Privatizing the Kill List

Facing a shortage in credentialed military personnel, the Obama administration is outsourcing part of its drone assassination program to unaccountable corporations. What could possibly go wrong?

According to the government, nothing much. You see, the private contractors operating the drones aren't actually allowed to pull the trigger on the "militants" (defined by the CIA as all males in "tribal areas" in the primes of their lives) whom they are tasked with suspecting and surveilling and identifying as bad guys.

From the New York Times:

 But there is no limit on the type of reconnaissance they can perform, and they are providing live video feeds of battles and special operations.

As the Obama administration has accelerated its campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the past 10 months, the Pentagon has added four drones flown by contractors to the roughly 60 that are typically flown every day by uniformed Air Force personnel.

This is adding mission creep to the mission creep. Today it's four, tomorrow it's eight. Because drones gotta fly and military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon gotta profit.

For purposes of absolving politicians and Pentagon officials of any personal accountability for their extra-judicial killing sprees,

 The number and identities of contractors working on the drone flights are considered classified information, the Air Force said. But Pentagon officials said there are at least several hundred contractors, many of them former drone or fighter pilots who are making double or triple their military salaries.

Where, they must be asking themselves, do I sign up for this gig at triple my lousy grunt salary? Why risk my life flying an airplane when I can retire early and make big bucks operating a joystick out of an air-conditioned trailer?

All of a sudden, within the same New York Times article, there are hundreds of eager beavers vying for only a handful of official drone control jobs. So here's the implicit message: let's artificially improve the United States employment rate by creating hundreds of new jobs building and operating a drone fleet on steroids. It gives a whole new meaning to trickle-down economics. Instead of trickling down, though, the benefits buzz around in the sky for a bit before zooming straight to the ground. Ka-ching and ka-boom! 

But in 2014, President Obama ordered a stepped-up military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Later that year, Mr. Obama, who had said that a small number of troops remaining behind in Afghanistan would have no combat role, decided to authorize a more expansive mission for them.

The Air Force was not prepared for this increased demand. Finding pilots was difficult. They typically work long hours in windowless rooms staring at computer monitors and do not get many days off. Many of those who fly armed drones have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder because they have witnessed so many airstrikes. There is also a powerful perception in the Air Force that drone jobs are less prestigious and glamorous than flying more traditional military aircraft, and recruitment has been hard.

OK, so the solution is to give these poor stressed-out drone pilots a break by bringing in constant new recruits for PTSD. This is called instilling some basic human decency into the Kill List. The war-mongers want us to believe that, despite the fact that new hires will be making as much as triple their military pay, it's hard to find recruits. The office ambience is a bit below-par. There's not as much glitter and glamour to long-distance murder as there is in making direct eye contact with your human targets before blasting them to bits. Maybe they can quadruple the pay and tack on an extra week of paid vacation. More likely, they will lower the professional standards. Since our politicians keep harping on a "skills gap" among jobless and underemployed graduates, perhaps our for-profit colleges can add a few Internet courses in drone operation. The market possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, the Times piece gets even more Orwellian:

Operating drones requires an extensive support network. One pilot and a camera operator typically control a drone, and since a drone is expected to be constantly in the air, each one must have several crews. The analysis of the footage taken in by the drones is even more labor intensive. For every drone, there is a need for up to four dozen analysts who can look at the many hours of footage to assess the targets and other intelligence.

With little alternative, the Air Force initiated a “get-well plan” in January 2015 that included several measures — among them an increase in pay — to try to alleviate the significant “stress on the force” that had developed.

How sweet. The Pentagon is having a Hallmark moment over its Hellfire missiles. Hitmen (and women) for hire in the private sector must be coddled and even sent get-well cards for all that incipient PTSD and eye-strain and aching backs. Forget about the innocent people on the ground getting killed or maimed by Predator and Reaper drones. They rarely get a mention, let alone an apology or compensation. It's not a part of the Drone Playbook. If they were expecting a sympathy card from America, they can think again.

Air Force officials said there are many safeguards in place to train and monitor contractors. But the officials declined to provide many details about the flights, such as where the contractors are deployed and which companies are operating the flights.

The officials also declined to address the role that contractors play in a select group of highly classified drone flights that the Air Force conducts daily for the C.I.A. Air Force pilots, who are essentially on loan to the C.I.A., fly those drones while the agency does its own preflight target planning and post-mission analysis.

We're the American Deep State. Just trust us. If you were expecting transparency over which private corporations are receiving lucrative contracts on your dime for purposes of killing people in your name, you can think again. But, they grudgingly admit,

 Contractors are typically compensated far more than service members, and some current and former senior Air Force officials said their use could actually exacerbate the shortage in military drone pilots because the pay of the private sector might lure them away.

Ya think? So pretty soon, we won't need a regular military at all. It's the capitalism, stupid. And privateers are under no obligation to disclose anything to the public. They only demand that the public pay for everything.

To its credit, the Times does give us a hint on one corporation that is profiting from privatized drone kills, without admitting outright that it is a direct beneficiary of the outsourcing.  In true Orwellian spirit, it is called Resilient Solutions Ltd. Its motto is Your Mission First.

According to its webpage, it was awarded an Air Force contract in May to provide

Advisory and Assistance Services to the Air Force Safety Center (AFSEC), Aviation Safety Division, Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Branch. The RSL Team supports AFSEC's RPA safety programs, involving studies, analysis, evaluation, engineering and technical services to the combatant commanders and major commands (MAJCOMs). The AFSEC Remotely Piloted Aircraft Mishap Prevention program utilizes the RSL team to support Safety Investigation Boards, investigate RPA mishaps, and facilitate the safe integration of RPA operations within the National Airspace Program. Services provided by Resilient Solutions include Safety System Engineering, MQ 1/9 operational expertise, Airspace/Air Traffic Control subject matter experts, RPA Human Factors subject matter experts, RPA maintenance subject matter experts, and Research Analysis.

I could be wrong, but I think that this is Newspeak for "We help you kill people efficiently and responsibly and then help you shove it all under the rug."

Among Resilient Solutions' other listed clients is the New York Times, a factoid which the Paper of Record chose not to disclose.

The New Meaning of Labor Day

Granted, the holiday set aside on the first Monday in September to honor American workers was always the weaker twin of the more radical May Day international celebrations. And it is also ironic, given that May Day itself was inspired by Chicago's Haymarket Massacre, in which agitators for the eight hour day, among other niceties. died for their progressive sins.

Look around at most major news sites today and you will find nary a word about working people and labor rights and the employment picture. That is because the true meaning of Labor Day in the eyes of the corporate media is that it marks the final stretch of the Presidential Horse-race.

Even Bernie Sanders, who walked the picket line with union workers in Iowa last year to mark the festivities, will be toeing the line today for Hillary Clinton. Of course, since his campaign speech will be delivered to the AFL-CIO's confab in New Hampshire, it will no doubt contain a lot of laborious rhetoric.

And let's be fair. Labor Day is the one day of the year that all politicians, even some Republicans, pay lip service to working stiffs. It's the homestretch. They've got a lot of work to do before they buckle down for the real job of rewarding the constituents and the corporations who gave them the most money.

None of today's New York Times op-eds honors the real workers of America, including the activists who achieved so much success in the Fight for Fifteen movement this year.

Paul Krugman instead complained that the media is treating Hillary Clinton unfairly, what with all the smears and innuendo they're directing toward her shady family foundation. Just because she met with some donors at the State Department who gave big bucks to her charity doesn't mean she's crooked. As far as Krugman is concerned, she's wearing the mantle of Saint Mother Teresa. Plus, she is not Trump, who Krugman says threatens to be George W. Bush to her Al Gore, if we malcontents aren't careful and just dutifully shut down the criticism. This poor multimillionaire candidate is getting Gored, for Gore's sake!

And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an “A” rating — better than the American Red Cross.

Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation “raises questions.”

But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, “no.”

Since Krugman is not a journalist, but a pundit, he is seemingly under no obligation to write fact-based columns. He is under no obligation to conduct actual research into the workings and money flows of the Clinton Foundation. Yet,

 So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

I couldn't resist. Here is my much-maligned published comment:

 You know who's really getting gored? The working class.

I guess the "conscience of a liberal" can't address the plight of the precariously employed, the poorly paid, and the chronically jobless on this Labor Day. The fortunes of an embattled politician are at stake!

And talk about innuendo. It seems like only yesterday that the pundit who now lectures the media on its ethics was smearing Bernie Sanders and his supporters as deluded, quixotic naifs who were selfishly demanding such impossible dreams as universal health care and a tuition-free public higher education.

Thanks to progressives, Clinton was forced to take a position on the minimum wage and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the corporate war on workers which now appears moribund.

Yes, HRC is getting smeared on ridiculous things, like the "shadow" cast over her candidacy by Anthony Weiner. The mainstream press is not only inept, it appears mightily bored.

But questions about her foundation are legitimate. Yes, it does good around the world. Apologists like to point out there's never been evidence of pay-to-play. But as New York congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on "Corruption in America," explains, a quid pro quo isn't necessary. Wealthy donors and potentates pay for political access, which usually pays handsome dividends over time.

 All the Clintons should divest themselves. And then we must get the obscene money out of politics by overturning Citizens United.

Now, to be fair, not all the members of the ruling establishment have ignored the true meaning of Labor Day. President Obama himself used it as the topic of his weekly address, recorded before he was so ignobly forced to deplane in China from the cloaca of Air Force One, minus the red carpet.

Of course, he only talked about American workers, not the suicide risks in China who make the Apple products that enrich Steve Jobs's widow, who in turn hosted a $200,000-a-person fundraiser for Hillary Clinton to ensure that those Apple jobs will never come to our shores and pay workers anything close to a living wage.

Obama actually started out his chat quite liberally: 

For generations, every time the economy changed, hardworking Americans marched and organized and joined unions to demand not simply a bigger paycheck for themselves, but better conditions and more security for the folks working next to them, too.  Their efforts are why we can enjoy things like the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, and a minimum wage.  Their efforts are why we can depend on health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and retirement plans. 
All of that progress is stamped with the union label.  All of that progress was fueled with a simple belief:  that our economy works better when it works for everybody.

I think it's his folksy usage of the word "folks" that should warn us where he's going with all this historical happy-talk. He is taking us straight to Brave Neoliberal Land for the newer, improved meaning of Labor Day:

That’s the spirit that’s made the progress of these past seven and a half years possible.  We’ve rescued our economy from another depression, cut our unemployment rate in half, and unleashed the longest string total job growth on record.  And we’ve focused on making sure that the gains of a growing economy don’t just flow to a few at the top, but to everybody. 

Yes, people. The radical labor rights movement fought to have Wall Street bankers bailed out, for General Motors to be rescued in exchange for new workers getting hired at lower wages in a divide-and-conquer two-tiered assembly line setup, and for the wages all across the land to decline even as the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown to historic levels in the Age of Obama. He says he focused on the gains of the economy not all flowing to the top. He's right. As a matter of fact, only 91% of the gains since the 2008 crash have flowed to the top One Percent. Everybody else got the crumbs.  Hey, at least most people aren't actually starving. If you still have a refrigerator and a flat screen, how can you possibly call yourself poor?

It’s why we took action to help millions of workers finally collect the overtime pay they’ve earned.  It’s why I issued a call to raise the minimum wage, and when Congress ignored that call, 18 states and the District of Columbia, plus another 51 cities and counties went ahead and gave their workers a raise.  It’s why the very first bill I signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; why we gave paid sick days to federal contractors; why we’ve fought for worker safety and the right to organize. 
And we’ve made good progress.  For a few years after the recession, the top one percent did capture almost all income gains.  But that share has been cut by almost half.  Last year, income for everybody else grew at the fastest pace since the 1990s.  And another 20 million Americans know the financial security of health insurance.

To be fair, Obama did finally extend overtime protections to millions of workers this year. But only after severe pressure and shaming from progressive activists. You see, it's an election year, and the Democrats have to do a few nice things to prove they care and deserve our votes. And this is precisely why the president casually squeezes the inconvenient truth about income disparity in this particular paragraph, rather than in the previous one. It's best practices to always save the bad news until after you've told the proles your little bit of good news. And did you notice how quickly he glossed over Obamacare? It is not doing too well. Plus, any financial security in the mix certainly does not belong to the health care "consumer." It belongs to insurance company executives and investors getting fabulously rich off mandated premiums and government welfare.

Obama can get away with his glossing over actual facts, because as William Dornhoff points out, most people have no idea of how extreme the wealth disparity truly is. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to very rich people, whom we have been taught got that way by virtue of hard labor and "risk-taking." It may be shocking, but the lowest two quintiles of the American population possess only .03 percent of total United States wealth. 

Obama smoothly sails on nonetheless:

I’ll be the first to say we’ve got more work to do in the years ahead.  Now, I know we’re in the heat of a more raucous political season than usual.  But we can’t get so distracted by the latest bluster that we lose sight of the policies that will actually help working families get ahead.  Because the truth is, that’s what’s caused some of the frustration that’s roiling our politics right now – too many working folks still feel left behind by an economy that’s constantly changing.

Now he is in full neoliberal propaganda mode. The common refrain in a society where capitalism has replaced democracy is "we've got more work to do in the years ahead." In other words, don't count on your lives improving while you're still alive. And meanwhile, elect Hillary Clinton. She has policies on a website, and all Donald Trump has is bluster. But Obama feels your pain if you still "feel" left behind by an economy that is constantly changing, all by itself, because there is no alternative and you can't change the weather. Greed and global plunder are like Hurricane Hermine in that regard. Very mean. So batten down the hatches, and hope for the best against those "economic headwinds."

The slickness continues:

 So as a country, we’ve got some choices to make.  Do we want to be a country where the typical woman working full-time earns 79 cents for every dollar a man makes – or one where they earn equal pay for equal work?  Do we want a future where inequality rises as union membership keeps falling – or one where wages are rising for everybody and workers have a say in their prospects?  Are we a people who just talk about family values while remaining the only developed nation that doesn’t offer its workers paid maternity leave – or are we a people who actually value families, and make paid family leave an economic priority for working parents?

By merely asking rhetorical questions, Obama means to imply that he actually cares about the answers. He tries to separate himself from the very same neoliberal policies which himself he has both kept in place and crafted anew. By asking if we want paid maternity leave, he pre-empts the demand for living wages, universal health care, tuition-free and debt-free higher public education, a government sponsored jobs program, and affordable housing. Paid family leave is the least of a working parent's worries. Not having enough money in the bank for a car repair and not having enough food on the table are more pressing concerns. But Obama will not go there.

These are the kinds of choices in front of us.  And if we’re going to restore the sense that hard work is rewarded with a fair shot to get ahead, we’re going to have to follow the lead of all those who came before us.  That means standing up not just for ourselves, but for the father clocking into the plant, the sales clerk working long and unpredictable hours, or the mother riding the bus to work across town, even on Labor Day – folks who work as hard as we do.  And it means exercising our rights to speak up in the workplace, to join a union, and above all, to vote.

That was the big tell. Obama is not addressing working stiffs in this speech. He is addressing well-to-do liberals who should be concerned about working stiffs. Those folks work just as hard as "we" do - we managers, doctors, lawyers, lobbyists, real estate executives and the like. "We" must care about The Help riding on the bus to clean our homes as hard as "we" clean up in billable hours and writing smarmy op-eds for the mainstream media.

And don't ever forget: in Neoliberal World, the paramount duty of the citizen is not to join the picket line or to occupy a public space in protest of racism and class inequality, but to vote for the person who can best serve the interests of the wealthy. If working folks are very smart and very lucky, Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump, and a few meager drops of her golden beneficence might just even reach the lower levels. Someday. Maybe. If we vote our little hearts out.

Abject surrender to these artificially limited and mandated choices can be so seductive, but the only thing we really have to fear is fear-mongering platitudes.

We've got a lot of work to do.

The Trump World We Live In

The New York Times came in for some much-deserved criticism this week over its coverage of the latest episode in the tawdry life of Anthony Weiner. But far from being chastened, the paper is staunchly defending its own tawdry descent into National Enquirer territory.

 I am certainly no fan of Hillary Clinton, but here's the part of the controversial article that made me cringe:

Now, Mr. Weiner’s tawdry activities may have claimed his marriage — Ms. Abedin told him that she wanted to separate — and have cast another shadow on the adviser and confidante who has been by Mrs. Clinton’s side for the past two decades. Ms. Abedin was already a major figure this summer in controversies over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state and over ties between the Clinton family foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Mr. Weiner’s extramarital behavior also threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.

 When contacted for comment by the Times public editor, one of the writers (Amy Chozick) of the piece said:“I completely understand why people have a reaction to a story like this, and question what it has to do with Clinton or politics, or don’t understand why it should. But that’s not the world we live in.”

Readers had reacted so negatively to her article because not only did the story insinuate that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin are themselves partially culpable for the actions of this troubled, creepy little man, it received pride of place on the top of the front page. It was sexist guilt-by-association with a vengeance.

 Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy then had to add gasoline to the fire by seeking out Donald Trump for his own expert comments. Needless to say, Trump added his own high octane to the gasoline by stating that Clinton's very association with Weiner is a matter of grave national security.

As is its wont, the Times is now doubling down and staunchly defending itself against criticism of its tabloid-style innuendo-rich coverage. Public Editor Liz Spayd herself added gasoline to the fire on Thursday by characterizing the paper's treatment of Weiner's compulsive sexting habit - which now even extends into the realm of child endangerment - as a "hot story."

She writes:

It seems to me this story falls into a realm of news coverage that invariably has the media tripping over itself. There’s a sex scandal, politics and questions about how much one has to do with the other. And contrary to public suspicion, mainstream newsrooms of the type I’ve worked in don’t particularly enjoy these kinds of stories. It’s easy to get ensnared in them and hard to get them right.

I don’t think The Times in this case was wildly off the mark. But it was not precise enough in what it was and wasn’t trying to say. Unfortunately, too many unforced errors can sometimes cost you the game.

Spayd as much as admits that journalism is a sport, with newsroom winners and losers and unforced errors and scorecards. Pretty flippant.

And since I just couldn't get over Amy Chozicks's own flippant retort - that disgusted readers should simply get used to it - I submitted my own two cents:

“I completely understand why people have a reaction to a story like this, and question what it has to do with Clinton or politics, or don’t understand why it should,” she (Amy Chozick) said. “But that’s not the world we live in.”

Ms. Chozick has just obliquely admitted that the mainstream media lives in a world all its own. It's a cocooned, careerist world dominated by horse race politics, clickbait, getting on the Most Popular and Trending lists, and beating the competition on the latest sleaze. It has little to nothing to do with journalism in the public interest.

Forgive me if I don't care to dwell in the world "we" live in, Ms. Chozick.

Hopefully the Times will get back to real reporting on the issues, once this hell of an election season is over. But I'm not counting on it. Coverage of scandals and palace intrigues and petty backbiting and ego-stroking among the elites of the incestuous political-media complex seems to be what passes for journalism these days.

 Coverage of existential issues affecting everyday people apparently just doesn't sell papers or attract enough ad revenue.

Much to my surprise, Amy Chozick responded to me - with a little more gasoline. It's not the media world, folks. It's the "political landscape". (And she seems to assume that since I was critical of her reportage, it naturally follows that I am a biased Clinton supporter) --

 Hi Karen, My comment wasn't about the world "we" (the media) live in, but about the political landscape that we cover. While Clinton supporters would like this to not be an issue, Donald Trump immediately made it one, and thus we have to cover it as such.

I'd also direct you to the numerous stories I've written about Clinton's policy plans, from taxes to criminal justice reform. Those far outweigh anything we've written about Anthony Weiner.

Thanks for writing.
Best,

 Amy

My response:

 Hi Amy,

Thanks for responding and clarifying your statement.

Yes, I have read and admired your many informative pieces on policy. Unfortunately, these are rarely placed above the fold where they belong (that valuable real estate seems to be Donald Trump's exclusive squatting domain lately.)

I look forward to reading your or another reporter's analysis of the very detailed mental health plan which Hillary Clinton unveiled just the other day. If there's already been coverage of it in the Times, and I missed it in trying to navigate the Trump landscape, I do apologize.

Cheers,

Karen

I loved "Tinmanic's" response to Amy:

"While Clinton supporters would like this to not be an issue, Donald Trump immediately made it one, and thus we have to cover it as such."

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ms. Chozick. I'm flabbergasted at this statement.

Trump said it was an issue, and therefore it's an issue?

Problem number one: if the issue was because of Trump, why is Trump hardly mentioned in the article?

Problem number two: since when did New York Times reporters become mere stenographers for the Trump campaign?

You are letting yourselves be manipulated.

Having worked as a newspaper reporter myself in a previous life, I can only imagine the pressure that Amy Chozick must be under, what with Hillary Clinton being her sole defined beat for the last several years. Boredom must be her constant companion. And Hillary is certainly not known for being "accessible" and for treating the press graciously.

Amy Chozick's rationalizations remind me of the time I was assigned by my male editor to confront the wife of a U.S. Congressman about revelations that he had fathered a child with one of his staffers. (My boss opined that it's always more gently effective for a woman reporter to rub a scorned woman's nose in it.) I telephoned, and immediately informed the wife that I was making the call under duress. When she said she didn't want to air her family's dirty laundry in public, I totally agreed with her, murmured apologies, and quickly ended the call. My editor, who'd been hovering nearby, was furious with me at having wasted such a golden journalistic opportunity and for not being sufficiently cutthroat.

 That was the business I had chosen to be in, but I always exercised my option not to obey all the rules of the game. (I refused, for example, to rush to the scenes of bridge-jumpers and landscapes of human beings mangled up in highway accidents). Such sporadic recalcitrance didn't make me many friends in all-male management. But, as has happened so often in the news biz over the past several decades, the paper was sold and folded before I actually got the chance to be fired.

It's the capitalistic, cutthroat world of creative destruction that we live in.

Advice to Needy Neoliberals

The kludge known as Obamacare is trying desperately to slide down the tubes, but it's too dense with defenders to simply go gently and smoothly into that good night. It's moldering in a limbo between the toilet and the sewer, while its subscribers and rejects are trapped in either purgatory or hell, depending upon the health of their bodies, their faith in politicians, and the size of their dwindling bank accounts.

It seems that the predatory insurance companies, which literally wrote the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, just aren't getting enough bang for our bucks, even though executives and Wall Street investors are still getting fantastically rich off the pain and toil of others. Aetna might have just pulled out from 11 states over an alleged lack of a pool of healthy but broke customers to suck dry, but that didn't stop its CEO from entering the Rapture and pocketing $27.9 million in compensation last year. A guy's got to eat, especially a guy with such a ravenous appetite.

Obamacare's defenders, getting worried that their product is increasingly seen as a scam of historic proportions (in an election year, no less) are thus in high concern-trolling gear. They're even daring to utter the previously forbidden "public option" phrase to placate the masses and fool them into thinking that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats can be counted on to help save Obamacare from itself, if not counted on to save any actual lives and livelihoods. (save those of millionaires and billionaires.)

And since the Neoliberal Thought Collective running the public-private partnership known as Government persists in treating medical care as a corporate endeavor rather than as a natural human right, the New York Times published its own advice column of possible fixes in the Business Section rather than the health or science sections.

 The headline itself wastes no time in framing the crisis of American health care as strictly a business problem: Obamacare Marketplaces in Trouble: What Can Be Done? 

It's been a hard couple of decades, even generations, for the tens of millions of unemployed or underemployed people lacking basic medical care. But you wouldn't know it from reading the Times lede (the standard Neoliberal buzzwords are in my bold)

It has been a hard couple of weeks for Obamacare. The law’s online marketplaces — where people were supposed to be able to easily shop for health insurance — have been suffering from high-profile defections and double-digit premium increases.

Critics of Obamacare have pointed to the recent problems as proof the market is not working, while even the law’s staunchest defenders are arguing that the marketplaces need some fixes.

In other words, the vaunted free market needs a lot more public assistance and corporate welfare in order to ensure that profits over people may continue to grow. And those damned shoppers searching for health insurance product won't be satisfied until they can be offered the illusion of choice, which fools them into thinking they actually have a say in their fates, as they struggle through the kludge.

Since the illusion of choice is disappearing from the flawed equation, the Times wants to know: What can be done to help the marketplace?

If the market looks as if it’s growing and stable, some insurers might come back. Both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have also revived the idea of the so-called public option, which would be a government-run plan that would either compete with or be a substitute for a plan offered by a private insurer. It’s politically controversial and hard to make work in practice.

The Times tells us that although Barack and Hillary really, really want to help, those nasty Republicans will do their useful idiotic best to thwart all good Democratic intentions. But keep your hopes alive anyway, the subliminal message goes, and vote for the Clinton Restoration. Never mind that the "public option" is in itself a useful idiot, since it displaces true single payer, or Medicare for All. But if the Times calls even a scammy proposal "controversial and hard to enact," then we might as well not even talk about genuine universal coverage. Because it's impossible. Because they say so. And Hillary is a progressive who likes to get things done. Because she says so.

Meanwhile,"we" have to get those outrageous health care and drug costs down - not by implementing cost-effective single payer, of course, but by making it even harder for us to access actual medical care with our pricey Obamacare plans:

 Bring down costs instead of raising prices. More and more insurers are choosing to limit the number of doctors and hospitals they will cover in their plans. A lot of the reason that health insurance is so expensive in the United States is that doctors and hospitals charge more here than their counterparts in other countries. So the narrow network strategy may be a smart way to start getting different groups to negotiate down on their prices.

One of the biggest impediments to capitalist predators profiting from people is that healthy - but increasingly debt-crushed and precariously employed - young Americans are averse to shelling out their meager food and rent money for a Bronze plan. So the answer is not free health care or student loan forgiveness - it's smarter, more effective punishments for irresponsible consumers:

 Change the incentives, so more people who are currently uninsured buy health insurance. Hillary Clinton has talked about giving out more generous subsidies, so insurance costs less and more people can afford to buy it. Many Republican politicians suggest another way to lower prices: eliminating current requirements that insurance cover a wide array of services. Some policy experts, including Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton health economist, in a recent Vox.com interview, have suggested tightening up the penalties for remaining uninsured, so people can’t wait and buy insurance only after they get sick.

So maybe if the Neoliberal Thought Collective can make Obamacare even crappier than it already is and cover only a few arcane diseases, then the Kludge can still be saved. And if that doesn't work, perhaps Obamacare refusenicks can be tried as political dissidents and sentenced to a long term at a for-profit private prison until they scream: "I love Big Insurance! Where do I sign up?"

 Uwe Reinhardt, who is not to be confused with Carmen Reinhart, the economist  so soundly discredited several years ago for falsely claiming that austerity spurs economic growth, is an opponent of single payer insurance because, he claims, the government is too corrupt. Congress might end up appointing a payment board with prices dictated by the same private insurance vultures now crying poverty, he said. There's always an expert to stop a program for the greater good right in its tracks. Always.

And speaking of austerity, neoliberals don't actually use that word any more, especially during an election year. They must reckon that "tightening up the penalties"  gives a more humanistic ring to Social Darwinism. Plus, if there is anything that neoliberalism prides itself on, it's the ability to grow and change its Orwellian language to keep fooling ("empowering") some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time.

The Obama administration has already made a few changes, including making it a little harder for people to sign up for insurance in the middle of the year. It has also signaled to Congress and state legislatures that a “reinsurance” program, which would pay insurers back for the sickest of their patients, would be a good idea.

There is little consensus among experts and advocates about what fixes would have the biggest impact when it comes to stabilizing the markets. The divides are not just partisan, but reflect persistent uncertainty about the most important things going wrong, and the most effective solutions to fix them.

Obama is already responsibly and expertly punishing people for trying to game the predatory insurance market. They have the unmitigated gall to seek medical care only when they get hurt or sick. The exasperated big insurance predators are simply running out of options for punishing these miscreants. Therefore, Americans might be forced to bail out the private insurance and drug cartels the same way they bailed out the Wall Street banksters and General Motors.

Here's my published response to the Times advice column to the vampires who are so worried about their dwindling blood supply:

The problem with the health insurance market is that it is even a market in the first place.

Forget the public option.That's a cop-out. We need true single-payer health care, a/k/a Medicare for All. Financed through a progressive tax, no co-pays or deductibles, universal coverage from cradle to grave, none of those opt-outs allowed in Red States where hatred of the poor is both a managerial strategy and a cultish dogma.

Obamacare is all about protecting big business and fostering competition for profit and making a handful of insurance and pharmaceutical moguls even more obscenely rich. Some 30 million people are still uninsured, while millions more are under-insured. Even those lucky enough to have insurance constantly have to shop around, prove their incomes, their addresses, their existence - and who still can't afford to visit a doctor or hospital when they get sick.

The idea is you shouldn't and/or mustn't use your plan, and that way the neoliberal bean counters can brag about medical costs going down. It's "best practices" and efficiency and the bottom line over the actual health and the actual care of people.

 It's a big, fat scam and a monumental rip-off.

So enough of making our human rights and our well-being subservient to endless economic growth. It's time to join the rest of the civilized world.

If we can afford trillion-dollar wars and negative effective tax rates for predatory oligarchs like Donald Trump, we can certainly afford universal health care.

Physicians for a National Health Plan, the group which was barred from the original Obamacare negotiations and even threatened with arrest, has the lowdown on why the "public option" isn't at all the progressive rescue it's cracked up to be. It would be an effective bailout of the insurance cartel because it would allow the predators to cherry-pick their subscribers and foist them off on the government, should they actually become sick and need care. It would allow investors to grow richer, because there would be fewer payouts required by the private insurers.

Additionally, a public option plan would not reduce costs, as would a genuine single payer scheme. It would keep intact private, investor-owned hospitals and clinics and end up delivering deficient care to the poor. It would be ripe for constant de-funding, especially if its control is exported to individual states.

Speaking of states, staunchly habitual Obamacare defender Paul Krugman chose to devote his own latest Times column to the evils of Texas - specifically, linking the doubling of that state's maternal death rate to the closing of its Planned Parenthood clinics. Although he feebly admits that correlation doesn't translate to actual causation, that remains his premise. As always, Krugman's approach to our great humanitarian crises is to blame them solely on those nasty old Republicans in Congress and Red States. Plus, it's all totally based on Trump-style racism. And Texas is just like misogynistic Russia, which is supposedly backing Trump and fooling with our free and fair elections.

And echoing his newspaper's neoliberal advice column, Parochial Paul concurrently toasts the "cost-effectiveness" of the Obamacare Market in California.

 Because if there's one thing that neoliberalism is extremely good at, it's creating competition where it shouldn't even exist: 

 California — where Democrats are firmly in control, thanks to the GOP’s alienation of minority voters — shows how it’s supposed to work: The state established its own health exchange, carefully promoting and regulating competition, and engaged in outreach to inform the public and encourage enrollment. The result has been dramatic success in holding down costs and reducing the number of uninsured.

Why are states like Texas so cruel, wonders Krugman, after he blames the cruelty solely upon racism and ignores the actual class war (which, by the way, disproportionately punishes women and minorities.)

My published response, along much the same lines as my previous Times comment:

 The solution is simple: centralize the medical care payment and delivery system. removing the profit motive from health insurance completely. Join the rest of the civilized world. No deductibles, no co-pays. Everybody gets covered, cradle to grave, no matter where you live. Take the power away from all these sadistic state governments and implement Medicare for All.

Texas is the extreme case, but the maternal death in the US overall is up by 27% - at the same time it has fallen sharply in other countries. It's not only that women in some states don't have access to prenatal care or Planned Parenthood. It's that they have little to no access to any kind of medical care at all, all across this country. According to the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, the major cause of the maternal death rate increase is the rise in such preventable chronic diseases as diabetes and obesity.

Black women are two to three times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth as white women. According to a 2014 U.N. study, the maternal mortality rate in one Mississippi county surpassed that of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It's a racist war and a class war of the richest elites in the richest country on the planet against the rest of us. Lowered life expectancy is just one glaring symptom of a sick society that puts profits for the few above the well-being of the many.

If we can afford trillion-dollar wars and Wall Street bailouts, we can afford universal health care.

Alt-Reality

Only a couple more months to go before America Votes. 

So my question is this: will it be safe to come out of the free-thinking closet to criticize Hillary Clinton once she's elected, or will calling her out as a corrupt dual tool/member of the plutocracy continue to get you labeled a pathological hater and a racist misogynist and a stealth Trump supporter for the entire duration of her reign?

Pundits are calling this election a major realignment of the two establishment political parties. If we still enjoyed a modicum of democracy and the wishes of the majority really counted, this would mean that the Democrats are getting more progressive, and that the Republicans are getting more dead.

Unfortunately, what's really happening is that the corporate Democrats are sympathizing, if not directly joining forces with, the "good" Republicans. Their new mutual enemy is something called the Alt-Right, whose fringe-dwelling denizens are supporting the candidacy of Donald Trump. As a result, some so-called liberals are actually championing Hillary Clinton's rescue of such mainstream misanthropes as House Speaker Paul Ryan (Ayn R) as well as almost the entire war crime cabal of George W. Bush. These pathocrats sure beat powerful and dangerous paranoid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as well as whatever is still left of the KKK.

Don't they?

Following the Clinton script, liberal pundits are likewise becoming damned tolerant and inclusive enough that they're also willing to extend the welcome mat to the same sadists and warmongers they used to pretend to despise. Isn't it just terrible that a new radical fringe is taking over a whole radical fringe party?

Donald Trump is saying right out loud what slimeballs like Paul Ryan have been dog-whistling. Ryan concern-trolls the poor as he cuts funding to Planned Parenthood and food stamps, while Donald Trump blasts the phony concern-trollers at the same time that he denigrates women and immigrants.

Hillary Clinton, former Goldwater Girl who is proud of her own conservative roots, thinks it's travesty. She said so last week in Reno:

This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have know it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’
Now Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.”
The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loose but organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

(Hillary explained her own driftable conservatism as she knows it two decades ago):

The political theater is being exposed as political theater. The political process is being exposed as benefiting only the wealthy and the well-connected. The enemies we were urged to despise yesterday are supposed to be our new BFFs today. Fear is the glue binding all of us together.

E.J. Dionne even goes so far as to cast "the Republican Party as we know it" as a special interest group in need our protection. Much like Black Lives Matter, the headline to his latest column perversely goes, "Hillary Clinton's Republicans Matter."

Saving Privatizing Ryan: Why's Everybody Altways Pickin On Me?

Dionne repeats the centrist Clintonian dogma that there really is such a thing as a mainstream,reasonable Good Old Party. Compared to Donald Trump, who wouldn't sound good? Except that Dionne fails to notice, or pretends to ignore, the fact that Republicans have been acting out their own Trumpian fantasies for at least the last century. There was that one brief shining moment when progressive Republicans like John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller were indeed the foils of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Therefore, it has to naturally follow that neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan are the natural foils of Donald Trump. And as such, we should all be on the same side.

And that is so cool, because such an alliance would put the kibosh on any annoying, lingering, gridlocky anti-war sentiment and pesky foreign policy differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. There would no longer be much of a need for the few diehard pacifists still left in Congress to make a stink about presidential war powers and the need to legislatively rubber-stamp every last invasion and bombing spree.

We can all be patriotically united in our hatred of Trump, who is, after all, nothing but a tool of Vladimir Putin, that bipartisan scapegoat we can all be taught to hate while Exceptional America bombs and invades at will. We can all overcome our dreaded "sickly inhibitions" against Permawar. We can all stop worrying and come together as one great big snuggley war party.

Dionne writes:

Others (the Never Trump Republicans) are a part of an unusual alliance between hawkish neoconservatives and Republican foreign policy realists who often disagree with each other but are joined in the view that Trump’s foreign policy, such as it is, is entirely outside the internationalist traditions their party has broadly upheld since World War II. Both ends of this anti-Trump alliance are especially suspicious of his friendly views of Vladimir Putin and his support of policies (on NATO and the European Union) that would advance Russia’s interests.
On foreign policy, there is some coming together between Clinton and her Republican allies. Dovish liberals worry about this aspect of the anti-Trump right. They suspect — partly on the basis of her history — that Clinton’s instincts are more hawkish than President Obama’s.
Her allies on international issues cast the issue somewhat differently — and more positively: that Clinton’s election could restore something close to an older consensus on foreign policy that was blown apart by the Iraq War. They argue that she occupies a middle ground between Obama and his hawkish critics. She is less interventionist than the neoconservatives but would, on some issues, be tougher in her approach to diplomacy than Obama has been.

Obama, of course, is now diplomatically bombing seven different countries. But the legend continues that he is some kind of weak pacifist. The pretense that Republicans and Democrats haven't always joined together and cooperated in appropriating unlimited and unaccountable funds for wars, surveillance and other Deep State activities continues.

The centrist discourse about Hillary Republicans is all about selling forever wars to the war-weary American people. And it might be working.

The propaganda being spooned out by the corporate media calls for a new Neoconservative/Neoliberal Coalition in the service of limitless American hegemony. People will have to get killed, of course, and that might make many of us feel a bit queasy, but it sure beats death by Donald Trump. Alt-right? All right?

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky tells how liberal pundit Walter Lippman wrote the original, finger-lickin' good recipe for his heirs in the Media-Political Complex:

He argued that what he called a "revolution in the art of democracy," could be used to "manufacture consent, " that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn’t want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, "the common interests elude public opinion entirely" and can only be understood and managed by a "specialized class "of "responsible men" who are smart enough to figure things out. This theory asserts that only a small elite, the intellectual community that the Deweyites were talking about, can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things "elude the general public." This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. It’s also a typical Leninist view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them to state power, and then drive the stupid masses toward a future that they’re too dumb and incompetent to envision for themselves. The liberal democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism are very close in their common ideological assumptions. I think that’s one reason why people have found it so easy over the years to drift from one position to another without any particular sense of change. It’s just a matter of assessing where power is. Maybe there will be a popular revolution, and that will put us into state power; or maybe there won’t be, in which case we’ll just work for the people with real power: the business community. But we’ll do the same thing. We’ll drive the stupid masses toward a world that they’re too dumb to understand for themselves.

***

Maureen Dowd, in her latest stinging column, writes that even though The Alt-Right Is All Wrong, Hillary Clinton has nonetheless provided it with some legitimacy by simply talking about it and deflecting attention away from her own corruption. (She even helped hand out chocolate truffles to the masses in Reno, in true, Marie Antoinette fashion!)

If Hillary had a normal opponent, her vulnerabilities would be more glaring. She would have spent the last week getting peppered with questions about how the F.B.I. discovered 14,900 more emails from her private server, which are going to drip out through the fall.

But Hillary does not have a normal opponent. She has one who manages to self-destruct in every news cycle. So instead she was soaring above her own paranoia and mocking Trump’s paranoia, soaring above her egregious messes and gamboling through Trump’s egregious messes....

.... Many people believe that Trump is so demented and dangerous that any criticism of Hillary should be tabled or suppressed, that her malfeasance is so small compared to his that it is not worth mentioning. But that’s not good for her or us to leave so many things hanging out there, without her ever having to explain herself.

Letting her rise above everything for the good of the country is not good for the country.

As per usual in the post-Bernie era, the most highly-rated reader comments were those that supported Clinton and berated Dowd. The consent has been skillfully manufactured and Chomsky has been proven all too right. Reality truly is in the eye of the propagandized beholder.

My relatively unpopular and even much-despised ("a bitter, hate-filled screed," according to one Hillarian) published comment:

It's so true that Bill and Hillary have always paradoxically benefited from the "vast right wing conspiracy." The more outlandish the attacks against them, the more we circle the Clinton wagons. Does anybody still remember that the progressive MoveOn was initially formed to defend Bill after the Lewinsky scandal? Even Gloria Steinem rushed to his defense back then, as the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on Iraq, and half a million children died as a result. Madeline Albright, who later said that there's a special place in hell for women who don't support Hillary, allowed that this was a hard choice, but ultimately worth it.

 Thus did last week's 20th anniversary of the Clintons' odiously named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act pass practically unnoticed amidst the latest outbreak of manufactured outrage.The extreme poverty rate has doubled as a result of cutting off cash aid to mainly black single moms and forcing them to take low-wage jobs minus the promised child care and training. It was a breathtakingly callous betrayal of the poor.

So, thanks to Trump, we're all invited to Hillary's great big happy "Better Together" family of billionaires and neocons, the latest of whom is war criminal Paul Wolfowitz.

Trump is only one psychopath among very, very many.