Why mainstream media kissed up to Christie

Posted on January 15, 2014 by oddmanout215

My backyard in the swamp after the rain

It’s been a long week in the Tinicum swamp. That crack in the roof of my shack that Swamp Rabbit fixed didn’t stay fixed very long, so I stole another bucket of epoxy and put him to work when the rain stopped. “If it ain’t the cold, it’s the rain,” the rabbit whined. Things could be worse, I told him. He could be Chris Christie, trying to patch up the hot air balloon he was hoping to sail to the White House in 2016.

Christie, the prince of paypacks, is still desperately trying to convince people he’s not the jerk behind the jerks who caused major traffic problems in Fort Lee, N.J., whose mayor refused to endorse Christie for governor in 2013.

Good luck with that. The Fort Lee fiasco has focused attention on other people to whom bad things happened after they bumped up against Christie. In fact, it seems bad things happen to most people who don’t kowtow to the gov’ner. He often physically confronts perceived enemies, including women schoolteachers who are one-third his size.

But let’s face it: A lot of people have admired and voted for Christie precisely because he is a bully, adept at deflecting accusations of greed away from his corporate masters and onto regular people, especially teachers, firefighters, and other labor union members. It’s much easier to resent the guy up the street whose income is a bit higher than yours than it is resent billionaire neo-fascists — or are they neo-feudalists? — like Charles and David Koch, who are genuinely ruining your life, but from a great distance.

And Christie got a lot of help from mainstream journalists, many of whom are instinctive ass-kissers, enthralled by the wielding of power and their proximity to those who wield it. Journalists like Joe Scarborough and Brit Hume, for example, like to gush about certain tough-talking politicians who dumb down every issue of import.

A writer at The Nation recently commented on the kid gloves treatment Christie got from most of the MSN. I read the piece to Swamp Rabbit when he came down from the roof:

It didn’t matter that [Christie] lost $400 million of federal school funding, or unilaterally canceled a plan to build a commuter train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan and presented it falsely as a big savings for his state, or vetoed — five times —additional funding for family planning, directly causing six reproductive health centers to close. Christie has filled the place formerly occupied by John McCain: the straight-shooting Republican “maverick” (a maverick being a Republican who admits the earth is probably older than 10,000 years). It doesn’t matter what he actually did or said.

It didn’t matter, not even when Christie was accused of using “money that was intended for victims of [Hurricane] Sandy to promote himself in a series of TV ads.” It only started to matter when the Christie administration got caught in an act of retribution so mean-spirited that it wasn’t possible to justify Big Boy’s style of governance by calling him a “straight-shooter” or an old-fashioned practitioner of “hardball politics.”

There are many exceptions, of course, but what is it about people in the media — usually men — that compels them to kiss up to politicians who are inflexible and vindictive, and to equate these flaws with leadership qualities?

“I ain’t sure,” Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Maybe Christie and them other blowhards remind them journalists of the guys they work for. Or maybe they just ain’t got no balls.”

Same thing, rabbit.

Footnote: Notice Christie always makes sure he is flanked by a squad of cops when he confronts someone. What a maverick. What a man.

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Beware the polar Gore-Tex… or is it cortex?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

It seemed I might be able to change my socks two days in a row, but then Arctic air crept in on big bear claws and pushed the swamp back into the deep freeze. Swamp Rabbit, flipping out from cabin fever, chugged Wild Turkey and ranted, convinced the new ice age had arrived via something called the solar cortex, or the polar Gore-Tex. The name kept changing, but whatever he was going on about sounded ominous.

“I’m telling you, it ain’t natural,” he shouted from next to the wood stove. “This here roller duplex gonna be the end of us.”

Noticing he’d been online, I checked the screen:

…Arctic air is normally penned in at the roof of the world by a powerful circular wind called the polar vortex, said Dim Coumou, a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) near Berlin. When the vortex weakens, the air starts heading southwards, bringing exceptional snow and chill to middle latitudes. The weather shift is also helped by changes in a high altitude wind called the jet stream…

The phrase “polar vortex’ was all over the Internet, like a new pop star or a contagious disease. “Reminds me of you,” I said to the rabbit. “You’re sort of locked in the same loop, round and round, but then you hit the Wild Turkey and start meandering south. You’d be in Georgia by now if you weren’t trapped by the cold.”

“Ain’t no sense to it, the rodent replied. “How come the cortex is so weak, and why ain’t the jet stream doin’ its job?”

I tried to explain that scientists aren’t yet sure of exact cause and effect, only that extremes of temperature down here are becoming more common as the Arctic grows warmer. Then I told him to fetch more wood for the stove while I went outside the swamp to steal more food.

He guzzled bourbon and said, “Why bother? It’s the end of the world.”

“Then I’ll just get food for me,” I replied, opening the door of the shack.

“Git me some veggies or somethin’,” he said, after an apparent change of heart. “Just don’t bring back no more swine.”

Posted in apocalypse, climate change, down and out, fiction, globalization, humor | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Bread and water beats jail food

Posted on January 7, 2014 by oddmanout215

new swamp

Pig meat gives me bad dreams; I don’t eat it unless there’s nothing else. Philosopher and Animal Liberation author Peter Singer would tell me there is always something else, that “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet — for the sake of hamburgers.” And hot dogs. But Singer lives at Princeton, not in Tinicum Swamp, where I make my home.

“Why didn’t you swipe soyburgers for yourself and leave the swine for me?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit asked me today.

He’s no Singer fan and he’s still angry about having to split a pack of wieners with me on Saturday, when the temperature in these parts plunged to near zero. He was angry on Sunday, too, but the weather was better. Warm air flowed in so fast the whole swamp fogged up as the ice melted.

I woke up Sunday night — or dreamed I woke up — and saw dead people floating out of the fog toward my shack. One was my Great Aunt Nan, who used to give me candies and warn me to stop being a bad boy. This time she issued her old warning in a ghostly tone. “Bread and water. That’s all they feed you in jail.”

Not true, I thought, recalling a piece last month in Truthdig by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges about Aramark Corporation, a Philadelphia-based professional services company that supplies food for inmates at 600 jails and prisons nationwide — food that, according to Hedges, sometimes isn’t fit for your dog to eat, or maybe even your Swamp Rabbit:

…In February 2009 a Camden County, N.J., health report found that the Aramark-run kitchen in the county jail had “mice throughout kitchen and storage area.” Mouse droppings were discovered in butter. Several food items, including grits, chicken, rice and beef, were not stored at temperatures low enough to protect against contamination. Prisoners at the county jail in Santa Barbara, Calif., went on a hunger strike last summer to protest the Aramark food, and inmates at Bayside State Prison in New Jersey went on a hunger strike in October for the same reason…

I’ll stop there, in case you dear readers are about to dine. Hedges’ piece is reminiscent of passages from The Jungle and addresses some of the ways big corporations are cashing in on the fact that incarceration rates in the United States are the highest in the world.

Hedges is an unabashed foe of corporatism, so it’s no surprise he wrote a negative piece about Aramark. But I’m wondering why The Philadelphia Inquirer or some other prominent mainstream news entity hasn’t done an “objective” report on the many complaints about the kitchen facilities and jail food served up by this services giant, a Fortune 500 company that has its own high-rise office building in Philly and generates $12 billion a year in revenues.

Maybe I just answered my own question.

Footnote: See Prison Legal News for more on prison food services.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Poverty gets more expensive every day

Posted on January 5, 2014 by oddmanout215

A view of Philly from my shack before the weather changed

From my shack, a view of Philly when the weather was good

Yesterday at the shack we woke to bone-chilling wind and a blanket of ice. Swamp Rabbit was huddled in a corner with a bottle from the case of Wild Turkey I stole to help him get through his post-holiday funk. I told him to fetch wood from the swamp so we don’t freeze, it would be two below zero soon.

“That booze won’t warm you for long,” I said. “I’ll find you stiff as a board tomorrow morning.”

“It won’t be my fault,” the rabbit said. “You ain’t nothin’ but an enabler, don’t ya know?”

While the rodent fetched wood, I chopped ice off the roof and surfed the Net for more weather and news and so on. I saw a letter to the Naked Capitalism guy that I read to the rabbit when he got back with some dead branches that looked like bones:

My expenses are beginning to get the better of me and month’s end is stretching beyond my dollars. Next year is looking the same. So, yesterday I was pointedly reminded how expensive it is to be poor. Instead of buying a lot when something I use is on sale, I have to buy what I have dollars for. No savings for me! And instead of buying by unit price–I’m a ferocious unit price shopper–I have to buy whatever size I have dollars for. And now I have to make more trips because I can only buy small dollars worth at a time.

“Amen to that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I used to buy carrots at twelve bucks a carton when I worked for that magician, gettin’ pulled out of a hat three shows a day. Now I can barely afford one of them two-dollar bags that don’t hold no more’n a half-dozen carrots.”

The lying varmint never worked for a magician but I could feel his pain, especially now that our reactionary Congress is cutting food stamps and unemployment, and secessionist governors in 25 states, with help from our neo-Confederate Supreme Court, are denying Medicaid to 4.8 million people who aren’t eligible for Obamacare. I read to the rabbit from something by William Greider:

The Supremes have done quite a lot in the last fifteen years to mess up our already weakened democratic system. They stole the presidential election in 2000. They cut loose Big Money to swamp elections by destroying lawful restraints. They are trying step-by-step to restore hoary old legalisms that favor capital over labor, corporations over individuals. Shouldn’t we be talking about how to stop them?

“No, we should be talkin’ about gettin’ somethin’ to eat,” the rabbit said. “I’m too hungry to talk politics.”

I told him to get a fire going in the stove so I could unfreeze the pack of wieners I pinched from Pathmark.

“What you take me for, a heathen?” he said. “I don’t likes me no swine.”

“You’d better get used to it,” I said, “or start growing your own carrots.”

Footnote: Uh-oh, now I’ve got playing in my head Captain Beefheart’s “A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The ill logic of the lower classes

Posted on December 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

Lone marsh tree

It’s the Eighth Day After the Solstice, and I’m back at the shack after checking up on my old house, which stopped feeling homey after a tree fell on it last year. Some of my old neighbors are doing OK, judging by the number of houses with Christmas decorations. Some of the those who weren’t doing OK have died. Others — the ones who, because of joblessness or a catastrophe, couldn’t make their mortgage payments — have simply disappeared.

On my way back to the swamp I ran into one of the disappeared — a big, blustery guy who used to remind me of a circus strong man, probably because of the striped tank tops he wore in the summer. Today he was wearing dark glasses and a ratty coat with a big hood, and he seemed about four inches shorter, but I recognized him and said hello as we crossed paths on the sidewalk. He returned my hello but didn’t stop walking. I got the impression he was homeless but I can’t be sure, because I didn’t stop walking either.

At the shack I asked Swamp Rabbit, an amateur psychotherapist as well as a closet bibliophile, why my former neighbor and I had shied away from each other. He spit into the Tinicum swamp and said, “Your ex-neighbor feels like a bum. He’d feel even more like a bum talking to you, because you knew him when he had a house. And I reckon you didn’t want him to know you feel like a bum, too.”

I reminded the rabbit that I’m a fiction writer, not a bum. He asked me what the difference was. It was noon, but he already smelled like he’d finished off a bottle.

I said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me a bum, all you do is drink Wild Turkey and spit in the swamp.”

“Think about it,” he replied. “It ain’t just them hyper-capitalists and their lap dogs in Congress that blame poor people for being poor. The poors blame themselves. They don’t even raise hell when food stamps get cut and unemployment benefits get killed after six months. If they do raise hell, it’s agin each other.”

“You don’t understand the fear, you dumb rodent. I’m all for raising hell, like I said last week, but I have to be careful. The New Deal is done, the rich have the whip hand until things change again.”

I read him the tail end of a column by Paul Krugman:

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

The rabbit twitched his nose and chuckled. “Whose agenda? Jobs are on your agenda if you’re jobless, but they ain’t if you’re in the owner class. The owners don’t need more workers, they’re making bigger profits without them. Who’s gonna make them start hiring?”

I threw one of his empty bottles at him. It’s annoying when the varmint makes more sense than that guy in The New York Times.

Posted in Congress, down and out, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Karl Marx gets a makeover

Posted on December 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

Just for a laugh, I read aloud from a Guardian UK article in which David Simon expressed qualified approval of some Marxist ideas. Sure enough, my friend Swamp Rabbit called me a commie before I was halfway through the piece.

Simon is the fellow whose well-regarded TV series The Wire depicted life in the other America, the one where there is no law and order and no tangible connections to the so-called economic recovery that we hear about in mainstream news reports. The Guardian article, an edited transcription of a talk Simon gave in Australia, made plain what was implicit in The Wire — that the growing divide between rich and poor is a consequence of policies forged by free-market zealots who decided it was safe to throw the poor under the bus once it was clear that communism was no longer a viable threat to the status quo.

“Big words and ideas,” said Swamp Rabbit, who used to be a commie himself. He waved his old, battered copy of Marx’s Capital: Volume I and added, “We was hopin’ for heaven on earth, but all we got was Joe Stalin.”

But Simon doesn’t say Marx’s communist dream wasn’t deeply flawed; he merely reminds us that Marx, who became the butt of countless jokes when communism failed, was right about unbridled capitalism:

…Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess…

Don’t let capitalism “work entirely” or you end up with a plutocracy, in which the wealthy thrive at record rates while the earning power of the middle class dwindles and the poor are deep-sixed. In which corrupt Democrats join Republicans in dismantling the New Deal, a force for change that involved a pragmatic mix of ideas meant to serve egalitarian ends, the first of which was to put people back to work. The overall goal was the triumph of social democracy.

Not so in our time. As economist Dean Baker recently noted, “At the moment, no prominent politician in national politics is arguing the case for a government budget that could bring the economy anywhere near to full employment.”

“That’s because the politicians are all owned by the skunks who profit by putting people out of work,” the rabbit said. “It don’t take no Karl Marx to figure that out.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if we don’t start pushing back against the skunks, like Marx did, then the joke’s on us.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, globalization, history, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A ‘Blue Xmas’ with Miles

Posted on December 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Miles Davis at his most demented coolest, with Wayne Shorter (sounds more like John Coltrane) on tenor and lyricist/singer Bob Dorough, the vocal equivalent of a funhouse mirror. (You might want to smash the mirror before the song is over.)

Full title: “Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern).” Cool, daddy-o.

Footnote: Thank you, Hobson Tarrant, wherever you are, for your “pipecleaner-based’ animation.

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The curious case of the two Barack Obamas

Posted on December 10, 2013 by oddmanout215

My friend Swamp Rabbit laughed all week at the speech in which the president, in typically stirring style, called for better treatment of low-wage workers:

Barack Obama warned that a “relentless, decades-long trend” of growing inequality and social immobility posed a fundamental threat to the American dream on Wednesday, throwing his support behind a grassroots movement to address chronically low wages across the US.

Attempting to regain the political momentum after a calamitous two months in which his healthcare reforms were plagued by website failures, the president said reversing the growing gap between rich and poor was “the defining challenge of our time…”

Unfortunately, this is the same president with the sneaky, pro-corporate agenda described Sunday in this report:

The Obama administration appears to have almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.

The memos, which come from a government involved in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations, detail continued disputes in the talks over the deal…

TPP, which critics often refer to as NAFTA on steroids, would deal another major blow to future attempts by progressives to cut big banks and mega-corporations down to size, and to stop the off-shoring of American jobs. One thing TPP definitely would not do is encourage corporate kingpins to provide wages that keep pace with the cost of living.

So is Obama using pro-workers rhetoric to distract us from his effort to “fast-track” an agreement that would leave workers with even less clout than they have now? Or does he really believe that a minimum-wage increase would compensate for the lost jobs and the decrease in workers’ bargaining power that would inevitably result from the passage of TPP?

It’s like asking if he’s grossly corrupt or amazingly naive. Swamp Rabbit thinks he’s both.

“A con man believes his own con when he’s in the middle of trying to con you,” the rabbit said. “Especially a con man who talks as good as Obama.”

One thing’s for sure: Another “challenge of our time,” just as defining as closing the income gap, is to dismantle the machine that, one election cycle after another, cranks out nothing but corporate-owned candidates for high office.

Posted in campaign finance reform, globalization, mainstream media, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Island of Sirens’

Posted on December 7, 2013 by oddmanout215

December is a tough time to live in a swamp. The trees are bare and the clouds so low you can almost jump up and touch them. You need music to stop the highway noise. Today I put on “Island of Sirens” for my friend the swamp rabbit. We commiserated.

“It’s one of them cautionary tales,” the rabbit said, breaking the seal on a Wild Turkey bottle. “Keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t let some siren sing you something so sweet you wanna drop anchor and hear more.”

I watched him guzzle and said, “It’s just a song. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

“It’s a Homer story,” he insisted. “Ulysses tempted by forbidden fruit.”

The rabbit must have slogged through a translation of The Odyssey back in the day. Or he heard Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”

“Whatever you say,” I said. “But I think you’ve got the sirens mixed up with Circe.”

“Don’t make no difference. The point is, don’t get off the boat.”

“Or the wagon,” I said, eyeing his half-empty bottle. “You might not be able to get back on.”

Footnote: “Island of Sirens” is by the Philly-based band Nicos Gun. It will be featured on their soon-to-be-released album Dream Vacation.

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Schumer’s in a bubble with the banksters

Posted on December 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

From New Republic’s interview with New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who, in a weasel-y way, links Sen. Elizabeth Warren with “left-wing blogs”:

CS: …You’ve got to look at the effect on average folks. The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year. I’m not saying Elizabeth does this, but there are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.
IC: You don’t think Elizabeth Warren makes a villain out of Wall Street?
CS: I am just going to leave it at what I said.
IC: Forget Warren then. Is this a problem for your party?
CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.
IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?
CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

Schumer’s been living in a bubble with the banksters for too long, or he’d know contempt for the Wall Street gang extends far beyond the “far left” faction of the Democratic Party. I don’t think today’s Democratic Party even has a far left. What Schumer is calling the far left would have been considered slightly left-of-center in 1964, or centrist in 1936.

But give Schumer credit for reminding us of the upcoming fight for control of the Democratic Party. He’s in one corner with President Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the many other neoliberal Dems who have alienated the poor and the middle class, or what’s left of it. In the other corner are Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and others in Congress who realize the party can’t energize its base, as they say, if it continues to help the rich grab an obscenely disproportionate amount of the national income, or if it continues to signal it might be on board with Republican demands for “entitlement” cuts.

The trick, of course, is to channel widespread contempt for an increasingly crooked elite into a movement for positive change, as opposed to something like the Tea Party, a movement of latter-day Know Nothings. If an old hustler like Schumer is upset, then those far-left crazies must be on the right track.

Footnote: Meanwhile, two writers from Third Way, a think tank where everyone thinks Wall Street and mega-corporations are terrific, slammed progressives and Warren in particular for not toeing the “centrist” line. Guess who sits on Third Way’s board of directors.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, mainstream media, Obama, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment