Can the other senators hear Sanders?

Posted on June 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

I often wonder how Bernie Sanders’ fellow senators are reacting when he’s on the floor, warning us for the umpteenth time that super-wealthy right-wingers, with much help from the Supreme Court, are snuffing out what’s left of our democracy. Maybe they’re too busy conferring with lobbyists to hear the guy. Or they take long bathroom breaks when he gets up to speak. Or simply turn down their hearing aids:

“… So we have people like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson. The Koch Brothers are worth $50 billion. That’s what they’re worth. And, they have said they’re prepared to put $400 million into this campaign to defeat Obama, to defeat candidates who are representing working families. Sheldon Adelson says he’s only worth $20 billion. He’s kind of a pauper. But he’s willing to spend what it takes to buy the government…”

Adelson’s hubris is breathtaking. As a recent New York Times editorial noted, the ugly little greedhound’s ideological fervor is a smokescreen:

Mr. Adelson… rails against the president’s “socialist-style economy” and redistribution of wealth, but what he really fears is Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on companies like his that make a huge amount of money overseas. Ninety percent of the earnings of his company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, come from hotel and casino properties in Singapore and Macau. (The latter is located, by the way, in China, a socialist country the last time we checked.)

Because of the lower tax rate in those countries (currently zero in Macau), the company now has a United States corporate tax rate of 9.8 percent, compared with the statutory rate of 35 percent. President Obama has repeatedly proposed ending the deductions and credits that allow corporations like Las Vegas Sands to shelter billions in income overseas, but has been blocked by Republicans.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, mainstream media, taxes | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Jong on Arianna’s ‘special place in hell’

Posted on June 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

Author and “zipless fuck” pioneer Erica Jong is seventy years old now, and her brand of feminism looks a bit naive in perspective, but it’s nice to read her priorities are still in good order. Here she is calling out the greedy, ideological shapeshifter Arianna Huffington for refusing to pay all those writers who helped make her online publication such a lucrative venture:

The idea that everybody’s writing for free is hurting writing as a profession. I wrote many articles for Arianna when she was establishing her aggregator blog and attracting all those eyeballs.

When she got $300m from the AOL acquisition, I said, ‘OK, Arianna, we all helped you get there so now you’re going to pay writers.’ She said, ‘No, I pay my editors.’ I’ve known Arianna for years…

I knew her when she was anti-feminist. I knew her when she was right wing. I knew her when she turned left wing. We promoted our first books together in the UK a million years ago… I admire her energy. She can be very interesting and she’s very clever.

But ‘there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,’ as Madeleine Albright once said. Artists who turncoat and exploit other artists — I have no words.

Arianna ditched the writers soon enough. That hurts… Now authors are blogging everywhere for free, and it’s not a good development. They are starving.

I care about artists — the oxygen of society. Suppress them and you asphyxiate discussion and change. Arianna was a writer once… She forgot her origins… We need to be paid! We cannot barter poems for food…

Clarification: I never gave Huffington any freebies and I’m not posting this because of a personal grudge. I just think it’s important for writers to call out con artists whenever their names come up.

Posted in mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Sorkin channels Howard Beale in ‘The Newsroom’

Posted on June 26, 2012 by oddmanout215

Jeff Daniels is, at least for one scene, the mad prophet of the digital age in the debut of “The Newsroom.”

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic editor and blogger, quoting from Aaron Sorkin’s “deeply unpleasant, condescending and sexist” interview with the Globe and Mail:

“I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties,” [Sorkin] says. “I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.”

Coates thought Sorkin, in the interview, was insensitive to victims of segregation and “gender repression” back in the ’40s. He scolded Sorkin for extolling a great era that never really existed, and for expressing “attendant notions that the internet [has] ruined everything.”

What a crock. In the interview, Sorkin betrayed an unfortunate nostalgic streak and apparent insecurities about the quality of his work. But I’m still trying to figure out what it is about him and his new HBO show, The Newsroom, that so deeply offended Coates and the many non-fans of Sorkin who posted comments on Coates’ site.

Coates ignored the brilliance of the show’s initial rant about America’s steep decline, delivered by Jeff Daniels, playing (at least in this scene) a latter-day Howard Beale:

…We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports…. America leads the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending…

Does it really matter that Sorkin glosses over what was bad about previous eras, that he is old-fashioned in some respects, an asshole sometimes? That he is skeptical about some current uses of the internet?

Decades ago, who but Howard Beale would have imagined that the Supreme Court, with something called the Citizens United decision, would all but eliminate government by the people? That labor unions would be close to extinct by 2012 and the gap between rich and poor at an all-time high? That America would elect a Democratic president willing to compromise with those who would dismantle Social Security, and hang out with the CEOs who have off-shored millions of American jobs?

Yes, some overtly racist and sexist laws were overturned in mid-twentieth century America. However, at almost the same time this was happening, reactionaries were developing a blueprint for a country that would in some ways be even more inequitable than America under the old laws. That’s fact, not nostalgia.

And yet Coates, in putting down Sorkin, doesn’t even acknowledge that America took a turn for the worse in the late twentieth century, away from the ideals codified in New Deal legislation and toward the dog-eat-dog world of Birchers and Ayn Rand acolytes.

It’s a big mistake to forget that collective ignorance is a force than fluctuates throughout history, and that most Americans in our era seem to be profoundly ignorant of the rights and protections fought for and won by their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Question for Coates: Are we really talking social progress if more and more Americans, regardless of race and sex, are reduced to living like serfs, and the mainstream media all but ignores this fact?

Give Sorkin credit, if only for stating the obvious with energy and eloquence.

Footnote: After the initial scene, The Newsroom‘s first episode became more like Broadcast News than like Network, but that’s not a putdown. It should be fun to see whether the show turns out to be truly bold.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Rich Greeks feel fine

Posted on June 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

From Guardian UK:

…Since the outbreak of Greece’s runaway debt crisis, its moneyed class has been notable more by its absence than presence. Oligarchs, who made vast fortunes cornering the oil, gas, construction and banking industries, as well as the media, have been eerily silent – often going out of their way to be as low a profile as possible.

Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world’s merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens’ biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece’s debt currently stands at €280bn.

As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad…

Posted in apocalypse, economic collapse, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

In Philly, taxed extra for paying taxes

Posted on June 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

Just what a struggling major city needs — more property tax hikes for tax-paying property owners, in order to make up for the huge amounts owed by deadbeat property owners, many of whom don’t even live in Philly:

From Patrick Kirkstra at PlanPhilly:

Philadelphia property tax delinquents piled up an additional $43.8 million in new debt over the last year, increasing the total amount owed to the city and financially desperate School District to $515.4 million, an increase of 9.3 percent in a single year, city records show.

There are now about 103,000 tax delinquent properties in Philadelphia. About 18 percent of all parcels in the city are in arrears. As documented in a PlanPhilly/Inquirer series last August, no other big city in the nation approaches that level of property tax delinquency.

Past due property taxes have long been a contentious issue in Philadelphia, but the growing pot of delinquent cash has attracted even more attention than usual in recent months.

And for good reason. City Council and Mayor Michael Nutter have enacted two straight property tax hikes, and are close to approving a citywide property reassessment that would collect as much as $94 million in additional property taxes. Meanwhile, the School District of Philadelphia – which relies on property taxes for 80 percent of its local funding – is in the midst of perhaps the worst financial crisis in its history…

I live in Philly. I often ride my bike around City Hall, the largest municipal building in the country, built in the grandiose Second Empire style. It is rumored that governance is going on somewhere in that building — that Mayor Nutter and City Council are actually taking steps to save the public school system and the middle-class tax base, despite opposition from PA’s wing-nut Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and the Philly-hating General Assembly.

I don’t believe it. The only government employees who seem to get anything done in Philly are the pests who issue parking tickets.

Posted in economic collapse, livable cities, Philadelphia, taxes | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Good luck finding those black holes

Posted on June 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

I don’t know how much taxpayer money was used to construct and deploy this orbiting telescope, but it will be money well spent if NASA can finding the black holes that sucked away millions of jobs and homes, a functioning federal government, honest officeholders, and hopes for economic recovery in the United States:

NASA is poised to launch on Wednesday a sophisticated orbiting telescope that uses high-energy X-ray vision to hunt for black holes in the universe.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) will first be carried into the skies by a jet which will deploy a rocket that sends the satellite into space, NASA said.

“Why launch from the air? Plane-assisted launches are less expensive than those that take place from the ground. Less fuel is needed to boost cargo away from the pull of Earth’s gravity,” the US space agency said in a statement.

The project aims to study energetic phenomena such as black holes and the explosions of massive stars…

Posted in humor, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

O’Donnell spins recall defeat as victory

Posted on June 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow seemed as disappointed as most rank-and-file Democrats when NBC analysts declared early Tuesday evening that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker would survive the bid to recall him. However, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, the one who’s an Obamabot spin doctor, announced at the top of his program that everything was just peachy:

Lawrence O’Donnell declared President Obama the “big winner” of Tuesday night’s Wisconsin recall election.

O’Donnell hosted the network’s breaking news coverage of the Wisconsin recall election results, along with MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann. O’Donnell called Obama the “big winner” after exit polls indicated that the president fared better among Wisconsin voters than GOP candidate Mitt Romney. When voters were polled, 53 percent said they would vote for President Obama. 42 percent said they would vote for Mitt Romney.

Heilemann said that was good news for Obama since his campaign seemed to feel confident about the president’s prospects of winning Wisconsin in the general election… He added that while Wisconsin has voted Democratic for a number of years, there was one downside to consider.

“In a hotly contested state election—where to some extent, it was a contest between outside money and boots-on-the-ground, grassroots organizing on the other side—money won,” Heilemann said. “And if you think about the army of Republican multi-millionaires and billionaires who are thinking about writing big checks to super PACs, they look at Wisconsin and say, ‘Our dollars helped keep Scott Walker in his job. Our dollars can help beat the Democratic ground game in a lot of states where it is really close, unlike Wisconsin.'”

But O’Donnell just kept smiling and taking solace in the exit polling data that showed Barack Obama has more support in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney. As if that means anything, given the fact that we’re still five months away from the presidential election.

It must be said: O’Donnell is a reality-denying Obama cheerleader, a liberal version of the Republican-backing talking heads on Fox. The “big winner” Tuesday were the billionaire fascists — the Koch brothers and the others who spent huge sums on political ads that helped ensure Walker’s victory. Only a propagandist would conclude otherwise.

Posted in mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Regarding Dylan’s latest award

Posted on June 3, 2012 by oddmanout215

[I posted the following on Suburban Guerrilla Thursday and felt compelled to post it here today after seeing the bizarre video of Bob Dylan, bobbing from side to side onstage, looking like he got off at the wrong bus stop, as Barack Obama, on the same stage, said nice things about him.]

From Rolling Stone:

Bob Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, at a ceremony at the White House [Tuesday] afternoon.

At the ceremony, President Obama said of Dylan, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music,” adding that the “unique gravel-y power” of his voice helped redefine “not just what music sounded like, but the message it carried and how it made people feel.”

When the White House announced that Dylan would be one of this year’s recipients, they wrote in a statement that the rock & roll pioneer had “considerable influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and has had significant impact on American culture over the past five decades.”

Dylan also had considerable influence on the anti-war movement — you know, protests against the undeclared Vietnam war, the war that made it so easy for future presidents to send young Americans into equally unnecessary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep them there long after it was obvious there was nothing to be gained.

Too bad Dylan didn’t get to sing a few verses of “Masters of War,” although I don’t think Obama would have been amused by the irony.

Posted in arts, Obama, pop music | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Chris Hayes, heroes, and ‘Catch 22’

Posted on May 31, 2012 by oddmanout215

Erik Kain at Mother Jones, defending MSNBC host Chris Hayes who, on Memorial Day weekend, was bombarded with insults after criticizing those who overuse the word “hero”:

In transforming our soldiers or police automatically into “heroes” we ignore the atrocities our own side commits. In doing so we also ignore the real moments of heroism. We give a free pass to anyone with a uniform and a gun regardless of their individual merit, and lend unwitting support to every war, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the War on Drugs, in the process.

I’m with Kain. What we need these days are more anti-heroes — people who rebel against the “my country right or wrong mentality” that allows us to be manipulated by lying politicians who all too often take the country into unnecessary wars to enrich “defense” contractors while dodging serious domestic problems.

Hayes later apologized for this statement:

I feel uncomfortable with the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.

He should have stood his ground. If more people in the media had the courage to voice such opinions, there might be fewer military debacles that result in thousands of needless deaths and billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer dollars.

I’m also with the late Joseph Heller, whose experience flying combat missions in World War II inspired him to write the brilliant anti-war novel Catch-22 and to invent the classic anti-hero, John Yossarian, who is haunted by the death of an airman named Snowden:

… Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or flying over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at the controls and Snowden dying in back.

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane.

“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.”

“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there…”

Sometimes, a book you love as a kid doesn’t seem nearly as good when you re-read it later in life. Not so with Catch-22. Decades later, the absurdities seem as funny as ever, but the grim humanism resonates in a way I wasn’t capable of appreciating the first time around. I guess the difference is I hadn’t yet really thought about all those real-life Snowdens whose lives are wasted in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. At least you could make a case for Heller’s war being just.

Posted in arts, fiction, history, Iraq war, mainstream media | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Mittens must have loved NYT’s puff piece

Posted on May 24, 2012 by oddmanout215

In case you missed it: Jodi Kantor’s front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times, headlined “Romney’s Faith, Silent but Deep,” was one of the most cringe-worthy puff pieces about a political candidate published in recent memory.

Read it and you’ll see I’m not exaggerating.

If I were Kantor’s editor, I would have immediately shot the piece back to her along with this question: How does Romney reconcile his supposedly deep faith with the well-documented evidence of his blatant lies regarding not only rival candidates but also his own past actions and statements on important issues?

Does he think lying is OK so long as it’s in the service of a greater good? Does he lie because he thinks American voters ultimately will overlook this glaring fault in their eagerness to oust Barack Obama?

Here’s an example of Kantor’s irony-free and unquestioning brand of analytical journalism:

…In church, Mr. Romney frequently spoke about obeying authority, the danger of rationalizing misbehavior and God’s fixed standards. “Most people, if they don’t want to do what God wants them to do, they move what God wants them to do about four feet over,” he once told his congregation, holding out his arms to indicate the distance, [Romney friend Clayton] Christensen remembered…

Kantor mentions that some Mormon supporters wonder how Romney can reconcile his moral notions with the attack ads presented in his name, but she doesn’t come close to addressing the disconnect between the candidate’s professed religiosity and his tendency to make deliberately false statements. Her story is a classic example of how far mainstream publications will go to prove how “objective” — i.e., non-adversarial — they are.

Posted in liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments