Talking with voters, walking with CEOs

Posted on October 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

What will it mean to American voters that Barack Obama has signed into law three trade deals that will destroy up to 159,000 American jobs, and that he did this at approximately the same time he promised to get serious about job creation at home? As Firedoglake notes, this latest betrayal

… tells you something important about President Obama and many members of Congress. The problem isn’t that most of our elected officials actually want to destroy Americans who have jobs, all things being equal they do want Americans to have jobs. The problem is protecting American jobs is a much lower priority for Obama and most members of Congress than is giving the large corporate lobbyists what they are willing to donate millions to see advanced.

It is always good to be reminded where you stand.

In other words, it will mean that voters, including all of us who voted for Obama, can move forward with fresh confirmation that the primary goal of this president is not to serve the people, but to be re-elected. (I know, what else is new?) Further, that all sitting presidents, Democrat or Republican, listen to lobbyists, not workers, because the big money for re-election bids comes from the corporations, not “grassroots” contributors.

It means that Obama is an unrepentant windbag who will talk jobs from now until November 2012 but will continue to walk with CEOs and banksters at critical moments. This also goes for most members of Congress, of course, who figure the jobs lost to South Korea, Panama and Colombia, a viciously anti-trade unionist country, will be forgotten by voters at election time.

Finally, it means the Occupy movement is likely to keep spreading. People are tired of living in a corporatocracy.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Instead of New Deal, No Deal

Posted on October 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Scheer’s reminder that we need a president whose policies help the 99 percent of Americans who are hurting, not the one percent who are extremely wealthy:

… To accomplish that, we need a moratorium on bank-ordered evictions, along with a government-funded program to aid the underemployed that is as robust as the trillions spent to save the Wall Street swindlers who caused all of this trouble.

Instead we are left with a Democratic president who soothes our rage with promises of decent-paying jobs that in actuality are being vigorously exported from our shores by the president’s top corporate backers. That absurdity was marked by Barack Obama’s choice of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric—a company that has shifted to foreign countries two-thirds of its workforce and 82 percent of its profits—to head the president’s job creation council.

Obama has failed not because he is a progressive in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but because he is not. He has blindly followed the lead of George W. Bush in bankrupting the nation by throwing money at Wall Street while continuing to fund wildly expensive and unneeded wars…

Scheer’s observations lead him to conclude that voting for Obama makes sense because he will be the lesser of two evils, but he notes that such a choice is “akin to a form of slow torture.” He adds, “Better to support the Occupy Wall Street protests as an inspiring alternative.”

Right, but you can’t just dismiss electoral politics and expect any changes to be made, not without a revolution. Scheer doesn’t mention it, but a third-party candidacy for the Democratic nomination might help make Obama behave more like a Dem. Or is this mere wishful thinking on my part?

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

Uh-oh, ‘the help’ is marching in NYC

Posted on October 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

How would you like to make pennies cleaning up after the royalists who helped create one of the biggest financial messes of all time, or after people just like them? Workers in NYC don’t like it at all:

Hundreds of office cleaners and guards marched near Wall Street on Wednesday demanding good jobs and protesting economic inequality, while a smaller group of demonstrators rallied at JPMorgan Chase’s skyscraper. The marches were part of a growing Occupy Wall Street movement, the month-long protests that have inspired solidarity rallies planned for Thursday at some 90 U.S. college campuses. Demonstrations have occurred in more than 1,400 cities around the world.

The movement began on Sept. 17, when protesters set up camp in a park near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, upset that the billions of dollars in bank bailouts doled out during the recession allowed banks to resume earning huge profits while average Americans have had no relief from high unemployment and job insecurity. Participants also complain the richest 1 percent of Americans do not pay their fair share of taxes…

Protesters appeared to be directing frustration at JP Morgan Chase’s high-profile chief executive, Jamie Dimon. About 500 protesters on Tuesday met on Manhattan’s upscale Upper East Side, marching past the homes of Dimon, hedge fund manager John Paulson, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, co-founder of energy firm Koch Industries…

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, mainstream media, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Warren way too honest for Obama’s inner circle

Posted on October 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

I hope she runs Scott Brown’s pickup truck off the road, I’ll root for her all the way, BUT… I won’t forget how Barack Obama turned his back on Elizabeth Warren for her loyalty, not to mention her effectiveness at fighting for the interests of the poor and middle-class:

As she crisscrossed the country, spreading the word about the [Consumer Finance Protection Bureau], Warren became a familiar face… She had gained millions of supporters… She had become like a modern-day Mr. Smith, giving voice to regular citizens astonished at the failure of Washington to protect Main Street – and what increasingly appeared to be its abandonment of middle-class America. By July, the AFL-CIO – speaking for its 12 million members – had called on Obama to name Warren to head the agency. So had scores of consumer groups. Eighty-nine Democrats in the House of Representatives had signed a letter, publicly urging him to choose Warren… By July 18, when Obama announced that he was passing Warren over, he did so after receiving petitions signed by several hundred thousand people and organizations urging him to appoint Warren as the country’s top consumer watchdog.

At the end of his remarks, Obama turned to Warren and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled gamely, though if there are kisses a woman can do without, this was one of them. A Judas kiss, some would say.

At the time of the betrayal, the Daily Kos crowd and other Obama-bots insisted that she didn’t really want the job, that the president had stood up for her, that it was her decision not to go through the arduous process of trying to get Congressional approval. Even Mother Jones suggested that Warren might be too much of a “lightning rod” for GOP opposition; that Richard Cordray, the person Obama picked for the position, would do a good job and would have a better shot at being confirmed.

This was all bullshit. It was Obama caving on a key commitment to the best person for the job and ignoring the wishes of the people who’d elected him. It was Wall Street demonstrating the extent of their influence over him. It was timid Democrats giving Obama his 99th benefit of the doubt.

I’m sure Warren will make a good senator, if such a thing is still possible. But she would have been much more directly effective and valuable as the country’s foremost official consumer advocate.

Too bad she’s not running for president, there would be someone to vote for.

Posted in CFPB, Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Nicos Gun, laughing at tornadoes

Posted on October 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test:

Coming up over the Blue Ridge Mountains, everybody was stoned on acid, Cassady included, and it was at that moment that he decided to make it down the steepest, awfulest windingest mountain highway in the history of the world without using brakes. The lurid bus started barreling down… [Ken] Kesey felt totally synched with Cassady… It was as if, if he were panicked, Cassady would be panicked, panic would rush through the bus like an energy. And yet he never felt panic… It was as if Cassady, at the wheel, was in a state of satori, as totally into this very moment, Now, as a being can get, and for that moment they all shared it.

My son Barney’s band mates in Nicos Gun were slowly pulling it together for a tour that will start in Gainesville, FL, then proceed north and end up back in Philly right before Halloween. Barney had dropped off the band’s new CD at my house and I’d just driven him home.

Bodies began to stir, on couches and on the floor of the band’s loft apartment in an old factory building in Kensington. There’s a main room, a kitchen and bath, and a few makeshift bedrooms on the apartment’s second level, which is really part of the first. You’d have to see it to believe it. The place is OK, they told me, except when the service elevator breaks down — about once a week — and they have to haul their equipment up six flights of stairs after a gig.

I tripped over amplifier cords and chatted with the band as they breakfasted on Cocoa Puffs and energy bars. Good guys, upbeat and scruffy, all muscle and bone. A few of them were drinking from little cans of Red Bull, which they get for free because somebody’s girlfriend works for a Red Bull distributor. “You want a Red Bull?” somebody asked me. “No thanks, it would kill me,” I said, meaning the caffeine.

Sunlight was streaming through a large window from which you could see the band’s RV on a lot across the street. Somebody was in the van, puttering — the band’s unofficial driver, the father of one of its members. The father can’t stand living at home because… well, I’d better skip that. I’ll call him Neil, after Neil Cassady in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, except that the band’s Neil isn’t a madman.

Barney told me Neil was there during the Midwest tour in the summer when they parked at a diner in Kansas and a tornado blew up. There was darkness and then hail that ricocheted off the RV like a million BBs. “Get down in case the windows blow,” Neil said, unperturbed. The big black whirling cloud cut a destructive path nearby, but the RV held steady.

Everyone laughed as Barney retold the story, even me, but I was trying not to think about the tornado. A few hours later I was at my computer, writing about something that involved a lot of action. I thought of Barney and the band, which was probably passing through Maryland by then. I remembered this was still hurricane season, but then I dismissed the thought — for a while.

I thought of some of the things I did at Barney’s age, 25, and wondered how I got from there to here, from risk-taking to worrying about the weather report. I can’t even tell you when the terrain began to change. All I know is that reaching middle age is good for your sense of irony, but not much else, not unless you continue to spend a healthy amount of time in the moment, now, though not necessarily as an RV driver for Nicos Gun.

Posted in arts, fiction, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Question for NYT: WHOSE economy is growing?

Posted on October 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

News stories often raise more questions than they answer. Such is the case with an article by Robert Pear, who seems to agree with Robert Reich that we’re in a “jobs depression,” then says something else:

In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found. Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession – from December 2007 to June 2009 – household income fell 3.2 percent. The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing.

First the gloomy income figures of a country in decline, then the assertion that “the economy has been growing.” How is Pear defining economic growth if the term doesn’t entail improved standards of living for the vast majority of citizens who aren’t wealthy? If, in fact, it can be compatible with declining standards of living?

Growth used to mean increased productivity, more products and markets, cheaper goods and service, increased demand for goods and services sparking job creation and good wages. Now there’s no demand. White-collar and blue-collar jobs continue to be outsourced, off-shored or eliminated. There’s been a 9.2 drop in income from the start of the recession to June 2011. Some of us can’t even afford to buy new shoes.

And yet the usual suspects continue to trumpet economic growth. Anyone who speaks like this is consciously or unconsciously equating growth with the soaring incomes of banksters, CEOs and other members of the owner class who are bleeding everyone else dry.

It’s time to talk about redefining terms such as growth, recession and depression, don’t you think, Robert Pear?

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Advice from butchers on healing the sick

Posted on October 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

Susan Madrack linked to this earlier today, but I’m bringing it back around because it’s so indicative of everything that’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party. And because it pisses me off in a big way:

In another public demonstration of concern about the struggling economy, President Obama will meet in Pittsburgh on Tuesday with the business and labor leaders he has chosen to counsel him on job creation. But many of the chief executives have cut American jobs and adopted tactics that weaken organized labor — even as their businesses post record profits. The executives are members of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which Obama created in January by appointing 26 leaders of companies including American Express, Comcast and Intel…

“They call it the jobs and competitiveness committee, but when they mean by competitiveness is massive concessions being imposed on working people,” said Chris Townsend, political action director of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which represents 3,500 General Electric workers. Townsend says General Electric has closed 31 U.S. locations and cut 22,000 jobs in the last four years. It has cut wages of nonunion workers and, in the most recent union contract, required employees to pay higher deductibles for health insurance and eradicated pensions for new employees. “We think it speaks of incredibly poor judgment on the part of the White House to select the members of the panel that they’ve selected and try to describe it somehow as a job creation panel,” he said.

It’s not poor judgment; it’s in-your-face cynicism. It’s Obama telling job seekers they’ll have to play ball with his corporatist pals and routinely accept jobs that pay less and involve fewer benefits than their parents enjoyed.

There’s nothing new about this dilemma. What’s new is that a Democratic president is overtly indicating he’s with the bosses, not with the workers. A real Democrat would be advocating for us directly, not sucking up to the people who are outsourcing and off-shoring our jobs for the sake of bigger executive bonuses.

No wonder so many people involved in Occupy Wall Street and similar protests refuse to even acknowledge party politics.

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

Romney is in a cult, but it’s not Mormonism

Posted on October 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

Don’t wonder if Mitt Romney wears magic Mormon underwear. Don’t fret that he’s a member of the Mormon Church — officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — started by Joseph Smith, a 19th-century con man who claimed he was visited by an angel named Moroni who directed him to a pair of golden plates engraved with ancient characters that Smith somehow translated into what became the Book of Mormon.

Don’t worry about Mormonism, it’s no crazier than any other religion. It has millions of followers. It’s not a cult.

Worry about the cult that Romney does belong to — the corporatocracy, the cult through which corporations dominate governments, “… even those governments nominally elected by the people…” It’s an updated version of the system Dwight Eisenhower warned against in 1961.

Romney is a corporatist of the first order, a vastly wealthy man who made his fortune through leveraged buyouts — “essentially, mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years.” Profits are made at the expense of the rank-and-file workers who typically lose their jobs and are robbed of their pensions after the company’s cash reserves are raided.

Here’s Romney on the campaign trail: “Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.” If he were honest, his sentence would have ended “… to the people who own the corporations.”

Romney is Gordon Gekko without the charisma. His cult is a relatively small group of executives, lobbyists, deregulating lawyers and corrupt politicians who devote their energies to bolstering and defending corporate monopolies and mergers that destroy the jobs and lives of ordinary people. Meanwhile, the favored companies become “too big to fail,” because their failure would mean the collapse of the entire economic system.

Romney is the scum of the earth, but his religion isn’t to blame. He is a cultist, but his cult isn’t Mormonism. He is a corporatist, and corporatists arguably are fascists, but we’re not going to see that argument discussed by the corporate media, are we?

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Do you know a gal, or guy, like Nicole?

Posted on October 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and ran across this masterful description of the great divide between rich and poor, in the 1920s and now:

… She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a traveling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes — bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance — but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors — these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze …

Not to be reductive, but I think the novel is partly about the the author’s struggle to appreciate beauty as something that exists above and beyond the trappings of wealth and power. Fitzgerald may not have successfully made this leap in his short life, but his best works are testaments to how well he succeeded in his art.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

These protesters are ‘angry at the right people’

Posted on October 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

Who would have thought a few weeks ago that hundreds of protestors from something called Occupy Philly would set up camp in Center City? The idea is almost as far-fetched as a tent city next to Wall Street.

But there they were at 9:30 Thursday night, with small groups of cops gathered near their campsite, on City Hall’s Dilworth Plaza. About a dozen tents had been pitched and many sleeping bags unrolled. Bicycles were locked up on the plaza, all along the railings that face 15th Street. Motorists sped by honking their horns to show support for the protesters, who cheered back at them.

Placards were stacked against the brick walls of the plaza. There was little light but people hung out, chatting in small groups. Those I spoke to expected the site to remain occupied for a long time, with individuals coming and going.

Stations were set up for the group’s various committees, for everything from first-aid to food. A young guy named Patrick DeWitt was chopping onions in the dark, on a folding table stacked with bowls full of sliced rolls, vegetables and donuts. He and others were glad to hear that a large supply of pizzas might be delivered around noon on Friday. (Call Erika Bell at 609-670-8545 about contributing food.)

The nearby Friends Center and Arch Street Methodist Church are helping. No major hassles regarding permits yet. No confrontations with cops or anyone else. Let’s see how long the honeymoon with the cops lasts.

It’s happening all over the country. Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Buffalo Springfield, got it right in his Friday column: “What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.”

Footnote: Jonathan Alter called Occupy Wall Street “a cross between a Hooverville and Woodstock – the middle-class jobless of the 1930s and the hippie protesters of the 1960s.” This is also a fairly apt description of the Philly site. There were many older people camped out at City Hall, some of them homeless. The big difference between the 1930s and now is that we don’t have an FDR or anyone remotely like him “occupying” the White House or campaigning to do so.

Posted in City Hall, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments