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

Dinner with Nat King Cole

Posted on November 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

I don’t want french-fried potatoes,
Red, ripe tomatoes,
I’m never satisfied.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay,
With chafafa on the side.

And I’ll have whatever you guys are smoking!

Posted in arts, humor, pop music | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Which side are you on, Dems?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

Woody Guthrie wants to know

Digby’s nicely distilled description of how Congressional Republicans continue to outmaneuver and cow Democrats — including world-class equivocator John Kerry — who are supposed to be protecting the social safety net:

Note [Republican Sen. Jon] Kyl’s language: he never says 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. He says, “cuts”, “savings”, “reduced spending.” No taxes or revenue of any kind. He’s simply asserting that this is about discretionary and mandatory domestic spending cuts, period. And that trigger obviously means nothing. Then, you had John Kerry on right afterwards saying that the Democrats were more than willing to take a meat ax to the budget as well but they really, kind of, wanted some revenue too. It doesn’t look like they are going to get even that (thank God.) But the terms of the election year debate are all going to be about how the Democrats are insisting on raising taxes. After all, the only spending cuts that are controversial anymore are the defense cuts — which Democrats will never fight for. In fact, the Republicans will be able to say quite honestly in their campaign ads that the Democrats want to cut social security and medicare and raise taxes.”

Yes, the supercommittee was set up to fail, and it did, and that was a good thing. But when are wishy-washy Dems (Barack Obama is the wishy-washiest) going to take a real stand against the one percenters’ insistence on cutting the New Deal’s cornerstone programs?

I know, stupid question.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Fox News moron: Why the fuss about pepper spray?

Posted on November 22, 2011 by oddmanout215


Megyn Kelly is:

A. Just another pretty face spouting misinformation on TV.
B. A mouthpiece for corporatists.
C. A and B

The answer is C, of course. It seems Kelly is also an expert on police violence, no doubt because of her extensive on-the-scene reporting at Occupy rallies (joking):

In the mind of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the pepper spray [incident at] University of California-Davis … last weekend was really just a one-sided food fight. Kelly gave her casual assessment of the increasingly common police weapon on Tuesday’s broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor, seemingly defending the cops.

“It’s a derivative of actual pepper, it’s a food product, essentially,” she told host Bill O’Reilly. “A lot of experts are looking at saying is that the real deal. Has it been diluted?” …

As Scientific American‘s Deborah Blum notes, commercial grade pepper-spray is immensely more painful than the most powerful natural pepper, the ghost chili. People who’ve eaten ghost chili compared it to “a cocktail of battery acid and glass shards,” and has since been turned into a weapon by the Chilean military.

Footnote: If you asked Kelly what she thinks of waterboarding, I’ll bet she’d say: “It’s a breathing exercise, essentially.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Sunday in the park with Lt. John Pike

Posted on November 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Photoshop meme “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” features images of famous paintings and photos graced by the instantly classic figure of UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike as he was filmed spraying protesters at an Occupy rally last week.

I’m sure everyone has their favorites. I’m especially moved by Pike’s intrusion on the tranquil scene depicted in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Pike’s presence in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is another fave, I guess because he makes Christina’s anguish seem all the more understandable.

Posted in arts, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

At Berkeley, a literal meaning for ‘Beat Poets’

Posted on November 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the U.S., describing how non-violent students and teachers were brutalized by UC Berkeley cops on the very site where the Free Speech Movement was born 50 years ago:

… None of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm…

… One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest…

Hass stopped recounting the assault by police long enough to note it was related to other unresolved social problems:

… I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000…

Arguably, the condition of the education and law enforcement systems in most other states is just as bad. Put another way, anyone who says our rights and opportunities are more secure now than they were 50 years is either wealthy, related to a cop, or just plain stupid.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Great Recession, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Me and the devil and a Dallas church

Posted on November 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

Blues great Robert Johnson’s songs include “Me and the Devil Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Road Blues.” The latter explains how he sold his soul to Satan in return for guitar-playing prowess.

It looks like some Christians in Texas are at a crossroads, too. They’ve bought the Art Deco building where Johnson recorded about half of his songs, and will use it to preserve his legacy. It’s next to a building the church uses to serve the homeless.

Johnson spent much of his short life homeless.

… “There’s a natural connection,” said the Rev. Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Stewpot [community center] and an associate pastor at First Presbyterian [Church]. “Robert Johnson could definitely relate to these people and the work we do.” …

Posted in arts, economic collapse, food, Great Recession, health care, humor, livable cities, New York Times, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments