A sick joke from Romney, ‘the serious one’

Posted on November 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, recently cited Mitt Romney’s plan to semi-privatize Social Security and Medicare and link these programs to Wall Street as proof that Romney is “the serious one” among Republican presidential candidates. Here’s Matt Taibbi on the audacity of these buttoned-down bozos:

Your typical Medicare/Social Security recipient might already have been ripped off three different ways in this era.

He might have been sold a crappy mortgage or a refi by a Countrywide-type firm (which often targeted the elderly). He might then also have unwittingly become an investor in such mortgages and seen the value of his retirement holdings devastated (many of the banks sold their crappy mortgage-backed securities to state pension funds). Lastly, if he paid taxes, he saw part of his tax money go to pay off the bets the banks made against these same mortgages.

So now that Wall Street has ripped off this segment of society three times, it makes all the sense in the world that Mitt Romney – a former Wall Street superstar who was a chief architect of the modern executive-compensation-driven corporation – is coming back and telling us that we need to cut their Medicare and Social Security benefits in order to defray the cost of the previous three scams…

If there wasn’t such a very real chance that this could happen, it would be worth laughing about, but unfortunately it’s no joke. It’s a testament to the tenacious idiocy of our national media that an idea like Social Security privatization could continue to be publicly contemplated, in the wake of a disaster on the scale we’ve just gone through.

Advocating the turning over of Social Security management to Wall Street after the 2008 crash is a little like asking Paris Hilton to pilot Air Force One, or tabbing Charlie Sheen to manage the inventory of a hospital pharmacy – completely nuts, but to David Brooks, that makes Mitt Romney the “serious” candidate.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, Politics, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Frazier dies. Fight of the century continues.

Posted on November 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

You had to be there, I guess, to appreciate the significance of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, on March 8, 1971. Not necessarily at ringside, but aware of the mood of the country. It was as if a civil war was being vicariously fought in Madison Square Garden, with each side represented by its champion.

In Ali’s corner were opponents of the Vietnam War, blacks fed up with second-class-citizen status, a large contingent of intellectuals and artists and college kids, affluent liberal types, and people who simply thought Ali was the coolest man on the planet.

Frazier appealed to the World War II generation of working-class whites and blacks who didn’t like Ali’s flamboyant outspokenness. Frazier was the real Rocky, a guy who became a great fighter through sheer force of will. He was also a strong black man who didn’t seem threatening to whites who already felt threatened by “uppity” blacks.

The backdrop, in a nutshell: I was a kid growing up in white working-class Philly and can’t remember a single adult in that little world ever calling Ali by any other name than Cassius Clay, even though he’d changed his name years earlier and everyone knew it.

The bout lived up to its billing as “the fight of the century.” The whole world watched two of the best heavyweights in boxing history slug it out for 15 rounds. Frazier won the decision because he flattened Ali with a vicious left hook in the last round.

Ali and Frazier half-killed each other — there were two more fights, both won by Ali — and their war of words, begun before the first fight and fueled partly by the social strife that defined the era in which they fought, persisted after they retired. Ali outlived Frazier but has suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a long time.

Stan Hochman, a long-time sportswriter for Philadelphia Daily News, neatly summed up their epic story the day after Frazier died:

They brought out the best in each other in the ring and the worst in each other outside the ring. And now Frazier is gone and Ali cannot put two sentences together to mourn our loss. And that is terribly sad.

It’s also sad that the societal divisions that helped make the Ali-Frazier rivalry so bitter and symbolically weighty have grown drastically worse in the 40 years since their first fight. The discontent of the poor and near-poor, dormant for decades, has been rekindled by the widespread realization that the rich have slyly encouraged these divisions — between poor and middle-class, black and white — in order to distract us from the fact that they’re robbing us all. (I’ve just described the genesis of the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

I don’t know if Frazier would see it that way, but one thing’s for sure — he didn’t tolerate anyone making a fool of him, in or out of the ring, and he never backed down from a fight.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, sports, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

More news pollution from the NYT

Posted on November 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

In a Sunday op-ed piece, Frank Bruni complained that Americans get worked up to no good end — headline: “The invention of outrage” — over what passes for news these days. Well, no shit. The odd thing about the piece was that Bruni didn’t bother to explain the difference between gossip and real news:

If ever you needed an example of how easily, spuriously or conveniently we gin up our outrage, last week was it. As we kept up with [Kim] Kardashian, kept tabs on a constipated Congress and beheld both the turmoil in Greece and the travails of Herman Cain, we summoned astonishment where there was questionable grounds for it and an ire sometimes out of proportion with the circumstances. So did the players in a few of these dramas and the parasites feeding off them. It was a mad, mad week.

My first thought was yo, Frank, if you want to hear less about bimbos such as Kardashian, don’t devote half of an article to her. Don’t mention her at all. My second thought was don’t equate coverage of vapid “personalities” with stories about our dysfunctional Congress, which is still hung up on reducing debt rather than creating jobs.

Bruni and many of his colleagues are like factory workers who dump toxins into a river and then complain about all the dead fish. What is this guy smoking?

Was he complaining about the general public’s tendency to become outraged over “news” that’s actually trivia, or the media’s purposeful reduction of all news to trivia? It’s not quite clear.

What Bruni should have written about is the remarkable absence of outrage in America over issues that directly effect our health and well-being. For decades most Americans were bamboozled into believing the increasingly wide income gap between the rich and poor was nothing more than a healthy result of the free market system at work.

The corporate media does everything it can to encourage belief in this lie. One of its tricks is to distract us from important issues by prominently running stories about bimbos and sideshow freaks while at the same time under-reporting the ways in which the rich and powerful have institutionalized inequality in our sick society.

My suggestion for Bruni, if he wants to write something substantive, would be to stop following the Kardashian news, ride the subway to Zuccotti Park and ask some of the protesters why they are there. It really is an outrage.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, environmentalism, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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