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.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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

Christie & Obama: We do big, stupid things

Posted on February 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Jackie Gleason does his Chris Christie impression

… Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I’ll take it that way.

— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reacting to President Barack Obama’s use of the phrase “big things”

Who’s more contemptible, Christie or Obama? The former is a bully, but the latter is the sort of eager conciliator who gives the whole pizza to the bully before the bully even asks for a slice. (No fat jokes, I promise.)

Read Obama’s recent pronouncements about fiscal policy. He agrees with Christie, in that part of his plan to get the economy back on track is to make like Herbert Hoover and cut services to the poor and middle class.

Obama and Christie are so alike, they’ve used variations on the same political slogan — “We do big things.” Christie has accused Obama of stealing this vacuous slogan and therefore must think it’s clever.

Obama did indeed say, “We do big things” in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address. The slogan was supposed to inspire, but it’s merely a reminder of his failure to do basic things, such as creating jobs programs for the long-term unemployed. He doesn’t promise a New Deal, a Fair Deal, or a Square Deal. He sees no New Frontier looming, and his idea of a Great Society, if his budget plan is an indication, is one percent of the population controlling the country’s wealth and offshoring American jobs.

Christie reacted to Obama’s speech by claiming he, the loud-mouthed governor, was the first guy to promise big things, back on Jan. 11. Not surprisingly, the big things on Christie’s agenda — cuts in pension and health benefit costs, and so-called educational reform — do nothing but reflect his small-mindedness. He’s in the forefront of the Republican movement to break unions and all other opponents of government run by the obscenely wealthy.

Read about Christie accepting the Lincoln Award at the Union League in Philadelphia (as if today’s Republicans have anything in common with Abraham Lincoln). Remember the video of him bullying a schoolteacher who asked him why he’s against tax cuts for the wealthy but thinks it’s OK to squeeze everyone else.

And realize this is what it’s come down to — a choice between Obama, a Democrat in name only, and Christie, an unfunny version of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners. A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing but absolute loyalty to his wealthy backers.

Will voters catch on? I guess we’ll find out if and when a third party emerges before the 2012 elections.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, NJ, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sweet nothings? No thanks, I’m full

Posted on February 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

“All I have to do is remember and imagine the rustle of your skirt and I’m ready to chew my own hands off.” — Aleksei to Polina in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

Exactly. What a relief from the Valentine’s Day story on my service provider’s homepage: “They fell in love at the Home Depot.” And from Dr. Ruth, “There’s one thing you must say today…” And from the sea of crimson greeting cards and candy boxes at CVS, and the supermarket on South Street where you can’t buy canned soup without tripping over Mylar love balloons.

Dostoevsky is an antidote to ad slogans, to coma-inducing American culture, to the idea that romantic love is sane and pleasant and not funny. Alexsei again, but in the style of Groucho Marx: “Oh well, I’ll put off killing myself as long as possible, so that I can feel the insufferable pain of being without you.”

It’s a question of taste. If you like white bread with sugar on top, this is your day.

Posted in fiction, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Beware the curse of Mubarak’s tomb

Posted on February 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

I'm still here!

Sir Joseph Whemple: [translating inscription] “Death [and] eternal punishment for anyone who opens this casket. In the name of Amon-Ra, the king of the gods.” Good heavens, what a terrible curse!
Ralph Norton: [eagerly] Well, let’s see what’s inside!
— from the screenplay of The Mummy, 1932

Hosni Mubarak has resigned — abdicated is more like it — and he’s as good as dead, right? In body, maybe, but his spirit will live on after the euphoria of the people he tormented for 30 years has faded.

Which is not to say our Arab friends uncorked their champagne substitutes too early, or that they shouldn’t be commended for bum-rushing the pharoah. There may yet be a bloodbath, but one can’t help being impressed when relatively peaceful protesters prevail, or at least appear to prevail, over the guys who hold the guns.

Inevitable comparisons between Egypt 2011 and Germany 1989 are being made. I was working in a newsroom in `89, when the East Germans were hacking away at the Berlin Wall. Everyone knew the world was changing, but was it changing for the good? Yes and no. Tyrants were overthrown, rights were reclaimed, but the dog-eat-dog version of capitalism that replaced Soviet-style communism did little to relieve poverty and injustice in Russia and many of its former satellite states.

It’s telling that no one in Washington, D.C., seemed to know what was happening in Egypt, even as it happened. Barack Obama’s instinct in critical moments — to respond with caution bordering on timidity — served him well. Republican uglies (imagine any of them siding with “the people” against the ruling class!) also got lucky, because they were too surprised by the revolution to put a convincingly negative spin on it.

We should enjoy Egypt’s great moment while it lasts and ignore American politicians who applaud the possible advent of democracy in the Arab world. Most of them are cheering unregulated capitalism, not democracy. If the latter was important to them, they’d take on the robber barons who are destroying what’s left of democracy in America. (See Bob Herbert for more on this.)

The Mubaraks of the world never quite go away because people everywhere, when desperate, tend to wonder if resurrecting an all-powerful ruler would set things right. (Let’s see what’s inside!) During the Great Depression, Germany saw in Hitler a new Frederick the Great. Italy mistook Mussolini for a Caesar. America opted for FDR, but only because most of the country maintained some faith in the democratic process. No one, not even Amon-Ra, can say for sure that Americans will keep the faith this time around.

Posted in Egypt, Great Depression, mainstream media, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

HuffPo/AOL — a new reason to avoid J-school

Posted on February 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

The next generation of American journalists

The Huffington Post is a brilliantly packaged product with a particular flair for addressing the cultural and entertainment tastes of its overwhelmingly liberal audience. To grasp its business model, though, you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9

Arianna, say it ain’t so!

I don’t mean the sale of Huffington Post, we already know that would happen. And we knew you ran your ship with a low overhead, that many good writers have contributed to HuffPo merely for the sake of advancing causes they feel strongly about. (That and four dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.)

I mean reports that you have used your shrewdness and Zsa Zsa charm to make a multimillion-dollar profit on the sale of HuffPo to AOL, a corporate dinosaur whose chairman, Tim Armstrong, wouldn’t give two stuffed grape leaves for the social consciousness you acquired in the 1990s while transitioning from a Newt Gingrich admirer to a California liberal.

What happens to the slightly left-of-center HuffPo now that it has become part of AOL’s lame effort to again become a serious media player? Is it true you recently downplayed HuffPo’s liberal identity and reminded readers that “politics” is just one of 15 sections in your infotainment vehicle? Are you gearing up for another wardrobe change?

You told Charlie Rose, “AOL has an incredible investment in video—and we intend to double down on that—a great investment in local [coverage] just in time for the Presidential election, over 800 towns already being covered by professional journalists.”

This is marvelous, but you didn’t mention that most AOL reporters are paid next to nothing, and that online news venues are feeding off what’s left of print journalism — relying on it for “content,” that is — as they help kill it. And that the end of print journalism will make mainstream news even less informative than it already is.

What happens, Arianna, to those reporters, in Philadelphia and around the country, when newspapers like the Inquirer and Daily News die? Will you fight for their right to make a decent wage at online venues, maybe even use some of your vast fortune to see that this happens?

As the Duke would say, “That’ll be the day.” More likely, you’ll continue to stroll the main deck, smiling for the cameras, as the slaves in the galley below power you to your next acquisition.

Posted in mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment