A Weaponized Human Refuse Dump

It's bad enough in the most drastic epoch of wealth disparity in American history that most people are suffering economically. What makes this particular era so heinous is that the hungry, the homeless, the unemployed, and the underemployed are being kicked when they're already down. They are being ground into human mulch for dumping in a vast neoliberal landfill. People are not only poor, their poverty and suffering have literally been deemed crimes by the elite class of sociopaths running the place.

As Henry A. Giroux puts it in his new Truthout essay,

Economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have argued that we are in a new Gilded Age, one that mimics a time when robber barons and strikebreakers ruled, and the government and economy were controlled by a cabal that was rich, powerful and ruthless.[3] And, of course, blacks, women and the working class were told to mind their place in a society controlled by the rich. What is often missing in these analyses is that what is new in the second Gilded Age is not just about the moral sanctioning of greed, the corruption of politics by big money, and the ruthlessness of class power.

What is unique is the rise of a brutal punishing-incarceration state that imposes its power on the dispossessed, the emergence of a surveillance state that spies on and suppresses dissenters, the emergence of vast cultural apparatuses that colonize subjectivity in the interests of the market, and a political class that is uninterested in political concessions and appears immune from control by nation states. The second Gilded Age is really a more brutal form of authoritarianism driven by what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a "death-saturated age," in which matters of violence, survival and trauma now infuse everyday life.

Giroux points out that for the first time, an entire generation has been condemned to lives of debt and hopelessness. Other recessions and depressions in our history have ended. This one is being extended, by deliberate design:

What has changed about an entire generation of  young people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in youth and the permanent fate of downward mobility but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations.  Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, surveillance and stillborn projects. The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are viewed increasingly as redundant and disposable or they are merely valued as consumers and commodities. In this discourse, young people are not seen as troubled but viewed as a source of trouble; rather than viewed as being "at risk," they are the risk and subject to a range of punitive policies.

So what can be done to prevent even more of us being treated as garbage by Neoliberal Waste Management? Writes Giroux,

It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the propaganda pumped out by the commanding neoliberal cultural apparatuses. We also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise.

He suggests alliances among disparate groups of feminists, immigration activists, organized labor, teachers, students -- and independence from and rejection of the two corporate political parties. Such solidarity is already manifest in spots -- for example in Chicago, where immigrants, mental health self-advocacy groups and teachers regularly join together to protest Mayor Rahm "One Percent" Emanuel's relentless privatization of education and housing and public sector jobs.

Read Giroux's whole piece. First, you get depressed. Then you get mad. Then you get inspired. And finally, you get moving.

Not to be confused with MoveOn, of course. Because you know what happens in those fake progressive, party-aligned veal pens? You eventually get chopped up and eaten up. And of course you know what happens to the leftovers. They're thrown out instead of saved. It's the American way.

So let's put the ruling class on a diet. If we refuse to be the food on their plates, it will be kind of impossible for them to throw us down their gilded garbage chutes. Right?

Oh, Those Demonizing Dems

I don't know what's funnier: that Beltway insiders are professing shock that Democrats are boldly demonizing the Supreme Court, or that the corporate Democrats in mid-term election mode actually think they'll be taken seriously as raging born-again populists.

Because when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) rails against predatory plutocrats, hilarity not only ensues -- it explodes:

“They wish to dismantle all limits on giving, piece by piece, until we are back to the days of the robber barons, when anyone or anything could give unlimited money, undisclosed, and make our political system seem so rigged that everyone will lose interest in our democracy,” Schumer said of the court.

Um, Chuck. The political system doesn't seem rigged, it is rigged, thanks in large part to your own complicity. Maybe people have lost interest in our democracy because in actuality, the system is on the fast track to an oligarchy. This did not start with the McCutcheon vs. FEC Supreme Court decision or with the Koch Bros, Chuckie.

Schumer is said not to be interested in the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee, purely because too-incessant public posturing against the very predators who finance him might dry up the dollars, even though it's simply posturing. Plus, he is in line to replace Harry Reid.  And being forced to go soft on Wall Street as banking leader could hurt his chances for the leadership. Those dreaded lefty bloggers might give him a hard time.

But still, it's explosively hilarious that Schumer is now publicly demonizing the robber barons, given that his last target was "lefty bloggers" who demonized... the robber barons!

From the December New Republic interview with Isaac Chotiner:

IC: It seems like one difference would be the approach to Wall Street. I assume you’re not supporting a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,³ which she (Elizabeth Warren) is sponsoring?

CS: No.

IC: You and Mayor Bloomberg, in 2007, said that reregulating Wall Street would cause people to flee overseas to London. That is very different than Warren.

CS: It has got to be, to me, a careful balance, OK? Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. And to sit there and do nothing, or do what the Republicans want—repeal Dodd-Frank—makes no sense. But on the other hand, I think that you just don’t attack Wall Street because they’re successful or rich.

I just unsuccessfully, with Bloomberg, supported raising the building height in midtown Manhattan, so we could build more office buildings. Office buildings are our factories—imagine the people of Michigan saying, “We don’t want to build a new auto factory, because the Ford family will get richer, or the person who builds the factory will make money.” You’ve got to look at the effect on average folks. The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year. I’m not saying Elizabeth does this, but there are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

Um, Chuck. Comparing Wall Street to Detroit is disingenuous. Your office buildings are not factories that manufacture things. They are the corrupt centers of the vampiric financialization of the entire global economy, the direct cause of the most soul-crushingly extreme wealth disparity in the history of the United States.

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck! There goes your falsely equivalent centrism again.The "left" goes after things based on reality -- like the widespread documented unprosecuted mortgage fraud by the robber-bankers. The right goes after things based upon their own lies, such as their chronic climate change denialism.

CS: It’s sort of funny. People on Wall Street think I haven’t done enough for them, and people on the left think I’ve done too much for Wall Street. On this one, I go by my internal gyroscope, and I’m pretty happy about where I’ve come down.

I had one of those gyroscopes when I was a kid. They spin and they spin and they spin. And when they come down, they come down with an annoying little clatter. Until the controlling player re-attaches the string and spins it a little more. They tilt at crazy angles, but with enough practice you can even get one to walk on a tightrope. It's sort of funny.

This time around, the spin is that it's safe to demonize the Supremes as long as you pretend that they're not every bit as controlled by the Wall Street's oligarchic strings as you are. As if the robber barons aren't the continuing source of your own continuing grasp on raw political power.As if you think you can pound the table for Wall Street deregulation with your right hand and pound the table for the victims of Wall Street with your left.

It would be sort of funny if it weren't so mind-numbingly corrupt.

Vomitrocities, Part 2

Little did I guess when I chose the title to the previous post that I'd soon be experiencing my own little vomitrocity, culminating in my admission to hospital over the weekend with the mother of all gallbladder attacks. Talk about karma! I am feeling much better now (morphine drips* sure are grand!) but not up to my usual mental or physical par --  so blogging will be limited.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing the lazy aggregation thing and posting links as I try to play catch-up on the news I've missed. When I got home last night, I naturally turned on CNN to see if they were still playing scavenger hunt on the missing plane. They were. Ashleigh Banfield was doing her chirpy ping thing, I guess because Don Lemon got tired of playing with his toy airplane.

  But Bill Moyers had a great show about restaurant slaves and sub-minimum wage. I was extremely and most pleasantly surprised that 60 Minutes, which had been veering into right wing territory for quite awhile, turned the tables on itself and did an excellent story on extreme poverty and lack of medical care in Appalachia. It seems that corporate media world in general is waking up and smelling the humanitarian crisis coffee in this country. Everybody who's anybody finally seems to be noticing that we are living in a third world country. Whether this will lead to drastic change is another story. Because the plutocrats own the joint, and they are a tenacious bunch.

Contributor Pearl Volkov shares her TimesPick comment on Ross Douthat's health care column:

Your concerns are valid, Mr. Douthat. I am a U.S. citizen living in Canada as a permanent resident and receive full medical coverage as well as my family in this country. How come Canada can accomplish this feat without bankrupting the nation? And do it at a fraction of the cost of the U.S. with better quality coverage? Simple. Our taxes which are more progressive cover the costs and there are no private for profit insurance companies or private medical conglomerates involved and hospitals are regulated with costs for medical care included in our coverage and no one's care is tied to their jobs.

Until and unless the health care needs for citizens are removed from the private sector, any form of Obamacare or other coverage will become an albatross for the nation and force medical needs to offer less and less help for the people.

Simple? We will have to have a financial and political revolution in my birth country before sanity will prevail and not only in the health care sector. It is depressing to witness what is happening and what the future holds. I am indeed fortunate to be living in Canada at this point in time.

You can say that again, Pearl. My hospital roommate, who'd just undergone cancer surgery, was more worried about what, when, and even if her crappy insurance would pay than with her own recovery and prognosis. Her son was upset because his boss had been giving him a hard time about taking time off to care for his mother. These are people who've worked all their lives and played by all the rules.

Something is terribly wrong with this country, and has been for a very long time. 

To be continued.... 

P.S. (4/8) I want to thank those who've commented here and emailed me with get-well wishes. I think my gall is now being properly redirected toward those who truly deserve it. See: Schumer, Chuck, above. 

P.P.S. (4/10) Several medical professionals have told me it was unlikely that I received a continuous pure morphine drip. To the best of my recollection, the nurse did use the word morphine, but she most probably said "morphine-like" or something similar. In any case, whatever I got morphed that bitch of a pain right away, and I was very sad when they discontinued it after a very short time. I guess I'll find out exactly what they shot into my veins when I get the bill. And then I'll really need some strong meds.

Vomitrocities

The last thing Barack Obama wants to do is to spoil the appetites of his rich benefactors or even worse, make them throw up after an expensive meal. Vomitoria are not yet fixtures in the homes of our contemporary oligarchs, as they were rumored to be back in Caligula's day.

Obama told attendees at the fundraiser, held at the Lincoln Park home of a top donor, that he was late because of the situation developing at the military base.

According to the Associated Press, Obama's announcement drew gasps and cries of, "Oh no." 

"We're monitoring the situation carefully," Obama said, echoing a statement he made earlier in the afternoon at a Chicago steakhouse where he held the first of two fundraisers benefiting the Democratic National Committee.

Obama did not dwell on the shooting, instead telling donors that being back home was "invigorating, and it reminds you of why you got into this business in the first place — because you got a lot of people here who have taught me a lot about community, friendship and family and for that reason I'm really grateful."

"As I look around this room, I'm reminded of all the pieces of myself that are connected to individuals in this room," Obama said. "There are people here who have been friends of mine for a couple of decades now. There are folks here who were with me when nobody gave me a chance to even get to the U.S. Senate."

Once the president had determined that the shooter who'd terrorized hundreds of people in the latest massacre at Fort Hood was a mentally ill Iraq veteran and not some evil jihadist enemy of our Freedoms, he was free to continue his official function as legalized bribe taker at the home of Craig Freedman. From all indications, a good time was had by all who forked over $10,000 for a little food and a lot of political access. There are compromised pieces of Obama all over their marbled halls.

Barack Obama made no mention of Wednesday's Supreme Court decision allowing them to fork over nearly unlimited wads of cash in the future.

 Craig Freedman, decades-long friend of Obama and co-host of the event, just so happens to be one of those sociopathic poobahs selling the "skills gap" zombie idea as an excuse to pay skilled welders at his factories only $12-$15 a hour while collecting corporate welfare in the form of tax incentives. Just last February, he was on CNBC bitching about how hard it is to find good slave labor to construct his bus and truck seats, even though public money is financing the training of his workers. He also has the contract for seating for Chicago's buses, as part of a deal with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to hire the unemployed in the future, for something called "Skills for Chicagoland's Future." Notice how these public private partnerships are always about the future, and not for the calamitous reality of the present? Suck the public dry today, promise to hire a few lucky duckies tomorrow, and laugh uproariously all the way to the bank.

And just yesterday, before his private fundraisers (transportation to which was funded by public money) Obama was in Michigan, telling college students to get those skills and get that Obamacare to tide them over during their unpaid postgraduate internships. Rowdy protesters were not allowed inside, where, using his g-droppin' country twang for the occasion, he bellowed,

Now, here’s the context.  Our economy is doing better.  It’s growing.  Our businesses are creating jobs -- 8.7 million new jobs over the past four years.  (Applause.)  Our manufacturing sector, which had been losing jobs throughout the ‘90s and throughout the -- what do you call it -- aughts?  (Laughter.)  You know, the 2000 to 2010, whatever you call that.  (Laughter.)

But manufacturing had been losing jobs -- about a third of manufacturing had lost -- and obviously that hit Michigan really hard.  But we’re now seeing the manufacturing sector add jobs for the first time since the 1990s.  So that is good news.  (Applause.)

The housing market is recovering.  Obviously the stock market has recovered, which means people’s 401(k)s, if they have them, are doing a lot better.

Troops that were fighting two wars, they’re coming home.  (Applause.)   We just went through the first month since 2003 where no U.S. soldier was killed in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  (Applause.)

Oops. I guess he spoke just a couple of hours too soon in that last paragraph. But his "heartbreak" over four new soldier deaths was sufficiently healed later that day to carry on money-grubbing.

By the way, Obama did not eat with either the lesser $10,000-a-platers, or the greater $32,000 big ticket holders. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, his food was pre-tested, pre-tasted, and served by military waiters at a private soiree with Mayor One Percent Rahm Emanuel and propaganda flack David Axelrod. Even his water was brought into the restaurant separately by a Navy steward.

Security State-Tested, Plutocracy-Approved

As his motorcade snaked through Chicago between plutocratic events, Obama was greeted by block after block of protesters. And while the president was drinking his special water and scarfing down his special steak, one demonstrator outside grew so incensed about the relentless onslaught of vomitrocities that he grabbed a TV reporter's mic and yelled out "Obama is a war criminal!" as blue-helmeted Chicago police on their horses looked on. The video is here, with another angle here. A second reporter prematurely broke off her own live spiel because, she said, she was there to talk about Democratic fund-raising, not protesting from the riffraff. Actually, it was fairly obvious she feared that she would be next.

Occupy Redux?

That title is misleading, because despite all the post-mortems, the Occupy movement has been alive and well since the security state disbanded the last physical camp a little over two years ago. It's branched off into Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Sandy, The Fight for $15, Movement Against Monsanto and GMOS,  Anti-Homelessness and Year of The Rent Freeze Coalition, Stop/Stop and Frisk-Stop Mass Incarceration Group, End The Fed, Ban Fracking Now, People’s Power Assembly NY/NJ, Occu-Evolve(OWS), Nationalize the Fed, Money Out Of Politics, The Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street, and Golden Farm Workers, among others.

So get ready for a re-occupation of Zuccotti Park and scores or even hundreds of other sites this Friday in what has been dubbed a Worldwide Wave of Action. The date, April 4, has been chosen to mark the 48th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as he protested with striking sanitation workers in Memphis. 

Friday's events in New York City will begin with a march of the grossly underpaid airport workers and their supporters from JFK Airport to LaGuardia Airport. Later that morning, proponents of a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street will hold a sit-in. Afternoon events include a "Disobedience School" for newbies by some of the original Occupy organizers.

It should be interesting to see how new Mayor Bill de Blasio, elected on a wave of progressive populism, will react to the events. I suspect it will be positive... as long as it's a one day only affair. You may recall that Mayor Mike Bloomberg himself was initially barely tolerant of Occupy and its predecessor, Bloombergville. It was two months before the final Homeland Security-orchestrated national onslaught against peaceful protesters began. And this being a midterm election year. I imagine Democratic candidates will be jockeying for camera position to gush their support.

The Worldwide Wave of Action is set to run through July 4. You can find more information here.

Meanwhile, I'd be remiss in not reporting that this apparent resurgence of Occupy is being described as "psy-ops propaganda" by some, because some of the publicity is a little strange and the demands are a bit free-floating. I think those Anonymous masks are also freaking people out. Plus, just as in the original Occupy movement, there is a hefty dose of libertarianism and LaRouche in the mix. Michel Chossudovsky has more.

Another possible red flag is the participation of establishment types. Former MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, for example, is enthusiastically blogging about it on the Huffington Post.

So, I am keeping an open mind. Remember, it was AdBusters magazine, a commercial enterprise, that initially publicized the Zuccotti Park encampment.

Update: What exquisite timing. As expected, the Supreme Court just dealt a huge blow to democracy by unleashing even deadlier torrents of unlimited cash into the political system. The 5-4 decision on McCutcheon vs. FEC has been described as Citizens United on Steroids.

Fed Up Federal Workers

Pay freezes, pay cuts, pension cuts, benefit cuts, unpaid furloughs, the threat of prosecution if you blow the whistle on waste or fraud or worse, the threat of prosecution of you fail to turn in your co-workers as "insider threats." What's not to love about a job like that?

So a few Congressional Democrats are baffled and concerned about a survey showing that morale among federal workers has been steadily falling in recent years, and they want an investigation. Three of them have sent a strongly-worded letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) seeking solutions on how to reverse this mysterious unhappiness trend. Because somebody has got to be held accountable! And it doesn't look like that Somebody will be the guy who ordered the pay freezes, suggested the Sequester, prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Ace than in any previous administration, and transformed federal office buildings into pits of paranoia. From The Washington Post:

“Stakeholders, including federal employee organizations, have noted that federal workers have become increasingly dissatisfied with their employment, and that this may be compromising the federal government’s ability to serve the American people,” the letter said.

Results from the annual federal-employee viewpoint survey and the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government report, which ranks federal agencies based on their survey scores, show that government-wide job satisfaction has declined for the past three consecutive years.

The letter calls on the GAO to report on root causes of worker discontent and how dissatisfaction affects retention, performance and productivity. It also asks the watchdog to identify the best practices that have helped certain agencies buck the trend and improve morale in recent years.

I'm surprised that workers even mustered up the courage to openly broadcast their disgruntlement in a survey. As McClatchy Newspapers revealed last year, President Obama had deemed disgruntled workers to be potential terrorist threats even before Ed Snowden rattled his cage. Failure to do one's ergonomic duty and spy on co-workers is grounds for punishment. Managers who fail to punish the underlings who refuse to report suspicious cubicle dwellers and bedpan emptiers could themselves be brought up on criminal charges under Obama's executive order. If the woman handling your Social Security application over the phone is having marital problems, the guy at the next desk is mandated to snitch on her. If the poultry inspector down the line is late on the rent, you'd better turn him in. You never know when he might snap and declare jihad. Or worst of all, leak something that might ruffle the feathers of the president.

According to McClatchey the worst place to work is the Defense Department. Working past quitting time, and reading The Onion and Salon on lunch breaks are potential threats and must be brought to the immediate attention of superiors.

And morale is going down? I am surprised more federal workers haven't quit their jobs using the Chinese factory worker method: jumping out of windows.

Conservatives want to drown government in a bathtub. Centrist Democrats like Obama prefer to shrink government through a sneaky program of human attrition. Make unionized government workers rattled and unhappy, and then point to their decreased performance and efficiency as an excuse to privatize everything, enrich your plutocratic friends, and drive down wages to subsistence levels.

Neoliberalism is on the march.

Earth Calling...

... With bad news. Via the Gray Lady:

Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported on Monday, and they warned that the problem was likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.

But some geniuses are having the bright idea to reconstitute the dodo and a couple dozen other extinct species while we're waiting for current populations to die. If, as some are suggesting, a new ice age is set to envelop Northern Europe, maybe they can evacuate the polar bears from the melting ice caps and let them duke it out with wooly mammoths among the glaciers in what is now merrie olde England.

This is beyond depressing. It is downright terrifying. But other geniuses in high places are balking at the UN's suggestion that rich nations had better start sending massive amounts of cash to poor nations, who will be especially hard hit by the climate change they had no hand in causing.

The poorest people in the world, who have had virtually nothing to do with causing global warming, will be high on the list of victims as climatic disruptions intensify, the report said. It cited a World Bank estimate that poor countries need as much as $100 billion a year to try to offset the effects of climate change; they are now getting, at best, a few billion dollars a year in such aid from rich countries.

The $100 billion figure, though included in the 2,500-page main report, was removed from a 48-page executive summary to be read by the world’s top political leaders. It was among the most significant changes made as the summary underwent final review during an editing session of several days in Yokohama.

Hmm.... I guess those geniuses who had a hand in censoring the report think their own ivory towers will be immune from catastrophe.  We should have learned by now that under no circumstances must one offend rich people for any reason, as the mere thought of parting them from their money to help the less fortunate sends them into paroxysms of rage and shrieks of class envy.

The edit came after several rich countries, including the United States, raised questions about the language, according to several people who were in the room at the time but did not wish to be identified because the negotiations were private. The language is contentious because poor countries are expected to renew their demand for aid this September in New York at a summit meeting of world leaders, who will attempt to make headway on a new treaty to limit greenhouse gases.

Many rich countries argue that $100 billion a year is an unrealistic demand; it would essentially require them to double their budgets for foreign aid, at a time of economic distress at home. That argument has fed a rising sense of outrage among the leaders of poor countries, who feel their people are paying the price for decades of profligate Western consumption.

I want the names of those Americans and I want to know who is bankrolling them. Rupert Murdoch? Jamie Dimon, the skills gap guru? On that topic, I also want to know why our normally stingy Congress is so eagerly sending a $1 billion aid package to Ukraine. What's that you say? That the money is going straight to the oligarchs who took over in that right-wing putsch? That it could be a way to undercut Russia and grease the skids for some all-American polluting fracked gas and oil to be exported? And that the poor people of Ukraine will take the blame for the crimes of the elites, and be forced into austerity?

One "bright side" in the United Nations climate report is mentioned by the New York Times, however. Because this is America, where we must always look the bright side because it's always darkest right before it goes totally black:

 Since the intergovernmental panel issued its last big report in 2007, it has found growing evidence that governments and businesses around the world are making extensive plans to adapt to climate disruptions, even as some conservatives in the United States and a small number of scientists continue to deny that a problem exists.

 “I think that dealing effectively with climate change is just going to be something that great nations do,” said Christopher B. Field, co-chairman of the working group that wrote the report and an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. Talk of adaptation to global warming was once avoided in some quarters, on the ground that it would distract from the need to cut emissions. But the past few years have seen a shift in thinking, including research from scientists and economists who argue that both strategies must be pursued at once.

Translation: yack while you frack. Pursue an all-of-the-above strategy. Transport flammable Bakken shale oil by rail instead of by pipeline. Choose between polluting water and polluting dry land. Well, I hope that is not what they're talking about when they talk about a "shift in thinking". Like the shift in a deforested mountainside that resulted in a deluge of mud burying an entire housing development.

Is anyone taking bets about when CNN will break into its marathon coverage of the missing plane and the unbelievable amounts of garbage in the oceans, and give us some brief coverage of the Washington state disaster and all the impending disasters on our global plate?

Never mind. Because oil and gas is a big sponsor of cable news shows. Because the earth will have the unmitigated gall to ignore the mindlessness of its human inhabitants as it takes its natural and inevitable man-made course. 

Nan Socolow said it best in her recent comment on the Times:

 In due course, the tragic truth of what happened to that Boeing 777 Dreamliner will be known to all of us. This is not a wild goose chase in the South Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart whose bones lie, undiscovered as yet on Nikumaroro Island not far from Howland Island where she crash-landed with her co-pilot Fred Noonan on 1 July 1937. But it's a needle in a haystack search for the floating debris from the 777 thousands of miles off Australia, in the gyre of the Pacific Ocean. The Roaring Forties is where that Malaysian plane with 239 innocent souls aboard may be found. The talking heads and "experts", who don't know a whit more than you and I about what happened, what Is happening and are fouling the airwaves with their nattering, codswallop and bumf. The remains of the plane will be discovered - maybe not the black boxes, but the tale will be told on the waves of the Pacific Ocean. A tale of immeasurable grief that greeted those who were lost on Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie, on TWA 800, on the 4 jets of 9/11, on so many other tragic air mishaps dating back to the Hindenburg. Tears will be shed. There will be no such thing as "closure" as we have been scalded mercilessly by nature, by man's invention of flight, and by know-nothings, belabouring us with their jabber on our cyber-widgets from pcs to iphones to tablets to TV. We are small and ignorant, filled with folly.