Obama to America: Fast Track or Die

What's a prevaricating prez to do when he's already got four Pinocchios under his belt for lying about the number of jobs to be created by a neoliberal coup euphemised as a free trade agreement?

He'll lie even more. He'll speak directly to the damned through an email blitz, attempting to draft them into an unpaid zombie coalition of the unwitting to spread the lies to their friends and neighbors. He'll pretend that China is the next enemy in line to creep over the borders and attack middle class zombies asleep in their beds. Sure, China is guilty of currency manipulation in order to sell its  products through Walmart more cheaply than an American manufacturer can. But the problem of currency manipulation isn't even addressed in the TPP!

Give President Obama fast track authority right now this very minute to negotiate your own inevitable misery, or die quickly. Wouldn't you rather be patriotic and let your own country trample you instead of China? Those are your only choices.

I won't even distinguish the White House's email blast as propaganda, because propaganda involves  a little verbal skill and rhetorical sleight of  hand. When it comes to his case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though, Obama has simply resorted to blatantly lying through his toothsome teeth. The better to eat you with, my dears.

Let's parse the email, sent out yesterday (It's essentially a rehash of his State of the Union bullshit, but repetitive self-plagiarizing bullshit never stopped him before):

 My top priority as President is making sure more hardworking Americans have a chance to get ahead. That's why we have to make sure the United States -- and not countries like China -- is the one writing this century's rules for the world's economy.

Your chance for survival (getting ahead) hinges entirely upon your willingness to work until you drop. If you don't have a job because of the financial collapse and continuing hard times, too bad. The last remaining superpower must control not only the United States economy, but the economy of the whole world.  That's also known as the plutonomy: a system of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. You can either be a pluto-participant, one of a billion tiny droplets comprising the geyser that gushes up to the very top, or you can sink to the bottom. Dig yourselves a hole and plummet all the way to China for all they care. "Give me authority, or give you death," is the gist of the Obama fear-mongering.

And, incidentally, China is already part of the World Trade Organization, so Obama's desperate scare tactic is just a case of closing the barn door after the fact. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that 2.7 million American jobs are already gone as a result of the U.S.-China trade deficit, with 2.1 million of those lost in the manufacturing sector. Along with these job losses, U.S. wages fell due to the competition with cheap Chinese labor. And that has cost a typical U.S. household with two wage-earners around $2,500 per year. So what is Obama even talking about?

Trade has an important role to play in supporting good-paying, middle-class jobs in the United States. Unfortunately, past trade deals haven't always lived up to the hype. That's why I've made it clear that I won't sign any agreement that doesn't put American workers first.

Doing the same things over and over and expecting you to expect different results is how the ruling class rolls. Of course, you are not allowed to see the actual terms and conditions of the TPP, nor is your congressional representative. Take Obama's word for it. Trust him. He'll make sure to put the phrase "American worker" right in the very first paragraph, Really, he will... just before the fine print that screws the workers of America as badly as it screws the workers of the whole world. A screwed American worker is better than a screwed Chinese worker any way you slice it.That is the new abnormal "Sopranos" definition of Made in America.

But we also should recognize that 95 percent of our potential customers live outside our borders. Exports support more than 11 million jobs -- and exporters tend to pay their workers higher wages. Failing to seize new opportunities would be devastating not just for our businesses, but for our workers too.

He's actually right that fewer and fewer ordinary Americans can afford to buy crap. The customer base is dwindling all the time. And he's right that the billionaire Koch Brothers and their fellow oligarchs, who are actively lobbying for the TPP, will indeed be emotionally devastated if they can't seize control of the global plutonomy. Corporations will rant and rave and cry and sob if they're thwarted in their crusade to pollute the planet and exploit the workers. Obama, meanwhile, wants to enlist you in common cause with the obscene rich by referring to exploited populations as "our potential customers."

Since the Obama administration was recently awarded four Pinocchios for falsely claiming that the TPP would generate 650,000 new American jobs, they have now deliberately muddled their lie by  throwing out a figure of 11 million jobs created by exports. This, of course, applies to "trade deals" in general, and doesn't actually specify where the jobs are created. Obama couldn't be more vague or misleading if he tried. But he is adhering to the propaganda rule of Joseph Goebbels: tell a big lie often enough, and it will tend to stick -- the same way exporters "tend to" pay their workers higher wages when they're allowed to plunder the universe.

Tellingly, even the experts at the Peterson Institute (funded by billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson) are refusing to forecast a jobs boost  from passage of the TPP. These economists-for-hire were burned once before, when they falsely predicted an American jobs boom with the passage of NAFTA. The actual number of American jobs created under TPP is more likely to be a Big Fat Zero, according to Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker and Pinocchio awarder whose report is linked at the top of this post. Beware, he says, of politicians and their fishy math.

But Obama's fishy email burbles on:

That's why my Administration is currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- so we can benefit from trade that is not just free, but also fair.

Notice the sudden sly pivot to beneficiaries being "we" (his administration and the VIPs it serves), not you or me. Very, very slimy. Whatever happened to "our" customers?

We have the chance to open up more markets to goods and services backed by three proud words: Made in America. For the sake of our businesses, and American workers, it's an opportunity we need to take.

You are made Americans, so be proud. He is making you an offer you can't refuse. Get kneecapped or get disappeared in the Pine Barrens.

 But beyond greater access to the world's fastest-growing region, the agreement will establish enforceable commitments to protect labor, environmental, and other crucial standards that Americans hold dear.

It's the wonder of plunder in those vast, untapped territories like Australia that currently enjoy quaint protections by individual governments.  You see, since the TPP will replace national courts with  self-serving corporate tribunals to enforce the commitments, the standards will not only be crucial, they will be cruel. For example, Big Tobacco needs to sell its toxic product in countries where they ban sale of cigarettes to children. The TPP will change all that. Big Tobacco could foreseeably be awarded damages from Malaysia for cutting into their pediatric customer base. The American gospel of Consume and/or Die, held so dear, will be spread to countries where the drug culture is not yet protected for the benefit of Big Tobacco or Big PHarma.

Right now, China wants to write the rules for commerce in Asia. If it succeeds, our competitors would be free to ignore basic environmental and labor standards, giving them an unfair advantage over American workers.

Bullshit. As noted above, currency manipulation has nothing to do with the TPP. For purposes of corporate hegemony, China is only the latest scapegoat. The TPP does nothing at all to reduce the trade deficit. As a matter of fact, it would succeed in widening it even more. NAFTA, for example, engendered a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada as it destroyed a million (and counting) American jobs.

 We can't let that happen. We should write the rules, and level the playing field for our middle class. The first step is for Congress to pass Trade Promotion Authority.

Without letting Congress or you even know what they're voting for. 

 After years of shipping jobs overseas, our manufacturing sector is creating jobs at a pace not seen since the 1990s. Rather than outsourcing, more companies are insourcing and bringing jobs back home. Today, more than half of manufacturing executives have said they're looking at bringing jobs back from China.

The jobs are temporary, precarious and poorly paid. The American worker is gaining parity in low wages with the rest of the world. Of course manufacturers are interested in bringing jobs home if our wages continue to stagnate or drop, if unions continue to be destroyed, if pension plans go broke. It'll boost corporate profits. Unless, of course, the TPP gets rammed through and they can ship even more jobs to Vietnam, a  negotiating partner which now pays its workers a minimum wage of 30 cents an hour.

Let's give them one more reason to get it done, by giving me the tools I need to grow our economy, boost exports for our businesses, and give more hardworking middle-class families a chance to get ahead. Thanks,

President Barack Obama

The one ray of hope we can probably take from Obama's email campaign is that he knows his TPP charm offensive to Congress might be in danger of not working. It's the bipartisanship that dare not speak its name -- an alliance between the Tea Party and the left, striking dread into the radical center. He had heretofore been loath to directly address the American people on the TPP, no doubt because he can't or won't tell us what's really in it.  So his sudden public push is probably a sign of his desperation.

And look who he's just enlisted to strong-arm the Japanese into screwing their own agricultural workers. Ayn Rand afficianado Paul Ryan is leading a bipartisan delegation (consisting of only one token Democrat) to wheel and deal on behalf of Obama and the oligarchs each of them serve in his own unique Good Cop/Bad Cop way.

 

Dastardly Duopolists

Class War Gaslighting

This just in.... 

Inequality is all in your head, proles! And not only that -- the rich are getting poorer. Or at least not getting as rich as they would like. Pity the poor rich, and stop your kvetching.

This also just in:

Danger: rich plutocrat-serving propaganda ahead. Cross at your own risk.

Today's New York Times and Washington Post, among others, are absolutely orgasming over a new study claiming that income inequality is a crock, and that the fortunes of the obscenely wealthy have actually been reversed since the Great Meltdown of 2008. The journalists, of course, don't bother to tell us who funded the miraculous conclusions behind cherry-picked data purporting to vindicate the malefactors of great wealth.

 All it takes is a Google and a functioning brain to discover that all winding, snaking roads lead back to the same place.

 Here are a few hints: What presidential candidate and failed memoir-seller took flack for claiming that she was "dead broke" when she left the White House? What presidential candidate recently hired 200 economists to help her walk the fine line between serving her wealthy Wall Street masters and running a populist campaign?

Now that you've guessed the answer, let's move on to the propaganda.

"Inequality Has Actually Not Risen Since the Financial Crisis" proclaims the Times' David Leonhardt in the headline of his front page stenographic effort. Quoting George Washington University economist Stephen J. Rose, he soothingly reassures the disgruntled enviers of great wealth that the incomes of the top earners have gone down since the crisis. And, adding insult to injury, the rich were even excluded from the temporary food stamp bonanza and unemployment bennies!

The wealthy have indeed received the bulk of the gains since the recovery began, but they still haven’t recovered their losses. Meanwhile, the steps that the federal government took in response to the crisis, including tax cuts and benefit increases, have mostly helped the nonwealthy.

 Fascinatingly, Mr. Rose’s case is not based on a new or previously undiscovered data set. It’s based on the same statistics most commentators have been using to discuss inequality. The most up-to-date numbers come from the pathbreaking analysis of tax records by Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, professor who often collaborates with Thomas Piketty. A second set of statistics comes from the Congressional Budget Office.

So the "truth" that the rich are not only being unfairly maligned by Piketty and Saez, but they are suffering unimaginable agony, has been hiding in plain sight all this time. And there are charts, charts, by golly, to prove it. So much for those nasty conservatives claiming that the economy is getting worse. If it weren't for meager food stamp stipends and temporary unemployment benefits, regular people would be dead. You regular folks might have lost a third of your incomes, but the rich lost millions and millions from their billions and billions. Therefore, you have no right to complain. You are fortunate without even realizing it.

The average income of the top 1 percent, by comparison, fell 21 percent over the same span. For the top 5 percent, the drop was 15 percent. For the bottom 90 percent of earners, it was 13 percent.

If anything, these pretax data exaggerate the level of inequality, as Mr. Rose notes in his paper, published by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington research group. The rich pay a higher average federal tax rate than the middle class and the poor. (The stories you hear about wealthy investors paying little in taxes are real but not the norm.) And unemployment-insurance payments and other federal benefits help the middle class and poor more than the rich.

What Leonhardt doesn't see fit to mention is that the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is pro-plutocracy neoliberal 501(c) (3) founded in 2006 with corporate money, just as Hillary Clinton was gearing up for her first presidential campaign. Its president, economist Robert D. Atkinson, was previously vice president of the New Democrat Coalition's Progressive Policy Institute, the Wall Street think tank instrumental in orchestrating Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, electing him to office, and helping move the Democratic Party to the right through such achievements as the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the end of direct cash aid to the poor. The New Democrat Coalition (of which Barack Obama himself is a self-described proud member) and its subsidiary, the ITIF, are also proponents of free trade deals like NAFTA, and now the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

That's what this Poor Rich People campaign is really all about. Granting Barack Obama fast-track authority to ram through a deal so unfriendly to regular people that even members of Congress are barred from seeing the details before voting on it. Oh, and promoting Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy by tamping down all that class war rhetoric and gaslighting the struggling voters into thinking that times really aren't as bad as we imagine them to be.

The Wall Street Democrats cynically characterize widening wealth disparity as an evil Republican talking point, the sole purpose being to discredit Barack Obama. Ergo, if you persist in believing that this inequality is for real, then you must be a Ted Cruz fan and an Obama hater. The plutocratic propaganda appeals to the limbic brain, where tribalistic instincts dwell, and thus do facts become unnecessary, even when your target audience consists of educated liberals.

Rose's "poor rich" study being touted by the corporate media is also published by the New Democrat Coalition house organ known as Republic 3.0, whose motto is "Where the Center Holds."

The big problem facing this country, they say, is not wealth disparity. It's Congressional Gridlock(TM) -- a mythical disease existing only in the minds of the media-political complex. The main symptom is the pretense that Democrats and Republicans just can't get stuff done (excluding, of course, starting and funding wars, spying on Americans, rewarding Wall Street and always finding ways to dismantle the New Deal after the manufacture of phony crises). Republic 3.0 (Third Way, get it?) describes its mission thusly:

Public trust in government has ebbed to all-time lows. But practical policy innovations – ideas that are pro-growth, pro-opportunity, broadly appealing and fiscally responsible – are still flourishing across the country. We want to bring those ideas to you and to inspire the kind of change that can only come from the broad center.

The broad center: defined by yours truly as the pathologically self-centered radical self interest of the obscenely rich.

The editor of Republic 3.0 is Anne Kim, another alumnus of the Progressive Policy Institute and Pete Peterson's Third Way. You might remember Pete Peterson as the Wall Street billionaire who funded President Obama's deficit reduction Catfood Commission and its evil stepchild, "Fix the Debt," both of which have called for cuts to Social Security and the social safety net.

In a previous article published in Republic 3.0, inequality skeptic Rose says if we were suffering as much as we claim, we'd be subsisting on off-label coffee.The fact that Starbucks is doing so phenomenomally well is proof that the middle class has money to burn.  Says Rose:

A middle-brow commodity that has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 1971 is the Starbucks coffee chain, which now has nearly 12,000 stores in America (and another 9,000 around the world). Before the coffee craze took off, most consumers spent between the equivalent of 50 cents and one dollar for a cup of coffee. Now, a cup of Americano goes for nearly $3 and other options can run to close to $6 a serving. The mass consumption of this kind of coffee is a sign of economic growth because otherwise people would be spending their money on bargain coffee.

Oh, and how can we be poor when we have cars and refrigerators? Rose, the suave Charles Boyer of economists-for-hire, is spewing the exact same gaslighting nonsense as Paul Ryan and the vicious blame-the-poor misanthropes on the other side of the Money Party aisle.

What Inequality? You Drink Coffee, Don't You?

Fortunately for the unfortunates, though, New York Times readers don't seem to be swallowing the Wall Street-funded propaganda as enthusiastically as they swallow their coffee. The biggest complaint among commenters is that Rose is only measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality. The rich, unlike the rest of us, don't draw a regular hourly wage or salary. They live off their investments, their assets, their rents, their inheritances, their various financial instruments, their fraud... and the blood, tears, toil and sweat of all the rest of us.

Sorry, rich people. Sorry, Hillary. Call us crazy, but no sale. We've woken up and smelled the coffee. Your ladders of opportunity are full of dry rot.

Democracy, What a Concept

I have a code id by doze, and clogging is not conducive to blogging on this outrageously freezing (windchill is Minus 20) Presidents Day.

In case anyone is out there, and wants to vent on anything at all, political, cultural, or nonsensical, have at it. Let's celebrate bottom-up democracy instead of George Washington's plump bottom on his horse.

I did manage to paste up a comment on Paul Krugman's column in the wee hours, when I awoke to medicate my sinuses. He wrote on Greece, which I'd serendipitously been reading up on over the weekend and jotting down notes... so deep thinking was not required at 3:30 a.m EST., when New York Times columns now ridiculously appear.

 Greece might seem like it's far away and not relevant to us, but since we're all in this together on the precarious little planet being plundered by the same interconnected global oligarchic psychopaths, we all must stick together. I am hope-hope-hoping that following the lead of Syriza, the Green Party will come into its own this election cycle. And if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders jump in, all the better. Because flawed and imperfect as they may be, they are anti-corruption. The thought of a Hillary versus Jeb neoliberal slime-pit fills me with alternating bouts of apathy and despair and disgust.

Krugman, meanwhile, writes that at least Greece won't be militarily invaded if it refuses to pay its bills. I wouldn't be so sure about that, given the voracious appetites of the Military Industrial Complex and its current stampede on Ukraine. Colonization by neoliberal forces is still invasion, still an assault on humanity. But he is right about Weimar Germany and its aftermath being an object lesson. My reply:

Europe's austerians should take a lesson from FDR's New Deal, which not only lifted the US out of depression but served to thwart the tide of fascism then washing over Europe. You'd think that Germany in particular would also remember the Marshall Plan, whose generosity and spirit of forgiveness helped save Western Europe for democracy, even as it rebuilt infrastructure and lives after World War II.

The assault of the Troika on Greece is indeed a war, a war by the amoral oligarchs who control the globalized, financialized political system. The latest crisis is the direct result of the avarice of these same unregulated players who caused the whole economic catastrophe to begin with. That they're now punishing regular people is both tragic and laughable, since the Greeks (at least before many of them lost jobs through no fault of their own) work more hours than in most other European nations. Indeed, the predators of finance capital are propagandizing, blaming the victims, and pitting disparate groups of people against one another -- Weimar deja vu all over again. And we know how that turned out.

The Troika would rather that people suffer than whole nations succeed, together. What individual investors and employers might gain temporarily by inflicting pain on others will inevitably harm them too, as well as do lasting damage to their beloved markets.

 The plutonomy's motto that "a rising tide lifts all yachts" sounds cute until everybody drowns. Even the pathocrats.

It Takes a Neoliberal Village

Hillary Clinton sure has a strange way of rolling out her presidential campaign. She's teamed up with Bill Frist (health industry profiteer, corrupt former senator, and inept long-distance diagnostician of Terry Schiavo) to advocate for the renewal of the Children's Health Insurance Program. (CHIP) This 90s initiative currently serves a couple million borderline-poor children -- out of the nearly 50 million people still uncovered under the Affordable Care Act.

It seems that CHIP will run out of funding this fall. So what more perfect way for Hillary Clinton to show that she cares than writing an op-ed in the New York Times? This is a huge dog whistle to her Wall Street backers, a reassuring signal that the crumb-throwing agenda would continue under a third Clinton term. And the empress-in-waiting will not be above teaming up with corrupt politicians like Frist to wheel and deal, either.

There is no wealth inequality or political corruption in Hillary World. There is only.... drum-roll, please.... that dreaded Congressional Gridlock. It turns out that all we need to save a few carefully chosen little people out of the millions and millions still suffering and struggling is for a couple of elite grandparental pols to get together to say they really, really care.... about the merest handful of very carefully chosen and vetted little people.

Even the title of the op-ed -- Save the Children's Insurance -- sounds like a marketing ploy by a charity scam. I half-expected to see a video of Sally Struthers embedded in the copy. As a matter of fact, if you want to avoid reading the op-ed, you can get the gist from this old TV spot. The messages are identical: all that sick and starving kids need is a little pocket change in order for rich people to feel better about themselves.

If you're still craving schmaltz, Clinton and Frist (or more likely, their P.R. people) give it to you in rancid dollops:

NO child in America should be denied the chance to see a doctor when he or she needs one — but if Congress doesn’t act soon, that’s exactly what might happen.

For the past 18 years, the Children’s Health Insurance Program has provided much-needed coverage to millions of American children. And yet, despite strong bipartisan support, we are concerned that gridlock in Washington and unrelated disputes over the Affordable Care Act could prevent an extension of the program. As parents, grandparents and former legislators, we believe that partisan politics should never stand between our kids and quality health care.

We may be from different political parties, but both of us have dedicated our careers to supporting the health of children and their families. This shared commitment inspired us to work together in the late 1990s to help create CHIP to address the needs of the two million children whose families make too much money to be covered by Medicaid, but cannot afford private insurance.

They then proceed to wax rhapsodic over the rights of individual states to use CHIP money as they fit. They wax very, very far right, as a matter of fact. Even Republican governors love CHIP! And why shouldn't they? It's nowhere near a universal health care program. It serves only a very narrow category of needy people.

Clinton and Frist go on to kvetch that because of a "glitch" in the Affordable Care Act, families that qualify for CHIP are in danger of losing all benefits for their kids. Actually, as with most of the ACA, this is not a glitch at all. It's a built-in feature, demanding that even the near-poor have some skin in the game, in the way of high co-pays and deductibles. The whole idea is to enrich insurance companies while discouraging people from seeking too much medical care, thus miraculously bringing health care spending down. In the infamous words of HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Obamacare is designed to "deliver impact to the American people."

Clinton and Frist (or their minions) conclude:

Reauthorizing CHIP for the next four years would cost about $10 billion — an investment in our children that will pay off (my bold) for decades to come. This is an opportunity to send a message that Washington is still capable of making common-sense progress for American families.

As 2015 unfolds, we know Congress will continue to debate the future of health care reform. We most likely won’t see eye to eye about some of the more contentious questions. But one thing everyone should be able to agree on is that our most vulnerable children shouldn’t be caught in the crossfire.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about our kids and our nation’s future. What could be more important than that?

I'll leave it up to readers to address that last hilarious question, because the answers are too endless to list, and Sally Struthers quit making commercials.

Meanwhile, here's my published comment to Hill and the other Bill:

While CHIP has done a lot of good, it hasn't been nearly enough in this era of increasing poverty, stagnating wages and extreme wealth disparity.

The health of US children ranks a shameful 26th among 29 advanced nations surveyed by UNICEF. The highest ranked -- Norway, Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Sweden -- have strong social safety nets, including medical care, emphasis on superior public education, and liberal family leave policies.

The sad truth is that the oligarchs running the USA don't care much about our children. An estimated one in four live in poverty, and one out of 30 is homeless. Although half of all school-age children are indigent enough to qualify for free school lunches, Republicans are already talking about further reducing their food stamp stipends. Even relatively liberal initiatives are piecemeal, always couched in the language of the free market, such as "investing in our children" for our future prosperity. How about we just give the kids what they need, and stop referring to them as commodities? How about we stop calling ages 0-10  "the Homeland Generation" who've never known a day that this country hasn't been at war? How about we take some of the trillions wasted on war, and spend it on day care and a government jobs program for every American and every parent who wants and needs to work?

No PERSON in America should be denied the chance to see a doctor. Single Payer for all is not only humane, it makes good economic sense.

Paranoia, Inc.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. There is danger lurking in every corner of every home in every neighborhood in every town in every one of the 50 states.

But take heart, patriots. Besides life, liberty, and the Second Amendment, each and every one of us has a unique biological weapon with which to protect ourselves and our loved ones. And that is our follicles. Whenever those little hairs stand at attention on the back of our necks, we can rest assured that terrorists cannot be far away.

To hammer that message home, FBI Director James Comey traveled to the great freedom state of Mississippi in order to deputize every man, woman, and child in Real America:

Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement," Comey said. "They're sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody."

So let's just outlaw basements. They're hotbeds of intrigue, blogging, Cheeto-eating and porn-watching. No terrorist worth his salt would ever devise an evil plot on the front porch or, God forbid, while sitting on the crapper in an upstairs bathroom. 

So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.

"If you can video tape it all the better, if it's law enforcement all the better, if you can cut somebody's head off and get it on tape, what a wonderful thing in their view of the world," he continued. "That's the challenge we face everywhere."

And while crazy people are rampaging throughout the countryside, sabers and axes in hand, the Homeland Police State is being thwarted in its noble efforts to unconstitutionally gather information on every man, woman and child in America:

Comey expressed particular fear that restrictions on information gathering could give terrorists more leeway because they are harder to track.

"I'm very worried about where we're drifting as a country in respect to law enforcement's ability to, with lawful process, intercept communications. I'm not talking about sneaky stuff. I'm talking about situations where we have probable cause to believe that somebody is communicating with a terrorist group," he said. "... We're drifting into a place where there are going to be large swaths of this country beyond the reach of the law."

Somebody is in a basement right now, installing encryption software on a computer in order to prevent Big Brother from watching them. Somebody in a dark, spider-infested basement has deliberately taken himself off the grid in a craven attempt to subvert surveillance. In every neighborhood in every town in every state, there are evil Swath People lurking just beyond our sight.

Because of that, Comey said, citizens need to be constantly on the watch. The current climate of the world does not make it acceptable to see something and not report it.

"Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck," he said. "We've gone back through every homegrown violent extremist case in the United States and studied it. In every single case, someone saw something online, at a religious institution, in a family setting, at a school, that was weird, that was out of place, this person was acting in a way that didn't make sense."

I know exactly what Comey is talking about. Because just yesterday afternoon, in what I'd thought was the safe haven of my living room, I switched on my TV. And what jumped out at me,  what I saw and heard, not only caused the neck hairs  to practically jump out of their follicles, it made my stomach lurch with a sense of impending doom. Some crazy men had taken over the public airwaves to demand billions of dollars and carte blanche to kill people, whenever and wherever they please, with no end in sight to their rampage of terror:

Bully! Neocon Rough Riders to the Rescue

 I saw something, so I'm going to say something:

The cynical campaign of the troubled soulless souls posing as our leaders to grind us into a state of abject fear and submission is hazardous to our social, economic, physical and mental health. 

We are simultaneously being cast as the hunters and the hunted. We are asked to become vigilantes on behalf of the very police state that considers all of us incipient criminals lurking in basements. We live not in the land of the free, but in the United States of Stasiland.

Comey is only the latest designated spokesman of what Alan Feldman has called securocratic warfare: free-floating, open-ended borderless conflicts. Battlefields are replaced with battle spaces. There is a permanent state of emergency, necessitating the suspension of basic human rights. The enemy exists not only over there, but over here. In parks, in schools, in shopping malls, in churches, in airports, in basements... even in an apartment complex in the same scenic North Carolina college town that hosted the last Democratic Party convention.

To be acceptable to the populace, capitalistic wars for profit must be waged in the name of human safety rather than for crass territorial or monetary conquest. These wars can never end, because capitalism and growth must never end.

"The figure of the terrorist looms large here," writes Stephen Graham in Cities Under Siege, "because terrorists are seen to breed improper circulation of bodies, money and drugs. State discourses ensure the vague fusion of these malign presences and mobilities, and political opportunism ensures that counterterror legislation is applied to all manner of putative threats. At the same time, the global logistics, the tourism, the migration, the continual flow of commodities and currencies that sustain neoliberal capitalism are rendered invisible, normal."

So while Obama pushes for fast-track congressional authority to ram through the invisible corporate coup called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he tries to distract us (and Congress) by cynically pretending to ask for permission to fast-track blasting unknown and unknowable enemies into oblivion. 

As Bruce Ackerman writes in a New York Times op-ed published today, Obama's putative request for war authority is vague enough to ensure that regardless of what Congress does, he and all future presidents will continue to call the shots.

Nevertheless, both the Bush and Obama administrations have used the wiggle word “associated” to transform the (War Powers) resolution’s limited grant into the wide-ranging war-making authority that Congress explicitly denied the president in 2001. White House lawyers have accomplished this power grab by claiming that a host of groups are somehow “associated” with Al Qaeda by virtue of increasingly distant connections to the surviving remnants of Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Despite this unhappy history, Mr. Obama’s current proposal explicitly endorses this power-grabbing formula. Not only does his proposal fail to limit the battlefield to Iraq and Syria, but it also authorizes him to take the fight beyond the Islamic State to battle any “associated persons or forces,” including “any closely related successor entity.”

Look over there at ISIS. Look over here, peer in your neighbor's basement window to detect those lurking, closely related successor entities and their associates. Look anywhere, as long as you don't look at the real terrorists: Citigroup and HSBC and Goldman Sachs and Exxon-Mobil and Northrup Grummon and G.E. and General Dynamics and Booz Allen and Stratfor.

Think with your hair follicles and your limbic systems, and for the sake of the plutonomy, please give those cerebral cortices a rest. It's the patriotic thing to do.

It's the Plutonomy, Stupid

I've been reading with great interest the richly detailed Times series about the claque of international high rollers creating a luxury real estate bubble in New York City. I am shocked, shocked that corruption is going on here.

This scam is one more manifestation of the global plutonomy -- an economy controlled by and benefiting only the extremely rich. Nations and their laws are being rendered moot faster than you can say TPP, IMF, WTO, NATO, the banking mafia, and the Obama Justice Department.  Rather than enforcing the laws on the books, the DoJ is doing nothing, zilch, nada about tax-evading oligarchs. The job of Eric Holder, the keeper at the plutocratic gates, is to give the malefactors a slap on the wrist at irregular intervals in order to placate a seething public.

 The most recent case, outlined in today's Times, has Holder cajoling the TBTFs (too big to fails) to enter into a felony plea agreement for the crime against humanity of international currency manipulation. At most, some low-level traders might be sent to jail. But if recent history is any indication, the Wall Street mafia's stock prices will actually go up with news of the pending deal, the DoJ's implicit message being that the crime spree may continue unabated. Crime literally does pay when you're a corporation or a billionaire headquartered in the One Indispensable Nation.

In the latest known case of fraud and larceny, leaked emails exposed Wall Street currency traders actually mocking their clients for being too stupid to realize they were being scammed.  When they were caught doing the mega-banks' bidding, they blamed the usual technical glitches. Mistakes were made.

Actually, the ruling class racketeers are laughing their heads off at the prospect of paying another huge fine, because they can claw every penny back in the form of tax rebates for their "losses" and still collect bonuses as their reward for stealing other people's money. And the stock market will soar.

Citigroup, one of the banks being charged with felony currency manipulation even as its executives remain embedded deep within the Obama administration, actually invented the concept of the Plutonomy. As deregulation and globalization were beginning to widen the wealth gap into a diseased maw of corruption and greed,  they were already laughing their heads off a decade ago too. They joked in private reports that "a rising tide will lift all yachts" as they smacked their lips in anticipation of an epic spending and hoarding binge by the uber-wealthy few.

When the memos first leaked in all their unfiltered greed, Citigroup executives were hugely successful in getting them suppressed by the corporate media. That's because they make the latest leaked emails from the latest crop of crooked currency traders look banal. You can watch forensic economist Bill Black dishing the dirt on the plutonomy porn here.

In pre-meltdown "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances," published in 2005, and its 2006 sequel, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer", bank analysts concluded that it was ultra-high net worth driving the economy.  "We think the plutonomy is here, is going to get stronger, its memberships welling from globalized enclaves in the emerging world, we think a ‘plutonomy basket’ of stocks should continue to do well … Binge on Bling … These toys for the wealthy have pricing power, and staying power.They are … more desirable and demanded the more expensive they are."

The markets might have collapsed, but the banksters were certainly right about the rich only growing stronger as a result of losses being socialized and all the gains being privatized into fewer and fewer hands.

The bankers writing those internal memos to their wealthy clients shrugged their shoulders and sighed that gross wealth inequality is just a matter of mathematics, not morality. (Shit happens.) They wouldn't know morality if it bit them in their sociopathic asses. But they're not stupid. Their Achilles heel remains fear of the great unwashed masses:

Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of a few, probably has its limits. What might cause the elastic to snap back? We can see a number of potential challenges to plutonomy.

The first, and probably most potent, is through a labor backlash. Outsourcing, offshoring or insourcing of cheap labor is done to undercut current labor costs. Those being undercut are losers in the short term. While there is evidence that this is positive for the average worker (for example Ottaviano and Peri) it is also clear that high-cost substitutable labor loses.

Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing or offshoring of labor being attacked as “unpatriotic” or plain unfair. This tends to lead to calls for protectionism to save the low-skilled domestic jobs being lost. This is a cause championed, generally, by left-wing politicians. At the other extreme, insourcing, or allowing mass immigration, which might price domestic workers out of jobs, leads to calls for anti-immigration policies, at worst championed by those on the far right.

Mind you, these centrist Democrat-oriented (pro-cheap immigrant labor and secret trade deals) Citigroup memos were written in the pre-Citizens United era, before money was declared speech and the ultra-wealthy were invited to openly and legally bribe and buy their politicians. The poor and working class were effectively silenced. And that silencing was subsequently and scientifically proven by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page.

  But even though we no longer have a functioning democracy, the proles must be stroked to avoid a repeat of 1789... or a new New Deal. Ten years ago, the Citigroup analysts stressed the necessity of politicians being skilled enough to fool us into continuing to think that our votes really do count. If we aspire to greed, we can then succeed:

Perhaps one reason that societies allow plutonomy, is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Pluto-participant. Why kill it off, if you can join it? In a sense this is the embodiment of the “American dream”. But if voters feel they cannot participate, they are more likely to divide up the wealth pie, rather than aspire to being truly rich.

Could the plutonomies die because the dream is dead, because enough of society does not believe they can participate? The answer is of course yes. But we suspect this is a threat more clearly felt during recessions, and periods of falling wealth, than when average citizens feel that they are better off. There are signs around the world that society is unhappy with plutonomy - judging by how tight electoral races are.

You Too Can Be a Pluto-Participant (All You Need Is a Bootstrap and a Dream)

And this brings us to poor, rich Hillary Clinton. It turns out that her biggest challenge is how on earth she'll be able to wage a populist campaign while still doing the bidding of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and without offending the donor-folks, both foreign and domestic, owning property in luxury towers. Her own daughter bought a $10.5 million apartment in a New York City luxury tower and received a nearly $1 million LLC tax break, for crying out loud. (not covered in the Times series.) Since it is very doubtful that Hillary can accomplish her tightrope walk of subterfuge with as much grace and finesse as the facile Mr. Obama, it's not a matter of if she'll crash and burn on her own gaffitude. It's when. So don't count Bernie Sanders or other backbenchers out just yet. And the Green Party is coming out hibernation, too.

 Now, back to the Times series on the money-laundering, tax-evading scam dressed up as investment in high end real estate. Lest the wealthy be unduly offended by the revelations of greed in their midst, the newspaper is also running a helpful companion piece on how the merely rich can cash in, too. (That's right: class envy has reached the point where multimillionaires are jealous of billionaires. Manhattan millionaires consider themselves middle class because of out of control housing costs. The whole definition of middle class should be changed, or maybe we should stop using the term entirely. In pricey Manhattan, for example, a family of four with an income of around $65,000 is considered poor enough to qualify for social services assistance, while such a salary in the rural heartland would probably make for a comfortable existence. "Middle class" is turning into more of a verbal ploy used by politicians in search of voters to groom and inspire to aspire, just as the Citigroup analysts have insisted they need to do in order to get elected.

The way for the One Percent to get richer is by betting on the .001 Percent. You mere mortal millionaires out there can get a sliver of the pie simply by investing in billionaires. You won't get to actually live in even one square foot of their luxury digs, but you can still belong to an LLC in-crowd or hedge fund. Even the family of Louise Storey, one of the writers of the Times series, owns real estate under LLC (limited liability corporation) tax-evasive and lawsuit-immunity  protection. (h/t Meredith-NYC). 

Good luck finding the humans behind the LLCs to sue in small claims court when you get bitten by your merely rich neighbor's dog. Nobody need ever own up to ownership. Magnify this scam a thousandfold when a Saudi prince's diamond-studded poodle bites you, and you get my drift. The tycoons in their towers are judgment-proof. And you can pay your own emergency room bill.

It's the plutonomy, stupid. 

Oh, and wouldn't you know it: the very last foreign godzillionaire to be exposed in the Times series is a Russian oligarch. How very nicely this ties in with the recent anti-Putin propaganda being broadcast in order to soften us up for a new war in Ukraine. We have a "responsibility to protect" those starving, freezing Russians, dontcha know. So they gin up the xenophobia, and call it a fight for world freedom. Making Putin a proxy for the despised Walton Family in the bitter hearts and jaded minds of the American precariat is just what the plutonomy ordered to keep itself whole.

Good (less evil) oligarchs vs bad (devil incarnate) oligarchs: that just about sums it all up.

And if the luxury real estate scheme crashes and burns, the criminals hiding behind their LLCs will get sanctuary in an undisclosed bank vault location or on a floating yacht-country somewhere, while you-know-who will left holding the bag. 

Oh, what a revolting state of affairs that will turn out to be. Because it's not if the next toxic greed-bubble will burst. It's when. You can bet on it.

Where Eagles Dared

Sandy Socolow (CBS News)

You may never have heard of Sandy Socolow, especially if you weren't around during the 60s and 70s and beyond, when watching Walter Cronkite deliver the nightly news on CBS was a ritual in millions of American homes.
I confess that he wasn't exactly a household name to me, either, until I got to know his former wife, Nan, through New York Times commenting. (Nan has contributed several poems to Sardonicky, and a Watergate-era poem she wrote to him is reprinted with her permission at the end of this post.)

Sandy Socolow, longtime producer of Walter Cronkite's newscasts, died on January 31 at the age of 86. He was among the last of the so-called "Murrow Boys," former newspapermen who turned the new medium of television into a unique and popular information-delivery vehicle. This was before news, and entertainment and corporate sponsor interests merged, and TV news -- as evidenced most recently by the Brian Williams scandal -- has been exposed as something of a personality, money- and ratings-driven fraud.

Journalists, many of them with perfect hair and pretty faces, were both physically and psychologically embedded deep within George W. Bush's misbegotten adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to glorify the war effort and probably helping to prolong it as well, through their largely non-critical coverage. (Remember the phony "Saving Private Jessica" story, and the staged toppling of Saddam's statue as preludes to the selling of war as a soap opera of infotainment?)

TV war coverage was, and is, a long way from Vietnam in more than time and distance. Back then, there was a Fairness Doctrine (broadcasting in the public interest). Back then, journalists tended to take their "afflict the comfortable" duties more seriously, as opposed to their banal goals today: getting access to the powerful and engaging in he said/she said debates instead of proactively digging for the truth. It was Sandy Socolow who produced the famous Morley Safer film segment that showed American troops setting fire to a Vietnam village, which sparked the previously lacking public outrage and hastened the end of the war. Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam himself, came back, urged a withdrawal of troops in the name of human decency, and caused LBJ to realize that since he'd lost Cronkite, he'd lost America.

Sandy Socolow (his last name is Russian for "eagle" or "falcon," says Nan) worked with Cronkite almost continuously from the time he arrived at CBS in the mid-50s until Cronkite's own retirement. As Bruce Weber chronicles in his excellent New York Times obituary, Socolow risked his job by producing Cronkite's succinct and damning overview of the then-obscure Watergate scandal:

Less than two weeks before the presidential election, the “Evening News” broadcast Cronkite’s two-part summation of the unfolding Watergate story, largely following the reporting in The Washington Post by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

The first installment, which detailed the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington and a dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the committee to re-elect President Richard M. Nixon, appeared on Friday, Oct. 27, absorbing an extraordinary 14 minutes of the 22 minutes or so devoted to the news.

The Nixon White House put pressure on CBS corporate executives to cancel the second installment of the report, which was to focus on the financing of the illicit doings and on the ways figures involved in the Watergate scandal were connected to the president.

But Sandy Socolow chose to ignore the threatening directive, imparted through CBS chairman William S. Paley, to kill the second part of the story, opting instead to trim it down. The rest, as they say, is history:

The CBS report nonetheless had a significant impact, not least because it gave the Watergate story the imprimatur of the nation’s most authoritative newsman, Walter Cronkite. Less than two years after Nixon was resoundingly re-elected, the Watergate scandal forced his resignation.

Fast forward 40 years, and a shocking 64% of investigative journalists are convinced that their own government is spying on them. Fast forward 40 years, and the Fourth Estate is largely a glorified steno pool. As Maureen Dowd writes in her Sunday New York Times column on the Brian Williams debacle,    

Although there was much chatter about the “revered” anchor and the “moral authority” of the networks, does anyone really feel that way anymore? Frothy morning shows long ago became the more important anchoring real estate, garnering more revenue and subsidizing the news division. One anchor exerted moral authority once and that was Walter Cronkite, because he risked his career to go on TV and tell the truth about the fact that we were losing the Vietnam War.

But TV news now is rife with cat, dog and baby videos, weather stories and narcissism. And even that fare caused trouble for Williams when he reported on a video of a pig saving a baby goat, admitting “we have no way of knowing if it’s real,” and then later had to explain that it wasn’t. The nightly news anchors are not figures of authority. They’re part of the entertainment, branding and cross-promotion business.

So on top of Orwell's 1984, we've got the anesthetizing frosting of Huxley's Brave New World. Distractions and delusions are the order of the day. My response to Dowd:

CNN was actually pre-empting their usual terror and sabre-rattling coverage on Saturday because of LyinBrianGate. Poppy Harlow fumed that it was "too soon" for Maureen Dowd to have exposed Brian Williams as a phony. Poppy hopes he gets his job back, because they're all like family.

I'm glad Maureen mentioned Walter Cronkite, because the longtime producer of his news program died just last weekend. Sandy Socolow was a trailblazer for TV news. It was largely due to Socolow that the American people learned the awful truth about Vietnam. And thus was the war dealt a mortal blow by the power of independent journalism.

Brian Williams, on the other hand, bathed himself in jingoistic glory and glamor. The viewers were numbed and awed, and the horror show went on. Those, of course, were the years of the "embed" -- the sneaky way that the Bush cartel controlled reporters by giving them unprecedented access to the battlefield and all the military toys and garb at their disposal. Chelsea Manning, the truly courageous soldier who did expose the war crimes -- including film of helicopter snipers shooting Reuters reporters to death -- languishes in prison while infotainer Williams is raking in the millions for performing the joint function of actor and propagandist.

There is no anti-war movement because we're not being told the truth about any of the wars. But now that Williams has been exposed as a fraud, let the chips fall where they may, and let all our eyes and minds be opened.

Nan Socolow shares the poem she wrote to her husband to celebrate his courage under fire from what had been, until the past couple of administrations anyway, perhaps the worst assault on journalism by government in American history. It was originally published in the June 1975 New Republic.

RIDING INTO BATTLE,

MY HEART ON YOUR LANCE

You're my peach

you're my prince

pennoned

gonfaloned

tietacked

you joust

mosey along

astride your

falcon steed.

You're my bee

you're my berry

my cufflinked
Charlemagne

of traffic jams

and medieval nights

the modern day

vassal of

Medici me.

Nan Socolow

Three Generations of Socolows: Nan With Her Sons and Grandsons