Lambs to the Slaughter

Humanity to Barack Obama: Don't pee down our backs and tell us it's raining.

The president last week signed a nearly trillion-dollar Farm Bill that, besides rewarding the ultra-rich, immediately cuts an average $100 a month from the food stamp stipends of nearly a million more people. Yet there he goes, traveling the country, claiming to be a champion of the oppressed. Look at the graphic put out by the White House. The most cherished aspect of the Farm Bill is that it "strengthens the economy" by reducing the deficit in the usual way: enriching the rich while immiserating the poor. So much for Income Inequality being the "challenging issue" of Obama's time. I think he meant that it's a challenge for him to hide the wealth gap by constructing a flimsy neoliberal "Opportunity Bridge" over it.

 

 And the media, bless their cold, cold hearts, are giving Obama the usual free pass for his marathon cruise down the Hypocrisy Highway. 

Paul Krugman is a case in point. Although he has previously railed against cuts to food assistance at a time when more people than ever are in need of it, he is now choosing to ignore the ignominious signing ceremony. He used his latest column space to once again elide the connivance of Obama and his Democratic toadies, and blast Republicans for "writing off" the unemployed.

My published response:

While the GOP is sadistically open in their disdain for struggling people, "centrist" Democrats try to keep their own complicity hidden behind their increasingly feeble "I feel your pain" platitudes.

For example, when the president signed the corporation-friendly Farm Bill last week, he effectively condemned almost a million more people -- the young, the disabled, the working poor, and the elderly -- to hunger. He put his imprimatur on an additional $8 billion in SNAP cuts. Yet, he had the chutzpah to call it a bipartisan victory! He suggested, with a straight face and with all apparent sincerity, that people can now use less money to buy more farm-fresh food! He even blustered on about deficit reduction, celebrating "common sense" reforms. (When politicians yack about common sense, you can rest assured that the commons will not benefit.)

He's euphemized income inequality into "the opportunity gap." Austerity is alive and well in both branches of the Money Party. Republicans hate you with a passion, Democrats love you to death. Corporate con artists get tax breaks and deferred prosecution agreements. And you get bupkis.

And so, when they flood my inbox with appeals for campaign donations in order to "make my voice heard" on the social ill du jour, I inform them that all my spare change is going to help my food bank. My long-term unemployed, retired, low-wage and disabled neighbors shouldn't have to choose between heating and eating in this long, hard, cold, cruel winter.

There is a woman in my town who, even though she herself is on disability and her 13-year-old car is falling apart, has made it her mission to drive around to the homes of needy neighbors to distribute the day-old bread that the local bakery is giving away for free. This past weekend, a bunch of high school kids held a food drive outside the Stop N Shop, asking emerging customers to donate just one item from their shopping carts for the rapidly depleting local food pantry. That's how bad it's getting in New York and many other areas of the country.

But Marie Antoinette's disembodied head must have been beaming and cackling from the grave last week at the spectacle of Obama signing the Farm Bill in Michigan. I'm including some highlights (or should I say storm-clouds) of his speech. Gratuitous overused neoliberal buzzwords, a/k/a soothing dog-whistles to Wall Street, are in bold:

 And today, thanks to your grit and your ingenuity and dogged determination, the American auto industry’s engines are roaring again and we are building the best cars in the world again.  And some plants are running three shifts around the clock -- something that nobody would have imagined just a few years ago.  (Applause.)

(And the auto union has been decimated and the wages have sunk, but the new CEO of GM is now getting paid the insane salary of $14 million a year. Using the tried and true flattery method, Obama goes on the immediate offensive. Cajole  the regular workers into feeling good by praising their grit. Make them believe that their toiling in sleep-deprived swing shifts for the benefit of the uber-rich is the patriotic thing to do. The workers of America, though not well-paid, are akin to noble heroic sled dogs, determined to carry the load over the frozen wastes of the corporate globe with nary a pause for food or rest. So stop your barking and forge ahead!)

 I just had lunch with Detroit’s new Mayor, Mike Duggan.  (Applause.)  He told me if there’s one thing that he wants everybody to know, it’s that Detroit is open for business.  And I have great confidence that he’s going to provide the leadership that we need.  (Applause.)  Really proud of him.  The point is we’ve all had to buckle down.  We’ve all had to work hard.  We’ve had to fight our way back these past five years.  And in a lot of ways, we are now better positioned for the 21st century than any other country on Earth.

(He gets applause for announcing that he ate lunch? So much neoliberal bunk in just one tiny paragraph. The new mayor replacing the jailed mayor has gotten the message and hastens to reassure Wall Street that his tragic city is wide open for capitalistic plunder. Obama's repetitive use of We manipulates the audience into believing that the rentiers extracting the resources and the victims being extracted are members of the same team. He tries to fool you into thinking the rich are "sacrificing" as much as you are. Thanks to the financial meltdown orchestrated by unprosecuted financiers, we are now better positioned to screw you over, because it's always easier for financial bullies to kick the little guy, the pensioner, the retired teacher, when they're already down.)

This morning, we learned that our businesses in the private sector created more than 140,000 jobs last month, adding up to about 8.5 million new jobs over the past four years.  (Applause.)  Our unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been since before I was first elected.  Companies across the country are saying they intend to hire even more folks in the months ahead.  And that’s why I believe this can be a breakthrough year for America.

(Nice try, Mr. Plutocratic Front Man. Officially, there are 10 million unemployed people in America, up from 6.8 million in 2007. One out of every six men of working age is jobless. There are three times as many long-term unemployed today than there were in 2006. As the World Socialist Website explains it, "these figures tell just part of the story, since they track only those who are actively looking for work. According to a survey by the Economic Policy Institute, a further 5.73 million 'missing workers' have dropped out of the labor force over the past five years for non-demographic reasons. If these missing workers were counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate would be 9.9 percent.
"The true scale of the jobs deficit is indicated by the fact that the US economy had 866,000 fewer jobs last month than it had in January 2008, while the working-age population had increased by ten million people.")

Sounds more like a Breaking Bad year for America, if you ask me. 

And I’ve come here today to sign a bill that hopefully means folks in Washington feel the same way -- that instead of wasting time creating crises that impede the economy, we’re going to have a Congress that’s ready to spend some time creating new jobs and new opportunities, and positioning us for the future and making sure our young people can take advantage of that future.

And that’s important, because even though our economy has been growing for four years now, even though we’ve been adding jobs for four years now, what’s still true -- something that was true before the financial crisis, it’s still true today -- is that those at the very top of the economic pyramid are doing better than ever, but the average American’s wages, salaries, incomes haven’t risen in a very long time.  A lot of Americans are working harder and harder just to get by -- much less get ahead -- and that’s been true since long before the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

(I've said it before, and I'll say it again: heed Noam Chomsky, and run for the hills whenever you hear a politician utter the word folks. Obama uses the word in two different contexts. First, as a term to subtly denigrate you. You're just plain folks, instead of astute human beings. Second, he uses the term to soften up and humanize plunderers and miscreants -- such as, "the folks on Wall Street," and "the folks in Washington." George W. Bush, though, really took it too far that time he talked about "the terrorist folks."

But back to the above paragraph. This is the standard part of every Obama speech where the left side of his mouth seems to take over, and he pivots and appears to be talking to or debating with himself. We're booming back, but wait... we're not really booming back. He feels your pain, folks! He gets that you're suffering succotash, and that the One Percent is sucking it all up. Of course, even though he is overseeing the worst wealth disparity in American history, the trend started long, long, long before he himself became a Washington Folk.)

And so we’ve got to reverse those trends.  We’ve got to build an economy that works for everybody, not just a few.  We’ve got to restore the idea of opportunity for all people -- the idea that no matter who you are, what you look like, where you came from, how you started out, what your last name is, you can make it if you’re willing to work hard and take responsibility.  That’s the idea at the heart of this country. That’s what’s at stake right now.  That’s what we’ve got to work on.  (Applause.)

(We, we, we, all the way to the ideational, nonexistent Land of Opportunity where taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth are never mentioned. Again, with the free market gospel of "if you work hard and play by the rules, you too can dream of riches beyond your wildest imagination". He stresses the Randian power of the individual will, rather than the need for community and solidarity with your fellow human beings. Soothe the plutocrats, nip the idea of a resurgence of the Occupy movement right in the bud.)

 And that is why I could not be prouder of our leaders who are here today.  Debbie in particular, I could not be prouder of your own Debbie Stabenow, who has done just extraordinary work.  (Applause.)  We all love Debbie for a lot of reasons.  She’s been a huge champion of American manufacturing but really shepherded through this farm bill, which was a very challenging piece of business.  She worked with Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who I think was very constructive in this process.  We had Representatives Frank Lucas, a Republican, working with Collin Peterson, a Democrat.  We had a terrific contribution from our own Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who deserves a big round of applause.  (Applause.)

(Challenging and Constructive are Austerian code words for cuts, cuts, and more cuts. Debbie Stabenow, the Democrat who came up with the bright idea of cutting food stamps for people who also get extra heating assistance during the coldest winter in living memory, also receives more financial aid from Big Ag than any other senator. But here, she is hilariously cast by her Party Leader as the Tender Shepherd....omitting the X-rated part where the flock gets turned into lamb chops... or maybe even the dreaded giraffe meat.  
 

  Now here comes the comic relief part, where in inappropriately jocular fashion, Obama pivots to the real Nitty Gritty:

Now, despite its name, the farm bill is not just about helping farmers.  Secretary Vilsack calls it a jobs bill, an innovation bill, an infrastructure bill, a research bill, a conservation bill.  It’s like a Swiss Army knife.  (Laughter.)  It’s like Mike Trout -- for those of you who know baseball.  (Laughter.)  It’s somebody who’s got a lot of tools.  It multitasks.  It’s creating more good jobs, gives more Americans a shot at opportunity.  And there are two big ways in which it does so.

(At least he's being unintentionally honest about the cuts and the pain. Swiss army knives, baseball bats, sharp tools, and shots never fail to get a big guffaw from the ovine audience being lead to the slaughter!)

This bill supports businesses working to develop cutting-edge biofuels -- like some of the work that's being done here at Michigan State.  That has the potential to create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.  It boosts conservation efforts so that our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy places like the Mississippi River Valley and Chesapeake Bay.

(Reaganomics won't just trickle down,it'll gush forth in a veritable flood of liquid manure. And why not, since Obama got his political start with the help of such Big Ag megaliths as Archer Daniels Midland. Corn, baby, corn! For our children, of course.)

It supports local food by investing in things like farmers markets and organic agriculture -- which is making my wife very happy.  And when Michelle is happy, I don't know about everybody being happy, but I know I'm happy.  (Laughter and applause.)  And so it's giving smaller producers, local producers, folks like Ben, the opportunity to sell more of their products directly, without a bunch of processing and distributors and middlemen that make it harder for them to achieve.  And it means that people are going to have healthier diets, which is, in turn, going to reduce incidents of childhood obesity and keep us healthier, which saves us all money.

(Whenever Obama is trying to pull a fast one, he references Michelle as both his inspiration and the object of his fear. You might even call the word Michelle a neoliberal catch-phrase as used in the context of an Obama speech. He is telling us that he is just like all the henpecked husbands of America, tryin' to avoid the wrath of Wifey. Of course, he fails to mention that it was Michelle's Let's Move healthy school lunch program that "borrowed" the first round of cuts from the SNAP funding last year.)

The second thing this farm bill does -- that is huge -- is help make sure America’s children don’t go hungry.  (Applause.)   And this is where Debbie’s work was really important.  One study shows that more than half of all Americans will experience poverty at some point during their adult lives.  Now, for most folks that's when you're young and you're eating ramen all the time.  But for a lot of families, a crisis hits, you lose your job, somebody gets sick, strains on your budget -- you have a strong work ethic, but it might take you six months, nine months, a year to find a job.  And in the meantime, you’ve got families to feed.

(I really don't know what to make of this paragraph. I suppose he means that by cutting only $8 billion from food stamps in this go-round, only a million more households will have to go hungry... as opposed to all 47 million currently receiving meager SNAP benefits. But still, it took a lot of chutzpah for him to utter those words. And he's not done yet. Totally ignoring, a la Paul Krugman, those one million unlucky "undeserving poor" duckies getting cut with his folksy Swiss Army Knife, he continues the charade:)

That’s why my position has always been that any farm bill I sign must include protections for vulnerable Americans, and thanks to the good work of Debbie and others, this bill does that.  (Applause.)  And by giving Americans more bang for their buck at places like farmers markets, we’re making it easier for working families to eat healthy foods and we're supporting farmers like Ben who make their living growing it.  So it’s creating new markets for produce farmers, and it means that people have a chance to directly buy from their farmers the kind of food that’s going to keep them healthy.

(Again, the Good Shepherdess and her Mother Teresa-like Good Works persona serves to mask the bipartisan condemnation to hunger of nearly one million additional people. This is the part of the speech I referenced in my Krugman comment, where Obama insinuates that you can now buy more farm-fresh food with less food stamp money. So gas up the car, folks, and have a folksy visit with Old MacDonald. Ee-i-ee-i-oh....bama.)

And the truth is a lot of folks go through tough times at some points in their lives.  That doesn’t mean they should go hungry.  Not in a country like America.  So investing in the communities that grow our food, helping hardworking Americans put that food on the table -- that’s what this farm bill does, all while reducing our deficits through smart reforms. 

It doesn’t include everything that I’d like to see.  And I know leaders on both sides of the aisle feel the same way.  But it’s a good sign that Democrats and Republicans in Congress were able to come through with this bill, break the cycle of short-sighted, crisis-driven partisan decision-making, and actually get this stuff done.  (Applause.)  That's a good sign.

(They shouldn't go hungry, but because Obama just signed this abomination of a Farm Bill, they will be going hungry. Instead of mewling he'd prefer not to see kids going to bed hungry, he could have vetoed the bill and sent it back to Congress, demanding that SNAP be expanded and kids get fed three times a day. But that wouldn't have been Bipartisan. It wouldn't have been a good sign. Millionaires agreeing trumps vulnerable people eating. 

And despite claims from Krugman and others that Austerity Is Dead and the deficit hawks have all flown home with their tail-feathers between their legs, Obama is still harping on Deficit Reduction. This is the biggest dog-whistle of all to Pete Peterson and the cabal of Wall Street billionaires who feel personally affronted every time a regular person gets an "entitlement." Smart reforms, as you all know, is another neoliberal buzzword for continued pain for the masses, and boundless pleasure for the insatiable greedheads of the plutocracy. People who, despite giving nothing back to society, are never held accountable for the ten-course luxury meals they enjoy on the public dime. Meals they enjoy thanks in large part to the latest gift of corporate welfare bestowed upon them in the latest Farm Bill.)

(The bill is signed.)  (Applause.) 

Olympics 2014: Where Everyone Is a Corporate Trademark

 I tuned in to the Olympics this weekend and got pretty much what I deserved: a relentless onslaught of commercial odes to global capitalism interspersed with a few carefully edited moments of actual athletic competition. The actual athletes highlighted were invariably Americans. (Or better yet, refugees to America from "lesser countries" who don't enjoy our Freedoms). And NBC and its corporate sponsors are making sure that the competitors are spending as much air-time being shills for consumer products as they are skiing and skating.

They can be silent shills, of course. Check out the bottles of Coca-Cola product strategically placed next to Bob Costa's interview subjects.

So, what's more off-putting -- malfunctioning toilets and brown water in Putin's Russia, or figure skater Ashley Wagner being forced to gush her gratitude to her Procter & Gamble Mom (TM) for washing her golden tresses with Pantene Shampoo and making sure she brushed with Crest after every meal?

The stench of neoliberal propaganda seems particularly acute in this year's Olympics, which are brought to United States viewers by one of the six conglomerates comprising the American Media-Political complex. The sports message and the political message seem to mesh perfectly. Personal responsibility, hard work, pushy self-sacrificing Tiger Mothers bringing up kids to be patriotic brand consumers and workhorses are sold as the keys to an Olympic Medal.  The slopes may be slippery, but trickle-down Corporate Benevolence -- not the taxing of the rich to enable direct government funding of athletic programs -- will reward the select few who possess that all-important Grit and Resilience (TM). President Obama couldn't have asked for better televised neoliberal runner-greasing, as corporatized athleticism partners with presidential prowess to advance the trans-global market-based solutions agenda. Just last week, Obama himself was able to reach the heights of Income Inequality performance art before executing an Opportunistic Double Flip followed by the usual crowd-pleasing spin.

Pivoter-in-Chief

And speaking of pivots, let's get back to P&G. Ashley and her Mom (TM) are just one family among the more than two dozen kinship units entrapped by something called The Procter and Gamble Global Family Home in Sochi. It's a one-stop Nirvana Shop offering everything from toilet paper that clogs up Putin's toilets, to free dentistry, to batteries for snapping Selfies while bobsledding, thus necessitating all that cosmetic dentistry.  From the press release:

The P&G Family Home is the heart of the company’s Thank You Mom program for Sochi 2014, in which P&G brands honor the role moms play in helping their kids achieve their dreams. Tide® athlete, Nick Goepper (USA), Pampers® athlete, Oksana Domnina (Russia) and Rosi Mittermaier, double Olympic gold medalist and mother of Gillette athlete, Felix Neureuther (Germany), attended the opening of the Family Home. Here, Opening Ceremony tickets were presented to moms of athletes partnering with P&G brands in countries around the world.

“Our brands are in the business of serving all moms on their journey through life with their kids,” said Phil Duncan, P&G Global Design Officer, who helped welcome moms and families of Olympians at the opening of the Family Home. “So when a P&G brand sponsors an athlete, we celebrate the mom who helped get them here.”

P&G brands are providing moms and families of Olympians in Sochi with more than 1,200 hours of everyday services that make an extraordinary difference when families are far from home. 

For instance, P&G’s beauty brands are offering the opportunity for pampering in the P&G Salon through:

·         Hair washing and styling services at the Pantene Studio

·         Treating moms to makeovers and polished manicure services at the COVERGIRL® Studio

·         Providing skin care recommendations for moisturizing body and hands at the Olay Studio

·         Hair coloring, cutting and styling treatments at the Wella® Studio

P&G male grooming brands are serving men in the Salon with:

·         Hot towel shaves and face massages at the Gillette Studio

·         Relaxing hair washes and styling services at the Head & Shoulders® Studio

·         Male grooming treatments, including the Perfect Trim by Braun®

Additional P&G brands supporting moms and families of Olympians in Sochi include:

·         Bounty, Charmin® and Puffs® are providing homecare products in the Family Home

·         Pampers is offering a changing station to help families with small children

·         Duracell® Powermats are enabling guests to charge their mobile devices while relaxing and watching the Games

·         Ariel® will be used to clean 30,000 linens per day, as well as serve moms of sponsored athletes with daily laundry services throughout the duration of the Games

·         Fairy® will be used to clean dishes in Olympic Village

·         Crest®/Oral-B®/blend-a-med® have teamed up with SOCOG in its provision of the Sochi 2014 dental clinic. The facility provides dental screenings, routine dental work, emergency care and oral care products for athletes and coaches in Sochi. 

U.S. Olympic athlete, Nick Goepper, was among the first to experience the services provided at the P&G Family Home. “I’m proud to be part of the P&G family of athletes. Not just because my mom and I use P&G brands like Tide, but also because of how they have supported my mom and me throughout my journey to the Olympic Games.. Knowing my mom will be taken care of here at the P&G Family Home gives me a little extra peace of mind so I can concentrate on what I came here to do.”

“The Family Home really feels like a home and I’m looking forward to connecting with other families of Olympians from around the world,” said Rosi Mittermaier, Double Olympic Gold Medalist. “It is a wonderful thing that Gillette and the other P&G brands are doing for families.”

“Serving moms and families is just what P&G brands do,” said Lada Kudrova, P&G Marketing Director, who also took part in the opening of the Family Home. “That’s why the P&G Family Home is our single activation at the Games. On the eve of Opening Ceremony, we’re honored to serve moms and families of Olympians in Sochi tonight and throughout the Games.”

 The subliminal message that Nick Goepper is being exploited to impart is that since the corporate overlords are supporting him and his mother, they don't have to rely on such social democratic niceties as food stamps and unemployment insurance. 

And in keeping with the subliminal neoliberal message of "no pain, no gain," there's a particularly loathsome P&G TV commercial currently airing during the Olympics. Called "Pick Them Back Up," it's a sadistic new variation on the enduring theme of the Helicopter Mom. It starts out harmlessly enough, in the multilingual, inclusive, cozy style that makes corporate greed palatable to people keeping track of such things.  Babies learning to walk adorably fall down on their well-Pampered (TM) butts as their doting parents murmur encouragement. But then, it starts to get dicey as their little bodies develop and they get into sports.

  As the orchestral soundtrack intensifies, so do the injuries. Toddlers are shown falling flat on their faces on the ice before advancing to crashing and burning on the slopes and the hockey rinks. The children in the film don't appear to be having fun. Their facial expressions run the gamut from dazed, to confused, to vacant, to tortured, to tear-streaked. But Corporate Mom is always there, washing their blistered and bloodied feet, (with P&G products) putting ice packs on their hematomas, and kissing their possible concussions all better. No emergency room visits exist in their world. It makes you wonder who's really calling the shots. Oh, I forgot. Silly me.... it's The Market, stupid!

And finally, after a resounding crescendo of patriotic pain that would make Leni Riefenstahl envious, the commercial ends with the same tinkly innocuous nursery music it started with. Hard work and branding pays off. The Will Triumphs, as the camera pans from the robust athletic spawn to Mom (TM) crying and beaming in the stands, grateful that laundry detergent brought her family to the Glorious Gold.

For more on the Capitalist Olympics, also see the latest episode of Democracy Now!

Obamacare Emancipation Proclamation

When you have a cumbersome free-market health insurance reform package like the ACA instead of, say, Medicare for All, confusion and disinformation are the inevitable byproducts. You really do have to be an economist to fully understand all the ramifications of a program that covers some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

The latest outbreak of mass confusion revolves around headlines falsely claiming that the Congressional Budget Office had announced that there will be a net loss of some two million jobs as a result of Obamacare.  What's actually predicted is that some bosses will be told to "take this job and shove it" by wage slaves chained to crappy jobs only because they provide crappy health insurance. Such workers will now be free to either quit and get subsidized plans on the individual exchanges, or reduce their hours to part-time, and still get subsidized plans on the individual exchanges.

So claims by Republicans that Obamacare is a direct job-killer are false. The CBO report simply conflates hours worked with the number of actual jobs. That's because in the world of government number crunchers, there are no human beings. There are only temporal units of production. 

Paul Krugman explains it in terms that even math-challenged units like me can understand:

So the CBO estimates that the incentive effects of the ACA will lead to a voluntary reduction in labor supply of around 1 1/2 percent, the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs. Labor compensation would fall less, around 1 percent, because the reduction in hours would be skewed toward the less well paid. Although they don’t say this, we would expect potential GDP to fall by roughly the same amount (assuming wages more or less reflect marginal productivity); since compensation is about 55 percent of GDP, this would mean reducing potential GDP by a bit over 0.5 percent.

Now, don't you feel relieved and elucidated? I sure do.

All over this New Utopia, we're told that poorly-paid workers will be instructing their bosses where to shove it, finally liberated to fly home to take care of the ailing spouse, move to another state, retire before they die, or just kick back and spend more quality time with the kids. The lives of up to a million abused temporal production units will be vastly improved, so the Democrats spin it, as a direct result of Obamacare. Free at last, baby!

But better watch out. This could also be the excuse for the GOP to refuse to extend unemployment benefits to a whole new generation of American Freeters they'll accuse of deliberately cutting their hours, just to suck up health insurance and avoid personal responsibility! Republicans will probably feel even more justified in their continued denial of Medicaid coverage to poor people in half the states. And just that one Social Darwinism policy alone will have the desired effect of killing an additional 17,000 units of humanity each and every year.

Meanwhile, by necessity and by neoliberal plan, a fair percentage of those newly freed work hours must now be spent in the time-consuming quest to find a doctor in the Obamacare Network. Traffic jams are unavoidable. But why work when you can shop for health care product? And think of those millions of unwanted job-hours waiting to be filled by other desperate units in the surplus labor market. Since more than one American man out of six is not working, what better way to support your fellow units of humanity than to do what the Washington insiders do -- rotate through the revolving doors, giving up the excess hours to the depressed guy slumped on his couch next door. 

It's the all-American solution: spin and win.

A Class War Soliloquy

 (Ed. note: This discourse was left as a comment in the previous thread. So that it may get the wider attention and the bigger font it so richly merits, I am taking the liberty of re-posting it here.)

MUSINGS OF THE LUCKY MAN
WHO THOUGHT HE WAS SELF-MADE

by Jay - Ottawa

To increase the Quality of Opportunity
Or to decrease the Inequality of Income:
That is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler to salute the gifted,
The avaricious, and the lucky born ––
And even to support them further as they
Zoom down the unobstructed lanes
Made special for them
At full throttle in daddy’s caddie
On the wide road to Comfort
Greed and Excess

And, by the way, for all of whom
The Starting Line of their existence
Is so f*cking close to the Finish Line
Of still more good fortune
Whose Starting Line may even be
On the doorstep of the Finish Line
Whether or not they backstroke,
Butterfly or float in the warm
Waters of their own good luck ––

Or to pivot in favor of the unlucky born
Whose daddies sadly had no caddies
Who are average, more or less,
In body and mind, financially or socially
And who strain from birth to death
To climb over the many obstacles
Laid down between them
And that faraway Finish Line
By capricious gods
And righteous men

What blameworthy fools
Those born unlucky
Short of physical wholeness
Short on intellect
Short of connected friends
Blind to the balanced view
What fools to have picked
As their Starting Line
Of all places
The doorstep of Want
And to remain stuck there by
Circumstances beyond their control
Light years from Barely Enough
Where, so they claim,
Quality of Opportunity
Means absolutely nothing.

Out With the Old Crap, In With the New

Many of us recognized that when President Obama declared in a December speech that Income Inequality is "the defining challenge" of our time, it was just one more dollop of whipped rhetorical crap designed to co-opt the populist message of the wildly popular new Pope. After all, he'd attempted the same trick within weeks of his orchestrated crackdown of the wildly popular Occupy movement in 2011.

His most recent Inequality shtick didn't even last a month before the Ruling Class began howling "Class War!" and he obliged them by hastily burying the Inequality word by shifting to the more neoliberally palatable "Equality of Opportunity" dump in his State of the Union speech.

And noticing that people are noticing the hastily buried doo-doo, the White House apparently enlisted trusty New York Times stenographer reporter Jackie Calmes to clean it up --  by hilariously blaming voters,  rather than paranoid filthy-rich people, for Obama's frantic forced January pivot away from the December pivot:

Like so many political fights, the one between President Obama and Republicans over income inequality has become a battle over language. Is it about inequality of incomes or of opportunity? On this question, the president and his party have moved in Republicans’ — and voters’ — direction. (my bold.)

Let's nip that lie right in the bud, shall we? Every recent public opinion poll has at least two-thirds of respondents howling mad over the most extreme wealth gap in American history. People didn't just wake up this morning, scratch their heads, and recognize "It's the Opportunity, Stupid," and that the poor billionaires are being unfairly maligned, and thus we need to stop the creeping threat of Marxism before Democracy explodes.

Obama is bending to the will of the voters, all right -- the voters who really count. He's simply continuing to bend over to voters who donate the big bucks to the politicians. The voters whose votes are weighted with gold. The voters of the One Percent. Calmes continues:

Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, recently wrote a column in The Hill newspaper condemning the decades-long trend of worsening income inequality, then advised “banish that term.” (into the Bastille!)

“However salient reducing income inequality may be,” he wrote, “it is demonstrably less important to voters than any number of other priorities” — including reducing poverty.

The differences are not just a matter of politics, but of policies, too. For both parties, their emphasis in talking about opportunity over income inequality matters because it affects the outcome of what the government might do, and what Democrats and Republicans can possibly agree on. (Bipartishit always rules in the Beltway.)

The president should “steer this debate” away from income inequality and “in a direction where we can find some unity,” said Vin Weber, a Republican strategist and former congressman from Minnesota. “I would not, if I were him, hit hard on income distribution, because everybody goes to their ideological corners right away and we’re at war.” (We millionaires in Congress are all in this together!)

And "over cocktails in the White House," Calmes continues, N.Y. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) urged the president to bury the Inequality crap. Because although it was never anything but a clump of plastic doggy-doo from a novelty shop in the first place, such talk from Obama was still making the sensitive patrician noses of Schumer's constituency positively wrinkle in fear and loathing.

Judging from the reader comments to Calmes's puff piece, people are just not swallowing the propaganda any more. William Neil of Rockville, MD. called her article "the intellectual equivalent of airbrushing." There is a class war, and it's being waged by the oligarchy against the rest of us. My published comment:

By euphemizing income inequality into "the opportunity gap," the rhetorical onus has been subtly shifted from the lords right back onto the serfs. The message from our politicians is clear: the rich shall not be taxed, nor corporations regulated, in order to narrow the gap. Rather you, the regular person, might also become rich someday, if you only work hard and "play by the rules." In other words, they want you to buy into the corporate cult of selfishness and "personal responsibility" rather than demanding justice and fairness for society as a whole. (Remember what Ronnie's partner in neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, said about "society" -- it doesn't exist!)

Instead of channeling Theodore Roosevelt and calling out the "malefactors of great wealth," and echoing FDR's "I welcome their hatred," President Obama is reaching out to the same coddled plutocrats who've caused the record wealth disparity in the first place. Among the CEOs invited to the White House last week to "voluntarily" consider hiring the long-term unemployed was the head of Bank of America. This bank is given the red carpet treatment at the same moment the Department of Justice is trying to extract a nearly $1 billion mortgage fraud settlement from it.

The elites get carried interest deductions and deferred prosecution agreements. The rest of us get bromides and platitudes interspersed with the regular beatings meant to improve our morale.

Disabled Workers of the World, Unite!

 *Updated below.

If you're a typical able-bodied McWorker, you're probably struggling to survive  on a minimum wage of $7 or $8. If you're among the lucky handful of able-bodied McWorkers just now entering the McWorkforce of a federal contractor, President Obama has benevolently decreed that your pay must start at $10.10 an hour. Because it's the right thing to do, because it's the all-American thing to do. Because Ten-Ten is easy to remember, and because it's a perfect Democratic campaign slogan. (When is the Ten? Ten, Ten, Say It Again! GOP Pays No AtTENtion!)

If, however, you are a disabled McWorker enrolled in a public-private federal "sheltered workshop" program, you will not get a raise. You won't even get minimum wage. That is because disabled people have long been legally subjected to something called "sub-minimum wage."  When it comes to making laws for the remuneration of labor, the government has conveniently lumped people with Autism, Down Syndrome, vision impairment, PTSD and other conditions into the same category as prisoners.

Barack Obama, newly self-cast as champion of the working stiff, is willfully discriminating against disabled people, who are three times as likely to live in poverty as a person who is not disabled. So much for his spiel about it not being about "who you are, where you were born, and where you come from." If you're disabled, you apparently don't qualify to be part of his vaunted middle-class dream. You're too impaired to climb up that Ladder of Opportunity. You are separate, and you are unequal.

There has been an immediate uproar. Workers are not silently accepting being scratched out by Obama's magical executive pen. They and their advocates are pushing back against their segregation, big-time. From Disability Scoop:

It’s unclear how many people earn less than minimum wage as employees of federal contractors, but the AbilityOne Program, which facilitates federal contracts for employers of those with disabilities, says that nearly 50,000 people with disabilities were employed through its programs in 2012, many of whom are believed to be working for subminimum wage.

In a call this week with U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and Vice President Joe Biden, disability advocates say they were told that the executive order would not alter the ability of approved federal contractors to continue paying people with disabilities less than minimum wage, though such workers could see a slight uptick in pay. That’s because sub-minimum wage is often calculated as a percentage of the pay that a typical worker would earn for the same job.

Now disability groups are uniting to ask Obama to reconsider.“This may mean that a worker receiving pennies an hour today may receive a dime as a result of the executive order. Surely we can do better than this,” wrote Jeff Rosen, chairperson of the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency tasked with advising Congress and the president on disability issues, in a letter to Perez and Obama.Meanwhile, a separate letter to the administration organized by the Collaboration to Promote Self Determination has support from the Autism Society, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and TASH, among others.

The White House, despite Obama's  recent boast that he'd make this a "year of action" and bypass Congress to help regular people, wasted no time announcing that Obama would indeed defer to Congress on the possible scrapping of the discriminatory sub-minimum wage for one "irregular" segment of the population. 

So what gives? Follow the money. The AbilityOne program reports annual profit increases of more than 6% to go along with its procurement of an ever-increasing number of disabled workers. So what a great way for the captains of industry to both brag about "hiring the handicapped" and save big-time on their labor costs! The United States Military Academy at West Point, for example, was able to get rid of its entire well-paid unionized janitorial staff simply by subcontracting with a local private social services agency offering up its clients up for a lot less money.... and, of course, no collective bargaining.

Elsewhere, disabled people provided by AbilityOne manufacture military uniforms, launder military uniforms, clean military equipment, sort military mail, manufacture military pens, package military food, and wash military dishes.... all for a salary as low as $3.25 an hour, after the "procurer" gets his own generous cut, of course.

You really think Free Marketeer Obama is going to shut down these plantations without a fight?

It's not only disabled workers being abused under the current system. It's the very same small business owners and manufacturers whom the president so loves to praise during his non-stop propaganda tour of America's factories. They're being squeezed out of government contracts because they're not allowed to pay their own workers sub-minimum wage.

One private uniform manufacturing plant in Alabama was forced to shut its doors in 2012 because it couldn't keep up with the AbilityOne competition, putting 175 people out of work. And as is the case with most neoliberal public-private contract schemes, it's the taxpayers as well as the exploited workers who end up paying more after the bidding-immune contractors rake in all the profits. The materials used are often shoddy. Corners are often cut. From Bloomberg News:

The (Defense Logistics) agency paid as much as 17 percent more for AbilityOne- manufactured uniforms compared with those made by large commercial businesses, according to a Bloomberg analysis of $2.23 billion in uniform spending by the agency during the past decade.

For example, the data provided by the agency showed it paid an average price of $33.98 for women’s Air Force coats, 17 percent more than the average price of $29.14 charged by large companies. AbilityOne contractors sold the agency Army combat coats at an average premium of 4.6 percent, for $34.67 per coat compared with $33.13.

Of course, AbilityOne sounds generous when compared to the Goodwill Industries plantation. There, workers are paid as little as 22 cents an hour, while the CEO is rewarded with almost $1 million in salary and compensation.

Nationwide, according to labor journalist Mike Elk, nearly 420,000 disabled people are employed in so-called 14(C) programs exempt from labor laws enacted in the 1930s, and coordinated by state and local governments. It is because they are deemed "training programs" that some of the employers can game the system, getting away with paying more or less permanent employees mere pennies per hour:

As Working In These Times reported last March, deep divisions remain within the disability community and even among top Congressional Democrats over whether disabled workers employed in 14(c) programs should be paid below the minimum wage. Some disability advocates—led by ACCSES, which represents employers of disabled workers under the 14(c) programs—claim that these programs provide valuable training to help transition people with disabilities into jobs, and that a minimum wage requirement would make that mission impossible.

Other advocates, however, say that the programs don’t provide meaningful training and rarely lead to outside jobs.  A 2001 study by the federal General Accountability Office (GAO) found that only 5 percent of workers employed in 14(c)-sheltered workplace programs left to take regular “integrated employment” jobs. These critics say the programs contribute to the well-documented cycle of poverty for those with disabilities: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a person with a disability is three times as likely to live in poverty as a person without a disability.

On Thursday, the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal advisory board, issued a statement on Thursday afternoon blasting the Obama administration’s decision to exempt workers with disabilities from the minimum-wage increase.

The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has already called the president out on his specious claim that he doesn't have the authority to scrap the sub-minimum wage. Within 48 hours of his State of the Union speech, they thoughtfully provided the Legal Scholar-in-Chief with a legal memo refuting his reasoning.

Nothing is preventing Barack Obama from using his pen to give every disabled federal contract worker $10.10 an hour. Nothing, perhaps, except his own sworn allegiance to the military-industrial complex and the miracle of unfettered free market capitalism.

*Update 2/7: Mike Elk reports that the Department of Labor is suddenly rethinking the Administration's position on wages for disabled federal contractors, now that the ACLU is also lending its heft to the fight. 

Brooks Whigs Out

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

David Brooks, concerned that the president he frequently canoodles with is in "stately decline," has a solution. Barack Obama can battle Lame Duck Syndrome by appointing commissions made up of the Davos/Aspen Ideas Festival crowd to lay out the framework for his successor's agenda! Obama
can become a Whig, and follow in the pragmatic footsteps of Lincoln! Never mind that Abe forsook Whiggery because of its regional factionalism and became a Republican. Brooks is counting on readers not to have boned up on any actual history.

In the world of David Brooks, Obama is finally at that point where he is free to transcend mere factionalism and pandering to Congress and voters and donors by allowing various outside influence peddlers (the Opportunity Coalition) to move in and dictate policy for the remainder of his term:

This means he will have the opportunity to build what he himself could have used over the past few years: An Opportunity Coalition. He’ll have the chance to organize bipartisan groups of mayors, business leaders, legislators, activists and donors into permanent alliances and institutions that will formulate, lobby for, fund and promote opportunity and social mobility agendas for decades to come. 

(snip)

President Obama could travel the country modernizing the Whig impulse, questioning current divisions and eroding the rigid battle lines. More concretely, he could create a group of Simpson-Bowles-type commissions — with legislators, mayors, governors and others brought together to offer concrete proposals on mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the life span.

Brooks, in his usual roundabout mushy way, is giving the stamp of elite approval to an Obama agenda that already exists, and has existed since the beginning of the president's political career. Obama has always served the Masters of the Universe, who are currently trying to take cover from the Inequality Craze behind the gilded walls of their charitable-industrial complex and their various corporate-funded think tanks. He's always traveled the country in a frenzied non-stop campaign to prop up business. Obama already created his Simpson-Bowles Commission, his White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness made up of Forbes 400 billionaires. His Justice Department has already invited the Malefactors of Great Wealth to partner up in the Fight Against Criminal Accountability. Obama has always been a congenial host to the movers and shakers of the global oligarchy.

Brooks is being disingenuous when he suggests that Obama needs to set a new cooperative agenda for his successors, because Obama is merely the latest front man of the de facto oligarchy. These global power players got their start with RRRR (Ronald Reagan's Randian Revolution), continued their assault all through the centrist Clinton triangulation years, made a killing both literally and figuratively during the Bush Neocon era, and then saw their wealth skyrocket to dizzying heights under Obama's reign as the wealth gap widened to historic proportions.

Brooks telling Obama to play nice with the plutocrats is like calling Genghis Khan a couch potato, and to get on with the plundering already.

It's all part of the same old shell game of the media-political complex. 

And, oh so coincidentally timed with the advice in Brooks's column, the president invited a whole cabal of tax-phobic CEOs over to the White House so that they can "voluntarily" and magnanimously pledge to hire more long-term unemployed people, and try to placate the increasingly restive masses for yet another day via crumbs, phony pledges, (I got a pen, yo!) and photo-ops. The outlandishly wealthy are so rattled by the specter of pitchforks and torches that even such misanthropes as Rupert Murdoch and the Waltons are being forced to pretend to care. And to show how personally accomodating he is, Obama even invited the CEO of Bank of America over for Concern-Fest,right in the midst of the DOJ trying to extract a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud settlement from the bank.

  As Robert A. Isaak explains the strategy in his book "The Globalization Gap,"

The only ones who ultimately accept the power of the super-rich individual are other excessively wealthy people who perceive a common bond and, presumably, a network of interests for their own long term security. Yet the affluent need to have the poor be marginally successful economically for much the same reason that the farmer needs to fatten up the cows before taking them to market. Absolute poverty leads to greater uncertainty and absolute chaos.

Brooks is simply slapping new phraseology (neo-Whig) on the same old agenda of the never-ending class war. And by shilling for the neoliberal Clinton Global Initiative, he also seems to be doing his best to set the stage for Hillary's Coronation. My published Times comment to his latest obfuscatory epistle:
 

Just what we need: a permanently enthroned power structure of philanthropic plutocrats pretending to solve the same social and economic problems they had an intimate hand in creating.

The fat cats... oops, I mean "thought leaders" -- fresh from their paranoid sojourn in Davos, are feeling nervous about the ever-widening wealth gap and opinion polls showing that the masses are mad as hell about their station in the Feudalistic States of America.

And thus does Income Inequality, only lately touted as the "defining issue of our time" get bowdlerized into ephemeral "ladders of opportunity" to encourage us to dream big, work hard, and shut up.

David Brooks's neo-Whig Party is just another name for the plutocratic cult of centrism, in which the rich get richer, and the poor get a little training and the nirvana of a meager $10 minimum wage if they're lucky enough to score a McJob. This grotesque opportunity cult supposedly will make up for the recent unbelievably sadistic slashing of food stamps for hungry families with children, discontinuation of federal unemployment benefits, and retention of most of the cuts of the Sequester.

Instead of Simpson-Bowles Catfood commissions and gap-widening Clintonoid "initiatives" that feel our pain while throwing us to the curb, we need to expand Social Security, ensure Medicare for All, get the money out of politics, and give the pathological rich their own unique opportunity to experience the joy of progressive taxation.