One Singular Snoopy Sensation

If you'd told me last week that Glenn Greenwald would be the featured guest on the corporate-funded Sunday blather-fests, I would have asked you what you were smoking.

If you'd told me last week that a creepy outfit named Booz Allen Hamilton was working in cahoots with the American government to spy on virtually everybody on the planet, I would have asked what you were drinking. Can I have my Booz on the rocks, please?

If you'd told me that the leaker would be a high-school dropout with an aristocratic name, as articulately well-versed in the law, politics, technology and humanitarian thought as any Ivy League meritocrat, I would have told you to throw your Clooneyesque Everyman script right back in the reject pile.

What a difference a week makes. The National Conversation has been turned upside down, and the elite official conversation-starters have landed on their collective ass in the Thump Heard Round the World. It doesn't get any better than this. It gives me renewed hope, knowing that a few people can indeed make a difference.

The outrage is palpable, the sense of relief that one person and a marginalized journalist and an independent foreign newspaper can drastically alter the way we view our country and our leaders overnight is miraculous. How do you spell B-a-c-k-l-a-s-h?

Some are saying that the irrefutable evidence that our government is spying on us will create a chilling effect, make us hesitate to use our phones and write emails and post comments saying what is really on our minds. But just in reading the more popular comments threads on media outlets like the New York Times and even more "conservative" sites like Politico, it is obvious that people are mad as hell in droves, and are not going to take it any more. At least for the time being, anyway. Whether this anger will lead to more right-wing nuts coming out of the woodwork, a resurgence of the Occupy movement or other forms of  public protest, or just a gradual slide back into lives of quiet desperation remains to be seen.

Somebody took issue with my observation yesterday, in response to Maureen Dowd's column, that the power players of the Security State are desperately trying to spread their manure of blame all over their disaster capitalist playing field. What does capitalism have to do with it, he asked. George Orwell certainly never warned us against capitalism. It was communist totalitarianism back in the day. The Cold War was just getting started when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published 65 years ago.

This was before the stunning revelation that the government is actually outsourcing spying to private corporations. 9/11 spawned a whole atrocity industry. There's a reason the Washington DC metro area is now the wealthiest enclave in the country. The Security State lives there. If you haven't yet read Dana Priest's Top Secret America, pick it up. Or, you can read the condensation here. It's Orwell with a side of Kafka and Huxley for dessert. If you don't particularly care one way or another, just keep popping your Soma with a chaser of Obama.

It's official. Capitalism has morphed into fascism, and fascism has spawned feudalism. And the lords and ladies of the manor cower behind their raised drawbridges, dreaming of falling men and rising profits, even as the peasants once again ponder sharpening the pitchforks.

I flew over the world trade center going to Senator Lautenberg's funeral. In the distance was the Statue of Liberty. And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building, hitting the canopy, part of our obligation is keeping Americans safe.

Human intelligence isn't going to do it, because you can't -- it's a different culture. So, this kinds of strict strictly overseen, it's overseen by the justice department, by inspectors general, by audit, by a 90-day review, by the court, is looked at like a method. I'm very happy if there's a better way.

-- Secrecy fetishist Dianne Feinstein, speaking on ABC/Disney on Sunday.  This 80-year-old woman needs to retire, very soon, to the Magic Kingdom Assisted Living Facility for the Obscenely Wealthy in Neverland, USA.

The Middle Digit of Digital Dissent

Good morning, Sardonicky readers and all the fine folks at the NSA.... or should I say, the fine computers at the NSA. If the reports are true, the security state machinery is culling this blog-post as fast as I can write it, looking for suspicious words and their placement in cyberspace, the better to keep me safe, secure, and suppressed. Fat chance. I hereby give the middle-finger salute to the dweebs. 

I think I finally figured out the real reason that Congress is trying to destroy the Post Office. Even though George Bush issued that infamous signing statement back in 2007 giving himself the right open your mail, it's just way too time-consuming and messy. Actual people with hands and eyes and bodies and benefits and union cards would have to do the actual opening. Paper cuts are a real menace, along with that annoying coating of tongue glue from having to reseal so many envelopes. Cyberspying is cleaner.

 So make it difficult for them. If you have something important to say, write a letter, maintain a semblance of privacy, and support our beleaguered postal workers, paper companies and Bic at the same time.

If, however, you can't tear yourself away from the instant gratification of the instantaneousness to which you are now accustomed, there are allegedly some ways you can make it harder for James Clapper (and the corporations both serving and served by him) to glom onto your info. Roberto Baldwin of Wired gives you the low-down. In a nutshell: ditch your phones and switch to the same pay-as-you-go disposables that all self-respecting terrorists and criminals use. And don't pay with your credit card, of course. Make sure the person you're calling has a burner phone too. Use an encrypted email service, and don't click on any links while doing so. Meet people in person, the same way the various resistance movements have made contact throughout the long global history of repressive authoritarian regimes. 

And, if you do use snail mail, pay for the stamps with cash, so that the security state can't accuse you of obstructing their efforts to keep you safe. And don't forget to smile at the ubiquitous face recognition software. Or, just give the finger at random, knowing that the chances are pretty good that some security camera somewhere is picking it up for posterity, for perpetual enshrinement in the Utah storage facility.

Meanwhile, here are a few links that absolutely essential and safe for you to click on:

Glenn Greenwald on whistle-blowers, and why he does what he does. A must-read.

Marcy Wheeler calls bullshit on the White House's self-serving talking points.

Josh Gerstein eviscerates Obama's "Let's Have a Debate" drivel. (He's eager to have a national discussion on stuff only when the stuff is exposed against his will.)

Margaret Sullivan of the New York Times diagnoses her paper's schizophrenia . (Is Obama incredible, or what?)

That should also keep you low-level techies at NSA busy for all of a microsecond. Go ahead.... take an off-the-clock coffee break. I'll never tell. 

"Right now I think everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new -- it's been going on for 7 years." -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Whew.... what a relief. If it had been going on for seven days, it would have been a reprehensible outrage of epic proportions. What we didn't know could only have hurt us if we knew. I guess it's kind of like being drugged and raped.

Big Brother Caught Peeping, Again

Actually, my headline is too mild. Big Brother has been caught ogling. With his pants down, into every window in America. And the strobe lights are flashing all around the world.

The Orwellian security state and the Obama administration may have put the Arctic chill on leaks, but at least one whistleblower hasn't been cowed, handing over to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald  a classified court order authorizing the FBI to seize millions of phone records.

No response yet from the government, although I am sure Attorney General Eric Holder was already drawing up the indictment against Greenwald this morning before he even took his first sip of coffee. (thankfully, Greenwald does not reside on American soil and is free from Homeland predations)

 That day last week when Holder professed to have rued secretly glomming onto to the phone records of reporters is nothing compared to the regrets he'll feel now that this giant cat is out of the bag.

I couldn't be happier that it was Greenwald who got this scoop. He has been fearless in his criticism of the Obama administration's assault on whistleblowers, resulting in sometimes outrageous attacks by Obamians who value Loyalty to the Leader above all else. Somebody in the government was encouraged enough by Greenwald's civil liberties advocacy to risk going to jail by giving him documentation, which has been sought under a FOIA request by other news agencies, including the New York Times. Access has been consistently denied by judges, themselves probably fearful of arrest for compliance with the First Amendment.

Even though we've known for a long time that the government was conducting a massive spying campaign against us, the evidence, in cold, stark black and white, was never there before now. Read the document; it's guaranteed to send a chill up your spine. It actually orders the recipient of the subpoena (Verizon) not to talk about it under penalty of some unknown fate.

As Greenwald points out in his piece, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, in various "cryptic" statements, have already all but admitted that such a blanket surveillance operation is underway in this country. But they, too, were under threat of arrest if they went any further than veiled warnings.

Now all we have to do is wait for the reactions* to the revelation. Will it be a monumental "Meh" from jaded citizens? Will Greenwald be subject to new rounds of attacks? Will President Obama grin sheepishly as he protests that spying on innocent people Is Not Who We Are? Will progressives protest that Big Brother Loves Them?

Stayed tuned.

* White House sources (anonymous to protect the sensitivity of their cowardice) are, as expected, defending the spying program because it keeps us safe from Terrah. Also the Justice Department is wasting no time going after the leaker who dares to give aid and comfort to the citizenry.

Of Flotuses and Hecklers

One more person finally had enough of one too many politicians pontificating about how we're here for the children.... the Children.... our Children.... We have to do it for the CHILDREN....  when she finally let loose on Michelle Obama and wondered out loud (very loud) why the president has not yet fulfilled his campaign promise to guarantee equal rights for gay employees of federal contractors.

It seems that just hours before a Washington DNC fundraiser yesterday featuring the first lady, Spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged that President Obama would renege on his campaign promise to sign an executive order ending such discrimination . Once again, he would punt an issue back to Congress for its inevitable demise. So, armed with tickets starting at $500, some LGBT GetEQUAL activists attended the exclusive confab on a private estate to GetREAL with Mrs. Obama. From the pool report:

Most notable part of the event was an interruption from a protester (later identified as Ellen Sturz) about 12 minutes into the 20-minute speech. A pro-LGBT rights individual standing at the front began shouting for an executive order on gay rights. (Pool did not hear exactly what.)

“One of the things I don’t do well is this,” replied FLOTUS to loud applause. She left the lectern and moved over to the protester, saying they could “listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.”

Crowd started shouting that they wanted FLOTUS to stay.

“You need to go!” said one woman near the protester.

The protester was then escorted out, shouting “…lesbian looking for federal equality before I die.” (First part of the quote was inaudible.)

As New York Times editorialist Andrew Rosenthal hilariously puts it, "Mrs. Obama did not handle it terribly well by threatening to take her marbles and go home." But, since Michelle was the most popular girl in the tent (did I actually hear her putting it to a voice vote?) the crowd voted for Michelle, and the activist was led out by a security detail. There is no word whether she was issued a ticket refund.... or a ticket.

I wouldn't care about this tawdry episode were it not for the over-the-top reaction from the progressive blogosphere. (see the Times reader comments to the Rosenthal post.) "You Go, Girl!" was the most common response, favoring Michelle Obama, as if she were the bullying victim next door instead of a wealthy seasoned politician. Then there are the protestations that she is not the reflection of her husband's policies, nor is she a paid member of his cabinet.... and most of all, that the heckler was rude. For god's sake! --  heckling is meant to rude. Heckling is what a desperate person does when all else fails -- be it patience, politeness, groveling, friendly calls to Congress, campaign contributions, voting for a politician who pretends to be for the little guy. Heckling is a healthy response to lies, platitudes and demagoguery. Heckling is a valuable tool. It gets you press you wouldn't ordinarily get. Would anybody be talking about the punted employment rights bill today were it not for the heckler? Would the corporate media establishment have written about Medea Benjamin if she hadn't heckled Obama at his frightening oral excuse for state-sponsored terror and murder?

 I tend to agree with Rosenthal, that Mrs. Obama could have handled the situation better. Since the gathering was exclusive, what would it have cost her to promise the woman a private meeting afterward? Instead, she went genteel-ballistic and held the distraught (and rude, rude, rude!) woman up to ridicule, even denigrating her cause -- "It’s not about you or you or your issue or your thing. This is about our children.”

It reminds me of the very different, but equally gauche, way that Laura Bush once handled a heckler. Not to mention the very dissimilar ways the faux-gressives treated the episode -- because I can't seem to remember any Democratic outcry over the rudeness of the bereaved Iraq war mother who heckled Mrs. Bush during a campaign speech in New Jersey in 2004. Sue Niederer showed up at that event wearing a t-shirt bearing the message: PRESIDENT BUSH: YOU KILLED MY SON.

 Molly Ivins described the event in her book Bill of Wrongs:

When Laura Bush started speaking about the war, Niederer stood up and shouted "Why aren't your children serving?" She was swarmed by young volunteers carrying placards, who had instructions to surround any protester, hold up their signs, and chant "Four more years! Four more years!"

The commotion caught the attention of the first lady's security detail.

Laura Bush might have seized the moment. Confronted by a grieving mother who had lost her son a few months earlier, she might have paused and asked Sue Niederer to meet with her in private after the event concluded. A mother -- "a mom" as George W says -- of twin daughters two years younger than Seth Dvorin was when his life ended in Iraq might empathize.

For a moment, Niederer thought that might happen. She had overestimated the compassion and agility of the first lady."Her jaw dropped and her face froze when I spoke" Niederer said.

The bereaved mother was then escorted out by the Secret Service, jailed and handcuffed to a wall until the campaign event was over, and Laura Bush was safely out of town. Charges were eventually dropped, because they couldn't think up a crime fast enough.

It reminds me of the time during the Obama campaign, when the prez was set to face off against  Mitt Romney for the infamous Binders Full of Women debate, and Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cherie Honkala showed up. Those women never even got the chance to heckle (not that they necessarily would have, mind you) before the Secret Service whisked them away and handcuffed them to metal chairs....  until the Obamas and the Romneys were safely out of town.

I am actually surprised that the Washington establishment does not get heckled regularly. They deserve it. And it's a healthy means of expression for the abused and the marginalized. Tomatoes, rotten eggs and flying shoes are also in order.

Of course, there is that little matter of H.R, 347, passed last year, which facilitates the criminalization of demonstrations within the sight or hearing of any public figure receiving Secret Service protection.

There are free speech zones.... and then there is the Twilight Zone, where democracy sunsets, humanists are ridiculed, and crowds mindlessly chant "Four More Years! Four More Years!"

 

Annoying Email of the Day

 

Dear Karen,

Last November, we did something special: we took on the full power of the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, FOX News, and the energized Republican Right, and we re-elected President Obama.

How did it all happen? In The Center Holds, Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an embattled President fighting back with the support of millions of us.

Buy yourself a copy and savor our historic victory!

Bob Fertik

This is the same Bob Fertik who co-founded the anti-Bush, anti-war organization called AfterDowningStreet.org (I still wear my ADS tee shirt occasionally, and my ADS sticker is still affixed to my old laptop.) This is the same Bob Fertik who, in 2009, called for the newly-elected Barack Obama to hold the Bush war criminals accountable for torture and worse. This is the same Bob Fertik who apparently hasn't noticed that "the man you re-elected" has not only embraced Bush's anti-democratic policies, he has expanded upon them. And that the man "we" re-elected raked in over $1 billion from kowtowing to the rich donor class, and that his re-election victory was wholly dependent upon that money paying for non-stop branding, advertising, and super-secret data mining.

Oh, and the fact that Mitt Romney was the greatest gift that the Wall Street Democrats could ever have asked for. Mitt Romney is the devil incarnate, and Obama is the devil in disguise. "We" chose the Satan Sandwich with the more appealing garnish. 

Incidentally, the Jonathan Alter book, based on the usual insider intrigue, sycophantic access and schmooze, is getting lukewarm reviews. (here, here, here ) I'd already decided to give it a pass after Maureen Dowd plugged it in a recent column. As I mentioned in my comment at the time, I'd call such discourse shallow were it not for the fact that whenever I read that kind of stuff, I feel like I'm suffocating in a deep hole, with no chance for escape.

The centrist cult center of the plutocrats that Alter serves so well may be holding, but millions upon millions of Americans are barely hanging on by a thread. And because six media companies now control 90% of everything we read, see and hear, Alter is getting the grand book tour star treatment. The true center cannot hold for very much longer. It's shrinking as fast as the polar ice, as almost all of the gains since the 2008 meltdown have gone straight to the top. A recent report from the St. Louis Fed reveals that the average household has only regained 45% of the wealth it lost since the beginning of our long depression. And put another way, via Pew Research," the end of the recession in 2009 through 2011 (the last year for which Census Bureau wealth data are available), the 8 million households in the U.S. with a net worth above $836,033 saw their aggregate wealth rise by an estimated $5.6 trillion, while the 111 million households with a net worth at or below that level saw their aggregate wealth decline by an estimated $0.6 trillion."

Yeah. It's a deep, dark, suffocating hole. It's the Class War. And yet here we have an erstwhile "aggressive progressive" tell us that it's really all about a Battle Royale between Obama and his enemies.  

Geeks, and the Havoc They Wreak

Welcome to Monday (a k a Terror Tuesday Eve). Well, we finally have all the proof we ever needed to show that They Really Are Out To Get Us. The following announcement has been popping up with odd regularity on the New York Times homepage lately: 

 

Truthers be told, my first thought on seeing this ad was that it was a plug for a new work of fiction by Friedman, something rip-offingly speculative, a cross between Schrodinger's Cat and the pulpy new Dan Brown best-seller. My second thought was that some Onion-inspired prankster had actually hacked the Times site and inserted Friedman the Illuminatus as a practical joke. (In case you haven't heard of The Illuminati, it's a nefarious cult of secretive plutocrats who are secretly plotting to create a New World Order. Actually, I thought they were being pretty blatantly gauche about taking over the world. But whatever. For the uninitiated among you, Gawker has published a handy guide to the bright bulbs of Conspiracyville.) 

My third thought, as I clicked on the Friedman ad, was: "Holy Crap! This is totally effing real!" Tom Friedman, resident millionaire free trade techno-babbler of the Times, is headed out to San Francisco later this month to host a $495-a-ticket (just reduced from $995) event on the New World Order. That he did not preface the title with Brave was probably just an oversight on his part.  

It gets even stranger. Friedman's column did not appear in yesterday's Times. And filling in was none other than besieged Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who must have slipped a mickey to Times editors for allowing the publication of a such a scathing piece of anti-Friedmanism. It's all about the creepy rise of Silicon Valley as a global political power, and the banality of Google's no-evil evil, as evidenced by a new book by its founders. Technocratic imperialists are taking over our lives and our world, joining corrupt governments to destroy the hopes and dreams of entire peoples through a campaign of mass, soft-power control. But unlike most conspiracy theories, this one, like the Friedman Festival of Fascism, seems all too real. Assange writes: 

“Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.  

Look no further than Obama's paradoxical White House. This administration, the most secretive in recent memory, prides itself on its transparency via such illusory populist ploys as its occasional "Google Hangouts" and "We the People" petition website. And as Edward Luce describes it in another chilling piece published in today's Financial Times, the president literally gets away with murder and other civil liberties assaults precisely because he comes across as such a nerdy, harmless geek who wouldn't hurt a fly. He is protected by the Silicon Shield, much as Ronald Reagan was protected by the teflon of his own bonhomie. According to Luce,

One of the geekocracy’s main characteristics is a serene faith in its own good motives. It is not hard to imagine how much greater the US left’s outrage would be over the drone programme were it carried out by George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. When Mr Obama asks Americans to trust that he evaluates every target on his “kill list”, most acquiesce. That pass is also extended to Mr Obama’s “signature strikes”, which select targets by probability based on often sketchy information. But there is a world of difference between zapping a known target and taking an educated guess. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr Obama’s reputation for being a nerd shields him from tougher criticism. Call it geek exceptionalism.  

It's no accident that, along with Wall Street and Hollywood, the president's biggest fundraisers were held in Silicon Valley, close neighbor to the site of Friedman's upcoming Brave New World convention. Obama's campaign database is the stuff of legend. Google founder Eric Schmidt, whom Assange eviscerated in his op-ed, is a defacto member of the Obama Administration. It turns out he was more intimately involved than we thought in constructing that massive database, having personally trained and recruited the geeks who creep, data-mining the personal information, habits, loves, beliefs and search histories of what is believed to be every registered voter in America. Joshua Green of Bloomberg has the scoop: 

(The) team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength. 

Green also confirms what many of us had long suspected -- that the information about private citizens that the Obama campaign was able to glean will also now be shared with predatory insurance companies to target potential enrollees in Obamacare. Your past medical history, prescriptions, allergies, proclivities, visits to websites for info on your hemorrhoids and other worrisome symptoms -- it's all likely there in the Obama Database to help the corporations pick and choose their subscribers and set their rates. 

Illuminated yet?

If not, Thomas Friedman explains it all in the video embedded in his New World website (linked above) You can actually hear him, see him in the flesh, previewing what the Times is actually going to charge you money to endure:

“And my view is that this is changing every job, every workplace, every industry, every job. and we’re not talking about it. Yet we’re all living it and feeling it...If you don’t start every day asking, ‘What world am I living in?’ you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”

In the real world, the court martial of Bradley Manning begins today, and Occupy is making a comeback.  

The Joy Boy of Joblessness

Live long, don't prosper.

Peter Orszag

That's the advice from one of the brightest young stars in the Plutocratic Galaxy of Greed. If you're whining about being chronically unemployed, just shut up and be grateful. You'll have less risk of turning into highway splat now that you no longer have to commute to work. If you're stuck in the impoverished suburbs, you don't have to breathe in the polluted air in our big city jobs centers. If you're lucky enough to live long enough to become warehoused in a nursing home, rejoice. You'll probably get better care in an economic depression than you would during a boom time. That's because there are theoretically enough people desperate enough to take a $9/hour job emptying bedpans than would have been the case without the government austerity policies dictated by capitalists gone wild.

Former Obama budget director/millionaire Citigroup executive Peter Orzsag has written a sleazy piece citing these and other "findings" to extol the upside of a crappy economy for the little people. And here you thought austerity had been thoroughly debunked!  "This is a morbid column about some unexpected and encouraging news," he cheerfully begins. (I can just envision him sitting at his engraved Apple laptop, cuddled up in a velvet smoking jacket, sipping Courvoisier as he taps out this drivel).

A reasonable estimate is that for every percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, the U.S. mortality rate drops by 0.3 percentage point. In other words, and although it runs counter to our intuition, recessions may be bad for your our wallets but good for our health.

Orszag cherry-picks his way through various studies, noting that since destitute people can no longer afford to smoke and drink, they're being forced to protect their lungs and livers. He cites the economic collapse in Iceland, and the ensuing improved health of the inhabitants who found themselves priced right out of vice. Strangely, he does not see fit to add that Iceland actually let its banks fail and chose to bail out its people instead. He also doesn't mention that Iceland's recession has essentially ended, thanks to good public policy and a democratic system of government. 

America's depression, for all but the booming stock market and those at the very top, slogs on and on and on. Its long-term health effects are just now getting some serious attention.

To be fair, Orszag wrote his plutocratic puff piece before a more recent study was released, reaching the exact opposite conclusion: Joblessness does indeed shorten lives, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. From today's New York Times: 

“What is it about employment that has this huge impact on mortality, beyond the material resources it brings?” said Jennifer Karas Montez, the study’s lead author, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

The study was an attempt to explain the reasons behind the troubling trend of declining life expectancy for the least educated Americans, particularly women. A study last year found that white women without a high school diploma lost five years of life expectancy between 1990 and 2008, a measure of decline last seen among Russians in the economic chaos that came after the fall of the Soviet Union. This year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that mortality for women had gone up in more than 40 percent of the counties in the United States since the early 1990s.

But the study raised more questions than it answered, in particular about why employment status affects physical health. Ms. Montez said there was some evidence that having a job offered intangible benefits that could improve health, including a sense of purpose and control in life, as well as providing networks that help to reduce social isolation.

Meanwhile, banker cum health expert Orszag actually thinks that statistics showing that unemployed people get more sleep is a huge plus. He either doesn't know, or chooses not to know, that excessive sleepiness is a sign of clinical depression. Or that the 30% increase in the past decade of our national suicide rate has been directly linked by the Centers for Disease Control to our unaddressed crisis of long-term unemployment. His glib conclusion:

None of which should make us plutocrats wish for economic trouble. (But it does, it does!) Higher unemployment means loss of productivity, lower income and mental anguish, and those are more than sufficient reasons to combat joblessness. There may be some small consolation, though, in learning that it probably doesn’t harm human health the way that we all imagined. (We can ease what little is still left of our Randian consciences, fellas!)

The Pete Peterson Fix the Debt cabal are going to jump all over this piece, and the dubious statistics behind it, in an effort to resurrect austerity policies in the wake of the epic scandal of the flawed Reinhart/Rogoff study. Their new, improved message: the Sequester and all the other whips and chains of gratuitous economic sadism may be painful, but a whole bunch of new cherry-picked stats now shows that they'll help all you peasants live to a shriveled old age.

The better to chain-CPI you with, my dears, said the Orszag wolf at the door. Yes, it is Orszag who's also been championing cuts in Social Security -- not because it'll actually help the economy, but because making people suffer for no good reason will magically tranform his old boss into a Profile in Courage in the eyes of Wall Street. That corner office is waiting.