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.

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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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Tom Friedman’s brave new fantasy world

Posted on August 2, 2013 by oddmanout215

Citizen Friedman's house

Citizen Friedman’s home

Richard Eskow’s insights regarding Thomas Friedman will make perfect sense to anyone who has read Friedman’s gung-ho dispatches about globalization and entrepreneurship in the digital age, or his advice to the discouraged — “But you know what they say to do with lemons? Make lemonade”:

Friedman is a closet Ayn Rand in many ways, but he gives Rand’s ugly and exploitative philosophy a pseudo-intellectual, liberal-friendly feel-good gloss. He turns her harsh industrial metal music into melodious easy listening: John Galt meets John Denver. That make him very useful to those who would dismantle the engines of real economic growth, the ones that create jobs while protecting life and limb.

Eskow was reacting to a recent column in which Friedman declared “Average is over,” dismissing the millions who’ve lost good jobs and haven’t come up with an idea for a new business that would catapult them into the ranks of the super-wealthy. You know — an air mattress bed-and-breakfast chain. Or maybe a new app that will cool your house, walk your dog and send witty texts to your girlfriend, all at the same time.

As if there is anything above average about Friedman, who rarely writes a column that doesn’t feature dead-wrong statements about American foreign policy and other weighty matters. Check out his support for the Iraq war or, more recently, his ignorant allusion to Winston Churchill while trying to make a point about immigration reform.

Friedman and Rand would make an interesting couple — the upbeat proselytizer and the dour scold — but Rand has been dead for decades and Friedman is cozily married to a real-estate heiress with whom he shares a mansion worth more than $9 million.

What’s remarkable about this is that we live in an era when many if not most journalists are either jobless or working for a lot less money than they once earned. Friedman avoided this dilemma by becoming a mustachioed mouthpiece for the owner class, making huge sums on the lecture circuit after writing the fatuously titled The World Is Flat. Hey, you know what they say to do with lemons…

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Dems-in-name-only won’t help close income gap

Posted on July 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

The British edition is more fittingly titled "What's the Matter With America?"

The British edition is more fittingly titled “What’s the Matter With America?”

Paul Krugman, commenting on one of the moral midgets who pushed through the House a new farm bill that would maintain generous government subsidies for agribusinesses while eliminating food stamps:

Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.

And here’s No More Mister Nice Blog‘s ironic restatement of Krugman’s point:

God and the free market (neither of which ever make a mistake) made you poor because you have poverty coming to you (because you chose to do things that made you poor, mostly having to do with laziness and sex and substance abuse). You are meant to suffer — and those evil liberals who insist on mandating that you get a helping hand from the taxpayer are interfering with God’s plan for you, and messing with the mechanisms of the marketplace, which are divinely ordained and are part of natural law.

Nicely done, but we already knew that libertarians and Bible thumpers are linked by their mutual contempt for the poor, and that Congress is full of Republicans like Fincher, who doesn’t even blink at the hypocrisy of cutting government food aid to the poor (a large percentage of whom are kids) while supporting government handouts to big business.

Liberal pundits needn’t remind readers that Republicans are ugly-minded — that’s a given. Better they should ask prominent Democrats why they aren’t pushing back hard against the uglies, who are clearly on a mission to expand the gap between the haves and have-nots. Better to exhort the Dems, from the president on down, to forge ahead rather than flinch in confrontations with those who would scuttle workers’ rights and shred what’s left of the social safety net. (This is assuming some Obama-style Dems have a sense of shame.)

Almost a decade ago, in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, the prescient historian Thomas Frank noted that the Democratic establishment had stopped siding with organized labor, and with the working class in general, in order to coax larger campaign contributions out of the predatory rich:

Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as “class warfare” and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party’s very backbone, the [Democratic Leadership Council] figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans.

In 2008, many working people, riding a wave of renewed optimism, figured Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, if voted in, would get the country back on track. Instead, the Dems helped bail out Wall Street banksters at the expense of millions of newly poor Americans whose jobs and/or homes had been lost in the economic collapse caused by the banksters.

With “nowhere else to go,” Democratic voters re-elected Obama in 2012, hoping he’d focus on the interests of the poor and nearly poor this time around. So far, Obama and other so-called liberals — Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and so on — have responded with nothing but empty rhetoric. They wring their hands and back down when the uglies threaten to block legislation that would benefit the 99 percent. And they pretend to be indignant, of course.

Check out this critique of a speech about the income gap that Obama gave Wednesday. Once again, our orator-in-chief voiced vague generalities regarding creation of good jobs and said nothing about maintaining programs that help the needy. Is it any wonder pigs like Fincher feel confident enough to back legislation that would all but eliminate such programs?

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

Krugman strains eyes, can’t see light at tunnel’s end

Posted on July 18, 2013 by oddmanout215

Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The ultimate economic stimulus trigger.

Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The ultimate economic stimulus.

Give credit to Paul Krugman for consistently refusing to pretend the so-called Great Recession was anything less than a depression. Now he’s suggesting hard times might be here to stay, because working-class Americans are too brain-dead to take action on their own behalf:

You might think that a persistently poor economy — an economy in which millions of people who could and should be productively employed are jobless, and in many cases have been without work for a very long time — would eventually spark public outrage. But the political science evidence on economics and elections is unambiguous: what matters is the rate of change, not the level.

Put it this way: If unemployment rises from 6 to 7 percent during an election year, the incumbent will probably lose. But if it stays flat at 8 percent through the incumbent’s whole term, he or she will probably be returned to power. And this means that there’s remarkably little political pressure to end our continuing, if low-grade, depression.

Someday, I suppose, something will turn up that finally gets us back to full employment. But I can’t help recalling that the last time we were in this kind of situation, the thing that eventually turned up was World War II.

We’ve been down so long, we forget what up looks like, except for the relative few of us with secure jobs that pay well. We’ve been duped by crooked politicians in both major parties and the corporate creeps who bankroll them — the guys who insist it’s OK for less than one percent of the population to keep growing richer at the expense of everyone else.

I’m glad when Krugman and others try to stir up public outrage at giant companies hoarding billions of dollars that could put people back to work. Not so glad about his reminder that it took a world war to restore the country to full unemployment after the Great Depression.

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In today’s U.S.A., Ellsberg would be deep-sixed

Posted on July 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

jail chair
Regarding a convergence of stories about truth tellers: Last week I watched The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009), about Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to shred the web of lies spun by government officials in their successful effort to pursue full-scale war in Vietnam. I’d forgotten how extraordinary Ellsberg was — he was a government insider who’d tried to make himself believe his colleagues were honest and the war worth pursuing — and how much the American justice system has changed since he presented the New York Times with a copy of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Ellsberg was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act, but he remained free for two years, speaking out against the war, until his trial began. Charges were dismissed after evidence of government misconduct — illegal wiretapping, the ridiculous Watergate break-in, and so on — was brought to light.

Watching the film, I wondered what would happen to Ellsberg if he’d blown the whistle on government liars in, say, 2013. Would he be out on bail and allowed to speak freely? Here’s Ellsberg answering those questions in a piece about whistleblower Edward Snowden:

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.

If freedom to leak information about corruption in government is the country’s lifeblood, then we’re badly in need of a transfusion. And if we’re counting on the mainstream press to fight for its right to report corruption, as it fought in Ellsberg’s time, we are truly screwed. It’s worth noting that prominent mainstream journalists — the dopey David Gregory and Wall Street sycophant Andrew Ross Sorkin come to mind — have behaved like mouthpieces for the government in their coverage of the Snowden story.

Ominously, the major news outlets are becoming more timid — more tightly controlled by their corporate owners — at the same time the government is using police-state tactics to make it harder for activists to protest the government’s attack on free speech and other rights we once took for granted.

Future historians will write volumes about America’s transition from democracy to police state in the decade following the 9/11 attacks. They will note that the free press’s last hurrah in an adversarial role with government took place in the 1970s, and that Americans, by and large, turned out to be just as inclined to accept government tyranny as Germans in the 1930s.

Posted in history, mainstream media, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, police state | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Li’l Tom’s big lie about Walmart and women

Posted on June 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

Tom Cruise is a bad actor, but a reliable shill.

Tom Cruise is a bad actor, but he’s a reliable shill.


Some Hollywood stars like to lend their names to noble causes. Other stars, more down to earth, prefer using their celebrity to pad their bank accounts. From Huffington Post, an exceptionally shabby example of the latter:

Critics are calling out Hollywood star Tom Cruise this week for praising Walmart as “a role model” that has “improved women’s lives around the world” during the retailer’s shareholder meeting earlier in June, according to MSNBC…

…The claim drew criticism from some activists, who called Cruise’s comments out of touch with reality. Cruise “didn’t really tell the truth about what happens on a day-to-day basis,” one activist told MSNBC. Others took to social media to criticize the actor, accusing him of being a “tool,” among other things…

…Walmart has spent years fending off discrimination suits from women who say they’re not treated equally at the company. About 2,000 women claimed in a class action suit last year that the retail giant discriminated against them when it came to pay and promotions. An earlier lawsuit was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which determined female workers nationwide didn’t have standing to sue as a class.

Some working mothers at Walmart also have decried the store’s pay, saying they have to rely on government assistance to make ends meet.

The comments also come at a time when Walmart’s facing criticism for not signing on to the Bangladesh Safety Accord, a deal aimed at promoting safer working conditions in Bangladesh garment industry. The agreement was forged after a Bangladesh factory collapse killed more than 1,000 workers earlier this year — including many women, who predominantly perform that kind of low-wage work.

The speech from Hollywood’s most diminutive leading man was to show gratitude to Walmart for stocking DVDs of his lousy movies. It’s unclear whether Walmart wrote the speech, or if Cruise knew how large a lie he was telling about Walmart’s women employees, or about the extent of Walmart’s connection to the Bangladesh disaster, or about similar workplace disasters in U.S. history — e.g, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in 1911 — that woke up American workers to the necessity of unionizing.

Maybe someone will make a movie about the Triangle fire and cast Cruise in the same role he always plays — the aging spoiled brat who learns the hard way that he’s “out of touch with reality.” Not that this lesson could deter Cruise from behaving badly. As long as he kisses corporate ass, he can invent his own reality and ignore everyone else’s.

Posted in globalization, Great Recession, history, humor, liar, mainstream media, The New Depression, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Obama’s Penny pal (the rich take care of their own)

Posted on May 18, 2013 by oddmanout215

It’s no secret that six members of the Walton gang — the Walmart Waltons — have more wealth that the bottom 40 percent of American households. This is up from the 30 percent more they enjoyed in 2007, before the economy crashed and the gap between rich and poor widened to Grand Canyon proportions. In another era, statistics such as these would spark strikes and rioting, and the growth of a third party that would force Democrats and Republicans to make laws that ensured decent wages and benefits.

But this is our era — the era of privatization. deregulation, downsizing, offshoring, union-busting, bankster fraud, of government for and by the corporations. An era of low expectations, dim prospects and dead ends for millions of young Americans who will spend their lives paying off student loans and sweating blood to make less, in real dollars, than their grandparents made for simply doing an honest day’s work.

It didn’t happen overnight, the dismantling of New Deal laws that had lifted tens of millions out of poverty, largely by making it harder for the owner class to buy politicians, exploit workers and dodge taxes. And it couldn’t have happened without help from the gullible middle- and lower-middle class Americans who had benefited from those laws.

I refer to those who believed Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” pitch, even as Reagan and his bosses were laying the groundwork for a new gilded age. And, much more recently, to liberals who thought Barack Obama’s “hope and change” promise was more than just campaign rhetoric. Any Obama fans out there want to defend the chief’s nomination of billionaire tax dodger Penny Pritzker to head the Commerce Department? I didn’t think so.

Obama was an investment. Pritzker — The Atlantic called her Obama’s Mitt Romney — and Obama’s other rich backers knew their investment would pay off in a big way if he was elected. They took care of him when he ran for president. Once elected, he took care of them.

The point is that many Americans are still in denial about their declining fortunes, just as they’re still in denial about Obama, who long ago became a whore for the Pritzkers of the world. As Cornel West recently said, “When [Obama] came in, he brought in Wall Street-friendly people – Tim Geithner, Larry Summers – and made it clear he had no intention of bailing out homeowners, supporting trade unions.”

But many people detest that sort of talk, they’d rather be in denial. Only denial can explain why Obama’s non-wealthy backers didn’t turn against him when he bailed out the banksters, or why a mob of Walmart’s $9-an-hour associates haven’t tried to roast the Walton clan over a slow fire fueled by cheap clothes from China.

Footnote: Bruce Springsteen is fan of John Steinbeck and knows that solidarity among workers only happens when quality of life for the majority sinks so low it can no longer be endured. He knows there will be no large-scale reaction against corporate thieves until Walmart “associates” and their fellow wage slaves — that’s most of us — are as desperate as Steinbeck’s Okies. The Boss has finally discovered irony!

Posted in Great Recession, history, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hitler’s food taster tells all

Posted on April 28, 2013 by oddmanout215

Margot Woelk, 95, recently confessed to having worked as a food taster for Adolph Hitler in his war headquarters, Wolf’s Lair, in what used to be East Prussia. She told the Associated Press that her job, like most jobs, had its good and bad points:

I know nothing!

I know nothing!

The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta. But this constant fear — we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.

Woelk eventually fled to Berlin, escaping the fate of the 14 other women on the food-tasting team who were shot by the Russians when Wolf’s Lair was overrun. She has outlived the 20th century’s most infamous vegetarian by 68 years, but kept her past a secret, according to the AP story, “because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member.”

She “never saw [Hitler] in person — only his German shepherd Blondie and his SS guards,” the AP report stated. This is unfair to Frau Woelk, but I instantly thought of Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes — he knew nothing! Then I thought of “The Schmeed Memoirs,” in which Woody Allen imagines Hitler’s ex-barber describing life with Der Fuhrer and his cronies:

As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company… At Berchtesgaden one day, Hitler turned to me and said, “How would I look in sideburns?” Speer laughed, and Hitler became affronted. “I’m quite serious, Herr Speer,” he said. “I think I might look good in sideburns.” Goring, that obsequious clown, concurred instantly, saying, “The Fuhrer in sideburns — what an excellent idea!”

Someday, when most of us are dead, George W. Bush’s remedial reading teacher, or maybe his barbecue chef, will emerge with a tell-all about the Iraq War years:

One day at the Crawford ranch, Dubya turned to me and said, “How would I look in one of them Air Force flight suits?” Rove laughed, and Dubya glared at him. “I’m not kidding, Turd Blossom,” he said. “I think I’d look good in a flight suit, with a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner behind me.” Rumsfeld, that double-talking brown-noser, said, “The commander-in-chief in a flight suit — excellent idea! We can have you photographed wearing it on an aircraft carrier.”

Then Dubya’s chef will add, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Posted in cruel and unusual Texas, history, humor, Iraq war, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment