A Scourge of Imaginary Friends

Reality assuredly bites, so the temptation to retreat into the cocoon of delusion is always there. It's just a part of being human. But too many lies and cons and fairytales have a tendency to build precariously upon themselves. And when they come crashing down, they tend to come crashing down all at once. I am talking to you, corporate media courtiers of America.

The Big Story today of course is about Heisman trophy hopeful Manti Te'o and the dead girlfriend who wasn't and the usual institutional cover-up of the fake dead girlfriend who wasn't and the usual journalistic lackadaisicality that permitted the fake dead girlfriend to live on in the continuing fictional narrative that makes America so special. I hadn't been paying much attention to this burgeoning scandal until the other day. All the elements are there: religious hypocrisy, the protection of institutions over individuals, greed, sports cheats. And that brings us to Lance Armstrong. Well no, it doesn't, because I am not going to waste any time belaboring Lance's sociopathic attempt at splainin' himself. You can get your fill about Manti and Lancey today with any random click of your mouse. I don't even need to supply you with any of the usual links.

But there is another massive con that is not getting nearly the attention it deserves. A wave of queasiness rolled over me when I read this headline in The Hill this morning: McConnell Seeks Fresh Start With the President.

I liked it better when Tortoise Face was vowing that his main goal was to make Obama a one-term president. No connection with Obama meant no grand betrayal. But now it looks at least vaguely possible that the president may achieve his Grand Bargain for the Grandees and a world of pain for the rest of us with the collusion of his new Imaginary Friend, Mitch. And even sloppy seconds Paul Ryan, who'd been missing in action since the election, crawled out of his hole this week to act pretend-reasonable. Hostage-taking over the debt ceiling is apparently off; negotiating the Petersonian cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is apparently on, without the default threat strings attached. (update: The House Republicans have agreed to lift the debt ceiling for another three months so the cutting of the safety net can begin apace. The Obama Administration is strangely, yet all too predictably, calling this a "victory." The nausea gets worse as the mind boggles.)

It's true that the GOP nihilists are still adamantly opposed to bilking obscenely rich people out of their hard-stolen fortunes, and that is the only sticking point that may, serendipitously enough, save us from The Only Adult in the Room. The one with the extra-notched belt and the bowl of peas.

There are some bright spots on the horizon, though. A few mainstream media people are waking up from their slumbers and putting the scold's bridle right back on the nattering heads of the deficit scolds. Case in point, this must-read by Kevin Brown, exposing the Journalists in the Service of Pete Peterson.

Paul Krugman follows up with a column and yet another blogpost pointing out that the deficit, even if it were the national catastrophe the imaginarians of the plutocracy insist it is, is largely fading away despite their best tactical efforts to keep it alive. Manti found it hard to give up his fake dead girlfriend, and so too are the deficit hawks and their media mawks finding it painfully hard to relinquish the mouldering love of their own entitled lives.

The infliction of pain on ordinary people is the Petersonian drug of choice, and it's a hard addiction to overcome. As soon as you flush the Fix the Debt poison pills, another loathesome toxin appears to take its place. The Business Roundtable cadre of CEOs sat around their Hogarthian abbatoir of a roundtable the other day and called for raising both the retirement and Medicare eligibility ages to 70. Rich people are living longer and age is no object when it comes to the vast accumulation of wealth -- so it naturally follows that poor people should share the sacrifice and the pragmatic economic patriotism of their betters. The BRT, as Richard Eskow points out in another must-read piece, is a right-wing extremist organization that actually wants to kill people whom they find personally inconvenient to their bottom lines.

But that didn't stop Mr. Balanced Approach from canoodling with the BRT just last month and kicking out the press corps who, the president agreed, would only spin the plutocratic lies and the greed and the plots and the lies out of all proportion were they allowed to stay and take actual notes.

These people, to borrow a line from my Krugman comment this morning, are like cockroaches. They scurry away whenever you shine a light on them, but sneak back in to steal your crumbs the minute your back is turned. So keep the high beams on, and the disinfectant ready.



Hogarth's Fourth Stage of Cruelty Reimagined: The BRT



Mawks & Hawks

Everybody knows that the Republicans are phony deficit hawks, pretending to care about spending only when they are out of power. (see: two unfunded wars, unpaid-for Medicare prescription drug benefit.) They hilariously paint President Obama as a big-spending socialist leading us down the road to financial ruin, even as he accurately points out that he has actually slowed down the rate of government growth.

