A Little Jebhillarity To Beat the Winter Blues

So, did you catch Jeb Bush's foreign policy speech in Chicago the other day? You didn't? Then you missed a rare tragicomic treat, a slapstick spinoff of Six Feet Under starring the dysfunctional Bush clan as the funeral home ghouls, and all the rest of us as their hapless clients.

Jeb Bush as president would put the toe tag on America for its final trip to the morgue. He'd skip the autopsy because in his world, no post-mortem is necessary. The Iraq and Afghanistan operations were a success even though millions of patients died.

To make the preview of his candidacy even more macabre,(as if that were even possible) the "moderate Bush" formally introduced his team of foreign policy  experts at the same time he bragged that he was "his own man." It's more like the man is owned -- by nearly two dozen unindicted neocon war-profiteering co-conspirators, including Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremmer -- and who Maureen Dowd in her latest column calls the "estimable" James Baker.

In his foreign policy speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Jeb was dismissive toward those who want to know where he stands in relation to his father and brother. “In fact,” he said, mockingly, “this is a great, fascinating thing in the political world for some reason.”

For some reason?

Like the Clintons, the Bushes drag the country through national traumas that spring from their convoluted family dynamic and then disingenuously wonder why we concern ourselves with their family dynamic.

My published New York Times response:

The list of Jeb's policy advisers is enough to make you run straight into the arms of the grifting grandma to beg for mercy. She'll at least pause before starting a war. The neocons start wars because they are unabashed psychopaths, killing and plundering for the pure sport of it, and then bragging about it, secure in the knowledge that they will never, ever be prosecuted for their crimes.

Dick Cheney, though not on the official Jeb List for obvious reasons, is no doubt also lurking in the background, pulling Jeb's strings as deftly as he pulled George's. Ditto for Karl Rove and Roger Ailes. Triple-ditto for billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the de facto head of the Republican Party.

And how about that "estimable" James Baker? (I guess anybody would look vaguely human next to Wolfowitz and his tattered socks.)

Baker's law firm is currently defending the Saudis in a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 families on grounds that the royal family funded the terrorists. Then there's the shady Iraq war debt investment deal worth billions that he brokered between Kuwait and the Carlyle Group, at the same time he was an unpaid "special presidential envoy." Baker had also been lead attorney for the 2000 Bush/Cheney Florida election campaign.

Once the Supremes crowned George king, it was only a matter of time before the corruption became complete. Citizens United was the coup de grace to our democracy.

 Let's get the 28 secret pages of the 9/11 Commission Report made public, pronto.

You know you're in trouble when Grifting Grandma starts smelling like a rose compared to the extended Bush Crime Family. As I said, Hillary would at least use the feeble "responsibility to protect" excuse for invading and occupying countries. And taking a tip from the Teflon Don (Gotti) and his block parties, she and her clan do share some of the proceeds from their slush fund with some carefully vetted indigent population groups.

That's not to say that Hillary Land is not also deeply, deeply corrupt. There's something decidedly sleazy about an imminent presidential candidate accepting cash from foreign governments and big bank fraudsters. The New York Times editorial board has duly advised her to cease and desist from accepting cash from such donors as.... Saudi Arabia! (Those sheikhs know how to hedge their political bets as well as Wall Street. They're all part of the same plutonomy after all.)

Donations from foreign governments and nationals, for example, were found to make up more than half of the category of $5-million-plus contributions (to the Clinton charity), according to The Washington Post. A third of donations in the $1-million-plus bracket came from foreign governments and other overseas entities.

Substantial overlap was found between foundation contributors and familiar Clinton campaign donors and money bundlers. Considering the Clintons’ popularity and influence in their party, this is no surprise. But it does make it important that Mrs. Clinton, in defending the family’s efforts on behalf of the world’s needy, reassure the public that the foundation will not become a vehicle for insiders’ favoritism, should she run for and win the White House.

Restoring the restrictions on foreign donors would be a good way to make this point as Mrs. Clinton’s widely expected campaign moves forward.

So would returning all that cash, but the Times won't go that far, nor will it threaten to withhold its endorsement of Clinton should she fail to comply with their friendly advice.

But centrist-leaning Times columnist Frank Bruni, to his credit, is again taking on the corruption of politics by big money and the enabling role that the mainstream media play in their sycophantic coverage of the New Abnormal:

An astonishing bounty of the comments and developments that make headlines emanate from the arena of fund-raising. We learned that Mitt Romney might enter the 2016 race because he was telling donors as much, and we learned that he had decided otherwise because he was letting donors know. In neither instance did we take sufficient note of that.

We articulate misgivings about how much of Clinton’s or Bush’s thinking may be rooted in the past. But the bigger issue, given the scope of not just their own political histories but also their relatives’, is how heavy a duffel of i.o.u.s each of them would carry into office.

Their prominence is commensurate with their debts. And only so many of those can be forgotten.

My published response:

The one positive thing about a Bush-Clinton neoliberal death match is that it would prove to the gullible, once and for all. that we no longer have a functioning democracy. Duelling wads of cash might as well replace human beings in what pass for free elections. Money, after all, has been declared to be speech by the supreme court.

Recent separate analyses of Congressional voting patterns and presidential initiatives (see Michael Barber and Brian Schaffner) have scientifically established that politicians act more in the interest of their wealthy donors than their poorer constituents. The GOP is much worse, blatantly serving millionaires and billionaires to the detriment of everyone else. Even Democrats pass legislation that mainly favors the upper middle class, defined as those earning between $100,000 and $300,000.

Without a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United and all other means of legalized graft, the corruption will only get worse. As it is, the creeping privatization of what used to be government services and functions amounts to borderline fascism. Relentless propaganda has replaced journalism in the public interest. Personality cult politics, excessive secrecy, a state of endless war, increasing xenophobia and racist rhetoric, failure to prosecute egregious Wall Street fraud, blanket surveillance of citizens -- these are among the symptoms of what Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.

People over profits: ban the money, now.

Oh, I did promise some hilarity to temper the depression, didn't I? Besides his "owned man" bon mot, here are some funny outtakes from The Smart Bush's Chicago speech. He takes the mundane Bushisms of The Stupid Brother to new intellecutal (sic) heights that I'll call Jebbisms. They're guaranteed to give you the hebbie jebbies.  A comedic sampling (this is absolutely verbatim, from the raw C-Span transcript):

 Have a hundred people come. It is a little intimidating with all the friends of the press. But I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the invite.

  We have lost the trust and confidence of our friends. We definitely no longer inspired fear and our enemies. The problem is perhaps best and mistreated by this administration's approach to Iraq. We have had 35 years of experience with -- excuse me, Iran.

America has opposes efforts. But the Obama administration has launched where the goal has shifted. The ministration seeks to merely to regulate nuclear enrichment.

People have lost confidence in the administration's efforts in relations to Iran. Congress to pass bills to sanctions and require approval in agreement if someone the breach -- if one should be rich. My hope is that the administration would rise and eat this defining foreign-policy issue of our time.


 I come to these issues with a great deal of thought and experience. One of my most formative experiences was when my wife and I at the age of 24 accepted the responsibility of opening up at -- in office in Caracas, Venezuela. We had an 18-month-old and we went down there and Caracas was this booming place. We lived overseas and live outside of our beloved country. We learned how to use something that our parents used -- diapers.


 I have been fortunate to have a father and brother who helped shape America's foreign-policy from the oval office. My views will be held in comparison to theirs. This is a fascinating thing in the political world for some reason. For the record, I love my brother, I love my dad, I love my mother as well, hope that's ok. [laughter] and i admire their service to the nation. But I am my own man. Each president learns from those who came before. 

  You must fix our entitlement -- we must fix our entitlement problems. You must focus on trade. Congress should give the president trade authority. The good news is, we are probably the only country that can make this assertion, if we're serious about it, to become young and dynamic again.


As people lose confidence around the world in capitalism and democracy that underpins capitalism, they move in different directions very if they see America at its best, growing with a tremendous austerity, they will emulate that system as that will bring about a more peaceful world.

 Socialism are the ones who have problems. It is a reminder of the obvious. Free market capitalism provides opportunities for people. The US  has pulled back from the region. (Latin America) The boys are being filled by new actors, -- the voids are being filled by new actors, notably China. Our withdrawal from the region is not appropriate. I think the focus ultimately needs to get back to a free trade agreement of the Americas.


 The first up for the US is to recommit to rebuilding our own military and making a commitment that we are committed to doing this. We want to rebuild  NATO. It is hard for us to go electric Europe about their declining commitment -- to go lecture Europe about their declining commitment when we are doing the same. Need to give the Europeans the sense that you are not disengaging -- we are not disengaging.

 In an extraordinary vantage point in your life. Among your father and his close circle of advisers, your brother and his close circle of advisers, and the quality of service that so many of those people are few to have contributed to those years. There is a perception that the same quality, even if you sort of have a point of comparison, no longer exists. Do think that is true? Or do we look at the rearview mirror with rose tinted glasses? We see things and always view it negatively. I can like, I should be the marine psychologist in the Geico ad. He throws the kleenex at the guy. Get over it. We should not be as pessimistic as we are. We are on the verge of the greatest time to be alive.

Jeb forgot to thank one person. Her name Sarah Palin. I wonder if he can see her from his extraordinary vantage point the same way that she sees Putin from her back porch, rearing his head over Alaska freedom. If Jeb thinks that is true, then he really should give her credit for her extraordinary word salad recipe.

Terror Horror Monster Theater

Without a hint of irony or even a snippet of self-awareness, the Drone President gave a pair of speeches at a Terror Summit this week, arguing that we must wage a war on the extremists and ideologues and propagandists and recruiters and funders who incite disaffected people to commit violence.

He kind of sort of forgot to include himself, Congress, Wall Street, the Supreme Court, the Military-Industrial-Media-Prison Complex and homegrown religious or atheist fundamentalists on his list of the global enemies of humanity. America is exceptional, after all. Do as we say, goes his message to Muslim youth tempted to wage jihad -- not as we do. Obama railed,

As we speak, ISIL is terrorizing the people of Syria and Iraq and engaging in unspeakable cruelty.  The wanton murder of children, the enslavement and rape of women, threatening religious minorities with genocide, beheading hostages.  ISIL-linked terrorists murdered Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula, and their slaughter of Egyptian Christians in Libya has shocked the world.   Beyond the region, we’ve seen deadly attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris, and now Copenhagen.

Elsewhere, Israelis have endured the tragedy of terrorism for decades.  Pakistan’s Taliban has mounted a long campaign of violence against the Pakistani people that now tragically includes the massacre of more than 100 schoolchildren and their teachers.  From Somalia, al-Shabaab terrorists have launched attacks across East Africa.  In Nigeria and neighboring countries, Boko Haram kills and kidnaps men, women and children.

Oops. He forgot to mention the wanton deaths of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of innocent women and children from American hellfire missiles launched from Predator and Reaper drones. He forgot to mention the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed and maimed by Israeli extremists in their Gaza  concentration camp. He forgot to mention the hundreds of people kidnapped and renditioned and imprisoned by his own special ops security forces and denied due process as they linger without charge or trial, denied even the right to starve themselves because of the force-feeding torture that Obama himself ordered. He forgot to mention his continual protection of CIA torturers, war criminals and Wall Street financial terrorists. He forgot to mention that last year was the deadliest yet in the Afghanistan War. He forgot to mention that his ending of that war is just a fairy tale told for public relations purposes.

To say that he lied by omission is actually being too kind. He lied by revising history itself. For example, there is this:

Obviously, there is a complicated history between the Middle East, the West.  And none of us I think should be immune from criticism in terms of specific policies, but the notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie.  And all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it.

But then came the typical, self-neutering Obama pivot which also managed to subtly blame the victims while ignoring the fact that the United States has criminally invaded and colonized vast swaths of their territory:

The reality -- which, again, many Muslim leaders have spoken to -- is that there’s a strain of thought that doesn’t embrace ISIL’s tactics, doesn’t embrace violence, but does buy into the notion that the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances  -- sometimes that's accurate -- does buy into the belief that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy; does buy into the idea that Islam is incompatible with modernity or tolerance, or that it's been polluted by Western values.

So Obama is essentially absolving Bush, Cheney and the neocons -- still powerful and still granted publicity and prestige despite their crimes -- of all responsibility for lighting the fuse under the current strife and rampage by ISIS. If you're an Iraqi or an Afghan whose whole family was wiped out by American extremists, then you're a conspiracy theorist. If you're aggrieved that American or European imperialism ruined your life or your livelihood, then you're buying into a "notion". And not only that, if you're an American Muslim who doesn't rant and rave against the violent elements every day of your life, then you too will bear responsibility for all the bad stuff, including the blowback against CIA coups and war crimes by the Pentagon.

It's the same thing as telling Catholics they're to blame for priestly pedophilia if they continue attending Mass without also becoming an anti-child porn activist. Obama's moralizing hypocrisy is not that far removed from the government policy of imprisoning Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, for the mere fact of their ancestry.

Obama just spat in the face of the very people he is pretending to care about. As he does so very often, he cancelled himself out. In much the same way that he pretends to fight for the middle class by advocating for the brutal and job-destroying Trans-Pacific Partnership. The same way he pretends to want peace by selling weaponized drones to any country that wants them and refurbishing the entire US stock of nuclear weapons. The same way he signs a climate agreement with China and then opens up the Atlantic to oil and gas drilling. The list goes on and on and on.

Also in typical Obama fashion, he mawkishly inserted his own wife and children into his platitudinous propaganda to show that he's a hokey-jokey human being, just like you:

I’m thinking of a little girl named Sabrina who last month sent me a Valentine’s Day card in the shape of a heart.  It was the first Valentine I got.  (Laughter.)  I got it from Sabrina before Malia and Sasha and Michelle gave me one.  (Laughter.)  So she’s 11 years old.  She’s in the 5th grade.  She’s a young Muslim American.  And she said in her Valentine, “I enjoy being an American.”  And when she grows up, she wants to be an engineer -- or a basketball player.  (Laughter.)  Which are good choices. (Laughter.)  But she wrote, “I am worried about people hating Muslims…If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do.”  And she asked, “Please tell everyone that we are good people and we’re just like everyone else.”  (Applause.)  Now, those are the words -- and the wisdom -- of a little girl growing up here in America, just like my daughters are growing up here in America.  “We’re just like everybody else.”  And everybody needs to remember that during the course of this debate.

Yes, except that Malia and Sasha were never stalked by the CIA-trained NYPD or put on terror watch lists because of what they believe or the clothes that they wear. Obama will neither repudiate nor end these surveillance programs, because they are not considered part of the acceptable "debate."

(And just as an aside, perhaps Obama got his valentine late from his daughters because they and Mom were away for the holiday, enjoying another Aspen ski vacation courtesy of the drone-manufacturing Crown family of General Dynamics.) 

The Crowns, the Kochs, the banks, the oil companies, the corporate media, the politicians: they all do their part to keep American terrorism perpetual and profitable and themselves safe, secure and rich.

Talk and summits and debates alternately substitute for and mask the de facto bellicose policies of ObamaWorld. 

Republican David Brooks, often cited as Obama's favorite columnist, slurps the president's bromides on extremism even as he goes along with the GOP extremists who are now revving up their usual bad-cop racist rhetoric and calling the president a touchy-feely soft-hearted wimp for pretending to care about disaffected Muslim youth. Brooks's solution? The middle Eastern jihadists should turn to nationalism  in order to make their world safe for American democracy. I am not kidding. They should make patriotism into their new religion. Brooks is essentially advocating for Nazism to substitute for Islamic jihad.

My published response:

The only extremism we have to fear is that of the predatory ideologues who decided it would be a great idea to plunder and nation-build in Iraq and other middle Eastern regions. These same ideologues continue to roam free and grow rich, attaching themselves like leeches to such corrupt pols as Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. They want to keep the endless wars going, start new ones, and ensure that the most extreme wealth inequality in modern times continues. These extremists would love nothing more than to convert we the people into a billion tiny droplets comprising a geyser of blood, sweat, toil and tears that will gush all the way to the top. And if some of us fall to the bottom in the process, that's just the way the cookie crumbles in GOP Land.

The Republicans and their plutocratic backers in Big Finance and Big Weapons and Big Media thrive on perpetual war and perpetual terror. It's the only thing left propping up the plutonomy -- an economy of, by, and for the obscenely rich.

To sell their extremism to the public, they ratchet up the dread and the fear and the resentment and call it a noble clash of civilizations and a fight for freedom. They broadcast their war and finance porn through the six media conglomerates that now control 90% of everything the American public sees and hears.

 The only extremism we have to fear is the extremism of neocons and hypercapitalists who dress up the greed and subterfuge in spiritual and humanistic terms. They're the devil in disguise.

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.