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.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Depression, history, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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

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