The Opacity of Trope

As if we needed any more clear and convincing evidence of the complete collapse of morality in American politics, there's this from the New York Times:

Facing the potential defeat of an appeals court nominee, the Obama administration decided Tuesday to publicly release much of a classified memo written by the nominee that signed off on the targeted killing an American accused of being a terrorist.

The solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., made the call to release the secret memo — and not appeal a court order requiring its disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act — and informed Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. of his decision this week, according to two administration officials.

The White House was informed Tuesday. But the memo will not be released right away because officials said they needed time to redact it and to prepare an appeal asking the court not to reveal classified sections of a federal appeals court ruling last month requiring that most of the memo be made public.

Everybody from civil rights groups like the ACLU to media watchdogs like the (ahem) New York Times has been clamoring for years to have the alleged justification for President Obama's drone assassination of Muslim cleric Anwar al Awlaki made public. The Obama administration has fought back for years, citing the usual feeble excuse of "national security" for keeping its rationale for murder secret.

But now that the nomination to the federal bench of Donald Barron (the Harvard crony who wrote the "legal opinion")  is in jeopardy, the president will deign, after all, to release a censored version of it. It seems that the credibility of a couple of Democratic senators who've been clamoring for years to get the information hangs in the balance. They would look like utter hypocrites if they approved Obama's guy without making at least a show of demanding the secret opinion. (And forget the Republicans -- they're bitching that Barron is still too liberal, despite the blood on his hands.)

 So, while we're waiting for Obama and Holder to stock up on their black Magic Markers, Democrats are prematurely and quite unbelievably proclaiming victory:

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, who is locked in a close re-election fight, had said he could not support the nomination if the White House did not release some of his legal opinions. After the administration’s announcement on Tuesday, he said he was “now able to support the nomination of David Barron.”

“This is a welcome development for government transparency and affirms that although the government does have the right to keep national security secrets, it does not get to have secret law,” Mr. Udall said. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, called the decision “a very constructive step.”

So, all will be well in the cosseted little world of senatorial civil liberties concern-trolling if the trope looks something like this: 

Based upon the foregoing and subject to the additional qualifications set forth below, we are of the opinion that:

            1.         The Company is validly existing as a corporation[1] and in good standing under Delaware law and is qualified as a foreign corporation and in good standing in [California].

 2.         The President has the corporate power to execute and deliver the Transaction Documents[2] in which it is named as a party and to perform its obligations thereunder.[3]

 3.         The President has duly authorized, executed and delivered the Transaction Documents in which it is named as a party, and such Transaction Documents constitute its valid and binding obligations[4] enforceable against it in accordance with their terms b 

Signed, Irving Washington, Attorney At Law.

---

Here is my Times comment:

Unless the memo also releases clear and convincing evidence that Anwar al Awlaki was planning an imminent attack, this "legal" opinion is not worth the paper it's written on.

I suspect the reason that the Obama administration has fought so long and so hard against its release is that such evidence is flimsy at best, nonexistent at worst. There's not even proof that Al Awlaki was a senior Qaeda operative. He published a magazine that apparently inspired the Fort Hood shooter, so the US government decreed he had to be neutralized. His due process arrest and trial would probably have inflamed too many of his followers. And it was likely a weak case, bound to open up a whole can of CIA/FBI worms.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill has revealed that Al Awlaki was a moderate imam before the FBI began hounding him, post-9/11, in hopes of getting him to turn informant on his fellow Muslims. After he fled the country to escape the harassment, he was thrown in a Yemeni jail without charge and without trial, where he languished for 18 months. It was there that he became radicalized.

It surprises me that the two Democratic senators now proclaim themselves satisfied with a bit of nontransparent transparency they have yet to see. Do you mean to tell me that as long as a memo is released, the contents or lack thereof don't matter and this man will sail on to confirmation?

Does the fact that he is "otherwise liberal" justify his apparent disregard for the Bill of Rights?

And in response to another commenter taking issue with my insinuation that had Awlaki constituted a real threat, his killing would have been justified:

The key phrase is "imminent threat" -- and so far, there is absolutely no evidence that Awlaki was on the verge of causing immediate harm to anyone. If he had, for example, been detected driving toward a crowded public place with a truck full of explosives, then taking him out with a Tomahawk missile obviously would have been justified. He would have been *planning* to carry out an atrocity. It's the same premise that justifies police neutralizing an active shooter or anyone immediately threatening to inflict grievous bodily harm to another. This is the exception to due process.

All indications are that the Obama administration sentenced this man to death based on their own paranoia and thirst for vengeance. Their esteemed intelligence community had displayed gross incompetence in failing to detect and stop the Fort Hood psychiatrist. They needed a scapegoat.

If they have anything implicating Awlaki other than his rhetoric, they should furnish it to the public along with their self-serving legal memo.

Since they have not already done so speaks volumes.

***

In the end, it all devolves into slimy politics. All they need is a trope, a literary device, some pretty redacted language as window dressing to absolve themselves as accessories to coldblooded, state-sponsored murder.

With a new Judge Barron now only a step away from a Supreme Court appointment, tell me again why it's incumbent to elect a Democratic president over a Republican. 

Sucked Into Vortex Theater

It's memoir season. It's celebrity elevator fights and office intrigue season. It's the overlapping of the acts in never-ending presidential campaign season theater season. Contenders for high office fall all over themselves pretending to be for the little guy, while actual presidents  no longer need even pretend to be for the little guy. Instead, they're in campaign mode for impending Private Life as they openly play golf with vulture capitalists and give speeches at Walmart and praise financial predators for their social impact efforts. (And to stave off the lame duck boredom, still enjoy the power to order drone strikes and plot coups during normal business hours.)

First, the memoirs. I've listened to Elizabeth Warren read her own book (she also wrote it herself, judging from the emotion behind every single word. I don't know how she can maintain the outrage without exploding.) I've listened to an excerpt from Hillary Clinton's memoir (she got a lot of scripting help, judging from the robotic flow of the few words she's teased us with with so far.) I am avoiding Timothy Geithner's book, because the avoidance of Timothy Geithner in all his manifestations is probably a mentally healthy thing to do. But judging from the reviews, his tome is destined for the bargain bins, even as he pockets his outrageous advance and speaking fees and mirthlessly chuckles all the way back to the bank.

As much as I want to root for Jill Abramson, the deposed New York Times editor, I simply cannot whip myself into a froth of outrage over her firing. For despite her shoddy treatment at the hands of a trust fund brat and a whole cavalcade of snivelling men in suits, her own hands are dirty. Most recently, she has overseen  the paper's disgraceful stenographic coverage of the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine and the publication of phony photographic evidence backing it up. She did not order a retraction or issue an apology. So, I can think of plenty of other downtrodden women to root for besides a multimillionaire who will not have to apply for food stamps as she juggles the myriad offers.

It's kind of the the same feeling I get now that Hillary Clinton's mental status and age are being openly questioned by Turd Blossom Rove. The pseudo-liberal female chorus erupts into new stanzas of "You Go Girl!"  I can think of plenty of other role models for vicarious victimhood besides a woman raking in millions in book deals and Goldman Sachs speeches.

It's like the suffocating feeling I got when I read the latest drama critique from Times columnist Frank Bruni, who today pontificates on Hillary's obstacle course while ironically complaining about the coverage swirling like an F-0 tornado all over the mass media landscape.  Such columns, of course, elicit standard partisan outrage and a rousing chorus of "You Go Girl!" with the Lesser Evilism 2012 back-up singers of "Supreme Court, Hold Your Nose!" fame.

I couldn't take it any more. I couldn't seem to help myself. I got sucked into the swirling maelstrom of meaninglessness. I jumped in with a Reader Comment:

"Hard Choices" -- the title of her forthcoming memoir -- should also be our first clue about what a Clinton third term forebodes. Because "hard choices" is also the common euphemism employed by the plutocratic deficit hawks from both parties to describe the planned gutting of FDR's New Deal and other social programs. As in, "you common folk have to make the hard choice to trim Social Security benefits so as not to rob future generations, while we oligarchs make the hard choice of reaping all the benefits."

Hillary, judging from the age of her recently deceased mother and her gold-plated health insurance, should live long and prosper.

Meanwhile, something she said recently should have us asking the tough questions about the hard choices:

"The 1990s taught us that even in the face of difficult, long-term economic trends, it is possible, through smart policies and sound investments, to enjoy broad-based growth and shared prosperity."

Long on platitudes, short on substance. Nothing, for instance, on taxing the rich or reining in the too big to fail/jail banks. The 90s brought us the end of direct aid to the poor and the reckless repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led directly to financial catastrophe, mass foreclosures and unemployment. The so-called Clinton boom years were a bubble.

Hillary has obstacles from her past, all right. They're named Rubin, Greenspan, Summers, and NAFTA.

Her present obstacles include Warren, Sanders, and the lingering power of the Occupy movement.

Mark Leibovich, who wrote his own memoir ("This Town")  of Beltway intrigue as practiced by the rich and shallow, has now written a bitingly hilarious preview of the Clinton opus. Here's an excerpt:

Hard Choices” was no doubt similarly prosecuted into existence by an army of ghostwriters, editors, researchers, fact-checkers and “superlawyers” who have presumably weeded out the tiniest specks of Benghazi cover-up catnip, bitterness over 2008, discord with Bill or second-guessing of Obama-Biden in the White House. Even if its newsworthy revelations are negligible, the “rollout” in advance of its June 10 release date will be staged at Normandy levels of intensity. There will be the requisite negotiations and strategic media “leaking” and the parceling out of “exclusives” like, say, the testimonial for Hillary’s late mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, which landed in Vogue just in time for Mother’s Day.

 “Hard Choices” also seems to borrow from another trope of its species. Regardless of what the author has accomplished, in the self-mythologizing world of Memoir Land, a life is cast as a riveting series of pivotal moments — choices, calls, decisions, things requiring courage. Politicians love to fetishize themselves as the makers of really tough decisions, befitting their leaderly burdens, as if no one else in the world has ever had to pick between unsavory outcomes. These sagas place the protagonists in a special class of “decider,” to use the term popularized by George W. Bush, author of a memoir, “Decision Points.”

If you're looking for a genuinely gripping and ripping good read, meanwhile, I plugged one in my comment on Paul Krugman's own review of Timothy Geithner's memoir yesterday:

One of Geithner's most ridiculous conceits is that he was a "public servant" and not a creature of Wall Street. As president of the powerful N.Y. Fed, he was, in fact, a banker's banker, the fox who guarded the henhouse, the guy that the sociopaths of finance could rely on. And given the deregulation spree that had gained steam under Reagan, loaded up on steroids under Clinton, and turned into an imperialistic blood-bath under Bush, collapse was inevitable.

As Nomi Prins lays out in her excellent book, "All the President's Bankers," when the Fed was first dreamed up by the original savvy robber barons after a panic in the last gilded age, its mandate to ease unemployment was a fig leaf to ensure congressional approval. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously, then or now.

From 2002 to 2007, says Prins, the biggest US banks created nearly 80 percent of $14 trillion worth of global mortgage backed securities, asset backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and other toxic brews. Yet, in a 2004 report, Geithner assured everybody there was no risk of a housing bubble.

And when it all went kaboom, he blasted right into the White House, failing upward just like the rest of his cohort. He ensured, as Elizabeth Warren tells it in her own truthful book, that TARP "foamed the runway" so the banks could spread out foreclosures, thus doubly victimizing the public.

Bankers are richer than ever, more reckless than ever. The next big crash is not a matter of if, but when.

So, Krugman is finally implicitly criticizing the Obama administration. So, the Democratic strategy seems to be going something like this:

Play up the inequality angle for all it's worth. Ignore Obama, and let Warren run wild through the mid-terms in hopes of Democratic sellouts squeaking through to victory on her coattails and fundraising acumen. Put Michelle and Eric Holder out there as born-again civil rights leaders to drum up enthusiasm from disaffected civil rights nostalgia buffs. To avoid appearances of a coronation, perhaps let Warren or Bernie Sanders pretend to mount a primary challenge. Hillary will pretend to be pushed left, perhaps even tapping Warren as her running mate and thus restoring the credibility of the Democratic Party.  Assuming she does, and she wins, what better way to neuter Warren and get her off her anti-banker soapbox  and onto a very short Clinton leash, soon to be assimilated into the Clinton vortex.

Must. Resist. The. Suck.

Atrocity Exhibition in the Gilded Age

It could always be worse, I suppose. At least they're not selling the "Twisted Metal" series of X-rated video games in the September 11 Memorial Museum gift shop. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a 9/11 souvenir shop. It will open its doors next week, to coincide with the grand opening of our Great National Shrine to Terror, appropriately located just blocks away from that other terror enclave known as Wall Street in lower Manhattan.

A dedication gala reserved for a class-spanning cavalcade of potentates, politicians, CEOs, corporate sponsors, emergency personnel and survivors was being held today.

But back to shopping. Among the mementos on sale are adorable search and rescue dog plushies. They're euphemistally being  labeled "rescue" animals for Disneyfication-of-atrocity purposes, due to their rapid redeployment as cadaver dogs after the tower collapses. 

And since the 9/11 gift shop is an equal opportunity purveyor, the puppies are available in both black Lab and yellow Lab. 

  The selection doesn't end with toys. For fashionistas anxious to show off their somberness for all the folks back home, the "Darkness" clothing label is offering a special line of tee-shirts and hoodies. This couture is not recommended for wearing upon dark skin, especially in Florida and wherever the NYPD is on patrol.

And for those hopelessly romantic death-denialists out there, there's a wide variety of "Survivor Tree" jewelry, named after the oak tree damaged in the attacks and nursed back to health by some volunteer horticulturists.

  Finally,don't forget your WTC Map & Memorial Tote Bag. For only $20, you'll have a sturdy place to stash your 9/11 plushies, earrings, mug, cap, cell phone cover, mousepad, magnets, keychains and a wide variety of 9/11 Christmas ornaments.

Are you worried that the commercialization of one of the most horrific crimes in history might be too intense for the sensitive shopper?  Well, you can ease yourselves. Because all proceeds will be used for the outrageously expensive upkeep of the 9/11 Museum itself. You see, the multimillion-dollar tax deductible predatory loans investments from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and virtually all of corporate America apparently are not enough to keep Terror alive, year after year, for all eternity.

 And heaven forbid that any proceeds are used to give away tickets to those New Yorkers who can't afford the $24 price of admission. The indigent population in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the World will get nothing. The ailing, poisoned first responders of 9/11 will not be seeing any additional proceeds either, despite the fact that their badges and insignia are being honored as religious artifacts and sold at high markups in the gift shop.

To be totally fair, though, Museum directors are not charging admission to children. They also don't recommend attendance by children under the age of 10. The exhibits are that disturbing.

If you can't or won't visit the glorified crime scene, you can still order 9/11 stuff from the gift shop website. And should your merchandise arrive in a mangled condition, there's a 45-day window for returns or refunds. Your complete satisfaction is their goal.

But, I digress from the sanctity of this surreal occasion.

In the 9/11 museum itself, the thrills will be muted, and open displays of  enjoyment will not be tolerated. Taking a cue from peep show culture, long-suppressed graphic video and audio of human beings in the act of death will be only available for discreet viewing in private rooms. Similarly, the unidentified human remains newly arrived from the city morgue for museum interment will be hidden from rubber-neckers who cannot prove that they are immediate family. Fetishists will have to be satisfied using their limited imaginations as they ponder the grotesque tableaux of mangled fire trucks, orphaned shoes, melted girders, and other relics and artifacts of mass murder. The mausoleum within the museum is off-limits to mere gawkers.

And J.G. Ballard must be rolling in his grave.

The late novelist actually presaged the 9/11 museum and the dystopian decadence of the 21st century Gilded Age in his fiction. His novel "The Atrocity Exhibition" included a controversial short story called "Crash". The plot, such as it is, takes place amidst a museum display of horrendous car crash memorabilia.

"All over the world," Ballard wrote, "major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized in its most digestible form."

Unlike the glitzy 9/11 shrine, we never do find out whether Ballard's atrocity exhibition of gruesome relics is real, or whether it's simply a figment of the protagonist's psychotic imagination.  First published in Great Britain in 1970, the book was considered so disgusting that copies were soon yanked from store shelves and destroyed. The pre-9/11 world apparently was not yet ready for science fiction pornography.

The late Christopher Hitchens described Ballard as a "catastrophist" who specialized in "dark materials," (as in the 9/11 Boutique "Darkness" clothing line) his inspiration flowing in a straight line from Jonathan Swift. In his review of Ballard's short story collection, Hitchens wrote:

Another early story (though not represented here: the claim of this volume to be “complete” is somewhat deceptive) in something of the same style, “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” ignited a ridiculous fuss in the very news rags whose ghoulish coverage of her life Ballard was intending to satirize. Randolph Churchill led the charge, demanding punishment for the tiny magazine that printed it. This “modest proposal” furnishes one of many clues to a spring of Ballard’s inspiration, which is fairly obviously the work of Jonathan Swift. In 1964 he even wrote an ultra-macabre story, “The Drowned Giant,” which tells of what happens when the corpse of a beautiful but gigantic man washes ashore on a beach “five miles to the north-west of the city.” The local Lilliputians find cheap but inventive ways of desecrating and disfiguring the body before cutting it up for souvenirs and finally rendering it down in big vats. One might characterize this as the microcosmically ideal Ballard fantasy, in that it partakes of the surreal—the “Gulliver” being represented as a huge flesh statue based on the work of Praxiteles—as well as of the Freudian: “as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite.” In the pattern of many other stories, the narrator adopts the tone of a pathologist dictating a detached report of gross anatomy. A single phrase, colossal wreck, is a borrowing from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which may be the closest that Ballard ever came to a concession to the Romantic school.

 Another and nearer literary source is provided by the name—Traven—of the solitary character in “The Terminal Beach.” This is one of two tales—the other being “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”—in which Ballard makes an imaginarium out of the ruined scapes of World War II. Like his modern but vacant cities full of ghostly tower blocks (he is obsessed with towers of all sorts) and abandoned swimming pools, the Pacific and Atlantic beaches, still covered by concrete blocks and bunkers, furnish the ideal setting for a Ballardian wasteland. The beach in the first story has the additional advantage of having been the site of an annihilating nuclear test. The revenant shapes of long-dead Japanese and Germans are allowed a pitiless flicker before their extinction.

 It was such an innocent time, that Pre-9/11 Era. And then Everything Changed (TM). We were speed-read the Shock Doctrine. The NSA revved up into high gear. The Bill of Rights crashed and burned and became a relic practically overnight. (all except the Second Amendment, which immediately began consuming the other nine, course by voracious course.)

Disaster Capitalism ran wild.

 “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans.” -- Barack Obama, 9/11 Museum dedication.

 “The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on its shroud." -- J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

Update, 5/19: Here's more about the "absurd" 9/11 gift shop. H/T Pearl.

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