Ruling Class Racketeers

This is rich:

(Reuters:) U.S. Health Secretary-nominee Sylvia Mathews Burwell sought to allay a major Republican worry about Obamacare on Thursday, telling lawmakers that President Barack Obama's reforms would not lead to a government-run single-payer healthcare system on her watch.

Her assurance against an approach reviled by Republicans and industry leaders came during a two-hour Senate confirmation hearing at which Burwell received an important endorsement from Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina. Burr sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which will decide whether to send her nomination to the floor for a final vote.

Awwwww. Burr hearts Burwell! Because when it comes to the perpetual enrichment of the ruling class at the expense of the poor, bipartisanship always has a way of magically breaking through the fake congressional gridlock. Sylvia Mathews Burwell is a dream come true from neoliberal heaven (or more aptly, hell) for the elites controlling both sides of the Money Party.

Not content to simply lick the boots of both Republicans and "industry leaders," a/k/a the predatory insurance cartel, the current White House budget director also used her Senate confirmation hearing to broadcast her disdain for ordinary people. Her message hovered somewhere between a dog whistle and a bullhorn:

"I am hopeful that we will have the opportunity to continue to work together closely in the months ahead to deliver impact for the American people," she said.

Ouch. What a weird choice of words. It kind of takes the whole TLC equation right out of Obamacare, doesn't it?  Then again, Burwell's comparison of medical care to a body blow is most likely an apt one, given the severe emotional impact of that first 50% co-pay bill from your Bronze Plan.

A millionaire centrist technocrat who was Treasury undersecretary under Robert Rubin, she was later named deputy chief of staff in the Clinton administration. Not only is she expected to sail right through the confirmation process, her corporate cred is even serving to mute the always-phony hatred of the GOP for the Affordable Care Act. The ACA was, after all, crafted in one of their own think tanks. 

And what self-respecting Republican can ignore the fact that the Obama nominee once ran the charity wing of the right-wing Walton Family of corporate welfare queens, as well as administering the charity begun by Bill Gates, the richest man on earth? She's worked for Erskine Bowles, he of safety net-slashing Catfood Commission fame. She's worked under Rubin, who helped orchestrate the repeal of Glass-Steagall in between his own stints at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. She's sat on numerous corporate boards. She belongs to the Aspen Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

She has no experience in health care administration. But so what? She's a member of the Club. She knows how to efficiently deliver impact, and deliver it good and hard.

 "I look forward to, if confirmed, making that system work as efficiently and effectively as possible, both in terms of cost and access," she gushed during the first part of her Senate confirmation schmooze-fest. Her testimony was to continue on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, now that Team Obama has blundered over the public relations hurdle of getting 8 million out of 45 million uninsured people "covered," the  Efficient Impact is finally starting to set in.... with a vengeance. The New York Times ran a front page story on Tuesday, all about how the newly-insured are finding the pickings mighty slim as they venture into the Obamacare Shopping Mall of America:

In the midst of all the turmoil in health care these days, one thing is becoming clear: No matter what kind of health plan consumers choose, they will find fewer doctors and hospitals in their network — or pay much more for the privilege of going to any provider they want.

These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans. While the sizes of the networks vary considerably, many plans now exclude at least some large hospitals or doctors’ groups. Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private Medicare Advantage plans.

That must be what Burwell meant when she said more Americans will be impacted. They'll be covered with bruises trying to squeeze through all those tiny passageways, not to mention bumping their heads on those ridiculously low coverage ceilings. 

The Times article continues,

 Insurers, ranging from national behemoths like WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Aetna to much smaller local carriers, are fully embracing the idea, saying narrower networks are essential to controlling costs and managing care. Major players contend they can avoid the uproar that crippled a similar push in the 1990s.

Oh my. We're not only getting impacted and squeezed -- we're getting played. Under Obamacare, patients are hockey pucks or golf balls. We'll either get slammed into a net, or driven down a deep dark hole. Not that we have any choice in the matter:

“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”

OK, now I get it: the quest for health care has become a bad habit, like heroin. And so it is up to the insurance cartel to break us of this tawdry addiction and deny us our fix. So get thee to rehab, proles! (and please don't expect reimbursement from the insurance racket.)

Employers remain concerned about the quality of the networks... and many are doing an analysis to see how disruptive changing the network would be for their workers.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that more employers are considering smaller networks. Many, like Walmart and General Electric, have gone so far as to steer employees to specific hospitals for certain expensive procedures like joint replacements.

In the case of Walmart, employees will likely be steered to in-store Joint Replacement Clinics run by sleep-deprived moonlighting interns. Care will be provided during unpaid meal breaks. Post-op physical therapy will consist of returning to work ASAP.  Shoulder replacements, for example,  are most efficient when they are used to restock store shelves with cheap Chinese electronics.

Of course, I am being facetious. Right?

But seriously, Sylvia Matthews Burwell is full of baloney. When she talks about how efficient Obamacare is, what she really means is that Wall Street and CEOs and investors and revolving-door politicians will continue to profit most handsomely and efficiently from the market-based system that only pretends to deliver medical care to millions of desperate people.

The Physicians for a National Health Plan advocacy group efficiently cuts through the crap and delivers some real impactful true facts:

The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) aims to expand coverage to about 30 million Americans by requiring people to buy private insurance policies (partially subsidizing those policies by government payments to private insurers) and by expanding Medicaid. However:

• About 30 million people will still be uninsured in 2023, and tens of millions will remain underinsured.

• Insurers will continue to strip down policies, maintain restrictive networks, limit and deny care, and increase patients’ co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.

• The law preserves our fragmented financing system, making it impossible to control costs.

• The law continues the unfair financing of health care, whereby costs are disproportionately borne by middle- and lower-income Americans and those families facing acute or chronic illness.

A handy chart comparing Obamacare and Single Payer can be found here.

So let's buck the system, and exercise some all-American free choice. We have the absolute right to be whatever sporting accessory we choose. But forget about the passive hockey pucks and golf balls.

Let them feel our impact. Let them feel it good and hard. 

Hashtag Histrionics

Michelle Obama, self-anointed mom-in-chief and ambassador of feel-good neoliberalism, has used the occasion of the star-studded #BringBackOurGirls Twitterblitz to implicitly scold a nation full of youthful American slackers. Because what's Mothers Day for, if not for the infliction of guilt?

From her White House address:

The (kidnapped Nigerian) girls themselves also knew full well the dangers they might encounter. Their school had recently been closed due to terrorist threats…but these girls still insisted on returning to take their exams. They were so determined to move to the next level of their education…so determined to one day build careers of their own and make their families and communities proud.  

That was the standard lead-in to the scold pivot. To wit: In Nigeria, the kids are saints who do not let fear of bodily harm stand in the way of exam-taking, parent-pleasing, nation-building, plutocrat-enriching and career-starting. Unlike in Spoiled Bratsville, USA. So here comes today's lesson:

Yet, we know that girls who are educated make higher wages, lead healthier lives, and have healthier families. And when more girls attend secondary school, that boosts their country’s entire economy. So education is truly a girl’s best chance for a bright future, not just for herself, but for her family and her nation. And that’s true right here in the U.S. as well…so I hope the story of these Nigerian girls will serve as an inspiration for every girl – and boy – in this country. I hope that any young people in America who take school for granted – any young people who are slacking off or thinking of dropping out – I hope they will learn the story of these girls and recommit themselves to their education.

Got that, slackers of America? Get off your butts. If the Nigerian kids can withstand mayhem and murder, so can you. The education-impeding terror of pediatric casualties by gunfire,  and gang war collateral damage on the streets of Chicago and other blighted cities are nothing compared to what other kids in other parts of the world have to go through. So feel the guilt, and get educated -- not so much for the love of learning, but to please others and boost the economy. Bootstraps, people. Bootstraps!

Michelle Obama is getting a lot of criticism for her speech. But not for its being part of the serial scolding that she and her husband indulge in whenever they talk to (mainly minority) youth audiences. Rather, FLOtus is being scolded for her rank hypocrisy in concern-trolling a terror campaign against Nigerian girls without acknowledging her own husband's state-sponsored terror campaign of drone strikes against thousands of girls, boys, moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas. While she waxed rhapsodic about her meeting with brave young shooting victim Malala Yousafzai at the White House, Michelle failed to mention that Malala had also bravely confronted Barack about his Kill List.

In Pakistan's "tribal areas," families aren't buying the phony bravery lectures. They're wisely keeping their children out of schools because schools are often targets of drone strikes. People complain of not being able to sleep because of the constant buzzing of American drones overhead. The kids can't concentrate nearly enough to make their folks and their communities proud and use, as Michelle says, their "god-given" talents to make money and boost the economy.

In their exhaustive study on the physical and mental health affects of drones on civilians in North Waziristan, a team of Stanford University researchers report:

One man described the reaction to the sound of the drones as “a wave of terror” coming over the community. “Children, grown-up people, women, they are terrified. . . . They scream in terror.”[202] Interviewees described the experience of living under constant surveillance as harrowing. In the words of one interviewee: “God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike and attack.”[203] Another interviewee who lost both his legs in a drone attack said that “[e]veryone is scared all the time. When we’re sitting together to have a meeting, we’re scared there might be a strike. When you can hear the drone circling in the sky, you think it might strike you. We’re always scared. We always have this fear in our head.”[204]

A Pakistani psychiatrist, who has treated patients presenting symptoms he attributed to experience with or fear of drones, explained that pervasive worry about future trauma is emblematic of “anticipatory anxiety,”[205] common in conflict zones.[206] He explained that the Waziris he has treated who suffer from anticipatory anxiety are constantly worrying, “‘when is the next drone attack going to happen? When they hear drone sounds, they run around looking for shelter.”[207] Another mental health professional who works with drone victims concluded that his patients’ stress symptoms are largely attributable to their belief that “[t]hey could be attacked at any time.”[208]

 (snip)

When [children] hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they’re always fearful that the drone is going to attack them. . . [B]ecause of the noise, we’re psychologically disturbed—women, men, and children. . . Twenty-four hours, [a] person is in stress and there is pain in his head.[241]

Noor Behram, a Waziri journalist who investigates and photographs drone strike sites, noted the fear in children: “if you bang a door, they’ll scream and drop like something bad is going to happen.”[242] A Pakistani mental health professional shared his worries about the long-term ramifications of such psychological trauma on children:

The biggest concern I have as a [mental health professional] is that when the children grow up, the kinds of images they will have with them, it is going to have a lot of consequences. You can imagine the impact it has on personality development. People who have experienced such things, they don’t trust people; they have anger, desire for revenge . . . So when you have these young boys and girls growing up with these impressions, it causes permanent scarring and damage.[243]

An article about Michelle Obama's speech in The Guardian has drawn hundreds of reader comments, a huge proportion of which have been deleted by moderators. Here, though, is a "fair and balanced" sampling of surviving public opinion:

Michelle see's her daughters in the kidnapped girls, that's nice.Any chance she can also see the innocent children her husband butchers on a weekly basis?

From drone attacks across the globe to 'empire building' in Venezuela, Ukraine, Egypt etc the body count just keeps piling up doesn't it.

Apparently the world is full of scumbags with large guns who get off slaughtering the innocent and try to justify their actions. Whether it's religion or 'freedom and democracy', the result is the same horror.

### (the hashtags are for comment-separation purposes only, not for sloganeering. Just so you know.)

Surely it is a good thing that someone cares about these missing 300 girls and what has happened to them. Too, it is humanitarian to use what resources the US government has to bring them back to their homes and parents. Hopefully that can be done without politicizing the issue and with no other agenda, but that the phrase "the battle against terrorism" has been added to the discussion by Wiwa raises for me feelings of unease, though.

It's also positive that Michelle has mentioned the conditions and lives of girls world wide, that they face many challenges and obstacles and that their hopes, aspirations and potentials are often truncated -surely unacceptable and unnecessary. In contrast, closer to home, there are over 60,000 [sixty thousand] homeless children in New York City alone, countless tent cities across America and in many communities near 25% of school children are homeless. Near 50% of American children are in families living below the poverty line and the only meals they get are those provided by school lunches and breakfasts. In DC, homelessness and homeless children are very visible and growing in number; many families sleep in abandoned cars, under bridges, in parks and doorways. This is not to say that one group of children are more deserving than another; all children everywhere should be protected from conflicts and the consequences of war, nurtured, protected, cherished and given a chance to reach their full potential. But I am disappointed that Michelle feels called to action about children on another continent, while saying nothing about the homelessness, hunger and poverty of children literally and virtually in her own backyard.

###

Horrible and brutal what happened to these girls, chilling - I have a daughter myself and one on the way. BUT

With all this military intervention, now all these neo-colonial powers will have armed forces on the ground in another oil-rich nation. Sad that my mind turns cynical thoughts like this, no doubt. Am I out of line or is this what could be happening - an opportune moment to begin the next round of colony-building?

###

'Nigeria also has a wide array of underexploited mineral resources which include natural gas, coal, bauxite, tantalite, gold, tin, iron ore, limestone, niobium, lead and zinc. Despite huge deposits of these natural resources, the mining industry in Nigeria is still in its infancy.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#Key_sectors

The Whitehouse clearly thinks most people are idiots. Maybe they are.

###

Jesus. You all sound like a bunch of guardian-readers. Is it not blindingly obvious that civil society is thick with politics, and politics not only cannot exist without hypocrisy, but that hypocrisy is practically its definition?

Perhaps you'd rather live in China or Russia. Perhaps they are helping too, but we haven't heard about it.

Michele Obama is right - it is an affront to any civil society that 200 girls - people's daughters - can be loaded into trucks and be driven off. And education is a massive problem across vast swathes of the world. Pity she looks like such a finger-wagging school marm, and telling Americans to finish their eduction is really about appealing to the less imaginative of her public.

But 200 families are missing their daughters, sisters, cousins etc, who are probably being subjected to some fairly blood-curdling abuses. The issue is not Michele Obama! Surely anything that can be done to focus attention is good.

It is shameful that the Nigerian government has been powerless to act. It must for them be the very worst kind of humiliation, exposing as it does the limitations of their state apparatus, and therefore any purpose in having a state at all. There will be far-reaching ramifications, not least further raids, which have happened already. But also there will be other groups of war-mongers who see in these actions a brilliant idea, and wonder if it's easier than they had imagined to procure sex slaves in such numbers.

Is this not a dark prospect? And surely any other claim by Boko Haram is brazenly insulting.

I am a father, and I have a daughter. I don't care about Michele Obama's personal PR efforts. If she lacks style, isn't getting it right in how she delivers it, it doesn't matter. It is a political issue, for all of us, and politics work by precedent and through public relations. What slips away from the agenda gets forgotten.

Or does the outcome not matter to any of you who are carping so visciously? Is there an implied racism or sexism there? Hypocrisy, maybe?

Meanwhile, the best analysis of the #BringBackOurGirls phenomenon I've read is by Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report:

While Americans wring their hands over the abducted teens, they know nothing about the African strong men supported by their government who do the very same thing. American allies like Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Paul Kagame in Rwanda have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers. Both are also responsible for the deaths of six million Congolese. Americans not only have to be better informed, but they must stop thinking that their government and its allies are good and beneficent when they are anything but.

Sometimes the answer to the question, “What can we do?” is “Nothing.” There is nothing that the average American citizen can do to get these girls released and those with the power to do something aren’t very interested in internecine warfare in Nigeria. Their machinations created this and so many other tragedies around the world.

 There's just something so insidiously destructive about the entertainment industry's Hashtag fetish, and its evil cousin, the celebrity Selfie, juxtaposed with the latest outbreak of banana republic butchery. This is all about suppressing nuance, and history, and the decoupling of learning for the sake of learning from corporatized education for the sake of the unfettered, free market economy.

It's also, I suspect, about #ParanoiaStrong and keeping the populace compliant as we are lulled into projecting the plight of the Nigerian victims onto our own (and of course Michelle's) precious children. According to a recent poll, fully 40% of American parents are already afraid to let their kids play outside unsupervised, lest they get kidnapped by strangers. The chance of this actually happening is extremely remote. But bring back our girls. Don't fear the ruling elites in your own country. Be afraid of the Other, instead. Keep fear of the unknown alive.

  How about we bring back some honesty. How about we bring back some  humanity.

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.

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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.