High Times At The Times

I mentioned in this blog's comments thread this past week that I've been trying to cut back on my Krugman habit. I've realized that smoking the Conscience of a Liberal brand was starting to make me feel a little peaked. Beating the rush to be among the first to publish a reader response to his columns was no longer giving me the mellow rush it once had. Because with his constant  defense of Obamacare, his constant railing against right wing ideological ignorance and stupidity instead of against the real menace of neoliberal corruption and greed, his willful ignorance of the wars and torture which he had once so valiantly condemned, PK was seriously beginning to harsh my mellow.

The man has been seriously phoning it in for a long time now. And yet, I can't quit him. It used to be that only David Brooks had the capacity to make me scream inwardly in silent, helpless rage as I tried to formulate a cogent response. I finally got over him. But now PK is making me nuts too.

I keep saying I'm going to give him up, but I am obviously hooked. Today I actually wrote two responses to his highly unoriginal but much-clicked piece lambasting Jeb Bush for being the asshole that he is.

 Krugman joined the vast liberal chorus expressing shock, shock I tell you, that Jeb flip-flopped on Iraq and not only that, he hid behind the Sacred Troops to do so! He is the only slimy politician who has ever cravenly hidden behind the troops in the whole history of slime. As a result, there has been an epidemic of columns and blog-posts expressing Jeb-Shock in just the past couple of days alone. You can find the echo chamber here, here, here, and here among the 75,000 Google search results on the Great Jeb Bush Iraq Flip-Flop of 2015.The shock schlock has surpassed even that on the Senate vote giving President Obama carte blanche to fast-track democracy to oblivion. When you have Jebbie to kick around, the global corporate coup takes a back seat, pronto. 

Here's today's Krugman sampler:

Given how badly these (Bush-era) predictions turned out — we had the biggest housing bust in history, inflation paranoia has been wrong for six years and counting, and 2014 delivered the best job growth since 1999 — you might think that there would be some room in the G.O.P. for economists who didn’t get everything wrong. But there isn’t. Having been completely wrong about the economy, like having been completely wrong about Iraq, seems to be a required credential.

What’s going on here? My best explanation is that we’re witnessing the effects of extreme tribalism.

Yes, how about that awesome growth last year in service sector jobs with the lousiest pay in years and the most extreme wealth inequality ever and the plummeting of Obama's America to near rock-bottom in every measure of social and economic well-being. Tribalism? What tribalism?

No matter that all the "wrongs" have been extended and perpetuated in a Democratic administration. The blanket surveillance continues. The wars continue. The government secrecy continues. The political bribery continues. Mass incarceration continues. Coddling of the wealthy continues. The war on whistle-blowers has surged. CIA torturers are not only shielded from prosecution, they're promoted.

As the late great Molly Ivins warned in Bill of Wrongs: "Pay attention, America! Your ass is on the line!"

My first response to Krugman's Democratic Party-absolved "Fraternity of Failure":

Jeb should take a tip from his rival and limit his utterances to scripted videos and Tweets. Hillary Clinton hasn't taken a question from the press in nearly a month and just look at her -- she is sitting pretty and inevitable, while Jeb is the deserving winner in this week's edition of the Scorn Sweepstakes.

If nothing else, Neoliberal Death Match will be fodder for a revival of the best-selling "Bushisms" series. His candidacy is a tragicomedy about how the inbred psychopathy and ill-gotten wealth of just one family manages, against all odds, to continue infecting a whole party, a whole country, an entire planet.

So let's take W's advice of "bring it on" and apply it lavishly to Jeb. If the scorn is lathered on early, often and copiously, who knows? He might even decide to drop out to spend more time with his money. After all, he did once tell the Miami News Times his ultimate goal in life: "I want to be very wealthy."

Stranger things have happened. Mistakes can sometimes be unmade, even if you're a Bush.

 Then again, pathological stubbornness is also a pesky Bush trait. W's "Is our children learning yet?" apparently doesn't apply to Jeb. The charter school he founded in a poor black Florida neighborhood received a grade of D and was ultimately shut down. But he still thinks he's a successful education reformer, and so do a lot of other enabling and mistaken rich people.

Mistakes were made. And then one day we woke up, and found that we lived under an oligarchy.

Due to my un-PC inclusion of the plutocratic Democratic candidate in an anti-Bush screed, I didn't get as many thumbs-up as I usually do from The Tribe, or even remotely as many as the thoughtful commenter who gushed,  "Wahoo!! Kicking it, PK!! Good job!! I'll forgive the reduction in blogs of late!! Two of your last three have been two of my favorites."

(You can tell that Campaign Season has now revved up into high gear. Wahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 

But as I depressively scanned other reader comments, I came across this blazing ray of sanity from Paul Cohen of Hartford, CT:

To Commenters and off topic,

I’ve written PRK and asked why he won’t you speak out against our perpetual wars in the Muslim World- all wars of aggression? He cannot say well, I write about issues affecting economic policy.

He wrote an op-ed in 2009 urging an investigation into torture- part of the broader issue of holding those in government accountable to the rule of law- that was purely political and no economic issues mentioned:

Op-Ed Columnist
Forgive and Forget?
By PAUL KRUGMAN on investigating Torture
January 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16krugman.html?_r=2&

Krugman is the very visible face and outspoken voice of Liberal politics. I cannot imagine Krugman is in favor of our open-ended, pre-emptive wars of aggression.

Am I the only that feels this way?

To which I replied, 

 Paul,
No. you are not the only one who feels that way. PK functions as the "left" voice in New York Times Pundit World, meaning contained. for the most part, within the safe confines of the Democratic Party. While he occasionally expresses disappointment with Obama's inadequate stimulus and his pivot to deficit reduction/austerity in the first term, he largely confines his columns to defending Obama (mainly Obamacare) against the vile depredations of the Republicans, or just shooting Republican fish in a barrel. PK's strong anti-war stance during the Bush era is now MIA, despite the fact that Obama is largely continuing Bush's aggressive policies.

Obama's record on civil liberties is even worse than Bush's: more drone strikes, more whistle-blower prosecutions of government employees, accelerated wars and ruthless defense of the surveillance state.

Don't even get me started on PK's recent radio silence (except for one short blog-post) on the TPP, which besides being a scam to protect wealthy investors and corporations from the sovereign regulations of mere countries, is also an act of aggression against China (the euphemized "pivot to Asia.")

I miss Bob Herbert and Frank Rich.

(I will get to the Great Obama vs Fox News Poor People Troll-orama soon, I promise.)

In other breaking viral news, Bill and Melinda Gates have announced that "Autopsies Can Save Countless Lives." Wahoo!!!!!!!!  But will Obamacare cover your post-mortem out of network? Is death a pre-existing condition? Stay tuned.

That Uppity Pope

The oil and gas industry thinks that Pope Francis is getting too big for his cassock. The Kochs, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP and their whole coterie of climate change-denying think tanks are tightening their collective sphincter in anticipatory dread of the Pope's upcoming major encyclical on the environment. His global warning to mankind will be followed this fall by his address to a joint session of congress.

 I wonder if the neoliberal pols will dare pull a police state union stunt and turn their backs on the Pope as he calls them out on their selfishness and capitalistic greed. I wonder if John Boehner will turn a brighter shade of orange as he is forced to take a public back seat directly behind a religious leader who accepts science as fact.

Environmentalists, stung by the recent betrayals of Barack Obama, the self-described environmental president (Atlantic and Arctic oil drilling now, tepid pollution reductions way down the road), are all excited by both the encyclical and the Pope's upcoming visit to the United States.

Despite the propaganda of so-called militant atheists, organized religion does not have a built-in anti-science bias. There is an organization called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment  which draws its membership from across the denominational spectrum to spread the message that environmental justice, social justice and economic justice are inextricably intertwined. Evangelicals love clean water and hate methane emissions as much as secular humanists do. Rationality and religion are not mutually exclusive.

This is making the God-fearing climate denialists' heads explode in paroxysms of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, like any fringe cultists worth their salt, they are tweaking their doctrine just enough to adjust to the changing times and a Pope who doesn't hail from the same right wing universe as they do. The heartless Heartland Institute, for example, now claims that he is not scientific enough to know whereof he speaks. Oil and gas magnates sent a group of their scientists-for-hire  all the way to the Vatican last month to issue a prebuttal to the Pope. Their main beef, though, is that he is teaming up with their other nemesis, the United Nations, in order to spread the scientific gospel. They're sounding the alarm against climate alarmism, and spending millions of tax-exempt dollars to do it. They get their tax-exempt 501 (C)3 "charity" money from the billionaire Koch Brothers, among others. They were recently outed in what's become known as ClimateGate: a group of scientists were exposed as deliberately lying for cash money. They're a nasty bunch, even going so far as to threaten to sue those who dare publicize their chicanery.

So now they think they have the Pope on the ropes? This ought to be good, coming as it does when the GOP Clown Car (which, due to rapid overcrowding, should probably be upgraded to the GOP Clown Recreational Vehicle) will be in full, grinding, dissonant gear.

The Heartland Institute has put its own financial backing into the presidential campaign of college dropout Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. They're calling it Operation Angry Badger. But although they might get their sadistic kicks out of badgering people and popes,  they're really nothing but a bunch of wretched weasels.

Open Thread

Or, as they say in the free trade biz, a progressive playing field of opportunity and wonder and surprises galore.

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.

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.

***

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.

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.” 

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.

Michelle and Mark (Invisible Free Market God Is Shown at Your Right)

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.

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.

Readers giving the homepage a quick glance this morning would have been under the (desired) mistaken impression that the creation of 10,000 new jobs was engraved in stone and was a fact, not just an "aspiration."

I'm wondering if the 10,000 figure is simply the monetary equivalent of how many jobs COULD be created, should the CEO and board and investors choose not to pocket the windfall profits from this corporate coup. If their claim or promise is further revised to read it would "support" 10,000 jobs, then there's your proof of the bait and switch. Obama has already been awarded the maximum four Pinocchios by Glenn Kessler for using similar phony jobs numbers to push this deal from hell.

This article does not attempt to verify Nike's claim that its Vietnamese wage slaves are being treated any better. What salary are they paid? The Nike CEO, himself worth a cool $23 billion, has refused to say. I wish this newspaper would do a little more investigating. Coverage thus far of the TPP by all of the mainstream media has been, to be blunt, abysmal.

***

To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama should put up or shut up.

After he'd previously accused Warren and other Democrats of lying about the TPP, she and a group of fellow Democrats had challenged him to make the terms and conditions of the deal public, so that the public and the reps they elect can make an informed decision without being subject to what can now only be called presidential badgering, even attempted extortion. (if you don't do what he wants, it just naturally follows that you love unemployment, hate the middle class, and are not "patriotic.")

To date, Obama hasn't had the decency to reply to the Democrats he smarmily professes to love. He resorts to throwing a public temper tantrum the day after shamelessly raking in even more millions from the wealthy donors he serves.

Obama might not have a political agenda, but he is definitely campaigning for what promises to be a long and lucrative post-presidential career. He is fully embracing his lame duck (or should I say golden goose) status and thumbing his nose at the people who elected him.

The man just squandered a huge chunk of whatever public support he still had left. And he doesn't seem to care. He is resorting to the lowest form of sophistry.