Parasites on Parade

All you have to do is part with one million George Washington smackeroos, and your corporation people will get exclusive access to the festivities at the Second Coming of Obama next month. This means that all the little people will be excluded and will not be around to breathe on you or otherwise disturb your VIP exclusivity during your foray inside the Beltway.  

If you didn't get your invitation yet, don't despair. They were delivered, en masse, via email, and merely give the illusion of being engraved. They are actually kind of cheap and tawdry-looking. And the spelling skills of whatever Social Secretary of Snobbery designed them leave something to be desired too. For example, the ultra-exclusive George Washington Premium Partner Package includes Inaugural Parade "bleecher" seats. Not only is the lack of custom-upholstered seating de trop, the offer is downright insulting. It sounds like they're going to stuff the corporate welfare leeches up in the nosebleed section.

The only surprising thing about President Obama shilling for tax-shielded corporate money to fund his extravaganza is that a lot of people are actually surprised about it. After all, this is the guy who sold exclusive access to his corpus throughout his campaign, for a grand total of a billion dollars. The proceeds from his Inaugural balls will be mere chump change in the grand scheme of things. 

But I guess you can't blame the victims of the Surprise. After all, in 2009, Team Obama made a big righteous deal about not taking any corporate lucre for the swearing-in festivities. Those were the days when our president was still fresh from his victorious marketing campaign based on a "grassroots movement." One of his PR flacks, a guy oxymoronically named Josh Earnest, sincerely joked at the time that the banning of corporate money was only the beginning to changing "the way business as usual is done in Washington."

 The pretense at pretense is all gone now. Still, as Public Citizen puts it, we the people should have the right to not have "our" inauguration brought to us by the likes of Bank of America:

 That the corporate-funded inaugural festivities will fall on the anniversary (Jan. 21) of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, is not just ironic given President Obama’s stated support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision holding that corporations can spend unlimited amounts on elections, it undermines the case for corporate-free elections.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has stated that it will not accept funds from lobbyists, foreign corporations, TARP recipients that have not repaid their government loans or others that do not pass its vetting process. But every corporation’s donations create a conflict of interest, because they all have business before the government in one way or the other. The problem with donations from lobbyists is that they expect something in return for their contribution. The situation is exactly the same with corporate contributors, virtually all of whom employ lobbyists.
 

Of course, it has long been known that the Obama Administration has a nifty work-around to its anti-lobbyist rule. Either the lobbyists don't even bother registering as lobbyists, thereby gaining unfettered access to the White House, or the Obama people just meet with the influence peddlers across the street at the Caribou Cafe. From the New York Times:

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”
 

So it's not so much the graft and corruption --  we have cynically come to expect that in our politicians. It's the continuing hypocrisy of a president who lectures the country on the need for austerity at the same time he wines and dines with the elites. Those "bleechers for leechers" -- the seating arrangements for the exclusive corporate rumps -- are being constructed at taxpayer expense, by carpenters who now may have to wait a few more years to retire and collect Medicare. Those people cannot afford tickets to Candlelight Receptions and Benefactors Brunches and Children's Balls.

Writes John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation,

Even if Sheldon Adelson doesn't throw a casino-themed gala in Obama's honor, there's a whole machinery in DC built on brokering wealth and influence, and a good party feeds the scene. Neither defending the celebrations nor priming the check-writers presents a good public interest case for this move.

(snip)

The Obama administration is likely to, again, justify their behavior by saying that they're following the law. Whenever their accountability policies have loopholes or problems, rather than fixing them, the administration asks to be judged in comparison to Bush, saying their record speaks for itself. At some point, though, it's time to judge Obama in his own words. Obama said unlimited donations sully our democracy, threaten public service, and weaken representation -- and has now chosen to embrace them.
Maybe Obama's setting the tone for his second term: we're not worried about whether we look like reformers at all.
 

Like I said -- they're giving up pretending at pretending. I wonder if the crowds in the exclusive bleechers (sic) will cheer when the president praises the free market in his Second Inaugural Address?  I wonder if they'll send me an email asking me to donate $3 for a chance to win one of the nosebleed seats?

One thing's for sure: if Barack Obama channels FDR and says "I welcome their hatred", he won't be talking about banksters. He'll be talking about his own base.

The Class War Ain't Got No Class!

 

A Confederation of Muppets

The dueling duopolists of the presidential pageant are creating and fund-raising off yet another phony wedge issue. They are so desperate to take our minds off the fact that participatory democracy is a mere illusion that they're not even bothering to be original this time. It's the Second Coming of Big Bird in only one campaign season! Republicans have been threatening to de-fund PBS since time immemorial, and it's always been an empty threat by posturing phony deficit hawks. But starting today, the latest skirmish in The Wars of Sesame Street has been officially been declared. So pick a side, and let the bloody battle begin.

Suddenly jolted into action by a cacophony of Tweets after his lackluster debate performance, President Obama voiced his indignation about the loathsome Mitt before a crowd in Colorado today. Mitt, he trilled, is the anti-Muppet. Mitt wants to privatize Bert and Ernie's Medicare! (Barry will chain their Social Security cost of living increases and make them work till they drop, but that's another story.)

Now that the well has run dry on their Rush Limbaugh-enabled War Against Women defense fund, Democrats are wasting no time with the email appeals to feather their nests with the lucrative golden plumage of Big Bird. (Did you ever notice how they always have to coyly hide asking for money behind a phony petition? Just Say No to Republican vaginal wands and gimme gimme gimme.)

Sen. Jeff Merkley wrote me today, not noticing or caring that my New York locale is 3000 miles, as the bird flies, away from his Oregonian flock.

Not on our watch! Sign my petition, and tell Mitt Romney: No Ads on Sesame Street!.... My kids watched Sesame Street growing up. Like many Americans – including Mitt Romney - I’m a huge Big Bird fan. But America's children need quality, educational, advertising-free television. For 43 years, Sesame Street has led the way for our kids. Putting commercial advertising on Sesame Street won't make any difference in our national debt, and just hurts our kids. For Big Bird, Jeff.

Yeah, right. Maybe if the Democrats go all pro-Sesame Street, we'll forget that they're totally run by Wall Street. We'll forget that they screwed Main Street. It's no coincidence, after all, that the crooks at Goldman Sachs refer to their prey as Muppets. In banking circles, it's a pejorative term for easily cheated stupid people.