But despite the fact that only about 15% of Americans point to The Deficit as their primary worry (most sane people declaring that the real national emergency is unemployment) Obama never wastes an opportunity to proclaim that the American People have given him a mandate to cut and grow, slash and invest, whip and woo. He likes to call it the Balanced Approach. I prefer to call it schizophrenia. How do you impose austerity and grow the economy? Paul Krugman writes himself hoarse trying to explain Keynesian economics, while Obama talks himself hoarse insisting that we need to tighten our belts now so that someday in the far-distant future, we can reach The Promised Land of American Feel-Goodism.

The truth is that Obama doesn't care about cutting the deficit any more than Republicans do. Otherwise, he'd be talking up the Public Option Deficit Reduction Act just introduced in the House. Government competition with the health insurance industry would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over a decade, say the bill's Democratic sponsors.

Forget about it. Obama would rather spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money for his mawkish "Get Out the Premiums!" campaign designed to sign up hordes of new customers for the profit-bloated insurance maggots to feed upon. He is actually using a former campaign operative and White House PR person to head up the effort, called "Enroll America."

It will be Anne Filipic's job to literally and figuratively go door-to-door in search of millions of uninsured people, convincing them to buy private insurance policies. In a puff piece published today in The Washington Post, she strongly implies that she will use the massive Obama for America database to pick and choose among potential new customers. So, in case you've been wondering how the campaign would use that much-coveted treasure trove of private information -- well, this is apparently it.

And Filipic is blunt about her main goal being that of burnishing Obama's image by selling private insurance to the masses:

 I truly believe there’s nothing more important for the president’s legacy than the number of people this law impacts. What is so exciting is how we can apply other tools, from electoral campaigns and the private sector, to increase the reach.... What I envision first is a lot of data and analytics, using a lot of the microtargetting that has taken off in recent years. there’s some potential to do what electoral campaigns do: Find people who wouldn’t be motivated to take action and inspire them in a way that they do. I think in terms of really building a list of the uninsured across the country. If we know where people live, there’s a real ability to have one-on-one conversations. We’ll be doing a lot of what the private sector does, and what a lot of recent electoral campaigns have done in figuring out how do you build that list and then how do you communicate with those people.

Filipic said she would not be surprised if the same vast  resources that propelled Obama into a second term would be matched by the Sign Up America effort. Since it was a billion-dollar re-election campaign, you have to wonder just how expensive this latest marketing campaign will be. All we're being told is "multi-millions."

 Obama is a shill for the corporate mawks. He just talks the fiscal restraint talk. The true cost of implementing ObamaCare is yet to be calculated. Yet, hiding in plain sight, staring him right in the face, is a bill that would reduce the deficit by $100 billion. Beginning right away. But it's being ignored, because it doesn't put profits over people.

And the profits keep rolling in. The insurance companies are drooling in anticipation of Sign Up America, raising their premiums in some states by double-digit percentages thanks to a convenient loophole in the Affordable Care Act. Corporate TV outlets are drooling in anticipation as well, since the Sign Up America campaign also plans a deluge of mawkish TV commercials. One planned spot involves a mother convincing her 20-something son to buy a policy, because it's the economically patriotic thing to do.

Meanwhile, health care spending growth itself is flattening out. It has nothing to do with people living healthier lifestyles and everything to do with them not being able to afford insurance co-pays, deductibles and pricey doctor visits.

Oh, and we're getting sicker and dying sooner than our counterparts in all other advanced countries. So get out your thin wallets, America, and Sign the Hell Up. The mawks need their meat.

*Update: Please see the comments for Denis Neville's excellent research/reporting on Enroll America. It is even worse than I thought. The already-blurred line between public assets and interests and private profits has pretty much been erased with this initiative. If you were among the millions of people who visited the Obama campaign website this past year or so, and thus were swept up in its secretive database, with such information as your age, medical history, current health status, assets, career history, internet search history, buying habits -- it appears likely that your private info will be shared with the insurance companies as they shill their overpriced and probably shoddy product with the added financial help of the same taxpayers they are already victimizing. If this is the case, I hope some class action lawsuits are filed on behalf of the American people against the government for such a gross violation of their privacy.

The Walmart-White House Connection, Revisited

Walmart has been getting some well-deserved bad press lately. Squelching union activity, paying abysmal wages, violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing officials in Mexico and elsewhere, neglecting hazardous conditions in its off-shore manufacturing plants.... the list goes on and on. The fact that the Walmart heirs now possess more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans combined only adds fuel to the fire.

So what more opportunistic time for Walmart, with the assistance of the Obama Administration, the New York Times and other media giants, to stage another publicity stunt as part of its endless and futile quest to repair its image -- all the while perpetrating historic income inequality by hoarding an outsized share of a nation's wealth. (The Times was getting a negative earful from its readers, and has quickly removed the story from its homepage.)

First Lady Michelle Obama, who in her past corporate life sat on the board for one of Walmart's main suppliers, and has previously shilled for its efforts to infiltrate so-called "food deserts" in poor neighborhoods, waxed enthusiastic over the latest public relations gimmick:

“We all believe that no one who serves our country should have to fight for a job once they return home,” Mrs. Obama said in the statement. “Wal-Mart is setting a groundbreaking example for the private sector to follow.”       

But in the top-rated NYT reader comment, "Horsedung" of North Carolina trenchantly observed, "As a former Marine Corps infantryman I cannot think of a more frightening future back in the US than working in Walmart."

To be fair to the Times, it does briefly manage to quote a labor historian critical of the Walmart campaign to hire military people:

They like military people because they have a sense of hierarchy and a commitment to the organization they are in,” said Professor Lichtenstein, who has been a critic of Wal-Mart’s management practices. “And that’s important to Wal-Mart.” In recent years, Wal-Mart has been the target of lawsuits by women, accusing the company of discrimination in salaries and promotions.  

The incestuous, neo-fascist, public-private pattern should be all too familiar by now. It repeats itself almost daily.

 Step One: Company is exposed by the Fourth Estate as a lawbreaker. Whether it's robo-signing fraud by banks, bribing Mexican officials by Walmart, money-laundering for drug cartels by HSBC, the vast landscape of white collar crime seems endless.

Step Two: Company joins forces with the United States Government to investigate itself.

Step Three: The Department of Justice signals there will be no prosecutions, but that the offending corporation will become a valued partner of the United States Government by taking steps to make the lives of all the little people better.

Along with the rest of felonious corporate America, Walmart will likely not only remain unpunished for its malfeasance, it will actually continue getting rewarded through various tax breaks, unfettered off-shoring of manufacturing and labor, praise from the first lady, and ever-creative forms of corporate welfare.

 Walmart, of course, has long been bragging about all the veterans it hires. Visit, if you dare, its "Careers With a Mission" webpage for the low-down of how one brand of regimentation can seamlessly morph into another:

The military instilled in you a sense of pride, honed your leadership skills, and drew on the deep sense of purpose you carry throughout everything you do. Continue making the most of those traits without compromise at Walmart. Our daily operations employ them to the fullest, offering a career experience that will feel like a natural fit for how you think, act and live your life.

The site purports to match veterans' skill sets with store positions. For example, if you were engaged in combat operations against peasants in Afghanistan, you'll be just perfect for "managing" wage slaves at Walmart! If you were a psy-ops specialist, disseminating propaganda to win the hearts and minds in occupied territory, Walmart wants you for such marketing campaigns as "We're Hiring 100,000 Veterans!" and "Unions are Un-American!" as well as convincing impoverished people that they can "Live Better!" by shopping at Walmart. If you served in military intelligence, you can either get a gig in store security, or if you're super lucky, become a personal bodyguard for Walmart Board members as they Travel the Globe, bribing corrupt officials. 

 One misleading TV commercial that ran a year or so ago told the story of a returning female vet who, through the magic of low wages, was able to buy a house and put her kids through college! Another Walmart good-will gesture, again garnering much free publicity through the White House's corporate-operated "Joining Forces" initiative, is to allow its minimum wage workers to transfer to another store if a military spouse gets redeployed. How noble can they get?

And to make the latest propaganda campaign even more effective, there are reports that President Obama is considering appointing the female president of the Walmart Foundation as his new Budget Director to replace Treasury nominee Jack Lew. (h/t Robert S.)

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who directs Walmart's various greedwashing endeavors, already serves on the president's newly-created Global Development Council. This is yet another of those in-house corporate lobbies that comprise the Obama Shadow Government, serving to promote private interests at public expense. The revolving door revolves several times each and every day in the wonderful world of Public-Private Partnerships.

Burwell, before revolving toward Walmart, worked on Obama's transition team as a banking expert, having previously served as deputy budget director in the Clinton Administration and chief of staff to bank-deregulating Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. She later headed up a global agricultural initiative for the Gates Foundation. (Walmart, coincidentally, has long been criticized for its role in putting third world subsistence farmers out of business.) Her first job out of college was a stint at the McKinsey and Co. lobbying consulting firm. Coincidentally, one of Chelsea Clinton's many jobs has been at McKinsey. And of course Hillary Clinton once served on the Walmart Board. I think Muckety needs to draw another one of its great maps for this latest web of incestuous intrigue.

And as the sticky threads are wrapped ever more cosily around Walmart and the White House, watch out for falling wages. Watch out for continued anti-union activity by the retail giant as the government looks the other way. Watch out for continued violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as Walmart metasticizes. Watch out for continued sales of weapons and bullets by returning veterans suffering from PTSD as they stand guard behind the Walmart gun display counters. Watch out for continuous corporate welfare for this retail behemoth that not only refuses to supply health insurance for its employees, but actually instructs them in how to efficiently apply for Medicaid and food stamps.

"We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do well while a growing number of Americans barely get by—or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." -- Barack Obama.

Let's face it, people. That settlement has already been reached. And it is patently unfair to 99% of us. The Great Shrinker has spoken.

*Update, 1/16: The recent Fiscal Cliff Aversion Act extended and enhanced the generous tax breaks for companies which hire veterans. So, factoring in the average $8/hour starting salaries,  and the fact that veterans receive government healthcare to begin with, I think it is fair to assume that  Walmart's workforce will be more taxpayer-subsidized than ever, assuming of course that it can attract enough former cannon fodder into its big box labor camps.

The Coin Is Dead, Long Live the Coins



Was  your whole weekend  ruined by the weekend news dump that the Obama Administration had nixed the trillion dollar platinum coin and is opting instead for more Debt Ceiling Crisis drama? Don't despair. While you're waiting for Austerity to kick in, the president wants you to go on a spending spree on the off-chance that you still have any actual money to burn.  Just go ahead and plunk it down on a set of three Obama Coins. You heard it right. Although the Treasury declared that minting a coin to stave off national default is illegal, unethical, unfathomable and undoable even though it's constitutional, the president has minted a whole mint of gold, silver and bronze coins to help defray the cost of his second inauguration.

Okay, so they're pretend coins. But they do have value. They will pay for somebody else, not you, to attend one of the Gala Inaugural Balls  Or maybe they will pay for the tons of lobster and bison destined for a thousand slavering maws at the Congressional Inaugural Luncheon. My own senator, Chuck Schumer, is in charge of the menu, which includes pie made of apples from my very own Hudson Valley. He invited a New York Times food critic, not you or me, for a food-tasting binge to decide the ultimate party fare:

"I was hopeful of having Long Island duck, but unfortunately the tasters and I said the dish doesn’t quite work — where the bison was wow,” Mr. Schumer said, hastening to add that “the duck was not at fault,” but rather the preparation.

At 10:30 in the morning, the senator was sampling and praising the Tierce 2009 Finger Lakes Dry Riesling, to be served with the first course of lobster with clam chowder sauce, as well as the award-winning Bedell Cellars 2009 merlot from Long Island that will be served with bison. By 10:45, he declared that the lobster would be his lunch, with a few bites of the bison, a few sips of the Bedell and a sampling of dessert, a pie made with Hudson Valley apples.

Go ahead. You know you want to. Buy the freaking coin set so Chuckie and the gang can have more than a few bites of bison. Let them devour the near-extinct national animal that is no longer even on the nickel before they nickel-and-dime the rest of us to death. It is called Sharing the Sacrifice. It is called Economic Patriotism.

And by the way, where in the Constitution does it state that the Senate may provide itself with official food tasters? Of course, it is understandable that elected officials with a 9% public approval rating might find a food taster necessary to vet their victuals. Even Obama has been known to bring along his own personal food tasters to dangerous plutocratic fund-raisers and on official trips. Leaders of Empire can never be too austere when it comes to budgeting for the personal protection of their palates.

Meanwhile, take another close look at those coins. They look like they were inspired by the Little Orphan Annie comics. Obama's eyes are vacant circles! They forgot to etch in any pupils! And get a load of Biden in profile. He looks like the "before" image in a Lifestyle Lift commercial, what with the double chin and the sagging jowls. I think that $7,500 price tag is way too steep if they can't even idealize our politicians. As Annie would say, "Gee Whiskers!"

Weekend Links / Open Thread

Flu-y Hooey: it's the big one, folks. Hope none of you is suffering, but if you are, that you were able to score some Tamiflu or other anti-viral meds that temper the vile effects, and are otherwise being well cared for. If you haven't yet had your fill of Flu Lit, you can find some here, here, here and for comic relief, here. (hint: it's another Rush Limbaugh conspiracy theory.)

In New York City, officials don't think the flu is making people cough enough. They have begun mass, 24/7 open-air burning of the tons and tons of Superstorm Sandy debris, despite protests from the American Lung Association and other environmental groups. As you may have guessed, the pollution is being perpetrated in a non-affluent section of the city, so the plutocrats will have no need to don their monogrammed gas masks. More here. (h/t WestVillageGal.)

While current mainstream media coverage of education has devolved into whether we should arm teachers and turn schools into militarized zones, a brave group of Seattle teachers is choosing to fight back. Not with guns, but by unanimously refusing to administer those odious state-mandated standardized tests this spring. (h/t Barbara Madeloni.)

And speaking of odium, is it me, or are President Obama and his band of crony capitalists now going out of their way to provoke unprecedented levels of disgust?  I've reached the point where the very sound of his voice affects me in an unpleasant, visceral way. I am just grateful that those smirking images of him have ceased following my every Internet click (the following is now covert, of course.)

No, it isn't just me. One of his own former national security advisors is now publicly calling him "as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor".

But sadly, even so-called progressives still support the man despite all the damning evidence of his corruption staring them right in the face. Sen. Bernie Sanders, self-described independent socialist, is a prime example of somebody who can rail and rage against the Boss Man's behavior, but never quite take that ultimate denouncing step. Bernie's statement that he will not vote for Treasury nominee Jack Lew begins "As a supporter of the president, I remain extremely concerned that virtually all of his key economic advisers have come from Wall Street."

Huh? How about withholding your support of the president, Bernie? How about leading a contingent of Progressive Congress Critters to the White House to protest? 

Better yet, listen to what Bill Black has to say about Loopy Lew, whom Bernie apparently can't help smarmily calling "intelligent" despite massive evidence to the contrary. Black just goes for it, and calls him a dumb-ass and a crook and an epic fail, and thus an ideal and extremely useful idiot for the PTBs.

At least when Bush was around, people used their brains and expressed their disgust in greater numbers. But for some reason, Barack is sheathed in so many layers of protective teflon that Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave with jealousy. Obama has got to be a master hypnotist with the 50% approval rating he currently enjoys.

You've heard of those Good Christian Bitches, and have probably had the misfortune to meet or even be related to one. But at all costs, avoid the League of Minnesota Granny Obamabitches, who make it their business to spy on their neighbors, troll comment boards,monitor dinner table conversations, and send all their findings to state and national Democratic Party databases. Buttinskyism has been taken to a whole new level. Crones & Drones are now vying for your personal space. It's getting a little cramped out there in Amurika.

Feel free* to join the National Conversation on these or any other issues that are striking your fancy or pushing your own personal odium button. Happy Weekend.

*Update 1/13: This does not include the freedom to call for armed rebellion and other violence. I just deleted several inflammatory comments along those lines which were posted overnight. I recently removed the comment moderation feature and the honor system thing had been working very well until now. But if this kind of crap continues, I will be forced to start holding and previewing everybody's comments again.

Additionally -- as I have stated in the past, I don't mind the occasional (and respectful) anonymous comment from the casual visitor to this site. But if you want to engage with other contributors, you're going to have to identify yourself a little better than "Anonymous."

The Incestuous-Industrial Complex

It looks like a demented ferris wheel from hell. But what it really depicts is the tangled corporate media web emanating from that exclusive, yet bloated, think tank known as the Council on Foreign Relations. For even more detailed CFR intertwinements, be sure to visit the Muckety site, which is running a series of special reports on the dizzying incestuousness that exists within the Beltway and beyond. The Hollywood bone's connected to the Wall Street bone, the Wall Street bone's connected to the government bone, the government bone's connected to the pharmaceutical bone, the pharmaceutical bone's connected to the defense contractor bone, and on and on, ad infinitum. It all adds up to one big metastatic blob of public-private cells, occasionally throwing off their toxic by-products for consumption by we, the peoples.

Even though such scions of the corporate media as the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and CNN's Fareed Zakaria are CFR members in good standing, what happens in the Council stays in the Council. The government can trust them implicitly with its top secrets, says this think tank, because  the revolving doors of influence peddling swing wide and swing fast and swing both ways. In the Council's own words:

There sometimes lurks among experts in high office a sense that they need not respect the opinions of those lacking access to the detailed information available within the “classified” preserves of government. The Council has never offered itself as a repository of classified diplomatic or military files. But those on bureaucratic staffs who base their actions on information that cannot be shared (in some form) with the public have learned over the years that they do so only at the peril of their policy goals. Discussions at the Harold Pratt House remain confidential—not because they deal with secret information, but largely because members and invited guests often use the occasions to test tentative opinions they have not yet fully thought through and developed.
 

 According to the CFR, you have to be an insider to even get in their door. "With nearly 4,700 members and term members, CFR's roster includes top government officials, renowned scholars, business leaders, acclaimed journalists, prominent lawyers, and distinguished nonprofit professionals" their web page gushes. They forgot to mention they also include movie stars, such as Michael Douglas and George Clooney, and unindicted banksters such as Lloyd Blankfein. And if you're a discredited ex-New York Times reporter named Judith Miller -- well, they won't kick you out for a little old transgression like lying about WMDs in Iraq.
 
Would you be surprised to learn that Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, he of the centrist Third Way anti-FDR cult and the austerity-mongering Fix the Debt Campaign, is also Chairman Emeritus and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations?  Follow the tentacles: the ongoing propaganda campaign designed to soften up the public for New Deal safety net cuts by fomenting deficit hysteria has Pete Peterson written all over it. Every centrist Tom Friedman column you'll ever read was no doubt hatched over cocktails with some poobah from the Council on Foreign Relations. That explains a typical muddled Friedman column, because as the Council itself admits, their members' "tentative opinions are not fully thought through". It's the influence that counts -- and whether it's half-baked, spoiled, or stunted matters not in the grand scheme of things. The scheme is power-brokering for the sake of lucrative power-brokering.

Fareed "Plagiarism Schmagiarism" Zakaria, meanwhile, uses Petersonian deficit scold talking points in a piece eerily called "Can America Be Fixed?" that is now running in Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations.* Can't guess one of the ways Zakaria will "fix" America? Here's a clue:

The continued growth in entitlements is set to crowd out all other government spending, including on defense  and the investments needed to help spur the next wave of economic growth. In 1960, entitlement programs amounted to well under one-third of the federal budget, with all the other functions of government taking up the remaining two-thirds. By 2010, things had flipped, with entitlement programs accounting for two-thirds of the budget and everything else crammed into one-third. 

(snip) 

Reform and investment would be difficult in the best of times, but the continuation of current global trends will make these tasks ever tougher and more urgent. Technology and globalization have made it possible to do simple manufacturing anywhere, and Americans will not be able to compete for jobs against workers in China and India who are being paid a tenth of the wages that they are. That means that the United States has no choice but to move up the value chain, relying on a highly skilled work force, superb infrastructure, massive job-training programs, and cutting-edge science and technology -- all of which will not materialize without substantial investment.

The U.S. government currently spends $4 on citizens over 65 for every $1 it spends on those under 18. At some level, that is a brutal reflection of democratic power politics: seniors vote; minors do not. But it is also a statement that the country values the present more than the future.
 

Doesn't that sound eerily like a typical gerontophobic David Brooks column? Well, maybe it is a David Brooks column, for all I know. They all get their talking points and marching orders from the same sources, no? There are only so many creative ways to say we have to kill off all the brutal old people in order to afford more endless wars, more gifts to rich people, more freedom to scam people via "cutting-edge investments" for private profit at public expense. The worker bees have to be beaten into the same submission currently enjoyed by Chinese factory workers and Bangladeshis slaving away in Walmart fire traps in order for America to stay competitive.

But do check out the Muckety series. You'll feel right at home, meandering through the sticky spiders' webs, alternating between outrage  and laughter. If you're not up for a virtual parody of Who's Who at the Zoo, though, you'd better just skip it.

* In an earlier version of this post, I mistakenly referred to another publication as being affiliated with the CFR. Thanks to an anonymous tip, I corrected the error.

A National Con(versation), or Summit Like That

I just couldn't get the plaintive trademark whine of the late Andy Rooney out of my head this morning as I mulled the question: "D'ja ever wonder what a national conversation is? Does a national conversation happen when 330 million people rush to their kitchen tables and all start babbling at once? Or is a national conversation limited to what the ruling class decides it is, and only the pre-approved big shots are allowed to do the talking?  How does a National Conversation become declared a National Summit? When the big shots go to the mountain-top, will the hoi polloi remain down below, out of mind and out of earshot?  And what are the requirements for a Task Force? Does it spring fully formed from a National Conversation, or does there have to be a Summit first?"

Hmmm... d'ja ever have a sneaking suspicion that the National Conversation was created to replace that other gimmick known as "Kicking the Can Down the Road"? Comparing political procrastination to a childish game has just been officially banned from the lexicon by Lake Superior State University, anyway, along with such gems as "job creators" and "double down."

There are so many National Conversations going on all at once that I can barely hear myself thinking like Andy Rooney. The loudest official gab-fest today, now that the planet is simultaneously drowning and going up in flames, is the National Conversation about Climate Change. The situation is so dire that President Obama is already mulling a National Summit on it. It will then be only a matter of time before "Summit Like It Hot" morphs into a special re-mulling Task Force.

Joe Biden will not be available to "do" climate change, since he is already tasked with doing gun control. That issue quickly evolved from a desultory can-kicker of a conversation during the campaign to a must-do-now issue in the wake of the Newtown massacre. I can foresee gun control morphing into a 2,000-page mess of a bill, replete with pork and corporate welfare. It bodes ill that the National Rifle Association has inexplicably been invited to meet with the Task Force. And you know what their knee-jerk response to "force" is: More force. Force in schools, force in neighborhoods, force in malls, force in movie theaters. We all remember what happened when the insurance leeches and pharmaceutical industry were invited to a seat at the table during health care reform negotiations. They ended up writing the law themselves, to enrich themselves.

And speaking of the NRA, did you (I mean, d'ja) ever wonder why ObamaCare protects gun rights? Were you even aware that it did? I sure wasn't. It turns out that the NRA, along with the usual suspects, was also inexplicably invited to help craft the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it is now against the law for doctors to ask patients about their firearms during intake screenings. Theoretically, a disturbed individual who has a hankering to commit mayhem can seek psychiatric attention and rest assured that any information about the arsenals he has squirreled away at home can never be part of his permanent medical record. It's the Don't Ask, Don't Tell clause of ObamaCare. Page 2,037, to be exact.

It's only a matter of time before the NRA is asked to join the Climate Change Task Force. There will probably be new laws enacted requiring all citizens to pack heat in their Hurricane Emergency Preparedness Kits, and to fight fire with fire power.

Of course, there are certain topics that will remain indefinitely stuck in the mire of the National Conversation, probably never evolving past that stage to actually become a summit or a task force. Marijuana legalization falls into that category. A petition on the White House website for pot legalization finally got enough signatures to force an official response. It comes from top Drug Thug Gil Kerlikowske:

 Thank you for participating in We the People and speaking out on the legalization of marijuana. Coming out of the recent election, it is clear that we're in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana. 

(snip)

(and here he quotes President Obama talking to Barbara Walters)" …this is a tough problem because Congress has not yet changed the law. I head up the executive branch; we're supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we're going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it's legal."
 

Meanwhile, I may be wrong in my notion that "having a conversation" is at the bottom of the prioritization totem pole. I forgot about the real pit of despair, which involves our elected officials just holding their ears and ignoring stuff. Tom Angell, a marijuana legalization advocate told The Huffington Post: 

"From 'legalization is not in my vocabulary and it's not in the president's,' as Gil Kerlikowske often used to say, to 'it is clear that we're in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana' is a pretty stark shift," he said. "Of course, what really matters is to what extent the administration actually shifts enforcement priorities and budgets, but I sure do like hearing the U.S. drug czar acknowledge the fact that marijuana legalization is a mainstream discussion that is happening whether he likes it or not."

Of course, there's a very familiar monkey wrench in the works when it comes to legalizing pot. You guessed it: the NRA. The War on Drugs is a lucrative enterprise, requiring lots of weapons and ammo for both the cops and the drug cartels themselves. The Obama Administration has not made weapons trafficking enforcement a huge priority. D'ja ever wonder why? Should we be having a Conversation about it?