U.S. foreign policy running on empty

Posted on February 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

The State Department didn't see this coming?

The rise of powerful Islamic parties [in Egypt] appears inevitable… not because of the Quran or a backward tradition, but because we and Israel believed we could bend the aspirations of the Arab world to our will through corruption and force. — Chris Hedges, Jan. 31, Truthdig

U.S. foreign policy is like the mattress delivery truck I saw the other day in South Philly. The driver and his co-pilot made the mistake of braving a narrow street to make a delivery a day after a snowstorm. The street had been plowed but not thoroughly, and the truck was soon spinning its wheels, stuck in snow that was deeper than it looked. Three times the truck got stuck and broke free after a lot of wasteful revving and gear-grinding and spewing of exhaust fumes. But then the driver was too impatient to make the tricky turn onto Ninth Street and instead forged onto the next little street, where the truck got stuck in the same mess.

The drivers at the U.S. State Department hold the wheel steady and forge into one Third World country after another, confident that America has the horsepower and sheer bulk to roll over any obstacles to our acquisition of cheap oil. Are the people pissed off because the Shah or Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak is torturing/starving/stealing from them? No problem, send the dictator another billion to bulk up the army, and gently advise him to stop slaughtering so many activists and give the people a bit more grain.

This is called realpolitik, the religion of characters like Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton — high-profile policy wonks who are always surprised when, after decades of repression, these Third World side streets, our shortcuts to the oil fields, are suddenly jammed with millions of people angry not only at the dictators but at those who propped up the dictators in order to fuel America’s gas guzzlers.

We lost Iran because we backed the Iranians who were on the wrong side of history. The same thing might be happening in Egypt, regardless of how and when Mubarak makes his exit. Once again, the big truck is spinning its wheels, but this time it’s a lot closer to running out of gas.

Posted in mainstream media, Obama, Politics, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Working at the Inky/DN will be a hard habit to break

Posted on January 30, 2011 by oddmanout215

Julio Cortazar understood the allure of habits, good and bad.

Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. — Julio Cortazar, Cronopios and Famos

I was running to reach the post office before closing time. I hurtled a mound of snow to get around a slow-walking elderly gent on a narrow pathway in South Philly. The old gent, all in black and hooded, looked like Woody Allen spoofing the Grim Reaper in The Seventh Seal. He chuckled when I landed and continued running — heh-heh-heh — as if to ask “What’s your hurry?”

Good question. I’m not much younger the old gent, and will catch up with him soon enough on the road to oblivion. In fact, I run not so much to beat deadlines as out of habit, because it’s the mode of transport that best suits me. I run, or bike when I can, because these habits make me feel less anxious than driving, which I avoid as much as possible.

I thought of the comfort of habits when I read Steve Volk’s thoughtful piece in Philadelphia magazine about Greg Osberg, the new CEO of Philly’s two daily newspapers. Osberg seems smart and amiable, not at all like one of those managers who tries to make up for lack of talent by lopping off heads or other body parts. (A former managing editor at the Inquirer said saving the papers will necessitate desperate measures, “something equivalent to cutting off a limb.”)

Osberg has good ideas and might do a better job of trying to salvage the papers and Philly.com than his predecessor, the pudgy propagandist Brian Tierney. But he’s still a CEO whose main responsibility is to promote the bottom-line interests of corporate owners, and that means more heads will roll as the bean counters continue to press for a revenue source to replace the advertisers who are jumping ship as sales of the papers’ print editions plummet.

More and more writers and editors will have to do without those smoothly worn habits — the drive to the office, the mug and spoon and coffee, the gossip with fellow cube rats — and without paychecks, as we move further into the brave new world of online publications, which often make do with skeleton crews. Lurking behind the questions posed by Volk’s article is a bigger question — what will happen to all the people made redundant, as the British say, by workplace innovations and changing reading habits?

No one knows the answer, except maybe the man in the black hood.

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

The ‘decoupling’ of Americans from good jobs

Posted on January 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

… The President’s failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he’ll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation’s “competitiveness” seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative. — Robert Reich, Jan. 26

Thank you, Robert Reich, for acknowledging “the elephant in the room” ignored by the mainstream journalists who, in yesterday’s news, further buffed and polished Obama’s brilliantly banal speech. And congrats on “decoupling,” which politely describes a horrendous phenomenon hardly ever cited, or even sighted, when editorial sages explore the widening gulf between rich and poor Americans.

(On an upbeat note, at least the money wasters in Philly government have yet to decouple snow plow operators from their jobs.)

I know I’ve asked you this before, Bob, but isn’t it time you stopped pretending Obama is any better than the people with whom he’s chosen to surround himself, including Jeffrey Immelt, CEO at General Electric, which “has more foreign employees than American,” as you so pointedly noted? Could you maybe start writing about elected Democrats with a social conscience and fighting spirit who might want to challenge Obama when he runs for re-election? (As if he’s not running already.)

Enough. I’m going outside now to throw snowballs. It’s more therapeutic than wasting words on Obama.

Posted in globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Great Oz explains the state of the union

Posted on January 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Great Oz has spoken. Stay away from that curtain!

Practicing civility means never having to say you’re sorry. It mostly involves learning to speak in a civil manner, never using words that might cause anger or tears or indigestion. This takes time and effort and — the hard-to-learn part — an abiding belief that all ideas are equally meaningless. It’s tricky, but once mastered, the art of civil speech pre-empts the possibility of a rancorous response to one’s words. In fact, it is safe to say that civil speech is the next safest thing to no speech.

Last night Barack Obama again showed us why he’s the reigning champion of civil speech, the man who comes closest to saying nothing at all, but with great style, so that political writers are stirred to describe him as setting the stage for a clash of ideals.

Republicans at the State of the Union address, no doubt eager to scowl and sit on their hands, instead found themselves politely applauding, often rising to their feet to do so. How could anyone not clap for a man offering tribute to those wounded in the Tucson shooting spree? How could they be tempted to shout “You lie!” at a man invoking nostalgia for the space race, reminding them that “We do big things” and, of course, repeatedly urging them to applaud our brave men and women in uniform?

It’s a testament to Obama’s brilliance that he didn’t address the need for more effective gun control, or explain how the Afghanistan situation is improving, or why ever-growing corporate profits at the expense of American workers is a good thing. And I loved the way he skillfully avoided addressing the millions of Americans who’ve lost or are losing their jobs and benefits and houses during a recession that shows no real sign of going away. And ignored the question of whether a recovery made possible by the outsourcing of jobs to other countries is really a recovery.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The man is a genius. The only way he could top this next year would be to simply declare the state of the union peachy, include some special effects by the tech crew and proceed directly to glad-handing with the Republicans who, apparently, have intimidated him to the point where he can only tell fairy tales (with much help from the mainstream press). He’s like an extremely civil Wizard of Oz, but with an army of ushers to make sure the common folk don’t peek behind the curtain.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, health care, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Comcast in, Olbermann out — coincidence?

Posted on January 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

Mainstream news can't get much more homogenized.

I doubt that covering the ups-and-downs and occasional broken promises of the Obama White House had the same thrill as exposing Obama’s thoroughly corrupt predecessors. — Will Bunch, Jan. 24, Attytood

Bunch went to high school with Keith Olbermann and seems to think the latter left MSNBC because he got bored. I didn’t go to school with Olbermann, don’t know him at all, but I’m guessing he left for exactly the opposite reason — because he was disgusted at the extent to which the Obama administration reminded him of the Bush administration.

What if it slowly dawned on Olbermann, as it has on many others, that Obama is either a phony or simply not brave enough to confront the reactionary forces that have driven the economy into a ditch and undermined our constitutional rights?

Maybe disgust set in after he realized Obama’s team had no intention of looking into possible prosecution of Bush’s gang for lying to us about WMD in Iraq. Maybe it happened when it became clear that Obama’s notion of health care reform involved even more riches for the insurance companies that have been robbing us. Or maybe it happened right away, when Obama hired corrupt Wall Street insiders to help fix the economy.

I’d mostly stopped watching Olbermann’s show but did tune in to see his response when Obama caved on extending bonus tax cuts for the rich, which will put the country another billion dollars in debt. Olbermann was angry, but he didn’t seem his old caustic self. He seemed sick to his stomach.

Olbermann could sometimes be a blowhard, too vain to see that his “special comments” would have packed a harder punch if he’d cut them down to TV size. But he was a left-leaning guy with intellect, conscience and spirit — in other words, a unique voice in mainstream media. (Rachel Maddow is smart and forceful, but she holds her nose and backs Obama, even when she disagrees with him. Laurence O’Donnell is a Washington insider who will never disagree with Obama.)

The Comcast factor should also be mentioned. Can you imagine Olbermann working for the Philadelphia-based, Republican-owned monster that ate NBC? I can’t.

Posted in mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wall Street mafia busted! (That’ll be the day)

Posted on January 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

The real wise guys rob legally, on Wall Street.

“This is one of the largest single-day operations against the Mafia in the FBI’s history, both in terms of the number of defendants arrested and charged and the scope of the criminal activity that is alleged,” said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Holder was bragging to the mainstream media about the arrest of 127 wise guys this week, but I doubt that most readers were impressed. The Mafia is old news, and its mystique was waning even before Ray Liotta entered the witness protection program in Goodfellas.

If Holder was serious about enforcing the law and restoring the credibility of the Obama administration, he’d go after mobsters who have real clout, namely the ones that run Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, AIG, et al. These truly fine citizens swindled state agencies, local governments and individual taxpayers on a scale that the Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, and Bonanno crime families, even in their heyday, wouldn’t have dared attempt. The Wall Street gangs played a key role in starting the Great Recession.

Goodfellas was partly based on the Lufthansa heist, an audacious and unprecedented crime that netted mobsters about $6 million in 1978. Compare that job to one of the 21st-century Wall Street heists summarized last May by Daily Kos:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Many of the guys who pulled off the Lufthansa heist ended up killed or in jail. Goldman Sachs got a slap on the wrist for swindling clients and continues to rake in billions.

Sure, the crime families ran lucrative gambling and extortion operations, but does anyone think those were as damaging to the economy as the Wall Street rackets? I didn’t think so.

I’d love to see a newspaper photo of Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein being led into a precinct house, maybe with Styrofoam peanuts all over his suit, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities. But that sort of thing only happens in old novels and movies.

Posted in finance reform bill, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coming soon to a town near you — Camden-ization

Posted on January 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

Corporations get bailouts. The poor get austerity.

Somebody send out the cadaver dogs to search for my midwinter optimism.

In the fall, at least, I was able to bike across the Ben Franklin  from Philly to take care of business. But after the first dusting of snow, the DRPA closed the bridge to walkers and cyclists, probably because they’re too lazy to sprinkle salt on the walkways, or they’re broke from funding too many multimillion-dollar projects unrelated to upkeep of the bridge.

But why stop at complaining about the bridge, which is run by corrupt hacks who control all the toll money? On the other side of the bridge is something worthy not only of complaint, but dread — meaning Camden, where almost half of the police force and a large number of firefighters were laid off this week.

Amazing. One of the poorest, most crime-ridden cities in America experiences a drastic reduction in safety personnel, and the state of New Jersey, run by Gov. Chris Christie, shrugs its shoulders.

My right-wing acquaintances are chuckling over this. Camden, they say, is full of shiftless, drug-addled “democrats” — a cute right-wing code word for black people. The democrats had it coming to them, for not providing enough of a tax base to prevent the layoffs. The cops and firefighters had it coming, for belonging to unions that demand good wages and benefits. The right-wingers’ solution? Let this vile little town of 79,000 rot to the point where the state can send in bulldozers and replace it with a giant parking lot.

Right-wingers see the Camden cutbacks as “austerity measures” forced by the country’s ongoing fiscal crisis. Never mind that the crisis was caused by Wall Street banks and monster corporations whose reckless business practices destroyed millions of jobs. That both major political parties responded to the crisis by bailing out the monsters instead of funding jobs programs that might have sparked a genuine recovery. That the monsters, now fully recovered, are continuing to help send American jobs to China, India and even the Caribbean. (Ask your Comcast operator where she’s based the next time you phone for service.)

As Robert Reich noted yesterday, “The United States doesn’t have a national economic strategy. Instead, we have global corporations that happen to be headquartered here.” His implicit point was that we don’t have a national strategy because it wouldn’t be in the interest of the corporations.

Many non-rich right-wingers refuse to make this leap of logic. They’d rather blame the poor, or the cops, firefighters and teachers than admit that corporations have taken over the political process. And that, consequently, the income gap between the rich and everyone else is wider now than at any time since the 1930s. To do so would be to admit that what’s happened to Camden is happening, more slowly but just as inexorably, to their hometowns, too.

Posted in Camden, Delaware River Port Authority, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, livable cities, mainstream media, NJ, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

MLK honored, Tucson-style

Posted on January 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. — Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

People kill people. Stop blaming my Glock.

Take a look at the truly fine citizens who lined up Saturday in irony-free Tucson for a gun show, where you could buy 40-round magazines for AK-47s at $19.99 apiece, or maybe a Glock 19 — the type of gun used in the Jan. 8 Tucson shooting that left six dead and 13 wounded — for $489.

The show’s organizer “extended condolences to the [shooting] victims and encouraged people to ‘lawfully and thoughtfully continue to exercise your Second Amendment rights,’ ” according to The New York Times.

After the show, attendees celebrated the long weekend ending in Martin Luther King Day at the target range, where “Pride (In the Name of Love),” U2’s ode to King and his dream of non-violent societal change, was blaring from the sound system.

Just kidding.

OK, not so much.

Posted in livable cities, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

David Brooks, a weasel in preacher’s clothing

Posted on January 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

— David Brooks, Jan. 13, The New York Times

Brooks's soul brother, Jonathan Edwards

Brooks should write speeches for Barack Obama, if he doesn’t already. He specializes in gobbledygook that’s crafted to appear well-meant and thoughtful, but never thoughtful enough to engage readers in a meaningful way with the issue supposedly under discussion. He is the Earnest Weasel, tweaking an imaginary congregation of moral midgets who don’t understand how sinful it is to oppose, in an uncompromising way, those who would destroy not only the social safety net woven from the New Deal but also the political system that put the safety net in place.

Imagine a preacher in the antebellum South, urging the darkies to tend to the earthly tasks that God in his wisdom has assigned them. Except that Brooks is a slick secularist. He speaks to the unwashed masses of all colors and nationalities, to those of us who can’t accept our place in this great oligarchy that America has become. We should have “gratitude for the political process,” especially given the fact that our “individual powers” are so limited. Isn’t it obvious?

Sensible people everywhere feel “redeemed” by others, Brooks writes. They know that their flawed efforts to do good, together with the flawed efforts of others, will, in some mysterious fashion, “move things gradually forward.” Except when they move things backward.

The Earnest Weasel’s moralizing would be easy to ignore if it wasn’t on display twice a week in The New York Times, where he has positioned himself as a moderate conservative, despite ample evidence he’s an unflagging front man for the special interests that have quashed all but a semblance of democracy — i.e., government for and by the people — in Washington, D.C.

Better a reactionary screed than Brooks’s pseudo-mystical claptrap. Better the borderline bigotry of a Pat Buchanan, honestly spelled out, than a Washington insider and right-wing hack who comes on like Jonathan Edwards, chiding us for “sinfulness” and for bucking the grand plans of our masters.

Brooks was born into a Jewish family but is worshipful of WASP-style elitism. Behind the phony appeals for civility and dialogue is a class-conscious prig, educated in the most expensive schools, nurtured by the rich and influential, cocooned in privilege, living in isolation from the commoners he is so eager to lecture.

It’s ironic that he made a name for himself with Bobos In Paradise, which seemed to celebrate the lifestyles of the exurban upper-middle class at the end of the millennium. What he was really celebrating was the old Protestant ethic, which equates the zealous pursuit of wealth with spirituality and lack of wealth with laziness. A believer in the Protestant ethic must make a show of being humble but never doubt the morality of capitalism, any more than a true Christian doubts the divinity of Jesus.

The next time you read one of Brooks’s “convoluted and deceitful” sermons on the state of the nation, consider the source.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, New York Times op-ed, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Obama vs. the desert of the real

Posted on January 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. — Barack Obama, Tucson, Jan. 12

The red pill or the blue?

The other Obama is back! The nation’s foremost orator, the silver-tongued successor to Bryan and FDR, appeared Wednesday in Tucson to deplore the shooting rampage by an apparent psychotic that left six dead and thirteen injured, including a critically wounded U.S. congresswoman. Obama was at the top of his game, paraphrasing Anne Frank, channeling Abe Lincoln and Karl Malden in On the Waterfront, exhorting us to “align our values with our actions” and “sharpen our instincts for empathy.”

As a customer in a South Philly coffee shop put it, “Great, but what is he gonna do about gun control?” To which I added, “Whatever happened to those jobs programs?”

The problem with Obama is that he’s content to substitute signposts for real things. He’s in love with abstractions and with the sound of his own voice, and blind to the notion that speeches should convey real messages about real issues in real America, where millions of real people are unemployed because of an economic disaster that wouldn’t have happened without the reckless policies of the very characters Obama chose to revitalize the economy, including Bill Daley, the former JP Morgan executive and new White House Chief of Staff.

It’s as if Obama is Morpheus in The Matrix, asking us to choose between red pill (reality) and the blue (illusion). Except that the president is unambiguously urging us to eat the blue, to keep the desert of the real at bay.

Obama wants us to mind our manners and keep our language civil, but to what end? Are we supposed to not remind him that he’s done next to nothing to oppose Republicans who insist that lowering taxes, cutting aid to the poor and outsourcing jobs will restore America to health? Should we ignore the indiscriminate sale of assault pistols and rifles, and the fact that those who tote them have already rejected the notion that civility solves problems?

It seems there are two Obamas — the eloquent humanist we voted for in 2008, and the doubletalking post-election pragmatist who is joined at the hip with the people who seek to destroy the middle class and reduce the poor to untouchable status. But there’s really only one, isn’t there?

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment