While drinking my coffee this morning in an effort to get my St. Patrick’s Recovery Day going, the local news went off and the national news came on. A few minutes later, an outraged Senator Chuck Schumer appeared, all aflutter in a fit of righteous indignation.

Who's more important to our leaders -- Hurricane Sandy victims or inconvenienced cruise ship passengers?

Cruise ship passengers, he declared, should never be “forced to live in Third World conditions.” Something must be done! Whereupon he promised to get right down to the all-important task of regulating the cruise ship industry to insure that their relatively well-heeled customers never have to endure, for a few hours or even a few (gasp!) days, the conditions that many New Yorkers either normally live in or have been forced to live in for months due to the government’s pathetic performance in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

I did a little research on the latter, and it seems the media have grown bored with the topic of the state of Hurricane Sandy victims. The most recent article I could find was this March 6 piece from HuffPo:

Superstorm Sandy punished low-income people in New York and New Jersey, especially renters who are now at risk of being unable to find new homes, according to a pair of studies released on Wednesday said.

Forty-three percent of the 518,000 households in New York and New Jersey asking for federal aid after Superstorm Sandy reported annual incomes of less than $30,000, according to the study from the affordable housing financing firm Enterprise Community Partners.

Of those making claims to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as of mid-February, 68 percent of renters and 24 percent of homeowners were low-income, the Enterprise study said.

Apparently, there are still thousands of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans who still don’t know where they will be living later on this year, and I don’t know how many are still in temporary shelters, trailers, or tents.

But that’s old news. Who can forget the grossly obese woman complaining about standing in line for hours for a hamburger while her cruise ship was being towed to Alabama? Or the horror stories from passengers deprived of electricity and indoor plumbing for several DAYS! And then we were treated to another story last week where these inncocent passengers had to go without working toilets or electricity for HOURS! Horrors!

Why, there might have been campaign contributors on those ships. After all, if you have enough money to go on a cruise, you probably have enough money to donate to some Senator’s re-election campaign. And Senator Schumer is going to go out of his way to make sure you notice his clarion call to insure that you never have to experience what millions of your fellow Americans go through on a regular basis. Especially when you’ve spent your no doubt hard-earned(actually, I do have doubts about that) money on a dream vacation.

The message I see loud and clear is this: Poor people made homeless by a nasty hurricane that was likely helped along by climate change may just have to suck it up. Middle class and wealthier people who can afford to go on cruises must never even be inconvenienced.

It pisses me off, it does.

cross-posted at Voices on the Square

Three years ago, the Supreme Court, in what Keith Olbermann correctly called “Our Dred Scott,” ruled that corporations had all of the rights of human beings and, more importantly, that  any attempt to limit their campaign contributions violated their First Amendment right to free speech in the infamous 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC decision.

Since then, there has been a growing movement to overturn that decision. Today, on Democracy Now!, thanks to a college NPR station on my way home from work, I heard the following exchange:

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/13/overturning_citizens_united_is_a_constitutional

I did not know that Senator Sanders and Congressman Deutch had introduced a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate personhood and forever overturn Citizens United. Neither did I know that 11 state legislatures had passed resolutions calling upon Congress to pass such an amendment, nor that similar resolutions are moving forward in other states. I suppose that’s no surprise: why should the corporate media report this development that is potentially inimical to their own interests?

Not to mention that my time is limited. I’m lucky enough to have a job, but it’s mostly on a computer, so I prefer to do other things than surf the net during most of my own time, believe it or not.

This is potentially very important. There are all sorts of people across the political spectrum who find the idea of corporate personhood ridiculous at best and insidiously dangerous to representative government at worst. The movement to abolish the abomination of corporate personhood has the potential to create a truly powerful popular movement that can effectively challenge our corporatist oligarchy’s transparent attempts to turn this nation into a neofeudal aristocratic plutocracy.

IOW, I think it’s a Good Thing. I think it’s definitely worth some of my time to follow, and to participate in. I’m curious to know if anyone else feels the same way.

Feedback is welcome. Even, maybe especially,  from you, Pope Francis I.

The following is my own admittedly biased interpretation of what President Obama really meant in his State of the Union speech last night. I will loosely follow the transcript provided by the Washington Post,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/state-of-the-union-2013-president-obamas-address-to-congress-transcript/2013/02/12/d429b574-7574-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html

and, for brevity’s sake will omit a lot of it, well, most of it, always seeking to emphasize what I consider the important points. Here goes…

Mr Speaker, Mr Vice President, members of Congress, it is my task to report the state of the union. To improve it for the sake of our corporate paymasters is the task of us all.

Tonight, thanks to our capacity for deception and kabuki theater, the loyal coverage of the mainstream media, and the seemingly inexhaustible gullibility of the American people, there is much progress to report. After a decade of grinding war, our official military is mostly coming home, but don’t worry, there are still plenty of oppotunities for private contractors such as Blackwater, or whatever it’s called now, to reap rapacious profits at the expense of the American and Afghan people.

After years of grueling recession for the many and soaring profits for those we represent, we can now deceive the people further by proclaiming that the recession is over and the recovery is at hand, and most of them are stupid enough to believe it.

Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all time highs, but the middle and working classes have seen their standards of living decline and are starting to get nonplussed. So it is our generation’s job to reignite the myth of a thriving, rising middle class so that we can fleece the suckers even more.

We can’t just cut our way to permanent corporate domination; we have to preserve the illusion that we really care about the American people. So let’s put party interests aside and work together to make it look like we really do care, and we can accomplish this by getting just a few corporate interests to sacrifice just a little for just awhile before somebody out there gets the idea that there might be a market for guillotines.

We are already part of the way there. We’ve reduced American wages and benefits so much that some great corporations are bringing relatively low-paying and highly profitable jobs back to America, and we need to trumpet that to the people. That’s why I’m going to Asheville tomorrow for a photo op.

We’ve accomplished much. We’re producing more natural gas than ever before, lowering costs for many corporations and setting the stage to export it to less fortunate countries at a profit.  But I’ve got to talk about climate change because of these recent big frackin’ storms that are starting to wake the people up. We must try really, really hard to at least pretend to be thinking about doing something about it and, who knows, some of our corporate sponsors might even find a way to profit from it, so let’s give it a try.

And together, we have to take steps to insure that Latin American immigrants and their descendants don’t get the idea that they have the numbers to force real change for themselves and their black and white working class brothers and sisters, so let’s do some immigration reform that will spare us the cost of deporting millions while insuring a source of cheap domestic labor for decades to come.

We also have to do something simple and concrete that will fool tens of millions into thinking that we really care about them, so let’s bite the bullet and raise the minimum wage to nine dollars an hour. That way, we can proclaim that anyone who is willing to work can live above the artificially low official poverty line that I, of course, will do nothing to raise, and then we can really turn the screws on those lazy slackers who prefer to get food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance over real work that is profitable to ourselves and our sponsors.

We’ll continue to protect our corporate interests overseas, no matter what the cost to our own people while convincing them that we are doing so in order to preserve their freedom, which we will continue to erode by more national security legislation and policies that ignore that quaint old Bill of Rights.

And now, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to throw tub to the whale of my Democratic base: We need to  vote on reasonable gun control! Hear that applause? They love it, the suckers.

Remember, my fellow members of the power elite, that while we may take jobs with different corporations or think tanks when we leave what the people still foolishly think of as public service, while our ties may be blue or red, our skin tones white, brown, or orange(heh!  Got you there, Mr Speaker!) we share the same proud title.

We are all Corporatist Americans who know which side our bread is buttered on. It is up to us to write the next chapter in the rise and consolidation of American Corporate Fascism. May Mammon bless us all. Good night.

In my last update, Kasich had a 3-0 lead.

Ohio Governor John Kasich looks smug because he's seen the Barbarian's latest scorecard.

Congratulations, Obama fans! He finally scored on the Barbarian’s tally! He proposed legislation to ban military-style assault rifles, limit the size of magazines, and expand background checks to close the notorious gun show loophole. He might even be serious. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Well done, Mr President. Push hard, and some of this will actually be enacted, even by this Congress, into law.

Then, today, Republican Governor John Kasich of Ohio came out with his proposed budget. He scored with me by proposing the following:

1. A real small business income tax cut. Half of the first $750, 000 of business income, or $375,000 is exempt from the state income tax. As a Socialist, I’m not totally in favor of this, but it is progressive in its way.  It clearly helps out local merchants and start ups, green grocers and farmer’s markets and repair shops and bookstores and the like. And it definitely does not give away the store to large corporations.

2. The state sales tax is lowered from 5.5% to 5%. Sales taxes are inherently regressive. Any reduction is welcome. To make up the revenue, Kasich proposes imposing the sales tax on previously exempt businesses,  including law firms and lobbyists. You gotta love that.

3. Medicaid expansion. Families making up to 138% of the federal poverty line, or about $32,000 a year for a family of four, will qualify for Medicaid. Contrary to many expectations, especially in the progressive blogosphere, Kasich went for it. Yes, I realize this was part of Obamacare, but that was before the 2012 election. This scorecard is only about what has happened since.

4. An excise tax on oil and gas companies extracting oil and gas from Ohio lands. It’s not much, only 1.5% the first year and 4% thereafter, but a lot better than the current rate of nothing. Kasich originally wanted 10%, but I figure he figured he’d never get it through the Republican legislature.

5. No cuts to state funding for K-12 education as a whole. His budget actually increases state funding for poorer districts and lowers it for the very wealthiest. Hence the score.

6. Refusal to privatize the Ohio Turnpike. In fact, revenues from the state-run road will finance $1.5 billion in desperately needed revenue to improvements in roads throughout northeastern Ohio. This is a complete reversal from one of Kasich’s original campaign promises, and a good one, IMHO.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a nice, short article on the budget.

9-1. One would think a Democratic President could do better. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. I’m not optimistic, for reasons very well-known to the reader if he or she has read my previous posts, but we shall see.

For the last couple of months, after seeing lots TV news stories wailing about Food Stamp fraud, I’ve been paying some attention to what appears to be a coordinated assault on what’s left of the American social safety net, and particulary Food Stamps, by both elements of the corporate media and rightwing politicians. For example, there’s this Daniel Halper piece in the Weekly Standard:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/federal-welfare-spending-skyrocket-8…

After a Scary Graph put together by Senate Republican staffers, Halperin quotes Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee:

 The best example of our broken welfare state may be SNAP, or the food stamp program: food stamp spending has increased every single year since 2000, even when the economy is improving.  1 in 6 Americans are now on food stamps and the USDA has an aggressive campaign to enroll millions more - whether they need the benefit or not.

Whether they need the benefit or not? I know quite a few people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program(SNAP), fka Food Stamps. I know that neither their incomes nor their SNAP benefits have increased, but the purchasing power of SNAP has been steadily eroded by rising food prices over the last couple of years. Most SNAP recipients also work for a living, many of them are employed full time but still qualify for the program because their wages are so low that they truly couldn’t feed their families every day without some help.

I’d say they need the benefit. The Department of Agriculture, and local SNAP offices, have been trying to get the word out to people that if they qualify they should apply, that there is no shame in applying, and that they should apply before their kids go hungry for several days. Apparently, there are many who think this is a Bad Thing that discourages people from getting off of their lazy asses and going to work for whatever Corporate America deigns to pay them.

A good example is this Wall Street Journal editorial from the American Enterprise Institute:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732446160457819314169099317…

This bit particulary struck me:

Why are Americans working less? While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed. These policies include:

• Food stamps. Above all else, people work to eat. If the government provides food, then the imperative to work is severely reduced. Since the food-stamp program’s beginning in the 1960s, it has grown considerably, but especially so in the 21st century: There are over 30 million more Americans receiving food stamps today than in 2000.

The sharp rise in food-stamp beneficiaries predated the financial crisis of 2008: From 2000 to 2007, the number of beneficiaries rose from 17.1 million to 26.3 million, according to the Department of Agriculture. That number has leaped to 47.5 million in October 2012. The average benefit per person jumped in 2009 from $102 to $125 per month.

<snip>

Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously. Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline. Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000. In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day. Congress should find out why.

Wow! People are unemployed because they have incentive to be out of work! If only that socialist Obama hadn’t increased SNAP benefits from an average of $102 to $125 per month per person! Take that away, and those lazy takers will have to get jobs! That’ll teach ‘em!

Never mind that most SNAP beneficiaries are children, often living with single parents, who aren’t part of the labor force anyway. I suppose the Wall Street Journal thinks those kids should be forced to go to work for the good of their characters, too.

It’s true that part of Obama’s woefully insufficient stimulus increased SNAP, benefits, but that increase will be completely phased out before the end of this year, as this article from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates:

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3239

So even Obama thinks that an average SNAP benefit of $125 per person per month is too generous or too unaffordable. I urge the reader to answer this question:

Suppose you’re in a family of three,one adult and two children. Suppose the adult is working as, say, a cashier at Wal-Mart making  $8 per hour 35 hours a week on average. That’s $1213 a month gross. Suppose the family’s on SNAP, so they’re getting about $375 a month for food. Suppose the kids are teenagers. Can you feed the family on that much?

If you pay attention to the prices in grocery stores, you know damned well you can’t. And later this year the SNAP benefit’s going to drop by about $70 a month? Surely Wal-Mart will give their hard-working employee a raise. Yeah, right.

There will be a lot of Congressional pressure during the next round of “debt ceiling” battles to cut the SNAP program even more, all for poor people’s own good, of course. So who will fight for Food Stamps?

I know SNAP recipients can’t count on Obama and the Democrats to help them because it’s the right thing to do; their track record proves that. They can’t even count on a conservative government that wants to maintain social stability on the old Roman principle of “bread and circuses.”

I find that disgusting and stupid, respectively.

Who can SNAP people count on? Oddly enough, Big Agra and Wal-Mart and the other corporate grocery store chains, which would take a direct hit in their bottom lines if SNAP benefits are reduced.

I find that sad.

“You don’t mess–with Mary Jo.”                                                                                                                     –Barack Obama, last week

Those were the words President Obama used when announcing his nomination of Mary Jo White as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC). The corporate media jumped on the bandwagon, proclaiming that the former Federal Prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, with a proven track record of prosecuting organized crime, the terrorists in the failed 1993 attack on  the World Trade Center, and some white collar criminals, showed that the Obama Administration was going to get tough on making Wall Street follow the law.

As the New York Times gushed about both White and Richard Cordray, the former Ohio Attorney General who Obama nominated to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau(CFPT):

The White House delivered a strong message to Wall Street on Thursday, taking the unusual step of choosing two former prosecutors as top financial regulators.

Since I wouldn’t believe Obama if he said rain was wet, or the Times if it said Manhattan was once New Amsterdam, I decided to do a little digging. It didn’t take much.

Thank the Odd Gods for the Trotskyites over at the World Socialist Web Site. They make digging so much easier. While I don’t always(often, but not always) agree with their conclusions or their rhetoric, they’re good investigative journalists. They point out that Mary Jo White, after her tenure as Federal Prosecutor was up, represented the Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, helping them respond to SEC investigations. She also served as Chair of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.

Furthermore, according to the article:

Her husband, John W. White, is co-head of Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, a law firm that advises corporations and banks on their public reporting obligations to the SEC and other regulators. He is also an example of the revolving door between Wall Street and the SEC, having served as head of the SEC’s division of corporation finance from 2006 through 2008.

So, she’s not married to the Mob, but she is married to Wall Street. Literally. For the full article, please click on the link below:

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/26/whit-j26.html

The WSWJ also talks some about what Cordray did and didn’t do after his recess appointment to head the CFPT, but I don’t really understand it. Maybe someone who reads the article will and will be so kind as to explain it.

The bottom line is, that once again, Barack Obama has talked a good game, and then done what he had to do to make sure that his buddies on Wall Street are insulated from any effective regulation or prosecution from the federal government. He uses government power to advance and protect corporate interests, which is why he fits Benito Mussolini’s definition of a Fascist to a T, and that is why I label him as such. If the shoe fits…

Cross-posted at Voices on the Square

In just a few hours from now, a travesty will happen. President Barack Obama will publicly begin his second term by taking the oath of office while placing his hand on the Reverend Martin Luther King’s Bible, and on the holiday that was set aside to honor the latter to boot. If such a thing as sympathetic magic or a wrathful God really existed, either the Bible or the President would burst into flame.

President Obama was inaugurated today on Martin Luther King, Jr Day

Dr King, you see, wasn’t just about achieving legal equality for his people, the black Americans, or Negros as they were called when he was alive. He was also all about eradicating poverty for all Americans, and, by extension, all human beings everywhere. Barack Obama does not share that vision, not at all, and chances are he won’t even mention it as he symbolically cloaks himself as the realization of Dr King’s dream.

Anyone who paid attention to the 2012 presidential election campaign, and anyone who turned on a TV in the “battleground” states knows that Obama and his campaign propagandists could hardly utter a sentence without mentioning the “middle class,” but “the poor” and “poverty” were seldom if ever mentioned. Dr King would have been horrified(all quotes from hereon are in the words of Dr King):

Middle-class values stress the importance of career and money. These were not the values which led to the civil rights movement; these are not the values which lead to positive social transformation.

What were these values? Every American schoolchild should know that legal equality was one of them, but economic equality was an equally important goal for Martin Luther King. For that reason, he was no fan of capitalism:

The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. 

The profit motive is the sole basis of our dominant economic system, and Barack Obama has proven himself to be one of its biggest supporters. He’s said that Americans should celebrate wealth, and compared the financial success of his investment banker friends on Wall Street to that of baseball players in an effort to make their obscene riches appear to be legitimate. Dr King would never have said any such thing.

Dr King knew that the society in which he lived was unjust, and he also knew that only a revolution could make it just:

The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. 

What did Dr King mean by “revolution?”