Next time you get a fund-raising appeal from a needy politician professing a smarmy attachment to Snuffleupagus, write back. Disabuse them of the notion that we are a Confederation of Dunces, and just tell them to stuff it upagus.

Tell Politicians: No Money from Wall Street

The Other Wars on Women

While we're all being Akinized (the latest method of torture in the eternal presidential campaign of the muddled mind), there's been hardly a riffle of angst over President Obama's announcement yesterday that he will extend the federal wage freeze at least into next year. At the same time the Democrats are casting themselves as staunch defenders of our fallopian tubes, the leader of their party is sending our economic well-being right down the tubes.

By now, that two-year-old pay freeze is amounting to a draconian pay cut for federal workers, whose health insurance and pension contributions have continued to increase. It's a tough choice he had to make, said Obama, but everybody has to share the sacrifice. Except, of course, rich people. They're still waiting for their turn. His exact words:

Civilian federal employees have already made significant sacrifices as a result of a two-year pay freeze. As our country continues to recover from serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare, however, we must maintain efforts to keep our nation on a sustainable fiscal course. This is an effort that continues to require tough choices and each of us to do our fair share.

Translation: since the real culprits won't own up, the whole class will be punished. Needless to say, the scapegoated workers (nearly half of whom are women) are incensed. David Cox of the American Federation of Government Employees is calling Obama's decision "unconscionable." He said the real loss in wages for an employee earning $30,000 is $2,000 when health care premiums are factored in. The president is again demonstrating his austerity bona fides to an electorate he seems to think cares about something called the deficit. No, scratch that. He is demonstrating his austerity bona fides to his unindicted Wall Street masters (contrary to common wisdom, they're still contributing to his campaign coffers, albeit at lower levels than to Rmoney.)

The president ordered the pay freeze only a month before he "caved" on the Bush tax cut extensions in late 2010. Therefore, the $5 billion saved off the backs of federal workers was more than wiped out by deferring to the Republicans and their mega-rich sugar daddies. Obama sweetened the pot even further by getting rid of the estate tax, ensuring that Paris Hilton won't have to pay a penny more. Those were the good old days, when progressives could still get outraged by their president derisively calling them whining purist ideologues, when it was still considered not only permissible, but essential, for the citizenry to dissent and criticize. A year later, the Occupy movement would be born, and the national repressive police state would become apparent.

So this is what we have to look forward to in a second Obama term. This is the face of lesser evilism: holding ordinary working people hostage unless and until a recalcitrant Congress agrees to a grandiose bargain of trillions of dollars in cuts to programs benefiting regular people and maybe but not really the Pentagon. At his impromptu press conference Monday, the president reiterated his burning desire for drastic cuts "balanced" by a polite request that the rich pay just a tad more in taxes. This guy, whose re-election hopes hinge upon his championing of the so-called middle class, is actually putting Medicare and Social Security on the table while he is running for office. And here you thought the Republicans were insane. Again, in his exact words:

  I continue to be open to seeing Congress approach this with a balanced plan that has tough spending cuts, building on the $1 trillion worth of spending cuts we've already made, but also asks for additional revenue from folks like me, folks in the top 1 or 2 percent. That would give more "certainty" to families and small businesses.

Notice how the president skillfully makes the cuts palatable to supporters by always reminding us that "folks like him" will have to share the sacrifice just as much as the impoverished widow who'll see her lifetime Social Security benefits decrease because of his chained COLA plan, or the 65-year-old unemployed and unemployable woman who will now try to stay alive just a few more years till her Medicare kicks in.

With friends like Obama, who needs enemies like RomRy? 

What? Oh, I forgot. The Democrats will protect us from coat hangers in back alleys. So be afraid-very-afraid, shut up, and eat your birth control pills.

And pay no attention to the fact that under a Democratic commander in chief, rapes and sexual abuse of women in the military have reached staggering new levels. (19,000 cases a year) These crimes go largely unprosecuted, and the victims themselves are regularly blamed, even discharged. Rep. Jackie Speier, who's been a lone Congressional advocate for military rape victims, writes:

Despite admonitions that the military has zero tolerance for rape, the military system supports a culture that values "military character" over justice for victims. Unlike the civilian system, the defense may cross-examine victims and previous sexual conduct is admissible evidence. It's no wonder so few victims report the crime.

And if a female soldier becomes pregnant as a result of rape, the armed services will not provide an abortion.  She is on her own, on any of the 1,000 (!) American military bases scattered around the world. Tell me again about the war against women.

Chains We Can Believe In

The Beltway media bubble is exploding over Joe Biden's latest supposed gaffe -- that Republicans want to "put y'all back in chains" via their nefarious plot to eviscerate Dodd-Frank financial reform. Which begs the question -- how on earth do you eviscerate watered-down gruel? But be that as it may, the remark is being universally lambasted as a "dog whistle" to his largely African-American audience. If you vote for Romney, black people, expect an imminent return to slavery. There hasn't been this much outrage since Hillary Clinton complained on Martin Luther King Day 2006 that Congress was being run like a plantation. "And you know what I'm talkin' about" she told her black audience in a really bad imitation of 1930s Hollywood slave dialect.

The Dems are defending the Bidenism, claiming he was simply using the Republicans' "we're being shackled by too many regulations!" complaint against them. Even President Obama, who has shied away from anything remotely racial* ever since the "Beergate" debacle, weighed in. In full folksy g-droppin' populist mode during his campaign bus tour through Iowa, Obama told the People (!) gossip rag:

"The truth is that during the course of these campaigns, folks like to get obsessed with how something was phrased even if everybody personally understands that's not how it was meant.That's sort of the nature of modern campaigns and modern coverage of campaigns. But I tell you, when I'm traveling around Iowa, that's not what's on people's minds."

You can say that again, Barry. And while we're on the subject of dog whistles, they've been blowing fast and furious since right before the selection last weekend of Paul Ryan as Romney's running mate. On selection eve, the Obama Administration, purely as a coincidence, announced that Goldman Sachs will not be prosecuted after all, because it's just too hard to punish bankster fraud, especially in an election year when donations are starting to dry up and they are not as flush with cash as they would like. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi grouses that Attorney General Eric Holder has no balls. Actually, he and the rest of Team Obama have balls of ice cold steel. They have the chutzpah to announce they are fully in the tank for Wall Street while simultaneously purporting to empathize with what's on "people's" minds.

And just in case Wall Street still doesn't get the message that they will be absolutely safe during an Obama second term, the Administration today sent out still another dog-whistly signal to its financial overlords. Pay no attention to the Bidenism. There will also likely be no prosecution of MF Global, nor of its CEO,  Obama bundler, former NJ governor and Goldman Sachs chief Jon Corzine. That is indeed chutzpatic, given that Corzine has "lost" the life-savings of many an Iowa farmer for whom the president so smarmily claims to care. As Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess write in today's New York Times:

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

The hurdles to building a criminal case were always high with MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy in October after a huge bet on European debt unnerved the market. But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives. Just a few individuals — none of them top Wall Street players — have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.

Meanwhile, the chutzpatic and chaotic Mr. Corzine is "weighing" whether to start yet another porous hedge fund in which to play with other people's money. Right now he's reduced to playing with his own family's vast fortune, according to The Times. Still, the ignominy has not stopped his listing as a major bundler (raising more than $500,000) on the Obama Victory Fund's website. And in an attempt to boost his cred even further, he may even cooperate with the government in throwing one of his former female minions at MF Global under the bus. Balls of cold, cold steel. Balls and chains. We're being yanked, y'all.

* I stand corrected. Reader Blank Paiges reminds me of President Obama's statement following the Trayvon Martin shooting. The Beergate incident was an example of a political gaffe, or an off the cuff remark that was construed as a political gaffe. His Trayvon statement, of course, was nothing of the sort. On whole, though, the president has shied away from involvement in racial politics. Read Black Agenda Report (on my blogroll) for further insight. 

Jaws

Attacking Mitt Romney is like shooting caviar in a barrel. The Obama campaign TV ads chewing him up and spitting him out are a hoot to watch and satisfy our great national craving for plutocratic blood. But let's face it. Picking apart one little rotten fish larva out of the whole slimy pile is not enough, when there are schools and schools of sharks circling in churned-up waters, waiting their voracious turn in the continuing feeding frenzy on what's left of our democracy.


Just because President Obama is going full-bore Captain Ahab on Mitt the Minnow does not mean he intends to harpoon the Moby Dicks of free market global capitalism. To the contrary, he is their keeper and protector. Look no further than his Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, described as "NAFTA on steroids". Actually, you can't look further because the negotiations are being conducted in so much murky secrecy that even United States senators are not allowed access to the details.



Corporate Feeding Frenzy -- Exposed!


But thanks to the Public Citizen consumer advocacy group shining a light into the murky depths, we are learning anew that although President Obama is attacking the offshoring and outsourcing of the man who wants his job, he is not attacking offshoring and outsourcing in general. In fact, he is a champion of sending our jobs overseas. We already got a hint of that when he signed the South Korean trade deal last year. That measure is estimated to cost 159,000 American manufacturing jobs. And the Panama part of the deal actually makes it easier for tax evaders like Romney to hide their millions offshore. And the Colombia part of the package allows us to ignore the worst record of labor and human rights violations on the entire planet. In effect, Obama has helped destroy more American jobs than Romney ever imagined in his most vivid vulture capitalist dreams. As a matter of fact, Obama got so much criticism from his base over his capitulation to transational corporations that he signed the final bill in secret. Only a few applauding oligarchs attended the Oval Office ceremony, as this noir-ish AP photo of the event attests:



Barry and the Barracudas

Ironically, the Obama camp's Mitt attacks are having the unintended consequence of attracting a lot more needed attention to the latest ongoing trade negotiations. There were demonstrations at last week's round of private talks in San Diego, along with petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures and letters of protest from legislators and activist groups in all 50 states. According to Public Citizen's Lori Wallach,

U.S. negotiators have tried to keep TPP negotiations totally below the radar, but even so opposition to the current "NAFTA-on-steroids-with-Asia" approach is escalating, which is good news for the public but a serious complication for the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney as a U.S. job offshorer.... President Obama is facing a growing chorus of opposition to what his trade negotiators are up to on the TPP from his base and from other Democratic elected officials, and given that his campaign seems to be honing in on job offshoring as a winning theme, he needs to redirect his negotiators from their current TPP agenda of NAFTA-on-steroids with all of Asia.

The TPP is a lot more than the usual government give-away to the oligarchs. If passed, it will free the global banking Mafia from even the limited oversight they currently enjoy, severely limit access to medicines by the countries that need them the most, make it easier for unsafe products and chemicals to flood into the United States, and absolve multinationals from adhering to domestic environmental and health policies. Even the legal system will be subverted by star chambers run by corporate judges. According to Public Citizen, it's nothing but a global corporate coup, a power tool for the One Percent. (h/t Kat.)

You obviously won't be seeing any Rombama attack ads about TPP on your TV, from either side. That's because Mitt Romney wants this deal as much as Barack Obama does. It's one more indication of it not really mattering, in the long term, which one of these apparatchiks of the Duopoly wins the election. For another great overview of what TPP means for regular people, do read this Truthout piece by Brian Moench, titled "America the Beautiful: A Fire Sale for Corporations." If this doesn't send a chill right down your spine, nothing will. An excerpt:

TPP is much worse than NAFTA, which eviscerated middle-class jobs and wealth in the US. And this sellout to foreign corporations is not just a rogue brain cramp of President Obama. Mitt Romney demanded this agreement be signed months ago, and the notorious "climate change denying" US Chamber of Commerce can't get it signed fast enough. Romney has called Obama's the most hostile administration to business in recent history. If the TPP trade agreement is "hostile" to business, god help us if we have an administration, presumably Romney's, "friendly" to business.

If you thought that with Citizens United we had hit rock bottom in surrendering our democracy to the power of money, this TPP "trade agreement" would throw our democracy into free fall. Foreign corporations will be allowed to feast like termites upon America's natural resources, trash our environment and public health, violate our rights as American citizens and make us pay them if we try to protect ourselves.

With enough public outcry, maybe we can buy some time. Although TPP had been scheduled to go into effect this year, it looks like it might be delayed until 2013 because of... you guessed it... the feeding frenzy of the presidential campaign. Plus, the Japanese are not yet part of the talks, and the plutocrats want them to get on board the corporate gravy train too. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ever the mega-lobby of unfettered capitalism, is keeping its fingers crossed. The elites are couching their crime against humanity in spin designed to foment fear of Chinese competition, making it easier for the gullible hoi polloi to swallow their poisoned bait -- hook, line and sinker.

The Horse's Ass Race

Mitt can't keep his story straight, and Barry doesn't even have a story to tell. 

And both of them claim to really stink at juggling.

Romney went on a marathon of talk shows Friday to try to untangle his web of deceit, and succeeded only in continuing his exhausting tarantella, trapping himself even further in a snare of his own making. Nixon saved his vice presidential candidacy with his famous Checkers speech. Romney can't even fall back on a Seamus speech, because Seamus outsourced himself to Canada after his car-roof ride from hell. What would Mitt even say? That Ann confines herself to driving two plain Republican Cadillacs with cloth seats instead of Corinthian leather? This is a man who doesn't even try to pretend to be humble. Any speech about his tax returns, tenure at Bain, and offshoring and outsourcing will contain only one phrase, repeated ad infinitum: "I Won't I Won't I Won't I Won't and You Can't Make Meeeeeeeeh." 

To hear Mitt tell it, he had a hard enough time juggling his various duties running the Salt Lake City winter Olympics during his Bain leave of absence to be able to manage juggling the Giant Slalom schedule with the Giant Offshoring schedule at the exact same moment in history. In fact, Mitt was so overwhelmed being Mr. Olympus that it was like jumping into an empty elevator shaft, according to Ann Romney. The guy is way too much of a nebbish to multi-task.

And Obama apparently can't walk and chew gum at the same time, either. In a cringe-worthy clip of a White House interview with Charlie Rose, (to be aired Sunday) he said his main mistake in his first few years was that he didn't spend enough time juggling his bullshit artistry skills with his other fantastic skills. Turns out he's just as lousy at juggling as Mitt:

When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well, the mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.

(snip)

It’s funny – when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job? And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.

Yeah, Barry. Your policies -- or really the lack of policies -- which resulted in one out of every seven of us without health insurance, one out of seven of us on food stamps, stagnating wages, epidemic unemployment, continued corruption on Wall Street, never-ending wars -- would have been easier to swallow with just that one extra spoonful of your propaganda sugar. You backstabbed us behind closed doors, when you should have bullshat us to our faces. We don't need no food, we don't need no stinking jobs. In your book, we just need a goddamn bedtime story.

Somebody turn out the lights before I get accused of false equivalency.

A Pipe Dream

Progressive Nirvana: in which both presidential candidates implode and sink into a morass of corruption just in time for the conventions later this summer, just in time for the Republican Party to die of its own self-inflicted wounds, just in time for Russ Feingold to grab the Democratic nomination by default to battle the Green Party's Jill Stein for the highest office in the land. Moderate liberal vs. European-style socialist.

It's looking bad for Mitt. At best, he evaded paying taxes on at least a quarter-billion in offshore accounts, at worst he lied to the SEC about not being in charge of Bain Capital when other documents during the same era listed him as CEO. Even the right-leaning Politico is intimating the Mittster may have broken a federal law or two. Will Mitt open his acceptance speech in Tampa with the words "I am not a crook" or better yet, "I shall not seek, nor will I accept my party's nomination for a first term as president of the United States"?

It's looking kind of bad for Barry, too, now that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is getting caught up in the Libor scandal. It is pretty obvious that Timmy knew that a massively sleazy version of price-fixing was going on under his N.Y. Fed watch, and that he knew it a long time ago. He was either too weak to stop it, too cowardly to report it, or too complicit to give a damn about it. There are an awful lot of municipalities out there, cash-strapped and crumbling, who wouldn't mind getting some of those stolen trillions in pension plans and such back from the banking mafia. The lawyers are salivating.

Of course, what I consider bad, and what the Plutocracy running things considers bad, are two different things. So what if Mitt lied through his teeth? It shows what a great American he is. It is patriotic to be savvy enough to game the system. And do you really expect Eric Holder to convene a grand jury seeking a Mitt-dictment? Remember, the motto of the Obama Administration is "Forward". If they won't prosecute the Bush war criminals or the Wall Street banksters, they are definitely not going after small-potatoes Mitt. To the contrary. In the interest of bipartisanship, Barry would probably offer him a cabinet position, or at least a seat on the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. It specializes in outsourcing and offshoring and regulation-killing, after all.

And Timmy Geithner? He's leaving anyway. The fact that the unindicted Jon Corzine was able to "lose" millions of investor dollars when his scam went bankrupt and yet is still listed as a top Obama bundler shows us that corruption is not only acceptable-- it's desirable. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the unlimited money in politics is corrupting the corruption.  

Like I said -- pipe dream. Just when you think politics can't make you any sicker, you start feeling nauseous all over again.

Cookie Monster Stalkers

We're all accustomed to politicians throwing out pitiful crumbs to the common folk, while they allow the highest corporate bidders to feast and gorge at public expense. And now it turns out they're tossing us fancy cookies, too. It's bad enough that they're constantly projectile-vomiting emails into our overflowing spam buckets. But internet cookies? Say it ain't so!  Barry and Mitt are cyberstalkers!

Um-Num-Num-Num-Num.... Don't Block Me, Bro!

Well, it is so. In case you were wondering how it is, no matter what web page you visit, that the same feel-good cheesy photos keep popping up urging you to "Help the Obamas Stand Up for Working Families" and "Tell Michelle You're IN" or "Grab a Bite with Ann", it's all the fault of cookies. If you have ever clicked on a link to their campaign websites or ads, a little gizmo is activated that will not only follow you wherever you go, but will gather information about you based on where you troll on the Internet. We knew it was happening with the Obama machine months ago, when ProPublica figured out that his campaign nerds customize their money-grubbing email appeals based solely on your browsing history.  

Romney is now playing catch-up. ProPublica reporter Lois Beckett was decidedly creeped out when Mitt started stalking her across cyberspace recently. As a reporter, she spends a "fair amount of time" on his campaign website and as a result, she became fodder for a slew of ads urging her to "learn more" and donate, donate, donate.

 This is the same kind of online targeting  used by sites that sell airline tickets or shoes. If you visit Zappos, advertisements for the sneakers you looked at will sometimes follow you around the web. Romney's campaign was sending me a "donate" button instead.

But the fact that I was being targeted based on my visits to the campaign site wasn't at all clear from the ads themselves.

Each of the ads had a teensy blue triangle in the top right corner. Because I report on online advertising, I know that the triangle means I've been targeted. Many online ad companies have agreed to give consumers a heads-up that they're seeing a message that's been personalized to them. They mark targeted ads with a blue triangle icon or the words "Ad Choices."

When I clicked on the blue triangle on one of the Romney ads, a message popped up saying that a company called ShareThis had "determined that you might be interested in an ad like this." The ad had been "selected for you based on your browsing activity."

If you're interested in more of the technical details of how ShareThis does what it does, do read the whole article. ProPublica also wants to hear from you about your own experiences with political cyberstalkers and asks that you send a screenshot of the ads targeting you to: mailto:targeting2012@Propublica.org.

But if you'd rather not be part of a survey, or if the idea of being stalked by Barry and Mitt makes you queasy, take out a restraining order. No, you don't have to sue or go to the People's Court. You can make all the ads go away, forever and completely, just by downloading an ad-blocking program. I installed AdBlock (the simple version) a few weeks ago and it made every single ad disappear immediately. No more opening an ad strategically placed to be accidentally clicked while I scroll down a page. No more ads that have to be "rolled" off the page before I can read an article. It has been rated completely safe and effective, and I can attest to its sanity-preserving virtues. There are different versions adapted to different browsers, so just Google to find the right one for you.

Of course, advertisers hate it because they're still paying for ads people are not seeing. And some people are ticked because most versions of AdBlock can't always distinguish between good ads and bad ads, annoying ads and helpful ads. It's all or nothing. You can't decide you want to see the Obama ads and block the Mittster. You have no choice between Greater Evil and Lesser Evil. You can't block Walmart ads and allow Bergdorf Goodman ads. Oh, the humanity.

While AdBlock and similar programs prevent the annoying messages from reaching your screen, they do not block tracking cookies. To foil the internet spies, clear out your browser on a regular basis. (I clean mine once or twice a day. This measure has the added perk of allowing you to access sites with paywalls by erasing your "footprint history.")

As far as the annoying emails are concerned, "unsubscribing" may or may not work. You may simply find yourself engaging in a futile game of whack-a-mole. As an experiment to determine the exponential grasp of political email lists, I signed a "thank you" card to President Obama on his gay marriage evolution, sent to me by Nancy Pelosi. Sure nuff, the fund-raising emails came barfing out almost instantaneously. They came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DNC, congress critters from thousands of miles away that I never even heard of. To make it all stop, I had to unsubscribe from each person individually -- a fraught and time-consuming process. This barely put a dent in the torrent. But I think it's finally starting to dwindle down.

I tried the same experiment with the right-wingers, having signed up for alerts from the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity (a/k/a Rich People for Rich People.) The nefarious koch-heads promptly gave my email address to every right wing nut job in Nutland. Herman Cain writes often, including all those videos of stuffed animal abuse. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer offered to send me an autographed copy of her book "Scorpions for Breakfast" if I sent her 50 bucks first. (I passed). Now, of course, they're going crazy with the Down with Obamacare missives that are truly hilarious in their insistence that government medical care will kill us all. No way am I unsubscribing from that crap. It is way too entertaining.

Update: This just in from Herman Cain. It's a teaser about "Cain TV", supposedly coming soon to a cable channel near you. I can guarantee it will also play in an endless loop on MSNBC, the liberal outrage channel. From the preview, it appears to be a hodge-podge of paranoid apocalyptica coupled with slapstick comedy with a racist-misogynist slant (there's a segment with a black comedian doing a minstrel routine--hard to figure out if it's satire, or the blatant hurling of red meat to bigots and militia groups. For now, I'll choose the latter.)  At the end, Herman himself appears, telling us: "Hello. I'm Herman Cain. They think we're stupid."  And he concludes with "Let's give a lamb a gun. I am Herman Cain. We are not stupid."

This has all the makings of a summer hit.

Obama Loses Miss Congeniality Title in World Pageant

Obama may be personally popular and likeable enough in the USA. But in the rest of the world, not so much. The rest of the world is not so wrapped up in glitzy presidential campaign propaganda and apparently has not developed our acquired taste for authoritarian kool-aid. The rest of the world that happens to be of the Muslim persuasion is not impressed with the Leader of the Free World's intellectualized "signature" drone strikes, nor does it buy into the canard of American Exceptionalism. (Do as we say, not as we do.) The rest of the world is not impressed with a president who can kill anyone, anywhere in an undeclared, free-floating War on Terror that includes every back yard as a battlefield. Or, if he decides to show mercy, who can imprison anyone, anywhere -- without charge or trial.

As a matter of fact, China is actually winning the world popularity contest in some of those unstable, terrorist-harboring regions. You know -- the China that imprisons and disappears dissidents, censors the Internet, pollutes its air, enslaves its workers, and is sort of repressive. Europeans now consider China, not the U.S., to be the dominant global economic power. And China itself is becoming less and less fond of the United States and the president.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project just released a report today showing that

Global approval of President Barack Obama’s policies has declined significantly since he first took office, while overall confidence in him and attitudes toward the U.S. have slipped modestly as a consequence.

(snip)

Even though many think American economic clout is in relative decline, publics around the world continue to worry about how the U.S. uses its power – in particular its military power – in international affairs.

There remains a widespread perception that the U.S. acts unilaterally and does not consider the interests of other countries. In predominantly Muslim nations, American anti-terrorism efforts are still widely unpopular. And in nearly all countries, there is considerable opposition to a major component of the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy: drone strikes. In 17 of 20 countries, more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

By contrast, a pretty shocking 62% of Americans polled are just fine with a president killing people overseas with drones. Probably because no other country has yet attacked us with drones, and because many of us are unfamiliar with the term "blowback." But it is only a matter of time. The unremitting bombing of civilians (aka "militants") in Yemen and Pakistan is only creating more terrorists where none otherwise would have existed. And when the relatives and friends of anonymous collateral damage do stage a revenge attack on American soil, you know what the official story will be: "They hate us for our freedoms."

Ironically, of all the countries surveyed, it is Greece that most despises the American drone program. Though not victims of predator bombs themselves, they are the victims of predator banks. It seems fitting that the birthplace of democracy only gives the Obama drone program a 5% approval rating. Sanity is alive and well somewhere in this world.

Phony Outrage

Let's see.... it's been more than a week since the New York Times first broke the story that President Obama has a secret list containing the names of "militants" and "terrorists" being targeted for assassination. Among other things, we learned that the president himself is the ultimate decider of who lives and who dies. Then, close upon its heels came another scoop, describing how Obama took over a secret cyber-war against Iran begun by George W. Bush.The Stuxnet virus, long suspected to be a joint American-Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, turns out to have been another program with hands-on direction from the president himself. 

Did the White House immediately issue statements denying the veracity of the information contained in these stories, and vowing to launch immediate investigations into who divulged state secrets to Times reporters? It did not. It neither denied, nor reacted in any way, other than a few brusque "no comments" due to the secretive, sensitive nature of the information that conveniently, somehow leaked out of the deepest recesses of the Situation Room.

For its part, too, Congress was initially and predictably silent. After all, the drone strikes are an open secret. Congress appropriates the money for them.Thousands have died from American bombs in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, many of them innocent men, women and children. The only outrage had been coming from the lonely outposts of the civil libertarian blogosphere and independent journalism. Polls have shown that most "liberals" are just fine with our President unilaterally taking it upon himself to kill Muslims, to keep us all "safe."

But when the Paper of Record sat up and took notice and spilled the beans on the Kill List and Stuxnetgate, Congress also finally sat up and took notice, howling about how that, and the drone program revelations are endangering national security. Depending on their political party, they alternately blamed the newspaper itself for publishing the articles, and accused the White House of being the source of the leaks. Democrat Dianne Feinstein is upset that such information being made public will make us less safe. Republican John McCain is livid that the information appears to have been leaked for pure political gain, to boost the president's re-election prospects. None of the power elites is complaining about the illegality of the programs, executive overreach, or the loss of innocent human life. Just the leaks, and nothing but the leaks.

And today, President Obama himself sat up and took notice. Without actually confirming that he is in fact, Lord High Executioner, he vociferously denied that his White House has been the source for the Times stories. (this, despite the fact that reporters wrote that their sources were a hefty three dozen White House insiders!) Quotes from his press con this morning:

"The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive. It's wrong.... People I think need to have a better sense of how I approach this office and how the people around me approach this office."

"When this information or these reports -- whether true or false -- surface, on front page newspapers, that makes the job of folks on the front lines tougher, and it makes my job tougher," he said. "Which is why, since I've been office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks and speculation."

"We're dealing with issue that can touch on the safety and security of American people, our families or our American security personal, or our allies, and so we don't play with that," he went on to say. "It is a source of consistent frustration -- not just for my administration, but for previous administration -- when this stuff happens, and we will continue to let everybody know in government, or after they leave government, that they have certain obligations that they should carry out."

Notice that while Obama decried the leaks themselves, he did not deny their veracity or that these were horrendous allegations in and of themselves .... only that they didn't come from him. He even claimed that the Times reporters have now said they didn't come from the White House. Actually, the reporters have said no such thing, at least publicly.

Scott Shane, co-author of the "Kill List" story, did write a blogpost this week blaming readers for misinterpreting the article. For example, he now denies ever having said that David Axelrod was present during "Terror Tuesday" meetings, even though his article did explicitly state that Axelrod was a silent observer. He also tried to run from his own lead, which had implied that the president mulled killing a 17-year-old girl. And then Shane blamed thousands of "left-wing" bloggers for starting rumors based on his reporting, strangely seizing upon the libertarian Prison Planet as an example of left wing rumor-mongering.

I have a feeling that Scott Shane, for all his hagiographic reportage on the Assassinator in Chief, got a bit of blowback from the White House after the publication did not have the desired effect. The majority of reader-commenters, far from cheering for the killing president, expressed disgust and shock. Shane subsequently made a lame attempt at some stenographic damage control, particularly on the Axelrod connection (as a campaign operative, he is not legally allowed to participate in White House policy meetings) and doing his patriotic duty to slime the left wing blogosphere that has had the nerve to be critical of the drone murders. Here's what I replied to Shane*:

With regard to David Axelrod's claim that he was never present at Terror Tuesday meetings, please allow me to quote the salient paragraph from your original article:

"David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the 'Terror Tuesday' meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone ne understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements." Can you understand why your readers did not discern the difference between the casual Terror Tuesday meetings in which Axelrod merely hung out as a silent observer, and the real nitty-gritty meetings in which other people ultimately decided who was to live and who was to die? I was among those who totally missed the nuance -- so our bad, huh?

You are a master of innuendo. In this blog post, for instance, you gripe about the thousands of posters "from the left" who went nuts with their inaccuracies. You then use as an example the conspiracy site "Prison Planet" -- thus subtly implying that leftist blogs are kind of nuts. Prison Planet, incidentally, is run by a self-professed libertarian -- not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination.

For some real criticism from the left, I suggest reading Glenn Greenwald.

It seems to me that some kind of damage control is underway here. The White House thought revealing its Kill List would make the administration seem heroic. Instead, they are getting some blowback from shocked citizens. Good.

Meanwhile, The Times finds itself in the business of having to push back against the leak accusations, protesting that they were in no way spoon-fed the information by the White House. The articles in question were the results of hard digging over long periods of time by the reporters, insists Managing Editor Dean Bacquet.

It may be for all the wrong reasons, but the assassination program and accompanying evisceration of civil rights (both foreign and domestic) by this president is finally getting some attention from the mainstream media. For a good overview on the hypocrisy of the Administration's paranoid prosecution of low-level whistleblowers, read this piece by Josh Gerstein. (and of course, Glenn Greenwalds's continuing series exposing the hypocrisy and crime sprees.)

And in a literary approach to both the Times reportage and the Obama kill list itself, Francine Prose has written a stunning critique in the The New York Review of Books. Before Shane used his innuendo skills to semi-retract his own article, he used them, writes Prose, to pen a chilling indictment of Obama under the guise of flattery. She aptly compares the president's chief anti-terrorism advisor John Brennan to Rasputin and Obama himself to Tony Soprano. It's a short read, so don't miss it.

* I have taken to writing just a few of my Times comments under my maiden name initials in a craven effort to maintain my own sanity -- due to some recent personal attacks from the "veal pen" commentariat. I have been told, essentially, to shut up if I can't say anything nice about Our Leader. There is a band of people which literally "stalks" me on Times comments threads. It's the typical crap that Obama critics from the left have been subject to lately, and I have to say, it is getting nasty out there. One person even attacked me through my place of residence, describing my little hometown as being full of tattoo parlors and pitbulls. These are so-called liberals. The times they are indeed a changin'.

The only thing scarier than an Orwellian government are the Orwellian authoritarian citizens enabling it.

Obama Biden His Time on Gay Marriage (*Updated)

I don't usually watch the Sunday morning blatherfests. I just read the recaps, starting with Jason Linkins' hilarity and then I go on to the Bobbleheads. If any of the segments seems especially entertaining, I might catch a few clips later in the day on the Internet.


Well, it looks like the Osama retrospective is winding down at least, because as Joe Biden did the musical chairs talk show circuit and plopped down at MTP, he only mentioned one time that Bin Laden is still dead. (As far as I know, that is. I mean, he may have repeated himself for all I know, but I have not been able to bring myself to actually watch. It's not that I don't not know, or still can't believe that Osama really is kaput, y'understand.)


But Biden still managed to make front page news on the New York Times homepage. He announced that he, personally, feels "comfortable" about gay marriage. This Bidenism was no doubt initially calculated to send a signal to all the people disappointed in President Obama's "evolving" stance on the issue. Psssst.... the Prexy is down with all you LGBT rich donor people and the 80% of the country in favor of same sex marriage. But it is not yet politically expedient for him to say so during this election year. He might have to spend some of his hoarded political capital. Karl Rove and Fox and the gang might gang up on him and call him anti-family and stuff. From The Times: 

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Mr. Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

(snip) 

Gay and lesbian voters, while generally supportive of Mr. Obama, have grown frustrated with his reluctance to take a clear stance for same-sex marriage. He has come under increasing pressure to do so from gay donors, one of his more lucrative fund-raising sources.

Even sending a minion out to telegraph the president's lukewarmth apparently has Team Obama second-guessing itself. Aides hastily released a statement insisting that gaffe-happy Biden's views are purely his own and that moreover, he is marching in evolutionary lockstep with The Boss:

“The Vice President was saying what the President has said previously – that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to rollback those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it. Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.”

 Talk about threading the needle! Jeeze. Though, when you close-read what Biden actually said, he parsefully means that once same-sex couples have actually tied the knot without the blessing of the federal government, who is he to say they are not thereafter entitled to the same civil rights as everybody? I mean, barn door and spilt milk and all.


Whatever. The circular meanderings, the craven calculating caution of this slow-jammin', market-driven, evolving dissolving president know no bounds. And that is a real no-no for Brave New World Warrior Prince.

*Update, 5/9: Congratulations to the LGBT community and amazingly too, to the mainstream press corps, for hounding the president into personally coming out in favor of marriage equality. Credit due to Obama for risking battleground states early in the campaign season. It was a careful juggling act of principle, expediency, optics, and the potential loss of millions of gay donor dollars. All those old homophobes from North Carolina were so going to vote for him before the Coming Out Party, right? One evolution down, a hundred more to go. Let us now force him to evolve into ending the wars, the drone strikes, the warrantless wiretapping and cyber-spying, the war on whistleblowers, beginning to prosecute the banksters, to strengthen Social Security and the safety net, to develop nausea at the mere sound of the words "bipartisan" and "Reagan".... yeah, yeah, I'm wasting my breath. 

The White House Gay Marriage Evolution Chart...Is Now Complete!

We Are So Fracked

A couple of weeks ago, in my "Hey, Barack! You Don't Know Frack" post, I wrote about how the Business Roundtable mega-lobby weaseled its way into the corporation-friendly Oval Office and suggested the fracking industry could frackin' regulate itself. And how the White House started a fracking task force to oversee fracking. And how it was probably just another smokescreen to make us rubes believe the government is operating in the public interest.  

Well, it turns out to be even worse than I thought. According to a report today in Bloomberg, the Obama Administration is considering allowing Big Frack to wait to disclose the cancer-causing chemicals it uses to propel gazillions of gallons of water to blast open the ground until AFTER it has already drilled the wells. And to disclose them on its own self-serving website, called FracFocus. If this is true, we are talking about political malpractice rising to the level of criminal negligence or worse.

You may recall what I wrote about FracFocus last time. When you visit the site to get information about gas drilling in your area, you will see a tiny disclaimer that the information on the individual wells may not be up to date. By as much as a year. Which means it's probably way more than a year. And that you should trust Big Frack telling you their chemicals are safe about as much as you trust BP telling you the oil magically disappeared and their chemical dispersants made deformed Gulf marine life taste better.

In related news,  EPA inspector Al Armandirez was fired by the Obama Administration this week after Koch Brothers shill Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) dug up an old video showing him making a speech about "crucifying" fracking polluters to set an example for other polluters. Armandirez, who once said that fracking one Texas gas well caused more pollution than all the regional cars and trucks combined, had used somewhat intemperate language which the sensitive frackers decided was anti-religion. And the White House naturally agreed, and canned him.  It's Shirley Sherrod all over again. Andrew Breitbart may be dead, but he apparently cloned himself well in advance of the blessed event. 

Yeah. We are so, so fracked.

Today in Chutzpah: Bank of America Issues Human Rights Credit Card

Just when you thought they couldn't get any more brazen....


If you sign up for a usurious credit card from foreclosure fraudster, too-big-to-exist, bailed out corporate welfare leech Bank of America, they will donate 25 whole cents out of every hundred bucks you borrow to the LGBT lobby, a/k/a "The Human Rights Campaign."


In other words, they will make a profit of about a thousand percent off the APR backs of liberal do-gooders who still have enough credit to qualify for this scam. Has the Human Rights Campaign no shame for partnering with a global financial crime cabal responsible for creating human misery on a scale not seen since the Spanish Inquisition? This is the same bank, remember, that tried and failed to charge customers $5 for using their own debit cards, so we definitely know the financiers in this partnership have no shame. It is a moral characteristic absent in sociopaths. If corporations are people, then BofA is a person with an incurable personality disorder.


And what about this Human Rights Campaign? (not to be confused with Human Rights Watch, which I wrote about yesterday) According to Wikipedia, it is the largest LGBT advocacy and political lobbying group in the United States. It supports the re-election of, among others, Barack Obama (who is still "evolving" on gay marriage and recently passed on signing an executive order forbidding workplace discrimination against gays by government contractors.)


HRC came under hefty criticism for making a deal with President George W. Bush during his campaign to privatize Social Security: the lobby agreed to go along with his scheme in exchange for same-sex partners becoming eligible for benefits.  HRC was also slammed for giving high corporate marks to tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds a few years ago. As you may recall from yesterday's post, the R.J. Reynolds family has also been very, very generous over the years to the Democratic Party and Obama.


And, as you probably already guessed, Bank of America itself has been a big contributor to the campaign coffers of Barack Obama. As much as the corporate media try to claim that newly-populist Barry has been rejected this cycle by Wall Street, he is still raking in the banking cash. Ninety-one individual employees of BoA have already given him almost $60,000 this year alone, according to Open Secrets. And when the president speaks at the Democratic National Convention in an anti-union state this September, the venue will be Bank of America Stadium. So, folks, be sure to get your BofA Human Rights credit card today and use it to get cash back in hotels and restaurants and bars, and for balloons and bumper stickers and escort services campaign bling in Charlotte! Those two bits going to Gay Rights for every hundred bucks you spend will surely find their way into the pocket of our amazing evolving president. It's the endless cycle of neoliberal public-private partnerships. The only ones left out of the money loop are the taxpayers who foot the bill.


If the thought of this North Carolina orgy of crony capitalism is bumming you out, there will be alternate events, including a "March on Wall Street South" to coincide with the Democratic Con. Here's the website where you can get information on attending. You can even make a non-BofA credit card donation to help secure parade permits and other bureaucratic nonsense already being put in place to stifle dissent.


And don't forget May Day this Tuesday. If you are unable to attend a protest, don't have a job to call in sick to, don't have money not to spend, don't have a TV to turn off to avoid the propaganda, more ideas can be found here.


The solidarity promises to be severe. No credit cards are required.

Don't Leave Home Without It

Obama of Sunnybrook Farm

I don't know which is worse: the fact that the Obama Administration has scrapped protections for child farm workers, or the fact that this craven act has engendered so little outrage.

Human Rights Watch, though, has just issued a scathing report on the Labor Department's abandonment of a policy that would have protected minors from dangerous working conditions on farms, bluntly stating that our leaders are condemning vulnerable children to maiming and death. Conventional corporate media spin has it that the White House was the victim of a right wing disinformation campaign by Sen. John Thune and others, accusing it of waging a war against family farms, the American work ethic, moms and apple pie. They had no choice but to crumble! However, the proposed regulations would only have applied to farm employees under the age of 16 -- not to the children of farmers. Family farms, to the extent that they have survived predation by Agribusiness, would have been exempt. Obama never even fought back.

Yet again, this Administration has "caved" to Republican and corporate pressure because it does not want to be maligned as anti-family farm, anti-Heartland. However, what nobody is talking about (yet) is that the proposed rules would have adversely affected big tobacco farms in those all-important swing states of North Carolina and Virginia. Tobacco farmers employ migrant workers, and migrant workers bring along the kids to help out and make more money. They get paid by the bushel, and do not earn a regular salary. Among the new rules the Labor Dept. had been due to enforce was a provision prohibiting minors from exposure to toxic tobacco plants and the equally toxic pesticides used to protect them. Barring children from the harvest would have cut into the bottom line of R.J. Reynolds. Barring children from de facto slavery might have evoked the wrath of the powerful tobacco lobby. Protecting children from nicotine poisoning in the fields might have spawned a whole slew of anti-Obama SuperPac ads in Virginia and North Carolina -- two states crucial to his re-election. 

Although the president has been a public critic of Big Tobacco (his Justice Dept. fought back against cigarette makers' fight to keep warning labels and graphics off the packages) he also has had no qualms accepting money from donors enriched by the cancer-causing industry. The late Smith Bagley, heir to the R.J. Reynolds fortune, was a major Democratic fund-raiser and Obama bundler. Obama appointed his equally generous widow, Elizabeth, to a "global ambassadorship" at the State Department. She had been ambassador to Portugal during the Clinton Administration.

Of course, this big money/political rationale for throwing migrant farmworkers' children under the bus is pure conjecture on my part. I gave up trying to delve into the presidential psyche a long time ago. Who really cares what his reasons are, when the results of his reasoning are what really count. And who can be surprised by this latest deregulatory action from an administration that has already condemned thousands of asthmatic children to suffering and death by punting on smog regulations last year?

That may sound harsh, but it is no harsher than this embrace of Dickension child labor abuses by a Democratic administration. As Zama Coursen-Neff, HRW's deputy director of children's rights puts it in her report:  

The US Labor Department has caved in to Big Agriculture and their allies in Congress to abandon the most vulnerable working children in America. Instead of protecting child farmworkers, the Labor Department will look the other way when children get crushed, suffocated, and poisoned on the job.

(snip)

Agriculture is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Children risk pesticide poisoning, serious injury, and heat illness. In 2010, the latest figures available, 16 children under age 16 were fatally injured at work in the US; 12 of them worked on farms. Thousands more are injured each year.

In interviews with Human Rights Watch, child farmworkers have described working with heavy machinery, including tractors; falling from ladders; exposure to pesticides and experiencing symptoms consistent with pesticide poisoning; working in extreme heat to the point of dehydration; and “topping” and harvesting tobacco, risking nicotine poisoning, known as green tobacco sickness.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the US Department of Labor bears responsibility for determining what jobs are particularly hazardous, and thus off limits, for children under age 16 working on farms that are not owned or operated by their parents. Current rules, known as “hazardous orders,” which were drafted decades ago, prohibit operating certain equipment, working in areas with certain animals, working from a ladder at a height of over 20 feet, and applying the most toxic agricultural chemicals.

According to OSHA, most farm accidents happen to people over 65 and under 16. Three hundred children are killed on American farms every year. (Most child deaths are not related to work, per se; the OSHA numbers reflect all accidental deaths on farms. These might include household accidents, animal mishaps, motor vehicle accidents.) Adolescents already have a false sense of invincibility and usually don't have the maturity to operate heavy machinery safely. Tractor overturns are the most common farm accident, accounting for 44% of all fatalities. Most farms are located far from emergency medical facilities and ambulances usually take a long time to arrive. They are often too late.  

In case you were wondering what the Obama Administration has to say for itself -- well, not very much. The president can't even take his usual easy way out and blame Congress. Here is the official spin:

"The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations," the Labor Department said in a statement announcing the withdrawal of the rule.

"The Obama administration is also deeply committed to listening and responding to what Americans across the country have to say about proposed rules and regulations."

(Hint: the day before the decision, Sarah Palin complained on Facebook that President Obama was not pro- working family values and family entrepreneurial togetherness. Enter damage control, exit rules against damaging children.)

The Happy-Talk Bullshit

The Grim Reality (from the film La Cosecha (The Harvest)