Thursday, May 14, 2015
Open Thread
Or, as they say in the free trade biz, a progressive playing field of opportunity and wonder and surprises galore.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Obama's Snafu
*Updated below.
The giant middle finger that Barack Obama has been giving us these past six years is now dangling at the root, the victim of its own terminal corruption. And yet he and his sycophants persist in downgrading yesterday's crumbling of the "pillar of his presidency" into an annoying little hangnail.
"It's just a procedural snafu," whined Josh Earnest, the aptly named White House press flack of the "stinging defeat" Obama suffered from members of his own party, who shockingly denied him the right to "fast-track" democracy into oblivion via the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership.
If you want to get Panglossian about it, Snafu (situation normal, all fucked up) is slightly better than Fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition.) And, let's face it: the Democrats of the Senate did not suddenly go all populist overnight, despite the good work of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in exposing the TPP for the nasty corporate coup that it is. The Dem poobahs (Reid, Schumer, etc.) were pissed because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled a fast one on them, and didn't include the fig leaves (currency manipulation rules, monetary aid for displaced American workers, feeble union protections, and anti-child labor measures) that would otherwise have allowed Democrats to sell out their constituents. These people actually still love the TPP. Most of them don't even care about those odious investor state tribunals replacing sovereign court systems.
What makes the TPP now so Fubar and so toxic for the selfish interests of the oligarchs is that Japan, one of the countries negotiating the deal, is adamantly against any TPP clause forbidding it to manipulate its own currency. Barack Obama is damned if he does go along with Democratic demands, and damned if he doesn't.
Hot damn!
Another reason that the TPP may now be Fubar is that people are finally paying attention to it. And Barack Obama has only himself to blame. He has essentially fingered himself and the neoliberal agenda, for all the world to see.
If he hadn't publicly and pettily dissed Elizabeth Warren, falsely and chauvinistically accusing her of greed and mendacity, the gossip-loving mainstream press probably wouldn't have bothered with the TPP story.
His trip to Offshore Sweatshop Central (Nike) last week didn't help his pro-plutocracy public relations campaign, either. Nor did his simultaneous announcement allowing Shell to drill for oil in the ecologically fragile Arctic. Nor did his onslaught of fund-raising for his half-a-billion-dollar Chicago shrine, and his announcement of a sketchy greed-washing "initiative" that would raise money by and for corporations for the ostensible purpose of trickling down to the same minority poor people that Obama's Wall Street-friendly policies have already thrown under the economic bus.
Even Obama's most diehard fans are at least mildly peeved and disappointed with him at this stage. He has skipped Lame Duck mode entirely, prematurely careering straight into Post-Pre$idency Clintonoid Nirvana.
Despite yesterday's heartening victory, we must not rest on our laurels. These people don't quit, and they don't take No for an answer. But their greedy quest for more, more and more suddenly got a whole bunch of new roadblocks in its way, and their journey is not going to be the walk in the privatized park they thought it would be.
Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
***
Before yesterday's Senate vote, the New York Times published an odious little editorial that urged the parties to go along to get along and bipartisanly compromise on the TPP, including whatever fig leaves are necessary to ram it through. Needless to say, readers were neither amused nor placated. My comment:
How is a compromise possible on a treaty whose terms are being kept from the public? How is this possible when the White House has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges details they are allowed to scan only under the watchful eye of the Security State?
Rather than urge a smarmy bipartisan compromise under cover of darkness, I just wish the N.Y. Times had noted how undemocratic this whole process has been. The only reason we know some of the details we do is because of WikiLeaks.
The clause allowing investor state tribunals to subsume sovereign court systems even contains a sub-clause dictating that it remain a classified secret for at least four years from the date of ratification. That's how bad it is. That's how much the billionaires and corporations dictating the terms of this deal know how bad it is, and how much we would hate it if we were allowed to know about it.
As Margot Kaminski of Yale's Information Society Project wrote in a Times op-ed last month, fast track authorization is "little more than a euphemism for Avoid the public, and benefit the fortunate few."
The citizens of the 11 other countries are standing against the secret TPP as well. They're also worried, and rightly so, that multinational corporations headquartered in the US will quickly ignore any labor protections for their low-wage workers built into the agreement as a fig leaf to ease passage.
Free trade agreements kill -- economically, socially, and literally.
*Update:
It was all pretty much a head fake. We are now back to full-bore Fubar, and Barack Obama has put his damaged middle finger in a splint, the better to screw you with, my dears. The Washington Post reports that the men in a room have reached their deal and agreed to make the currency manipulation a separate bill, thus ensuring that any final TPP package would be acceptable to Japan. Obama must be so relieved.
The Democrats apparently also got a grudging concession from Republicans on compensation for the American workers becoming collateral damage in the latest attack in the class war -- if and when the TPP and TTIP make corporations free to further depress wages and exploit those abused workers in already ill-protected countries like Vietnam.
So, after yesterday's Kabuki, the full Senate will start their show over with a Thursday matinee, with multiple melodramatic bravura performers vying for attention and lobbyist dollars in the first act of the Plutocrat Grand Prix Theater. Watch those phony plastic traffic cones begin falling like dominoes.
Just more evidence, in case you still needed any, that the much ballyhooed and bemoaned Congressional gridlock the pundits love to kvetch about only applies to measures that might benefit the little people. I hope you didn't waste any of your time today calling your Group of Ten senators with your premature thanks for their phony stance yesterday. I hope you will continue to bombard them with warnings of what they can expect at the ballot box as they "cave" to giving the center-right president authority to turn the screws in utter secrecy. The first tranche of Democratic quislings includes Carper of Delaware, Cantwell and Murray of Washington, Wyden of Oregon, Nelson of Florida, Warner and Kaine of Virginia, Bennet of Colorado, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Cardin of Maryland. These are all Obama needs to supplement the loyalists in his own Republican Party.
Meanwhile, members of the House are expected to vote on Fast Track as early as next month. Get ready for another stampede of lobbyists to make those hordes of holdouts an offer they can't refuse.
The giant middle finger that Barack Obama has been giving us these past six years is now dangling at the root, the victim of its own terminal corruption. And yet he and his sycophants persist in downgrading yesterday's crumbling of the "pillar of his presidency" into an annoying little hangnail.
"It's just a procedural snafu," whined Josh Earnest, the aptly named White House press flack of the "stinging defeat" Obama suffered from members of his own party, who shockingly denied him the right to "fast-track" democracy into oblivion via the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership.
If you want to get Panglossian about it, Snafu (situation normal, all fucked up) is slightly better than Fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition.) And, let's face it: the Democrats of the Senate did not suddenly go all populist overnight, despite the good work of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in exposing the TPP for the nasty corporate coup that it is. The Dem poobahs (Reid, Schumer, etc.) were pissed because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled a fast one on them, and didn't include the fig leaves (currency manipulation rules, monetary aid for displaced American workers, feeble union protections, and anti-child labor measures) that would otherwise have allowed Democrats to sell out their constituents. These people actually still love the TPP. Most of them don't even care about those odious investor state tribunals replacing sovereign court systems.
What makes the TPP now so Fubar and so toxic for the selfish interests of the oligarchs is that Japan, one of the countries negotiating the deal, is adamantly against any TPP clause forbidding it to manipulate its own currency. Barack Obama is damned if he does go along with Democratic demands, and damned if he doesn't.
Hot damn!
Another reason that the TPP may now be Fubar is that people are finally paying attention to it. And Barack Obama has only himself to blame. He has essentially fingered himself and the neoliberal agenda, for all the world to see.
If he hadn't publicly and pettily dissed Elizabeth Warren, falsely and chauvinistically accusing her of greed and mendacity, the gossip-loving mainstream press probably wouldn't have bothered with the TPP story.
His trip to Offshore Sweatshop Central (Nike) last week didn't help his pro-plutocracy public relations campaign, either. Nor did his simultaneous announcement allowing Shell to drill for oil in the ecologically fragile Arctic. Nor did his onslaught of fund-raising for his half-a-billion-dollar Chicago shrine, and his announcement of a sketchy greed-washing "initiative" that would raise money by and for corporations for the ostensible purpose of trickling down to the same minority poor people that Obama's Wall Street-friendly policies have already thrown under the economic bus.
Even Obama's most diehard fans are at least mildly peeved and disappointed with him at this stage. He has skipped Lame Duck mode entirely, prematurely careering straight into Post-Pre$idency Clintonoid Nirvana.
Despite yesterday's heartening victory, we must not rest on our laurels. These people don't quit, and they don't take No for an answer. But their greedy quest for more, more and more suddenly got a whole bunch of new roadblocks in its way, and their journey is not going to be the walk in the privatized park they thought it would be.
Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
***
Before yesterday's Senate vote, the New York Times published an odious little editorial that urged the parties to go along to get along and bipartisanly compromise on the TPP, including whatever fig leaves are necessary to ram it through. Needless to say, readers were neither amused nor placated. My comment:
How is a compromise possible on a treaty whose terms are being kept from the public? How is this possible when the White House has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges details they are allowed to scan only under the watchful eye of the Security State?
Rather than urge a smarmy bipartisan compromise under cover of darkness, I just wish the N.Y. Times had noted how undemocratic this whole process has been. The only reason we know some of the details we do is because of WikiLeaks.
The clause allowing investor state tribunals to subsume sovereign court systems even contains a sub-clause dictating that it remain a classified secret for at least four years from the date of ratification. That's how bad it is. That's how much the billionaires and corporations dictating the terms of this deal know how bad it is, and how much we would hate it if we were allowed to know about it.
As Margot Kaminski of Yale's Information Society Project wrote in a Times op-ed last month, fast track authorization is "little more than a euphemism for Avoid the public, and benefit the fortunate few."
The citizens of the 11 other countries are standing against the secret TPP as well. They're also worried, and rightly so, that multinational corporations headquartered in the US will quickly ignore any labor protections for their low-wage workers built into the agreement as a fig leaf to ease passage.
Free trade agreements kill -- economically, socially, and literally.
*Update:
It was all pretty much a head fake. We are now back to full-bore Fubar, and Barack Obama has put his damaged middle finger in a splint, the better to screw you with, my dears. The Washington Post reports that the men in a room have reached their deal and agreed to make the currency manipulation a separate bill, thus ensuring that any final TPP package would be acceptable to Japan. Obama must be so relieved.
The Democrats apparently also got a grudging concession from Republicans on compensation for the American workers becoming collateral damage in the latest attack in the class war -- if and when the TPP and TTIP make corporations free to further depress wages and exploit those abused workers in already ill-protected countries like Vietnam.
So, after yesterday's Kabuki, the full Senate will start their show over with a Thursday matinee, with multiple melodramatic bravura performers vying for attention and lobbyist dollars in the first act of the Plutocrat Grand Prix Theater. Watch those phony plastic traffic cones begin falling like dominoes.
Just more evidence, in case you still needed any, that the much ballyhooed and bemoaned Congressional gridlock the pundits love to kvetch about only applies to measures that might benefit the little people. I hope you didn't waste any of your time today calling your Group of Ten senators with your premature thanks for their phony stance yesterday. I hope you will continue to bombard them with warnings of what they can expect at the ballot box as they "cave" to giving the center-right president authority to turn the screws in utter secrecy. The first tranche of Democratic quislings includes Carper of Delaware, Cantwell and Murray of Washington, Wyden of Oregon, Nelson of Florida, Warner and Kaine of Virginia, Bennet of Colorado, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Cardin of Maryland. These are all Obama needs to supplement the loyalists in his own Republican Party.
Meanwhile, members of the House are expected to vote on Fast Track as early as next month. Get ready for another stampede of lobbyists to make those hordes of holdouts an offer they can't refuse.
Monday, May 11, 2015
Lying Through Their Fangs
Only a day after President Obama huffily and falsely accused Elizabeth Warren of lying (for what he called purely selfish and political reasons) about the democracy-gutting measures in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he was exposed for allegedly telling a pretty gruesome lie of his own.
According to Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama essentially ordered the execution of Osama bin Laden while he was a prisoner of the Pakistanis. Bin Laden wasn't holed up in a heavily weaponized and guarded secret bunker, plotting the next al Qaeda attack. He was alone, helpless, feeble and unarmed, and Navy Seals were allowed to simply traipse on in and blow him to bits with the full complicity of Pakistani security state authorities. The American taxpayers paid for the killing privilege with a bribe/reward of millions of dollars. Oh, and our military didn't bury him at sea in a respectful Muslim ceremony as the White House later claimed. They unceremoniously dumped his mangled body parts from a helicopter as it flew over an inaccessible Afghan mountain range.
If we are to believe Seymour Hersh, Obama lied about the less-than-courageous details of the assassination of bin Laden for purely political reasons. He needed to glorify himself for his upcoming re-election campaign. He need to portray himself as a hero who grappled with the moral dilemma of putting our troops in harm's way on a mission from hell.
Hersh's version of the bin Laden execution is like a scenario that would have Obama sending Special Ops assassins into the secure prison cell of Boston marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, and then telling the world that he was killed while he was on the lam after a daring escape. It's like storming Gitmo to blow away all those dangerous emaciated terrorists hooked up to their forced feeding tubes, and then claiming they'd taken over their own island prison.
So his Mothers Day insult to Elizabeth Warren-- that "she is a politician, just like everybody" -- is rendered all the more loathsomely ironic. Because, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh's account, Barack Obama himself is a singularly loathsome politician for the ages. And a damned good liar, because Hersh's blockbuster account is getting little to no play in the mainstream media. Both The New Yorker and the Washington Post had also passed on another Hersh blockbuster from last year, exposing the White House's lies on the Syria Sarin attacks.
And so the gaslighting of Hersh continues, with the White House-friendly Vox helpfully pointing out that he is old and decrepit, that his sourcing is thin and anonymous, and that he is unable to supply incontrovertible photographic proof of the bin Laden killing/coverup conspiracy, as he did with his Abu Ghraib torture scoop. In other words, he didn't act like a New York Times propaganda flack. Instead of using anonymous sources to aggrandize government liars, Hersh used anonymous sources to bring government liars down a peg. Hersh and Elizabeth Warren are only the latest victims of what might be called the Cornel West Treatment.
The mainstream media are no longer in the business of speaking truth to power, or admitting that they've been dupes of mendacious politicians.
According to Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama essentially ordered the execution of Osama bin Laden while he was a prisoner of the Pakistanis. Bin Laden wasn't holed up in a heavily weaponized and guarded secret bunker, plotting the next al Qaeda attack. He was alone, helpless, feeble and unarmed, and Navy Seals were allowed to simply traipse on in and blow him to bits with the full complicity of Pakistani security state authorities. The American taxpayers paid for the killing privilege with a bribe/reward of millions of dollars. Oh, and our military didn't bury him at sea in a respectful Muslim ceremony as the White House later claimed. They unceremoniously dumped his mangled body parts from a helicopter as it flew over an inaccessible Afghan mountain range.
If we are to believe Seymour Hersh, Obama lied about the less-than-courageous details of the assassination of bin Laden for purely political reasons. He needed to glorify himself for his upcoming re-election campaign. He need to portray himself as a hero who grappled with the moral dilemma of putting our troops in harm's way on a mission from hell.
Hersh's version of the bin Laden execution is like a scenario that would have Obama sending Special Ops assassins into the secure prison cell of Boston marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, and then telling the world that he was killed while he was on the lam after a daring escape. It's like storming Gitmo to blow away all those dangerous emaciated terrorists hooked up to their forced feeding tubes, and then claiming they'd taken over their own island prison.
So his Mothers Day insult to Elizabeth Warren-- that "she is a politician, just like everybody" -- is rendered all the more loathsomely ironic. Because, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh's account, Barack Obama himself is a singularly loathsome politician for the ages. And a damned good liar, because Hersh's blockbuster account is getting little to no play in the mainstream media. Both The New Yorker and the Washington Post had also passed on another Hersh blockbuster from last year, exposing the White House's lies on the Syria Sarin attacks.
And so the gaslighting of Hersh continues, with the White House-friendly Vox helpfully pointing out that he is old and decrepit, that his sourcing is thin and anonymous, and that he is unable to supply incontrovertible photographic proof of the bin Laden killing/coverup conspiracy, as he did with his Abu Ghraib torture scoop. In other words, he didn't act like a New York Times propaganda flack. Instead of using anonymous sources to aggrandize government liars, Hersh used anonymous sources to bring government liars down a peg. Hersh and Elizabeth Warren are only the latest victims of what might be called the Cornel West Treatment.
The mainstream media are no longer in the business of speaking truth to power, or admitting that they've been dupes of mendacious politicians.
***
Speaking of truthiness, Paul Krugman is at it again. He manages to defend Dodd-Frank and Elizabeth Warren against the predations of Republicans and Wall Street vampires while giving the corporate Democrats their usual free pass. And of course, he blithely ignores the fact that Obama spent part of his Mothers Day weekend publicly shaming Elizabeth Warren and shilling for the Wall Street vampires.
My published comment: (I'm tweaking this a bit due to typos/clumsy grammar in the original)
Vampire bankers can't undo Dodd-Frank in the bad publicity-inducing light of day, so they're going the darkness route, otherwise known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Elizabeth Warren is striking fear into their venal little hearts because she has pointed out, rightly, that this trade deal could effectively gut Dodd-Frank reforms without our even knowing it. Congress is allowed to see this, but the Obama administration has already threatened to prosecute our reps should they reveal the classified details to their constituents.
Vampires love darkness and secrecy because showing their ugly fangs might endanger feasting on their human meal. The meal might run away or revolt.
The TPP's leaked portions show that investor state tribunals would grant "market access protections" to transnationals, and could theoretically rule that Dodd-Frank's protections against risky derivatives unfairly restrict the global banking cartels' ability to suck even more lifeblood from our economy. This has been strongly denied by Obama and Trade Rep. Michael Froman, who got a multimillion dollar bonus from Citigroup upon spinning through the revolving doors to act in somebody's best interests.
But they refuse to hand over the evidence -- and meanwhile, Obama can ostentatiously veto more blatant GOP efforts to kill Dodd-Frank and smarmily call Elizabeth Warren a liar for bravely speaking truth to pathocratic power.
She is a human stake through the financial vampire's heart. We are lucky to have her.
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Open Letter to a Young Forest Ecosystem Management Major
By Bill Neil
I
suppose another way to look at this is that the prints have come back from the crime lab,
and ours are collectively all over the extinguished species. The best we can plead, I think, is
“involuntary species slaughter.”
Dear Matt:
An environmental friend of mine passed
on your letter from the “Gowood Blogspot,” and your worries that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has gone overboard
in protecting “nature,” and slighted humans as a consequence.
I think it is a good thing we greens to
have face tough questions about what we value, and the efficacy of the laws on
the books, good to listen to those who have a very different perspective and
probing questions about the ancient conflicts, between the human economy and
nature’s ecology. However, neither the
economy nor nature’s ecology is static, and the equations between the two may
not look the same today as they did just after the Ice Ages, in 1776, or 1996.
Indeed, the two are more fatally intertwined than we ever imagined. That’s something I want to explore with you. I think that your statement in the first
paragraph that “very few of the species we currently have are ones that were
here 10-20 thousand years ago” is not correct.
I suspect that 95-99% of them are still with us, and the ones that have
gone extinct first are the ones our ancestors hunted to that fate, and I think
that even if you changed “thousands to millions” that would still be the case. But I defer to other experts to confirm what
survived from that epoch. And the
situation is changing rapidly now, over the past quarter of century, especially
with the rise of Asia to middle class American aspirations, and Brazil too, and
the intensification of globalization and global warming. Something new and ominous is afoot as we will
soon see, something called “The Sixth Extinction.”
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Fake to the Left
(* and **Updated below, 5/8 and 9)
What kind of mellow skunk spliffs are the corporate Democrats smoking these days?
Hint: beware of fake populists bearing gifts. It's all about maintaining the oligarchs in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed while throwing a few crumbs at the rest of us. The propaganda is busting out all over like a field of giant boils.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-Wall Street) has penned a totally out-of-character editorial demanding a living wage for fast food workers.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D-One Percent) has announced an awesome $5.5 million in reparations for victims of police brutality and institutionalized torture.
Hillary Clinton (D-Empire) has finally broken up with hubby (ideologically speaking) and embraced criminal justice reform. She's also in semi-breakup mode with her paramour, Barack Obama: no deep-throated endorsement of his Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate legacy pillar for her! She is even going him one one better on relief for undocumented immigrants.
What is going on here? Need we even ask?
It's campaign season, and therefore it is time for some serious triangulation which the media are pretending to take seriously. Those heretofore fiscally conservative Democrats are delivering promises to the Left in order for their party to stay viable. They are also dog-whistling to the Right. To wit:
Andrew Cuomo is still running TV commercials shilling for charter schools, for the benefit of the hedge-fund billionaires who stand to profit handsomely off poor minority students. To accomplish the destruction of public education, he needs the electoral support of parents working in Walmart and McDonalds. He is the last man standing/sitting of the Three Men in a Room. Two-thirds of the people who decide things in New York State have already been indicted, and Cuomo is still not out of the woods. So what better time for him to throw a placatory bone to the electorate?
Rahm Emanuel just survived an embarrassing challenge from slightly to his left in the mayoral race. He must pretend to be chastened after being called out on his cronyism and allegiance to the One Percent. Therefore, each person tortured into making false confessions to the Chicago PD over the past several decades will get an average of $100,000, plus such perks as free community college tuition to make up for the ruination of their lives. To many people, this signals that Rahm has been rehabbed. But not so fast: at the same time he's offering free psychological counseling to the victims of the police state, the state has ordered the city's largest mental health system to be shut down. This is called robbing from the poor to give to the poor. If a few hundred men are to receive reparations, then hundreds of thousands more must suffer. It's the neoliberal way. It pits poor people against one another so that the oligarchy can stay entrenched.
Hillary, Hillary, Hillary: the woman of the people will say whatever it takes to appeal to the regular folk, even as she becomes the first Democratic candidate in the age of Citizens United to blatantly court SuperPac dark money. She is raking in the bucks while claiming to want to overturn Citizens United. However, since she never gave us a time frame for campaign finance reform, we can assume that she wants to overturn the Money is Speech doctrine sometime after her granddaughter wins her first dynastic presidency, perhaps 40 or 50 years hence. Wall Street has already signaled that they know her campaign rhetoric is so much B.S. Needless to say, however, her latest craven actions are being dubbed "bold and risky" by the passive-aggressive New York Times.
While she bathetically bloviates about keeping immigrant families together, she remains mysteriously silent on her demand last year that child migrants be returned, without legal recourse, to the Central American violence they had fled. Some families just have to be "sent a message" that they are not welcome in Hillary Clinton's America. Humanitarianism is relative, and coldly calculated. Some asylum-seekers are more important and equal than others. Plus, children do not vote or donate to political campaigns.
These three Wall Street Democratic players are flimsily faking Left so that Barack Obama can catch their deflated ball and run with it down the right field line to score a touchdown. He is openly teaming up with his Republican friends to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he is going out of his way to gleefully rub his supporters' noses in it. What better way to signal his disdain than traveling to the Oregon HQ of Nike this Friday to hype NAFTA-on-steroids?
Nike is the poster child for the off-shoring of labor to sweatshop countries. Although the company has refused to say how much it pays the workers at its factories in Vietnam (one of the 12 countries negotiating the TPP) the average hourly wage in that country is only 30 cents. Nike sneakers retail in the US for well over $100 a pair. Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, is not only allowed to see the TPP details being kept from the public -- he is dictating the details.
The Nike-Obama Partnership is nothing new. In 2013, Parker traveled to Chicago to join the first lady in selling his brand as a cure-all for America's so-called obesity epidemic. While Rahm Emanuel was closing a record number of schools in the name of austerity for the masses and prosperity for the asses, Michelle Obama and Parker lectured the proles on the necessity of exercise. What better, "value-added" way for kids suffering bipartisan food stamp cuts to lose even more weight: they should sprint across town to their faraway new schools in Air Jordans manufactured by kids even poorer than themselves. Never mind that the parents of these kids can't afford the Nike brand. Nothing gets in the way of Public-Private Predation, euphemized as free market solutions to social problems caused and perpetuated by the free market.
Nike gets away with paying child laborers pennies per hour by ostentatiously "investing" $50 million in order to shame slightly less hungry American kids into getting off their lazy butts in order to become active consumers of brand name couture. The Nike Brand and the Obama Brand feed off one another.
So Obama is no longer trying to pretend to be on the side of the people who elected him. Like a corporate logo, he's just doin' us. He's in The Zone: the Twilight of His Presidency Zone. His visit to Nike is not only his dog-whistle to Wall Street -- it's his bullhorn to Wall Street. He is cynically signalling to his past, present and future paymasters that even should the TPP go down in defeat, he tried. He really, really tried.
These truly are the times that try our soles.
What kind of mellow skunk spliffs are the corporate Democrats smoking these days?
Hint: beware of fake populists bearing gifts. It's all about maintaining the oligarchs in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed while throwing a few crumbs at the rest of us. The propaganda is busting out all over like a field of giant boils.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-Wall Street) has penned a totally out-of-character editorial demanding a living wage for fast food workers.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D-One Percent) has announced an awesome $5.5 million in reparations for victims of police brutality and institutionalized torture.
Hillary Clinton (D-Empire) has finally broken up with hubby (ideologically speaking) and embraced criminal justice reform. She's also in semi-breakup mode with her paramour, Barack Obama: no deep-throated endorsement of his Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate legacy pillar for her! She is even going him one one better on relief for undocumented immigrants.
What is going on here? Need we even ask?
It's campaign season, and therefore it is time for some serious triangulation which the media are pretending to take seriously. Those heretofore fiscally conservative Democrats are delivering promises to the Left in order for their party to stay viable. They are also dog-whistling to the Right. To wit:
Andrew Cuomo is still running TV commercials shilling for charter schools, for the benefit of the hedge-fund billionaires who stand to profit handsomely off poor minority students. To accomplish the destruction of public education, he needs the electoral support of parents working in Walmart and McDonalds. He is the last man standing/sitting of the Three Men in a Room. Two-thirds of the people who decide things in New York State have already been indicted, and Cuomo is still not out of the woods. So what better time for him to throw a placatory bone to the electorate?
Rahm Emanuel just survived an embarrassing challenge from slightly to his left in the mayoral race. He must pretend to be chastened after being called out on his cronyism and allegiance to the One Percent. Therefore, each person tortured into making false confessions to the Chicago PD over the past several decades will get an average of $100,000, plus such perks as free community college tuition to make up for the ruination of their lives. To many people, this signals that Rahm has been rehabbed. But not so fast: at the same time he's offering free psychological counseling to the victims of the police state, the state has ordered the city's largest mental health system to be shut down. This is called robbing from the poor to give to the poor. If a few hundred men are to receive reparations, then hundreds of thousands more must suffer. It's the neoliberal way. It pits poor people against one another so that the oligarchy can stay entrenched.
Hillary, Hillary, Hillary: the woman of the people will say whatever it takes to appeal to the regular folk, even as she becomes the first Democratic candidate in the age of Citizens United to blatantly court SuperPac dark money. She is raking in the bucks while claiming to want to overturn Citizens United. However, since she never gave us a time frame for campaign finance reform, we can assume that she wants to overturn the Money is Speech doctrine sometime after her granddaughter wins her first dynastic presidency, perhaps 40 or 50 years hence. Wall Street has already signaled that they know her campaign rhetoric is so much B.S. Needless to say, however, her latest craven actions are being dubbed "bold and risky" by the passive-aggressive New York Times.
While she bathetically bloviates about keeping immigrant families together, she remains mysteriously silent on her demand last year that child migrants be returned, without legal recourse, to the Central American violence they had fled. Some families just have to be "sent a message" that they are not welcome in Hillary Clinton's America. Humanitarianism is relative, and coldly calculated. Some asylum-seekers are more important and equal than others. Plus, children do not vote or donate to political campaigns.
These three Wall Street Democratic players are flimsily faking Left so that Barack Obama can catch their deflated ball and run with it down the right field line to score a touchdown. He is openly teaming up with his Republican friends to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he is going out of his way to gleefully rub his supporters' noses in it. What better way to signal his disdain than traveling to the Oregon HQ of Nike this Friday to hype NAFTA-on-steroids?
Nike is the poster child for the off-shoring of labor to sweatshop countries. Although the company has refused to say how much it pays the workers at its factories in Vietnam (one of the 12 countries negotiating the TPP) the average hourly wage in that country is only 30 cents. Nike sneakers retail in the US for well over $100 a pair. Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, is not only allowed to see the TPP details being kept from the public -- he is dictating the details.
The Nike-Obama Partnership is nothing new. In 2013, Parker traveled to Chicago to join the first lady in selling his brand as a cure-all for America's so-called obesity epidemic. While Rahm Emanuel was closing a record number of schools in the name of austerity for the masses and prosperity for the asses, Michelle Obama and Parker lectured the proles on the necessity of exercise. What better, "value-added" way for kids suffering bipartisan food stamp cuts to lose even more weight: they should sprint across town to their faraway new schools in Air Jordans manufactured by kids even poorer than themselves. Never mind that the parents of these kids can't afford the Nike brand. Nothing gets in the way of Public-Private Predation, euphemized as free market solutions to social problems caused and perpetuated by the free market.
Nike gets away with paying child laborers pennies per hour by ostentatiously "investing" $50 million in order to shame slightly less hungry American kids into getting off their lazy butts in order to become active consumers of brand name couture. The Nike Brand and the Obama Brand feed off one another.
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| Michelle and Mark (Invisible Free Market God Is Shown at Your Right) |
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| The Family That Brands Together Stands Together |
So Obama is no longer trying to pretend to be on the side of the people who elected him. Like a corporate logo, he's just doin' us. He's in The Zone: the Twilight of His Presidency Zone. His visit to Nike is not only his dog-whistle to Wall Street -- it's his bullhorn to Wall Street. He is cynically signalling to his past, present and future paymasters that even should the TPP go down in defeat, he tried. He really, really tried.
These truly are the times that try our soles.
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| Nike's Obama Brand (Odor Eaters Recommended, But Not Included)
*Update (5/8): Odor-Eater alert! Get ready for the next Big Lie, once again brought to you by Obama's favorite steno, Peter Baker of the New York Times. The headline makes no effort to hide its shameless mendacity: Nike To Create Jobs If Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Approved.
The article then goes on to claim, without a shred of evidence or a shred of investigation, that the Sweatshop of the Pacific will create 10,000 new American jobs -- if and only if Nike and the rest of the global corporacracy are allowed take over more sovereign legislatures and court systems. The Times should be sued for journalistic malpractice, and Baker should go to work for Fox News.
**Update (5/9): As of this morning, Peter Baker had revised his article a pretty amazing eight times. The invaluable NYteXaminer has the Diffs, allowing us to watch the frantic propaganda spin out in real time. The narrative morphs from Nike's job creation being uncritically reported as fact by the newspaper, followed several hours later by a smarmy Nike "linking" of the trade pact to job creation, then on to both Obama and Nike using the passive-aggressive "linking" word, then Baker rewriting the lede into the usual lazy he said/she said battle of the partisans (Obama accuses Democrats of lying and he is usually mean, according to Peter Baker, only to the Republicans!) and finally, modifying the presidential temper tantrum into a more righteous "scolding" of Democrats. I wrote two comments, the first addressing the initial sneaky changes to the article, and the other remarking Obama's public hissy fit: At least the editors now have the decency to change the headline of this piece to Nike merely "linking" passage of the TPP to 10,000 new American jobs. When it first appeared early today, this is what the Times slavishly and unquestioningly announced: "Nike To Create Jobs If Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Approved." The piece was online for hours before its more "balanced" revision was posted, and it was opened up for reader comments.
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Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Griftopolis, Part Two
Like two luxury ships of state, the Clintons and the Obamas will pass in the night. Or more accurately, they plan to spin past each other at the speed of blight through that proverbial revolving door between public-private and private-public life.
As told to one of his favorite stenographers, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Barack Obama has now found such a strong voice on race that he will parlay its dulcet tones straight into a post-presidential "initiative" (neoliberal code for any scam pretending to help the hammock-trapped poor) which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Clintons' ownslush fund charity, itself unsurprisingly dubbed the Clinton Global Initiative.
Baker displays an uncanny knack of his own for maudlin presidential mind-reading:
But wait. It gets worse:
I've criticized My Brother's Keeper before. Since its propaganda stems from Obama's own autobiography as a fatherless son, it specifically leaves out women and girls, and positively drips with noblesse oblige and the gospel of Bootstrapism.
There's more to Baker's article, including the obligatory juxtaposition of Ted Cruz (R-Paranoia) which is designed to deflect possible criticism of Obama's motivations right into a stampede of tribal support from "the base." The only criticism permitted an airing (besides the smarmy, dainty tiptoeing into the Clintonoid sleaze arena) is the crazy criticism from the Right, the better to transform Obama into a victim-hero for the ages.
Here is my published comment on Baker's piece:
As told to one of his favorite stenographers, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Barack Obama has now found such a strong voice on race that he will parlay its dulcet tones straight into a post-presidential "initiative" (neoliberal code for any scam pretending to help the hammock-trapped poor) which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Clintons' own
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| Obama and Baker Share Tender Moment at WH Correspondents' Dinner |
Baker displays an uncanny knack of his own for maudlin presidential mind-reading:
All you need is love. Love is all you need.As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”
But wait. It gets worse:
Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.Notice the passive voice. Obama didn't bail out the Wall Street banksters and throw underwater mortgagors under the bus. He was consumed by the economy. He didn't escalate the war in Afghanistan, bomb Libya into terminal instability, or assassinate thousands of people with drones. He was eaten alive by the war monster. He didn't reject universal single payer medical coverage, selling out the American people behind closed doors to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. He was gobbled up by health care. It was all beyond his control. Now he is ready to cross, if not race, across the Race Bridge. And it's not the Selma Bridge he crossed earlier this spring for a photo-op. It's the bridge from Wall Street-on-the-Potomac to Wall Street itself.
In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017."Unrest" is the popular neoliberal buzzword for the citizen revolt against both racism and the oppressive economic policies that fuel it. Obama's post-presidency is staked by $80 million that can only metastasize to Clintonoid proportions.
I've criticized My Brother's Keeper before. Since its propaganda stems from Obama's own autobiography as a fatherless son, it specifically leaves out women and girls, and positively drips with noblesse oblige and the gospel of Bootstrapism.
Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies (my bold) address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.
Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.There apparently will be no direct cash aid to the Bro's. It needs must recycle through corporations and politicians before (maybe) finally trickling down. See my published Times comment at the end of this post. But first, some hilarity (Hillarity):
They are very well aware of Obama's commitment to transparency. His administration has been widely and rightly called the most secretive in recent memory. Josh, earnestly and with tongue planted firmly in cheek, confirmed that the plutocratic grifter class has nothing to fear from Big Guy. He is utterly committed to them and their interests. That is why, in the same breath that Obama denied a direct role in the donations, he will be spiritually present when the money changes hands.The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. (Peter Baker makes sure to brag that as an insider with unique access to power, he got a cushy ride on AF One) But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”
There's more to Baker's article, including the obligatory juxtaposition of Ted Cruz (R-Paranoia) which is designed to deflect possible criticism of Obama's motivations right into a stampede of tribal support from "the base." The only criticism permitted an airing (besides the smarmy, dainty tiptoeing into the Clintonoid sleaze arena) is the crazy criticism from the Right, the better to transform Obama into a victim-hero for the ages.
Here is my published comment on Baker's piece:
Venture philanthropists have been out in full force ever since the 2008 meltdown, drumming up self-serving publicity as they pretend to alleviate the very economic misery they helped to create in the first place. Do-gooderism by corporations and billionaires is designed to deflect our attention from the fact that they have demanded -- and gotten -- the cruel austerian policies that cut food stamps, closed schools, ended long-term unemployment benefits and depressed wages.
So now it's time for some reputation-salvaging, as what Peter Buffett has called the Charitable-Industrial Complex deigns to bestow a few pennies from their corporate welfare slush funds upon the victims of 30 years of Reaganomics.
It is no coincidence that some of the same businesses donating money to My Brother's Keeper are also pushing hard (either directly or through their lobbyists) for passage of the job-destroying, poverty-creating Trans-Pacific Partnership.
And what a travesty that News Corp, which has made demonization of the poor and demonization of the first black president its raison d'etre, is now welcomed into the philanthro-capitalist fold with open arms. How nice that they're using the spoils of racism to now pretend to fight racism.
Charity is fine, but it's no substitute for good public policy. We need a wealth tax and a stronger safety net, not "promise zones" and the occasional handout from a tycoon in a board room.One final thought. Since Bill Clinton was dubbed the first black president, is it PC to call Obama the first black Clinton?
We used to have a democracy. Now we have Downton Abbey.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Griftopolis
Why isn't this getting more play?
Wild West, meet The Sopranos.
For all intents and purposes, our country's electoral regulatory watchdog is not only muzzled, it's been effectively euthanized after a valiant 40-year run. Four decades ago, during Watergate, the nation still had the capacity to be shocked. It searched its soul and saw that it was rotten. The rot has continued to eat away at democracy until it can no longer be said to exist.
Nixon's C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-elect the President) and its sleazy slush fund sound so quaint nowadays. Nixon, were he running today, could expect to garner glowing headlines for his fund-raising prowess. The multibillion-dollar Clinton and Bush machines make him look like St. Francis of Assisi.
Congress might as well make it official and cut off the feeding and funding of the moribund F.E.C. Or they might use the neoliberal method of reanimation and simply privatize it. Coors Light could complain to a corporate electoral tribunal if it was being undercut by Schlitz in the "who'd you rather have a beer with?" billionaire sweepstakes.
Don't laugh. After all, presidential debates have been privatized and controlled by corporate sponsors for years. The rules clearly state that if the oligarchy doesn't buy a candidate a minimum 15% share of the votes in rigged national polls, then that candidate can be barred from participating. It happened to Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It happened to Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012. Not only was she barred, she was taken to a secret police prison and shackled for the duration of the "free and open" discussion.
Also -- forget about the United Nations coming in to monitor our free and fair elections. If the outside world tried that trick, and called the One Indispensable Nation out on its perfidy, the American griftopoly would simply cut off their funding too, before evicting them from the Income Disparity Capital of the World.
Meanwhile, an antidote to insanity:
The leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reining in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.Politicians like Jeb Bush and Martin O'Malley are raising money without even formally declaring their candidacies, as required by quaint federal election law. "Everybody does it" is the new legalized way of bribery, as the billions changing hands becomes the main story and the measure of a candidate's worth. The corruption is not only complete, it has become a badge of honor among thieves. Gone are the good old days of bag-men and midnight meetings in hotel rooms and, heaven forbid, undercover FBI agents wiring provocateurs for sound in hopes of catching crooked pols in the act.
“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim,” Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman, said in an interview. “I never want to give up, but I’m not under any illusions. People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.”
Wild West, meet The Sopranos.
For all intents and purposes, our country's electoral regulatory watchdog is not only muzzled, it's been effectively euthanized after a valiant 40-year run. Four decades ago, during Watergate, the nation still had the capacity to be shocked. It searched its soul and saw that it was rotten. The rot has continued to eat away at democracy until it can no longer be said to exist.
Nixon's C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-elect the President) and its sleazy slush fund sound so quaint nowadays. Nixon, were he running today, could expect to garner glowing headlines for his fund-raising prowess. The multibillion-dollar Clinton and Bush machines make him look like St. Francis of Assisi.
Congress might as well make it official and cut off the feeding and funding of the moribund F.E.C. Or they might use the neoliberal method of reanimation and simply privatize it. Coors Light could complain to a corporate electoral tribunal if it was being undercut by Schlitz in the "who'd you rather have a beer with?" billionaire sweepstakes.
Don't laugh. After all, presidential debates have been privatized and controlled by corporate sponsors for years. The rules clearly state that if the oligarchy doesn't buy a candidate a minimum 15% share of the votes in rigged national polls, then that candidate can be barred from participating. It happened to Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It happened to Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012. Not only was she barred, she was taken to a secret police prison and shackled for the duration of the "free and open" discussion.
As Christopher Hitchens wrote, "the polling business gives the patricians an idea
what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed, or shall
we say ‘shaped.’ It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the
elite. It also allows for ‘fine calibration’ and for capsules of ‘message’ to
be prescribed for various constituencies.”
Also -- forget about the United Nations coming in to monitor our free and fair elections. If the outside world tried that trick, and called the One Indispensable Nation out on its perfidy, the American griftopoly would simply cut off their funding too, before evicting them from the Income Disparity Capital of the World.
Meanwhile, an antidote to insanity:
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