The Huffington Post reported today that Kentucky senator Jim Bunning, who is not running for re-election, staged a 1-man filibuster and would not give his consent to extending Federal unemployment benefits for a 30-day period until Congress can pass more detailed unemployment extension legislation. The GOP leadership did not support Bunning in his crusade to keep $10 billion from being added to the Federal deficit. This will not stand, of course, but in the interim state governments who collectively are facing a $250 billion shortfall will have to make up the difference. To top off this inexplicable act of cruelty Bunning complained about missing a basketball game. Didn’t he get a chance to call his bookie? I guess the chance to play President Bunning for at least one evening was just too enticing to pass up. Even with the American people suffering through daily examples of a totally broken legislative process this perfidious act of “fiscal discipline” strains the cerebral cortex. Jim Bunning, All-American asshole! And he sucked when he pitched for the Pirates too!

    For 7/1/2 hours on Thursday President Obama argued with Republican leaders over a heatlh care reform bill that leaves 23 million uninsured, places no caps on premiums for older Americans plus those with pre-existing conditions, enacts a 40% excise tax on individuals with top-shelf  health insurance plans worth $24,000/yr or more, makes it nearly impossible for women to get abortions through private insurance coverage, and quite likely includes cuts in popular Medicare programs.  Single-payer and public option advocates were not invited to the table.  My question to the Republican leadership is what’s there not to like? Obama taking credit for this travesty? Of course! This is the result of a bought-off Congress taking $1.4 million a day from private-insurer lobbyists for months on end pretending to cross swords over the best way to deliver tens of billions of dollars in profit to the existing  health care monopoly. I actually agree with the GOP that the bill should be scrapped, but not for piece-meal legislation that will do nothing to stop the Wellpoints of the world from raising premiums by 39% because of “soaring costs” while their top executives take a cue from the financial services industry and receive hundreds of millions in undeserved bonuses.  Apparently “bonus envy”  is a supreme motivating factor among our corporate elites, all jockeying for recognition by Obama the Private-Insurer King as great guys who deserve over-the-top compensation just like baseball players. What has our inverted totalitarian debt- state come to? Hopefully a sizeable protion of the sentient public can see this bullshit for what it is even if we’re all just riding on the Titanic.

      As that Peoples’ Soviet-smasher V.I. Lenin used to say, “What Is To Be Done?” Shake off your lethargy, America!  Scream, Rant and Rave at your senators and reps, let them know you’re in on the scam and next year a new corporate-approved toady will be souring the milk of  late-stage capitalism! Above all, you in the middle-class, Lie, Cheat and Steal to get the best health care you can for you and your loved ones. Me, I’m poor; I’ll get mine!

  This past week I was surprised to learn that reports of the death of the “Public Option” seem to be wildly exaggerated. Written off as progressive pie-in-the-sky by mainstream punditry (and more importantly, Rahm Emanuel) little more than a month ago, as of this writing 18 senators have gotten religion and word is that the increasingly cautious Barack Obama will give his blessing if Harry Reid signs on. What’s going on here? One difference-maker has to be the Scott Brown Effect; anti-incumbency resulting from bi-partisan populist rage directed toward Obama’s coddling of the financial sector has sent Democrats scurrying to find a mea culpa to satisfy the “little people”.  Liberal elite consensus seems to have momentarily spurned the private insurance industry and its massive lobbying warchest;  even so the public option is not exactly Medicare For All. As previously envisioned, this program will enroll at most 9 million people and will not begin until 2013; by then a newly elected republican administration would obviously do everything in its’ power to derail it, so it’s not exactly political suicide to support the public option NOW. In its’ last-gasp previous incarnation the P.O. had been emasculated to the point of where the program would have been privately run anyway so insurers would not be out of the loop. And  with Obama finally realizing that budgetary reconciliation is the only option left for saving his agenda,  the mere hope that a public option will be part of the solution will be seen as enough to shore up his increasingly dispirited base.  After all, 18 senators is way short of the majority needed to pass this “socialist” program that so rankles Democratic corporate contributors.

    President Obama’s latest miscalculation of the mood of the average American mid-term voter is absolutely SHOCKING in its innate cluelessness, but let’s get real here; Rahm Emanuel has obviously calculated that keeping at least some of the financial industry’s monstrous campaign contributions in the Democratic fold trumps any sort of populist posturing. After all, with SCOTUS’s recent decision to open the floodgates for corporate political donations tilting the playing field sideways, and considering recent reports that the banking industry will throw mid-term financial support back to the GOP, the new corporatist party had to do something. I can just imagine the conversation:

          Obama: well gee, I don’t know Rahm, I have been doing the FDR thing to death recently. Don’t you think this Bloomberg interview will make me look two-faced and out-of-touch with the voters?

          Emanuel: I don’t give a fuck how it makes you look, Barry! We’re gonna get slaughtered anyway! Do you wanna lose majorities in both houses, or do you wanna congratulate that bitch Palin in February 2013?

         Obama: I certainly want to be re-elected!

          Emanuel: Well then kiss Lolyd Blankfein’s ass! Jesus, what a retard!

    Paul Krugman’s correct; we are doomed, but since Sept. 2008 we’ve been doomed anyway. The deterioration of our democracy into a completely inverted and privatized totalitarian state will make the fall of Rome look like a burnt matchstick.

    Words fail to describe the incompetent, error-filled, and nearly inhuman snail’s-pace response of the Pittsburgh Public Works Department to “Snowmaggedon 2010″, the extraordinary weather event that absolutely ravaged Western Pennsylvania this past weekend. From my unique vantagepoint as a Pittsburgh cab driver, ferociously dedicated to filling a stranded public’s tranportation needs throughout the disaster, I can personally attest to the city’s complete lack of preparedness for the blizzard. In the winter of 1978 we experienced a similar storm which dumped 12 inches of snow one day, followed by 13 inches 24 hours later.  Even in the midst of that catastrophe the buses still ran while salt trucks and snowplows were out in force all over Allegheny county. This time around there was NO coordinated response whatsoever until Monday morning  Feb. 8th, almost 48 hours after the snow stopped falling. Obviously the buck stops at the desk of our boy-wonder mayor, the “honorable” Luke Ravenstahl, a pathetically lame throwback to the Democratic “machine” politicians who ran Pittsburgh for decades. An inside source who will remain anonymous clued me in to the fact that Luke the Drifter spent the weekend of the blizzard partying at a central Pennsylvania resort complex while the city was paralyzed. This is consistent with Mayor Ravenstahl’s other recent  “initiatives”,  which include spending well over $1 million to import security personnel (police units from as far away as Arizona plus the National Guard) to fend off anarchists and “protestors” (the arch-enemies of all God-fearing yinzers) at September’s G-20 Summit. Trouble was, there were so few dissenters to repress that said security forces wound up instigating a police riot at the University of Pittsburgh, where totally innocent not to mention completely apolitical students were tear-gassed, beaten, and in some cases arrested for the crime of stepping outside their dorms and apartments at the wrong time of day. More recently Mayor Ravenstahl demonstrated his compassion for the working class by vetoing a living-wage provision for Pittsburgh janitors and maintenance personnel on New Year’s Eve after signalling that he would support the measure. But this chicanery pales in the face of endangering the most vulnerable sectors of the populace (the elderly, the handicapped, the underclass and the working poor) who are absolutely dependent on city services and especially public transportation during a mega-blizzard. A completely unscientific sampling of the public mood (i.e. bitching with my customers) reveals a complete unanimity of disgust. In short, IMPEACH LUKE RAVENSTAHL!!!

     What would a shut-in Snowmeggedon Sunday morning be without Maureen Dowd’s “fashion politico” column in the NYT? Oh, wait, you mean that’s not what its called? Could’ve fooled me, since today’s profile of potential New York Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr. (A Scrubbed Toe In The Race, 2/07/10 @nytimes.com) told us everything about Ford’s workout regimen, his favorite downscale eateries, his family history both political and personal, and absolutely nothing about Ford’s reasons for presumably entering the N.Y. Senate race. I guess no explication is necessary after you’re already anointed by Maureen Dowd.  Ford plays it both ways, riffing on his love for NYC while maintaining that “the political bosses” (Chuck Schumer and The White House) shoved him away from the race. And maybe that’s a good idea. Perhaps it’s Dowd’s intention to illustrate Ford’s lack of engagement with political reality by focusing on his lifestyle of cushy accoutrements. It’s really hard to imagine the ex-Tennessee congressman switching gears and running as a raging populist (has he ever been outside of New York City?) in a year when the “man of the people” routine is a necessary political fiction. Although emblematic of the elite that spawned him, Harold Ford Jr. distiguishes himself only by virtue of a pathetically entitled opportunism and an “empty vessel” status (aside from “rainmaker” designation at Merrill-Lynch) that seems entirely deserved.

    From Day one, President Obama’s supposed focus has been jobs, jobs, jobs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, last year’s stimulus has saved or created 2.4 milllion work opportunities, although with 16 million unluckly job-seekers out there this barely a drop in the bucket. In today’s Salon Andrew Leonard refers to the “ever-popular ‘U-6′ measure of unemployment, which puts together ‘Totally employed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilan labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force fell … from 17.3% to 16.5%”. Of course, the stimulus would have created a lot more jobs  if half the money had not gone to legislative pork and tax cuts, which is how you make sausage in the District Of Columbia. So the question now arises as to what the Administration does for an encore. In Barack Obama’s America, simply taking $30 billion of unsed or refunded TARP money for bestowing tax credits on small business to start hiring should do the trick. After all, $5000 per new employee is a pretty sweet deduction come tax time. Unfortunately, what’s absent in this scenario is that economically universal need for consumer DEMAND, which is not expanding. Most liberal (Krugman, Dean Baker, Robert Pollin) and even centrist economists compellingly argue for getting more money into the hands of working people who will certainly spend it, as these folks (like myself) are holding on to financial “security” by their fingernails. More spending = more demand = more jobs. How this equation is accomplished via a paltry 30 billion dollars is inconcievable to my layman’s consciousness, but you can be sure that successful or not the “jobs bill” will be trumpeted by the Democrats in November (what else have they got?).

       A huge constraint on any new spending to create consumer demand is, of course, THE DEFICIT. Funny, I remember Herr Cheney remarking not too many years ago that “deficits don’t matter”, especially when increases in the military budget are paid for by China. Democrats are not so lassiez-faire. Bill Clinton used budget concerns as an efficient smokescreen to self-derail his own “progressive agenda” in the name of fiscal discipline. A cynic would discern the scam; recent Republican administrations (Bush 41 and 43) run up the debt so “progressive” democrats have no choice but to govern from the right in the name of austerity (I know a rigged game when I see one). For the American people this all resolves in a poisoned cul-de-sac; either be content with a decade of yearly trillion-dollar deficits, with accompanying economic malaise (i.e. 10% unemployment or better ’til 2019!) or throw the Democrats out, strangle the Federal Govt. in a bathtub, and bring back the Ownership Society (stand on your own 2 {white} feet, tinhorn!). It’s a bulwark of Marxian economic theory that economies have to collapse for the petit-bourgeoise (i.e. liberals) to get off their grad-school superstar assses and ally with the working classes to demand radical reform through demographically integrated “populist” movements. I sure hope so.