Austerity measures = medieval bleeding

Posted on November 30, 2011 by oddmanout215

Millions are protesting in Britain, and it’s no wonder — the government is making an already sick economy even sicker. Paul Krugman provides a good analogy:

… History says that a financial crisis reduces long-run growth potential if policymakers don’t limit the short-run damage it does.

And yet what’s happening in Britain now is that depressed estimates of long-run potential are being used to justify more austerity, which will depress the economy even further in the short run, leading to further depression of long-run potential, leading to …

It really is just like a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding.

And the truly awful thing is that [David] Cameron and [George] Osborne are so deeply identified with the austerity doctrine that they can’t change course without effectively destroying themselves politically.

The other truly awful thing is that there are so many Americans politicians who are just as destructively reactionary as the British PM and his henchman, and working people will continue to suffer if they prevail. This is one reason why the Occupy movement in this country has to keep a high profile despite demolition of encampments by police.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , | 1 Comment

NYT, WSJ: SEC is in a quandary, not corrupt

Posted on November 30, 2011 by oddmanout215

In applauding the smackdown of the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its $285 million penalty against Citigroup, Matt Taibbi wrote, “The [Judge Jed] Rakoff ruling shines a light on the way these crappy settlements have evolved into a kind of cheap payoff system, in which crimes may be committed over and over again, and the SEC’s only role is to take a bribe each time the offenders slip up and get caught.”

So-called objective reporters saw things differently. Edward Wyatt of The New York Times opened his news report by defending the poor, beleaguered SEC:

When a Wall Street firm trades billions of dollars of securities a day and sometimes showers seven-figure bonuses on top executives, regulators are hard-pressed to fashion a penalty that really hurts.

He added that Rakoff

… added another dimension to that quandary on Monday when he told the [SEC] that he could not determine whether [its] penalty against Citigroup was adequate if he did not know what had really happened.

In other words, the SEC isn’t an integral part of the corrupt system that allows Wall Street firms to get off with a slap on the wrist, without admitting to fraud or even discussing the facts of a case in a public court. The SEC is a victim of a policy dating from the 1970s, before the Wall Street firms joined with commercial banks, effectively making them too big to police.

Wyatt quoted an SEC official’s explanation for why the agency makes secret settlements with Wall Street firms:

“We agree to settlements because they achieve for us largely everything that we could hope to get should we take the case to trial,” Robert Khuzami, the S.E.C.’s enforcement director, said in an interview this month. “I think the message is pretty clear. And the investors get their money much faster, because, as you know, lawsuits can take years.”

Which is total bullshit to anyone who believes in the rule of law, but Wyatt ended the piece without so much as a quotation from a legal expert challenging Khuzami’s feeble rationale. Nowhere in Wyatt’s article was the suggestion that the SEC might escape its “quandary” by hiring more enforcement agents and being less secretive.

The Wall Street Journal also said the SEC faced a “quandary,” but it at least noted that some legal experts think the agency “had only itself to blame by failing to provide the judge with enough information to make a decision on the proposed settlement.”

Neither the NYT or the WSJ even hinted that the SEC might be, at the very least, shirking its duty and ought to be rebuilt from the ground up. As Rakoff wrote:

… In any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth.

Posted in mainstream media, New York Times, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

WikiLeaks vs. the surveillance machine

Posted on November 29, 2011 by oddmanout215

More and more, the so-called social media remind me of a children’s book I read to my son many years ago: There’s an Awful Lot of Weirdos in Our Neighborhood. Weirdos aren’t necessarily bad — some of my friends are weird — but too many online weirdos are malicious snoops who work for politicians, government agencies, or corporations.

Just ask Emma Sullivan, the teenager who got in trouble for tweeting about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. Or ask Julian Assange, the journalist and founder of WikiLeaks, the website that released a ton of U.S. government diplomatic and military documents that the U.S. government was hiding from the American people.

Addressing a group of journalists via videolink yesterday, Assange said the “big battle” for WikiLeaks and its sympathizers around the world will be against forces that have turned the Internet into Big Brother’s favorite monitoring tool:

…The Internet [has] become “the most significant surveillance machine that we have ever seen,” Assange said in reference to the amount of information people give about themselves online.

“It’s not an age of transparency at all … the amount of secret information is more than ever before,” he said, adding that information flows in but is not flowing out of governments and other powerful organisations…

Assange, 40, is under house arrest in England pending the outcome of a Swedish extradition request over claims of rape and sexual assault made by two women. He says he is the victim of a smear campaign.

He’s also being sought by the U.S. government, of course, in regard to his involvement with WikiLeaks.

Think about the stakes involved in what Assange is saying and doing the next time you get e-mail from someone who shouldn’t know your business but does. Or the next time you send a message on Facebook, a virtual neighborhood where the authorities might know more about you than your next of kin.

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

Gov. Brownback, you really do suck

Posted on November 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

Great story out of Kansas regarding attempts to intimidate Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old girl who insulted wing-nut Gov. Sam Brownback in a message to her Twitter friends.

The principal of the high school Emma attends ordered her to send the governor a letter apologizing for her nasty remark. I’ll write the apology for her, if she wants. It would go something like this:

Dear Gov. Brownback,

I’m sorry for pretending I told you that you “sucked” when you appeared in Topeka. My tweet was a lie, I never spoke to you personally.

However, the fact is, you do suck, and I should have said so to your face. You vetoed the Kansas Arts Commission’s budget, making Kansas the only state to eliminate arts funding. You can afford to employ snitches who monitor social media for postings that mention your name (hello, snitch!), but you say we can’t afford to fund arts classes? You expect us to believe that?

I used the word “sucked” because I was tweeting. If I’d had room, I would have mentioned not only the arts budget but also that you cosponsored a bill that would have reduced the power of federal courts to rule on church/state issues. We live in the Bible Belt, sir. I’m glad federal courts can rule on such issues.

You also suck because of your involvement with the sinister Christian-advocacy group The Fellowship, and because you tried to close the Lawrence branch of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, and because you rejected a $31.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to set up an insurance exchange to help enable the federal health care reform law. If you’re a Christian, then maybe we’d be better off with a pagan governor.

I could list more reasons why you suck, but I’d need a whole book to contain them, not a letter. I’d be happy to discuss with you why you are so suck-y, preferably in a public forum. However, I have no intention of apologizing. Apologies should be sincere, and they shouldn’t be offered to people who are insincere.

Have a nice day.

Update: Brownback apologizes to Sullivan! His PR department must have had second thoughts about making an issue of the fact that he sucks. But Brownback’s snitches are still out there, reporting on everyone else who mentions his name on the Internet.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, humor, mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

‘Occupy’ news that’s not fit to print in NYT

Posted on November 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

If you haven’t seen Naomi’s Wolf’s analysis of the nationwide, federally supported crackdown against Occupy encampments, that’s because you don’t read Reader Supported News or foreign newspapers such as Guardian. No way the corporate media in America will investigate stories that might reflect badly on the people who own the media, unless they’re embarrassed into doing so, as they were when the Occupy movement reached critical mass:

… We… already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the [Department of Homeland Security] and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can’t suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

Update: More than a few credible journalists, including Joshua Holland, have noted that Wolf’s piece is stronger on suppositions than facts, and that it reeks of conspiracy theorizing, and might therefore alienate skeptics waiting for more evidence of federal collusion with municipal police departments.

Holland’s piece is a reminder to build stories based on facts — i.e., don’t use phrases such as “it is likely” if you don’t have hard evidence — but I hope his article doesn’t discourage anyone from aggressively asking questions about the suspiciously synchronous attacks on Occupy, or Obama’s silence on police violence, or the corrupt relationship between Congress and lobbyists.

I’m sticking with the point I made in my opening paragraph: The corporate media has repeatedly shown that it must be embarrassed into reporting stories that reflect badly on the wealthy and powerful.

Posted in Congress, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Sleeping at the ‘Laundromat’

Posted on November 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Well, I don’t have no clothes to clean
To put inside the machine
But it’s the craziest place I have ever been

A long-overdue trip to the laundromat last Sunday started me on a week-long Rory Gallagher binge. Coincidentally, the Irish rocker, who died in 1995, was just named one of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine, which should have called its list “100 Notable Pop Guitarists, Carefully Chosen to Please All Demographics.”

Unlike about half of the RS picks, Gallagher actually belongs on a best-guitarists list. More accurately, he ranks high among the greatest rock & roll guitarists, and was considered close to No. 1 among R&R fans in the blue-collar neighborhood where I grew up.

A legendary live performer, Rory played his beat-to-shit Stratocaster with great flair and logic and soul, and with an instantly recognizable style that makes even his lesser recordings worth hearing. He wrote most of his best songs leading the power trio Taste, whose On the Boards is an all-but forgotten R&R masterpiece.

Footnote: Paul Simon, Steve Stills and Joni Mitchell are (were) great songwriters, but did you know they’re also great guitarists? Did you know that Bruce Springsteen made the cut, but not the virtuoso Nils Lofgren, who now plays in Springsteen’s band? That Angus Young and Kurt Cobain are in the pantheon? Somebody call the music police! What were RS’s criteria for greatness? As politely as possible: RS stopped being reliable more than 30 years ago, after it became a corporate rag.

Posted in arts, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

You can’t take it with you (Ayn Rand, meet Steve Jobs)

Posted on November 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Eric Alterman on Apple’s maestro, who died in October:

… The [Apple] stock could have continued to soar even if the pay and conditions of these workers’ lives were built into the cost of an iPhone or an iPad. People would have kept buying the products, and other companies would have been forced to follow suit. But Jobs didn’t care. He even instructed Obama that the United States had to behave more like China in the manner in which it encouraged corporations to act free of regulations or concern for their employees and their environment.

A second issue raised by Jobs’s life and death is all that money he accumulated. When New York Times “DealBook” editor Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a column before Jobs died, wondering why he seemed so stingy with his fortune—noting also that he did away with all the company’s charity programs (which were restored after his departure in August) — Sorkin addressed the topic so gingerly, I half thought he feared Jobs would send a thunderbolt from the sky to disable his typing fingers …

How ironic that the media love to celebrate this alleged icon of ’60s idealism at the expense of poor, square Bill Gates, who is devoting the better part of his fortune to improving the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people…

If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs’s example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie: “The man who dies… rich, dies disgraced.”

Well written, and well-timed. When Jobs died, I thought “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” even after seeing all those glowing tributes from people who avoid like the plague pondering what a good life is and isn’t. But it’s time to take off the black armbands and, for the sake of accuracy, acknowledge the guy for what he was — a master of technology, a brilliant inventor, an astute businessman, and a cold, stingy creep.

Footnote to Alterman: I can live without an iPod Classic that holds 27,000 songs, or even 5,000 songs. I’m not sure there are 5,000 songs worth downloading.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How was your bird?

Posted on November 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Photo by TONY WOOD

[My Thanksgiving Day post, two days late.]

A bad cold was kicking my ass, but I felt the need for sun and exercise in the late afternoon. All around me was that weird holiday stillness and quiet, as if everyone had gone somewhere and I’d missed the boat — a boat I wouldn’t have wanted to board.

The Anvil Ironworks was closed, and so were Taqueria La Veracruzana and the Chinese medical clinic and Giordano’s and even the horrible little pastry shop where The Lady of the Planets makes on-the-spot prophecies. I ran down Washington Avenue, on the side where there was sunlight and long shadows. The sun was warm and seemed like it didn’t want to set, but the Earth would not cooperate and, by 4:15 or so, the sunlight was gone.

The signage in my South Philly neighborhood spoke to me — DIM SUM EVERY DAY and NO WAY OUT and, on a little patch of earth, next to a recently planted tree: PLEASE NO DOGS. It’s a goal of mine — to please no dogs, ever again.

The only people on the street were kooks and scavengers, which means I didn’t feel out of place. Most notably, my elderly neighbor Angelo was outside with part of his inexhaustible trove of antiques, as he calls them, lined up for inspection in the mini-parking lot next to his home.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I said, and he looked at me as if I’d just put a curse on him. He has many real and imagined enemies.

“I thought for a second you were that guy from the Colombian mob,” he said.

Then he went back to his antiques, which he is always wading through and organizing and throwing out, or so he says. I think he’d go completely mad if he ever really threw out that stuff.

I know exactly how he feels.

Posted in humor, livable cities, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Hitler’s jealous fury at pepper-spray cop

Posted on November 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

I don’t know who’s responsible for the “Hitler reacts” pieces, but they’re brilliant. This might be the best yet:

Posted in arts, humor, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Please don’t feed the corporate beast

Posted on November 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

A reminder about Walmart, now that the holiday spending orgy is about to begin: Don’t shop there. If you do, you are helping to kill your community and digging your own grave, economically speaking.

Sure, I feel bad for Walmart employees — they have to wear clown vests and kiss ass for the privilege of being badly paid — but we’d all be better off, ultimately, if the big-box stores were boycotted, shut down and replaced by independent stores that sold American goods and treated employees with dignity. This is only a pipe dream for now, but so was Occupy Wall Street, last summer.

For now we can at least look into buy-local strategies, since much of the money we spend in corporate chain stores is being used to help elect the liars who look after the interests of the wealthy, at our expense.

Footnote: Don’t forget, today is Buy Nothing Day:

Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now lets give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits…

… This year’s Black Friday [marks] the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against corporate greed and casino capitalism continues, lets take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts … the wallet…

Clarification: I’m well aware that what I write and link to won’t reach most of the people for whom it’s meant. For every person camping out to occupy Xmas there will be hundreds camping on the parking lot of a Best Buy, waiting to take advantage of “bargains.” Already, a woman in L.A. allegedly pepper-sprayed other consumers in order to get to the new Xbox 360.

It’s encouraging that some people are waking up to how we further empower our enemies by purchasing from them. But consumerism is a religion, very much alive, and not about to be dislodged until most Americans can no longer afford to buy toys — on credit, of course — to distract themselves from the fact that they continue to lose ground to the one percent of the population that owns most of the country.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment