Making the world safe for plutocracy

Posted on September 12, 2013 by oddmanout215

Obama is a singing an updated version of an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

Obama is singing a variation on an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

I tuned in Wednesday evening for Barack Obama’s let’s-bomb-Syria speech and heard this:

What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?

My friend Swamp Rabbit stopped reading the new biography of Woodrow Wilson and spit out the window into the swamp. He said to the TV, “Dude, you should never ask a question that begs for an answer you won’t like.”

My pesky, rodent-like friend had a point. An honest answer to Obama’s question would be that we live in a cynical world where dictators — and some presidents — invoke morality and basic decency to justify using raw power to advance their own interests.

As for international law, Obama must be oblivious to irony. Most civilized countries would have put George W. Bush on trial for crimes committed in prosecuting the so-called war on terror, but Obama, when he took office, quickly snuffed out hope that Bush and his gang would even face a federal investigation.

Predictably, Obama used his Wednesday speech to invoke American exceptionalism, something presidents have been doing since Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany so that the world could “be made safe for democracy.” But the joke was on Obama when the devious Vladimir Putin scolded him in yesterday’s New York Times: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Footnote: Among other things, Obama’s obsession with bombing Syria is his way of distracting attention from the fact that he has done little to restore the economic health of America’s middle class and everything to bail out and increase the wealth of the plutocrats who run the big banks and corporations. Robert Reich:

More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years. Nearly 4 million have given up looking for work altogether…

…And the median wage keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for all but the top 1 percent are below where they were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009…

A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks and schools.

All in good time, I guess. Maybe after the plutocrats hoard another trillion or two.

Posted in economic collapse, history, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

I don’t see color. Obama looks just like Bush.

Posted on September 10, 2013 by oddmanout215

I was back at my shack in Tinicum swamp, eating pizza and reading the Obama administration’s rationale for wanting to bomb Syria. It passes the “common sense test,” an aide said. I don’t know how Barack Obama is defining common sense, but Tom Paine must be spinning in his grave.

Then I read this, from AP:

The U.S. government insists it has the intelligence to prove it, but the American public has yet to see a single piece of concrete evidence – no satellite imagery, no transcripts of Syrian military communications – connecting the government of President Bashar Assad to the alleged chemical weapons attack last month that killed hundreds of people.

In the absence of such evidence, Damascus and its ally Russia have aggressively pushed another scenario: that rebels carried out the Aug. 21 chemical attack. Neither has produced evidence for that case, either. That’s left more questions than answers as the U.S. threatens a possible military strike.

“Neat trick,” I said to my friend Swamp Rabbit. “Obama has turned himself into George W. Bush. This is worse than Libya. It’s the Iraq war scam all over again.”

The rabbit was on the windowsill, leafing through the September issue of Vogue. “And this surprises you?” he said. “You got a lotta nerve calling me stupid.”

I threw a piece of pizza crust at him. It sailed over his head and into the swamp. I hate when the rabbit is right.

Obama’s recent war dance made me think of Stephen Colbert’s recurring joke about race. He looks at the camera and in the solemn tone of a dewy-eyed liberal says something like, “I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I don’t get frisked.”

I don’t see color either, not when it comes to politics in that swamp called Washington, D.C. From where I sit, out here in my swamp, Obama looks just like Bush.

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Yo, Daily News! Bike theft more than ‘pesky’

Posted on September 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

Don't forget to lock up the bike, you lovebirds.

Don’t forget your bike lock, you lovebirds.

From Tuesday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

Cops in Center City are trying an unusual approach to thwarting bike thieves: They’re letting them steal bikes. Undercover cops… set up stings – like the one Aug. 15 observed by the Daily News – leaving an unlocked “bait bike” out somewhere and then waiting for someone to take it.

They’ve logged more than a dozen arrests this way this year for a pesky quality-of-life crime that historically has had low arrest rates.

It’s great that a local paper devoted time and space to bicycle theft in Philly, where riders have been making slow but steady progress in forcing drivers to share the roads with them. Too bad the reporter didn’t mention some of the reasons why bike theft is so rampant.

Start with the fact that city government and private businesses have done a lousy job of creating parking space for the growing number of riders in Center City and other popular biking areas. Some racks and corrals have been installed, and some poles fitted with metal rings, but finding a safe outdoor spot to lock up can still be a challenge. It’s not uncommon to see a bunch of bikes mashed together and somehow locked to the same pole.

Also, cops rarely put much effort into trying to catch bike thieves, despite the crude entrapment strategy described in the Daily News story. I had more than a half-dozen good bikes stolen in Philly over the past decade and reported each theft. The cops who responded to my complaints shrugged them off, and in some cases laughed in my face.

The Daily News reporter called bike theft “a pesky quality-of-life crime,” an expression that hints at police indifference and points to a big contradiction in the story. Is pesky the right word, given that “11,000 bicycles were reported stolen from 2007 through 2012 in Philly”? Bikes are as important to cyclists as cars are to drivers, but would the Daily News describe the theft of a gas-guzzling Hummer as pesky? And what if the bike owner catches up with the thief and someone gets his head bashed in? Still pesky?

Give the Daily News credit for calling attention to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and StolenBicycleRegistry.com and the Facebook page called Philadelphia Stolen Bikes. Otherwise, the story was mostly a puff piece for the Philly police.

Footnote: Philly might have more bike commuters per capita than any other major city in America, so it’s nice to know city officials are at least working with the Bicycle Coalition to install more racks.

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Obamabots to Cornel West: Shut the f*ck up!

Posted on September 2, 2013 by oddmanout215

Cornel West recently called MSNBC’s Al Sharpton “the bonafide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation” in connection with media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. A cheap shot but funny, and it’s hard to argue with West’s main contention — that most media commentators, including Sharpton, voiced nothing but platitudes about the historic speech and didn’t seriously speculate on what MLK might have said about the status quo in contemporary America.

West, the gap-toothed provocateur with the French-style cuffs and old-style Afro, thinks MLK would have found many of Obama’s policies only marginally less repugnant than those of the yahoo who preceded him as president. He figures MLK would have spoken out against bank bailouts, drone bombs, trade agreements that destroy American jobs, and perhaps against Obama’s attempts to portray himself as working to build on MLK’s efforts to help create a more equitable society.

One thing’s for sure — Democrats who aren’t progressive wish West would just go away. I mean Dems like Obama, who congratulates himself for stands he never took (remember how he ignored labor unions under attack by Wisconsin’s reactionary governor?) and is routinely patted on the back by so-called liberals who won’t admit that Obama, although not nearly as loathsome as the high-profile Republicans, has been a major disappointment to progressives of all races.

Footnote: If Sharpton is a house negro, then what should we call MSNBC’s other talking heads — Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and the insufferable Lawrence O’Donnell? I guess “Obamabots” will have to do, although that’s a bit unfair to Maddow. The problem with MSNBC is that support for Obama is intrinsic to its brand, at least for now. Who knows where the network’s unprincipled president, Phil Griffin, will steer it if its ratings continue to plummet?

One more: MSNBC became totally predictable after Keith Olbermann quit, or was fired. He was the only host who seemed a true progressive, eager to shine a light on all the bad guys, not just on the usual suspects.

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Bagel bomber busted at Vital Records

Posted on August 31, 2013 by oddmanout215

My plan was to hitchhike from Tinicum swamp past the junkyards and into Philly through the backdoor. My friend Swamp Rabbit tried to discourage me, but I had no choice, a temp agency was insisting on proof that I really existed, so I had to order a copy of my birth certificate, in person, at the Division of Vital Records, in Center City.

This, of course, is easier said than done. When you get to the Vital Records building, you have to take a number and wait for hours to speak to a clerk through a tiny hole in a bulletproof window. And that’s only if you get past two armed, gray-uniformed guards and their scanning devices, which are to make sure no one brings in bombs or other weapons. Why anyone would want to blow up a bunch of applications for birth and death certificates is a mystery to me, but I guess Big Brother knows.

I was commanded to empty the contents of my pockets into a plastic tray and put the tray and my backpack on the conveyor belt of the x-ray scanner. Then I had to walk between the two poles of another scanner, which (I think) was merely a metal detector. I made it inside but my bag set off an alarm, beep beep. The conveyor belt stopped moving.

The heavier guard took a long look at a monitor I couldn’t see. Then she eyed me suspiciously and said, “You got something shaped like a bagel in that bag?”

“Yes,” I replied, “A bagel.”

The guard ordered me to walk back through the metal detector, zip open the bag and remove the offending article. I pulled back the tin foil in which I’d wrapped a pumpernickel bagel, my favorite kind.

“You can’t bring no bagel into Vital Records,” she said.

I explained that the bagel was my lunch and promised not to eat it until my business inside was finished, but she wasn’t having any of that.

“You got to eat it outside, or throw it away,” she said, eyeing me even more suspiciously.

You’ve heard of the shoe bomber? I guess she thought I was the bagel bomber, armed with an explosive too subtle for x-rays to detect. It was a losing battle, so I threw the bagel into a nearby trashcan. The guard tensed up, as if fearing the bagel might still go off.

I’d learned my lesson — don’t try to sneak a bagel into a municipal building. But too late! My picture was probably being taken from a dozen angles and sent by Big Brother to cops all over the country, with this message: Be on the lookout for this man. May be carrying explosive bagels.

Footnote: Here’s a good piece about x-ray scanners and police states.

Posted in humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, Philadelphia, police state | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Atlantic City’s ultimate crap-out, a.k.a. Revel

Posted on August 28, 2013 by oddmanout215

Revel is a bust, but A.C. is still a great place for enterprising job seekers.

Revel is a bust, but A.C. is still a great place for enterprising job seekers.

They echoed in my head this morning, the words of Swamp Rabbit as he confronted me at my shotgun shack in the Tinicum swamp: “What’s your plan, Odd Man?”

The pesky little rodent mocks me because I tend to bitch about being broke. He tries to provoke me into jumping off the porch into the swamp to try to wring his scrawny neck. His other favorite question is, “If you’re so smart, Odd Man, how come you ain’t rich?”

He still jokes about my recent trip to Atlantic City, where I tried to get work with the beach patrol, making sure women’s bathing skirt hems were no more than four inches above their knees. (Atlantic City is trying to become more of a family resort, or so I have read.)

The women kicked sand in my face when I tried to grab hold of their legs, so I took a walk to see if Revel was hiring. Revel, you might recall, is the $2.4 billion, 47-floor casino-hotel that was going to transform A.C. from a blue-collar gambling town into a chic destination for vacationers who enjoy lunch prepared by Michelin chefs, a dip in the rooftop pool overlooking the ocean, and a few hands of baccarat before the full-body massage. And God help any troglodyte who tried to smoke a cigarette in this upscale consumers’ paradise.

But Revel wasn’t hiring. In fact, it was trying to bounce back from bankruptcy by pulling a one-eighty. Its fate will hinge on whether it can re-invent itself as a hangout for hardcore low-level gamblers (slots players, ugh) rather than a haven for would-be sophisticates. As for the smoking ban — would you like a fresh ash tray with your cigarette, ma’am?

Swamp Rabbit got a few laughs out of Revel’s new incarnation, especially when I told him it had secured $350 million in “exit financing” when it emerged from bankruptcy. He said, “If the guys who run this place are so dumb, how come they ain’t busted?”

Which happens to be the question of the decade, one that reporters never get around to asking about the thieves who still run the economy-killing Wall Street banks that survived only because of government bailouts.

Footnote: Revel’s main financial backer used to be Morgan Stanley, which received a $107.3 bailout from the Fed after the economy tanked in 2008.

One more: A recent newspaper story headlined “Revel sued by gamblers who felt cheated by casino’s ‘You Can’t Lose’ campaign,” provides more evidence that the people who run Revel, and Atlantic City, are dumber than swamp rabbits.

Posted in casinos, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Walter White, working-class hero

Posted on August 26, 2013 by oddmanout215

walter white

Last week the Philadelphia Daily News ran a story about unemployment with a photo of a middle-aged man in a business suit — a former office worker out of luck and money — begging for a job on a streetcorner in Center City.

Reading the story at my shack in the Tinicum swamp, I thought: 1) There but for the grace of God and a few thousand bucks go I, and 2) The only thing worse than having a soul-killing office job is having no job at all, and 3) the guy in the DN story needs to make a survival plan, as Walter White did in the TV series Breaking Bad.

At that moment my friend Swamp Rabbit swam up to me and said, “What’s your plan, Odd Man?”

Good question. I confessed to the rabbit that I’m too ignorant to make a go of it in the digital world and not a good enough thief to prosper in financial services. I don’t have the commercial instincts to make money writing fiction, the racket in which I’ve invested most of my time and energy, and I don’t know enough chemistry to cook high-quality methamphetamine, the substance that has saved Walter White from bankruptcy and worse. The next time I get hit with a serious health- or housing-related expense, I’m busted.

I’m not alone, I added. In my rare unselfish moments, I wonder what will happen to the hordes of recent college grads in debt up to their ears, fighting to land jobs in a country run by a small group of self-obsessed jerks who grow their personal fortunes, and those of their investors, by cutting wages and killing good jobs. And what about the older workers being fired left and right and, in many cases, robbed of their pensions?

A recent piece in AlterNet summed up the situation:

We are living in a zero-sum economy – in which a handful of investors and owners win at everyone else’s expense. But ultimately, it will catch up with investors, too. The U.S. economy is engaged in a vicious cycle in which low-wage jobs and under-employment stimulate little demand, giving companies little reason to hire workers. Would-be workers then get discouraged and drop out of the workforce. They lack money to buy things, so consumer spending sags and companies don’t hire or offer raises to workers they know they can keep. Repeat.

Meanwhile, our elected officials, who are owned by the corporate bosses and the financial wizards who wrecked the economy, are working to put home ownership, higher education and decent medical care out of reach for most Americans. The deck is stacked against us.

The Breaking Bad writers knew this was the key to making Walter sympathetic — show the deck was stacked against him. He’s a family man who had worked hard at a regular job and had always paid his taxes but ended up, because of lung cancer, with debts he couldn’t repay without becoming an outlaw. Who in Walter’s situation wouldn’t break bad to save their families and homes, if they thought they could get away with it?

More importantly, how bad is the drug kingpin Walter compared to the kingpins who created and nurtured our zero-sum economy — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and so on. In the same room with such swine, Walter would smell like a hero.

The rabbit shook his head and ducked underwater for a minute. “Nice speech,” he said, resurfacing. “But what’s your plan, Odd Man?”

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Philadelphia, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Stalin would have smiled at Manning’s sentence

Posted on August 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

stalin smiles

Ben Wizner of the ACLU sums up why he thinks decent people everywhere should be disgusted by the 35-year prison sentence imposed on Bradley Manning this week:

When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system.

Actually, Wizner missed the mark. It’s not about the degree of punishment. Manning should be hailed, not punished, for bringing to light crimes of a military apparatus that is supposed to adhere to a code of conduct that prohibits torture and attacks on civilians. The fact that Manning’s defense team was barred from using evidence of those crimes and the cover-up of those crimes — i.e., the documents leaked by Manning to Wikileaks — is proof that the government never intended to allow him anything more than the sort of show trial Joe Stalin would have ordered in Communist Russia.

But this obvious point was ignored by the corporate media, which would much rather direct our attention to the big questions of our time. Who will play Batman next. How many times did Paula Deen use the n-word. Will the Pats be strong enough at tight end now that Aaron Hernandez is in jail. Stay tuned.

Footnote: James Wolcott points to another sick irony in his take on this travesty of justice:

As has been noted on Twitter, Hitler’s favorite architect and convicted Nazi war criminal Albert Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison, 15 shy of the 35 year sentence meted out to Bradley Manning this week for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

Posted in Iraq war, mainstream media, police state, terrorism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chris Christie to Mother Nature: Who’s your daddy?

Posted on August 8, 2013 by oddmanout215

Chris Christie as King Canute, when the next hurricane hits

Chris Christie as King Canute

New Jerseyans know better than to mess with Gov. Chris Christie. They’ve heard him dis firefighters who want decent pensions, shout down schoolteachers who defend the public school system, and heap scorn on skeptics who argue it’s foolish to spend huge sums on beach replenishment because the beaches will surely be washed away again in the next Sandy-size storm.

Christie scoffs at such negativity and at the suggestion that climate change is real. “I’ve got a place to rebuild here and people want to talk to me about esoteric theories,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer on Memorial Day weekend. “We’ve got plenty of time to do that later on.”

“Later on” presumably means when billions more dollars are needed to bolster the barrier islands again, after Christie’s bid for the presidential nomination. Meanwhile, I’m picturing him as King Canute, in an extra-large beach chair on Long Beach Island, commanding Mother Nature to stop the next superstorm from rolling in.

Someone could be in for a rude awakening, and it ain’t Mother Nature.

Footnote: The firm that came up with “Stronger than the Storm,” a post-Sandy slogan for New Jersey that also works as a slogan for Christie in the upcoming gubernatorial election — is living proof that arrogant and stupid are sometimes synonyms.

One more: How come tax-hating Republicans who own beachfront property always expect taxpayers to bail them out after a big storm?

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The pig and the Post (another trophy for Jeff Bezos)

Posted on August 7, 2013 by oddmanout215

Caravaggio's Narcissus

Caravaggio’s Narcissus

A few facts about Jeff Bezos, billionaire CEO of Amazon.com, the enormously profitable online department store that’s beating up on bricks-and-mortar retail outlets: 1) The price Bezos paid this week for the Washington Post was $250 million, about one percent of his net worth. 2) Bezos has sunk $42 million — about one-sixth of what he paid for the Post — into construction of a giant clock that reportedly will keep on ticking for 10,000 years.

The first fact is depressing, the second absurd. It’s a reminder that plutocrats (so glad that word is back in common usage) are prone to spending great sums simply because they can. It hardly matters whether the money is spent on a once-prestigious newspaper, a great artwork, or a clock that will last as long as a pharoah’s tomb. The more money spent, the brighter the purchased object glitters. To an obscenely wealthy egotist like Bezos, its glitter reflects the greatness of the purchaser. Greatness can be measured only in terms of purchasing power.

I first heard about the $42 million clock on Marketplace, a business news show on public radio that never fails to present free-market capitalism as gossipy and glamorous and exempt from criticism. You’ll hear cute little items about the antics of guys like Bezos but nary a word about the warehouses where badly underpaid workers had to endure brutal heat before Amazon was shamed into installing air-conditioning. Nothing cute about slave labor.

Footnote: Thanks to Alec MacGillis of New Republic for pointing out that President Obama, the plutocrats’ pal, thinks its great news that Amazon is creating more warehouse jobs that don’t pay a living wage.

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