Headline of the day from Germany: 'Romney Has Already Disqualified Himself'

ya gotta love it...


from a round-up of german views on romney's big european adventure 

from spiegel online international...

'Romney Has Already Disqualified Himself'

Center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Travel educates. As a result one should assume that Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger of Barack Obama, wants to learn something during his visit to Israel. Wrong! Almost everything that the candidate organized in Jerusalem fuels the impression that he doesn't want to try understanding how complicated the Middle East situation is. Instead, Romney paints the crisis region in black and white: Israel is good and the rest -- the Palestinians and the mullahs in Iran -- are lumped together."

"This one-sided world view is less dumb than it is coldly calculated. Romney is soliciting campaign donations in Jerusalem (the minimum price for two plates at breakfast is $50,000.) And he is ensnaring Jewish voters at home."

"The trip to Israel may help Romney in the short-term. But in the long-term the Republican has done damage. The Middle East needs the US as a mediator. As such, the presidential hopeful has already disqualified himself."

how wonderful that we can send a candidate for arguably the most powerful office in the world to represent us in europe and display his masterful command of foreign affairs and diplomacy... it certainly makes ME lean toward supporting the guy, doesn't it do the same for you...?

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Larry Summers wanted a flagging economy so he could torpedo Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

this goes back to a point i've made countless times here... there is nothing whatsoever incompetent about how our super-rich elites are running the show... the constant carping about incompetence under george bush made me crazy... those bush administration bastards knew exactly what they were doing and so do the bastards running the obama administration... they're carrying on with the same agenda that's been vigorously pursued since ronald reagan - shredding of the social contract and making sure that those who have the money and the power not only keep it but add to it significantly... and, guess what...? it's working splendidly...!

mike whitney in counterpunch...

What [Obama’s chief economics advisor, Lawrence Summers] wanted was exactly what he got, a slow, underperforming economy with high unemployment and huge deficits. Does anyone really think that an economist with Summers’ impressive education and experience could be $1 trillion off in his calculations? (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was eventually whittled down to $787 billion) It’s ridiculous. Summers wanted a flagging economy so he could torpedo Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These were the targets from the very beginning.

As for Obama, well, he probably figured that the $800 billion fiscal package would be enough to carry him over the finish-line in the 2012 elections, but not so big that it would subvert the goals of his chief economics advisor who was beholden to Wall Street and big business. In truth, Obama wanted the same thing as Summers, a justification for attacking the meager programs that keep the elderly and vulnerable from destitution.


[...]


Obama could allocate $300 billion per year to rehire the 650,000 teachers and other state and local workers who’ve been laid off since the crash. That would be the easiest thing to do. Skip all the red-tape connected to infrastructure and gov job’s programs and just rehire the people who got their pink slip after the crash. The money spent on jobs would more than pay for itself by raising state revenues and boosting economic activity by many orders of magnitude.


Have you seen a graph of how many (state and local) jobs have been lost under Obama? It’s shocking! Take a look: http://streetlightblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/government-job-destruction.html

We need to get these people back to work so they can feed their families and pay the bills. If we can afford $11 trillion to bail out crooked bankers, we can certainly afford a measly $300 mil for hard-working middle class families. It’s just a matter of priorities.


[...]

Obama is just as committed to gutting Social Security as Romney. The only difference is that he’s a better pitchman. Much better.

and where do you suppose all that money will go after social security and medicare lie in ruins...? hmmmm...? that's right... the social darwin .0001% are closing ranks, raising the drawbridge, flooding the moat and heating up the barrels of oil... when the peasants finally storm the castle, they want to make sure their fortress is impenetrable...

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Yes, it's been one of those don't really give a shit periods

seems to happen every few weeks... other than a few more criminal bankers being arrested (see here) - which is always a good thing - there just hasn't been much going on other than the usual shit, and pardon me if i don't give a rat's ass about mitt, barack or the olympics... besides, i've been busy so deal with it...

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Ya know what REALLY bothers me about the campaign advertising in the 2012 Presidential campaign?

watching the romney and obama campaign ads, it's like whoever is putting them together is convinced that those of us sitting out here watching them have absolutely no idea about what's REALLY going on... they're condescending and completely discounting of the intelligence of the voting public...

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Mr. Obama isn’t compromising with Republicans—he is a Republican

it's getting harder and harder to witness the charade that is the 2012 election season... the ugly lie of government of the people by the people makes it really difficult to give a shit...

rob urie in counterpunch...

Mr. Obama selected the members of his deficit
commission with a particular outcome in mind—to cut the social programs
long derided by the right as ‘entitlements’ while maintaining tax cuts
for the rich and pushing more of the same neo-liberal reforms that led
to the current bifurcated economy. To be clear, with this commission Mr.
Obama was not defending against the wing-nut economics of the radical
right, he was straightforwardly promoting them.

To assure the outcome that he wanted he loaded his commission with
deficit-hawk Democrats and Republicans. Even so, the commission couldn’t
 come to consensus and the required votes for ratifying its
recommendations weren’t found. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama continued to push
 the most onerous of these recommendations as if consensus had been
found in subsequent negotiations with congressional Republicans.


This tale, generally known to folks who are paying attention to
politics and economics, is retold in response to the ongoing pleas from
liberals, progressives and New York Times columnists that Mr. Obama stop
compromising with Republicans on economic issues. Clearly from his
actions, Mr. Obama isn’t compromising with Republicans—he is a
Republican. And Mr. Obama has demonstrated time and again that he isn’t a
defender against the predations of our economic elite; he is an active
proponent of them. How much more evidence is needed for this to be
clear?

[...]

As is the case in American presidential politics, the
choice is never between ‘good’ candidates. It is always a contest in
lesser-evilism. But at least Mitt Romney is straightforward about whose
interests he represents. Despite the use of seemingly different
rhetoric, Mr. Romney and Barack Obama serve the same masters. Those
putting forward the pretense that there is a great difference between
them are not paying attention to Mr. Obama’s record. Sure Mitt Romney
would be a disaster. Barack Obama already is a disaster. What we need is
a revolution, not more delusion that either candidate would serve our
interests.

maybe succumbing to helplessness and hopelessness is precisely the strategy... people who believe that nothing is ever going to change tend not to be troublemakers...
meanwhile, the barrage of requests for donations to candidates and causes is approaching a fever pitch...

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A real choice for President in 2012

mr. fish certainly has managed to grasp the essential reality of the u.s. presidential election charade...

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Chris Hedges: Fear and instability ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival

as the 2012 presidential election campaigns gather momentum and obama and romney face off against each other, it is increasingly apparent just how empty our political process really is... the united states - and indeed the rest of the world - is beset by problems and challenges so big as to be practically incomprehensible, yet we are treated day after day to reality show bites on mitt's "bullying," the secret service sex-for-pay scandal, and george clooney's $15M obama fundraiser... moreover, we know that, whoever wins in november, absolutely nothing will change... the super-rich elites who stand in the shadows and pull the strings of our greedy empire will still be there, writing the script and directing the every move of their puppets strutting about the stage...

chris hedges in truthdig...

[T]he functioning of our corporate state ... We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

[...]


[T]he Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.


[...]


A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and commitment.  If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided. 

strong words but redolent with truth...

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Matt Taibbi on the 2012 election: Two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus

just a short dose of reality from glenn...

Matt Taibbi has an excellent post on the 2012 presidential election, focusing on how boring and apathy-producing it is, particularly compared to the 2008 election, and how this threatens to undermine one of the prime purposes of American elections — distracting citizens’ attention from what is actually being done:

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. . . .

In other words, Obama versus McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House.

Then there’s one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don’t have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don’t have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. . . . The presidential race is always a great illusion, designed to distract people from the more hardcore politics in this country, the minutiae of trade and tax and monetary policy that’s too boring to cover. When the presidential race is a bad show, people might not have any choice but to pay attention to those other things. And this year’s version is the worst show in memory. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Digby dissents from that last point on the ground that political strategists and media mavens are adept at keeping interest levels high by manufacturing the appearance of meaningful conflicts: “It’s like one of those Housewife reality shows where everyone is obscenely wealthy and they create phony feuds and stage screaming fights and then magically become bffs the next season. It’s kind of a trainwreck that you can’t keep your eyes off of at first, but then you just end up falling asleep in front of the TV.”

and, lest we forget, this incredibly shallow, superficial reality show has been pushing its way onto our television screens and nagging us from every conceivable media outlet for the past 18+ months... beam me up, scotty...

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Mr. Fish hits one out of the park

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The 1% is a social darwinist force bent on destroying the essential social contract

i've said since i started posting on this blog back in 2005 that there is nothing our 1% desires more fervently than to drive a stake through the heart of any explicit or implied social contract... they are truly the champions of the "you're on your own" society, a dystopian, randian, survivalist nightmare that would turn a blind eye to any effort to support the common good...

robert scheer equates the 1% with the republicans, an equivalency i believe is less than accurate, particularly given the lack of any discernible daylight between the repubs and the dems...

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation’s political soul. Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems. Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party’s wanton behavior.

[...]

[T]he Republicans refuse to take ownership of the collapse resulting from their longstanding advocacy of radical financial deregulation that led to the derivatives bubble, hundreds of trillions of dollars of toxic junk, now a permanent, nightmarish feature of the world’s economy. Romney, who made his fortune through such financial finagling, even has the effrontery to call for more of the same and blame Obama’s tepid efforts at establishing some sane speed limits for the financial highway as a cause of our ongoing crisis.

scheer's conclusion is that we have no choice but to re-elect obama...

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.

it was good to hear obama use the term "social darwinism" in his speech the other day... it's about damn time somebody in our national leadership dared to say it... unfortunately, however, even though i've used the term a million times myself, it's somewhat misapplied... darwinian theory claims that only the fittest survive, but in our current context, the 1% is massively underwritten by national policies designed to benefit them and their interests, the most egregious example being the massive bankster bailout...

predictably, obama's use of the term has spawned controversy...

the huffpo takes issue with obama's use of social darwinism...

For language expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson, social Darwinism seems like a risky term to use for political ammunition.

She says most people are familiar with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – survival of the fittest.

But Jamieson, a political communication authority at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, explains that social Darwinism is a concept, an extension of Darwinism, that essentially says that those who are innately superior, often biologically superior, are advantaged in the conflict among or between groups.

She doesn't think that is what Obama is suggesting when he uses the term. Instead, what he is probably trying to convey is that he thinks Republicans subscribe to a theory that each person is on his own – no help from others, no government help.

The term is loaded with all sorts of negative historical associations. It has ties in the past to the rationalization of inequality, says Jamieson, as well as to the eugenics movement and the idea that those who are unfit should not be allowed to propagate.

And that's probably not what the president intends to suggest.

jonathan chait has a different take...

I happen to think "social Darwinist" captures the prevailing Republican philosophy pretty well. The point of the label, created by historian Richard Hoftsadter, is that a species of laissez-faire economics treated the market the way Darwinians treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards. You do not have to venture into the Republican fever swamps to find evidence of this belief. Greg Mankiw, an economist, adviser to Mitt Romney, and relative moderate within the party, has written:

People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his.

Now, I suspect that right-wingers object to the term "social Darwinist" because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce. Almost none of them would take the theory quite so far. But the more symbolic application of Darwinism to the market, as a morally optimal tool for allocating rewards, seems appropriate. Republicans may prefer a more positive-sounding label, but in politics you don't always get to pick your label.

the biggest piece of work that needs to be done in this country is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we are ALL in this goddam boat together and that it takes ALL of us to make it work... and that realization will never come about as long as the 1% insists they are at the top of the economic ladder as a result of their own inherent self-worth... such a misbegotten notion is at the fetid, rotting core of what we so proudly extol as our "capitalist free market" while completely ignoring the dynamics of a system specifically built to empower the rich...

p.s. it's interesting to see both commentators eschew eugenics... believe me, even though - thankfully - it's not part of the national dialogue, for those who are convinced that they have achieved their lofty status in society as a result of their superior genetic attributes, the concept of eugenics is only a small step away...

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Reverend Billy and his gospel choir join OWS in targeting Romney fundraiser

reverend billy and the gospel choir of the church of stop shopping sings outside the waldorf astoria hotel in new york city where a fund-raiser was being held for mitt romney...

On March 14, 2012, over one hundred people from Occupy Wall Street and other groups rallied against corporate tax breaks, against corporate spending in politics, in support of the Dream Act, and AGAINST Mitt Romney (because he is on the wrong side on all those issues).

Mitt Romney was holding a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria for his presidential campaign.

i'm a self-confessed fan of the reverend billy and his gospel choir...

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AIPAC and the 2012 US Presidential election - a report from Al Jazeera

What role does AIPAC play in US elections?

(click image or here to access video clip)

The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US, is holding its biggest annual conference yet with around 13,000 delegates in Washington.

For all those bidding to become the next US president, it has become an essential campaign stop. The group has strong ties to the religious right and evangelical voters. And it is a very influential force in Washington politics.

Demonstrators from the occupy movement held a small protest outside the event urging no war on Iran and no US tax dollars for Israel.

On Sunday, Barack Obama, the US president, took to the stage and told the audience that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. But he did not support Israeli military action against Iran's nuclear facilities - at least not yet.

"If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he'd be impeached. Former President Ronald Reagan's confrontations with Israel were harsh and personal, yet Republican conservatives revere him and the Jews remember him as a great friend."

- Chemi Shalev, an Israeli journalist and political analyst

Three of the four Republican candidates bidding to unseat the US president addressed the conference on the biggest day of the nomination battle so far - 'Super Tuesday'.

Rick Santorum flew in especially for the event before heading back to Ohio, while Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich appeared via satellite link.

A number of Republicans have sought to attack the US president over his administration's relationship with Israel. And the Republican presidential candidates have all tried to paint Obama as an undependable partner for Israel who is weak on Iran.

Mitt Romney said: "We've heard a lot of words from the administration. Its clear message has been to warn Israel to consider the costs of military action against Iran. I don't believe we should be issuing public warnings."

And Newt Gingrich said: "If an Israeli prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second holocaust through pre-emptive measures that I would require no advance notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world."

So what role do pro-Israel lobby groups, and AIPAC in particular, play in the US election and why are they courted by those competing to be the next US president? How do Barack Obama's dealings with Israel compare with those of his predecessors, including Republicans?

To discuss these issues presenter Anand Naidoo is joined by: John Mearsheimer, the co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy; Larry Greenfield from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; and Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House and US state department official.

the u.s. is so in bed with israel...

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Alexander Cockburn: Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era

living through the slow-motion train wreck that is the endless 2012 presidential election is one of the most painful experiences of my 64 years and candidates like rick santorum push the pain level to almost intolerable levels...

from counterpunch...

Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who ran for the nomination in 1988, has the tolerant, glassy-eyed bonhomie of the late Dean Martin. Robertson has always been in show business. Four years ago we had Mike Huckabee, the evangelist and former governor of Arkansas, one of the boys, shacked up with Mrs Huckabee in his doublewide on the grounds of the Arkansas gubernatorial mansion. He has always been in show business too.

But with Santorum – a conservative Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei – there’s a truly manic edge to his religious pronouncements and activities. It was Santorum and Mrs S, don’t forget, who took their still-born baby home from the hospital and laid it among their living tots, telling them, “he’s with the angels now,” an episode Mrs Santorum later recorded in a memoir.

Santorum doesn’t believe in the right to privacy. Not that Obama has any qualms about taps on your phone and powers of arbitrary arrest, but he probably doesn’t care too much about whatever human combos are being tried out in the bedroom. Santorum frets 24/7 about beastliness and unnatural acts, and yearns to restore full rights to snoops to kick down the motel door, twitch aside the blankets and haul couples off for all manner of moral abominations.

Contraception in Santorum’s opinion is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”. Pre-natal testing is also a no-no for Santorum, father of eight.
 
In 2003 Santorum said he favored having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”. The possibility of bestiality in today’s licentious times bothers him a lot — “man on dog,” as he famously put it on a talk show. Not for him the possibility of abortion in cases of rape: “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.”

[...]

Why is a guy like this currently running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination? The usual maps drawn by political experts stipulate that at some point in the prolonged nomination battle the candidate has to shed the gothick nuttiness and over-the-topness that got him traction in the early primaries and reach out to the independents without whose support no presidential bid can succeed.

There’s zero sign that Santorum is of any disposition to do this. So why does he turn out to be the last man standing in the path of the Mormon billionaire Mitt Romney in the battle for the nomination?

First and foremost, he’s not Mitt Romney.

ain't it amazin' how somebody like santorum can actually make somebody like romney seem not all that bad and somebody like romney can make a two-timing, bait-and-switch president like obama seem halfway acceptable...? nah... screw 'em all, every damn one of 'em...

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James Howard Kunstler: The banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of the economy

kunstler takes on the rantings of the unhinged repubs and compares them to the equally unhinged democratic denials of reality...

[I]t's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

[...]

Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.

The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?

when people are afraid, they will listen to just about anything that they think can reduce their fear...

if the world as i had always known it was coming down around my ears and i had no idea what was going to happen next, i would be VERY receptive to anyone and everyone who presented themselves as having a solution at hand...

whether it's the repubs promising that they will vanquish all society's great "evils" - brown people, gay people, non-christian people, poor people, uppity women, uppity presidents, uppity countries, the list goes on - or the dems promising a return to the go-go economy, people who live in fear will be very responsive...

the one thing fearful people DON'T want to hear is anyone spouting reality...

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This is your democracy on meth

post title courtesy of timothy egan in the nyt...

Newt’s Shop of Horrors

ari berman in tomdispatch...

Tomgram: Ari Berman, The Politics of the Super Rich

[T]he super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1% of the 1%. Romney’s Restore Our Future Super PAC, founded by the general counsel of his 2008 campaign, has led the herd, raising $30 million, 98% from donors who gave $25,000 or more. Ten million dollars came from just 10 donors who gave $1 million each. These included three hedge-fund managers and Houston Republican Bob Perry, the main funder behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, whose scurrilous ads did such an effective job of destroying John Kerry’s electoral prospects. Sixty-five percent of the funds that poured into Romney’s super PAC in the second half of 2011 came from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, otherwise known as the people who brought you the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.

[...]

Before Citizens United, the maximum amount one person could give to a candidate was $2,500; for a political action committee, $5,000; for a political party committee, $30,800. Now, the sky’s the limit for a super PAC, and even more disturbingly, any donor can give an unlimited contribution to a 501c4 -- outfits defined by the IRS as “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare,” and to make matters worse, that contribution will remain eternally secret. In this way, American politics is descending further into the darkness, with 501c4s quickly gaining influence as “shadow super PACs.”

so, the u.s. has now officially joined the ranks of third world countries whose super-rich elites have routinely bought and sold the national assets of their people to the highest bidder, the common good be damned...

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Obama the neo-con is no longer in the closet

for those of us who've been waiting for obama to rip off his mask and reveal his true self, andrew levine, writing in counterpunch, claims that has now happened...

[W]ith what remains of organized labor finally beginning to fight back, and with the Occupy movements of last fall getting ready to burst forth again, American politics is no longer just an electoral circus in which two semi-established parties huckster their offerings to “moderate” voters. Because Democrats and Republicans are beholden to the same interests and because there are few differences between them that are not merely stylistic or cosmetic, our electoral politics has long been mainly of sociological or even clinical interest; what called for an explanation was why two such likeminded parties became so polarized, why they couldn’t “all just get along.” Now we have more important things to concern us; real politics is back.

But Obama is still relevant, especially in an election year, when our media can be counted on to work overtime covering every facet of the horse race, while ignoring matters of graver consequence. It is therefore timely to reflect on the trajectory of Obama’s governance to this point, and on one rather startling development in the Obama story that has emerged in recent weeks – his newfound willingness to trumpet neoconservative ideas.

Obama, or at least the Obama of term one, will be remembered, above all, for disappointing the hopes of the constituencies that put him in office. He will also be remembered not just for having raised the level of ambient hypocrisy, but for the audacity with which he talks the talk, while walking a very different walk. The more Obama waxes ‘populist,’ the better the rich do, and the more corporate criminality flourishes. The more he speaks of peace, the more the drones fly, and the more his very own Murder Incorporated (Navy Seals and the rest) spread murder and mayhem.

He gets away with it, in large part, because he’s good at fooling some of the people all of the time – not all liberals, but a sizeable number of them. Once it becomes clear to all that the Republicans will nominate their least scary contender, expect those liberals to make fools of themselves big time. No longer can they make a case for Obama by playing up the absurdity of a Trump or Cain or Bachmann presidency. Soon, they won’t have Newt Gingrich to kick around any more either. Expect Rick Santorum too to go the way of what Google says he is — unless, as in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, Romney again miscalculates and underspends.

[...]

But Obama’s readiness of late to signal approval for neoconservative ideology marks a new departure. What makes it all the more astonishing is how unnecessary it is. It is not as if anything is changing at the policy level. In deeds, not words, Obama has always been a practicing neocon; from Day One he could justifiably have declared “we are all neoconservatives now.” But he had too much sense to do anything of the sort — then.

[...]

Unless we have all been wrong about how smart Obama is, it could hardly be because he finds neocon musings intellectually engaging. And we can only hope that he isn’t testing the waters, seeing how much liberals of the Obama-is-the-best-of-all-possible-presidents school will accept. The most likely explanation is that, with an election coming, this is a calculated move on Obama’s part to close what space there is that separates him from Romney, the better to capture the rightward veering center.

Whatever the cause, there are indications of late that Obama has taken on board Kagan’s main contention – that American power is not in decline; that, quite the contrary, we are on the threshold of another glorious American century. The plain implication is that there is no hard crash in the offing, and therefore no need for the empire to change course. American world dominance isn’t over yet, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. And for this, the argument goes, the world can only be grateful.

[...]

But until now he has at least tried to be discreet about it; he was just a closet neocon. Now that is changing. Is it because he feels that the pressure to go to war against Iran is becoming irresistible, and that the wisest course for him, in an election year, is: if you can’t beat them, to join them? All that is clear for now is that the neocon con is back, and that it is happening not just in the Romney campaign – and, for what difference it makes, also in Gingrich’s and Santorum’s — but also, blatantly, at Obama’s instigation.

at least perhaps now, we can step away from the cognitive dissonance that has plagued those of us who have continued to cling to the "hope and change" mantra...

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Romney's Bain & Co., a job "cremator," now advising American Airlines on how to kill their unions, their pensions and their workforce

ain't this sweet...

As Mitt Romney campaigns in today’s Florida presidential primary, airline workers have been following him with a message about one of his old company’s newest clients: Airline giant AMR, the parent company of American Airlines and American Eagle. AMR, which filed for bankruptcy in November, last week announced plans to retain the advice of Bain & Co., the consulting firm where Romney worked before co-founding private equity firm Bain Capital in 1985.

“He’s talking about creating jobs,” says Transport Workers Union President James Little, but “he’s not a job creator. He’s a job cremator.” TWU represents 24,000 members at American Airlines and American Eagle whose jobs and benefits are threatened in the bankruptcy process.

AMR’s retention of Bain (for consulting on its American Eagle subsidiary) came out the same week as news that AMR had contributed less than $7 millionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif to its pension fund, out of a normally required $100 million, for the month of January. Days later, AMR increased its contribution. “I have a hard time sitting back,” says Little, “when the company is taking hard-earned money…to pay $525,00 a month to have this company come in and tell them how to cut heads.”

[...]

Reporter Terry Maxon predicted Sunday in the Dallas Morning News that AMR’s proposal tomorrow will include replacing all pensions with a 401(k), outsourcing thousands of jobs, and requiring employees to pay more of the cost of their health insurance. Maxon says those predictions were based on “conversations, management proposals in contract talks and what other airlines adopted” in their own bankruptcies.

this has all the makings of a deadly cocktail for romney, bain and american... unfortunately, american employees and retirees will still be the ones who get screwed...

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The cartoonist tries to figure out what's funny about the Republican candidates

i guess it's only funny insofar as any of us find bigotry, deliberate ignorance, pandering, denial, delusion and lying funny...

equally not funny is that they are being paid attention to as if they had anything worthwhile to say...

and to think that one of them - most likely the pathetic one-percenter from massachusetts - will be our next president...

and, even if the incumbent is re-elected, we'll simply have to continue dealing with this...



i just don't know how i can handle this kind of excitement...

we are s-o-o-o-ooo screwed...

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Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it

i've always felt this way about the super-rich... they've always lived in their separate little worlds but i don't remember that they have ever had a larger impact on the rest of us as they do now...

mike lofgren, truthout...

I am unaware of a well-developed theory ... about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally.(i) It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension - and viable public transportation doesn't even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree, the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy's palpable animosity toward public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education "reform" is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends.(ii) A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie's is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an Army pack. Now, the military is for suckers from the laboring classes, whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich toward the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"

[...]

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years - a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies - and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent President Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

the super-rich have always thought of themselves as global citizens, for the most part not constrained by national boundaries and free to rape and pillage wherever in the world there was money to be made...

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The buying of the President 2012 - Mitt Romney's top contributors

and who, may i ask, do you think mitt will feel most obligated to if he is elected...? i venture to say it would not be the peasants and serfs...

from opensecrets.org...

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Goldman Sachs	$367,200
Credit Suisse Group	$203,750
Morgan Stanley	$199,800
HIG Capital	$186,500
Barclays	$157,750
Kirkland & Ellis	$132,100
Bank of America	$126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers	$118,250
EMC Corp	$117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$112,250
The Villages	$97,500
Vivint Inc	$80,750
Marriott International	$79,837
Sullivan & Cromwell	$79,250
Bain Capital	$74,500
UBS AG	$73,750
Wells Fargo	$61,500
Blackstone Group	$59,800
Citigroup Inc	$57,050
Bain & Co	$52,500

by contrast, the largest contributor to barack obama is microsoft at $171K...

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