The Culling of the American Herd (Update)

The only thing more surprising than a new study showing that middle-aged white people are dying in a virtual epidemic of suicide and substance abuse is that the experts are so shocked by this news. After all, the USA is the richest, most technologically advanced, most exceptional country in the history of history. Aren't minimum wage earners taking advantage of the Obamacare shopping network and champing at the bit to fork over $5,000 in deductibles every year before predatory insurance kicks in to treat their ingrown toenail? What gives?

The discovery by a pair of Princeton economists of the awful truth that tens of thousands of people in their forties and fifties are dying prematurely and unnecessarily was made purely by accident. Co-author Anne Case, herself suffering from a painful and inoperable back condition, was curious about the possible relationships among happiness, pain and suicide rankings in the various states. She and her husband, recent Nobel economics prize-winner Angus Deaton, were stunned to learn that the death rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. The causes of these deaths are not diabetes, heart disease or hypertension: they are suicide, and the liver-damaging, life-shortening effects of alcohol, and accidental overdose from heroin and prescription opioids. 

They write:

 This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population.

The New York Times:

 The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

 (snip)

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

Wow? More like duh. Another economist, from Harvard, is quoted as sniffing that he'd always just assumed that these drug deaths were just "blips on the radar," and  that "everyone's" health is improving, just as the "economy" is supposedly improving. Actually, the new study shows that by "everyone," the experts mean those of a higher educational and socioeconomic status, who can afford to see a doctor because they have actual jobs paying a living wage. The premature death effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent, while they actually fell for those with a college education. 

It's the class war, stupid. It's the wealth inequality, geniuses. It's the corporate media propaganda telling us that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is a "moderate" who will join with Democrats to soberly, responsibly and wonkishly cut what remains of the social safety net out from under millions of struggling, suffering Americans. It's Social Darwinism newly illustrated on a spreadsheet. It's the continued, deliberate culling of the American herd.

This silent epidemic of sadism within the political class has been going on for decades now. That the new findings of premature death are about white people probably accounts for much of the elite shock, since the death rates among blacks and Latinos are still higher than those of even the poorest whites. They simply have reached something of a plateau of pain, while whites are rapidly playing catch-up in their trek to the misery mountaintop.

It's telling that the Deaton-Case study didn't delve into the correlation between the higher death rates of poor whites with residence in states opting out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Liberal pundits are very fond of blaming higher mortality and morbidity among whites in red states on Republican governors and legislatures refusing to join in the expansion, even though it is initially being paid for by federal funds.

Therefore, a Harvard study last year showing that as many as 17,000 people will needlessly die every year in states opting out of Medicaid expansion was met by a group shrug by liberal experts, who pointed to GOP nihilism rather than the despair and hardship of the individuals affected by the lousy economy as the cause. If only more people could access the rare doctor willing to accept those paltry Medicaid fees, the conventional wisdom went, people would be alive and well and happy.

The new study turns that supposition right on its head. Poor people are dying way too young in all 50 states, Medicaid or no Medicaid, Obamacare or no Obamacare. While official Census Bureau figures show that one in six people exists below the official poverty threshold, the reality is much worse when you consider that more than half of us don't have enough savings to cover a $1,000 medical co-pay or a $500 car repair. 

And we are all supposed to be surprised that a person would rather self-medicate with cheap heroin or a six-pack than log on to the Healthcare.gov website and be faced with rate hikes as high as 40 percent a year. Pay up, or else the IRS will charge you a penalty. Your pain is their gain.

It is obvious is that more and more people have been forced to treat their pain with opioids and booze because they can't afford a surgeon or a dentist. The authors of the study are still unsure what came first: the pain, or the substance abuse.  And they do not purport to find a link between the death rate and the financial crisis.

But an earlier study on the increasing fatal use of painkillers by white women squarely blames the plutocracy-spawned financial meltdown for premature deaths of poor and working class females:

Increases in midlife mortality are paralleled by increases in self-reported midlife morbidity….The increase in reports of poor health among those in midlife was matched by increased reports of pain. Rows 4–7 of Table 2 present the fraction reporting neck pain, facial pain, chronic joint pain, and sciatica. One in three white non-Hispanics aged 45–54 reported chronic joint pain in the 2011–2013 period; one in five reported neck pain; and one in seven reported sciatica. Reports of all four types of pain increased significantly between 1997−1999 and 2011−2013….
The epidemic of pain which the opioids were designed to treat is real enough, although the data here cannot establish whether the increase in opioid use or the increase in pain came first. Both
increased rapidly after the mid-1990s. Pain prevalence might have been even higher without the drugs, although long-term opioid use may exacerbate pain for some (26), and consensus on the effectiveness and risks of long-term opioid use has been hampered by lack of research evidence (27). Pain is also a risk factor for suicide (28). Increased alcohol abuse and suicides are likely symptoms of the same underlying epidemic (18, 19, 29), and have increased alongside it, both temporally and spatially.
Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience (lanekenworthy.net/shared-prosperity and ref. 30). The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans (31).

Between 2007 and 2013, median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and about 100 plutocratic families owning as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent of Americans combined.  The wealth gap is now the highest ever recorded.

And the experts still have the chutzpah to call themselves "startled" that half a million desperate white people (a probably too-low figure, in my opinion) are killing themselves at rates comparable to those during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Methinks they had better rethink their definitions of the American Empire, and American Exceptionalism.

We'd also be wise to define Chronic Despair as a public health emergency. The pathology of the plutocrats is trickling down like a ton of Ebola and killing people right in their tracks.

Democracy Upside Down

It's not surprising that in its obituary of Sheldon Wolin, who died last week, the New York Times studiously avoided any mention of the term for which this political philosopher is most famous: inverted totalitarianism. Instead, the obit's headline misleadingly and somewhat crankily blared that Wolin was an expert on "the limits of popular democracy."

So it was all the more eerily prescient that in an interview with Chris Hedges last year, Wolin observed that it is essentially verboten for the media-political complex to openly declare that American democracy has been kicked upside the head, resulting in the creation of the Total Capitalistic State. Speaking such a truth might give the plutocratic ruling class a bad case of agita, even if it's mentioned in the obituary of the man who made educating the public about this inconvenient truth his life's work.

Wolin was talking about the capture of private media and public institutions by unfettered capital long before Bernie Sanders started running for president, of course. And given that such plain-speaking from within the political establishment is as rare as a snowball in hell, whether Bernie does in fact have a chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination has been rendered moot. He is changing the dialogue. He is mentioning the S word, (socialism) and the world has not come to an end. That is quite a revolutionary breakthrough in the historic scheme of things.

The recent rise of Bernie Sanders is comparable to the rise of Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in the early 20th century. TR failed to win the presidency under that populist banner, but the rhetoric still became part of the conversation. Wall Street was put on notice. And by the time the market crashed in 1929, the populist stage was set for Cousin Franklin's New Deal.

What Sheldon Wolin has called the radical experiment, "an unprecedented expansion of state power during peacetime" of FDR's great social programs has been under reactionary attack ever since, with the Democrats wimping out to Republicans when they are not actually aiding and abetting them. The Cold War and the fight against Communism was the initial excuse for shredding the safety net, with that excuse now morphing into the perpetual War on Terror. Fear and want, they think, will keep people quiet.

 That Sanders is even getting mainstream coverage on the proposed expansion of New Deal programs should at least put a temporary halt to their open evisceration by the GOP, and their piecemeal evisceration by Clintonian Third Way Democrats. To that extent, he is right about his campaign being tantamount to a revolution.
 
It's the beginning of a counter-counterrevolution against the corporate capture of government."The ultimate merger would be between capitalism and democracy," Wolin wrote of the right-wing war against the New Deal in Democracy, Inc. "Once the identity and security of democracy were successfully identified with the Cold War, the stage was set for intimidation of most politics left of right."

Unlike Nazism, Stalinism and fascism, inverted totalitarianism in the United States is "a system driven not by an individual ruler, but by abstract totalizing powers, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on 'private' media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events."

Here's looking at you, New York Times, from your boosting corporate political candidates, to your boosting preemptive wars of aggression, to bowdlerizing the message of one your harshest, most accurate critics in the obituary that you just deigned to write about him. 

"Managed democracy" is the definition of inverted totalitarianism. American democracy is largely contained within the now-permanent electoral process. We are invited to give our opinions on candidates and wedge issues rather than upon substantive issues. We're invited to rail against Ben Carson's snake oil and Marco Rubio's sordid finances instead of the things, like medical care and paychecks, that affect us personally. We're invited to equate voting for a pre-selected candidate with legitimating that candidate.

Wolin wrote, "The United States has become the showcase for how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed. This has come about, not through a Leader's imposing his will or the State's forcibly eliminating opposition, but through certain developments, notably in the economy, that promoted integration, rationalization, concentrated wealth, and a faith that virtually any problem -- from health care, to political crises, to faith itself -- could be managed, even subject to control, predictability and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of the product. Voters are made as predictable as consumers.... The regime ideology is capitalism, which is as virtually undisputed as Nazi doctrine in 1930s Germany."

Another word for this state of affairs is "neoliberalism," or as Margaret Thatcher charmingly defined it, "There is no alternative." (TINA.)

That is why, even though he might not have a chance of winning, Bernie Sanders is turning TINA right on its over-inflated head. He's chasing away the apathy that the oligarchs are counting on. He's afflicting the comfortable. And that includes Hillary Clinton. Even if she wins the presidency, she will lose political capital and public approval for every campaign promise that she decides to break.

Meanwhile, here is the complete 2014 Real News Network conversation between Sheldon Wolin and Chris Hedges. It's divided into eight 20-minute parts, so you can watch it at your leisure.

Commentariat Central

 *Updated below

(Part of a continuing series of New York Times comments by yours truly, with some added commentary in this post to make the fun even funner.) 

Charles Blow, Hillary Clinton Wins Again

Blow makes his centrist political preferences and Times group-think perfectly clear with his second column in a row canonizing Hillary Clinton. The fact that his other gig is on CNN (the Beltway group-think/ terror channel) explains it all.

Here's a sample from his latest ode to the Empress-in-Waiting: 

She is far from flawless, but she is no slouch or dummy. She is sharp and tough and resilient. She is a rock, and she is not to be trifled with.

The Clintons as a couple, and individually, are battle-hardened. They are not new to this. They are survivors. Even when they lose, they survive. No upstart congressman or woman can do more damage than has already been done and dealt with.

Why can’t these people see that? Oh well…

And Blow's obligatory ode to Libya war cheerleader Elijah Cummings (Centrist D-Black Misleadership Class):

 Toward the end of the 11-hour hearing, Cummings said to Clinton:

“You have laid it out. I think — you’ve said — this has not been done perfectly. You wish you could do it another way, and then the statement you made a few minutes ago when you said, you know, I have given more thought to this than all of you combined. So I don’t know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s talking about?”

He continued:

“We’re better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That’s not what America is all about.

My response to Blow:

 With all due respect to Elijah Cummings, Congress is not "better than that." With its approval rating at 15%, Hillary Clinton went into that hearing knowing full well that it would be a marathon campaign commercial, the equivalent of five victorious prime-time debates between a competent politician and a group of bumbling idiots and sadists that made even Ben Carson and Donald Trump look reasonable and kind.

Her composure and stamina were enormously boosted by her fellow Democrats. who obligingly used their time to praise her to the heavens while placing one figurative dunce cap after another upon rapidly deflating Republican heads. There weren't any questions on reports that Benghazi was the site of a secret CIA prison or its use as a hub for illegal arms smuggling to Syrian rebels, for example. There were no questions about her brokering a $20 billion arms sale to the Saudis, who then donated a cheap $1 million to her family foundation. No Democrat questioned her retention of Cheney neocon Victoria Nuland.

 The over-the-top right-wing inquisition of Hillary Clinton has served to temporarily defuse legitimate criticism of her actions and policies from the left. Memories of the Clintons' betrayal of poor women through the odious Welfare Reform Act of 1996 are forgotten as besotted pundits praise her as a role model for beleaguered women everywhere.

Watch out for those falling shards as she breaks the glass ceiling, and Wall Street cries all the way to Wall Street.

***

Paul Krugman, Free Mitt Romney!

No, he isn't being snarky or ironic. He thinks that Romney, in his heart of hearts, is a really cool technocrat who just doesn't get enough credit for inventing Obamacare. I haven't been keeping count, but this has got to be about the hundredth of all Krugman's blog-posts and columns over the past several years which have inordinately praised the Affordable Care Act.

Krugman is especially pleased that some rich people in his own social set are happy with the program, no doubt because they are able to afford the ridiculous premiums on the Gold Plan, or whatever they're calling health coverage for the pampered ruling class these days:

How good is the insurance thus obtained? Not perfect: despite subsidies, policies are still hard for some to afford, and deductibles and co-pays can be onerous. But most people enrolled under Obamacare report high satisfaction with their coverage, which is hugely better than simply not being uninsured. And may I inject a personal note? If truth be told, I live in a pretty rarefied, upper-middle-class-and-above milieu — yet even so I know several people for whom the Affordable Care Act has been more or less literally a lifesaver. This is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a really big deal.

Well, unlike his Times colleagues, Krugman is rare in his honesty. He readily admits that he is a snob.

My response to him: 

 Meanwhile, Mitt's running mate Paul Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, as well as getting rid of Obamacare and tearing the rest of the social safety net to shreds. But Joe Biden has just come to his defense, saying that Ryan is "a good guy" with whom Democrats should be eager to cooperate.

And therein lies the problem. The DNC leadership has veered so far right that it is either reduced to shooting diseased GOP fish in a barrel, or pretending that bipartisanship is still a good thing. It's reduced to defending a clunky insurance program that benefits only some of the people some of the time.

Yes, the expansion of Medicaid to some of the working poor is to be applauded. But the fact remains that at least 30 million of us remain uninsured or underinsured. Thousands of people are still dying because they can't afford to see a doctor. 

Medicare for All (John Conyers' HR 676) is getting well-deserved new attention through the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Not only would it cover everybody from cradle to grave with medical, dental, mental health care and drug therapies, it would actually save as much as a trillion dollars a year. From "consumers" who must now enter a fraught health care lottery every year in order to enrich the increasingly consolidated insurance industry, we'd be able join the rest of the civilized world in defining health care as a basic human right.

Forget about freeing Romney. How about freeing 330 million Americans via Medicare for All?

*** 

As a further antidote to Times-think, here's Bernie Sanders tearing it up at last weekend's Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. (Yes, the Dems unfortunately still honor a slave-owner and an ethnic cleanser.) 

* Update, stop the presses! Maureen Dowd tells Public Editor Margaret Sullivan that her "Column (about Beau Biden's death-wish) Is Accurate."

I wrote about this planted column when it was published on Aug. 2. And presto change-o, months later, during the same week Biden decided not to run, he appeared on TV to huffily disown the whole bathetic story about Beau's death-wish. And now the New York Times is embroiled in yet another "scandal" of its own making. It seems that news reporter Amy Chozick extrapolated from Dowd's puff piece the image of Beau on his death-bed, a la The Gipper, when all  Dowd had done was place him sitting up at the kitchen table. Seriously.That is how seriously these very important, shallow people take themselves.

My comment:

It was so obvious that Joe Biden and/or his operatives used Maureen Dowd and the Times as the vehicle to float his presidential trial balloon. Whether Beau had the alleged conversation with his dad as he sat dying, or whether he had the conversation as he lay dying, or whether the conversation existed at all, is a moot point.

I remember that her column appeared earlier than usual that weekend, and that moderators immediately placed reader comments saying "Run Joe Run!" in the "Times Pick" category, effectively sequestering those that were more skeptical. The agenda was perfectly clear.

As others have noted, the propaganda was mutually beneficial to both Dowd and Biden. If her column did not suit his express purposes, don't you think he would have immediately demanded retractions on both her column and Amy Chozick's subsequent article?

Biden had come under renewed criticism in the past few weeks, when his PAC ran a maudlin commercial which shamelessly used Beau Biden's death as a vehicle to push his father's candidacy. The VP demanded that it be taken down because it was that obvious and slimy and phony.

And now that he is no longer running (or at least until Hillary Clinton possibly implodes) he suddenly comes out and makes a stink about the Beau column and the articles on "60 Minutes." It seems to me that Regular Joe bears as much of the blame for this whole mini-scandal as the sycophantic press corps.

Lesson to pundits and reporters: don't be shills for the powerful.

WHO, Meat?

How can you tell that you live in an oligarchy, where money and profits trump human health and well-being?

When the consolidated corporate media frames a new report showing that red and processed meats cause cancer around how mad and sad these findings make the meat industry feel. Not about how each 50-gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases your chance of colorectal cancer by 18%.

As far as they're concerned, this is not only about how eating certain foods might make you sick and dead, but about how shockingly un-American the report by the World Health Organization truly is. Hating hot dogs would be as unpatriotic as hating Exceptional USA, dontcha know.

The Wall Street Journal's lede:

 Red and processed meats have the potential to cause cancer in humans, according to a report by a World Health Organization agency that is drawing ire from meat industry groups that argue the science is inadequate.

 The Washington Post's take:

The report by the influential group stakes out one of the most aggressive stances against meat yet taken by a major health organization, and it is expected to face stiff criticism in the United States.

Get ready for outraged The War Against Steak coverage to vie with The War Against Christmas on Fox. Get ready for the congressional sausage-makers to open up their gluttonous maws for millions of lobbyist dollars to help them bring home the bacon even as they continue to cut food stamp stipends for the working poor and retirees. According to the Post, it isn't the meat that's deadly: it's the international health group itself:

 But the panel’s decision was not unanimous, and by raising lethal concerns about a food that anchors countless American meals, it will be controversial. The $95 billion U.S.  beef industry has been preparing for months to mount a response and some scientists, including some unaffiliated with the meat industry, have questioned whether the evidence is substantial enough to draw the kinds of strong conclusions that the WHO panel did.

It looks as though carcinogenic meat will be the next big Climate Change Debate. Gluttony will be given equal time with moderation and abstention in order to make the coverage, as well as the meals, fair and balanced. The debate largely centers around semantics. Although red and processed meats have long been linked to cancer, this is the first time they have actually been said to cause cancer. 

In recent years, meat consumption has been the target of multi-faceted social criticism, with debates erupting not just over its role on human health, but the impact of feedlots on the environment and on animal welfare. The public debate over the WHO's findings will likely play out with political lobbying, and in marketing messages for consumers.
But at its core, the dispute over meat and cancer revolves around science, and in particular the difficulty that arises whenever scientists try to link any food to a chronic disease.

In order for scientists to prove once and for all that red meat causes cancer, long-term studies of red meat consumers and non-red meat consumers would have to be conducted. And it would be so inhumane to force-feed tons of bacon to groups of hungry guinea pigs just to prove that they will develop cancer at higher rates than vegans and fish eaters. And goodness knows, the food industry only has our health and best interests at heart. Therefore, they suggest that we simply ignore the WHO report.

The meat industry is already taking tips from Big Tobacco and getting their big lies ready. 

They will repeat the lies often enough and loudly enough to give them the patina of truth.

The North American Meat Institute derides even less strident findings than those of WHO as "flawed and nonsensical," claiming that today's modern meat is less fatty and more nutritious than yesterday's meat, and that processed meat is more readily consumed than ordinary meat, and that it also makes you feel fuller faster because of  its "nutrient density."

If this sounds like bunk, it's because it is bunk.

As if that were not enough, the Institute also claims that the excessive salt added to processed meat is good for you, too! 

“As an ingredient in meat products, salt is used as a preservative, which is one aspect of a multi-hurdle approach toward maintaining product safety,” AMI said. “In the last 20 years, the meat and poultry industry has also learned in more quantitative fashion the importance of sodium chloride in managing pathogenic bacterial risks presented by L. monocytogenes, Salmonella, and pathogenic E. coli in processed meat and poultry items.”

Who wouldn't pick a slow death from colorectal cancer or hypertension or heart disease over an instantaneous, nasty case of food poisoning?  Or, as the Lesser Evil Caucus  phrases it, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

And if you feel guilty about eating a formerly living animal, don't. Because slaughtering methods are so much more humane than they were when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. So says Big Meat.

Most important, the meat industry is the biggest sector in the agriculture industry, which in turn is the biggest sector of the whole lousy US economy. Therefore, if you don't eat carcinogenic food, there will be no metastatic growth and progress.  Forgoing bologna sandwiches would destroy thousands of low-wage jobs in charnel houses and meatpacking plants. Never mind that thanks to "free trade," American meat is now being shipped to such slave-wage countries as China for processing and shipping back to our dinner tables.

And did I mention that the North American Meat Institute is one of the secret negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Did I even have to? They truly put the mystery back into the Mystery Meat.

The Benign Inquisition of Hillary Clinton

You've seen the already iconic images of Hillary Clinton at her Congressional hearing on Benghazi yesterday. The bored resting of the hand on the regal chin, the dismissive flicking of imaginary dirt off the regal shoulder, the barely contained smirk on the regal face as the good cop Dems squandered the opportunity to ask her substantive questions and instead used our time to pay her court.

It was eleven hours of kangaroo court testimony taking place at the eleventh hour of our moribund democracy. One set of plutocrats did battle with another set of plutocrats. And the Queen-in-waiting was, in the words of Democratic operative Donna Brazile, steely, stoic, and serene.

It was an eleven-hour-long campaign commercial and fund-raising opportunity. Emails urging us to have Hillary's back arrived at regular intervals. We were urged to show our proletarian solidarity by sending a few bucks her way to supplement the hundreds of millions already supplied to her by Wall Street.

 Hillary Clinton could never have offered such a bravura performance without such a strong supporting ensemble cast of comical Torquemadas, Macbethian shrews, fawning fan-waving Uriah Heeps, soldiers of fortune,  and a whole Greek chorus full of wailing pundits. It helped her case enormously that Trey Gowdy, the guy touting himself as Best Actor in a Sadistic Series, seemed to be going for the Ed Grimley look.

Hillary Clinton ventured forth from her mobile Petit Trianon and donned shining designer armor for a one-day-only performance as Joan of Arc under siege. But instead of being tied to the stake, she was plopped up on an embroidered cushion atop expensive leather upholstery. The rest of us were glued to our seats as Hillary endured the third degree by a right-wing cabal of third rate actors. She came out of the whole Grand Guignol ordeal smiling, refreshed and smug.

And why shouldn't she be happy and relieved?  She was never questioned on her real crimes and those of the Obama administration. To wit: 

The extent to which the non-Congressionally approved Libya adventure destabilized the country and led to the attack was left largely unexamined. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has previously revealed that Benghazi was the hub for an illegal gun-running operation to Syria. And then-CIA director David Petraeus's girlfriend, Paula Broadwell, has let slip that Benghazi was also the site of a secret, illegal black-ops prison. 

Nor was Clinton confronted about the administration's role in the ongoing migrant and refugee crisis engendered by the Libya bombings and other wars of aggression, and her individual role in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, and the ensuing refugee crisis and imprisonment of Central American mothers and children in Homeland Security immigration prisons.

Hillary Clinton has every reason to feel happy, relieved and triumphant. Her twin  personality traits and political techniques  -- victimization and survivalism -- remain intact.

Judge Dread and the Corporate Vampires

When it comes to exploiting and extracting from poor people, one Alabama judge certainly knows how to put the blood back into Churchillian blood, toil, tears and sweat.

In the true spirit of Halloween and turbocharged capitalism, rural Circuit Court Judge Marvin Wiggins has devised a unique form of punishment for minor offenders. If you can't pay the fine, you don't necessarily have to do the time in debtors' prison. All you have to do is open up a vein and relinquish a pint of one of the last personal resources that you still have left.

The New York Times has all the grisly details:

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” began Judge Wiggins, a circuit judge here in rural Alabama since 1999. “For your consideration, there’s a blood drive outside,” he continued, according to a recording of the hearing. “If you don’t have any money, go out there and give blood and bring in a receipt indicating you gave blood.”

For those who had no money or did not want to give blood, the judge concluded: “The sheriff has enough handcuffs.”

Forcing someone to undergo an invasive medical procedure in order to extract revenue for the state is unethical, if not downright illegal, posing as it does a public health danger from an unvetted blood donor population. According to the Times, dozens of "offenders" found guilty of everything from running a stop sign, to poaching, to drug use, dutifully lined up at a blood drive van in the courthouse parking lot. They were issued receipts, and were promised $100 off their fines, or old debts.

Who knows? Some of them perhaps were already employed in the gig economy as "plassers," entrepreneurs who supplement their meager incomes through regular hook-ups at their local blood banks. Even then, the plutocracy must take its cut, as donors are paid their $50-a-pop not by cash or check, but via plastic debit cards. So every time the plasser buys something in Walmart, a bank deducts a fee. That telltale pale bruised look that you see on struggling people is often a result of chronic anemia as well as malnourishment and the fatigue of working two or three minimum wage jobs.

Blood donations as a way of paying fines and bills were more common during wartime, but were largely abandoned by the justice system as outbreaks of hepatitis and H.I.V. scared government officials right out of their sadistic, bloodsucking greed.

Ironically enough, the for-profit mobile blood bank operating from the Alabama courthouse parking lot was run by LifeSouth, which had recently lost a $4 million lawsuit over an H.I.V.-tainted blood transfusion. The thirst for money is like a vampire. It dies hard, if it ever dies at all.

When LifeSouth couldn't contact all of Judge Wiggins' involuntary donors to ask some of the required medical questions ex post facto, the biological collection agency ended up discarding all the blood it had drawn. The Times article doesn't specify whether it disposed of the blood properly, or whether it simply dumped it into the nearest drinking water supply.

And to add insult to injury, a spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center says Wiggins the Impaler even reneged on his promise to reduce the defendants' fines by $100. His victims may yet have to serve jail time for the crime of hunting for their own food after dark, and other offenses against the oligarchy.

Meanwhile, blood is a very big business. Along with charter schools and EBT food stamp cards, it is just one of the myriad ways for the rich to profit from the poor.  Even so, the onerous chore of sucking the lifeblood out of people makes the corporate vampires kvetch. So much of it ends up spoiling due to those dreaded market inefficiencies.

Ben Bowman, the CEO of a private blood mill originally called "General Blood" told Forbes magazine that more than a million pints of the valuable red stuff get tossed every single year. His business plan is to undercut the Red Cross by operating a one-stop blood sales and distribution hub smack dab in the US Heartland.

Bowman, 33, can offer pints at an ­average price of $229. He’s contracted with donation centers along the Interstate 35 corridor—from Laredo, Tex. to Duluth, Minn.—to ship blood by FedEx  to hospitals that have agreements with General Blood. Bowman and 30-year-old cofounder David Mitchell guarantee delivery of the mix of types (O+, AB and B–) that hospitals prefer for local populations; blood types vary somewhat by ethnicity.

Bowman teamed up with a former investment banker from Wells Fargo (which also made a pile of dough off the poor via its subprime mortgages and foreclosures) to devise his business plan, which is predicated on an excess of the blood supply resulting from the financial collapse which Wells Fargo helped to cause in the first place. Fewer people can afford to have elective surgeries, even necessary surgeries, because of no jobs, no insurance, or junk insurance with sky-high co-pays and deductibles. Forbes reporter Erin Carlyle ghoulishly notes:

 Critics say this gave General Blood an opening: soaking up the excess and ­distributing pints where they were needed. But when the economy eventually turns and more people have those operations, there will be less need for a middleman.

“We’re projecting that as the boomers get into their 70s, you’re going to see a lot more hip replacements, knee replacements,” says Jim MacPherson, CEO of America’s Blood Centers, a network and trade organization. “We project, over the next five to six years, that blood demand will start increasing again and could increase rather dramatically. At that point there’s no more surplus, [and] General Blood probably goes away.”

But the upstart Lestats were not discouraged and soon expanded operations into an Internet blood exchange. It operates like E-bay: hospitals and blood entrepreneurs can compete and bid on batches of Type O-Positive. Goldman Sachs can even get into the act, drawing on its social impact betting formula to place odds on how long a given vat of Type B will stay fresh before it is lost, stolen, sold, transfused or otherwise imbibed.

And don't tell me about those medieval leechers, either, because General Blood was a recent, and proud, semifinalist in the Minnesota Cup contest for venture capitalists. 

  But after a few years in the biz, the CEOs realized that "General Blood" sounded a bit boring and macabre, so they renamed it Hema Vista. (translation: spectacle of blood). And to go with its brand new marketing image of a bright-red sunset, it is now also based in The Cloud! 

Let's face it, folks. Judge Wiggins of Alabama is just a very small vampire in a very big castle.

Skål, Amerika!

Just as Woodrow Wilson made the world safe for democracy, Larry David has made Bernie Sanders safe for America.

Once you've been impersonated by an A-list comic who regularly plays golf with Obama, you have finally arrived as a respected mainstream politician. Paul Krugman will even break down and write a whole column about you. OK, so I exaggerate. He actually wrote a column about Denmark, and somehow concluded that Hillary and Bernie are the same person. Or, to be more specific, he glibly turned Hillary's snarky debate remark about Denmark into a "demure" Bernie mind-meld in order to spread the message that Hillbern is better than Republicans. She is not only a progressive, she's a damned born-again socialist to boot!

Krugman boldly goes where no pundit has gone heretofore. He goes to Denmark, and proves that it is not the scary Commie place that the Beltway Thought Collective makes it out to be. It turns out that not only are those dour Danes outrageously fortunate, they rank at the very top of the global life satisfaction heap:

Denmark maintains a welfare state — a set of government programs designed to provide economic security — that is beyond the wildest dreams of American liberals. Denmark provides universal health care; college education is free, and students receive a stipend; day care is heavily subsidized. Overall, working-age families receive more than three times as much aid, as a share of G.D.P., as their U.S. counterparts.

To pay for these programs, Denmark collects a lot of taxes. The top income tax rate is 60.3 percent; there’s also a 25 percent national sales tax. Overall, Denmark’s tax take is almost half of national income, compared with 25 percent in the United States.

My published comment:

 The Nordic countries in general rank among the happiest places on earth. Our own version of the happiest place on earth is the Disney theme park. The wages are low, and the high price of admission is way out of the reach of what is still quaintly called the middle class. In that sense, Disney is a true American symbol.

Despite this being a rich country with the highest health care costs on earth, we still lack universal coverage, still rank near the bottom in morbidity and mortality. Inequality is extreme.

Scandinavian happiness is predicated not upon money and consumerism, but upon societal solidarity. Their politicians don’t wage wars, have SuperPACs, or campaign for years on end. That fascism is now gaining a toehold even in Northern Europe speaks to the contamination by Eurozone austerity and the migrant crisis spawned by American wars of aggression.

 It's no wonder that deficit hawks don’t want to hear about Scandinavia. But how ironic, their crabbily calling Bernie Sanders a grumpy Quixote as he talks about happy countries. He merely speaks the truth that we, too, could get a good thing going if we’d only tax the richest families and corporations at about the same rates that they were taxed during the Eisenhower years. You might even remember those wonder years, when Walt Disney built his empire, and the middle class reached its zenith, and all you needed to be happy was a steady job and a living wage and a secure retirement.

Skål, Bernie!

In response to another Times commenter who took umbrage at my unpatriotic dissing of Disney, I wrote:

 The price of a one-day Disney pass has been jacked up to $108 per person, while the workers employed there as characters are paid low wages and no-to-low benefits. Rich families can go to the head of the line by paying extra, or by paying down-and-out people to wait in line for them. It is truly all-American, right down to the classism and the jingoism and the buy-buy-buy mentality.

At Tivoli Gardens, Denmark's iconic amusement park, children under 8 are admitted free and adults are charged the equivalent of $15.

My point was that American and European values, and their measurements of happiness and well-being, are worlds apart.

And I personally don't know any struggling families who can afford a day at Disney World.

But I digress. Upon further reflection, I fear that my toast to Bernie may have been somewhat premature, if not downright misplaced. My Bernie-emblazoned mug of Carlsberg is not only losing its froth, it's going flatter by the minute. It seems I'd missed Bernie's TV appearance yesterday in which he declared himself A-OK with Obama's wars. How can you be a democratic socialist and a war-monger at the same time?

As always, the good folks over at the World Socialist Website have the bummer of a lowdown. From the transcript of Bernie's  interview with ABC-Disney's George Stephanopoulos, in which he dodged and weaved on how, why, when and where he would use unilateral military force:

BS: Well, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.... I think sensible foreign policy and military policies suggest that it cannot be the United States of America alone which solves all of the world’s military…

GS: In all circumstances?

BS: Well, of course, you know, I’m not saying, you know, I don’t want to get into hypotheticals. I didn’t say in all circumstances.

The WSW's Patrick Martin is scathing in his assessment:

While Sanders is happy to denounce George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq as one of the worst decisions ever made in US foreign policy, he made no reference to the devastation created by Barack Obama’s interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.
Sanders is in no sense an “antiwar” candidate. He uses demagogic condemnations of “millionaires and billionaires” and the growth of social inequality to appeal to working people and young people who are deeply opposed to American militarism, but only to divert their attention from the growing danger of the imperialist war. His support for the policy of the ruling class abroad exposes his pretense of opposing the policy of this same ruling class within the United States.
Even on the infrequent occasions when he has discussed the disastrous consequences of US policy in the Middle East, it is only from the standpoint of American nationalism, not genuine opposition to imperialist war. Once in a while, Sanders bemoans the casualties suffered by American troops or the waste of resources better used at home, but he has never indicated any sympathy for the people of the countries targeted for destruction by US military interventions.

Krugman was wrong about the Bernary mind-meld, but only insofar as it pertains to their economic policies, which are as different as FDR and Clinton. Bernie and Hillary are, unfortunately, of the same mindset as regards US militarism. Why else would he not confront her about her pathological plot to bomb Libya and the subsequent refugee crisis that it engendered?  Why else would he ignore the corruption of her family foundation, and her record billions of dollars in arms sales to despotic regimes?

So, to be a Bernie supporter or not to be?  All I can say to you is "to thine own self be true."

Meanwhile, Bernie proclaims himself so pleased with Larry David's impersonation of him that he thinks the comic can substitute for him on the stump.

But if you think Bernie tells it like it is, how about Lewis Black trying to explain Amerikan kapitalisme to a bunch of socialists from Amsterdam? This rant makes Bernie look like a centrist Democrat on Valium:

 "Pull out your gold fillings and put them on E-bay. I'm getting the &*$% out of here!"-- Lewis Black.