Power broker vs. broken newspaper

Posted on October 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Gary Cooper at the doomed desert fort in Beau Geste. Who will hold down the fort at the Inquirer?

Manning the doomed desert fort in Beau Geste. Who will hold down the fort at The Inquirer?

Swamp Rabbit chugged his hangover remedy, a carrot juice and swamp grass mix, as I complained to him about the sorry state of the mainstream news media — in this case, The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is owned by the same people who own The Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com. All three news entities are in trouble because advertising revenues have been declining for years. And now the owners are fighting among themselves over the firing of The Inquirer‘s editor, Bill Marimow.

“What’s up with that?” the rabbit said. “Who’s in charge over there?”

“Good question,” I said before reading to him from a piece by David Carr of The New York Times:

Two of [the owners], Lewis Katz, the former owner of the New Jersey Nets, and H. F. Lenfest, a former cable TV mogul, filed suit against [The Inquirer], as well as its publisher, Robert J. Hall, claiming that Mr. Marimow’s firing was a breach of contract. They and Mr. Marimow claim he was dismissed at the behest of their partner George E. Norcross III, a businessman and power broker in Democratic politics, as part of a pattern of interference.

The old rodent wanted to know what had pissed off Norcross. I told him it looked like Norcross thought Marimow was too slow to make the changes at the The Inquirer that Norcross wanted (see the City Paper piece by Daniel Denvir), including firing certain staffers and working more closely with Philly.com. As Carr noted, Norcross already had forced some interesting changes at Philly.com:

Working through the publisher, Mr. Hall, Mr. Norcross installed his 25-year-old daughter, Alessandra, to run the Web site, Philly.com, even though she had no experience as a media executive.

The rabbit leaned over the porch and spit into the swamp and said, “Damn, she must be the female Charles Foster Kane.”

“It gets better,” I said. Here’s Carr assessing the quality of Philly.com and, indirectly, the leadership abilities of those who direct its course:

When it was not publishing link bait — last Thursday, there were prominent articles about drunk-dialing members of Congress and the pornographic career of New Jersey’s “tanning mom” — the site began competing with The Inquirer and its sister tabloid The Daily News, creating a civil war within a struggling organization that could ill afford the duplication.

“That don’t make no sense,” the rabbit said. “I thought you had to have brains to be a power broker.”

“You’ve been out here in the swamp too long,” I told him. “You can be rich and powerful and dumber than a fence post these days.”

Footnote: In case you don’t know, The Inquirer used to be a top-tier daily, jammed with ads and news stories written mostly by its own staffers. It was thick as a phone book on Sundays. Now, because of competition from digital media and other factors, it’s a ghost of itself. Its online site has trouble growing because of paywall restrictions. It’s like the fort in the old movie Beau Geste — from a distance it looks good, but get closer and you see dead soldiers propped along the parapet to fool people into thinking there are plenty of staffers left.

Posted in humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, movies, New York Times | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Newsflash! ‘Sisterhood’ is dead

Posted on October 11, 2013 by oddmanout215

Back at the shack, Swamp Rabbit made gagging noises as he paged through The New York Times Book Review. He read aloud a quote-out from a review of The XX Factor, British economist Alison Wolf’s book about the growing divide between working-class women and the relatively small percentage of women who, in recent years, have landed high-level professional jobs:

Wolf says that universal sisterhood is dead, with elite women sharing the ambitions and concerns not of most other women, but of elite men.

“Universal sisterhood,” the rabbit repeated. “I musta got caught in one of them time warps. Is this 1970, or what?”

I snatched the paper and read the review. The rodent’s point was that the reviewer makes the author sound as if she cares more about the progress of elite women than about the vast majority of workers, male and female, who are facing what looks like a permanent reduction in their living standards. As Joseph Stieglitz recently wrote:

In many EU countries, GDP remains lower, or insignificantly above, pre-recession levels. Almost 27 million Europeans are unemployed. Similarly, 22 million Americans who would like a full-time job cannot find one. Labor-force participation in the US has fallen to levels not seen since women began entering the labor market in large numbers. Most Americans’ income and wealth are below their levels long before the crisis. Indeed, a typical full-time male worker’s income is lower than it has been in more than four decades.

The rabbit downed a shot of Wild Turkey and ruminated out loud. He professed to be shocked that some feminist academics are only now grasping that women who land elite jobs tend to be as indifferent as elite men to the plight of the poor, including their poor “sisters.” He wondered why some of these academics still won’t acknowledge that the great divide in the developed world is determined by class (meaning money), not gender or race; that sisterhood is and always was a fatuous myth.

“I hear you, Swamp Rabbit,” I said. “But a lot of women would think your remarks are sexist.”

“They’re wrong, I read Erica Jong,” he said, paraphrasing Bob Dylan. “I wanted to git it on with Germaine Greer back in the day, but she didn’t think I was feral enough.”

It’s fairly obvious that most of the old, reliable feminist issues don’t resonate with most women these days. The problem of whether to work or stay home with the kids, for example, is only relevant to the small subset of women — and men — who can afford to make that choice. The rabbit showed me this, from a recent AP story:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that the income gap in the United States has increased to the point where members of the middle class resemble the Americans who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House.

You’ve come a long way, baby, as the women’s cigarette ad used to say. All the way back to a system under which most people are either very well-off or poor and getting poorer.

Footnote: The full title of Wolf’s book is The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World. Here’s an excerpt.

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Today’s GOP — morons or monsters?

Posted on October 4, 2013 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were laying down planks to fix the hole in the floor of my shack and arguing about Republicans in Congress who shut down the government this week. Is their bad behavior grounded in stupidity or malice? Do they not understand the economic damage they’re doing, or do they understand all too well?

The rabbit thinks the Republicans’ bad behavior can be blamed on their stupidity. In his view they are mean-spirited, but mostly they are not quite bright enough to realize they’re being used by the super-wealthy sociopaths who own the country.

To bolster his case, the varmint showed me a Mencken-esque rant by Charles Pierce:

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals…

…We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

I disagreed with my rodent friend. Yes, most Congressional Republicans are stupid — check out their opinions on climate change, for example — but their behavior is mostly rooted in malice. In the case of the government shutdown, they are not being used by the billionaires. More accurately, they think they’re not being used. Their contempt for the poor and their race hatred of Barack Obama almost trump their allegiance to the plutocrats who bankroll their campaigns.

I showed the rabbit a short, sharp piece by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones:

The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to make sure that the working poor don’t have access to affordable health care. I just thought I’d mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that’s it. That’s what’s happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.

That’s a pretty stirring animating principle, no?

The floor job took all afternoon because neither of us can drive a straight nail. Our argument about the GOP was pointless — one of those chicken or egg, nature vs. nurture arguments in which causality can’t really be determined.

We decided Pierce and Drum are saying the same thing — that the right-wing government haters are morons or monsters, sometimes both. More important, they are proof that our much-vaunted democratic system is broken in a way it hasn’t been since way back in 1861, when the country split in two. We’re not in for the same sort of break, leading to the same sort of conflict, but we’re in a truly bad place. As the swamp rabbit likes to say, using that quotation falsely attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Footnote: Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) is definitely in the moron zone. The other day he said, regarding the GOP, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

One more: “It’s very important, I think, to realize that while right now the GOP seems to have been taken hostage by its radical wing, the general strategy of responding to a lost election by trying to gain through blackmail what the party couldn’t gain at the polls was a consensus decision, arrived at way back in January. If the leadership is now dismayed by where it finds itself — leading a party of “lemmings with suicide vests” — it has only itself to blame.” — Paul Krugman

Posted in climate change, Congress, health care, history, humor, mainstream media, taxes | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Walter White says bye-bye, ‘Baby Blue’

Posted on September 30, 2013 by oddmanout215

Walter White to his long-suffering wife Skyler in their final scene together: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.”

