These days, a bad tooth can break you

Posted on December 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

How many people have realized that the presumption of belonging to a “middle class” is delusional and dangerous? Enough to toss the reactionaries out of Congress in 2012? Maybe, but wouldn’t the current crop be replaced by a new bunch of corporate-sponsored whores?

These question gnawed at me today after a dental bill took a big bite out of my dwindling savings; after it occurred to me, for the thousandth time, that sheer luck is the only thing that prevents many of us in this country from slipping into poverty.

On the plus side, the Occupy movement has focused media attention on the fact that average Americans are being routinely robbed by bankers, hedge-fund managers, CEOs and politicians who work only for super-rich constituents. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich recently wrote:

One reason the concept of an economic 99% first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation… Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment…

… Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.

So what’s to stop corrupt Congresspeople, indirectly aided by an ineffectual, neoliberal president, from making living standards even lower for most of us? For now, almost nothing. The conniving skunks who control the House and, to a lesser extent, the Senate, remain dead-set on preventing any relief for the unemployed, the homeless, the soon-to-be-homeless, the sick but uninsured and all other poor or near-poor people.

As Robert Reich noted today, “big money is taking over government,” in the absence of campaign finance reform. Nothing will change until we can elect politicians who aren’t owned by big business and can therefore respond to our needs — good schools, an upgraded infrastructure, decent jobs, a social safety net.

Without real change, more and more people will slip into poverty, at roughly the same fast pace our government is becoming fascist.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

The personal liberties lie

Posted on December 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

Columnist George Will is rarely at a loss for words, but he could only respond with cliches yesterday when Barney Frank asked him to square his alleged libertarian leanings with his authoritarian views on personal liberties. Another guest on the show, the Ayn Rand admirer Paul Ryan, tried to change the subject, but Frank wasn’t having any of that:

“Let’s get off marijuana,” Ryan interrupted, eager to move to the next topic.

“It’s a great embarrassment to the conservatives,” Frank pointed out. “They want to tell people who they can have sex with. Come on, all this is big government! Who can I have sex with? Who can I marry? What can I read? What can I smoke? You guys, on the whole — not all of you — but the conservatives are the ones who intrude on personal liberty there.”

Footnote: Another guest on the program, Robert Reich, recently wrote,

If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won’t go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street’s mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.

Posted in humor, mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

A semi-grudging salute to Hitchens

Posted on December 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

My respect for Christopher Hitchens’ talent never waned, even when he used it to defend the likes of George W. Bush. Hitchens often argued that his support for the Iraq war followed logically from his abhorrence of tyranny in all its guises. His Satan was Joe Stalin, and he saw Saddam Hussein as a minor Stalin, and to hell with the actual reasons, or lack of reasons, for going to war. It was as if he were saying, “Bush is a moron, but that’s irrelevant. Saddam has to go.”

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie possibly triggered Hitchens’ shift to the right, but who can say for sure? He took the path of many iconoclast/contrarians who reach a certain level of notoriety — i.e., he abandoned the version of himself that many people took for granted and, in the process, seemed to enjoy pissing off those who assumed he was on their side simply because, for example, he despised the war criminal Henry Kissinger.

Even in the years when his views were strongly leftist, there may have lurked in Hitchens a contempt for people who presumed to know what the masses wanted, or needed. An admirer of George Orwell, he contemned the mob mentality, the gleeful surrender of decency and reason, that comes with being a member of the party — any party — in which people decide their individuality counts for nothing compared to the will of the leader, and the leader’s cause.

He was widely and sometimes rightly criticized for focusing on “Islamofascism,” but it’s not as if he didn’t recognize the threat of neo-fascism in the West, especially among fanatical Christians and white supremacists. Here’s what Hitchens had to say about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in August 2010: “The numbers were impressive enough on their own, but the overall effect was large, vague, moist, and undirected: the Waterworld of white self-pity.”

Hitchens didn’t do self-pity, not publicly. He was too busy examining and evaluating, even right before he died, when he wrote a piece about the familiar maxim attributed to Nietzsche — “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

A ridiculous notion, and Hitchens laughed at it. He was gutsy and clear-eyed and eloquent, even with the end in sight.

Posted in mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Christmas blessing

Posted on December 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

So I’m biking to pick up medicine in South Philly a few nights ago, and I find myself behind a slow-moving flatbed truck, tall and wide and crammed with Christmas trees, and spewing vile fumes. And there are cars parked bumper to bumper on each side of the street, so I can’t ride onto the sidewalk and pass the truck. I curse at the truck — no one can hear me in the truck cab, I guess, this vehicle is huge, there are about 150 trees on it — and I picture myself, a curmudgeon cursing dead trees in the dark.

Then I have a vision of the truck jolting forward and all the trees falling off and burying me, and of the headline in the Daily News — “Local Scrooge crushed by Christmas trees” — and this makes me laugh, seeing myself from a distance, getting angry at objects, as if objects are purposeful. You can use up a lot of energy, thinking objects are purposeful. So I decide I’d better get into the spirit of the season, if only to stay healthy.

Or, as Tiny Tim would say, “God bless us, everyone!”

Posted in humor, livable cities, movies, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Oldie but goodie: Myth of liberal media

Posted on December 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Justin Lewis discuss how elites use the big lie to disallow expressions of opinion that are outside what’s acceptable to the corporate media:

Herman: The mainstream media really represent elite interests, and they serve those elite interests in a way that can be described as carrying out a propaganda function.

Chomsky: If you assert the opposite [of what is true], that eliminates mountains of evidence demonstrating that what you’re saying is false. That’s what power means. And the way you assert the opposite is by just saying, “The media are liberal.” Now the question becomes “Are the media too liberal, or are they not too liberal?”

Lewis (on studies indicating liberal bias in the media):

Even if you take these studies at their face value, there are a number of flaws with them. Perhaps the most important one is that they assume that it’s the journalists rather than the owners, advertisers, the news shapers or the news makers who control the manufacture of news. That’s like saying that the workers on the factory floor decide what the car industry produces.

Footnote: Jonathan Turley commenting on the country’s apathetic reaction to Barack Obama breaking his promise to veto the National Defense Authorization Act: “While the Framers would have likely expected citizens in the streets defending their freedoms, this measure was greeted with a shrug and a yawn by most citizens and reporters. Instead, we are captivated by whether a $10,000 bet by Romney was real or pretend in the last debate.”

The story of Obama’s most recent broken promise will die quickly. The notion that we are being stripped of our civil liberties is outside of what’s considered acceptable opinion by the corporate media.

Posted in mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Shine On Brightly

Posted on December 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

The chandelier in sinful swing
as gifts for me the three kings bring
of myrrh and frankincense, I’m told,
and fat old Buddhas carved in gold

Google the lyrics of the title song of Procol Harum’s second album, Shine On Brightly, and see how many sites have the second verse starting with “The chandelier is in full swing.” That is not what Gary Brooker is singing! The song is from the point of view of a decadent, half out of his mind, probably from over-indulging various appetites. The chandelier is in sinful swing. The narrator imagines himself as the Baby Jesus, being smiled on by the Magi. A blasphemous fellow.

OK, maybe it is “in full swing.” I’ll e-mail the lyricist, Keith Reid.

At any rate, many bands tried to fuse rock & roll with classical music, but Procol Harum’s joyously transcendent sound is unique and enduring. They were like a British version of the Band in that they distilled disparate influences into songs that were oddly soulful and somehow grand.

Question for fans: Why does this band usually sound so Christmas-y, even though hardly any of its songs mention Christmas? Yes, I know organist Matthew Fisher is a factor, that Brooker and Fisher borrowed heavily from Bach and other composers who wrote church music. But there’s more to it. Nostalgia, I guess.

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

Barack Obama, the human cave-in

Posted on December 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

I’m stumped. What does Barack Obama believe in? Is there any promise he wouldn’t break, any anti-progressive stand he wouldn’t take if he thought it might gain him some political advantage?

Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth is convinced that Obama, if he signs the National Defense Authorization Act, “will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” And Obama has signaled he will indeed sign after apparently caving to Congressional factions. Or maybe he simply believes in an imperial presidency.

As Robert Scheer wrote:

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.

Sadly, this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.

Arguably, this bill is the most recent bad consequence of 9/11. That calamity a decade ago didn’t begin the erosion of our civil liberties but it gave a tremendous boost to authoritarians — Dick Cheney and that gang — who were dead-set on stoking fear in order to subvert laws and traditions that date all the way back to the founding of the republic.

But who among us dreamed in 2007-2008 that Obama was in the gang? Who would have guessed he’d be just as eager to pump up the military and ditch due process as Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romnney and other Republicans? Obama and the Republicans, one of whom will be the other presidential nominee, would rather fuel the war machine than create jobs and fix the country’s decaying infrastructure. This is how low the American political system has sunk.

Posted in Congress, Great Recession, history, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Person of Year should be Pepper-Spray Cop

Posted on December 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s Time magazine’s argument — the writer was Kurt Andersen — for why 2011 was the Year of the Protester:

So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 – but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a countercultural pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then – within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies… inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice… as well as a huge peaceful demonstration of democratic solidarity in New York…

Whoa, Kurt. Street protests took place around the world on a larger scale than any year since 1989 — that much I’ll give you — and might have more lasting effects than the worldwide protests in 1968. However, it’s too early to declare that 2011 marked the beginning of changes as sweeping as those in 1848, a year of genuine revolution.

My choice for Person of the Year would have been Pepper-Spray Cop, meaning not only the cop who pepper-sprayed peaceful UC-Davis protesters at point-blank range, but also the thousands of other cops who share his mindset and engage in similar behavior. There’s nothing new about protesters, or police violence against protesters, but the systematically heavy-handed approach taken by cops in 2011 did seem ominously new, at least in the United States.

These cops used military tactics to disperse or disable people who were doing nothing more than expressing their rights of free speech and assembly. Yes, cops overreacted against protestors in other eras, but now they can do so using cartoonish body armor, military vehicles, and “sublethal” weapons such as sound cannon, flash grenades and pepper-spray. And of course, by using run-of-the-mill lethal weapons.

Arguably, police departments in major U.S. cities over the past few decades have morphed into private armies with hardware and surveillance technology formerly accessible only to the military, and the courts have made it easy for these police armies to treat protesters as terrorists, just as cops in supposedly less democratic countries do.

Posted in history, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Onion exclusive: Tom Joad goes to Mars

Posted on December 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

I sometimes kid the Onion for taking a lame approach to political satire — for shooting at battleships with a BB gun. However, its social satire is often right on the money:

RUMSON, NJ—After more than a year of writing and recording, Bruce Springsteen released his 18th studio album Tuesday, a concept record titled Red Dust that explores the everyday lives and struggles of immigrant workers scraping by in the 23rd-century carbonate mines on Mars.

According to the 61-year-old songwriter, the new tracks depict rugged Martian colonists as they come to question what’s happened to their lives, finding themselves saddled with unpayable debts and hard-pressed to put food on the table for their embryonically harvested juvenile-clones…

“…I try to write about universal feelings and desires,” Springsteen continued. “There’s tragedy, grief, redemption. But there’s also nostalgia for one’s carefree younger days of racing souped-up hyper-thrust cruisers through the Valles Marineris canyon, and for nights spent chasing Martian girls along the rusting boardwalks of a crater-side spaceport.”

To which I can only add:

This interplanetary life for me is through
You ought to quit this scene, too..

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

Coddled senator: No minimum wage hike

Posted on December 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” is the Anglicized version of a Balzac aphorism. I would add that behind most Republicans in Congress is a great unearned fortune and a defective sense of irony. Here’s an example from Wisconsin, a state with a long history of fighting between progressives and wealthy Republicans:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Sunday defended voting against raising the minimum wage by suggesting that only bad workers earned minimum wage.

“Bottom line: when you’re a good worker you don’t stay at minimum wage for long,” he said. “Trust me on that. It’s not universal, but trust me as an employer, as an employer I certainly didn’t want to lose good employees. And so you actually have a better marketplace. And so if your employer is not paying you good wages and you’re a good worker, you go look for other places…”

… Democrats blasted the senator for his comment, noting that he married into millions.

“We know he doesn’t like workers and we’re not even sure if Ron Johnson supports a minimum wage, but the least he could do is keep his mouth shut on the subject when his fortune came not because of his hard work, but because of a fortunate marriage,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate said Tuesday.

“Being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple has led Ron Johnson to dangerous ideas that would shred our social safety net and drive wages into the dirt all to appease a master class of people that sees fit to celebrate its riches while the rest of America suffers in rags…”

Footnote: At this point, I’ll bet there’s an army of suffering Wisconsin residents wishing they hadn’t voted out Sen. Russ Feingold.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment