Ten signs you’ve slipped into the underclass

Posted on August 30, 2010 by oddmanout215

Here’s how to tell you’ve hit bottom

Make a list that traces your downward mobility. This is the opposite of what you’d do if you were reading “Six signs that you’ve made it to the middle class,” a recent article which states the obvious — the middle class in America is becoming extinct — but then lists items one must have in order to belong.

Can't afford this coat? You're in the underclass.

My list is, I hope, more in tune with the times. You know you’ve joined the underclass when:

1. Five-dollar dress shirts at the Wolf Street thrift shop begin to seem too pricey.

2. “Hey kids, we’re going to the ballgame!” means the softball finals at Palumbo Playground, not the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

3. You cancel your cable TV subscription because you can only afford channels that show “Three’s Company” and infomercials.

4. The family car has four flats and a 2009 inspection sticker.

5. You live in Philadelphia but the closest job opening in your field is in Bangor, Maine.

6. You see a movie called Eat Pray Love — about the emotional turmoil of a well-off American woman on yearlong holiday — and want to write a sequel called Load Aim Splatter.

7. Your most up-to-date musical gadget is a boom box, not an iPod.

8. Dining out means pizza slices at Lorenzo’s, not a table for two at Amada.

9. Dental insurance isn’t an option, so you decide your chipped front tooth looks ruggedly handsome.

10. You insist that hole in the roof you can’t afford to fix is really a skylight.

I hope this helps everyday people everywhere get their bearings. For a macro version of this list, try “Thirty-six sure signs that your empire is crumbling.”

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Can a daily biking regimen cause homicide?

Posted on August 28, 2010 by oddmanout215

Maybe not, but make sure you look both ways

Exercise might “moderate” one’s anger level, according to a research study reported by the Phys Ed column in The New York Times. Hmm…

In the study, scientists monitored the brain activity of 16 young men as they were shown films of the Ku Klux Klan, kids being fired on by soldiers and other disturbing images. The monitoring devices indicated that “the men were growing angry” as they watched. However, those who rode stationary bicycles after watching the images ”ended the session no angrier than they began it.”

Don't argue with an SUV. It's not worth it.

Brilliant stuff, Phys Ed. Now we know there’s a link between exercise, stress relief and anger management. This is like announcing yes, it’s true, a certain combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms produces a clear liquid substance that quenches thirst.

Notice the research team used stationary bicycles. Would the anger of the subjects in the study have plateaued if they’d ridden bikes on city streets after watching anger-inducing images? My own study, involving personal experience and anecdotes from friends (yes, very scientific) indicates that an hour or two on the narrow streets of Philly’s grid is more likely to fill your head with Buckethead riffs and Road Warrior scenarios than keep your anger in check.

Not that you’re likely to use your bike to chase down and harm rogue drivers who breeze through stop signs, curse and spit at riders, make sudden turns without using signals and honk their horns when they’re directly behind you and speeding to beat a red light. You might picture these drivers in fireballs or crawling through wreckage or hurtling through windshields after high-speed crashes, but you wouldn’t want to play a part in making such horrors happen, perish the thought.

Besides, in that no man’s land between parked cars and moving traffic, who’s more likely to end up as roadkill, the bike rider or the oinker in the SUV?

I’m hoping, like Rodney King, that we can all get along. That bike riders who blow through red lights and ride against traffic will get their act together. That government will fund new ways to do right — more designated bike lanes, bike racks, bike sharing and so on — by the growing numbers of city residents who choose bikes as America transitions, ready or not, from the era of gas guzzlers to the era of livable cities (hmm, that’ll be the day).

Meanwhile, the streets would be a lot worse if it wasn’t for the stubborn advocates at Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, who are sponsoring Bike Philly 2010, a car-free ride on Philly streets, Sept. 12. BCGP works hard to foster peace between irritable cyclists (speaking only for myself, of course) and the spoiled hogs who poison our air and jam city streets, even though half of them could just as easily bike or use public transportation.

I could go on, but I think it’s time to get back on my stationary bike.

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Forget the blog tax, fine Carl Greene!

Posted on August 24, 2010 by oddmanout215

City should sniff out corrupt bureaucrats, not freelancers

The City Paper recently reported that Philadelphia is taxing residents who blog. An online CP follow-up clarified that the tax is on blogs that “make some money or, at least, have the potential to make some money.”

Actually, it's a lifetime tax of $300 or $50 a year

In other words, bloggers who run an advertisement or two and have a Philly address are being taxed. Which sounds more like extortion than taxation. Many of us already pay a business privilege tax for freelance writing and, in good years, a net profits tax, not to mention wage taxes on regular income as well as property taxes and other steep fees. All of this for the privilege of living in a cash-strapped city that puts itself even deeper in debt by paying huge sums to officials like Carl Greene, who can’t even pay his own bills. More on that scumbag in a second.

The blog tax is the sort of squeeze play executed by a city where idiots call the shots. A city that gouges taxpayers because it has a large percentage of residents who don’t pay any taxes. That uses its tax revenues wastefully, often on salaries for drones and cronies and petty dictators like Greene, the Housing Authority chief, who makes $306,370 a year plus bonuses to oversee spending of federal money for public housing in Philly.

Next thing you know the snoops at City Hall will be taxing residents who sell their possessions at sidewalk sales, probably to keep up with city taxes.

City officials diligently pursue residents who are paid, say, $200 for writing a freelance article. I propose that they out the same amount of energy into pursuing and prosecuting well-paid public officials who turn out to be crooks or incompetents. It’s not a crazy idea, not if it’s written into the contracts. Think of how much more efficient and just it would be if Greene had to surrender a year’s salary in return for settlement of sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him. That amount would add more to the tax revenue stream than 6,000 bloggers paying annual $50 usage feees.

It’s annoying that right-wingers all over the country have picked up the blog tax story and are using it as an argument against all taxes, instead of just bad taxes. Or as an argument against regulation of businesses. (If regulations had been in place, the Wall Street banks wouldn’t have been able to wreck the economy.) Way to go, Philly!

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Hellhound on his trail (prosecutors, too)

Posted on August 22, 2010 by oddmanout215

Roger Clemens’s deal with the devil blows up in his face

Question, sports fans: What does big clunky bully-boy Roger Clemens, the former New York Yankees pitching ace, have in common with blues artist Robert Johnson?

Answer: Both men, after realizing the limits of mortal achievement, sold their souls to the devil in return for magical powers. Legend has it that Johnson went to hell, but not before writing and recording a bunch of immortal songs, including “Hellhound On My Trail.” Clemens might go to jail, a better deal than going to hell if you land in the right jail, but he has lost his bid for immortality.

Testifying before Congress in 2008, Clemens said, “I have never taken steroids or [human growth hormone].” Last week an unconvinced federal grand jury indicted the seven-time Cy Young Award winner for perjury. This is how the situation was summed up on Friday by ESPN.com:

Robert Johnson, circa 1937

“What once seemed to be a he-said vs. he-said dispute between Clemens and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, once the New York Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, escalated into a federal case. The grand jury heard testimony from McNamee, who gave federal authorities syringes he said were used to inject Clemens with drugs.”

I’d feel sorry for Clemens if he wasn’t such a nasty piece of work. He did what many other athletes do — cheated, that is — because the potential rewards seemed to outweigh the risks. Because he knew he could make many more millions of dollars if he kept winning ballgames in apparent defiance of the aging process. Because he knew the Yankees and Major League Baseball and the TV networks and sportswriters and most fans didn’t care what he and other “superstars” were swallowing or shooting up, so long as they continued to win.

This was obvious in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in their fraudulent duel to break Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. Both were grotesquely beefed up and hitting moonshots on a regular basis. They looked like pro wrestlers masquerading as baseball players, but everyone kept cheering them on.

In the end, both broke Maris’s record and neither did. In 2009, it was revealed that Sosa had tested positive for steroids in 2003. Early this year, McGwire confessed to using steroids at various times in his career, including the ’98 season. Record keepers don’t really know how to categorize their bogus achievements and they won’t know what to do with Clemens’s stats either.

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Newsflash: Iraq not ready for U.S. pullout

Posted on August 20, 2010 by oddmanout215

The war has cost close to $1 trillion so far. Guess who’s paying for it?

Earlier this week more than 60 people were killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as they stood in a long line waiting to apply for jobs in the Iraqi military.

The vast sums wasted in Iraq could have been used to boost the economy

There was sick logic to the attack. The jobs queue was long because unemployment in Iraq is anywhere from 30 to 68 percent, depending on whose figures you believe. Unemployment is sky-high because Iraq remains a battleground more than seven years after the U.S. invaded and occupied it, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and creating hundreds of billions of dollars of debt that has been passed on to U.S. taxpayers.

The suicide bombing was like an exclamation point on remarks made last week by Iraqi Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, who thinks it would take another decade before Iraqi forces could operate without help from U.S. forces.

Except that the U.S. literally can’t afford more war in Iraq, where ethnic and religious divisions run even deeper now than when the war began, and where the only real winners have been the corporations that made billions contracting with the U.S. government to supply goods and services and mercenaries for the war effort.

The rationale for the war was based on lies invented by the Bush administration, as was the rationale for maintaining a military presence after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. We had to end the factional unrest and stabilize the government, Bush said.

Iraq is still unstable, so it’s no surprise that the Obama administration, which was stuck with Bush’s mess, is ducking the question of future U.S. military involvement. Much has been made of the departure of the last American combat brigade, but who knows what next year will bring?

The fact is that taxpayer money will continue to prop up Iraq’s dysfunctional government and fund the 50,000 troops who will remain in Iraq in 2011 as “advise and assist brigades,” which means they will become fighting units if and when the situation calls for it. We’ll also be funding thousands of U.S. contractors — that means mercenaries — who will be hired to protect American diplomats from insurgent attacks, which are likely to begin to increase again now that most of our uniformed forces have been redeployed.

The money problems don’t end there. Barack Obama is as gung-ho about the pointless Afghanistan war as George W. Bush was, so billions in tax dollars are being spent there even as our military involvement in Iraq is winding down. And billions more are being spent to prop up the corrupt regime in Pakistan, and to keep Israel from attacking Iran.

Meanwhile the situation in America grows dimmer, with the federal deficit worsening, stimulus money drying up and applications for unemployment benefits on the rise again.

The folly of wasting huge sums on unnecessary wars becomes clearer by the day. The costs of Iraq alone will top out at more than $3 trillion. And yet few people in government are talking about bringing military spending in line with the realities of our rapidly weakening economy.

Bottom line: The war that matters is the war to cut American trade and budget deficits, and we are losing it, partly because of insupportable military spending. China and other East Asian countries are clobbering us without firing a shot.

Quotable: From British historian Tony Judt, who died Aug. 6 — “… the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Iraq war, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dowd for White House press secretary? A good fit

Posted on August 16, 2010 by oddmanout215

D.C. gossip queen has low tolerance for Democratic ‘lefties’

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a caricaturist who also specializes in insider gossip, semi-clever puns and simplistic assessments of the national mood.

She would make an ideal replacement for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, whom she recently deemed unfit for the job.

Maureen Dowd would know how to work the White House press corps

Dowd was in her glory in the late 1990s, dishing the dirt about Bill and Monica. Then she spent eight years trying to make light of George W. Bush and his posse. No sex scandals in that dull bunch, so she joked about Bush being a spoiled rich kid who felt inferior to his dad.

Her tone is catty and ultra-casual, even when she’s writing about things like the Bush administration’s dishonest but successful effort to start a disastrous war in Iraq. It isn’t until she gets riled up and tries to make a substantive argument that you notice how welded her opinions are to the status quo.

On Sunday Dowd seemed upset because millions of Democrats are disappointed and/or angry about President Obama’s failure to deliver on meaningful health care reform, Wall Street regulation and other big campaign promises. She agreed that Gibbs should be “yanked” for ranting against Obama’s Democratic critics, but she also wrote that Gibbs was correct, such critics are “lefties” who “won’t recognize the necessity of compromise.”

In a dishonest flourish, Dowd tried to pretend there’s no widespread Democratic criticism of Obama, but rather only a few disgruntled ideologues who — and here she quoted Gibbs — “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” She compared progressives who’ve lost faith in Obama to right-wing extremists who’ve “co-opted” the message of the Republican Party. The difference is that Republican “radicals” often end up helping their elected representatives — she named the far-right Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl — whereas “Democratic extremes typically do damage to a Democratic president.”

Dowd concluded that Gibbs should be removed not because of his wildly off-base attack on fellow Democrats but rather because he’s doing a poor job of communicating Obama’s message to the press. As if the flaw wasn’t in the message itself — i.e., in Obama’s watered-down legislative initiatives and his lame insistence on working with an opposition party that from the outset dismissed the possibility of compromise.

Obama’s policy failures shine a light on the general failure of Democratic politicians in Washington to adequately represent the interests of their constituents. Dowd’s defense of Obama shows she’s out of her depth when not writing about Bill Clinton’s cigar tricks or George W. Bush’s frat boy mentality.

If only Dowd could persuade Gibbs to quit and worm her way into his job. She could spew the same “centrist” nonsense that she pushes in print but this time verbally, to fellow insiders in the Washington press corps, and then engage them in gossipy off-the-record chats about matters that have nothing to do with the dreary faraway problems that most Americans wake up to every day.

Posted in Congress, finance reform bill, health care, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Canadian health care?’ We should be so lucky

Posted on August 13, 2010 by oddmanout215

Robert Gibbs is the new poster boy for Dem cowardice

Like many other Democrats, I puzzled for a few days over Robert Gibbs’s scornful remarks about the “professional left.”

Is President Obama’s press secretary just another beefy bureaucrat who lost his temper after catching flak too often, or was his outburst part of a strategy to reassure “moderates” that Obama leans only slightly more to the left than George W. Bush?

This man wouldn't want to hear about real health care reform

If Gibbs’s weirdly right-wing rant was OK’ed by his boss — apparently it was, because Obama had no public comment about it — then we’re looking at a president who’s way out of touch with the core values of the Democratic Party and at an administration that will remain content to offer the poor and middle classes almost nothing in the way of real change.

Some analysts think Gibbs was only jabbing at cable news outlets — specifically, at talking heads on MSNBC. It hardly matters. If his remarks were sincere, he’s barely in the same party with most Democrats. He represents a faction that is Democratic only insofar as it helps prevent reactionaries like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner from running Congress.

Gibbs got my attention when he said the professional left, whatever that is, seeks “Canadian health care.” My guess is that most Democrats think Canadian-style health care — publicly funded, efficiently administered — would be vastly preferable to our country’s current system, which leaves us all at the mercy of health insurance companies that charge exorbitant fees and routinely cheat customers who think their medical costs are covered.

Most of us who aren’t DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) would have liked to see Obama make a real fight for health care reform instead of settling for a bill that was watered down to a thin gruel. We also hoped he’d fight to put the jobless back to work, crack down on Wall Street thieves, pursue progressive conservation policies, scale back America’s futile war in Afghanistan and, in general, make us notice that Dubya was no longer in office.

Democrats want and need representatives who act out of conviction rather than fear. The last thing we need is a spin doctor who goes out of his way to pander to right-wingers and woo an imaginary legion of moderates.

Quotable: A tweet from  David Frum, former speechwriter for Dubya, regarding Gibbs’s outburst — “More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brother, can you spare… a twenty?

Posted on August 11, 2010 by oddmanout215

Joblessness will be ‘the new normal’ if Americans tune out

It’s hard to tell what’s coming, anarchy or more apathy, but there’s no doubt that things haven’t looked this bleak for the poor and near-poor since the 1930s. (Think Al Jolson, singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” adjusted for inflation.)

Al Jolson would feel your pain, brothers and sisters

About 20 percent of American homeowners are underwater, and more and more of the jobless are lining up for free food on Front Street in South Philly and all over the country.

Some economists are calling this situation “the new normal,” but that’s not an expression the out-of-work are likely to use. A rally by the long-term unemployed, to demand help from their vacationing congressional reps, will take place tomorrow on Wall Street, home of the banks that caused the economy to tank.

Anyone who’s paying attention has noticed that a weirdly diverse group of activists, economists and politicos are speaking the same language regarding the Great Recession, or whatever you want to call it. Bill Gross, a free market cheerleader who co-runs the world’s largest bond fund, hopes the government “spends tens of billions on new infrastructure projects to put people to work and stimulate demand.” Glenn Hubbard, an economic advisor to George W. Bush, thinks recovery entails investing large sums in retraining workers whose jobs are gone forever. These guys are not exactly wild-eyed radicals, but they’re on the same page, sometimes, with people like Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren and Debbie Stabenow.

Meanwhile, whose page is President Obama on? We are hearing calls for works projects from conservatives but not from the guy who was elected by millions of Democrats and independents to set the economy right. We are hearing his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, railing against Democrats who are pressing Obama to do his job.

I don’t pretend to know Obama’s true feelings about the importance of putting the jobless back to work, or his definition of economic recovery, but his conduct up to now indicates a belief that recovery means providing fiscal stimulus for banks and corporations. His actions are based on the notion that recessions are best gauged by estimating the gross domestic product, not the number of people employed. In other words, a recession is over if the GDP rises to a certain level.

Incredibly, Obama and his math wizards, Timothy Geithner and Laurence Summers, have stuck to this notion, even as millions more people lost their jobs, then their hopes that they can find new ones, and then their belief that Obama knows what he’s doing.

It makes we wonder if the president understands what the New Deal was about. If he did, he would answer the question posed by Robert J. Shiller: “Why not use government policy to directly create jobs — labor-intensive service jobs in education, public health and safety, urban infrastructure maintenance, youth programs, elder care, conservation, arts and letters, and scientific research?”

One might add, why not fight to persuade Congress to reinstate taxes on the rich — taxes scuttled in the obscenely cynical Bush era — and use the resulting revenue to fund the jobs programs?

It might all work out in the end, years from now, with or without a real jobs program. Or we’ll be rocked by social breakdown that’s less dramatic but far more harmful than what happened in the ’30s.

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

No more ear meat for Iron Mike

Posted on August 8, 2010 by oddmanout215

Ex-champ’s vegan conversion still hard to digest

Mike Tyson bites for his life.

I’m way behind on celebrity gossip. It turns out Mike Tyson says he appeared in the movie The Hangover because he needed drug money, but the big story – the one that apparently broke way back in May – was that Iron Mike, the former baddest man on the planet, the boxer who bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, had lost a lot of excess weight after becoming a vegan. How did I miss this? Who’s next for vegan-ism, Michael Vick?

Footnote: Holyfield was/is a notoriously dirty fighter. Tyson resorted to biting only after Holyfield repeatedly head-butted him.

Posted in sports | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Summers, Geithner give elitism a bad name

Posted on August 8, 2010 by oddmanout215

Obama’s go-to guys botched economic recovery. Why do they still have jobs?

Barack Obama thinks Ivy League grads who’ve worked on Wall Street have all the answers, which is why he ended up depending on Laurence Summers and Timothy Geithner to pull the country out of its economic tailspin and, arguably, why so many Americans still can’t find work.

According to Timothy Geithner, America is on a path back to growth.

Geithner, who was joined at the hip with the Wall Street crooks who started the tailspin, is still in denial about how screwed up things are. Summers, who also was thisclose to the crooks, is the bright boy who insisted back in the early days of the Obama administration that unemployment wouldn’t exceed eight percent after the stimulus package passed. The official jobless rate is now at 9.5 percent.

According to The New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Summers disagreed with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, over the size of the stimulus bill before it was proposed in 2009. Romer, like Paul Krugman and many other economists, thought the package would have to be worth more than $1 trillion in order to fuel a long-term recovery. But Summers and Geithner, along with Rahm Emanuel, feared congressional opposition and advised the boss to go with what became a $787 billion bill. So here we are with a recovery that has sputtered to a halt and a jobless rate that’s holding steady.

Romer reportedly will resign next month. As TalkLeft put it, “If Obama fails politically, the cause will be his policy failure regarding the size of the stimulus — when he listened to Geithner and Summers instead of Christina Romer.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments