Genocide, Fast and Slow

The mass poisoning of the residents of Flint, Michigan is a lot more than a public health emergency. It's even a lot more than depraved-heart murder and assault by deadly bureaucrat.

 Using the guidelines established by the United Nations, it's likely that the deliberate and continuous piping of lead-contaminated water to unsuspecting people qualifies as both a crime against humanity and actual genocide.

Heads should indeed roll... all the way to The Hague. The only trouble with that suggestion, of course, is that the United States has conveniently absolved itself from accountability before the International Criminal Court. America is an exceptional Third World nation.

At the very least, a special U.N. rapporteur should be appointed to go to Flint to collect the evidence, before it's destroyed or mysteriously misplaced.

Characterizing the poisonings as genocide is not at all hyperbolic, by the way.  According to Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention, it is not necessary to prove actual intent to exterminate. It is only necessary to prove "constructive intent." In other words, since state and federal authorities knew or should have known that they were causing harm to Flint residents, their "mistakes were made" defenses won't wash. Ignorance is no excuse.

Put another way, the piping-in of water from the Flint River to save a few bucks  was (and still is) a policy having a destructive, de facto exterminating effect. It doesn't matter whether the poisoning was inadvertent or unintentional, or whether it was incidental to another motive. (cost-cutting in the name of austerity)

That the poisonings in Flint also have a distinctly racist stench should give further impetus to the genocide charge. Unlike other means of culling the herd, this particular crime has a relatively short, very straight chain of evidence from perpetrators to victims. It also doesn't matter whether the victims die quickly, die slowly, or endure a lifetime of disability and pain before dying of old age. (not very likely, given all the kidney and neurological damage.)

Genocide is actually pretty broadly defined, albeit hard to prosecute. As Adam Jones wrote in Crimes Against Humanity:

"More recently the drafters of the (ICC) Rome Statute's 'Elements of Crimes' have declared their understanding that extermination can include 'deprivation of access to food and medicine,' resulting in death through protracted debility.... Other examples appearing in case law of the Tribunals include imprisoning a large number of people and withholding from them the necessities of life, resulting in mass death, and introducing a deadly virus into a population and preventing medical care, which results in mass death."

The crimes against humanity in Flint look so outrageous because they and their victims are so visible to us. These crimes should not be hard to prosecute.

Run-of-the mill, garden variety lead poisoning cases, on the other hand, are rarely, if ever, prosecuted. They've been a silent, hidden epidemic for generations. Rarely do we see such acute, severe cases as in Flint, in so many people all at the same time. The lead in drinking water is usually invisible and tasteless. Symptoms develop insidiously, and they vary from victim to victim. The toxic metal accumulates in bone and body tissues over years, and can be passed down through generations, from grandmother to mother to child, ad infinitum.

 No amount of lead is safe.

In poor black communities, lead poisoning is a common congenital birth defect. It is transmitted to fetuses long after the mother's exposure. Lead is an extremely stable element and degrades little over time. Ninety percent of lead dust in surface soil will still be present 70 years after contamination, according to the Illinois Dept. of Public Health.

Yes, it is racial, inordinately affecting black populations. And yes, it is ignored.

I used to write regular newspaper articles based on piles of health department inspection reports of slum housing containing lead-based paint in the poor Orange County, New York cities of Newburgh and Middletown. Children would regularly get poisoned by ingesting paint chips as well as from drinking water from lead pipes. Slumlords would get warned, again and again, referred for criminal prosecution rarely, and perhaps eventually get fined for failure to follow through on abatement orders. It's the cost of doing blacksploitation business.  Moreover, ownership of substandard housing is often sliced and diced into lawsuit-proof LLCs. Immunity is built right in, as permanent as multiple coats of toxic old paint.

Newburgh, New York

After decades of public health reports and complaints, there is still lead paint in the same substandard Newburgh housing, at some of the same addresses on the same blighted streets. Law firms that specialize in lead poisoning cases are as common as flaking paint chips. Depending on your address, prenatal blood screenings for lead are not only recommended, they are required.  It's estimated that least a third of all learning-disabled children in New York state are in special education classes because of chronic lead poisoning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in 38 American children has lead poisoning. That's half a million kids. Violent crime and drug abuse are among the results of the socially painful, permanent brain damage caused by lead poisoning. How much easier that makes it for white bigots to blame black people for their own plights, for their own behavior. Lead within black bodies is conveniently so invisible that it can be ignored.

Meanwhile, federal funding for testing and treatment was slashed four years ago -- as usual, all in the name of bipartisan fiscal responsibility and austerity. Funding was finally, partially restored this year, despite the best sadistic efforts of House Republicans to cut it yet again, by a full third.

Newburgh happens. Detroit happens. Chicago happens. And then Flint happens. But just for once, what happens in Flint is not staying in Flint.

Whether it's fast or whether it's slow, genocide is genocide. Even in America. Are we waking up yet?

We need a super Super Fund for all the people that this country has hurt. We must put an end, once and for all, to austerity for poor people. We've had enough of the greed of the oligarchs. They're weighing us down like a ton of lead.
 

Criminalizing the Sick

As Hillary Clinton cynically vows to incrementally build upon the "successes" of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration keeps chipping away at them.

The latest chip punishes people who desperately sign up for expensive private health insurance when they get sick or hurt. Such behavior is a rude slap in the face to the free market predators, who are then forced to dip into their obscene profits and pay a portion of your hospital and doctor bills. 

Of course, the way the insurance companies spin it, it's those conniving sick people who are to blame for driving up everybody else's premiums. It's the same old Divide and Conquer ploy that the ruling class has used since time immemorial in an attempt to hide their own greed and malfeasance.

As Barack Obama might explain it, if you "game the system" by waiting until you're at death's door to use your rent and grocery money to pay hefty insurance premiums, you're going to have to pay the piper. You'll have to wait until the next open enrollment period to have your bursting appendix removed.  You might even have to die as prematurely as you would have in those awful days before the health care sweepstakes were instituted. You can't buy a lottery ticket after the drawing, people! You can't put a flat screen TV on your credit card just to watch the Super Bowl, and then expect a full refund when you return it the next day, all full of smudges and fingermarks. 

As the New York Times explains it,

The administration, which had created more than 30 “special enrollment” periods, sent emails to millions of Americans last year urging them to see if they might be eligible to sign up after the annual open enrollment deadline. But, insurers and state officials said, the federal government did little to verify whether late arrivals were eligible.Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, said Tuesday that special enrollment periods “are not allowed for people who choose to remain uninsured and then decide they need health insurance when they get sick.”

Since the Neoliberal Project has deemed your body to be a commodity which you only partially own, you are expected to behave like a responsible consumer. If you seize up your engine because you didn't oil the capitalistic machinery as directed, don't come crying to Obama when you stall out. If you don't pay through the nose for the pricey undercoating deal, tough luck if your bod gets rusty. Keep yourself polished and gassed up, and pledge your financial allegiance to the underwriters instead of to the undertaker. Above all, keep up those monthly extortion payments, lest you get an unpleasant visit from the WellCare repo man. 

Mr. Counihan said the administration would eliminate six of the special enrollment periods, including two for certain lawfully present noncitizens who experienced “system errors” and “processing delays” when they used HealthCare.gov. In addition, he said the government would clarify eligibility standards and step up enforcement to prevent abuse of special enrollment periods.

The actions appeared to have several purposes: to motivate consumers to sign up by the Jan. 31 deadline; to prevent an influx of large numbers of sick people into the market in the middle of the year; to persuade insurers to enter or stay in the public insurance marketplace; and to minimize rate increases in 2017 and later.

Medical care cuts both ways, said Counihan. The right of protection racketeers to get rich hinges upon the fear cooperation of regular people, who must pay for Medical Care Product in advance. You see, in the most exceptional nation the world has ever known, health care is still not a basic human right. It is a privilege for only the select few with a high enough credit score and bank account balance to qualify for survival.

The new rules mean that not only will people have to go shopping every year for a new insurance plan, they will now have to prove they have a permanent address. People who temporarily move in with relatives (maybe because they lost their job when they got sick) won't qualify for coverage outside the narrow enrollment period. People who get sick or hurt outside their home states will have to jump through hoops to prove that they're not trying to cheat the system. All citizens shall be considered suspects until and unless they can prove their financial and medical innocence:

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mr. Counihan said, “Our program integrity team will pull samples of consumer records nationally and may request additional information from some consumers or take other steps to validate that consumers properly qualified for these special enrollment periods.”

In addition, he said, officials will emphasize to consumers that “they may be subject to penalties under federal law if they intentionally provide false or untrue information.

These are the same pathocratic clowns who profess to be so amazed that Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All campaign is so popular. They seem to be honestly baffled that people aren't in love with Obamacare. Who, except lefty unicorn believers, wouldn't rather pay high premiums and co-pays and deductibles to the for-profit insurance racket and then get treated like a criminal if they show up in the emergency room?

The architects of the Affordable Care Act and the private insurers they serve are now criminalizing and intimidating the sick. Before you know it, newspapers and websites will be adding photo galleries of Obamacare Cheats to supplement their regular poor-shaming features on Food Stamp Grifters and Welfare Queens.

So use your Obamacare card at your own risk. And keep up those monthly payments to Blue Cross. Stay close to the phone in case a government official, acting on behalf of United Healthcare, decides to call you in for an audit. A hospital-to-prison pipeline could be in your future if you don't get sick responsibly.

Trouble On Hemlock Hill

The rich are different from you and me. Their money has done a number on their basic cognitive functions.

You and I went to bed last night thinking that Bernie Sanders had clocked Hillary Clinton but good in their latest corporate-sponsored party debate.

You and I got up this morning and were stunned to learn in the New York Times that Hillary Clinton had "won" the debate simply by wrapping herself in the mantle of her erstwhile nemesis, Barack Obama, and obliquely accusing Senator Sanders of causing the Charleston Massacre by virtue of his vote for an arcane loophole in the tepid gun laws of our blood-soaked violent nation. The Times did not note that Charleston was the venue of the debate, and that she is forecast to win in South Carolina by pandering to the Black vote.

Still, the establishment elites are panicking. They thought that their money and scheduling would control this election. They forgot to repeal our voting rights. Their inverted totalitarianism -- the system in which oligarchs rule through social oppression, propaganda from a consolidated media, and the most extreme wealth inequality the world has ever known -- has been subverted by the masses of people and turned right upside the head.

To paraphrase Mehitabel the Cat, there's life in the old democratic girl yet. The plebeian chiggers are burrowing under the sensitive skin of the plutocrats. The proletarian fleas are nipping at the ankles of the elites.

Paul Krugman, economics pundit of the Gray Lady, has abandoned all pretense at intellectual honesty as well as the last vestige of his alleged liberal conscience by openly embracing the lies of Chelsea Clinton -- lies which claim that Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, immediately stripping millions of their medical coverage, and  throwing the election to the Republicans in the process.

Chelsea has been the deserving target of such cliches as "a chip off the old block" and the "apple doesn't fall from the tree." But a more apt metaphor might be that she, Krugman and the whole panoply of elites from the Council on Foreign Relations and other plutocrat-funded think tanks are the little white umbelliform flowers of the poison Hemlock. They cling to the parent plant like dessicated parasites before finally drifting downwards, burrowing into the wasteland, creating their own dense fetid clumps, and crowding out all the potentially nutritious herbage in the process.

The grazing creatures that actually survive ingesting Hemlock become both immune and addicted to it, and keep coming back for more, despite the awful taste and the stench. 

 Krugman's job is to create docile herds of carefully inbred cattle who become mildly intoxicated, but personally unharmed, by the poison of neoliberalism. The herds prefer vitamin-rich fodder, of course, but they can be taught to make do on noxious weeds. 

Once a proponent of single payer, Krugman now shamelessly claims that true universal health insurance in the United States would be just as "kludgey" as the 2,000-plus page Affordable Care Act; he apparently hasn't read the 13 pages that constitute the Canadian medical care system. He obviously has never had to choose between paying the rent and filling a prescription. He is a blatant shill preaching the free market gospel from high atop his perch on Hemlock Hill.

My published response to his dreck:

Hillary Clinton will most likely grab this influential column to further curb the enthusiasm of voters with their pipe dreams of nobody ever going bankrupt just because they get sick. She, and the corporate media, and high finance and predatory insurance (paying her hundreds of millions in speaking fees and "donations"), will do their utmost to kill the hopes of the millions of Americans hanging on by a thread, who despite the ACA, must still choose between medicine and food.

After all, as Gilens and Page have established, the rich get what they want. And what they want is to get richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Krugman blandly observes that in the current pathocracy, single payer would be a tough sell. After all, the GOP's idea of helping people is not only the repeal of Obamacare. It's the postmodern eugenics project now underway in Flint, Michigan, and in other blighted places throughout this greatest, most exceptional, most unequal country on earth.

The first step is to get the big money out. Bernie himself says this won't happen without a people's revolution. We need to pick up where Occupy left off -- before it was squashed by the same neoliberal state that informs us that universal health care is impossible. Just because they say so.

But guess what? All the cold water in the world, thrown by "experts" on the "Bern" of a resurgent bottom-up democracy, will not put out the flames.

It's Martin Luther King Day. And we still have a dream.

Nobody will ever accuse Paul Krugman of being a champion of economic and social justice, that's for sure. But this latest column was a new low, even for him.

Even the centrist Washington Post sounds progressive today, compared to Krugman and the Times. Most pundits are declaring Sanders the winner, albeit "narrowly."

The usually mainstream Chris Cillizza, for example, raved: "More than anything he said, though, it was the passion and disruption that Sanders oozed from every pore over the two hours that should push Democrats on the fence about the race into his camp. Sanders effectively positioned himself as the anti-status-quo candidate, a very good position to have in this electoral environment."

Contrast this to the anal-retentive New York Times piece by Hillary Clinton publicists Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy: "Clinton Seizes on Policy Shifts by Sanders" is the slanted headline, which immediately sets the stage for Bernie's role as a "shifty" guy vanquished by Hillary of Arc. 

Among the derogatory phraseology used to describe Sanders: "anti-political", "appearing frustrated at times" by Hemlock Hill's tactics, and prone to testy "eye-rolling and sighing". His fans were termed "restless" --  which in Times-speak can only be defined as being a tad unhinged.

The Times went through the motions of "fact-checking" the debate, seemingly surprised to learn that Sanders' figure of 29 million uninsured Americans is, in fact, true. But, but, but.... Obamacare is supposed to be universal health care! Say it ain't so, Bernie!

One toxic whopper by Hemlock Hill about the reign of Belladonna Bill that should have been fact-checked, and wasn't, was this cubic zirconium she palmed off as the Hope Diamond:

 .. I’m going to have the very best advisers that I can possibly have, and when it comes to the economy and what was accomplished under my husband’s leadership and the ’90s — especially when it came to raising incomes for everybody and lifting more people out of poverty than at any time in recent history — you bet.

I’m going to ask for his ideas, I’m going ask for his advice, and I’m going use him as a goodwill emissary to go around the country to find the best ideas we’ve got, because I do believe, as he said, everything that’s wrong with America has been solved somewhere in America.

We just have to do more of it, and we have to reach out, especially into poor communities and communities of color, to give more people their own chance to get ahead.

Through their repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Hill and  Bill did more to condemn women (mainly women of color) to lives of grinding poverty than any Republican administration or congress could ever have done on their own. That this reality was not immediately apparent during the booming 90s of the bubble economy and reckless financial deregulation was pure serendipitous timing. Not until the Bush years would it be revealed that the Clinton years of "prosperity" were based on inflated stock prices, manipulation and outright fraud. When the Clintons left the White House, the gap between rich and poor was already greater than it was when they began their co-presidency in 1992.

During the Clinton reign, as pointed out by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the incomes of the wealthiest 1% increased by nearly 100%, while that of the bottom 99% increased by only 20%. The repeal of Glass-Steagall (described as "modernization") sent the Clintons' banker buddies on a rampage, fueling a bubble as they gambled with customer deposits and used some of the ill-gotten, untaxed surplus to reward Hillary and Bill's family foundation and campaign coffers as well as those of their neoliberal political cohort.

Money begat power begat more money begat more power in an endless closed corrupt feedback loop. And Hillary and Bill are avid to "do more of it." They've been ever on the lookout for the growing number of American and global waste spaces on which to infest neoliberal umbelliform life-forms.

Until along came master weeder Bernie Sanders, riding on the coattails of the never-moribund Occupy movement.

The elites are tearing out their hair even as the populist gardeners are tearing out whole clumps of invasive political hemlock by the deep, grasping, corrupt roots.  
  

Open Thread

Life has been interfering with blogging. So if anybody is out there, please feel free to contribute.

Shorter SOTU

The minute Michelle Obama walked into the hall wearing her blinding $2,000 dayglow yellow designer dress, I sort of figured Hubby would be giving us the full Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm schmaltz in his valedictory State of the Union spiel.

Barack did not disappoint, of course. His oratory always delivers. Despite numerous cracks in the content, there were no cracks in the rich baritone stereophonic sound. Nearly half the country was still drunk on his optimistic kool-aid this morning.  Nearly half the country is still not tired of his purple state purple prose, because despite what Donald Trump says, America is Great Again and it always has been. Rah rah zis boom bah (humbug.)

I am not going to parse his whole speech because it's not worth my time or yours to do so. If nothing else, the speech was simply a pastiche of all the Obama speeches that have gone before, beginning with his 2004 Purple Prose audition at the Democratic National Convention. But for those of you who didn't, or couldn't, or refused to tune in, here's the Reader's Digest-Digest interpretation, amping up a bit on the hidden treblous dog-whistles to Wall Street. Stuff in italics are direct quotes so telling and so essential that condensation and satire are neither merited nor necessary. Res ipsa loquitur.

Without further ado, the Shorter Sardonic SOTU:

Kudos to Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan speaker for helping us get the job done for the rich in the budget last month. (shakes Ryan's hand, laughs cynically.) Now let's hope we can get together with the Kochs to do criminal justice reform for them. Gotta do something about those opiates too, which I won't mention are killing off poor unemployed white people in droves.

But meanwhile, open up wide while I attempt to shove some severely heavy-duty secular opiates for the masses right down your throats.

I won't let up till I get the small-bore, gateway-to-oblivion stuff done. I definitely don't want to focus on the sucky here-and-now. I want to focus on 10, 20, a hundred years from now because it's easier and it sounds good.

We live in a time of extraordinary change, when stuff like technology is shaping us no matter our own human will and with little to no input from us. All the crap making your lives hard is a lot like the weather, you see. Headwinds, tides and the like. But anyway, the Internet is not only good for girls in remote villages, it helps the terrorists. America has been through crap and crises before, and every single time the Plutocracy has won. So we can do it again! Lebensraum, Volk!

We made change work for us, always extending America’s promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before. Achtung!

The American plutonomy is richer than ever, the wealth gap the widest in memory. We still deign to take care of the permanently wounded troops lucky enough to come home from the Forever Wars we wage in order to help the plutonomy grow like a cancer. And gays can marry each other in all 50 states.

The growth is the result of choices a few obnoxious rich people make, but for oratorical purposes I must insist that it's the result of choices "we" all make, together.

I have four questions for y'all to make you think you even have a choice in the matter.

First, how do we give ever'body the illusion that they have a fair shot at opportunity and security in the New Plutonomy? Second, how can we make technology work for ever'body? Third, how can we pretend we're not the Policeman of the World even when we invade countries like there's no tomorrow and invest a trillion dollars in nuclear weapons? Fourth, how can slimy politicians make themselves look good? (Applause, applause, applause from the millionaires and generals and judges in the audience. Close shot to Michelle Obama, her eyes brimming over with tears of pride... or something.)

We've created thousands of new crappy jobs, and our austerity policies cut the deficit and culled the herd -- so pay no attention to Donald Trump saying that America is Not Great. Because it is, it is, it is! The Ruling Class still rulz, baby! The plebes just feel a little anxious, is all. We have to change their feelings, is all. Maybe a little Pre-K, a little science class, a little tech. No humanities, though, for the Lessers: it might encourage them to think. Our goal is to make them  McJob-ready on Day One of their brutish, foreshortened lives.

We shouldn't weaken Social Security and Medicare. We should strengthen them. Notice that I am not saying "expand" them as Bernie Sanders suggests,  See, whenever neoliberals like me say that we should "strengthen" programs, it means that we want to cut them so that future generations can hope to get a few pennies from them down the road. But I can't say this in an election year.

Oh, and with Obamacare you can move a lot and still keep the same high premiums and co-pays and deductibles and put off going to the doctor as much as you do now. Before, you were really screwed. You strike out and launch that new business and you're still covered. If you fail to launch, it's because you didn't go shopping for the best predatory insurance deal. So don't blame me if you get diabetes and stay a poor non-entrepreneur.

I want to have a serious discussion with Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan about how to tackle poverty. He has some great ideas. He has successfully tackled poor people in the past.

The disagreement we've had with Republican sadists have been honest disagreements. You have to hand to them. They are totally upfront in their brutalism. They don't try to hide it behind pretty words and platitudes like I do.

 I believe a thriving private sector is the lifeblood of our economy. I think there are outdated regulations that need to be changed, there is red tape that needs to be cut. (The  most deafening, protracted applause of the entire evening.)

 I am ready, willing, anxious and able to cede more ground to the Republicans and reward more wealth to the voracious oligarchs represented most faithfully by their bipartisan political servants.

But, but, but. Since this approach is not fair to the regular Volk, I will rely upon the good greedwashing will of the Owning Class -- that most talented creative class that ever outclassed the Volk --  to throw a few crumbs in the direction of the poor. I refer to these crumbs as "Best Practices" -- Neoliberal-speak for  good corporate citizenship. I want to lift up and reward the rich owners and bosses and foundation donors who don't treat their workers like absolute crap right to their faces in an election year.

We've taken more steps to get poor people online so that they can start a new business in a single day.  Notice these are only steps, not initiatives I am touting as much as I am touting the job-destroying Trans Pacific Partnership out of public view.  But fellow Americans, I tell you that anybody can grow up to be Donald Trump. I do believe, I do believe, I do I do I do believe in Trickle-Down.

All this stuff won't happen overnight. All you need is a dollar and a dream to Win the Future.

We've already won. Trump is full of shit, because the whole world respects us, meaning they are scared shitless of us. I am really good at killing people. Let me tell you something. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. Period. (Stupendous applause from the millionaire audience in D.C., stupendous cramps from the viewing audience here at home.)

But the other terrorists we created? They must be destroyed! To create even more terrorists! To create even more profits for the Masters of War! In Africa, Central and South America, all over the world!

Oh, but we can't always be the Policeman of the World.

Then again.... we'll act alone whenever we think it necessary, and then call ourselves a Global Coalition. I'll even have the chutzpah to quote Pope Francis who said we cannot be tyrants. We must instead call our death and destruction of others "humanitarian interventionism." We only kill with love and respect.

And we gotta get the money out of politics. It really bummed me out personally, collecting a billion bucks from the billionaires instead of doing stuff for the regular Volk. But hey, it's up to you people, not moi. Pay no attention to the Rootstriker report proving that I am a big, fat, mendacious fake about this whole corruption issue. My donors got what they paid for, and I will continue to deliver for them.

My biggest regret as President is not that the wealth gap has increased to shameful proportions, and that millions of people are still suffering needlessly --  but that I couldn't get the Republicans to like me. 

So, as I embark upon my year-long Legacy-Burnishing Tour, burning up millions of gallons of jet fuel as I preach climate change amelioration, I just want to remind ever'body how easy it is to be cynical.

May the Invisible Guy in the Sky bless our pathocratic little hearts.

Brown & Black Forum

In case you missed it, here's the Democratic candidates' forum on social and economic justice issues held last night in Iowa. It's well worth two hours of your time. Bernie Sanders is on first, followed by Martin O'Malley and Hillary Clinton.

Of course the Fusion network, which broadcast the forum, is not widely available on cable outlets. I only found out about the YouTube-streamed program at the last minute, because a friend emailed me about it. The Q & A soars miles above the corporate-sponsored debates you've been watching (or tuning out) on TV.

Gunfight at the Hokey Corral

Hillary Clinton loaded Gabby Giffords into her rifle, took aim at Bernie Sanders, and fired wildly. And she missed, very badly. Because judging from the latest polls, her Wells Fargo golden caravan of a campaign is edging dangerously close to Deadwood territory.

Besides being grotesque and slimy, Clinton's use of shooting victim and gun control activist Gabby Giffords to typecast Bernie as a latter-day Gabby Hayes is downright persnickety, given Giffords' own pro-Second Amendment legislative record as a rootin tootin Blue Dog Conserva-Dem from Arizona.

From Politico:

 Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords will endorse Hillary Clinton, a person familiar with her plans confirmed.
The backing of Giffords, who became a leading advocate for gun control after being shot by a would-be assassin in 2011, comes amid stepped-up efforts by the former secretary of state to portray her opponent in the Democratic primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, as soft on guns.
"He often says, 'Well look, I'm from Vermont and oh, it's different, it's not like being in New York City,'" Clinton said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, noting that his Vermont colleague Sen. Patrick Leahy had voted differently. "I think that the excuses and efforts by Senator Sanders to avoid responsibility for this vote — which the NRA hailed as the most important in 20 years — points up a clear difference, and it's a difference that Democratic voters in our primary can take into account."

Hillary, who as hawkish Secretary of State personally brokered a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the fanatical autocrats of the misogynistic, heheading-happy, hospital-bombing House of Saud without so much as a background check, apparently forgot to ask her pal Gabby about her vote to overturn Washington DC's ban on personal possession of assault weapons, as well as her signing of a Supreme Court amicus brief upholding the right of Beltway denizens to arm themselves with military-grade weaponry. Giffords also voted to allow interstate conceal-carry reciprocity, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to NRA-sponsored legislation that teaches little kids, through coloring books and fun games, how to shoot responsibly.

When Gabby Giffords upheld the Second Amendment rights of her constituents, she was simply being a "pro-gun pragmatist."

 But according to Hillary's bizarre 2016 playbook, when Bernie defended small Vermont gun store owners from potential liability stemming from subsequent criminal activity of the purchaser or any subsequent owner or thief, he became a cheerleader for mass mayhem.

The Sanders campaign has "fired back" (the media are certainly going metaphor-happy over the Great Gun Debate, aren't they?), noting that Hillary Clinton herself as been all over the map, both pro and con, on gun legislation. Her manipulation of Gabby Giffords shows what a desperado she has become. Bernie, no longer restrictable as the curmudgeonly colorful sidekick of the Beltway Imaginarium, is outshining Hillary the Tough and Inevitable on the political stage.

The slimy Crabby Gabby Hayes paintballs being lobbed at him apparently are not sticking.The Clinton Posse can no longer type-cast him as a wild-haired, ornery old codger, consarn it!

Courage Under Joystick

Finally acknowledging that drone attacks take a psychic toll on the people performing them from afar in airless little trailers, the Pentagon plans to recognize these operators with the same military honors accorded to soldiers who kill in more direct physical proximity to their targets.

Since President Obama has made drone operators "increasingly important," according to the New York Times, it's only right that the folks fulfilling his Kill Wish List should be given some long-overdue recognition. Whether Obama and his successors will have the chutzpah to give out Medals of Honor to joystick operators in televised East Room ceremonies remains to be seen, however. It seems highly doubtful, given that the president has steadfastly refused to divulge the names and details of the "enemy combatants" he chooses to obliterate in this highly secretive program. The fact that up to 90 percent of the drone targets turn out to be innocent civilians might make the award ceremonies a bit fuzzy too.

Instead of his eyes welling up and overflowing with tears over wedding parties turned into funerals by his predator drones, Obama would probably have to be satisfied with getting just a little misty...  at the very least, he'll play Misty for us.

Michael S. Schmidt writes that computer geeks who launch cyber-attacks will also be eligible for the bright shiny medals.

“It’s way past time,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who pushed the military to embrace drones. “People should be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions to accomplishing security objections regardless of where they are located.”

Current and former military officials had been deeply divided about whether to recognize the drone pilots. An initial Pentagon plan in 2013 to honor them with a “Distinguished Warfare Medal” was criticized by some veterans’ groups, which feared that the award would rank higher than combat medals like the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

Ousted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel scrapped the first plans for the drone and cyber medals, but now that he's gone, the proposal to honor the office-based warriors of Obama's "smart" foreign policy during his last year in office is gaining new life. 

“As the impact of remote operations on combat continues to increase, the necessity of ensuring those actions are distinctly recognized grows,” said a Pentagon document outlining changes to how the military gives awards and other decorations.

The use of drones has been widely credited with diminishing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. But civilians have also died in drone attacks, fueling anger toward the United States among Muslims across the Middle East.

Nothing will tamp down anger like the sight of Obama awarding medals to remote-control geeks who turn Muslims into pink mist at his explicit direction, right?

The Pentagon also plans to award more medals to soldiers who are still alive, so that they might at least get some personal enjoyment from them.

And, given that the wars are now permanent, medal recipients will no longer have to wait as long before collecting their shiny objects from the Commander in Chief. It will be a virtual assemblyline of medals, ribbons and plaques.

As war is modernized, so must its rewards be modernized. When all else (like public support) fails, bring out the symbols and put on a show. CNN, Wall Street investors, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley will love it and even help direct it.

Just as the Oscars help sell movie tickets, just as the movies in their turn help sell video game tie-ins, just as the video games help hone the skills of the drone and cyber-espionage geeks of the future, so too will military awards shows and brand new acting categories help to further enrich the war profiteers.

They'll cry for American children killed by guns, but revel in the billions of dollars in lethal weaponry that they manufacture, sell and deploy against other people's children, all around the world.

Greed Ain't Good

For those of you who missed it in the New York Times and on cable TV, here's Bernie Sanders in the Big Apple today, calling for the breakup of the banks. (Only kidding about the coverage in the corporate media: there was none. The media were too busy taking a group swim in Obama's coincidentally-timed tears.)

 It's interesting that for all the rumors of his lack of support among black voters, Bernie was rousingly introduced by his "twin," State Senator James Sanders of New York, who happens to be black. "In New York City, we're starting to feel the Bern!" he said. So much for Hillary Clinton, New York's alleged Favorite Daughter. He also got the endorsement of the state's Working Families Party, which traditionally adheres to the Democratic machine except in the most extreme cases of corruption in the establishment candidate. Oops. When the WFP endorsed centrist incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo over the progressive Zephyr Teachout in 2014, they lived to regret it.

But back to the very popular Bernie.

"To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear," Sanders said. "Greed is not good. Wall Street and corporate greed is destroying the fabric of our nation. And, here is a New Year’s Resolution that we will keep: If you do not end your greed we will end it for you."

Is that welcoming their hatred, or what?

Here's his eight-point plan for financial reform:

Break up huge financial institutions in the first year of my administration. Within the first 100 days of my administration, I will require the Secretary of the Treasury to establish a “Too Big to Fail” list of commercial banks, shadow banks, and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the U.S. economy without a taxpayer bailout. Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy.

Reinstate a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act to clearly separate traditional banking from risky investment banking and insurance services. It is not enough to tell Wall Street to "cut it out," propose a few new rules and slap on some fines. Under my administration, financial institutions will no longer be too big to fail or too big to manage. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments. If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

End too-big-to-jail. We live in a country today that has an economy that is rigged, a campaign finance system which is corrupt, and a criminal justice system which often does not dispense justice. The average American sees kids being arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana. But when it comes to Wall Street executives — some of the most wealthy and powerful people in this country whose illegal behavior hurt millions of Americans — somehow nothing happens to them. No jail time. No police record. No justice.

Not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. That will change under my administration. “Equal Justice Under Law” will not just be words engraved on the entrance of the Supreme Court. It will be the standard that applies to Wall Street and all Americans.

Establish a tax on Wall Street to discourage reckless gambling and encourage productive investments in the job-creating economy. We will use the revenue from this tax to make public colleges and universities tuition free. During the financial crisis, the middle class of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to help the middle class.

Cap Credit Card Interest Rates and ATM Fees. We have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees. In my view, it is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM. And it is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.

The Bible has a term for this practice. It's called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for sinners who charged people usurious interest rates. Today, we don't need the hellfire and the pitchforks, we don't need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law.

We need to cap interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15 percent. I would also cap ATM fees at $2.

Allow Post Offices to Offer Banking Services. We also need to give Americans affordable banking options. The reality is that, unbelievably, millions of low-income Americans live in communities where there are no normal banking services. Today, if you live in a low-income community and you need to cash a check or get a loan to pay for a car repair or a medical emergency, where do you go? You go to a payday lender who could charge an interest rate of over 300 percent and trap you into a vicious cycle of debt. That is unacceptable.

We need to stop payday lenders from ripping off millions of Americans. Post offices exist in almost every community in our country. One important way to provide decent banking opportunities for low-income communities is to allow the U.S. Postal Service to engage in basic banking services, and that's what I will fight for.

Reform Credit Rating Agencies. We cannot have a safe and sound financial system if we cannot trust the credit agencies to accurately rate financial products. The only way we can restore that trust is to make sure credit rating agencies cannot make a profit from Wall Street. Under my administration, we will turn for-profit credit rating agencies into non-profit institutions, independent from Wall Street. No longer will Wall Street be able to pick and choose which credit agency will rate their products.

Reform the Federal Reserve. We need to structurally reform the Federal Reserve to make it a more democratic institution responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans, not just the billionaires on Wall Street. It is unacceptable that the Federal Reserve has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating. When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Federal Reserve acted with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system. We need the Fed to act with the same boldness to combat the unemployment crisis and fulfill its full employment mandate.

So my message to you is straightforward: I’ll rein in Wall Street's reckless behavior so they can’t crash our economy again.

Will Wall Street like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.

Howard Fineman, a fairly middle-of-the road liberal writer for The Huffington Post, broke away from the group-think mainstream pack today, and actually admitted that Hillary might not be the shoo-in for the nomination his colleagues believe she is. 

Voters in 2016 are more skeptical than ever of leaders in all realms, beset by a lack of growth in real wages, and vociferously divided on immigration, race, religion, policing, guns, terrorism, refugees and drugs.
The kind of anti-establishment sentiment heard around the world -- from the early days of the Arab Spring to the darker nationalist movements in Germany and France -- echoes loudly in the U.S. Voters are drawn to the energy and electricity of candidates who vow to smash the power of institutions from Wall Street to Washington, from university campuses to the media.

Floating above it all, for the moment, is Hillary Clinton -- still the conventional wisdom's pick to become the next president.
The former first lady/former senator/former secretary of state has organized intensively and tried to address the economic disquiet in her Democratic Party with solid policy proposals that move her cautiously into the anti-Wall Street camp. But the mood of the country is more dangerous to her chances than her supporters admit or outside analysts recognize.
This isn't a good time to be the embodiment of a political insider. But she is. Clinton and her husband have grown very wealthy over their decades in politics. They have become experts at currying the favor of rich donors, many of whom are now their personal friends.

Greed ain't good. Time ain't on her side.

Give me a Bernie Vs Trump contest, and I might not follow through on my New Years resolution to cancel cable.

Exceptional USA: So Special, So Sick

The New York Times finally discovers what thinking people living in the real world have known all long: that Obamacare is not only not all it's cracked up to be, it's a disease unto itself. Insured Americans are still going bankrupt, getting sicker, and dying younger. (Hillary Clinton, for her part, has cold-bloodedly called such atrocities mere "glitches.")

The Times is even openly soliciting testimony about medical insurance nightmares from its readers.The lede of the front-page article is reminiscent of Rep. Alan Grayson's legendary 2009 rant on the House floor:

Here is the surest way to enjoy the peace of mind that comes with having health insurance: Don’t get sick.

The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by an estimated 15 million since 2013, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act. But a new survey, the first detailed study of Americans struggling with medical bills, shows that insurance often fails as a safety net. Health plans often require hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments — sums that can create a cascade of financial troubles for the many households living paycheck to paycheck. 

In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same.

These financial vulnerabilities reflect the high costs of health care in the United States, the most expensive place in the world to get sick. They also highlight a substantial shift in the nature of health insurance. Since the late 1990s, insurance plans have begun asking their customers to pay an increasingly greater share of their bills out of pocket though rising deductibles and co-payments. The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in 2010, protected many Americans from very high health costs by requiring insurance plans to be more comprehensive, but at the same time it allowed or even encouraged increases in deductibles.

***

Sick and Sicker:

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson came uncomfortably close to channeling Heinrich Himmler as he outlined his reasons for rounding up Central American refugee families for imprisonment and quick deportation back to the countries they had fled out of desperation for their very lives. Many of the deportees face almost certain death upon their return. Johnson's cold-blooded statement:

 The focus of this weekend’s operations were adults and their children who (i) were apprehended after May 1, 2014 crossing the southern border illegally, (ii) have been issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, and (iii) have exhausted appropriate legal remedies, and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief under our laws. As part of these operations, 121 individuals were taken into custody, primarily from Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, and they are now in the process of being repatriated. To effect removal, most families are first being transported to one of ICE’s family residential centers for temporary processing before being issued travel documents and boarding a return flight to their home countries. 
Given the sensitive nature of taking into custody and removing families with children, a number of precautions were taken as part of this weekend’s operations. ICE deployed from around the country a number of female agents and medical personnel to take part in the operations, and, in the course of the operations, ICE exercised prosecutorial discretion in a number of cases for health or other personal reasons.

.... I know there are many who loudly condemn our enforcement efforts as far too harsh, while there will be others who say these actions don’t go far enough. I also recognize the reality of the pain that deportations do in fact cause. But, we must enforce the law consistent with our priorities. At all times, we endeavor to do this consistent with American values, and basic principles of decency, fairness, and humanity.

Contrast this to Reichsfuhrer Himmler's cold-blooded rationale for rounding up and deporting the Jews (and unlike Johnson's boasting, his speech was given in secret):

 I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over.

 As Ian Buruma writes in Theater of Cruelty, "Evil deeds are often committed by people who have convinced themselves that they are doing something good. When Heinrich Himmler told his audience of SS officers in Posen in 1943 that 'exterminating' the Jews was a necessary duty carried out 'for the love of our people,' he was most probably sincere. No doubt he reveled in his own power, but I don't think he was evil for the sake of being evil. Himmler was not Satan, but a repellent human being with the means to put mad and murderous fantasies into practice."

Likewise, Jeh Johnson can ease his alleged conscience by adding social workers and medical personnel to his own de facto extermination squads. He sends "illegal" people to their deaths in the sincere belief that he is acting purely from decent and humane principles, for the love of Exceptional America.

Likewise, if millions of the beloved American people who are allowed to remain in the Homeland by virtue of their birth on American soil go broke, suffer and die prematurely through a lack of basic medical care, then the architects and defenders of the Affordable Care Act are smug in the knowledge that at least they are giving mercy to a chosen, select few. The unlucky others have been simply designated as necessary internal deportees. Despite Obamacare, as many as 17,000 legal Americans are still dying unnecessarily every single year. That is a feature, not a bug.

  Internal and external deportees are what the neoliberal thought-collective, the cold-blooded cullers of the herd, euphemize as the collateral damage of their "hard choices."

Sick, sicker, sickest.

Making Human Junk on the Upper East Side

The rich might not be so different from you and me after all. Even they occasionally experience twinges of conscience, especially during the winter holiday season.

In a New York Times advice-to-the-landed gentry column published on Saturday, one denizen of the plutocratic Upper East Side of New York City is torn about whether to say something if s/he sees something in the ongoing War of Economic Terror of the rich versus the rest of us. In this case, the "something" is a 16-year-old boy working double shifts as a doorman at a pricey building.

The condominium in which I rent an apartment employs a 16-year-old doorman. He recently worked a double shift on a Sunday, from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., which violates state child labor laws. I find myself in an ethical quandary. Isn’t the condo open to prosecution for breaking child labor laws? Do we have a responsibility to this child to enforce the rules so he is not exploited? At the same time, what if he is the only wage earner in his family? Any thoughts on what to do?

How seriously the Times takes this question is evidenced by its accompanying illustration, casting the Doorboy as a cherubic white cartoon character straight out of South Park.

The Littlest Doorman (Michael Kolomatsky/The New York Times

South Park Stan

Thus is the stage immediately set for an orgy of conscience-soothing from the handful of legal experts that the Times approached to answer the pressing question of Resurgent Child Labor in the New Abnormal Economy. Racism doesn't ever rear its ugly head to further discompose the millionaires of the Upper East Side, home to the most extreme income inequality and concentrated wealth in the entire country. The Times' version of the doorboy is not only white and well-scrubbed, even his couture is non-sexistly correct. The crisp, Little Boy Blue uniform is ever so nicely balanced out by the girly pink pacifier. Ease yourselves, socially liberal plutes!

If the Times viewed the comeback of child labor as anything more than a passing social quandary for the pathologically wealthy, they might have gone the route of  sociologist Lewis Hine, whose Depression-era, WPA-funded photography of  "Kids At Work" literally saved the lives of thousands of effectively enslaved children. If the Times were honest, its editors would have made this shallow advice column front-page news, just as Hine's scathing  "Making Human Junk" broadside slapped the robber barons of yesteryear right where they didn't yet hurt.

One lawyer, while telling the Times that employing a child for 16 straight hours of guard duty for rich people is a clear violation of state and city labor laws, still advised caution on the part of the condo-dweller with a conscience. Reporting the offense might get the tenant evicted. Another expert suggested that the concerned citizen approach the doorboy directly, thereby putting the onus of labor violations directly on him. Ronda Kaysen, the writer of the piece, splits the difference, and suggests that the questioner approach her fellow tenants for further advice.

 When all else fails, oligarchic solidarity is just the ticket. Kaysen did not suggest inquiring about the child's personal situation, commuting time, hopes and dreams, or suggest increasing his tips into the realm of the living wage to enable him to cut down his hours, or god forbid, direct him to the Doormen's Union, which might picket the building.

Let's face it: the only reason for the obscenely wealthy to hire a child instead of an adult is because underage, underpaid, under-educated wage slaves are less likely to be unionized and more apt to be exploited. It was the organized labor movement and advocacy journalism that once put an end (on paper, anyway) to child labor in the first place. The new robber barons hate unions with the same brutal intensity as their pre-New Deal, pre-globalization predecessors.

And that goes for both of our corporate political parties and the antisocial donors who own and control them. Former Obama adviser David Plouffe, now in charge of public relations at Uber, is spearheading the anti-union charge at his own company. He most recently prevailed against mildly progressive New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, who had once sided with unionized taxi drivers before Plouffe and the 21st century robber barons of the Upper East Side made him an offer he couldn't refuse. It could always be worse. they tell us. Uber responsibly requires its low-wage workers to be at least 21 years old, with three years' experience behind the wheel. They are, after all, responsible for transporting millionaires, not simply carrying their packages and opening their doors for them.

It could always be worse. For instance,who can ever forget Republican Newt Gingrich's call to replace unionized school custodians with pupils working off their school lunches with their slave labor? The Newt is just one of thousands of  cold-blooded .01 Percenters whose Depression-era dreams are most likely of the wet variety, not the nightmare variety experienced by the masses.

If the Littlest Doorman looks, in real life, anything even remotely like the children photographed by Lewis Hine during the last Gilded Age-spawned Depression, it is apparently news that the Times doesn't see fit to print: