a CIA source; and the conviction and imprisonment of journalist Barrett Brown for his alleged hacking into the Stratfor private intelligence website.

  And if and when the Trans Pacific Partnership goes through, the government and its corporate partners might go even further, awarding themselves the absolute power to shut down websites they don't like. According to leaks coming out of the ultra-secretive negotiations, even linking to articles from a blog-post could be declared copyright infringement and grounds for immediate shutdown -- without warning and with no recourse for the blogger-journalists. And even if the TPP fails and the blogs escape shutdown, there's always the pending Comcast-TWC merger. If it proceeds as planned, the media-political complex will have the absolute power to effectively bury or slow down traffic to sites. An orgy of bribe-taking from politicians pretending to mull the whole thing over has already broken out. Net Neutrality may soon be a thing of the past.

There's really no need here for any puny Putinesque blogging register. Before we know it, we'll have one huge Chris Christie-ish traffic jam on our own information superhighway. Censorship can be accomplished in so many ways. There's the iron-fisted, potboiler/spy thriller of a Putin way. Or there's the smarmy, ice cold fingers clenching wads of cash American way. The goal and the results are the same: the silencing of the masses.

Meanwhile, dutifully adhering to its own function as quasi-registered White House propagandist, the New York Times sounded the front-page alarm about Russia and the evil Putin:

Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.

 Mr. Putin’s action on Monday, just weeks after he disparaged the Internet as “a special C.I.A. project,” borrowed a page from the restrictive Internet playbooks of many governments around the world that have been steadily smothering online freedoms they once tolerated.

(snip)

Widely known as the “bloggers law,” the new Russian measure specifies that any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the information published.

Besides registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.

Hmmm. The New York Times administration mouthpiece requires its bloggers to register -- and until recently, it required "verified" contributors to use their real names and jump through an extremely anti-private Facebook hoop. And naturally, the NSA would never dream of monitoring or infiltrating Times commenting threads, blogs, or any other social networks. 

The Times article conveniently forgets to mention that right here in the Land of the Free, a clause in a proposed federal shield law designed to protect reporters would also strip bloggers of their rights under the First Amendment. Senator Dianne Feinstein, miffed about revelations from Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, wants the legislation amended to limit protections to only those writers employed by an established media outlet. Such a restriction could, theoretically, open the door to Putinesque registration requirements, or even prosecution of independent writers for thought crimes against the State.

Feinstein's definition of a journalist is Orwellian in its vagueness:

1. working as a “salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information;”
2. either (a) meeting the prior definition “for any continuous three-month period within the two years prior to the relevant date” or (b) having “substantially contributed, as an author, editor, photographer, or producer, to a significant number of articles, stories, programs, or publications by an entity . . . within two years prior to the relevant date;” or
3. working as a student journalist “participating in a journalistic publication at an institution of higher education.”

Feinstein apparently needn't worry about "real" journalists overstepping their bounds, either. Judging from a new study from the University of Indiana, a big chill worthy of Putin has already descended upon the American reporting landscape. Wired has the whole sad summary:

One of the most surprising developments over that period over the past ten years, is the steep decline in the percentage of journalists who say that using confidential documents without permission "may be justified." That number has plummeted from about 78 percent in 2002 to just 58 percent in 2013. In 1992, it was over 80 percent.

(snip)

The Obama Administration's unprecedented targeting of whistleblowers, too, likely has played a role in turning opinions against the use of secret documents. That lack of approval may have played a role in the many media hit pieces on Glenn Greenwald, for one. 

It's not just confidential documents, though; the study also found that journalists are more wary of what it calls "controversial" techniques, such as hidden microphones or falsifying your identity to get information. Approval of Gonzo-style muckraking is way, way down in general.

And the Obama administration, sensing an opening in the frozen door that it had a huge hand in creating, is jumping right in, supplementing and supplanting the Times and the rest of the steno pool traditionally at its disposal. It's spurning the middleman, and going direct to the consumer. According to the Washington Post, Obama, not satisfied that journalism is living up to his fair and balanced approach, is looking for "new ways to bypass the polarized media."

 He started his campaign innocuously and laudably enough, by inviting local TV weather forecasters to a White House garden party to give voice to his belated election-year concern about climate change. And his handlers vow it won't stop there:

“With presidential communication, it can either preach to the choir or convert the flock,” said Matthew Baum, a professor of global communications at Harvard. The technological and media changes “basically mean it’ll be easier than ever before to preach to the choir and get harder and harder to convert the flock.”

This new reality has prompted the White House to adopt messaging strategies that once might have seemed unusual or even undignified — including hosting an animated page on Buzzfeed, letting Obama appear on the Internet show “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis, and encouraging the president and others to pose for “selfies” and other funny pictures. In hopes of it going viral, White House staff members promote such content to popular sites such as Upworthy, which is known for stock headlines promising readers they will be “amazed” by a particular story.

And once Net Neutrality is neutralized, and discourse polluted by state-sponsored viral outbreaks, our Google search for news on, say, "record income inequality" could well lead straight to a White House handout that features Obama (and later, Clinton II or Bush III) jokily enthusing that prosperity is just around the corner for the regular folks.
 
The Post/White House press release continues,

For the president and his advisers, the Web has gone from being an enormous asset to reach young people in the 2008 campaign to a place that can easily divide Americans by political ideology, making all but the staunchest Obama supporters hard to reach.

“In every year, this project gets harder, the media gets more disaggregated, people get more options to choose from, and they self-select outlets that speak to their preconceived notions,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser and longtime communications strategist.

OMG! All those options are impeding the flow of official propaganda. Heaven forfend that people get to self-select when they could be watching Obama taking selfies. Because too many choices and "polarizing" points of view might lead to too many independent thinkers. And that leads to dissent.... and ultimately to (dare I say?) revolt! But the White House is on it:

 Pfeiffer said the White House is not bypassing traditional media such as news conferences and other events. But he said it’s more important than ever to do late-night comedy and daytime talk shows, ESPN and MTV.

“It used to be that Ronald Reagan or, to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton could give a national address,” he said. “We don’t have that option. We have to go where the public is.”

They won't have to dig too deep to get their unfiltered messages to the pleasure-seeking, blood-sport, LOL, and bassline rock music receptors in our always-public brains. We won't even have to register with the State, like in horrible Russia!  The State will be only too happy to register with us. Our compliance is their greatest concern. Anesthetized satisfaction is guaranteed.

 

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Supreme Being Supremes

The town in upstate New York that gained notoriety a couple of years ago for the viral video of the bullied bus monitor has made the news again. The Supreme Court ruled today that the monthly town board meetings of Greece may now legally begin with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month."

Controversy and outrage ensue. While it's SOP to begin meetings in this country with a pledge of allegiance to the American flag as the symbol of "one nation under God," swearing allegiance to God without the jingoism has long been considered undemocratic in public settings.

What's the big deal? Prior to every corporate-tested school day, before every bloodthirsty sporting event, before every political meeting, we Americans lie, en masse, by proclaiming that there is liberty and justice for all in the One Indispensable Nation. And God is yet to be banned from the Pledge.

Plaintiffs argued before the Court that imposing upon an invisible Guy in the Sky to extra-nationally bless us is unconstitutional. According to the previous  decision rendered by the New York State Court of Appeals, the prayers of the Greece town meetings have tended heavily toward the Christian idea of God, thus violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The Supreme Beings, in office for life, disagreed by their usual 5-4 margin and overturned the lower court ruling.

So, the deity barely squeaked through to gain parity with the Stars & Stripes. According to the decision, municipalities will not be allowed to directly proselytize one faith over another -- although the courts will not, of course, appoint any "prayer police" to make sure that such niceties are adhered to. The exception would be in a case where the audience was "coerced" into participating in prayers. Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog has all the details here.

How about we just do away with pledges and prayers of all stripes and get on with the important municipal business of awarding no-bid cable franchises, purchasing military hardware for the police department, arguing over millimeters on property lines, and granting friendly variances to marauding developers? Ritual incantations of any sort have the effect of giving the absolving stamp of approval to some pretty shady stuff, as history has shown. Always beware of politicians claiming to have both God and Flag on their side.

From Adam Liptak of the New York Times:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said “ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

They both actually do have a point. With the NSA taking the place of God as the all-knowing, all-seeing Eye in the Sky, many Americans are indeed insisting, like Kennedy, that their existence should be beyond government authority. And Kagan is absolutely correct about every citizen being promised, by the First Amendment, ownership of an equal share of government. Key word: promise. Because as recent studies show, we are now living in a de facto oligarchy. Democracy is dead. 

All the more ironic, seeing how the Town Without Pity is named after Greece, the original birthplace of democracy. That nation, like many a town and state here, is being sucked dry and plundered by the austerian global banking cartel. 

Liptak continues,

Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

Maybe some Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Jews, Jains, Sikhs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Satanists, Scientologists, Wiccans, atheists and pagans can be prevailed upon to converge on the town, volunteer for the Chaplain of the Month Club, and thus ease some of the burden on the establishment Christians.  After all, the Town of Greece does have a history of championing the marginalized, the underdog, and the oppressed: town fathers originally named the place to show solidarity with Greece in its own 19th century struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire.

And if the diverse volunteers aren't forthcoming, officials can always schedule a referendum that would make a stint as Town Chaplain mandatory, like jury duty. They can draft people the Shirley Jackson way, through an annual lottery. (let he who is without sin cast the first stone.) Maybe some born-again Bus Bullies can do the drawing and transportation honors.

Plus, sordid history of bullying notwithstanding, the Town of Greece has been named the ninth (shades of Supreme Court!) safest place to live in the One Indispensable Nation. And all the schools have enlightened Greek names: Olympia, Apollo, Odyssey Academy, Arcadia and Athena.

 "Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful." -- Anarcharsis, 6th century B.C.

"Life is short." --  Hippocrates, c. 460-357 B.C.

Obama Orders Unusual Review of Cruelty

Today in Sociopathic Irony:

Fresh from a victory designed to forever keep the grisly details of all his extrajudicial overseas drone executions from the American public, President Obama has deftly pivoted away from his own hypocrisy by calling for a review of capital punishment here in the One Indispensable Nation.

That is because in the Land of the Free, as opposed to those anti-free "tribal areas," executions are open to the public, albeit by invitation only. And sometimes they don't go as smoothly and as silently as planned. The "botched" execution of an Oklahoma inmate is a case in point. The convict didn't oblige the State by going gently into that good night. It was not a clean, surgical strike. The guy suffered mightily under state-sanctioned torture. Witnesses were subjected to his impolitic lingering.

Death has a funny way of doing that to us sometimes, even in America, where we squeamishly like to keep our dead and dying under sanitized wraps.

The New York Times' Peter Baker is on it:

President Obama declared this week’s botched execution in Oklahoma “deeply disturbing” and directed the attorney general on Friday to review how the death penalty is applied in the United States at a time when it has become increasingly debated.

Weighing in on a polarizing issue that he rarely discusses, Mr. Obama said the Oklahoma episode, in which a prisoner remained groaning in pain after sedatives were apparently not fully delivered, underscored concerns with capital punishment as it is carried out in America today. While reiterating his support for the death penalty in certain cases, Mr. Obama said Americans should “ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions” about its use.

Whenever Obama is forced to concern-troll an issue that he would not otherwise touch with a ten-foot pole -- such as those extra-legal executions and NSA spying --  he suggests that we think deep thoughts, ask questions, have a debate... and, oh yeah, conduct the obligatory whitewash review:

Within hours, the Justice Department outlined a relatively narrow review focused on how executions are carried out rather assessing the entire system. But given Mr. Obama’s broader comments, supporters and opponents wondered whether he might be foreshadowing an eventual shift in position by the time he leaves office, much as he dropped his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2012.

Wonder away, supporters and opponents. Comparing the president's championing of the right to marry (for political purposes) to his championing of the right to live (for humanitarian purposes) is like comparing apples to oranges. You simply do not "evolve" a conscience where none has previously been shown to exist. See: Presidential Kill List.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

 But this is America, where we do still have trials by jury. People theoretically are given due process before being condemned to death. And if you are affluent and white, you even get all due deference. See: the Affluenza Defense. Outside the exceptional boundaries of the One Indispensable Nation of dispensable people, there's something called a Disposition Matrix. This is the unwritten law, dreamed up by the Obama administration, that proclaims that all men in the prime of their lives are considered guilty unless proven innocent ex-post mortem. And Obama has certainly never raised any "significant questions" about the possible innocence of those people. He has never ordered DNA testing on the human bugsplat staining the "tribal regions."

For now, Mr. Obama said his position had not changed.

“The individual who was subject to the death penalty had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes,” he said of the Oklahoma inmate. “And I’ve said in the past that there are certain circumstances in which a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate — mass killings, the killings of children.”

By all credible accounts, Barack Obama is responsible for the mass killings of thousands of people. And transparent humble-bragger that he is, he has only seen fit to admit to the drone strikes against the four Americans targeted in his killing spree. Could it possibly be that he doesn't consider the lives of foreign "militants" (including children and wedding parties) as valuable or as concerning as the lives of American citizens? Is his campaign of extra-legal executions being "unevenly applied"?

In a piece written for the New York Review of Books, David Cole notes that the Senate decision that excuses Obama from coming clean about his own filthy deeds comes on the 10th anniversary of that other public spectacle of cruel and unusual punishment: the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal:

To this day, the United States has not held accountable any senior official for torture inflicted during the “war on terror”—not at Abu Ghraib, not at Guantanamo, not at Bagram Air Force Base, and not in the CIA’s secret prisons, or “black sites.” President Obama has stuck to his commitment to look forward, not backward, and his administration has opposed all efforts to hold the perpetrators of these abuses to account. Indeed, the administration has classified even the memories of the survivors of torture in CIA black sites, now housed at Guantanamo, maintaining that they and their lawyers cannot under any circumstance even talk publically about their mistreatment.

Otherwise, the consumer-spectators of America might get the unpleasant idea that war crimes are being both covered up and continuing,  and that the people they elected to represent them are cold-blooded sadists and worse.

But, whatever. Let's have a debate. Let's conduct a study. Let's cover it up. Pick the red team, pick the blue team,  and let's all go to the polls and pretend we're still living in a humane, democratic society.

Meanwhile, you can probably scratch Occidental College (Obama's peri-alma mater) off the list of potential presidential library sites. A gigantic satiric sculpture of one of his killer drones is currently on display at that California campus:

From the press release for the exhibit:

The centerpiece of "We Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust" is a full-scale model of a MQ-1 predator drone, and the public is invited to participate in its completion. Participants will use traditional methods to apply architectural grade mud to the surface of an industrially manufactured drone skeleton. In the dichotomy between the drone's form and its surface, the sculpture is intended to open a discussion about technology and foreign policy while inviting multiple propositions about cultural legacies and possible resistances in the era of global surveillance and warfare.

(the sculpture was completed with the help of the public in March, and will remain on display in the center of the campus through this month)

With this project, Finishing School continues to explore its ability to make unwieldy political issues tangibly personal. For more than 10 years, the collective has employed various strategies to create environments in which a viewer/participant voluntarily enters into a relationship (usually an uncomfortable one) with an idea that has previously been regarded as an abstraction.  At first glance the projects can appear to be light-hearted, as the collective generally uses an element of humor to disarm its audiences.  Topics spotlighted by their work have ranged from corporate and government impacts on individual freedoms, to interpersonal hierarchies, and now to our relationship with the fastest-growing new technology wielded for civilian and military use.

Wow. No wonder Barack high-tailed it out of there and fled to the elite Ivy League. President Transparency will not be going to an Occidental reunion any time soon, I reckon.

May Day Mayday

The best part about May 1st is that the April 30th midnight deadline for more annoying-than-usual Democratic fund-raising has passed. Here's a typical example, titled "Crumbling Down" --

Karen:

The FEC deadline at midnight is a big deal.

If we don't meet our goal, we will fall behind. If we fall behind, we risk our work crumbling down because the Koch brothers' chosen candidates will walk into office.

