The Return of Chompy

This is how the moribund chained consumer price index (CPI) method of cutting Social Security gets reanimated:

As one of its first orders of business upon convening Tuesday, the Republican House of Representatives approved a rule that will seriously undermine efforts to keep all of Social Security solvent.

The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

But it's especially urgent now, because the disability program's trust fund is expected to run dry as early as next year. At that point, disability benefits for 11 million beneficiaries would have to be cut 20%. Reallocating the income, however, would keep both the old-age and disability programs solvent until at least 2033, giving Congress plenty of time to assess the programs' needs and work out a long-term fix.

The procedural rule enacted by the House Republican caucus prohibits the reallocation unless it's accompanied by "benefit cuts or tax increases that improve the solvency of the combined trust funds," as paraphrased by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

As Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times lays out, this all-out war on the disabled, the sick, and the old has been planned for quite some time now. With a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, President Obama and the Wall Street branch of the Democratic party finally have the opening they've been craving to "reform" the social safety net.

 The GOP's job is to present a plan so cruel, so odious and so extreme that any eventual cuts in benefits agreed to by the Lesser Evil Party will have us breathing a sigh of relief that they're only sickening us and shortening our lives rather than immediately murdering us in our beds. The Republicans kill swiftly and with gusto; the Democrats prefer the gentler "boiling frog" approach.

It's how Good Cop/Bad Cop oligarchic theater works. It will be sold to the public as the sick and disabled being part of an organized crime ring, stealing from both current retirees and those mythical "future generations." It's just another variation on the tired old "divide and conquer" method used by rulers throughout history to maintain their choke-hold on power.

It's how politics in the age of Citizen United works. Even though large majorities of Americans want Social Security and Medicare expanded, the rich donor class does not. As we all know, the rich get what they want. And what they want is the profits from social insurance programs we've paid into all our working lives. What they want, frankly, is for the most vulnerable among us to simply disappear.

Such neoliberal media megaliths as CBS and NPR have already gotten the propaganda ball rolling with their recent "exposés" on disability scammers. According to the Beltway consensus, any malingerer with a pen and a stamp and a shyster lawyer and crooked doctor can collect lifelong disability simply on demand. In reality, however, only a small percentage of applicants are ever approved for benefits -- if anything, the system is unnecessarily cruel and time-consuming enough without Congress decreasing already meager benefits. It often takes years for a severely sick or disabled person to even get scheduled for an appeal hearing before an administrative court.

Embracing the Suck: The Sequel

Once the Democrats and Republicans grab that grotesque cudgel to hammer out their less-horrible plan (increased hunger for the vulnerable rather than outright starvation) Obama will most likely hail himself as the hero who saved the New Deal by bravely compromising. He was thwarted in his goal to reward the Wall Street grifters with our earned benefits early in his administration, but his time may finally have come. As Eric Zuesse of Washington's Blog reminded us shortly before the latest mid-term "shellacking,"

To Obama, his plan to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, so as to fund the Wall Street bailout, was an act of political courage. (In his interview with the Washington Post, he “pledged to expend political capital on the issue.”) It was his long-term plan, even though the polls showed widespread opposition to it by the public. This was a matter not of expediency, but of conscience, for him: he needed to find some way to fund both the ongoing Wall Street bailouts, and the massive federal debt that would be caused by the 2008 Wall Street crash and its resulting plunge in federal tax-collections; and this “balanced approach,” of tax hikes and spending cuts, would be his solution to both problems.

Here's then-Senator Obama's 2006 political audition before the directors of the oligarchy at the Brookings Institution, where the self-described "free trader" and market ideologue specifically promises to modernize (neoliberal-speak for slash) Social Security. He actually warns the filthy rich that their counterrevolution will not be a "bloodless process." (too bad that this smoking gun of a clip was not posted for public viewing until after the 2008 election.) The "Bob" he addresses is mega-banker Robert Rubin, former Clinton treasury secretary and architect of the Glass-Steagall repeal:

Before Thomas Piketty became a best-selling author and wealth inequality became part of the political lexicon, Obama used the smarmy mantra "sharing the sacrifice" to ram through his federal wage freezes, cuts in home heating assistance, slashing training programs like Job Corps, and other austerity policies. A variation on this theme, mouthed by House Minority Maven Nancy Pelosi upon agreeing in 2013 to cut unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless in exchange for keeping the government open, is "embracing the suck."

 It was only the recalcitrance of the Tea Party that doomed Obama's initial efforts to enact chained CPI and raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Now that austerity and deficit reduction have been totally discredited as means to "grow the economy," it should be interesting, to say the least, to see how he plans to justify sticking it to us this time.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he'll veto the Republicans' efforts to slash Social Security. But I'm not hopeful. This man is a dyed in the wool conservative who is not about to change into a progressive two years before he's due to cash in big-time in private life.

So stock up on your popcorn now while you can still afford it.

Baby It's Cold Outside

 There's a big chill, and it has nothing to do with the new Polar Vortex (named Gorgon, because of its many tentacles) now writhing its way through the lower 48.

Americans who write for a living (or for free, for that matter) are still afraid to jot down every thought that comes into their heads, lest the all-seeing icy eye of the government Gorgon be watching them. It's the reptilian chill felt round the world, but the head, or epicenter, of this particular monster is smack dab in Washington, DC -- or more aptly, within the Surveillance State snake-pit located in and around our nation's capitol.

In the latest survey conducted by the PEN American Center, a literary and human rights association, more than half the participating 800 American writers reported that they self-censor. Government surveillance is the culprit, they say, and has "significantly damaged U.S. credibility as a global champion of free expression for the long term."

The polar vortex of this internalized censorship is churning all over the writing world, with other less-free countries all shook up because  the United States has been revealed to be not quite the bastion of democracy and free speech its leaders still insist it is. Turns out that the Land of the Free subpoenas reporters, jails reporters' sources, and generally bends over backward to suppress information, like torture reports.

 The United States is the all-seeing, crawling eye with global surveillance capabilities. As the One Indispensable Nation, it resides on a high peak of frozen unaccountability.

  The PEN survey expands on its findings from last year by not only questioning American writers on the horror they feel, but by comparing the writing habits of Americans with their foreign counterparts.

It found that American writers are just as afraid of creepy-crawly government surveillance as writers in such authoritarian countries as China. Writers in democratic and undemocratic countries are equally worried. And that leads one to believe that the concept of democracy itself needs to be redefined in this Age of Abnormal. All the world's an oligarchy, and all the men and women merely serfs, maybe? From the report:

Vast majorities of writers around the world said they were “very” or “some-what” worried about levels of government surveillance in their countries, including 75% in countries classified as “Free”by Freedom House, 84% in countries classified as “Partly Free”, and 80% in“Not Free” countries.

These  levels are consistent with the findings of PEN’s October 2013 survey of U.S. writers, which showed that 85% of American writers were very or somewhat worried about current levels of government surveillance. The high level of concern among U.S. writers mirrors that of writers living in the other four countries that make up the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance (Australia,Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), 84% of whom are very or somewhat worried about government surveillance. Writers are not outliers when it comes to their level of concern about government surveillance. Eighty percent of Americans surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll released on Nov.12, 2014, agree that Americans should be worried about the government’s monitoring of phone calls and internet communication.

Writers are so spooked that some of them were even afraid to respond to the PEN survey itself, lest the government take extra steps to monitor the fearful scribes. One writer complained that surveillance has cast a "ghostly and intimidating cloak" over his or her communications. Another woman describing herself as the daughter of Holocaust survivors said that compared to the NSA, the East German Stasi was amateur hour.

Writers in both free and not-free countries report avoiding speaking and writing about certain topics in public, as well as in their email and phone conversations, and have either refrained, or considered refraining, from conducting Internet searches on topics which might be considered fraught.

If for no other reason that it damages the US's reputation around the world, PEN is urging that the dragnet surveillance conducted by the NSA and other intelligence agencies cease -- or at the very least, that the government offer more transparency about whom it monitors and why.

I guess they haven't yet swallowed the government propaganda that were it not for Edward Snowden, writers would still be feeling free to write about whatever they want. What we didn't know couldn't possibly hurt us, right?  Until it comes out that the government is monitoring reporters, and that somebody like James Risen can get subpoenaed and threatened with prison unless he tells Big Brother what its monitoring of him could never reveal: his inner thoughts and the identity of a whistleblowing source.

It's a coincidence that Risen is in court, refusing to help the government prosecute a CIA whistleblower, the same week that the PEN survey came out. It's a coincidence that the Obama administration is shielding CIA torturers but vindictively prosecuting an agency employee (Jeffrey Sterling) who apparently had the courage to disclose the CIA's messed-up plot to mess with Iran's nuclear program.

Attorney General Eric Holder, while sanctimoniously promising he will not send Risen to jail for failure to comply, is nevertheless vindictively keeping this reporter twisting in the wind anyway, holding him up as an example of how uncomfortable and expensive the US can make life for writers should they write down thoughts and facts not conducive to the oligarchic national security. It's not-so-subtle mind control.

Risen is entering the eighth year of his battle with the Justice Department over a book he wrote that embarrassed the Bush administration. He is only the latest high profile example of Obama's war on whistleblowers. If a famous writer like Risen, protected by the most powerful newspaper on earth, can be persecuted this way, where does that leave others without the financial and legal resources to defend their civil rights?

The Obama administration is sending a definite message to all of us, and to government employees at every level: don't even think about talking trash about us. If you see something, don't say something. As Risen himself put it, Obama is "the greatest threat to press freedom in a generation".

So it's no surprise that the US has fallen a record 13 slots, to 46th place, in Reporters Without Borders' annual report on global press freedoms.

Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.

This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest.

US journalists were stunned by the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records without warning in order to identify the source of a CIA leak. It served as a reminder of the urgent need for a “shield law” to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources at the federal level. The revival of the legislative process is little consolation for James Risen of The New York Times, who is subject to a court order to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. And less still for Barrett Brown, a young freelance journalist facing 105 years in prison in connection with the posting of information that hackers obtained from Statfor, a private intelligence company with close ties to the federal government.

The UK fell a less drastic three spaces, to 33rd place, due to its smashing of Guardian computers in the wake of the Snowden revelations.  The UK doesn't even enjoy the same constitutional rights, including a shield law, as Americans supposedly do.

Still, we're not the worst of the worst. In other countries, organized crime and non-state violence severely curtail the freedom of the press. Four Guatemalan journalists were murdered last year, and Egypt has imprisoned Al Jazeera reporters for doing their job. Kuwait fell 13 places because a new law was passed which fines writers $1 million for criticizing the Emir, and sentences them to 10 years in prison for insulting Allah, Mohammed, the prophets and even the prophets' wives. In Greece and Hungary, journalists are at risk for physical attacks by the fast-growing fascist movements being spawned by neoliberal austerity measures.

So whether or not prison and violence against reporters are real or whether they're threatened, writers all over the world are feeling similar levels of fear, and they self-censor accordingly.

It's the globalization of state-sponsored terror and the war against independent thought. Hard, soft, in-between; physical or psychological: terror is still terror.

Meanwhile, there's always propaganda to calm our nerves. This recently-released official White House photo, for example, purports to show some staffers doubled over with hilarity at something mouthed by the Jokester-in-Chief. But the subliminal message -- be sycophantic or be sorry -- comes through loud and clear.

All Is Calm, All Is Blight

Americans certainly are a short attention-spanned bunch, not to mention stuck like glue to whatever the top-trending story is on any given day. Our anxieties are fleeting and fickle. One month, all we cared about was the Ebola outbreak. By the next month, when nobody we knew personally had actually caught or died of the disease, it was on to the next big thing. Namely, Kim Kardashian's butt.

I have to say that I'm really fond of the actual next big thing on the Things We Hate List. Because politicians are now even more feared than the crappy Economy they helped to create!  Granted, only 18% of those polled by Gallup actually consider our elected leaders to be problematic, but that is huge compared to the mere two percent who still list terrorism as the top thing to be terrorized about. And that should really scare the despised politicians, who rely on fear fomentation to keep the proles in line.

Here are the complete results:

As you can see, there is virtually no agreement on what should concern us the most. I suspect, though, that most people would agree that being called by pollsters during the dinner hour can be considered universally problematic, especially since most "polls" are simply marketing ploys in disguise. I noticed that Gallup asked no questions about the total failure of the FTC's Do Not Call program.

And how about that section titled "War/Wars (non-specific)"?  People apparently were not permitted to be nuanced about, say, their approval of the 30 Years War as opposed to the current Forever Wars. As a matter of fact, the Gallup pollsters seem to assume that just because President Obama "responsibly" ended the Afghanistan War by leaving only thousands of soldiers behind, and is only dribbling back troops to Iraq in mission-creep piecemeal fashion, we are basking in some sort of Orwellian Pax Americana.

Since we can't agree on what to loathe, the pollsters glibly conclude that everything is calm amidst the blight. The sum of all fears effectively cancels each one out.

With unemployment and gas prices falling, the U.S. not being involved in any major wars and scaling back operations in Afghanistan, and no acts of domestic terrorism occurring, the factors that have caused Americans to converge on a single pressing concern in the past simply weren't present in 2014. Rather, as mentions of the economy and unemployment have dwindled since 2012, mentions of healthcare and government leadership have grown to join them, forming a set of comparably sized, moderate-level concerns that now define the public's view of what ails the nation.

Not only was this the average picture in 2014, but it remained the state of affairs in the last quarter, suggesting 2015 is starting on a similarly calm note. That is underscored by the significant improvement in the Gallup Economic Confidence Index in late December, reaching positive territory for the first time since before 2008.

So that last bit about consumer confidence should make the despised politicians a little happier. The Dems' Hooveresque propaganda campaign about prosperity being just around the corner seems to be working.

But how will the muddled poll results affect the messaging of the detested politicians? How, most importantly, will they affect "the narrative" of Jeb and Hillary's Neoliberal Death Match?

The dispersion of public concern seen in 2014 may also have implications for the 2016 presidential election. Should it persist, the lack of a single defining public issue could make candidates' task of honing a message for the election more complex.

I guess, like the population they aim to fool, they'll "hone" their message on whatever topic is trending on any given day. They'll talk about whatever the corporate media stenographers tell us to care about, cancelling themselves and us out in the process.

As long as we're on the subject of meaningless polls, I'll add to the current listicle frenzy by pointing you to the most despised words of 2014, as compiled in the frozen north by Lake Superior State University. Here's a synopsis of what should be banned:

BAE ("before anyone else"): I have to admit that I'd never even heard of this one.

Polar Vortex: the top-trending euphemism for Winter, making Jack Frost and Old Man jealous. I don't understand why it wasn't included in the Gallup Poll. They never even mentioned what we really should be afraid of -- and that is Climate Change.

Hack: the gripe is with the misuse of this word, as in "life hack." I still plan to use it liberally when describing loathed politicians and sycophantic journalists.

Skill Set: banned for redundancy. You have a skill or skills, period. Similar in annoyance to "mindset."

Swag: banned for its catch-all quality. It's a lazy verbal tic similar to "um" and "American exceptionalism."

Foodie: what took them so long to ban this one?

Curate/Curated: it used to mean something to do with a museum. Now, everything is curated. The NSA doesn't collect your emails and phone conversations, it merely curates them as valuable works of art. The word is also used to justify copying and pasting entire articles on one's blog. If you "curate" someone else's work, you cannot possibly be accused of theft or plagiarism. You just dug it up somewhere to put in your own vanity museum.

Friend-Raising: typifies the mass marketization and dehumanization of life itself.

Cra-Cra: that is just craaaazy, dude!

Enhanced Interrogation: here's looking at you, New York Times.

Takeaway: not food for foodies, but a trendy word for "conclusion." As in, "what's your takeaway on the stupid Gallup poll?"

-Nation: another long-overdue one, in which loathed and insufferable people add "nation" after themselves or their organization. As in HillaryNation or FoxNation or ObamaNation. It's a real abomination.

Terror in the Big Apple

When two New York City police officers were shot to death this month, they were parked in front of a public housing project during an anti-terrorism training exercise. That just about says it all.

Cop union boss Patrick Lynch is actually correct about there being a war in the Big Apple. But it's not only a war of the cops against a liberal Democratic mayor and against the people protesting police brutality. It's the war of neoliberalism against the poor and working classes, and it's been going on for decades. The cops function to ease the gentrification process, and to contain the disposable populations. It's the rich whom they serve and protect. And thus it was no anomaly that the US vice president, the governor of New York, and all manner of dignitaries ostentatiously attended the funeral of one lowly murdered cop last weekend. The dead man is a symbol of their own endangered law, their own endangered order. Not for concern for the hoi polloi, either, is the New York Times wringing its hands over an alleged work slow-down by some selfish counterrevolutionary cops.

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the inner cities abutting the enclaves of the obscene rich are the theaters of modern  guerrilla warfare. Poor neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the cop shooting took place, might as well be another Mogadishu or Fallujah as far as the elites are concerned.

The wealth gap in New York City is the most extreme in the United States, with the city simultaneously housing a record number of billionaires and a record number of poor people. Homelessness is at a record high, and half the population is living in or near poverty.  From Bloomberg:

The most commonly used measure of inequality is the Gini index, which ranges between 0, which would be complete equality (everyone in a community has the same income), and 1, which is complete inequality (one person has all the income, all others none).  Manhattan’s Gini index stood at 0.596 in 2012, higher than that of South Africa before the Apartheid-ending 1994 election. (The U.S. average is 0.471.) If Manhattan were a country, it would rank sixth highest in income inequality in the world out of more than 130 for which the World Bank reports data. In 2009 New York’s wealthiest one percent earned a third of the entire municipality’s personal income — almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

The same patterns can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, in other major cities. A 2006 analysis by the Brookings Institution showed the percentage of middle income families declined precipitously in the 100 largest metro areas from 1970 to 2000.

Meanwhile, based on the number of actual boots on the ground, the NYPD  is now the seventh largest army on the entire planet.

The collapse of the financial system in 2008 only accentuated the plight of the already marginalized living in poor urban neighborhoods. Even low-level employment opportunities collapsed, and brutal austerity measures under both a billionaire mayor (Michael Bloomberg) and the deficit hawks in both national political parties oversaw food stamp cuts and unemployment insurance and other drastic reductions in the social safety net.  Foreclosures on subprime mortgage disproportionately hit black and Latino populations, while the financial fraudsters of Wall Street have not only gone unpunished, but have succeeded in extracting even more wealth as a reward for their own malfeasance.

And the week before Christmas, two cops sat in their squad car, parked outside of a building which houses the poor and downtrodden. In the war on terror, the poor and downtrodden are considered terrorists until proven otherwise. The "disposition matrix" constructed by President Obama and his CIA consigliere John Brennan has come home to the Homeland. And HQ Central of the Homeland is in the Big Apple. Goldman Sachs even shares office space with the cops in its taxpayer-subsidized office tower. (If nothing else, the city police are suffering from one hell of a post-Bloomberg hangover. No more Muslim-stalking. No more stop-and-frisk. It must be hard to have a new mayor trying to at least somewhat reverse a fascist coup.)

The two murdered police officers were victims not only of the crazed shooter -- they were collateral damage of the tenuous oligarchic system that employed them. They were working overtime, probably to earn some extra money for Christmas. Cops, as members of the middle class Precariat, are tasked with keeping the real underclass in line. The plutocracy draws its domestic armed forces not from within its own class,  but from the ranks of the working poor, integrating them into its program of economic and political oppression. Police forces are the low-intensity (usually) military ops for the elites. No wonder the rulers get all shaken up when a few of their domestic troops get killed. If you actually think they personally give a shit about the murdered cops, though, think again. They are mourning symbols of their own power, not the disposable bullet-ridden human bodies.

Two cops were sitting in their squad car in front of a public housing project, learning how to detect the terror camouflaged in every neighborhood resident. They were there to learn how to track and target people moving about within the cluttered infrastructure, there to detect threats in the mundane activities and spaces of everyday life.

It was probably no accident that another recent police shooting took place within another Brooklyn public housing project, neglected by the same austerity policies which have destroyed the hope and dignity of so many people. A cop shot and killed a resident for the offense of simply moving and existing within his own pitch-black stairwell. The officer apparently panicked, but he'd also been effectively trained to automatically criminalize the tenants of projects.

And while cops patrol the domiciles of the demonized poor, the free-marketers of both political parties have ramped up selling out public housing to vulture capitalists. In a little-noticed section of this month's corporate giveaway known as the Cromnibus Bill, the number of public housing units being "privatized" by the Obama administration has tripled, from 60,000 to 180,000 units.

Of course, the neoliberals of HUD are euphemising this corruption by calling the program "Rental Assistance Demonstration" (RAD). It's rad, all right -- in a scary Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand kind of way. Not only did  RAD go from an unproven pilot program to full-scale evisceration of public housing in the space of only a few months, it puts the lives of the poor -- mainly elderly and women -- into the clutches of the same predators who destroyed the housing market through subprime fraud in the first place. The Obama administration has once again chosen the rentiers over the renters. And it set the stage for this privatization of the units by deliberately underfunding public housing in every proposed White House budget since 2010.

The developers who take over public housing (a major safety net for the poor) will be able to set their own rents and, as usual, will be immune from all government oversight and accountability should the dwellings fall into even further disrepair. The renters themselves will receive government rent vouchers instead of protective leases. Foreclosures and evictions are distinct possibilities and are all part and parcel of the "creative destruction" of poor neighborhoods.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) complained to Obama about the selling-out of public housing in her own Watts district, but to no avail. (After all, he got his start in Chicago politics thanks to the FIRE gentrification crowd). Waters said, “Put simply, if the price of accessing private capital is to put public housing ownership at risk, then that price is too high. A more appropriate and sustainable approach would be for the federal government to provide adequate funding directly to the public housing program.”

And as tenants rights advocate Lynda Carson writes,

In addition to RAD destroying thousands of good union public housing jobs across the nation, RAD pits low-income renters in the Section 8 program against public housing tenants needing Section 8 vouchers. Because RAD results in displacing tenants from their public housing units, the tenants are pressured to accept Section 8 vouchers to find another place to reside. Vouchers that may not be worth much as the on-going massive sequestration budget cuts destroy the Section 8 voucher program.

According to a November 2014 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), massive sequestration budget cuts that are still in effect have resulted in the loss of 100,000 Section 8 vouchers (Housing Choice Vouchers) during 2013. Unless the sequestration budget cuts are ended which is unlikely once Republicans take total control of Congress on January 1, 2015, public housing tenants pressured to accept Section 8 vouchers because of the RAD program are being placed at risk of homelessness.

And isn't that the whole plan? More open green spaces, less housing for the marginalized and criminalized poor to hide from the paranoid and predatory rich.

 Neighborhoods on the elite chopping block have been transformed into military Human Terrain Systems.  CCTV at every intersection allows real instances of urban violence to supplement the fictional fare that Hollywood produces to frighten us into submission. If citizens can envision urban areas and housing projects as hotbeds of savagery, then citizens can also accept more police and more jails. It's an endless propaganda feedback loop, in which both the cognitively superior "liberal" elites and the fundamentalist right-wingers are manipulated into joining forces in their hatred of the "Other". One side calls them IQ-deficient gun-loving losers in need of a hand up rather than a handout. The other side calls them godless moochers and takers lolling about on their hammocks of dependency.

Two cops, sitting in their patrol car, guarding against terror in front of the place where the poor people live.

America: where life itself has been a war for a long, long time.

You can watch the Ball drop tonight in Times Square.

The Propaganda Game's Afoot

There will be no need, after all, for us to don our Sherlock Holmes tinfoil deerstalkers to investigate whether there's an orchestrated White House-corporate media plot underway to gaslight Americans into believing that their economic travails are mainly all in their heads. (see my last post.)

The game's afoot, Watson. And since it's brain-damaging football season, it's being advertised as a sporting event that we're all invited to attend. The agenda is this: rather than acknowledge the most extreme wealth gap in modern history and suggesting legislation ( say, higher taxes on the rich) to do something about it, President Obama will be embarking on yet another propaganda campaign tour to convince us that we're nuts if we continue to believe these times are really all that hard.

The pompom-waving change we can believe in is the changing of the American mind about reality itself. From Politico:

Changing Americans’ sense of the economy is Obama’s critical project for the next two years, and he and his aides know it. His own legacy depends on it — neither health care, immigration reform, opening an embassy in Cuba nor anything else is going to add up to much if most people feel like they’re worse off than the day of his inauguration.

 Analysts agree that improving Americans’ sense of the economy is the single most important thing Obama can do for Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee: Whether she wins will most likely hinge significantly on whether the “Obama-Clinton economy” is a positive Democratic slogan or a snide Republican talking point.

 But for now, the growing pile of economic data that Obama and his aides believe demonstrate his success digging the country out after the financial collapse hasn’t broken through, and they know it. Wages haven’t kept up, prices keep rising, and Obama seems to be presiding over a period in which Americans’ lives are getting more difficult.

This insider's view of the inner workings of the Beltway group-think brain presupposes that the targets of the coming onslaught of propaganda don't read Politico and thus will be totally fooled by the most syrupy bromides to come out of a presidential mouth since.... well, at least since his last weekly address, repeated so dutifully by the liberal pundits I wrote about the other day. Not only are Obama and his stenographers stupidly revealing their own dishonest strategy for all the world to see, they're actually starting to believe it themselves. Obama only seems to be presiding over some of the most truly horrific hard times in modern history. All he needs to do is change the slogan or the "narrative," and all will be right with his world.

“You can’t convince people that their paycheck is going farther than it was — and you shouldn’t try. That would be a big mistake. What you can do is try to affect people’s optimism for the long term,” said a senior Obama adviser. “If we can make people understand that there are reasons for a bright future and the president has a plan to address what ails them, then that will be real progress.”

Of course, there is no real plan. There just has to be a perception that a plan is coming down the pike. And Obama's in his fourth quarter and time is beginning to run out! Ever notice how the actual lives of struggling people are always treated as a sporting event to which they are mere helpless spectators? It seems like only yesterday (because it was only yesterday) that I got yet another money-grubbing appeal from "Barack Obama": 

Some folks have started to call this the "fourth quarter" of my presidency. In a game, with the clock ticking down, that's when you want your best team out there.

That's what this email is about. It's because of folks like you that I'm able to give this everything I've got in the next two years.

As Politico tells it, though, we're still stuck in the pre-game show as the fourth quarter gets underway:

Ideas are still being proposed, vetted through the budget process, nixed and reworked for the State of the Union. But already, White House aides are starting to see some preliminary proposals that they believe will break through to talk about and show where economic progress is taking hold, and trying to spark what they like to refer to as a serious debate about issues middle-class families care about, with possible initiatives ranging from early childhood education to housing.

This is just pathetic. One in thirty children in this country is homeless, and they want to spark a debate? "Preliminary" is a word we should hear at the beginning of a presidential term, not near the end of one. But if it isn't the nihilist Republicans, it's the damned travel schedule of the leader of the free world:

But Obama won’t have much time immediately after the Jan. 20 speech to press the message himself. Only a few days after he addresses Congress, he’ll head to India for a number of events with the new prime minister.

 Obama aides continue to point back to the speech he delivered at Northwestern as a guide for what’s ahead — “a new foundation,” with “cornerstones” that include investments in the energy, tech and manufacturing; education and job training; health care reform; and structural overhaul.

What the hell does that even mean? Paging George Orwell, who in Politics and the English Language eviscerated this kind of muddled thinking. It is so sweepingly generalized as to be meaningless by intent. Obama's largely ignored Northwestern speech and its endless variations  are textbook cases of what Orwell called the "defense of the indefensible":

 Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

What could be more cloudily vague and hackneyed than a "New Foundation" whose cornerstones include "investments" and "structural overhaul" of education and health care? Brutalities such as 40 million people still lacking medical insurance, and the anti-labor, child-abusive privatization of public education, and the continued offshoring of manufacturing via secretive trade pacts are not cornerstones, but rather huge blocks of cement meant to weigh us down and ultimately bury us.

There are endless variations on the trite tactics of persuasion. When the Edward Snowden revelations got people all riled up, the  government surveillance of Americans didn't cease. And nobody went to jail or got castigated in the media except the whistleblowers. The only thing that's had to be changed is people's perceptions that loss of their civil rights and privacy is even a bad thing. It's the same tactic the politicians used when they rammed austerity down our throats. Rather than admitting they are in total thrall to the plutocrats running the place, they couched their slashing of the social safety net in terms of patriotic "sharing the sacrifice" and "we're all in this together."

But there's a harsh light at the end of this tunnel of journalistic and political vacuity. Politico unintentionally admits that Obama's charm offensive will only serve to mask his real agenda: putting the permanent screws to what's left of the working and middle class. In modern Orwellian Politico-speak, this is called "bipartisanship" -- or if you prefer your whammies to be triple ones, "triangulation."

On the Hill, they’re less interested in high-minded talk of principles than clear legislation, with particular emphasis on the corporate tax reform and trade deals that Obama and his advisers have for months identified as their best chance for striking deals with Republicans.

 “He has every right to go out and talk about his message. But he ought to spend more time up here, working with Democrats and Republicans alike on passing items that will actually help improve the wages of middle-class Americans and provide more opportunity for growth in the economy,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who’s met privately with Obama and offered himself as a bridge for bipartisan economic deals.

Portman talks out of both sides of his mouth with the best of them. He moans that Obama isn't coddling him "up here" but then admits that the president is stroking him down there --  that is, meeting with him "privately," and plotting who's going to play the part of the human bridge to Kochtopia in the latest episode of Corrupt Kabuki.

It's political pornography and it's doublespeak and it can only be harmful to our collective mental health if we choose to succumb to it.  

When Pangloss Attacks

When two Democratic pundits write essentially the same column about what a great year it's been, you're tempted to don your tinfoil Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and ponder whether the game's afoot.

 In this episode, the detective travels back in time and comes face to face with a villain even worse than Professor Moriarty: the dreaded Doctor Pangloss!

You might remember Doc P from Voltaire's Candide, which satirizes phony glass-half-full optimism in the face of every unspeakable catastrophe known to man. Pangloss literally spans the globe to find the bright sides to the Lisbon earthquake, to the Inquisition, to Western hemisphere plunder and genocide, and all the wars and diseases and famines in between. If you can't find something to be glad about in any crisis or cataclysm, that's your problem. If you think life sucks, you've simply been listening to the political enemies of the feel-good State.

Today's Panglossian scourge is brought to you by Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Michael Grunwald of Politico. You might think one guy is plagiarizing the other, but that would be totally unfair. They're both simply aping the talking points mouthed by President Obama and his cohort in the neoliberal echo chamber: life is good, and America is exceptional, and the naysayers are evil for telling you otherwise. Sure, things may seem dire to millions of us, but that's mainly because the Republicans will tell any lie to make Obama look bad. If you'd only pay attention and turn off Fox News once in awhile, then you'd hear the choirs of angels getting louder all the time.

Your misery is all in your head. So let them gaslight you into meek submission through some message-disciplined tandem columnizing:

All year Americans have been bombarded with dire news reports portraying a world out of control and a clueless government with no idea what to do.

Yet if you look back at what actually happened over the past year, you see something completely different. Amid all the derision, a number of major government policies worked just fine — and the biggest successes involved the most derided policies. You’ll never hear this on Fox News, but 2014 was a year in which the federal government, in particular, showed that it can do some important things very well if it wants to.

Start with Ebola, a subject that has vanished from the headlines so fast it’s hard to remember how pervasive the panic was just a few weeks ago. Judging from news media coverage, especially but not only on cable TV, America was on the verge of turning into a real-life version of “The Walking Dead.” And many politicians dismissed the efforts of public health officials to deal with the disease using conventional methods. Instead, they insisted, we needed to ban all travel to and from West Africa, imprison anyone who arrived from the wrong place, and close the border with Mexico. No, I have no idea why anyone thought that last item made sense.(Krugman, Tidings of Comfort.)

Let’s face it: The press has a problem reporting good news. Two Americans died of Ebola and cable TV flipped out; now we’re Ebola-free and no one seems to care. The same thing happened with the flood of migrant children across the Mexican border, which was a horrific crisis until it suddenly wasn’t. Nobody’s going to win a Pulitzer Prize for recognizing that we’re smoking less, driving less, wasting less electricity and committing less crime. Police are killing fewer civilians, and fewer police are getting killed, but understandably, after the tragedies in Ferguson and Brooklyn, nobody’s thinking about that these days. The media keep us in a perpetual state of panic about spectacular threats to our safety — Ebola, sharks, terrorism — but we’re much likelier to die in a car accident. Although, it ought to be said, much less likely than we used to be; highway fatalities are down 25 percent in a decade. (Grunwald, Everything Is Awesome!)

What’s more, recent data suggest that the economy is gathering strength — 5 percent growth in the last quarter! Oh, and not that it matters very much, but there are some people who like to claim that economic success should be judged by the performance of the stock market. And stock prices, which hit a low point in March 2009, accompanied by declarations from prominent Republican economists that Mr. Obama was killing the market economy, have tripled since then. Maybe economic management hasn’t been that bad, after all. (Krugman, Tidings of Comfort)

Come to think of it, the 62 percent of Americans who described the economy as “poor” in a CNN poll a week before the Republican landslide in the midterm elections were also wrong. I guess that sounds elitist. Second-guessing the wisdom of the public may be the last bastion of political correctness; if ordinary people don’t feel good about the economy, then the recovery isn’t supposed to be real. But aren’t the 11 million Americans who have landed new jobs since 2010 and the 10 million Americans who have gotten health insurance since 2013 ordinary Americans? It’s true that wage growth has remained slow, but the overall economic trends don’t jibe with the public’s lousy mood. And the public definitely does get stuff wrong.( Grunwald, Everything Is Awesome!)

Finally, there’s the hidden-in-plain-sight triumph of Obamacare, which is just finishing up its first year of full implementation. It’s a tribute to the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign against health reform — which has played up every glitch, without ever mentioning that the problem has been solved, and invented failures that never happened — that I fairly often encounter people, some of them liberals, who ask me whether the administration will ever be able to get the program to work. Apparently nobody told them that it is working, and very well. (Krugman, Tidings of Comfort)

The steps we took nearly six years ago to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s.  Over the past 57 months, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs.  And in a hopeful sign for middle-class families, wages are on the rise again.

Our investments in American manufacturing have helped fuel its best stretch of job growth since the ‘90s.  America is now the number one producer of oil and gas, saving drivers about 70 cents a gallon at the pump over last Christmas.  The auto industry we rescued is on track for its strongest year since 2005.  Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, about 10 million Americans have gained health insurance in the past year alone.  And since I took office, we have cut our deficits by about two-thirds.Meanwhile, around the world, America is leading.  We’re leading the coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL.  We’re leading the global fight to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  We’re leading global efforts to address climate change, including last month’s joint announcement with China.  We’re turning a new page in our relationship with the Cuban people. (Barack Obama, weekly address, 12/20/14)

All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios.(Pangloss, Candide.)

Krugman and Grunwald both like to portray themselves as "pragmatic progressives" who admonish us to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good in this best of all possible worlds. They are neoliberal shills, of the type Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic has termed "radical" in their own passive-aggressive way. They are corporate Democrats whose m.o. is to regularly call out both the right and left for "extremism." They deflect attention from White House corruption and plutocratic ownership of the government by effortlessly cherrypicking instances where GOP shills were wrong (Ebola, climate change, the child immigrant invasion, Obama's alleged hatred of big business), and using this mendacity  to prop up the Wall Street Dems. And to prove what stand-up guys they are, they always honorably add the qualifier that Democratic initiatives have been more tepid "than we would have liked". But what's a president to do in the face of such blind hatred and nihilism?

In short, lesser evilism is all they've got. 

They're of the type that will defend their political party, right or wrong. They're of the type that can condemn Bush-era torture out of one side of their mouth and gloss over Obama-era drone assassinations with the other.

As a matter of fact, Grunwald (who then worked at Time) gained notoriety last year when he Tweeted "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

He later apologized for the Tweet, but whined that just one ill-conceived message should not be grounds for condemnation. One Tweet, he said, isn't who he is -- the same way that "torturing some folks" isn't who America is. He also fumed that only right-wing libertarians should have a problem with Obama's drones, that all criticism of the White House -- be it that of the GOP against environmental regulations or that of progressives against security state overreach -- is similarly deranged.

Friedersdorf analyzed this authoritarian, Obamabotic mindset, so eerily reminiscent of Bush's crazed message to the Iraq War critics: "You're either with us or against us."

It is nevertheless worth dwelling on his tweet a moment longer, because it illuminates a type that is common but seldom pegged in America. You see, Grunwald is a radical ideologue. It's just that almost no one recognizes it. The label "radical ideologue" is usually used to describe Noam Chomsky or members of the John Birch Society. We think of radical ideologues as occupying the far right or left. Lately a lot of people seem to think that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald is a radical (often they wrongly conflate the style with which he expresses his views with their substance). 

But Grunwald graduated from Harvard, spent a decade at the Washington Post, and now works as a senior correspondent at Time. How radical could someone with that resume possibly be?

Extremely so.

For Krugman's part, he entirely avoids addressing such Obaman civil liberties atrocities as drone strikes and surveillance on Americans and the war on whistleblowers and suppression of the free press. His latest contribution to the established order (besides his serial shilling for the Affordable Care Act, that is) has been to join in the anti-Putin chorus, without even seeing fit to mention that the neocons in the Obama administration helped foment a coup against the democratically-elected Ukraine government. Robert Parry over at ConsortiumNews has some good takedowns of Krugman's descent into party-line propaganda here and here.

Parry is right. The sycophantic "liberal" columnists in our midst are starting to exude a distinctly totalitarian aroma. Krugman and Grunwald lack the basic honesty to admit that the economic growth (aka corporate profits) is due largely to speculative bubbles enabled by the further whittling away of Wall Street regulation, as well as by the brutal war on workers: demands by the elite bosses for increased labor output at stagnating or reduced wages. Neither liberal pundit saw fit to mention the ever widening income disparity, or that orders for durable goods fell for the third month in a row, or that home sales are declining.

The disease of Panglossitis is infecting and suffocating us.

Wassailing the Wealthy

The Christmas season is traditionally the one time of year that we're permitted, even encouraged, to burst forth from our hovels to guilt-trip the rich while spreading  joy and fellowship throughout the land.

Key word: traditionally. Because according to government studies, the charity coffers are dwindling and fewer of us are reaching out to our fellow human beings in these hard times. In sixteen out of the twenty categories measured, the levels of social engagement by Americans have plummeted this year. People are either too busy working multiple minimum wage jobs, or too depressed about their worklessness, to be able to extend themselves. Volunteerism, as well as average household wealth, has dropped precipitously since the Great Meltdown of '08. An estimated two million fewer Americans volunteered last year than they did in 2012.

Besides the actual cost of volunteering (say, reliable transportation) are the increasingly erratic work schedules foisted upon the Precariat by the owner class during this New Abnormal Era. People working insecure crazy hours at Walmart or McDonalds, for example, are less likely to commit to helping and socializing because they never know, from one week to the next, what hours they'll be assigned to work. Increasingly, people no longer feel like they own their own time.

The professional philanthropy/donor class, meanwhile, is becoming ever more selective in its own generosity. The extremely rich are wont to "invest" in places rather than in causes and people, and insist that their charity be tax-deductible. They tend to give to the arts, to medical research (the rich get sick too) and elite institutions of higher learning. Living, breathing human beings  not part of one's dynasty are not tax deductible  -- they are, however, eminently disposable. Charities such as the Salvation Army and United Way, that give aid more or less directly to the poor, are really hurting this year.

Says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "The favored charities of the wealthy are gaining in share of the philanthropic economy. The total amount of the money given away by the very wealthy is going up, not because they're giving away a greater share of their income, but because their total wealth itself has grown."

And that brings us to the lost tradition of wassailing: directly accosting and assailing the uber-rich for a share of the pie. The modern substitute of representative democracy, in which the politicians we elect to represent us are supposed to tax the rich in order to even the playing field is yet one more tradition now relegated to the scrap heap of the public good.

The custom of orphans and beggars going door to door and serenading the ruling class right where they live dates at least as far back as the third century. The landowners and nobility would  briefly open their homes to provide a little warmth, food, and mystery liquid from the Wassail Bowl. The wassail songs themselves were but gentle, good-natured reminders to the rich that 'tis the season for noblesse-obliging.

During times of plague and famine, however, the wassailing tradition would often devolve into armed home invasions, leading to the siege mentality so common among our sensitive ruling elites today. Not that wassailing ever really caught on in Exceptional America anyway, founded as it was on a shiny, right-leaning hill. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrims actually banned the whole celebration of Christmas!  Those Puritans we honor at Thanksgiving were the original Bah-Humbugs.

Let's face it: fast forward, almost 400 years, and anybody daring to go on a Wassail Jaunt through the Blackwater-guarded gated communities of the Forbes 400 is really taking his life in his hands.

In early 19th century New York City, the rich and the prominent were very upset when the rabble rabbled during Yule. Gunfire, bread riots, lots of sex and drunkenness and vice sent the privileged behind locked doors, where they've remained ever since. The evolution of Christmas in income-disparate America into insular closed-door gatherings was a direct result of elite paranoia.