Plutus Loves Potus

  What rout, whomping, tsunami, thumping, shellacking, rejection? All you had to do was look at President Obama's body language at his Wednesday press con to realize that a few Democrats losing their seats in the meh-terms will not upset the neoliberal order of which he remains the powerful front-man. He's even looking forward to slurping Bourbon with his new BFF Mitch McConnell. He is still hopey and not at all, he said, "mopey."

Why should he be? Hell is emptying out, and Plutus continues to rise, the hoards of wealth safe, hidden and secure thanks to Potus* and all his devilish minions.

 

Barack and Mitch to Plutus: Arise, Repatriate Thyself! (h/t William Blake)

  And if Obama's calm, self-satisfied demeanor didn't convince you that the plutocracy is triumphant, then maybe his actual words will:

The point is, it’s time for us to take care of business. There are things this country has to do that can’t wait another two years or another four years. There are plans this country has to put in place for our future. And the truth is, I’m optimistic about our future. I have good reason to be.I need Americans all across the country who are determined and big-hearted and ask what they can do and never give up and overcome obstacles, and they inspire me every single day.

I think that the president's confident persona was more a message to his global compatriots than to a disgusted, fearful American constituency. That's because Obama's next order of business-caretaking and obstacle-overcoming will be his trip to Asia,where he hopes to finally seal the deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was quite shameless in his goal to work with Republicans to ram through this corporate coup behind our backs. Majority Leader-in-Waiting McConnell is equally as eager to get the job done for his cronies.

The president really does need Americans to be about as engaged  (around 30%) as they were on Election Day, when they foolishly thought they were sending a punishing message to the huckster-in-chief and his minions. Obama did admit that he is also listening to the two-thirds of eligible voters who didn't show up. Their silence must indeed be very inspiring to him:

 So, the most important thing I can do is just get stuff done and help Congress get some things done.

Ironically (and stupidly) enough, though, the next round of TPP negotiations is being held at the US Embassy in Beijing so as to avoid possible eavesdropping by the Chinese government, which is not part of the 12-nation partnership. Obama will ostensibly be in China as part of the separate Asia-Pacific Cooperation Forum (APEC). So, despite the optimism for bipartisan cooperation for trade deals displayed by Obama at his presser, there is a silver lining for the proles:

There are concerns that the TPP countries holding their own meetings in Beijing could irritate China, which is not part of the initiative, as such meetings might take the limelight away from the APEC ministerial and summit meetings China is hosting this year.

U.S. President Barack Obama had said he envisioned a substantial outcome on the TPP in time for his trip to Beijing, but U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman recently admitted there would be no agreement during the APEC forum.

The TPP countries have struggled to strike a deal due partly to Japan-U.S. bickering over market access for agricultural products and autos.

So, while Obama might be "determined" to complete the corporate coup by the end of the year, the rest of the world might not be quite as willing to succumb to multinational corporate greed. Or, the individual greedy interests of the potentates involved might not jibe enough "to get the job done." And if we're really lucky, the Embassy will be bugged and some enterprising Chinese Ed Snowden will leak the goods on how the ruling class plans to stick it to the little guy. 

A withering editorial published Wednesday in the Chinese Global Times should also give the president pause. Here's what passes for the welcome mat from China's official government press organ:

US public opinion has downgraded Obama. Former president George W. Bush met with criticism due to his failure in the war on terror.

Obama always utters "Yes, we can," which led to the high expectations people had for him. But he has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters. US society has grown tired of his banality.

Undoubtedly, Obama is one of the post-Cold War presidents who had to undergo difficult times. He has encountered the global financial crisis and the decline of US influence. He has found many thorny problems because he is the first African-American president in history. As a result, he can only get limited tolerance and acceptance.

Obama has behaved much more prudently than most of his predecessors, and has thus lacked the ability to push forward complicated issues. What's worse, Obama is in the midst of a time when partisan politics is becoming more extreme.

That party interests are placed higher than the interests of the country and its people is an inherent shortcoming of Western political systems. The problem is particularly acute when the US undergoes difficulties. Cohesion in American society is diminishing.

Obama's best performance is empty rhetoric, while he achieved nothing on issues such as lowering the income gap. The American people have not benefited from the economic recovery.

Ouch. Of course, the Chinese people working in the Wal-mart and Foxconn factories for pennies an hour haven't exactly benefited from the Chinese economy either. So this editorial is likely, at least in part, some empty rhetorical payback on the international playground of oligarchic bullies. But still.

All the salesmanship posturing by Obama might be moot anyway, since there's also a ray of bright domestic sunshine to augment the international silver lining. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen writes that Tuesday's Republican "rout" will further reduce Obama's chances of gaining so-called Congressional "fast track authority" to take care of his Big Business clientele:

The issue is not who is Senate Majority leader. The fight over trade authority is always won or lost in the U.S. House of Representatives. Recall that second-term Democratic President Bill Clinton lost a bid for Fast Track in 1998 in the GOP-controlled House with 171 Democrats and 71 GOP members voting “no.” (Clinton had Fast Track for only two of his eight years. Indeed, in the past two decades, the only president to obtain Fast Track was President George W. Bush, and winning that five-year grant required a two-year effort at the start of Bush’s first term and a lot of political capital, after which Fast Track passed by one vote in a GOP-controlled House in 2002.)

The reason that the GOP controlling the Senate could make Fast Track’s passage less likely is related to who will now be writing a trade authority bill. The old Fast Track trade authority mechanism faces a significant bloc of GOP House opposition and virtually no House Democratic support. Outgoing Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had undertaken an inclusive process to get input to write his own version of trade authority, which he dubbed Smart Track. That process and its outcome could have broken the bipartisan House opposition to the old Fast Track system.

(snip)

A significant bloc of House GOP does not want to delegate more power to Obama, especially as the GOP has been attacking him as the “imperial president” who grabs legislative authority for his own. Tea party activists oppose Fast Track per se and anything that empowers Obama, which leaves GOP lawmakers who support Fast Track exposed to the dreaded tea party primary threat. To make political matter worse, House GOP lawmakers know that even if the GOP votes were available to pass Fast Track on a party line vote, almost no Democrats will vote to give their own president such authority, so any fallout from future trade pacts would be owned solely by the GOP.

Gridlock does occasionally have its unintended benefits for regular people. Remember, it was only because of Tea Party intransigence that Obama was unable to ram through his cuts to Social Security and Medicare in 2011, after his last "shellacking."

But wait. With the very crafty and sly Mitch McConnell in power, beware of a reprise of the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich partnership from hell that saw, among other atrocities, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the end of direct cash aid to poor people. Obama and McConnell are already plotting a way to "repatriate" offshore wealth stashes at little to no cost to the greedy hoarders. They could also very well sidestep the "fast/smart track authority" stumbling block altogether, and get some kind of a deal passed in full public view, with the full advice and consent of Congress. In oligarchic paradise, anything is possible. Since the whole purpose of capitalism is continued growth, if they have to relinquish their secrecy, so be it. Public opinion be damned.

The majority of Americans declare themselves disgusted with politicians. But far from being chastened, Obama and McConnell appear on the world stage in full triumphalist mode. "I'm optimistic about our future," crowed the president in the wake of his pseudo-whomping. "I have good reason to be."

So we can't let our guard down. Especially in states where they're celebrating pot legalization. The powers that be would love for you to be permanently mellowed out as they get on with their bipartisan creative destruction.

**Potus: Beltway insider-speak for President of the United States.

Be Cynical: Vote

Happy Meh-term Day, everybody! I trust that all of you will be doing your civic duty and casting your votes today. I know, I know.... voting in the Age of Citizens United is like casting your line into the muddy waters and hoping you'll snag a piece of old plastic instead of a rotting animal carcass.

But take it from one who knows: despite what President Obama says ("Don't be cynical! Vote!") it is indeed possible to be both a cynic and a voter. All you have to take with you to the polls (besides an ID card if you are voting in a red state while brown or black) is your tongue, held firmly against your cheek. You might also offer up a silent prayer of thanksgiving that today is the last day you'll have to endure what have to be the worst and nastiest political TV ads ever dreamed up by a data-driven pea-brain with a billion-dollar budget. (unless, of course, you have the misfortune to reside in one of those runoff states.)

I have to confess that the New York ballot had me a bit confused. It seems that there are four guys named Andrew Cuomo running for governor this year. There's a Democratic Andrew Cuomo, a Working Families Party Andrew Cuomo, a Women's Equality Party Andrew Cuomo, and an Independence Party Andrew Cuomo. Why there is not a Republican Andrew Cuomo is anybody's guess, since he is a Goldwater Republican. This is the guy who only last week called public schools a "monopoly" he wants to bust up in order to make room for Wall Street investors' charter schools. Way, way down the ballot was Green Party co-founder Howie Hawkins, who is not surprisingly polling at ten percent (compared to his previous one percent tally.) The Green Party is actually going mainstream. The Democratic Party has gone that far to the right under Cuomo. So stifle the cynicism for a second. Anti-Cuomoism is becoming a political force in its own right.

The whole back-story of that Women's Equality Party is really a textbook case of political cynicism. The WEP did not even exist until very recently, and it's not even a political party. It's a front organization whose board consists of nine men and two women. It was manufactured out of thin air in order to "punish" the Working Families Party, which had grudgingly endorsed Cuomo this summer after mildly criticizing him for being a sell-out to Wall Street. Don't you just love it when a sell-out like the WFP gets sold out by an even bigger sell-out? It really keeps one's cynical enthusiasm alive.

Anyway, Cuomo hopes that if enough people are confused enough to think that he actually stands for women's rights instead of for his plutocratic cronies, they will bypass the WFP ballot line and relegate it to oblivion.  So, the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party is making the election all about the viability of the sell-out Working Families Party instead of about such issues as record poverty and political corruption. That other co-opted sellout -- MoveOn. Org -- has gotten in on the action by actually urging progressives to vote for Cuomo to keep WFP alive. Here's their actual email (links deliberately disabled by me):

Dear New York MoveOn member,

Let's get this out of the way: The election for Governor of New York on Tuesday won't be a nail-biter.

Governor Cuomo is far ahead in the polls and appears certain to win. But one thing is still up in the air—and it could very well decide the entire progressive agenda in Albany for the next four years.

That's the fate of the Working Families Party, one of New York's most effective progressive political groups.

The WFP will vanish unless 50,000 voters cast their votes on the Working Families Party ballot line for Gov. Cuomo—and MoveOn members can be the ones to push it over the top.

Will you join me in voting on the Working Families Party ballot line in order to make sure that Governor Cuomo is forced to compromise with progressives, instead of just with Republicans?

For the past four years, the Working Families Party has been able to pull the often conservative-leaning Gov. Cuomo to sometimes act like a progressive. In his first year in office, the WFP successfully pressured Gov. Cuomo to abandon billions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich.

This summer, in exchange for the WFP endorsement, Gov. Cuomo agreed to break off his alliance with the State Senate Republicans, and start supporting Democrats. Along with that, he pledged to support a raft of progressive priorities, including a big minimum wage increase, public financing of elections, and the Women's Equality Act.

And how does Gov. Cuomo thank the WFP? By trying to destroy it.

This summer, Gov. Cuomo founded a new party, just one letter off from the WFP—the WEP. It stands for the Women's Equality Party, and you might have seen its TV commercials by now. But it's not a party at all—it's just a cynical attempt to knock out a huge piece of the progressive infrastructure by stealing votes away from the WFP. 

The attack on the WFP is coming because Gov. Cuomo doesn't want WFP forcing his hand anymore. That's all the proof I need that the WFP is an effective, and necessary, part of New York politics.

Click here to see an image of the ballot and pledge to vote on the Working Families Party ballot line.

Earlier this year, the Working Families Party recruited Zephyr Teachout to challenge Governor Cuomo, but after his concessions to the party, the WFP wound up endorsing Gov. Cuomo.

Some progressives celebrated the concessions from Gov. Cuomo. Others were upset the party didn't back Zephyr Teachout. But that's in the past. What's clear today is that for progressive voters, the best vote is for the WFP.

Let's get real: Gov. Cuomo isn't a reliable progressive. But he can be moved, like any politician, with enough grassroots pressure. And it's the Working Families Party that has been able to apply that pressure. And because of that, Gov. Cuomo seems to want to see the party vanish.

We can't let that happen. WFP has been at the forefront of many of the biggest progressive wins in New York, from the Millionaires Tax to the election of the Progressive Caucus in the New York City Council to paid sick days and much more.

It is virtually certain that Gov. Cuomo will be re-elected. The practical question that we face is this: Do we want to have a strong progressive movement around to keep the pressure on Gov. Cuomo, or do we want to let Gov. Cuomo destroy a key piece of it?

If the choice is between those two futures, it should be a clear one. That's why I hope you'll join me and MoveOn members across New York State in voting for Gov. Cuomo on the WFP ballot line on Tuesday.

Click here to pledge your vote for the Working Families Party.

Thanks for all you do.

–Ilya, Brian, Stephen, Aiyi'nah, and the rest of the team

I think MoveOn should change its name to the Pretzel Party, because its twisted logic just makes you want to forget the cynical tongue in your cheek and resort to grinding your teeth in despair before you choke on your own bile.

The rest of the ballot was pretty easy..... Write-in, Green, Green, Green, Write-In, Democrat, Democrat (assemblyman and Family Court judge, because she wrote me personally and is not likely to take bribes from hedge fund guys running private for profit juvenile detention centers in need of clientele.)  For State Senator, I again voted for Candidate Blank over State Senator John Bonacic, again running unopposed on several different ballot lines. If this were a true democracy, Senator Blank would have been the incumbent. New Yorkers have historically voted for Senator Blank over Senator Bonacic. New Yorkers are a lovable, cynical bunch.

Memo to Andrew Cuomo: next time around you might think of running on the Chauncey Gardiner Party, since in one of your cynical TV commercials, you describe your sole paternal function as  "Being There."

Cynical movie buffs will remember Gardiner, played by Peter Sellers, as the intellectually-challenged man who rose to national political prominence purely on the basis of his simplistic and reassuring utterances to the rich and powerful.

His Penultimate Hurrah

You knew this was coming. President Obama, according to the political celebrity-focused pundit class, will be faced with a theatrical conundrum after midterm elections. He must either continue pretending to ineffectually despise Republicans while pleading for ineffectual legislation like the $10.10 minimum wage. Or, he can finally drop the pretense and reprise 2011, venturing even more boldly out of his right-wing closet to give John Boehner 99.999% of what he wants, to save Hillary the trouble and precious political capital.

Freed from the chore of grubbing money from Wall Street and Hollywood, Obama can hunker down with his fellow neoliberals across the aisle to ram through the corporate coup known as the Trans Pacific Partnership.  A reanimation of the "Grand Bargain" for the grandees (Social Security and Medicare cuts) isn't out of the question either. I imagine that the permanent immiseration of the old and poor will be the quid pro quo for a couple of token public-private infrastructure deals, temporary corporate tax loophole-closings, and temporary funding for corporate-run universal preschool.

  To paraphrase Bette Davis: Fasten your seat belts -- it's going to be a bumpy night/two years/decade/ass-killing slide down into the black pit of doom.

We got one of our first nauseating clues about what the Barack-Hillary interregnum will be like in today's New York Times. Peter Baker, who works the Oval Office trial balloon beat, puts it thusly:

Whipsawed by events and facing another midterm electoral defeat, President Obama has directed his team to forge a policy agenda to regain momentum for his final two years in office even as some advisers urge that he rethink the way he governs.

Without waiting for results from elections on Tuesday that few in the White House expect to go well for Mr. Obama, top aides have met for weeks to plot the final quarter of his presidency. Anticipating a less friendly Congress, they are mapping possible compromises with Republicans to expand trade, overhaul taxes and build roads and bridges.

So right off the bat, Obama is portrayed as the powerless victim of "event whipsawing," absolving him of any personal responsibility for the event horizon nose-thumbing about to be delivered to the American people. Politicians don't run the government -- events do. And the Big Event is not Ebola, or the ignored and looming catastrophe of climate change -- it is the not-so-invisible whipsaw of the free market plutocrats, who just bought themselves a new-old passel of corrupt politicians to do their bidding.

For a president who has lost public support and largely failed to move his agenda on Capitol Hill since winning re-election two years ago, there may be little hope for significant progress if Republicans capture the Senate and add to their House majority. But if Republicans are fully in charge of Congress rather than mainly an opposition party, both sides may have an incentive to strike deals, at least during a short window before the 2016 presidential campaign consumes Washington.

This approximately year-long window of opportunity is just perfect for the oligarchy. All eyes, courtesy of our corporate media Svengalis, will be directed to the stars of the 2016 horse-race, instead of on the back-room deals being forged between the bipartisan frenemies already in power. Paul Ryan, (R-Sadism) is not sated on what he cynically termed the "low-hanging fruit" of food stamp cuts and other concessions given him last year by Patty Murray (D-Masochism). Ryan wants to gnaw on the whole trunk of democracy like a busy little nihilist beaver. He's also shamelessly telegraphing his omnivorous gluttony for even more human flesh. He's betting that the conservative Obama will forgo the veto pen on legislative Social Darwinism if one of the prizes is the president's longed-for global corporate coup of the free trade deals. And he's probably betting right. Obama has never even taken Chained CPI and other poor-punishing treats off the neoliberal table-- he's just hidden them under his cheap tray of populist hors d'oeuvre and sugar-coated Halloween crumbs for the duration of his last campaign season.

 

The Nightmare Before The Nightmare

Ryan also promised that, just as they did in the Democratic-controlled Congress in the last throes of the Bush administration, Republicans will upend the filibuster by using budget reconciliation to ram through plutocrat-friendly legislation. Even so, the Democrats (mostly of the anonymous coward branch of the Party) quoted in stenographer Peter Baker's article are coyly pretending ignorance of the ploy -- which they themselves chose not to avail themselves of in the last six years of their majority: 

Joel P. Johnson, who was Bill Clinton’s counselor late in his presidency, said Mr. Obama should test Republican intentions soon after the new Congress takes office. “Make it clear there is a negotiating table awaiting, and don’t shut down the possibility that there could be a dialogue that results in something that’s progress,” he said.

In some ways, a change in the Senate majority may not make that big a difference. Other than presidential nominations, which can be passed with a simple majority, most significant legislation must still muster 60 votes, which neither party will have, to overcome a filibuster. One Democrat close to the White House said the election was just “the difference between 96 percent gridlock and 100 percent gridlock.”

Gridlock is the stale excuse used by both sides of the duopoly to explain why they can't get anything done. Actually, they get plenty done -- including protecting the security and police states and bloating the coffers of the military industrial complex to beyond bursting, ignoring the unemployed, and cutting deals to reduce food stamp benefits. and absolving themselves of ethical constraints to their insider trading and other methods of self-enrichment.

Fasten your seat belts. And rev your engines, honk your horns, screech your tires, blast your air brakes. Let's not make it easy or pleasant for them.  

*** 

Update, Sunday evening: Here's my response to Paul Krugman wondering why the logic of business tycoons, notably even in Japan, has such weird influence on gummint economic policies:

How can the twisted logic of austerity, as espoused by the billionaires, be kept off the to-do list of their surrogates -- the politicians that "we" elect to run the place?

Get the $$$ out of politics. Yes, easier said than done, given that politics and money are now essentially the same twisted entity. As Sen. Bernie Sanders told Bill Moyers this weekend, only a populist uprising massive enough to shake the corrupt duopoly to its very core will do the job.

Again, easier said than done, since a pervasive police/spy state now exists to quell such inevitable uprisings. The AP just got the goods on Missouri, which established a strict "no-fly zone" for news helicopters wishing to film the state brutality against the peaceful Ferguson protesters. The plutocrats and the politicians don't want a repeat of the aerial footage of the Watts riots of the 60s, which cemented public demand for various civil rights reforms and the War on Poverty. They want Nixon's ensuing counter-revolutionary Southern Strategy to remain the status quo. They want to keep that screw turned dead-right for as long as they can.

 It serves the interests of the greedy big business "thought leaders" to keep wages depressed and jobs scarce. And just in time for Halloween, Al Simpson was back on TV to play the folksy Grim Reaper. Despite the misery that misguided austerity has wrought, the plutocrats still want to burn Social Security at the stake.

The only deficit we have to fear is their empathy deficit.

(You can catch the Bernie Sanders clip on the Bill Moyers link located on my Blogroll. I wasn't all that impressed, because he essentially blamed voters for not holding Obama (whom he cloyingly still respects and admires) to his campaign promises when he filled his cabinet with Wall Streeters. Sanders also respects and likes Hillary. As far as I am concerned, Bernie basically succeeds in cancelling himself by refusing to criticize his fellow pols. That clip of his Iowa speech was great, though. He is quite the fiery orator.... as was/is Obama.)

Have a Very Classy Halloween

Not counting the zombie invasion of roaming Ebolaphobes, what are you most frightened about this Halloween?

If you're a One Percenter, chances are that the lower classes coming into your neighborhood to beg for goodies is high on your list of fears. One wealthy woman allegedly (or maybe actually -- because although this reads like satire, the super-rich are extremely talented at unwitting self-parody) sought advice about how to keep the riffraff away. From Slate:

Dear Prudence,

I live in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, but on one of the more “modest” streets—mostly doctors and lawyers and family business owners. (A few blocks away are billionaires, families with famous last names, media moguls, etc.) I have noticed that on Halloween, what seems like 75 percent of the trick-or-treaters are clearly not from this neighborhood. Kids arrive in overflowing cars from less fortunate areas. I feel this is inappropriate. Halloween isn’t a social service or a charity in which I have to buy candy for less fortunate children. Obviously this makes me feel like a terrible person, because what’s the big deal about making less fortunate kids happy on a holiday? But it just bugs me, because we already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services. Should Halloween be a neighborhood activity, or is it legitimately a free-for-all in which people hunt down the best candy grounds for their kids?

—Halloween for the 99 Percent

Needless to say, "Prudence" told Rich Bitch to stuff her Snickers up her Ayn Rand knickers.

Meanwhile, we learn from the New York Times Motherlode blog that there are subtler ways for the rich to control the seasonal beggars daring to set foot in their neighborhoods. Simply judge the Trick or Treaters by their classiness and couture,  and hand out the goodies accordingly:

Turned off by the people who came to their door last year, many of them adults or kids in street clothes, and few who said “trick or treat,” he (the author's Halloween decoration fanatic neighbor) decided to try something new: candy tiers. This year, they’ll reward those who play by Halloween’s basic rules — wear a costume, say “trick or treat” and be more or less a kid — by giving them pretty good candy. Those with amazing costumes will get better sweets. Those who don’t dress up at all or are of voting age or older will get a consolation prize: Dum Dums, which our neighbor considers the dregs of the candy pile.

So a taciturn kid dressed as a hobo will choke on the cheap lollipops, huh? On the other hand, anyone named Biff wearing a Mitt Romney mask will be rewarded with adult-size PayDay bars. Too bad the Times blogger didn't reveal the location of her neighborhood. It is a prime target for decorative off-brand toilet paper. 

(Incidentally, I always liked DumDums, especially the red and purple ones. Those disgustingly chewy caramel-peanut PayDays were the first to hit the garbage can.)

Meanwhile.... just not in time for Halloween: bringing a whole new meaning to the term Hot Zone:

Sexy Ebola Containment Suit

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That Hideous Strength

Maybe you haven't heard the news. Not only does The Homeland now have its very own Ebola Czar, it has spawned yet another shadowy government agency. It's called N.I.C.E. -- the National Institute for the Co-Optation of Ebola.

In C.S. Lewis's dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, N.I.C.E, stood for the National Institute for Controlled Experiments -- a shadowy government agency designed to exploit and destroy everything it touches through the copious use of propaganda. Torture and prison are in store for the few malcontents refusing to get with the program. The novel, the finale of Lewis's Space Trilogy, derives its title from a 16th century poem about the Tower of Babel myth, in which a massive structure built by the oppressed masses for the glory of the elite few resulted in death, destruction, and lots of people talking past each other.  

In dystopian 21st century America, a lethal little microbe that has killed a lot of people in Africa and sickened a few people here has been magically transformed into a political wedge issue, a campaign talking point that serves more to demonize the other side than to frighten the ruling establishment into implementing sanitary living conditions and true universal health care for all people, all over the world.

It turns out that not only can Ebola be grown in culture, it has quickly become an integral part of the American culture wars.  Health care workers have become the latest pawns in the identity politics game played by the two sides of the corporate duopoly. Ask not if we can study and treat this disease. Ask which "side" can best co-opt Ebola, and then pick your team. Are you with the Republicans, who cast nurses as demons to be cast out of society or burned at the stake along with their illegal immigrating germs? Or are you with the Democrats, who cast health care workers as exemplars of American military might and superiority?

Are you with Chris Christie, vicariously insulting your peers who dare stand up to the hideous strength of the boorish ruling class? Or are you with Barack Obama, who pays lip service to Doctors Without Borders even as his hideous and secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership would put life-saving medicines out of the economic reach of poor countries fighting Ebola and a whole host of other treatable diseases?

Chris Christie: (nasty, brutish and short to accommodate hate-infested A.D.D. sufferers) "Sit down and shut up."

Barack Obama: (droning on and on in jingoism to accommodate the fiscal needs of the Military-Industrial Complex he so ably serves): "I said this at the U.N. General Assembly -- when disease or disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the world calls us.  And the reason they call us is because of the men and women like the ones who are here today.  They respond with skill and professionalism and courage and dedication.  And it’s because of the determination and skill and dedication and patriotism of folks like this that I’m confident we will contain and ultimately snuff out this outbreak of Ebola -- because that’s what we do. A lot of people talk about American exceptionalism.  I’m a firm believer in American exceptionalism.  You know why I am?  It’s because of folks like this..... What we are -- what we need right now is these shock troops who are out there leading globally.  We can’t discourage that; we’ve got to encourage it and applaud it."

(Did you ever hear Florence Nightingale described as a bellicose shock troop before?  Moreover, tiny socialist Cuba is leading the fight against Ebola. It's not as concerned with border security, partisan politics.... or profit-driven health care.)

Dr. Kent Brantly, the physician successfully treated for Ebola, again was co-opted by Obama as a photo-op prop on Wednesday. After the president displayed his utter sincerity by referring to Brantly as "Keith," the good doctor delivered a gentle but pointed retort to the jingoism:

"At this time, perhaps more than any other, we feel the impact of our position as citizens of not only the United States of America, but as citizens of the world. We must strive together for the good of all mankind to put an end to this disease.”

Of course, Obama never once applauded or even mentioned Kaci Hickox, the nurse whose civil disobedience does not jibe with either Obama's political needs or the fiscal needs of the Military-Industrial Complex. The war budget is now so bloated that it actually boosted the GDP several percentage points this quarter. Obama himself cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control.

So pick your poison. Better yet, refuse to drink. Or better yet, go for a bike ride as you try to ignore your police escort.

Wait a Minute Mr. Postman

 So the New York Times has the big scoop that the U.S. Postal Service manually monitors our mail as well as computer-scanning every piece of it for Homeland Security posterity. What a shock. Half my mail seems to arrive mysteriously unsealed these days. Either the senders ran out of spit, or the gremlins have been at work again. Just yesterday, a thank-you letter from Doctors Without Borders arrived already ripped open. (I don't know if it had gotten mangled en route through Chris Christie's Port Authority, or was simply delayed in a postal containment tent set up for monitoring Ebola charities -- but I'll try to find out for you.)

According to the Times, the Postal Service admits having honored more than 50,000 mail-monitoring requests from various police agencies, There has been little oversight and accountability on the spying campaign, nor has its efficiency or lack thereof ever been measured.

The surveillance program, officially called mail covers, is more than a century old, but is still considered a powerful investigative tool. At the request of state or federal law enforcement agencies or the Postal Inspection Service, postal workers record names, return addresses and any other information from the outside of letters and packages before they are delivered to a person’s home.

Law enforcement officials say this deceptively old-fashioned method of collecting data provides a wealth of information about the businesses and associates of their targets, and can lead to bank and property records and even accomplices. (Opening the mail requires a warrant.)

Who are they kidding? Warrants are so yesterday, as old-fashioned as the century-old surveillance program itself.

 But anyway -- I have long suspected/known that the post office had gone over to the Dark Side... or at the very least, harbored Dark Side aspirations.

It all started with a strange phone call I received one dark December night in 2010. When the caller identified himself as the chief assistant counsel for the Postal Regulatory Commission, my heart skipped a beat. Had I neglected to put extra stamps on that thick letter I'd just sent out?  Had they finally tracked down the culprit who'd put the chewing gum wrappers and pennies and other detritus into the prepaid credit application envelope from the annoying Capitol One scammers?

I Should Be So Lucky

  No, it was actually far more horrifyingly banal than that. My caller (who only rang the once) said he knew of me through my New York Times reader comments, and was just alerting me to an op-ed he'd written for the paper in hopes I'd give it a thumbs-up review. His nifty idea was to make the financially-strapped Postal Service more viable by having mail trucks double as spies for other government agencies. (cue the James Bond music.)

I obviously assumed it was a prank call.  But after hanging up, I checked the Times Sunday review page. And there it was:  The Postman Always Pings Twice (cue the Nightmare On Elm Street music) --

The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail. But what if they were fitted with sensors to collect and transmit information about weather or air pollutants? The trucks would go from being bulky tools of industrial-age communication to being on the cutting edge of 21st-century information-gathering and forecasting.

After all, the delivery fleet already goes to almost every home and business in America nearly every day, and it travels fixed routes along a majority of the country’s roads to get there. Data collection wouldn’t require much additional staff or resources; all it would take would be a small, cheap and unobtrusive sensor package mounted on each truck. (This idea is mine alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Postal Regulatory Commission.)

Well, thank God for that. Also thank God there was no option for reader comments.  Then again, this guy had my number. I began to shiver as I read further:

True, other types of vehicles, like taxis or buses, could also carry sensors. But such vehicles typically don’t follow as many regular routes. Nor are they managed by a single organization that could readily coordinate nationwide or regional data collection.

There are a few obvious objections. For starters, there are privacy concerns regarding certain types of data. But a review panel could be set up to monitor the use of the network and ensure safeguards for handling the data.

Mind you, this was long before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the Panopticon State. Back in the good old innocent days of 2010, most people were blissfully unaware that their privacy had gone by the wayside decades ago. The worst thing that had happened was that the Bush administration was caught harassing librarians over what books we were subversively reading.  This was before the seemingly daily revelations of privacy abuses, greeted with a politician or a bureaucrat blithely insisting that such assaults on civil rights were not done "willingly", or if they were, they could be handled by "review panels." Soothing cross-agency checks and balances are there to ensure that any abuses can be safeguarded against public outcry. But my Mr. Postman already knew this years ago.

There’s also the question about marketplace competition from a federal agency monopoly, an issue that has led Congress to limit the types of non-postal services the agency is allowed to provide. But in this case, the service wouldn’t be competing; rather, it would be providing a platform that a business could never afford. If anything, by offering access to a wide range of data and thereby being a catalyst for business innovation, the service would be promoting competition, not hindering it.

Who is Mr. Postman kidding? There is no separation of government and corporations. Ed Snowden worked for private contractor Booz Allen, not the NSA. The Department of Homeland Security has an office high in the government-subsidized Goldman Sachs tower, and shared its intelligence on Occupy protesters directly with Wall Street. In an oligarchy, the moneyed interests always call the shots. Fool me once, ping me twice, the excuses are getting stale. The proles are beyond wise to the fact that we live in a crypto-fascist world.

Incidentally, the reason that I am not including the name of my postal ringer within this post is so that the next time he Googles his own name, my article won't instantly pop up in the search results, and the Postman will be less likely to ring/ping me twice. But if he does, I'll be sure to ask him about that New Jersey-Chris Christie connection to the tampering of my letter from Doctors Without Borders. 

  ***

Oh, and totally off-topic, but since other bloggers brag about their adorable pets, I thought I'd share this latest snap of my dog Snap in one of his good moods:

Quarantine This

In the spirit of austerity, and with memories of the Sequester and shut-downs still fresh in their craven little minds, the ruling establishment has now decreed that human beings as well as the programs that help human beings must now be quarantined in the interests of Homeland Security.

Whether the possibly unconstitutional sequester of people against their will is humane (Democrats' house arrest) or inhumane (Republicans' unheated tents in late October) is a matter of fevered debate.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who never met a public employee or teacher he didn't hate, has actually imprisoned a nurse in a tent outside a hospital on grounds that her humanitarian spirit might possibly spread to others. (She has tested negative for Ebola.) In a just world, it would be the corrupt and corpulent Christie who'd be placed under perpetual quarantine.... in a super-max prison somewhere, with no possibility of parole, for crimes ranging from "BridgeGate" to his illegal halfway house scam to pay-to-play as a governing ideology.

(Update: the New York Times now reports that he will release Kaci Hickox, who lawyered up, from tent prison -- if the CDC approves. This way, he can cover his own ample ass should she later develop the disease, which is what he is probably really, really hoping happens. He is that much of a dick.)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo hasn't been much better, boomeranging around the political spectrum all weekend from Far Right A (Christie) to Plain Right B (the Obama administration) in a frenzied quest to appear competent as he, too, has barely escaped prosecution for corruption.

Double Your Fun

Let's hope, meanwhile, that Ebola doesn't strike in Detroit, which on the banana republic scale  now ranks pretty close to Liberia, where the virus is out of control. Since thousands of Detroit residents have had the basic human right of water snatched away from them for lack of ability to pay, even such basic sanitation niceties as hand-washing and toilet-flushing have become luxuries out of their reach. It has gotten so bad that the United Nations visited the Motor City to condemn the fact that the gulf between rich and poor in the United States has widened to alarming and inhumane and dangerous proportions.

It's actually pretty amazing that President Obama will have the chutzpah to visit Detroit next week to "stump" for the same Democrats who have remained stonily silent on the plutocratic pillaging and ethnic cleansing of that once-great city. But I wouldn't be surprised if he manages to fit in another photo-op with the latest celebrity Ebola recoveree first, to hand out the sterile air kisses as a prelude to the next blast of hot air. Projectile political speech, as we should know by now, is as hazardous to our health as any microbe.

Here's what Obama should do: grab his pen and sign an executive order providing for five-star hotel accomodations for all returning symptom-free Africa aid workers under quarantine order, and a promise of a life-long government job in the field of their choice, followed by awarding of the Medal of Freedom and a ticker-tape parade.

***

In his latest "blame the Republicans and give the Democrats a pass" column today, Paul Krugman bemoans lack of investment in public infrastructure and how "America has turned its back on its own history."

Umm... it's the plutocracy, stupid. A gridlocked government with two undemocratic parties running the joint is just a propaganda ploy to get us to pick a team and pretend we're all participants in a battle royale between the forces of good and evil. Maybe after the midterms, Krugman will turn his attention to actual issues affecting ordinary people. But I am not holding my breath. Anyway, here's my published comment:

 Americans haven't turned their backs on history. The plutocrats have turned their backs on America.

For the government to invest in infrastructure, there first has to be a commitment to the commons. And the super-rich hate to make commitments outside of their own class.

In the global economy, there is no such thing as patriotism. Multinationals locate their headquarters and trillions in excess cash to international tax havens Or, if they're feeling especially benevolent, to the states that will pave their private parking lots for free and spend public money to train the low-wage labor corps of the future. (The promised jobs are never for right now.)

Public works projects require well-paid, unionized jobs. Since one of the main objectives of the oligarchy is to destroy unions, squeeze labor, and thereby depress wages, even the ability to borrow at zero interest is not in their best interest and not in line with their goal of total global feudalism. What do the Koch and Walton dynasties care about potholes and crumbling schools? They've got their Lear jets, helicopters, private tutors and armed security forces.

They are corporate parasites who aren't satisfied with sucking the last meager drops of blood, wealth and toil from the public. They're even taking out life insurance policies on The Help, with themselves as sole beneficiaries.

As Downton's Dowager once observed, "Nothing exceeds like excess."

And the serfs are getting restless... and mad as hell.