It seems that for the better part of 4 years President Obama has been missing in action from Hollywood, but with Super Pacs weighing in for Mitt Romney, Obama is back in town.

On With the Show!

Hollywood and Obama

by HOWARD LISNOFF

Although “Let’s go on with the show” is a lyric from the Broadway show “Annie Get Your Gun” (1946), in “Obama’s New Courting of Hollywood Pays Off,” (The New York Times, May 9, 2012) readers don’t have to be anywhere near The Great White Way in New York City to know that President Obama’s Hollywood supporters don’t need any encouragement to take up the faux banner of “hope and change” in 2012 and go on with the show.

It seems that for the better part of 4 years President Obama has been missing in action from Hollywood, but with Super Pacs weighing in for Mitt Romney, Obama is back in town.

Indeed, what a show the US political and economic systems are! Just as the “hope and change” marketing scheme of 2008 paid off for Obama, so can Hollywood deftly inject fear into the hearts of movie buffs with voracious man-eating sharks; place the comfortably seated in the heat of battle in war; or immerse viewers in the ecstasy and loss of love and life. The dream-making machine in Hollywood is as effective as the political machine in the U.S. In the case of the political system, however, there’s no need to materially reward faithful constituencies as Obama quickly learned following his 2008 election to the Presidency.

Recently, Hollywood made a striking turnaround after being shunned by Obama. Obama was able to raise over $6 million at a fund-raiser at the home of George Clooney where there was no room at the dinner table after $40,000 tickets to the event sold out.

Another Hollywood legend, Rob Reiner states: “I felt that he tried to accommodate the other side too much,” but Reiner concluded, “that it’s virtually impossible,” speaking of the President’s failed attempts to accommodate Republicans in Congress.

After criticisms by talk show host Bill Maher about Obama’s record on defense spending and lack of tax policy that would tax the wealthy, Maher muted his criticisms and wrote a one million dollar check to a Super pac for the President when he realized that “You just run back into his arms,” when a possible Romney presidency is considered. In “Democracy in the Streets” (CounterPunch, April 23, 2012), I make the point that the Democratic Party has foisted the banner of being the only show in town (and many voters are driven to conclude that Democrats are the lesser of two evils every four years), with the result of bringing progressives, liberals, and union members into the fold where those groups have been most often rewarded with absolutely nothing in return for their allegiance to Democrats over the past 35 years.

Now with Hollywood’s dream factory cheering Obama on, many voters may forget the $8.2 trillion that has been lost in home equity since the housing bubble burst in 2007. That’s more than a 60 percent loss in home equity noted in a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“Home Equity Declines More than 60% During Great Recession,” Reverse Mortgage Daily, February 13, 2011). Much of the money from the President’s stimulus package of $787 billion could have gone to homeowners who were most damaged by the housing bust. Instead, that money went to Wall Street where banks like JP Morgan Chase are still playing fast and loose with derivatives while hindering any attempts to regulate investment banks.

And war, which seems to be on no one’s mind (along with the decaying environment), has cost taxpayers $3.7 trillion according to the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (“Cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting,” Reuters, June 29, 2011). The cost of war may reach a whopping  $4.4 trillion soon according to the same study.

Both Hollywood and the political system are good at entertaining both movie buffs and voters alike. The political system, war, and big business, are often the stuff of an ugly reality that can shock, just as the moviegoer is shocked back into reality when the theater or room lights come back on.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com. 

The bully or the murderer, make your choice.

May 13, 2012 by the Toronto Star

Mitt Romney’s Anti-Gay Bullying 

Has a Human Face Now

by Heather Mallick

I love guilt. I wish people felt more of this emotion so foreign to Mitt Romney that he claims not to remember what a brute he was in school, the boy being father to the man, a Bain consultant who killed so many jobs in the ’80s that many grown men must have come home weeping to their families and never worked again.

It was 1965. The prep school was Cranbrook, in Michigan. Mitt Romney’s posse took a dislike to a younger boy who had bleached his hair and wore it draped over an eye. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Romney told his friends.

And so his posse attacked young John Lauber, pinning him to the ground. As Lauber cried and screamed for help, big ole’ Mitt cut Lauber’s hair off with scissors.

The act still haunts the gang of five grown men who did it. One apologized to Lauber. “It was vicious,” says another. Romney’s friend, who held Lauber down, remains appalled.

A fourth encountered Lauber (who was later expelled for a minor school infraction) at O’Hare airport in the mid-90s. “Hey, you’re John Lauber,” David Seed said. Seed, now a school principal, apologized.

Lauber said, “It was horrible.” He described his terror and told Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

Lauber led a difficult, ill-paid, itinerant life. In 2004, he died of liver cancer. Romney became rich, then richer. He felt no guilt last week when confronted with his past.

“I just did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by it, obviously I apologize. I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school.” I only include this classic weaselly “if” apology because it contains the word “hijinks,” not a word you hear much.

Two years before Romney attacked Lauber, Ann Keenan died a horrible death after a botched abortion. She was the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law and died at the age of 21 in 1963, a full decade before Roe v. Wade. Her death did not make Romney, whose legislative past is notably anti-gay, more thoughtful about suffering.

Romney, in a 1994 Senate debate, claimed Keenan’s death had shaped his pro-choice opinions. Later, conveniently, he changed them.

The Romney revelations appeared in a Washington Post story with the gripping verb-packed headline, “Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents,” if you happen to need an explanation of why the Washington Post is failing fast.

This was Thursday, a day after President Barack Obama announced his support of gay marriage. Naturally Obama looked like a saint compared to the gay-bullier. Great timing.

And New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait pointed out that at Stanford, Romney shaved rival students’ heads and painted them red. His take? “Romney Hated All Hair, Not Just Gay Hair,” a headline that reveals why Nymag.com is prospering. “Maybe Romney didn’t hate gays — maybe he just hated hair,” Chait writes hopefully. “Or, other people’s hair, anyway. Perhaps that is the deeper fixation: It is not enough for Romney to have perfect hair. Others must have terrible hair.”

This is the kind of deep political analysis I admire. Chait, you will go far.

Lost in the question of bullying, it’s easy to forget that Obama killed an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and his teenage son in an illegal drone strike, which does technically make him a murderer even if he won’t be charged.

On the other hand, you completely know that young Obama would never hound, pound and sheer a terrified classmate.

The bully or the murderer, make your choice.

Romney has always reminded me of the Tom Buchanan character in The Great Gatsby, unspeakably wealthy, arrogant, hard. “His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked. . . .

“ ‘Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,’ he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ ”

I can see Romney thinking this as the boy’s tears wet Romney’s sleeve, as chopped blond hairs clung to his tie.

Why, I think I’ll take Obama the murderer. Yes. I will.

© 2012 Toronto Star

Heather Mallick is a columnist for the Toronto Star

The big 3 of the U.S. economy: Pot, Porn, WEAPONRY

Our Guns and Butter Economy

Obama: Pitchman for Exporting US-Made Weapons

by David Sirota

With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. "I want us to sell stuff," said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.

That nebulous word "stuff" is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we're shipping overseas. In this cold-blooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that's as far as any conversation should go.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we're building.

The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that "the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons." Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the "stuff" theory of exports to ignore the objections.

This is part of a larger pattern since President Obama took office. During Obama's first year in the White House, he began to gut the Pentagon's approval process for arms exports, weakening controls on what could and could not be sold. Later, diplomatic cables uncovered by Wikileaks showed, as Fortune magazine put it, "American officials act(ing) as de facto pitchmen for U.S.-made weapons."

The result is that America has become the true "Lord of War," as the arms dealer motto goes. We are the leading arms supplier to the developing world and we are responsible for the majority of all weapons sales across the globe. Yes, we are so committed to selling instruments of death to the rest of the planet that military industries have almost tripled their share of the U.S. economy in just a decade.

The second bit of news came from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, whose new study shows that America is exporting our obesity crisis to Mexico. Coupling health statistics with U.S. export data since the North American Free Trade Agreement tore down Mexico's agriculture trade barriers, researchers found that the Mexican market was flooded by American agribusinesses' taxpayer subsidized commodities (corn, soybeans) and their processed derivatives. According to the report, that quickly wiped out Mexico's local food economy, leaving its food system exactly "like the industrialized food system of the United States — characterized by the overabundance of obesogenic foods." Not surprisingly, Mexican obesity rates have consequently skyrocketed.

Taken together, these export booms represent what could be called America's new Guns and Butter economy. We are so desperate to export any "stuff" we can, we are now fattening up the world and arming it for permanent bloodshed.

Seeking to short circuit any objections to this trend, President Obama has said simply that "we're at a moment where necessity has tempered the old debates" over exports and economic policy. In terms of history, he's not wrong — during the previous century, America witnessed fevered fights over what constitutes a moral farm policy, and in the 1930s the U.S. Senate's Nye Committee held almost 100 hearings into "greedy munitions interests that were unduly influencing public policy. Sadly, Obama is correct - those debates have been silenced.

But should they be? Should we simply say that any exports — no matter their moral, ethical, environmental or health implications — are inherently good? Does "necessity" really mean that "stuff" for stuff's sake must be the basis of our export economy?

Washington and profit-at-all-cost industries certainly say yes — but that doesn't mean it's the right answer.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose new book "Back to Our Future" is now available. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and is a contributing writer at Salon.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website atwww.davidsirota.com.

There are biblical admonitions a' plenty about what to do with the poor - hint: not a one of them says to oppress them. There WILL be HELL to pay, I say!

How Government and Corporations 

Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

Preying on the Poor

by BARBARA EHRENREICH

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But asBusiness Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

Government Joins the Looters of the Poor

You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.

These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributesabout $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program, gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is left of a public sector that’s gone totally schizoid: on the one hand, offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly trying to help.

At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.

And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country — from California and Texas to Pennsylvania — counties and municipalities have been toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school hours. In New York City, it’s now a crime to put your feet up on a subway seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime of having a “messy yard.” Some cities — most recently, Houston and Philadelphia — have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in public places.

Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage — a practice so common that the industry even has a term for it: “sewer service.” In a sequence that National Public Radio reports is “increasingly common,” a person is stopped for some minor traffic offense — having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake light — at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting offender is whisked off to jail.

Local Governments as Predators

Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost willfully sketchy.

According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed that the amount is typically in the “hundreds of dollars.” If we take an extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that 80%-90% of criminal offenses are committed by people who are officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.

And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of Washington, estimates that “deadbeat dads” (and moms) owe $105 billion in back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.

Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers’ licenses of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be able to work.  Michigan just started suspending the drivers’ licenses of people who owe money for parking tickets.  Las Cruces, New Mexico, just passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting off their water, gas, and sewage.

Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of Wipeout. Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost money.

In a study of 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found 14 of them contained jurisdictions that charge a lump-sum “poverty penalty” of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their fees and fines, plus late fees and “collection fees” for those who need to pay over time. If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are increasingly being passed along to the offender.

The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that tired phrase “the cycle of poverty.” Poor people are more far more likely than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor like a landlord or a hospital.

Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court costs, but you’ll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you’ve acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less like a “cycle” and more like the waterslide to hell.  The further you descend, the faster you fall — until you eventually end up on the streets and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recently Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. The 10th Anniversary Edition of her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America has just been released by Picador Books.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.