Who crashed the economy? NYT dodges question.

Posted on November 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

Thanks for nothing, New York Times. I refer to the analysis piece in the Sunday edition, above the fold on Page 1, that totally obscures the causes of the economic mess that is destroying the middle class and making the poor even poorer. Yet another example of how absurd it is to accuse The Times and other corporate-owned news operations of being part of the liberal media.

The writer, David Leonhardt, states early on that America’s economic problems begin and end with debt, which he links to our aging population and slow economic growth. Astonishingly, he neglects to mention that the huge size of the debt is directly attributable to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and his decision to launch two unfunded, enormously expensive wars on the other side of the world.

Instead, Leonhardt seems to blame the so-called debt crisis on the apathy and unrealistic expectations of the general public:

Most voters in [the United States and Europe] have yet to come to grips with the notion that they have promised themselves benefits that, at current tax rates, they cannot afford. Their economies have been growing too slowly, for too long, to pay for the coming bulge of retirees…

On the most basic level, affluent countries are facing sharply increasing claims on their resources even as those resources are growing less quickly than they once were…

The increasing claims come from the aging of the population, while the slowing growth of available resources comes from a slowdown of economic expansion over the last generation. A complex mix of factors, varying by country, has slowed growth, and the slowdown has been exacerbated everywhere by the worst financial crisis and global recession in 70 years.

Yes, but who and what caused the slowed growth of resources and the financial crisis that exacerbated the slowdown? Leonhardt dances around this essential question, perhaps because he and his editors would rather not flatly state that one percent of the population — including the owners of The Times — have thrived at the expense of the other 99 percent, largely because of laws passed by high-level political officeholders whose interests are aligned with the one percent, not with the rest of us.

Some readers would call Leonhardt’s handling of the debt issue intellectually dishonest, but that doesn’t quite say it. The man writes as if he’s a willing stooge for the people who are steadily and intentionally lowering the living standards of average Americans. More than once he stresses the “hard choices” we face, but not until the story’s 12th paragraph does he casually mention that there is “debate” in this country about “whether the affluent, who have done very well in recent decades, should pay more taxes.”

The debate is over. Most Americans have caught on to why the economic situation is so bleak. We’re strongly in favor of higher taxes on the rich and many other common-sense measures that Leonhardt’s article either doesn’t mention or carefully downplays.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Great lit to great film? Well, there’s ‘The Dead’

Posted on November 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann in ‘The Dead’

How often have great literary works been made into great movies? Certainly more often than the Eagles have won the Super Bowl (never), but only slightly more often than the Phillies have won the National League championship (seven times).

What’s beautiful and fascinating on the page is usually lost in translation to the screen. One exception is the 1987 film of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” by director John Huston and screenwriter Tony Huston (John’s son), which was recently mini-reviewed in the NYT by Rodrigo Garcia, film director and son of novelist Gabriel García Márquez:

… It’s the tale of a dinner party and its aftermath on the Feast of the Epiphany in the home of the Morkan sisters on a snowy winter evening in Dublin in 1904… It’s devoid of much plot and deceivingly simple. The themes are ambitious: self-delusion, vanity, mortality, the effect of the passage of time on our feelings. All of it is told with humor and with affection for little human strengths and weaknesses, and with the tenderness and delicacy of a girl playing with a dollhouse…

… [John Huston] is responsible for “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The African Queen…” He made some of his best and youngest films the older he got, until finally, at 80, armed with a wheelchair and an oxygen tank and two of his children (Anjelica and Tony), he made the perfect film, “The Dead.” Now that, ladies and gentlemen, was a director.

Near the end of the short story, the protagonist’s wife tells him about a young man named Michael who had loved her long ago but died. He realizes he has never deeply loved anyone, including his wife. The last lines of the story, which is told from the protagonist’s point of view:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

John and Tony Huston make slight alterations to Joyce’s text so that the voice-over is in first-person and conveys to viewers the shock of self-awareness felt by the protagonist, played with great reserve by Donal McCann.

Footnote: If your idea of a great film is Transformers, this movie might not be for you.

Posted in arts, fiction, movies | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Hedges arrested. King Rat still rules.

Posted on November 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

In case you missed it, Chris Hedges took a moment to cogently connect the dots between the big investment banks and the Obama administration on Thursday, before he marched with several hundred other protesters to the mouth of the sewer — the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs:

Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared…

Goldman Sachs unloaded billions in worthless securities to its clients, decimating 401(k)s, pension and mutual funds. The firm misled investors about the true nature of these worthless securities, insisted the securities they were pushing on their clients were sound, and hid the material fact that, simultaneously, they were betting against these same securities—$2 billion against just one of their deals…

CEO Lloyd Blankfein apparently not only lied to clients, but to the [Senate subcommittee investigating Goldman-Sachs] on April 27, 2010, when he told lawmakers: “We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients.” Yet, they did.

Hedges was arrested with 15 other protesters, including longtime NYC activist The Reverend Billy. Meanwhile, Blankfein and his fellow rats remain free and presumably busy in their gilded sewer, where they sold bundles of bad mortgages — bundles of shit — and called them securities, as part of a grand scam to fleece their clients.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, liar, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

What did Bloomberg’s homies do? The shadow knows

Posted on November 4, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a self-styled independent who has always been careful to suck up to the liberal establishment, reminding us he’s a blood brother of the vampires whose world-class scamming drained the life out of the housing market and left millions of people deep in debt:

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.

To Matt Taibbi, this statement at a business breakfast on Tuesday amounted to Bloomberg’s “Marie Antoinette moment,” and proved the mayor would rather tell bald-faced lies than badmouth the real villains:

In fact, just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could.

And now the word on the street in New York City is that Bloomberg might seriously crack down on OWS protesters, possibly because their continued presence near the citadels of power is beginning to make the country’s biggest crooks very nervous:

Mike Bloomberg has started to publicly lose patience with the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. Yesterday, he told the Observer that recent reports of crime and sexual assault in the park were “a very high priority” for the administration and that any withholding of information from the police by protesters “is despicable, and I think it is outrageous and it really allows the criminal to strike again making all of us less safe.”

Today during his weekly appearance on John Gambling’s radio show, Bloomberg said that “we’re not going to tolerate” some of the behavior at Zuccotti. “If you see what happened like in Oakland, we are not gonna have that here,” he said. “That’s not gonna happen here.”

The story gets better with each new day of occupation. How long will this smooth-talking, well-groomed little monster allow the Zuccotti Park protest to persist like a shadow on the people who wrecked the economy, who are a few blocks away, not even under indictment, still making billions? And to remind Americans that he, the “independent” Mike Bloomberg, condones and defends what they did?

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Citizens United decision corrupt, not ‘insane’

Posted on November 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

Everyone knows what would be the first and most important step toward campaign finance reform. The question is whether there are enough honest people in Congress to make reform a reality:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Wednesday night slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision and supported legislation to overturn it. Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado introduced a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that would overturn the ruling, which gave corporations and unions the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.

Sanders told [Keith] Olbermann he thought passing the constitutional amendment was possible, despite the inevitable opposition from conservatives.

“I think what we are seeing now, through the Occupy movement and other efforts, is a growing anger and frustration with the power of big money in this country. You’re seeing it just the other day, when people actually defeated the biggest financial institution in America, Bank of America, who wanted to impose the $5 debit fee. We beat em.”

“I think right now, whether you’re talking to a Republican or a progressive, people are saying that that Supreme Court decision, Keith, is basically insane,” he said. “Nobody that I know thinks that Exxon Mobil is a person.”

Footnote: Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the four dissenting judges in the Citizens United case (Jan., 2010), explaining why the majority opinion was so corrupt and corrupting:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Marx Brothers, still in their prime

Posted on November 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

How cool that one of the greatest comedic movie scenes can be downloaded and watched with the click of a mouse. A few minutes of screwball perfection, more than 75 years old, as fresh as any skit you could name. Seemingly improvised, almost chaotic, but a masterpiece of timing and ensemble acting.

Elsewhere is a clip of Groucho in very old age being honored at the Academy Awards. Below the clip are viewers’ comments. Someone wrote what a shame it was that a guy as vital and sharp as Groucho had to become old and frail. I look at it the other way. What a miracle it is that Groucho and his brothers in their prime can be seen now and, presumably, for as long as people still like to laugh.

Posted in arts, humor, movies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Obama to fight Wall St. corruption — joking!

Posted on November 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

When Barack Obama took office, it was almost embarrassing to watch so many otherwise intelligent people rejoice at the notion that he could somehow do good and remain closely allied with the corrupt Wall Street banks that had wrecked the economy during the Bush era.

Most people know better now, but what’s amazing is that this president, with a re-election fight ahead, remains as obsequious in his dealings with the Wall Street crooks as he was when he appointed Wall Street alums Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council and Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury.

As this point, the idea of Obama reforming Wall Street has been reduced to a joke, even to Robert Reich:

Next week President Obama travels to Wall Street where he’ll demand – in light of the Street’s continuing antics since the bailout, as well as its role in watering-down the Volcker rule – that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected and big banks be broken up.

I’m kidding. But it would be a smart move – politically and economically.

Politically smart because Mitt Romney is almost sure to be the Republican nominee, and Romney is the poster child for the pump-and-dump mentality that’s infected the financial industry and continues to jeopardize the American economy. Romney was CEO of Bain & Company – a private-equity fund that bought up companies, fired employees to save money and boost performance, and then resold the firms at a nice markups.

Economically it would be smart for Obama to go after the Street right now because the Street’s lobbying muscle has reduced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to a pale reflection of its former self. Dodd-Frank is rife with so many loopholes and exemptions that the largest Wall Street banks – larger by far than they were before the bailout – are back to many of their old tricks…

I doubt the President will be condemning the Street’s antics, or calling for a resurrection of Glass-Steagall and a breakup of the biggest banks. Democrats are still too dependent on the Street’s campaign money. That’s too bad. You don’t have to be an occupier of Wall Street to conclude the Street is still out of control…

And you don’t have to be a professor at Berkeley to suspect voters aren’t going to see a dime’s worth of difference between Obama’s and Romney’s attitudes toward the banks that are drastically undermining living standards for 99 percent of Americans.

Posted in economic collapse, finance reform bill, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Mitt Romney, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Gitmo is Bush and Obama’s ‘law-free zone’

Posted on November 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

I thought it was the responsibility of professional American journalists to call attention to politicians who, after being elected, break promises they made on the campaign trail. And to write stories about the lies of former office holders whose illegalities while in office did great harm to the public good and the rule of law.

And yet the only new stories I’m seeing regarding presidential approval of torture and broken promises to close the Guantanamo Bay jail are coming out of European and Indian publications:

The former chief prosecutor for the US government at Guantánamo Bay has accused the administration he served of operating a “law-free zone” there, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the order to establish the detention camp on Cuba. Retired air force colonel Morris Davis resigned in October 2007 in protest against interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and has made his remarks in the lead-up to 13 November, the anniversary of President George W Bush’s executive order setting up military commissions to try terrorist suspects.

Davis said that the methods of interrogation used on Guantánamo detainees – which he described as “torture” – were in breach of the US’s own statutes on torture, and added: “If torture is a crime, it should be prosecuted.”

Davis’s Crimes of War project is leading pressure on the administration of President Barack Obama during Guantánamo’s 10th anniversary, with firm reminders of Obama’s unequivocal pledges to abolish military commissions and close the camp. Professor Thomas Keenan, the head of the Bard College human rights programme, which staged the conference, said: “The president campaigned on a pledge to close down the jail at Guantánamo Bay, and to end the use of military commissions to try its inmates. How is it possible that, two years after he was elected, there are still more than 150 prisoners there, and this November, one of them will go on trial before one of those very commissions?”

Posted in Iraq war, liar, mainstream media, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Music to haunt you on Halloween

Posted on October 31, 2011 by oddmanout215

There are at least three varieties of scary songs — novelty numbers, done for laughs; songs that have dark lyrics but aren’t all that scary; and songs (“compositions” is a better word) that actually sound scary and give you the creeps. Here are some that fit in the latter category, at least for me:

“Moonlight In Glory,” Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. First there’s the retarded preacher’s sermon, then the young guy knocks on the old lady’s door…

“Bat Chain Puller,” Captain Beefheart, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller). In case you want to hear what an army of zombies marching in lockstep sounds like.

“Farewell Ride,” Beck, Guero. A master of postmodern pop writes and sings a 12-bar dirge as spooky and sincere as something by Robert Johnson or Son House. Go figure.

“Clap Hands,” Tom Waits, Rain Dogs. “They all went to heaven in the little rowboat.”

“Rebel Music,” Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burnin’. Sounds like horrible things would be happening if everybody wasn’t so stoned.

“Broken English,” Marianne Faithfull, Broken English. The lyrics are troubling, the melody stark, but Faithfull’s broken voice is what’s scary.

“Always Crashing In the Same Car,” David Bowie, Low. World-weary, fatalistic, dreamy, chilling.

“O Superman,” Laurie Anderson, Big Science. This one scared the hell out of my best friend’s young son many years ago. Scared me, too.

“I Put a Spell on You,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Frenzy. Yeah, it’s a novelty tune, but Screamin’ Jay was authentically, undeniably demented.

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

Back in the saddle. Bike thief still at large.

Posted on October 30, 2011 by oddmanout215

I forgot to mention weeks ago that I finally found an affordable used bicycle to replace my Iron Horse, the theft of which left me in a funk not unlike Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo after he failed to save his fellow cop from plummeting to his death during a rooftop chase of a bad guy. My self-loathing was so severe, the doctors had to lock me in a padded room for weeks and play Mozart records until I snapped out of it…

Actually, I became angry and searched the neighborhood for a long time, hoping to blunder into the thief with the bike, or the bike by itself. I was ranting. Someone said, “If a stolen bicycle upsets you this much, how would you react if you found out you had terminal cancer?” I replied, “I would die, I guess. That’s a stupid question.”

My point was that a setback that seems minor to one person might seem earth-shaking to someone else. It depends on your hierarchy of needs and frame of mind. Years ago I suffered an ankle injury — torn ligaments — that kept me on crutches for three months. I was in a resilient frame of mind, so I reacted by doing a lot of upper-body exercises and speed-walking on crutches.

This time I wasn’t feeling resilient, and my mood didn’t improve until I was able to buy a new bike. At some point I re-watched Bicycle Thieves (also known as The Bicycle Thief), the old Vittorio De Sica movie about a poor man supporting his family with a job that requires him to have a bicycle. His bike is stolen and he steals someone else’s bike after a fruitless search for his own. He gets caught, of course, right in front of his son, and ends up feeling shame as well as outrage. Now that’s a setback.

The moral of Bicycle Thieves is don’t do something that might embarrass you in front of your son. Or don’t steal bicycles unless you’re a professional thief. Or don’t steal bikes that are so slow and clunky, you’ll get caught in the act.

There is no moral. Great stories don’t have a moral. De Sica’s movie is about coming to grips with the fact that opportunities are rare and second chances even rarer, especially if you’re poor. It’s about the difficulty of enduring mundane cruelties without becoming cynical or defeatist. There is a sociopolitical subtext to the movie, but De Sica was too artful to allow his story to become overtly polemical. There is no happy ending.

Footnote: You can watch the whole goddamn movie on YouTube!

Posted in arts, bicycling, humor, movies, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments