Whose side are you on, Salon?

Posted on December 28, 2010 by oddmanout215

Yesterday I was reading the virtual magazine Salon.com and wondering why a high-profile liberal publication, a rarity, doesn’t take a hard line on the U.S. government’s campaign to smack down WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Woody Guthrie would have wondered.

One answer is that some writers at Salon think Assange’s alleged efforts to publish classified materials is a crime. Or they don’t support WikiLeaks because they’re busy calling Assange an anti-feminist, or worse. Herein lies a big problem. If liberals can’t agree it’s a journalist’s right to expose government lies, then the word “liberal” ought to be redefined, or at least used more sparingly. Also, Salon’s editors should reevaluate their mission. Are they running a venue for strong liberal opinions — on, say, health insurance reform or government secrecy — or a vague “forum of ideas” for Obama-style Democrats who dread saying anything they can’t qualify or water down when challenged?

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald is pro-WikiLeaks, but Salon’s Michael Lind recently argued that supporters of WikiLeaks are as reprehensible as people who advocate targeted assassinations and preventive war. This despite the fact that WikiLeaks exists to expose those who orchestrate assassinations, preventive wars, etc.

I don’t think journalists should be free to publish “e-mail correspondence or online records of any individuals they dislike” — that’s what Lind thinks WikiLeaks will lead to — any more than free speech should be used as an excuse for shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But I think Greenwald was right to point out similarities between WikiLeaks and the work of certain foreign correspondents at The New York Times, and to state that journalists should “inform the public about important actions taken or being considered by their government which the government is attempting to conceal.”

If you can’t distinguish between exposing the secrets of private citizens for personal reasons and exposing government wrong-doing — Lind can’t, apparently — then maybe you should call yourself a neoliberal. Or maybe those of us who lean left, strongly opposed to government suppression of free speech, should disassociate ourselves from the L-word.

I’m with Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed government lies that got us mired in the Vietnam War. And with Thomas Jefferson, who said that if it came to a choice between government and a free press, he’d choose the latter.

I’m not with President Obama, who has done his best to discourage investigation of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and other secrets that Bush and his cronies hid while pursuing and waging war in Iraq.

The question is, where is Salon? Is it with Greenwald or Lind? Does Salon have an editorial board, or something akin to one? Will Salon take an official stand on WikiLeaks, or is it like the Democratic Party, too divided to take a stand on anything?

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A holiday fairy tale about lame ducks

Posted on December 23, 2010 by oddmanout215

It’s depressing to think that there was no way to win that would not have involved giving away billions of dollars to people who don’t need it. But it’s kind of cheery to think we have a president who actually does know what he’s doing.
— Gail Collins, Dec. 23 New York Times

Once upon a time, there was an adversarial press corps in D.C.

Santa’s been good to you, hasn’t he, Gail? You have a cozy gig covering national politics, far from the madding crowds waiting to apply for minimum-wage jobs, and from millions of solitary basket cases peeking out their windows to make sure the repo man isn’t creeping up the driveway.

Maybe this is why you seem to believe congressional Democrats — the lame ducks lined up all in a row, ass-backwards — have done a good job.

If Barack Obama “actually does know what he’s doing” — if he really did surrender on tax cuts for the rich in order to make possible the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the New Start treaty and the bill to help 9/11 responders — then he’s even more incompetent or sinister than most of us thought.

Has it occurred to you or your colleagues, Gail, that Obama and the Dems, by quitting without a fight on the tax-cuts issue before mid-term elections, sold out all constituents who make less than $250,000 a year? That Mitch McConnell and the other GOP uglies are happy to give ground in a few battles — 13 months of benefits for some of the jobless, DADT, money for first responders — now that they’ve won the war?

Is there even a blip of suspicion on your radar screen regarding the fact that Obama only took a stand on issues that don’t buck the interests of billionaire bankers and corporate chiefs?

Now we’re saddled with close to $1 billion more in debt, with a budget hole too deep to climb out of, and with a large influx of new congressional Republicans, many of them tea party types, who plan on dismantling what’s left of the laws put in place over the last 75 years to protect the poor from the super-rich. How cheery is that, Gail?

You’re telling a story that’s wildly different from the story most of us are living. You and your D.C. colleagues are on snooze control, writing about the imaginary enmity between wealthy senators, seemingly blind to the real news all around you. Are fairy tales the only stories you’re allowed to tell?

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, mid-term elections, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Martians land in Meadowlands!

Posted on December 21, 2010 by oddmanout215

An NJ man stands his ground against the Martians. Or is it the Eagles?

There it was in big bold caps, the main headline on the front page of Monday’s Philadelphia Inquirer: BEYOND BELIEF. Had Obama created a jobs program? Had Martians landed in New Jersey, or among Florida’s frozen oranges?

No, it was an Eagles story. Under the headline was a color photo of running back DeSean Jackson prancing toward the winning touchdown in the final seconds of Sunday’s game against the New York Giants, at New Meadowlands Stadium. (Don’t ask me why an NYC team makes its home in NJ.) The football game was big news because the Eagles, led by quarterback Michael Vick, the former dog-slaying outcast, had scored 28 points in the last eight minutes of the game.

In America, victory = redemption. That’s in case you were wondering why animal lovers are no longer dogging Vick.

What struck me as I held the Inquirer was the lack of actual news on the front page. There was a piece about the controversy over teachers’ salaries in the Philly area, non-news about the Kensington strangler, a wire story about arms control legislation, a non-story about the fifth anniversary of the court ruling against the teaching of “intelligent design” theories in a Dover, PA, high school. But half of the page was about football. This in a town with a tabloid, the Daily News, that already does a great job over-reporting sports news.

Maybe I was overreacting. The Inquirer and DN were sold again this year. The print version of the Inky is on life support, operating with a skeleton crew. The new owners  are treading water while they try to figure out how to make money with an online newspaper (good luck with that).  They’re desperate for eye-catching stories.

It was a great game, but it’s not as if the Eagles had won the Super Bowl, or even the NFC championship. What about WikiLeaks, the most important free-speech story of our time? What about the danger of war in Korea, the pending FCC ruling on net neutrality, the repercussions of the country’s unrelentingly high jobless rates, and dozens of other stories, many of them local, that affect readers in a real way?

Instead, the Inquirer editors, grown men and women, chose the “miracle” in East Rutherford as their main story. Beyond belief.

Posted in mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics, sports, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The beauty of Xmas be upon you, Dick

Posted on December 14, 2010 by oddmanout215

There ain't no sanity clause

An old friend sent me a holiday e-card — an animated cartoon, actually, with an angel and the baby Jesus in a Christmas tree, and a bit of text at the end. Enjoy the beauty of Christmas, and so on. I e-mailed a response: “If you see Santa Claus, send him to South Philly. Send Jesus, too. Tell them to bring cash. Even a stocking full of coal would do, at this point.”

‘Tis the season to count one’s blessings, if you’re my optimistic (and well-off) friend. To most of the rest of us, it’s the season to spend carefully, so as not to bounce any checks. It’s the season to quit unrealistic expectations. I question the sanity of anyone who expects Obama’s Republican tax-cut deal to jump-start the economy for more than a season or two. As Chico Marx said, “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause.”

Christmas is an invention that will persist only so long as debt-ridden Americans can pretend they’re part of the middle class, which keeps disappearing as jobs are outsourced and incomes decline. (For a different POV on this, read the Earnest Weasel, David Brooks.) These days, only draft dodger/super-patriot Dick Cheney and other millionaires can afford to observe Christmas without going deeper into debt.

I mention Cheney only because he was singled out today in an online column by Michael Moore, about the WikiLeaks controversy:

“… what if the public in 2003 had been able to read “secret” memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the “facts” he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched – or rather, wouldn’t there have been calls for Cheney’s arrest?”

Moore makes good sense, but can you imagine a mainstream media venue in America publishing such a column? You’re more likely to get a visit from Santa Claus, or to read that Cheney is spending Christmas in continental Europe, where many prominent jurists consider him a war criminal. Old Dick knows he’s much better off at home, where there ain’t no sanity clause.

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

More mumbo jumbo from Ishmael Reed

Posted on December 12, 2010 by oddmanout215

Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout. The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the unemployed in Chicago, knows too.

— Ishmael Reed, Dec. 12, The New York Times

Back in the day, black author Ishmael Reed was a darling of postmodernist English Lit professors. He wrote Mumbo Jumbo and other wildly satiric, Afrocentric novels but was a contrarian who resisted being pigeonholed as a leftist.

In his Sunday op-ed defense of Barack Obama’s policies, Reed reminds us that he’s still a contrarian with an aversion to orthodoxies and other notions of certainty. Except, of course, when it comes to his own notions.

Reed argues that Obama’s tendency to slink away from political fights is a tactic he must use to avoid being labeled a militant by racists itching to bring down America’s first black president. His op-ed is essentially a mini-lecture of everyone who suspects that expediency or other base motives played a part in Obama’s retreat (the kindest way to put it) from his campaign promises.

Reed, who has taught for many years at Berkeley and other elite universities, likes to have it both ways. In his view, Obama should be admired as “the coolest man in the room,” even when his coolness looks like a betrayal of working people, black and Latino and white. But white critics of Obama are automatically uncool. They are “used to getting it all,” and therefore don’t understand that Obama’s unwillingness to fight more bonus tax cuts for the rich is somehow in the best interest of the non-rich.

Reed clearly thinks he’s the second coolest man in the room — too cool to take a close look at political complexities, too cool to acknowledge that not all of Obama’s critics are rightwing loonies or white progressives, too cool to examine his self-contradictions. If he did the latter, Reed might have to re-think his special pleading and admit that black people who thrive in elitist environments are just as likely as white elitists to feel little empathy for the poor and disadvantaged.

Posted in Congress, fiction, mainstream media, mid-term elections, New York Times, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYT says beware of ‘hipster’ Democrats

Posted on December 11, 2010 by oddmanout215

In 1960, the hipster John F. Kennedy represented for liberals something similar to what Mr. Obama embodied as a candidate… ” — Matt Bai in the Dec. 7 New York Times

Is Obama a secret fan of William S. Burroughs?

The mainstream news monster is half-blind and barely functional, as Matt Bai recently demonstrated with his piece about Democratic challengers to Obama’s renomination. Early on, you realize there are no challengers, not yet, and that the article is a “what if” piece based on Bai’s hunch that Obama’s abysmal performance thus far might inspire progressive Democrats to field a candidate.

Bai’s article isn’t labeled “analysis,” but that’s what it’s supposed to be. In journalese, analysis means that the reporter takes the facts of the news story and tells you what they mean in the context of the big picture. Thus, the angry reaction of Democratic legislators to Obama’s tax-cut compromise with Republicans “is bound to intensify a debate” over whether the president “should face a primary challenge in 2012.” But “bound to” means there is no challenge as of yet, no actual story.

Note the spin in Bai’s piece. He writes that a primary challenge would come from “self-described progressive critics” of Obama, as if all Democratic critics of Obama are not only progressives, but self-described progressives. His language is flip, inaccurate and obviously biased, but he gets to pretend it is none of those things. He’s merely writing an analysis, even though he’s analyzing a story that hasn’t happened and using judgmental terms to indicate his disapproval of progressives.

The Kennedy reference is not only biased, but strange. Bai states that today’s liberals (are liberals and progressives the same thing?) see in Obama the same qualities a previous generation saw in “the hipster Kennedy.” Does that mean Obama is a hipster or merely that his fans think he is? And what does Bai mean by hipster? The word could refer to Beat Generation artist/bad guys like William S. Burroughs, or it might be a contemporary usage and refer to mild-mannered, shabbily dressed young urbanites who hang out in coffeehouses and have no strong political leanings.

The hipster Kennedy?

Take a chill pill, Matt, and try saying what you mean. Your false neutrality merely makes you seem sneaky, and more than a little incoherent.

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Obama’s bottom line: No, we can’t

Posted on December 8, 2010 by oddmanout215

If life were a Frank Capra movie, Barack Obama would have looked across the table at Mitch McConnell and said, “OK, Turtle Face, I’ll take this issue to the people and lay out the facts. You’re trying to blackmail Democrats. You’re holding jobless people hostage for the sake of the super-rich.”

Unfortunately, real life is the depressing spectacle of Obama being bitch-slapped by Republicans in November and bowing to their wishes a few weeks later, after they finally agreed to meet with him. It’s the non-spectacle of him slinking away in the name of compromise at exactly the times he should be asserting himself.

Real life is Obama appearing at a press conference and scolding the people who elected him instead of at community meetings, in front of voters, excoriating Republicans for pretending to care about the deficit while seeking an extension of Bush’s bonus tax cuts. It’s Obama sounding just like a Republican, promising that extended tax cuts will create three million jobs, even though some of these cuts have been in place for almost a decade — a decade in which Americans have been losing jobs at unprecedented rates.

Real life is Obama’s minions saying that tax deal was good “under the circumstances,” without adding that the president created the circumstances by not fighting the extensions months ago. By not going directly to the people with his arguments, as Harry Truman or any principled Democrat would have done.

Real life is Obama proving beyond a doubt that the Democratic establishment, which includes him and most Congressional Democrats, doesn’t represent the interests of the people any more than Republicans do. It’s confirmation that his “Yes we can” slogan really meant “No we can’t” as in no, we can’t stop big business and Wall Street from robbing us.

The only question now is whether the enigmatic Obama is merely an eloquent fool or a super-sly front man for the robbers. His continued reliance on the opinions and judgments of corrupt Wall Streeters such as Lawrence Summers feeds suspicion that the latter is true.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Depression, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ugly old white men still rule!

Posted on December 5, 2010 by oddmanout215

It is hard to believe, as the holidays approach yet again amid economic hard times, but Congress looks as if it may let federal unemployment benefits lapse for the fourth time this year. — Nov. 28 New York Times editorial

Mitch McConnell (Yes, Virginia, there is a grinch.)

No, it is not hard to believe, not unless you’re naive enough to think the ugly old white men who run the Republican Party would consider placing the needs of millions of poor people ahead of the wishes of the billionaires who are their benefactors and bosses. Not unless you don’t understand that Republicans will block any economic stimulus plans that aren’t tied to continued bonus tax cuts for the wealthy.

Here’s what didn’t happen this week: legislation to help the two million people who might soon join the four million who’ve exhausted unemployment claims and the God-knows-how-many millions who’ve been jobless for so long that bean counters simply ignore them. The newbies would be jobless in a country where the official jobless rate  is now at 9.8 percent. (The unofficial rate is twice as high.)

Here’s what else didn’t happen: an agreement to end “temporary” bonus tax cuts for the wealthy that were pushed through early in the George W. Bush administration. Republicans blocked an end to the cuts even though extending them will add more than $80 billion to the national debt in two years, will not stimulate economic growth, and will defy the majority of Americans who want bonus tax cuts for the wealthy to end.

The vote was yet another defeat for the Dems who, despite significant majorities in the House and Senate, have for two years done almost nothing to create jobs for those put out of action by the ongoing economic meltdown that started in 2008.

The upshot is no tax-cut extensions for the less than super-wealthy (couples who make $250,000 or less), and no benefits extensions or jobs programs for the unemployed — not without extended tax cuts for the wealthy. The non-wealthy are essentially being held hostage by the uglies, who answer to the billionaires.

But I don’t blame the uglies — they are merely doing what ugly people do. The people who deserve blame and ought to be ashamed are President Obama and the Democrats in Congress who didn’t push legislation to combat unemployment and end bonus tax cuts when such efforts might have succeeded. At the latest, this should have happened a few weeks before the midterm elections, in order to signal voters that there was still a difference between the parties. Now many of the Dems are lame ducks and have only a few days left to make a difference.

A clarification on ugliness: Yes, there are probably equal numbers of unfortunate looking male Democrats and Republicans in Congress. However, unfortunate looking isn’t the same as ugly, which entails an ungenerous mindset and meagerness of spirit. Using these criteria, I challenge anyone to debunk my claim that Republicans are uglier than Democrats. Ladies and gents, take the human tortoise Mitch McConnell — please. You can also have John McCain, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, Jim Bunning, Roy Blunt, James Inhofe, Richard Shelby and Joe Lieberman (the latter used to be a Democrat but is so ugly, he had to become an independent.) Look up the voting records of these guys, they’re even uglier than you think.

Quotation of the week: “Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness cuts straight to the bone.” — anonymous Southwest Philadelphia sage

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, mainstream media, mid-term elections, New York Times, Obama, Politics, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Tow-truck vultures vie for feeding rights in Philly

Posted on November 20, 2010 by oddmanout215

I’m wondering who else got a laugh watching the convoy of shiny tow trucks that circled City Hall like mechanized vultures a few days ago. The drivers were protesting a proposed city law that would place all local towing companies under the supervision of the Philadelphia Parking Authority. Some of the drivers stood on streetcorners handing out fliers explaining the injustice of the city’s power grab.

Give me a break. There aren’t many forms of urban life lower than the PPA bosses, but owners of tow truck companies is one of them. This subspecies is permitted to steal your car if it is parked in an “illegal” space and hold it until you come up with the $150-plus ransom fee.

The new law would force tow drivers to acquire special licenses and bring towed vehicles to PPA lots, and would keep rival companies from fighting over towing rights at car-wreck scenes.

One tow driver complained that the law would eliminate jobs. Pretty funny. Over the decades, Philly has lost countless thousands of manufacturing jobs to corporate outsourcing and thousands of desk jobs to suburbs that have more business-friendly tax laws. Philly over-relies on taxes and parking tickets to pay its bills because no one in city government has been smart enough to make the sort of changes that would attract new businesses and generate jobs.

The city feeds on itself, ultimately, and would be dead if not for tourism and the universities and hospitals. What would it matter if we lost a few vultures? They probably don’t even live here.

One useful nugget from the tow driver story in Philadelphia Daily News: It turns out George Smith, owner of the most notorious of the towing companies, is actually a shifty old bird named Anthony D’Angelo who is downright indignant because hundreds of towing companies are being penalized thanks to a few “bad apples.”

Yes, George, or Anthony, it’s a tough town we live in. It’s getting so even the vultures can’t feed in peace.

Posted in City Hall, livable cities, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Alfred E. Neuman on cable news: ‘Yes, me worry!’

Posted on November 18, 2010 by oddmanout215

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of [Keith] Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

— Ted Koppel, The Washington Post, Nov. 14

Reading Koppel’s piece, I remembered his old TV news show Nightline — his measured tones and smug Alfred E. Neuman-esque visage. He was so sure of everything.

Now he wants America to be sure about the decline and fall of TV journalism. To be nostalgic for the era of unbiased news, which never really existed, as Charles Kaiser persuasively argued this week. Walter Cronkite took to the airwaves to state the obvious about the Vietnam War in 1968, but you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times mainstream journalists have shown such courage in the face of opposition from their “parent organizations.”

It’s easy to condemn others for bias when you’ve made a career of walking the thin line between impartial reporting and self-serving avoidance of news stories that cast an unflattering light on your network bosses and friends in government. (On Nightline, Koppel turned to the likes of Henry Kissinger for news analysis.) However, it’s inexcusable to pretend Olbermann and the other commentators on MSNBC are on the same gutter level with the frauds on Fox.

I can only take Olbermann in small doses, he can be a windbag and narcissist, but I’ve never heard him make any on-air assertions that weren’t backed by fact. Fox rarely traffics in facts. Its modus operandi is to take slanderous online items (from Andrew Breitbart and his ilk) and present them as news. I like this from an online piece by Rachel Maddow: “Pretending that MSNBC’s analysts and evening hosts do not have a liberal bias is not my point, they clearly do. However, Fox has proven in the past 18 months that it is not an actual news organization, but rather the media arm of the Republican Party.”

And yet no one in the so-called unbiased news racket, from Koppel on down, seems willing to acknowledge Maddow’s point. To do so would be to concede that unbiased news is a badly flawed concept that doesn’t serve the public any better than news that doesn’t pretend to be neutral. Koppel would rather push a false equivalence between MSNBC and Fox than admit mainstream news outlets are too complacent or scared to take on the powers that be, even when the stakes are as high as war in Iraq.

Footnote: Thomas Friedman recently dissed rightwing frauds for spreading the absurd rumor that Barack Obama’s recent trip to Asia was costing taxpayers $200 million a day. A little late, Tom, but good job. Too bad your colleagues in the news department seem determined to avoid any reporting on the link between media liars and the Republican Party.

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