South Philly saints come marchin’ in

Posted on May 20, 2012 by oddmanout215

Mother Mary, minus the money strips

This is in case you missed the May procession held today under a soul-piercing blue sky on Philly’s Italian Market. Kids in white suits and dresses, followed by statues of solitary saints on floats pushed by local parishioners, with a little marching band behind each float.

The Latino musicians, all in white, reminded me of The Wild Bunch, the scene in which Angel is tied to the generalissimo’s car and dragged around the camp as drunken soldiers laugh it up. Music equally suited to a wedding or a wake, superficially gay but ultimately mournful and demented, especially the trumpets.

Mother Mary rolled by wearing blue and white robes and adhesive strips to which dollar bills had been attached by the faithful. Actually, there were two Marys — one for the Italians, one for the Latinos. On each of the floats was a name tag, in case you didn’t know your saints. St. Lucy and Padre Pia glided past, then St. John Newmann, whose mummy is enshrined right here in Philly. Poor St. Joseph was way in the back, far from his revered wife. Somewhere in the middle of the procession was — I kid you not — St. Rocco. The patron saint of wiseguys, I guess.

Then it was time for the Italian Market Festival. Ninth Street was closed to cars, with white tents pitched north and south for six blocks and ancient blooze rock blasting from the speakers of WMGK. Thousands of revelers filled the streets and sidewalks, streaming under metal awnings, past produce vendors, through clouds of barbecue smoke, sipping beer from plastic cups, feasting on gourmet cupcakes, tomato pie, pepperoni on a stick, mozzarella in a cup, sculpted mangoes, hot sausage and meatballs, porchetta (oven-roasted pigs, with eyeless heads still attached), and enough cannoli to clog a thousand arteries.

Afterwards, a mess. But the garbage will be gone by morning and the market, which is pretty messy to begin with, will be back to normal.

My gratitude will linger. Times are tough, but at least I don’t live in the suburbs.

—–Original Message—–

Posted in food, humor, livable cities, pop music | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Wall Street creep of the week

Posted on May 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

Even the grimmest fiction seems less depressing than many real-life news stories. For example, there’s that poor man in California who killed himself Sunday after a long, unsuccessful fight to avoid being evicted from his home by Wells Fargo, the “too big to fail” bank that had scammed him and his wife into taking out a predatory mortgage.

And the rash of stories about Wall Street creep of the week Jamie Dimon, who was reelected chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase Tuesday, at $23 million a year, despite the fact that his “too big to fail” bank recently blew more than $2 billion making the sort of derivatives trading bet that wrecked the economy a few years ago.

Then Dimon made a speech in which he scoffed at the notion that banks should be better regulated. Then Barack Obama, on some dumb-ass daytime TV show, skimmed over the $2 billion debacle and called Dimon “one of the smartest bankers we got.”

Nomi Prins of The Daily Beast:

Bank chairmen, like Jamie Dimon, will claim that regulation is too complex, too anti-competitive, and too un-American (putting U.S. banks at a disadvantage against other global banks). Yet, those arguments are exactly what led a cadre of bankers, an incoming and an outgoing treasury secretary (Larry Summers and Robert Rubin) and President Clinton to, in 1999, abolish the last remnants of the Glass-Steagall banking-reform act—making it fair game for banks to grow in size and complexity, plus engage in a bevy of speculative plays under the same roof as their FDIC-insured, Fed liquidity-baked deposits and loans. And that’s exactly what they did.

If you know you will be cushioned no matter how high you jump off a tightrope, and you’re getting paid to jump, you’re going to find ways to jump. Take away the tightrope, and you won’t jump. Resurrecting a true Glass-Steagall barrier is like taking away the net.

Update: Late today it was announced that Dimon will be “invited” to testify before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss JPMorgan Chase’s huge trading loss. This is according to Banking Committee chairman Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD), who said a hearing date has yet to be determined.

Posted in Great Recession, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Wall Street | 1 Comment

America colonized again

Posted on May 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

From The National Employment Law Project, May 10:

Long-term unemployed workers in a growing list of states are being abruptly cut from federal unemployment insurance, a new analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows. Due to reductions Congress enacted earlier this year, more than 400,000 workers in 27 states will have lost between 13 to 20 weeks of federal unemployment insurance under the Extended Benefits program by Saturday, May 12th. The cuts come even though long-term unemployment remains near record highs.

From Chris Hedges in Truthdig, May 14:

… We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense… The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability — keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits — ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game…

And so on, a Marxism 101 summary. For a second, I thought Hedges was calling me a member of the proletariat, the low-born who tend to simply endure rather than revolt, or the lumpenproletariat, who — gasp! — survive through crime and other sordid activities, like Wall Street banksters but not as sneaky.

But no, it seems I’m in the declasse intellectual camp, which sounds a lot cooler, even though it means you’re jobless and probably in as much debt as the proles, a situation that ensures you will divert “all personal energy toward survival.”

History shows that it’s up to the declasse intellectuals and other disaffected members of the middle class to light a fire under the proles, and that, of course, is what Occupy Wall Street is all about. A lot of what Hedges writes makes sense, but there will be no large-scale push against the corporate monsters until a significant percentage of the (formerly) middle class uses up the last of its assets and gives up trying to stay solvent in a rigged economy. Even then, a radicalized citizenry is highly unlikely, don’t you think?

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

Wing nuts love Mom, too

Posted on May 13, 2012 by oddmanout215

Sara Robinson of Alternet had a good idea for a Mother’s Day column – “Ayn Rand-Loving Right Is Like Teen Boys Gone Crazy” — but she got carried away and ended up arguing that Randian conservatism is, more than anything else, anti-feminist:

… Make no mistake: all this Ayn Rand libertarian me-first-and-the-rest-of-you-go-to-hell stuff – the there’s-no-government-like-no-government theology that’s now being piously intoned as Holy Received Truth by everybody, male and female, in the GOP – is, very precisely, the kind of politics you’d come up with if you were a 16-year-old boy trying to explain away his dependence on Mom.

Parents? I don’t have any parents. I raised myself, on roots and berries and small vermin I dug up in vacant lots. That lady hanging around, feeding me and nagging me and picking up my socks and driving me to practice? She’s just the nanny state. That bitch. I hate her…

Later, Robinson adds this regarding the term “nanny state”:

… It’s sexist as hell. Anti-feminist at its very core. It says that the concerns that we most identify with mothers – cleaning up your crap, minding your manners, not annoying other people, taking responsibility for your actions – are intrusive and unwarranted infringements on your essential freedom, instead of the basic adult responsibilities that are required of everybody if society is going to remain free and functional.

It says that the power and authority by which mothers – “nannies,” in this construction – set the rules within the family is illegitimate. It belittles women who are bossy enough to insist on adult behavior from men…

Amusing, but off-base. What about women libertarians, who are just as contemptuous of the nanny state as the Paul Ryans of the world? Most libertarians are men, but the number of true-believing women is on the rise. Just ask the Ladies of Liberty Alliance.

I’ve encountered libertarians up close, men and women, and they are very good at cleaning up their own crap and minding their manners. They’re extremely arrogant, but in a “reasonable” fashion. You don’t even know they’re wing nuts until you talk politics with them and they shock you with their lack of compassion for the wretched of the earth — more precisely, with their professed belief that government assistance to those in need is harmful to social order.

Robinson should have remembered that Ayn Rand ran a very strict cult. I can’t imagine Alan Greenspan and Rand’s other male minions balking when she ordered them to pick up their dirty socks.

I’m guessing Robinson’s hot-botton issue is feminism. Otherwise, she’d see that libertarianism is essentially anti-humanist, not anti-feminist.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

‘Get a job’ easy to say if you’ve got one

Posted on May 13, 2012 by oddmanout215

Paul Krugman recently noted a close resemblance between Ben Bernanke’s famously lame prediction about the economy — “I think as those green shoots begin to appear in different markets and as some confidence begins to come back that will begin the positive dynamic that brings our economy back” — and the words of Chance, the simple-minded gardener who is mistaken for a sage in the satiric movie Being There, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s novel — “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden. . . . There will be growth in the spring.”

In the same piece, Krugman quoted from the novel Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by B. Traven:

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.

B. Traven was a German mystery man who wrote in Mexico and probably was an anarchist. I’ve never read Traven, but the quotation and my fondness for the classic movie adapted from his novel makes me want to run out and buy the latter.

Footnote: I wonder if the the most famous line from the movie — “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” — was taken from the novel.

Posted in arts, movies, unemployment | 1 Comment

When will Obama ‘evolve’ on jobs?

Posted on May 11, 2012 by oddmanout215

From MoveOn.org:

Breaking: The Obama Announcement That May Just Make You Cry

And after the sappy headline:

Yes! We couldn’t be more excited! As MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben puts it: “This is a historic day. The president’s support for marriage equality is great news that’s likely to energize progressive activists across the country.”

I’ll bet most people who are excited by Obama’s lukewarm and long-overdue announcement live inside the liberal bubble, where no one speaks of how little leadership and passion the president has shown on most progressive concerns, especially the ongoing disaster of unemployment in this country.

Put another way, Obama had been described as “evolving” toward the state of mind he was in when he endorsed marriage equality. I’m wondering how long it will take him to evolve into a leader who recognizes the urgent need for economic equality.

It’s true Obama had nothing to do with the financial collapse. There’s no way he could quickly reverse the effects of Dubya’s disastrous stupidity, or defeat all by himself the loathsome Congressional Republicans who are happy that one percent of Americans prosper while the rest grow poorer.

But again — when will this guy evolve beyond equating “the economy” with the interests of big banks and multinational corporations? When will he stop hobnobbing with the heads of companies that make billions, are taxed at outrageously low rates, and continue to outsource jobs and lower the wages of Americans still hanging on to jobs? When will he at least try to appear to be serious about fighting for working people?

Here’s Paul Krugman on the extent of the problem:

… There are now four job seekers for every job opening, which means that workers who lose one job find it very hard to get another. Six million Americans, almost five times as many as in 2007, have been out of work for six months or more; four million have been out of work for more than a year, up from just 700,000 before the [financial] crisis… Not since the 1930s have so many Americans found themselves seemingly trapped in a permanent state of joblessness…

The fact that Obama made a condescending speech to endorse marriage equality — as if it’s a big deal that he’s for something that wouldn’t even be controversial in more civilized countries — while he continues to ignore the scope of the unemployment problem, sickens me.

And the fact that MoveOn.org functions as a cheerleading operating for the president instead of pressuring him to fight for job creation makes me think the Democratic Party will never re-connect with the working class.

Full disclosure: I’m an out-of-work writer. If MoveOn.org reads this and is seeking someone to crank out news releases that are realistic, as opposed to euphoric-sounding and worshipful, please contact me.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Mittens distinguishes himself again

Posted on May 10, 2012 by oddmanout215

How awful is Mitt Romney? Is there anything he won’t do or say to improve his chances of being elected? Here’s a for instance:

… On Thursday morning, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conducted tense negotiations with the Chinese government over the fate of Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident who had sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, Romney seized on rumors of American capitulation to launch a political salvo: “If these reports are true, this is a dark day for freedom and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration,” he said at a rally in Virginia. “We are a place of freedom here and around the world, and we should stand up and defend freedom wherever it is under attack…”

The crisis ended in what Joe Conason called a “face-saving solution” for the Chinese and the Obama administration. It turned out to be a bright day for Chen. I don’t agree with Conason too often, but I’m with him on this:

… Romney’s error was worse than a misguided political tactic. It showed a woeful ignorance of diplomacy and a callow opportunism that don’t befit the next occupant of the Oval Office. To endanger Chen’s safety and the prestige of the United States in those difficult hours was an act of weak character as well as stupidity…

Romney’s statements about Chen came shortly after another glaring example of his weak character — his decision to throw Richard Grenell under the bus. The openly gay staffer resigned after taking a lot of heat from anti-gay rights Republicans. Romney didn’t defend the man, and didn’t ask him to stay on. Conason again:

If Grenell was qualified to hold the sensitive post of foreign policy spokesman, why did Romney cave instantly to demands from radio hosts and other ignorant bigots to let him go?

Gee, I don’t know. Could it have anything to do with the fact that he’s simultaneously ruthless and cowardly, not to mention morally bankrupt? He also came out against same-sex marriage, of course, to counter Barack Obama’s position on the issue.

Footnote: I’ll take it all back if Romney turns out to be an android — a suspicion I expressed in a previous post — like those creatures in Blade Runner. Except that the Blade Runner androids had character.

Posted in humor, Mitt Romney, Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Cut food stamps, save the F-35!

Posted on May 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

The projected costs of this war toy have hurtled through the stratosphere and are moving into deep space.

And save the rich from having to return to those grim days before the Bush tax cuts, which have, over the past decade, added $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit.

From ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, House Republicans moved legislation forward aimed at preventing any reductions in military spending, even if that means cutting much needed programs for the nation’s poorest. The House Armed Services Committee’s bill provides $554 billion for the Pentagon — $29 billion more than [the Department of Defense] had requested — while the GOP-led Budget Committee packaged six bills that would “slice $261 billion from food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programs for struggling Americans.”

From DoD, the Online Defense and Acquisition Journal, March 20:

Cost overruns for the first batches of F-35 Lightning IIs total more than $1 billion, Congress’ watchdog agency said Tuesday, in the latest report to detail the woes of the world’s largest defense program.

The overall cost estimate for the whole program is now close to $400 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office, and although investigators were careful to note the progress DoD and Lockheed Martin have made in the past year, the overall picture remained very bleak.

Also from ThinkProgress:

While Republicans push these cuts [in programs for the poor] in the name of righting America’s balance sheet and staving off a debt crisis, their efforts are miniscule compared to their push to extend budget busting tax cuts for the rich. By promising last week that they will offer a full extension of the Bush tax cuts — at a 10-year cost of $2.4 trillion — without offsetting the cost, GOP leaders assured Americans that their deficit-reduction efforts will never be achieved.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

A lie is a lie is a lie is a lie

Posted on May 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

― Gertrude Stein

How many of you English majors knew that Gertrude Stein took the side of Frenchmen who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis before and during World War II? From the New Yorker:

… In 1941, at [Bernard] Faÿ’s suggestion, Stein agreed to translate a set of speeches by Marshal Philippe Pétain—a hundred eighty pages of explicitly anti-Semitic tirades—into English. (She hoped that they would be published in America, although they never were…)

… It would be easy to chalk up Stein’s endorsement of Pétain to her gratitude toward Faÿ, who shielded her from persecution during the war (Stein and [Alice] Toklas, both Jews, stayed out of the capital and in the countryside throughout the fighting), or to her political cunning. But her enthusiasm for Pétain, who was responsible for the death and deportation of nearly eighty thousand French Jews, was nothing new. After she met Faÿ—the first professor of American studies in France and a friend of Pétain—in 1926, she increasingly warmed to his political thought, writing to him once that she “sees politics but from one angle, which is yours.” Stein felt it vital for artists to work in undisturbed serenity in a climate of political stability; on the day, in 1940, that France fell to the Nazis, she published a book in which she wrote, “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free…”

The latter quote, possibly a distortion of something Flaubert wrote, is key. Stein was saying that artists, in order to be free to make art, must not defy the powers-that-be, even when freedom is being stomped out, and people killed, all around them. As if art exists in a realm outside of human experience. As if you don’t have to decide at some point to be on the bus or off it.

How ironic that such a sophisticate, so famous for her literary ambiguity, would stumble so badly over her own lies and self-deceptions.

Posted in arts, history, liar, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

It’s the jobs market, stupid

Posted on May 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

Last week I noted that Mitt Romney — insipid, empathy-free, and a congenital liar — was a gift from the gods to the Barack Obama re-election campaign. But even the gift of Mittens won’t help Obama if he continues to campaign as if that alone will get him re-elected.

Put another way, if autumn rolls around with the unemployment numbers — the real numbers — as bad as they are now, and with Obama continuing to passively allow the Republicans to blame him for this, he’ll lose.

Here’s Robert Reich on the latest misleading jobless estimates — 8.1, my ass! — reported by the mainstream media:

Friday’s jobs report for April was even more disappointing than March. Employers added only 115,000 new jobs, down from March’s number (the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the March number upward to 154,000, but that’s still abysmal relative to what’s needed). We need well over 250,000 new jobs per month in order to begin to whittle down the vast number of jobs lost in the Great Recession. At least 125,000 new jobs are necessary each month just to keep up with an expanding population of working-age people…

Most observers pay attention to the official rate of unemployment, which edged down to 8.1 percent in April from 8.2 percent in March. That may sound like progress, but it’s not. The unemployment rate dropped because more people dropped out of the labor force, too discouraged to look for work. The household survey, from which the rate is calculated, counts as “unemployed” only people who are actively looking for work. If you stop looking because the job scene looks hopeless for you, you’re no longer counted…

Most of the job gains in April were in lower-wage industries – retail stores, restaurants, and temporary-help. That means average wages continue to drop, adjusted for inflation – continuing their long-term decline. Most of the new jobs that have been added to the U.S. economy during this recovery have paid less than the jobs that were lost during the downturn…

Voters might forgive Obama for screwing up most of his first term — i.e., for focusing on bank bailouts and faulty health care initiatives at the expense of jobs programs. But at this point he should be on the road as often as possible, in the home districts of corrupt Republican stooges, exhorting them to quit pretending billionaires are job creators, reminding voters that cutting public-sector jobs and shredding the social safety net can only make the situation worse.

Instead, Obama is mildly reproaching the GOP for blocking jobs. He’s staging publicity stunts such as his secret trip to Afghanistan last week, during which he implicitly bragged about his role in the slaying of Osama bin Laden.

What a dope. Most voters want a president who seems fully engaged in helping the middle-class and poor get out of the ditch dug for them by Wall Street and advocates of globalization. They don’t want a Dem who reminds them of that jackass who strutted across an aircraft carrier, trying to look manly. Not this year.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Obama, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , | 1 Comment