Plutocrats in Plunderland

Just as Hillary Clinton was professing her sudden and unexpected opposition to exclusionary charter schools, the think tank founded by her own campaign manager was very conveniently and coincidentally going on full school privatization overdrive offensive.

Clintonite John Podesta's Center for American Progress, already exposed as a corporate front group by Senator Elizabeth Warren, has gathered together the usual suspects -- private equity vultures, Silicon Valley moguls, neoliberal politicians, charter school advocates, billionaire philanthropists and lobbyists -- under a telltale hashtag called TeachStrong. (the immediate supposition that teachers are inherently weak and in dire need of improvement should be your first clue about their true agenda!)

I got the email announcing #TeachStrong on Tuesday, which appropriately enough was also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Alice In Wonderland". So get ready for a tortured trip down a neoliberal rabbit hole:

It's time to elevate and modernize the teaching profession. (began CAP's email.)

Our students are falling behind internationally. In an effort to catch up, we are asking more from our teachers than ever before. Yet we continue to provide them with inadequate preparation, training, and pay.To address this gap, the Center for American Progress and 40 partner organizations are launching the TeachStrong campaign. It is a movement to change the national education policy conversation and make modernizing and elevating the teaching profession the most pressing and significant education policy priority for our nation. As a part of the campaign’s launch, TeachStrong held an event today with Governor Jack Markell (D) of Delaware and Governor Terry Branstad (R) of Iowa, where they discussed the need for a bipartisan effort to act.

"Modernization" is the neoliberal buzzword for privatization. And whenever they crow about "bipartisan" you can almost feel the tentacles of Wall Street grasping you around your throat. And whenever they brag about their "diverse" groups joining together for a project, you can rest assured that even cursory searches of their funding and leadership will reveal astroturf groups within political parties within marketing divisions within corporations.

 Governor Markell, (D-Oligarchy) for example, was one of the original members of Bill and Hillary Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, a/k/a the party's conservative Big Business wing. Before entering politics and most recently becoming an education concern troll, he held managerial positions at First Chicago Corporation, McKinsey, Comcast and the Nextel Corporation. As governor, one of his first accomplishments was the legalization of sports betting. In December 2013, following a lengthy investigation,  a special prosecutor found that Markell had violated campaign finance law in 2008 by advising high-rollers how to sidestep donation limits. However, since the very brief statute of limitations had expired, and the prosecutor graciously allowed that ignorance of the law is an excuse when it comes to the misdeeds of VIPs like Markell, no criminal charges were ever pressed against him. 

Markell is just the type of principled, qualified cat we need to help kids learn and to "elevate" teachers and improve their skills, don't you think?

 

My Reality Is Just Different Than Yours

But back to #TeachStrong and its diverse group of partners with the Brave New World goal of "building a better teacher." 

Trust me: this gets curiouser and curiouser, the further down the rabbit hole you plummet, and the harder you try to dig your way back out of the muddy morass. 

But take a peek behind the curtain anyway...

... and you can find the entire Fab Forty on the #TeachStrong webpage. To discern the funding and the people behind each partner, simply Google each of them individually, and then look for the fine print under "Our Board" or "Our Advisers" or "Our Directors" or "Our Team." Much to your surprise, you will discover that many of the "diverse partners" making up #TeachStrong are actually subsidiaries or downright clones of themselves! Here's a sampling of the subterfuge:

"Alliance For Excellent Education": led by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, a lobbyist for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Common Core testing-for-profit program. His alliance is a front group for something called Digital Learning Day, which sells educational software to public schools. From that, he has developed "Project 24," which in turned spawned "Future Ready Schools," which gets taxpayer funding from Obama's Department of Education. Besides being a recent recipient of the "Bammy Award," he also serves on the Barbara Bush Family Literacy Board. Like a bipartisan circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.....

Anyway, Wise gets assistance at his Alliance from Daniel H. Leeds, who also  happens to sit on the board of the Center for American Progress! It's a small world after all. Leeds is the president of Fulcrum Investments, a private equity firm with a stake in charter schools and educational software.

"America Achieves": Another charter school front group, listing its funders as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Will and Flora Hewlett Foundation among other philanthrocapitalists. Its executive director, Jon Schnur, served on Barack Obama's transition team and as an advisor to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who is soon leaving public service to spend more time with his money family.

