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

Obama offers new spiel, but no New Deal

Posted on September 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

I wasn’t surprised that Paul Krugman didn’t slam my good buddy Barack’s jobs plan, a mix of tax cuts and increased government spending that makes more sense than anything congressional Republicans will ever put together.

But I thought it excessively generous of Krugman to describe the plan as “bold,” given the fact that it’s long-overdue and just happens to coincide with the start of Obama’s re-election campaign.

Krugman stated that Obama’s $447 billion plan is bigger and better than what he expected. But then he noted that it’s much too small to do what is needed to restore the country to anything approaching economic health, even if Obama doesn’t encounter the GOP opposition he and other sane people are expecting.

One could argue that Krugman was right to put a positive if ambivalent spin on Obama’s jobs plan, if only to remind people that Republicans and the Federal Reserve are cynically opposed to all job creation plans, and because Obama’s plan “may finally have set the stage for a political debate about job creation.”

But this argument isn’t likely to impress those who are out of work or underemployed, and/or in danger of losing their homes. The economic tailspin continues, and politicians might finally “debate” whether to try to stop it… This is progress?

Truthdig published something before the jobs speech that seems just as accurate afterwards:

Time and again, Obama has shown that he will only tinker around the edges, relying on the same tired supply-side initiatives that will not work: more incentives to build business confidence, subsidies to reduce labor costs and to promote exports, and maybe even tax cuts to please Republicans. He told a Labor Day crowd in Detroit that he wants to match the more than 1 million construction workers with an infrastructure-related rebuilding program to improve the nation’s roads and bridges. That is an improvement over his efforts to date, but it falls far short of the 20-plus million jobs we need.

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

Pre-speech e-mail from my buddy Barack

Posted on September 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

I received an e-mail from the president late Thursday afternoon as he was preparing for last night’s important jobs speech. The chief addressed me as “David” and signed his message “Barack.” I was so moved by this personal gesture, I had to reply.

Obama to McKenna:

David —
I’m about to head to the Capitol to ask Congress to act on my plan to put Americans back to work. Before I do, I wanted to write you directly to remind you that the fight to create jobs — and provide the kind of economic security for middle-class families that’s been slipping away over the last decade — won’t begin or end with the speech I give tonight. What happens will be up to you. In the coming days and weeks, it will be up to you to pressure Congress to act — or hold them accountable if they do not. If you’re with me, let me know. And the campaign will make sure you are looped into our efforts to support this plan.

Talk to you soon,
Barack

McKenna to Obama:

Barack,
Thanks for keeping me “looped into” your efforts. I think you’re right, the fight won’t begin tonight. Don’t take this the wrong way, dude, but I don’t think there’s going to be a fight. You’ll pitch something big and bold-seeming, but the Super Committee (POW! BANG!!) will strip away the meat then gnaw the bones. And in truth it won’t be that bold to begin with, because you’ll start by meeting Republicans halfway on their plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Not to bust your bubble, old buddy, but the fight should have begun more than two years ago, when you had majorities in both houses and some cred with the people who voted for you. You blew that by turning your back on the poor and middle-class while you took care of the millionaires. A lot of people — not me, of course — think you only talk jobs when you’re campaigning.

I’d wish you good luck, but I know you don’t need it. Not when it comes to speechifying.

Talk to you soon,
D.

Follow-up:

Barack,
I found out registered Democrats all over the country got the same e-mail as me, but each with his or her own name in it! How’d you do that, dude? Anyway, just wondering how things went with Congress tonight. I’ll bet you gave ’em heck.
D.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, enviromentalism, globalization, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Harvard Business Review: ‘Was Marx right?’

Posted on September 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

You know the economy is on its last legs when a Harvard Business School publication reminds us that Karl Marx might have been on to something in his critiques of industrial-age capitalism.

In an article headlined “Was Marx right?” economist-consultant Umair Haque notes that “the truth might just be that the global economy is in historic, generational trouble, plagued by problems the orthodoxy didn’t expect, didn’t see coming, and doesn’t quite know what to do with.”

Haque isn’t a commie or even a socialist like Albert Einstein. He’s an idealistic capitalist who believes that “prosperity as we know it might be lazily circling the glowing inner rim of the burbling event horizon of a massive supergalactic black hole.”

One after another of Marx’s bugaboos are briefly discussed, with Haque conceding that prosperity is withering in the face of worker exploitation, worker alienation, stagnating rates of profit, commodity fetishism and other maladies, some insidious and others obvious. I like Haque’s take on Marx’s notion of false consciousness:

According to Marx, one of the most pernicious aspects of industrial age capitalism was that the proles wouldn’t even know they were being exploited — and might even celebrate the very factors behind their exploitation, in a kind of ideological Stockholm Syndrome that concealed and misrepresented the relations of power between classes. How’s Marx doing on this score? You tell me. I’ll merely point out: America’s largest private employer is Walmart. America’s second largest employer is McDonald’s.

The fact that Haque posted this where he did is a good indication of how bleak the big picture looks even to establishment insiders. I wonder if anyone showed the piece to Harvard Law School grad Barack Obama.

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