‘Liberal’ media, Wall Street thick as thieves

Posted on September 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

Will Bunch commented on its invisibility. So did Firedoglake. Keith Olbermann discussed it with Bunch on Countdown, and even Stephen Colbert noted its conspicuous absence from mainstream news reports.

I’m referring to the “occupation” of Wall Street (Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza, actually) by a small army of idealists hoping to persuade Americans that their most dangerous enemies aren’t in Afghanistan but rather in New York City, in the skyscrapers that house the banksters who wrecked the economy in 2008 and put a permanent dent in American living standards.

So why aren’t mainstream media outlets covering an event involving would-be reformers of the deregulated, and often unregulated, financial services industry? Bunch pretty much answered the question he raised:

… Many reporters are somewhat liberal in their personal leanings… And since professional journalists are often obsessed with proving their “balance” above all else, and weak-kneed on reacting to right-wing criticism dating back to Spiro Agnew, that means bending over backwards to show they’re not ignoring something conservative like the Tea Party… The other ultimate goal of the modern journalist is to appear “savvy.” And what could possibly be more embarrassingly unsavvy than taking seriously the ambitions of a band of granola-eating missed-the-60s dirty bleeping hippie wannabes – crazy enough to think that they can change the world.

So what would it take to compel reporters from, say, The New York Times to travel a few blocks to cover a new phase of the class war that’s been going on in America for thirty years?

It would take more than the embarrassment of seeming “unsavvy,” or of being scooped by the Guardian (as usual) and Russian TV.

It would take an influx of “occupiers” so large and defiant and organized that reporters could no longer ignore the angry mood of the country, not without seeming to engage in suppressing a story simply because it runs counter to the interests of their employers, the owners of the MSM.

Footnote: I should have noted, as I usually do when the subject comes up, that Paul Krugman, Gretchen Morgenson and a few other staffers at NYT are aggressively critical in their coverage of Wall Street’s con men. But these people are commentators and analysts, not reporters.

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

Adios, summer girl. Or is it ‘sun-eyed’ girl?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

Summer’s gone and good riddance, I’d rather any weather than a heat wave in Philly. But I still like the idea of summer, which I associate with old memories of hitchhiking, seashore towns, and chasing girls who enjoyed being caught.

Beck Hansen associates summer with… who knows? No one else making pop music since the early 1990s is more enigmatic. The scrawny space cowboy has cranked out scores of carefully crafted songs wrapped in swirls of sound that dazzle and amuse. He’s had it both ways — commercial success and the freedom to intermittently record albums so quirky and downbeat, he pisses off even ardent fans (shades of Dylan and Neil Young.)

Beck borrows from hiphop, Delta blues, bossa nova, electronica, whatever comes to mind as he writes and records. His postmodernist tricks are to disguise that he’s a throwback — a gifted songwriter and multi-instrumentalist always looking to improve on his existing work.

“Girl,” from Guero (2005), is a sunny melody with lyrics that grow darker the closer you listen. The boy pursuing the girl — … And I know I’m gonna steal her eye she doesn’t even know what’s wrong… — is probably a stalker, or worse.

Beck’s little joke is that he’s not singing “My summer girl” on the chorus. “Sun-eyed,” maybe. It sounds like “summer” (to me, at least) because that’s the word his melody has set me up to expect.

Footnote: I love the surprise of Beck’s acoustic slide guitar jumping up front for the interlude before the final chorus. It sounds like a tangle of conflicted urges.

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

Belated populist rhetoric from the big chief

Posted on September 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s rude and obvious, so I’ll say it: If Barack Obama had stood up to Republicans early on instead of being cowed by their enmity and wowed by his own rhetoric, he’d have a much better chance of being re-elected. More importantly, our sick economy might be on the verge of modest recovery rather than major relapse.

Instead, for reasons that remain murky, Obama’s strategy for fixing the economy was one of pre-compromise that sank his initiatives even before he launched them. Now, abruptly, a big change:

During his remarks this morning, Obama directly responded to Republicans accusing him of “class warfare,” but rather than simply deny the charge, he made the critical point that the act of protecting tax cuts for the rich is itself class warfare, in effect positioning himself as the defender of the middle class against GOP class warriors on behalf of the wealthy.

Well, duh… Did it really take the man more than two years to understand Republicans were using the class warfare charge to pre-empt attempts to re-install tax rates on the rich that were in effect in the 1990s? I doubt it. More likely, Obama has finally understood he’ll be turned out in 2012 if he doesn’t confront the grim reality that class war is in progress and the non-wealthy are losing badly.

I wish I could believe he has had a change of heart rather than a political panic attack. But then I think of his pathetic job performance leading up to the disastrous midterm elections last year, when he more-or-less disowned basic Democratic principles, and Democratic candidates, signaling Neville Chamberlain-style weakness when he should have been coming on like FDR in support of the jobless and underpaid and in opposition to Bush’s tax cuts.

A shrewder cynic would have at least paid lip service from the start to the idea that he cared about the non-wealthy.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

When serfs fight back, GOP cries ‘Class warfare!’

Posted on September 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

This week’s winner of the chutzpah award is libertarian con man Paul Ryan, for accusing the Democratic Party of “class warfare.” Ryan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the Benzedrine-addled academic who wrote two door-stopper novels that celebrated “the morality of rational self-interest,” a concept Republicans use to justify cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, slashing aid to the poor, and privatizing everything from mail service to Medicare.

From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Republicans on Sunday decried the notion of a new minimum tax rate for millionaires as “class warfare,” saying the proposal by President Obama may be intended to portray congressional Republicans who resist it as being callously indifferent to the hardships facing many Americans… Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said the tax proposal, which Obama is expected to roll out Monday, would also weigh heavily on a stagnating economy… “It adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation,” Ryan told Fox News Sunday. “Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

Ryan said a few years back that Rand was the main reason he got involved in “public service.” This would be amusing if he wasn’t in a position to potentially impose Rand’s ideology on the rest of us. “Instability” doesn’t exist in Rand’s universe, where there are two primary classes — a small group of gifted, courageous entrepreneurs and a horde of compliant serfs. Creating jobs for others wasn’t a priority for Rand and isn’t for Ryan, not unless the jobs pay badly enough to further enrich the ruling class.

I wonder how many of Ryan’s fans have actually read the artless, humorless trash that made Rand a hero to mean-spirited right-wing academics and politicians.

Regarding class warfare: In the modern American era, it’s been going on at least since August 5, 1981, when, as Michael Moore recently wrote, “Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who’d defied his order to return to work.” Reagan felt safe doing this because the AFL-CIO told its members who worked for airlines to cross the air controllers’ picket line, a death blow to their strike.

That moment of cowardice and disunity helped embolden the Ryans and Reagans of the world to wage a relentless ongoing campaign to crush organized labor and workers’ rights. They’ve almost succeeded. It’s now or never for a serious counteroffensive.

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

Are e-books tomorrow, or just the end of time?

Posted on September 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

Check out this from The Economist in case you’re still wondering about the future of mass-produced paper books:

To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books…

Is this necessarily a bad-news story, or is it just that fogies like me are too quick to equate the physical presence of books — in ceiling-high shelving units, in stacks on the floor — with literature and even literacy?

The latter, probably. Looking at a wall full of books comforts me. I like the smell of books and enjoy rubbing the pages between my thumb and forefinger before turning them.

I can’t pretend reading paper books is more elucidating than reading e-books. Nor can I argue with those who say it’s more convenient and eco-friendly to store a library of books on your Kindle than crowd your home with hard copies.

On the other hand, it’s likely the brave new world of digitization will undermine the book business, just as it has undermined what used to be called the record business, if only because it’s so much easier to steal and rapidly “share” digital files than hard copy. (Take “Purple Haze,” for example.)

Also, it’s too soon to know what digitization is doing to artists and audiences. Will consumers place as much value on instantly accessible digital content as on works that were packaged and displayed in public, in stores? Are future artists as likely to strive for innovation or even distinctiveness now that works from all eras are being randomly clumped together and accessed via digital gadgets?

William Gibson, an aging writer but not a fogie, thinks artists and audiences will do just fine. He rejects the very use of words like innovation and future, and argues that kids today think in terms of “a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.”

Gibson and his fellow novelist Bruce Sterling have noted that the present turned out to be very different (grimmer) than many people thought it would be, so much so that it is foolish to think in terms of “a grand historical schema.”

Maybe so, but my endless digital Now isn’t likely to include e-books, even if I could afford a Kindle. And I can definitely live without a BILLY bookcase, just as easily as I live without IKEA’s other crap.

Posted in arts, enviromentalism, humor, mainstream media, movies, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Banking on degenerate gamblers

Posted on September 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

Confirmation that a “rogue” trader somehow lost $2 billion making “unauthorized” trades at UBS “will test the faith of investors, clients and regulators,” says Wall Street Journal. It should also test the credulity of anyone who would still argue that traders and investment bankers are fundamentally different from degenerate blackjack players with a lot of money to lose.

Matt Taibbi gets to the heart of the matter:

… The reality is, the brains of investment bankers by nature are not wired for “client-based” thinking. This is the reason why the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks and commercial banks separate, was originally passed back in 1933: it just defies common sense to have professional gamblers in charge of stewarding commercial bank accounts.

Glass-Steagall was scuttled in 1998 with the help of corrupt hustlers in high places, including Phil Gramm, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and yes, Bill Clinton, who probably bears as much responsibility for our current financial mess as any Republican hustler you can name. As Taibbi notes:

… We now have a situation where trillions in federally-insured commercial bank deposits have been wedded at the end of a shotgun to… career investment bankers from places like Salomon Brothers (now part of Citi), Merrill Lynch (Bank of America), Bear Stearns (Chase), and so on. These marriages have been a disaster. The influx of i-banking types into the once-boring worlds of commercial bank accounts, home mortgages, and consumer credit has helped turn every part of the financial universe into a casino.

Here’s the sad truth about the casino analogy: Casino degenerates can gamble away their own money, or their families’. The degenerates at the investment banking arms of commercial banks can gamble away your money, and that of thousands of other people.

Posted in casinos, Congress, economic collapse, finance reform bill, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Great Recession, Politics, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Today’s Republicans would NOT like Ike

Posted on September 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s a fresh perspective on the nest of vipers officially known as the Republican Party. The writer, Mike Lofgren, a former Republican Congressional staffer, argues that Republicans really are trying to bring down the federal government, and might succeed because of Democratic weakness, “tens of millions of low-information voters,” and the “complicit” mainstream media:

I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages…

… It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant…

Lofgren mocks the “false evenhandedness” of reporters with first-hand knowledge of the Republicans’ cynical agenda. He rips current Dems for speaking the language of Republicans. (Too bad he didn’t write more on how Dems undermine their own credibility by appearing to compromise on Social Security and other key programs.)

He provides a context for the gullibility of Tea Party types — “the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class” — and for their distrust of Democratic politicians, “who were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad.”

Most importantly, he spells out and sheds light on a truism that “low-information” voters remain blind to:

The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy.

Footnote: Lofgren got my instant attention by summing up the sorry state of our two-party system with dialogue from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — very funny, and right on the money.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Depression, Great Recession, health care, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Obama’s ‘odd strategy’ for pushing jobs bill

Posted on September 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Poor Robert Reich. Every time I look at the photo of him that runs with his column he seems to look more bemused, or even dumbfounded, and I can’t help thinking it’s because President Obama is slowly driving him crazy.

For two years he has nudged Obama to make the right policy decisions. He has asked pointed questions that seem directed at Obama’s famous reasonableness. Sometimes he seems on the verge of hectoring the big chief, but then he stops short and just says Obama’s decisions seem sort of… odd:

On Monday the President will offer ways to pay for his $467 billion American Jobs Act mostly by increasing taxes on the wealthy. I’m all in favor, but it’s an odd strategy. If any Republican was prepared to vote for the jobs bill, this will send him or her scurrying. So if the President was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place – if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch – why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?

Here’s another odd thing.

The deficit-reduction plan the President will present Monday to Congress’s special supercommittee on the debt (now struggling to come up with $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction) will also propose some $2 to $3 trillion in additional deficit reduction over the next ten years – including changes in Medicare. According to the President’s plan, those tax increases and spending cuts would go into effect in 2013. But there’s a strong likelihood the American economy will still be anemic in 2013, if not on life support… When unemployment is still in the stratosphere, it would be insane to start cutting the deficit by $3 trillion to $4 trillion. That would push unemployment into outer space.

Reich never seems to be saying that Obama is corrupt, or too weak to stick to his guns, but rather that he is profoundly obtuse when it comes to tackling what seems obvious to most people who aren’t right-wing nut jobs — i.e., that “Our national crisis is joblessness and low wages, not the deficit.”

At this point I wish Reich would speculate on why Obama can’t address or even acknowledge what’s really ailing the economy. Is it because an inner circle of wrong-headed advisers keeps steering the president off-track, or because Obama is too stubbornly off-track to listen to anyone who offers good advice?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, taxes, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Ten years after, we’re still in a dark age

Posted on September 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

The shame of it is that Osama bin Laden was counting on America to react in a disastrously foolish way to the 9/11 attacks, and no one in government was clever or cool-headed enough to disappoint him. In fact, the Bush administration thought it was a good idea — good for business, that is — to stoke fear and loathing to the point where most citizens would applaud our entry into two unfunded but enormously expensive wars.

Here’s Chris Hedges on the aftermath of the event that arguably started America’s downward spiral:

Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil…

What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost… We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Iraq war, mainstream media, Politics, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Bush speaks on 9/10, supersizes lies

Posted on September 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

Yesterday on the Atlantic City Expressway, at the sprawling Frank S. Farley rest stop, I remembered how quickly 9/11 became a device for generating hatred while at the same time lulling Americans into swallowing lies about costly, undeclared wars.

All around me was fast food and the poor people who eat it or serve it. In the middle of the floor was George W. Bush, on a large flat-screen TV, praising American troops who

… have risked and given their lives to prevent our enemies from attacking America again. They’ve kept us safe, they have made us proud, and they have upheld the spirit of service shown by the passengers on Flight 93 …

Lulling is the right word. Many people have yet to realize Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to wage war, not long after he’d led the successful charge to lower the taxes of the super-wealthy, or that these actions are the main reasons we’re mired in a seemingly incurable economic slump.

Or that the death toll from the 9/11 attacks is small compared to that of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Or that Bush’s reasons for starting those wars had nothing to do with preventing attacks on America.

Or that patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s also an effective defense strategy for elected officials who broke the law in order to further enrich their rich friends and patrons. It’s a stick that can be used to beat those who suggest the scoundrels are also criminals.

No American court will ever try Bush or Dick Cheney or the others, partly because the scoundrel’s rule of thumb is the same as the fast-food marketer’s: Don’t just lie — lie big. Sell them Coke by the half-gallon and call it medium-size. Ignore the measly burger and push the Whopper. Would you like a rancid hunk of cheese with that, sir?

Now that’s a tasty burger!

Footnote: The Bush team’s strategy for selling their wars to the public could have been lifted from Joseph Goebbels, who wrote:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, food, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment