Wassailing the Wealthy (Redux)

Despite all the toil and strife, dare I hope that there is renewed cause for optimism as 2015 grinds to a close? His name is Bernie Sanders, and he is the first presidential candidate since FDR to burst upon the scene and welcome Wall Street's hatred with open arms. His op-ed demanding financial reform in today's New York Times should have the plutes wailing all the way to the slopes of Aspen, drowning out the polluting noise of their own private Lear Jets.

In the spirit of the (hopefully) coming socialist revolution, here's an expanded and updated version of my Christmas post from last year:

The Christmas season is traditionally the one time of year that we're permitted, even encouraged, to burst forth from our hovels to guilt-trip the rich while spreading joy and fellowship throughout the land.

Key word: traditionally. Because according to government studies, the charity coffers are dwindling and fewer of us are reaching out to our fellow human beings in these hard times. In sixteen out of the twenty categories measured in 2013, the levels of social engagement by Americans have plummeted. People were either too busy working multiple minimum wage jobs, or they were too depressed about their worklessness to feel able to extend themselves. Volunteerism, as well as average household wealth, has dropped precipitously since the Great Meltdown of '08. An estimated two million fewer Americans volunteered last year than they did in 2012.

Besides the actual cost of volunteering (say, reliable transportation) are the increasingly erratic work schedules foisted upon the Precariat by the owner class during this New Abnormal Era. People working insecure crazy hours at Walmart or McDonalds, for example, are less likely to commit to helping and socializing because they never know, from one week to the next, what hours they'll be assigned to work. Increasingly, people no longer feel like they own their own time.

Here's a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the volunteerism rate dropped precipitously during the misbegotten reign of Bush the Younger, recovered somewhat at the onset of Barack Obama's second term, and is now sliding once again:

 According to the BLS, volunteerism is now at its lowest point since the agency started keeping statistics in 2002. The rate of "highly educated" volunteers is decreasing more than in any other demographic group.

A survey by Gallup reveals that while charitable giving increased worldwide last year, it fell in the United States, now the wealth disparity capital of the advanced world. The proportion of Americans who reported making a charitable donation decreased from 68% to 63% Nonetheless, the US is still far more generous than most: 

Despite its 12th place rank in giving, the United States retained the index’s designation as the most generous country in the developed world, with relatively high marks in helping strangers (third place) and volunteerism (sixth place).
Worldwide, the United States stood second overall behind Myanmar, where, the report says, the traditions of the overwhelmingly predominant Theravada branch of Buddhism lead to high rates of giving and volunteerism. More than 92 percent of Myanmar survey respondents reported donating money.

 But wait. The professional philanthropy/donor class is becoming ever more selective in its own generosity. The extremely rich are wont to "invest" in places rather than in causes and people, and insist that their charity be tax-deductible. They tend to give to the arts, to medical research (the rich get sick, too) and elite institutions of higher learning. They give to politicians via secretive "charity" slush funds. They give to each other's money-laundering family foundations. They set up charitable LLCs to protect their untaxed wealth. Living, breathing human beings who are not part of one's dynasty are not tax deductible  -- they are, however, eminently disposable. Charities such as the Salvation Army and United Way, that give aid more or less directly to the poor, are really hurting this year.

Charles Dickens had a description for the narrow-minded charity of the elites. He called it  "telescopic philanthropy."

In Bleak House, his satiric masterpiece on social class and greed and the evil that men do, one of the most memorable minor characters is Mrs. Jellyby. In her ostentatious zeal to concern-troll the denizens of a far-away African backwater, she neglects her own home and children. Mrs. Jellyby is the Victorian fictional counterpart of such modern-day philanthrocapitalists as Bill Gates and the Clinton Family, who set their sights on largely foreign, arcane initiatives while the wealth disparity and poverty and misery in their own country are allowed to continue as their own rich selves only grow richer in the process.

Dickens's trenchant definition of this kind of self-serving charity is "rapacious benevolence."

"There were two classes of charitable people," he wrote, "the people who did a little and who made a great deal of noise; the other, who did a great deal and made no noise at all."

Mrs. Pardiggle, another obnoxious character in Bleak House, sounds eerily like the presidential candidate who never tires of boasting how tirelessly she works for "the struggling, the striving, and the successful." 

 "I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The quantity of exertion (which is no exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!"

And her staged visits with ordinary folk -- "great shows of moral determination and talking with much volubility" -- are at carefully vetted, focus-grouped events, with the poor people acting as mere props.

"Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word."

As Hillary Clinton also said, "It's not easy, it's not easy. And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do." And, "everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion." 

According to her official (auto) biography on the White House website, Hillary Clinton has "worked tirelessly on behalf of children and families" from the time she was a child herself. Her work ethic and stamina are the stuff of legend. Even after falling and breaking her elbow while Secretary of State, she returned to working tirelessly almost immediately. Anybody who doesn't realize that she never spares herself from her grueling schedule just hasn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. She must astonish even herself as she temporarily divests herself from her family's charitable foundation and travels the country, making a Great Noise about how much she cares.  

But enough about everyday Americans. What about those everyday benevolent raptors, aka the philanthrocapitalists? What are they up to this season of Yule for the wealthy, gruel for the rest of us?

Says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "The favored charities of the wealthy are gaining in share of the philanthropic economy. The total amount of the money given away by the very wealthy is going up, not because they're giving away a greater share of their income, but because their total wealth itself has grown."

The wealthy are great hiders and hoarders of their record wealth. As well they should be, given that the 80 richest people on earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population combined.

And that brings us to the lost tradition of wassailing: directly accosting and assailing the uber-rich, Bernie Sanders-style, for a share of the pie that they stole right from off our collective windowsill in the dead of night. The modern substitute of representative democracy, in which the politicians we elect to represent us are supposed to tax the rich in order to even the playing field is yet one more tradition now relegated to the scrap heap of the public good.

The custom of orphans and beggars going door to door and serenading the ruling class right where they live dates at least as far back as the third century. The landowners and nobility would  briefly open their homes to provide a little warmth, food, and mystery liquid from the Wassail Bowl. The wassail songs themselves were but gentle, good-natured reminders to the rich that 'tis the season for noblesse-obliging.

During times of plague and famine, however, the wassailing tradition would often devolve into armed home invasions, leading to the siege mentality so common among our sensitive ruling elites today. Not that wassailing ever really caught on in Exceptional America anyway, founded as it was on a shiny, right-leaning hill. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrims actually banned the whole celebration of Christmas! Those Puritans we honor at Thanksgiving were the original Bah-Humbugs.

Let's face it: fast forward, almost 400 years, and anybody daring to go on a Wassail Jaunt through the Blackwater-guarded gated communities of the Forbes 400 is really taking his life in his hands.

In early 19th century New York City, the rich and the prominent were very upset when the rabble rabbled during Yule. Gunfire, bread riots, lots of sex and drunkenness and vice sent the privileged behind locked doors, where they've remained ever since. The evolution of Christmas in income-disparate America into insular closed-door gatherings was a direct result of elite paranoia.

New York City Christmas Riot, 1806

In the mid-19th century, just as unfettered capitalism and the Industrial Revolution were gearing up with a vengeance, an Englishman named William Henry Husk departed from the bland God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen feel-goodism and repurposed the traditional Wassail carol to fit those particular hard times. He might have titled it "Soaking the Rich at Christmas." It was during this same magical era that Karl Marx was stirring things up with his revelations of the capitalist war on labor, and when Charles Dickens was sticking it to the greedy rich in his popular novels. The Scrooge-like forbears of the oligarchs of Kochtopia and Walmartistan were just as annoying then as they are now.

Here's what greeted Ebenezer Robber Baron back in the day:

We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door.
But we are neighbours' children
Whom you have seen before.

Jo the street sweeper from Bleak House (Mervyn Peake)

  Tell that to Congress and the plutocrats who own the government. Our rulers have once again evoked the Ayn Rand Who Stole Christmas in order to fill the begging bowls of the too-rich by draining those of the less fortunate. The coal in recent stockings consisted of food stamp cuts and ending long-term unemployment insurance. The latest lumps for the Lumpen are pension cuts and transforming what's left of our savings into gambling chips for Wall Street casinos.

As Bill Moyers wrote in his eloquent Christmas essay: 

The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11. As Michael Winship and I described here last Thursday, the bill is a bonanza for the donor class – that powerful combine of corporate executives and superrich individuals whose money drives our electoral process. Within minutes of its passage, congressional leaders of both parties and the president rushed to the television cameras to praise each other for a bipartisan bill that they claimed signaled the end of dysfunction; proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media (including public television and radio), especially the networks and cable channels owned and operated by the conglomerates, didn’t stop to ask: “Yes, but work for whom?” Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin — repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not “a perfect bill,” it does a lot of good things. “But for whom? At what price?” went unasked.

We have got a little purse
Of stretching leather skin
We want a little of your money
To line it well within.

We asked Santa for a tax on high speed trades. This relatively modest surcharge and some relatively modest affordable tax increases on the richest .01% would fund health care, highway improvements and public education. Helping those less fortunate -- now commonly known as the refugees from the middle class -- would help the rich, too. A rising tide lifts all yachts. It's time for some trickle-up. Hell, it's time for a geyser. We ordinary people have been stretched and bled dry enough.

So let's get on with the sarcasm, shall we?

Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth
Bring us out a mouldy cheese
And some of your Christmas loaf.

It's not prime rib we want, but it would be nice if a few banksters went to jail for that subprime mortgage fraud. Just a slab of tainted cheese and some of that rock-hard fruitcake from last year to keep a little flesh on our ribs. A living wage of at least $15 to start would be nice, too. That thin Yule Gruel of platitudes and bootstrap-boosting Randian rhetoric just doesn't do it for us any more.

And while we're waiting for the inevitable revolution, here's one last rich-shaming stanza to tide you over:

Good master and good mistress
While you're sitting by the fire
Pray think of us poor children
Who are wandering in the mire.

Needless to say, this mildly socialistic version of the Wassail Song is probably not being piped through to plutocratic office parties. The various recorded versions still around are heavily bowdlerized. The mouldy cheese is transformed into "tasty" cheese in one rendition. In other version, the money for our purses is reduced to "a few coins." Nor is it likely to be heard on the automated loops of easy listening holiday tunes coming from a corporatized FM radio station studio devoid of any actual human wage-earning DJ. The Christmas music will be cut off precisely at the stroke of midnight on December 26th. That's when the annual mad stampede for the post-holiday sales and binge of gift returns will get underway.

This is not to say that actual Christmas caroling is not still around. You just have to know where to look for it. And look no further than the great American cultural center-cum-New Abnormal town square: the shopping mall. (or Galleria, if you prefer to be elite.) The voices are singing and the bells are ringing to get shoppers in the mood to spend and consume till they drop.

You can even find a modern version of the Wassail Bowl. It's over at the food court, and it's called a self-serve soda machine. And it'll cost you.

Cheers and happy holidays to Sardonickists everywhere!

P.S. And on a lighter note... If Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn ever goes wassailing, it'll probably sound something like this: 

Update: Those Other Terrorists

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling for a criminal investigation into October's deadly US  bombing attack on a charity hospital, where the death toll has now reached at least 42. The destruction of the Médecins Sans Frontières facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan was so complete that an accurate death count has been impossible. Some victims were literally incinerated in their beds, while others remain buried beneath the rubble. Moreover, within a few days of the sustained bombing by an AC-130 gunship, American tanks had returned to the scene in order to level what had not already been crushed. 

Since the United States has thus far balked at subjecting itself to any outside scrutiny of its rampage, HRW has bluntly told Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that the criminal inquiry must be conducted outside the usual chain of command. It seems that the One Indispensable Nation has a nasty habit of covering its ass in cases like this.

From the HRW press release:

Human Rights Watch analyzed information from the US military, MSF, and other sources and found that there is a strong basis for determining that criminal liability exists. Under the laws of war, hospitals have special protections from attack, and attacks on them can be war crimes.

“The attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz involved possible war crimes,” said Sarah Margon, Washington director. “The ongoing US inquiry will not be credible unless it considers criminal liability and is protected from improper command influence.”

Only a week ago came revelations in the New York Times that members of an elite Navy SEALs unit were promoted, rather than punished, for beating a group of men they had arrested. One of their victims later died.

 "It is essential that you publicly and explicitly clarify that ongoing investigations into the Kunduz attack include a thorough inquiry that considers the possible criminal liability of U.S. personnel, including at the command level," HRW's letter to Carter states. "We believe that there is a strong basis for determining that criminal liability exists.... We also call on you to take all necessary steps to ensure that the investigation is independent and not subject to undue command influence."

Carter, thus far, has even balked at releasing the full text of his own internal investigation, instead reducing his alleged findings to the usual "mistakes were made" whitewashing. A separate MSF petition for an outside international investigation was signed by half a million people and was hand-delivered to the White House a few weeks ago. There has still been no response from President Obama.

Where HRW itself falls short, in my view, is in its tepid suggestion that Ashton Carter name his own investigatory panel, to be called the "Consolidation Disposition Authority." That sounds all too coldly close to President Obama's own "Disposition Matrix" measurement for killing any person of military age, any time, any place, anywhere, whom he deems to present a vague existential threat.

And then there's the timing of Human Rights Watch's polite request: only a few days before Christmas, when nobody is paying too much attention to anything other than what they see on the news: in other words, the San Bernardino and Paris massacres, and pundits and candidates demanding ever more American terror strikes and bombings Over There in order to keep us all feeling secure, righteous, heavily armed and eternally paranoid Over Here.

 Donald Dumpf doesn't have the fascism market cornered at all. In case you still haven't heard, you won't just be electing a president. You'll be electing the commandant of the Wehrmacht. Cue Leni Riefenstahl:

 

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

 ** 12/20: Readers, please feel free to join the discussion on last night's debate in the comments section below.

  *12/19: Updated below

'Twas the week before Christmas and all through Times Square, they finally stopped joking 'bout Bernie's wild hair.

And much to my wondering eyes did appear a headline, above the New York Times homepage fold, containing the name of Bernie Sanders!

But wait. The article didn't mention Bernie's record two million donors, or his two major union endorsements until the very end, as a kind of afterthought. Rather, it gleefully spread the news that one of his campaign's workers* had "breached" a voter database belonging to President-designate Hillary Clinton. The only thing shocking about this news is that Hillary Clinton is actually allowed to own a bunch of our names. Our personal information has been collected and collated, possibly without our knowledge. Politicians are cyberstalking us, and then they have the nerve to get upset when a rival inadvertently uncovers their strategy and methods. Don't we have a say in all of this?

Very conveniently, a firewall set up by the Democratic National Committee was allowed to collapse just as the Sanders worker went on his computer. The DNC immediately pounced, barring the Sanders campaign from accessing any further voter information from its site.

This should tell us three things. First, that the DNC website is as much a bungled mess as Healthcare. gov. Second, that Hillary Clinton and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz are taking the Sanders campaign very seriously. They see the same polls and numbers that we do. If they weren't scared, they wouldn't give a shit about what some low-level Sanders staffer was doing with Hillary's precious information.

The third possibility is that the Sanders campaign was simply set up.

But for now, they are "disciplining" Bernie for the data breach, even while admitting that it was a software error of their own subcontractor's making that enabled the Sanders staffer to see what he couldn't later unsee. The poor peeper was summarily fired for peeking at Hillary's data.

From the Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasanti: 

The Democratic National Committee has told the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that it was suspending its access to its voter database after a software error enabled at least one of his staff members to review Hillary Clinton’s private campaign data.

The decision by the party committee is a major blow to Mr. Sanders’s campaign. The database includes information from voters across the nation and is used by campaigns to set strategy, especially in the early voting states.

The breach occurred after a software problem at the technology company NGP VAN, which gives campaigns access to the voter data. The problem inadvertently made proprietary voter data of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign visible to others, according to party committee officials.

The Sanders campaign said that it had fired a staff member who breached Mrs. Clinton’s data. But according to three people with direct knowledge of the breach, there were four user accounts associated with the Sanders campaign that ran searches while the security of Mrs. Clinton’s data was compromised.

The timing of this news is exquisite, coming as it does on the very eve of the third primary debate among Clinton, Sanders, and Martin O'Malley. While Hillary might choose to not bring it up during the festivities, the publicity is at the very least designed to rattle Sanders' nerves as it implicitly impugns his heretofore spotless integrity.

Ironically, it was the Sanders campaign that has been warning the DNC about lax security on its digital databases.

Meanwhile, the Times is finally taking note that the Democratic debates are few and far between, compared to the nonstop GOP series of circus acts. Columnist Frank Bruni, for one, disingenuously wonders why he is just now hearing about this kick in the teeth to democracy. Maybe it's because he's been holding his fingers over his ears when he is not opening them wide to hear every blast of every Trump, Cruz, and Carly?  

My published response to the former restaurant critic/current horse-race style maven:

It's a little late for Frank Bruni to grouse over the Undemocratic Party specifically, and the demise of democracy generally.

By my count, since last June, he has written 6 columns devoted exclusively to Donald Trump, 3 on Ted Cruz, one on Carly Fiorina, one on Ben Carson, one on Scott Walker, and one on each of the four GOP debates. He's written 3 on Hillary, one of which inordinately praised her performance at the first and only weeknight Democratic debate.

He has written zero columns about Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.

But Bruni is only part of the group-think pack which seems to have made a pact to either ignore Bernie, or to gently castigate him. ("he's unelectable, proles, because we say so!") This is regardless of the inconvenient truth that Bernie is more popular than Trump, and that a recent Quinnipiac poll has him beating Trump by a wider margin than Hillary.

Media Matters reveals that ABC is the worst, having devoted 81 minutes to coverage of Trump, to Sanders' 8 seconds.

Over the past month there have been 22 Sanders headlines in the NYT and 64 in the Post, while Trump got 145 headline mentions in the NYT and 535 64 in the Post:

https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/wheres-bernie-media-ignores-sanders-...

Here's a challenge to Frank Bruni. Break away from the Group-think Pack and devote an entire column (serious and issues-centered, not snarky) to Bernie. Your readers will thank you.

(In retrospect, I should probably have been more careful what I wished for. More rapid than eagles, let the prancing and the pawing begin. Stay tuned for some very serious commentary about the Great Bernie Breach, or How Hillary Got Hacked.) 

* The worker was not a low level naif, as I'd originally surmised. He was, in fact, Josh Uretsky, Bernie's national digital data director. Uretsky told MSNBC that his breach of Hillary's info was an intentional way of alerting the DNC about how effed up their security is, comparing it to leaving a friendly note in the hallway of a homeowner who'd stupidly left his door open. That is a pretty poor analogy, in my opinion. He should have compared it to staying on the premises till Hillary and her security detail returned (probably from breaking into a different house or database down the street), and then pleasantly surprising them with a welcome home party, complete with cocktails and snacks. Leaving a note, then cutting and running is just so lower class. You have to stick around and schmooze a little.  Amazon gift cards for the Clinton volunteers would have been a nice gesture, too.

Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign took the DNC to federal court, suing the party apparatus for breach of contract over its rude slamming of Bernie's own door on his own house of data. A temporary truce has been declared, though the lawsuit is continuing. Maybe Hillary and Bernie can have a beer summit like the one Obama conducted with professor Skip Gates and the cop who arrested him for attempting to breach his own home while black. I hope not, though. Hillary is she who cannot be placated, so Bernie shouldn't even try. It is looking more and more likely that he was/is being set up... and in a most inept fashion, given the blowback against the DNC and the Clinton machine.

I'll write more either tonight or tomorrow, post-debate. 

Meanwhile, if there is a Dump Debbie (Wasserman Schultz) petition circulating out there, please let me know. The sooner we see the back of that ham-handed autocrat, the better off we'll be.

  

Can We Talk?

The establishment doesn't hate Donald Trump because he's a bigoted narcissist. They hate him because of truths like this that occasionally escape his uncensored maw:

We have spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems, our airports and all the other problems we have we would have been a lot better off I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East but to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion.

I didn't watch the CNN war-mongering infomercial during which Trump uttered those words, because as I noted last month, I am boycotting CNN as a form of silent anti-war protest. Judging from the snippets of it that I have seen and read, though, I did myself a y-u-u-ge favor. What was quaintly advertised as a debate was nothing less than a mental waterboarding of the entire viewing audience. Donald Trump at least provided a little comic relief as he played Good Cop to a group of blathering sadists and an immoderate moderator appropriately named Wolf Blitzer.

Speaking of comedy, it finally dawned on me who Trump reminds me of. He is the male version of his late lamented friend and fellow vulgarian, Joan Rivers. Or maybe the ghost of Joan Rivers has possessed his brain.

  In a stand-up routine Wednesday broadcast live on several channels from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Arizona by way of the mouldering Catskills Borsht Belt, Trump was in full "Can we tawk? Can we tawk?" mode. He perfectly aped Joan Rivers' vocal pattern of never completing a word or a sentence, as a way of expressing and sharing mass exasperation with All Things Stupid. For example, instead of saying "A hundred and fifty" Iranians in a prisoner exchange, he sputtered "A hundred and fi---." You can almost imagine him resting his waving demagogic finger just long enough to pretend-gag himself, Joan Rivers-style. Awwwk!

" And Hillary Clinton?" he ranted. "She leaves and goes back to sleep for a week. It's incre--!" (incredible.)

"Am I wrong? Am I wrong?"  Double-sentencing is a Trump-Rivers standard.

"They are the worst, the worst!" is another of their trademark vocal tics. Also, "It's horrible. Horrible!" And, "It's just---. It's just....!" and its variant, "It's just the worst!"

 

 
And don't even get me started on the mocking of the disabled, a Rivers-Trump staple. So is the fine art of heckling the hecklers:

(OK, so she admitted afterwards that there are two things going on whenever you do comedy: your mouth, and your head. The same can be said of Trump and his improvisational political stand-up routines.)

And last but not least, hate speech against Muslims and Latinos is an entertainment must when your audience consists largely of white refugees from the middle class, feeling more maligned and ignored by the day. The masses must have their scapegoats.

 

Joan Rivers is dead, Donald Trump is alive, and he may become the next president of the Feudal States of America. But take heart, plebs!  Democracy is not really moribund. It has simply morphed into a laugh riot of a reality show. We the people are the paying spectators. We'll have the freedom to chortle till we die.

Amirite, or am I wrong... am I wrong that this is just... this is just the worst, the worst?

It's horrible.

Immunity, Impunity, Plutocracy

(optional soundtrack)

The very rich and the very incorporated have long been able to rob, plunder and despoil with de facto impunity. Now, however, the billionaire Koch Brothers and their Republican puppets want to ensure that their flouting of the law will get the rubber stamp of de jure impunity.

The Kochs and their think tank, the Heritage Foundation, are being unfairly praised for spearheading bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation. The decriminalization of low level drug use among the poor and minorities is just the fig leaf they need. Their real aim is to ensure that white collar crime at the very highest levels  may be committed with impunity from now until the cows come home... or more likely, until they are barbecued alive on the polluted killing fields of Koch-sponsored climate change.

That the corruption allowing for the de facto impunity of the rich is well nigh complete is evidenced by the revelation that Obama administration officials have been secretly negotiating the criminal justice reform bill --  not with Congress, but directly with Koch Industries. From The Washington Post: 

Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden huddled Thursday with White House counsel Neil Eggleston and the president's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to discuss the prospects for criminal justice legislation, which has made recent advances but may run aground because of an impasse over a proposal that would change the burden of proof for some corporate crimes.
One measure that passed the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support— the Criminal Code Improvement Act — would require prosecutors in cases as wide-ranging as food tainting and corporate pollution to prove that defendants “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” otherwise known as “mens rea.” President Obama and several congressional Democrats have warned the change could derail legislation that otherwise enjoys significant support from both parties.

In other words, ignorance of the law and of the consequences of criminal behavior would be an excuse.... but only for the very rich and the very incorporated. Not that any BP officials are actually going to prison for the lethal Deepwater Horizon disaster, not that any Wall Street CEOs are actually being prosecuted for the worst financial disaster in modern history, not that any General Motors bigwigs have been indicted for dozens of defective ignition switch deaths. These people simply want the guarantee of immunity and impunity to be ironclad, engraved into law.  All they'd have to do for a get out of jail free card is to plead stupidity.

Because they've grown a little fatter, they've grown a little meaner, and they need that Christmas angel of impunity on their shoulders.

For you and me, ignorance of the law would still be no excuse. An unpaid traffic ticket could still land us in debtors' prison.

The rich want unequal protection under the law. They want to change the Constitution, not just bribe politicians and judges to ignore the Constitution.

And all that Obama and "several" Democrats can do is warn that this death blow to what is left of democracy "could" derail the reform package? I mean, the phony Christmas deadline these officials use every year as an excuse to ram through legislation that hurts citizens and rewards the rich is one thing. That the legalization of plutocratic crime and dismantling of the Bill of Rights is even being contemplated is a whole new kettle of very rotten fish.

Jarrett admits to a very cozy relationship with the Kochs' lawyer, exchanging several emails a week with him to secretly discuss the legislation. (Can't wait for those emails to made public decades from now, when the statute of limitations has safely run out. Or until Wikileaks provides them.)  Right now, the official cover story is that Jarrett is prevailing, getting the Kochs to change their minds about granting premature immunity to rich people and polluters like them as a prerequisite to getting the justice reform bill passed. After all, the chances of them ever being punished for their misdeeds are already near zero. If anything, they are rewarded for their misdeeds, in the form of waivers, tax breaks, and admission to the inner sanctum of the White House itself.

Meanwhile, it is a given that the Koch lawyers are also secretly huddling with Republican congress critters, making them an offer they can't refuse even as they give themselves and the White House cover. Will the White Plutocrats' Impunity Bill squeak through at the 11th hour, just in the time for their holiday vacations to Aspen and Hawaii? Or, do we call up our congress critters and say "Hell, NO!"

 As Karen Faulk wrote in In the Wake of Neoliberalism, a chronicle of the social justice movement that sprang up in the 1990s after Argentina's Dirty Wars, "corruption in the public sphere and the impunity that guarantees it are part and parcel of the neoliberal state."

Argentinians took to the streets to protest the cover-ups of psychological and physical violence, directly relating them to the ensuing economic and social violence made manifest by the rampant criminality of the oligarchs and the impunity granted them by corrupt public officials. Citizens not only didn't accept the official story that "we tortured some folks," they rightly and directly correlated the whitewashes of the Dirty Wars with the injustices later wreaked upon the populace by free market neoliberalism.

Something similar is now going on with the Black Lives Matter movement protests. These young activists understand that the impunity of the rich is tantamount to the denial of human rights for the poor. They are reacting to the myriad ravages of neoliberalism: physical and psychological, economic and judicial.

The United States version of the Argentinian "disappeared" have names like Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald. Elsewhere on the planet, they are largely nameless, and they number in the millions. They are the detritus of war and colonialism. They are the collateral damage of the Neoliberal Project.

And meanwhile, the White House secretly and cynically negotiates with the abhorrent Koch Brothers as our cold, lean lives hang in the balance.

Plutocratic impunity has got to go. We need a little justice, right this very minute.

Cruz Missiles and Obombers

"We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion." -- Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, speaking this week to his high-rolling donors and war profiteers.

"Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform are stepping up our campaign to destroy ISIL.  Our airstrikes are hitting ISIL harder than ever, in Iraq and Syria.  We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers. Our Special Operations Forces are on the ground—because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide.  In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.  Our message to these killers is simple—we will find you, and justice will be done." --  President and plutocratic hopeful Barack Obama, speaking today to his high-rolling foundation donors and war profiteers under the guise of his weekly address to "the nation."

So, which man's gruesome bellicosity do you think the New York Times is wringing its hands over today?

Let the newspaper's editorial board explain its own convoluted thought processes:   

Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that “carpet-bombing” is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of “smart” weaponry and precise targeting.

In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization. That’s why military leaders utter the term “carpet-bomb” only while laughing at Mr. Cruz.

Ted Cruz apparently has the same semantic problem as Donald Trump. He isn't discreet enough about his desired rampages. Unlike Barack Obama, he apparently wouldn't quietly meditate over St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas before checking his Kill List and therapeutically bombing people into oblivion. Unlike the mature and placid Barack Obama, he is using divisive fire and brimstone Biblical language to justify death and destruction.

Obama, on the other hand, uses Biblical mythology to unite everybody in the love of death and destruction. 

 He even crams the miracle of Christmas into his accelerated bombing campaign. The co-option of religion for purposes of Permawar is, as a matter of fact, the true centerpiece of today's address:

Faith communities have come together in fellowship and prayer.  Families lined the streets for the annual children’s Christmas parade—because we can’t let terrorists change how we live our lives....Churches and synagogues are reaching out to local mosques—reminding us that we are all God’s children....   Back in San Bernardino, people from across the community have joined in prayer vigils—Christians, Jews, Muslims and others.  They’ve sent a powerful message—we’re all in this together.  That’s the spirit we have to uphold.  That’s what we can do—as Americans—united in defense of the country that we love.

I guess his propaganda shop wrote his speech before the arson attack on a mosque near San Bernardino.

Meanwhile, everybody is piling on the odious Ted Cruz, for the sole reason that his verbiage on killing innocent civilians is distasteful and crass, while Obama is not only smarmily discreet, he keeps the details of his massacres as close to the vest and as hidden from the public  as possible. The thousands of people killed by his drone strikes, for example, are part of a sanitary "Disposition Matrix" in which Muslim men of military age are considered enemy combatants until never proven otherwise. When women and children are killed, their names are not revealed either. Mistakes get unfortunately made. Obama's targets not carpet-bombed, of course. They simply get turned into pretty pink mist by predator missiles, or decapitated by cluster bombs.

And Obama does continue to use sadistic cluster bombs, refusing to sign a near-universal treaty banning their use. This year alone, the United States and/or its puppets have cluster-bombed five separate countries: Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Cluster bombs are essentially horse-sized hollow point bullets. When they hit, they divide themselves into hundreds of smaller bombs, the better to wreak more death and injury for miles around.

When Obama dropped a cluster bomb on Yemen in 2009, killing 35 women and children, he tried to keep the atrocity quiet by arranging for the two-year imprisonment of the journalist -- Abdulelah Shaye Haider -- who exposed this war crime to the world. Since the regime change in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has taken over the sadism, purchasing an additional $640 million worth of cluster bombs from the United States.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept, the modus operandi of the Obama administration has been to condemn the use of cluster bombs by other countries while continuing to stockpile, sell and use them itself. Just as the New York Times tacitly exonerated the Democratic president in today's editorial blasting Cruz over his carpet bomb rhetoric, so too did they exonerate him earlier this year by insisting that Obama was voluntarily abiding by the provisions of the treaty he refuses to sign.

When Obama's defense secretary, Ashton Carter, appeared this week before a Senate committee (that Ted Cruz "irresponsibly" missed) in order to demand billions more dollars for weapons and the building of several more military bases from which to launch murderous attacks, he and his minions even scoffed at the Texas senator in absentia. The Times editorial noted:

At the hearing on United States military  strategy against ISIS that Mr. Cruz missed on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, assessed Mr. Cruz’s prescription.

The wanton bombing Mr. Cruz repeatedly refers to, General Selva said, is categorically “not the way that we apply force in combat. It isn’t now, nor will it ever be.”

Ted Cruz, a man who thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief, decries terrorists’ taking of innocent lives while agitating for bombing that would kill thousands of noncombatants and radicalize thousands more. What he’s saying shows an utter lack of fitness to command America’s armed forces.

When they kill under Obama's direction, they do so with steely Zen-like resolve rather than with salivating Cruzian idiocy. Better to have a president professing love for the people on his hit list than one screaming about how much he hates their guts. Screaming while killing and maiming your victims might make them despise America or something.

As Obama himself soothed, Bush-like, today,

This week, we’ll move forward on all fronts.  On Monday, I’ll go to the Pentagon.  And there, I’ll review our military campaign and how we can continue to accelerate our efforts.  Later in the week, I’ll go to the National Counterterrorism Center.  There, I’ll review our efforts—across our entire government—to prevent attacks and protect our homeland.  And this week, the Department of Homeland Security will update its alert system to ensure Americans get more information, including steps that you and your communities can take to be vigilant and to stay safe.

He's even bringing back those bizarre color-coded terror threats to help keep your minds off the fact that you don't have as much money for Christmas presents for the kids this year. When you're visiting family and friends during the holiday season, make sure you monitor them for suspicious language and activities. If you see that Uncle Joe's eyes are glittering maniacally as he carves the turkey, say something.

Who is the idiot here? Obama seems to believe that killing more people will magically prevent their friends and relatives from becoming "radicalized" and killing us. Who is the radical here?

God bless us, everyone. 

"We worship an awesome God...." -- Barack Obama, from the 2004 keynote address that lit the fuse under his own presidential campaign.

The Varieties of Pride

By Jay - Ottawa

"WASHINGTON — One key indicator of the health of the US aerospace and defense sector, foreign military sales rose to a record high of $46.6 billion for fiscal 2015, but US officials are warning of a dip in sales next year."

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2015/10/18/pentagon-agency-handled-record-foreign-arms-sales-2015/74003606/

Aw gee, a dip in sales next year.  Despite the predicted dip in weapons production and the export thereof nobody is likely to beat the USA in this business any time soon.

"Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) director Vice Adm. Joseph Rixey said that 2015 was the agency’s biggest year yet….  'It’s just been volume, there’s not been one big sale,' said Rixey…. 'We’ve had to double down contracting officers just to keep up the pace….' "  

Way to go, admiral.  From another respected source we learn that "US exports of major weapons increased by 23 per cent between 2005–2009 and 2010–14 [and] the Middle East received 32 per cent."

http://books.sipri.org/files/FS/SIPRIFS1503.pdf

Dollars and contracting officers may be standard measures on the progress charts, but there are other indicators that the business of war is booming.  The arms export business is a fillip to sectors found on the fringes of war, many of them nonprofits, like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) or the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).  They also complain about not keeping up the pace.

Nothing changes.  All year round planes loaded with small arms and ammo lift off from the States and head east to the most lucrative trouble spots.  Ships loaded with the heavier stuff  cast off and head east with tanks, howitzers and drones, batteries included, some assembly necessary upon arrival.  All in time for Christmas if you order now.  Some of us wonder whether these exports will ever end.  Bon voyage, exports, down to the last round for whomever you're aiming to take out tomorrow.

Yesterday, something new was added to the import-export business of North America.  From Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey there began the export of a special cargo, this time moving from east to west.  Syrian refugees are heading for Canada.  The first plane in the new trade flew over my Ottawa around 3PM on its way to Pearl's Toronto by around 4PM. Then four hours of paperwork until the first shipment of 150 Syrians could leave the airport to explore their new home.  All this I know from the headlines; it was top story all day on radio and TV.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2394286/live-blog-toronto-set-to-welcome-feds-first-syrian-refugees-to-canada/

Nature spread out an unusually mild and sunny December 10 for Canadians and for the incoming Syrians.  Today it's much the same, unusually mild.  "10,000 Syrians by Christmas," says the new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, straining to keep the pace of his campaign promise.

Most people back him in this business but let's be honest; some Canadians object.  We commoners welcome you Syrians with a bit of hesitation.  But you do look so tired.  And we do have room here.  Shades of the first Christmas story.  So eat, rest.

Did I mention the weather is so fine for this time of year?  What a day.  Mild weather predicted again for tomorrow when the next flight lands in Montreal.  (Up here we have to do everything first in English, then French, or vice versa––very inefficient––just to make sure nobody feels left out.)  After Montreal's day in the sun a flood of charter flights will head west from the Middle East with much less hoopla.  Another 25,000 by March 1, says Trudeau. 

O Canada!