MERRY CHRISTMAS

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year to savor the very finest music from all corners of the earth. There's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Chanticleer. And the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.

And then there's the fabulous mezzo soprano Melissa Davis. Oh Lordy...how the woman can sing. Enjoy!

Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All.

Merry Christmas, love and joy,

-2Truthy

Have Yourself a Miserly Little Christmas: How the 'Bro Stole the Country

(Very Seasonal Thanks to Joe Cannon's Brilliant, All-time Masterpiece How the Bro Stole the Country)

“Insurance companies were often “just one step ahead of the sheriff.’’ -Sen. Sherrod Brown

“The industry lacks a moral compass.’’ -Sen. Dianne Feinstein

Miserly Trickle Down Economics of the Season

North Dole, USA – HO! HO! HO! Just in time for Christmas! This Grinch of a glitzy, corporate welfare land grab health care “reform” bill passed the Senate today. Roll out the Wassal! Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (D) Rhode Island said the business model of the health insurance industry deserved to die:

“It deserves a stake through its cold and greedy heart.”

Cold and greedy? Is that what the people of this nation have become? I don't know about the rest of you, but this Christmas, I am asking Santa to deliver a moral compass to Barry's stocking to help guide him in the New Year during his much ballyhooed eleventh dimensional chess game. But hey, who ever said trickle down economics was dead? This health care scam bill is IT – gift wrapped in a sterling silver C.O.D. bow just for you, dear plebs!

HAVE YOURSELF A MISERLY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

Have yourself a miserly little Christmas

With their morals light

From now on,

Health, jobs and war are this nation's plight.

Have yourself a miserly little Christmas,
And if you are gay,

Fight for equal rights -

Or you'll have hell to pay.

Here we are as in olden days

Looking for civility of yore.

Forcing us to pay insurance thugs

Like a bunch of mugs forever more.

Through the years

We always will remember
Obama's fateful bow

Hanging onto a Nobel while slopping at the trough.
And have yourself a miserly little Christmas now.

Merry Christmas to All.

-2Truthy

The Gay Swami's Happy Friday Poetry Hour: Copenhagen Lowdown

Copenhagen – New reports indicate that the Copenhagen Summit is cutting corners on climate change safeguards. While this shindig is arguably all about spreading the wealth around as in “trickling up”, read Al Gore's thoughtful, Yeatsy climate change poem here that defies the critics and explains its true mission. Then read The Gay Swami's “View from the Vassals” literary masterpiece below to help plug any leaky gaps.

The Gay Swami's Climate Change Poem

One fat January soon

A sinking Kingdom blows

And moons its limp people

Vapors spread as

Heat torches Hopenhagen's acid tongue

Far from the mouth of my hazy portfolio

Snow jobs crash the airwaves

Ice mother fuc*ers scramble

A stiff noodle comes quickly

Then Viagra is generic (NOT from Canada, but China)

Burning is replaced by the man crush (sigh)

For the skies open up my yearning bank account

Unknown creatures of fealty

Smother them MORE, no regrets

Parched myrmidons offer their gifts

Passion rocks BFFs in Bangalore

And New Jersey, too

Globalists! Well hung savior$

The hazy shepherd screams

"Your Gulfstream awaits you, dude"

Congress and Wall Street are our tools

-THE GAY SWAMI

Howard Dean Cracks ObamAgenda Behind Health Care Bill

(Special thanks to Joe Cannon at Cannonfire)

ObamAgenda Health Care Bill Exposed by Howard Dean

Blame it on Rham, but it's time to kill the Democratic sponsored health care bill. All of it. Scrap it. Start over.

But wait – they're in charge, as Glenn Greenwald at Salon reaffirms what many of us have known all along about Rahm's placebo health care bullet, Congressional Democrats' and RhamBama's number one goal of this health care bill scam: suck up to big pharma and the insurance industry and then cash out. Although Greenwald reports that Obama never had any intention of including a robust Public Option, his article doesn't emphasize (much less mention) the key motive behind the RhamBama health care bill – which is a mandate to force everyone to buy cost-prohibitive insurance from a mafioso industry that would bankrupt America's middle/upper middle class. With the impending passing of their health care bill, are the Democrats the Victim or the Crime?

Now, a fresh crop of instant Obama critics are starting to fall out of the trees, including the ones who stomped and voted for him. They're shocked about the “betrayal” - even ones like David Sirota who used to write books about the great heart of darkness within the One Big Party of Money. As Greenwald notes, the fate of this horrible health care bill from the Democrats has a chorus bleating about how the Democrats are the VICTIMS of big monied interests and how Lieberman is the spoiler  in getting this bill passed. Pass the Rolaids.

Let's hear a huge round of applause for former DNC chairman, Dr. Howard Dean who is now fed up (a little too late?) and is finally standing up for the majority of Americans who will be hurt by this deadly insurance industry giveaway bill. The good doctor Howard Dean has been sidelined and marginalized long enough by this party. Good for him for FINALLY telling us that this damn health care bill is not worth passing and that we should “start over.”

But is the current One Big Money Party system “tragically ungovernable” as Greenwald cites such Obama followers including Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Steve Benen who claim it to be? Ungovernable? What does this imply? Isn't this supposed to be a Democracy by and for the People? Right. By and for the People with the “I Got Mine” bumper stickers and tee-shirts for fawning sycophants. Greenwald explains how the ObamAgenda has succumbed to “centrist compromises” that don't include America's middle class:

“In an ideal world, Congress would be -- and should be -- an autonomous branch of government, exercising judgment independent of the White House's influence, but that's not the world we live in.  Does anyone actually believe that Rahm Emanuel (who built his career on industry support for the Party and jamming "centrist" bills through Congress with the support of Blue Dogs) and Barack Obama (who attached himself to Joe Lieberman when arriving in the Senate, repeatedly proved himself receptive to "centrist" compromises, had a campaign funded by corporate interests, and is now the leader of a vast funding and political infrastructure) were the helpless victims of those same forces?  Engineering these sorts of "centrist," industry-serving compromises has been the modus operandi of both Obama and, especially, Emanuel.”

But that's been the ObamAgenda when it comes not only to this health care bill but to job outsourcing/insourcing. The two are intrinsically linked, with the expressed goal of extracting every last penny from America's dying middle/upper middle class by forcing them to finance unaffordable health care insurance for themselves and for unnecessary, imported labor that Corporate America should be taxed and charged to cover instead.

Look at what the ObamAgenda is doing to kill jobs (h/t Patrick Thibodeau) for Americans in addition to trotting out the loathsome and dangerous Alan Greenspan, who dictates that the H-1B visa cap would make dreadful, educated, middle class Americans a “priveleged elite.” Fuck Alan Greenspan. Yes, the Democrats are still down with this, too? Shame on them all, these self-important fools now tumbling out of the trees who support selling out our jobs to the third world. HilBama was a false choice from the get-go, and now media wannabe's are choosing sides, like driveling weasels without courage and conviction. Where are their apologies? Whether too stupid or too insufferable, this ilk of media whores who support the ObamAgenda of mandated health insurance and job outsourcing/insourcing should move to the third world countries they are propping up by not standing up for the rights of America's middle class citizens to build better lives and support our infrastructures right here. If the Obama administration wants to open up the floodgate for MORE imported labor when there are not enough jobs for Americans, how does this mandatory insurance get paid? Is it the intention for the Democrats to build a huge underclass on the dole? It's looking that way, and the Democrats want to own that feudal serf lord political action as James Carville predicts in his book 40 More Years. Welfare at the bottom and corporate welfare at the top, all around!

A so-called public option without access for all to quality health care that Single Payer would provide (and was never on the table) is NOT an option. It can't be, when the ObamAgenda is committed to selling out middle class jobs so American citizens can't even afford to pay for it. The Democratic party is hell-bent on competing with the GOP to create a huge welfare state. While middle class Americans need to have access to affordable health care and good paying jobs to pay for it, this health care bill deserves to to be buried. Along with the greedy sponsors it rode in on.

Are the Democrats the Victim or the Crime? Dick Durbin yesterday said that he doesn't expect the party to lose supporters over this sick bill. What has he been smoking? Patience is running out on these cheap-labor junkies in the White House and Congress from millions of Americans, Left and Right.

-2Truthy

Doing a Cheney: Tom Friedman Puts 'Climategate' in Perspective, Prepares for %1 While Chris Floyd Discusses the Boiling Point

(Photo Credits/Scientific American)

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit

What a mess. It's a rare day (as in when hell freezes over) that yours truly agrees with anything that  leading flatworlder doctrinaire, Tom “Fingernails on the Blackboard” Friedman has to say. Whether it's climate change or globalization, he has unexpectedly earned himself another PARTIAL temporary stay out of 2Truthy's doghouse for at least being on the same page for  his understanding of global warming science.

In today's Seattle Times Op-Ed column, Friedman registers his take on the current Copenhagen climate change summit disaster dubbed “Climategate" that has turned on the fire hose at credible scientific global warming research, threatening to dampen the burgeoning, global cap and trade carbon market momentum. Depending upon which camp you fall it into, when it comes to the volatile subject of global warming and climate change, the yea and nay camps both have much to gain or lose when looking at the debate through an economic prism.

Shrouding his thoughtful (or manipulative) message in a hawk (pro-war) and dove (pro-environment) analogy, Friedman begins by describing Cheney's 1% doctrine of logic when he declared the best strategy to “confront” a new, unprecedented type of threat, a "low-probability, high-impact event." Cheney explained:

"If there's a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." Cheney contended that the United States had to confront a very new type of threat: a "low-probability, high-impact event."

This assertion, of course, was and is cold comfort to anti-war activists. Then Friedman compares Cheney's 1% doctrine to legal scholar Cass Sunstein's “one percent principle”, observing that Cheney “seemed to be endorsing the same "precautionary principle" that also animated environmentalists.”

War bad, environmentalism good. But true to Friedman form, what starts out at the beginning of his article as sober analysis falls as flat as the big, fat, flat world hoax the King of Globalization himself has choked on. Friedman concludes that even if global warming is proven to be a “hoax”, we at least should work towards building “a clean-power economy” which would “raise our energy costs”. What's this? Invoking the Royal “We”? Aye, and here lies the rub. Now "we" US taxpayer plebs are all “we”...Whenever the next big bubbles roll out, leave it to the wealthiest 1% to cook up ways to stick the bill on the growing numbers of poor who, through disastrous labor and trade policies from the same ilk, have destroyed the lives of millions of middle class American citizens. Group hug time?

At least he gets it right on the science and the desire to clean up this place. But he fails to address, as usual, the players behind the curtain and how, in an ungreedy global flat world, the wealthiest 1% have no proclivity to contribute in mighty, unprecedented ways to start covering the “clean power economy” costs by halting US job outsourcing (which he champions) and reforming lousy trade deals. And maybe it doesn't even matter if the science is right. What does matter is the growing divide between this US have and have-not society that he and his insider BFFs don't seem to ever want to change.

Whichever side you are on when it comes to the climate change debate, it is crystal clear that these two very wealthy, beltway tied, ex-vice presidents Dick Cheney and Al Gore  have no shortage of corporate oil industry experience and have both invoked the 1% doctrine. Let's hope that the spoils don't trickle up to the wealthiest 1%, as they tend to always do – because for all of the “global warming denier” bluster out there, a conservative guess would bet that 98% of it is coming from an increasingly alarmed population which is increasingly being left out in the cold by the wealthiest 1% doctrinaires who scream “Let them eat coal.”

And for all of the urgency involved to “get the job done” over the sham of a “health care” bill, so it goes at the Copenhagen Summit as President Obama has once again hummed the same mantra. Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque couldn't convey my thoughts on the climate change debate any better in this fine, timely essay entitled Boiling Point: Hijacking the Planet for Power and Privilege:

“The Copenhagen talks have become captive of what we might call the "Reform Syndrome"; i.e., the absolute, urgent imperative to put together a crappy deal that gorges the rich and hobbles the poor in egregious ways -- but which can be palmed off on a compliant media and a diverted public as some kind of "reform." The important thing is that an illusion of positive action be created -- while the same-old same-old keeps grinding on behind the scenes.”

It's a status-quo thing, I know, and for what it's worth, I hate to see guys like Gore serving as the hubris stuffed, corporate Neo-frat boys dupe (or duper) in this bubble. Either way. The very best outcome of rolling ahead with a cap and trade carbon trading market is that if the US can't innovate and manufacture anything around here anymore and continues selling our jobs to the third world under the ruse of a Great Labor Shortage, at least it warms the cockles (what are those?) to know that the 1% who make the rules that play the fools will have pulled off another derivatives beast bonanza. US Plebs, get over yourselves!

Like Floyd says, the “same-old keeps grinding” and at least we can be certain that the beat goes on, blowing snows or sinking sands.

-2Truthy

2Truthy's Happy Friday Hour with Old Dogs Starring John Travolta, Robin Williams & Matt Dillon

 Click HERE to Watch Old Dogs Official Theatrical Trailer

SYNOPSIS: "Two best friends -- one unlucky-in-love divorcee and the other a fun-loving bachelor -- have their lives turned upside down when they're unexpectedly charged with the care of seven-year-old twins while on the verge of the biggest business deal of their lives. The not-so-kid-savvy bachelors stumble in their efforts to take care of the twins, leading to one debacle after another, and perhaps to a new-found understanding of what's really important in life."

Travolta & Williams? Alrighty then, this is what I am going to see tonight. And hey, I'll watch anything with Matt Dillon in it - although I still maintain he did his most outrageously, tragically black, hilarious work in Drugstore Cowboy with a masterful turn by Kelly Lynch starring as the depraved wife.

Happy Friday, Loserettes!

-2Truthy

 

Obama's Jobs Summit: PR Stunt?

Obama's Jobs Summit Recommendations

Washington – President Obama rolled out his jobs summit or possible PR stunt today to review the nation's growing unemployment crisis, where Vice President Joe “Middle Class Czar” Biden addressed an audience of corporate CEOs from General Electric, Boeing, Google, Xerox and others, along with several “prominent” economists and labor leaders. While the government faces mounting pressure from labor unions and professional guilds regarding corporate America's role in kicking millions of educated US citizens to the curb in favor of cheap foreign labor, there is much that corporate America's CEOs could do to make the Obama administration's job a whole lot easier. For an excellent list of action items to create a successful American citizens jobs program, please read our good friend Rob Oak's excellent, laser-focused list of bullet-proof solutions at The Economic Populist here. Some of the mandatory highlights include:

• Cancel all State and Federal offshore outsourced contracts. Bring those jobs back.
  
  

• Immediate freeze on all guest worker Visas.
  
  

• Mandatory Expansion of Nursing Schools with above market value Professor Salaries. Students must be permanent residents, U.S. citizens.
  

Let's start with one of the business leaders at the summit, CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns. Earlier this fall, Xerox announced plans to acquire Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services, an outsourcing firm for $63 per share -- about 33 percent over market value. Since the acquisition announcement, the Xerox share price has tanked by 12 percent, but this couldn't possibly stop ACS chairman from grinning all the way to the bank, could it? Just last week after a Xerox filing with federal regulators, the ACS chairman can stand to pocket a modest $41.3 million severance package resulting from the takeover deal PLUS $17.4 million more to foot the taxes on the severance deal. But wait – there's more - he'll ALSO  stand to collect a whopping $800 million upon the finalization of the ACS stock sale to Xerox, according to this footnoted.org article. But in order to make the deal pay, will heads at Xerox have to roll to secure “cost savings” of between $300 to $400 million a year? Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of the Everest Group Dallas Business Journal explains:

“Through the acquisition, Xerox said it will establish annualized cost savings in the range of $300 to $400 million in the first three years after the transaction. The companies did not say anything about potential layoffs.

“You have some (job losses) coming from somewhere,” Bendor-Samuel said. “ACS is a very well-run and lean company. There’s not a lot of fat (in ACS).”

Aside from Burns' impressive record of working her way up through the ranks at Xerox to earn the distinction of becoming the company's first black female CEO, she was also appointed by President Obama “to help lead a national program aimed at honing students' skills in science, technology, engineering and math” according to this Daily Record report. I hope more American students will consider the STEM fields, as these kids have watched our government collude with greedy corporate executives to sell off the jobs of their computer scientist and engineering fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and neighbors to the lowest third world bidder under the ruse of a Great Labor Shortage. (h/t David Sirota.)

Leave it to Biden who has a way with words, as he characteristically cuts to the chase with the business and “thought leaders" below:

"Your presence is welcome, but quite frankly it's not as important as your input.  Without you, it will not become a reality. 

Our task together is obviously not an easy one. And while the $787 billion stimulus package had helped kick-start the process, the government's capacity is still somewhat limited." 

 

-2Truthy

Obama's Afghanistan and US Middle Class War Strategery

(Very Special thanks to The Dark Wraith)

United States Neo-Frat Boy Government Gives Whores a BAD NAME

In today's Afghanistan, things are not all poppies and roses.

President Obama has decided to send over 35,000 more US troops to ostensibly “stabilize” their country, begging the question what needs stabilizing over there by the United States? In a perfect world, Afghanistan is the kind of place one could visit to enjoy the company of kind and decent locals, enjoy great food and centuries of strong tradition that is not exactly patterned after Disneyland. Far from it. Obama has declared open season on the people of Afghanistan and America's middle class by diverting US taxpayer dollars to kill Afghanis and US middle class citizens by not spending the money on single payer health care and restoring middle/upper middle class jobs to US citizens that were given to imported Indian workers.

Strategery, Bush 2.0. In his speech last night, Obama said “the only nation I am interested in building is our own.” Is someone's nose growing? If ONLY this were true, as his actions continue to betray his words on every single policy stance his Manchurian fingers (h/t Dave Lindorff) have touched in his award winning role of POTUS. From job outsourcing/in sourcing US jobs to India, disastrous health care “reform”, casino climate change cap and trade, and this latest Afghanistan foreign policy fiasco, it is important to recognize these four convergent points ALL hinge on selling out American middle class jobs and livelihoods to imported, cheap workers and shoring up an insiders playground of global elites determined to profit from ridding the US of any traces of a prospering and truly democratic middle class society through labor arbitrage.

Killing off national pride and sovereignty is the first place to start, and the corporate run US government is hellbent on spreading its hubris disease to the AfPak region in order to strengthen its US/Indian alliance with its “strategy” of integrating US military forces while it grows its corporate presence into their population “as long as they are needed on the ground.” Hmm, like indefinitely? Sounds like a grand recipe of taking US taxpayer funds to shore up US/India interests over there from guns to butter, if you want to ask me...and while the US economy is in the shitter, why not spend billions of dollars over there so we don't have to spend them over here to create new jobs and improve our own infrastructures? (h/t Tony Wikrent at Economic Populist.)

What I want to know is this: why is Obama so concerned about stabilizing someone else's country when he can not even stabilize his own? (Presuming of course, that he really IS a US citizen.) For the past twenty years, US citizens have watched their jobs and salaries disappear and erode as greedy politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton figured out to a way to hack away at middle class jobs and create a delightful have and have-not neo-feudal frat boy society in this country by importing cheap workers from India under the lie that Americans are too uneducated to work and that there are not enough of them. Hey, go tell that to over one hundred million US citizens with degrees from the finest universities in the world – American -- who are now unemployed and underemployed because a few US corpo-political sociopaths have no regard for human life and local civility. With his latest let them eat cakism, hey, goes the thinking, why not just export this distinct US brand of ''hate thy neighbor' over to the AfPak region, too?

So why not turn Afghanistan into a serfy police state and get them to protect US corporate interests against a few of the local, uppity bad guys? I mean, how many American soldiers DOES it take to weed out a few bad guys and then go home? Maybe as many Secret Service guys it takes to weed out a couple of terrifying party crashers? India has looked to the US as a strategic partner to not only siphon American jobs but to shore up their own interests in the AfPak region against Muslim Pakistan. This is a country which could arguably be considered a virtual mecca of perpetual destabilization by the US in order to create more foment, wars and profits for a few sociopathic corporate and political elites.

This unseemly bond between the US and its so-called partner, India, has led to the destruction of the US economy as evinced by the H-1b visa/green card program designed to siphon US jobs from American citizens. (h/t Paul Craig Roberts.)

And now, not only are US government officials fond of employing a disproportionate mix of Indian cybersecurity “experts” to run everything from its IT infrastructure to agriculture with Obama's recent appointment of this USAID Czar (with ties to Google 'Monopoly Man' Al Gore), it is hardly a stretch to imagine Afghanistan becoming Big Ag's new bitch with this accelerated troop increase to protect profits for the few who will gain. And it won't be the ordinary Afghanis, the ones whom the US government insists will benefit from our deadly and hateful brand of “democracy” spreading.

Obama said the goal of sending 35,000 more troops into Afghanistan is based upon the need to help train their military on how to police certain elements of their society who would threaten “democracy” but the reality is that it has bug eyes on expanding the neo-frat boy corporate state over there whether they like it or not. Current TV (Al Gore's company) explains Big Ag's role in “the real war agenda” in Afghanistan:

“In this Briefing, we look at how the US's agricultural reconstruction work in Afghanistan and Iraq not only gives easy entry to US agribusiness and pushes neoliberal policies, something that has always been a primary function of US development assistance, but is also an intrinsic part of the US military campaign in these countries and the surrounding regions.

Seen together with the growing clout that the US and its corporate allies exercise over donor agencies and global bodies - such as the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres, which influence the food and farm policies adopted by the recipient countries - this is an alarming development.
These are not unique cases born from unusual circumstances, but constitute a likely template for US activities overseas, as it continues to expand its "war on terror" and pursues US corporate interests.”

In the true spirit of giving, as we enter the most joyous of holiday seasons and celebrate Christmas, isn't it redeeming to know that someone is profiting wildly from the spread of Islamaphobia? (h/t Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque.) With Obama's commitment to more killing and destruction in the name of “democracy” in Afghanistan, let us not forget that those billions of dollars spent on this Surge 2.0 in Afghanistan and their destruction diverts US funds from paying for universal health care and a real US jobs program to restore stolen American jobs that this US/India “strategic alliance” cooked up in order for a few elites to wildly profit from. This Sodahead article observes:

“In order to increase profits, companies outsourced American jobs to China, Korea, Taiwan, India, etc. This has cost many Americans their jobs, and by doing so they cannot buy the products the companies they used to work for produce, as well as insurance, cars and homes. All the company needed to do was ask for money and it was given, by a government they bought and paid for. They stayed rich as the middle class worker joined the ranks of the impoverished.”

If this is what Obama meant by his promise of transparency, isn't it a relief to know that he and his neo-frat boy sycophants are spending US taxpayer dollars killing people in other lands with guns and bombs over there while they oh-so-discreetly kill off educated US citizens here by denying universal health care coverage and jobs? Like many people here and around the globe, during this Christmas and holiday season, I'll be praying for the people of Afghanistan. And like the peace loving dove that I am, I know Obama's deadly Afghanistan troop surge is more smoke being blown up the pants of corporate crooks and war hawks to blur the truth about this war against America's middle class, dressed up in a burqa and smoking a hookah pipe.

  

Party on, plebs!

-2Truthy