I assumed for many years, because of the scorned and scornful tone of the lyrics, that this was a Lennon song. Actually, McCartney wrote most of it. The fact that he’s the lead singer should have tipped me off. John plays acoustic rhythm guitar and sings back-up.
Footnote: Paul is 69 and sounding a bit ragged (check out the Grammy Awards), but so what? The Beatles’ records will never get old.
Gertrude Stein’s famous quotation — “There is no there, there” — is as good a way an any to describe Mitt Romney, who can’t seem to make a public statement without lying and/or contradicting himself. A Huffington Post story explains why one of Mitt’s most bold-faced lies may come back to haunt him in the Michigan primary:
In his recent op-ed, Romney — who also opposed the bailout in an op-ed in The New York Times in 2008 — argued that automakers should have been left to go bankrupt on their own, letting the courts force the companies to restructure. As the son of both a previous Michigan governor and former head of the American Motors Corporation, Romney says he speaks from experience. He was born in Detroit, after all.
The bailout gave the unions too much power in the new companies, Romney argued, and gives the government a large stake in General Motors that it should divest itself of immediately.
Yet in the fall of 2008 and early 2009, there weren’t any banks willing to help GM or Chrysler through bankruptcy. If a company goes into bankruptcy without a bank willing to fund operations for a while, companies typically go out of business and are sold piece by piece.
Without someone stepping in, it seemed GM and Chrysler would sink. And Ford, which didn’t take bailout money, urged the government to come forward. If the two other automotive giants in town went under, they could drag Ford under, too, CEO Alan Mulally told Congress.
Mitt still has almost two weeks and millions of dollars to turn things around in his old home state, but it won’t be easy. Even the most gullible Republican voters can see right through him on this one.
I walked 47 miles of barbed wire/Used a cobra snake for a neck tie/Got a brand new house on the roadside/And it’s made out of rattlesnake hide/I got a brand new chimney put on top/Made out of human skulls/Come on take a little walk with me, baby/Tell me, who do you love?
Bo Diddley made “Who Do You Love?” in 1956, and many acts since then have tried to record the badass definitive version of the song. Everyone from Ronnie Hawkins (backed by the Band), to John Hammond (also back by the Band), to the Doors, to George Thorogood.
It’s a tough song to do right. You have to have a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, you can’t mind dyin’. You have to be a romantic.
The ad was shown during the Super Bowl, to make sure it reached the maximum number of sophisticates. The girl in the ad is a famous foreign model — “super-hot,” as they say on the sports radio stations. You know she’s hot stuff because the background music sounds like someone is having sex, or maybe shooting meth. The model recites the ad copy:
Guyz, Valentine’s Day izz not that complicated… Give, and you shall receive.
Subtle! Izz like this, guyz: Valentine’s Day is about goods and services. You give me the goods — cash is best — and you shall be serviced.
She was supposed to be selling flowers, but her message would be the same if she were a politician courting campaign contributors. Izz like this, guyz — you give to super PAC, I service you till next election. Then you give more. Happy Valentine’s Day night!
Your people I do not understand
So to you I shall put an end
And you’ll never hear surf music again
A must-read piece in today’s New York Times focuses on the declining fortunes of Chisago County, near Minneapolis, and examines an interesting paradox:
The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.
And as more middle-class families… land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age…
This is called denial. These stalwart white citizens will need more help as the real economy continues to spiral downward, and they will accept this help because they want to live. But they will continue to bitch about the government that keeps their leaky boats afloat, just as they will continue to vote for morons (Rick Santorum) and phonies (Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich) who will tell them that their choice is between an “entitlement society” and an “opportunity society.”
This is what comes of 30 years of expensive right-wing propaganda extolling Reagonomics. These sorry-ass citizens are the Seeds of Ronnie — full-grown organisms now and wilting, each in his own backyard, still waiting for good jobs and other opportunities to trickle down from the people who conned them into believing taxation and regulation are the enemies of prosperity rather than its allies.
Their real choice is between a society that embraces the idea of a social contract ensuring good jobs and decent pay, and a society that rewards only those people who are rich and well-connected beyond the wildest dreams of the down-and-out.
It’s 2012. The middle class is dwindling, the poor have been abandoned, and decent, informed people everywhere (not only in Occupy Wall Street) should be shouting this question: When will you suckers wake up?
Footnote: My headline refers to CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, a short-story collection by George Saunders that examines some of the same issues as the Times piece, but from more interesting angles.
Background: Danny Ciello (Treat Williams) has cooperated with a federal investigation into NYPD corruption, after being assured investigators wouldn’t go after his friends and fellow cops in the narcotics unit. He learns he made a deal with the devil as prosecutors use his information to coerce his friends, one by one, into making similar incriminating deals.
The clip opens with Ciello confronting Gus Levy (Jerry Orbach), the only cop who won’t cooperate with the feds, soon after Gus learns that Danny, with whom he was very close, is King Rat.
Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) has its flaws — too long, sometimes too talky — but it’s a harrowing study of loyalty and betrayal that examines difficult moral questions. Is it OK to betray friends if you think there’s a higher good at stake? Is it OK if you think your friends will be protected from the consequences of your actions? If you betray your friends under any circumstances, do you not betray yourself? And so on.
Check out the second scene in the clip, in which Danny exalts over Gus’s refusal to be a rat. It’s as if Danny thinks Gus is the world’s last hope for decency.
What, if anything, did the federal government’s $25 billion “mortgage settlement” deal with the big banks do to help people who lost their homes, or are on the verge of losing them because of deceptive practices by the banks?
Despite the billions earmarked in the accord, the aid will help a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure.
If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.
Really this looks like America’s public prosecutors just wilted before the prospect of a long, drawn-out conflict with an army of highly-paid, determined white-shoe banker lawyers. The message this sends is that if you commit crimes on a large enough scale, and have enough high-priced legal talent sitting at the negotiating table after you get caught, the government will ultimately back down, conceding the inferiority of its resources.
And yet, if you watched MSNBC this week, you might have thought the settlement was a big initial victory in the struggle to nail the swindlers who have caused so much misery. God forbid Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz or Lawrence O’Donnell should state or even imply that the Obama administration continues to do a lousy job of protecting the interests of ordinary citizens against thieving corporations and big banks.
This is not to say MSNBC is in the same league with Fox News. Fox traffics in blatant lies and cynical distortions in order to push right-wing agendas. MSNBC reports and comments from a liberal perspective, but doesn’t blatantly lie or distort.
However, MSNBC’s prime-time commentators sometimes avoid drawing conclusions, or even asking questions, that might cast the Obama administration in an unflattering light, and this should make uncomfortable all of us who have noticed this tendency.
Footnote: Keith Olbermann would have asked the right questions — especially to Eric Schneiderman, who was on Maddow’s show — but MSNBC forced him out last year. Coincidence, right?
Where would America be without the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan? Answering this question, Charles P. Pierce addressed the ghost of the Gipper on his 101st birthday:
…You did more than anyone else to demolish the notion of a political commonwealth, the principle that “government” is a common enterprise that must be undertaken by all citizens, and not some foreign entity to be whipped and controlled. You brought “states’ rights” back from the historical ignominy where it richly deserved to have been sunk. You showed how The Other can get you elected, how elections are really simply magic shows of pretty images and soft music. You ruled for an entire second term as a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient and dared anyone to act in a patriotic manner and suggest you step down. Nobody did. You robbed the system of its confidence. You broke down important constitutional barriers that have yet to be reconstructed. You were the first among vandals…
Great stuff, but Pierce doesn’t mention that Ronnie boy couldn’t have done it without help from tens of millions of Americans who should have understood that his anti-government policies were ultimately directed against them. These people were convinced by right-wing propagandists that they could have it both ways — a middle-class lifestyle, but without paying taxes to maintain the infrastructure essential to such a lifestyle. They embraced the philosophy that helped corporate America destroy not only labor unions, but also the sense of unity and common purpose that was the legacy of the New Deal.
Reagan’s legacy is the notion that unregulated markets and tax breaks for the rich will raise all boats. It is the lie that the 99 percent, through hard work and dog-eat-dog selfishness, can become the one percent.
What we have instead is a wrecked economy and a gulf between rich and poor wider than that in any other developed country. We have a political system that puts in place cruel hacks such as PA Gov. Tom Corbett, who would rather drastically cut funding for safety-net programs and public schools than tax the corporations that paid for his election.
A lot of people now realize you can draw a direct line between Reagan the mean-spirited fraud and truly vile creatures such as Corbett, who doesn’t even pretend to represent the poor and near-poor. Too bad it took a second Great Depression to wake them.
From Rod Stewart’s first solo album (1969), released not long after he broke with the great guitarist Jeff Beck. This was before Stewart stopped singing songs about working-class misfits and turned into a Hollywood poof (“Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”).
I like this from Paul Evans, writing for Rolling Stone Album Guide:
An object lesson in the perils of pandering, Stewart’s career proves that “selling out” wasn’t just some thought crime dreamed up by ’60s idealists. For a golden hour, Rod the Mod was one of rock’s finest singers, with a lock on, of all things, sincerity, taste and self-mocking humor…
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