Yahoos to feds: We hate you, but send money

Posted on March 22, 2012 by oddmanout215

Last month I made fun of the new breed of Republican governors by posting something headlined “Federal Government for Dummies.” But the governors aren’t really dumb. They’re sly yahoos who know they can demonize “big government” as they make massive cuts in jobs and services for the poor, and in taxes on the one percent. But they can only work their con game until catastrophe strikes. From Rolling Stone:

Sometimes you stumble on a case where politics, ideology, and reality collide in a way that provides you with a strikingly clear view of the contradictions that threaten America today.

[A recent] Washington Post described a situation in the state of Louisiana where a global trend—climate change—is leading to a situation—rising sea levels—that YOYO (you’re-on-your-own) economics can’t solve.

Sea levels have been rising in Louisiana and they’re threatening to wash out a highway that’s a supply route for – wait for it – oil and gas…

…Officials in a state with an aggressive tax-cutting governor – Bobby Jindal can boast of having pushed through the largest tax cuts in the state’s history – one who consistently inveighs against government spending, are “demanding” the Feds send money.

Posted in climate change, Great Recession, Gulf, The New Depression, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Emotional weather report for March

Posted on March 21, 2012 by oddmanout215

Photo by TONY WOOD
tony@anthonywoodphotography.com

The sun is beginning to shine on me,
But it’s not like the sun that used to be.
– Bob Dylan, “Highlands”

Overheard on South Street, outside the city’s worst supermarket: “Yeah, but most South Philly people, they’re really rude and psychotic, I’ve talked to them.” Good thing he didn’t talk to this South Philly person, I hate people when they’re not polite…

I guess the beautiful weather is making me ill. A storm is blowing through my head — I’m paraphrasing Tom Waits’ “Emotional Weather Report” — just ahead of a slow-moving cold front. I’m trying to push past the storm and avoid the cold front. I feel the sunshine on my face as I ride my bike past blossoming dogwoods and blocs of sluggish pedestrians. But it’s not my sunshine; I’m in it, but not of it.

Do I feel off-kilter because the winter ended with a long stretch of sunny 70-degree days? Have I blown the internal fuse that normally makes me feel good in such weather?

The world is only a projection of how well the mind is functioning. The mind isn’t functioning well if the present feels remote and the past doesn’t feel past.

I remember moments of bliss in bad weather. Sipping coffee with a friend in 14-degree weather, waiting for an early-morning bus ride to a bad job. Carrying a futon through snow-clogged streets to a cold fourth-floor walk-up the day after my son was born.

Sometimes there’s no bliss, even in beautiful weather. Laughter sounds sad. Good food tastes bad. Memories feel like regrets.

Monday was St. Joseph’s Day, my mother’s birthday. She’s been dead a long time, but time has no meaning when the mind plays tricks. Joking about her birthday, my mother used to sing “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” recorded by the Ink Spots in 1940 and written, as Wikipedia puts it, “as a tribute to the annual springtime return of the cliff swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano in southern California.”

She would speak of wanting to be present at the mission when the birds returned, but she never actually considered doing this. I should have put her on a plane and sent her out there.

Update from Climate Central:

The March heat wave continues to shatter longstanding records from the Upper Midwest to the Northeast, with more than 2,200 warm temperature records set during the month so far.

Posted in arts, humor, pop music, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Surging toward another snafu

Posted on March 20, 2012 by oddmanout215

Obama’s war propaganda sounds like Bush’s. Put another way, the Obamabots are as eager as the Bushies to put a good face on disaster, if that’s what it takes to keep their candidate’s poll numbers from slipping. And they get lots of help from the mainstream media. From Robert Parry:

As the Afghan War grinds toward another U.S. military defeat – on the heels of the forced departure from Iraq – Official Washington remains in denial about these failed neocon strategies, still preferring to embrace happy myths about “successful surges” and ignoring the actual outcomes.

I encountered this cognitive dissonance again Saturday morning when I was flipping the TV channels and landed on MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes,” with substitute host, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. There was a panel of bright and attractive pundits again praising President George W. Bush’s Iraq War “surge.”

One had to wonder: Did these seemingly smart people not notice that the U.S. military was sent packing from Iraq at the end of 2011, less than three month ago? Do they not know that the giant U.S. Embassy, once meant to be a command center for imperial domination of the Middle East, sits mostly idle?

Were they oblivious to the fact that Iraq, still a shattered society afflicted by terrible sectarian violence, leans closer to Iranian foreign policy than America’s because of Bush’s invasion?

Forget the surge. Hit squads and bribery arguably had a lot more to do with the decrease in sectarian violence in Iraq than the large increase in combat troops:

A more serious analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the “surge” and were implemented by the commanding generals in 2006, George Casey and John Abizaid, who wanted as small a U.S. “footprint” as possible, to tamp down Iraqi nationalism.

Among their initiatives, Casey and Abizaid deployed a highly classified operation to eliminate key al-Qaeda leaders, most notably the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. Casey and Abizaid also exploited growing Sunni animosities toward al-Qaeda extremists by paying off Sunni militants to join the so-called “Awakening” in Anbar Province.

If you can’t beat them, pay them off.

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Busting bagpipers in NYC

Posted on March 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

Call the music police!

When I’m assaulted in a public place by the sound of bad music, I shout “Somebody call the music police!” But I’m joking at such times. I don’t really expect anyone to dial 911 when Madonna is blaring from the speakers of a passing car, or when Billy Joel is soiling the sound system at my local CVS. Cops have better things to do, right?

Not true, it seems, on St. Patrick’s Day at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, where hundreds of protesters staged a rally to mark the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. From Firedoglake:

The mood in the park was light and celebratory when the sounds of bagpipes were heard, approaching from the west. Hundreds in the park moved toward the noise, only to witness NYPD officers preventing the pipers from entering the park, arresting at least one. Some on the scene said that the pipers were not affiliated with OWS; they had come to NYC from Brittany to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and later decided to play for occupiers.

According to The New York Observer, police became more aggressive soon after confronting the pipers. They entered the park en masse and began clearing it.

Was it the maddening sound of the pipes that set them off? The fact that the pipers were French? We know only that scores of nonviolent protesters were arrested and, in some cases, beaten up. And that this was Michael Bloomberg’s way of reminding the world that his Praetorian Guard is ready to resume kicking ass and ignoring Constitutional rights, whenever they can get away with it, wherever OWS gathers.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, Wall Street | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

In D.C., ‘fat cat’ is a term of endearment

Posted on March 18, 2012 by oddmanout215

The worst social sickness of our time, the one that might eventually bring down this country, is the growing divide between rich and poor. But you rarely see honest stories about this sickness in our mainstream media, because to acknowledge its scope is to admit the two-party system in its current form is a fraud, existing merely to ensure the persistence of the status quo.

Fact: Every time the economy expands, the super-rich grow richer and the non-rich slip a few more rungs down the ladder. This has been true for decades, regardless of whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.

From David Cay Johnston:

…While markets are a factor, I think the evidence makes clear that government policy is at the core of the differing fortunes of the vast majority and the super-rich.

Inaugural addresses of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama bring this into sharp focus. Both spoke of the need for restoring confidence, while denouncing greed and irresponsible conduct. Roosevelt in 1933 specified “callous and selfish wrongdoing” by bankers abusing a “sacred trust.” Obama vaguely referred to the “consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some.”

Roosevelt said that “our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” Obama, again less specific, spoke of government that “helps families find jobs at a decent wage.”

Roosevelt brought in trustbusters, reformers and even an expert at Wall Street manipulations to implement policies benefiting the vast majority…

By contrast, while Obama called Wall Street executives “fat cats,” he surrounded himself with financial insiders with the exception of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert now seeking election to the U.S. Senate. His administration has failed to prosecute the central figures in the frauds that created our economic distress…

Johnston mentions the changes that could make government healthy — increased spending on education and research, creation of jobs to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, an end to bailouts of “too big to fail” institutions, and tax reforms “to discourage capital withdrawals and offshoring and, instead, encourage reinvestment of profits at home.” Unfortunately, there currently are very few politicians with the integrity and resources to fight for these changes.

Footnote: To complain about the corrupt Dems, as I’ve done before, is not to say that we should sit out the 2012 elections. The GOP is a horror show of woman haters, climate-change deniers, racists, “free market” extremists, and worshipers of billionaires. Decent people have to vote against it. Too bad we can’t vote for someone — i.e., someone brave enough to fight for an overhaul of the whole rotten system.

Posted in campaign finance reform, climate change, Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Occupy Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Will Ye Go Lassie Go’

Posted on March 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

It’s a good day to listen to “Will Ye Go Lassie Go” by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. It was also recorded by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, as “Wild Mountain Thyme,” and has been sung for hundreds of years. It’s not really a sad song, not unless you’re already in a sad frame of mind… OK, it’s a sad song.

Who said Ireland is “a land of happy wars and sad love songs?” It was Richard Sheridan, writer of The School for Scandal and other famously convoluted Restoration plays.

Footnote: How ironic is it that the Irish fought to throw English armies out of Ireland for hundreds of years and then, after all was finally going well, allowed themselves to be enslaved by a bunch of bankers?

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

From the Gaelic for ‘water of life’

Posted on March 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

Leave it to the Irish to write a song in which the miracle of resurrection is achieved through spilled whiskey (from the Gaelic for “water of life”). This version of “Finnegan’s Wake,” by my deceased mother’s favorite band, brings back memories of the many resurrections I witnessed as a child.

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Bank on BofA ripping you off

Posted on March 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

Matt Taibbi starts his new Rolling Stone article with a Shock and Awe-style barrage of over-the-top analogies:

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time… Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard…

Then Tiabbi dissects BofA’s large-scale scams and puts to rest the rumor that the Obama administration ever intended to make the bank pay back most of the money it stole. He takes a moment to strafe Hugh McColl, the driving force behind BofA’s expansion, a swaggering sack of shit who rewarded successful underlings with crystal hand grenades. He drops a cluster bomb on what’s left of BofA’s credibility:

In sum, Bank of America torched dozens of institutional investors with billions in worthless loans, repeatedly refused to abide by contractual obligations to buy them back, evaded hundreds of millions in local fees and taxes, pushed tens of thousands of people into foreclosure using phony documents, ignored multiple court orders to stop its illegal robo-signing, and exploited President Obama’s signature mortgage-relief program. The bank fixed the bids on bonds for schools and cities and utilities all over America, and even conspired to try to game the game itself – by fixing global interest rates!

All this before he even gets to TARP. Taibbi’s piece is both hilarious and infuriating, an indictment of a “too-big-too-fail” bank and the scoundrels in government who enable its criminality. Read the whole thing, but only if you have a strong stomach.

Footnote: Sorry about the excessive combat jargon. I’d been reading about the battle of Stalingrad. The Germans had just eaten the last of their horses.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Vampire squid strikes back

Posted on March 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

Yes, it was fun to read that column by Goldman Sachs apostate Greg Smith, even though most of what he had to say about his former employer had already been reported in one form or another by Matt Taibbi, who years ago famously described Goldman as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And I’m not especially impressed by Smith’s self-serving act of contrition — although he gets points for revealing that some of his colleagues in the sales and trading department at Goldman referred to their easily manipulated clients as “muppets” — or by the predictable counterattack against him by Goldman and its allies at places such as The Wall Street Journal.

From ThinkProgress:

…Goldman has been quick to push back on Smith’s claims, portraying him as just a disgruntled employee. Some employees told Fox Business’ Charlie Gasparino that Smith doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he “never made more than $750,000 a year.”

And of course, the financial press has begun reporting anonymous attacks on Smith, quoting “people familiar with the matter” saying that Smith was angry with the size of his bonus and his lack of promotion…”

There you are. You can tell the guy is a loser because he never made more than $750,000 a year and because he only got a “small bonus.” I wonder what “small” means in that racket?

Update: Goldman continues to respond to Smith’s confessional op-ed with its usual arrogance, although its shares dropped 3.4 percent in New York trading on Wednesday.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

PA voter ID battle not over

Posted on March 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

Pennsylvania legislators on Wednesday pushed through a bill requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. Gov. Tom Corbett quickly signed the bill into law, and said it sets a “simple and clear standard to protect the integrity of our elections.”

Yes, integrity. Everybody knows this sneaky corporate stooge, this governor who is despised in all parts of the state not dominated by crackers, signed the bill to block as many Democrats as possible from voting, and that the bill was part of a voter suppression campaign fueled by rich Republicans and aimed at Republican-governed states.

On the bright side, passage of the bill was only Round One in the battle over voter rights in PA. From Reuters:

Pennsylvania joined several Republican-governed states, including Texas, Kansas and Wisconsin, that have adopted stricter voter identification laws, arguing they were needed to prevent ballot box fraud. Supporters say the laws are no different from needing identification to board an airplane or obtain a library card.

But some civil rights groups say such laws discriminate against the poor who may not be able to pay fees for copies of legal documents such as birth certificates, and that they could suppress minority votes. Democrats say voter identification measures are aimed at squeezing out university students and senior citizens who tend to vote for Democrats…

Other states have encountered setbacks trying to impose voter identification requirements. A judge issued an injunction earlier this week against Wisconsin’s law, and the U.S. Justice Department blocked a new voter identification law in Texas.

The Justice Department, which also blocked a voter identification law in South Carolina from taking effect, said the Texas law could harm Hispanic voters who lack identification documents.

“Our legal team is currently mapping a strategy for overturning this voter suppression bill,” ACLU of Pennsylvania Executive Director Reggie Shuford said in a statement…

Footnote: It’s interesting that the proudly penny-pinching Corbett eagerly backed a scheme that would cost the state so much money:

The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center estimated the legislation would cost $11 million. In order to withstand legal challenges, the state must provide photo IDs for free, notify and educate voters about the new voting restrictions, hire more election staff, and purchase additional photo ID equipment.

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