Bikeless in Philadelphia — again

Posted on July 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

The frame looks like this, but all scratched up

I rarely blog about myself. I prefer the veneer of fiction when it comes to personal matters, so when my bicycle was stolen Monday, I blogged about the thieves in business and government who prosper at the expense of the poor and near-poor. The usual stuff.

But I’m still angry about losing my bike. I’ll probably never meet the Koch brothers or Gov. Tom Corbett and the other creeps who rob us from afar, so I’m content to simply bitch about them. And yet it seems somehow unfair to me that a street thief should remain as unaccountable and inaccessible to me as his white-collar brethren. It’s as if I’ve unwittingly bought into the societal double standard that the Goldman Sachs crooks rely on to stay out of prison.

As Celine wrote:

Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

I’m still on the lookout. The theft took place outside a shop on Eighth Street where I’d stopped for a coffee to go. There was no place to lock up the bike (Iron Horse, black, hybrid, 26-inch wheels), and it was gone so fast, it was like magic. I didn’t even see the thief.

I reported the theft to police then drove around South Philly in my car for a few hours, not sure what I wanted more, to get back my bike or get my hands on the guy who stole it.

I tried to think things through. If I saw someone on the bike and ran him over, then I’d ruin my bike and probably go to jail. But if I stopped the car and shouted “Hey chump, that’s my bike,” he’d keep peddling and disappear before I could catch him on foot. If I saw him and called the cops — well, most of you probably know how much good that does, so I’ll spare you a rant about our lazy men and women in blue.

It seemed best to cut directly in front of the thief, to make him stop riding, then jump out of my car and nail him. But I didn’t see my bike on the road, so my prowling was a waste of time, as were my visits to various bike shops and pawn shops. Street thieves can be pretty stupid, but usually not stupid enough to try to sell a bike to a store anywhere near the crime scene.

I saw bikes locked to poles all over South Philly and slowed my car for a close look many times, much to the annoyance of drivers behind me. I found that, if you really look hard for a stolen bike, you can drive yourself crazy thinking you see it then realizing you don’t.

I’ve checked craigslist to see if my stolen bike is for sale. I’ve searched again in my car — I normally use the car only for certain long-distance trips or to transport heavy stuff — but I suspect the thief probably has painted it a different color by now, put different handlebars on it, and so on, an infuriating thought.

A friend told me to “let it go” and move on, to accept the theft as part of the downside of life in the city. After all, if you ride more than 300 days a year in a town run by people too dull and backward to even install bike racks on a large scale, then your bike will eventually be stolen. In fact, I’ve lost several bikes to theft in the past decade, one of them right out of my house.

But moving on is easier said than done. Off-road bikes are too low to the ground and slow, skinny-wheeled racers get too many flats, and a used hybrid that looks shabby (so as not to catch the eye of most thieves) but rides great is extremely hard to find, and usually costs more than I can afford.

I’ll put the theft in perspective soon. Meanwhile, I’ll also continue to console myself — my apologies to hippies who read this — with the thought of what I’ll do to that thieving prick if I catch up with him.

Posted in bicycling, economic collapse, fiction, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, livable cities, Philadelphia, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Media’s ‘cult of balance’ drags it to the right

Posted on July 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

Interesting blog yesterday by Paul Krugman, edgier than most of his op-ed columns, sparked by his gloomy conclusion that “the cult of balance, of centrism” is hurting the country more than the cult of right-wing loonies pushing for default on the national debt:

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president…

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

I suspect Krugman, in denouncing faux centrism, was thinking of his colleague Thomas Friedman, a jack-ass of the first order whose latest pipe dream involves a Washington, D.C. “political start-up” called Americans Elect that wants to hold an “internet convention” to select a centrist third-party presidential candidate for 2012.

And how would this third-party force obtain the multimillions of dollars needed to develop an infrastructure that would get out the vote? Friedman doesn’t address this and many other questions, just as he never addressed the devastating downside of globalization in The World Is Flat, his wet dream about our glorious future in a world run by multinational corporations.

Posted in Congress, globalization, mainstream media, New York Times op-ed, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Groveler-in-chief can’t cut deal on debt

Posted on July 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Last night I listened to Barack Obama beg right-wing fanatics to accept his proposed solution to the debt ceiling standoff. He may as well have said, “Come on guys, I’m giving away the store plus all the land around the store.”

If Obama were a leader, he’d be fighting to create jobs programs, not proposing to make life more difficult for the poor in return for Republican cooperation on the debt ceiling, which has been raised dozens of times under previous administrations. I thought of how far the Democratic Party has strayed from the simple principle spelled out by Franklin Roosevelt:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Obama’s speech was almost as noxious as the response to it from the double-talking hack John Boehner. Obama said Americans “are fed up with a town where compromise has become a dirty word.” Not true. What Americans are fed up with is a president who can’t tell, or pretends he can’t tell, the difference between compromise and surrender.

At some point last night Obama apparently got behind Harry Reid’s alternative plan for raising the debt ceiling. However, his spin doctors didn’t mention the Reid plan contains no provisions for raising revenue and is, in some respects, as much a cave-in as what Obama proposed prior to it.

Obama likes Reid’s plan because it would get him through the 2012 election without another fight over debt, and would delay but not prevent the cuts to the Big Three — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — that Obama was ready to make before Reid stepped in. Congressional Dems like the Reid plan because it would allow them to say they didn’t break their promise of no cuts to the Big Three. But this is a dodge — sooner or later they must choose between policies that generate more revenue or cutting back on the bedrock programs of the Democratic Party.

All in all, more proof that politicians who belong to a party headed by a jellyfish are unlikely to get their backs up in defense of the people they were elected to serve. They’d rather swim away from controversy until a leader with more spine comes along.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Depression, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

WP newsflash: Obama is no FDR!

Posted on July 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s a tradition, I guess. The Washington Post reported the Watergate break-in and now, 39 years later, it is still dropping investigative bombshells:

Since the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — which Obama and his advisers seem to have believed, incorrectly, would offer a self-perpetuating boost to the economy — Obama has experimented neither boldly nor persistently with programs on the scale of FDR’s initiatives.

Instead, he threw the stimulus money at the states to do with what they wanted. He has given in to prolonging the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy and is now considering more belt-tightening that would weaken entitlements. And he’s watched as the number of government jobs has shrunk by the thousands. In the budget negotiations, the president has signaled that he would sign off on cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

But we should have known all along. Unlike FDR, who vowed radical measures to fix the depressed economy during his presidential campaign, Obama offered vague bipartisan pledges. In his inaugural address, FDR asserted: “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” Obama echoed nothing of the kind.

Yes, I kid the Post, but it really is a shame that its news “analyst” spent so much time and space stating facts that have been obvious — even the tardy analyst says so! — for more than two years to anyone who isn’t in total denial about Obama’s disastrously feeble style of governance.

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

Media to America: What unemployment crisis?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

Soup line during the Great Depression


On and on goes media coverage of the debt ceiling standoff, a shocking spectacle of Democratic weakness and Republican greed. What’s not being covered in the ongoing misery of the millions of Americans who lost jobs and/or homes and see no signs that the White House and Congress intend to do anything in the way of jobs creation.

An exception: George Packer recently shed light on the situation by combining a description of one poor family’s plight with a report on the posturing of the blowhards we elected to help mend the economy. Then he tried to put the rot of our political system in perspective:

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two. On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Packer’s reading of Weber is superficial, and his use of the word “sane” is dubious — where is the sanity in Obama’s style of governance? — but he makes it clear the the jobs picture won’t brighten until we stop electing people to high office who are weak and/or corrupt.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Depression, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

God taps Rick Perry for prez…

Posted on July 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

… but what about the other Christian worthies?

… Lest you think the Lone Star State has the only direct line to the divine, note that, in this presidential cycle, both Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain have said they are running at God’s behest. So, for that matter, has Paul Sims, an ex-firefighter and self-proclaimed “George Washington of today” from Rolla, Missouri, who shared his plans via a YouTube video posted in March. In a less conventional move, Mike Huckabee explained that his decision not to run for president was based on God’s guidance.

All of which means the governor with the cowboy boots and the permanent wave might encounter a bumpy road should he decide to go with God. As the Good Book (almost) says, “Many are called, but only one is chosen for the nomination.”

Posted in God Squad, Great Recession, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Record heat is a hoax, Limbaugh says

Posted on July 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

Get out of the way, I'm next

My house was so hot this morning, I didn’t even have to kill any ants. They usually run across the drainboard when I try to make breakfast, but today they must have loaded up on sugar and bagel crumbs and retired to their ultra-cool ant lounge in the basement.

Or maybe it’s not as hot as it seems. On Friday the eminent climate scientist Rush Limbaugh weighed in on what looks to him like a government conspiracy to convince us climate change is for real:

They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge, Drudge getting sucked in here. Gonna be a 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s going to be a 100, maybe 99. The heat index, manufactured by the government, they tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there. 116 – When’s the last time the heat index was reported as an actual temperature? It hasn’t been. But it looks like they’re trying to get away with doing that now…

Forget for a minute that Limbaugh probably never goes anywhere that isn’t air-conditioned and looks like he hasn’t worked up a sweat in 30 years, and that the humidity level does have a direct affect on how hot you feel unless you’re on narcotics, which can make you more or less oblivious to the weather.

The facts are that we’re heading toward “an irreversible rise in summer temperatures” and much more severe storms “if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase.” That’s according to a Stanford University study and a thousand other scientific reports and the experience of any sane person who knows not only that summers are getting hotter but that the ice cap at the North Pole is melting.

More facts: This weekend, from the Plains to the East Coast, temperatures are in the upper 90s and 100s. Last year, 28 cities – from Washington, D.C. to Caribou, Maine – set record highs for average temperature from March through August. And, according to the EPA, “The eight warmest years on record (since 1880) have all occurred since 2001, with the warmest year being 2005.” And…

Never mind. The point is that it’s one thing to dispute the causes of climate change and quite another to deny it’s happening. Only frauds do that — meaning Limbaugh and the legion of reporters in the Rupert Murdoch media empire who have tried to suppress the facts.

Headline of the Week: From ThinkProgress, in regard to Limbaugh’s style of climate-change denial: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.”

Posted in enviromentalism, livable cities, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A new corporate tax holiday would shock even cynics

Posted on July 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

Remember the disastrous “tax holiday” Congress granted mega-corporations such as Apple and GE in 2004? The idea was to allow corporations to bring home huge profits they’d stashed overseas, in the hope they might use the money to create jobs. Instead, the corporations used some of the money for executive bonuses and hoarded the rest. Then they went back to relentlessly “offshoring” profits.

Here’s Matt Taibbi, reacting to the possibility that Congress might be gearing up to grant another holiday, even though there’s no reason to expect a different result this time:

We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4 percent effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all , but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a shit. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds?

Taibbi is the guy who famously described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” His passions include documenting the extent to which Wall Street banksters and large corporations have taken over our political system and, in the process, offshored millions of American jobs and evaded billions of dollars in taxes they should pay.

He’s seen the rotten core of the system up close and usually seems to take pleasure in stating flat out and with great wit that America is being run by thieves whose crimes are growing increasingly bolder. (BTW, the thieves don’t challenge Taibbi, in print or in court, because he always has the facts on his side.)

And yet, in the article cited above, his tone is incredulous. It’s as if the system is evolving into something so rotten he can no longer process the lassitude of the American public, which seems to grow with each new grand theft by the corporations and their puppets in government.

I’m probably wrong. Taibbi knows how sheepish poor and middle-class Americans have become, and I think he also knows that the status quo will persist until the level of poverty, debt and joblessness reaches a point where the majority of people can no longer stomach being robbed so often and so thoroughly. Meanwhile, the rhetorical flourishes liven up his copy and ask the questions we should all be asking ourselves by now.

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

Obama dumps Warren, keeps streak alive

Posted on July 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

If political betrayals were base hits, Barack Obama would be approaching the record for hits in most consecutive games. This week he kept the streak going by not nominating Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency she willed into being over the past year, allegedly because he’s sure Republicans would block her appointment.

This is a betrayal of all of us, but did you notice how many so-called liberals hemmed and hawed and then swallowed whole the rationale for Obama’s decision? Yves Smith summed up their sad passivity today in a piece called “Why Liberals Are Lame, Part 3”:

What little remains of the left seems to be rallying around Elizabeth Warren, which given the dearth of prominent figures who are serious about standing up for middle class Americans, as opposed to pandering to them and then selling them out, isn’t a bad impulse per se. But they are deploying their energies in quixotic missions or worse, falling completely in line with the Administration’s plan, which has been to… box [Warren] in and render her incapable of independent operation. And in case you wonder what I am talking about, I mean the plan, concocted by the Democratic Party hackocracy, for her to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Scott Brown.

Obama and other high-level Dems have not only marginalized Warren. They have used the excuse of a possible Republican filibuster to cave on almost every issue important to the “quixotic” people who helped vote them into office.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if, just once, the people who supposedly represent us had followed through on what should be done and let the Republicans do their own dirty work? If they’d let the country watch Republicans try to explain why they think Warren isn’t ideally suited to run an agency that’s supposed to protect consumers from dirty-dealing financial companies?

If Obama had pushed for Warren, the country might have learned something about her credentials and importance. Now she just disappears.

Footnote: What are the chances that rednecks like Sen. Richard Shelby will be any more receptive to the appointment of Richard Cordray as CFPB director, given the fact that the GOP is more or less opposed to CFPB’s existence?

Posted in CFPB, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bastille Day for the well-fed

Posted on July 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

The crowd called for Marie Antoinette’s head, they bellowed for it, but in the end the only guillotine victim was a watermelon. The master of ceremonies sentenced the French queen to become Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new housekeeper, not a bad fate for one so used to the trappings of wealth.

This was on Saturday, during Bastille Day festivities at Eastern State Penitentiary, former home of Al Capone and other luminaries. I’d biked to the pen from South Philly, and things were winding down by the time I arrived. The Bastille had been stormed by the angry peasants. The queen — a costumed local restaurant owner — had declared “Let them eat Tastykake!” and Krimpets had rained down from the prison towers.

Thousands of spectators milled around, although the show itself was barely visible unless you were right in front of the stage on Fairmount Avenue. It was ironic, of course — a bunch of restaurateurs in Fairmount drumming up business by re-enacting the beginning of a revolution triggered by widespread hunger.

The parallels between then and now are obvious. The French Revolution (1789-1799) happened partly because the royals remained indifferent to the plight of the peasants, in the same way that American politicians and their corporate masters remain indifferent to the plight of millions of Americans who lost their jobs and/or homes in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.

Which is not to say a bloodbath looms in the very near future. Most unemployed Americans in the 21st century are much better off than French peasants in the 18th. A minority of Americans aren’t suffering at all. Tell a bored housewife in a place like Narberth, PA, that the country is in deep trouble and she’d think you must mean some banana republic.

Watching the show in Fairmount, I thought of Milan Kundera`s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Right. Every event, no matter how horrific, eventually seems quaint and harmless, even cartoonish, to those who feel safe. The queen wasn’t executed until the Terror began, years after the Bastille was stormed, but who cares? These things happened a long time ago and they can’t happen again.

In the same vein, re-enacting battles of the American Civil War is an amusing pastime for certain goofballs, largely because the battles took place a century and a half ago. In “the sunset of dissolution,” the war’s horror seems noble. The re-enactors feel nostalgic about it.

But what if the past only seems past? What if it’s possible to learn history but not learn from it? What if we, as a species and as individuals, are fated to repeat the same mistakes again and again, with minor variations involving changes in fashion and technology?

Thinking about these “what ifs” can only lead you to places where crazy novelists and philosophers go. No wonder Fairmount would rather party like it’s 1789.

Posted in economic collapse, fiction, food, Great Depression, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment