Attention, couch potatoes: Walk for Christie

Posted on April 11, 2012 by oddmanout215

Chris Christie shouting down a member of the paternalistic entitlement society? No, it's Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, another paragon of fitness and integrity.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is rangy and fast, a sinewy specimen of manhood, a champion of physical fitness who said yesterday that he fears America might become a “paternalistic entitlement society” populated not by hard workers but by “a bunch of people sittin’ on a couch waiting for their next government check.” Cynics immediately accused Christie of pandering to anti-government wing nuts, but others think the governor, whose self-discipline is evident not only in his streamlined physique but also in his style of speech, was simply urging people to get off the couch, put on their walking shoes, and start racking up yardage on the road.

Christie’s remarks have sparked renewed hope for a Chris Christie 100-Yard Walk to mark the June 2011 day when the governor was flown by helicopter “from Trenton to Montvale [NJ] to watch his son Andrew play baseball in a state playoff game. Upon arrival next to the field, Christie was shuttled about 100 yards in a dark town car with tinted windows to the stands.” The governor apparently used this incident as an incentive to begin a conditioning program, and these days is said by unbiased sources to be weighing in at a lean and mean 320 pounds.

In his speech yesterday, Christie linked physical fitness and virtue when he said success in life depends on one’s “willingness to work hard and to act with honor and integrity…” Long-time Christie watchers believe the governor was referring in part to his years as a hard-working lobbyist who fought to keep Wall Street exempt from laws against securities fraud. Or to the fact that he worked so hard to “exaggerate” the potential cost of a train tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan that would have reduced traffic congestion and pollution.

Promoters of the 100-Yard Walk say they are optimistic that the governor will not only lend his name to the event but also permit them to stage it at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton. Apparently, they are hoping to capitalize on the fact that Christie is, as his speech implied, a credible role model for those seeking both fitness and integrity. How could this event not be a success?

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U.S. is leader of the pack — in poverty rates

Posted on April 10, 2012 by oddmanout215

In an article in Boston Review, Paul Osterman notes that income inequality in the United States is much greater than in northern Europe, and that the situation here could improve if our government focused on raising and enforcing labor standards, pushing companies to invest in training, and allowing labor unions to effectively advocate for workers.

Sounds pretty simple and fair, but don’t tell that to the corporatists and legislators who, with something like religious zeal, oppose all efforts by the gov’mint to intervene in the jobs market.

Using tables of statistics to make his points, Osterman writes:

… Clearly the United States is the outlier. It is not surprising that the U.S. poverty rate substantially exceeds that of other developed nations.

Europeans achieve [lower poverty rates] through a combination of higher minimum wages, stronger unions, and more egalitarian social norms. Economists often argue that more egalitarian wages reduce incentives to work and that a higher minimum wage increases the cost of labor and therefore encourages unemployment, so the European job market should suffer as a result of lifting the bottom. Does it? In fact, among both women and men, the fraction of the “prime age” (25–54 years old) population that works is higher in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands than in the United States.

Read the whole article then ask yourself whether American apathy regarding our high poverty rate stems from principled objection to government intervention, or simply from misinformation about how government works in democracies where income inequality isn’t nearly as shameful as in America.

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

Why liberalism is on life-support

Posted on April 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

Why do so many so-called liberal politicians in our time openly embrace cultural liberalism — i.e., equal rights for blacks, women, gays and other groups — while running like hell from the sort of economic liberalism that made the New Deal possible?

Writing in the Sunday NYT, Eric Alterman argued that the problem stems from a failure of vision, over the past half-century, on the part of those who should have been encouraging a stronger coalition of poor and middle-class constituencies:

… Many liberals chose to focus, rather perversely, on a “rights” agenda and the internecine fights it engendered within their increasingly fractured coalition. They lost sight of the essential element that had made the coalition possible in the first place: the sense that liberalism stood with the common man and woman in their struggle against economic forces too large and powerful to be faced by individuals on their own.

Liberals must find a way to combine their cultural successes with new approaches to achieving economic equality. But they must do so unambiguously and unequivocally…

This is not happening under the party headed by Barack Obama, who will, as the presidential election approaches, make more and more noble noises about the importance of economic equality, but without taking any actions that would indicate he stands in opposition to the interests of the crooked investment bankers and the corporations that send our jobs overseas — i.e., the forces that bolster economic inequality.

Bottom line: Call me a progressive, even if you think it’s an insult. Just don’t call me a liberal. These days, the word summons feelings of guilt by association.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Easter weekend supermarket dream

Posted on April 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

If grocery prices keep going up, it's gonna cost me $10 just to feed my family!

Perhaps the relevant truth… is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that a undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

– Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Last night I dreamed I was at home — I didn’t recognize it, but it was home — and listening to a hard rain beating down on the roof and walls. I opened a window and leaned out to see what sort of materials were keeping out the rain. The walls had been stuccoed, but gaping holes in the stucco exposed rusty metal rods. I couldn’t figure out why the house hadn’t yet leaked, but I knew it was on the verge of collapse.

A buzzer rang. I opened the front door and there was Tommy, my neighbor, a solitary eccentric who went missing in January and was found dead in his armchair a month later when the cops broke into his house. I reminded Tommy of this fact and he said, “That’s OK, it’s almost Easter.”

He told me to abandon my house before it collapsed. But first I had to find the others, so I slammed the door on him and searched every room. The others, it seemed, had left. I’d better leave, too, I knew, but I was hungry and went to the refrigerator to fetch a brick of cheese. The cheese was smaller than cheeses I’d bought before, and I realized the Kraft company had cheated me by charging the same high price for a new, smaller portion.

Livid, I decided to take the cheese back to the supermarket. First I wrote a letter to the store manager about the good old days, when cheese was affordable. I was putting on my raincoat when the walls caved in and a big wave rolled over me and I woke up treading water, as usual.

Posted in economic collapse, fiction, humor | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Shades of Mayor Richard J. Daley

Posted on April 5, 2012 by oddmanout215

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is the man who once referred to progressive critics of “moderate” Democrats as “fucking retards.” Imagine what he thinks of the “Occupy Spring” crowd.

Rahm helped put into place major restrictions in preparing for the G8 summit that was to be held in Chicago, perhaps to recreate the conditions that led to a police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Barack Obama, Rahm’s former boss, subsequently moved the G8 to Camp David but, as Rick Perlstein of Rolling Stone recently noted:

… The restrictive ordinances are still in place, with no hint that they’ll go away – leading Bernard Harcourt in the Guardian to wonder whether this wasn’t the point all along: “It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine,” Harcourt writes. “In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and NATO summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent…very rapidly and without time for dissent.” Or, as Rahm himself said, in a different context (the economic meltdown that Obama got landed with in 2009), “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.” Indeed.

You’re suprised? Don’t be. For that is how Rahm Emanuel rolls: underhandedly and opaquely, without consultation, obsessed with finding ways to expand his executive power.

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Just can’t make no ‘Connection’

Posted on April 4, 2012 by oddmanout215

Every day is going in the wrong direction
The doctor wants to give me more injections

Tense and tight, “Connection” has lyrics that convey the rocker’s familiar lament, that life on the road, especially if you’re famous, will drive you crazy. The Stones sound extra-funky — i.e., focused entirely on playing as a unit, in a space I imagine as no bigger than a walk-in closet. Richards’ guitar is so rude, it honks, and his vocal harmonies with Jagger add a convincing note of desperation.

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Survival of the foulest

Posted on April 4, 2012 by oddmanout215

Mr. Mutton Chops, Herbert Spencer, was an ideological ancestor of clean-cut, cold-blooded Paul Ryan.


Barack Obama, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times:

Disguised as deficit reduction plans, [the Paul Ryan budget] is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it’s a prescription for decline.

Obama finally states the obvious! Maybe someone in his inner circle forced him to read columns by Paul Krugman or Robert Reich, who wrote this two weeks ago:

Republican social Darwinists are determined that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent. Those cuts saved the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (roughly 1.4 million people) more money on their taxes last year than the rest of America’s 141 million taxpayers received in total income.

And that’s only a small part of what Republicans are determined to do to widen the gap between the rich and poor. Obama is right, but it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for him, given all the time he spent during his first term in pow-wows with social Darwinists — i.e., with banksters and chiefs of multinational corporations. With people such as Timothy Geithner and Jeffrey Immelt, who are part of the problem, not of the solution.

Footnote: Poor Charles Darwin. His name will forever be connected with the “survival of the fittest” philosophy popularized in Victorian England by Herbert Spencer, a foe of social reform movements and an ideological ancestor of libertarians and other compassion-free conservatives. The sort of guy who could shrug off the potato famine in Ireland, which killed more than a million people.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, history, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Mitt to America: Let’s go serfin’ now

Posted on April 3, 2012 by oddmanout215

You may have noticed that the American political system as it currently exists is helping reduce many of us to the status of serfs in a feudal system. Or, if you’d rather, into what sociologists Kevin Leicht and Scott Fitzgerald call “postindustrial peasants,” in debt up to our ears, from young adulthood to the grave.

The media remain oblivious to this reality except for a few dependably progressive outlets.

ThinkProgress noted today that Mitt Romney is the favorite GOP candidate of Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial industy — big surprise, right? — and that many misleading TV ads for Mitt are from a Super PAC called Restore Our Future, which receives almost half its funding from the financial industry:

Of the $43.2 million raised by the attack PAC, $20.5 million, or 48 percent, came from finance industry donors, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the Center for Public Integrity.

At least $13.5 million came from private equity firms ($7 million) and hedge funds ($6.5 million) while most of the rest came from investment banks and other asset managers. So-called “non-bank lenders” that run storefront cash-for-title and payday lending operations gave the super PAC $437,500, according to the analysis.

Who would have dreamed in 1962, when “Surfin’ Safari” was released, that America would one day be openly run by high-stakes gamblers and extortionists? That an emotionally stunted, compulsively lying, super-wealthy jobs destroyer — “Corporations are people, my friend” — would be a major-party candidate for president? That a significant portion of the political establishment would by openly hostile to the interests of the working class?

The takeaway from the ThinkProgress item is there’s no hope of restoring even a vestige of government for the people until we bar the rich from funding, and more-or-less anointing, candidates for high office. Which means, first of all, that Congress must scuttle the reactionary Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Which means we must back only those candidates who vow to pursue this goal.

Politicians can’t even get nominated without selling out to the rich, but once in office they sometimes can be scared into doing the right thing.

OK, that’s a fairly lame declaration, but I’m trying to cultivate a positive attitude.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, economic collapse, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Arianna won’t have to share the jackpot

Posted on April 2, 2012 by oddmanout215

Some bloggers are half-crazy, probably from spending too much time alone. Picture those poor fools who thought Arianna Huffington would compensate them for having worked for nothing to help make her another fortune. From Raw Story:

Bloggers hoping to put themselves on a more robust financial footing and close the gap between them and fully paid journalists are vowing to fight on after a New York court dismissed their multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the Huffington Post calling for compensation for exploitation of its army of unpaid commentators.

The ruling, slipped out relatively unnoticed at the end of last week, dismisses the argument made by a group of bloggers that their unremunerated contributions had provided a substantial part of the value of the Huffington Post and that they should therefore be entitled to some of the spoils of the site’s sale to AOL for $315m. The bloggers demanded a third of the sale price, $105m, in compensation…

The lawsuit was launched last April by a labour activist and writer, Jonathan Tasini, who posted more than 200 unpaid columns for the HuffPo before the AOL deal went through. He framed the suit as a class action on behalf of an estimated 9,000 bloggers for the website…

Arianna was an outspoken right-winger while married to right-wing billionaire Michael Huffington, but “her politics later moved to the left,” as the Guardian put it. She campaigned unsuccessfully to become governor of California in 2003, and started HuffPo with a partner in 2005.

I’m imagining her wearing a bemused expression, doing her very best Zsa Zsa imitation upon hearing those humble scribes wanted to get paid. “But darlink, don’t they know there is little money to be made writing for the Internet unless you are a celebrity?”

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, unemployment | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

An April Fools’ Day song

Posted on April 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

I’ve seen the bright lights of Memphis and the Commodore Hotel/And underneath a street lamp I met a Southern belle/ Well, she took me to the river where she cast her spell/And in that southern moonlight she sang the song so well

If you’ll be my Dixie Chicken, I’ll be your Tennessee Lamb/And we can walk together down in Dixieland…

Little Feat specialized in California-style New Orleans funk, and I mean that in a good way. These guys could play. “Dixie Chicken,” a short story in verse form, is by Lowell George, the heart of the band, a singer/slide guitarist who died way too young. Check out the guest stars on this live version.

Posted in arts, pop music, Uncategorized | Leave a comment