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

American exceptionalism, in a nutshell

Posted on April 27, 2013 by oddmanout215

Bad guys are everywhere, friend-o.

Bad guys are everywhere, friend-o.

Spokespersons for the U.S. military often refer to anti-American combatants as “bad guys,” as if opposition to U.S. foreign policy is the same as immorality. As if killing on behalf of the U.S. government makes you exempt from bad-guy status.

Newsflash: Bad guys are everywhere. Chechen bad guys have killed Russian noncombatants in efforts to win independence for Chechnya. Russian bad guys have killed Chechen noncombatants in efforts to keep the region under Russian control. American bad guys are killing noncombatants throughout the Middle East to protect the interests of Big Oil.

One might argue that American bad guys are exceptionally bad because they insist on portraying themselves as good, no matter how many noncombatants they kill. These are the same Americans who insist that slaughtering Indians, nuking Japan and dropping napalm on the Vietnamese were all for the good.

It’s a big old goofy world, as John Prine sang, and there is nothing goofier than the notion that one nation is morally superior to another. That’s the message of every preacher or politician who denounces terrorist attacks on America while condoning American terrorism abroad; of everyone from the obviously bad Dick Cheney to the not-so-obviously bad Barack Obama, who speaks out against bombers in Boston even as he green-lights drone bombings that kill noncombatants on the other side of the world.

Footnote: Has anyone else had their fill of so-called news stories about the Boston Marathon bombings? Of ghouls with cameras who stalk those who knew the victims? (Reporter to relative of bombing victim: How does it feel to be the relative of a bombing victim?) Nothing is revealed in these creepy encounters, other than the fact that some people think journalism and voyeurism are the same thing.

Posted in Iraq war, life in the big city, mainstream media, Obama, terrorism | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

NY Times to Denmark: Work harder, for less

Posted on April 24, 2013 by oddmanout215

From a weirdly negative front-page story about Denmark in the Sunday New York Times.

In 2012, a little over 2.6 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 were working in Denmark, 47 percent of the total population and 73 percent of the 15- to 64-year-olds.

While only about 65 percent of working age adults are employed in the United States, comparisons are misleading, since many Danes work short hours and all enjoy perks like long vacations and lengthy paid maternity leaves, not to speak of a de facto minimum wage approaching $20 an hour. Danes would rank much lower in terms of hours worked per year.

The economist Dean Baker and other readers are still scratching their heads. Why does The Times find something ominous in the fact that Danes work fewer hours per year than Americans but enjoy a stabler economy, a higher employment rate and better quality of life in most measurable categories? Is The Times spooked by Denmark’s higher tax rates? By the very idea of a system that isn’t rigged to impoverish the working class?

Posted in Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Ding dong! Maggie’s dirty deeds live on

Posted on April 13, 2013 by oddmanout215

From a 2004 column in Daily Mail on what happened to the working class in Britain after Margaret Thatcher’s successful crusade to kill the miners’ union:

… What the [coal miners’] strike represented to us was a set of values worth fighting for. It was never simply about pay. It was about the threat Thatcher’s free-market philosophy meant to their way of life, to their communities, to the very idea of trade unions.

Looking back, the Right wing Press cleverly presented Thatcher’s ideology as the inevitable future – an economy based on privatisation and deregulation.

This meant closing the pits, so the miners were represented as fighting for the past. Nobody much mentioned that this past included a time when a working man’s dignity, self-sacrifice and solidarity were considered virtues.
But look who was right and who was wrong.

The future that Thatcher fought for has arrived in the pit villages where the mines are shut down. It is the future of drug addiction, social deprivation and part-time, temporary, non-unionised jobs.

Thatcher worked like a pearl-bedecked fanatic to transform the Britain of Clement Attlee into a lean, mean corporate machine — a middleweight version of what the USA has become. It’s almost as if her policies were conceived to flatter Ronald Reagan, the union-busting blowhard who was her ideological paramour. Too bad the two of them didn’t run off together in the early 1980s and buy a million-acre plantation, or a dude ranch, instead of wrecking millions of lives.

Footnote: Polly Toynbee of Guardian tried to write nice things about the Iron Witch, mostly by favorably comparing her to David Cameron. But near the end of Toynbee’s column was this:

When [Thatcher] walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered.

One more: I’ll bet E.P. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz movie (1939), would have loved that Thatcher’s death breathed new life into “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead.” which almost reached the top of the pops this week in Britain. As Ed Lamb recently noted, Harburg was a lifelong leftist who also co-wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” an anthem from the Depression that preceded the one we’re in now.

Posted in economic collapse, history, humor, mainstream media, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

When life feels like ‘Groundhog Day’

Posted on April 7, 2013 by oddmanout215

I was biking through a school-free drug zone, on my way to a temp job, cultivating bad habits. Not overtly bad habits — Marlboros and meth, and so on — but rather those drab little habits meant to ensure the absence of surprise and disorder from one’s life. God forbid I should fail to eat my oatmeal before 8 a.m. or choose a different route to that glass-and-steel tower in Center City. Surely there’s a bus waiting to crush me if I don’t use 18th Street or don’t ride past the rodent that’s been rotting on Fitzwater Street for two weeks.

I’m thinking of the rodent in Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman mad at the world because he’s trapped in what feels like a soul-killing routine. The gods punish him by literally making him live the same day over and over until he learns to enjoy what he has and treat people better.

The Murray character sinks into depression as he wakes each day to the cloying refrain of “I Got You, Babe” on his clock-radio. For a while his dread of sameness commingles with gratitude for it. He begins to mistakenly believe that the sameness, the repetition, is an opportunity to fix his life without taking risks. But that doesn’t work either, so he kills himself, only to wake up again to “I Got You, Babe.”

I wake to NPR and the hope that neurotic rituals will help me feel better, or at least no worse than I’ve felt since New Year’s, when the tree in my backyard snapped in the wind and crashed into my house, capping what was for me a really bad year. But that’s another story, one that feels too tritely symbolic to make into a good movie, or even a good blog post.

Footnote: Check out the late Roger Ebert’s review of Groundhog Day — a re-review, actually — for a good example of his insightful style.

Another: I had that “This is like Groundhog Day” feeling ten years ago while the mainstream media, day after day, backed Bush’s call for war in Iraq, just as it had backed the equally disastrous war in Vietnam.

One more: Listen to “I Got You, Babe” and try to get the insipid melody out of your head. I dare you.

Posted in economic collapse, humor, Iraq war, life in the big city, mainstream media, movies, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Easter story, updated

Posted on March 31, 2013 by oddmanout215

And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher? — Mark 16:3

My friend Jesus the taqueria owner was whacked on Friday by demented jerks with nail guns. It wasn’t pretty. I went to the viewing this morning with all his other friends, hoping it would be a closed-casket affair. Lo and behold, somebody had stolen his body! A bunch of cultists, I’ll bet. Probably the same guys who whacked him. I hope they aren’t planning any further mischief.

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‘The Next Day’ a surprise gift to Bowie fans

Posted on March 31, 2013 by oddmanout215

On with the show, duckies.

On with the show, duckies.

David Bowie’s low visibility in recent years led to rumors he might be dying, or simply too bored to record again. At some point, he got over his ennui, if that’s what it was, and began working on The Next Day, his first album in a decade and easily one of the best high-profile pop records of late, no offense to Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, and the other middle-of-the-road regulars on “alternative” radio.

The Next Day isn’t so much about Bowie making a comeback as coming to terms with mortality, a subject he explored decades ago through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and his other exotic self-inventions. He’s working the same territory again but without the masks, which would look pretty silly on a 66-year-old heart attack survivor. In spirit, the new album is reminiscent of Time Out of Mind (1997), the great record Bob Dylan made when it seemed he was all used up.

Most of Bowie’s new songs are sardonic, harshly melodic reminders of his enduring impact on mainstream culture. (Someone should write a book about the cognitive dissonance of all those homophobic, blue-collar corner boys who fell under Bowie’s spell back in the days when music critics were introducing the word “androgynous” to Middle America.)

The dark but jaunty title song sets the tone — Here I am/Not quite dying/My body left to rot in a hollow tree. “Dirty Boys,” with its rude bass sax and brittle guitar, is a mock-sinister salute to predatory misfits. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” imagines pop stars as otherworldly creatures who take a hostile, voyeuristic interest in normal people. (In the video, the stars stalk Bowie and Tilda Swinton, playing a normal couple in a supermarket.)

None of Bowie’s conceits would matter if he didn’t have a gift for transforming self-obsession into wildly theatrical material that rings true on an emotional level — old songs like “Heroes” and new ones like “I’d Rather Be High,” which has a martial beat and a beautifully transcendent chorus sung from the point of view of a reluctant young soldier: I’d rather be high/I’d rather be flying/I’d rather be dead/Or out of my head/Than training these guns on those men in the sand/I’d rather be high.

The latter song has been playing in my head for more than a week, since I landed a temp job in a corporate setting where I have to fake being normal, not that I’m fooling anyone.

The Next Day includes 13 other new tracks, but you get the idea. A few are less than stellar, but the album as a whole is, yes, better than anything Bowie has done since Scary Monsters (1980). Even some of my fellow geezers might like it.

Footnote: Speaking of supermarkets, I was in the local Super Fresh last weekend reaching for a can of frijoles negros when “Subterranean Homesick Blues” came on the store radio. Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift. I can think of only a few songwriters whose ironies resonate more deeply with each passing year. Dylan is one, and Bowie is another.

One more: Buy Bowie’s Heathen (2002), too, if you missed it. It’s a good one that got lost in the shuffle.

Posted in arts, humor, mainstream media, pop music, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Cruising mean streets in the popemobile

Posted on March 23, 2013 by oddmanout215

The mainstream media love big, easy stories — natural disasters, inaugurations, papal elections. The election by the College of Cardinals of Jorge Bergoglio was a softball lobbed right over the plate, and the media knocked it out of the park.

Much was made of the fact that Bergoglio took the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, a choice that’s humble or grandiose, depending on your point of view. I couldn’t help but think of Harvey Keitel, in Mean Streets, as the would-be mafioso who secretly aspires to the saintliness of Francis. Which is not to say there’s anything criminal about Pope Francis I; it’s just that he’s a long way from being a saint.

AP reported that Bergoglio, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, “often rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina’s capital. He considers social outreach, rather than doctrinal battles, to be the essential business of the church.” But the new pope is also a shrewd and personable company man who, as Robert Parry wrote, knew when to speak up for the poor and oppressed, and when to keep his mouth shut:

…Much as Pope Pius XII didn’t directly challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust, Father Bergoglio avoided any direct confrontation with the neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Argentina. Pope Francis’s defenders today, like apologists for Pope Pius, claim he did intervene quietly to save some individuals.

But no one asserts that Bergoglio stood up publicly against the “anticommunist” terror, as some other Church leaders did in Latin America, most notably El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who then became a victim of right-wing assassins in 1980.

Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy – from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries – was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated “liberation theology,” i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor…

Church leaders would have us believe that liberation theology inevitably leads to the sort of leftist regime depicted in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, whose protagonist is a deeply flawed priest in Mexico, circa 1935, struggling to maintain his faith while running from a government-sanctioned death squad.

In one scene, set in a barn, the priest tries to finish saying Mass in time to escape the killer cops. Greene describes the priest as he sees his fear reflected in the eyes of the faithful:

Heaven must contain such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy — it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.

Greene’s priest seems to have more in common with the leftist Romero than with Bergoglio, who “visited the slums” but wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t played ball with right-wingers who killed advocates of the poor and oppressed.

The question now is whether Bergoglio, as the boss of bosses, will actively fight for slum dwellers or merely praise their poverty as he cruises past them in the popemobile. He’d be a lot more interesting if he tried to walk the walk, or at least revealed himself to be a man in conflict with himself, openly struggling with his flaws, like Greene’s priest or Keitel’s mobster.

Food for thought: If the pope had an iPod, would he download the Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit”?

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