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 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

Sound and fury, signifying status quo

Posted on July 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Macbeth contemplates murder after hearing the phrase 'debt ceiling"

Joseph Stiglitz, a few months ago in Vanity Fair:

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security — they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.

Invoking Stiglitz, Dee Dee Myers recently made the point that a significant majority of Americans want higher taxes on the rich, and that Barack Obama must insist on these increases “to ensure that any deal he may be able to strike [on the debt ceiling] moves us back toward a society where the burdens are shared equally — by all our people.”

But Obama hasn’t insisted on anything. Instead, we’ve heard him offer to cut a deal with Republicans that would chip away at the programs that form the foundation for America’s social safety net. As a Dem official said yesterday, Obama “wants the largest deal possible – with tough spending cuts, including entitlement reforms, and savings from the tax code.”

Lost in speculation over whether Obama or the Republicans will be perceived as the winner of the debt ceiling fight is the fact that the rest of us lose, regardless. It needs to be repeated: Obama long ago showed his true nature by bailing out the banksters, going along with extension of the Bush-era bonus tax cuts, and taking pathetic half-measures to stimulate jobs growth.

The debt ceiling will be raised. Obama will prevail over the Tea Party freaks — Wall Street has told both major parties no default on the debt! — but ending the drama won’t change the parties’ indifference to the plight of the unemployed, homeless and bankrupt. We’ll see nothing like the FDR-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) National Youth Administration (NYA), or National Housing Act of 1934.

High-profile Dem politicians will continue to buy state-of-the-art citadels, maybe with drawbridges, often in the same neighborhoods as corporation owners, Wall Street banksters and elected Republicans. Many Americans who aren’t wealthy, D or R, will continue to slide into the ditch, usually without a peep, because there is no way to register dissatisfaction through our existing electoral system.

This will change someday, of course, but not in an orderly, civilized fashion, because the mechanisms of orderly change have been broken — i.e., almost all office holders and their challengers are beholden to wealthy backers — and it’s in the interest of the people who own and run both major parties to keep them broken.

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

Will Obama side with workers? Don’t hold your breath

Posted on July 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

I saw this from WP posted on Suburban Guerrilla and could hardly believe I was reading about a Democratic president:

SEATTLE — President Barack Obama is calling once again for Boeing Co. and its workers to resolve their differences without “wasting a lot of time in court.”

Obama was asked about the National Labor Relations Board’s lawsuit against the aerospace giant in a KING-TV interview aired Friday night. The president restated an earlier comment that “businesses should be able to locate wherever they want to operate” and have to follow the law.

But Obama noted America is “competing against folks around the world who are after our jobs and our businesses and our market share.” He added, “We can’t afford to have businesses and their workers arguing instead of coming together to try to produce the best possible products and sell them as aggressively as possible.”

The NLRB alleges that Boeing retaliated against its unionized work force in Washington state by opening a new production line for its 787 airplane in South Carolina, which is a right-to-work state. The case could drag on for years.

What does “work out their differences” mean? I’m picturing a heavyweight kicking the shit out of a dwarf and a cop standing by and saying, “That’s it, boys, work it out.”

Boeing is building a plant in a “right to work” (anti-union) state, and Obama, as he does with all controversies, is twiddling his thumbs rather than taking a stand. Does he think big business should have the right to force down workers’ salaries and effectively break unions, or doesn’t he? Remember when he promised to put on comfortable shoes and walk with union members? By what definition is he a Democrat?

At this rate, Obama might go down in history as The President Who Wasn’t There — the man who wore sharp suits but presided in a dull, passive way over the dismantling of the New Deal and what was left of organized labor.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Nice economy you had here…’

Posted on July 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s Paul Krugman last week in The New York Times, urging Barack Obama “to draw a line in the sand” regarding the debt ceiling issue:

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

Republicans believe, in short, that they’ve got Mr. Obama’s number, that he may still live in the White House but that for practical purposes his presidency is already over. It’s time — indeed, long past time — for him to prove them wrong.

It’s good advice, but Krugman, like many other observers, is watching this Obama comedy play out with a sinking feeling that the president is about to fall off a cliff and take Social Security and Medicare with him rather than call the GOP’s bluff on its threat to vote against raising the debt ceiling.

Obama’s die-hard supporters think he’s backing up to ensure himself a second term, by painting intransigent Republicans as extremists. It’s Bill Clinton-style triangulation all over again, they say. Sounds good until you consider what this means to the rest of us. By messing with entitlements and not calling for substantially higher taxes on the rich, Obama only proves there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the major parties.

In the old Warner Brothers cartoon, Bugs Bunny draws a line in the sand and dares Yosemite Sam to step over it. Sam does so and Bugs, backing up, draws another. He keeps drawing lines and backing up until he fools Sam into stepping off a cliff.

Except that in the modern-day cartoon of D.C. politics, it looks like Bugs (Obama) is the one who will take the fall. He’s not fooling anyone. If he caves on the cornerstone programs of America’s social safety net, especially in our rapidly worsening economy, there’s nowhere for him to go but down.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

To Frank Rich, the future looks like Hamlet, Act V

Posted on July 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

Thy offense is rank, Wall Street. It smells to heaven.

You may have noticed that more and more social critics are looking at the future and seeing very few smiley faces. Here’s Frank Rich’s take on the end of the world as we know it:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

Nicely put, but I wonder if Rich is hip to the implications of the sentence I bolded or merely reminding us he used to be a drama critic. If the former is the case, then he’s saying that the likelihood of bringing to justice the Wall Street crooks who trashed the economy is slim to none; that politics as usual will continue until the crimes are burnt and purged away in an orgy of violence.

We expect a violent resolution in Hamlet because the drama is studded with a succession of serious crimes — murder, incest, treason, and so on — that leave the players weighed down with feelings of hatred and guilt that obviously will persist until the stage is crowded with corpses.

Is Rich forecasting this for America, or is he expecting something less extreme despite his Hamlet allusion? The prosecution and jailing of the crooks and the carving up of their financial empires would be a good place to start resolving things, but Rich knows Obama is joined at the hip with the crooks. His justice department will never prosecute them.

As Rich sees it, one likely outcome is that Obama will be turned out of office by voters disgusted over his coddling of billionaires and his subsequent failure to deliver on promised jobs programs. And now we have his odious decision to put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” during discussions about the debt ceiling.

But what happens after these and other austerity measures (for the poor) kick in, stripping Americans of more and more basic protections from destitution?

I wouldn’t bet against widespread unrest, if not actual burning and purging, regardless of whether the next president is Obama or his counterpart from among the Republican corporate stooges.

Footnote: The difference between Shakespeare’s time and ours is that Claudius at least had a conscience: “O, my offense is rank it smells to heaven.” The Wall Street banksters who own both major parties don’t worry about heaven or hell. To them, hell is life with no government bailouts.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments