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.

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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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My dinner with Arianna — submit your questions

Posted on March 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

Craft in NYC. Waiter! Please tell Arianna I'm over here at the bar.

Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive.

— Chris Hedges in Truthdig, regarding the sale of Huffington Post to AOL

The next time you see Arianna Huffington stroking Bill Maher and making noises about poor Third World-ers, please tweet or e-mail her regarding this piece in The Raw Story. Ask her if the fortune she made selling Huffington Post to AOL will now be used to pay the many freelancers who wrote for free and helped make HuffPo so valuable.

I asked Arianna this question recently and thought we mght arrange for her to be interviewed by me at Craft, her favorite restaurant, the next time she’s in New York, but I haven’t heard from her yet. If you have questions for her, please send them to me and I’ll pass them along.

Maybe she’ll get back to The Newspaper Guild, which is also curious about this issue.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Obama to workers: Can’t find those shoes!

Posted on February 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

I'm not sure this style is presidential enough...

If Americans workers are being denied their rights to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America because workers deserve to know that somebody’s standing in their corner.

— Candidate Barack Obama, 2007

It’s a pleasure to walk into Center City Philadelphia, and it’s downright thrilling when you know President Barack Obama will be walking with you to show support for embattled union workers.

I’m referring to the “Save the American Dream” rally at LOVE Park, attended by upwards of 700 union members and union supporters, one of dozens of such events held Saturday around the country in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to gut collective bargaining laws in Wisconsin.

I’m joking about Obama being there, of course. While campaigning for president, he pledged what sounded like solidarity with working people everywhere. Then he got elected and revealed he felt more at home with the likes of Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner.

Obama made a lukewarm statement of support for Wisconsin workers two weeks ago and, in a speech today, asked people not to vilify unions. He has attended no — as in zero — pro-worker rallies since Walker launched his crusade.

I guess he can’t find those shoes. I’d ship him my old pair of Asics, but they’re a bit too comfortable for the President of the United States (the soles are falling off). Can anybody out there help this man start walking?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Money for (next to) nothing on WXPN

Posted on February 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

But there’s nothing, really nothing, to turn off. — Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna,” 1966

I turned on the car radio this morning and noticed the DJ on WXPN was yakking for a long time between songs. “Oh no, a funding drive!” I said. “Didn’t you just have one?” (Talking to the radio is a habit of mine, you got a problem with that?)

Adding insult to injury, the DJ offered free tickets to see Fleet Foxes to those who contributed a certain amount.

I yelled, “Wow, Fleet Foxes! How about Death Cab for Cutie tickets, too?”

The DJ didn’t answer. I hit the “off” button.

Three problems with so-called non-commercial XPN: 1) It frequently asks listeners for money even though it’s affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, an enormously wealthy institution that should be funding the station. 2) It has corporate “sponsors” whose names are often dropped in on-air spots. Shouldn’t the sponsors cover the station’s operating costs? 3) Its playlist often sucks. For every good song — by Beck or Cee-lo Green, say — they might play ten by the sort of tuneless angst-ridden twits who gave “alt” rock a bad name.

Does anyone still listen to radio? I live in a shotgun shack at the Tinicum swamp, so it’s hard for me to gauge this stuff.

Clarifications: XPN is a bit better on weekends than weekdays. And, through NPR, it runs a website called The Key, to showcase Philadelphia bands… And yes, public radio needs our money because government funding is way down. (“American Routes“, on WHYY, is worth a contribution, if you can afford it.)

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

Media guy blames media for Wisconsin turmoil

Posted on February 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

This is to help Michael Smerconish locate the center.

Wisconsin says a lot about our political discourse, none of it good… Complex issues are reduced to sound bites. Talking points of the extreme left and right dominate. Americans obediently fall into line, either for “free enterprise” or the “working man,” even if they don’t know what the phrase collective bargaining means.

— Michael Smerconish, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 25

I doubt very much the protesters standing in the Wisconsin cold don’t know what collective bargaining means. Perhaps Smerconish, a right-winger with a law degree, was arguing that working people think they know their rights but really don’t, possibly because they’re too dumb to understand the nuances of the laws that were passed over the years to protect those rights.

Displaying chutzpah of the highest order, Smerconish, who hosts a radio talk show and holds a cozy second job opining for the Inquirer, wrote that “media coverage of the frenzied atmosphere in Wisconsin” is to blame for the failure to provide “insight into who should be held accountable for unsustainable financial promises.”

Guess what, Mike — you are the media, and you’re doing a piss-poor job of providing insights about what’s at stake for the protesters or their foes. Many of us think the latter have been duped by the Republican propaganda machine into believing unions are to blame for Wisconsin’s budget shortfall, which wouldn’t even exist if tax rates on the wealthiest citizens hadn’t been drastically cut since the Eisenhower era…

But Smerconish wouldn’t want to hear such talk, it might distract him from his stock argument — i.e., extremists who “dominate” our discussions are avoiding “middle of the road realities” we must face in order to end the Wisconsin standoff and, it seems, passively accept the disappearance of decent jobs in America.

In his column were statistics showing that union workers in Wisconsin earn more than non-union workers and have better benefits (that’s what unions are for!), as if this is reason enough for union workers to make wage and benefits concessions (something they’ve already done). Not surprisingly, he offered no statistics on the sums billionaire right-wingers have spent on fomenting the Wisconsin crisis, and no speculation on whether David Koch calls the shots for Gov. Scott Walker.

But God forbid we should conclude Smerconish was blaming the collective bargaining process for Wisconsin’s woes. “The lawyer in me,” he wrote magnanimously, “sees an analogy between collective bargaining and two sides involved in a legal dispute.”

It’s a favorite trick of right-wing commentators these days to pretend they’re arguing from the center, wherever that is. In this regard, Smerconish reminds me of the NYT’s David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, who tries to sugarcoat his right-wing views with homilies about the importance of everyone converging — through astral projection, I guess — on that mythical center.

I take it back, there is a center in Philadelphia. It’s just east of Eden, around the bend from the Elysian Fields, in the big white building on Broad Street where Smerconish opines.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Philadelphia, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blow them up good, then corporatize

Posted on February 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

Labor backlash may blunt GOP's shock and awe.

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wisconsin, isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad – specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

— Paul Krugman, The NY Times, Feb. 25

Krugman cited Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in suggesting that the endgame of Scott Walker and the other Republican governors is the same as the Bush administration’s in Iraq after the U.S. invasion — as Paul Bremer put it, to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises.” The idea is to use a crisis — in Wisconsin’s case, the budget crisis created when Walker and Republican lawmakers cut taxes for the wealthy — as an excuse to make laws that would help Republicans realize, in Krugman’s words, “their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.”

Republicans want us to get used to such a society. The so-called Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin’s isn’t only about breaking unions — a deplorable enough goal — but is also designed to make drastic cuts in health coverage for the poor and to open the door to a Texas-style sell-off of state-owned power plants to private interests. (Rortybomb — love that tag! — first called attention to the latter scheme in a Feb. 21 post, using the same passage from the bill that Krugman cited.)

The Republicans’ worker-against-worker strategy is a risky game. The other night on TV, a group of pissed off firemen interviewed in Elizabeth, NJ, slammed Gov. Chris Christie for blindsiding them with his all-out war on unions, which is premised on the lie that working people are to blame for the state’s budget shortfall. It might finally be dawning on America that the GOP’s nationwide shock and awe-style assault on unions is to distract us from the fact that the country’s economic collapse was caused by the same people who fund the party’s anti-union political campaigns.

Barack Obama is hiding in the White House, banking on the hope he’ll be re-elected if he ignores Walker’s power grab in Wisconsin and other aspects of the GOP’s coordinated effort to destroy workers’ rights. Not surprisingly, corporate-owned media outlets are, for the most part, also ignoring the deeper purpose of this effort. But workers in Wisconsin aren’t ignoring it, and the situation will get ugly if the general public catches on. Maybe not on an Iraq scale, but ugly enough to make the rich and powerful quit dreaming we’ll get used to the feudal system they’re trying to impose.

Footnote: Hey Bill Keller, how come we have to read about the Budget Repair Bill in Krugman’s opinion column? Why wasn’t there a news story on the full import of the bill? Why is it that, at your paper and most others, the right hand never seems to know what the left is doing?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, NJ, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The NYT’s ‘no shit’ style of news analysis

Posted on February 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

OK, they're pissed in Wisconsin... Is that all you've got, NYT?

There are deeply divided opinions and shifting allegiances over whether unions are helping or hurting people who have been caught in the recent economic squeeze. And workers themselves, being pitted against one another, are finding it hard to feel sympathy or offer solidarity, with their own jobs lost and their benefits and pensions cut back or cut off.

— A. G. Sulzberger and Monica Davey, The New York Times, Feb. 21

Welcome to the “no shit” school of news analysis. Two reporters are sent to write about conflict among workers in Wisconsin. An editor slaps a headline on the piece — “Union bonds in Wisconsin begin to fray” — although the piece does not attempt to show that unions are “fraying” in their fight against Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to gut collective bargaining laws. (They are growing stronger.) Instead, the piece merely states that some workers are mad at other workers. Well, no shit!

It is not news, especially not front-page news, that private-sector workers in Wisconsin are angry because they’ve suffered at the hands of CEOs who simply move companies elsewhere if workers refuse to accept dramatic wage and benefits cuts.

It is not news that workers who are hurting often direct their resentment at people they can see — fellow workers who aren’t hurting as much. Obviously, it is easier to lash out at those people than to accept the reality of invisible robber barons who are reducing the lot of all workers to something akin to serfdom.

It is not news and certainly not news analysis when a reporter merely quotes distressed non-union workers — “I don’t get to bargain in my job,” and “There are a lot of people out of work right now that would take a job without a union,” and so on — or workers on the other side of the issue who think union-busting hurts all workers, union and non-union.

Analysis entails evaluating arguments in relation to all the available information. The Times, it seems, equates analysis with “he said/she said” journalism, apparently out of fear that some readers — or, more likely, people in powerful positions — will accuse the newspaper of bias if its reporters use background information to provide a context for the events of a particular week.

Did public-sector wages and benefits cause a budget crisis in Wisconsin, or was the crisis manufactured for political purposes by Gov. Scott Walker and his billionaire backers? This question is never addressed in the story, which means the reader has no way of determining to what extent out-of-work Wisconson residents might have a valid grievance against public-sector unions.

Footnote: The Times finally ran a piece about the close connections between Walker and Koch Industries, but this was two days after it ran a profile of Walker that didn’t even mention the Koch Brothers’ role in Walker’s fierce attack on organized labor. And nothing from either of those stories was referenced in the “union bonds fray” story. The intentional disconnect, I guess, reflects Bill Keller’s notion of fair and balanced news.

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Why Madison, Wis., looks like Egypt-land

Posted on February 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

They're mad as hell in Cairo... I mean, Madison

Credit where it’s due: Not all mainstream reporters are treating what’s happening in Wisconsin as a budget-related spat over cuts in benefits. In today’s Philadelphia Daily News, Will Bunch considers the global context of the story and ponders the likelihood of workers’ protests in other states where Republicans would like to crush organized labor, including Pennsylvania.

Bunch even mentions the link between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Koch Industries, a relationship that helps explain why Walker’s attack on labor has been so swift and vicious.

Also today, on his online site, Bunch links to a blogger who explains how Walker’s so-called Budget Repair Bill calls not only for union-busting but also for selling state-owned power plants to private companies, without bidding or input from the public.

Does the DN’s sharp coverage mean that the news media in general is on the verge of taking a serious look at the extent to which both major political parties in America have come to be dominated by corporatists, also known as fascists? I doubt it, but it’s good to know that not all journalists are ignoring the obvious.

Footnote: A labor rally in support of Wisconsin workers is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Thursday at LOVE Park in Philly. That’s in case the idea of working for the pharoah doesn’t appeal to you.

Posted in economic collapse, Egypt, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Wis. workers try to slip pharoah’s yoke

Posted on February 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

The mastermind behind Republican efforts to crush labor unions

I dig a ditch, I shape a stone/Another battlement for his throne/Another day on earth is flown/We’re all working for the pharaoh.

— Richard Thompson, “Pharoah”

The nicest thing you can say about the mainstream media’s skimpy coverage of the workers’ backlash in Wisconsin last week is they didn’t see it coming, any more than they saw mass protests in Egypt brewing.

It’s not as if there were no warning signs. For 30 years now, powerful right-wing groups have waged a concerted campaign to wipe out rights won by American workers in the first half of the 20th century. Their first high-profile victory was Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controllers strike in 1981, for which I spit on your grave, Ronnie-boy. (Just kidding — loved you in Bedtime for Bonzo.)

Now the Republican Party and its wealthy backers think they’re ready to deal a death blow to labor unions, the last remaining reliable source of funding for Democrats who run for office. Step One in the campaign is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s ongoing effort to not only cut workers’ wages and benefits, but to gut their collective bargaining rights.

Wisconsin’s public-sector employees are fighting back, which is fortunate for all American workers, even those too brain-dead to understand what this country might be like — no decent wages and benefits, no middle class or suburbs, no flat-screen TV in every home — if their grandfathers and great-grandfathers hadn’t fought hard to win basic rights, usually through unionization and collective bargaining.

Not surprisingly, most of the belated reporting of the workers’ protests by mainstream news outlets has been pro-business. For example, a NY Times story yesterday buried the fact that Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature have made the budget situation worse by pushing through $117 million in tax breaks for business owners. (Wisconsin’s budge shortfall this year is $137 million.)

But street protests in Madison have grown so large that observers have started raising obvious questions — such as, why are Walker, NJ Gov. Chris Christie and other Republicans blaming workers for a bad economy primarily caused by Wall Street traders, big banks and super-rich activists, the very people who bankroll their political campaigns?

There, I just answered my own question.

The injustice of Walker’s union-busting effort has become so blatant that even Barack Obama, our chronically temporizing president, has felt compelled to voice lukewarm opposition to it.

It’s hard to tell, but labor might be on the verge of a modest victory. More importantly, many Americans might finally be getting hip to the fact that people who lack workplace rights, in this country as well as in places like Egypt, might as well be working for the pharoah.

Posted in economic collapse, Egypt, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, NJ, Obama, Politics, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment