Denial is just a sign of the times

Posted on March 29, 2011 by oddmanout215

Sign? What sign?

This is what happens in other democracies when bankers try to reward themselves for helping to ruin the world economy:

Britain has a rival when it comes to bashing bankers. After a furious row over pay packages at Amsterdam-based ING in which thousands of customers threatened to make mass withdrawals, the Netherlands is now vying for the title of Europe’s most bonus-hating country. A growing Dutch political storm could end with a blanket ban on bonuses to financiers who work for institutions bailed out by the taxpayer. ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment. Fred Polhout, union organiser at the bank, says: “People were outraged. We heard about the bloated sums being paid again in the City and in New York; but suddenly the issue exploded on our own front door.”

Why no outrage here? Why allow Wall Street bankers to keep the huge bonuses they were awarded for sparking the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? Why not consign the masters of the universe to Sing Sing or some other black hole for perpetrating the fraud at the heart of the securities industry? While we’re at it, why not penalize rather than reward GE and other corporations for shipping American jobs overseas?

As Chris Hedges recently noted, Americans are discouraged by the mainstream media from questioning the big lies, and are, for a variety of reasons, in deeper denial about them than Europeans:

We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best…. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes.

These things will matter, of course, but apparently not until a lot more jobs are sent overseas, nest eggs dry up, modest inheritances are spent, pensions and health benefits disappear, utilities are turned off and homes repossessed. Meanwhile, most Americans continue to walk around with “kick me” signs on their backs. You and I can’t see these signs, but politicians and their corporate bosses can.

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First, Dems give away the store. Then they haggle.

Posted on March 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

This is what happens when you supposedly represent the interests of working people but are too timid, dishonest or stupid to fight for those interests:

Republicans are poised to reject a White House offer, TPM has learned, that would cut over $30 billion in current spending because of disagreements over whether the package should include cuts to mandatory spending programs. Democrats are pushing for such cuts, which include the big entitlement programs, though the specific cuts they’re proposing remain unclear. In an ironic twist, Republicans oppose those cuts and want to limit the negotiations to non-defense discretionary spending, a smaller subset of the federal budget.

I’m betting timidity and dishonesty are closely linked in this case. It’s been obvious since last summer that Barack Obama and leaders of the (at that time) heavily Democratic Congress were gearing up to give away the store in the hope of appeasing fiscal conservatives. You have to wonder, as firedoglake does, whether the D.C. Dems, especially Obama, were ever serious about jump-starting the sort of economic recovery that would benefit working people as opposed to corporations and big banks:

There’s no question that Republicans played the “Bad Cop, Insane Cop” game very expertly. But it was apparent from the moment that Democrats allowed the 2011 budget to be decided on the watch of the new Republican House that there would be a massive reduction like this. They failed to finish a 2011 budget resolution as part of the deal for extending the Bush tax cuts for two years. They failed to incorporate an increase in the debt limit into that as well. As a result, they forced themselves to negotiate with a bad hand. And they’re not the best negotiators in the first place.

The result is a series of immediate cuts when the recovery remains fragile. Furthermore all of those cuts will hit the relatively shallow non-discretionary non-security slice of the budget, magnifying the impact on Americans who receive services from that.

Or were the Dems merely outmaneuvered, which would put them in the “stupid” category? Two years ago, no one would have guessed that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the other uglies would turn out to be more clever than Barack Obama. Harry Reid, maybe, but not Obama.

The Dems, essentially declaring defeat, have conceded $30 billion in spending cuts even before the serious fighting has begun. Now the only question is how much more badly they will be defeated by the time the battle is over.

And don’t count on the Dems scoring a public relations victory if the uglies shut down the government. Given their track record, they’re more likely to find a way to end up looking like the bad guys.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Depression, health care, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, taxes, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Corbett — ideologue or high-priced whore?

Posted on March 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Philly.com:

“The Marcellus industry has been clear and outspoken on this for a year or so,” said Ray Walker, vice president of Range Resources in Texas and chairman of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group. “We are willing to discuss a severance tax.” But the new governor isn’t. In fact, Gov. Corbett, who signed a no-tax pledge during his campaign last year, is far more resolute in his opposition to a tax than many in the industry that would pay it…

One thing is not in dispute: A tax on Marcellus Shale gas could raise a lot of money. Drilling in the shale has ramped up dramatically since 2004, when Pennsylvania got its first well using the new hydraulic-fracturing process that frees gas from the rock. From July 2009 to December 2010, drillers reported, 1,247 Marcellus Shale wells produced 466 billion cubic feet of gas. At today’s prices, a 5 percent tax – akin to West Virginia’s – would have collected $93 million in that period.

Corbett says he’s opposed to a tax because it would spur drillers to move to a more business-friendly state. But Marcellus Shales says it was willing to discuss being taxed. So what’s the real reason he won’t tap into this revenue source but is, for instance, eager to break the public school system because, he says, there’s no money to fund it?

Maybe Corbett has read Ayn Rand’s trash and is a genuine free-market ideologue, opposed to taxing businesses on principle, regardless of the good it might do. Or he’s afraid his “no taxes” promise will come back to bite him if he’s opposed for renomination by some Republican who’s even more right-wing than he is, though that’s hard to imagine. Or he was bought by a taxes opponent more powerful than the drilling industry, which gave Corbett’s campaign $800K. Maybe there’s an extremely discreet sugar daddy Corbett simply can’t afford to offend.

I’m opposed to drilling in PA because all the money in the world isn’t worth having your water supply poisoned, and because any politician in today’s world not working to establish alternative energy sources — there would be plenty of PA jobs for wind and solar — is an enemy of the future.

But I’m also interested in psychopathology and know an interesting case when I see one. What’s this guy’s story?

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New Deal soon for the jobless? More like no deal

Posted on March 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

Frances Fox Piven recently addressed the plight of the long-term unemployed and, perhaps more strongly than she intended, linked it to President Obama’s failure to act as a forceful advocate for jobs creation.

Piven cited Obama’s lukewarm efforts to persuade corporate executives to use some of the cash they’re hoarding for new hiring and concluded that “pressing [Obama] hard from his base” is the only tactic that might provoke him to take serious action on behalf of the unemployed.

But she stopped short of addressing the obvious need for an alternative to Obama. Real change always happens spontaneously, she argued, and it happens at the grassroots level, through some catalyst that’s hard to identify:

… Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant… Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible…

There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights demonstrations that spread across the South in the early 1960s? We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom—and then join it.

I don’t buy this sort of magical thinking. I’m all for taking grievances to the street, but attention will not be paid to the long-term unemployed or the working poor until progressives rally behind a viable Democratic or third-party candidate for president — someone who will, at the very least, scare or shame Obama into addressing the problems of the working class as a Democrat should.

The transformation Piven urged must start with the understanding that most D.C. Dems, under existing conditions, will do nothing to narrow the great divide that separates the wealthy from the barely-scraping-by.

People aren’t transformed spontaneously, or as soon as they stop blaming themselves — it only looks that way afterward. Transformation happens when people organize behind leaders who not only inspire them to believe their goals are achievable, as Obama did in 2008, but who also fight for those goals, as Obama failed to do once elected.

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For labor foes, Triangle fire never happened

Posted on March 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and a good time to acknowledge there are powerful people still determined to undo the progress made by organized labor in the aftermath of that disaster. Here’s Robert Reich on one such splendid fellow:

Maine Governor Paul LePage has ordered state workers to remove from the state labor department a 36-foot mural depicting the state’s labor history. Among other things the mural illustrates the 1937 shoe mill strike in Auburn and Lewiston. It also features the iconic “Rosie the Riveter,” who in real life worked at the Bath Iron Works. One panel shows my predecessor at the US Department of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was buried in Newcastle, Maine. The LePage administration is also renaming conference rooms that had carried the names of historic leaders of American labor, as well as former Secretary Perkins. The governor’s spokesman explains that the mural and the conference-room names were “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” Are we still in America?

That depends on whose America you’re asking about. Reactionary forces have been chipping away at workers’ rights at least since Reagan’s election and probably since George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968 helped Richard Nixon slither into the White House. The seeds planted in those days have sprouted to full-grown trolls like LePage and other Republicans who campaigned last year as reformers. Voters drank the Kool-Aid and here we are in the Jonestown that Reich describes:

Governors across America are slashing corporate taxes as they slash state budgets. House and Senate Republicans are intent on deregulating, privatizing, and cutting spending and taxes so their corporate and Wall Street patrons will do even better.

LePage, who seemingly would like to wipe out the history of the labor movement, has more in common with Benito Mussolini than with Perkins. He and the other trolls want to push back the clock to as close to 1911 as the law will allow, and the law will be on their side unless the backlash against their efforts is fierce and determined.

One obstacle to a backlash is the Republicans’ ability to pit one wing of the working class against the other while claiming to be pro-jobs. They’ve gained ground because they know how to tweak people’s fears — OMG, what if there were no jobs at all! — and because the current crop of high-profile Dem politicians, from Obama on down, are more afraid of making enemies of the wealthy than of fulfilling promises they made to the people who elected them.

Reich again:

And it’s why we need a president who will fight for workers and fight against this assault – just as Perkins and FDR did.

I’m with you, Bob. Any suggestions?

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N.J. polls show Christie’s act may wear thin

Posted on March 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Republican credo: austerity measures for all but the wealthy

Corbett in Pennsylvania, Christie in New Jersey, Walker in Wisconsin, Kasich in Ohio, Snider in Michigan, Daniels in Indiana and LePage in Maine are governors with the same objectives: break labor unions, privatize everything from school systems to liquor stores, boost the power of the millionaires and corporations.

In all of these states, most voters didn’t realize how ruthless these people are until after they’d voted them in. This month, N.J. voters are having second thoughts, and some of their legislators might be getting the message:

A resolution that would allow voters to decide whether to restore a higher tax rate on actual New Jersey millionaires has been introduced in the state Senate by Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer). If voters approve the ballot question, the personal income tax rate on taxable income over $1 million would be increased from 8.97 percent to 10.75 percent, and the revenues from the levy would be dedicated to property tax relief. New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation. “An overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents indicated their support of resurrecting the millionaire’s tax, according to a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll,” Turner said Tuesday. “Seventy-two percent of New Jerseyans approve of the idea; the level of support for this tax reflects a strong public opinion that the sacrifice during these tough economic times has not been shared by the wealthy.”

Turner’s idea probably has no legs. Even if it does, Christie’s blitzkrieg for the wealthy will continue on all fronts. He has refused to discuss millionaires’ income taxes and instead is planning a new gift for them — a massive estate tax cut. Similar cuts have been proposed by LePage and Kasich, and are part of the multi-state rightwing effort to shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-class.

I suspect Christie is watching the polls and, if it seems the smart thing to do, will begin to tone down his Ralph Kramden act before the presidential primaries, maybe by losing a hundred pounds and lowering his voice a few dozen decibels. But his propaganda machine will keep cranking out the same lies, in the hope that constituents won’t catch on to the enormity of the con job he is perpetrating in the name of austerity.

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MBS nuns wouldn’t have mourned Liz Taylor

Posted on March 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

The actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at age 79, was oft-mentioned in the Catholic grade school I attended. The nuns who taught at Most Blessed Sacrament in Southwest Philadelphia, lecturing on sin, used to tell us the “hussy” Liz embodied all that had gone wrong with the world since, I guess, the Inquisition ended. Or at least since the Age of Enlightenment began. She was beautiful and flaunted it. She converted to Judaism for her fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, then left him for a married man, the actor Richard Burton. She was the original Eve, tempting us to banishment from the garden. Have a bite, kid, it’s delicious.

Naturally, I had to find out about this woman, which wasn’t hard to do. Stories and photos of her were in every mainstream publication. She was the Angelina Jolie of her time, but without the pomposity or the anorexia. I saw her in Cleopatra, a really bad movie, and was smitten. I knew then what I wanted when I grew up. (Maybe the nuns were right.)

Later on, I grew to appreciate Taylor’s talent and heart, especially playing against type as the blowsy, acid-tongued Martha, with Burton as George, in the screen adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The movie still packs a punch, as in this exchange that might amuse my friends in academia:

Martha [to the couple’s young guests]: You see, George didn’t have much push. He wasn’t particularly aggressive. In fact, he was sort of a flop. A great big fat flop!
George [roars and smashes liquor bottle on bookcase]: Stop it Martha.
Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You can’t afford to waste good liquor. Not on your salary. Not on an associate professor’s salary.

Almost forgot: Liz seemed to be one of the good guys in real life, devoting a lot of time to charities, including a foundation that raised about $325 million to fight AIDS. But yes, the nuns were right — she was beautiful.

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Nader to Dems: Are you with labor or agin’ it?

Posted on March 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

From The Raw Story :

In an extended interview with Middle East news network Al Jazeera, consumer advocate and repeat U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader suggested that President Barack Obama is not supporting the labor movement because “they have nowhere else to go” except for Democrats. “If he doesn’t stand up for those millions of workers, we might as well call him a president in a corporate prison called the White House,” Nader said, likening Obama’s “playing” of labor unions to the stretching of an elastic band. But this time, Nader said, the band may be just about ready to “snap.” Should that happen, it could kick-start a “popular revolt” in the U.S., he added.

Nader looks gnarly as an olive tree, but his mind is still sharp. I detested him for years after his candidacy played a role in Bush’s victory over Gore in 2000. (Except that Bush actually lost the election and was appointed by allies on the Supreme Court, but that’s another story.) What a vile egomaniac, playing the spoiler’s role in so important a race!

I’m still mad at Nader, but his complaint that Democrats and Republicans are nourished by the same rivers of money and are therefore more alike than unalike rings even truer now than then. He’s the person least likely to be surprised by Obama’s failure to aggressively support labor unions, or by the fact that the independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and a few maverick Dem legislators have had to take the lead in seriously proposing higher taxes on the rich.

Nader’s notion that there might be a popular revolt brewing sounds like a pipe dream, but who would have though a few months back that Madison, WI, would become a hotbed of workers’ protests? Check out the March 21 Al Jazeera video on The Raw Story and see for yourself how much sense Nader makes.

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Shock and Awe 3.0, pre-released in Libya

Posted on March 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

Buried in the 16th paragraph of the NYT story about the Allied air assault on Libya:

The international effort, called Operation Odyssey Dawn, may also present a double standard: While the West has taken punitive action against Libya, a relatively isolated Arab state, the governments in Bahrain and Yemen have faced few penalties after cracking down on their own protest movements.

Odyssey Dawn? Sounds more like a porn star than a military action. Might as well be. If disaster porn is a fitting term for video of a tsunami leveling a Japanese town then it certainly fits video of bombs raining on Libya then filling the night with cascades of flame visible, possibly, from those safe ships on the Mediterranean. This is masturbation at its most technologically refined.

It’s war but it’s not war, because we’re here but the bombs are over there. Ooh, what a beautiful long-distance image of a Tomahawk missile being fired from an aircraft carrier. Aah, that’s a nice touch, shooting it through night-vision glasses. Who cares where it lands, it won’t land on us.

It’s Version 3.0 (updates soon to follow) of the video game introduced March 19, 2003, exactly eight years ago, when Dubya went on TV to announce the start of his crusade in Iraq that would kill tens of thousands, most of them non-combatants. All evening the networks reran the speech while showing background footage of bombs over Baghdad. It was war, but it wasn’t. It was the Fourth of July, but awesome.

I remember thinking Bush and his bozos already had pushed through major tax cuts for the rich. Now he was starting a new war while his Afghanistan folly was still in progress. Who would pay for the fireworks? Surely someone sensible would persuade our dummy-in-chief to declare victory quickly, lest we smart-bomb ourselves into permanent debt.

But there we were, still in Iraq and Afghanistan when Obama took office. And here we are, with the country still in an economic coma, watching Obama start war No. 3, or something that looks like a war.

Ooh, there goes another Tomahawk, look at the trails on it… Each one of those suckers costs more than a half-million dollars. Which means the military spent at least $100 million on only one day’s bombardment of Libya. How many teachers’ salaries would that pay for, or tuitions, or jobs to fix our rotten infrastructure?

Instead, that money and a whole lot more is paying to secure an oil source. This is how empires end.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

To get to an Arizona bigot’s heart…

Posted on March 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

…hit him in the wallet, real hard:

Arizona established itself over the past year as the most aggressive state in cracking down on illegal immigrants, gaining so much momentum with its efforts that several other states vowed to follow suit. But now the harsh realities of economics appear to have intruded, and Arizona may be looking to shed the image of hard-line anti-immigration pioneer.

In an abrupt change of course, Arizona lawmakers rejected new anti-immigration measures on Thursday, in what was widely seen as capitulation to pressure from business executives and an admission that the state’s tough stance had resulted in a chilling of the normally robust tourism and convention industry.

I’m not quoting from the NYT because I think U.S. immigration laws are perfect. Or because I like NAFTA or similar corporate-backed trade agreements that have proved to be disastrous for workers in this country.

However, it’s been obvious since last summer that the war on immigrants waged by Gov. Jan “Cactus Face” Brewer was a ploy conceived by her spin doctors, who knew the surest way to win a Republican victory is to appeal to voters’ baser instincts. Xenophobia beats reason every time in an election year, especially in a red state.

But you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re a state that thrives on rugged, Latino-hating individualism, or you’re a state that recognizes that a reputation for bigotry will kill your much-needed tourism business.

It’s amazing how quickly Republicans tone down the rhetoric when they see the connection between tolerance and cash register tally sheets.

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