Support our couch-potato patriots

Posted on August 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

Jackass proclaimed hero. Mission accomplished.

What’s with The New York Times? Week after week this summer, its editors have been running thoughtful essays on the Sunday Review section’s front page. Maybe they’ve decided to move away from predictable analysis pieces by staffers to guest writers who are used to thinking independently.

This week’s essay is about an annoying symptom of America’s decline — i.e., the tendency of far too many people to “infantilize” themselves through mindless worship of the military and belief in American exceptionalism. Think of George W. Bush strutting in his flight suit under the “Mission Accomplished” banner:

It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them… The cult of the uniform also bespeaks a wounded empire’s need to reassert its masculinity in the wake of 9/11. “Dead or alive,” “bring it on,” “either you’re with us or you’re against us”: the tenor of official rhetoric in the ensuing years embodied a kind of desperate machismo…

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators.

Posted in humor, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Obama bans war criminals. Very funny.

Posted on August 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s good to see something by Nat Hentoff, who wrote for Village Voice when it was worth reading and is still fighting the good fight against people in powerful positions who break the law. The subject matter of Hentoff’s recent article should surprise no one:

By executive order on Aug. 4, President Barack Obama refused entry to the United States of war criminals and human-rights violators (jurist.org, Aug. 4). He ignored, as he often does, the deeply documented factual evidence of war crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney administration along with grim proof that the Obama administration also violates our anti-torture laws and the U.N. Convention Against Torture we signed. Take, for example, right now under Obama, “The CIA Secret Sites in Somalia” (the nation.com, July 12).

In what will be an historic 108-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” Human Rights Watch is further accelerating the rising insistence here on accountability from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet for having not only authorized these war crimes, but also failing “to act to stop mistreatment, or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses” (www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0711webwcover.pdf).

Not only has President Obama rejected an independent criminal investigation of these highest-profile officials, but also, adds Human Rights Watch, of Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, David Addington (counsel to Cheney) and, among others, John Yoo, author of the unsparingly cruel, aptly dubbed “torture memos” from the Ashcroft Justice Department that gave “legal cover” to allow torture.

Hentoff’s piece reminds us of the difference between “disappointing” and “disastrous.” Some people look at Barack Obama’s record — his collapse on the debt ceiling issue, betrayal of organized labor, expansion of the war in Afghanistan, extension of the Bush tax cuts, refusal to push for jobs programs, failure to push for prosecution of Wall Street crooks and possible war criminals, and so on — and say his presidency has been disappointing.

Others look at Obama’s record thus far and say it is disastrous. I don’t think historians will have a hard time making the right call on this one.

Posted in Congress, enviromentalism, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Some ‘Rain’ to keep us sane in Philly

Posted on August 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

At last the rain god intervened to clean the stinking streets — am I paraphrasing Travis Bickle? — after the hottest July on record in Philly. And now there’s a chance this will be the city’s wettest August on record.

Some people don’t like the rain, as the Beatles noted on the flip side of “Paperback Writer”:

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead.

Not me. I’ll take the rain over the heat and feel fortunate not to be in Texas, where a record drought continues despite climate-change denier Rick Perry’s much-publicized rain dance in April. I’m sure Perry is devoting much deep thought to this matter.

The Philly heat wave broke with a flourish last Sunday, when a morning drizzle turned into a downpour that rarely let up until evening. I took a break from writing and went for a run in the afternoon after I dug through the rubble in my basement and found an old bill cap to keep the rain off my glasses.

Running to the Delaware River and back from the Italian Market is my version of going to church on Sunday. It’s much better for body and soul, especially when the temperature dips below 90 degrees and you feel cool rain streaming down your back instead of sweat.

After my run I ducked into a coffee shop (not vegan) and dripped water all over the floor as I ordered. The counter guy looked at me funny, as most people do these days, and said, “Where did you get that cap?”

I took it off and looked at the lettering on the front: Super Bowl XXIII. I realized the cap must be from the ton of stuff left by my son Barney when he moved out of my house years ago. Where Barney got the cap is anybody’s guess, although I’m sure it wasn’t at Super Bowl XXIII, he was three years old at the time.

“At the Super Bowl, of course,” I said. “What’s the matter, it doesn’t look so good?”

As if it mattered. If I worried about looking good, I wouldn’t run in the rain.

Posted in arts, humor, livable cities, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

You can’t tell the cops (SEC) from the robbers

Posted on August 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

As you probably know, e-mailed information often ends up in databases that can be used against us by government agents, corporate spies or even acquaintances out to avenge real or imagined injuries. (I spent two years unsuccessfully trying to salvage online materials that were stolen or destroyed by a malicious hacker who’d pretended to be something else.)

And it’s just as easy for online criminals to destroy evidence of their crimes as it is for them to harass and steal from non-criminals. This is a point Matt Taibbi underscores in his most recent piece on Wall Street corruption, a story the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell:

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

A jobs-led recovery — what a concept!

Posted on August 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

A report written by Rutgers law and economics professor Philip Harvey pushes for a jobs-led recovery in place of the jobless recovery over which Barack Obama has chosen to preside up to now.

Harvey’s plan involves quick creation of a million jobs in fields such as “childcare, eldercare, education, public health and housing, construction and maintenance, recreation and the arts. And as many as 414,000 jobs created outside the program. Annual cost in program spending: $46.4 billion. Actual net cost, taking into account revenues and savings: only $28.6 billion.”

Go here for more info on the report. Meanwhile, here’s a killer detail from Harvey that helps explain why some of us think Obama has been the worst Democratic president in recent history:

…We currently need about 8.2 million more jobs to reduce the nation’s unemployment rate to 4.5%. Creating that many jobs in a program like the one described… would require a net increase in federal spending of about $235 billion during the first year… If the Bush-era tax cuts had been allowed to expire at the end of 2010, the federal government would have collected about $295 billion in additional revenue during 2011. This would have been more than enough to cover the cost of the job program…

Footnote: Robert Reich is hoping Obama’s recent call for jobs creation is serious, but no one knows how many jobs Obama has in mind or how hard he’ll fight for them. If past performance is an indication he’ll throw in the towel early, probably with the idea of saving the jobs issue for his re-election campaign.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, livable cities, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Cost of Bush’s wars? At least $12K per American

Posted on August 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

The U.S. in Afghanistan is looking a lot like the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. The cost of the war there and in Iraq, our other quagmire, is one of the two main causes of our record deficit, the other being lowered tax rates on the filthy-rich ultra-wealthy.

From McClatchy Newspapers:

… Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department… Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American… According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan …

Call your Congressperson and tell him/her you want your $12,000 back and you don’t care if he/she has to go straight to Dick Cheney’s door and threaten to shake the loot out of him and his Halliburton buddies. Even better if we could get the money back and have Cheney and Dubya extradited to one of those countries eager to try them for war crimes.

Any day now, right?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, Iraq war, Politics, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

More songs about buildings and bikes

Posted on August 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was watching a sunburned woman with red hair in a thick braid. In the corner of my eye, a bike rider zoomed past and disappeared behind a bus. I stepped into the street for another look, but the rider was a block away by then and I couldn’t see much of the bike.

It occurred to me that I’m still edgy — Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire — three weeks after my Iron Horse was snatched and I set out to replace it.

I wasn’t what you might call laid back before the theft, but at least I didn’t look at bikes as if they were obscure objects of desire, stirring up feelings that have little to do with practical needs.

Replacing a good bike is like trying to replace a so-called soul mate, except it usually becomes clear afterwards that the latter was merely a warped projection of one’s self-image, an illusion, while the former seems even more real and reliable once it’s gone. Soul mates often end up trying to kill you in one way or another, but the worst you need fear from a good bike is an occasional flat tire.

Which might be why I’ve been watching bikes more closely than I watch girls, pardon my politically incorrect usage. Sometimes a gaggle of bikes will be chained together at the same pole and I’ll stop to make sure my old used-to-be isn’t among them waiting to be rescued, and so what if I have to “retire” the thief, Rick Deckard-style?

The used bikes I see for sale at local stores are either battered and tired looking, or square and insubstantial, like certain suburban women in my distant past. Sometimes I’ll walk past one of the few public buildings in Philly where bike racks have been installed, and I’ll stare at a row of two-wheelers, amazed that bikes hardly ever resemble one another and never look remotely like my ex.

The guy who owns the shabby shop where I bought my Iron Horse has promised for weeks he’ll get used, affordable hybrids in stock, but I stopped by again yesterday and all his used bikes were clunkers. He had two brand-new hybrids, each priced at $400, not including taxes and a good $50-plus lock, and I thought of saying something rude but at that moment an ancient new wave song came on the radio and filled my head with ironic art school vibes:

A straight line exists between me and the good things.
I have found the line and its direction is known to me.
Absolute trust keeps me going in the right direction.
Any intrusion is met with a heart full of the good thing.

“The Good Thing” is right around the corner, I’m sure. Maybe it’s that elusive new bike.

Posted in arts, enviromentalism, Great Recession, humor, livable cities, Philadelphia, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Low wages = no recovery. Suck on that, Perry.

Posted on August 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

He walks tall, he talks tall, he sucks a mean corn dog in Iowa but, as Paul Krugman notes, Rick Perry is merely another well-groomed Republican liar when he promises to speed the country’s economic recovery:

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act. So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

Perry governs an anti-union state with the highest percentage of minimum-wage jobs, a magnet for corporations systematically lowering the standard of living for average Americans. As Krugman observes, Perry’s slash-and-burn approach to jobs creation — low wages and weak regulatory policies — are a recipe for an even more depressed economy in the future:

… At a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

Does Perry get it? Of course he does. He’s George W. Bush on steroids, with the same low cunning and an uglier disposition. He’s convinced Americans are too gullible to understand that bringing down wages does nothing but enrich the people who own, invest in, or spin lies for corporations. And he will fire guns, hold prayer vigils and suck anything you put in front of him rather than tell this truth.

Footnote: The God-fearing gun toter is a hypocrite as well as a liar, as pointed out recently by Juan Cole:

[Perry] is another one of those dreary Red State governors who denounces federal taxes but is first in line for federal help. In fact, he covered a $6 billion shortfall in the Texas budget with $6 billion in stimulus money from Barack Obama, and now boasts of his governing skills with regard to the economy.

Posted in economic collapse, enviromentalism, God Squad, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Philly’s tax mess — no wonder we’re going broke

Posted on August 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

I write from Philadelphia, one of the most stupidly governed major cities in the nation. If you doubt that, take a look at the Inquirer story about our delinquent-property-tax-collection system.

For years our various mayors and City Council members have seemed at a loss to find ways to pay for infrastructure upkeep, social services for the poor, a failing public schools system and so on.

And yet the Inquirer has to remind those in charge that they have yet to seriously go after $472 million in unpaid real estate taxes:

It is a delinquency epidemic that reaches from Chestnut Hill to Point Breeze, infecting every neighborhood. In all, there are nearly 111,000 delinquent properties, or about 19 percent of all parcels in Philadelphia… The past-due properties include such pricey parcels as the proposed Foxwoods casino site, an Old City art gallery, a South Philadelphia hotel, and choice real estate a block off Rittenhouse Square… But it is in low-income neighborhoods where the delinquency crisis has peaked and where the city’s response has been the least effective… In communities such as North Philadelphia, Fairhill, and Tioga/Nicetown, the city has done little as tens of thousands of tax-delinquent properties – many of them abandoned lots and vacant shells – have rotted away, blighting neighborhoods and making redevelopment all that much harder.

The same corrupt gang that connived to allow construction of the SugarHouse casino on the riverfront — in order to generate revenues, they said — did next to nothing to collect tons of delinquent tax dollars or seize abandoned parcels that could have been converted into revenue-generating housing.

Curiously, the king of deadbeats has casino connections:

According to city records, the largest delinquent, owing $6.1 million in principal, penalties, and interest on five unpaid years including 2011, is Roman Philadelphia Property L.L.C. at 1499 S. Columbus Blvd., site of the potential Foxwoods casino.

The punchline — Instead of chasing down wealthy deadbeats, the Nutter administration continues to impose higher property taxes on poor and middle-class residents who keep up with their bills.

Footnote: Civilized people understand that special provisions should be made to keep low-income residents in their homes, regardless of whether they can keep up with property taxes. However, the city hasn’t even made a serious effort to persuade poor homeowners to enroll in hardship programs!

Did I mention that the people who govern Philly are stupid or corrupt, and often both?

Posted in casinos, City Hall, economic collapse, enviromentalism, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

A ‘post-idea’ world? I don’t know what to make of that.

Posted on August 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

Read Neal Gabler’s essay in the Sunday New York Times before you jump on Facebook to tell friends what your cat had for dinner and how much you hate Mondays:

… If information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to…. The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day.

Gabler, like curmudgeonly essayists before him, reminds readers that instant-information gadgets, rather than help generate discussion of new ideas, encourage us to jump into the steady stream of “informational effluvium” that “crowds out” provocative subjects and serious debate:

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

Hmm. So we live in an era that is not so much “post-Enlightenment” as “post-idea.” I’d like to think more about this, but I have to go on Facebook now. I promised to “like” somebody’s flash fiction.

Posted in humor, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments