Straining Credulity

Save the nation. Join the movement:

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

 
Rattled by the spectre of the oligarchy getting taken over by the democratic rabble, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is seriously considering putting his billions into an independent run for the presidency. 

He planted his lead balloon into Saturday's obliging New York Times, followed immediately by a hysterical blog-post by pundit Paul Krugman, who warns us that if we persist in nominating Bernie Sanders like a bunch of airheads, this will usher in Bloomberg, which will then get us President Donald Trump. So forget all about democracy, proles! At least, that's what I interpreted Krugman's inchoate fear-mongering to mean.   

You'll be happy to learn that "Bloomberg Nation" already has an inspiring  campaign slogan designed to fire up the masses before they're transformed into ashes: "The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get."  

"It's time for ACTION," cleverly blurts out the website blurb. "Bloomberg Nation is a grassroots movement dedicated to making our nation bloom."

Something like this, maybe:

It attractively continues, "We need your help. Volunteer your time and services. Help us get 10MM people to endorse Bloomberg for president and create viral media."

Bloomberg, the world's 10th richest godzillionaire, apparently cannot or will not actually pay people to knock on doors for him. He wants, and expects, the freedom to which he is entitled. He is just, as the Times puts it, "galled" about Trump's mumbles and Hillary's stumbles. "His aides have sketched out a version of a campaign plan that would have the former mayor, a low-key and cerebral personality, give a series of detailed policy speeches backed by an intense television advertising campaign. The ads would introduce him to voters around the country as a technocratic problem-solver and self-made businessman who understands the economy and who built a bipartisan administration in New York."

Alternate slogan, riffing off Jeb Bush: "Right for Bile to Rise."

It'll be interesting to see whether the corporate-sponsored presidential debate committee will bend its rules and allow the unpopular Bloomberg to buy his way into the general election debates, regardless of how low his poll numbers are. If that is the case, then they should also open up the forum to the Green Party's Jill Stein, who you might remember was summarily arrested and handcuffed when she had the gall to try to join Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for their infamous Binders Full of Women debate in 2012.

It'll also be interesting to see how the Black Lives Matter movement responds to Mayor Stop & Frisk, who infamously said: "We disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little."  

At least the Shrillionaire Mayor isn't yet boasting, like Donald Trump, that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

Hillary Clinton's House Slaves

You might not know this, but the woman who aims to re-occupy the House built by slaves once had slaves herself. To be fair, she didn't actually "own" them. She merely borrowed them for a time. It was one of the perks of her position as Arkansas First Lady. Who was she to object to free live-in help, shipped in from state prisons?

In one chapter of her 1996 (ghost-written) neoliberal polemic, "It Takes a Village," Hillary Clinton fondly reminisces about the cozy times she had with the black help during her halcyon days in Little Rock.  Far from being shocked and appalled that prison inmates were actually being used as slave labor at the governor's mansion, Hillary decided to make the best of a bad plantation situation. Rather than protest 20th century slavery, she pragmatically decided to try it out to see whether it fit her family's lifestyle. It did, it did!

It was only long after the fact, multimillion-dollar book contract in hand, that she conducted an informal study of the various alleged pathologies she believes caused their imprisonment in the first place.

Her words speak for themselves:

"One unusual aspect of living in the Arkansas governor's mansion was getting to know the prison inmates who were assigned to work in the house and the yard. When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor's mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs, and I was assured that the inmates were carefully screened. I was also told that onetime murderers were by far the preferred security risks. The crimes of the convicted murderers who worked at the governor's mansion usually involved a disagreement with someone they knew, often another young man in their neighborhood, or they had been with companions who had killed someone in the course of committing another crime."

Her first reaction was to fear for her own safety. Then she learned (or was told by the plantation overseer) that the house slaves were only into black-on-black crime. And since entire gangs weren't being "assigned" (rather than forced against their will) to the plantation kitchen detail, she was assured she had no reason to be afraid of the men. It was tradition, tradition... kind of like Fiddler on the Roof. And longstanding, to further ease her white Northern guilt. Her own white body would remain pristine! But the sight of those big black dudes scared her, nonetheless. There were no prison bars separating them from Hillary Clinton:

"I had defended several clients in criminal cases, but visiting them in jail or sitting next to them in court was not the same as encountering a convicted murderer in the kitchen every morning. I was apprehensive, but I agreed to abide by tradition until I had a chance to see for myself how the inmates behaved around me and my family."

If Hillary Clinton had been elected the first woman president during the Civil War, we would probably still have slavery. She would have "abided by tradition," and never written The Emancipation Proclamation. And if those house slaves of hers had so much as looked at her white family funny, she would have sent them to jail, pronto. Oh, wait.... she did send some of them back to jail when they got too uppity:

"I saw and learned a lot as I got to know them better. We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule. I discovered, as I had been told I would, that we had far fewer disciplinary problems with inmates who were in for murder than with those who had committed property crimes. In fact, over the years we lived there, we became very friendly with a few of them, African-American men in their thirties who had already served twelve to eighteen years of their sentences."

 Hillary fancied herself more a liberal Scarlett O'Hara than she ever aspired to walk in the abolitionist shoes of the Grimke sisters. I wonder if the kitchen slaves also helped her lace up her corset after she gorged on their corn pones and hominy grits?  She never does specify exactly what the Clinton Family Rules for Modern Slaves were. I imagine "No Time Theft" had to have been among them, since it is one of the cardinal rules of Walmart, on whose Arkansas board First Lady Hillary then sat.

Hillary's Disciplined Southern Strategy: Enforcing Rules Strictly

  "I found myself wondering what kind of experiences and character traits had led them to participate in the violent and self-destructive acts that landed them in prison. The longer and better I came to know them, the more convinced I became that their crimes were not the result of inferior IQs or an inability to apply moral reasoning. Although they had not finished high school, they seemed to have active and inquisitive minds. Some had whimsy as well as street smarts. They showed sound judgment in solving problems in their work, and they plainly knew the difference between right and wrong."

Hillary, although in her mid-thirties by this time, was only then discovering that not all black convicts are stupid. Why, the few of them who passed muster as her personal slaves were actually smart, even though they were not as educated as herself. The savvy slaves must have figured out how not to just lazily spread the dirt around the floor as they mopped. That is possibly because Hillary forced them to get down on their hands and knees to scrub away Little Chelsea's spilled baby food by hand. Hillary Clinton certainly got what she didn't have to pay for.

"What, I wondered, had caused them to commit a crime that resulted in the loss of another's life? Now that I have read Daniel Coleman's Emotional Intelligence I am better able to understand what back then I could only wonder about."

Miz Hillary has just implicitly admitted that she never directly asked her slaves about their biographies. She just sat silently, vapidly wondering about them as she monitored their job performances from afar, across a mansion room.  

She then goes on to blather about how the convict-slaves got to where they were because they'd failed to harness their emotions, not because of any Jim Crow policies. Her prisoners were totally to blame for their own "impulsive overreactions". They'd apparently responded to perceived threats where none were intended. Without providing even a smidgen of evidence, she calls them "emotional illiterates." To back up her armchair diagnoses, based solely on reading a book or two, she calls upon the pathological wisdom of Attorney General Janet Reno. Those black prisoners simply let their primitive amygdalas get in the way of their cerebral cortices, Clinton smugly surmises from her rarefied perch as First Lady of the Land.

She then goes on to mull over what roles the digestive, cardiovascular and muscular systems of her former slaves had played into their "choices."

If I were recommending books to Hillary Clinton, on the top of my list would be Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. You might remember what happened to the concern-trolling, clueless white plantation mistress in that classic.

Like any colorblind limousine liberal worth her salt, Hillary settles for both Nature and Nurture to whitewash her conscience as well as systemic American racism. If only her house slaves had had supportive adults to cuddle them in infancy, they never would have landed in prison! Or her mansion kitchen, for that matter!  Clinton fails to mention the draconian "three strikes, you're out" sentencing laws instigated by her husband, and the Clintons' later role in creating the most extreme incarceration rates in the modern world, with more black prisoners locked up than there were slaves during the Civil War. (more free labor for plutocrats!) She fails to mention her role in ending FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children and direct cash aid to the poor. She fails to mention that forcing poor black mothers from welfare into low-wage work without subsidized child care tended to severely cut into nurturing cuddle-time for millions of African-American families.

Her solution is not to restore AFDC, but to insert "empathy curricula" into crumbling schools in poor black neighborhoods, to make up for that lost direct maternal care. It hasn't seemed to dawn on Hillary Clinton that conniving with Republicans in the late 90s to "end welfare as we know it" has only ended up severely damaging motherhood as once we knew it.

Nothing has changed, despite her best efforts to pay lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement.  Hillary Clinton is now in full pandering mode to African-Americans, casting herself as the Second Coming of Obama (who himself is the second Third Way coming of Bill Clinton.) Her characterization of the South Carolina Democratic base as little more than a convenient "black firewall" against Bernie Sanders is beginning to show some well-deserved cracks in its neoliberal plantation edifice, however.

I say we preemptively fire Hillary before we even consider giving her the job of her perverse dreams.

Once a Goldwater Girl, always a Goldwater Girl. 

Abide With Me. No Comment Even Necessary

Genocide, Fast and Slow

The mass poisoning of the residents of Flint, Michigan is a lot more than a public health emergency. It's even a lot more than depraved-heart murder and assault by deadly bureaucrat.

 Using the guidelines established by the United Nations, it's likely that the deliberate and continuous piping of lead-contaminated water to unsuspecting people qualifies as both a crime against humanity and actual genocide.

Heads should indeed roll... all the way to The Hague. The only trouble with that suggestion, of course, is that the United States has conveniently absolved itself from accountability before the International Criminal Court. America is an exceptional Third World nation.

At the very least, a special U.N. rapporteur should be appointed to go to Flint to collect the evidence, before it's destroyed or mysteriously misplaced.

Characterizing the poisonings as genocide is not at all hyperbolic, by the way.  According to Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention, it is not necessary to prove actual intent to exterminate. It is only necessary to prove "constructive intent." In other words, since state and federal authorities knew or should have known that they were causing harm to Flint residents, their "mistakes were made" defenses won't wash. Ignorance is no excuse.

Put another way, the piping-in of water from the Flint River to save a few bucks  was (and still is) a policy having a destructive, de facto exterminating effect. It doesn't matter whether the poisoning was inadvertent or unintentional, or whether it was incidental to another motive. (cost-cutting in the name of austerity)

That the poisonings in Flint also have a distinctly racist stench should give further impetus to the genocide charge. Unlike other means of culling the herd, this particular crime has a relatively short, very straight chain of evidence from perpetrators to victims. It also doesn't matter whether the victims die quickly, die slowly, or endure a lifetime of disability and pain before dying of old age. (not very likely, given all the kidney and neurological damage.)

Genocide is actually pretty broadly defined, albeit hard to prosecute. As Adam Jones wrote in Crimes Against Humanity:

"More recently the drafters of the (ICC) Rome Statute's 'Elements of Crimes' have declared their understanding that extermination can include 'deprivation of access to food and medicine,' resulting in death through protracted debility.... Other examples appearing in case law of the Tribunals include imprisoning a large number of people and withholding from them the necessities of life, resulting in mass death, and introducing a deadly virus into a population and preventing medical care, which results in mass death."

The crimes against humanity in Flint look so outrageous because they and their victims are so visible to us. These crimes should not be hard to prosecute.

Run-of-the mill, garden variety lead poisoning cases, on the other hand, are rarely, if ever, prosecuted. They've been a silent, hidden epidemic for generations. Rarely do we see such acute, severe cases as in Flint, in so many people all at the same time. The lead in drinking water is usually invisible and tasteless. Symptoms develop insidiously, and they vary from victim to victim. The toxic metal accumulates in bone and body tissues over years, and can be passed down through generations, from grandmother to mother to child, ad infinitum.

 No amount of lead is safe.

In poor black communities, lead poisoning is a common congenital birth defect. It is transmitted to fetuses long after the mother's exposure. Lead is an extremely stable element and degrades little over time. Ninety percent of lead dust in surface soil will still be present 70 years after contamination, according to the Illinois Dept. of Public Health.

Yes, it is racial, inordinately affecting black populations. And yes, it is ignored.

I used to write regular newspaper articles based on piles of health department inspection reports of slum housing containing lead-based paint in the poor Orange County, New York cities of Newburgh and Middletown. Children would regularly get poisoned by ingesting paint chips as well as from drinking water from lead pipes. Slumlords would get warned, again and again, referred for criminal prosecution rarely, and perhaps eventually get fined for failure to follow through on abatement orders. It's the cost of doing blacksploitation business.  Moreover, ownership of substandard housing is often sliced and diced into lawsuit-proof LLCs. Immunity is built right in, as permanent as multiple coats of toxic old paint.

Newburgh, New York

After decades of public health reports and complaints, there is still lead paint in the same substandard Newburgh housing, at some of the same addresses on the same blighted streets. Law firms that specialize in lead poisoning cases are as common as flaking paint chips. Depending on your address, prenatal blood screenings for lead are not only recommended, they are required.  It's estimated that least a third of all learning-disabled children in New York state are in special education classes because of chronic lead poisoning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in 38 American children has lead poisoning. That's half a million kids. Violent crime and drug abuse are among the results of the socially painful, permanent brain damage caused by lead poisoning. How much easier that makes it for white bigots to blame black people for their own plights, for their own behavior. Lead within black bodies is conveniently so invisible that it can be ignored.

Meanwhile, federal funding for testing and treatment was slashed four years ago -- as usual, all in the name of bipartisan fiscal responsibility and austerity. Funding was finally, partially restored this year, despite the best sadistic efforts of House Republicans to cut it yet again, by a full third.

Newburgh happens. Detroit happens. Chicago happens. And then Flint happens. But just for once, what happens in Flint is not staying in Flint.

Whether it's fast or whether it's slow, genocide is genocide. Even in America. Are we waking up yet?

We need a super Super Fund for all the people that this country has hurt. We must put an end, once and for all, to austerity for poor people. We've had enough of the greed of the oligarchs. They're weighing us down like a ton of lead.
 

Criminalizing the Sick

As Hillary Clinton cynically vows to incrementally build upon the "successes" of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration keeps chipping away at them.

The latest chip punishes people who desperately sign up for expensive private health insurance when they get sick or hurt. Such behavior is a rude slap in the face to the free market predators, who are then forced to dip into their obscene profits and pay a portion of your hospital and doctor bills. 

Of course, the way the insurance companies spin it, it's those conniving sick people who are to blame for driving up everybody else's premiums. It's the same old Divide and Conquer ploy that the ruling class has used since time immemorial in an attempt to hide their own greed and malfeasance.

As Barack Obama might explain it, if you "game the system" by waiting until you're at death's door to use your rent and grocery money to pay hefty insurance premiums, you're going to have to pay the piper. You'll have to wait until the next open enrollment period to have your bursting appendix removed.  You might even have to die as prematurely as you would have in those awful days before the health care sweepstakes were instituted. You can't buy a lottery ticket after the drawing, people! You can't put a flat screen TV on your credit card just to watch the Super Bowl, and then expect a full refund when you return it the next day, all full of smudges and fingermarks. 

As the New York Times explains it,

The administration, which had created more than 30 “special enrollment” periods, sent emails to millions of Americans last year urging them to see if they might be eligible to sign up after the annual open enrollment deadline. But, insurers and state officials said, the federal government did little to verify whether late arrivals were eligible.Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, said Tuesday that special enrollment periods “are not allowed for people who choose to remain uninsured and then decide they need health insurance when they get sick.”

Since the Neoliberal Project has deemed your body to be a commodity which you only partially own, you are expected to behave like a responsible consumer. If you seize up your engine because you didn't oil the capitalistic machinery as directed, don't come crying to Obama when you stall out. If you don't pay through the nose for the pricey undercoating deal, tough luck if your bod gets rusty. Keep yourself polished and gassed up, and pledge your financial allegiance to the underwriters instead of to the undertaker. Above all, keep up those monthly extortion payments, lest you get an unpleasant visit from the WellCare repo man. 

Mr. Counihan said the administration would eliminate six of the special enrollment periods, including two for certain lawfully present noncitizens who experienced “system errors” and “processing delays” when they used HealthCare.gov. In addition, he said the government would clarify eligibility standards and step up enforcement to prevent abuse of special enrollment periods.

The actions appeared to have several purposes: to motivate consumers to sign up by the Jan. 31 deadline; to prevent an influx of large numbers of sick people into the market in the middle of the year; to persuade insurers to enter or stay in the public insurance marketplace; and to minimize rate increases in 2017 and later.

Medical care cuts both ways, said Counihan. The right of protection racketeers to get rich hinges upon the fear cooperation of regular people, who must pay for Medical Care Product in advance. You see, in the most exceptional nation the world has ever known, health care is still not a basic human right. It is a privilege for only the select few with a high enough credit score and bank account balance to qualify for survival.

The new rules mean that not only will people have to go shopping every year for a new insurance plan, they will now have to prove they have a permanent address. People who temporarily move in with relatives (maybe because they lost their job when they got sick) won't qualify for coverage outside the narrow enrollment period. People who get sick or hurt outside their home states will have to jump through hoops to prove that they're not trying to cheat the system. All citizens shall be considered suspects until and unless they can prove their financial and medical innocence:

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mr. Counihan said, “Our program integrity team will pull samples of consumer records nationally and may request additional information from some consumers or take other steps to validate that consumers properly qualified for these special enrollment periods.”

In addition, he said, officials will emphasize to consumers that “they may be subject to penalties under federal law if they intentionally provide false or untrue information.

These are the same pathocratic clowns who profess to be so amazed that Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All campaign is so popular. They seem to be honestly baffled that people aren't in love with Obamacare. Who, except lefty unicorn believers, wouldn't rather pay high premiums and co-pays and deductibles to the for-profit insurance racket and then get treated like a criminal if they show up in the emergency room?

The architects of the Affordable Care Act and the private insurers they serve are now criminalizing and intimidating the sick. Before you know it, newspapers and websites will be adding photo galleries of Obamacare Cheats to supplement their regular poor-shaming features on Food Stamp Grifters and Welfare Queens.

So use your Obamacare card at your own risk. And keep up those monthly payments to Blue Cross. Stay close to the phone in case a government official, acting on behalf of United Healthcare, decides to call you in for an audit. A hospital-to-prison pipeline could be in your future if you don't get sick responsibly.

Trouble On Hemlock Hill

The rich are different from you and me. Their money has done a number on their basic cognitive functions.

You and I went to bed last night thinking that Bernie Sanders had clocked Hillary Clinton but good in their latest corporate-sponsored party debate.

You and I got up this morning and were stunned to learn in the New York Times that Hillary Clinton had "won" the debate simply by wrapping herself in the mantle of her erstwhile nemesis, Barack Obama, and obliquely accusing Senator Sanders of causing the Charleston Massacre by virtue of his vote for an arcane loophole in the tepid gun laws of our blood-soaked violent nation. The Times did not note that Charleston was the venue of the debate, and that she is forecast to win in South Carolina by pandering to the Black vote.

Still, the establishment elites are panicking. They thought that their money and scheduling would control this election. They forgot to repeal our voting rights. Their inverted totalitarianism -- the system in which oligarchs rule through social oppression, propaganda from a consolidated media, and the most extreme wealth inequality the world has ever known -- has been subverted by the masses of people and turned right upside the head.

To paraphrase Mehitabel the Cat, there's life in the old democratic girl yet. The plebeian chiggers are burrowing under the sensitive skin of the plutocrats. The proletarian fleas are nipping at the ankles of the elites.

Paul Krugman, economics pundit of the Gray Lady, has abandoned all pretense at intellectual honesty as well as the last vestige of his alleged liberal conscience by openly embracing the lies of Chelsea Clinton -- lies which claim that Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, immediately stripping millions of their medical coverage, and  throwing the election to the Republicans in the process.

Chelsea has been the deserving target of such cliches as "a chip off the old block" and the "apple doesn't fall from the tree." But a more apt metaphor might be that she, Krugman and the whole panoply of elites from the Council on Foreign Relations and other plutocrat-funded think tanks are the little white umbelliform flowers of the poison Hemlock. They cling to the parent plant like dessicated parasites before finally drifting downwards, burrowing into the wasteland, creating their own dense fetid clumps, and crowding out all the potentially nutritious herbage in the process.

The grazing creatures that actually survive ingesting Hemlock become both immune and addicted to it, and keep coming back for more, despite the awful taste and the stench. 

 Krugman's job is to create docile herds of carefully inbred cattle who become mildly intoxicated, but personally unharmed, by the poison of neoliberalism. The herds prefer vitamin-rich fodder, of course, but they can be taught to make do on noxious weeds. 

Once a proponent of single payer, Krugman now shamelessly claims that true universal health insurance in the United States would be just as "kludgey" as the 2,000-plus page Affordable Care Act; he apparently hasn't read the 13 pages that constitute the Canadian medical care system. He obviously has never had to choose between paying the rent and filling a prescription. He is a blatant shill preaching the free market gospel from high atop his perch on Hemlock Hill.

My published response to his dreck:

Hillary Clinton will most likely grab this influential column to further curb the enthusiasm of voters with their pipe dreams of nobody ever going bankrupt just because they get sick. She, and the corporate media, and high finance and predatory insurance (paying her hundreds of millions in speaking fees and "donations"), will do their utmost to kill the hopes of the millions of Americans hanging on by a thread, who despite the ACA, must still choose between medicine and food.

After all, as Gilens and Page have established, the rich get what they want. And what they want is to get richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Krugman blandly observes that in the current pathocracy, single payer would be a tough sell. After all, the GOP's idea of helping people is not only the repeal of Obamacare. It's the postmodern eugenics project now underway in Flint, Michigan, and in other blighted places throughout this greatest, most exceptional, most unequal country on earth.

The first step is to get the big money out. Bernie himself says this won't happen without a people's revolution. We need to pick up where Occupy left off -- before it was squashed by the same neoliberal state that informs us that universal health care is impossible. Just because they say so.

But guess what? All the cold water in the world, thrown by "experts" on the "Bern" of a resurgent bottom-up democracy, will not put out the flames.

It's Martin Luther King Day. And we still have a dream.

Nobody will ever accuse Paul Krugman of being a champion of economic and social justice, that's for sure. But this latest column was a new low, even for him.

Even the centrist Washington Post sounds progressive today, compared to Krugman and the Times. Most pundits are declaring Sanders the winner, albeit "narrowly."

The usually mainstream Chris Cillizza, for example, raved: "More than anything he said, though, it was the passion and disruption that Sanders oozed from every pore over the two hours that should push Democrats on the fence about the race into his camp. Sanders effectively positioned himself as the anti-status-quo candidate, a very good position to have in this electoral environment."

Contrast this to the anal-retentive New York Times piece by Hillary Clinton publicists Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy: "Clinton Seizes on Policy Shifts by Sanders" is the slanted headline, which immediately sets the stage for Bernie's role as a "shifty" guy vanquished by Hillary of Arc. 

Among the derogatory phraseology used to describe Sanders: "anti-political", "appearing frustrated at times" by Hemlock Hill's tactics, and prone to testy "eye-rolling and sighing". His fans were termed "restless" --  which in Times-speak can only be defined as being a tad unhinged.

The Times went through the motions of "fact-checking" the debate, seemingly surprised to learn that Sanders' figure of 29 million uninsured Americans is, in fact, true. But, but, but.... Obamacare is supposed to be universal health care! Say it ain't so, Bernie!

One toxic whopper by Hemlock Hill about the reign of Belladonna Bill that should have been fact-checked, and wasn't, was this cubic zirconium she palmed off as the Hope Diamond:

 .. I’m going to have the very best advisers that I can possibly have, and when it comes to the economy and what was accomplished under my husband’s leadership and the ’90s — especially when it came to raising incomes for everybody and lifting more people out of poverty than at any time in recent history — you bet.

I’m going to ask for his ideas, I’m going ask for his advice, and I’m going use him as a goodwill emissary to go around the country to find the best ideas we’ve got, because I do believe, as he said, everything that’s wrong with America has been solved somewhere in America.

We just have to do more of it, and we have to reach out, especially into poor communities and communities of color, to give more people their own chance to get ahead.

Through their repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Hill and  Bill did more to condemn women (mainly women of color) to lives of grinding poverty than any Republican administration or congress could ever have done on their own. That this reality was not immediately apparent during the booming 90s of the bubble economy and reckless financial deregulation was pure serendipitous timing. Not until the Bush years would it be revealed that the Clinton years of "prosperity" were based on inflated stock prices, manipulation and outright fraud. When the Clintons left the White House, the gap between rich and poor was already greater than it was when they began their co-presidency in 1992.

During the Clinton reign, as pointed out by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the incomes of the wealthiest 1% increased by nearly 100%, while that of the bottom 99% increased by only 20%. The repeal of Glass-Steagall (described as "modernization") sent the Clintons' banker buddies on a rampage, fueling a bubble as they gambled with customer deposits and used some of the ill-gotten, untaxed surplus to reward Hillary and Bill's family foundation and campaign coffers as well as those of their neoliberal political cohort.

Money begat power begat more money begat more power in an endless closed corrupt feedback loop. And Hillary and Bill are avid to "do more of it." They've been ever on the lookout for the growing number of American and global waste spaces on which to infest neoliberal umbelliform life-forms.

Until along came master weeder Bernie Sanders, riding on the coattails of the never-moribund Occupy movement.

The elites are tearing out their hair even as the populist gardeners are tearing out whole clumps of invasive political hemlock by the deep, grasping, corrupt roots.  
  

Open Thread

Life has been interfering with blogging. So if anybody is out there, please feel free to contribute.

Shorter SOTU

The minute Michelle Obama walked into the hall wearing her blinding $2,000 dayglow yellow designer dress, I sort of figured Hubby would be giving us the full Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm schmaltz in his valedictory State of the Union spiel.

Barack did not disappoint, of course. His oratory always delivers. Despite numerous cracks in the content, there were no cracks in the rich baritone stereophonic sound. Nearly half the country was still drunk on his optimistic kool-aid this morning.  Nearly half the country is still not tired of his purple state purple prose, because despite what Donald Trump says, America is Great Again and it always has been. Rah rah zis boom bah (humbug.)

I am not going to parse his whole speech because it's not worth my time or yours to do so. If nothing else, the speech was simply a pastiche of all the Obama speeches that have gone before, beginning with his 2004 Purple Prose audition at the Democratic National Convention. But for those of you who didn't, or couldn't, or refused to tune in, here's the Reader's Digest-Digest interpretation, amping up a bit on the hidden treblous dog-whistles to Wall Street. Stuff in italics are direct quotes so telling and so essential that condensation and satire are neither merited nor necessary. Res ipsa loquitur.

Without further ado, the Shorter Sardonic SOTU:

Kudos to Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan speaker for helping us get the job done for the rich in the budget last month. (shakes Ryan's hand, laughs cynically.) Now let's hope we can get together with the Kochs to do criminal justice reform for them. Gotta do something about those opiates too, which I won't mention are killing off poor unemployed white people in droves.

But meanwhile, open up wide while I attempt to shove some severely heavy-duty secular opiates for the masses right down your throats.

I won't let up till I get the small-bore, gateway-to-oblivion stuff done. I definitely don't want to focus on the sucky here-and-now. I want to focus on 10, 20, a hundred years from now because it's easier and it sounds good.

We live in a time of extraordinary change, when stuff like technology is shaping us no matter our own human will and with little to no input from us. All the crap making your lives hard is a lot like the weather, you see. Headwinds, tides and the like. But anyway, the Internet is not only good for girls in remote villages, it helps the terrorists. America has been through crap and crises before, and every single time the Plutocracy has won. So we can do it again! Lebensraum, Volk!

We made change work for us, always extending America’s promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before. Achtung!

The American plutonomy is richer than ever, the wealth gap the widest in memory. We still deign to take care of the permanently wounded troops lucky enough to come home from the Forever Wars we wage in order to help the plutonomy grow like a cancer. And gays can marry each other in all 50 states.

The growth is the result of choices a few obnoxious rich people make, but for oratorical purposes I must insist that it's the result of choices "we" all make, together.

I have four questions for y'all to make you think you even have a choice in the matter.

First, how do we give ever'body the illusion that they have a fair shot at opportunity and security in the New Plutonomy? Second, how can we make technology work for ever'body? Third, how can we pretend we're not the Policeman of the World even when we invade countries like there's no tomorrow and invest a trillion dollars in nuclear weapons? Fourth, how can slimy politicians make themselves look good? (Applause, applause, applause from the millionaires and generals and judges in the audience. Close shot to Michelle Obama, her eyes brimming over with tears of pride... or something.)

We've created thousands of new crappy jobs, and our austerity policies cut the deficit and culled the herd -- so pay no attention to Donald Trump saying that America is Not Great. Because it is, it is, it is! The Ruling Class still rulz, baby! The plebes just feel a little anxious, is all. We have to change their feelings, is all. Maybe a little Pre-K, a little science class, a little tech. No humanities, though, for the Lessers: it might encourage them to think. Our goal is to make them  McJob-ready on Day One of their brutish, foreshortened lives.

We shouldn't weaken Social Security and Medicare. We should strengthen them. Notice that I am not saying "expand" them as Bernie Sanders suggests,  See, whenever neoliberals like me say that we should "strengthen" programs, it means that we want to cut them so that future generations can hope to get a few pennies from them down the road. But I can't say this in an election year.

Oh, and with Obamacare you can move a lot and still keep the same high premiums and co-pays and deductibles and put off going to the doctor as much as you do now. Before, you were really screwed. You strike out and launch that new business and you're still covered. If you fail to launch, it's because you didn't go shopping for the best predatory insurance deal. So don't blame me if you get diabetes and stay a poor non-entrepreneur.

I want to have a serious discussion with Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan about how to tackle poverty. He has some great ideas. He has successfully tackled poor people in the past.

The disagreement we've had with Republican sadists have been honest disagreements. You have to hand to them. They are totally upfront in their brutalism. They don't try to hide it behind pretty words and platitudes like I do.

 I believe a thriving private sector is the lifeblood of our economy. I think there are outdated regulations that need to be changed, there is red tape that needs to be cut. (The  most deafening, protracted applause of the entire evening.)

 I am ready, willing, anxious and able to cede more ground to the Republicans and reward more wealth to the voracious oligarchs represented most faithfully by their bipartisan political servants.

But, but, but. Since this approach is not fair to the regular Volk, I will rely upon the good greedwashing will of the Owning Class -- that most talented creative class that ever outclassed the Volk --  to throw a few crumbs in the direction of the poor. I refer to these crumbs as "Best Practices" -- Neoliberal-speak for  good corporate citizenship. I want to lift up and reward the rich owners and bosses and foundation donors who don't treat their workers like absolute crap right to their faces in an election year.

We've taken more steps to get poor people online so that they can start a new business in a single day.  Notice these are only steps, not initiatives I am touting as much as I am touting the job-destroying Trans Pacific Partnership out of public view.  But fellow Americans, I tell you that anybody can grow up to be Donald Trump. I do believe, I do believe, I do I do I do believe in Trickle-Down.

All this stuff won't happen overnight. All you need is a dollar and a dream to Win the Future.

We've already won. Trump is full of shit, because the whole world respects us, meaning they are scared shitless of us. I am really good at killing people. Let me tell you something. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. Period. (Stupendous applause from the millionaire audience in D.C., stupendous cramps from the viewing audience here at home.)

But the other terrorists we created? They must be destroyed! To create even more terrorists! To create even more profits for the Masters of War! In Africa, Central and South America, all over the world!

Oh, but we can't always be the Policeman of the World.

Then again.... we'll act alone whenever we think it necessary, and then call ourselves a Global Coalition. I'll even have the chutzpah to quote Pope Francis who said we cannot be tyrants. We must instead call our death and destruction of others "humanitarian interventionism." We only kill with love and respect.

And we gotta get the money out of politics. It really bummed me out personally, collecting a billion bucks from the billionaires instead of doing stuff for the regular Volk. But hey, it's up to you people, not moi. Pay no attention to the Rootstriker report proving that I am a big, fat, mendacious fake about this whole corruption issue. My donors got what they paid for, and I will continue to deliver for them.

My biggest regret as President is not that the wealth gap has increased to shameful proportions, and that millions of people are still suffering needlessly --  but that I couldn't get the Republicans to like me. 

So, as I embark upon my year-long Legacy-Burnishing Tour, burning up millions of gallons of jet fuel as I preach climate change amelioration, I just want to remind ever'body how easy it is to be cynical.

May the Invisible Guy in the Sky bless our pathocratic little hearts.