Recycled Dairy Product

If President Obama's SOTU address sounded familiar, it's because it was familiar. His bombed speechwriter (see yesterday's post) was a day early on the White House's Big Block of Cheese marketing campaign. That's because he borrowed liberally from a weekly address prepared for the boss last summer during another dairy tour, that time featuring ice cream cones instead of moldy Cheddar. 

Obama dredged up and recycled a stereotypical all-American bootstrap family that any plutocrat could love, for a speech designed to make you feel that plutocracy-imposed hardship and austerity is just the ticket to bring you joy and rapture later. Much, much, much later.

Last night:

Seven years ago, Rebekah and Ben Erler of Minneapolis were newlyweds.  (Laughter.)  She waited tables.  He worked construction.  Their first child, Jack, was on the way.  They were young and in love in America.  And it doesn’t get much better than that.  “If only we had known,” Rebekah wrote to me last spring, “what was about to happen to the housing and construction market.” 

As the crisis worsened, Ben’s business dried up, so he took what jobs he could find, even if they kept him on the road for long stretches of time.  Rebekah took out student loans and enrolled in community college, and retrained for a new career.  They sacrificed for each other.  And slowly, it paid off.  They bought their first home.  They had a second son, Henry.  Rebekah got a better job and then a raise.  Ben is back in construction -- and home for dinner every night.

“It is amazing,” Rebekah wrote, “what you can bounce back from when you have to…we are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times.”  We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times.

America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story.  They represent the millions who have worked hard and scrimped, and sacrificed and retooled.  You are the reason that I ran for this office.  You are the people I was thinking of six years ago today, in the darkest months of the crisis, when I stood on the steps of this Capitol and promised we would rebuild our economy on a new foundation.*  And it has been your resilience, your effort that has made it possible for our country to emerge stronger.

June 28, 2014 ( weekly address to mark the Presidential Summer of Love & Recovery campaign):

I went because of a letter I received from a working mother named Rebekah, who shared with me the hardships her young family has faced since the financial crisis.  She and her husband Ben were just newlyweds expecting their first child, Jack, when the housing crash dried up his contracting business.  He took what jobs he could, and Rebekah took out student loans and retrained for a new career.  They sacrificed – for their kids, and for each other.  And five years later, they’ve paid off debt, bought their first home, and had their second son, Henry.

In her letter to me, she wrote, “We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times.”  And in many ways, that’s America’s story these past five years.  We are a strong, tight-knit family that’s made it through some very tough times. 

Today, over the past 51 months, our businesses have created 9.4 million new jobs.  By measure after measure, our economy is doing better than it was five years ago.

But as Rebekah also wrote in her letter, there are still too many middle-class families like hers who do everything right – who work hard and who sacrifice – but can’t seem to get ahead.  It feels like the odds are stacked against them.  And with just a small change in our priorities, we could fix that.

It was revealed by Reuters and other outlets last summer that Rebekah Bootstrap just happened to be a former operative for Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), which is perhaps why Obama noticed her random letter at the top of his pile, and why the entire Bootstrap family were Michelle Obama's honored recycled photo-opped guests at last night's political theater extravaganza.

And just so you know, the new improved progressive lefty Obama spouting the message of the "middle class economy" is really just a recycled version of the old neoliberal Obama. He still believes that austerity worked, and that pain was good for people. He still protects Wall Street by not only refusing to condemn or prosecute it, but by filling his administration with the same culprits who caused the whole mess in the first place. He still believes that the government is just like a family, and that belt-tightening was a very, very good to way to grow the economy. He has always made the "folks" bear the brunt of the sacrifice while forcing them to shoulder the blame for the most egregious financial fraud in American, or global, history.  From his first Inaugural Address, at the peak of the financial crisis:

*Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. 

***

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.  (Applause.)

Last night:

My fellow Americans, we, too, are a strong, tight-knit family.  We, too, have made it through some hard times.  Fifteen years into this new century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and begun again the work of remaking America.  We have laid a new foundation.  A brighter future is ours to write.  Let’s begin this new chapter together -- and let’s start the work right now.  (Applause.)

You may remember an old movie called Swing Time in which Fred Astaire also uses the ploy of pretending to have two left feet in order to pull one over on the object of his desire and to win her love through shameless subterfuge and doubletalk. Nothing's impossible, Obama found, for when his feet are on the ground and his chin is up in the air despite bad poll numbers and half of all American children living in poverty, he can put on quite the show. All you Bootstrappers need is confidence and the willing suspension of disbelief.

Propaganda Under the Influence

Usually when we talk about State of the Union drinking games, we bet on how many times President Obama will utter such words as middle class and grit and folks during his annual song of himself.

This year we come to find out that not only has the Temp Emp not even written the speech himself, the designated populist theme is so phony that the designated hack had to go on an all-night drinking binge before he could pull it off. The speechwriter actually admits to one snort of pricey single malt Scotch over the course of his nocturnal writing marathon. That story is as old as the one about the drunk driver pleading that he only had one beer before careening the wrong way down the interstate at 100 mph.

The New York Times story about the speech story is as grotesquely phony as the actual speech itself promises to be:

One night last week Cody Keenan, the chief White House speechwriter President Obama has christened “Hemingway,” knew he needed help.

Mr. Keenan had spent 15 days holed up in a hotel room in Honolulu as the president vacationed nearby, and seven more in a windowless office in the basement of the West Wing trying to turn a blank computer screen into a 6,000-word State of the Union first draft. The lonesome process had finally gotten to him.

So the burly 34-year-old former high school quarterback left his White House office and trudged in the freezing rain to the nearby apartment of one of his closest friends in the administration, Benjamin J. Rhodes.

It was after midnight, but Mr. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and the writer of many of the president’s foreign policy speeches, was up reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” to his 4-week-old daughter. The two men poured two single-malt Scotch whiskies and, with the baby resting quietly, began triage on Mr. Keenan’s prose. By 5 a.m., a more succinct draft was on its way to the president.

What's more bizarre? Ostentatiously reading Harper Lee to an infant, drunk-writing a speech, or claiming that writing propaganda under the influence is a sure-fire way to make the American public feel as fuzzy as you do?

In all the policy pronouncements about tax increases on the rich and tax cuts for the middle class, Mr. Obama’s remarks are certain to address the struggles of ordinary Americans in some of the gritty, Everyman prose that has become Mr. Keenan’s trademark.

(Okay, it's already time for the first drink and it's not even lunchtime yet.)

“He reminds me of some of the folks I grew up with in the old days in Chicago journalism — those hard-bitten, big-hearted, passionate writers who brought the stories of people to life,” said David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Mr. Obama and a former newspaper reporter.

Mr. Keenan, who is not shy but did not want to talk about himself on a day when attention is on the president, declined to be interviewed for this article.

("Nobo-o-ody knowsh, How Shy I Am,"  the hard-bitten Everyman Mike Royko wannabe folksily explained.)

Meanwhile, now that we know all about the provenance of Obama's speech,  the Times' resident Obama publicist treats us to the usual pre-propaganda propaganda. Peter Baker, apparently sober as befits his job title, nevertheless writes that Barack is "ready to move past hardship."

With the American job market surging to life, President Obama plans to use his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to effectively declare victory over the economic hard times that dominated his first six years in office and advocate using the nation’s healthier finances to tackle long-deferred issues like education and income inequality.

All right, I take the "sober" part back. Baker has to be on something in order to gratuitously accept that the nation's finances are "healthy." I think what he meant to write is that the nation's billionaires' finances are twice as healthy. The 80 richest people, nearly half of whom are Americans, now own as much wealth as half the planet. Also, in using the passive "hard times that dominated his first six years of office," Baker implies that Obama himself was not the dominant force in ramming austerity and deficit reduction down our throats. Baker echoes the canard beloved of the ruling class: that the economic meltdown was a natural disaster, not a plutocrat-made one. 

In presenting a series of initiatives aimed at the middle class, Mr. Obama hopes to pivot finally from the politics of adversity and austerity that have frustrated him for much of his tenure. But coming off a midterm election defeat that handed full control of Congress to Republicans, the president faces long odds in actually enacting his agenda and in essence is trying to frame the debate for his remaining time in power and for the emerging 2016 contest to succeed him.

Again with the Frankenstein austerity monster, for which Baker glibly grants Obama absolution for creating. The horrific monster of wealth inequality, which has grown ever larger during Obama's complicit tenure, apparently is "frustrating" the president at this late date. The country doesn't approve. So Obama is cast as a wounded warrior by the Times, rather than ordinary people being cast as the victims of his policies.

“Over the last six years, we have been weighed down by the legacy of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said in a video posted on the White House website, previewing his State of the Union address. “And because of the incredible grit and resilience of the American people, America is now in a position to really turn the page.”

While you're taking your second, third or fourth drink of the day, ponder those semantics. What Obama essentially says here is that austerity worked. And since "we" have now suffered enough, in his estimation, he will now throw you a few populist crumbs. He's ready to turn the page, knowing full well that the mean old Republican librarian will stomp down on his hand before he can even take his book of forbidden magic down from the shelf. The cynicism is breathtaking, and utterly predictable.

Of course, the temporary uptick in poll numbers for the Temp Emp after his speech will make it easier for him to sell his real agenda to the newly propagandized. Instead of lobbying Congress to pass tax reform and other sweeteners to placate the base, Obama will immediately start whipping for the corporate coups known as "trade" deals. With Democratic brains softened by visions of free community college tuition and make-believe taxes on the ultra-rich (who, tellingly, are not at all howling with rage over this presidential rhetoric), the White House will go on full plutocratic attack. From The Hill:

President Obama is tasking every member of his Cabinet to round up votes from Democrats for fast-track negotiating power, which would give Obama leverage to complete trade negotiations by preventing Congress from amending his agreements.

About 80 House Democrats have been targeted in the effort, and Cabinet members are divvying up those names based on their personal relationships with the members.

The rest of the House Democratic Caucus, which consists of about 100 members, are seen as likely “no” votes.

The White House is making the push in part because of pressure from congressional Republicans.

Obama hilariously will try to claim that the Trans Pacific Partnership and its evil twin, TAFTA  (Europe) would protect American workers and the environment. Mere mortals, though, are not being allowed to see the actual details, which are being negotiated behind closed doors by the corporations benefiting from them.

His actual policy goal is in direct contradiction to his rhetorical strategy. A new report from Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch reveals that trade deals have increased wealth disparity, aggravated global poverty, driven down wages and destroyed American jobs. Obama wants fast track authority to literally undermine his own vaunted accomplishments of medical coverage for a few and minor regulations on financial predators.

Just in case your friendly congress critter is falling under the undue influence of Obama's sugar high of a speech and looming charm offensive, here's information on how to contact your reps. Tell them to Just Say No to granting him fast track authority, Just Say No to driving one more lethal stake into the heart of democracy. That heart is barely beating as it is.

The Effective Rage of Nonviolent Protest

Now that a new generation of civil rights activists is making its collective voice heard, the same very important persons who lately scoffed at Occupy and declared it dead are scoffing once again.

 The demonstrators staging the nationwide die-ins and strikes and generally disrupting life for the self-satisfied Establishment are rankling them for all the usual reasons.

They don't have a single charismatic leader for possible co-optation by the Duopoly. They aren't going through official channels by groveling before politicians, or running for office themselves. They aren't getting out the vote. Their tactics are annoying and loud. And worst of all, they don't have that magical "list of demands" on hand to proffer to the proper authorities at the proper time. (Actually, they do.)

Oprah is pissed because they're not asking her advice, or maybe they should be paying to see the Hollywood version of her MLK biopic production. Al Sharpton is pissed because the young protesters are on to his serial fakery, and he can't co-opt them. And the New York Times is concern-trolling What New Breed of Activists Is This?  Do the kiddies even have the necessary stamina to prevail? The Gray Lady helpfully dredged up a prize-winning MLK biographer to make her dull point:

David J. Garrow, a historian and the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said the impromptu protests that had erupted in recent months were not comparable to the strategies used by civil rights groups of the 1960s, which had clear goals such as winning the right to vote or the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter.

“You could call it rebellious, or you could call it irrational,” Mr. Garrow said of the new waves of protests. “There has not been a rational analysis in how does A and B advance your policy change X and Y?”

Mr. Garrow compared the protesters to those of Occupy Wall Street. “Occupy had a staying power of, what, six months?” Mr. Garrow said. “Three years later, is there any remaining footprint from Occupy? Not that I’m aware of.”

Garrow sounds like a real fuddy-duddy, doesn't he?  I can just imagine him in his velvet smoking jacket, sniffing his snuff and stroking his chin.

 Yo, Garrow. What about income inequality and "the 99%" becoming part of the national political lexicon because of those algebra-challenged protesters? What about the Occupy Sandy disaster relief drive spawning its own national mutual aid movement, what about Occupy Our Homes and StrikeDebt offshoots saving homeowners and tenants from foreclosure and eviction? What about the reason for the Wall Street Democrats' delayed (and probably short-lived) epiphany that even spending a billion bucks won't win you an election when socially aware and pissed-off voters refuse to show up?

It's odd that Garrow, purporting to be a historian and therefore familiar with the government's persecution of King, neglects to mention the role that the FBI and the Homeland Security fusion centers had in monitoring and disrupting Occupy, and the coordinated role the militarized police had in finally obliterating the actual physical camps in what used to be public spaces.

But I digress. Back when King marched and spoke and wrote, he too was marginalized, he too was derided as an extremist by the Powers That Be. Before his death, he scored very low on those vaunted (and rigged) public opinion polls. The vast majority of white Americans thought highly unfavorably of King and his movement. He was actually proud of being called a radical, though, because Jesus and Gandhi had been considered radicals in their times, too.

When they call fighting for justice "radical," you know you've touched a nerve.

King himself, while fighting against segregation and for voting rights, always stressed the importance of the actual bodies of the protesting people themselves, the force and influence that the actual movement of the people exerted in affectuating change at the top. The lists of demands were just part of the strategy.

His last occupation, the one that he didn't live to see, was the Poor People's March on Washington. Its agenda included what King called "non-violent action skills," actions which would never be tolerated today in the heavily weaponized and guarded and cowering and corrupt Capitol. Then, as now, peaceful protest was called "terrorism" by paranoid politicians in service to the rich and powerful and the military industrial complex. Then, as now, the media concentrated on sporadic outbreaks of violence and later larger riots instead of the economic and social issues involved. Then, as now, there was a right-wing backlash. Then, as now, the government responded to activists' demands by calling for a Day of Prayer (shades of MLK Day itself being downgraded to a Day of Service) and appointing task forces and study groups made up of the rich and powerful. Dr. King said,*

"When a government commands more wealth and power than has ever been known in the history of the world, and offers no more than this, it is worse than blind, it is provocative. It is paradoxical but fair to say that Negro terrorism is incited less on ghetto street corners than in the halls of Congress.

I intended to show that nonviolence will be effective, but not until it has achieved massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale.

The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor, both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to life the load of poverty."

King planned the virtual occupation of the Capitol, with protesters physically camping out in Congressional offices and other government facilities, and refusing to leave until politicians voted in a living wage law and a jobs bill.

"If you're poor, or if you're unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you. And if that official says, 'But Congress would have to approve this,' or 'But the President would have to be consulted on that,' you can say, 'All right, we'll wait.' And you can settle down in his office as long a stay as necessary."

Such a mass action today would result in mass arrests, mass rousting, or worse, by the domestic military forces protecting the Homeland Security State. So nowadays, activists are engaging in strikes and boycotts and disruptions in shopping malls, they're shutting down the flow of commerce on interstates, they're even converging in upscale restaurants frequented by the wealthy to stage "Black Brunches."

At last, this year's Martin Luther King holiday is finally about what Martin Luther King actually stood for. I think he would be very happy about that.

I think he would also be very bemused that the digital archive of his writings was made possible today through the self-serving financial generosity of TBTF JP Morgan Chase, responsible for so much of the global misery, poverty and wealth disparity that Dr. King so decried.

(*Above excerpts are from The Trumpet of Conscience, published in 1968 as a compilation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Massey Lecture Series, originally aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and not in the public domain. Yet another irony in the legacy of a man whose championship of the public was his life's mission.)

 

Where's the Outrage?

Dissipated in the ozone, or in whatever wispy tendrils remain from the smoke of the smoking gun, that's where. This blockbuster was outrageously easy to miss, mainly because the corporate media chose to miss it:

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.

I wish I could tell you that Attorney General Eric Holder was seeking an immediate indictment against McDonough, Brennan, and even Obama -- who despite his calculated distance from the events, had to have approved the break-in.  At the very least, you'd think that a few congress critters would  proclaim themselves shocked, shocked that the Obama White House was behind a burglary much worse than Watergate. Because not only is breaking and entering into Senate computers a felony, it is a punch in the gut to the Separation of Powers. It is the declaration of unitary executive powers and a tacit admission that we have an imperial presidency. The corruption is complete. Democracy is dead.

Holder. of course, cannot be shocked because he's the guy who wrote the secret opinion allowing Obama to kill people (specifically, American people, because dead "militants"/ foreign people don't count) with his drones. Holder, in one of those Kafkaesque fits of whimsy so popular these days, declared that due process and judicial process are two different things. In other words, it's a reiteration of the Nixon Doctrine: when the president does it, it's not illegal. And finally, Holder announced a long time ago that he wouldn't be investigating the CIA, no doubt knowing that the road to perdition led all the way to President Obama himself.

If this were about President Bush, I think we'd see a tad more outrage from Democrats. But the Obama Personality Cult lives on, against all odds. Normal reaction is impossible in these times of the New Abnormal. Normal reaction is lost in the O-Zone.

There is no outrage at the highest levels of our government-media complex, because they're all complicit in high crimes and misdemeanors. As such, the only reaction trickling down to the citizens is that these revelations will result in less bipartisanship between the good cops and bad cops of the plutocratic duopoly. The Huffington Post, for example, has this take:

The new information suggesting the White House was aware of -- and did not stop -- the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA's computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.

The Oval Office’s prior knowledge of the controversial computer review will no doubt worsen the tensions that have erupted over the matter between the executive branch, its chief intelligence agency and the lawmakers tasked with their oversight.

Wow. If only the partisans could simply relax, everything would be hunky-dory. They just need to get together and spike the Champagne with Valium. So sad that the rulers choose instead to petulantly stew in the status quo their own noxious juices.

Since Temp Emp (autocrat pro tem) Obama is silent, so too shall be the media stenographers, lest their access to the powerful be adversely affected. (They've obligingly downgraded illegal domestic spying and digital burglary to a "controversial computer review.") Bipartisanship actually is alive and doing really, really well. Democrats and Republicans are equal opportunity offenders whose function is to coddle the super-rich while they take their legislative dictation and take in all that cash, becoming multimillionaires in their own right.

The CIA is not some rogue agency attached to the government. The CIA is the government, because the three ostensible check-and-balance branches have allowed it to be. It's just the way they want it.

Capitalism on Crack

The Market God is feeling a bit wrathful these days. Not only are the hypercapitalists beginning to O.D. on their greed drug, their stash itself is so full to bursting that the hidden hoards in Switzerland actually took on a life of their own, so to speak. It turns out that just holding on to all that excess finance got to be too much, and the Swiss National Bank decided to both un-peg the franc from the Euro and also to charge depositors a fee -- an interest rate of minus 0.75% -- to guard the hidden stashes, mostly ill-gotten gained since the meltdown of 2008. It is getting too expensive to be the bag man for the oligarchs. Serving the oligarchs was beginning to hurt Swiss manufacturing, making its own products too costly for the rest of the world to afford. This is despite previous efforts of Swiss financiers to reduce the value of the franc in an effort to normalize the greed-spawned abnormal, winner-take-all state of affairs.

Some VIPs, along with the subsidized banking cartels, are losing money in the currency betting game as a result. That's the thing about pathological greed. When the game is rigged to such a criminal extent, the whole House can come crashing down -- as in a house of cards. But guess who gets handed the IOU?

Not even smart economists like Paul Krugman know exactly what's going on with Switzerland, and how it will affect you and me, but he thinks we should probably be very afraid, given the current reactionary and misanthropic makeup of our own government. He didn't actually use the word "corrupt," but he should have. The greed drug not only makes you stupid, it makes you even greedier. And the capitalist crackheads are not operating in a vacuum. It's no coincidence that increasing income disparity accompanies the rising tide of fascism and xenophobia both in Europe and America, which in turn accompanies this recent market "volatility."

As I've written about before, the ongoing police brutality we're seeing has to be viewed within a larger context. The media are relying on Police Shooting of the Week narratives instead of looking at the bigger picture. One of the latest incidents took place in Billings, Montana, where just one 20-something cop has already taken out two people in his very short career.

 To New York Times columnist Charles Blow's credit, when recounting the incident in a recent column he allowed that the issue of deadly police force is a complex one. However, he mentioned only in passing that both shooting victims were high on crystal meth at the time they were killed by Officer Grant Morrison. As I wrote in my response,

Being high on meth is being armed and dangerous. Quadruple the paranoia and the aggression and the typical jerky movements of a meth-head -- within a confined space -- and you can empathize with this officer. It's really not fair to say that he "punished" the victim without also being able to see the behavior that was going on inside that vehicle.

There's a huge meth problem in Billings, which no doubt exacerbated the cop's hair trigger mentality. That his other victim was also high on meth is probably no coincidence. The whole area is a boom town, flush with cash from the Bakken oil fields. The drug is a popular, powerful stimulant in high demand by the truckers and field workers to help them stay awake. Police say that the crystal meth hitting Billings is 95% pure.

So while it's right to protest against police violence, this violence is only part of our larger sick and violent society. The meth comes from Mexican drug cartels, whose funds are laundered by American banks. As we know, not one bankster has gone to jail for crimes against humanity. And then there are the guns, trafficked here there and everywhere with the full collusion of our elected officials.

That the USA, wealth disparity capital and largest arms dealer on the planet, either cannot or will not control the lucrative weapons and drug industries should come as no surprise.

 Cops, therefore, are both reflection and collateral damage of the corrupt political and economic system that employs them.

Meth, though it's been around a long time, is very much a growing part of the New Abnormal Economy. The popular dystopian TV show "Breaking Bad" is very much based on reality. The anti-hero originally got into the drug trade and a life of crime because he needed cash to treat his cancer. His insurance didn't "cover" his treatment. Like a corrupt financial institution unto himself, his big headache became not only the manufacturing, but where and how the hell to launder, stash and hide all those piles of money.

Capitalism on Crack, Money on Meth: it's both literal and figurative.

Here's my comment on today's Paul Krugman column:

Hoarding isn't just unhealthy for the hoarders, it's making the whole global neighborhood sick unto death.

We should follow Piketty's advice and institute a global wealth tax to help the Swiss. Barring that unlikelihood, we might follow Elizabeth Warren's advice and just break up the banks.

Unfortunately, the possessors of wisdom and the owners of obscene wealth live in different universes.

The capitalist malefactors are, of course, hysterical over the market volatility and even the feeblest belated efforts to rein them in. Their response to economic turmoil has been put their legalized bribery into overdrive as they drill the already toothless Dodd-Frank law into a gaping maw of uselessness.

As if that were not enough, leaked clauses in the top secret corporate coups known as "trade" deals reveal that the multinationals aim to destroy regulations in European (TTIP) and Pacific (TPP) countries as well.

It's capitalism on crack. And as the crash from the latest orgy of unbridled excess looms, all we can do is brace ourselves, and wish that instead of listening to Jamie Dimon whine, we could be watching him and his pals do a perp walk.

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." - FDR.

(Credit: Radical Art Initiative)

Kiss My Grits

"Is our children learning?"

That was the question asked by C-student and President George W. Bush before he seamlessly morphed into a lucrative but still-unexamined private life of self-portraiture and ghostwritten memoirs.

That was the wrong question. For what we should be asking is not if our children is learning, but WTF is our children learning? You might be surprised. Or not.

If our children is learning in a charter school, mainly operated for the profit of the ruling class whom the children are expected to eventually serve, the first challenge for the elites is to change their very essence, their very personality, their very core. Rather than build and maintain more public or affordable housing, rather than enact a government-sponsored jobs program so that their parents can support them, rather than increase the food stamp stipend so that children aren't too hungry to learn, reformers want pupils to develop what they call grit. It's not their lives that need improving. It's their attitudes. 

Hominy Grits for the Homies

It gives a whole new meaning to the already odious Common Core.

If  this "personality curriculum" -- on which pupils are actually graded -- isn't racist and classist, I don't know what is. Yet the New York Times is treating this bizarre effort at social engineering as, at the very least,"possibly" legitimate.

Self-control, curiosity, “grit” — these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum. Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit will distract policy makers from problems with schools.

Notice that the gratuitous other side of this manufactured "debate" is defined as problems with schools rather than problems with wealth inequality and stagnating wages in the larger society. No time is wasted before the erection of the stereotypical straw man in this editorial, written by OpTalk columnist Anna North.

The KIPP network of charter schools emphasizes grit along with six other “character strengths,” including self-control and curiosity. Leyla Bravo-Willey, the assistant principal at KIPP Infinity Middle School in Harlem, said, “We talk a lot about them as being skills or strengths, not necessarily traits, because it’s not innate.”

“If a child happens to be very gritty but has trouble participating in class,” she added, “we still want them to develop that part of themselves.”

How about giving the child a snack to help her concentrate in class? How about asking whether her apartment has heat during this cold winter? Maybe she's physically gritty and uncomfortable because the place where she lives has no hot water for baths and showers. But as long as she attends a school named "Infinity" or "Renaissance Academy" and can wear a private school knockoff of a uniform, she can aspire to be as snobbish as the investor class which owns and names her publicly-subsidized and privately profitable place of learning.

Another criticism of the personality curriculum that North mentions in her column is that it fails to teach "morality." The kids being graded on the principles of Ayn Randian bootstrappiness are learning selfishness instead of kindness. The implicit, subliminal message from even the critics of the Grit method is that we can't have these minority overachievers stomping all over one another in their quest to become Top Servant. The aspiring butler has to be kind to the incipient scullery maid. The budding staff sergeant must be humane to the buck private. There cannot be dissension in the lower ranks.

Grit, meanwhile, is making tons of money for its proponents. And it is by no means restricted to charter schools. Strapped public school districts, too,  are vying for Grit Grants funded by (who else) the Gates Foundation:

Piedmont (Alabama) Middle School has been chosen as one of 16 recipients nationwide of grants to fund a new initiative teaching, among other things, grit. Next Generation Learning Challenges, funded partly by the Gates Foundation, will provide $150,000 in initial funding and up to $300,000 in matching funds for "mBolden Piedmont." The funding will be implemented over the next four years. That means the school could receive as much as $750,000 for the program.

So it's not just the inner city kids who must learn "tenacity". It's the poor kids from rural communities. Poverty is an equal opportunity scourge, as is the greed and tenacity of the financial predators making a ton of money through exploiting the indigent in infinite creatively destructive ways.

But to be fair to gazillionaire Bill Gates, his co-gazillionaires over at the Walton Family aren't donating any money at all to the financially strapped schools, for any reason. They are, however, spending a fortune to ensure that public education gets destroyed, and gets destroyed quickly:

 In a June 2011 speech to the graduating class of the private school her son Lukas attended, Christy Walton explained that her family became involved in K-12 education reform because their business—presumably Walmart—“was having trouble finding qualified people to fill entry-level positions” and because the family believed that “the education being provided [in public schools] had been dummied [sic] down.”

The Walton heirs, who despite their limited vocabulary and intellectual skills possess as much wealth as nearly half of all American families combined, want to forgo schools entirely and simply supply poor parents with "education vouchers" so they may teach their children as they see fit. And given that so many poor families lack even the basics of food and shelter, the result most likely will be that the money will go toward survival instead of school.  What the Waltons see fit is the survival of the fittest: them. 

Our "choice" is becoming limited to no public schools at all (Walton) or taxpayer-funded schools controlled by, and profiting, the plutocracy (Gates.)

And let's not forget that since we're also pawns in the lucrative and permanent War of Terror, we must also ensure that children are force-fed paranoia as one of the essential American personality traits. This just in:

A letter sent to parents of students at W.F. Burns Middle School in Chambers County (Alabama again) asked students to bring in an 8 ounce can of food, AL. com's news partner WHNT reported.

Principal Priscilla Holley said the items would be used against an intruder - presumably thrown at them - if someone entered the school.

"We realize at first this may seem odd, however, it is a practice that would catch an intruder off guard," Principal Priscella Holley wrote in a Jan. 9 letter to parents. "The canned food item could stun the intruder or even knock him out until police arrive. The canned good item will give the students a sense of empowerment to protect themselves and will make them feel secure in case an intruder enters the classroom."

The idea is part of the ALICE - Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. You can read more about it here.

Actually, you can learn more about pediatric Kafkaesque nightmares here:

Pay Attention, You Horrid Little Gritless Girl!

The Alabama school prefers canned peas (as in, eat them, proles) or corn. (because Corn is King and cheaply supplements the diets of the poor, But I would suggest Bush's canned grits (shown above.)They're cheap, full of salt and low in nutritional value but boy, do they fill you up. They give you the grand illusion of substance. Eat them, throw them up, or just throw them. It's your free choice.

But is nobody asking the question: is our children learning KIPP-mandated self control if they're encouraged to engage in canned food fights against "intruders?" And what's the definition of an intruder anyway? Immigrant students? The Alabama principal did not specify.

Rather than hurling, though, how much more tempting to simply pry open thousands of cans of creamed corn and golden hominy grits, trickle them all over completed standardized tests, and send them by the bushel to Pearson and Arne Duncan's Department of Education.

 On second thought, scratch that. Pranksters would only be charged with making terrorist threats against the free market and sentenced to a private Corrections Corporation of America prison somewhere where the only book in the library is Decision Points.

"Childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured." -- George W. Bush. 

Now We Are Four

When I started Sardonicky four years ago, I was still on fairly friendly terms with Democrats. This blog, in the beginning, was only a slightly more leftist version of the Daily Kos. I was part of the crowd that largely bought into the myth that GOP bad, Lesser Evilism at least slightly good part of the time. I did my fair share of lazy-blogger Republican bashing and preaching to the liberal choir because it was fun and easy. I got tons of comments agreeing with me. My very first blog post was on -- who else? -- the snark magnet named Sarah Palin. In honor of Sardonicky's birthday, I am reprinting it below.

I actually cringed today when I reread one my earliest posts in which I defended neoliberal shill Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I called her "a breath of fresh air."  And as a result, I got lots of "you go, girl!" type of comments. But if the old saying "you live, you learn" is a truism, then "you blog, you get an education whether you want one or not" is a close relative.

I have become radicalized over the last four years, thanks to this blog and the hard thinking that it has forced me to do. It took me awhile, but eventually I realized that the two-party system is a sham and the neoliberalism it represents is a clear and present danger to all of us. Quite a few of my earlier readers abandoned this site in disgust, particularly during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Blogging requires lots of research and lots of facing of inconvenient truths, lots of reading beyond the New York Times, lots of closer reading of the New York Times to discover just how the language of propaganda actually works. It was that original scholar of propaganda, Edward Bernays, who wrote, way back in 1928, that at least half of all front page Times stories consist of government and corporate propaganda. Key words: at least.

Cutting through the crap and parsing the language of deceit and examining how words are used as tools of economic, social and political control has become my main area of interest.

***

My first post here, titled "Out, Out Damned Spot" was written in the wake of the mass shooting that wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and for which Sarah Palin attracted much outrage because of her infamous electoral "crosshairs"  website graphic, leading her to release a web video accusing her detractors of "blood libel."

Blaming Sarah Palin for the Tucson Massacre is just as unfair as blaming Lady Macbeth for the mayhem at Inverness Castle.  All these two maligned ladies did was lay out the weapons: Sarah, her cross-hair graphics and Lady M, a few carelessly placed daggers.  Subtle hints do not a murderess make.

Along with their histrionics and lust for power, both women have a fixation with blood. Palin, subdued from her usual frenzied harangues, looked like a robot on tranquillizers  as she Youtubed herself into the queen of the martyrs and the victim of “blood libel” of the biased liberal lamestream punditocracy.  To give her credit, I doubt she knows the anti-Semitic origin of the phrase, but the blood part likely was what appealed to her.  And Lady Mac was  totally obsessed with blood, even to the point of sleepwalking and being unable to wash the imaginary stains from her hands. Sarah, of course, also had difficulty scrubbing her website clean of the infamous Cross-Hairs map.  It had already gone viral all over cyberspace. “Out, out damned cache!” could be heard echoing through the valley, according to Wasilla lore.

The Lady Sarah really doth protest too much, methinks, and all the sanguineous references in the world can’t mask the fact that this anti-mother/mama grizzly has ice water running through her veins and a stony heart totally lacking in the warmth of human kindness.

On a somewhat related note to this little retrospective, I'll also include my comment to today's column by David Brooks, who somewhat uncharacteristically showcases famed leftist writer Ursula Le Guin's cautionary tale Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. It recounts a Utopia predicated on people enjoying life due to the imprisonment of a scapegoat; a child in a basement. The story is along the same lines of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.(I've included a link to a recent speech by Le Guin; it's a must-watch). As is usual for Brooks, though, he writes a book report or presents a fictional scenario, and then fails utterly to condemn its real-life parallels. So I did:

Rousseau's social contract inspiring Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité has tragically devolved into the Gospel According to Ayn Rand. It's every rich man for himself. 

Every plutocrat alive thrives not on the suffering of one child in the basement, but on the suffering of the whole planet. In today's neoliberal world, only the Market is free, while everywhere human beings are in social, economic and political chains.

In the USA, one child in four lives in poverty. One in thirty is homeless. And according to polls, the majority of us are also fine with torture and even sanguine about the drone strikes that kill innocent children. 

Ursula Le Guin gave a wonderful speech last month at the National Book Awards, and challenged her fellow writers to "remember freedom." If the Enlightenment spelled doom to the divine right of kings, she said, then we can achieve a modern Enlightenment spelling doom to the hellish right of capitalists. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed them, "the malefactors of great wealth."

Fear is the enemy of literary freedom. The PEN human rights organization reports that more writers are actually self-censoring because of the chilling effect of government surveillance. We, whose Bill of Rights prides itself on freedom of speech, now rank a low 46th in press freedoms. 

We can either enlighten ourselves, start thinking outside of ourselves, start treating this planet with respect and dignity, or we might as well forget about existing at all.