We can't afford to let these guys to win. We have to fight back.

If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

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Together we can do this. We need you to step up.

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Thanks,

Progressives 2014

 As far as I know, the world did not crumble overnight, and the billionaire Koch Brothers did not succeed in swallowing poor multimillionaire Harry Reid whole because I failed to "step up." Nor did Debbie Wasserman-Schultz get turned into a pumpkin by the evil Tea Party Fairy. Unfortunately.

Also unfortunately, it seems that I have forever missed (until next month anyhow) the deadline to get my name forever implanted upon Obama's Wall... or, as it's alternately called,"The Permanent Record." I don't know about you, but when I was in school, getting your name put in the permanent record was a threat, not a promise. It was a punishment guaranteed to keep you in a low-wage job and in debt servitude for the rest of your misbegotten life. And if you went to Catholic school, condemnation to a very long stint in Purgatory.

Oh, wait.

So yesterday, doomsday, the Democrats pulled the cute stunt of putting the paltry $10.10 minimum wage bill on the senate floor, knowing full well it would fail by virtue of their failure to reform the filibuster.  It would fail.... but they would not. Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post got the whole thing pegged with the silly rhetorical question "Can President Obama and Senate Democrats Win by Losing on the Minimum Wage?"

They held conference calls and media events and rallies. They mobilized their biggest names, including President Obama, on a nationwide messaging push behind the minimum wage legislation.

And the result? The bill only got one Republican vote, falling well short of the 60-vote threshold needed to open debate.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is.

Last month, Democrats did essentially the same thing for the Paycheck Fairness bill, which aimed to cut down on disparities in pay between men and women.

There was news conference after news conference on Capitol Hill, impassioned speeches from the Senate floor, and Democratic women lawmakers even started walking around wearing necklaces made of Payday candy bars.

(snip)

So why, a reasonable person might ask, are Democrats continually pushing bills that seem dead on arrival?

Because passing the bills isn't the point.

The point is to make the Republicans look like the sadistic psychopaths they are, and to raise money, money, money by dint of the "we suck less" credo. I can't even begin to count how many times Sean Eldridge, the billionaire Democratic neophyte running for a seat in my district, has emailed asking for $5 to "stand with him" on the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and marriage equality in solidarity against the evil GOP billionaire-fellaters.  Other than Elizabeth Warren, not one Democrat has asked me to send money to fight the banksters and reinstate Glass-Steagall. And even Elizabeth Warren isn't asking for donations to fight against American imperialism, endless war, and the Surveillance State.

And this being May Day, not one Democrat has asked me for help in defending workers' and union rights.

But, on this first day of the lovely month of May, I was mighty intrigued by an email from Lawrence Lessig, simply titled "Mayday."

I opened it with excitement, thinking it was announcing a general strike, or a march on Washington. This is what it said:

We all know this democracy is in distress. It's time to send an urgent signal that we can fix it.

Today we're launching a SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. It's called the Citizens SuperPAC, and it's only going to succeed if you support it. The video below will explain the plan, and you can also head over to MayOne.US to learn more.

When I clicked on the link to Learn More, I was asked for money money money to get the Money Money Money out of politics. I was not asked to partake in a march, join a general strike, start a boycott, stage a sit-in, or write a speech or article. I was asked to write them a check or supply my credit card info, then Tweet all my friends, and spread the word on Facebook.

OMG!!! It'll have the oligarchs shaking in their Pradas. Meanwhile, my email address will spread far and wide throughout the fundraise-o-sphere, and somebody's office overhead will be protected for another 30 seconds.

Lessig means well, I'm sure. But the PTB must be so happy. Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to be consumer-spectators in the One Indispensable Nation of dispensable people. We have been assigned our roles. Their Big Money is Big Speech. Our little money is but a faint whisper, giving us the illusion that we are citizens participating in our own democracy.

In 80 other countries, May Day is a public holiday. Stock markets are (gasp!) closed. Ironically, what's also known as  International Workers' Day commemorates the struggle that Chicago workers, unionists and reformers went through in 1886 to fight for an eight-hour work day. Violent protests broke out on May 1, 1886 as 35,000 workers rallied on the streets in Chicago to demand better working hours.

