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.

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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

Fast Eddie’s casino freakout on 60 Minutes

Posted on January 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

You guys don't get it!

I’m Fast Eddie Rendell, and I’m smarter than the rest of you guys, always have been. It took me years to make you understand that casino gambling is the solution to shuttered factories and tens of thousands of lost jobs. That it’s good for the economy when people go broke at casinos, because some of what they lose comes back to state coffers. And so what if the losers can no longer afford to pay the mortgage or feed the kids? That’s what welfare is for.

Let’s face it, the sort of degenerates you see at casinos these days would blow their money on football pools or cockroach-racing if they couldn’t feed the slots in PA.

As we part-time sports announcers (ugh, how about those Eagles?) like to say, this is a no-brainer to everyone but Leslie Stahl and her sinister producers on 60 Minutes who ambushed me Sunday night with a bunch of stupid questions about the alarming nationwide proliferation of legalized gambling.

I mean, only wusses think casinos aren’t good business. Sure, these seedy little slots parlors sucker the poor and the clueless, but how else was I supposed to make up for the tax money that corporations and people with six-figure incomes won’t pay? If you guys don’t get that, you’re simpletons. You’re idiots if you don’t get that.

You’re probably involved with Casino-Free Philadelphia or one of those other professional leftist wing-nut groups that somehow blocked Foxwoods from building a second casino on the Philly waterfront, not long after I helped Neil Bluhm, my billionaire buddy from Chicago, build the first one.

You don’t get that the super-rich own this country, and that it’s a politician’s job to help the super-rich get even richer so that, when the politician’s term of office is up, he can reach out to the super-rich and get rich, too.

Let me put it this way: Do you know how many years I would have to be governor to make what Michael Jordan made in one year? I do — 600 or so. (I’m repeating this in case you didn’t hear me on “Radio Times” today.)

It’s my turn, people. It’s time to hit the jackpot, and I’m not talking about the video slots in those trashy-ass casinos I spent half of my adult life trying to help build. Or don’t you get it?

Posted in casinos, economic collapse, livable cities, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, sports, taxes, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hunting lion in the Italian Market

Posted on January 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

Would you eat burgers made from the king of beasts?

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. – Giambattista Vico

Is this a great country, or what? A friend of mine walks into a butcher shop in Philadelphia’s Italian Market today and witnesses a customer haggling with the shop owner about a cut of meat. The shop stocks exotics – everything from ostrich to emu – but my friend is surprised to realize the meat being discussed is lion.

The customer leaves in a huff. It turns out he wanted to buy a lion’s head but, in order to get the head, he would have had to order and purchase an entire lion carcass – a lot of meat.

But why would anyone in America want to eat a lion’s head, or its other parts? Did the customer want the head for his wall, to pretend he was a big-game hunter?

I googled an old Philadelphia Weekly article. It seems at least one local restaurant/bar used to include lion meat on its menu, but stopped doing so because of protests from vegans and environmentalists, or because lion is too expensive to stock, or doesn’t taste very good, or all of the above. The writer of the story hit a few dead ends when he tried to find out who “farm-raises” lions for slaughter and sale to purveyors.

Help me if you’re out there, lion meat fans. Does eating it make you feel dashing? Is it like Viagra without a prescription?

I don’t expect much feedback on this. If I found an American who eats lion and asked him why, I’ll bet his honest reply would be “Because I can.”

Posted in enviromentalism, food, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Boehner is so loathsome, he could cry

Posted on January 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

A good reason for all but the richest to weep

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel… – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Speaker of the House John Boehner looks and talks like one of those Hollywood actors, circa 1960 – Tony Randall, Gig Young, et al. – who spend all their time drinking martinis and trying to get it on with Doris Day. They nurse hangovers and never work. Their saving grace is lightness – i.e., good-humored acceptance of their limitations and an aversion to pretending they’re serious about anything.

The difference is that the chronically weeping Boehner – nicknamed “Boner” by George W. Bush – wants America to take him seriously, despite abundant evidence he’s a shill for special interests and a bag man for the GOP. I can’t imagine Tony Randall trying to hook up by quoting from the Declaration of Independence (which Boner mistook for the Constitution). Or Gig Young blubbering about how hard he’s worked to become what Matt Taibbi called the “the ultimate Beltway hack.”

Read Taibbi’s well-researched piece from Rolling Stone and ask yourself where the Washington press corps was when this bleary-eyed bozo was setting new records for congressional sleaziness.

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