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

Demon weed or regular fags?

Posted on May 5, 2012 by oddmanout215

Don’t tell the Department of Justice, but Ray Davies may have been substituting the rhyming slang term “Harry rag” for “marijuana cigarette.” But the song could just as easily be about regular cigarettes, or fags, as the Brits call them.

Footnote, from Alternet:

More U.S. teens are now smoking marijuana than smoke cigarettes.

That’s right. Among high school students, current use — defined as use within the last 30 days — is now higher for marijuana than for cigarettes. According to the [Center for Disease Control and Prevention], 21.9 percent of teens reported smoking cigarettes within the last month, while 22.4 percent smoked marijuana.

There is a lesson here, but one that policymakers won’t want to hear: If the idea is to stop teen substance use, the approach we’ve used with tobacco works better than the approach we’ve taken with marijuana. That means regulation of adult use, rather than prohibition…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The DOJ’s jihad on medical marijuana

Posted on May 3, 2012 by oddmanout215

The world’s most ridiculously named law enforcement organization — the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms — is one of many federal agencies participating in the crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries and growers, something that many Barack Obama supporters couldn’t have imagined happening when they elected him. From Time:

…In 2011, the Department of Justice revised its guidance to U.S. Attorneys, allowing them to target any medical marijuana activity except for ill patients and their immediate caregivers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has made it clear that “medical marijuana is not medicine,” and even called it a “mortal danger.” The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms has banned the sale of guns to medical marijuana patients. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has told public housing authorities that they can’t rent to medical marijuana patients. And the Internal Revenue Service has reiterated its position that medical pot businesses cannot deduct expenses related to an illegal drug. Fearing federal intervention, many banks are now dropping medical marijuana dispensaries as customers…

…Individual sick users are safe from prosecution, but they are likely to find it harder in the coming months to get the drug. Growers and dispensers are not protected by state law from federal prosecution, especially if they become large enough to get noticed by federal investigators. And the likely result is that more of the medical marijuana industry will be pushed underground in the coming years, making it more difficult for local officials to track the business. This arguably will only increase some criminal activity, as large amounts of money and a very profitable commodity move through the system by way of small-time dealers working without sophisticated security systems…

I can’t help wondering just how nervous the law-breaking banksters who ruined our economy would be if the feds went after them with a tiny fraction of the same zeal.

Footnote: Tell me again, Obama fans — what does this guy stand for that you admire?

Posted in health care, liar | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Bill Clinton’s disastrous assumption

Posted on May 2, 2012 by oddmanout215

Somebody at Truthdig was pondering the gulf between rich and poor in America and, not coincidentally, thought of the 1996 State of the Union address, in which Bill Clinton “kneecapped Franklin Delano Roosevelt” by declaring that the era of big government was over:

The full line, which is awfully haunting 16 years later with record poverty and the safety net in tatters, is “The era of big government is over, but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

Later that year, on Aug. 22, Clinton would sign the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which sounds like it was titled by George Orwell and ended the way welfare had been distributed to the poor, mostly women and children, since the 1930s.

“Welfare reform” was a plank of Newt Gingrich’s true believers in Congress. Clinton’s acquiescence and the line about big government, replayed below, were, a skeptic might say, an election year maneuver to show that the president could be tough on poor people. It worked in the sense that it helped Clinton win re-election. It failed in the sense that the welfare system is now so broken and insubstantial, some poor people don’t even bother applying.

In acquiescing to the wishes of the Gingrich gang, Clinton was indeed consigning America back to a time when citizens in need were left to fend for themselves. You can’t really have it both ways, can you?

Posted in economic collapse, history, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Why we’re still in Afghanistan

Posted on May 2, 2012 by oddmanout215

Misleading headline. I’ve no idea why the American military presence in Afghanistan is, in fact, three times as large as it was before Barack Obama took office. Does Obama know? If he does, he’s keeping it to himself. He’s saying things like this, from the speech he gave during his surprise visit to Bagram Air Base:

…Yet here, in the predawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon…

He makes Afghanistan sound like “mission accomplished,” then allows that the military will be there through 2014, and maybe much longer, at who knows what cost. He doesn’t say why. How does such a gifted, well-educated man bring himself to use such banal and deceitful language?

I just finished reading the Vanity Fair piece about Obama in the 1980s, living in New York City and attending Columbia, doing a lot of reading and thinking. This is from a letter to a girlfriend in which he expresses admiration for poet T.S. Eliot’s world view:

…Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini…)

I know, don’t make too much of the self-infatuated ramblings of a bright guy in his early 20s, but those lines arguably shed light on why Obama turned out to be a major disappointment to progressives who expected him to put a lid on exorbitant “defense” spending, curtail growing economic inequality, crack down on banksters, and so on.

Obama is attractive and socially adroit but he’s essentially a private man who learned early on to rein in his passions and hide his conservative beliefs regarding how to change the world for the good. He learned to veil his beliefs in abstract language that would appeal to progressive voters on an emotional level.

The irony is that, in pursuing power, he may have fooled himself as much as he fooled the rest of us. What is the good of his cautious, ostensibly middle-of-the road approach to governance? How different are his speeches — his beliefs — about the conduct of foreign wars from those of the much less gifted George W. Bush?

Posted in history, mainstream media, Obama | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Dad, can I borrow $100K for college?

Posted on May 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

This is premature, but Mitt Romney seems more and more like a gift from the gods to the Barack Obama re-election campaign. The quarter-billion-dollar man is tone deaf but he keeps braying, and each of his pronouncements seem more out of tune with the national mood than the last. From Paul Krugman:

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants…

A gift from the gods, or an android sent by extraterrestrials to sabotage the GOP’s efforts to create environmental disaster. Or just a tremendous lucky break for the hapless, undeserving Democrats.

Posted in Great Recession, humor, Mitt Romney, The New Depression | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Two-party system = no change

Posted on April 29, 2012 by oddmanout215

Our homes were gambling chips, not castles. And most of us weren’t even in the game.

I still can’t tell if most “middle-class” Americans understand what hit them, and why, when the economy tanked in 2008. Robert Scheer takes a crack at explaining the catastrophe with what seems the perfect metaphor. But then again, I used to work in Atlantic City:

The securitization of mortgages into collateralized debt obligations turned homes—the castles of so many average Americans—into gambling chips, and the fallout mainly hurt those who were not even in on the game. As The Wall Street Journal reported in February when [Mitt] Romney was campaigning in Nevada, the primary victims of foreclosure are those who had paid down their home loans, or worse yet owned homes outright, only to find that repossessions on their block destroyed the value of their investment.

The appalling thing is that this enormous mess did not have to happen. It is a man-made disaster, the result of capricious Wall Street bankers who have no regard for the national interest. Perhaps that is to be expected, but what is shocking is the inability of leading politicians of either party to mount a challenge to the unfettered greed that has come to dominate our political process.

In the end, the perpetrators of this calamity have been rewarded, and their patsies, the ordinary folks who are supposed to matter in a democracy, have been cast overboard.

Good so far as it goes, but Scheer is pulling his punches. He notes that executives at the big banks are “capricious,” then professes to be shocked at the “inability” of politicians to “mount a challenge” to “unfettered greed.” As if the current crop of nationally known politicians in both major parties is any better than the banksters. If they were, they wouldn’t have allowed the banksters to turn the economy into a crap shoot.

Scheer, or his headline writer, also made a curiously optimistic assumption — that we’re “halfway through the lost decade.” What makes him think things will be any better five years from now if the banksters and corporations still run this country? What if we’re one-twentieth of the way through the lost century?

Scheer and other pundits need to speak a different language in order to get beyond complaints and into the realm of solutions. They could start by addressing a basic reality — it is ridiculous to expect any real change for the good so long as we’re at the mercy of a political system dominated by two parties, both owned by moneyed interests.

Posted in casinos, Congress, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Louie Louie (Jordan & Armstrong)

Posted on April 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

When I get up each morning
There’s nothing to breathe but air

Posted in pop music | Leave a comment