Student-loan rate bill booby-trapped

Posted on April 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

Is our fearless leader really so feckless? Can’t he see the Rove propaganda machine uses the same tactic over and over — tying legislation that would benefit the poor and middle-class to legislation that would provide tax breaks and other advantages to the super-wealthy? Can’t he use more forceful language to spell this out for voters?

From The Raw Story:

President Barack Obama threatened on Friday to veto a House Republican bill that would keep government-backed student loan interest rates at their current level because of a poison-pill amendment, even though his veto would play directly into an obvious trap laid by Republican political strategist Karl Rove.

President Obama has said repeatedly that student loan rates must not go up — which they will on July 1 without Congressional action — and the Interest Rate Reduction Act would indeed accomplish those ends. However, it would do so by eliminating the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a key part of Obama’s health care reforms.

“This is a politically-motivated proposal and not the serious response that the problem facing America’s college students deserves,” the administration said Friday in a policy statement (PDF), threatening to veto the bill if it lands on Obama’s desk.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Friday afternoon by a margin of 215-195, with votes falling mostly along party lines.

That veto could be issued at hazard to the president, who’s facing a political Catch-22 thanks to a new strategy hatched by former Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Rove’s political action committee, American Crossroads, has a new ad out this week that makes a pitch for the youth vote by condemning Obama as a “cool” president who’s somehow causing students to struggle…

If the president is forced to veto the booby-trapped student loan bill, it will enable Republicans to ultimately claim that the president is doing little to help young people. Without Congressional action, however, government-backed student loan rates will double on July 1, which will make college significantly more expensive for 7.5 million American students, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.

Obama should get out in front on this one, telling “folks” — he loves that word — that the GOP is offering a choice: We’ll keep student loan interest rates low or cut an important health care program. He should say, “Are you folks going to let them get away with this? Wouldn’t you rather keep the student loan interest rates low by doing away with tax subsidies for oil companies?”

The alternative is to stand around pretending his hands are tied before the final vote — which is a pretty good description of how he has conducted himself at crucial times throughout his first term.

Posted in Congress, Obama | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Paul Ryan renounces his god, Ayn Rand

Posted on April 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

Paul Ryan renouncing Ayn Rand is like Peter denying Christ, except that Anne Rand was a batty old atheist who preached a self-serving “philosophy” called objectivism.

ThinkProgress explains why the news of Ryan’s loss of faith seems so shocking at first glance:

In 2005, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) heaped praise on Ayn Rand, a 20th-century libertarian novelist best known for her philosophy that centered on the idea that selfishness is “virtue.” The New Republic wrote:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Ryan also noted in a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.”

But today, Ryan is singing a far different tune. From an interview with National Review’s Bob Costa this week:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

The key word here is atheist. Ryan, author of the draconian Republican budget, might still keep a secret shrine to Rand but he knows he has to publicly renounce her in order not to offend voters who still find a way to reconcile their selfishness with belief in the Christian god.

AS for Ryan’s bizarre allusion to Aquinas — well, Ryan calls himself a Catholic. It makes sense for him to say he admires a Catholic theologian at a time when the Catholic hierarchy has been condemning his budget plan, which calls for severe cutbacks in aid to the poor. I wonder if he’s read what Aquinas said about the habit of doing good?

Footnote: Nice old interview of Rand by Mike Wallace on the ThinkProgress video, above.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Attention, Marxists

Posted on April 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

Posted in movies, pop music | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Zizek on OWS: Where to next?

Posted on April 26, 2012 by oddmanout215

Slovoj Zizek quoting from Ninotchka: 'Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?'

Bill O’Reilly recently denounced liberal economist Robert Reich as a communist, and Reich responded to this absurd charge by challenging O’Reilly to debate him. The debate I’d like to see, which will never take place, would be between O’Reilly and philosopher-funnyman-motormouth Slavoj Zizek, a genuine communist and an admirer of both Karl and Groucho Marx.

Here is Zizek in The Guardian, all wound up and addressing the dilemma of all who identify with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition, limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.

It is here that [Karl] Marx’s key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the “apolitical” social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political…

One of Zizek’s points is that many fed-up people are in denial about the link between their declining standards of living and the failure of capitalism in its current form. He’ll go anywhere to make his points, including classic movies:

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

“Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to the pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, history, humor, movies, Occupy Wall Street, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Cutting food aid to poor kids

Posted on April 25, 2012 by oddmanout215

It’s not just bleeding-heart liberal rhetoric. Republican politicians really are mutating backwards — devolving — into enthusiasts for social Darwinist notions that were popular in the Gilded Age. From ThinkProgress, another nauseating example of how low these mutants will stoop to please their corporate masters:

On April 18 the House Agriculture Committee passed a bill cutting over $33 billion from SNAP over the next decade. About one-third of these cuts ($11.5 billion) comes from putting restrictions on “categorical eligibility,” a provision that enables states to better coordinate between programs and improves access to assistance for low-income families.

By restricting this provision, the bill would kick an average of 1.8 million low-income people a year off of food aid and end automatic enrollment in free school meals for 280,000 children in struggling families.

The Republican budget sells this bill as an effort to “reduce lower‐priority spending” to avert military cuts that will otherwise take place in January 2013 due to the debt deal agreed to last summer. But when it comes to reducing the deficit, it’s clear the House would rather ask low-income kids and families struggling against hunger to foot the bill than asking multimillion-dollar estates to pay their fair share.

Case in point: As part of the 2010 tax-cut compromise, House Republicans insisted on including a tax cut on multimillion dollar estates, adding an estimated $11.5 billion to the deficit this year alone. That’s the same amount they’re now claiming is necessary to cut from low-income families through these restrictions.

Posted in Congress, food, mainstream media, taxes | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Android, psycho CEO, or just a liar?

Posted on April 24, 2012 by oddmanout215

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

From Dr. Kevin Barrett, in Veterans Today:

Is [Mitt] Romney a plastic shell, operated in real time by a gray alien equivalent of Karl Rove? Possibly. But it seems far more likely that he is, like [Ted] Bundy, an inhuman human: one of the 2% of males who are clinical psychopaths.

Interesting. On the one hand, it’s tempting to conclude Mittens is an android, capable of only the crudest simulations of spontaneity and empathy. If you prick him, will he not bleed some sort of industrial coolant?

On the other, he might simply be one of those people who “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done.”

The latter quote is from Prof. Clive R. Boddy, who argues in a piece published in the Journal of Business Ethics that “corporate psychopaths” in executive positions played a large role in creating the global financial crisis that began in 2008.

Robert Parry’s argument, that Mittens is a “professional liar,” seems to owe something to the corporate psycho theory advanced by Boddy and more than a few other academics. Parry writes:

In Romney’s previous career – as a corporate raider – lying may have been a part of the job, in lulling a company’s long-time owners into complacency or convincing some well-meaning investors that massive layoffs won’t be necessary. Then, wham-o, the company founders are out, their loyal workforce is on the street, and the company can be “reorganized” for a big profit.

Arguably, Romney learned his skill as a liar from those days at Bain Capital – and he has put it to good use as a politician, taking opposite sides of issue after issue, from abortion rights to global warming to government mandates that citizens buy health insurance to whether stay-at-home mothers “work” or not…

I don’t know, Bob. Did Romney learn to lie at Bain or merely cultivate his innate talent there? And I’m not ready to rule out the sci-fi scenario, either. Mittens seems in many ways a throwback to the Gilded Age — like someone who has mutated in reverse, into the sort of primitive political animal I discussed in a previous post. But there’s something special about him that makes me wonder what, if anything, goes on in his subconscious mind, and whether he assumes Americans have become so robotic they’re ready to be snookered by a guy who makes Richard Nixon seem like a mensch.

As Philip K. Dick wrote, do androids dream of electric sheep?

Posted in liar, Mitt Romney, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

New York Times discovers ALEC

Posted on April 23, 2012 by oddmanout215

At last a response to questions my friend Sergie and I puzzled over in my March 27 post: Why doesn’t the New York Times write an investigative piece about that extremely effective stealth lobbying group called the American Legislative Exchange Council? Why didn’t it write this piece years ago?

I’ll bet you’ve already heard of ALEC, unless you only read newspapers. The furtive, pro-corporate, tax-exempt group not only spends taxpayer money to persuade state legislators to pass right-wing bills — it often writes “model bills” used by legislators all over the country. Which isn’t surprising once you know ALEC’s members include not only corporations but also almost 2,000 state legislators. Almost all of the legislators are Republicans.

The horse is out of the barn and halfway across the valley, but better late than never for the story to be in a “newspaper of record.” And who cares that the Sunday NYT piece relied heavily on materials obtained by the watchdog group Common Cause, which is hoping to have ALEC busted for not meeting the criteria for tax-exempt status?

But I kid you, NYT. You did manage to dig up, or at least choose to use, some good anecdotal material that helps illustrate how thoroughly sleazy ALEC is. I liked this:

Last December, ALEC adopted model legislation, based on a Texas law, addressing the public disclosure of chemicals in drilling fluids used to extract natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The ALEC legislation, which has since provided the basis for similar bills submitted in five states, has been promoted as a victory for consumers’ right to know about potential drinking water contaminants.

A close reading of the bill, however, reveals loopholes that would allow energy companies to withhold the names of certain fluid contents, for reasons including that they have been deemed trade secrets. Most telling, perhaps, the bill was sponsored within ALEC by ExxonMobil, one of the largest practitioners of fracking — something not explained when ALEC lawmakers introduced their bills back home.

Footnote: Wouldn’t it be nice if President Obama could take the high ground and politely denounce ALEC for working to destroy the democratic process by putting crooked politicians in bed with corporate skunks? But he can’t do that because he too is in bed with skunks, especially those of the Wall Street variety.

Posted in mainstream media, New York Times, Obama | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Mutants stall Gulf clean-up funding

Posted on April 22, 2012 by oddmanout215

Anyone want to sample the mutant shrimp? I didn’t think so.

Chris Bowers of Daily Koz recently sent out an e-mail petition telling House Speaker John Boehner “to pass legislation mandating that fines paid by BP go toward the clean up and restoration of the Gulf Coast.” The petition includes a picture of a mutant shrimp, to remind Boehner that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which began two years ago this week, is still causing major harm.

This is how far to the right the GOP has mutated: Boehner and the other Republicans who control the House are insisting on amendments to a transportation bill whose passage is tied to the passage of the Gulf clean-up bill, called the Restore Act. They’re delaying a vote on the act in an attempt to force approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline and block effective regulations for disposal of toxic coal ash. And who cares about the condition of the Gulf and the millions of people affected by it?

I hope you all got the Daily Koz petition and signed it. Go here for more information on how to spread the word about stopping the mutants.

Posted in Congress, environmentalism, food | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Remind me again

Posted on April 21, 2012 by oddmanout215

You got my attention
Go ahead, speak
What was it you wanted
When you were kissin’ my cheek?

The lyrics are from “What Was It You Wanted,” on Oh Mercy! (1989), produced by Daniel Lanoir, who arguably helped pull Bob Dylan out of a long artistic slump. In his Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan wrote of his difficulties and pleasant surprises in making the album, and praised Lanoir for the distinctively spooky sound of the song:

…It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like a gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous. We had to keep the song level and right-side up. Danny’s sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it’s coming out of some mysterious sonic land…

The song reminds me of the time I was in upstate New York, paddling a canoe on one of the Finger Lakes and thinking about the Indians who did this centuries ago. But more than anything the song evokes a mysterious psychic landscape. You never really know why people do what they do, no matter how close you think you are to them.

Posted in arts, pop music, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Levon Helm dead at 71

Posted on April 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

Levon Helm, second from left, in the cover photo for the Band’s second album.

From the L.A. Times’ music blog:

Levon Helm, the widely respected and influential singer and drummer with the Band, whose Arkansas drawl colored the group’s signature hits, including “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” died Thursday in New York of throat cancer.

The writer added that “Helm and the Band largely created the template for a genre now labeled “Americana music” for its blend of rock, country, folk, blues and gospel strains.”

An accurate summary of the Band’s musical influences, but I was puzzled by the reference to “Americana music” as a genre. Levon Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, AR, and was able to experience first-hand not only roots music but an entire culture that’s almost totally alien to 21st century America. The same goes for Bob Dylan, growing up in Hibbing, MN, who wrote “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which Helm sang — with all the irony and soul the song demands — on the Band’s Cahoots album.

Americana is not a genre, even if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame says it is.

The Band was the Band. Their music influenced a lot of musicians, but it didn’t create a template for anything. There’s no template or formula for the magic that happens when a group creates a sound that’s unique and timeless. And there’s no replacing the people who created the sound. Let’s just be thankful for the recordings.

Posted in arts, pop music, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments