America Is Bummed

Not that we really needed an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll to tell us this stuff:

More people than ever before in the history of the greatest exceptional g-d-blessed nation that the world has never known now think that their children will be worse off than they are. The magic number is three-quarters, or 76% (as an aide-memoire for the pop quiz, just remember the magical year that the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776).

  Also for the first time, most Americans now believe that record wealth disparity is a driver of the lousy economy. And for one more time in a whole series of many times, most Americans blame their elected officials for the perpetuation of the chronic lousiness. But in a deviation, more people are now including their own particular pork-barrel pols in the despised category.

Despite the vaunted recovery (of the One Percent) two-thirds of us still feel mired in a recession. Forty per cent of us report that at least one member of our family has lost a job in the past five years. Most of us feel that the country is in decline.

So, while Americans are bummed, their disaffection does have a healthy basis in reality. It's what they call an exogenous depression. It's a malady caused by outside forces. Therefore, these polls are actually a faint sign of hope: the majority of people at least are correct about the root causes.

The people win when the people refuse to blame themselves, despite the best efforts of the propagandists of Bootstrapville. 

It even sounds like the "folks" are morphing from depression into anger and actually directing their rage at all the right culprits.

Whether the people can resist the usual "divide and conquer" tactics commonly used by our leaders whenever the national mood turns sour and their power is threatened remains to be seen.

 Do we turn against each other when politicians manipulate such hot button issues as immigration, or do we embrace solidarity and finally turn against our common plutocratic enemy?

Never say never. Strange things happen.

When the Depraved Get Depressed

Just when you thought the filthy rich couldn't get any more depraved, they get so mind-numbingly depraved that they don't even care what the deprived might think of them. From the New York Post:

A Manhattan corporate attorney is leading a group of wealthy Hamptonites who want to tear down a Water Mill road sign honoring a nun killed in a 2012 hit-and-run — because, he whines, he’s tired of repeating her depressing tale to guests.

“Every time someone visits, I am forced to recount this tragedy because they ask who Sister Jackie was,” John Carley, a former counsel to rental-car giant Avis, said in a January letter to Southampton Town officials.

“While I have no doubt Sister Jackie was a wonderful person and deserves to be remembered by those who knew her, her tragic death while visiting us is not an event residents wish to recall.”

Town highways boss Alex Gregor had installed a blue sign that reads “Sister Jackie’s Way” above the normal green street marker last summer to memorialize Sister Jacqueline Walsh, 59, who was killed walking near the Sisters of Mercy convent on Rose Hill Road in July 2012.

Sister Jackie

Since the majority of rich denizens of the road have now officially voted to remove the sign, town officials will comply with the request in order to lift all those heavy, unspiritual spirits.

Among those demanding that the memorial to the nun be torn down is Pia Lindstrom, who is married to Carley. A former NBC reporter, she is a daughter of late actress Ingrid Bergman, who famously starred as kindly Sister Mary Benedict opposite Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary's. 

The Anti-Nun Nonentities

 
You might think that Lindstrom, the anti-nun, would be auditioning for the role of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. But she's really just a critic, and not only of street signs that interfere with the shallow chitchat at her garden parties. Here's one of her blurbs for New York Magazine's annoying "The Best of Everything" feature:

If you walk along Flying Point Beach in Water Mill, there's a warm inlet of water where children can play because it's shallow. Also, there's never anybody at all on Wyandanch beach in Southampton.

It's as quiet as a nun without a street sign memorial to spoil the ambience.

Right next to Lindstrom's beach blurb is an entry from one Lizzie Grubman, who raved, "Everybody goes to Gibson in Sagaponack, a sceney beach that feels public, even though it's private."

 You may remember Lizzie as the socialite who created quite a sceney scene when she mowed down 16 people with her Mercedes SUV at a Hamptons bar way back in 2001 and served all of a month in jail on multiple felony counts, including drunk driving, reckless endangerment and assault. (To be fair, she had nothing to do with the hit and run of the nun.) Lately, she has become notorious in the Hamptons for stiffing her servants out of their wages and bouncing checks. It must be like there is never anybody at all in the world except Lizzie Grubman and Pia Lindstrom.

One Too Many Days On A Shallow Beach: La Lizzie

Gregor, the Sister Jackie highwayman memorialist, is sanguine about the latest brouhaha:

“I guess rich people, especially around here, get annoyed pretty easily,” he said.

Easily annoyed.... and, it turns out, very easily depressed. Hoi polloi, both dead and alive, are causing the phone lines of Hamptons psychotherapists to light up  this summer. The New York Times, keen chronicler of  the crowd that "summers," is on the tragedy:

The East End of Long Island has long been one of the most sought-after summertime escapes, one generally out of reach for the average vacationer as fishing villages and farms have become playgrounds for the rich. But the democratizing power of the Internet has turned more Hamptonites into prospering landlords, given visitors many more options and brokers many fewer, and left local officials busy trying to keep a cork on all the new activity.

Websites like Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO and even Craigslist are vastly reshaping the seasonal market, letting renters and owners transact for as little as $75 a night in an area where six figures for one month is not extraordinary. But as in New York City, where some sites, notably Airbnb, have come under scrutiny, in the town of East Hampton, which includes the villages of Sag Harbor, Amagansett, Springs and Montauk, many listings blatantly violate local laws severely restricting short-term rentals.

Street signs honoring merciful nuns. And now Craigslist? Oh, the humanity. Somebody, call Pia Lindstrom's husband, pronto! Alert Lizzie to get the Merc out of the 10-car garage!

“If you’re staying for a month or two, you probably want to behave yourself and be a good neighbor, but if it’s just for a weekend, it’s probably just to party,” Fran Donovan, a local mental health therapist, said on Thursday while enjoying an iced tea at the Golden Pear Cafe on Newtown Lane. Ms. Donovan said one of her patients’ top anxieties these days was the explosion of short-term rentals.

A house down the block from hers has already been rented out online to large parties twice this season. “Does my business benefit from people coming out? Of course,” she said, referring to her seasonal clients. “But it seems like everyone’s trying to ride the gravy train, and if they’re not careful, it’s going to crash.”

 Somebody call Doctor Freud, before their pampered dispirited heads explode.

On second thought, somebody call a Hamptons yoga instructor named Erika Halweil, who infuriated New York Times readers when the "Vows" section ran a story last year recounting the "spiritual awakening" she herself experienced when she accidentally struck and killed a child with her car, resulting in a better life for Erika Halweil, who was changed for the better by the sight of the victim's spirit leaving the body. So don't get mad, rich people. It is absolutely possible to get even more self-fulfillment at an Ayn Rand Yoga Center in a tony neighborhood near you. 

On third thought, somebody call Doctor Piketty and have him give a lecture to these rich assholes. They need to be reminded that all this record wealth inequality is hazardous to their health, too. There's Affluenza, there's an epidemic of narcissism, but there's also TB and MERS and Ebola. So if they're not careful about reining in their greed, and sharing a little wealth with the teeming masses, they're liable to go crashing down just like Sister Jackie's sign.

And they will be shown no mercy. And nobody will ever dream of naming a street after them.

Not Intimidated by Depravity: Alex Gregor (photo, N.Y. Post)

Depraved Diplomacy

Just when you thought the official depravity couldn't get any worse, it gets mind-numbingly worse:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail.

Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion.

In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals - a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally.

It's bad enough that the CIA used a hepatitis screening program in Pakistan as a ruse to gather DNA evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, resulting in an actual outbreak of polio in that country when the fraudulence was exposed and citizens refused to avail themselves of legitimate vaccination programs.

 But this operation in Cuba is even worse, because the Obama administration has exploited unqualified students for use as agitators and undercover agents for purposes of regime change. Not to nab a terrorist, but to foment the overthrow of a legitimate leftist government in order to make that part of the world safe for ravenous capitalism.

 And now that the White House's cynical ploy has been exposed, it might even have succeeded in making Cuban youths think twice about getting tested for HIV.

And to add insult to unthinkable injury, the administration paid its democracy mules sub-minimum wage. It even made their relatives unwitting couriers of American cash.

Then again, these adolescent agents are not exceptional Americans. They will not be allowed anywhere near Obama's vaunted "opportunity ladders" even if they work hard and play by the rules. They got little to no job training.They are from some of the same poor drug and gang-infested, CIA-destabilized regions from which tens of thousands of other youths are fleeing for their very lives. They are, therefore, highly expendable and exploitable. Obama used them the same way unscrupulous con artists advertise summer jobs in which naive kids end up getting dumped into cities far from their homes to sell magazines door to door.

In all, nearly a dozen Latin Americans served in the program in Cuba, for pay as low as $5.41 an hour.

The AP found USAID and its contractor, Creative Associates International, continued the program even as U.S. officials privately told their government contractors to consider suspending travel to Cuba after the arrest of contractor Alan Gross, who remains imprisoned after smuggling in sensitive technology.

The Cuban operation is part of a shadowy foreign policy which allows the government to partner with so-called "aid" agencies as cover for its coups and other mischief. It works the same way as the outsourced torture contracts. It allows for arms-length immoral transactions and plausible deniability when things go awry.

The use of callow youths as spies and their placement into dangerous situations is a new low, even for this White House. And it was only a couple of days ago that, with Obama's bland admission that "we tortured some folks" and that he had only outlawed "some" of the torture techniques, I thought I'd seen it all.

I was wrong. Now he can add labor rights abuse (and depending on the spies' ages, even child abuse) and a potential new AIDS epidemic to his list of accomplishments. Why do I keep thinking of Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man?" Oh yeah... the polio vaccine scam and the memorable scene of the exploited kids in the hospital beds.

Creative Associates (a name more than creepy enough for a Graham Greene spy thriller) does blandly admit, right on its web-page, that its alleged mission of global HIV eradication has plenty of ulterior, free-market motives (Tell-tale Orwellian weasel words are in my bold):

For over a decade, Creative has served as an implementing partner for HIV and health interventions worldwide. Creative works with local communities as primary platforms for development interventions in health, HIV prevention, literacy, national stabilization, elections, life skills, and capacity building often leveraging schools and their unique reach into those societies. Throughout its efforts, Creative remains committed to the “whole child.” We bring capacity in each area relevant for a child’s development and growth and throughout the life cycle: literacy and cognitive development; health and well-being; economic security; and a safe and secure environment. This holistic approach fundamentally recognizes the community’s role and impact on children’s development.

In his World AIDS Day 2012 address, President Barack Obama declared that “we stand at a tipping point in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and working together, we can realize our historic opportunity to bring that fight to an end.” Creative is committed to contributing to the reality of an AIDS-free generation through its work -- promoting HIV prevention in communities and schools, supporting access to care and treatment services, and improving economic livelihoods through partnerships and linkages.

Creative’s keen sensitivity to local culture gives us intimate insight we apply to develop and integrate customized technical solutions to build country capacity, scale evidence-based technical strategies, promote gender equality, and ensure program sustainability. Creative incorporates monitoring and evaluation metrics into programs from inception to measure accurate outcomes, foster transparency, and increase sustainability. Our sustained commitment to health and HIV interventions has grown from the meaningful opportunity to save mothers and children, foster an AIDS-free generation, and ultimately support people around the world to better their lives.

That last paragraph, by its very banality, is the most cynically telling of all. It jibes so conveniently with the neoliberal "empowerment of women" movement which gives cover to so much of the American meddling abroad. How using the young as spies promotes "gender equality" is anybody's guess. But it's worth noting that Hillary "It Takes a Village" Clinton was secretary of state when this whole regime change fraudulent HIV initiative was dreamed up shortly after Obama took office and promised a better relationship with Cuba.

 Creative Associates itself was founded by a female "venture philanthropist."  M. Charito Kruvant was recently named among Washington's "100 Most Powerful Women." 

Go figure.

Her agency was also behind the fake Cuban Twitter scam revealed by the AP earlier this year. A longer version of the article linked above can be found here. (One young Costa Rican operative tracked down by AP reporters is not talking, having signed a "nondisclosure" agreement with the US Government on the illegal operation.)

As Moon of Alabama observes, "This only shows again why every nation on this world must distrust ANY word that comes out of official Washington. The leaders from African countries who are just now visiting Washington should keep the Cuban example in mind when Obama tries to charm them into U.S. dependency. None of his words can be trusted or be accepted as having any real meaning."


When there's money to be made, particularly at the expense of the desperate and the marginalized, there is no limit to the depravity, newly euphemized as "venture philanthropy" to disguise its innate ugliness.  Money begets power begets more money begets more power. Too much is never quite enough when expansion is the only goal.

And as Hannah Arendt noted in her seminal work on the subject, the unhealthy mixture of superfluous (excess) capital and superfluous human beings is always a recipe for totalitarian disaster.

A President Bares His Teeth

"We tortured some folks," President Obama casually remarked as a kind of afterthought at the end of his Friday afternoon press conference. 

Obama Lightens Up on Torture (Aug. 1 Press Con)

Let those brutally cavalier words be chiseled deep into the door of his soon-to-be-built shrine to himself so that visitors can be warned to "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

"Folks" should also be advised to bring their own barf bags, because they probably won't be on sale in the gift shop alongside Barack's (TM) golf bags.... and the sweatshop-produced Bo and Sunny plushies and Michelle's overpriced "Drink Up! (TM) plastic bottles of designer tap water.

Seriously. I didn't think that the Drone President could possibly do or say anything else to make me queasier than I normally feel whenever I look at him on TV. So I really do have to hand it to him. He totally outdid himself in the sociopathy department on Friday.

Even normally staunch Obama supporters like Charles Pierce are disgusted. (" ... If the president thinks he can use the (torture) word and then just walk away from its profound implication in a cloud of banalities, he's been out on the golf course without a hat too long. Yeesh.")

The only thing worse than Obama's folksy sangfroid was that he admitted the torture and promised protection for the torturers all by himself, with no prodding whatsoever from the feeble White House press corps. They were more interested in the theatrical lawsuit being brought by Republicans, and of course, the kidnapped Israeli soldier who is so much more important to their corporate sponsors than 1400 slaughtered Palestinian civilians.

When Obama shockingly confessed to torture and the enabling of torture, there was not one single follow-up question from the scribbling stenographers in the audience. 

But they fell all over themselves wishing him a happy birthday before he strutted out of the room, cool as a GMO cucumber. The silence of the lambs was deafening. If one of them so much as bleats, their future access to the White House can so easily be denied. But it was nice to imagine the righteous hectoring ghost of Helen Thomas in the front row anyway.

Nauseating as they were, the president's remarks are still worth quoting, and parsing, if only for posterity.

On Brennan and the CIA, the RDI report has been transmitted, the declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee.

Not so fast, Barry!  Dianne Feinstein just got handed your bowdlerized report, and it's been redacted into such a condensed piece of Readers Digest pulp that she is delaying release to the public "until further notice." She is not pleasured! She is holding it back (or pretending to, for Kabuki purposes) in its current heavily censored form, at least until another make-up/make-out session can be arranged. possibly in a secret room off the Oval Office.

     I have full confidence in John Brennan.  I think he has acknowledged and directly apologized to Senator Feinstein that CIA personnel did not properly handle an investigation as to how certain documents that were not authorized to be released to the Senate staff got somehow into the hands of the Senate staff.  And it’s clear from the IG report that some very poor judgment was shown in terms of how that was handled.  Keep in mind, though, that John Brennan was the person who called for the IG report, and he’s already stood up a task force to make sure that lessons are learned and mistakes are resolved.

Actually, John Brennan has full confidence in the continuing loyalty of Obama, who Brennan personally  brought over to the dark side for intensive tutoring in extra-judicial kill skills. These two miscreants are full and equal partners in the drone assassination program, which by some estimates has killed upward of 5,000 "folks." And anyway, Brennan is such a great spy that he was even able to investigate his own agency as well as spy on the Senate. A felony crime and an outrageous insult to the separation of government powers has thusly been reduced to "some very poor judgment."  Mistakes were made, lessons learned, and political tongues are held very firmly in cheek.

     With respect to the larger point of the RDI report itself, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong.  We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks.  We did some things that were contrary to our values. 

Yeah, so "we" tortured some folks, but Obama has decreed that serial criminal assault (and in some cases, premeditated murder) will be reduced to temporary lapses in judgment and morality. Referring to CIA victims as "folks" instantly demeans them. I've written before about Obama's chronic over-use of this word. As Noam Chomsky warns, "When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit or worse that is coming." 

     I understand why it happened.  I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this.  And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.  And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots. 

Get ready for a brand-new criminal defense: Fear. Obama just gave tacit approval to George Zimmerman's fear defense in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. 

Those New York City cops who killed a man with a choke-hold last month? They were simply afraid. The plump asthmatic guy selling loosies on the street might have been imminently getting ready to attack a whole phalanx of scared militarized police with his unarmed flesh. 

In this terror-filled world created by unfettered capitalism and the state-sponsored terror that perpetuates it, if you torture or kill somebody you can even call yourself a patriot. Obama totally gets you, because he is one killer patriot himself.

Harmless "folks" can get so pressured that sometimes they just snap. So if we dare criticize poor beleaguered heroes like Dick Cheney, we're just being sanctimonious. This hearkens back to Obama calling people who complained about his extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "sanctimonious purists".  It's the dread sanctimony slur again!  But, at least he didn't call us "sanctimonious folks." I would have died after throwing up.

     But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong.  And that's what that report reflects.  And that's the reason why, after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some (my bold) of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.

Obama just pulled one of his verbal fast ones. He said he banned "some" of the extraordinary interrogation techniques. (Notice how quickly Obama again softens torture in the Age of Obama into "interrogation techniques"?) There is plenty of evidence that his administration still outsources torture to other countries. And the United Nations has also deemed his continued force-feeding of Guantanamo detainees to be torture. Plus, Obama has recently approved the torture of marine animals through underwater sound-blasting to detect gas and oil.

     And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.  And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.  And that needs to be -- that needs to be understood and accepted.  And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don't do it again in the future.

Since Obama has already guaranteed that no torturers will ever be prosecuted in a court of law, "hope" that it won't be repeated is pretty much all we've got. Waterboarding of American POWs by the Japanese during World War II was punishable by death. Waterboarding of nameless "folks" in the manufactured War on Terror is punishable by being called a patriot by the Commander in Chief.

George Tenet, who oversaw torture during the Bush administration, was awarded the Medal of Freedom. Brennan can probably look forward to getting the same honor from his boss.

After one of the White House press corpses asked a question about how terrified we all should be with a bunch of African folks coming to D.C. for a summit on how Mister Market can best profit in the Dark Continent, Obama assured the nation that visitors will be thoroughly screened for Ebola before being allowed to get anywhere near healthy American folks. 

And then he allowed One Final Question. (I was holding my breath in faint hope.)

Q    Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT:  There you go, April.  (Laughter.)  That’s what I was talking about -- somebody finally wished me happy birthday -- although it isn’t until Monday, you’re right. 

Thank you so much.

With handpicked corporate journos like that, Obama does indeed have so very much to be thankful for.

He's right about the Ebola virus, though. If that plague comes anywhere near the cesspit of corruption known as Washington, DC, it will probably keel right over and die of fright.

Makeout Sessions at the Highest Levels

Two weeks after the Obama Justice Department announced that it wouldn't bother investigating the CIA for allegedly hacking into the computers of Senate staffers investigating CIA torture, the CIA has come clean about hacking into the computers of Senate staffers. 

In case that verbiage is too obfuscatory for you, let the CIA, via McClatchy Newspapers, come clean in its own cogent way:

Findings of the investigation by the CIA Inspector General’s Office “include a judgment that some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009,” CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement.

In case that verbiage is still too murky for the comprehension of the average intelligent person, let us be super-duper crystal clear:

The spooks broke the law and domestically spied on Congress. They got caught in the act. They denied it at first. And like any abusive spook worth his salt, CIA Chief John Brennan proceeded to publicly impugn the mental health ("beyond the scope of sanity") of his chief accuser, pictured below

Senate Moll Dianne Feinstein

Star-crossed bureaucrats that they are, they soon kissed and made up behind closed doors. Therefore, hapless Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to be a third wheel. He didn't want to spoil the rapprochement by airing the squabbling pair's dirty laundry. But since other dirty laundry (the Senate's CIA torture report)  is going to get aired anyway after a thorough whitewashing by the Obama White House, Brennan decided to manfully admit to just a teensy little bit of jealous cheating (hacking his moll) to deflect attention from the felony physical assault already perpetrated upon hundreds of CIA torture victims -- not to mention the criminal propaganda assault soon to be perpetrated on the report-reading public.

Just to make sure that he is completely forgiven, Brennan this week held yet another makeout session with Feinstein, which was really a three-way involving  Republican heartthrob Saxby Chambliss. (Is there a more seductively evocative name than Saxby Chambliss?) This guarantees that the ultimate whitewashing of torture will be completely and unimpeachably bipartisan. And to further prove what a peachy abuser he is, Brennan will also submit his apology for the high level review of Fox News contributor and former senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. Thrilling disciplinary measures have not been ruled out! So stay tuned for evocative yardsticks upon brass knuckles.... and plenty of lash-ready wet noodles.

If there is one thing that the CIA (Criminal Idiots of America) know how to do, it's covering all their bases as well as covering their own asses.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/31/234997/cia-staffers-accessed-senate.html#storylink=cpy

Everywhere Is War: Gaza Edition

Let's just say that both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt would be having a field day with the way the Western media are covering both the Forever Wars and the Forever Propaganda Wars. Luckily for us, the major actors are dumb enough and clumsy enough to be caught in the act of gross dishonesty on a regular basis. Every day comes news of some major new atrocity and every day come revelations of the atrocious ways the media are trying to hide the truth and twist the facts.

If there's  one thing we've learned since the latest assault on Gaza began, it's that the American government, the Israeli Government, and the corporate mainstream media are, for all practical purposes, one and the same entity.  And that the narrative which they sell on a daily basis -- that Republicans and Democrats are sworn enemies -- is a complete fabrication.

As Counterpunch and other outlets have revealed, there's even a secret instruction manual floating around which lays out myriad clever ways to "blame your victim/sympathize with your victim." It was written by GOP propagandist Frank Luntz, specifically for pro-Israel apologists who were desperate for bromides to justify the last mass slaughter five years ago. These identical talking points are still being used with mindless abandon across the political spectrum... which in America the Righty and Mighty, runs the gamut from A to B. (H/T Mary McCarthy.)

Republican and Democratic politicians and government bureaucrats and ruling class personalities all joined hands at a Support Israel Rally Monday in Washington, D.C.  It might have been titled "We're Saying It Loud and We're Saying It Proud: We're All Neocons Now!" We haven't seen anything like it since these phony merchants of death all joined hands and sang America the  Beautiful and replaced the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act after the CIA blowback attack known as 9/11.

The Wall Street Journal was on it, with all the vapidity it could muster:

Speaking at an impromptu gathering of Jewish leaders here, congressional leaders denounced Hamas as a terror organization.“We will not equate professional militaries with terrorist organizations that use human shields as they seek maximum civilian casualties,” House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said, pledging Congress’ support for Israel. “America must send this clear, public and united message: Israel is our friend, and Israel’s enemies are our enemies. And as long as I am speaker of the House, I give you my word this will be our cause.”

Multiple lawmakers, including House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), called for a demilitarization of Gaza to end violence in the region. “If there is to be a political solution, it is imperative that Hamas is disarmed,” Mr. Hoyer said, adding that Palestinians must have confidence that their government is using its resources to support them, rather than invest in weapons.....

Susan Rice, the White House national security adviser, told several hundred people at the conference that Israel has “the same unequivocal right to self-defense as every other nation,” and that Hamas is to blame for the violence. “Hamas fired the rockets. Hamas deliberately targeted Israeli citizens, particularly civilians,” she said. “Hamas refused an early plan for a cease-fire. Hamas, in a time of glaring human need, instead of investing in the future of Gaza’s children, built tunnels to kidnap and kill Israelis. So Hamas initiated this conflict. And, Hamas has dragged it on.”

Meanwhile, lest too much of the light of truth escape from Gaza, its one electrical power plant blew up in one of those same spontaneous combustions that have been mysteriously afflicting Palestinian schools, hospitals, United Nations shelters and places of worship. More than a thousand civilians, at least a third of them children, have been killed. The official media narrative would have us believe that this "collateral damage" was deliberately conceived and birthed by Palestinian parents to serve as human shield photo-ops.

The establishment of a Heart of Darkness in what's been described as the world's largest outdoor prison should save NBC the trouble of having to scrub out the actual cause of the combustions from its website. What journalists can no longer actually see will not hurt the Israeli government's explosion of propaganda. Moon of Alabama has the details of what is only the latest and more blatant example of self-censorship of the "free" press.

And then there's David Gregory of Press the Meat. He is the poster child for the way not to do slick propaganda. Rumor has it that he's on his way out, but for now, he is a very non-useful idiot indeed. David Gregory didn't even try to hide the fact that he was blind-siding a U.N. official with some phony film footage purporting to show a Hamas rocket launch from a U.N. school. To the official's credit, his reaction to Gregory's ham-handed antics was barely contained laughter.

And as for Barack Obama: the official narrative is the same old, same old schizophrenia. He hates it when children die, but supports Israel's right to slaughter them. He loves peace even though he himself wages war.  Common corporate media verbiage has him alternately "grappling" and "wrestling" with the tragedy, the weight of the entire world upon his inner Buddha. He has a "frosty" relationship with Netanyahu. He occasionally picks up the phone to impart some tepid wrath.

Philip Weiss, though, has a reality check, pointing out that it was Obama who quashed the global condemnation (the Goldstone Report) of Israel's previous  onslaught on Gaza, and effectively granted Bibi perpetual immunity from war crimes prosecution. Therefore, the current fatalities should indeed weigh heavily upon whatever passes for the president's conscience.

Paul Ryan Does Christmas in July

It's as regular as melting Salvador Dali clockwork: Paul Ryan speaks, and the media-political complex (aka the Permanent American Ruling Class) melts. It's the persistence of false memory and denial of reality.

The important people listen, and they are filled with gratitude and awe. Paul Ryan has taken a bold new leap, going where no Republican has gone before! He has devised a brand new Poverty Plan, a starting point from which both political parties can slice and dice the safety net, and then have the nerve to call it a darned good plan for the indigent.

"Democrats should welcome Paul Ryan's poverty plan!" gushes centrist wonk Ezra Klein. 

The Obama-affiliated Center for American Progress calls Ryan's nouveau-humane approach to sentencing reform "progressive" because he wants to help low-level criminals get back on their feet. Oh the humanity.

"Three Ideas from Ryan's Poverty Plan That Even Liberals Can Love," blares a headline in the Washington Post. (Here's a teaser: Ryan's earned income tax credit for childless workers is nearly identical to Obama's. Then again, so is that banal "opportunity ladders" rhetoric.)

Getting the drift? This is how the brutality agenda gets set in an election year, and how newly-returned Dems and Republicans can get together this fall with their pruning shears for a backroom rip-fest and call it a sewing bee.

Once you get past the feel-good bipartisan hype, the truth is that this year's Ryan excrescence is only a slight variation on his usual Social Darwinist theme. Since wealth inequality is In, and deficit hawkery is Out as a subject of polite conversation, the GOP has to be especially careful in this year's framing of its inbred sadism. So, taking a cue from Obama's own Newspeak, "cuts" have been euphemistically replaced by "reform."

Rather than peddle his standard starve the beast slash-o-rama, the GOP chairman of the House Budget Committee has pivoted to the concern-trolling of the down and out. He's dispensed with actual budgets and numbers this time, simply because his past mathematical gyrations were so easily debunkable.

What economist, after all, can presume to read the inner workings of Paul Ryan's emotional mind?

So, like his literary heroine, the cult priestess of selfishness Ayn Rand, Ryan is playing it safe and sticking to pure pulp fiction.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

 Romantic that he is, he's even invented a hero and a heroine of his very own to illustrate how his bait and switch "Opportunity Grants" (OGs) would work. Ryan's plot has poor people embarking on a one-stop shopping spree which ends at the exclusive Personal Responsibility Boutique.  A "counselor" (who sounds suspiciously like a used car salesman) will shove a contract in front of you. Failure to sign on the dotted line and then to strictly abide by its onerous terms and conditions will result in a midnight visit from the repo man.

 You will be given X amount of time to get your ass in gear and have your dreams come true, or you'll be dead meat. Failure to use your bootstraps to get a job by an artificial deadline will result in a boot getting locked onto your benefits.

 But! If you get off your butt quicker than expected, if you spring from your hammock of dependency like a Pavlovian dog on a trampoline, Ryan promises you a reward.... a savings bond! (or more likely, a Walmart gift card. Because Walmart must always continue to get government welfare. Always. )

Also, the more clients that communities can kick off welfare, the more federal money they'd receive as their own reward. Just like car salespeople, the "counselors" will be compensated on the basis of how thoroughly they can screw the customers.

The fictional poor people that Ryan invents (see pages 20-23 of the report) are a deserving single mother named Andrea, and an undeserving male slacker he calls Steve.

Andrea, through no fault of her own, has been abandoned by her louse of a husband. Since she bore him two kids within the sanctified bonds of matrimony, she is not a slut. She is, therefore, a "deserving" poor person.  Her only fault is the mythical "skills gap" that centrist pundits have dreamed up to absolve greedy plutocrats and pandering politicians of their own responsibility for record income disparity and the unemployment crisis. So Ryan's solution is for Andrea to use her parents as free babysitters while she goes after hubby for back child support, works part-time, gets her teaching degree, and climbs up the magical opportunity ladder.

How similar Ryan's OG proposals are to to the Mitt Romney's Guide to Paying for College. To wit: hit up Mom and Dad!

 Ryan conveniently ignores the fact that fewer and fewer working mothers have access to free child care courtesy of their stay-at-home unemployed relatives. Grandma and Grandpa are putting off their own retirements in record numbers, working longer hours for less money. Increasingly, working mothers are sandwiched between taking care of children and taking care of ailing impoverished parents. And historically, ex-husbands do not pay regular or adequate child support.

 Paul Ryan seems to be living in 1960s sitcom land. Here are some facts:

The percentage of child care provided by day care centers had increased from 6 percent in 1965 to 28 percent in 1990, partly because the influx of women into the workforce had narrowed the pool of female relatives and friends available to take care of other people's children. Between 1985 and 2005, employment by day care centers increased over 250 percent, representing a gain of almost 400,000 new jobs. Workplace child care facilities did not grow at the same rate: a 1995 survey found that only 10 percent of the nation's 681 major employers offered on-site care programs to their employees.

So much for Ryan's Cinderella fantasy world, in which on-site day care doesn't exist, even for Andrea's born-in-wedlock children. 

Now for the "undeserving poor" section in his poverty manifesto. He and his cohort have gotten into hot water recently for racial dog-whistling, so he avoids such words as "urban" and "culture" when talking about Slacker Steve. Needless to say, he still manages to dog-whistle, if not to bull-horn. This make-believe guy comes from a "generational poverty" family of single, unwed (read: Black) welfare queens. Steve fathered a child out of wedlock himself, and neither visits nor supports his baby mama and his kid. He hangs out on his couch of dependency and does a lot of drugs. He's a high school dropout. He's every racist Republican's nightmare. They probably don't want him anywhere near the virtuous Andrea.

But Ryan isn't satisfied with just bashing indigent minorities for their "laziness". Since Mr. Gen-Poor is a drug addict, Ryan cynically surmises there is at least one career goal that fires him up. And that's the medical field! So he has Steve trade in his food stamps for a full-time job as a cashier to earn money while striving for his GED in order to attend Dental Assisting school while he's kicking drugs through ineffectual talk therapy and responsible parenting classes.

Now we've definitely gone from Disney to Dali. Ryan cannot be serious.There are no full-time cashier jobs for high school dropouts. There are hardly any full-time cashier jobs for college graduates! Even Ryan, given his own budgetary math disability, would probably flunk the Walmart aptitude test section that measures making correct change at the register.

 And a job in a dental office? Addiction is a lifelong chronic disease requiring intensive rehabilitation and support to keep it under control. Relapses are the rule. No medical professional with half a brain would dream of letting even a recovering addict anywhere near medication and prescription pads.

Ryan cannot be serious. But he can be very, very cruel. He has just effectively set Make-Believe Steve up by surrounding him with drugs in his work environment, thus condemning him to joblessness, and probably prison, followed by dumping back on the street for "humanitarian reasons", followed swiftly by a premature death.

But isn't that the whole point? The real star of the Poverty Plan is the Social Darwinism wolf in sheep's clothing.

The OGs (Opportunity Grants) from hell's marketplace should actually be called UGs.... or OMGs. As in, oh my god. 

This is Paul Ryan's Christmas in July greeting card to America.

"Get Well Soon" (photo by T. Garcia)