Hiroshima: Seventy Years And Counting

I owe my life to Harry S. Truman.

Or so my father told me at the dinner table one night in the 1960s when, having just read John Hersey's Hiroshima, I was expressing my shock, sadness and indignation that a US president could kill 80,000 people in one fell atomic swoop. What did innocent Japanese people have to do with the war, I'd asked. Children did not deserve to die, or survive that horrific day only to develop leukemia and other cancers decades later. 

That's when Dad told me that as a soldier stationed on the island of Okinawa in 1945, he was to be part of Operation Olympic, the first stage of the invasion of Japan. Since the Japanese were fully aware of the planned attack, it was believed at the time to be essentially a suicide mission. American casualties were forecast to be in the millions, what with the Japanese heavily fortifying the southern island of Kyushu, where my father's unit was scheduled to land.  

I had always known that my father was in the war, but like so many World War II vets, he never talked about it much. Those were the days before PTSD became a diagnosis, those were the days when men had to be macho. One story he loved to tell revolved around some exquisite watercolors which a Japanese P.O.W. he'd been guarding painted for him in exchange for a carton of Lucky Strikes. Those paintings were among his most prized possessions, along with some autograph and photo memorabilia of star-studded welcome-home parties and studio tours thrown for him and other GI's in Hollywood. He also loved to tell the story of how he'd accidentally barged into Lucille Ball's dressing room, and how warm and gracious she was in her semi-nudity. Diehard "I Love Lucy" fans that we kids were, we were suitably impressed. (My mother, not so much.)

As he rather gruffly pointed out to me that night at the kitchen table, were it not for the atomic bomb I might never have been born. When Truman dropped the bomb, the war ended, Dad got to go home, party, get a good job, get married, and procreate.

 I stared at him in stunned silence, my appetite gone right along with my indignant words.To be told that you are alive because of the mass deaths of others is quite the revelation, instilling not a little of ye olde survivor guilt.

Since that long-ago conversation, recently declassified documents reveal that if Truman hadn't dropped the bomb and Operation Olympic had proceeded as planned, my father might have encountered more weaponized civilian draftees (teens and old people) on the island of Kyushu than seasoned Japanese soldiers, who were busy elsewhere. If he'd gotten killed, it likely would have been from an aerial bomb instead of from a bayonet.

If existential gratitude is indeed in order, I should also probably thank Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Because if anybody went on a guilt trip after the bombing of Hiroshima, and later of Nagasaki, it was those two guys.

As for Truman, he had some regrets over the loss of human life, but apparently suffered no guilt. From his diary:

“It was a decision to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings. The Secretary of War Mr. Stimson and I weighed that decision most prayerfully. The President had to decide. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities and I still think they were and are.

“But I couldn’t help but think of the necessity of blotting out women, children and more combatants. We picked a couple of cities where war work was the principle industry and dropped the bombs. Russia hurried in and that war ended.”

  Give Em Hell Harry's statement that he dropped the bomb to save flowering masculine lives had some truth in it, if I do say so my selfish self. But as his critics point out, he also might have been ignoring Japanese overtures for peace. The estimates of millions of American casualties might have been overblown in order to justify the ultimate reality of a quarter-million Japanese casualties. And Truman's atomic attack on Nagasaki was most assuredly done as a warning to the Soviets, who had their own goal of taking over post-war Asia. The bombing of Nagasaki was an act of monumental brutality and pure, chest-thumping hegemony.

What is also brutally clear is that in the 70 years since Hiroshima, not one country has attacked the United States. And yet American leaders have used the same Trumanesque rationale of "saving American lives" to justify every invasion, every bombing, every drone strike, every construction of every one of its  thousand military bases around the world. The dropping of the atomic bomb set the stage for American dominance, with the Soviet Union the scapegoat until its collapse in 1991.

By then, of course, it was too late to rein in what Dwight Eisenhower had warned about: the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Since the end of the Cold War, the US has unleashed its military might against the Balkans, northern Africa and the Middle East. In just the past year, the Obama administration has staged a coup in Ukraine and sent troops to Russian border countries, and begun what is euphemized as "a pivot to Asia."

In yesterday's Faux-Peace In Our Time speech to his Iran deal critics, President Obama manfully boasted,

As commander-in-chief, I have not shied away from using force when necessary. I have ordered tens of thousands of young Americans into combat. I have sat by their bedside sometimes when they come home.
I've ordered military action in seven countries. There are times when force is necessary, and if Iran does not abide by this deal, it's possible that we don't have an alternative.

 And while the US chickenhawks in both parties wring their hegemonic hands and thump their imperialistic chests over the proposed de-nuking deal with Iran, the MIC continues to build up its own nuclear arsenal with a vengeance.The Obama administration last fall announced plans to invest another trillion dollars in a renewed nuclear arms race. The first phase was the building of a sprawling plant twice the size of the Pentagon in America's heartland. One thousand people have been hired to build new warheads in Kansas City, MO. From the New York Times: 

  This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.

 Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama administration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.

 Supporters of arms control, as well as some of President Obama’s closest advisers, say their hopes for the president’s vision have turned to baffled disappointment as the modernization of nuclear capabilities has become an end unto itself.

Meanwhile, the Nobel Peace Prize president sanctimoniously scolds critics of his Iran "peace" deal. Without the ability to peacefully threaten Iran over its own nonexistent-to-modest nuclear program, he boomed yesterday, war will become inevitable. He is kindly giving Iran a chance to behave before bombing it to smithereens.

Meanwhile, over at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, they just completed a massive renovation of their plutonium processing plant.

Meanwhile, over at the Y-12 Security Complex in Tennessee, they just completed a $550 million Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. 

Meanwhile, over at the 3,000-worker Pantex Plant in Amarillo, they're building a "high explosives pressing facility" at a cost (so far) of $145 million.

Meanwhile, over at the Savannah River Site, more than 5,000 gainfully employed Americans are enjoying the brand new Tritium Engineering Building. Tritium is a highly radioactive form of hydrogen gas.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For more information about what they're building and improving, be sure to visit the National Nuclear Security Administration website. Look at all the happy employees. Read all about how weapons of mass destruction keep you safe and secure.  Read all about how thousands and thousands of lucky workers with good-paying jobs are "giving back" to their communities as they build, refurbish, maintain and stockpile the American nuclear arsenal. Whoever said Americans don't manufacture stuff any more is nuts.

Their faces are literally glowing. They are grateful, and they want you to be grateful too.

Nuke University, Class of 2014

Pangloss Does Puerto Rico

As expected, Puerto Rico has defaulted on a $58 million debt repayment after a cabal of bond holders, hedge fund vultures, and Congressional politicians have balked at allowing the US territory to restructure its debt through bankruptcy protection.

And since the Obama White House has already nixed a bailout, the usual solutions are proceeding apace: austerity for the citizens, and plunder by the same predators who helped create Puerto Rico's fiscal crisis in the first place. 

Although it is officially known as a Commonwealth, Puerto Rico's wealth (now largely consisting of real estate and public utilities) will no longer be shared with the commons. The same hedge fund vultures refusing to cut this debtor colony the smallest break are already buying up luxury hotels at fire sale prices, even bulldozing out a portion of a pristine bay, so as to accommodate their mega-yachts.

As is usual in these fiscal crisis situations, there is plenty of blame to go around. A long history of government corruption and mismanagement on the island: check. Irresponsible borrowing by government officials: check. Mass exodus of tax-exempt corporations once the tax exemptions stopped: check. The same housing bubble collapse that fueled the global economic collapse in 2008: check. A stupid rule requiring that all shipping to and from Puerto Rico be done by expensive United States lines: check.

The real culprit in Puerto Rico's default, though, is Wall Street. Just as the big banks bought up subprime home mortgages and chopped them into pieces before selling them to investors, the big banks went on a Puerto Rican bond-buying orgy, then acted as the middlemen foisting off the shoddy financial instruments to hedge funds. The banksters banked on human need on one side, human greed on the other side,  and then pocketed their unfair share.

So who do island government officials turn to for advice in the wake of this massive swindle? A rational, humane person might suggest the Pope, or Thomas Piketty. But that would be too sane. Because when it comes to solutions, politicians cannot seem to help themselves: they prostrate themselves before the altar of the global banking cartel -- in Puerto Rico's case, this takes the form of current and former International Monetary Fund officials. And what do you suppose these IMF officials prescribed?

You guessed it: austerity for the people victimized by the banks, everlasting debt for the debtor state, a token haircut for the hedge funds, and absolutely no punishment for too big to fail/jail JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Bank of America.

It's a broken record, playing the same Deju Vu All Over Again song, over and over and over again. The title on the album is The Neoliberal Project's Greatest Hits. To edify the uninitiated, political economist Philip Markowski has written a helpful Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism type of liner notes guide that can easily be applied to the Puerto Rican Solution, the Greek Solution, the Detroit Solution, the Fiscal Cliff Solution, the Sequester Solution, or any creative solution relying on twisted logic to create, and then cash in, on a crisis.

A report called Puerto Rico: A Way Forward, authored by former IMF and World Bank neoliberal economist Anne Krueger and some of her minions, closely adheres to the Gospel According to Neoliberalism; to wit, never let a crisis go to waste.

Krueger starts off with the standard false empathy. Times are tough, she says. The politicians worked so, so hard to stave off catastrophe, she says. They deserve credit for all the austerity they've already inflicted, like pension-gutting, higher taxes, public employee wage freezes, and larger class sizes. But those simply are not enough. Puerto Rico has advantages it "can parlay into Market Confidence." And that Market Confidence can be accomplished by the following:

Abolish the minimum wage. Bring back child labor. Privatize public transportation and utilities. Cut government medical insurance benefits a whole lot more. Cut food stamps. Close schools (kids can work!) and fire teachers. Deregulate businesses. Oh, and reduce the costs of shipping and let the hedge funds share just a teensy bit of the sacrifice in order to make the cruelty seem fair and balanced.

Meanwhile, the only people feeling the cruelty are our fellow American citizens of Puerto Rico. The island is already undergoing a crisis in health care. In the past five years, three thousand physicians have fled the island for more lucrative jobs on the mainland. Medicare and Medicaid have already been cut. From the New York Times: 

On an island where more than 60 percent of residents receive Medicare or Medicaid — an indicator of Puerto Rico’s poverty and rapidly aging population — the dwindling funds have set off outpourings of concern among patients and doctors, protest rallies and intense lobbying in Washington.

And while the crisis is playing out most vividly today, its cause dates back decades and stems, in large part, from a vast disparity in federal funding for health care on the island compared with the 50 states. This disparity is partly responsible for $25 billion of Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt, as its government was forced to borrow over time to keep the Medicaid program afloat, according to economists.

And now I come to a peculiarly bloodless, tone-deaf column by the Times' resident liberal economics pundit, Paul Krugman. He must not have read his own paper's article about the health emergency on the island, because according to him, the situation is not all that bad. At least it's not as bad as in Greece, where they are literally starving to death.  Comparing Puerto Rico to depressed Appalachia, he opines that these places are in hard times because all the young healthy folks are fleeing, leaving the sick and the old behind to live large on the government. So stop your complaining! The anti-austerian rock star economist agrees with Anne Krueger that the minimum wage cut might be a reasonable idea because those Puerto Ricans just aren't as "productive" as the mainlanders:

  A recent report commissioned by the commonwealth’s government argues that its economy is hurt by sharing the U.S. minimum wage, which raises costs, and also by federal benefits that encourage adults to drop out of the work force. In principle these complaints could be right. In particular, even economists who support a higher U.S. minimum wage, myself included, generally agree that it could be a problem if set too high relative to productivity — and Puerto Rican productivity is far below mainland levels.

Then again, muses the benignant Doc Pangloss, the "safety net" is not such a bad thing for those unskilled unemployables. It's not their fault that the "shifting tides of globalization" left innocent people in the lurch. But still, even though they might be "hurting," you can't really call it suffering, because Puerto Ricans  consume 30% more stuff than the Greeks.

I guess that "shifting tides" must be Krugman's euphemism for Wall Street malfeasance. While he rightly chides the hedge funds for being too greedy, he totally ignores the crimes of the big banks. He treats the Puerto Rico crisis as a regional problem, not part of the larger, global problem. "The fiscal crisis is basically the byproduct of a severe economic downturn," he vaguely writes. "The commonwealth’s government was slow to adjust to the worsening fundamentals,."

Not once does he delve into the malign sources of the severe economic downturn. According to him, government officials just couldn't adjust to the fundamentals of free market fundamentalism. Heaven forbid that the banksters adjust to the fundamentals of what it means to be a moral human being.

"Puerto Rico is in the wrong place at the wrong time," he blithely continues.  "These days manufacturing favors either very-low-wage nations, or locations close to markets that can take advantage of short logistic chains to respond quickly to changing conditions. But Puerto Rico’s wages aren’t low by global standards". 

Notice how "Manufacturing" suddenly becomes the living, breathing scapegoat -- as opposed to those the ruling class racketeers whose "trade deals" offshore jobs to places where slavery is still legal.

He concludes with some insipid, glass half-full Panglossian l'optimisme :

 Overall, however, the Puerto Rican story is one of bad times that fall well short of utter disaster. And the saving grace in this situation is big government — a federal system that provides a crucial safety net for American citizens in times of need, wherever they happen to live.

Here is my published response:

 It's easy for Mr. Krugman to say that Puerto Rico falls "far short of disaster." Tell it to somebody who actually lives there, somebody whose life is about to be cut short because Medicare and Medicaid payments to doctors -- who are leaving the island in droves -- are being drastically reduced. Tell it to the Vieques residents, half of whom already live in poverty and suffer from the health effects of years of US Navy bombing exercises right in their back yard. Many if not most of them suffer from lead, arsenic and mercury poisoning. And yet they're lucky because they're getting the "saving grace" of bare-bones government aid? The Greeks must be dying of envy.

Anne Krueger, veteran of the IMF and World Bank, prescribed poisonous austerity to Puerto Ricans. An esteemed economist who ironically invented the term "rent-seeking," she now suggests that Puerto Rico's $7.25 minimum wage be cut right along with food stamp stipends and health care. Her laughable Rx of a relatively small haircut for investors while the debt is "restructured " is unsurprisingly being met with howls of indignation from aggrieved hedge fund vultures.

They want Congress (where second class Puerto Rican citizens have no voting rep) to refuse the island's request for bankruptcy relief while they embark on the further plunder of the latest in their long series of victims.

They're terrorists, yet there is no war against them. They own the killing fields.

In his 2013 book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste," (see review here) Philip Mirowski writes that as Keynesian as Paul Krugman professes himself to be, he enables the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC). This enablement is perfectly and most recently evidenced in his latest column, which ignores Anne Krueger's sadistic prescription of austerity for Puerto Rico, if not tacitly accepting it.

Krugman's criticism of neoliberalism, such as it is, is largely limited to the GOP and those always-nameless "Very Serious People." Regarding Krugman and other liberal pundits, Mirowski writes:

The phenomenon they excoriate and try to pin on the Republican Party is far more elaborate and profound than any party-political dispute or local Machiavellian turn: how can there be a 'Republican' plot when it is a worldwide phenomenon? Indeed, many NTC members reserve their purest disdain for card-carrying Republican Party figures. Surely a few think tanks inside the Beltway cannot, of themselves, paralyze our minds 23/7!.... The understanding of politics displayed by these writers is far too parochial to stand up to the pervasive  character of the global crisis. It is distressing that these writers, frequently champions of hard-nosed, tough-minded 'analysis of reality,' fall short when it comes to serious analysis of the multipronged efforts to steer public discourse in certain targeted directions, the incongruous swerves that so vex their sensibilities.

As what Mirowski calls a cog in the larger neoliberal machine, Krugman continues to enjoy his Times gig as well as his frequent guest appearances on corporate ABC-Disney and CNN Sunday chat-fests and other perks of the punditry profession.He is about as far left as the transpartisan, transglobal NTC can tolerate without self-imploding on its own hot air.

The Biden Bandwagon

Almost overnight, the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden has morphed from a trial balloon into a high-octane bandwagon.

The unofficial official roll-out of the Biden Balloon With Wheels came in the form of a Maureen Dowd column, published on Saturday. It's a textbook case of inside-the-Beltway influence-peddling told in the form of a sentimental narrative. Dowd, who has long had a soft spot for Biden and a hard spot for Hillary Clinton, comes from the same Irish Catholic working class background as the vice president. So right away there's the affinity, fraudulent or otherwise. Biden, or perhaps one of his inner circle, whispered in MoDo's ear the heart-wrenching story of how the dying Beau Biden begged his father to vanquish Hillary and run for president himself.

And thus is a legend and a candidacy born. As the dangerously maudlin Ronald Reagan once urged us to win one for The Gipper, so too do the moribund establishment Democrats want Joe to win one for the party.

Were it not for for Beau's dying wish, modern legend has it, Joe would never have the gall to challenge the Empress-in-Waiting. So the liberal world reads the Dowd column and weeps as it gets out its handkerchiefs and checkbooks. And the Washington Establishment breathes a sigh of relief as it begins its attempted neutralization of Bernie Sanders. They seem to think that Hillary's problem is mainly one of her robotic speaking style and her scandalous email server. Bernie is out-performing her on the stump, and what the Dems think they need is a barn-burning stump speaker like Regular Joe Biden, who despite his populist rhetoric, presents no real danger to the oligarchy. He is Barack Obama's zany white uncle in style, Obama himself in what passes for substance.

Dowd ineptly tried to disguise her blatant shilling for Biden by also floating a much smaller trial balloon for Howard Schultz,  CEO of Starbucks, and socially liberal billionaire darling of the centrist Washington Establishment. He loves conversations about race that consist of slogans on latte cups, he loves marriage equality, he loves diversity, and he especially loves pathological global corporate coups disguised as "free trade" deals. 

Reader comments to MoDo's article flowed in a torrent, with New York Times editors quickly segregating and highlighting the most fawning "Run, Joe, Run!" accolades. Thus is public opinion manipulated, thus are the ruling class's wishes honored, thus is a legend and a candidacy born. And thus  is Bernie Sanders left in the dust, as the rest of the Sunday Times home-page concentrates on the antics of Donald Trump, (several pieces) Obama's latest legacy-burnishing propaganda pivot, and the angst of millennials being robbed of their futures by greedy geezers on Medicare.

Here is my buried comment on Dowd's piece:

The Draft Biden movement sure is picking up steam in the corporate press. "Washington" is worried that Bernie Sanders is overshadowing unpopular Hillary, and they desperately need one of their own to quash the Bernie-mentum.

Who is more likeable than Joe? His folksy charm, his loveable gaffes, the outpouring of national sympathy after the tragic loss of his son, make him a natural replacement candidate. He is a centrist's dream: he can reach across the aisle and "get things done."

As Elizabeth Warren recounts in "A Fighting Chance," one thing that Biden got done in 2005 was co-sponsoring the bankruptcy reform bill, as dictated by the banks and credit card companies of his home state, Delaware. This bill, originally vetoed by Bill Clinton and signed into law by George W. Bush, makes it much harder, if not impossible, for working families with credit problems to get legal relief.

Despite his working class persona, Biden sold out to the plutocrats years ago. But unlike Bill and Hill, he's been in continuous government service the whole time. He doesn't charge millions for speeches, and he uses a government email server. He is suddenly "electable."

When Obama boasted last week that he could win a third term, it also seemed to be a tacit endorsement of Biden, who despite his grief, has worked overtime (as has Howard Schultz) selling those job-destroying corporate coups euphemized as "free trade" deals.

The fix, as ever, is in.

Incidentally, Warren's memoir glossed over the inconvenient truth that Hillary stabbed her in the back by promising to vote against the later version of the bill she voted for it. One team player cannot diss another team member, I suppose.

However, in her earlier book, "The Two Income Trap," Warren was less circumspect. Not yet a politician herself, she could afford to be blunt. She even went so far as to practically call Biden a misogynist:

Warren describes briefing Hillary Clinton, when she was first lady, about the bankruptcy bill backed by the financial industry. “It’s our job to stop that awful bill,” Warren quotes Clinton as saying. But several years later, when the bill came up for passage, Senator Clinton voted for it. “The bill was essentially the same but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote. As senator, “she could not afford such a principaled (sic) position…” When the bill finally passed, in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden was one of its biggest backers. “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” Warren said.

And then there was Biden's disgusting treatment of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Once Obama picked Biden as his running mate, Democrats became even more squeamishly loath to discuss that inconvenient truth.

And then there was this cringe-worthy moment with the wife of the incoming master of war defense secretary.

Of course, next to Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP circus, Biden looks like a noble Galahad in shining armor.

I've avoided writing about Trump on this blog, because he already has more than his share of publicity. But I did write a response to yet another New York Times "style over substance" political column by the lovely Ross Douthat.  The Times' resident white millennial conservative putz opines that Trump serves to give cover to the "moderate" Jeb Bush. He also thinks the Republican debates will be interesting, if not quite reaching the realm of importance. My comment:

Only to the self-referential Washington leisure/media class is the GOP reality show either interesting or important.

Those of us living in the real world have other things to worry about besides Trump's media-savvy buffoonery and Jeb's equally comedic "Right to Rise" militant preppie tone-deafness. Since billionaires are funding this stage show posing as a political debate, we might as well dispense with the official candidates, and have the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson duke it out with Trump on live TV. Let them fling their thousand-dollar bills at each other in lieu of answering questions. Bill it as the WWF of the Plutocrats, with spectators invited to cast their meaningless votes for which loathsome humanoid can best serve the interests of the .01%.

Ross rightly observes that the longer Trump prevails as ringmaster, the longer Jeb will be able to skulk around unnoticed as he vacuums up the lucre on his stealthy road to the nomination. But it's wrong to cast Jeb as a respectable moderate. He is neither respectable, nor even remotely moderate. He wants to destroy Medicare, invade whatever chunk of global real estate is still unsullied by the military-industrial complex, privatize the earth, and thus complete the radical right-wing revolution started by Reagan.

Scott Walker is the clown who might actually win the nomination. Because as bad as Jeb is, he just can't whine out the aggrieved hatred and the ignorance quite as well as Scottie, the ultimate Koch puppet.

Let's face it, though: the whorehouse known as the American media/political complex is mostly made up of puppets pulling the strings of other puppets. 

Dog Days Edition

When I woke up way too early this morning, the first thing I noticed was that alpha dog Sirius had beaten me to it, even getting out ahead of Old Sol in the rising department. Some might call this presumptuous. But if Jeb Bush's Billionaire Job Creators have the Right to Rise before everybody else, why not Sirius?

The Dog Days are upon us, spelling all manner of catastrophe and general misery. Or, so the ancients cheerfully believed. Not like us moderns, who live under the false impression that the Dog Days have something to do with panting dogs lying around in the heat because it's too hot to move. That is what they want you to think, because in America, we must always look toward the cruel, big, bright sun with the happy face as we sweat and weep and gnash our teeth. That twinkling little dead dawn-star named after a dog? You can wish upon it all you want, but contrary to what Jiminy Cricket sang in Pinocchio, it absolutely does make a difference who you are in whether your dreams come true in the 21st century.

Therefore, I leave you with a fair and balanced Panglossian approach today -- equal parts joy and misery.

First, the cheer. One of the pillars of Barack Obama's presidency has developed a possibly lethal crack, as the latest round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations broke down last night. Reps for the American plutocracy apparently had a hard time convincing such nations as Chile and Australia that sky-high drug prices to replace reasonable ones was a good idea, in the best interests of sick people. This is really strange, since they were doing the deal-making in mellow Maui. I guess either the Maui Wowie was cheap skunk, or the negotiators refused to smoke it, because they also balked at jeopardizing such nationalistic munchables as sugar, rice and cheese. And this, after the Obama administration promised to protect sea turtles as well as protecting the Malaysian slave trade!

***

 Obama should take heart, though, because there is still misery aplenty in Precariatland. As the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson lays out, the HAMP program designed to protect homeowners from foreclosure has ended up protecting the big bank predators instead. The banks have thrown 72% of distressed homeowners requesting loan modifications under the bus, and then they have the nerve to blame their "irresponsible" victims for having the poor taste to get old, lose a job, or become disabled.More than six years after the economic meltdown caused by the Too Big To Fails, the Obama administration is still foaming the runway for the Too Big To Jails. Tiny Tim is still telling Citigroup and Bank of America: "Mammon Bless Us Everyone!"

***
But here's some good news, Evictees of America. Big Poultry is removing antibiotics from the feed it gives the chickens it crams into those filthy, inhumane cages. The birds will now have the Freedom to spread their diseases to you while Perdue and Chick Fil-A and their partners in pharmaceutical crime insist that overpriced, patent-protected meds to treat those diseases are no longer strain-resistant! Of course, this altruism will give drug companies an excuse to charge consumers even more. They still have to feather their own nests, y'know.

We Are So Clucked

***

Since the Dog Days are upon us, Prime Minister David Cameron is literally calling out the dogs to prevent African and Middle Eastern refugees from tunneling their way over from France to his blessed plot, his earth, his realm, his England. No word yet as to his breed of choice, but I would assume that pit bulls are about to be drafted into the Royal Canine Corps. After all, since Cameron's whole neoliberal governing philosophy (austerity) is both bull and the pits, why not put some teeth in it? 

Austirius Rises: "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Tunneled Masses."

Medicare Is Golden

Despite all the radical right-wing efforts to kill it and defund it and privatize it, Medicare has lived to celebrate its 50th birthday today. Ronald Reagan, himself a Medicare recipient in his interminable dotage, must be rolling in his grave. Ditto for chain-smoking Ayn Rand, whose lung cancer treatment was also covered by the single-payer health care program.

In honor of Medicare's 50th, I propose lowering the eligibility age to 50, thence in rapid increments of five years every single month, culminating in automatic coverage for all citizens beginning at birth. I also propose doing away with the current deductibles and co-pays in order to get the private insurance predators out of the mix entirely.

How did LBJ do it? The LBJ Presidential Library has the transcript of a White House conversation from March 1965:

LBJ: When are you going to take it up?

Mills: (Wilbur Mills, the powerful House Ways and Committee chairman) I’ve got to go to the Rules Committee next week.

LBJ: You always get your rules pretty quickly though, don’t you?

Mills: Yeah, that’s right.

LBJ: . . . For God’s sake, let’s get it before Easter! . . . They make a poll every Easter. . .You know it. On what has Congress accomplished up till then. Then the rest of the year they use that record to write editorials about. So anything that we can grind through before Easter will be twice as important as after Easter.

(Mills gets off the telephone line)

LBJ: Now, remember this. Nine out of 10 things that I get in trouble on is because they lay around. And tell the Speaker and Wilbur [Mills] to please get a rule just the moment they can.

Cohen: (Wilbur Cohen, Assistant HEW Secretary) They want to bring it up next week, Mr. President.

LBJ: Yeah, but you just tell them not to let it lay around. Do that! They want to but they might not. That gets the doctors organized. Then they get the others organized. And I damn near killed my education bill, letting it lay around.

Cohen: Yeah.

LBJ: It stinks. It’s just like a dead cat on the door. When a committee reports it, you better either bury that cat or get it some life in it . . . [to Mills as he gets back on the line:] For God’s sakes! “Don’t let dead cats stand on your porch,” Mr. Rayburn used to say. They stunk and they stunk and they stunk. When you get one out of that committee, you call that son of a bitch up before [our opponents] can get their letters written.

Ronald Reagan, remember, shilled for the American Medical Association. Reagan must stink like a dead cat by this time, as he rolls. But here he is in his happier rigor mortis days:

Migrants, Dehumanized

After initially likening dark-skinned refugees from war-torn and poverty-stricken Africa and the Middle East to diseased tunnel rats, the New York Times has belatedly and quietly changed the lead of its July 29 article, "Britain and France Scramble as Channel Becomes Choke Point in Migration Crisis."

Here are the original opening paragraphs as prominently displayed on the top of the online home-page yesterday: 

Britain and France scrambled on Wednesday to address the latest flash point in Europe’s festering migrant crisis after a second consecutive night in which hundreds of people living in squalid camps in northern France sought to force their way through the Channel Tunnel.
British ministers and officials held emergency talks in London as pressure mounted on both sides of the English Channel for tighter security around the tunnel and for broader measures to defuse the situation, the most recent to highlight the scale of illegal migration from the Middle East, Africa and other poor and war-torn regions into Europe.

They've since been revised to read:

 They have reached Europe after often-treacherous journeys, usually across the Mediterranean. They have dodged the authorities as they made their way north toward their ultimate goal, Britain. But now, thousands of illegal migrants, refugees from war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, find themselves bottled up at one final choke point in northern France: the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.

Over two nights this week, their desperation and frustration flared to new levels as they tried in far larger numbers than normal to breach the security around the tunnel and hide themselves amid the trucks and freight being shuttled by rail from Calais to southern England.

Wow, it's a miracle. Overnight, the migrants evolved from swarming invasive hordes into human beings --  albeit still "illegal." Of course, the Times revision is now buried well off the home-page. The original article was, unsurprisingly enough, a magnet for self-righteous xenophobic rants from all across the A-B political spectrum. But many astute commenters also noted the connection between the current migrant crisis and decades of American/NATO imperialism.

I wrote my own comment in response to the original lead:

 This article immediately dehumanizes the migrants by describing their existential plight as a "festering" crisis.

From the online Free Dictionary, definitions of festering:

1.venomous, vicious, smouldering, virulent, black-hearted; recrimination and festering resentment.

2. septic, infected, poisonous, inflamed, pussy, suppurating, ulcerated, purulent, maturating, gathering, afflicted by festering sores.

3. rotting, decaying, decomposing, putrefying The cobbles were littered with festering garbage.

Words matter, New York Times. This type of coded language gives credence to Donald Trump-style xenophobia.

Meanwhile, David Cameron wrings his delicate hands over the delays being suffered by affluent vacationers.

Where's the pity? Where's the empathy? Where are the prosecutions of the Bush-era war criminals who created this whole human catastrophe in the first place?

Many of the "festering" migrants are from Libya and Syria, destabilized by the Bush-era successors.

My favorite comment is by a Daily Kos reader named "dconrad," who channeled Donald Trump:

"If I am elected president I will build a wall in the middle of the English channel to keep these immigrants, who are rapists by the way, out of England and I will make France pay for it. The French are lightweights, and, frankly, losers. I don't respect anyone who got invaded by the Germans. And I will build a Trump hotel and casino on top of that wall, because I'm extremely successful and, I don't like to brag, but I'm very rich and if you don't believe me, just read The Art of the Deal, the greatest book ever written."

TPP: A Pimper's Paradise

As expected, the Obama administration has decided to ignore the atrocities of the Malaysian slave trade in order to make the world even more comfortable for global plutocrats and their unfettered capital.  This cynical move is all of a piece with the long American tradition of deploring the behavior of countries our officials don't like (Russia, North Korea, Iran) while turning a willful blind eye to the deplorable behavior of countries which either buy US weapons of mass destruction (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt), or allow the extraction of their human and material resources for the benefit of the American ruling class and its corporations.(name just about any third world country.) These fire sale-type extractions usually follow bribes in the form of loans from the International Monetary Fund. The collateral is the imposition of austerity on poor and working people. Since the countries are rarely able to make timely repayments, the plunder by creditors is then free to proceed with a vengeance.

Malaysia is one of the twelve nations included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In order for Barack Obama to salve his alleged conscience enough to sign the accord, his State Department has simply "upgraded" Malaysia to a less-bad level of human rights violations. This is despite the recent discovery of a mass grave containing the murdered bodies of hundreds of enslaved people, or as pseudo-democratic governments like to euphemise them, "human trafficking victims." 

Dave Dayen writes in The Intercept:

The move to officially upgrade Malaysia from Tier 3 to Tier 2 in the department’s annual report on human trafficking came despite scant evidence that the country has improved oversight of the businesses that enslave workers within its borders. It has raised concerns among some anti-trade activists that the decision was made for purely political reasons.
The trade promotion authority that Congress approved, which was signed into law by President Obama in June, came with a condition: No country on Tier 3 of the human trafficking report could get “fast-track” status for trade agreements signed with the United States.
In other words, trade deals with a Tier 3 country could not go to Congress for a guaranteed up-or-down vote without the possibility of filibuster or amendment. Malaysia is one of 12 countries negotiating TPP. The White House tried on multiple occasions to neutralize this language without success. So the State Department’s upgrade for Malaysia could be seen as a Plan B.

(snip)

Despite the White House’s contention that trade deals like TPP are “the most progressive in history,” it appears to be overlooking significant forced labor violations to get it passed.
In 2014, the State Department demoted Malaysia to Tier 3 status for being a destination “for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and women and children subjected to sex trafficking.” Malaysia’s 4 million foreign workers are threatened by large smuggling debts and confiscated passports that put them at the mercy of recruiting companies. Women in particular, recruited for hotel or beauty salon work, are routinely coerced into the commercial sex trade. And forced labor runs rampant in agricultural, construction and textile industries, producing the same goods that would get duty-free access to U.S. markets under TPP.

Of course, the human rights catastrophe in Malaysia is already the direct result of American foreign policy as inflicted by the IMF. By "progress," Obama presumably means that the slave trade can forge ahead even stronger than ever, if and when the TPP is ratified and signed into ignominy. Just as he and previous presidents have always feebly insisted,  the inclusion of "deplorable" nations in the global free market will be predicated on the flimsy promises of said nations to do the nicey-nice in the future. 

As The Nation reports, the very existence of the State Department's tiered rating system of human trafficking nations is itself a cynical ploy to make the United States the global moral arbiter which can and will grant altruistic clemency to hardcore delinquent nations like Malaysia -- on the mere promise that they will mend their ways. And once they don't mend their ways, the US more often than not will turn another willful blind eye to the broken promises. The fact that Colombia, for example, continues its abysmal record of assassinating trade unionists with impunity after Obama's signing of CAFTA is a case in point.

The Obama administration, as have other human bondage apologists before it, carefully concentrates on only the "trafficking" part of Malaysian slavery -- thus reducing it, in the court of public opinion, to just what it sounds like: a minor traffic violation rather than felony murder, kidnapping and rape. Maybe if Americans were able to view the abused victims of the Malaysian slave trade as thousands of Bill Cosby victims who are never allowed to escape his coercive clutches, they could then begin to feel some empathic outrage.

The transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 18th centuries was not about the "movement." It was about permanently enslaving 11 million Africans, on top of merely "transporting" them across the ocean. Malaysia, too, is more than a "route." So, the question must be asked: where are the 21st century abolitionists?

The reason that Barack Obama can so easily condemn the predations of a Bill Cosby while easily accepting the existence of slavery is the usual one: money, and lots of it. Slavery is a truly progressive growth industry, generating billions of dollars in profits every year, a profit margin greater than any other industry in the world, whether legal or illegal. The State Department estimates that one woman or child is trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation every 60 seconds.

As researcher Siddharth Kara writes, 

Trafficked sex slaves are by far the most lucrative slaves in the world. Only 4.2 percent of the world's slaves are trafficked sex slaves, but they generate 39.1 percent of slaveholders' profits. To benchmark the astounding profits generated by the exploitation of sex slaves, one need look no further than the fact that the global weighted average net profit margin of almost 70 percent makes it one of the most profitable enterprises in the world. By comparison, Google's net profit margin in 2006 was 29 percent, and it is one of the most profitable companies in the United States."

Slavery has always been an integral, even necessary, part of capitalism. Globalization and "free trade" deals have made it even more so, creating as they do crisis situations in countries bearing their brunt. As jobs disappear and wages plummet, millions of women and children become vulnerable to exploitation. The IMF's prescription of the "shock doctrine" of austerity in the name of the free market has actually encouraged and accelerated slavery. Malaysia found itself in the neoliberal crosshairs in the early 90s, as speculators and hedge fund predators "invested" money in the country, leading to bubbles and currency devaluation. Then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad was blunt in his assessment:

We are told we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators. We had tried to comply with the wishes of the rich and mighty, but when the big funds use their massive weight in order to move the shares up and down at will and make huge profits by their manipulations, then it is too much to expect us to welcome them, especially when their profits result in massive losses for ourselves. The currency traders have become rich, very very rich through making other people poor.

The IMF/banking cartel did not take this radical rebellion against the Invisible Fist graciously, and the longest-serving prime minister in Malaysia's history was eventually forced to resign, with much help from Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and austerian vice president Al Gore.

 Punishment by the IMF/global banking cartel for debtor states' failure to adopt "reforms" (austerity) always comes with a price. Just look at Greece. Just look at Detroit. Just look around your own foreclosed neighborhood.

And now, with the Obama administration's renewed, tacit acceptance of Asian slavery as an engine of economic growth, it is not hyperbole to label any complicit politicians who vote for "trade deals" not only whores, but pimps, high and free on capitalistic crack.

The victims of the global sex trade are the comfort women of the plutocrats -- each and every one of whom calls himself a devoted family man, or a simpering feminist with a shallow verbal penchant for "empowering" poor women and breaking the glass ceiling.

Where are the 21st century abolitionists? Where are the protests? Where are the scolding magazine covers that shame and call out the political pimps and the plutocratic predators?

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength". -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 "The fact is some folks are just opposed to trade deals out of principle, a reflexive principle. And what I tell them is, ‘You know what? If you’re opposed to these smart, progressive trade deals, then that means you must be satisfied with the status quo.’ ” -- Barack Obama at Nike Headquarters, May 2015, doing Orwell one better. Not only is slavery free, and freedom slavery, but the whole abomination is eminently sane. The slaves are just too damned stupid to realize that their progress across national borders is preferable to just staying put in their miserable countries of origin.

"This is a testament to when we're not vigilant in defense of human rights, what can happen". -- Barack Obama on his visit to the Senegal Slave Trade Memorial, June 2013.