Cheeseheads battle billionaires

Posted on March 3, 2012 by oddmanout215

Not long ago, the people of Wisconsin were dumb enough to elect Gov. Scott Walker, a dull-eyed lapdog for a group of billionaires that wants to destroy organized labor and do business without paying taxes. Now Wisconsin citizens are trying to undo their mistake with a recall movement that faces strong opposition from, oddly enough, a group of billionaires.

A story about Walker is featured in this week’s New Yorker. You can’t read the whole piece on the Internet unless you subscribe to the magazine, but don’t fret, I excerpted a passage that draws a stark contrast between the two sides:

In mid-January, United Wisconsin submitted more than a million signatures to recall Walker… On the snowy Tuesday when the petitions, weighing three thousand pounds, were filed with the Accountability Board, in Madison, Scott Walker was on Park Avenue, in New York, attending a five-thousand-dollar-a-couple fund-raiser for the anti-recall effort. The event was hosted by Maurice Greenberg, the billionaire former chairman of American International Group, the insurance company that was rescued from bankruptcy in 2008 by the largest federal bailout for a single institution in United States history — $182 billion.

That pretty much says it all. In this corner are the poor schmucks who belatedly realized the only way to save jobs, decent salaries and benefits is through sheer force of numbers. In that corner is the small group that wants to retain government for the billionaires, with built-in provisions for limitless corporate welfare. I hope it’s clear to most Americans what the battle is about, and that it ultimately will be fought on a national scale. It’s certainly clear to the piggies on Park Avenue.

Posted in mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Greenspan’s legacy is Ayn Rand’s

Posted on March 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

A new book by Gary Weiss details Ayn Rand’s profound influence on generations of right-wing ideologues. Her most prominent contemporary acolyte might be the smug U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, whose goals include abolishing Medicare and Social Security.

However, I’m guessing the most interesting stuff in Weiss’s book focuses on further revelations about Rand’s guru-like power over the now discredited Alan Greenspan. In a recent article, Pam Martens notes that Greenspan…

… the man who chaired the Federal Reserve Board for 18 years, guiding U.S. monetary policy under four presidents, was a member of Rand’s Collective in New York City, which Weiss likens to a cult: “For much of its existence the Collective was for all intents and purposes a cult. It had an unquestioned leader, it demanded absolute loyalty, it intruded into the personal lives of its members, it had its own rote expressions and catchphrases, it expelled transgressors for deviation from accepted norms, and expellees were ‘fair game’ for vicious personal attacks.”

More troubling about Greenspan, who during his term as Fed Chair, aided in the gutting of critical Wall Street regulations, including the repeal of the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act which barred the merger of insured deposit banks with investment banks and brokerage firms, was his blind loyalty to Rand’s cultish propaganda.

Weiss produces a gem from The New York Times Book Review from 1957. Greenspan was defending his idol after her most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, had been thrashed in multiple reviews. Greenspan dutifully makes his case in Randian-speak: “Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness,” he wrote. “Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand wrote bad fiction and invented a faux philosophy that touted the “virtue of selfishness” and laissez faire capitalism. Greenspan is living proof that Rand was a much more dangerous hustler than Charlie Manson or even Jim Jones. It’s largely thanks to her that Greenspan became a zealot for the unregulated free-market economy that has brought “Main Street” America to its knees.

Posted in economic collapse, fiction, Great Recession, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

NPR’s new goal — be ‘fair to the truth’

Posted on March 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

A new ethics handbook released by National Public Radio would seem to indicate the network is reacting in a positive way to persistent criticism of its “he said, she said” approach to the news. According to Jay Rosen of PressThink, the new handbook bluntly states that “a report characterized by false balance is a false report.” It calls for reportage that rejects false balance in favor of reportage that’s “fair to the truth.”

Rosen reprints two key passages from the new handbook:

In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

and….

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.

Fair to the truth — what a concept! New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued for the same approach to the news back in July while criticizing the corporate news media:

News reports portray the [major political] parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of ‘centrist’ uprising as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides. Some of us have long complained about the cult of ‘balance,’ the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”

Is there a trend in progress? Will mainstream media outlets begin printing stories that are fair to the truth rather than constructed to present opposing sides of a story as equally true, regardless of what the facts indicate?

Probably not, but the NPR directive at least calls for reporters to strive for accuracy rather than report the “spin” that publicists and propagandists always prefer. Think how far the George W. Bush team would have gotten in pushing for a war in Iraq if the corporate news media had been fair to the truth. Imagine all the lives that might have been saved.

Footnote: From Jawbone, in Suburban Guerrilla: “I appreciate what the NPR guidelines say — but I will believe it when I see the principles in action and affecting actual reporting.”

Posted in Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Santorum throws up on himself

Posted on February 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

From The Raw Story:

Rick Santorum wished Tuesday morning that he could rescind his statement of wanting to “throw up” after hearing former President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on the separation of church and state.

Appearing on the Laura Ingraham Show, the GOP presidential candidate expressed some regret for his comments this past weekend before continuing his attack on President Obama.

“I wish I had that particular line back,” Santorum said. “I think we need to have a free exercise of religion in this country and it’s important for those First Amendment freedoms to be alive and well in America and I think they are threatened here in America as we’ve seen by President Obama, not by Rick Santorum.”

Think about it for a second and you’ll realize why Santorum regrets using “that particular line” to describe his reaction to the 51-year-old speech in which John F. Kennedy clarified his belief in an America where “the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Santorum knows he can get away with pretending there is no distinction to be made between freedom of religion and governmental policy that reflects preference for a particular religion, because most of the yahoos who support him are unaware that the Founding Fathers were adamant believers in church/state separation.

What Santorum can’t get away with is wanting to “throw up,” as he so elegantly phrased it, at the memory of JFK’s speech. He’ll never renounce his fanaticism, but he’d love to take back his scornful dismissal of the first Catholic president, because he knows there exists among many working-class Americans not only a residue of fascination with the Kennedy years, but also nostalgia for a time when crooked-faced, crooked-minded zealots were the exception rather than the rule in presidential races, even among Republicans.

Don’t get me wrong — Kennedy is no hero of mine, and nostalgia always masks the unpleasant side of the era it invokes. I’m simply saying that many people associate JFK with an America that aspired to progress and enlightenment — the things Santorum despises — and that these people aren’t likely to forgive Santorum’s comments should he manage to win the nomination.

Posted in God Squad, history, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Class warfare? It’s only just begun

Posted on February 26, 2012 by oddmanout215

I should change my name to Ed Anger. Or Joe Jeremiad. I’m disgusted that the robber barons who rule the GOP were able, with much help from the corporate media, to push into the language the catchphrase “right to work,” which is almost as obscenely misleading as those “Arbeit macht frei” signs over the entrances to Nazi concentration camps.

How did we sink to where less than 12 percent of workers are represented by unions? To supporting a president who brags of saving GM and Chrysler but fails to mention autoworkers’ salaries and benefits were cut in half? To the dreary reality of an android named Mitt Romney bragging he would not have saved the auto companies?

The disaster didn’t happen overnight. It took tons of money and decades of propagandizing by the one percent and their mouthpieces in the media — people like David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, who has warned for years that complaining about the growing gulf between the rich and poor is tantamount to inciting class warfare. As if class warfare isn’t inevitable if the law allows for the destruction of the middle class.

From a piece by Jack Random of CounterPunch:

… The Right to Work is the right of a worker to refuse to pay union dues. Because unions gain power by representing workers as a united front in negotiations with management, right-to-work laws negate that power…

We are the victims of a devastating fifty-year war against workers that is relentless and without mercy. The corporations have taken control of our government with unlimited sponsorship of elected officials. They have moved our industries to China, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere, without any concern for the welfare of our nation or its people. They have outsourced our technology service, drafting and infrastructure planning jobs to India. They have reduced their share of tax responsibility to a minimum with offshore accounts and favorable legislation, forcing a beleaguered workforce to pick up the tab. And they have done all this with a sense of entitlement. We are just beginning to fight back…

The first part of the labor agenda must be to strike down right-to-work laws in the 23 states that now embrace them… The second part of the labor agenda should be an affirmation of the right to collective bargaining and binding arbitration as an alternative to the general strike…

The corporations that have taken control of our government will cry foul. They will accuse us of class warfare to which we will reply: yes, but now we are fighting back.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Obama: Love me, I’m a liberal

Posted on February 23, 2012 by oddmanout215

Phil Ochs has been dead for decades, but he has Barack Obama's number

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

— Phil Ochs, 1966

****

Here’s Robert Reich, feigning befuddlement over yet another Barack Obama cave-in:

The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers.

The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the Administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.

Why isn’t the White House just proposing to close the loopholes without reducing overall corporate tax rates? That would generate more tax revenue that could be used for, say, public schools.

It’s not as if corporations are hurting. Quite the contrary. American companies are booking higher profits than ever. They’re sitting on $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with…

The Republican presidential hopefuls are wingnuts, but Obama doesn’t think that gives him enough of an advantage. He thinks he can make everyone love him, the 99 percent and the one percent. He will close loopholes and reduce corporate tax rates.

I wish Reich would drop the rhetorical niceties. Every time Obama panders, backtracks, or makes a major concession to Republicans without even negotiating, Reich says he doesn’t get it. What is there to get? How much longer are Reich and other Democratic commentators — real Democrats — going to pretend to be stunned by this spineless purveyor of false hope and empty promises? Right up till the election, no doubt.

Posted in humor, liar, Politics, The New Depression | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Ash Wednesday blues

Posted on February 22, 2012 by oddmanout215

A butcher friend of mine on Ninth Street said hello today, and I couldn’t help but notice the thin black cross on his forehead. I realized this was the first day of Lent and the cross was ash rubbed into his skin by a priest. “Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” Such a neatly drawn cross. Back in the day, the priests used to do much sloppier work, unsightly smudges that bore no resemblance to crosses.

Then I thought of the Christian custom of giving up something pleasurable for Lent, a tradition that honors Jesus’ 40 days and nights of fasting in the desert. And I remembered why, even as a good Catholic boy, I thought there was something morbid about Christianity’s insistence on self-denial and the pursuit of suffering, as if life doesn’t already hand us all the suffering we can handle, and often more.

Listen to Muddy Waters’ music. It’s clear he knew most people don’t have to “give something up” to understand what suffering is. Look at his face. Can a priest teach you more than Muddy can? Not unless you’re tone-deaf and blind.

Footnote: Little Walter makes the lowly harmonica sound as powerful as a pipe organ in a cathedral.

Posted in arts, pop music | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Serfin’ USA (the new feudalism)

Posted on February 22, 2012 by oddmanout215

Did Cameron Diaz go under the knife? Will the stars of Hangover 3 score big pay increases? These are the questions that try journalists’ souls.

Meanwhile, in another world, in a piece called “Is Market Capitalism Dead?,” Columbia Prof. Thomas B. Edsall focuses on questions of far less import to brain-dead Americans:

Are large segments of the American workforce — millions of people — at a structural disadvantage in the face of global competition, technological advance and ever more sophisticated forms of automation? Is this situation permanent?

Will the share of profits from improving corporate productivity flowing to capital and to high-earning C.E.O.s continue to grow, while the income of wage earners stagnates and their share of profits declines?

Has the surging wealth and income of the top one percent and of the top 0.1 percent reached a tipping point at which the political leverage of the very affluent decisively outweighs the influence of the electorate at large?

Is it possible that in the United States and Europe, democratic free market capitalism is no longer capable of providing broadly shared benefits to a solid majority of workers?

Read the piece and you’ll see Edsall is reluctantly answering “yes” to all of his questions, although he notes the situation isn’t nearly as bleak in northern Europe. Barring some act of God, or social upheaval that results in something akin to revolution, the numbers indicate that the 99 percent in the USA are screwed.

Edsall makes a bleak but polite-sounding statement in the last paragraph:

The debate over the workings of democracy, the market, technology and globalization remains unresolved. The political system instinctively avoids this debate, despite its salience and centrality, because the political costs of engagement are likely to substantially outweigh any potential gains.

In other words, expect only doubletalk from politicians, because they know honesty would cost them ties to their sugar daddies, and their jobs. Expect pious lies and outright lunacy from Republican presidential candidates, and pretty words masking brutal realities from Obama.

Perhaps more so than at any time in our history, the situation cries out for a third-party candidate who will speak the truths that the corporate media and almost all politicians ignore. How do I campaign for this candidate? Did I miss something?

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My birthday in outer space

Posted on February 20, 2012 by oddmanout215

John Glenn on Feb. 20, 1962

I love the past, which doesn’t exist/until I summon it, or make it up,/and I love how you believe/and certify me by your belief,/whoever you are, a fiction too,/held together by what? Personality?/Voice…?

— from “Loves,” by Stephen Dunn

****

My mother and I must have taken the #11 trolley to Center City and walked five blocks to the department store at Eighth and Market. I remember a row of TV sets in the store, each repeatedly showing a clip of a rocket lifting off, so that viewers could see the launch at Cape Canaveral had gone well. Walter Cronkite’s soothing TV voice provided further assurance that astronaut John Glenn was far above the atmosphere in his space capsule, single-handedly winning the space race against the Russians. This was in 1962.

Customers watched the multiple images of the ascending rocket. I could tell by Cronkite’s tone that Glenn was a hero. He circled the Earth not once but three times, in five hours. On TV, Glenn’s voyage seemed remote and undramatic, not at all like the sci-fi movie voyages I loved. But I knew his was a great feat, because it was taking place on my birthday, February 20.

I can’t remember why my mother was shopping, but on the floor where the toys were she told me to choose a present for myself. I picked a half-dozen plastic figurines shaped like astronauts — spacemen, wearing little helmets and spacesuits. At home that evening there was a birthday cake for me, and I planted my spacemen feet-first in the vanilla icing on top of the cake, and pretended the cake was the moon.

Along with most people, I figured Glenn or one of his space buddies would soon land on the moon, just as JFK had promised. After the moon, they’d go to Mars and beyond. I decided to become a spaceman. A few years later, America did land spacemen on the moon, but those landings marked the end of an era, not the beginning. We Earthlings couldn’t afford to visit other worlds, we were spending too much money destroying this one.

I considered other lines of work — archaeologist, deep-sea diver, bartender — and many years later settled on fiction writer, which is to say I became a sort of spaceman, exploring the gulf between dreams and realities, intentions and results, earthbound but always on the verge of becoming lost in space.

Footnote: John Glenn is 90 years old and still going strong, 50 years after his brief but grand voyage.

Posted in history, humor | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

GOP gets medieval on our ass

Posted on February 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction

My two favorite Catholics recently weighed in regarding American bishops opposed to the use of contraceptives. First comedian Stephen Colbert warned that American Catholic women who are unopposed — i.e., the majority of those who are sexually active — are “cock-blocking the Almighty.” Then Garry Wills, a veteran journalist who is also a historian and classical scholar, wrote a reminder that what the bishops think of contraception is irrelevant to Catholics and doubly irrelevant to the rest of the population:

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden…

…Catholics who do not accept the [bishops’] phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm. The king was “Denmark.” Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy. This is particularly true where celibacy is concerned…

I’m guessing the only reason Wills wrote the piece was to remind non-Catholics that the “nice smiley fanatic” Rick Santorum speaks not for the vast majority of Catholics, but rather for a contingent of yahoo Christians who want to “get medieval” on our ass, to paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction.

It’s a pretty sad commentary on American culture that the medieval contingent still wields so much power in one of our major political parties.

Posted in humor, movies | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments