Anti-unions bill OK’d. (Don’t sit still for it, Tom.)

Posted on March 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

— from “Ash Wednesday,” by T.S. Eliot

What’s with the “us,” Tom? Speak for yourself. My wings are working fine, and tonight I might use them to fly to Wisconsin, where David Koch’s Republican lapdogs just sneaked through a new bill that will tear the heart out of collecting bargaining rights in that state.

Republicans had denied that their so-called Budget Reform Bill was to crush labor unions, but 14 Democratic senators knew better and went AWOL three weeks ago to keep the bill from being voted on. So Republicans stripped away parts of the bill in order to present it in a form they could weasel into law without the presence of any Dems. That happened last night. The Assembly is rubber-stamping the bill today.

Said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, “In 30 minutes, 18 state Senators undid 50 years of civil rights in Wisconsin. Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.”

This is a national story. The future of organized labor, and decent treatment of workers in general, is on the line. PA Gov. Tom Corbett, who’s only slightly less right-wing than Walker, is watching closely, and so are his opponents. (Where’s Obama on this issue? Still in hiding, I guess.)

Today, pissed-off protesters who understand what’s happening to Wisconsin government are climbing through the windows of the state capitol. The billionaire Koch is probably having a good laugh on the phone with Gov. Scott Walker. (This time it might really be Koch on the line.)

Where’s that leave you, Tom? I know, it’s Lent now and you’re depressed and into your soulless-sounding Catholic conversion bit, and you’re trying to equate spirituality with sitting still and doing nothing, which is how it usually goes with dessicated academics like you. You were dead long before you stopped breathing.

But really — couldn’t you get off your dead ass for once and take a stand with flesh-and-blood humans instead of laying on us your ashes-to-ashes resignation and wishy-washy prayers (Teach us to care and not to care…) to describe your obscure version of enlightenment? I’ve looked through volumes of your work, first time in a long while, but can’t find much that has a pulse.

I prefer Warren Zevon:

So much to do, there’s plenty on the farm
I’ll sleep when I’m dead
Saturday night I like to raise a little harm
I’ll sleep when I’m dead

Zevon’s stuff doesn’t need to be annotated, but at least he speaks for the living. You either care or you don’t care.

Update: The modified Budget Reform Bill is more than just anti-unions. As Crooks and Liars put it, “Every public program, worker, and Wisconsin citizen will be at risk as a result of this ‘legislation,’ if that’s even what it is.”

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, pop music, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A song for Charlie Sheen?

Posted on March 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

Listen all you fools out there
Go on and love me I don’t care
Oh it’s lonely at the top

— Randy Newman, “Lonely At the Top,” 1972

People say it’s lonely at the top, but I sure like the view.

— Charlie Sheen, 2011

“The Sheen machine marches on,” as a Philadelphia Daily News headline put it. Where in the mainstream media are the front-page stories on Wall Street’s manipulation of gasoline prices, or on the Wisconsin 14, who are still holed up in Illinois, waiting for Gov. Walker to give ground in his union-busting crusade? The only real news this week on the latter was when the Wall Street Journal falsely reported that the 14 state senators were ready to give up and come home.

It’s all entertainment all the time, and it’s hard to let go of an entertainer of Charlie’s caliber. If I had a hat, I’d tip it to this man for taking a great lyric and turning it on its head. He ain’t Oscar Wilde, but he’s good for a chuckle.

Newman wrote “Lonely at the Top” with Frank Sinatra in mind, thinking the irony was a good fit for the aging, world-weary crooner. Maybe it was too good — Sinatra turned Newman down, maybe because he saw the double irony in the song’s message. Yes, the narrator is lonely but he’s arrogant, not remorseful or self-pitying. He has great talent and contempt for all who don’t.

I wonder if even Newman, a great ironist, would be capable of doing justice to the phenomenon of Sheen, who has an ego as big as Sinatra’s but whose greatest artistic triumph is a moronic sitcom?

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How wingnut radio really works

Posted on March 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

The company responsible for syndicating big conservative radio names like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity has been using paid actors to call in to their radio shows. According to a recent report in Tablet Magazine, Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, hired actors to call in as guests.

— David Edwards, The Raw Story, March 7

Driving to New England in the late 1990s, I switched the radio to AM and heard a talk show host calling on Bill Clinton to resign for having had sex in the White House with someone other than his wife. The radio host brayed and thundered, but he sounded smoothly theatrical, like a cross between Robert Preston in The Music Man and the cartoon star Foghorn Leghorn. (“I don’t, I say, I don’t think this boy’s got all his marbles…”) He was reveling in his bravado. He was Rush Limbaugh…

Good job nailing down the story about paid actors, guys, but it should surprise no one that Limbaugh and the dimmer bulbs, Beck and Hannity, might use callers who’ve been vetted and rehearsed before they appear on-air, or that the Clear Channel network lurks behind the scenes to make this happen. Right-wing talk radio is, after all, as much about theater as politics. These people make up facts to fit the stories they want to tell.

Limbaugh is cynical and mean-spirited, but he’s first of all a showman. Everything he does — the pauses, verbal tics, cruel jokes, rants, indignant asides and so on — is carefully considered. The goal is to keep the ratings high. I’d be astounded if he ever let anything unscripted happen on-air.

I’m wondering about callers to the local wingnut shows in Philadelphia, as opposed to the syndicated shows… Nah, nobody would pay those morons.

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DiCicco drops out, but has DROP to console him

Posted on March 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

Jackpot! DiCicco and several others on City Council love the DROP.

And so it comes to pass that one of Philly’s most consistently [GASPS, GRABS FACE]-inducing City Council members would rather just take the DROP money and run, rather than deal with your broke asses for another cringe-inducing term. And it’s gonna leave a huge gap in this sitcom: Who will play both sides of the casino issue depending on which looks the most politically advantageous at the time?

— Philebrity, March 7

The next First District councilperson who talks out of both sides of his mouth won’t be Frank DiCicco. That, at least, is worth celebrating.

DiCicco is the guy who told constituents early and often he was opposed to construction of casinos in his district. Then he reversed course, maybe after a visit from the corporate gods of gambling, and decided casinos were OK. After he became a true believer, he supported plans to build a Foxwoods casino on the waterfront, and then at Market East, in Center City.

The plans failed, thanks to Casino-Free Philadelphia and others who couldn’t warm up to a casino down the street from Independence Hall. (SugarHouse, the other casino proposed for the First District, wasn’t stopped but it’s not nearly as big as it would have been if casino foes hadn’t fought the good fight.)

It’s hard to tell who will replace DiCicco, but I hope he or she has enough imagination and energy to support business ventures that bring money into the district rather than sucking it out, casino-style.

And don’t feel sad for Frank, he’ll be walking away from Council with $424,000 from DROP, the city’s much-abused Deferred Retirement Option Plan.

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To D.C. Dems, compromise means capitulate

Posted on March 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

Jobs market improves! It will be even brighter when Dems cave on new budget.

Unfortunately, the efficacy of slashing spending and taxes on the wealthy will become conventional wisdom now that Democrats have signed on to the program and the disaster capitalists will have won their war against egalitarianism and redistribution. The Democrats didn’t even put up a fight.

— Digby’s Hullabaloo, March 6

President Obama and most other D.C. Democrats are signaling that they’ll cave to Republican demands rather than risk the possibility of a government shutdown. We’ll see haggling over this or that provision, but Republicans probably will get what they want — huge cuts in taxes and spending that will keep the economy stagnant and dig an even deeper hole for those of us who aren’t wealthy.

In other words, it’s business as usual for the Democrats In Name Only.

Chris Hayes in Daily Kos recently noted that the D.C. area is booming and Democrats there are part of a ruling elite more alienated than ever from the experiences of ordinary Americans. Many of them probably aren’t even aware of how quickly standards of living are eroding outside their bubble of prosperity.

If they were, they wouldn’t be calling the new jobs data mildly encouraging. They’d take a more careful look, as Robert Reich did the other day:

…To get to the most important trend you have to dig under the job numbers and look at what kind of new jobs are being created… While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

The workforce is suffering a severe, ongoing decline in wages, part of a radical redistribution of income to the already wealthy. The mainstream media seem to be pretending that the drop in wages is the inevitable result of a stubborn recession; that it will eventually be reversed by a “recovery.” Most D.C. Democrats are pretending, too. They know Republicans are dead-set on making sure the gulf between rich and poor will never again be narrowed.

Liberal activists seem content to criticize Democrats for not trying to prevent this disaster, but few are seriously exploring what actions might be taken to counter it. We know by now that Obama’s weirdly passive style of governance amounts to a betrayal of voters who hoped he would focus on jobs creation rather than the health of big banks and corporations. We know he’ll be even more passive as 2012 approaches and he grows more wary of offending imaginary “independent” voters.

We should recognize that Obama has no intention of seriously challenging the right-wing agenda. That he would rather compromise to the point of enabling it, if that’s what he thinks it will take to be re-elected.

It’s time to start the search for a third-party candidate, or at least someone who will make a strong run for the nomination and maybe scare Obama into behaving like a Democrat. If you think this search might be counter-productive, remember the old Bob Dylan lyric: When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.

Footnote: Paul Krugman calls what’s happening to the jobs market a “hollowing out.” He does a great job of explaining the correlation between improved technology and the scarcity of decent jobs, but he doesn’t mention the effects of outsourcing, a word you’ll hardly ever hear from Obama.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, livable cities, mainstream media, Politics, taxes, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Beneath the nitty-gritty, in the land of Newt

Posted on March 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

A garbage barge passes over Newt's domain.

One of Gingrich’s main themes in his columns and speeches over the past few years has been the need to stop the “secular socialist” takeover of America, which he blames for the demise of the family. Yet he had several of these affairs while attacking President Bill Clinton for his own. He justified his hypocrisy to his second wife once, telling her, “It doesn’t matter what I do.”

— Zaid Jilani, ThinkProgress, March 3

Picture a chasm in the North Atlantic, far beneath the spot where sludge pipes and garbage barges converge to relieve themselves. Descend to the floor of this foul locale and you’re in the spiritual home of Newt Gingrich, champion of unregulated markets, states’ rights and family values. That’s where the news is this week.

Newt is the the man who best illustrates the difference between Democratic and Republican styles of bad behavior. A politician in either party might belly up to the trough to take bribes. He (or she, rarely) might blow money on the horses, or go on a bender with a transsexual crack whore, using campaign contributions he hid in the freezer, next to the Stoli.

But nine times out of ten, it’s the Republican who does such things while presenting himself as a moral exemplar. Only a Newt-like creature will cheat on his wife and simultaneously call for the censure, or even the impeachment, of another politician on moral grounds.

There’s no time to get into the why of it, except to note that Republicanism made a deal with the devil when it joined forces with religious fundamentalism. Politicians who are beholden to religious absolutists must fake zero tolerance all the time, and are as scary and scabrous a breed in the United States as in Iran or Afghanistan.

A full squad of Republican uglies will run for president if it looks like Obama can be beaten. Almost all of them will reveal themselves to be hypocrites as soon as they start making speeches. One of them — the doughy-faced, philandering moralizer from Georgia — doesn’t even have to open his mouth. It’s a matter of public record.

Footnote: Just ran across this, from the inimitable James Wolcott:

Like a stripper too conceited to hang up the tassles, even though those tassles don’t have the twirl they once did, indeed they droop like limp silver spaghetti swaying to and fro, Newt Gingrich insists on parading his tired act down the runway, exciting no one except the political pundits for whom the sheer drop of a bra strap makes their hot dogs lose control.

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Consumer confidence & the price of Cheez Whiz

Posted on March 4, 2011 by oddmanout215

I'm mad as hell and not going to stand for this price hike!

Pat’s Steaks, in South Philadelphia, which raised the price of its cheesesteak from a tourist-targeted $8 last year to $8.50, is getting by with a bit less profit to keep from raising prices again, said spokesman Tommy Francano. “Last year we bought a case of Cheese [sic] Whiz for $63,” he said. “Now we’re paying about $78.”

Philly.com, March 4

Now is the winter of our discontent. It’s not bad enough gasoline prices are rising faster than a Gulf oil gusher. That the mainstream media endorses the lie that a slight decrease in unemployment claims (because more people stopped looking for work, or took Walmart-level jobs) proves the economy is on the rebound. That supermarkets no longer seem to offer discounts on real food, even their suspicious in-house brands.

Now we’re expected to also passively accept rising junk food prices. I’ll warn you just once, whoever you are: Cripple my ability to gas up my Hummer, but do not fuck with my Cheez Whiz. Not if you hope to make it to the spring of our discontent.

This is America, you socialist bastards. I’ll give you my cheesesteak with Whiz when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!

FYI: Pat’s is the dumpier-looking of the two cheesesteak emporiums at Ninth and Passyunk. The best thing to be said for it is that it’s not Geno’s, the other steak shop, whose owner made a name for himself exhorting cheesesteak eaters to blame illegal immigrants for their troubles.

Footnote: Check it out in person if you don’t believe me. Customers at Pat’s really do fork over eight-freaking-fifty for a cheesesteak on a long roll and another few bucks for a soda. A lot of them look like they do this every day.

Posted in economic collapse, enviromentalism, Great Recession, Gulf, health care, immigration, livable cities, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Wisconsin cops to GOP: We won’t round up Dems

Posted on March 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

Maybe the GOP should call Joe Friday.

The thought of using law enforcement officers to exercise force in order to achieve a political objective is insanely wrong and Wisconsin sorely needs reasonable solutions and not potentially dangerous political theatrics.

— Jim Palmer, director of the 11,000-member Wisconsin Professional Police Association, in response to Wis. Senate Republicans ordering the forcible detention of their 14 Democratic colleagues

According to radio evangelist Howard Camping, the story of the year is that Jesus Christ will reappear to end the world on May 21. If Jesus is a no-show, then the domestic story of the year might be the workers’ protests in Wisconsin, which has many subplots, including that of the state senators who fled to Illinois to prevent a vote that would cripple collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin public-sector workers.

Protests have taken place every day for weeks. Tens of thousands have turned up in Madison to express outrage regarding the so-called Budget Reform Bill, the key to Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union crusade. Fans of democracy are groaning at the under-reported news of Walker’s allegiance to billionaire David Koch, the force behind Walker’s plan to cut wages and benefits of workers in conjunction with continued tax breaks for the wealthy. Fourteen state senators are AWOL!

How much crazier does this story have to get before the mainstream media give it the priority it deserves? Maybe if Kim Kardashian revealed that her greatest worry, besides cellulite, is that the Wisconsin 14 will be extradited to Madison before they get to hear her new single.

The Wisconsin standoff should be front-page news nationwide, every day. Instead, the story has been treated as a curiosity by the MSM, which seem to want to define it as a regional spat over budget cuts rather than a pivotal battle in the war between the country’s dwindling middle class and the wealthy few who want to crush what’s left of the middle class and the democratic process.

Maybe the MSM will take the story more seriously now that Walker and the rest of the GOP in Wisconsin are revealing the full extent of their fanaticism, not to mention their debt to Koch and other wealthy benefactors.

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Media likes Sheen, but angry workers? Not so much

Posted on March 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

Corporate media to Charlie: Here we are now, entertain us.

Three blivets wreathed in American flags and automatic weapons could stand on a streetcorner with signs reading “Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare,” and they would find themselves surrounded by camera crews from CNN, MSNBC and, of course, Fox News. But put 50,000 people a day out on the streets of Madison, put tens of thousands more on the streets in every state in the union, and those same news cameras are suddenly too busy covering the Oscars and Lindsey Lohan’s ongoing crime spree to make an effort at coverage.

— Will Pitt, Truthout, March 1, by way of Suburban Guerrilla

To this I can only add that the media has made coverage of Charlie Sheen bigger than the Oscars (possibly the dullest telecast ever of this event) and Lohan combined. They know that Sheen, even though he’s wealthy and has Adonis DNA and tiger blood, seems to be venting the delusional, misplaced anger of everyone who has lost their bearing since the country’s financial crash in 2008.

It doesn’t matter what he’s actually saying — it’s his tone that fascinates them, and his capacity for denial, which is a lot like our capacity for denial. Not that I would pretend to diagnose him — the son of a bitch is funny, just as Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network was funny. He’s slightly more subdued than Beale but clearly feels as tuned in to great truths. (Beale really was, as it turned out.)

The mainstream media, owned by the sort of people who despise unions, is counting on Americans to want more from Charlie — “I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ rock star from Mars.” — and less from workers in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is about fighting back against those who are deluding us, and the media would definitely rather not go there, so to speak.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Karl & Groucho assess GOP’s war on labor

Posted on March 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.

Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down, I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers’ share of the US economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4 percent of GDP, down from about 60 percent in the 1970s.

— Rana Foroohar, Time magazine via Reader Supported News

You might think it would be a cold day in Costa Rica when a Time article mentioned wage inequities in this country in the same sentence with Marxism, but there it was, plain as the Republican Party’s blueprint for destroying organized labor.

How ironic that so many pundits, not to mention historians, assumed twenty years ago that the fall of the Soviet Union (which wasn’t even Marxist) would be the final nail in the coffin of Marxist ideology. Francis Fukuyama, for one, went right to work on a book that addressed “whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional universal history of mankind.”

In 2011, it’s looking as if Marxism suffered a knockdown but not a KO. How naive of Fukuyama to ask whether the temporary defeat of this or that ideology or style of government might portend the “end of history.”

What if Marxism was simply waiting for the 21st century, when corporation owners would finally succeed in using technology to inexorably reduce employment and pay rates in the First World and thus, possibly, spark widespread unrest? What if something much darker than Marxism is waiting to descend on what’s left of democracy in America?

And what’s the meaning of democracy as it’s currently practiced in the United States? From Karl Marx’s greatest hits: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

I also like this, from Groucho Marx (no relation to Karl), something he might have said to Fukuyama if he’d lived to see publication of The End of History and the Last Man: “From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”

Clarification: To be fair to Fukuyama, his phrase “end of history” was meant to be partly ironic. His book ultimately asked what would become of a populace that has nothing left to strive for but the accumulation of new consumer gadgets. He probably couldn’t see when he wrote it that the threat of tyranny, in this country and the rest of the world, would remain as strong as ever.

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