Yet in Miseducation Nation, schoolchildren are not getting the day off  (if they play hookey, they'll get their names on that dreaded permanent record!)  and they are probably not being taught about labor history in the classroom. According to the valuable teaching tool known as Washington Post's Kids Post, May Day is all about flowers, moms, baskets, beauty contests, dances, and maypoles. Children are finally and falsely told, as a kind of afterthought,  that only in "other countries" is May Day observed to honor workers' rights:

In the late 1800s, workers in different parts of the world were fighting for the right to work no more than eight hours a day. At the time, it was common for them to have to work 11 hours or more each day. They chose May 1 as a time to protest in favor of a shorter workday.

Despite the best corporate efforts to suppress the news, Chicago was actually holding an event to commemorate the May Day Haymarket slaughter. Other events are scattered throughout the nation. And if you can't get out, the World Socialist Website is holding on online rally this Sunday, May 4th. (Yeah, they do discreetly ask for an optional donation, but they also stress that money is not necessary to sign up.)

Update: I may have missed my chance to get my name on the Obama Wall, but no matter. Organizing for Action, his political post-campaign arm, sent me another email today, this time asking that I sign a petition in support of the minimum wage. The president's ungrammatical pitch (this failure is going on his permanent record!):

"What every American wants is a paycheck that lets them (sic) support their families, know a little (as opposed to much) economic security, pass down some hope and optimism (as opposed to property and money) to their kids. And that’s worth fighting for. (me)"

Am I in? You betcha. Who doesn't want to bequeath platitudes? And once I sign my name, I'm directed to the page where I get instructions on how to get the minimum wage -- by giving  OFA a lot of economic security, in amounts of $15, $35, $50, $100, $500, $1,000 and beyond. Coming soon to my inbox: a friendly guilt-inducing reminder from OFA that they're still waiting for me to step up and honor my pledge to the momentum. These follow-ups are always in the form of invoices telling me that I have remitted exactly $0 to the momentum so far. 

It must have been a momentary lapse. But if it goes on my permanent record, it really is of no moment.

Senate to Obama: Drone, Baby, Drone

Remember around this time last year when President Obama gave his big ballyhooed Drone Speech, promising more transparency to the citizen-consumers of America about who, when, where and why he obliterates and maims with his flying missiles?

How time does fly, just like a Predator. Five years of Obama drone strikes, at least 2,500 people in their graves. That's assuming they could find any body parts to inter.

 Meanwhile, buried deep in the cyberspace of Tuesday's online New York Times (so as not to inordinately clash with another, bigger front page bullshit story about Obama the Peaceful) is this piece by Mark Mazzetti:

The Senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States uses lethal force.

The move highlights the continued resistance inside the government about making these operations, primarily carried out using armed drones, more accountable to public scrutiny. In a letter to the Senate earlier this month, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, expressed concern that a public report would undermine the effectiveness of the operations.

Clapper, who still has his job despite his perjury before Congress on that whole massive phone eavesdropping debacle, is perfectly correct to say that confession to mass murder by a sitting president would probably put a damper on the killing spree. I mean, it's one thing for information on Obama's drone kills to be readily available from such activist groups as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Wikileaks and such whistle-blowers as Brandon Bryant. It's another thing for Obama to publicly sign a confession, or a rolling series of confessions, to massacres of wedding parties and women and children, and have the butchery actually covered on cable TV.

The article continues,

The provision, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year as part of its authorization bill, required Mr. Obama to make public an annual report on “the total number of combatants killed or injured during the preceding year by the use of targeted lethal force outside the United States by remotely piloted aircraft.” The provision was the same for civilians killed or injured. But officials said that the provision encountered almost immediate resistance both from intelligence officials and Republican lawmakers, some who have fought against any changes to the way the targeted killing program has been managed.

No Republican lawmakers were named. But they are probably the same Republican lawmakers whose job description is going on TV every Sunday to bitch about Obama not using enough lethal force in Ukraine, Iran and Syria. If Obama were forced to openly brag about the people he does kill, it would make them look like liars and spoil the whole canard that Obama is a peacenick with a manhood problem. Just who do they think they're kidding? 

Mazzetti continues:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Intelligence Committee and who originally offered the provision, agreed to take it out of the authorization bill to enable it to be passed unanimously.

Dianne, who made such a big impassioned Senate floor speech about being spied upon by the CIA over the torture report, and who recently wrote a strongly-worded letter/op-ed to Obama demanding he turn over said torture report post-haste, appears to have received the apology from on high she'd so strongly craved. She is back on the dark side. The light must have hurt her eyes. And that torture report is not forthcoming from the White House.... no doubt because it is extremely damning to all concerned, who still have their jobs, power, and perks.

In a speech last May, Mr. Obama pledged to make drone operations more transparent, and administration officials said that the White House would like to gradually shift drone operations away from the C.I.A. — partly to allow targeted killing operations to be discussed more freely.

But nearly a year later, there has been little movement on the proposals. Some powerful lawmakers, including Ms. Feinstein, have opposed moving drone strikes out of the C.I.A. and managed to blunt any momentum to enact the White House proposals.

It's the tired old Good Cop/Bad Cop kabuki. Obama wants to do the right thing, wants to be honest, wants to play Shuffle the Psychopath, but DiFi, and Hillary's pal John McCain, say no way. Because the Times wants you to believe these doddering fools have more power than God -- or more accurately, the authoritarian state breviary known as Disposition Matrix.

Mr. Clapper said in a letter that the executive branch was exploring ways to “provide the American people more information about the United States’ use of force outside areas of active hostilities.”

They're wracking their brains to come up with more propaganda, but not wracking them too hard. Because for the most part, the citizen-consumers of America don't give a shit about brown-skinned foreigners being rendered into bug-splat far, far, far away. And the executioners' branch knows it.

As Spencer Ackerman points out in The Guardian, the Senate very carefully and very specifically excused Obama from disclosing the names of the civilian victims he wrongfully kills in the drone strikes:

The bill authorizing intelligence operations in fiscal 2014 passed out of the Senate intelligence committee in November, and it originally required the president to issue an annual public report clarifying the total number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured by drone strikes in the previous year. It did not require the White House to disclose the total number of strikes worldwide.

And what Ackerman also writes about, and the Times does not, is that "another provision, which would require alternative intelligence analysis, as well as commensurate congressional notification should an intelligence agency consider legal action against a US citizen, has been moved to a classified annex of the bill."

In other words, if Obama decides to kill ("legal action") an American citizen, he won't have to tell us about it. He'll whisper it in DiFi's ear, though. Because she just loves being kept in the cozy classified annex.

The Groupthink Party

At the same time Wall Street bigwigs are signalling, via the Politico gossip rag, that they'd be equally OK with a President Hillary Clinton or a President Jeb Bush or a President Chris Christie, comes word that Hillary was guest of honor at Republican John McCain's annual neoliberal schmooze-fest for the ruling class. The press was barred, and so far there is no news about what was discussed. No secretly recorded goodies from a minimum-wage servant or waiter yet, anyway.  Her gig wasn't even publicly announced until two days before the event:

The McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University announced today (April 24) that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will participate in a conversation with U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at the McCain Institute's annual Sedona Forum on Saturday, April 26, 2014 in Sedona, Arizona.

"I am very pleased to have my friend Secretary Clinton join this year's Sedona Forum," said Senator McCain. "From her years of service as first lady, in the U.S. Senate and at the State Department, one would be hard-pressed to find a leader with Secretary Clinton's informed perspective on the many challenges facing America across the globe."

The guest list was a hodgepodge of Senate centrists, tax-avoiding CEOs, polluting oil company execs and neocon war hawks. (or, in the press release propaganda-speak,"thought leaders, philanthropists and decision-makers.")

Hmm. So when Elizabeth Warren told George Stephanopoulos yesterday that she thinks Hillary would be a "terrific candidate,"  maybe she meant that she hopes Hillary runs on the Republican ticket, right where she belongs.  As Hillary herself might say, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Or,as the late Gore Vidal did say, "Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic.  But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s.  'We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."