Medicare, Dr. Mengele, and You

So, the multimillionaire architect of Obamacare went on a luxury trek up Mount Kilimanjaro recently with two of his trust-fund nephews. I am guessing that much to his dismay, he got a bit winded moving through all those exotic ecosystems. His 57-year-old body, so buff, so pampered, must have protested with a few creaks and groans. His middle-aged elite lungs probably gave out a few embarrassing wheezes. His technocratic brain, deprived of oxygen at the freezing summit, sent him a Eureka moment message:

If Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D. can't live forever in a young body, then neither should you. If Ezekiel Emanuel's attack of male menopause freaked him out, then you should freak out too. If Ezekiel Emanuel fears a decline, then the rest of the aging population should just quietly disappear, even before they get sick or senile.

 Ezekiel Emanuel has decided that if he can't function like a rich jerk forever, he would just as soon die before he reaches 75. Therefore, nobody else should live past 75 either. Once you stop being entertaining or remunerative, you should just check the hell out.

Ezekiel Emanuel seems to hate old people, believing that they are eyesores and albatrosses around the necks of High Society. This is a Democrat, mind you: a highly influential member of Obama's inner circle of health policy advisers. And you thought Republicans were terrifying fascists? It just goes to show how severely right-wing, nihilist, cruel and cynical this country's ruling class has become. The culling of the herd is nigh. The time has come for Exceptional America to go all nomadic, leaving the old folks behind, so that only the fittest may survive.

The Manifesto of Death to Grandma was published in The Atlantic, which hilariously included an oversize photo of a goofily grinning Emanuel to accompany his Social Darwinism screed. The subliminal message of the photo is that the passive-aggressive dying experience will be fun for the entire family. Don't go away by suicide, assisted or otherwise: just go away. Play a game of Russian Roulette by daring to skip the colonoscopy and the mammogram... and simply fade away through attrition. Your heirs will thank you. The plutocrats of Wall Street will definitely thank you.

Let Natural Selection take its course.... especially if you're dependent on Medicare and Social Security for your continued survival. Let a benevolent smirking rich guy like Zeke be your guide:

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Full disclosure: I am a physically disabled person, yet somehow I do not feel as deprived as Emanuel thinks I should. Until I read his article, I'd had no idea that my being in a wheelchair has robbed me of my creativity, and even worse, that my continued existence in a less-than-perfect body will rob my children of any pleasant memories of me for the rest of their lives. My living will stipulates only the physical and mental conditions for ending extraordinary intervention, not an arbitrary age for doing so. Moreover, since I still have quite a ways to go before my own date with Diamond Jubilee Destiny, does that mean I'm still safe, despite my "faltering" state?

 But I digress. Let Dr. Death explain further by projecting his own will on everybody:

  By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.

It's all about Ezekiel Emanuel. If he can't hear the smarmy accolades at his own funeral, then why even have one? (Speaking of limitations, he already has a major one, one that he was probably born with: a congenital absence of the empathy trait. He is, after all, the brother of Rahm "Mayor One Percent" Emanuel.)

I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75. Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.

I think oxygen deprivation at the summit of Kilimanjaro must have either permanently impaired Emanuel's brain function, or his death-wish may even represent a form of late onset manic-depressive psychosis affecting mainly elites. According to his logic, Ruth Bader Ginsburg should never have been (successfully) treated for her pancreatic cancer. If Hillary Clinton is elected president, she should forgo physical exams midway through her first term, lest Chelsea suffer needlessly in the event that a health problem in Mom is discovered and treated. Albert Einstein should have skipped his annual check-ups, because once he discovered the Theory of Relativity, he was surplus flesh. Ditto for E.M. Forster, who stopped writing 60 years before his death at 91. How pathetic is that? And forget Harper Lee: her artificial leg is a complete and utter waste of Medicare dollars, given that she was a one-hit wonder: Ezekiel doesn't think it'd be a sin to kill that bird.

He finally cuts to the chase after cherry-picking through data that purports to show that while Americans live longer, they live longer most miserably. This is  also all about his Dad, who simply refused to die in the best shape of his life:

My father illustrates the situation well. About a decade ago, just shy of his 77th birthday, he began having pain in his abdomen. Like every good doctor, he kept denying that it was anything important. But after three weeks with no improvement, he was persuaded to see his physician. He had in fact had a heart attack, which led to a cardiac catheterization and ultimately a bypass. Since then, he has not been the same. Once the prototype of a hyperactive Emanuel, suddenly his walking, his talking, his humor got slower. Today he can swim, read the newspaper, needle his kids on the phone, and still live with my mother in their own house. But everything seems sluggish. Although he didn’t die from the heart attack, no one would say he is living a vibrant life. When he discussed it with me, my father said, “I have slowed down tremendously. That is a fact. I no longer make rounds at the hospital or teach.” Despite this, he also said he was happy.

Then Daddy must be demented, or at least getting close. As Ezekiel hypomanically continues:

Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower.

It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity. About a decade ago, I began working with a prominent health economist who was about to turn 80. Our collaboration was incredibly productive. We published numerous papers that influenced the evolving debates around health-care reform. My colleague is brilliant and continues to be a major contributor, and he celebrated his 90th birthday this year. But he is an outlier—a very rare individual.

I don't know about that. Everywhere you look, there are amazingly brilliant octogenarians and nonagenarians who still dare to function at the peak of their abilities. Several of them contribute to this blog. (see 91-year-old Pearl's scathing remarks in my comments section.) And there is a New York Times commenter named Larry Eisenberg who can produce a limerick on any topic in the space of a few minutes. He is 94. Creative older people are "outliers" only in Emanuel's closed, elitist mind.

Here's a section sure to strike dread into the heart of every gerontologist:

At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.

How much you want to bet that Zekey-Boy will be screaming for extraordinary measures at the age of 98, ripping the oxygen-mask off the 75-year-old down the hall just to get a last sucking selfish mouthful of life?

He finally gets to the real reason (besides his gerontophobic disgust at looking at Daddy) for his faux-altruism: America is in decline. For a civilized country, our mortality rates are nothing to brag about. Despite being the richest country (the most billionaires on the planet) we rank only 40th in life expectancy. This is not so much because of biology, but because of our cruel social policies and continuing high poverty rate. The plutocrats of Wall Street and the political hacks like Emanuel who serve them want their Grand Bargain of safety net cuts. They don't want even the smallest portion of the wealth that they've managed to siphon off for themselves to trickle back down to medical care for the old, disabled and indigent.

The Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission went down in ignominy. The debt and deficit are no longer popular campaign themes. So what is an oligarch to do? For starters,  Doc Zeke has come to their rescue with his cheery article, keeping the macabre herd-culling conversation alive. 

What Emanuel has indulged himself in is just more poor-shaming and psychological elder abuse, albeit couched in the most liberal, caring, and sensible terms. Please don't take him to mean that he espouses the easy Ernest Hemingway suicide route out, because Emanuel (says he) is absolutely against that, along with euthanasia. He protests (too much, methinks) that he is no Dr. Kevorkian!  But do skip the flu shot voluntarily this year, old people. Your grandchildren and the Medicare trust fund will be ever so grateful.

Did I mention that Dr. Zeke is director of the Bioethics Department of the budget-slashed National Institutes of Health? And they said that irony is dead.

     “The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” -- Ernest Hemingway, from the original version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".

Shocker: Holder Won't Be A.G. for Life

Well, knock me over with a feather. Attorney General Eric Holder will only serve about seven-eighths of his two-term stint as the nation's chief selective law enforcement officer. With any luck, he'll take another spin through the revolving doors a year or two before Obama does. Assuming, that is, that the Senate will deign to confirm any replacement who is not Alberto Gonzales or Michael Mukasey. If the GOP takes the Senate, I am sure things will go a lot more smoothly. They will no longer have to pretend that there is any major difference between the two corporate parties.

I guess we can be marginally grateful that Holder is not pulling a Ruth Bader Ginsburg and arrogantly claiming that nobody but nobody could ever replace him in the current political gridlock, which of course magically goes away whenever there's a war to be fought, or CEOs to be enriched, or plutocratic nominees like Obama donors Penny Pritzker and Caroline Kennedy to be bipartisanly fawned over. So, maybe if Obama nominates a Forbes 400 scion, he or she will have a fighting chance to fight for truth, justice and the American way of wealth.

The premature accolades for the first African-American attorney general are flowing fast and furious. The New York Times has not only placed Holder's eventual departure prominently on its home page, but shockingly called him "the most prominent liberal voice of the administration."

It just goes to show how far the definition of "liberalism" has fallen. Some examples of Holder's liberalism:

-- Declared that assassinations of American citizens are perfectly O.K. as long as they constitute an imminent threat to American interests. Of course, "imminent" as defined by Holder is not the same thing as how you or I might define it. Holder's DOJ has decreed that "imminent threat" can be something as benign as a group of malcontents bitching to each other in emails, or an Imam calling USA the Great Satan.

-- Blamed his failure to prosecute even one bankster on the canard that not only are mega-banks too big to fail, their individual human overseers are too important to jail. Although Holder later tried to backtrack from his remarks, he's never backed them up by actually indicting anybody.

-- Has overseen more prosecutions of whistleblowers than in any previous administration. Despite giving lip service to press freedoms, Holder has still refused to withdraw the subpoena demanding that New York Times reporter James Risen testify against one source who embarrassed the Bush administration.

--Immediately upon being sworn in as chief selective law enforcement officer in 2009, Holder announced there would be no prosecutions of CIA torture. And on the off-chance that Congress should decide to hold the torturers to account, Holder promised at that time that the government would provide them with free legal representation and use taxpayer money to pay any judgments."It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.

-- Absolved the CIA from criminal accountability even when Kill List architect John Brennan admitted hacking into Senate computers. 

I know that this list of Holder faits accomplis is far from exhaustive. For one thing, it does not include his accomplishments as assistant AG under Clinton, the most famous of which was the pardon of Marc Rich. But you get the picture.

 Naturally, the Opologists are concentrating heavily on Holder's victimization/contempt charge at the hands of the GOP over the Fast and Furious debacle. It's this political martyrdom -- rather than his actual misdeeds -- which help drive the mythologizing campaign to paint him as a liberal hero for black people. His defenders don't want to admit that Holder raided medical marijuana dispensaries before piecemeal state legalization made this war on drugs seem as thuggish as it was. He also initially tried to keep largely minority prisoners in jail under unfair sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine possession, before worries about his own legacy got to him and he minimally modified his stance, pre-revolving door.

This man's departure can't come fast enough for me. In a just world, he would not be missed. And when he rejoins his white shoe law firm, or becomes a well-remunerated, chin-stroking pundit at some faux-liberal, corporate-funded think tank, the initial liberal disappointment that he won't be offering pro bono representation of indigent defendants will no doubt be fleeting, shallow, tepid, and insincere.

What If They Gave a War Protest and Nobody Came

It turns out that Americans are not war-weary after all. They're just weary of being weary. They're all outraged out. They're replete on Marching for Climate. Bombing another Middle-Eastern country? Yawn. Were there any nip-slips on Dancing With the Stars last night?

Maybe I'm all wrong about the ennui. Because if narrowly-framed polls are any indication, the propaganda efforts by Frighteners, Inc. are working really well. A sizeable portion of the population, besides being bored out their skulls, really does believe that Islamists are on the verge of breaching the borders of The Homeland, bent on killing us all in our beds. It really is possible to be apathetic and scared shitless at the same time.

I don't know whether the 60 percent or so who think that bombing Syria is a good idea are among the same 60-plus percent who can't name the three branches of government. That's a poll for another day.

Oh, and it's not that people aren't protesting the latest surge in perpetual War Against Terror. Because they are. Yesterday, a grand total of 22 people showed up to demonstrate in front of the White House. In San Francisco, erstwhile Demonstration Central, the streets were quiet. The same folks who got wee-wee'd up when Bush waged war are marching in lockstep behind Obama for this one. This is despite the fact that he bragged that such bastions of repressive totalitarianism as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are his new BFFs. These are places where they still behead and enslave people. The cognitive dissonance between that statement and a later one at the star-studded Clinton Global Initiative, urging civil rights on other countries, was deafening.

And it's more than apathy and fear cancelling each other out in the average American. It's cynicism and gullibility. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 

A mixture  of gullibility and cynicism has been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever changing incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct assumption that under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

And thus it was only the day after the bombing of Syria that our government deigned to let us know of the secret existence of a nefarious little group called Khorasan (rhymes with Corazon, which is Spanish for "heart," so this is a shadow terror group you'll really love to hate!) Is it a real threat? Our inner Cynic All tells us no, our inner Gully Bull tells us yes, and the two of them give birth to Con Fusion. Maybe it's best to just keep quiet, and assume that if the Commander in Chief lies, it's to keep us safe. He has our best interests at heart. After all, the uninsured rate has gone down by eight percent, and he embraced gay rights. It's a cold hard world out there. And as Arendt observed, secrecy is an absolute prerequisite for the successful indoctrination of the masses. Not for nothing has the Obama administration been called the most secretive in modern history. A few intrepid journalists are even daring to complain, their access to the powerful be damned.

The AP lists eight ways that the White House suppresses news and thus effectuates its own buzzing war propaganda machine. I quote the list in its entirety, because this is important:

1) As the United States ramps up its fight against Islamic militants, the public can’t see any of it. News organizations can’t shoot photos or video of bombers as they take off — there are no embeds. In fact, the administration won’t even say what country the S. bombers fly from.

2) The White House once fought to get cameramen, photographers and reporters into meetings the president had with foreign leaders overseas. That access has become much rarer. Think about the message that sends other nations about how the world’s leading democracy deals with the media:  Keep them out and let them use handout photos.

3) Guantanamo: The big important 9/11 trial is finally coming up. But we aren’t allowed to see most court filings in real time — even of nonclassified material. So at hearings, we can’t follow what’s happening. We don’t know what prosecutors are asking for, or what defense attorneys are arguing.

4) Information about Guantanamo that was routinely released under President George W. Bush is now kept secret. The military won’t release the number of prisoners on hunger strike or the number of assaults on guards. Photo and video coverage is virtually nonexistent.

5) Day-to-day intimidation of sources is chilling. AP’s transportation reporter’s sources say that if they are caught talking to her, they will be fired. Even if they just give her facts, about safety, for example. Government press officials say their orders are to squelch anything controversial or that makes the administration look bad.

6) One of the media — and public’s — most important legal tools, the Freedom of Information Act, is under siege. Requests for information under FOIA have become slow and expensive. Many federal agencies simply don’t respond at all in a timely manner, forcing news organizations to sue each time to force action.

7) The administration uses FOIAs as a tip service to uncover what news organizations are pursuing. Requests are now routinely forwarded to political appointees. At the agency that oversees the new health care law, for example, political appointees now handle the FOIA requests.

8) The administration is trying to control the information that state and local officials can give out. The FBI has directed local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology the police departments use to sweep up cellphone data. In some cases, federal officials have formally intervened in state open records cases, arguing for secrecy.

***

It's not only mission-creep we have to worry about. It's totalitarianism-creep. Secrecy and democracy simply cannot co-exist. And adding to the AP's list of oppressive government tactics, here's a scary new one, just in today:

Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable direction.

Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank observes in today's Washington Post, "Obama endures as the lesser evil for liberals." Noting the low turnout at a D.C. peace protest, he writes:

He has disappointed liberal constituencies on immigration, on climate change, on Guantanamo Bay and targeted killings, and now on Syria. Yet this month’s Washington Post-ABC News poll shows him with 69 percent support among liberals, 87 percent among African Americans and 75 percent among Democrats. Liberals supported airstrikes in Iraq and Syria (64 percent and 54 percent, respectively), as did Democrats (67 percent and 60 percent).

(snip)

 I asked (Code Pink's Medea) Benjamin, who like (antiwar activist David) Swanson voted for Obama in 2008 before turning Green, why so few on the left oppose Obama. “He’s totally defanged us,” she said, citing his party, his affability — and his race. “The black community is traditionally the most antiwar community in this country. He’s defanged that sentiment within the black community, or certainly voicing that sentiment.”

Only time will tell if Obama will continue enjoying the support, enjoyed largely because of the concomitant secrecy of his administration and his skill at marketing. Remember, the majority of the people also supported George W. Bush in the early days of the Second Iraq War. And Bush was not nearly as attractive or glib as the current White House occupant, who lobs the love bombs along with the Tomahawk missiles. History is full of charismatic politicians whose forceful personalities trump the common sense of their followers.

If there is any hope at all, it lies with the young. Just when I thought the news couldn't get any more depressing, I came across an article in today's New York Times about a group of Colorado students who walked out of class to protest a Koch-fueled curriculum touting the free market and patriotism. 

At least we still have free speech, suppressed and discouraged and monitored as it is. It's on us to keep fighting back, against all odds and against all apathy. The Colorado students, part of what Commander-in-Chief Obama creepily calls the 9/11 Generation, have never known a day in which this country has not been at war. So good on them that they refuse to get used to the status quo.

The Smog of War

Nothing says cynicism like unleashing mega-tons of bombs on the very eve of the much-ballyhooed United Nations climate change summit, huh? President Obama and the "deep state" of which he is the current figurehead, must have figured that the air and sea assault against IS, ISIL, ISIS or whatever new terror brand they're marketing today, will clear the air for a real serious debate. They'll jabber about reducing their carbon footprint while ignoring the fact that they're deepening and widening their carbon footprint by waging perpetual war. The Pentagon is, after all, already one of the biggest polluters in the world. And this is, after all, another war for oil. (aka "American interests.") 

Before this latest act of aggression and bombs bursting in the sovereign air space of another country, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon had presciently remarked that "there is a sense that there is change in the air." You can say that again. According to his press handout,

(Moon) has invited world leaders, from government, finance, business, and civil society to Climate Summit 2014 this 23 September to galvanize and catalyze climate action.  He has asked these leaders to bring bold announcements and actions to the Summit that will reduce emissions, strengthen climate resilience, and mobilize political will for a meaningful legal agreement in 2015. Climate Summit 2014 provides a unique opportunity for leaders to champion an ambitious vision, anchored in action that will enable a meaningful global agreement in 2015.

His first mistake is that he's inviting all the wrong people. Like oil and water, warmongering and climate change alleviation do not mix, as evidenced by that fantastic "Flood Wall Street" protest march yesterday, which brought attention to Too-Big-To-Jail Big Finance's role in polluting the earth. As usual, the wrong people were arrested.

And then there are the war criminals, either identical or related by incest to the finance criminals. The Pentagon has already been declared immune from blame in its ongoing and accelerated role in the climate catastrophe. From an award-winning "Project Censored" story published in 2009:

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count.

The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil.

Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

The American military's reported use (five years ago) of 320,000 barrels of oil a day didn't even factor in the oil used by state department "contractors" and other auxiliary war personnel. Since the last Iraq war caused the emission of at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007, one can only imagine the lasting damage that the latest expansion and escalation of death will unleash into the atmosphere. President Obama, who is increasingly and scarily referring to himself as the "Commander in Chief" rather than the "president," has already promised that the current greed-grab for more oil and treasure should last at least three years.

Follow the money. Take a deep breath, (if you still can) and then keep taking to the streets.


 

Do As We Say, Not As We Do

Despite the official narrative of congressional Republicans and Democrats hating each other's guts, the political Bickersons of the Senate were simply unable to resist the aphrodisiac of more military violence. They indulged themselves in a little afternoon delight on Thursday. They achieved a rare public simultaneous orgasm. Flushed and spent, (half a billion dollars' worth of high tech weapons for complete strangers while the long-term unemployed are forgotten) they left town to smoke a cigarette and search out more johns donors. And President Obama, who'd enjoyed the porn spectacle from afar via TV, also declared himself well-satisfied. Let the bombing, killing and maiming continue into perpetuity. Let the masters of war laugh maniacally all the way to the too-big-to-fail bank.

Meanwhile, the White House "sternly told the NFL that 'it's important that the league get a handle' on its own extra-judicial violence. (concussions and fractures and mayhem on the field are still fine, however, especially when they're accompanied by patriotic music and military trappings and sponsored by tax-sheltered defense and big oil contractors and other masters of war.)

 Apparently, the White House legal eagles who write their own secret extra-judicial opinions, allowing a president to maintain his own Kill List as well as to unilaterally declare war whenever he feels like it, missed the class in law school where they teach the doctrine of Clean Hands:

A senior administration official told reporters during a briefing about a new White House public awareness campaign on preventing sexual assaults on college campuses that "the most recent revelations of abuse by the NFL players is really deeply troubling."

"The NFL has an obligation not only to their fans but to the American people to properly discipline anyone involved in domestic violence or child abuse and more broadly, gain control of the situation," the official continued.

"Many of these professional athletes are marketed as role models to young people and so their behavior does have the potential to influence these young people, and it's one of the many reasons it's important that the league get a handle on this and have a zero tolerance."

Or what? President Obama won't do his Fox pre-game Superbowl interview, or have a White House Superbowl party to fete The Troops, or Michelle won't give a Pentagon-produced patriotic shout-out to the military before urging "folks" to enjoy the game? Will Obama decline to open the air space above the stadium so that a trillion dollars' worth of military aircraft can do a flyover?  Could this annual domestic display of American might, violence, and exceptionalism actually be banned?

Not likely. There is too much money at stake. Anyway, this latest presidential scolding defines violence only in the narrowest, political wedge issue sort of way:

The official's comments come as the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell are facing criticism after numerous off-field incidents involving players including Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson and, most recently, Jonathan Dwyer.

After the Baltimore Ravens cut Rice earlier this month, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement, "The President is the father of two daughters. And like any American, he believes that domestic violence is contemptible and unacceptable in a civilized society. Hitting a woman is not something a real man does, and that's true whether or not an act of violence happens in the public eye, or, far too often, behind closed doors. Stopping domestic violence is something that's bigger than football - and all of us have a responsibility to put a stop to it."

Of course, domestic violence in the military is exceptional. The Obama administration has notoriously caved to the wishes of the generals, refusing to order that prosecutions and investigations of rape and other violence against female troops be taken outside the macho chain of command.

He actually used the same limp finger-wagging language with the Pentagon as he did with the NFL:

President Obama issued a stern statement on the problem of military sexual assault on Friday, telling military leaders they have one year to "step up their game exponentially" in preventing and responding to sexual assault cases.

Congress passed a defense authorization bill on Thursday night that includes some military sexual assault reforms, but does not go so far as to take those cases out of the chain of command. Obama said the onus is now on Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other military leaders to carry out those changes and produce results.

"I have also directed that they report back to me, with a full-scale review of their progress, by Dec. 1, 2014," Obama said. "If I do not see the kind of progress I expect, then we will consider additional reforms that may be required to eliminate this crime from our military ranks and protect our brave service members who stand guard for us every day at home and around the world."

So the rapes continue unabated while Obama waits for his full-scale review. Additional reforms "may" be required, but it's not a sure thing. They need to "step up their game", because war, like football, is an exceptional American sporting event. I am sure that the female victims of sex crimes are relieved to know that their plight is being framed as an athletic event by the Big Guys.

Hitting a woman or child is not something a real man does, regardless of whether it happens in the public eye (and officials have to pretend to care for awhile) or behind closed doors. A real man indulges his violent tendencies by proxy and from a safe distance... like from a Kill List. For instance, when Obama decided that a 17-year-old girl was a threat, she went right on The List.

It has never been revealed whether he did actually end up drone-punching her to death. That is because all Predator strikes are conducted behind closed doors, far away from prying elevator cameras. And anyway, Obama has been declared legally exempt from accountability, thanks to his complicit bipartisan friends in the Senate. If they can't see or refuse to acknowledge the innocent women and children getting killed because of appropriation bills they passed, then they can still pretend to care about pay parity for females, and Obamacare-covered birth control.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

When a father and his two children testified about their own ordeal-by-drone before Congress last fall, only a few legislators even bothered showing up. Obama himself was ironically meeting with the manufacturers of the same drones that had killed the family matriarch, and obviously missed their appearance on C-Span.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama's drones have killed at least 2500 people. These casualties include mothers, aunts, sisters, grandmothers, and children. But these casualties do not officially exist.

Yemeni Drone Victims

"The idea of democracy has been stripped of its moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy": so explained Paul Wellstone, one of the last great senators, before his untimely death, long before there was ever such a thing as a predator drone to add a robotic cover to the ruling class decay and state-sponsored violence against all humankind.

The time for the White House and Congress to get a handle on their own hypocrisy and to "step up their game" is indeed long past. They're moral losers who just can't stop marketing themselves as role models for the unfettered free market.

How To Starve a War Fever

The slippery slope to war is finally getting some much-needed sand thrown on it by the media -- even by some of the same newspapers and pundits who so unquestioningly cheer-led the last Iraq invasion.

Perhaps most important, the press is revealing the long-suppressed Saudi connection to 9/11, and exposing the Saudi elites' funding of ISIS,which is at least partly composed of remnants of their own private army. The Saudis have recently balked at putting their own "boots on the ground" to essentially fight against themselves, and that was one of Obama's prerequisites for America getting dragged back in.

Matt Stoller has written an especially illuminating piece which lays out Saudi Arabia's outsized influence on American foreign policy, and the role of petrodollars in financing various shadow wars and other secret machinations by the global ruling class.

The latest sabre-rattling is clearly aimed at toppling the Syrian government, long an aim of both Saudi Arabia and Israel and their neocon counterparts, still led by the unindicted Dick Cheney. The CIA and special ops have been fomenting this overthrow battle for awhile now, but Obama would "prefer" that the Congress now openly fund and back his efforts so as to spread future blame to all of us who never bothered to call our congress critters in futile protest. It's getting kind of hard to keep this secret war a secret any longer. And the beheading of two American journalists provides what they think is the perfect excuse to bring all their aggression out into the open. Obama himself was so rattled by the first murder, of James Foley, that he immediately had to calm his nerves by playing another round of golf, a big grin plastered on his face.

And there was bonhomie galore in the Oval Office last week as the president convened with his Republican frenemies and got their enthusiastic approval for what promises to be a very successful enterprise for the profiteers of the oil and "defense industries."

While some journalists are finally doing their jobs, there's still a vibrant propaganda machine whirring away and pumping its exhaust fumes through fiber-optic cables and into American homes. CNN, for example, has obviously been completely taken over by the Pentagon and the various intelligence "communities," whose bloviating is underwritten by the same oil and gas cartels and arms industry think tanks so desperate for more tax-sheltered cash. I wrote last week about one former ambassador, under criminal investigation in Europe for money-laundering his war profits, but still appearing on CNN to howl about ISIS coming to America to murder us all in our beds.  Lee Fang of The Nation names even more names.

CBS, whose news division president is the brother of Obama national security advisor Ben Rhodes, can also be relied upon to feed the fever. Veteran pundit Bob Schieffer did his bit on Sunday by shrilling that "we'll all get killed" unless we kill a whole bunch of people. The FAIR Blog has more examples of media quacks trying to feed the fever.

How then to starve the war fever? Hefty dosages of that tried and true antipyretic known as investigative journalism. Before you know it, millions of people will break a sweat, wake up from their fever dreams, and realize how badly they've been conned by the original political snake oil treatment. Hopefully it's still not too late to stop World War III in its tracks. 

As Charles Blow wrote in a recent excellent column,

When we invaded Iraq in 2003, about three out of four Americans approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll. Three years later, that approval had fallen by half.

We don’t want to look back three years from now and ask, “What have we done?”

An ABC News poll in early March of 2003 found that most Americans believed the Iraq war would last several months at most — it officially lasted nearly nine years — and nearly eight in 10 thought Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States at the time.

And the cost of that war, particularly in death toll, was staggering.

According to the website Iraqbodycount.org, more than 4,800 members of United States and coalition forces were killed between 2003 and 2013, as well as 468 contractors.

How to break a war fever? As I responded to Charles Blow, the immediate release of that long-suppressed Senate report on CIA torture would immediately knock some sense into people clamoring for revenge over the recent decapitations. So would the release of the whole cache of still-suppressed photographs documenting horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American forces. So would those censored pages of the 9/11 Commission report, which allegedly tie the Saudi royal family directly to the attacks.

Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Transparency from our public "servants"  and our right to know are every bit as crucial to our survival as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Joe Biden said "we must follow ISIS to the very gates of hell, because hell is where they reside."

 Actually, what we really must do is relentlessly pursue our own elected leaders and expose the shadowy moneyed forces controlling them before we all fall into the inferno.

Nobody Could Ever Have Predicted

Happy sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Main Street! As President Obama so blithely assured us last week, America is bouncing back and bouncing forth to fight more manufactured Terror:

Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression.  Yet despite these shocks, through the pain we have felt and the grueling work required to bounce back, America is better positioned today to seize the future than any other nation on Earth.

Our technology companies and universities are unmatched.  Our manufacturing and auto industries are thriving.  Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades.  For all the work that remains, our businesses are in the longest uninterrupted stretch of job creation in our history.  Despite all the divisions and discord within our democracy, I see the grit and determination (TM) and common goodness of the American people every single day –- and that makes me more confident than ever about our country’s future....

 America, our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden.  But as Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead.  From Europe to Asia, from the far reaches of Africa to war-torn capitals of the Middle East, we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity.  These are values that have guided our nation since its founding.

Military Keynesianism (stimulating the arms and oil profiteers, a.k.a. "the economy," through endless war) is the only tool left in the tools' box. Or should I say the fools' box. The Best and the Brightest zombies have arisen from the grave, their ivy-covered marble tombstones miraculously untoppled. That is why President Obama remains so confident. Just as the titans of Wall Street paid no price for perpetrating the worst fraud in modern history, the warmongers of the Pentagon and the mainstream media have paid no price for the desecration of Iraq and its environs. Failing upward is the reward given to miscreants in a corrupt world.

Unless, of course, their supreme arrogance and self-confidence become miraculously doomed. I may be wrong, but it looks like despite alleged poll results, more people are against the latest war than are for it. The jingoism isn't quite so jingly this time around. People are noticing that the phrase "moderate Syrian rebel" has an oxymoronic ring to it. This is despite the growth of a deformed third branch of the Democratic Party. There's the pseudo-progressive Warren/Sanders branch, there's the centrist Hillary/Obama Wall Street branch, and now there's the all-inclusive Cheney Branch.

Because, if you're willing to follow Barack Obama, self-proclaimed heir to the unitary executive coup effectuated by Dick Cheney, then you might as well face it: you are a Cheney Democrat. It's a unifying experience, because both Warren Democrats and Hillary Democrats are both cordially invited to join in the exuberant bellicosity. You can be an enemy of the banks or a friend of the banks, but when it comes to embracing death, you are all partying under one big tent. Is there even one anti-war Democrat in Congress these days?

But back to the economy. Paul Krugman, who I thought might have written a column on military Keynesianism again in light of this latest outbreak of war fever, instead marked the sixth anniversary of the economic collapse by blaming the whole debacle on individual ignorance and careerism and giving the Obama administration the usual free pass. (Weaponized Keynesianism only comes in for a Krugman drubbing when the Republicans tout it.)

 In what sense did economics go astray? Hardly anyone predicted the 2008 crisis, but that in itself is arguably excusable in a complicated world. More damning was the widespread conviction among economists that such a crisis couldn’t happen. Underlying this complacency was the dominance of an idealized vision of capitalism, in which individuals are always rational and markets always function perfectly.

Krugman conveniently ignores the continuing corruption, the continuing criminality, and the de facto global fascist coup that has subsumed the world over the past 30 years. This unrestrained coup toppled the global economy six years ago, and threatens to do so again, thanks to toothless and meaningless "reform" passed to placate the masses. But Krugman hilariously blames "capitalist idealists" instead of financial felons. And then there's this:

You might say that this is just human nature, and it’s true that while the most shocking intellectual malfeasance has come from conservative economists, some economists on the left have also seemed more interested in defending their turf and sniping at professional rivals than in getting it right. Still, this bad behavior has come as a shock, especially to those who thought we were having a real conversation.

Krugman is falling into "both sides do it" sophistry again. Just who are these sniping, backbiting "economists on the left" who haven't gotten it right? He does not say. The erection of straw men certainly seems to be a prerequisite for a gig as a New York Times columnist. 

As for his claim that hardly anyone predicted the economic crisis, there is a mountain of evidence that says otherwise. The accurate predictors include Dean Baker, one of those economists on the left. He warned about the housing bubble in 2002 and again in 2004. The Wall Street Economists blog has more on the Cassandras.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman tepidly concludes, " if we’ve made a hash of things — and we have — the fault lies not in our textbooks, but in ourselves.

My published response:

The fault lies with economists and other "experts" willing to sell out their integrity to the highest bidder. In America as in most of the world, the ultra-rich dictate neoliberal policy. The academic sellouts at think tanks and universities have no choice but to follow the money if they want to keep their ivory tower perches. There are plenty of Rogoffs and Reinharts only too eager to cherry-pick the data, ignore facts, and throw intellectual honesty into their circular files.

Picketty was all the rage for awhile, until the plutocrats panicked and got politicians from both parties to bowdlerize the most extreme wealth inequality in history into the "opportunity gap" and the "achievement gap" and the "personal responsibility gap."

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has come out with a largely ignored report showing that by all measures, life for regular people is only getting worse. Without even factoring in the obscene wealth of the Forbes 400, the Fed founded that the wealth share of the top 3 percent rose from 44.8 percent in 1989 (late Reagan years) to 54.4 percent in 2013 (mid-Obama years.) The wealth of the bottom 90 percent fell from 33.2 percent in 1989 to 24.7 percent in 2013. Incomes and home ownership rates fell, while debt, both consumer and student, has risen.

It can be no coincidence that these economic woes are concurrent with skyrocketing incarceration rates, a massive surveillance and police state, and more war.

Jobs, not bombs. Schools, not prisons.

Read the other comments. People realize that the corruption and the stupidity and the militarization are all of a piece. This response from Tim Kane of Mesa, AZ was especially insightful:

You can tell who the bad guys are because they never mention demand side economics. They believe that "supply creates demand" (Hollande - the Socialist President of France) the most absurd thing. Build a buggy-whip factory and see how much demand that supply creates.

I think it can also be said that other problems in the news are related to this. People have too little bargaining power, that means too little wages, which means too little demand, and it then recycles downward.

A huge % of African Americans can't find a way to make a middle class standard of living with just one job. Republicans think "why should they be able to?". Then Ferguson happens.

In the Middle East people are suffering while those tide to Big Oil live in undreamt of comfort. This is all fodder for Jihadist doctrines. And not just in the Middle East, which is why so many people from the west are signing up.

In the 1950s and 60s in the height of the cold war, the issue was which system could give working people a better living: capitalism or communism. In the west they mixed capitalism with socialism creating the mixed economic system (New Deal in the U.S., social democracy elsewhere) resulting in the greatest golden age in history (global GNP doubled in 30 years - ie, grew more in 30 years than the prior 11,000 years since the neolithic revolution).

Somehow, since the end of the cold war, all that's done away with - and the world is falling apart, just as it did after 1929. Economists know this.

Obama's latest terroristic counterinsurgency is not only a war on ISIS. It's a deformed offshoot of the class war. That English-speaking beheader hails from lower-class Britain, which was also rocked by civil disturbances a few years ago, a direct result of the austerity imposed by the global oligarchy. Obama is pissed off because these jihadists have now essentially formed their own oil cartel. The beheadings by disaffected serial killers are only the excuse given to incite vengeance among the sheep. The real cancer of the military-industrial-spy-media complex can continue growing, while the president unilaterally dictates that a relatively minor malignancy, both fed by and feeding the beast, shall be cosmetically nipped and tucked with band-aid bombs.

War under Obama is like another branch of Obamacare: a neoliberal kludge dependent on so many moving parts that it makes "success" impossible. The inclusion of "moderate rebels" will turn out to be just as disposable a notion as the employer mandate. Boots will be put on the ground, but Obama will say they're walking on air. 

It's one more battle between and among wealthy criminal factions. And as usual, the poorer citizens of the world are the ones caught in the crossfire.