"We Want Information"

Despite what they claim, the congressional inquisitors who browbeat Silicon Valley executives this week are not particularly interested in suppressing those amateur-hour political ads coming out of "troll farms" with easily manipulated Russian I.P. addresses. Haven't any of them ever heard of proxy servers?

Their real goal seems to be gaslighting the American public into wondering whether that next protest march they join, or the next independent news site they click on is "legitimate" -- or as even the Democratic inquisitors put it, "real American."  And to make sure that the US public is getting the stern message, the committees are demanding that the tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter willingly hand over information about their posters and users to Congress and, by implied extension, to the CIA and the FBI. And that is so weird. Because their demand simply reveals that the NSA, which was outed by Edward Snowden as the collector of every bit of Internet info on every man, woman and child in the world, is apparently not too adept at actually filtering out the mounds and mounds of cyber-information they continue to vacuum up, willy-nilly, for storage in a massive facility out in the Utah desert.

Watching Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) machine-gun out his accusatory questions at the bemused-looking tech lawyers and executives unpleasantly reminded me of the opening scene of the surreal British TV series called The Prisoner.

The co-equal partners of Congress and the "intelligence community" desperately want the private information on social media users which the tech giants have scooped up for their own purposes of advertising and endless profits. Reactionary politicians are using the contrived RussiaGate scare and "national security" concerns as the pretext to get what they want out of the sub-nation of Silicon Valley. "You have transformed the way we do everything from shopping for groceries to growing our small businesses," Warner, who made his own millions in tech and private equity, railed in righteous fury. "But Russia’s actions are further exposing the dark underbelly of the ecosystem you have created!"

Pop Quiz: Find the Dark Underbelly For Extra Points

"And if you won't do it, we will," vowed Dianne Feinstein (D-CIA), with the requisite scare-mongering about "us" being at war with Russia, and accusing the Kremlin of being the major sower of social divisions in the United States, simply by pasting up a bunch of truly cheesy-looking ads on the Internet.

This One Swayed Bernie-Supporting Atheists & Convinced Ted Cruz True Believers 

The aim of the congress-critters could not be any more transparent. By accusing a foreign power of creating social unrest in the most unequal advanced country on earth, they save themselves the trouble of exploring the true, historical roots of these social problems, not to mention doing anything about them. It all boils down to government of, by, and for an oligarchy which has replaced representative democracy.

It's easier for them to crazily claim that 10 million American citizens, or roughly one-thirtieth of the entire population, have been hypnotized into eyeballing an estimated 3,000 ads emanating from Petersburg. Even crazier is the claim by Facebook that more than 100 million - meaning one out of three Americans - viewed the ads. This exposure allegedly has caused people to start hating individuals and groups they would not otherwise have hated, and voting for a reality show huckster they would not otherwise have even noticed outside the $5 billion worth wall-to-wall free coverage of his hate-speech granted him by the domestic mainstream media. These claims simply beggar belief.  

  Despite carefully labeling their witch-hunt a patriotic effort to weed out Putinesque propaganda, committee members did slip up a few times during their series of hearings, admitting that they're also trying to suppress or weed out left-leaning domestic news sites and blogs and social justice organizations. During the House's own separate fishing expedition, Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) groused that search engine algorithms don't do enough to cull any kind of content that is "fear-based, or anger-based." In other words, this is any content not sponsored by corporations, such as on the fear-mongering terror channel, CNN, or the anger-spreading, lie-spreading Fox News.

Why doesn't Schiff just cut to the chase and add some more oomph to the Congress-enabled opioid epidemic by giving every American a lifetime prescription for Xanax or Valium? We simply can't have the poor, the overworked, the underpaid, the jobless and the uninsured getting so damned mad all the time about their all-American allotted stations in life.

On the one hand, elected officials bitch and moan that people are too dumb to figure out that a primitive cartoon ad which casts Hillary Clinton as the devil attacking Jesus isn't really Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, they bitch and moan that people are too smart for their own good, and know only too well how badly their leaders are screwing them over. 

Congress wants to have it both ways. They want a populace smart enough to track down approved sources of information, and then limit their consumption to six major media conglomerates. They also want a populace dumb enough to actually believe what these six major conglomerates spoon out to them.

Meanwhile, they act out their drama of disingenuous confusion over this whole contrived chicken and egg dilemma. Which came first: the social unrest fueling the inflammatory content, or the inflammatory content fueling the social unrest? They might as well ask which came first: the pamphlets of the Sans-Culottes inflaming hatred for the French monarchy, or the French monarchy inflaming the hatred of the revolutionary masses? Congress is suddenly pretending that this question is not as old as humankind itself. Maybe they've been spending too much time watching and appearing on corporate propaganda-cum-news shows.

This latest inquisition might look like a mere fishing expedition for a relative handful of Russian trolls. What it is in reality is a shot across the bow against the First Amendment itself.

"We're just getting started," huffs Adam Schiff.  He's gung-ho for a brand new piece of legislation, oxymoronically called the "Honest Ads Act," or HAA. 

The Don Drapers of Madison Avenue must be laughing their asses off on that one, as they market the painkillers along with the drugs to counter opioid constipation. Be very afraid of cartoon Trumps and Clintons and pay proper attention to the diet scams, the local dark money political attacks, the banks, the airlines, the luxury cars, and the military recruitment come-ons produced for your viewing and reading pleasure by the six major media conglomerates. Join the defense of capitalism on steroids. It may not be truthful or just, but it's definitely the all-American way.

Donna Brazile, Whistleblower

The former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee has just thrown erstwhile pal Hillary Clinton right under the proverbial bus. Like so many other "woke" elites popping up like acne all over the face of the media-political-entertainment complex, Donna Brazile is rushing to cash in on her own disingenuous newfound awareness. It is suddenly so cool to admit that there is graft and corruption and fraud and abuse going on all over the place. You get instant good press whenever you screw up your courage to let the public in on all the "open secrets" of the high and mighty.

 Donna Brazile is the first, but hopefully not the last, high-ranking elite Democrat to finally screw up enough courage to share the dirt on Hillary. You might say she is the Ashley Judd of the political wing of the political-media-entertainment complex, except that in no way can she be considered the "victim" of a predator. She was more in the enabler class, such as those who knew about Harvey Weinstein for decades and still kept silent.

 The problem is that after awhile, belated celebrity regrets from high places can get to sound hypocritical, especially when the only price the revealed culprits ever seem to pay is some luxury therapy, or a non-disclosure agreement, or a get-out-of jail wrist-slap involving a civil fine.

And Donna Brazile is more preposterous than most of the Johnnie-come-lately's, especially when she claims that she did all this supposed "muckraking" for her new BFF, Bernie Sanders. He was cheated out of the nomination, and Donna Brazile is here to vindicate him by finally - finally! -  telling the truth as she knows it. Of course, it's not anywhere near the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Brazile is not about to destroy her own already-shaky reputation in the process of selling her "tell-all" potboiler of a book.

Brazile, savvy operator that she is, is unabashedly slathering herself with protective Bernie Sanders ointment and importuning him in the process. She knows which way the political wind is blowing. She knows that Bernie is now the most popular politician in the country.

 So in pleading total and unbelievable ignorance of the money-laundering operation at the very heart of her organization, Brazile is like the pathetic getaway driver in a bank heist. "It wasn't me, officer! All those bags full of marked cash exploding into a purple cloud as I drove? They not only blinded me, they gagged me!  I thought we wuz driving to the annual charity bazaar!"

More than a year after the heist, Donna Brazile is suddenly remembering a thing or three. So in exchange for a lighter sentence in the annals of revisionist history and for a generous publishing advance, she's turning informer and singing like a bird.

The big money scam at the center of the Clinton/DNC operation allowed deep-pocketed but maxed-out donors to give another $353,450 to an entity called the "Hillary Victory Fund," which then sent the money in $10,000 increments to some 30 state parties for ostensible use in their own local campaigns. The catch was that the "non-battleground" states were only allowed to keep a very tiny portion of this money. The rest was funneled right back to Hillary's Brooklyn headquarters.

Although the existence of this laundered slush fund became common knowledge in April 2016, when Margot Kidder broke the story on CounterPunch and other outlets soon followed up, Donna Brazile proclaims herself absolutely flabbergasted when she read about it the following July, in some of the leaked emails.The most shocking reality to Brazile was that Hillary Clinton was a grasping authoritarian, personally bailing out and imperiously controlling the DNC with wads of that ill-gotten cash - long before securing the nomination.

Brazile said and did nothing at the time. And while she now pats herself on the back for vindicating Bernie Sanders, she also passive-aggressively throws him under the bus by claiming that when he learned the details of the graft, he kept quiet about it too. Defeating Trump, even at the cost of their own moral values, was the only thing that really mattered to both of them.

Despite her firing from CNN last year for sneaking a question to Hillary Clinton prior to a debate with Sanders on that cable channel, Brazile now hilariously pretends to have entered a recovery program for enablers - but only after she'd eagerly helped Clinton to get away with it.

I'd promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

 So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

It's getting to be very crowded under the Donna Bus. Can't you just picture  neglectful, narcissistic Barack curled up beside lackadaisical flunky Debbie as both of them fight for air and space in the pages of Brazile's truthy confessions? Since Brazile unquestioningly accepts the notion that the theft of the DNC emails was a Russian hacking operation and not an inside job, you also have to wonder whether the imputation of mere neglect and stupidity to two powerful Democratic politicians isn't also a useful cover for their own unethical, if not criminal, complicity.

While Brazile calls her book "Hacks," she sadly isn't talking about herself and other party operatives and factotums and corporate media pundits. She's talking about the Russians. If it weren't for the Russians and the leaked emails, she implies, she wouldn't be having to cry all these crocodile tears in her incipient best-seller.

Meanwhile, her complaint that Obama selfishly left the Democratic Party high and dry and $24 million in debt after his 2012 run rings absolutely true. He created a vacuum absolutely ripe for Clintonian graft and control. The fact that nearly a thousand Democratic seats in state and congressional elections disappeared during his eight-year tenure does point to one man sucking up all the money for his own political gratification at everyone else's expense.

Although a power broker in the Democratic Party for decades, Brazile asserts it wasn't until taking over as interim chair after the 2016 convention that her ingenue eyes were opened by Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Obama financial watchdog who went on to head Clinton's campaign finance division.

...I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

Weeks? It's starting to sound as though Brazile was in a state of self-serving and party-serving denial, or at worst, cynically "running out the clock" until Election Day.

If she isn't careful, Brazile even threatens to overtake Hillary herself in the Blame Game Steeplechase, not to mention topping her on the Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists:

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

That, right there, is the big tell. Donna Brazile was not worried enough to cancel her annual vacation in Martha's Vineyard, the playground of the rich and famous and well-connected. In her new career as an elite whistle-blower, she wants you to know that she's still got a lot more clout and leisure time than most people.

 The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and (Clinton campaign manager) Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

Donald Trump is going to have a field day with this. And sad to say, he'll be perfectly justified in using it as a deflection and distraction from his own campaign's indicted money-laundering operators. 

Think of Donna Brazile's book as a preemptive unofficial plea deal. After all, if Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta can get caught up in the special prosecutor's net, none of them should be considered immune.

Meanwhile, the real distraction of these palace intrigues is that they divert media attention from such bipartisan plots as cutting social programs in order to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy.

So many scams, so little time.

More MIsery of the Elites

Paul Krugman's latest is yet another noodle-lashing of those nasty Republicans and their foul donor class whose added tax cuts won't put the slightest dent into their pre-existing conditions of meanness and misery.

The wealthy donors for whom the G.O.P. will apparently do anything, up to and including covering up for possible treason, will get no joy from their tax cuts.

I don’t mean that history will judge them harshly, although it will. I don’t even mean that plutocrats as well as plebeians will eventually suffer if America becomes a lawless, authoritarian regime. I mean that a few hundred thousand dollars extra will do little if anything to make the already wealthy more satisfied with their lives.

You might well ask, who cares? Even if tax cuts would make the rich joyful, this shouldn’t count against the sheer misery Republicans are trying to impose on the tens of millions of people they’re trying to deprive of health care, food stamps, disability benefits and more.

Still, for some reason I find it fascinating that all this misery, plus the possible destruction of constitutional government, may happen without even making the intended beneficiaries happy.

My published response: 

  Making this all about the feral GOP donor class lets the "good rich" off the hook. It isn't a matter of Republicans vs Democrats. It's a matter of the rich versus the rest of us. And it's bipartisan. Why else are "centrist" Democrats, like Wall Street mogul Steve Rattner, so rabidly against Medicare for All? 

As Gilens and Page established in their study of affluence and political influence, even most wealthy Democratic donors are against increased spending for public education and higher taxes to pay for true universal health care. As a result, more often than not, the beholden Congress does the exact opposite of what the voters want and need.

And as Forbes's latest annual wealth list reveals, the 400 richest US billionaires now own as much wealth as the bottom 60% of the population combined. This obscene inequality is making even the ultra-rich so nervous that one UBS banker suggested a "cure" of more public exhibits of plutocratic art, and more investment in sports teams. This noblesse oblige would not, however, extend to actual free admission for the public. Even the despots of the crumbling Roman Empire let their citizens watch the gladiators get killed for free.

So Trump isn't the only clueless tycoon who thinks that his dollars are equivalent to IQ points. Even if he were kicked out tomorrow, there's plenty more where he came from.

It's total war. It's 400 plutocrats' combined net worth of $2.68 trillion against the rest of us. It's the antithesis of democracy.

The Misery of the Elites

I've always been a sucker for Halloween lit, so when I first glanced at Ross Douthat's latest New York Times column, my heart went pitter-pat with crazed excitement. Since he titled his effort "The Misery Filter" I thought it might be a squeamish conservative's guide to reading the Stephen King bestseller of the same name.

Reader, I read it. And its hypocrisy was every bit as terrifying as anything Edgar Allan Poe could ever have dreamed up.

For those of you who've blessedly forgotten the Reagan Wonder Years of the 80s, King's Misery is the story of a pulp fiction writer who is imprisoned and hobbled by a psychotic serial killer nurse named Annie Wilkes. She is so smitten with her captive's series of books about a heroine named Misery that she keeps him alive just so he can type out the next episode, exclusively for her. It's a kind of gender-reversal retelling of the Scheherazade story.

But much to my disappointment, it turned out that Ross isn't into Grand Guignol black comedy at all. Like so many of his Republican ilk, though, he is suddenly very much into "wokeness." The same misanthropes who've been howling like werewolves for decades about "unassimilated illegals"  and lazy "welfare queens" are suddenly realizing that empathy for others might be the better tactic if they hope to have a respectable journalistic career in this Trumpian age of cruelty.

Of course, when these conservative types talk about empathy, what they really mean is empathy for one of their own class or profession. This empathy tends to rise to the surface whenever one of them gets stricken with a terminal disease or other unexpected bit of bad luck. Even then, they persist in narrowly framing the definition of loving-kindness in terms of the political corporate Duopoly. In young Ross Douthat's own tell-tale column, the scolding is in terms of that old Nixonian standby, the "generation gap."

Naturally, the meme of the cluelessness of the generic college student is an ideal scapegoat for the causation of Trump. Those privileged young-uns, those coddled snowflakes, so totally explain why Donald Trump won, and Hillary Clinton did not.

Because this seems to me to be the signal failing of modern education — visible among my own peers, now entering the time of life when suffering is more the weather than a lightning strike, but especially among the generation younger than us, who seem to be struggling with the contrast between what social media and meritocracy tell them they should feel and what they actually experience.

In America we have education for success, but no education for suffering. There is instead the filter, the well-meaning deception, that teaches neither religious hope nor stoicism, and when suffering arrives encourages group hysteria, private shame and a growing contagion of despair.

How to educate for suffering is a question for a different column. Here I’ll just stress its necessity: Because what cannot be cured must be endured, and how to endure is, even now, the hardest challenge every one of us will face.

Even on Halloween, Douthat can't face the awful truth: that the force enabling Trump is the record economic and social inequality causing all this misery in the first place. Douthat's own clogged filter chugs out the same old exhaust, refuses to acknowledge that the polar opposite of empathy is not ignorance. Rather it is cold-blooded greed. It's personified not just by Trump, but by the outlandishly powerful, blood-sucking predators of the global oligarchy, a club in which only six or eight billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire world.

 Therefore, Douthat has fashioned something called the "misery filter" - the ability of the coddled to ignore suffering, and the falsely equivalent incapacity of the suffering to embrace the virtues of stoicism, and or noble acceptance of their lots in life. It sounds every bit as appetizing as the medieval scold's bridle.

My published response:

 "What cannot be cured must be endured" was also the dogma of the Calvinist settlers who landed on Plymouth Rock. This cruel philosophy is the entire basis of wealth for the deserving few, and poverty for the unworthy masses.

Stoicism is what the ruling class dictates to the underclass as justification for their membership in the Ebenezer Scrooge Club. As Princeton's Gilens and Page established in their study of affluence and influence, the very wealthy simply don't want to be taxed to make the lives of ordinary people better. Rather than admit this selfishness, though, they preach such beatitudes as "blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Or, if they're really mean and nasty, they hire"values" politicians who preach to hungry children: "Those who do not work shall not eat."

In other words, there will be no decent wages, no secure jobs, no well-funded public schools and no guaranteed health care on Planet Plutocrat. Forget educating for suffering, Ross: the hyper-rich are desperate to privatize education to regiment the future wage slaves of America while putting all the dividends into their own deep pockets.

 Before people can develop hope, or stoicism, their oppressors need to develop some cognitive empathy. They should stop hoarding and virtue-signaling and lecturing people, and start imagining what life is really like in an oppressed person's shoes.

There's cruelty, and then there's benevolent paternalism. Both are inherently anti-democratic.

***

Since reading Douthat's version of misery left me with an unhealthy craving for some real Stephen King,  I picked up a book of his called Grave New World. I hadn't seen it on any recent bestseller lists, so I'd assumed it was a sequel to Pet Sematary or The Shining, and that I'd missed it.

Much to my horror, it was not only written by a different Stephen King, but by a Stephen D. King who is a chief economic advisor to the monster called HSBC. This is another too-big-to-die multinational behemoth, the seventh largest bank in the world. Among other things, it's been accused of money laundering for international drug cartels. Despite (or more aptly, because of) this criminal background, it thrives and it grows and it devours.

So, while King's book is in part yet another apologia from yet another "woke" neoliberal, at least it's a lot more honest than what Ross Douthat has to offer. For one thing, the "other" Stephen King outright accuses the saintly Barack Obama of lying about the benefits of the moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership. King acknowledges it was never a free trade deal at all, and that Obama's claim that it would protect the workers of the United States is ridiculous on its face. The TPP essentially was the core of Obama's aggressive "pivot to China" in the selfish interests of US-based corporations and billionaires.

The two Stephen Kings actually do have something in common: a macabre sense of humor. 

In his time-travel novel November 22, 1963 the novelist King describes the future in a world where John F. Kennedy was never assassinated. The 21st century he envisions is a dystopian mess ruled by President Hillary Clinton.  (To be fair, not even Stephen King saw Donald Trump coming.)

The economist King, on the other hand, wrote his book after Trump's election. In his version of events, although Hillary Clinton didn't get to reign in Dystopia USA, she did help to create it. She just couldn't hide her elitism, even flaunted it proudly in the form of a $12,495 Armani jacket at the New York City celebration of her primary victory over Bernie Sanders. "She fooled nobody," he notes drily. (Did I mention that he is British?)

King the economist also mocks the elitist horror of all things Trump, most notably the dirge over the death of "international norms" as moralized by the exceptional United States:

Too often, the three words used by politicians and news organizations lazily seeking to establish some sense of moral superiority are 'the international community.' If the government of a particular nation acts in a way that 'draws condemnation' from the international community, then it has apparently done something very bad indeed. If it has merely acted in a controversial way - perhaps impulsively, without spending enough time weighing up the evidence - its actions may be 'frowned upon by the international community.' If, alternatively, a government has done something that appears to be morally upstanding, its actions are 'applauded by the international community.'

King, in a refreshing departure from the wit and wisdom of Ross Douthat, aptly notes that the real division is not between political parties, or ethnicities, or genders, but between rich and poor. "That our international representatives tend to be more comfortable in each other's company than they are with the citizens they are supposed to represent is, in itself, a serious challenge to globalization, particularly if they insist on looking down on their fellow citizens from a great height," he writes.

While the novelist Stephen King is commonly lambasted by "serious" literary critics as being two-dimensional and lurid, the economist/historian Stephen King is lambasted for being too glum. 

In its own review,The Economist sniffed at his prescriptions, which include an economic United Nations and a breakup of the Eurozone. 

They didn't even like his entertaining closing chapter, a Grand Guignol imagining of Ivanka Trump as the GOP's 2044 presidential nominee (rather than as an inmate in the penthouse of a Club Fed.)  She enthuses to loud and sustained applause:

 Ladies and gentlemen. As president, I will always make sure that the United States of America is in control. I will engage only with those countries that believe 100 percent in the American way. And those who don't can expect to be faced with the full force of my proposed Pacifying Protectionist Regime (PPR). I'm fed up with countries using their cheap labour to steal from good, honest American workers. So tonight I pledge to protect remaining American jobs come what may!

 They don't call Economics "the dismal science" for nothing, even when the misery is so hilarious as to be absolutely supply side-splitting.

Fifty Is Not So Nifty In Unequal America

People within a decade of retirement are at increased risk of not living their "golden years" in the same state of good health that their own parents enjoyed and in many cases continue to enjoy.

Sixty might be the new 40 for the rich and famous. But for too many people, it's become the new 80. The Great Recession has not only wiped out savings and jobs, it's been a main cause of premature aging and the development of chronic diseases which only get worse the longer that they go untreated. 

Depression-Era Photo Courtesy of the Social Security Administration

A study by University of Michigan researchers reveals that American workers in late middle age are at a higher risk of developing disease than the previous generation. People are forced to retire later, and they have fewer resources to pay for medical treatment and the high insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles of the Affordable Care Act. Those who are within 10 years of qualifying for Social Security and Medicare are at especially high risk.

From UM's Health Care Institute for Policy and Innovation:

• Those born after 1967, who have to wait longer to receive their full Social Security benefits, tended to have higher rates of poor cognition, such as memory and thinking ability, in their 50s than the earlier cohort groups had at a similar age.
• When people in the latest-born birth cohort was asked at around age 50 to rate their own health, more of them said it was fair or poor—compared with lower percentages in the middle three birth cohorts when they were around 50.
• The later-born groups had higher percentages of people who had at least one limitation on their ability to perform a basic daily living task by themselves, such as shopping for groceries, taking medications or getting out of bed.
• There weren’t strong differences between the groups in physical function, such as being able to climb a flight of stairs without resting, lifting 10 pounds or walking several blocks.
• Stark differences in health between people with different levels of education were seen—echoing what other studies have shown. For instance, about 25 percent of people who had to wait until age 66 to claim full benefits and had less than 12 years of education reported at least one health-related life limitation when they were in their mid-50s. But among those who had more than 12 years of education and were in the same claiming group (age 66), only about 7 percent had at least one such limitation. Those whose education had stopped at high school graduation were in the middle.

Economic inequality has been growing steadily worse since the Reagan years. According to another survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the wealth gap among American senior citizens is the widest of any other developed country, with only Mexico and Chile doing worse.

 And if Donald Trump's regressive tax plan goes through, the divide will become even more extreme. Wealthy, healthy retirees will get to keep more of what their investments earn, and they'll be able to pass most of their money down to succeeding generations with the planned repeal of the estate tax.

No wonder that the predatory casino known as the Stock Market (heads they win, tails you lose) is posting record gains. These are gains for the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, Trump has even axed the Obama administration's milquetoast and rather cynical MyRa private retirement plan - for the quite logical reason that not enough workers have had the spare change to put into it.

Yet, the richest of the rich are still not satisfied with having it all. They want to extract every last penny from the poor, the old, and the sick.

"Centrist" Obama administration advisor and financier Steve Rattner, who had no qualms orchestrating the bailout of the auto industry after the 2008 crash, has now penned a New York Times op-ed warning of the dangers of Medicare for All. His elite class cringes at the very thought of hordes of vulnerable people escaping from poverty and illness. This unprecedented glut of healthy people threatens to suck the life right out of the billionaires - or at least prevent them from using their hoarded money to buy a larger mega-yacht or a fifth vacation home.

Of course, Rattner didn't put it quite like that. Rather, too much health care for too many people would have the awful affect of sinking the whole Democratic Party! What is more important than life itself, if not an exclusive political party?

Rattner begins with the stale argument that since Medicare for All proponent Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat, his proposals are absolute heresy, if not inherently un-American. This is definitely a question of Party Over People, especially when the partiers are billionaires and CEOs. And not only that - Sanders also viscerally offends the Upper Crust by dint of being a "crusty Vermont independent."

"A freight train is coming at us from the Left!" the Wall Street multimillionaire shrills in the proper spirit of Halloween and Krusty the Clown. 

That ghost train would run right over and crush the lucky few who now enjoy gold-plated health care. They would be inconvenienced if they were automatically enrolled in a Medicare-type health plan with little to no effort on their own parts. Single Payer insurance would take away all the pleasure of shopping and choosing among gold, silver, bronze, copper, plug nickel and paper plans. It wouldn't even require Internet access.

Even worse, public insurance would knock the joy right out of the booming stock market. Therefore, Rattner clownishly concludes, if Democrats would only get out their knives and join in the ghoulish fun and heartlessly deny single payer health care to the poor, the old and sick, they are bound to beat Trump in 2020!

Needless to say, the Times did not open Rattner's unhinged horror story to reader comments.

On a related note, though,  the Times is urging what it calls "consumers" (who apparently are human beings only secondarily) in that high-risk 50+ age bracket to blithely fork over $280 for a brand-new Shingles vaccine:

According to the C.D.C., almost 1 of every 3 people in the United States will contract shingles, a viral infection that can result in a painful rash and lasting nerve damage.

The disease, also known as herpes zoster, can range in severity from barely noticeable to debilitating. It is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which also triggers chickenpox.

The newspaper made no mention of the cruel policies which have triggered the shameful morbidity and mortality rates in the richest country on the face of the earth.

How To Buy An Impeachment

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that the very rich usually get what they want from elected politicians.

And so if a hedge fund billionaire wants Donald Trump to be impeached, he'll  spend whatever it takes to make his dream come true. Just ask Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, who's already forked over $10 million for TV ads to inform the already converted that Trump needs to go. He's spending another 10 mil or so on social media ad buys, or at least 10 times what the Russians allegedly invested in order to magically propel Impeachy Don directly into the White House. And if you only count the $10,000 that Russian troll farms spent on Facebook ads, the total Steyer ad buy would amount to a whopping 20 times of that foreign expenditure.

Still, his impeachment campaign doesn't come anywhere close to the $5 billion worth of free TV coverage  which Trump got from the mainstream media during his endless campaign, nor the $2 billion in estimated cash raised by the Clinton machine.

But thanks to the power of even lesser - but still obscenely excessive - cash, Steyer is also getting plenty of free press to boost his ad campaign investment, most recently in a prominently-placed column by the New York Times' new hire, Michelle Goldberg. It's so awesome what tens of millions of dollars will do to "control the narrative" with little to no independent reporting even needed from the stenographer in question.

All Michelle Goldberg had to do to write her column was to elicit a little confirmation bias from other Democratic operatives and "thought leaders" who operate in Steyer's cash-rich political milieu. These experts are here to urge the cash-needy Congressional Democrats to get off their hands for a change, and hold out those hands for all the great ideas and policies and outcomes that progressive billionaires have to offer them. They should then absolutely embrace their donors impeachment.

Why wait for Robert Mueller to complete his criminal investigation into the Trump Empire's wheelings and dealings? Goldberg scrolled down the Times's speed-dial list to find out:

But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump. “If the president went on vacation in Madagascar for six months, that’s not a crime, but that’s impeachable.”

If you're going to use an establishment Democrat as the main supplementary source of your piece, you must also plug his book while letting him deny that he is plugging his book and also letting him deny that his book is even about Trump. This makes your column seem very plausible, and nowhere close to the Russian propaganda spreading its tentacles into our hearts and minds on a daily basis. It also artificially limits the "terror" that US citizens feel, restricted to only Trump and Russia as the roots of all evil.

  "And the best way to show Trump that people are serious about impeaching him is to put the message on television," sagely concludes Michelle Goldberg.

My published response:

Before they think about impeachment, Congress should take the keys to the nuclear code right out of his little hands. They should stop spending 70% of their time raising money, and start passing emergency legislation which rescinds the unitary executive powers instigated by Dick Cheney. They should repeal the Patriot Act at the earliest opportunity, strengthen shield laws for reporters, and rescind the blanket authorization for military force they give to presidents every single year, with virtually no serious debate.

The same congress critters who clutch their pearls over every last Trumpian faux pas just handed his perpetual war machine three quarters of a trillion dollars to play around with.

Senior Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham both admitted in recent days that they had no idea we had nearly a thousand troops in Niger, and at least six thousand in other African countries. Huh?

So methinks that Donald Trump isn't the only guy who isn't up to the job. The way the Pentagon and the CIA and corporations run roughshod over the legislative branch, you'd think they were only a millionaire social club whose job is to go on TV and complain helplessly when they aren't begging us to elect them to just two more years, six more years, a lifetime's worth of years.
 And while Mr. Steyer's heart might be in the right place, he exemplifies the dangerously outsize power that billionaires now have in running the country.

And then there's Mike Pence. God help us all.

Rewarding Our Psychopaths

The rehabilitation of George W. Bush is well nigh complete.  Within mere hours of delivering a glowingly-reviewed anti-Trump speech, he was honored with the coveted Thayer Award at the United States Military Academy at West Point for all his folksy contributions to the perpetual war effort.

There is such a sudden glut of Bush revenance, in fact, that it even makes you wonder if the coordinated piling-on of Harvey Weinstein by every celebrity under the sun is being done for the express purpose of smoothing the way for Bush's own final release from political purgatory into the heavenly realm of the permanent ruling class.

 Weinstein himself reportedly didn't do well during his own truncated rehab, even having the effrontery to fall asleep during luxury therapy sessions.  Dubya, on the other hand, did an entire decade's worth of self-exiled penance, before finally graduating summa cum laude. His bizarre "leaked" bathtub oil paintings of his own feet in 2013 were the first tentative big toe into the rehab publicity waters before the inclusive photo-ops with psychopathic presidents of Christmases Past began popping up all year round like demented greeting cards.

Rub a Dub, Three Men in a Tub of Money: Bros For All Seasons

And of course it helps the Bush redemption campaign immensely that Donald Trump is so universally loathed by the liberal class that even liberals have been welcoming Dubya back with open arms. Michelle Obama gave him that famous hug last year, automatically promoting him several levels ahead to a blissful state of pre-Nirvana. At about the same time, he magically appeared on the Ellen Show to pose for insipid selfies and to crack self-deprecating jokes.  It was so totally not coordinated.

The Hug Heard 'Round the World: Redemption of the Psychopath

Joining the steady stream of prominent op-eds penned by a veritable army of "woke" A-List actresses recounting the horrors of the Harvey Weinstein massage, the New York Times's Frank Bruni wrote a puff piece massaging the image of George W. Bush under cover of a cozy luncheon with Barbara and Jenna, his twin daughters. It was so coincidentally placed adjacent to his paper's very approving coverage of Bush's pro-market, anti-Trump speech. The former Times restaurant critic generously topped Barbara Jr.'s pricey grilled salmon entree with globs upon globs of feel-good froth about Dear Old Dad.

 So, now that we know that Goofy Pappy likes to use emojis in his emails, we can forget all about the hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis who died as a result of his unprosecuted war crimes.

Trump does his own part for the cause by making the deeply reactionary words which Bush spoke at his neo-confab Thursday seem downright benign, delivered as they were with his fake Texas drawl as a syrupy counterpoint to Trump's Queens-bred bile. Bush babbled,

There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned, especially among the young, who never experienced the galvanizing moral clarity of the Cold War, or never focused on the ruin of entire nations by socialist central planning. Some have called this “democratic deconsolidation.” Really, it seems to be a combination of weariness, frayed tempers, and forgetfulness.
We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions – forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

McCarthyism and red-baiting are presented as moral imperatives rather than what they really were, and are: attacks on the social programs of FDR's New Deal and an excuse for billionaires and corporations to get even richer from the constant manufacture and sale of deadly weapons. This is very much a diatribe against socialism in general, and the Russian Revolution specifically, which is marking its 100th anniversary this month. It is an appeal to fear and religion as the toxic glue with which the political duopoly strives to both bind us and gag us. Notice that Bush merely bemoans the degradation of "our discourse" by casual cruelty. It's not the institutional cruelty that his regime and others have spread all over the world by way of wars and predatory International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans that bother him. It's that the propaganda which has literally allowed them to get away with murder is coming apart at the seams. 

 Barack Obama deserves the most credit for immediately getting the rehab ball rolling in 2009 when he ignored the Geneva Convention and refused to prosecute George Jr. and other members of the Bush administration for torture and the illegal invasion of a sovereign country. On the contrary, Obama actually ramped up Bush's wars and drone assassinations, and kept the Guantanamo Bay gulag for "enemy combatants" open. Although he banned the CIA from conducting any more direct torture, he did outsource torture to poorer countries in much the same way that pro-corporate trade deals outsource jobs to poorer countries. He suppressed the Senate's investigatory report on CIA torture, and praised the criminals as "patriots."

And, ever so coincidentally, he delivered his own anti-Trump speech on Thursday, the exact same day that George delivered his. Obama's criticism was in the guise of an endorsement speech for Phil Murphy, the  multimillionaire Goldman Sachs banker and former DNC finance chairman who was appointed by Obama to be ambassador to Germany before he entered the New Jersey gubernatorial race. 

 Of course, both former presidents' publicists denied that the speeches were in any way coordinated. So if you thought that the twin polemics damning Trumpism were just another ploy to use neoliberal "bipartisan" harmony as a propaganda tool to get the masses of disaffected people to shut up and get with the plutocratic program, you are probably a stooge of both Trump and Putin.

Antony J. Blinken, a contributing op-ed Times writer and Democratic national security expert who has lately pushed for a surge in the proxy war against Russia in the interest of Joe Biden's financial interests in Ukraine, was the centerpiece of a coordinated article written by fellow Timesman Peter Baker:

“The two presidents speaking out so forcefully and eloquently is a warning that some basic principles of democracy that both parties have long supported at home and abroad are in jeopardy,” said Antony J. Blinken, who served as Mr. Obama’s deputy secretary of state and attended Mr. Bush’s speech on Thursday.

The bipartisan apprehension was illustrated by Mr. Blinken’s presence. As managing director of the newly formed Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement led by Mr. Obama’s vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Blinken attended to kick off a joint project with the George W. Bush Institute and Freedom House to counter the erosion of support for democratic principles and institutions at home and abroad.

Translation: with the waning of American influence around the world, and the destruction of social programs here at home, the continued profits and power of the ruling elites are in jeopardy. Telling citizens that their discontents and sufferings are mostly a result of Russian "meddling" into our so-called democracy is falling about as flat as Bush's oil-painted feet.

The Art and Artifice of Dubya: Glub, Glub, Glub

As I mentioned above, it wouldn't be a successful rehab without a glittering awards show to complement the speechifying and the selfies. During the same week that Harvey Weinstein finally got his bogus W.E.B. Dubois medal stripped right off his massaged chest by Harvard University, West Point honored George W. Bush with its own signature award, which glorifies patriotic non-graduates who epitomize the USMA slogan, "Duty, Honor, Country."

In a photo-op reminiscent of the "Mission Accomplished" bomber jacket monstrosity taken at the very beginning of the Iraq War debacle, Bush rode to the ceremony in a military jeep as prelude to a grandiose parade held in his honor.

Ever the hokey war criminal capitalist, Bush humbly poked fun at himself, to many loud guffaws and much applause from the Corps of Cadets, those budding generals and corporate CEOs in service of Forever War.

"Col. Thayer founded the dialectic society in order to foster debate and dialect, which makes my selection for this honor somewhat puzzling,” he said to laughter and loud applause.
“Laura and I had dinner with Lorne Michaels, the creator of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and during the course of the dinner, he told me something very disturbing,” the 43rd president said.
“He said he put his best writers on me while I was president, and they came up with ‘strategery.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? All those years I thought I was the guy who came up with that.’ I said, ‘Did your writer come up with ‘mis-underestimate?’

He even hilariously quipped about "outlaw regimes" without once mentioning the names of Dick Cheney, John Yoo, or Donald Rumsfeld.

Now, just in case you were wondering where Hillary Clinton is in all of these speeches and awards shows, never fear. Because it will finally be "her turn" this week. when the Democratic veal pen's Women's Media Center will honor her with its first-ever "Wonder Woman" prize, just for existing in the world as Hillary Clinton. Her name (along with those of prima Harvey Weinstein accuser Ashley Judd and journalistic Trump nemesis April Ryan) was added to the prize list literally at the very last minute, not having been included in the original roster of winners announced in September.

Hillary, far from apologizing for a career which has included agitating for wars and orchestrating the impoverishment of millions of women under welfare "reform," doesn't feel the need to enter into even a phony personal rehabilitation program like Weinstein and Bush. Skipping the mea culpas, she's going straight to the awards stage at the exclusive Capitale club in Manhattan's Upper West Side this week. Her prize is, of course, totally not coordinated with her ongoing global blame tour and book-selling spree.

From the gushing press release:

 The Women’s Media Center is presenting its first—and only—WMC Wonder Woman Award to Clinton as she is a hero to millions in the United States and around the globe for her extraordinary accomplishments and public service. Like Wonder Woman, she seems to have superhuman strength, resilience, and courage. She also blazes new paths so that everyone has equal opportunity to pursue their dreams, and she has done much of it in the face of enemy fire.

Who can ever forget her trip to Bosnia under all that heavy sniper fire?

I hereby nominate Hillary to receive the next Thayer award, with full military parade honors, in acknowledgment of her duty to the oligarchs, her honoring of the Orwellian slogan "War Is Peace", and her devotion to No Country For the Bottom 99 Percent.

You and Me Against the World. Literally.