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

Newt to Mitt: It takes one to know one

Posted on December 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

Does it take a thief to know a thief? If so, it’s no accident that the two most ruthlessly dishonest people vying for the Republican presidential nomination are accusing each other of corruption:

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been taking a lot of heat for receiving $1.6 million from Freddie Mac, the government backed mortgage giant, and Mitt Romney has now piled on, calling on Gingrich to return the money. “He was on a debate saying that politicians who took money from Freddie and Fannie should go to jail,” Romney said.

Gingrich was asked about the remark today during an appearance in New Hampshire. He replied, “if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to listen to him.”

This is worse than the pot calling the kettle black. This is two chimps in a cage throwing their own excrement at each other. Gingrich took money as a lobbyist, although he would never call what he did lobbying. Romney broke large companies then picked up the pieces and turned them into a personal fortune. While trying to steal the biggest prize of all — the presidency — the candidates are reminding anyone who’s listening that they’re both corrupt.

I think each man should call for the jailing of the other, repeatedly, until Barack Obama’s oddly apathetic Department of Justice is embarrassed into investigating how they made their money. Maybe neither man did anything technically illegal, but an investigation would raise a stink that might gag even “low-information” voters.

Posted in campaign finance reform, humor, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘The Piano Has Been Drinking,’ not me

Posted on December 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

Tom Waits performs, then jokes with Martin Mull and Fred Willard on Fernwood Tonight. The mock-talk show ran for a few months in 1977, and was re-formatted and telecast as America 2-Night for a few months in 1978. I had to look up those dates.

In my mind, Fernwood is bound up with two other innovative shows from roughly the same era, SCTV and David Letterman. SCTV because of its “Great White North” skits, featuring two guys who behaved exactly like the two burnouts I shared an apartment with in the early 1980s. (My co-renters were both Waits fans.) Letterman because his TV show in the 1980s, when Waits appeared on it, seemed a cross between Fernwood and a “legitimate” Johnny Carson-type talk show.

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

Happy Xmas — or is it Groundhog Day?

Posted on December 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

Grandma run over by eine reindeer? Ja. Es muss sein.

I run past Dan’s store on Passyunk Avenue, I see his Christmas trees for sale at curbside, breathe the scent of pine and hear “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” skipping from the speakers above his storefront. Each time this happens, I feel it has always happened, and always will; that I’m jogging around a large track that brings me past Dan’s Christmas shop at the same time each day, and what I do before and after this daily occurrence is more or less the same as what I’ve done on previous days.

Don’t be crazy, I tell myself. It only feels like last year’s Christmas season never ended. The couple in the Explorer who just asked me where Pat’s Steaks is — it only seems like they ask me this every day. John the shopping-bag salesman with his cart full of bags and his quadruple layer of overcoats — he’s not really on the market all the time, listening to the Eagles game on an ancient boom box. And Jack Bogus, the restaurant owner — when I turn the corner, he won’t be outside, painting those cellar doors the same color again.

But there he is, and there’s his brutal orange paint. WTF! Am I buying into the myth of “eternal return” that Nietzsche, for some reason, found so attractive? Have I seen Groundhog Day too many times? If I chase Jack Bogus and he’s back here tomorrow, painting again, should I surrender to fate, learn to love it?

Pointless questions. I should be researching Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, isn’t that cute?), not eternal return. There’s nothing wrong with me that a new passport and a plane ticket wouldn’t fix. Or a frontal lobotomy. Or a bottle in front of me.

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

Correction, Paul — Mitt is a villain

Posted on December 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

He doesn't smoke and has no charisma, but he's just as greedy as Gordon Gekko.

I’m glad Paul Krugman took a moment Friday to link Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street to Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, but I’m wondering why the columnist pulled his punches rather than go for the KO. The record shows that the profoundly false Romney made a career of pillage and plunder while heading Bain Capital; that he became rich, as I stated in my Nov. 14 post, “at the expense of people who worked for companies that were bought and sold by his private equity firm.”

Krugman writes:

… According to the prediction market Intrade, there’s a 45 percent chance that a real-life Gordon Gekko will be the next Republican presidential nominee…

I am not, of course, the first person to notice the similarity between Mitt Romney’s business career and the fictional exploits of Oliver Stone’s antihero. In fact, the labor-backed group Americans United for Change is using “Romney-Gekko” as the basis for an ad campaign…

… Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980…

But in the final paragraphs of the column, Krugman goes soft, as if adhering to some civility vow he made when he started writing for the ultra-polite but often ultra-hypocritical New York Times:

So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us.

The truth is that what’s good for the 1 percent, or even better the 0.1 percent, isn’t necessarily good for the rest of America — and Mr. Romney’s career illustrates that point perfectly. There’s no need, and no reason, to hate Mr. Romney and others like him. We do, however, need to get such people paying more in taxes — and we shouldn’t let myths about “job creators” get in the way.

First of all, Romney is a villain, and it follows from everything Krugman wrote in the first half of his column that the rich — i.e., the rich who made their fortunes by exploiting those of modest means — should be sanctioned for restructuring companies so that the assets of thousands of working people would flow to a handful of executives. The luxury Romney lives in was made possible by schemes that impoverished people who were merely trying to make an honest living, and that wrong should be righted.

It’s not enough to simply make Romney and other would-be Gekkos pay their fair share of taxes. The laws should be changed to the point where these sociopaths aren’t in a position to profit by destroying jobs — and lives.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Rove’s ads are from the Goebbels playbook

Posted on December 9, 2011 by oddmanout215


Karl Rove, shown here on Stephen Colbert’s TV show, has taken aim at Elizabeth Warren, perhaps to prove his filthy mind is still as nimble as in 2004, when he destroyed John Kerry’s presidential hopes by portraying him in campaign ads as a traitor rather than a war hero.

First Rove’s people aired an ad presenting Warren — she’s running for the Massachusetts Senate seat currently held by Scott Brown — as a wild-eyed radical, a sort of godmother to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. When that didn’t work, Rove veered 180 degrees with a new ad that tried to paint Warren as a crooked Washington insider:

The ad blames Warren for “bailing out the same banks that caused the financial meltdown, bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives while middle class Americans lost out.” It closes by imploring the viewer to “tell Professor Warren we need jobs, not more bailouts and bigger government.”

The accusation that Warren is responsible for TARP, bank bailouts, or huge executive bonuses is beyond absurd. TARP and the bank bailouts were Republican ideas that began under President Bush. As Simon Johnson notes, Warren “has also been a strong supporter of all efforts to rein in Too Big To Fail banks, including by breaking them up.”

In fact, her work creating and heading up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau involved advocating directly on consumers’ behalf, a key check on the power of big banks. She also ran the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, where her role was to track the money that was given to the banks. She was extremely critical of both the banks’ and Washington’s inability to accurately account for TARP money.

Rove’s style of propaganda is so bold it often stuns people. Poor Kerry was such a stiff that he didn’t bother rebutting the Rove ads until it was too late. He thought voters couldn’t possibly believe such big lies.

I think Warren knows better than to underestimate Rove. She’s more of a fighter than Kerry, and probably quicker to recognize a truly malevolent foe. Here’s something from a sharp satirist who posits a direct connection between Rove and master propagandist Joseph Goebbels. both of whom “grappled with childhood hostilities that demanded revenge”:

We’ll never know how much damage has been wrought by the countless kids who got their egos kicked and went on to seethe in anonymity. We do know about the calamities caused by two mental cripples whose misfortunes turned them into experts at manipulating the damaged psyches of other troubled souls. Goebbels compensated for his inadequacies through writing. Rove became a master debater. One can only imagine the two reprobates licking their lips, Joker style, when they realized that dirty tricks and right-wing politics added up to a license to kill.

Read the whole piece here.

Posted in CFPB, economic collapse, history, liar, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Obama is on our side… when he’s campaigning

Posted on December 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

This is from President Obama’s much-praised speech Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910. The setting was chosen so that the corporate media would link Obama to the resurgence of progressive sentiments among voters, but some of us thought the president sounded as lofty and disingenuous as ever:

The fact is, this [economic] crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We’re going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house.

I’m sorry, but why should any progressive — any Democrat, really — give Obama credit for saying what he should have said more than two years ago? And how can Obama speak of a “deficit of trust” without explaining why he didn’t tell us the Fed bailed out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, not $800 billion, as was commonly assumed until Bloomberg News got the real figures recently?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

‘I Wanted To Tell You’

Posted on December 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Matthew Sweet’s third and best album, Girlfriend, which appeared 20 years ago this Fall and proved that the age of hard-driving, well-crafted pop songs wasn’t quite over. It’s a catchy batch of rockers and ballads about crazy love and lost faith, brought to life with a killer studio band that included guitarists Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd.

Sweet’s style of disillusionment was in sharp contrast to that of the grunge rockers who were coming into their own at the time Girlfriend was released. He seemed a disappointed idealist, not a hard-boiled cynic. His cover girl was Tuesday Weld, and one of his weepiest ballads is called “Winona.” He loved the idea of finding love that would last. His vocal harmonies soar to the point where it would be fair to call them anti-grunge.

Footnote: One drawback was that there were too many songs, a common flaw of albums in the CD era. If Sweet had included the 10 best of the 15 songs, Girlfriend might have been a great album.

Posted in arts, pop music | Tagged , | 2 Comments