"Digital Promise": This front group is at least upfront about admitting that teachers and students are not its top priorities. According to the website: "Building relationships with developers and entrepreneurs is core to Digital Promise’s work. The Corporate Partner Program aims to create mutually beneficial relationships between our corporate partners, our staff, and our network. We engage with corporate partners as thought leaders, co-designers, and problem solvers alongside our education leaders and researchers."

Well, if you can engage with Thought Leaders, who needs any damned teachers? And their corporate sponsors are a Who's Who of the Oligarchy. The ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates, Hewlett Packard, McGraw-Hill, Apple, Amazon, Discovery and Microsoft to name just a few. Ka-ching! 

And the Board of Directors is to die for. Among them is one Gilman Louie, described on Digital Promise's website as "the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. (my bold.) Previously Mr. Louie built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Mr. Louie founded and ran a publicly traded company called Spectrum HoloByte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer. He has served on a number of boards of directors, including Wizards of the Coast, Netwitness, Ribbit, Zephyr Technologies, the National Venture Capital Association, the CIA Officers Memorial Fund and currently chairs the Mandarin Institute and the Federation of American Scientists."

Just the kind of intelligence expert we need to spy on entertain advertise to teach our kids, and to elevate our teachers to the highest heights of servitude, huh?

"Emerson Collective": Founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder and jobs off-shorer Steve Jobs, this "partner" of the CAP anti-teacher offensive is obviously in no great need of outside funding. As a result, watch for a Brave New World Jobs Elementary coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Students will concentrate not on the Three R's, but on "personalization" and "syncing." Needless to say, this involves lots and lots of very pricey educational software, to be installed in both homes and classrooms. Mrs. Jobs explains:

"We've developed a set of algorithms that choreograph the movement of students between learning stations (that include both live and digital instruction), identify the skills and concepts each student is ready to learn as well as which of their classmates need the same skills. As a result, students spend more time on skills they are ready to learn, understand their personal learning goals, and are accountable for their own learning. Learn more about our most recent results here.

Are we all mad here, or do you think that Laurene Jobs and Gilman Louie would make an excellent team? Ka-ching on steroids!

"Hope Street Group":  Just when I thought I'd finally reached rock bottom of the rabbit hole with Laurene Jobs' Orwellian vision, there is this hilariously named education reform front group. Actually, you should probably abandon hope once you've entered this domain, which prominently features the mugshot of outgoing Education Sec. Arne Duncan. It seems to have little or nothing to do with actual teaching, what with its core message that education must be viewed as "an economic opportunity," along with health and jobs, small j, to be oxymoronically aligned with "market forces for social good." (the accepted definition of Clintonian third way politics, or neoliberalism.)

 The Board of Directors is a star-studded cast of plutocratic characters from private equity, the tech industry, vulture capitalism and the predatory health insurance cartel. 

Hope Street is definitely Arne Duncan's baby (or at least one of them), now that he is retiring from "public service". Triple-triple-triple Ka-ching!

"Third Way": If it's American Progress, and there is money to be made from the commonwealth, you cannot possibly leave out Wall Street billionaire and Clinton pal Pete Peterson. Now that his austerity for the masses initiative is in temporary hibernation due to campaign politics, he might as well glom onto public education to get his outsized share, right? This guy actually wants Congress to reauthorize George Bush's No Child Left Behind scam, and the Clintons' think tank is welcoming him with open arms, just as Bill and Hill welcomed him with open arms to their family foundation, and even lent out daughter Chelsea in calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The aforementioned astroturf organizations are just a tiny slice of the Center for Progress's #TeachStrong initiative. To be fair, there do seem to be a few legitimate teachers' groups interspersed among the lot for appearance's sake, not least of them Randi Weingarten's American Federation of Teachers, which mysteriously endorsed Hillary Clinton without even bothering to take a vote from actual members.

 "... if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

Commentariat Central

The poobahs of the New York Times opinion section were up to their usual reality-altering tricks this past weekend.

First, there was Maureen Dowd's pre-mortem elegy to George H.W."Poppy" Bush, which had the desired effect of plugging the new hagiography by Jon Meacham. The book has gleaned headlines because Poppy finally chastized W over Iraq at the same time he called Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld a couple of "iron asses."  Dowd painted a picture of a principled elder statesman tortured in his dotage by the legacy of his idiot son. Riffing on Dylan Thomas, she mawkishly urged Poppy to "not to go gentle, man, into that good night."

Meanwhile, pouncing on a recent study on mortality rates, good Christian bitch Ross Douthat raged, raged against "The  Dying of the Whites" and blamed the usual cultural breakdown and lack of religious faith for the epidemic of suicides and drug abuse among poorer white people. If only whites could learn to be as accepting of their reduced circumstances as blacks and Latinos are to their chronic marginalization, he said, maybe then they'd give life a chance.

And not to be outdone, Paul Krugman yawned, yawned against the dying of the whites as he boringly blamed, blamed the Republicans rather than globalization and political corruption and the oligarchy for the epidemic of suicides among struggling middle-aged white people. He said there might be something to Douthat's cultural breakdown theory after all, while proclaiming that the jury is still out as to whether income inequality and the greed of the plutocracy has anything to do with poor people dropping like flies for no strikingly apparent reason that he can fathom. So it must be the fault of those nasty replicons. And Krugman, acknowledging that Obamacare and a slight raise in the minimum wage might "not be enough to cure existential despair," does not offer any solutions of his own, or God forbid, give a shout-out to Bernie Sanders' social welfare agenda.

I responded to each of these lovely people. First, to Dowd:

I think I'll give Meacham's bio a pass. That the publisher's blurb brags that he was granted unique access to all Poppy's and Bar's diaries as well as to their august doddering selves should be your first clue to run for the hills. Your second clue is that Poppy is openly shilling for what smells like a shameless hagiography*.

The fact is that a corrupt scion like W can only grow out of a corrupt family tree. An oil-rich Skull and Bones river oozes right through the thought-free realm that shelters this whole misbegotten dynasty.

Unmentioned in the cheap Freudian analyses about obscenely rich fathers and sons is the fact that Poppy himself never could have clawed his way to the top without the help of the Ford administration's Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Although Poppy followed the grand Bush family tradition of being woefully underqualified, they orchestrated his appointment to head the CIA as a cynical means of pushing back against the Church Committee. Once there, Poppy accomplished such feats as destroying all the records of the CIA's hideous mind control experiments. He helped the Neocon cabal give birth to their whole criminal enterprise 40 years ago. They enriched the military-industrial complex by falsely hyping Soviet threats, just as they would later falsely hype the Iraq threat.

They always were asses, iron or otherwise.

Intelligence failure is built right into the Bush DNA.

They deserve neither biographies nor therapy. They deserve indictments.

*********

Now, my retort to Ross Douthat: 

It's the class war, stupid.

Ross blithely supposes that since black death rates haven't been increasing as sharply as those for poor whites, the suicide epidemic must be a cultural, religious thing as well as an economic thing. The fact is that black mortality still surpasses white mortality. It's just that in this age of record wealth inequality, whites are finally gaining parity in the race to the misery mountaintop. Or, to be more accurate, the plummet to the depths of a hell created just for us by a de facto pathocracy.

Douthat's suggestion that blacks and Latinos have developed some sort of "resiliency" to oppression that should be emulated by whites smacks of both classism and racism. In other words, his prescription is to just get used to the new feudal order, and pray a lot. Indulge in the opiate of the masses instead of Oxycontin, and all will be well in your pathetic little worlds.

Here's my prescription: instead of voting against their own economic interests and keeping the Republican Simon Legrees in power, desperate white people should join in solidarity with their brown and black brothers and sisters and fight back against the oppression and inequality.

Thanks to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. the idea of democratic socialism is starting to sound mighty appealing to the dispossessed of all races, colors and creeds.

Let's follow his advice and automatically register all people to vote on their 18th birthdays. Let the revolution begin.

******

Finally, my comment on Krugman's "Despair, American Style":

Capitalism on crack, deregulation, globalization, the corruption of the money-hungry political class: These are the poisons causing our existential despair. Call it post-modern eugenics.

Corporate coups like NAFTA, and the looming TPP and TTIP, shutter the factories that traditionally employ lower-educated white people, driving their jobs offshore and depressing their wages. People who are "shockingly" killing and over-medicating themselves know that they will never get another job. "This ('free trade') is not a bloodless process," then-Sen. Barack Obama correctly told a group of financiers at the Hamilton Project back in 2006.**

Meanwhile, we're informed that if we haven't succeeded, we haven't tried. We have a "skills gap." Fascist right-wingers urge us to hate thy neighbor as thyself, while centrists tell us to look at the wonderful new job stats as we sign up for predatory health insurance and they "fight" for a slight increase in the minimum wage by, say, 2020 or thereabouts. Leftist pols who want to expand -- not just "protect" -- Social Security get little to no coverage in the complicit, corporate press.

It was only recently that the government began cracking down on the notorious "pill mills" of Florida, and restricting the manufacture of limitless numbers of opiates. (Read "American Pain" by investigative journalist John Temple, and the Case-Deaton report won't seem shocking at all.)

Chronic despair should be declared a public health emergency.

*******

The New York Times pundits should take heart, though. As the dynastic George W. Bush himself once admitted, "I don't understand how poor people think." 

* Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of "Family of Secrets," posits that the new bio is a huge cover-up. That most people will neither buy it nor read it matters not. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. Baker offers exhaustive evidence in his own book that, far from being the mild-mannered virtuous statesman of legend, Bush the Elder has been up to his eyeballs in intrigue and corruption and dirty political tricks his entire life. It was Poppy, for example, who gave Karl Rove his first big break. Baker even suggests a Bush-as-CIA spook connection, through various degrees of separation, with the Kennedy assassination. Yikes. Needless to say, his book was almost universally trashed by the establishment media when it was published, via that tried and true technique called "gaslighting the author." (See: Seymour Hersh.)

** Note Obama's opening remarks in the video above, as he smarmily congratulates Robert Rubin ("Bob") and the other architects of the soon-to-be worst financial meltdown in history for leading the country on "the path to prosperity." Note how he refers to the victims of globalization as "losers."

Obama readily acknowledges to the plutocrats vetting him that "trade" deals like the TPP are harmful to regular people. He admits that the "work being done here" has horrific consequences, and says nothing to discourage it. This performance was effectively his audition to head the Democratic ticket. He obviously passed with flying colors.

COGs (Continuity of Government) in the Machine

Holding Corruption Harmless

It's always bothered me when politicians try to satirize themselves, because it tends to co-opt and take the bite right out of real satire. It was the late Molly Ivins who defined satire as the prime weapon that the powerless have against the powerful. Effective satire always punches up, never down or sideways or inward.

When presidents do it, usually at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, their self-satire has the desired effect of rendering their crimes against humanity into cute little foibles. The audience of sycophants chuckles right along in knowing complicity.  Who can ever forget the laugh riot of mass murderer George W. Bush pretending to peer under his desk in a futile search for WMDs after his misbegotten invasion of Iraq? 

 Then it was Barack "Kill List" Obama yukking it up in the same venue a few years later, warning the singing Jonas Brothers to stay away from his then pre-pubescent daughters lest he decide to aim his Predator drones their way. Bug-splat and pink mist will kill them every time. You'll never see it coming.

When mere presidential wannabes seek campaign laughs to go along with their dark money, they finagle themselves onto Saturday Night Live. It was Donald Trump's turn last night. His appearance was a ratings bonanza for NBC, what with all the buzz that his performance might be interrupted by hecklers calling him a racist.The network news even made itself the news as it showcased protesters gathered outside its own studios, threatening to storm the barricades. Any protester who managed the racist shout-out on live television was promised a $5,000 cash reward by a human rights group. The suspense had built up to a fever pitch by the Trump made his appearance.

And the winner was.... Larry David, in full Bernie Sanders character. As Trump appeared onstage to deliver his monologue, David obligingly appeared in the wings, on camera, right on cue, right on script, to yell out "You're a racist!" And the audience roared with appreciation. And any protest moment was immediately co-opted, any incipient hecklers immediately silenced. They were laughing way too hard. Everybody got in on the joke. It was one entertainer ribbing another. It was an example of sideways satire. No harm, no foul. The show must, and did, go on. And multimillionaire Larry David is $5,000 richer.

And the human slime machine that is Donald Trump was immediately rendered harmless.  

And the winner was.... NBC, with its advertising and ratings bonanza. It might even have managed to recoup its losses after having self-righteously fired Trump from Celebrity Apprentice when he called Latinos entering the United States a bunch of thugs and rapists.

Besides showing that self-directed political satire is usually a dud, the SNL production proved that the long-blurred line between politics and entertainment no longer even exists. It also demonstrated that Trump is an untalented, stiff amateur when it comes to delivering lines which somebody else has written for him. The show would probably have been better if he'd been allowed to do the usual full improv.

Last night's SNL skit of Trump in the Oval Office, immediately post-election, was nothing less than a third-rate modern take on Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. That was the story of how fascism comes to America, and how the Corpo Party takes over and everybody is very happy.... for a very short while. So maybe the SNL writers did have something up their sleeve after all when they envisioned Trump changing the national anthem into "It's Yuuuuge!" Maybe they were just attempting to set Trump up, rather than Trump co-opting them in what he thought would be a fun, free campaign ad. But if SNL was also trying to scare or enrage people, they failed miserably. I found myself yawning and nodding off instead of quaking with fright, screaming "racist," or God forbid, laughing.

The reviews have not been kind. The New York Times called it "a stilted and unfunny performance," Salon deemed it "an epic fail," and the Guardian groused that it was "nothing short of torture."

Having Trump on SNL was as if the Weimar Kit Kat Club had showcased Adolf Hitler joking that some of his best friends are Jews and Gypsies, and then having Lotte Lenya screaming at him from offstage in a scripted retort. A good time was had by all, even by the incipient concentration camp denizens. Life is a cabaret, my friend.

 Because if our great American racists and fascists and war criminals can't make fun of themselves, what good is democracy?

The sun will rise and the moon will set. It'll all go on if we're here or not:

 

American Empire: Dripping With Blood and Disdain

When he testified to an overly friendly Senate committee last month about the American military attack on a charity hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, General John Campbell promised a full accounting of the "collateral carnage" by Halloween. His self-imposed deadline has come and gone. Everybody is shocked, shocked I tell you. Not.

Meanwhile, an independent report released Thursday by the actual victim of the attack, Médecins Sans Frontières, was also greeted with a group yawn by the complicit mass media. Revelations that doctors were decapitated or had their legs blown off by American air-gunners as they fled their burning hospital were buried beneath a very tiny headline on today's New York Times homepage, just below the apparently more important news that Ben Carson isn't trying to woo black voters, and that Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie didn't make the cut for the next Top Tier GOP debate show.

It could not be clearer that the elites of the political-media-military nexus want us to forget about this horrific war crime perpetrated in all our names. As MSF (translated as Doctors Without Borders) has learned to its chagrin as its requests for investigatory help from 76 separate sovereign nations have gone coldly unheeded, the tentacles of  Superpower encircle the globe in a literal stranglehold.

Meanwhile, we can read the medical charity's own report of the carnage inside the hospital right as it happened.

Especially chilling is the revelation that an unnamed US official  from Washington, D.C. called the medical staff the day before the attack and specifically demanded to know if Taliban fighters were "holed up" within the hospital before smarmily inquiring as to staff safety. The MSF responded that they were treating patients at full capacity, and yes, the patients included wounded Taliban members. This turned out to be the calm before the airstrike storm. There had been virtually no fighting in the area, as General Campbell had initially claimed.

"MSF staff recall that the first room to be hit was the ICU, where MSF staff were caring for a number of immobile patients, some of whom were on ventilators," according to the report. Two children were among the victims burned alive in their beds.

From the ICU ground zero, the Americans proceeded to methodically destroy the library, the emergency room, the laboratory, the mental health unit, the outpatient department, the physical therapy department and the operating suite. Doctors were killed as they performed surgery, as were two patients lying anesthetized on the tables. A nurse suffered a traumatic amputation, his arm hanging by a thread as he rushed, covered in blood, to an administration building to awaken and warn other sleeping staff members.

Witnesses reported that airplane gunners seemed to be directly pursuing the medical personnel and patients fleeing the carnage to seek safety in other buildings. The open-air victims of the prolonged attack included a patient in a wheelchair.

The total number of known dead has increased from 22 to 30: 13 patients, 10 staff, and seven so badly burned as to be unidentifiable. 

At the time of the attack, the hospital was well lit and easily identified by a large lettered flag on its rooftop, the report said.

Christopher Stokes, general director of MSF. told a news conference in Kabul:  "A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage.From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war. You cannot do this. You cannot bomb a hospital.”

He suspects that somebody, somewhere, decided to relieve the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions. That icy phone call from Washington right before the attack lends credence to that suspicion. The bombing of the hospital was neither collateral damage nor was it a passive-aggressive mistake that was made. It was pure, brutal, cold-blooded murder.

Unless the Obama administration indicts those responsible (the US has refused to be part of the International Criminal Court) his much-ballyhooed legacy will be even bloodier than it already is. The man is positively dripping with it, to complement the disdain for the rule of law and democracy that he and most other presidents have harbored with impunity.

Meanwhile, MSF president Joanne Liu is right: "The silence (of the whole world) is embarrassing."

American Exceptionalism

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.