The Games Plutocrats Play

Many a tear has to fall, but it's all in the game.* 

Even though Weeper of the House John Boehner rails, "This isn't some damned game!"

It most certainly is, suavely counters Secretary of State of Affairs John Kerry. Think of this little tiff as a rare bad inning for the World Series champs. 

The fact that one upstart, extremist right wing faction seemingly has the power to bring the greatest nation on Earth to its knees should not be cause for too much concern, he reassured the wavering global client/fan base of Team America. This shutdown kerfuffle is merely an example of how broad-minded and exceptional and strong we truly are. Since it is indeed all a game, it's patently unfair that the United States is getting such a bad rap and taking such an unfair hit to its good rep.

“Do not mistake this momentary episode in American politics as anything more than a moment of politics,” he said. “This is an example of the robustness of our democracy.”

I imagine that those nearly one million furloughed federal workers are breathing a huge collective sigh of relief right about now. When the bill collectors call, they can always say they are experiencing a momentary episode. The robustness of their endangered personal credit ratings must not be challenged.

The New York Times inadvertently broadcast the real truth: "Standing in for President Obama at an economic summit in Asia, (Kerry) warned on Saturday that the United States’ reputation was endangered because of the government shutdown, which sends the message that “we can’t get out (sic) own act together.”

Whereby he confirmed that the latest piece of bipartisan Disaster Capitalism is, of course, just an act. And that we the people are just the audience posing as unpaid bit players in the whole staged fiasco. Along with the furloughed workers, we will breathe a collective sigh of relief as the bickering parties in a fundamentally solid marriage finally come together to renew their vows.... their Grand Bargain for the Grandees. The Republicans won because they got all their hatred out in the open. The Democrats won because they made a good show of fighting for the peeps, even as they started their negotiations having already accepted austerian budget numbers.

The Democrats, as a few analysts point out, have essentially adopted flim-flam man Paul Ryan's budget. All this talk about Obama standing firm against the Republicans is bullshit. He already caved. John Boehner already got 98% of everything he wanted. Wall Street already got 1000% of everything it wanted.

It's all in the game.

Once in awhile he won't call, but it's all in the game. Soon he'll be there at your side with a sweet bouquet. Then he'll kiss your lips and caress your waiting fingertips. And your hearts will fly away.

The sweet bouquet, of course, is cutting Social Security through chained CPI, along with the possible raising of the Medicare eligibility age, no new taxes on the rich, further tweaks to Obamacare, and maybe even approval of the tar sands pipeline. Obama has left "entitlement reforms" on the table for a romantic candlelit dinner in the denouement of Crisis Theater, 2013. Kiss and Makeup Time is inevitable. John Kerry promised this to the fan base of the whole world. They're just waiting for either the staged GOP temper tantrum to bawl itself out, or for Obama to issue a time-out and invoke the 14th. Either way, he wants to bargain away the great social insurance programs of the 20th century.

"The robustness of the Market shall not be challenged" is what he dog-whistled. The world shall remain safe for plutocracy.

Unless, of course, more of us spectators make our voices heard. We stopped the bombing on Syria. We stopped the appointment of Larry Summers to the Federal Reserve. We can also stop the final shredding of the New Deal. We can crash their makeup scene, take all the pleasure out of their fervid makeout session.

We can, and must, get out of the box the media-industrial complex has constructed for us. This is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, and picking a side. This is about the .01% vs. the rest of us. It's about resetting the terms of the Class War.

* This pop staple was actually written by Calvin Coolidge's vice president, Charles Dawes... who was a banker before he entered politics. Plus ça change, etc.

** Update: here's a link to Maureen Dowd's cinematic column, comparing Jeffersonian "Utopia" to Ted Cruz-inspired Thunderdome. It got good reviews from the usual critics; it had me riveted right up to the point where she seemed to compare Julian Assange to a crazoid militia dude. I notice that all our usual media suspects, stung by recent criticism of their "both sides do it" journalism, are now on their best behavior and trying to be very careful not to lump the Dems and the Pugs together in the Shutdown debacle. Ergo, for some reason, Dowd drags out Assange as an example of extreme leftism. My comment:

Great cinematic treatment of 2084. But for many of us, the future is now.

You might even say it started with Jefferson himself, whose declaration that all men are created equal didn't extend to freeing his own slaves. His utopia was envisioned as a utopia for the ruling class.. Emancipation was always for another day. That "existential dread" has been a way of life for the underclass since the founders did the founding. Just ask the Native Americans.

The most recent outbreak of fear of our own government is due not only to the antics of the Tea Party. It stems from the overarching, paranoid antics of the national surveillance state, the evisceration of civil liberties, and capitalism gone wild. Julian Assange did us all a favor revealing such antics. So casting him as a villain in your dystopian film makes me suspect that the script came from the same official sources that brought us "Zero Dark 30."

And it's a movie we've seen before. Create a crisis, foment some fear, use it as a smokescreen to rob the poor and give to the rich. Even John Kerry as much as admitted that the current showdown meltdown is just a glitch in the well-oiled machine. He told a nervous crowd in Asia: "Do not mistake this momentary episode in American politics as anything more than a moment of politics, This is an example of the robustness of our democracy.”

Translation: Fear not, blood-sucking plutocrats. The fundamentals of the Market are strong. Keeping you well-fed is our highest priority.

Still Shut Down and Out

Well, wonder of wonders. The New York Times finally got around to noticing that the majority of poor people will be barred from getting health insurance under Obamacare. The exclusion, of course, is due to those nasty, red, mainly southern states opting out of Medicaid expansion, which the Supreme Court obligingly allowed them to do at the same time it gave the thumbs-up to taxpayer subsidization of the private insurance predators. But still, the numbers are downright shocking, worse than I imagined:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help.....

 The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

So this begs the question: since Obamacare is shutting out poor people and minorities, why on earth are the Republicans so dead set against it? I thought their whole raison d'etre was the denial of health care to the poor and the darker-hued. Did they just shut down the government for no reason at all?

The Times article does not even touch upon the de facto exclusion of those opting for the high-deductible and co-pay "Bronze" junk packages that still leave "better-off" subscribers vulnerable to bankruptcy when they can't make their out-of-pocket costs. We won't know the full extent of the damage until cheap plan subscribers attempt to actually use their shiny new cards and then get those unexpected bills in the mail. Assuming, of course, that they can even log on to apply, which assumes they have an internet connection in the first place.

The Down and Out are getting a lot of unexpected The System Is Down messages on their screens. Do you suppose The System is trying to tell us something?

Meanwhile, with every day that goes by in the continuing contrived Shutdown Saga of the Crazy Pols vs. the Pragmatic Pols, the end-game is looking more and more obvious. The alcoholic in charge of the Crazy Caucus is now willing to play the sober president's longed-for Grand Bargain game of safety net cuts in exchange for giving up the Tea Party's fight against Obamacare. He might even sacrifice his Speakership in exchange for a lucrative spot on Fox or CNN. As I have repeated ad nauseum: heads they win, tails we lose.

Old people, widows and orphans, veterans and the disabled will "share the sacrifice" through the imposition of Chained CPI, giving up some meals and extras in order to placate Wall Street tycoons. The middle and working classes will be asked to give up just a little more so that their fellow citizens can morph into full-fledged health care "consumers."

And most people, who have already picked the blue team or the red team, will never know what hit them. One day we'll wake up to the glorious news that yet another crisis has been averted behind closed doors, in the wee hours. The Panda Cam will be turned back on! We'll be able to get forecasts from the National Weather Service! The Centers for Disease Control will be able to track down the source of the latest Salmonella outbreak from the unregulated factory farms!  Kids with cancer will be admitted back into NIH trials.

And one day, so gradually that we won't even notice, our monthly Social Security checks will start shrinking. If we're among the 50 million and  growing "food-insecure" people who need to sign up for SNAP subsidies because of unemployment or underemployment, those stipends will pay for maybe two weeks worth of food instead of three. We'll be helping the richest nation on earth, a nation that is nowhere near going broke, meet its "long-term fiscal challenges", as the president assured Wall Street yesterday.

Reports are contradictory on possible unilateral presidential action. According to Wall Street mouthpiece CNBC, Nancy Pelosi has said that Obama will ignore the Constitution and refuse to invoke the 14 Amendment so that the nation's bills can be paid. According to the New York Times, though, she is urging him to apply the 14th. Default or bust. Keep us confused, churn up the phony uncertainty and crisis atmosphere so that the market can make the necessary bets, in which heads they win and tails you lose.

 According to the transcript of his CNBC interview, aptly headlined with the word Politic$, Obama craftily sidestepped those 30 million health care rejectees. "I am exasperated," he droned in his usual monotone, "with the idea that unless I say that 20 million people, 'you can't have health insurance, they will not reopen the government.' That is irresponsible."

And the beauty of it is, he seems to have quietly relinquished what had been the main sticking point for Republicans. He is no longer even insisting on a "balanced approach" of revenue from the rich in exchange for entitlement cuts. He is not insisting on the repeal of the Sequester either. As a matter of fact, he is offering decreased corporate tax rates to encourage low-wage manufacturing jobs coming back to our shores. I'll say it again. Heads they win, tails we lose. 

So take your pick. Would you rather die quickly at the hands of a raving lunatic with an axe, or slowly by the scalpel of a cold-blooded psychopath who anesthetizes you first?

Gray Lady Gothic

That's the name of a whole new literary genre bursting forth from the Style pages of the New York Times. One feature, called "Vows", takes the real love stories of real rich people and makes them available for the delectation of the ravening masses in the hinterland. One such entry celebrated the spiritual journey and sexual awakening of a woman after she serendipitously and fatally struck a child with her car. 

In her most recent blog post, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan addressed the torrent of reader outrage over the piece. It was in supremely bad taste, complained the complainers, to mention the death of a child in the same column as a feel-good New Age Society wedding. Sullivan correctly noted it also seems to be in especially bad taste to celebrate the self-indulgence of the rich at the same time almost a million federal workers have been furloughed from their jobs.

But bad taste, tastefully presented, is the whole point of the "Vows" stories in particular and the Style section in general. I am convinced that these pieces are deliberately designed to piss off normal people as they purport to celebrate the shallow lives of the entitled rich. The only people apparently not in on the joke are the entitled rich, whose addiction to their own inclusion as stars of the never-ending atrocity exhibition prevents them from any real insight into their own selves. They're victims of their own toxic affinity fraud.

Lois Smith Brady, the writer of the latest target of hoi polloi wrath, actually produced a masterwork of satire with her calm evisceration of the "soul mates" of the Hamptons. She immediately lets us know what we're in for with the sharp thrust of her lead: 

People describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who has a lot of backbone in every way. She has great posture. She rarely gets upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she probably doesn’t have many.) She is sometimes stern but never shy.

Erica's brother oxymoronically gushes about how at ease she is with her own exuberance. (The privileged rich can be relaxed and hyper at the same time, unlike the rest of us.) Growing up privileged, she and her family would forage for elderberries in Central Park when they weren't surf-casting on Long Island or watching old Laurel and Hardy movies.

The new bridegroom, one Corey De Rosa, was not quite so privileged, coming from an "Everybody Loves Raymond" type family. He only got rich catering to the rich as a Yoga instructor. He was a late bloomer, it seems, a party animal who had a hard time "transitioning" from decadence to that sweet spot of total relaxation, which for him is a special room painted all red and black that he calls his Womb.

But here's the paragraph that really got Times readers so ticked off:

On Aug. 17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front of Ms. Halweil’s car. When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms. Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open demeanor. In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear road. I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.” She swerved but still hit the wagon. “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale skin and blue eyes was laying in the road. Her eyes were glazed over. I knew the spirit had left her body.”

She found salvation in Yoga and the love of her life, Womb Man. He fell head over heels because in the wake of the accident -- which the article touchingly calls a "bump in the road" --  he found her amazingly "beautiful and radiating." And ever so much "light and fun." Plus, she reminded him of Mommy.

Eventually, De Rosa and Halweil dumped their respective significant others and shacked up. When they finally made it legal -- only after Halweil gave birth to De Rosa's child with the aid of a concoction of Vodka, castor oil, baking soda and pineapple juice -- she dressed in a wedding gown she described as "pigeon-blood red."

Naturally, the happy couple humble-brags about how unpretentious they are. They are really "stripped down." And the sex is really, really good.

I had always made it a point to avoid the Style section like the plague. So thanks are due to Margaret Sullivan to alerting me to its rich satire. There are plenty of gems hidden amongst the fluff. Flannery O'Connor is alive and well in the Hamptons. And it is Absolutely Fabulous, sweetie-dahling.

Shut Down and Out

Government shutdown is actually kind of a misnomer. That is because the leaders who actually run things have not been shut down, nor will they ever shut up. The Congress critters have not gone home. To the contrary, they're boozing it up* like it's 1929. The White House is open for business and schmoozing it up. Obama is reportedly feeling pretty chipper. Because as far as I know, Terror Tuesday has not been disrupted by Shutdown.  As a matter of fact, economic terrorists Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and a whole passel of their unprosecuted little bankster buddies will be dropping by tomorrow to give their factotum in the Oval Office instructions on how best to save the world for the Masters of the Universe.

One National Zoo will be closed down, but the one known as Congress will go right on roaring its terrible roar and gnashing its terrible teeth and grazing at the corporate lobby trough. The Panda Cam is going dark, and the pandering will continue in the dark.

The troops on the battlefield will continue drawing their paychecks thanks to a laudable and "rare" show of bipartisan unity, but the troops wounded in mind or body  are out of luck. Money for their benefits will be gone by the end of the month.

The NSA and the Surveillance State will lumber on, unimpeded due to their budget being secret and infinite. Keith Alexander's Star Wars chair will not be yanked out from under him, and the ribbons and medals will not be yanked off his chest. But real crime? Real terrorism?  Not being fought so much any more. Poor victims and witnesses are not being protected. And this has nothing much to do with Shutdown, but everything to do with Sequestration.... which goes on, and on.

Eight hundred thousand federal workers are being sent home, and millions more are being ordered to work without pay. But Obamacare is open for business in what is cutely known as a soft "anti-climatic" launch. Or, the opposite of a mass orgasm. Or, the letdown in the shutdown. Starting today, assuming that you still have enough money to pay your Internet bill, you are invited to log on and shop around for partial insurance from for-profit middlemen.

Let's just put it this way. The Great Shutdown of Thirteen will not inconvenience the elites and their essential services (war and wealth extraction) in any great way. The only people being made to suffer are the poor and the dwindling middle class. It's business as usual, only more noticeable. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the people will finally revolt.

* The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom and political correctitude, axed a totally tasteless comment I wrote last night in response to Joe Nocera's Those Banana Republicans. It went something like this:

More like Banana Daiquiri Republicans, judging from the Tweets of enterprising Capitol Hill reporters gagging on the legislative fumes. (Although hemochromatotic Weeper John Boehner is said to favor Merlot.)

Although it is politically incorrect to say that "both sides do it", when it comes to boozing while legislating, both sides do it. Which is why Boehner and the lesser boozers will probably never be brought up on ethics charges or be treated to an intervention by their peers. So it is up to the media. Why the NYT silence on the problem of alcohol abuse in the chambers? Those enterprising reporters could maybe cop some strands of congress-critter hair or even capture a drop of flying demagogic spittle to forward to a lab for immediate chemical analysis.

With these sloppy drunks immiserating millions of already struggling people through sequestration and shut-down and furloughs and closings of essential services, the whole nation could probably use sponsorship in an Al-Anon chapter for the constituents of sick abusive pols. If Boehner and his Caucus of Creeps won't honorably resign from their leaky ship of state, we should just kick the bums out. Let them, inebriates in the service of inebriates that they are, lurch away into the political oblivion they so richly deserve.

Remember George W. Bush? He was an untreated alcoholic, a "dry drunk". And look where he got us. 

And Ted Cruz is a whole 'nother story from a whole 'nother country. He is probably more into stimulants than depressants. Before he left Houston to begin his 20-plus hour marathon filibluster on the Senate floor, I think he must have made a detour to a certain laboratory in Albuquerque, because he came across as more of a meth-head than a drunk. Either that or he is congenitally hypomanic. Judging from his marathon glittery-eyed appearances on cable TV all week, I don't think he ever sleeps.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman blogs that it probably wouldn't be rectitudinal to post on the Times website what he considers to be the best commentary so far on the whole Shutdown Mess:

  

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The Insecurity of the Security State

The good folks of the Surveillance State are terrified that we are not afraid enough of the bogeyman. They worry that we're not comfortable with our roles as domestic targets of our own government. So, instead of scaling back the surveillance, the spooks are simply ramping up both the fear and the guilt. They are striving mightily to wipe the Snowden egg off their faces even as they cravenly try to hide their faces.

Therefore, it's no big surprise that, having slunk and lurked on the dark side for so many decades, they are N.S.A. (Not So Adept) at filling this tall public relations order in order to justify their own continued, useless, bloated and lucrative existence.

But they're trying, they really are. Just in time to respond to the news of another blockbuster of an impending revelation that the Not-So-Adepts are in cahoots with the C.I.A. over an assassination program, the Obama administration has again commandeered the Paper of Record for use as its propaganda mouthpiece of record. In a masterpiece of the genre, the N.Y. Times has relied solely upon unnamed "present and former" officials to actually blame one of its rivals, McClatchey Newspapers, for an alleged August bombing plot leak that supposedly led to the "terrorists" clamming up and preventing the USA from monitoring them. The Times, of course, has proclaimed itself innocent of such enterprise journalism, patriotically and idiotically bowing to White House demands that it sit on the story to prevent the danger of official embarrassment.

The Times piece, homophonically and homogeneously written by a couple of reporters named Schmitt and Schmidt, is actually quite hilarious in places. For example, it takes seriously a complaint by Obama officials that the only chatter they've been able to pick up from Al Qaeda lately is terrorist gossip about the Snowden revelations! How dare they, when it is the duty of bad guys everywhere to broadcast their actual plans for mayhem. Idle chit-chat has no place in Spookville. As we all know, the Mid-east miscreants always, always stupidly allowed the American spooks to listen in, until Snowden and journalism happened along to spoil all the fun. Come on.

But the Times dutifully forges ahead anyway:

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.

In other words, the "terrorists" are rubbing their faces in it. A lot like the American citizens who, suddenly made privy to state secrets, are now sending greetings to eavesdropping N.S.A. cubicle dwellers who might be feeling left out from the conversation, or who've run out of LoveInt targets to peep upon.

The data hoarders are also theorizing that since newspapers sometimes publish news, the terrorists have now discovered how read newspapers. The subliminal message, of course, is that information presents a clear and present danger. Ignorance is good. We must not know things, lest the Bogeyman tap into our knowledge:

“We have seen, in response to the Snowden leaks, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups seeking to change their tactics, looking to see what they can learn from what is in the press and seek to change how they communicate to avoid detection,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., in July.

And worst of all, the terrorists might stop using the Internet and communicate in person! And just when the Surveillance State had finally built its multi-billion dollar Data Resort out there in the Utah desert:

The government’s greatest fear concerning its counterterrorism operations is that over the next several months, the level of intercepted communications will continue to fall as terrorists most likely find new ways to communicate with one another, one senior American official said. It will likely take the government some time to break into that method and monitor communications.

One way the terrorists may try to communicate, the official said, is strictly through couriers, who would carry paper notes or computer flash drives. If that happens, the official said, terrorists will find it very difficult to communicate as couriers take significant time to move messages.

There's only one thing for it. Yank the cubicle-dwellers away from their computers and send them out on the trail of the paper-pushers. Commandeer the thousands of courier bikes from the streets of New York City and start an international counter-courierism campaign. The Tour du Yemen can be filmed from above by Reaper drones for our viewing pleasure. Where there's an insatiable will for the corporate suits of the Surveillance Industrial Complex to make a stash of loot, they will always find a way. 

Lowdown on the Countdown to the Showdown

With government shutdown Armageddon only days away, is the stock market  freaking out? Will brokers be jumping out of windows if the contrived debt ceiling isn't raised? Well, apparently not. Fear is only for the little people. The Market is cool, calm, and collected.... and collecting, extracting, counting and hoarding.

Despite the crisis atmosphere whipped up by the concentrated ownership media conglomerates, those in power, those with all the wealth, those in the know, are apparently not panicking -- either over a looming government shutdown if Congress fails to pass  a CR by Tuesday (continuing resolution to keep the bureaucracy humming)  or later next month, when its failure to pay the nation's bills would breach the imaginary debt ceiling.

Pay the Damned Bills and Let Me Outta Here!

That is because The Market (whom, we have been led to believe, is a living, breathing entity not controlled by mere greedy humans) fully expects the two right wings of the Money Party to come together in the usual series of last minute negotiations. The plutocrats have seen this movie before. It always ends well for them. They expect to make a ton of money by the time all the manufactured dust has settled. The more it comes right down to the wire, the more profitable it will be for them. It's how disaster capitalism always works. Create a crisis, cash in while the freak-out is in full throttle, and the stunned populace will never know what hit them. All they will know is that the crisis has been averted and the world has been saved.

In the event of a government shutdown this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not be able to issue its Friday jobs numbers, the abysmal nature of which usually causes a slide in the market. Therefore, what can't be told will not endanger the bottom lines of the investor class. Our ignorance is their bliss.From Reuters:

In a second explosive Washington cliffhanger, Congress must agree to increase the $16.7 trillion limit on federal borrowing, which the administration says will be reached by October 17. If Capitol Hill fails to act in time, the unthinkable could happen and the United States could default on its debts.

But even in the options market, which is often seen as the place to offset risk and make protective bets against a decline in the stock market, there is little or no volatility premium priced in for the debt ceiling debate.

A growing number of market participants are even viewing the battle in Washington as an opportunity to jump into equities.

"Every situation we've had like this over the past few years has been a buying opportunity. This is just another wrinkle, not a time to change your strategy," said Andres Garcia-Amaya, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds in New York with $400 billion in assets under management.

During the federal government shutdown from December 15, 1995, to January 6, 1996, the S&P 500 added 0.1 percent. During the November 13 to November 19, 1995, shutdown, the benchmark index actually rose 1.3 percent, according to data by Jason Goepfert, president of SentimenTrader.com.

An unthinkable tragedy of epic proportions if we default on our debts and merely threaten to drown government in a bathtub is a tried-and-true buying opportunity for the chosen few. Welcome to the feudal states of America.

Meanwhile, the official story from the Paper of Record is that the House of Reprehensibles is meeting in one of those increasingly common "rare Saturday sessions" (the crisis atmosphere is immediately ramped up just thinking of the spectacle of politicians working on weekends. It seems like only six months ago that Congress was meeting in a whole series of rare weekend, middle-of-the-night sessions, the better to screw us as we slept unaware in our beds.)

And President Obama, in his all-too-common Saturday dose of pabulum, proclaimed that "the American people have worked too hard to recover from crisis to see extremists in their Congress cause another one.”

Huh? I was not aware that the American people had actually recovered from anything. Most of us are hardly working, through no fault of our own, thanks to the real crisis: a decades-long unraveling of the social safety net and government for the common good that culminated in an epic crash and burn and the opening of the most extreme wealth chasm in American history.  Even during the times of outright slavery, the income inequality was not as bad as it is now.

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Here are reprints of my New York Times comments from yesterday and today. First, from Charles Blow's excellent piece on a Congress full of demented Ahabs stalking the whale of an Obamacare law:

Take a 2,000-page law that nobody's read, in large part because the average American reads about a book a year. Throw in ownership of 90% of all media outlets by six conglomerates. Add a coup d'etat by a minority faction owned by the Koch cabal, with its billionaire-bloated tentacles winding and squeezing their way around the Supreme Court to the halls of Congress, to the state houses, to K Street, cable, the hinterland, and beyond -- and you've got yourself one epic mess, a tragedy in its final act.

And yes, right along with the pathological greed of the plutocrats, racism in the Age of Obama has blown up like a tempest in a Tea Pot.

Those Koch-funded alien abduction probe ads seem to be doing the trick. Because, according to another poll, while 46% of Americans view Obamacare negatively, only 37% view the Affordable Care Act negatively. Another 30% had no opinion, because explaining things is not in the pollsters' job description. Nor is it the job of the media, according to NBC flack Chuck Todd. They aim to please their sponsors by mastering the script.

In a sane world, in a real democracy, our politicians would be hounded daily over the fact that the vast majority of us want Medicare for All.

Just think. The law that created the Canadian single payer health plan is all of 13 pages long. But that is way too complex, when the continued spin of the closed feedback loop -- wealth begetting power begetting wealth -- depends upon keeping us simple, stunned and quiet.

And from yesterday's editorial on the Republican Ransom Note, in which the unnamed writer warns against a possible Democratic cave to extortion:

Here's how Disaster Capitalism kabuki always works (unless the Tea Party crashes the party again.)

The GOP submits its usual laundry list of impossibly outrageous demands. The Democrats, rather than countering with demands of their own, such as a Robin Hood transaction tax on Wall Street trades, a living wage bill, lifting the contribution cap on Social Security taxes -- whine and complain and waffle. And then, phony disaster looming, they begin to capitulate, bit by teensy bit. Because they're the adults in the room. Also because the plutocrats of Fix the Debt are back in town, clamoring for Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Republicans want to slash $40 billion from SNAP? The Senate, bless their little adult hearts, already agreed to "snip" $4 billion, on top of the planned expiration of the increase in the program that was put into effect under the 2009 stimulus package and that nobody even dreamed of renewing. And the Dems are willing to cut even more. They haven't a clue or a care about the millions of people who might miss a few meals because of their grand bipartisan horse-trading.

As Gore Vidal observed, this country boasts one political party with two right wings. And we're drifting ever closer to the bipartisan-manufactured, plutocrat-approved point of no return from de facto feudalism.

It could be avoided if the president did his constitutional duty and invoked the 14th Amendment, simply ordering the government to pay the bills.

And finally, my comment on Paul Krugman's Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted:

If the malignant rich had as many brains as they do dollars, they'd know better than to whine and complain. The magnates have become magnets -- for the seething anger of the great unwashed masses.

They feel compelled to rub our noses in it, with their insatiable need to criminalize poor people every bit as compelling as their endless craving for yet another financial fix. The extraction of rents, the extraction of 350 times the income of the average worker is not enough, nor is their reaping of 90% of all the gains since the collapse that they themselves instigated. 

The thing about this new breed of plutocratic class warriors is that they ain't got no class.

Take the Extell Corp. of NYC, income disparity capital of the world. Developers (big political donors) wanted to get some special state subsidies for themselves, and tax deductions for the purchasers of luxury condos in their new high-rise. So, they grudgingly agreed to include some affordable apartments in the same building. The tenants, who already pay regressive tax rates on their own labor in order to fund the rich, are thus double-dipped through their rent payments. Oh -- and they must use their own special back door to get in. Plus, they're barred from using the pool and the full-sized basketball court.

Economic apartheid is now the de facto policy of the feudal states of America. We are subsidizing our own serfdom and perpetuating our own inequality, just so that the rich may be quantitatively eased.

America the Exceptional

I owe my readers an apology. I neither watched nor read Obama's sermon at the United Nations yesterday. I did not savor his appearance at the Clinton Greed-Washing Rich People Confab. I am not joining the required liberal mock-fest of Ted Cruz's phony filibuster. I did not and do not eat Green Eggs and Ham. (the progressive blogs are reverse-orgasming over the Cruzian rape of Dr. Seuss. I imagine Gail Collins will devote a full column to it)

Okay. So my denial of watching the latest American Atrocity Exhibition is a fib, kind of. Because, although I did turn on CNN yesterday, I  kept the mute button on my remote firmly in the ON position the entire time. Did you ever watch Obama speechifying with the sound off? Let me tell you, the body language was a pretty scary sight to behold. It was a non-stop hodgepodge of  ambidextrous scolding, defiance, self-righteousness and barely disguised surliness. 

 

 

 

His facial expression was a contorted mélange of sanctimony, prissiness, and general aggrievement. Watching with the sound off sort of reminded me of the old films of those World War II despots that Walter Cronkite used to show on his 21st Century TV show. My fondest memory of childhood Sunday nights is being curled up in the den with my dad, watching Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin gutterally bloviate. Of course I didn't understand a word they said. And what really baffled me was that they always seemed so consumed with rage. They really seemed to hate the whole human race. And yet, there were those infinite throngs of people, cheering their every word!

But back to Obama. I did read the New York Times version of the United Nations event. Some editor, I suppose out of a sense of smarmy fairness, inserted one token dismissive paragraph of Dilma Rousseff accusing America of criminal behavior deep within the body of the Obama hagiography. Talk about burying the lead! When the seventh largest economy on Earth calls out America for breaking international law, you'd think there would be banner headlines. The gratuitous Times mention so jarred with the whole tone and gist of the piece that it was obviously a last-minute decision, lest the wrath of the Public Editor be evoked. And nobody managed to call out the president for being for war before he was forced to be for diplomacy. Or, how much he seemed consumed by the Cheney borg, trumpeting American Exceptionalism. Or, as a precious few journalists noted, how he took his allotted 15 minutes of fame and tripled it without so much as a by-your-leave from the Lesser Countries.

It was apparently a Big Lie-a-Minute extravaganza. See David Swanson's excellent deconstruction here.

Maureen Dowd, meanwhile, waxed vituperative about the photo-op of Barry shaking hands with the successor of the "provincial Iranian fruitbat" never coming to fruition before he fled into the "sweaty and freighted embrace of the Clintons". And by the way, I think Dowd is getting a bad rap from the commentariat. She is an equal opportunity abuser. Her schtick is the display of the Inside-the-Beltway Shallowness in all its atrocity, for which she herself is accused of being shallow. She has the gift of showing, not telling. She is increasingly a parody of herself, and she does it exceedingly well.

Most readers of her latest column were incensed over her shockingly mean-spirited lead, in which she wrote that "The One" had once been heralded as the Messiah. Nobody seems to remember that, yes indeed, he and his handlers did actually embrace the Barack as Christ meme. It was Oprah who called him The One, saying that "we need politicians who know how to Be the Truth." (as opposed to a mere mortal who might only be expected to tell the truth.) Michelle promised Americans that he could heal "the hole in our souls." At one campaign speech, Obama himself intoned in response to the cheering crowd, "I give all praise and honor to God. Look at the day the Lord has made." 

So, I says to the embattled Maureen, who I am sure reads all the comments:

But didn't you know America is exceptional? It was announced at the U.N., as the whole world listened ever so politely. With the refreshing exception, of course, of Dilma Rousseff. And Ted Cruz in his ostrich Keds, filiblustering his heartless heart out. 

We have the most billionaires, paradoxically coupled with the highest wealth disparity ranking on earth. We're 24th in both life expectancy and per capita income. We imprison more people than any other country on earth. And why not? We have more prisons than the lesser countries. 

The USA ranks a dismal 19th in retirement security, yet the Serious People all agree we need to cut Social Security. Our kids, a shameful quarter of them poor, scored 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading. Ergo, they're closing schools and firing teachers. 

We have the most expensive health care system in the world with some of the worst outcomes. Seven people get shot every hour -- but six are lucky enough to live another day!

So God Bless Us. With our 1,000 military bases and our long history of doing the greatest good for the fewest number, we are truly exceptional. 

And God Bless Hillary. Looking toward 2016, which began for the pundits In November 2012, she actually makes me glad that Obama is still president. Because the only thing worse than a potential prez bragging about American exceptionalism is a politician telling a magazine that she loves elephants, stupid movies, laughing at dogs, and going for walks. 

God help us.

It's official. Running for president is now just like auditioning to be the new Miss America. Hillary (whose resume-padding State Department stint Maureen rightly castigated as being nothing but a marathon international good-will tour) is starting to sound like a better-educated version of that hapless beauty contestant from a few years ago:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Are you there, God? It's us, the holey-souley United Statesians.