Breaking Bad was an unusually good TV show partly because its creator, Vince Gilligan, never stopped poking fun at contemporary notions of acceptable behavior. For a long while, we could root for Walt the cancer-riddled meth cook because he was trying to make sure his family would be provided for after he died. Then Gilligan revealed a more ruthless and arrogant Walt, until we couldn’t help but wonder how much of his professed commitment to family was to rationalize the pleasure he took in wielding power.

Most viewers “get” that ours is a dog-eat-dog society in which conventional morality is usually an obstacle to success and well-being, and that the people who wield real power in this country are far more beastly than Walt at his worst. (Dick Cheney is Ozymandias, not Walter White.)

But there are still limits to the amount of nasty behavior a TV audience will accept in a protagonist, even if he’s an anti-hero. Walt crossed the line when he let Jesse’s junkie girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit, a sin that indirectly caused many more deaths. He clearly “deserved” to die, but only after some terrible comeuppance.

He suffered many comeuppances in the show’s final season. His “I did it for my family” became an ironic motif, especially to feminist critics who see patriarchy as the root of all evil. He seemed to have reached the limit of his self-awareness.

But Gilligan threw one final curveball in the finale, when Walt fessed up to having taken pleasure in breaking bad. His “I was alive” declaration, reminiscent of some existential hipster dreamed up by Norman Mailer, was also an admission that his quest to do right by his family had corrupted him and done terrible damage to them and others.

Gilligan apparently sensed that fans didn’t want the show to end on a morally simplistic note, so he left us with a Walt whose vengeful final actions were also about trying to undo some of the harm he’d done. He died fully aware of his guilt but more or less at peace with himself, an Everyman, if Everyman could cook perfect blue meth and had the guts to fight back, however recklessly, against those who would expect him or her to die without trying to, yes, provide for his or her family.

Footnote: An old Badfinger hit was used in Walt’s death scene as a lament for killer meth (… the special love I had for you, Baby Blue). Gilligan’s ability to use music in a subversive way is on a par with Quentin Tarrentino’s.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, mainstream media, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Media still propping up economic recovery myth

Posted on September 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

Don't be fooled by joblessness and hunger. The economy is recovering.

Don’t be fooled by declining wages, foreclosures and hungry children. Happy days are here again.

My shack in Tinicum was in a miserable state, so I paid Swamp Rabbit to help me clean and paint it. Afterwards, the place looked good from the porch but when I stepped inside, I fell through the floor into three feet of swamp water. It hit me that my shack was like the economy, a total wreck no matter how many times the media try to slap a new coat of paint on it and claim it’s as good as new.

Richard Wolff put it this way:

Here is the “recovery…” The top 1% of income-earners in the US took 19% of the national income in 2012, the largest share since 1928. That 1% also saw their average income rise by 31.4% from the current crisis’s low point in 2009, through 2012. The top 1% certainly enjoyed a recovery.

In total contrast, income for the other 99% rose by an average of 0.4% during the same period. Many of those people actually saw their earnings drop…

Many mass media corporations render the service of hyping the recovery eagerly to their advertisers. These advertisers wish to avoid association with bad news that might distress audiences. The mainstream media therefore offers up infotainment with economic recovery “highlights.” They also emphasize reports about countries whose experiences with the global economic crisis are worse than that of the U.S.

For example, immense attention focuses on Greece and Spain, rather than Germany or Sweden. The crisis has been far, far less damaging in the latter than in the former or in the U.S. Likewise, when the mass media here cover the high unemployment rates in certain European countries, they often conveniently omit that unemployment there does not affect citizens’ health insurance coverage, pensions, or most public services and subsidies as negatively as it does in the U.S.

I pulled myself out of the hole in the floor and began to rant: It’s no accident that America’s corporate media never present stories that compare quality of life in the U.S. and western Europe! It’s about time they started reporting what’s really going on!

The rabbit cracked open a bottle of Wild Turkey, his reward for helping clean up. “Great speech,” he said, “but who’s gonna pay them to write what’s real? Depressions are depressing, Odd Man.”

Posted in economic collapse, health care, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Stranger than Strangelove

Posted on September 22, 2013 by oddmanout215

Slim Pickens rides the bomb in 'Dr. Strangelove." No worries.

Slim Pickens rides the bomb in ‘Dr. Strangelove.” No worries.

I was back at the shack, beside myself with angst, reading to Swamp Rabbit about a catastrophe that almost happened a half-century ago:

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

I reminded the rabbit that we live a hop and a skip from Philadelphia. The bomb might have wiped out Philly and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region faster than you could say “Duck and cover.”

“‘Almost’ don’t count,” the rabbit said. He was drinking Wild Turkey and Coke, a rustic concoction that brings out the philosopher in him. “The Germans almost took Stalingrad. Dylan almost died in a motorcycle accident. What’s your point, Odd Man?”

I threw an empty bottle of Guinness at him and said, “The point is that real life is stranger than fiction. Even Stanley Kubrick, in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, couldn’t have made up a story this strange. If not for one measly switch, that bomb would have gone off.”

The rabbit gulped his drink, spilling some on his greasy coat, and said, “So what, Odd Man? If the bomb had gone off, then you wouldn’t be sitting here worrying out loud like some old lady with rheumatism. That was Kubrick’s point, don’t you know? In an absurd world, why worry?”

I watched the Guinness bottle bobbing in the swamp and said, “You stupid rodent. Dr. Strangelove was a cautionary tale. Kubrick was trying to wise people up to the danger of nuclear war.”

“Dr. Strangelove was a comedy,” he said. “Ain’t no way nobody like you could have done nothin’ about no nuclear war, not when the Cold War was on. You might just as well laugh. If you want to worry, then worry about where you’re gonna sell them stories you write. Worry about where you gonna git money for food now that there ain’t no jobs.”

I almost tossed him in the swamp by his ears but resisted the urge. What good is angst if you don’t have an audience for it?

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, history, humor, mainstream media, movies, Philadelphia, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The sport of kings, and of corporate welfare

Posted on September 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

horse

Most non-fans of horse-racing, if they think of the sport at all, probably picture frantic racetrack patrons at ticket windows, or at computers, placing last-minute bets as horses and jockeys mosey up to the starting gate. But an article on Philly.com today explains why it’s incorrect to assume the horse-racing industry in PA is funded by people who gamble on horses:

…Rather, it’s funded by the tens of thousands of small-time Pennsylvania casino patrons who play — and lose at — slot machines. Thanks to a law written primarily by the horse-racing industry itself, slots players — many of whom are retired and elderly — are the primary funders of what some consider a massive corporate welfare program that props up the state’s horse-race industry, and often benefits rich horse owners.

In just six years, more than $1.5 billion has gone to horse owners, race-horse breeders and others in the industry, thanks to a little-known state subsidy that feeds 12 percent of casino slot revenues to the horse-race industry. Last year, slots pulled in $2.4 billion in revenue. While schools struggle, pension funds decline and the state’s roads and bridges crumble, many of the recipients of the horse-race subsidy are out-of-state multimillionaires. Some are billionaires several times over…

Way to go, Ed Rendell, and all you other politicians who played a part in linking the casino racket to horse-racing, once called the sport of kings, which was on its last legs, so to speak, before receiving a massive infusion of cash from the serfs who play the slots.

Footnote: The philly.com story neatly illustrates one of the ways in which state-sponsored casino gambling pretends to pump up regional economies while actually draining money from them.

Posted in casinos, Philadelphia, sports, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Summers’ end (exit Iago)

Posted on September 17, 2013 by oddmanout215

“Look, it’s Larry Summers,” said Swamp Rabbit, pointing at an oil slick on the wetlands that surrounds my shotgun shack in Tinicum. “I think he’s heading north, maybe back to Harvard.”

“No way,” I said. “He gambled away a big chunk of Harvard’s endowment.”

We’d just read that Summers will not be nominated to head the Federal Reserve Board. One less malignant hustler using a powerful post to undermine the quality of life of Americans who aren’t rich. I can’t think of a better possible story out of Washington, D.C. Maybe if Summers had been knocked on his ass by someone who lost a home to one of the banks he helped bail out during the economic crisis he helped cause.

No surprise that Barack Obama, according to The New York Times, had wanted Summers for the job but apparently didn’t choose him because of the political risks:

…But as that Oval Office meeting last year also suggests, Mr. Obama’s one concern about nominating Mr. Summers has been the potential for a Senate battle — not only from Republicans spoiling for fights, but also from Democrats who view Mr. Summers as having been too friendly toward deregulating big banks when he was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration…

“Too friendly” — how’s that for polite understatement? Summers played a key role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall. After the big banks went belly up, he saved them with taxpayers’ money, much of which should have been spent to replace millions of lost jobs, and on a large-scale foreclosure-blocking program. And now, even though he won’t head the Fed, the self-satisfied little toad is still playing Iago to Obama’s Othello.

Footnote: From a piece by Peter Beinart that explains why the Democratic Party will become even more like the GOP unless progressives completely overhaul it:

From Tony Coelho, who during the Reagan years taught House Democrats to raise money from corporate lobbyists to Bill Clinton, who made Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, to Barack Obama, who gave the job to Rubin’s former deputy and alter ego, Larry Summers, Democrats have found it easier to forge relationships with the conservative worlds of big business and high finance because they have not faced much countervailing pressure from an independent movement of the left.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

J.D. Salinger groupie tells all — again!

Posted on September 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Great stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard's memoir

Good stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard’s memoir

My friend Swamp Rabbit, an autodidact who tries to hide his deep knowledge of American literature, was surprised and appalled by a recent piece in The New York Times by the writer Joyce Maynard. It began:

In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god.

Now comes the word — though not really news, to some — that over the years when he was cherishing his privacy, Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he.

“This ain’t about Salinger, it’s about Joyce Maynard,” the rabbit said after reading the rest of the piece. “Why does she want the whole world to know she was a Salinger groupie?”

My carrot-gnawing friend hasn’t seen much of the world beyond the swamp we both live in and therefore couldn’t believe it when I told him that many Americans would rather read something about Salinger than by him. And they’d rather a tell-all with sex details than, say, a re-evaluation of why Salinger’s first-person narrator in The Catcher In the Rye was so popular with critics and the public.

The rodent looked befuddled. I tried again to explain why people who are bored by Salinger the recluse can’t help but be aroused by the idea that he “was a kind of god” who turned out to be Charlie Manson in disguise, an evil manipulator of innocent girls. They know, sometimes without having read them, that none of the Nine Stories could possibly be as juicy as the story of how poor little rich girl Joyce was victimized during an eight-month “relationship” with the famous author, who died in 2010.

“That’s crazy talk,” Swamp Rabbit said. “We all get used and abused, conned and compromised, bamboozled and betrayed at some time by someone we looked up to or fell in love with. Why carry a grudge like that for forty years?”

My scrawny friend is so naive. I told him that Maynard’s Times piece was written to be in sync with the release of Shane Salerno’s documentary film about Salinger, and with a Salinger biography by Salerno and David Shields. More importantly, she had already dished the dirt on Salinger in her 1999 memoir At Home In the World and is reissuing that book now that the gossipy new movie and biography are out. Which means her Times piece is as much a self-promotional device as it is a cautionary tale for starry-eyed young girls or another stab at revenge. It certainly isn’t news.

Footnote: From Zoe Heller’s 2001 review of At Home In the World:

It is one of the cast-iron rules of biographical writing: the more damaging and transgressive the revelations on offer, the more fervently priggish the author’s explanation of his or her motive.

One more: The Salernos and Maynards of the world will never forgive Salinger for that most un-American of sins — refusing to be a celebrity.

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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