Commentariat Central

(*Updated below)

 Per reader request, here is one my semi-regular New York Times comment dumps. Please feel free to also post your own, Times or not, on any topic within or without reason.

Paul Krugman, Bungling Beijing's Stock Markets, Aug. 14:

China's leaders swing more toward Ayn Rand than Karl Marx, that's for sure.
Whether the state runs the "markets" or the markets run the state is moot. Losses are socialized, profits are privatized. Struggling people become the victims and scapegoats. Wealth disparity widens to epic proportions. The center cannot hold.
Surely it is no coincidence that the day after China began devaluing its currency, there was that horrific explosion in Tianjin. China is in political and social and ecological crisis as well as economic crisis. While a small cartel of billionaires bask in luxury, millions are suffering. The government is even banning press coverage of what looks to be a monumental health and environmental disaster.

 This is what we have to look forward to if the Randians of the GOP gain power and abolish the EPA, along with what few banking regulations we still have left and are still being feebly enforced. Just as the global financial collapse didn't teach them, China won't teach them. Capitalism run amok is a veritable cancer upon the body politic -- and the cancer always dies along with the host.
But as Murray Bookchin wrote, “For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it to commit social.suicide."
China seems to prefer collapse. It's not alone: the global Market State is condemning us and the planet we live on to an early death. Unless and until we act, the smoldering ruin of Tianjin will be the future for all of us.

 ***

 Maureen Dowd, Introducing Donald Trump, Diplomat; Aug. 15:

 This piece might be called "My Dinner With Donald," because never for one minute are we allowed to forget that Maureen Dowd has cast herself in a starring role. On the surface it's an exposé of plutocratic misogyny, but ultimately it's a screwball pas de deux between an ornery billionaire and a woman who not only has the guts to confront him, but ends up on his approval list anyway.

It's damage control, an endearing portrait of a gruff, flamboyant old honeybear of a man. It has the tone of a Tracy-Hepburn battle of the sexes. Maureen waves her scolding finger at Trump while snidely snickering over their banter. Like any romantic comedy, it ends very well for both of them.

 The audience -- both the selfie stick-waving gawkers at Trump's restaurant, and we, the hapless Times readers -- are cast as the pathetic outsiders in this dramedy. And that is as it should be, because those of us residing in the fringes of the real world are indeed superfluous to what passes for politics these days. The presidential contest is a marathon reality show for which we're forced to pay premium rates that we can ill-afford.

We gape as she teases Donald about his high chair, gasp as they schmooze over his Rosie O'Donnell slurs and Heidi Klum disses. She assures us he was never referring to Megyn Kelly's period.

 Dowd's political columns have the same superficial quality as Trump's infinity of mirrors.
Jump out of her shallow pool and get into the sunshine. Feel the Bern.

***

Charles Blow, Activists "Feel the Bern?", Aug. 17:

Maybe Black voters are not as familiar with Bernie because the mass media don't cover him as well and as outrageously as they cover Hillary and Donald and Jeb.

 Maybe BlackLivesMatter can't heckle Hillary like they heckled Bernie because she has Secret Service protection and a billion-dollar oligarchic war machine, and he doesn't.

 And anyway, what is so wrong with heckling? It's as old as democracy itself. Bernie handled himself very well at his campaign event. Certain white critics of the hecklers, not so much. Would they have preferred that he give the protesters the finger, as Nelson Rockefeller once did to his everlasting regret, or break out into a cold scowling paranoid sweat like Nixon, or pettily snipe that "this is my House and these are my drinks" as Obama did recently to an LGBT activist who heckled him over his border incarceration policies? The other LGBT activists in the audience did themselves, not the protester, a huge disservice by booing her.

In this age of money-driven politics, heckling is bottom- up democracy in its rawest form. Without the heckling of politicians by women advocates in the 19th century, we never would have gotten female suffrage. Because of 20th century hecklers, the Vietnam War ended more quickly.
I hope to see a lot more heckling this campaign season. It'll keep the office-seekers off their robotic scripts and on their toes. It might even remind them who they're supposed to be working for.

***
 Paul Krugman, Republicans Against Retirement, Aug. 17:

 The trashing of Social Security has long been a pet project of the American oligarchy. GOP pols are just more vocal about it, because "hate thy neighbor" is a huge vote-getter. Or, at least it used to be. People are becoming aware of how rigged the system is against them.
Every day I see another scare headline about how Social Security is going broke, or how disabled workers are committing massive fraud to collect a few paltry dollars on the taxpayer dime. Big media, totally captured by the 01%, and are only too happy to spread the Big Lie on behalf of their owners.
The most egregious recent example comes from journalist Katie Couric of Yahoo, whose CEO is a big donor to Democrats. She tells the whopper that the government hoards your personal, deducted FICA taxes until it starts paying them back out to you when you retire. The truth, of course, is that the trust fund and contributions from current workers go to pay the benefits of current retirees. It has worked this way for 80 years.

Never once does she mention that any shortfalls in the trust fund can be easily fixed by a raising or scrapping of the FICA tax cap. Instead, she repeats the Big Lie that the old are robbing the young.

Until a year ago, the Clinton Global Initiative was partnering with Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to spread this same sick message on college campuses.
We should be expanding Social Security. Scrap the cap, lower the retirement age, and raise the benefits.

+++

*Ana Marie Cox, Bernie Sanders Has Heard About That Hashtag, Aug. 17:

The Gallup pollsters didn't bother informing respondents of the difference between "socialism" (Marx, Lenin) and "democratic socialism" (Sanders, Scandinavian countries with a strong social safety net, most aspects of FDR's New Deal.)

Thus is the poll skewed on its face. And Ms. Cox, to her discredit, seemingly didn't bother to do her research on the differences between the two socialisms either. She seemed more interested in the differences in candidates' hairstyles.

But, to her credit, at least she is not quite as dismissive of Bernie as Nate Cohn and his obsession with polls. As G. William Dornhoff writes in "Who Rules America?"--

"Polls also can be used to suggest that a public opinion exists on issues for which there is none. This does not mean people do not have general opinions, but that they often make it up as they go along when responding to specific questions about policy preferences. If questions about affirmative action or oil drilling are framed in one way, they yield one answer, but framed in another way, they yield a different answer, especially for those without knowledge or firm opinions."
 So I wonder if the Gallup respondents, in the Age of NSA, were afraid to answer the socialism question, lest they be deemed unpatriotic. Maybe they figured it would be safer to Just Say No to the stranger on the phone.

But I bet if they were asked if they'd vote for FDR again, the "yeses" would have been in the 90%-plus range. Sanders is the FDR of the 21st century.

Obama to America: Support Your National Police State

 Barack Obama today praised the bravery of armed police officers while glibly commiserating with victims of police state violence and terror about how "frustrated" they must be feeling these days. To beat a cliche even further into the ground, he vowed that morale will improve while the beatings continue.

In his weekly taped address (a.k.a. his weekly dog whistle to the Oligarchy), the president announced the allocation of more government money for police department public relations programs, and  zero money for the actual victims of police state brutality. Never once did he utter the phrase "Black Lives Matter."

So without further ado, here is another edition of Let's Play Parse-a-Prez. (Obama's actual words are in italics and my analyses are in parentheses):

Hi everybody.  It’s now been a year since the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.  His death—along with the events in Cleveland, Staten Island, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and other communities—sparked protests and soul searching all across our country.  Over the past year, we’ve come to see, more clearly than ever, the frustration in many communities of color and the feeling that our laws can be applied unevenly.

(Obama reduces the homicide-by-cop of Michael Brown to a "tragic death." He euphemises the homicides in Baltimore, Staten Island and elsewhere as "events." The police state assassination of a twelve-year-old boy in Cleveland, for example, just sort of happened without any direct racist cop action. And these passive happenings make people understandably upset and frustrated!  But instead of admitting that government agents are executing black people at the rate of about one a day, for no other reason than they exist, Obama dismisses this brutal reality as a "feeling" in communities that the "laws" (actually, it is total lawlessness) are being applied unevenly. In other words, if cops killed white people at the same rate that they kill black people, he wouldn't even be needing to have this Doctor Phil-type conversation.) 

After Ferguson, I said that we had to face these issues squarely.  I convened a task force on community policing to find commonsense steps that can help us drive down crime and build up trust and cooperation between communities and police, who put their lives on the line every single day to help keep us safe.  And I’ve met personally with rank and file officers to hear their ideas.

 (Again, he does not address the government's de facto policy of brutality. He immediately pathologizes poverty by pointing to the need to "drive down crime" in poor neighborhoods. He defends police against poor communities and black drivers without mentioning the predations of the police state. He convened yet another study group. He softens the negative image of police by enfolding them into a cozy "community," in which cops and the people they terrorize are all members of the same family. He's even met personally with lower-level, callow young officers to show what a friendly, paternalistic guy he is. He doesn't mention that a small but significant number of these officers are certifiable psychopaths who not only put citizens' lives at risk, they also endanger their fellow cops, both directly on the streets and indirectly in the court of public opinion.)

 In May, this task force made up of police officers, activists and academics proposed 59 recommendations – everything from how we can make better use of data and technology, to how we train police officers, to how law enforcement engages with our schools.  And we’ve been working with communities across America to put these ideas into action.

(True free market neoliberal that he is, Obama prioritizes data and technology. Somebody, somewhere, is going to make big bucks crunching numbers and analyzing algorithms and marketing body cameras at huge mark-ups.

 Rather than question the horrific practice of placing police in schools, the president changes the issue into how the police state might insert itself into the classroom in a more "engaging" fashion. Maybe they can use pink guns with Disney logos to make standardized test-taking under armed guard fun and scary at the same time?

I'm not being entirely facetious. One of Obama's cosmetic solutions to the public's perception problem is to outfit domestic occupying forces with "softer" uniforms. However, the police are having none of it, rightly noting that a cop dressed up as Mister Rogers is not likely to elicit as much respect from the huddled masses as somebody looking like this:

 

 To be seen as even more fair and righteous, Obama has used the tried and true procedure of co-opting "activists" by placing them, at staged White House events, into close physical proximity with concerned police state officials and a smattering of wise, detached professors. As Glen Ford and other critics have pointed out, officials allowing protesters a seat at their table is S.O.P. for the attempted watering down of protest movements.) 

Dozens of police departments are now sharing more data with the public, including on citations, stops and searches, and shootings involving law enforcement.  We’ve brought together leaders from across the country to explore alternatives to incarceration.  The Justice Department has begun pilot programs to help police use body cameras and collect data on the use of force. 

(As long as they are honest about whom they arrest, maim and kill for the crime of existing while black, then it's all good. This is actually the most breathtakingly shocking, Orwellian part of his weekly dog-whistle. As far as Obama is concerned, the collation and sharing of data trumps the evil of state-sponsored violence and murder.

 Remember, Obama has always boasted about being the Most Transparent President Evah, so the Drone President is urging his terroristic minions to be just as open and honest (wink, nod) as he is about admitting that they kill people, and regretting that mistakes are sometimes made in the name of Keeping Us Safe. Additionally, saying one thing and doing another is a talent that must be constantly honed in order for it to be effective. Fooling some of the people all of the time takes a lot of practice. Obama should know. His hair is getting grayer by the minute.

And about that data. Police are gathering tons of it spying on the BlackLivesMatter movement, both online and in person.)

 This fall, the department will award more than $160 million in grants to support law enforcement and community organizations that are working to improve policing.  And all across the country – from states like Illinois and Ohio, to cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Nashville – local leaders are working to implement the task force recommendations in a way that works for their communities.

(No money will be awarded to hire teachers, create jobs, or improve housing and infrastructure in these communities.  But because they create the buffer zone between the rich and the poor, police agencies will get all the money they need.)

So we’ve made progress.  And we’ll keep at it.  But let’s be clear: the issues raised over the past year aren’t new, and they won’t be solved by policing alone.  We simply can’t ask our police to contain and control issues that the rest of us aren’t willing to address—as a society.  That starts with reforming a criminal justice system that too often is a pipeline from inadequate schools to overcrowded jails, wreaking havoc on communities and families all across the country. So we need Congress to reform our federal sentencing laws for non-violent drug offenders.  We need to keep working to help more prisoners take steps to turn their lives around so they can contribute to their communities after they’ve served their time.

(Obama kindly admits that police violence will not be solved by police violence alone. Nevertheless, he gives credence to the right-wing dogma that the police state is an important weapon against poor and minority people. Oligarchic man cannot live by bread alone, after all. Although the president recently commuted the sentences of a handful of drug offenders, he dog-whistles in this speech his intent that there will be no more pardons or commutations for the tens of thousands still languishing in for-profit  prisons. He is punting it over to the selectively moribund Congress. Meanwhile, he will constantly trumpet all the propagandist baby steps he is taking to help those lucky symbolic few "turn their lives around." Meanwhile, he stands by while public schools in poor neighborhoods are closed, unionized teachers are fired and their pension funds robbed, and hedge fund billionaires reap the education profits via charter schools.)

More broadly, we need to truly invest in our children and our communities so that more young people see a better path for their lives.  That means investing in early childhood education, job training, pathways to college.  It means dealing honestly with issues of race, poverty, and class that leave too many communities feeling isolated and segregated from greater opportunity.  It means expanding that opportunity to every American willing to work for it, no matter what zip code they were born into. Because, in the end, that’s always been the promise of America.

"Investing in our children" is code for the aforementioned billionaire charter school movement and other privatization schemes. Obama, like other centrist extremists, always uses the language of the market to refer to people and their needs. The commodification of human beings is the very essence of neoliberalism. So, if you "feel" isolated and segregated, the only way you can escape your crumbling existence is to develop your skill-sets through hard work and college debt peonage.

  The president has one thing right, though: In the end, the American Dream is nothing but a public relations promise. The reality is a nightmare. We are, indeed, in the end-times of democracy.

   And that’s what I’ll keep working for every single day that I’m President. Thanks everybody, and have a great weekend.

Loving Lizards

By Nan Socolow

I have always loved frogs and lizards, reptiles and small amphibs.

Living for decades in the tropics on a tiny island (pop. 1,400, the size of Manhattan) 90 miles south of Cuba, lizards lived inside and outside my house.

On the island there were Lion Lizards and iguanas and geckos and"wood slaves" (tiny, almost  transparent rubbery lizards that hung around wood and were ocher-colored as old Luden's cough drops).  There was also the occasional scorpion in the house.  And I shook out my sandals and shoes before putting them on.  

Wood Slave

The lion lizards, grey and white as old coral rocks,  disengaged their tails when attackers were near, and left their curly tails rocking back and forth like smiles while the lizards sped away to grow another tail. They would gather outside in coral rock walls just like old American stone walls in New England, and wait for a bread crumb or bit of cheese, and trundle comically toward the food .  We called them Larry, Moe and Curly.

 

Curly Tail

 

 There was a good size lizard - pale white - perhaps an albino female gecko, who laid her white eggs behind books  in my bookshelves. Alas, the eggs never hatched, the mother lizard had chosen an infortuitous nest.

 

Chameleons changed colours, Anoles climbed the screens and ballooned their throats like tiny bright orange spinnakers.  All of the lizards "pumped" their upper bodies up and down - did push-ups - to declare their territory, proclaiming "I AM!". 

 

 The male lion lizards were chubbier  than their girl friends and would mate fearlessly in the sun, regardless of oglers.  The local boys made a lizard snare from the long central rib of a fresh palm-frond - machete-hacked from nearest bearing coconut palm - a slip knot loop on the end - and they would reach far ahead of the curly tails with the long frond and catch the lizards around the neck and watch the lizards dancing on the snare and then let them go.

 

Green Anoles Mating

 

 I supplied lizard food inside my house. The plats du jour that the lizards enjoyed were cockroaches.  People would ask "how can you stand lizards in your house?" 

 

 And I said they were great bug-eaters! In the morning I would find only the pale brown transparent wings and tiny black twiggish legs and feet of a large flying Caribbean tropical cockroach (also called Palmetto Bug in South Carolina) on the floor. The roaches came in adult and teen-ager sizes, and fortunately the lizards made short shrift of them.

Green iguanas were outliers, bad guys, invasive and large and long and immigrants from some other island, but Rock iguanas (grey) and a few Blue Iguanas (endangered and endemic only in the Cayman Islands), were homeys, good guys. All the iguanas enjoyed basking in the sun, stretching out on the hot macadam roads, and alas tourists and locals ran them over in their trucks and  cars and left them for road pizza.  Huge buzzards - turkey vultures -  gathered like old clubmen and feasted on whatever had been mashed by such careless drivers.

 

Blue Iguana

 

 Once, I spotted an anole on my windshield,an adventurous soul nestled next to the window-wiper, and I drove to the bank, to the market, to the Post Office and stopped for a take-out fish-dinner at Star Island restaurant, and that lizard just leaped off the windshield when we got home, and she must have had traveling tales like Eudora Welty to tell all her friends.

 I wasn't the only amphibian/reptile amateur on the island - a friend of mine had a Hickatee (fresh-water and land turtle) who answered to the name of YO...  In addition to lizards, I love frogs,but my frog-lover story is for another time.

Feel the Bern

This, as Bernie Sanders might say, was pheNOMenal, not to mention specTACuluh. The candidate who all the experts say doesn't have a chance has been drawing in Obama-size (circa 2008) crowds. The clip above is from last night's Los Angeles rally, which attracted an overflow audience of nearly 30,000 people.

Meanwhile, Fox News now finds itself in the position of having to grovel to Donald Trump after failing to bring him down in last week's debate. His fans were actually threatening to boycott the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. 

Something is happening here. And whatever it is, as both Bernie and Donald would say, it is YUGE.

Any day when media attention can be deflected away from Hill vs Jeb is a good day in America.

Meanwhile, I'd love to see a debate between Bernie and Trump. Or else a pre-emptive debate among Bernie, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, Lawrence Lessig and all other comers. Who, besides Hillary and the DNC, decided that the Democrats must wait until October?

Certainly not the populace. Maybe some enterprising cable outlet can start doing some end runs around the corporate debate committee apparatus, which itself has been doing an end run around democracy for decades now. 

Informal and formal debates alike must also include Jill Stein of the Green Party, which has already filed a lawsuit against the authoritarian Committee on Presidential Debates. 

Plutocratic Study: No Riches For Workplace Bitches

This is the gist of a new report, shockingly not written by Donald Trump, but commissioned by a billionaire every bit as misogynistic as Donald Trump.  

Market based, pseudo-sociological analyses are how women get denied a raise in the age of political correctness. It is just the kind of "research" that neoliberal politicians and pundits will use to justify the status quo of women's 75 or 80 cents to the male employee's dollar. This kind of shlock is just another way of blaming female hormones for women's failure to thrive at work:

 The research shows that when women are equally as aggressive as men in workplace communication, their perceived deserved compensation drops twice as much as men’s—by up to $15,088 a year—and their perceived competency plunges by 35 percent.

Two hacks-for-hire with business degrees (Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield) purport to have either personally or remotely studied 11,000 women in office settings through a psy-ops outfit they call VitalSmarts. It is an offshoot of TwentyEighty Inc, which is an offshoot of Providence Equity, property of billionaire vulture capitalist Jonathan M. Nelson. He apparently is not an attention-seeking narcissist like Trump, preferring to hide his sexism in a Russian doll-type nest of subsidiaries. 

In a world of high-profile media moguls, Jonathan Nelson has made a fortune buying and selling media and telecom properties without hardly anyone noticing. He founded private equity firm Providence Equity Partners in 1989 to invest in communications companies. Today, Providence manages $40 billion in assets and holds stakes in Hispanic TV provider Univision and education Web platform Blackboard. Past investments include YES Network, Warner Music Group and Hulu. In January 2014 Nelson sold his firm's 25% stake in AutoTrader to Cox Enterprises for $1.8 billion, triple what he originally paid for it. A Rhode Island native, Nelson studied economics at Brown and got his MBA at Harvard. He serves on Brown's board and helped fund the school's $45 million fitness center, which bears his name.

Unlike Donald Trump, he subcontracts out the concern-trolling misogyny to his minions. Like Donald Trump, he gives copiously to politicians in both establishment parties. He gave to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008, then switched his allegiance to Mitch "Binders Full of Women" Romney in 2012. Like any plutocrat worth his salt, he hedges his bets and knows who to call when he needs something. 

If women don't get paid or promoted as much as men, say Nelson's paid authors of the white (guys) paper, they also have themselves to blame. If you are a victim of workplace gender bias, that's just terrible. They really feel your pain. But, while you're waiting for the culture to evolve (and rather than sue your boss or co-workers for discrimination or harassment) they suggest that you change your behavior, and for that matter, your whole personality. Become more obsequious. Shrink, and grow rich:

“Speaking up in forceful, assertive ways is especially risky for women,” said Grenny, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations. “An emotion-inequality effect punishes women more than men. Women are burdened with the assumption that they will conform to cultural stereotypes that typecast women as caring and nurturing. Speaking forcefully violates these cultural norms, and women are judged more harshly than men for the same degree of assertiveness.”
Grenny said that emotional inequality is real and it is unfair. And while it is unacceptable and needs to be addressed at a cultural, legal, organizational, and social level, individuals can take control.

 Notice how pay inequality is no longer the issue. Emotional inequality is the issue.

It takes an innovative neoliberal mind to not only invent a social problem brand called Emotional Inequality, but then to capitalize on it by both diagnosing and treating the alleged sufferers. Not to to worry, ladies. They will give you a script, and if you follow it faithfully, you can squelch your bitchiness and morph right into Richie Richiness! It's all in the "framing": 

As explained in the white paper, by framing the assertive statement with what the authors term a “behavior phrase,” a “value phrase,” or an “inoculation phrase,” the negative perception was significantly reduced. These phrases include:

• “I’m going to express my opinion very directly; I’ll be as specific as possible.” (behavior phrase)
• “I see this as a matter of honesty and integrity, so it’s important for me to be clear about where I stand.” (value phrase)
• “I know it’s a risk for a woman to speak this assertively, but I’m going to express my opinion very directly.” (inoculation phrase)

The white paper explains how and why such framing phrases work so effectively.

Now, I am going to go out on a dangerous limb here, and don't take this the wrong way, guys, but what if Megyn Kelly had used these groveling techniques when questioning Donald Trump the other night? I bet you wouldn't see the continuous flood of bile coming out his mouth or wherever, if she had only politely asked, "I see this as a matter of honesty and integrity, but please allow me to humbly remind you, Mr Donald Sir, that you have called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals."

On second thought, that is probably a terrible example. Megyn Kelly is not your average female wage slave. She is not spied upon without her knowledge by researchers with remote video cameras. She gets paid well to be in Roger Ailes's Fox News stable of blond bombshells. She gets paid very well to play the part of provocatresse with a whip .She is an extremely well-remunerated actress in the Neoliberal Theater of Sadism. She's a ratings magnet with a functioning brain. 

Although she self-identifies as a crusading journalist, she is more inquisitorial Judge Judy than muckraking crusader Ida Tarbell.

She operates from the right wing Fox studio to provide scripted vicarious relief to all those oppressed, underpaid, overworked, moody and unappreciated female worker bees out there, while at the same time titillating millions of male masochists. The plutocratic white paper advising  women to bottle it all up and act nice to assholes was never directed at her. Megyn Kelly will probably get a bonus from her bosses after her bravura performance. She will get richer, right along with The Donald.

Emotional Inequality is for the little people. It's just the latest fake ailment peddled by the permanent ruling class to make you feel bad about yourself. It is meant to make it seem like the overlords care about you while they control you and deflect your attention from their own bloated wealth, greed and stinginess. 

Rather than confront your bully, you are trained to coddle your bully. You are advised to be sensitive to your bully's trigger points and play the part of the proper servant.

Oligarchs like Jonathan M. Nelson will always find new ways to gaslight and cash in on the Precariat. First, they pathologize you. Then, they blame you. Then, they promise you a cure. Then, you pay.

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Unless, with all due respect of course, you refuse to get with their cruel program.

Links/Open Thread

There's been enough written about the GOP debates, the various hangovers suffered by the various pundits and bloggers covering the GOP debates, and the battle between the odious Donald Trump and the odious Fox News to make the Internet explode. Therefore I am desisting. For now, anyway. I plan to go outside and get a lot of fresh air this weekend. No links needed. The stories are everywhere.

Ditto for the Jon Stewart hagiography machine. The satirist for the ages is currently vying with Trump, that other satirist for the ages, for this week's Greatest Clicks award.

In other news (not that you'd know that there was any other news):

The New York Times dog-whistles the accusation that President Obama is a dog-whistling anti-Semite for daring to criticize Aipac's multimillion dollar ad campaign to squelch the Iran nuclear deal. Writes Julie Hirschfeld Davis,

Mr. Obama’s advisers strongly disputed the suggestion that he used coded language to single out Aipac when he said in his American University speech that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.”

“This has nothing to do with anybody’s identity; this is a policy difference about the Iranian nuclear program,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “We don’t see this as us versus them,” Mr. Rhodes added, predicting that the White House and Aipac would work closely in the future on other matters, including Israeli security. “This is a family argument, not a permanent rupture.”

Well, that's all good then. Israel and the USA are members of the same family, just as the American economy family and the American government family are just like your family. (Whenever a politician or operative uses the word "family," you can be very sure that something nasty is afoot.)

The Times unquestioningly accepted Aipac's denial that it is funding the mammoth PR blitz against the Iran deal, even though it has been proven the pro-Israel government lobby is behind the effort. I got a call a month or so ago from this lobby, called Citizens For a Nuclear Free Iran. The woman haltingly and ineptly reading from her script claimed she had a direct open line to somebody she hilariously called "Senator Chuck" (she meant Schumer) and insisted she connect me to him immediately so I could personally voice my terror, outrage and confusion. I hung up on her, but now wish I hadn't, if only to find out whether she did, in fact, have direct access to Senator Chuck. Because every time I try to call him -- say, on the TPP -- his mailbox is mysteriously full.

***

 Speaking of phone calls, it has now reached the point where my home phone has become an instrument of torture, payable by me. Every other call I get is from "Bridget from Card Services," or some guy claiming that my Windows system is a mess, but if I will just give him all my passwords, he can fix it for me remotely. I tell him I prefer to wash my own windows with a weak ammonia solution, thank you, and then I hang up. That "Do Not Call" registry is a joke. So is the app claiming to be able to block robo-calls.

***

The latest monthly jobs report reveals that the Precariat is still teetering, "solid and steady," on the brink of destitution. This disaster of crappy pay, part-time jobs and temporary gigs is a big fat bore, as far as the Times is concerned. But I bet they are not half as bored as the youth of America. Nearly half the teenagers who went looking for a job this summer were unable to find one. The number of unemployed people aged 16-24 increased by a staggering 2.1 million in just the last quarter. All the old people are stealing the sub-minimum wage/commission- only phone solicitation jobs.

***

For those lucky enough to have a real job, the latest thing is for your boss to plant a microchip under your skin to make sure you're not playing Solitaire on his dime, or otherwise goofing off, even on your own time. This is also being done, supposedly, to track your "wellness," because your health is of the utmost importance to them. It is estimated that by next year, most major corporations will fit workers out with "fitness trackers."  At Amazon, warehouse workers are already monitored by GPS before they're stopped and frisked -- on their own dime -- upon leaving the workplace.

*** 

For those lucky enough not to have Big Brother for a boss, there is always entrepreneurship. Some unknown bootstrapper out there in Washington DC exerted some good old-fashioned American can-doism by paintballing the American war thug presidents in their alleged balls.

If thuggery doesn't do it for you, maybe the Postmodern Incestuous Industrial Complex will: 

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