The Impact of Incestuous Ironies

This is rich: 

President Obama blasted Republicans as the party of “billionaires” on Tuesday while mingling with high-rollers at the $26 million estate of Rich Richman — yes, that’s his real name — in Greenwich, Conn. Richman, who built his $10 billion company developing rental housing, lives in the Conyers Farm area, where the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Twenty-five donors paid $32,400 each to get their photo taken with the president. Others paid $10,000 for dinner.

(snip)

Obama arrived from New York City — where he had attended a fundraiser with hedge-fund billionaires George Soros and Paul Tudor Jones — in a convoy of four helicopters that landed at the Greenwich Polo Club.

And the irony just keeps on coming. The Washington Post has all the rich dirt:

... New details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.

The team member was a well-heeled young Yalie named Jonathan Dach. So not only did the Obama administration cover it all up, it rewarded the young stud muffin with -- get this -- a job at the State Department's Office of Global Women's Issues. One night in Cartagena with an exploited sex worker is apparently more than enough to qualify a male as an expert in "women's issues" in the Obama administration. According to the State Department website, Dach's role is to foster "participation of women and girls in the political, economic, and social realms of their countries (as) a key goal of U.S. foreign policy. When women and girls are empowered, educated, and equipped to contribute to their societies, their families and countries are more likely to prosper, and be more stable and secure."

 Meanwhile, according to the Post, government investigators looking into the Secret Service prostitution scandal were fired when they started asking too many questions about young Dach. The White House was afraid the truth might hurt Obama's re-election chances.

Could it get even richer? Yes, it could.  It turns out that the wealthy father (Leslie Dach) of the aforementioned Ivy League Lothario was one of those generous high-roller Obama campaign donors while also working as the top lobbyist for Walmart. Dach and first lady Michelle Obama later became partners in a short-lived Let's Move publicity campaign, in which Walmart promised to someday day stock its shelves with healthier foods -- thus helping divert public attention from a class action lawsuit then being brought by the retail chain's underpaid women employees. (The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the case, on grounds that women wage slaves don't constitute a class.)

Leslie Dach (the chin-stroker at the left) with Michelle Obama

 
And guess what Leslie Dach is doing now? He's spun through the revolving doors right into the very heart of the Obama administration in order to help his former Walmart colleague, HHS  Secretary Sylvia Mathews-Burwell, to implement the next phase of Obamacare!

In 2011, Mr. Dach recruited Ms. Burwell to become president of the Walmart Foundation, where she worked for just over a year before heading back to Washington. As we noted earlier, Mr. Dach has spoken well of the work she did there.

 HHS announced Wednesday that Mr. Dach would be coming to the department for a newly-created job that will include working on the next sign-up period for coverage under the health law. “Leslie’s experience, which spans the business, government, and civil society sectors, will further enhance our ability to deliver impact for the American people,” said Ms. Burwell, in a statement.

The impact is already being delivered good and hard, with all the intensity of a sledge hammer. Just this week, only one day after Walmart announced that it is getting into the lucrative for-profit Obamacare marketplace itself, it cut off tens of thousands of its own part-time employees from their company-subsidized health insurance plans. It was just getting way too expensive for the Walton family, who own more wealth than the poorest 40-plus percent of all American families combined. From Common Dreams:

For the fiscal year of 2014, Walmart "increased net sales by 1.6% to $473.1 billion and returned $12.8 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases," the company states on its website. Furthermore, in 2014, Walmart was ranked number one on the Fortune 500 list for its large revenues. The Walton family is one of the most wealthy on earth and has consistently been in the Forbes 400 top ten wealthiest list since 2001.

Now, let's ironically take a stroll back through the revolving doors, from Burwell to Wellborn --  the ironically-named Sally Wellborn that is, head of Walmart's ironically named Benefits Division. She said the policy axing employee medical benefits for part-timers (legally defined as workers putting in slightly less than 40 hours per week) was one of those "tough decisions," made by tough bosses not afraid to say "tough shit" to minimum wage workers.  This begs the question: will Sally Wellborn's own job be discontinued? Will Wellborn be hired by Burwell?  Or is Wellborn, like young Jonathan Dach, well-born enough to not have a care in the world?

Always the high public cost of low prices, low wages, low moral corporate standards, outsourced manufacturing.  Always.

The trouble is, while the Cartagena tawdriness is getting all the headlines, the political prostitution is not. It's just the way business gets done in an oligarchy. And it's by no means a victimless crime. Tens of thousands of low-wage Walmart victims, tens of millions of victims of the predatory health insurance industry, seven billion victims of unfettered capitalism the wide world over.

Delivering impact? Quite the understatement.

Torturing Obama

Poor Barack. Everybody's piling on.

First, Leon Panetta, and now even mild-mannered fellow Nobelist Jimmy Carter is chiming in while still constructing Habitat houses at age 90. The drone president of peace is being portrayed as a paranoid bumbler and anathema to his own party. Pretty much all he's good for these days is acting as the main bag-man for all that campaign cash. The Dems don't want to be seen with him, but they're only too happy to accept the bribery money of plutocrats and entertainers just as eager to shell it out for a quick bite and photo-op schmooze with their president and fellow performance artist.

Oh, but here comes Paul Krugman to the rescue. In a new Rolling Stone O-pologium at least partially inspired by Cornel West's recent scathing Salon piece, the erstwhile New York Times columnist takes a wee break from dissing Paul Ryan and the Republicans, and takes direct aim at the left: 

They (Cornel West and unnamed "others") are outraged that Wall Street hasn't been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ''neoliberal'' economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained (sic) even his much more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims seriously.

Criticizing the Obama administration for its failure to prosecute a single big banker in the worst financial fraud in American history is just going too far, continues Krugman, who essentially defends the Obama/Holder/Geithner Too Big to Fail/Jail policy, while carefully weasel-wording that yes, we might have another crisis, but it might not be quite as bad. He's right: it won't be at all bad, for him. The ingrained corruption of the political system and the outsized influence of the fabulously wealthy go unmentioned.

 Even creepier, in my view, is that Krugman specifically singles out a piece by a black public intellectual. West discusses all the ways that people of color are actually doing worse (job loss, home loss) under a black president. He calls out the collusion of the erstwhile progressive Black Congressional Caucus with Obama's centrist, corporatist agenda as part of the "the death of the black prophetic tradition," which has historically advocated for social and economic justice.

So Krugman, like Jonathan Chait, now also falls into the cringe-worthy category of "whitesplainer." (a centrist caucasian pundit who instructs a leftist black pundit that his or her criticism of Obama is way out in left field and "hard to take seriously.") That Krugman singles out only Cornel West as a "trash-talker" from the left is actually pretty stunning. That Krugman indirectly bashes the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. is also testament to the right-wing drift of the "conscience of a liberal" in the Age of Obama.

  Regarding the surveillance state, Krugman lamely blames his own lack of expertise for his refusal to give a strong opinion, except to say that Romney and McCain would probably have been a lot worse. Obama's ramping up of Perpetual War, his drone assassinations, his abysmal domestic civil liberties record, his abuses of press freedoms, record deportations, the war on whistle-blowers and his secrecy fetish (see: Trans-Pacific Partnership) go unmentioned. If you still had any doubt that the good professor is quickly achieving parity with his pseudo-nemesis David Brooks in the intellectual laziness department, read the whole article, and weep. Or yawn, or throw up, as your fancy takes you.

Meanwhile, everybody else who's a Somebody is all obsessively abuzz over Panetta, who's had the effrontery to write a book about the Obama administration while Obama is still out there collecting cash and giving jingoistic speeches about American exceptionalism. It is apparently a breach of loyalty and a violation of the unwritten rule (described by Elizabeth Warren in her book) that insiders don't criticize other insiders. I haven't read the book, but the juicy bit getting the most attention is yet another F-bomb tirade by former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel -- this one about that still-suppressed CIA torture report. Reading between the lines of the various synopses of "Worthy Fights," it appears that Barack has been striving mightily to protect his CIA careerist pal John Brennan from exposure. Brennan, Panetta's eventual replacement, remains at his post as agency director, despite calls for his ouster after he admitted spying on Senate investigators.

According to Panetta, he'd made a deal with Senator/CIA Moll Dianne Feinstein to release findings of torture abuses by the agency during the Bush administration. But then, he writes,

 “I was summoned down to a meeting in the Situation Room, where I was told I would have to ‘explain’ this deal to Rahm… It did not take long to get ugly....

’The president wants to know who the f**k authorized this release to the committees,’” Rahm said, slamming his hand down on the table. ‘I have a president with his hair on fire, and I want to know what the f**k you did to f**k this up so bad!’”

Then-director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair asked in vain who'd set Obama's hair on fire. Blair was later fired and replaced by admitted perjurer and now-NSA director James Clapper. Feinstein is still withholding the torture report because it's been redacted into near-meaninglessness by Obama, Brennan, and other CIA functionaries named within its pages.

Jimmy Carter, in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, again slammed Obama over his drone assassination program and other human rights violations, as well as for ignoring the rise of ISIS:

“I really object to the killing of people, particularly Americans overseas who haven’t been brought to justice and put on trial,” he said. “We’ve killed four Americans overseas with American drones. To me that violates our Constitution and human rights.”

(And then he proceeded to cancel himself out by vowing to support war-hawk Hillary Clinton, should she win the Democratic nomination. Oh well.) 

All this public dissing comes right on the heels of a judge ordering Obama to release video of the force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, as well as deny his anti-democratic request that the ongoing trial be closed to the public. The judge, Gladys Kessler, astutely noted (in so many words) that the administration's national security excuse is simply their fear of being exposed as barbarians on the world stage -- at the very same time they're trying to foment public outrage at the video barbarism of ISIS as the latest casus belli.

There is plenty of inhumanity to go around, even from -- and especially from -- exceptional America, homeland central of the centrist elites.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/10/07/6182968/carter-unhappy-with-obamas-policies.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

The Zombie Democracy Shuffle

Paul Krugman's latest column takes issue with Paul Ryan's proposal to have the Congressional Budget Office use something called "dynamic scoring" (Alice in Wonderland math)  to justify more tax cuts for the rich. Despite the sound debunking of "voodoo economics," it's an idea that refuses to die a good death. As a result, Krugman fears, the very credibility of the CBO (not to mention that of the august 15% approval rating Congress) might be in jeopardy if Ryan's dream bill squeaks through a GOP senate! What a shock.

The CBO has already taken quite a few hits for being politicized, most notably from Roosevelt Institute economist Jeff Madrick, who points to that august body's prediction earlier this year that a $10.10 minimum wage "might" be a job killer. These government budget analysts have to thrive on projecting economic forecasts based on such variables of war and peace. And although the CBO hedges its bets through the practice of listing a variety of different scenarios for every eventuality, politicians from both parties have a habit of pouncing on only the choice bits, tastiest to their own agendas. So the addition of dynamic scoring would add one more flaw to an already flawed body.

  Krugman, meanwhile, seems to automatically assume that even if the GOP wins the Senate, President Obama will use his veto option against CBO manipulation and other horrible stuff.  Krugman also manages to use his column space to sneak in the current risible Democratic campaign talking points touting the Recovery under Obama, with its unprecedented part-time/temp job growth since the 2008 meltdown. But the column's main accomplishment is to ignore the de facto jobless and point fingers at perhaps the most valuable Useful Idiot that the "lesser-evil" Wall Street Democrats have ever propped up. Krugman writes,

For years people like Mr. Ryan have posed as champions of fiscal discipline even while advocating huge tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. They have also called for savage cuts in aid to the poor, but these have never been big enough to offset the revenue loss. So how can they make things add up?

Well, for years they have relied on magic asterisks — claims that they will make up for lost revenue by closing loopholes and slashing spending, details to follow. But this dodge has been losing effectiveness as the years go by and the specifics keep not coming. Inevitably, then, they’re feeling the pull of that old black magic — and if they take the Senate, they’ll be able to infuse voodoo into supposedly neutral analysis.

Would they actually do it? It would destroy the credibility of a very important institution, one that has served the country well. But have you seen any evidence that the modern conservative movement cares about such things?

The Times did not see fit to publish this response from me: (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and chalk it up to a techno-glitch rather than outright censorship):

The credibility of the Senate is already shot, so why would the GOP spoil a good losing streak? If we've learned anything, it's that power has nothing to do with intelligence, that rules don't apply to wealthy crooks, and that fomenting fear and hatred for your neighbor is a sure-fire way for sociopaths to win elections in a gerrymandered system.

 Yes, Obama will be able to veto any vile stuff a GOP senate passes. But will he? Or, like President "end welfare as we know it" Clinton before him, will he bargain away the rights of the working class and poor? Will a GOP majority finally give him fast track authority to ram through the corporate coup known as the Trans Pacific Partnership? Will he try to reanimate his "grand bargain" of Social Security cuts?

Here's one clue: the Obama administration is actually siding with the temp agency being sued by Amazon warehouse workers. They're fighting to get paid for the daily half hour they're held after work, forcibly searched to prevent theft of all those cheap goods manufactured by other oppressed wage slaves in other parts of the globalized economy.

 Voodoo and greed also survive because the media let them. The same oligarchs who bankroll the parties control the 6 major outlets broadcasting 90% of all we see and hear.

 Why else is the DCCC  not supporting Ron Zerban, Paul Ryan's progressive challenger in Wisconsin?  Because it takes a village of Ayn Rand heartthrobs from hell to keep our sham democracy shuffling along.

Where would Krugman and the Democrats be without Paul Ryan to provide the impetus for all their op-eds, their relentless fundraising appeals, their free floating pseudo-outrage? Who could they possibly huddle with behind closed doors to split the difference on food stamp cuts and other austere measures to make themselves appear halfway human? Without Paul Ryan and his fuzzy math to softly kick around, we might even begin to notice that the Dems are nothing but a bunch of corporate shills instead of the party of the working stiff. Oh, wait -- that would only remind people how shamefully they've ignored the crisis of unemployment and underemployment during the mid-term elections. So-o-o-....

Another Pop Quiz

Follow this link to take Pew Research's annual test of world events. As my 9th grade world history teacher Mr. Albanese used to say before every multiple-guess treat, "Do as good as you could, boys and girls. Do as good as you could."

Full disclosure: I did as good as I could, and I still got one answer wrong, which I partially blame on what I consider to be a faulty question with a built-in supposition. More on that later, because I don't want to spoil your fun while the day is so fresh, new, and Panglossian.

Update: O.K., it is now dinnertime and time to confess my wrong answer to the question "on which of these activities does the US Government currently spend the most money?" I answered interest on the national debt, but according to Pew, it's Social Security... which I thought Pew had inserted as a "trick question," given that the Social Security trust fund is separate from the federal budget and is a pay-go social insurance program in which workers and employers contribute a payroll tax to fund current retirees. As such, Congress does not have the power to administer these funds, as it does with spending on transportation and foreign aid (other possible answers in the quiz). And the debt ceiling is a whole other story, given that paying interest on money owed used to be a no-brainer.  So, either Pew worded its question too murkily, or I over-interpreted/read too much into it. I'm quite sensitive to the arguments of the deficit hawk billionaires who are always accusing the old and disabled of bilking the government in their quest to survive. Hope they don't use the Pew poll to say "we told you so!"

The Children's Crusade for Plutocracy

 One of the creepiest aspects of the predatory class's insidious takeover of public education is the way they're using little kids as human shields. To say that hordes of children dressed in sloganized shirts are reminiscent of the Hitler Youth movement isn't really all that hyperbolic. Fascism, be it Homeland-style or Fatherland-style, is still fascism.

Taking a page from the Koch Brothers' Tea Party playbook, the hedge fund billionaires' front group known as "Students First"  has co-opted struggling parents from poor neighborhoods, sending them and their kids out on forced unwitting marches in behalf of perpetual wealth disparity. The kids get free snacks and bottled designer water and nice outfits. They get off the streets for a longer, safer school-day. They are raised up into elite "scholars" who attend such snobbishly titled places as "Democracy Prep" and "Renaissance Academy"  -- rather than the mythical gang-infested grubby P.S. Elsewhere down the block.

And the filthy rich get richer capitalizing even more on the poverty and fear that they themselves have wrought. (Lee Fang of The Nation has an excellent piece detailing the putrid financial underbelly of the charter school movement.)

Exploiting hoi polloi as an innocent means to a nefarious end is the tried and true method of fascists everywhere: present your greed and lust for power as a grassroots social movement, and cloak it with all the accoutrements of populist protest: flags, signs, T-shirts, chants, demands for "freedom" from public school "prisons," secretly-funded media propaganda campaigns. Thomas Frank  describes these big-money, Koch-tastic public demonstration/co-optation techniques in his book "Pity the Billionaire."

The latest bizarre pseudo-proletarian uprising for oligarchic freedom was perfunctorily and turgidly described in Thursday's The New York Times:

The buses arrived in Lower Manhattan from Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn on Thursday morning, carrying thousands of charter school supporters who put on matching red T-shirts and came out to draw attention to what organizers called a crisis in the quality of New York City’s public schools. Some of the smallest protesters, squirming in T-shirts that stretched to their ankles, were less than four feet tall.

“The whole school came,” said Angela Sutherland, whose son, a student at Success Academy charter school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, stood quietly by her side.

The rally at Foley Square, which included speeches by politicians and a performance by the musician Questlove, was part of a coordinated campaign, organized primarily by charter school advocates, to put pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio as he and legislators in Albany develop their education agendas in the coming months.

(snip)

On the south end of Foley Square, organizers distributed dozens of handmade signs, each painted with one of a few slogans, like “Great Schools Now” and “Don’t Steal Possible.” The buses, stocked with granola bars, fruit and bottles of water, had been hired to encourage parents and students from charter schools to participate.Many parents said the schools made calls, texted and sent their children home with fliers to ensure a strong turnout. Teachers made speeches on the buses to outline for parents the talking points of the day.Eva S. Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy charter network, delayed the opening of all 32 schools in her network so that children and their teachers could attend the rally. Children were required to be accompanied by a parent or guardian; those who could not make it had to make alternative child-care arrangements for the morning.

 Their "possible" is being stolen from them... which leads one to believe that not only are the charter school crowd dangerous predators who shouldn't be allowed within 100 yards of classrooms full of innocent children, they also have abysmal language skills in dire need of remediation.

Although Eva Moskowitz of the Success Academies charter school chain is the well-known public front-woman of Students First, its real financial mastermind is one Daniel Loeb, founder and CEO  of the multibillion-dollar Third Point LLC hedge fund.  The identities of the uber-wealthy investors in the charter school takeover of public education for private gain are kept largely secret, although Students First maintains close incestuous ties with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a plutocratic think tank which churns out one fatuous policy paper after another in the cause of profiting off the poor. Among the backers of the anti-public education movement are such corporate behemoths as G.E., the Walton Family, the Koch Brothers, and ExxonMobil. In other words, the usual oligarchic suspects running this show, now commonly known as "The Homeland."

Did I mention that Daniel Loeb sits on the board of AEI?

One of the AEI "scholars" who dreamed up the PR ploy of using using mainly minority parents and kids as social activist props in these fascistic spectacles is a young guy named Daniel Lautzenheiser. He's also helping tout the nifty idea of combining the fake protest marches of kids in identical garb with the elite "civics education" curriculum taught to the charter "scholars."

One of his AEI policy papers bears the sinister title "Charter Schools As Nation Builders." Its lede is eerily similar to the Times article linked above:

On a sunny Tuesday in June, the streets of Harlem, New York City, are filled with the usual midday crowd hustling in and out of subway stations and eating hurried lunches. One thing they are most decidedly not doing is voting. And this is a disappointment for a small army of schoolchildren dressed in bright yellow shirts.

The students in yellow attend one of the charter schools in the Democracy Prep Public Schools network and, with the help of their teachers and several parent volunteers, are waging a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign. The occasion is the Democratic congressional primary for New York’s 15th Congressional District, which encompasses upper Manhattan (including Columbia University, Washington Heights, and Harlem) and surrounding locales. Congressional primaries are typically low-turnout affairs in which incumbents have a massive advantage.

It turns out that ethics-challenged Charles Rangel, a Democrat in Congress for about the last hundred years, was in some danger in his district. So the kids, dressed in identical yellow "Future NAACP Member" t-shirts, were getting a lesson in civics by being transformed into sidewalk automatons to get out the (Rangel) vote. 

To show his appreciation, Rangel sent 80 lucky Democracy Academy kids on an all-expenses paid junket to Korea, the trip funded by the usual anonymous suspects. And thanks to another $9 million grant from the Obama Department of Education, Democracy Academy is expanding its operation to another 15 schools over the next seven years.

Lautzenheiser continues explaining the charter movement's "liberal" activist approach to indoctrination civics education:

Though scholars have unpacked civic education in a number of ways, we distinguish between two basic strands. Students are taught abstract citizenship: how our system of government works, what rights and responsibilities US citizens share, and an understanding of significant issues, events, and turning points in American history. Abstract citizenship is most often taught in the classroom; it teaches students about being a citizen and why it is important.

Operational citizenship, on the other hand, teaches students how to be an active citizen. This side of civic education relates to the behaviors and attitudes expected of American citizens, such as following rules, respecting others, performing community service, and making one’s voice heard via voting, rallying, or testifying. Operational citizenship is often learned through experience, some of which can be gained in school but much of which takes place outside of the classroom.

"... teaches students how to be an active citizen." Another indication that the creative destruction crusade of the plutocrats also applies to grammar. Lautzenheimer, incidentally, came to his pro-student activism Eureka moment relatively late in his 20-something life. As a "scholar" at the University of Virginia in 2006, he editorialized against a different student rally which called for a living wage for the school's janitorial staff. Protesters were guilty, he fumed, of "disrespecting" university administrators by standing up for poorly paid custodians. And horror of horrors, they had the chutzpah to deface school sidewalks with the "10.72" wage .... in chalk, of all things.  Young Lautzenheimer made sure to go to the school administrators to personally apologize for his rowdy socialist peers and assure readers that the earned income credit was a worthy substitute for a living wage.

No wonder he got hired by AEI immediately upon graduation. No wonder he was chosen to subvert leftist student protest movements to his oligarchic bosses' own ends. He follows the rules.

Re$pect Our Rule$

Quick Quiz

  Name the person who uttered the following words:

"I actually believe that capitalism is the greatest force for prosperity and opportunity the world has ever known. And I believe in private enterprise -- not government, but innovators and risk-takers and makers and doers -- driving job creation".

Was it:

A) Mitt Romney

B) Rand Paul

C) John Boehner

D) None of the above.

Answer will be provided in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, anyone who can Name That Conservative within the next 10 minutes will receive a free subscription to Sardonicky.   

Update: Congratulations to Fred Drumlevitch, who quickly came up with the correct answer: D) Barack Obama. For anybody interested, Barry made his neoliberal remarks to a group of business students in Chicago yesterday. You can find the entire transcript on the White House website, which I refuse to link to again for fear they might think I'm an obsessive fan.

 

Ebola Does Dallas

Now that the Ebola virus is in their backyard, the obscenely wealthy are expected to finally start prying open their wallets to fight a plague that heretofore had only been afflicting "the other."

A combination of factors that include a lack of a cataclysmic event, slow-building media coverage, and significant government intervention had tempered the philanthropic community’s response during the first several months of the outbreak, according to Mr. Ottenhoff and other experts.

"When you read stories that the American government is sending 3,000 military workers and spending hundreds of millions of dollars, some donors think, ‘Well good, this problem has now been addressed,’" Mr. Ottenhoff said. "Then there are other donors who think, ‘Given all this money, where are the gaps?’ and ‘Maybe we need to hold back a little while and figure out where the funding gaps are before we commit our money.’"

Bob Ottenhoff is the director of a group called the Center for Disaster Philanthropy  which in my proletarian ignorance, I'd heretofore never known existed. So far, he says, the rate of plutocratic giving to fight a disease wreaking havoc in countries in West Africa has been, to put it euphemistically, downright mean. A relatively modest $50 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, out of its more than $40 billion stash, has been the top donation so far to fight a disease expected to strike more than a million people. First runner-up was the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with $9 million to the CDC,  $2.8-million to the American Red Cross, and $100,000 in matching funds to Global Giving.  The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave $5-million to various international health organizations in the fight against Ebola, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The American Red Cross has only raised $98,000 thus far from individual private donors (in addition to the Allen Foundation's gift) for the treatment and prevention of Ebola. Because, let's face it --  Africa is not as conveniently close as earthquaked Haiti, or flooded New Orleans, or the superstorm-ravaged East Coast of Indispensablistan. It is next to impossible to get self-promoting politicians and celebrities to go to the scene of the action for photo-ops that show them helping in some rebuilding effort. Celebrities in haz-mat suits aren't aesthetic marketing ploys.

And anyway, the media have been bending over backwards to help assure the wealthy that It Can't Happen Here. From the New York Times:

Dr.(CDC director Thomas) Frieden told the president that the C.D.C. had been prepared for an Ebola case in the United States, according to an account of the call distributed by the White House, “and that we have the infrastructure in place to respond safely and effectively.”

The Obama administration was working to prevent a public panic over the case, using social media to describe how Ebola can — and cannot — be transmitted.

“You cannot get Ebola through the air, water or food in the U.S.,” the White House said on Tuesday night in a posting on its official Twitter account. “Ebola can only spread from contact with the blood or body fluids of a person or animal who is sick with or has died from the disease.”

Another official Twitter posting said, “America has the best doctors and public health infrastructure in the world, and we are prepared to respond to Ebola.”

USA! USA! USA! What about the 30-40 million people who remain uninsured, and where even people now receiving expanded Medicaid benefits under Obamacare often can't find a doctor willing to accept their insurance?

 Was the unidentified man now being treated for Ebola in Dallas initially sent home from the hospital where he sought treatment because of his lack of insurance in a state which is refusing Medicaid expansion? Or was it just the fantastic health infrastructure? No word yet. But if one individual's inability to pay turns out to be the cause of Ebola spreading in the US, then it also might be the impetus to finally enact a true single payer health care system in this country. After all, denial of medical care to people based on their bank accounts and social status will also have an adverse affect on the healthy wealthy who dictate social policy. All the gated communities, all the private security guards, all the private boutique hospital suites with concierge service in the world will not protect them in the horrible event that Ebola (or any other mutated pathogen, for that matter) gets out of control. You can't bribe Ebola.

Meanwhile, our leaders have been doing everything in their power to actually foment a public panic over the "cancer" of ISIS, which before Ebola made its unscripted appearance, was threatening to surge over the Texas border right along with all those hideous hordes of undocumented Illegals, threatening to kill us all in our beds unless we spend trillions on bombs and tanks and drones.

Meanwhile, officials blithely assure us that once it hits the exceptionally rich soil of the Homeland (the preferred new name for USA) Ebola doesn't stand a chance. I guess they never heard the story about how the Black Plague had morphed into two forms (bubonic and pneumonic) -- the first spread by fleas, the other, then-rarer form, by human aerosol droplets. As they say in the pathogenic real estate biz: Mutation, Mutation, Mutation.

As Sophie Delauney, director of Doctors Without Borders, told NPR recently,
"It (the actual reality of the plague) is so horrific, that once you realize how dramatic the situation is, then you just keep thinking about Ebola all the time. But until you make that step, you prefer to get away from it."

The only thing we have to fear are the fear-mongers themselves, who prefer that we think instead about fake terror groups and beheadings. What we really should all be panicking about is the latest outbreak of official ineptitude, pathological denialism, and outright stupidity of government bureaucrats and self-dealing politicians.