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

Banksters spooked by ‘Occupy Our Homes’

Posted on December 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

Not surprisingly, the corporate news media hasn’t made much of the human drama taking place as foreclosures and evictions by the big banks continue across the country. As Michael Moore wrote yesterday, “You need a Kardashian in your home as you’re being evicted to qualify for news coverage.”

And yet organized resistance to foreclosures and evictions continues to grow, thanks to the joint efforts of Occupy Our Homes and Take Back the Land to occupy empty houses while calling attention to fraudulent business practices by the big banks. The resistance is having an effect, as a leaked memo from Bank of America indicates:

A national effort to reclaim vacant properties has one of the country’s largest lenders scrambling. The financial website Zero Hedge has… obtained a memo from Bank of America’s field services operation warning, “We need to make sure we are all prepared.”

Vocal New York organizer Sean Barry told Raw Story Tuesday that an action known as “Occupy Our Homes” would place foreclosed and homeless families in otherwise-vacant homes. That effort began Tuesday with over 40 events in more than 20 cities.

“On Tuesday December 6th there is a potential nationwide protest planned that could impact our industry,” BofA employee Leonard Pavlov reportedly wrote to BAC Field Services. “We believe the protests will likely take place tomorrow at auction sites, homes that are being foreclosed, homes in the eviction stage and vacant homes.”

Among other things, the memo claims Pavlov called on field services not to engage with protesters, but to ensure that BofA properties are “secured.”

Here’s Moore paraphrasing Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, who appeared in his movie Capitalism: A Love Story:

Do not leave your homes if the bank forecloses on you! Let them take you to court and then YOU ask the judge to make them produce a copy of your mortgage. They can’t. It was chopped up a hundred different ways, bundled with a hundred other mortgages, and sold off to the Chinese. If they can’t produce the mortgage, they can’t evict you.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Police armed to the teeth to fight — protesters?

Posted on December 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

We all know that police departments across the country are becoming more and more militarized, as if expecting attacks from a domestic version of the Taliban. But the amount of hardware moving from the Pentagon to the police is even greater than you might have thought, according to Business Insider:

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute’s project on criminal justice told The Daily, “The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire.”

Posted in Congress, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A peculiar way to measure jobs growth

Posted on December 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Reich is a commonsensical guy, and so what if he sometimes injects false optimism into his commentaries? You can tell he’s merely trying not to be a gloom merchant, that the jobs picture looks as bleak to him as to any other realistic person.

Last week, Reich noted a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey showing unemployment had dropped to 8.6 percent. In his second paragraph he wrote, “We’re not out of the woods but we might be seeing some daylight.”

But from that point on in his column, he listed all the reasons why the government statistics are worth less than zero:

First, this rate of job growth is barely enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population… Second, retail jobs constituted a third of new private-sector employment in November. Retail jobs tend to be unstable, temporary, and low-paying… Third, the jobless rate fell partly because around 315,000 people who had been looking for jobs dropped out of the job market in November… Fourth, hourly earnings are down, as are real wages. So to some extent Americans have been substituting lower wages for lost jobs…

… Fifth, another reason for November’s job growth is that American consumers – whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the economy – increased their spending. But this can’t continue because, as noted, wages are dropping. They spent more by cutting into their meager savings. Don’t expect this to last…

There’s more, but the item about increased spending is a killer. It probably means a lot of people are finally replacing those broken appliances, or putting in those new window frames they’ll need to keep their houses warm.

Reich concludes his list of grim counter-statistics by stating “…it’s way too early to break out the champagne.” Right. The BLS reminds me of a lyric in an old Marvin Gaye song: “You tell me lies that should be obvious to me.” Even Reich can’t help wishing the lies were true.

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