It's My Country, Too

A Plea

2011-11-11T08:16:00.001-05:00

You give them a few weeks to grow.

They give them a chance at a forever home.

It's a good deal all round. Please consider fostering for your local shelter.

Political CSI: Exhuming the Truth is a Never-Ending Forensic Job

2011-11-03T05:15:00.001-05:00

Charts charts charts! Check these out, is from Business Insider(be sure to click through the link at the bottom):

And lest that not make the point clear enough, here's Mike Konczal at Rortybomb emphasizing the point that, no it wasn't the government forcing business to help the poor, the blacks, the Latinos, the dirty fucking hippies, the unwed mothers, or the non-college degreed that drove our economy into the toilet:

For fun, we should mention that the conservative think tanks spent the 2000s saying the exact opposite of what they are saying now, and the opposite of what Bloomberg said above. They argued that the CRA and the GSEs were getting in the way of getting risky subprime mortgages to risky subprime borrowers.

My personal favorite is Cato’s Should CRA Stand for “Community Redundancy Act?”, (2000, here’s a writeup by James Kwak), arguing a position amplified in Cato’s 2003 Handbook for Congress Financial Deregulation Chapter: “by increasing the costs to banks of doing business in distressed communities, the CRA makes banks likely to deny credit to marginal borrowers that would qualify for credit if costs were not so high.” Replace “marginal” with Bloomberg’s “on the cusp” and you get the idea.

Bill Black went through what AEI said about the GSEs during the 2000s here and it is the same thing – it was blocking subprime from being made. Peter Wallison, 2004: “In recent years, study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.”

That's right...the right-wing WANTED that poor people market! I've read a lot of essays arguing that Bloomberg is just ignorant and buying into the Koch/Scaife/Murdoch snake oil. I don't believe that for a heartbeat. No one as smart and educated as Bloomberg got where he was by buying other people's bullshit. He knows which story makes his ass smell fresher, and that story is the one saying his class didn't do anything wrong, except to try to help the government help poor people.

When's the last time the wealthy of this country made a point of going out and trying to help the government help poor people? Name five.

I rest my case.

There's Always Free Cheddar in a Mousetrap

2011-10-28T20:46:00.000-05:00

Ah, hell, I give up.

It's amazing how many people post videos of dying mice. We don't have to wait for Hell. We've already made it, right here.

More of That Liberal Agenda

2011-10-28T14:19:00.000-05:00

In the cosmos of Planet Sulzberger, being anti-torture and anti-genocide equals "liberal values":

Since the skirmish, which resulted in more than 100 arrests, several liberal groups — including Amnesty International — have condemned the use of tear gas as well as the actions of Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, who said the measures were justified because protesters threw rocks.

Yes, this is where we have landed--in a place where fighting to free people who've been jailed and persecuted for criticizing their murderous govenments is the equivalent of voting for Elizabeth Warren. #OWS has been painted as a liberal movement, so anyone or anything that appears to defend it is by extension also "liberal". This is a perfect exemplar of the knee-jerking modern journo, who works like mad to find a way to wedge every damn article in the universe into boxes labelled "left" or "right".

Taking this thinking to its logical conclusion necessarily requires us to assign mass murder, thought suppression, and torture to conservatism. Because no self-respecting conservative is going to find fault with whaling tear gas grenades and concussion grenades and rubber bullets at unarmed citizens exercising their right to peaceable assembly. At least I have yet to locate one.

One Step Closer to Small Gubmint

2011-10-26T08:49:00.000-05:00

I was reading this nonsense in the NYTimes this morning:

A constitutional amendment facing voters in Mississippi on Nov. 8, and similar initiatives brewing in half a dozen other states including Florida and Ohio, would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, effectively branding abortion and some forms of birth control as murder...

The amendment in Mississippi would ban virtually all abortions, including those resulting from rape or incest. It would bar some birth control methods, including IUDs and “morning-after pills” that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. It would also outlaw the destruction of embryos created in laboratories.

The amendment has been endorsed by candidates for governor from both major parties, and it appears likely to pass, said W. Martin Wiseman, director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University. Legal challenges would surely follow, but even if the amendment is ultimately declared unconstitutional, it could disrupt vital care, critics say, and force years of costly court battles.

That'll be good for the GDP. And it will have to be, because all those rubes are going to have to figure out where they're getting the money to pay for all the extra police and law enforcement actions it's going to take to monitor all those monthly cycles. If a woman has a drink and then a particularly heavy period, are they going to go into her garbage after the sanitary pads for forensic evidence of a homicidal miscarriage? It was only last February these small government types were rattling the same sword. It seemed so far away back then:

Personhood, Personhood, Riding Through The Glen

see more Celeb Look-A-Likes

Of course, the difference is that no one is trying to pass legislation stipulating that Cookie Monster is a person.

Happy Diwali Quick...

2011-10-26T07:31:00.000-05:00

...before liberals declare war on it! Oops, too late:

Turkeys and Some Mistletoe

2011-10-24T06:18:00.004-05:00

Nothing else makes the Christmas season as magical as the Yuletide carols of campaign advertising and the candidates dressed up like Eskimos throwing mudballs in the snow:

Nevada today moved its caucus date back a month to Feb. 4, ending a cross-country power struggle with New Hampshire and paving the way for the Granite State to schedule its traditional first-in-the-nation primary in early January.

Nevada Republicans had originally scheduled their caucus for Jan. 14, infuriating New Hampshire officials, who said the date would throw the election calendar into chaos and force them to hold their primary in early December.

Happy Holidays!

'Tis the Season

2011-10-22T06:20:00.000-05:00

As usual, the right wing's information on the origins of Halloween is as fact-based as the right wing's information on climate change.

BOO!

New Depths Sounded in the Ocean of American Brutishness

2011-10-21T13:50:00.000-05:00

The Joe Arpaio School of Economic Sadism is deeply influential across the southern states, and here's one more proof:

Thousands of other inmates in the Texas prison system have been eating fewer meals since April after officials stopped serving lunch on the weekends in some prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three. A meal the system calls brunch is usually served between 5 and 7 a.m., followed by dinner between 4 and 6:30 p.m.

The meal reductions are part of an effort to trim $2.8 million in food-related expenses from the 2011 fiscal year budget of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state prison agency...

Prison administrators said that the cuts were made in response to the state’s multibillion-dollar budget shortfall in 2011, and that the weekend lunches were eliminated in consultation with the agency’s health officials and dietitians...

Ohio and Arizona serve two meals per day on the weekends to reduce food-service costs. Georgia serves two meals per day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, though inmates on work details receive a third meal.

Bravo, then. We'll have no bleeding hearts whining about taking away the privileges of bad guys, like food and sanitation and mobility. We'll have more of this guy, this Democrat:

State Senator John Whitmire, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee whose outrage over last meals on death row led to the end of the practice last month, said the reductions were not a major concern to him. “If they don’t like the menu,” he said, “don’t come there in the first place.”

You know what else we could do to save the taxpayers money? Shoot people between the eyes as soon as a court finds them guilty. Then we wouldn't even have to feed them! And we could charge their relatives for the bullet, the removal, and the dumping fee. If they don't like it, well, they shouldn't be related to shoplifters in the first place!

Even Cattle Can Have A Change of Heart on the Ramp to the Killing Floor

2011-10-21T05:17:00.001-05:00

Lewis Lapham on America's cultivated fear of the future:

The collapse of the World Trade Center in the fall of September 2001 destroyed the last trace elements of the American future conceived as a nostalgic rerun of the way things were in the good old days when John Wayne was securing the nation’s frontiers and Franklin D. Roosevelt was watching over its soul. The loss of the utopian romance that had once supported both the ambition of the state and the strength of the economy was terrible to behold. So terrible that it has been replaced by an apparition—Gorgon-headed and dragon-winged—that reduces its beholders to paralyzed stone. Much of the effect I attribute to the Bush administration’s war on terror, which was lost on the day it was declared. Lost because, to wage the war, the Bush administration was obliged to manufacture, distribute, and magnify the reflection of its own ignorance and fear. Nobody’s cell phone to be left untapped, a jihadist in every rose garden.

In the years since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the palsied dysfunction has become more pronounced. The foreign wars haven’t been going according to plan; the domestic financial markets have suffered calamitous reversals of fortune; the sum of the national debt goes nowhere but up. The public parks bloom with the installations of surveillance cameras; the inspections at the airports maintain the national quota of patriotic dread, introduce the frequent flyer to the game of playing dead.

Among the country’s stupefied elites, the bad news induces the wish to make time stand still, to punish the presumption of a future that presents itself as a bill collector. As self-pitying as Shakespeare’s melancholy king, they sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of money. Without it the future doesn’t bear contemplating, doesn’t include their presence in it and therefore doesn’t exist. How then can the banks be expected to lend money, the government to build hospitals and schools, the rich to pay taxes for comforts not their own? The suggestion is outrageous, an intolerable effrontery, out of line with the all-American revelation that the name of the game is selfishness. The surplus of resentment affords the excuses to do nothing and bids up the market in transcendence. Politicians in Congress stand around like trees in a petrified forest, or, if allied with the zeal of the Tea Party, console themselves with notions of biblical vengeance, the wrecking of any such thing as a common good a consummation devoutly to be wished. Secure in the knowledge that only the wicked shall perish, they press forward to the Day of Judgment when the host of the damned—variously identified over the course of the centuries as false priests, proud barons, profiteering capitalists, vile communists, and godless democrats—shall fall into the hands of an angry god and gnaw their tongues in anguish.

The last-named beneficiary accounts for the media’s preoccupation with what some of our less well-informed critics still insist on deploring as “the bad news.” They miss the point. The bad news is the carnival-barking spiel that sells the good news, which are the advertisements. First, at the top of the network hour, the admonitory row of corpses being loaded into ambulances in Brooklyn or cleared from the streets of Islamabad; second, an inferno of fires burning in California, of bombs exploding in Libya; third, a muster of criminals, political, financial, and sexual, shuffling offstage in chains. The fear of a deadly tomorrow having thus been firmly established, the camera makes its happy return to the always-smiling anchorwoman, and so, with a gracious waving of her snow-white hand, to the previews of salvation sponsored by Jet Blue, Pfizer, and Mercedes-Benz. The lesson is as plain as a medieval morality play. Obey the law, pay your taxes, speak politely to the police officer, and you go to the Virgin Islands on the American Express card. Disobey the law, neglect your mortgage payments, speak rudely to the police, and you go to Kings County Hospital in a body bag...

Always careless about keeping appointments, the barbarians at the gate tend to show up fifty years sooner than anybody expects or six months after the emperor has fled. They depend for their victories on the fear and trembling enthroned within the walls of the city, and it doesn’t make much difference whether they come armed with slingshots and spears or with subprime loans and credit-default swaps. The waiting around for their arrival is the bait and switch alluded to both by the poet C. P. Cavafy and by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who asks “whether anything can be more idiotic” than the directing of one’s purposes “with an eye to a distant future.” The doing so suspends the will to think, saps the courage to act...

The future is a work in progress, something made instead of something lost or bought or found. We have little else with which to make it except time-past revised and reconstituted in the present—as close at hand as the next sentence on a new page, no further away than around the corner or across the street.

That knowledge that the future is ours to create has been as carefully bred out of us by our politicians and media as viciousness has been bred out of cattle by husbandmen of centuries past. Maybe the real reason behind the #OWS revolt is that there is still a spark of that old innate wisdom left in us.

The Southern Cross Is Bending--No Matter How Geological The Time Frame, It Is Bending

2011-10-20T17:48:00.000-05:00

Eugene Debs died today, away back in 1926. As The Daily Bleed said:

1926 -- US: Good Ol'Days? Labor activist, anti-militarist & socialist Eugene Debs dies. His "radical" reforms included an eight-hour workday, pensions, workman's compensation, sick leave, social security — commonplace today. Ran for president from his jail cell. [Seems to us it's the elected ones should be ensconced in the hoosegow.]

"We [propose] to destroy the capitalist & save the man. We want a system in which the worker shall get what he produces & the capitalist shall produce what he gets."
— speech, December 10, 1905

Here are some of the recipients (partial list) of the Eugene V. Debs Award Program:

1965 John L. Lewis
1968 Walter Reuther
1972 Dorothy Day
1974 Arthur Schlesinger
1978 Jesse Jackson
1979 Pete Seeger
1981 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1982 Coretta Scott King
1983 Studs Terkel
1987 Edward Asner
1991 John Sayles
1992 Ralph Nader
1994 Richard Trumka
1995 Jim Hightower
1998 Howard Zinn
2002 Julian Bond
2003 Molly Ivins
2005 Thomas Frank
2007 Barbara Ehrenreich

From his Statement to the Court, on his conviction of violating the Sedition Act for opposing WWI:

I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison.

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men...

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence...

Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.

I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Another Fine Mess

2011-10-16T12:44:00.000-05:00

This is why the loss of the Fairness Doctrine was no joke. That Reagan-engineered surgical strike single-handedly gave us the Murdoch media empire, Fox News, and the capture of U.S. broadcasting by hate radio, none of which could exist in their current virulent incarnations today if they were required to ensure diversity of opinion on the air. There are a lot of walk-backs that need to be made to rescue the country from its headlong plunge into feudalism, and I know its not popular among liberals, but restoring the Fairness Doctrine could be the most powerful blow of all.

How to Help Occupy Philadelphia

2011-10-16T09:35:00.001-05:00

Yesterday we bought a ton of food, cleaning aids, and hygiene products for the folks at Occupy Philadelphia and dropped them off after the march. The Plaza looked really good. Looks like they recovered well from the onslaught of homeless that unexpectedly put added strain on the encampment. Of course, instead of stepping up and taking care of the homeless that descended on City Hall, the city was happy to let the protesters deal with it, which is just business as usual from a city that can give millions in subsidies and tax breaks to businesses but can't open new shelters or maintain properly the ones they have.

Their Facebook page has suggestions for donations that can be brought directly to the northwest side of Dilworth Plaza, City Hall, if the goods are toiletries, camping-type supplies, or ready-to-eat. Food that has to be prepared and kitchen supplies should be taken to the Friends Center on the Cherry Street side. You'll see a gate, and can enter with your goods through there, then up the ramp and to the right.

They are also calling for volunteers to work in the kitchen and at the Plaza when and where people can. And of course, if you can get there and set up a tent for yourself, even if only for a day or two for the solidarity of it, they will welcome you.

But what will happen when the long-planned renovations to the Plaza begin in November? The Christkindlmarkt was set up there in past seasons, but because of the construction this year it will be in Love Park instead. Where will the protesters go then?

The Dog-Torturer-in-Chief

2011-10-15T05:58:00.000-05:00

Even when all my friends were sweating the Second Coming of Rick Perry and positive he was going to be the next President, I felt certain he wasn't our problem. Nor do I fear that Old Extra Pepperoni is going to be on the radar come fall. My biggest concern from day one was Romney, and it continues to be. The feudal lords of the Colonies have had their fun with the Bircherite fringe, and have gotten their money's worth out of them and the reliable plants in the Supreme Court, but now it's time to hunker down and pull out the serious weaponry, because all that extremist talk is fine when you're dog-whistling to the booboisie, but now you have to appeal to a whole broad array of people, and a lot of them don't even look like you. After winning the primary, Romney can hang a louie and start behaving like a grown man again, and besides, he's one of the Landlords of America--the Chamber of Commerce knows he's as good as any FIRE sector CEO they could plant.

So I hope to see a lot of people reminding the public next year that this is a guy who could do this to a dog:

The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus's rather visceral protest.

Remeber? Now, if a man could do that to the family dog--a happy creature that one may safely assume he knows well and purports to love--what do you think he may be capable of once elected President, with regard to the minions under his gaze? Here's a clue:

Romney, of course, has expressed support for the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques when it comes to terrorists; his campaign refused to comment about the treatment of his dog.

He then went on to tell CNN how much old Seamus liked "fresh air". And yes, this is a person who expressed shame at having helped saved the lives of the poor and sick with statewide health insurance coverage. I think Charles Koch has his man.

THIS is What's the Matter With Kansas

2011-10-14T05:00:00.000-05:00

Even Scientific American is paying attention to #OWS. In a recent article subtitled "The surprising psychology of the Occupy Wall Street protests", we read that the phenomenon the rest of us know as "crabs in a barrel" has been identified by Princeton researchers as the "last place aversion" paradox. In other words, if you're near the bottom, you don't want to see someone poorer than you get a break if it means they will catch up to you economically. They explain:

Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose (income) redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.

Bolding is mine. That's the key takeaway: that the sense of security and self-worth of the people close to the bottom is so fragile that having no one left to look down on is the ultimate insufferable indignity. This really isn't new news. It was always the chief motivater of poor Southern whites who persecuted blacks during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. Taken to its ultimate deadly conclusion, it distracts the downtrodden from their true enemies--those who keep them on an economic knife edge--and makes them accessories to campaigns of genocide.

The authors end with this:

We’ve also found evidence of last place aversion in laboratory experiments. In one, we created an artificial income distribution by endowing individuals with different sums of money and showing them their “rank”– with each rank separated by $1. We then gave them an additional $2, which they had to give to either the person directly below or directly above them in the distribution. In this income distribution, of course, giving $2 to the person below you means he will jump ahead of you in rank. In our experiments, most people still give to the person below them – after all, the alternative is to give $2 to a person who already has more money than you. People in second-to-last place, however, who would fall to last place when giving the money to the person below them, are the least likely to do so: so strong is their desire to avoid last place that they choose to give the money to a wealthier person (the person above them) nearly half the time. If Americans behave like people in our experiments, then it could be challenging to unite those in the bottom of the income distribution to support redistribution.

Again, the bolding is mine. It really brings into focus the habit amongst the American working class of giving passes to the wealthy while seeking to stick it to the poor, doesn't it?

You can read the study by the authors here.

Steve Jobs Accepts Appointment To Head R & D For Major Dude

2011-10-05T19:04:00.000-05:00

God evidently needs him.

I don't mind saying I thought as much.

Remember That It Was The Little Guys That Prevailed

2011-10-01T03:04:00.000-05:00

Belong to one of the big banks that are about to (yet again) squeeze you for accessing and using your own money? The best part is that some, like HSBC and TD Bank, are not only planning to charge you a fee to use one of their own ATMs, they are also going to charge you for using a competitor's ATM, which means, of course, you will be charged twice: once by the competitor for using a "foreign" ATM, and once by your own dear bank for philandering around. Depending on the charges, that could result in more than $5.00 a shot just to pull out a yuppie food stamp. Did I mention that it was your own money?

Well, believe it or not there are other banks. There are even other banks that give you excellent customer service, look out for your interests, don't gouge you just because they can, and make it cheaper and easier to buy cars and houses. They are community banks and credit unions. And as the customer of the latter for 16 years, I can tell you that I love and cherish my bank over diamonds and rubies. You can get out from under these crooks.

You can find information on credit unions and how to locate one near you here.

You can find info on a new concept in banking called BankSimple here.

And the Move Your Money Project can help you find small community banks and credit unions, along with lots of good advice.

You don't have to suck this up and take it. Fuck them. Small banking is the wave of the future. And once these dinosaurs fall under their own weight, we'll need the solid support and reliability of the little mammals still standing afterwards.

Emile Zola Wept

2011-10-01T02:34:00.001-05:00

Isn't this nice? This is behavior worthy of the Ancien Régime...

...that is, before Marie Antoinette had her final coif under the blade.

Christ, these people really do think their money makes them better. A decade of TV worship at the altar of the Bougie God during the Reagan regime, and the broadening demonization of the poor, got these clowns hot for it.

Keep it up, fools. I'm sure there must be a few folks amongst the sans-culottes down below who can knit.

Via scarce at Crooks and Liars.

The Lizard-Brained Satisfaction of Name-Calling

2011-09-28T06:19:00.001-05:00

Yves Smith responds to Melissa Harris-Perry's lazy-ass slur of racism on disillusioned white liberals:

So the Democratic party (and remember, our two party system makes the Democrats the home by default for the left) pretends to be a safe haven for all sorts of out groups: women, gays, Hispanics (on their way to being the dominant group but not there yet), blacks, the poor. But this is stands in stark contradiction to its policies of selling out the middle class to banks and big corporate interests, just on a slower and stealthier basis than the right. So its desperate need to maintain its increasingly phony “be nice to the rainbow coalition” branding places a huge premium on appearances. It thus uses identity politics as a cover for policy betrayals. It can motive various groups on narrow, specific issues, opening the way for the moneyed faction to get what it wants.

It took most people far too long to get that Obama was a phony because the presumption that a black man would be sympathetic to the fate of the downtrodden is a deeply embedded but never voiced prejudice (and this bias is exploited successfully by the right in depicting Obama as a socialist). Other elements of traditional Democratic associations played into the Obama positioning: his Administration is chock full of technocratic Harvard wonks, and the last time an Administration was so dominated by technocrats was under Kennedy, the last Democratic Administration to have a strongly positive (indeed romanticized) image. (Yes, the Clintons also liked fancy resume types, but they also placed a very high premium on loyalty, and with the result that long-standing supporters often wound up in surprisingly senior roles).

These traditional iconic symbols of liberalism – secular urban elitism, blackness, technocratic skill, micro-issue identity based political organizing groups – have been fully subverted in the service of banking interests. Obama is the ultimate, but not the only, piece of evidence that these symbols are now used simply to con the Democratic base out of their support and money. The task of moving forward will require rebuilding the symbolic vocabulary of the defenders of the middle class. It will probably also require a similar intellectual civil war within the left, against people like Melissa Harris-Perry. Those engaged in that effort need to become skilled in dealing with these liberal McCarthyite identity smears.

Good God, our entire political infrastructure is crumbling into a sea of self-hate. The Republican party has been taken over by the Pod People, and the Dems are eating each other alive. I don't see how we can continue on through the new century as a cohesive nation and still maintain this utterly dysfunctional Balkanization. At this rate I don't see how the Democratic party can avoid imploding into a score of navel-gazing boutique cults with a complete lack of vision beyond their own narrow interests.

And A Merry Old Soul Was He

2011-09-24T19:13:00.000-05:00

He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, and he called for his Thorazine tea. Now this is what I call a horserace:

(Reuters) - Former pizza executive Herman Cain surprised rival Rick Perry with an upset victory on Saturday in a Republican presidential straw poll in Florida, dealing a disappointing loss to the Texas governor two days after a shaky debate performance.

All right, then! Let the race to the Seclusion Room begin! Pull up a seat and pass the popcorn, folks. It's on!

King of Pain

2011-09-20T05:38:00.002-05:00

I haven't yet read Obama's Big Idea, but if what I read here is true, we may as well kiss the 2012 election good-bye:

...require new beneficiaries to pay higher deductibles (for) Medicare coverage of doctors’ services and other outpatient care...The deductible, now $162 a year, is...increase(d)...further by $25 in 2017, 2019 and 2021...

...increase Medicare premiums by about 30 percent for new beneficiaries who buy generous private insurance to help fill gaps in Medicare...the White House said this protection “gives individuals less incentive to consider the costs of health care and thus raises Medicare costs”...

...raise $20 billion over 10 years by charging higher premiums to higher-income beneficiaries and by freezing the income thresholds so more people would have to pay the surcharge (up to 25% of all beneficiaries)...

...certain new beneficiaries to pay co-payments for home health care, which is now exempt from such charges. The co-payment would be $100 per episode, defined as a series of five or more home health visits not preceded by a stay in a hospital or a skilled nursing home...

...Revise the formula for calculating Medicaid payments to states, saving $15 billion over 10 years. Restrict states’ ability to finance their share of costs by imposing taxes on care providers...

...Cut $3.5 billion over 10 years from a prevention and public health fund created by the new health care law.

I particularly like the "rob Peter to pay Paul" aspect of that last one. Why worry about the opposition dismantling the ACA when you can simply do it yourself?

And I just love the concept of slamming old people with higher premiums just because they were able to cobble together enough cash to buy some Medigap to fend off potential bankruptcy---because otherwise they have "less incentive" to keep their spending costs low. Just buying the damned supplemental insurance isn't evidence enough that they want to keep their costs down. They need to lose a fucking leg! Goddammit, in this New World of Pain, the last thing you want to do is reward the sickest members of your society (who are already on fixed incomes that you want to ratchet down even more with your fucked-up chained CPI) with affordable coverage for their sicknesses. Slackers!

And I realize that the prospect of paying a $237 deductible may not seem like much to someone currently earning $60, $70, or $80k a year--but once you're on a fixed income and earning $12-$14k, that's going to look a lot more like a choice between buying groceries or an examination of that sore spot inside your mouth, and a lot less like a drop in the bucket. The size of buckets, after all, being relative.

Obama’s budget director says the new plan will impose “a lot of pain,” (in this new S&M culture we call America that's the mot du jour délicieux.) That's certain to be true for the people who have already been writhing in agony. And it's going to be true for a lot more who are teetering on the precipice. But the wealthy who have been doing all the squealing? Not so much. They have plenty of insurance, so whatever happens to Medicare (and certainly to Medicaid!) isn't going to matter one whit to them. And really, since that's where the campaign money is coming from, isn't that all for the best anyway?

In a world where "justice" has disappeared from the daily language, maybe it does sound fair to "share the sacrifice equally" between suburbanites with multiple SUVs parked at million dollar McMansions, and widows living hand to mouth in little apartments in working-class ghettos. Maybe the entire definition of "justice" is now passe.

I can't wait to see how he plans to "help" Social Security.

Meaty Discourse

2011-09-19T04:40:00.005-05:00

Once, even against all evidence, I could have accepted the idea that David Brooks was a human being who lived a relatively ordinary life in the gated enclaves of AwSchucksJustARegularMiddleClassJoeMakingSixFiguresville, Virginia. After all, he showed up regularly on The News Hour for good-natured jowl-punching with Droopy Dog doppleganger Mark Shields,, and surely he must have had to leave his habitat to do that. He must have had the opportunity to at least observe other members of his culture from the depths of his brougham-landaulet during the trip. And even though he could predictably come up with this sort of thing at the drop of an Alka-Seltzer:

"On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s. I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

I could still picture him at a computer terminal, torn between finishing his latest Times lament and watching cats play the piano.

Well, I've stood by this belief against all odds, but there comes a time when one simply has to face facts. Brooks' inability to find a restaurant in which to spend more than $20 is not the result of spending too much time watching piano cat. Even a sheltered Cheetos-eating basement-dweller could find a way to do that. No, I'm sorry to say, the only real explanation is that Brooks is a tissue experiment grown on a meat scaffold who dictates his "columns" based on nothing more than the freshman philosophy problems fed to him daily by William Bennett and the perfluorocarbonated head of Leo Strauss. And here is your proof:

"The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good. When you are in the grip of a big, complex mess, you have the power to do discrete good but probably not systemic good.

When you are the president in a financial crisis, you have the power to pave roads and hire teachers. That will reduce the suffering of real people who would otherwise be jobless. You have the power to streamline regulations and reduce tax burdens. That will induce a bit more hiring and activity. These are real contributions.

But you don’t have the power to transform the whole situation. Your discrete goods might contribute to an overall turnaround, but that turnaround will be beyond your comprehension and control.

Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t."

Yes, you have sinned by letting the big banks and billionaires destroy your 401(k)--you know, the only kind of pension the Wall Street boys would let you have after they got done with you back in the '80s--and by losing your home in the floods, and your livestock in the wildfires, and your loved ones in the tornadoes, and your job in the layoffs, you fiddle-playing grasshopper! Now you can just shut up about needing a hand from the gubmint, because you're not a patient; you're a zillion zillion decisions! Now go suck it up under a bridge somewhere, and just be glad we're not Greece.

That's just meat talking.
Play it off, Keyboard Cat.

Same Old Shinola

2011-09-01T14:48:00.000-05:00

Ah, shit. Give it a rest, already. Every goddamn day is Find A Leftist To Punch Day at Balloon Juice lately. Even when Firedog Lake has failed to provide some suitable outrage, they can find a way to manufacture one, and the commenters pride themselves on who can behave like the biggest asshole. I'm sure all of this will be vindicated when Obama destroys the opposition with the power of his understatement.

A Kickstart from the Divine

2011-08-31T04:20:00.000-05:00

The week in Apocalyptica: first an earthquake, and now a hurricane.

In the wake of Irene, it was interesting to see this (shorter Eric Cantor: "Now let's hold disaster victims hostage.") Interesting because, while the hurricane was howling, and when I wasn't keeping an eye on the basement flooding and worrying about trees coming down, I was watching the destruction unfold up and down the coast and thinking "Jobs! GDP!! Economic stimulus!!!" As Mother Nature has devastated the country this year with fires, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes, I've wondered if She's been sending us a message (no, not the climate change message, although, duh, that, too), that contra Michele Bachmann, we really DO need government, because the free market isn't going to rescue us from the 2nd floor of a burning building or pull our asses out of a swollen river. And while She's at it, maybe She's also thinking, "If those asshats in Washington won't get it together to create work for their people, I'll just have to do it for them."

The Ghost of Foxconns Yet to Come

2011-08-24T18:47:00.000-05:00

Do you think this means Steve Jobs is dying?

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apple's Board of Directors today announced that Steve Jobs has resigned as Chief Executive Officer, and the Board has named Tim Cook, previously Apple's Chief Operating Officer, as the company's new CEO. Jobs has been elected Chairman of the Board and Cook will join the Board, effective immediately.

Chairman of the Board? Hah! Interchangeable as Lego blocks. If he is checking out, I hope it grows him a conscience before it's too late. Turkey dinners for all the suicidal widget-makers in Taiwan!

Peter and the Austerity Wolf

2011-08-21T10:06:00.000-05:00

I need a happy ending.

To the Lessons of the Past Unlearned

2011-08-07T13:29:00.000-05:00

From an August 7, 2005 post, in memory of what should have never been:

The Lesser Evil

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth."
---Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

My father fought in the Pacific Theatre of World War II as an Army sergeant in the Philippines, and then beyond. He was not far from Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped, and right after the peace treaty was signed, he was stationed in Japan itself for a brief period. He never spoke about it, never volunteered information, but if pressed he would tell me some thing fairly innocuous, like how a Zero suddenly appeared above their camp and sent everyone flying for cover, including the driver of a jeep, whose sudden abandonment of the vehicle sent it careening over him. Thereafter he always carried a scar on his shin from where the tires ran over his leg, and the scar, like the jungle rot in his feet that never quite went away, or his revulsion toward seafood, which had come from a steady diet of fish heads and rice, remained a constant reminder of where he'd been and what he'd done. But when he and his friends got together, or the other veterans in my family, none of them ever exchanged war stories. None of them could even be coaxed into talking about it.

He had been back from the war for almost 8 years by the time I came along. I was still a very young child when I first remember poring over the old photos he brought back, of himself and his friends posing in front of some monument with a nameless Japanese woman who smiled pleasantly for the camera. I remember thinking, even as a child, how unlikely that smile seemed. I remember running my hands over the hilt of the samurai sword he brought back as a souvenir, fascinated by that tangible link to an impossibly alien place, and how, despite all entreaties, he refused to tell me how he'd come by it. He once showed me the helmet he wore in the jungle, with the bullet hole through the gap above the webbing that had held the helmet away from his head, and I thought more than once on how close he had been to never coming home.

The popular take on those days, the post-war 50's and the early 60's, is that they were ones of halcyon innocence and peace, and endless prosperity and opportunity, and in many ways, for many people, they were. But they were also days of incredible paranoia, of enemies under every rock, and if it wasn't the Communists it was the fallout in the icicles dangling from your house, or the Conelrad alerts and Civil Defense drills. My uncle, a classic sailor with fascinating tattoos on his muscular forearms, had by then become a career Navy man, and went from World War II to Korea hardly missing a beat, while Joe McCarthy was hard at work creating the seige mentality that would enable our governments to justify sending us to war for decades to come. By then the phrase used so hopefully during the First World War, that "war to end all wars", was beginning to look a little threadbare. Still, after being fed a steady diet of nationalist propaganda, cover-ups, and re-written history, we were psyched to shrug our collective shoulders with a sigh, accept that this was just the way it would have to be, and ready to embark on the brave new world of industrial slaughter those in power had in mind for us.

Never have a nation's demurs against war rung so blatantly false or for so long. Even now we delude ourselves into thinking that we are never aggressive, never looking for a fight, always being pushed into situations where war is our only option and therefore justified. Here we are, always just minding our own business, and along comes some pushy country just spoiling for a fight. The fact that for the last 60 years those pushy countries have happened to be small, powerless, backward, irrelevant, or all four, has somehow failed to make an impression on a people whose national myth includes standing up for the underdog and playing the part of the hero. That was the story we told ourselves in World War II, and that is the story we continue to tell throughout the subsequent years of evidence to the contrary.
It was in 1975 that in "Home to Roost", her speech on the state of the union immediately after Watergate, Hannah Arendt lamented the desperate lengths to which we went to make ourselves feel good after the humiliation of Vietnam:

"What comes home to roost now is this long education in imagery (i.e., the retreat from uncomfortable truths and quest for lies from which to create positive images), which seems no less habit-forming than drugs. Nothing in my opinion told us more about this addiction than the public reaction, on the street as well as in Congress, to our 'victory' in Cambodia, in the opinion of many 'just what the doctor ordered' (Sulzberger) to heal the wounds of the Vietnam defeat. Indeed, 'Twas a famous victory!' as James Reston aptly quoted in the New York Times, and let us hope that this was finally the nadir of the erosion of self-confidence when victory over one of the tiniest and most helpless countries could cheer the inhabitants of what only a few decades ago really was the 'mightiest power on earth."

So the anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb against human beings is being noted this weekend, and as it inevitably will, the discussion has arisen as to whether it was justified. The usual arguments are made for it: that a million servicemen's lives were saved, that Japan would have never surrendered otherwise, that an example had to be made to ensure their will was broken and they never became a threat again, that Truman warned them and they wouldn't listen. That something good came out of it after all. That like the war itself, it was a moral action justified in the cause of eradicating evil. That it was a lesser evil chosen for a greater good.

My head, much like Hiroshima, wants to explode.

There are plenty of sites on the internet and at the library where you can immerse yourself in the facts and fantasies that surrounded the event, and although I believe the bombings were the greatest atrocities my nation ever committed (and I do not believe they saved my father's life), I'm more interested in the idea of a "moral" war. Chris Hedges, in his wonderful book, Losing Moses on the Freeway, calls on his many years as a war reporter, and interview with a Vietnam vet who went on to become a Bishop in the Episcopal church, to answer those who posit the existence of a moral war. After recounting incidents from the war in which the bishop committed acts he would have never thought himself capable, Hedges says this:

"Bishop Packard discovered in the war the capacity we all have for evil. He discovered the darkness that allows us, when the restraints are cut, to commit acts of brutality against the weak and the defenseless, including children. He discovered the ghoulish delight soldiers can take in killing"

And to answer the suggestion that war can be moral, he says this:

"Wars come wrapped in patriotic slogans, call for self-sacrifice and glory. They come wrapped in the claims of divine providence... It is what is right and just. War is always waged...to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil...
But up close war is a soulless void. War quickly descends to raw barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. It is a state where human decency and tenderness are crushed, where those who make war work overtime to destroy love, where all human beings become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the crying wounded spin us into another universe. In this moral void, blessed by institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions are laid bare. We call for strict adherence to some commandments and laud the purposeful violation of others. Hypocrisy rules. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions. It lets us see."

War is evil. It is the industrial slaughter of human beings we do not know, and when our weapons hit their marks, we can't possibly know whether one of them lays low a deserving victim or not. We cannot help but kill non-combatants, many of whom are children, old people, pregnant women, mothers, fathers, sisters, people who were loved as much as we ourselves are loved, and whose claim to the right to life is as strong and legitimate as any of our own. When we engage in it, for whatever reason, we do evil, and commit sin. Yet, with few exceptions, you seldom hear the institutionalized religions speak out against government when war is waged. How often did you hear the voices of the churches of the land raised in protest and condemnation as Bush pushed the country inexorably toward Iraq? How often do your hear churches, so eager to shut off communion for politicians in favor of choice, threaten the same for those who support and fight the war? The most self-righteous and judgmental of them actually praise it as a just retribution, and support those who engineered and maintain it. Their religion is actually a civic one, and as Hedges states:

"These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is often a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation. The god of war takes over the pulpits and airwaves. Religious leaders line up to bless the enterprise of war."

When religion and the state become one, they enable one another, and the combined force of their authority can push a nation into committing any conceivable horror.

Robert Jay Lifton told Hedges:

""Ordinary men can all too readily be socialized to atrocity. These killing projects are never described as such. They are put in terms of the necessity of improving the world, of political and spiritual renewal. You cannot kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. Our own campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed this way, as if once we destroy all terrorists we destroy evil."

This is the lesson of Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, and Bagram: when we choose torture because we are "forced to by desperate circumstances", when we drop a nuclear bomb because we must "eliminate the danger posed by Japan for all time", we bargain with demons. The bargain says: "We know we do evil but it's a lesser evil, and we hope we won't have to do this again, but if we do, we hope you forget that we promised you our soul". Hannah Arendt said this about lesser evils:

"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they choose evil... Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials and the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."

We have already chosen far too much of the lesser evil, and have been doing so for decades. How much more can we choose before it becomes indistinguishable from the very evil we thought we were running away from?

I Don't Know What Ethics Are, But If You Got 'Em, They Must Belong To Somebody Else

2011-07-29T17:11:00.001-05:00

I couldn't figure out whether to post this as a metaphor for what the House is actually trying to do to the country, or as an incitement to actually...burning down the House. Either one seems appropriate:

And while we're on the subject of Sucking Up The Painful But Necessary Compromise, let's see what example Matt Yglesias is using to buoy our spirits:

Adam Serwer reminds us that “During the so-called ‘age of liberal consensus,’ the massive engine of the federal government was devoted to creating an American middle class, but that was only possible because of the Faustian bargain made between southern segregationists and liberals to ensure that black people were cut off from the opportunities being created.”

Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America is a fantastic book on this.

This is something I think about when I ponder the ethics and pragmatics of political compromise. The conventional progressive view sees FDR has a model of strong leadership and the New Deal as a signature achievement. But it’s clear that these achievements were only possible thanks to massive concessions to the white supremacist elements of FDR’s political coalition. Was that the right thing to do or wasn’t it? Something interesting is that it was during the Roosevelt era that African-Americans in started voting Democratic in large numbers. So even though the Democratic civil rights agenda of the era was puny and the welfare state was deliberately exclusionary of black interests, it at least seems to be the case that all things considered, black voters deemed the New Deal agenda to be in their interests. Of course the ideal scenario would be to say that there would have been some way to enact all the famous programs of the era without concessions to white supremacists. But I don’t see any credible account of how that could have been done. So great leadership, or appalling sellout? Most likely both. Most likely, political leadership just demands a level of cognitive dissonance and self-justification that normal people can’t muster.

I have Katznelson's book, and it is not a paean to compromise. It is an contextual exploration of how black Americans, despite nearly 50 years of Civil Rights actions, and 30 years of progressive programs instituted before then, have remained so mired in poverty and so destitute of wealth compared to their white counterparts. The story of the struggle of black families in America post-slavery is riven with obstacles, setbacks, broken promises, and deliberate subversion by a hate-filled Confederacy cohort dependent on free labor. It's the story of how Roosevelt held his nose and allowed the Dixiecracker caucus to maintain hegemony over the lives of southern blacks by excluding their main sources of income from coverage by Social Security, thus bereaving slavery's grandchildren, who had already been betrayed by the Union after Reconstruction, of a desperately-needed assist out of incomprehensible impoverishment. It's about how the crafting of the G.I. Bill allowed local southern administrators the discretion to deny black veterans the benefits that pulled millions of white vets into the middle class. It's about why blacks are still struggling against the odds, while whites rest on the modest nest eggs and safety nets of a wealth gained over nearly a hundred years. It is NOT about how plucky Roosevelt got the best deal he could and, despite the repulsiveness of the original horse trade, everything worked out for the best. As Katznelson stated in his book, the achievements of Roosevelt and Truman were shaped by the pivotal role southern Democrats were able to play as guardians of racial segregation. It didn't work out for the best for a large and important minority of our citizens. The repercussions of the rot of the deal are effects they, and the rest of us, still live with today.

And as an aside, Yglesias' observation that blacks started voting as Democrats during the New Deal had as much to do with how the Dems (on the northern and national level) were evolving from a party of southern rebellion and slavery into a party of social welfare and inclusion, as it did with their admiration for Roosevelt. If Katznelson's book carries any message it's this: such deals with the devil carry consequences not only for those directly harmed, but for all of us, and those consequences may reverberate down the years for many lifetimes.

So it is with the sad little health care Act. So it will be with Obama's economic choices. You can say in his defense that Obama has far greater obstacles in his path than Roosevelt did (you can say it, but it's not true). But even if it were so, Obama has neither the leadership nor the vision of a Roosevelt. Without those, he has no more chance of besting the enemies of the nation than a rat trapped in a maze. And unfortunately, he's trapped us in there with him.

We're on a road to nowhere, baby.

Digging In The Dirt

2011-07-24T15:40:00.000-05:00

An arresting image from Scientific American's photo essay on the nascent New York 2nd Avenue subway build:

Ever since seeing this scene from Fellini's Roma, I've been enamored of tunnel boring machines (click full screen--the image isn't great and it's very dark):

Meanwhile, In Switzerland, they still know how to do a public works project up right:

Do Something

2011-07-24T09:14:00.001-05:00

The movement to preserve livable environment and the life forms that depend on it is old. Even in the mid- to late-1800s, private groups realized that land was finite. They were given support at the turn of that century by the Theodore Roosevelt Administration, and our nation parks system and species preservation were born. By the late 60s and early 70s, it seemed that we had a real chance to make meaningful change, to halt the damage done by the Industrial Revolution and the developmental ramp-up of the post-WW I years, to curb and neutralize the toxic effluvia in our land, to salvage the remaining wild areas, and to seek a green and sustainable future for ourselves and our kids. In a muscular act of Congressional will that would be considerable inconceivable in today's poisonous political arena, we passed the Wilderness Act (1965); the Clean Air Act (1967); National Trails Act (1968); the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968); and the National Environmental Policy Act (1969). In 1970 a Republican president submitted a plan for an Environmental Protection Agency to successful Congressional vote, and the EPA was born. There quickly followed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), Federal Insecticide, Fungicide & Rodenticide Act (1972), Endangered Species Act (1973), Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (1976), Clean Water Act (1977), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (1980) which established the Superfund. It would take too long to continue to list the many more that were passed. But it will hardly take the blink of an eye for the current crop of science-hating, life-hating reactionary Know-Nothings, in their blinding ignorance, to undo it all. This is, after all, an implacable group of lightbulb libertarians dedicated to anarchy, not the public health.

So thanks to Elliott at Firedoglake for turning me on to this heartbreaking video on the beauty of our Mother Earth, and our suicidal headlong destruction of the only lifeboat in the sea. As the info paragraph under the video says, the cut was put together by Vivek Chauhan, a young film maker, together with naturalists working with the Sanctuary Asia network.

Wave goodbye to the polar bears. Maybe we can eventually pull ourselves back from the brink, but really...after we murder everything else, would it really be the kind of place you'd still want to live in?

The Sun's Anvil is Open for Business

2011-07-22T05:37:00.002-05:00

It's hot.

Comments

2011-07-20T18:22:00.002-05:00

All right. I've enable comments again. We'll find out how much Blogger has improved spam capture, if at all.

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

2011-07-19T17:34:00.001-05:00

To break the tension I would like to have put up the video of Rupert Murdoch being attacked by a cream pie today, but the incident wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. A flying shoe would have been better.

Gang of Sucks

2011-07-19T16:24:00.002-05:00

Jesus H. Christ. We are so screwed. These mindless ideologues are going to destroy us. I'm watching my retirement fly off to Wall Street on tattered wings.

And all just so O'Hoover can get his "grand bargain", a big goose to his ego, and a vote that would have gone through anyway. This is what I wrote about the Gang of Six back in April:

That Gang of Six consists of mouth-frothing right-wing extremists Saxby Chambliss, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo, and Republican-lite Dems Mark Warner and Kent Conrad. Dick Durbin always gets stuck in there somewhere because his genuinely moderate record gets spun as somehow liberal. But there is not one real liberal in there, not one progressive, and there never is in these circus sideshows. Regardless, I suppose everyone thinks this kind of equivocating worked out so well for health care reform that we'll be stuck with these posturing preludes to bad law for the foreseeable future. After all, the lasting peace of the filibuster solution has been so gratifying, hasn't it?

This is what passes for "getting things done" now. And after Obama's recent display of pride in avoiding the shutdown by giving the hostage-takers even more than they originally demanded and taking even more away from the ones on the bottom, (it's historic!) I suppose there's no sense in hoping he will do anything to keep the upcoming clusterfuck from devolving into further debasement and fiscal ruin.

Name everything we could possibly do to make things worse and hurt more of the wrong people, and like Ragu Spaghetti Sauce, "it's in there". It'll be delicious.

Is The Head Dead Yet?

2011-07-18T13:08:00.000-05:00

Give us dirty laundry:

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

You know the guys in the newsroom have a running bet.

Looks Like A Tree, Smells Like A Tree, Tastes Like A Tree, Must Be A Horse

2011-07-18T04:51:00.000-05:00

If you give a way to afford medical care to people without money, they will use it, fewer will die, and they'll have more money for other necessities. Gee whiz.

They've been debating this nonsense ad nauseum for weeks. In fact, they needed a "study" to figure it out. And the vultures who want to pull this life jacket off the needy and sell it for chump change to their ventriloquists in the insurance industry are still denying what anyone with an ounce of sense could suss out. If that doesn't exemplify the degraded state of empathy and critical thinking in this benighted and crumbling empire, nothing can.

Try To Remember

2011-07-16T20:28:00.000-05:00

God bless the internet...and thanks to Digby for linking to Tiny Revolution's disinterment of an old Time Magazine article referencing the Obama plan of 2009:

When Obama unveils his annual budget in late February or March, Summers promises that the President "is going to describe the kinds of approaches he wants to take to the entitlement problems that have been ignored for a long time." Some options might include delaying retirement, stretching benefits and lifting the cap on taxable earnings...

On that front, Republicans could come to Obama's rescue. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has told Obama in person that his party favors entitlement reform and would work for passage if both parties shared the risk.

So sweet. So cozy. This is who Obama is. And if you're looking for him to save you, or the New Deal, you can put that shit on ice for the duration. Meet the new boss, baby; same as the old boss. And you can tell yourself "at least he's not evil" from now until doomsday, but you don't have to be evil to do irreparable damage. You only need to be callow.

Why Can't Johnny (& Barry & Mitchy & Eric & Pauly) Count?

2011-07-15T12:37:00.006-05:00

Is it the result of starving our schools for years? Is it because they don't teach science anymore? Is it because subjectivity has been elevated to the sacramental and has slipped, wolf-like, into the sheep herd of public reason in America?

Because how else do you explain this, from Obama's morning presser:The "shared sacrifice" and "balanced approach" means taking down domestic spending to levels we haven't seen since Eisenhower...
Here's the thing: if you want to reduce domestic spending to the level of the Eisenhower era, remember what the rich paid in taxes during that time, which was 91%, and 25% on capital gains. And remember, that high level of taxation supported and grew (grew!) a nation of a much smaller a population (less than 179 million then compared to more than 308 million in 2010), with many fewer needs and a shorter lifespan; fewer cars, and houses, and schools, and less need for infrastructure. And remember how much newer our sewers were, and our water treatment plants, and bridges, and dams, and roads, and prisons, and gaslines, and waterlines, and electrical lines, and how much further away from failing they were then.

We had money pouring in, and a lot less to spend it on, but somehow these geniuses think we can dial back spending by more than half a century AND stifle revenue, even though we're not even taking in as much total direct revenue now as we were when Dubya took office, and income taxes are producing half of what they did then. These magical thinkers really believe that if we give up our 2008 Honda Accord for an old '53 Hudson our grandfather used to own way back when, we can conjure up the Frank Capra-corn lifestyle none of us had in 1950 and all live in a Lassie episode forever. Things cost money! Things now cost more than they did 10 years ago, let alone when Ike was President. It's beyond ridiculous to insist that we can go backward in time and take our checkbooks with us. But this is exactly what these morons have been pretending we can do, and if it means those suffering or living on a knife edge now are going to have to tighten their belts, well, hell, why not? It's not as if any of these dimwits pushing this ceremonial economic magic will ever have to bear the brunt of their own stupidity.

The Emperor has No Clothes Because He's Covered In Something Else

2011-07-14T18:27:00.001-05:00

Watching the horror unfold that is the debt ceiling negotiations is like waking up and finding yourself covered in excrement. You're immersed in it; you can't escape the smell; you know it resulted from something totally beyond your control; you're overwhelmed with shame; you can't stop retching from disgust; it feels like the nightmare will never end; and your only respite, the shower, hasn't worked for days because the landlord doesn't want to spend the money to replace the plumbing.

But I'm sure this could all be fixed if we fired some park rangers and closed some public schools.

The Power of Positively Not Thinking

2011-07-12T19:32:00.000-05:00

Fuck the All Star game. And fuck Arizona. And fuck all the players that thought they just couldn't make it through their mundane forgettable athletic careers without playing there. Seriously...your job employs multiple Latinos and other non-Anglo players, and yet you think you're playing above it all in racist, fascist Maricopa County?

Get a clue.

Because You're Just Too Dumb To Know What's Best For You

2011-07-07T05:36:00.005-05:00

Well, here it is at last--the Big Double-Cross by the Double-Crosser-in-Chief:

Mr. Obama, who is to meet at the White House with the bipartisan leadership of Congress in an effort to work out an agreement to raise the federal debt limit, wants to move well beyond the $2 trillion in savings sought in earlier negotiations and seek perhaps twice as much over the next decade, Democratic officials briefed on the negotiations said Wednesday.

Because this mundane, yearly procedure to raise the debt limit, a procedure that has been done regularly for decades under both parties without controversy, has now been seized upon by the New John Birch Society as the latest tool to enable them to enact their lifelong goal--the elimination of government and the elevation of the wealthy in its place--and that's not good enough for Obama. No, Obama has to prove he's also the Hysteric-in-Chief, and he can out-lemming the most self-destructive of the opposition as he leads the whole country off the cliff.

Hah, what am I saying? What opposition? Obama's real opposition are the millions of liberals who got him elected and to whom even now he holds out his hand, pretending he needs the little guys to stick with him and get him re-elected. His true base works on Wall Street, and his real political allies visit him in secret, plotting how best to appease their masters and consolidate the destruction of the middle class.

The president’s renewed efforts follow what knowledgeable officials said was an overture from Mr. Boehner, who met secretly with Mr. Obama last weekend, to consider as much as $1 trillion in unspecified new revenues as part of an overhaul of tax laws in exchange for an agreement that made substantial spending cuts, including in such social programs as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security — programs that had been off the table.

Forget it, Grandma. Forget it, poor kids. Forget it, single moms and sick people and people without pensions and imminent retirees and minimum wage workers. The New John Birch Society must have its brave new world, and you're just in the way. If you only understood that Obama is selling you down the river for your own good, you'd know what a monumental opportunity this is, what a grand bargain it is, how this is really exactly what you voted for back in 2008, even though you didn't realize it at the time. And after all, he's only one man, and really the Presidency isn't all that powerful, just a figurehead of a position, actually, and he's the grown-up in the room and you're just a spoiled crankypants who doesn't understand how politics works and you never will so STFU and send in your money and pull the "D" lever in 2012 and good luck with the cat food. You never wanted to retire anyway.

Thank you, Herbert Fucking Ohoover.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald reminded me of this righteous rant by George Carlin, may he rest in peace, and I wanted to have it on my post, too. Because he nails it, brother: "They call it The American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe in it".

All that hope we had, all that change we thought was gonna come (ah, I can still hear them playing Sam Cooke), it was a dream, all right. And we were asleep when we bought it.

Independence Day--For Some

2011-07-04T06:25:00.002-05:00

From the Harper's blog and the inimitable Mr. Fish, the only person I'm aware of who's more cynical than I am:

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things:
freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain

Happy 4th of July.

DSK Skates

2011-07-03T11:46:00.000-05:00

I only have this to say about the DSK case and the recent turn of events:

Here is the DA's letter to the defense, outlining the areas in which the accuser admitted she made false statements.

Nowhere in the letter does it state that the accuser retracted her allegations about the rape itself. Nowhere does it state that evidence has come to light proving that Strauss-Kahn was innocent, or that the accuser was not raped. The areas retracted by the woman relate to previous issues connected to her attempts to get into the country, remain here, and maintain her residence. The retraction related to what she did immediately after the alleged rape--wait in a hidden area of the hallway, or continue on to clean other rooms--does not really make it impossible or even unlikely that she had been raped. Yes, those retractions of statements under oath are harmful to her credibility. Credibility is crucial in a case of he-said, she-said. But there are other credibility issues, too, related to Strauss-Kahn's prior predatory behavior toward women, and there is the forensic evidence of rape relied upon by the DA after the woman was admitted to the hospital for examination.

In any case, it looks as though a man with a history of assaulting women will go free, possibly because he is innocent, or possibly because he had the juice to pull in fixers, or possibly because the truth is somewhere in the middle. One thing I know: at no point did his defense raise the issue that he had been the innocent victim of a seduction. Because even the French can't be stupid enough to believe that one.

The Sleeping Giant Stirs

2011-06-24T17:01:00.000-05:00

Surprise! Workers in Connecticut decided they'd had enough of being double-crossed and used as political pawns:

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and union leaders announced Friday that Connecticut’s state workers had rejected a deal meant to produce $1.6 billion in labor savings over two years, blowing a hole in the state’s budget and raising the likelihood of widespread layoffs.

The rejection was a startling slap to both the union leadership and to Mr. Malloy, who was elected in November with enthusiastic labor support.

What was going through union minds when they gave this tentative deal the heave-ho? Well, the fact that Hartford has proven its own word worthless in the past may have influenced them:

The opposition centered on suspicions about the health care provisions in the package, workers’ frustration over past concessions and the belief among some members that they could get a better package if they rejected this one...

Michele Higgins, 63, a supervisor in the audit division of the State Labor Department office in Bridgeport, noted that two years ago workers agreed to furloughs and paying more for health insurance. “I don’t think that it’s a bad agreement, but a contract has no meaning anymore, because I think the state will be back in two years looking for more,” she said.

Nailed it. Breaking union contracts by whipping up an "emergency" or a "bankruptcy" has become very faddish these days. Yet these workers' "friends" in the legislature just can't understand why anyone would give up a such a dream package:

“The failure to ratify by state employees does more harm to them and the cause of labor than anything their enemies could possibly achieve,” Senator Williams wrote. “It’s unbelievable that they don’t understand that."

What they understand is that whenever a moment in history arrives that calls for someone to give something up, the powerful always have something pressing to tend to elswhere that day. Senator Williams is using the language of the man with nothing at stake, the general at the back of the lines, the lawmaker waxing eloquent over the war he loves as the troops wave farewell to their limbs and their lives. What sacrifices were demanded of Senator Williams, or Governor Molloy, or any of the blathering pundits who declared this such a "harmonious resolution"? What will they be giving up anytime soon?

That's what I thought.

Don't Look For The Cage You Can't See It It's Everywhere

2011-06-23T05:31:00.000-05:00

The Rude Pundit sees the connection between our reality TV culture of humiliation-as-entertainment, and the siccing of the desperate working class on itself:

The Rude Pundit thought about Brian Jackson and his never-popping hot water bottle while he read about the latest attacks on working people by state legislatures and governors. See, it's not that New Jersey is seeking to raise state workers' contributions on health care and pensions. It's that the bill that made its way through committee stops collective bargaining on health care. It's the ongoing battle over collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, in Massachusetts, in Ohio, in Illinois, in places Democratic and, especially, Republican, under the notion that this is somehow the way that everyone sacrifices for the good of some broad, undefinable "economy." Meanwhile, wages have stagnated as union membership has fallen. Somehow, surely, this is just the fault of greedy union workers. It always has been the workers' fault for demanding fairness, according to management. Why should these greedy bastards get decent health care when you can't find a job?

And this is how we get back to Brian Jackson. There's a political calculation being made here, as there so often is. They are pitting unemployed and non-union workers against the unionized state employees, who often have enviable job security in an insecure job market, by making those unionized government workers the target. It doesn't matter that the benefits gotten through collective bargaining make up for the shit wages. Boo to that; raise your arms in an X to get it swept away. Hope for failure and embarrassment. Turn on each other and give power and profit to the people behind the curtain, again and again.

Bravo.

Flogging the Dead Horseshit

2011-06-22T05:23:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a real pisscutter of a propaganda piece up on how the evil public unions are destroying America. A handy little paper written by long-time public pension haters Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua D. Rauh accompanies the thing. For whipping up panic, you'd have to go a fur piece to find a better example than this boatload of bilge, and for propaganda on behalf of the haves, it's absolutely pitch perfect.

First, let me give you a quick math lesson: I am a supervisory employee with the state. When I retire, in my 60s, with 20 years of service, I will earn the princely sum of about $25,000 a year from my public pension, assuming I still have it after Corbett gets done. Many people I know earn less than me, and will get less when they retire. Even I earn more than the average public employee in my state, so comparing some anomalous local fire chief or some highly-paid but rare regional director to a cashier at Barnes and Noble is like comparing a highly-paid private-sector Vice President to me.

Now imagine that you and your husband have a savings account, and every pay, you both contribute to it. You put in a bit more than he does. But for the last 10 years, unknown to you, you continued to contribute while he refused to do so. He even pulled money out. Since he used this money to pay your bills, you didn't notice that the cost of living was going up beyond what you were earning, and you didn't think to wonder why you could still afford to live on your combined incomes. One day you check the account and--quelle surprise!--there's less than half of what you had in it 10 years ago, and your retirement is just a couple years away. You can't continue to live on what you earn because neither or you has had a raise in 10 years, and your only choice now is to keep working and eat up the rest of your savings. Well, that savings is the pension fund. Your pay checks are the taxes we pay for the services we expect from the government. The raise you didn't get is the tax hike that should have occurred to fund government services, the cost of which were going up just like the cost of everything else. And that rat of a husband stealing your retirement from under your nose is the elected official who bought voter approval by stealing from the public pensions instead of raising taxes as he should have.

My comment on the story linked to above and left at the Times, follows:

Nice hatchet job. Let's cherry-pick the stats on the people getting the best pensions in the private sector instead of the public sector and compare them: payouts from shareholders and taxpayer subsidies and consumers that amount to billions of dollars over the lifetime of a single former CEO hardly compare. But you would object that using such a CEO as an example for the whole private sector, Wal-Mart greeters included, badly skews the argument against pensions for the private sector? Well, no more so than this article does to the public sector.

Further, where is the close examination of the fact that these pensions were deliberately unpaid or underpaid by these governments for years, even during good times, while the employees themselves continued to pay, and increase their contributions, into the fund? Where is the discussion of the cutbacks experienced by public employees in their contracts for the last 10 years even while private business payroll grew, which permanently hurt public employees' pension amounts? Where is the mention of the fact that as the cost of all other things grew, governments and taxpayers chose to cut or failed to fund the infrastructures needed to continue to provide services, and then woke up one day wondering why it was going to cost so much to make up the difference?

This kind of biased prole-baiting is exactly the reason the richest country in the world poor mouths every time a bridge needs fixed or a child needs medical care. And the fact that the real money continues to flow from the poorest to the richest never gets a mention, and if it does someone inevitably squeals "class war!!" That way, the working-class can be diverted from calling the ones responsible for this mess to account, and keep pretending they have more in common with Donald Trump than the clerical worker at a government office making $32K after 30 years on the job.

Everybody Loves the Sunshine

2011-06-21T06:24:00.000-05:00

Here's to the solstice, and a hat tip to my buddy Norm for the reminder:

And here's what you can expect this summer in your area.

Another Country Heard From

2011-06-14T05:09:00.003-05:00

How leadershippy of President Hope and Change to inject himself into the urgent issue of the moment:

Pressure on U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner to resign escalated as President Barack Obama called his behavior “highly inappropriate” and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi prodded the New York Democrat to heed the president’s advice to leave office...

“I can tell you that if that was me, I would resign,” Obama said of Weiner in an interview with NBC News. “When you get to the point where, because of various personal distractions, you can’t serve as effectively, then you should probably step back.”

Leaving aside the fact that the outcome of this will not matter one whit to 100% of Americans and their lives, and the fact that Weiner is from a district that can be counted on to vote in another liberal if he resigns, so the balance of power for votes won't change, and the fact that he did nothing legally or ethically wrong, and the fact that stupidity is not yet a capital offense so far as I know, and the fact that his ability to "serve effectively" is being harmed more by the pearl-clutching of the Democrats than by the fact of what he did---well, leaving aside ALL that, the question that immediately rises to my mind is where the fuck was Mr. Hands-Off when the workers and teachers in Wisconsin needed his opinion and he couldn't even be bothered to send his second-in-command to talk to them, let alone make a random comment about something he promised that, if it happened on his watch, would make him put on his walking shoes and march around in solidarity with the union protesters?

Just asking.

Because there is no wrong, There is no right, And I sleep very well at night

2011-06-07T20:53:00.006-05:00

Thanks to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism for linking to this--the documentary Lifting the Veil, on the collusion of corporate interests and the American political machine:

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

And here's a reminder, from a previous post, of the vast differences between the two operators of that machine:

The Pathetic Little Circus

2011-06-07T05:25:00.000-05:00

This is truly sad:

For the revelations about the congressman, Mr. Breitbart partnered with ABC News, which interviewed Ms. Broussard and published its own account of her relationship with Mr. Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Mr. Breitbart, whose credibility was damaged by his release of a selectively edited tape of Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official, said he felt ABC News could help the Weiner story rise to something more than a scandal flamed by the conservative blogosphere.

“One of the reasons I went to ABC, believe it or not, was to take this out of the partisan rancor realm,” he said in a phone interview...

ABC News acknowledged Mr. Breitbart’s role in uncovering the story but declined to comment on their talks with him.

Breitbart has been shown up time and again for the liar and right-wing propagandist he is, but no matter how many times his hatchet jobs are exposed, the news media keeps giving him credence. Like James O'Keefe, he spends his days wallowing in the muck on only one side of the fence, looking not for wrongdoing but for opportunities to hurt progressive causes, faking when he comes up empty, or exaggerating when he doesn't, using the lies and rigged videos that have become the hallmarks of reactionary disinformation. Long ago programs like Inside Edition began blurring the line between entertainment and "news", and cable TV, with its 24 hour vacuum to fill, raised the ante further. And now, even in the New York Times, this is what we have that passes for serious reporting. Did anyone bother to ask how this sudden interest in Weiner's underpants might be linked to his digging into Clarence Thomas' financial disclosure irregularities? No, and they won't, because some dumb Congressman's faux pas with consenting adults is so much better rube-bait, especially when his own party falls all over itself to buy into the opposition's hooey-of-the-moment.

Ron Swanson's Interpretive Dance

2011-05-14T15:27:00.000-05:00

Nothing made-up can rival the silliness of reality as showcased by our current political clowns. So why bother? Here's to election day:

The United States of Amnesia

2011-04-30T13:10:00.001-05:00

Yes, less than 6 years after the worst natural disaster ever to hit the nation, which spread over 90,000 square miles, killed 1,836 people and left another 705 still missing, demolished 275,000 homes and left 182,000 homeless or displaced, and caused $110 billion in damages (much of which is still awaiting repair) he said it:

“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” the president said.

I don't mean to minimize the horrors and devastation the victims of the recent tornadoes have experienced, even if their states (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas) are full of government-hating Randians who wouldn't take a penny from the feds, except, but wait, where's FEMA now?. Still, every one of their heartless governors likes to brag about how much pain he's willing to cause to the disposable people in his state because the deficit is worse than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and every damn one of them has his fucking hand out now.

But for Obama to make such a callow statement, when many of those hit by Katrina have yet to be able to go back to their homes, is just stunning in its cluelessness. We have a still-seeping wound down in New Orleans, yet even as recently as the days of the Japanese earthquake, NPR reporter John Burnett was still making the kind of fact-empty and racially-tinged comparisons (they didn't loot like those thugs in NOLA!) that the media was spewing in 2005.

The faces of the tornadoes are overwhelmingly white, and that makes it okay to take care of them. Even if it's that uppity Muslim in the White House who's giving out the money. They'll take it, and then grind their heels into the poor and demand to know where Obama's report cards are.

Apple Is Just As Shocked As You

2011-04-27T16:34:00.000-05:00

This is hooey:

Confirming speculation from some security researchers, Apple said in the statement posted on its Web site that the file in people’s iPhones was not a log of their location but rather “the locations of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone.”

Apple said it used the data, which it called a cache, to calculate a device’s location more quickly than through GPS satellites.

But Apple acknowledged that it had made mistakes, which it attributed to programming errors, in storing the data for a long time, keeping the file unencrypted and storing the data even when users had chosen to turn off location services.

Why do I say this? Because of this:

Apple has been collecting location information since 2008, when notice of that practice began to appear in its End User License Agreements for various Apple devices...Apple still has not offered any comment on the nature of the "partners and licensees" it shares the location data with, or the time period for which it retains the data. By using the phones and devices, users are implicitly giving Apple their consent to collect the data. But, the EULA explains, "users may withdraw this consent at any time by going to the Location Services setting on your iPhone and either turning off the global Location Services setting or turning off the individual location settings of each location-aware application on your iPhone."

And this:

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.

And this:

Also questionable tables in the database with names *Harvest and *HarvestCounts. would be interesting to know what they are.

Either Apple's programming and R&D departments are full of doofuses stumbling around like clowns in a Gary Larson cartoon, or the company just didn't give a shit. This is not the first time they've been asked to account for themselves, but this may be the first time they smelled blood in the water and realized it might be their own.

Meet the New Big Brother, Same As the Old Big Brother

2011-04-22T05:45:00.001-05:00

Remember this ad?

Apple has always positioned itself as the hip, right-brain alternative to the boring-ass monoculture of Microsoft, and when it looked as if it might go down for the third time way back when, it was the artists and creative class that saved it. Now it seems to be setting itself up to become not just Nerd Wrangler Extraordinaire, but the repository of all info on every hapless soul who evinces an interest in an iPod Shuffle. Just try to buy one and use it. i-Tunes is the proprietary link to transfer music into it, and to use iTunes requires a commitment of self-disclosure on the level of marriage: not just name, address and e-mail, but phone number, age, gender, and credit card, not to mention at least 3 sign-offs on Apple legal agreements, one of which is 17 pages long.

Since the iPhone took off, we've seen increasingly draconian limits for both users and developers placed on the apps Apple will allow, which also affect iPod and iPad, and some of which seem to be driven more by the Morality Police of Steve Jobs' mind than profit motive.

On top of these issues is the black heart at the center of Apple's supply chain overseas: environmental poisoning, and mistreatment and enslavement of the workers who build our little toys at Foxxconn and elsewhere.

So I recalled the advert above when the latest concerns over Apple's secret tracking of its iPhone owners' whereabouts hit the front pages this week:

The privacy startle, apparently enabled by this summer's iOS 4 release, was discovered by two security researchers, one of whom claims he was an Apple employee for five years. They're equally puzzled and disturbed by the location collection: "By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements," they explain. All it would take to crack the information out of your iOS device is an easy jailbreak. On your computer, the information can be opened as easily as JPEG using the mapping software that the security experts have made for download—Try it yourself.

The data itself is jarringly accurate (most of the time). And even though it appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing (meaning you're probably not safe with location services switched off), the map I was able to generate with mapping software the security duo released visualizes my life since the day I bought my iPhone 4 in July. Everywhere I've been. Bus trips home. Train trips to visit family. Vacations. Places I'd forgotten I'd even gone. Zoom in on that giant blotch over New York, and you can see my travels, block by block. My entire personal and professional life—documented by a phone I didn't know was also a full time location logging device. It's all accessible—where I've been, and when.

This was foretold last year when Apple unleashed its new "privacy" policy:

The new terms, to which Apple users must agree before they are able to download any additional apps or media, allow Apple to collect "precise location data," as well as the "real-time geographic location" of your device, and share it with Apple's "partners and licensees." Apple notes that its location-based services, specifically MobileMe, require this location information in order to work, but is otherwise vague on how the data will be used.

The most interesting part is that it can't really be switched off without wiping memory, and it goes with you as you change and upgrade your devices. And for the conspiracy fan, there's this:

Security expert Kevin Mitnick says he's "Quite shocked and disturbed" by the revelation, noting that the logged data could be of great interest to a variety of entities—prying spouses, private investigators, and, he reckons, the government. He speculates that the existence of the log itself "could have been at the request of the government," as such data "can't be used for advertisements. It seems to me more to be a governmental request." He added, "I like to know what my device is doing." And, that the phone's logging of data was in this case like "carrying around a bug and a tracker at the same time."

The easiest way to control people is to seduce them into loving you first. Apple's doing a fine job of both.

Of Course They're Consumers; What Isn't?

2011-04-21T05:46:00.002-05:00

Paul Krugman thinks patients are not consumers:

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping...

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

Well, like the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine, that laid the foundations for the takeover of the airwaves by radical conservatives and their sugar daddies, we can lay this one, too, at the feet of St. Ronnie, and you could have seen it coming over 25 years ago:

Direct-to-consumer advertising, or DTC, has been controversial from its inception. Pharmaceutical companies have championed advertising as an effective method for informing consumers of health care choices. Physician groups such as the American Medical Association have opposed the advertisements out of fear of disruption to the physician/patient relationship. From September 1983 to September 1985, at the request of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), pharmaceutical companies agreed to a voluntary moratorium on advertising. During the moratorium, the FDA sponsored public meetings, invited comment, and conducted research. On September 9, 1985, the FDA withdrew the moratorium, announcing that existing advertising regulations which governed marketing directed toward physicians were also “sufficient to protect consumers.” With no regulations that “pertain[ed] specifically to consumer-directed promotion,” DTC became increasingly popular during the 1990s.

One restraint may have been the requirement that all advertisements include a complete description of risks and side effects. Pharmaceutical companies may have worried that such disclosure, which can take up to a half page of fine print, would detract from the appeal of otherwise “sleek ads on TV or in magazines.”

In August 1997, the FDA removed at least part of that deterrent. The Guidance for Industry Direct-to-Consumer Rx Drug Promotion19 affects only broadcast advertisements on television or radio. Print advertisements must contain a “brief summary” of the drug’s “side effects, contraindications, and effectiveness.” The Guidance authorizes broadcast advertisements to substitute for the “brief summary” an “adequate provision” “by which the majority of a potentially diverse audience can receive the advertised product’s approved labeling.” Thus, the pharmaceutical company may omit the summary of side effects by announcing that interested consumers can obtain package labeling by dialing a toll free telephone number, contacting an Internet site, or visiting a physician’s office. Advertisements for psycho pharmaceuticals began appearing shortly after the FDA published its draft guidance. Mental health professionals have decried the ads as inappropriate because they are directed toward “[p]eople who are seriously mentally ill [and who] often have impaired judgment.” The Pharmaceuticals Manufacturing Association has responded with an opposite take on the value of the marketing schemes: “This is the information age, and more information empowers patients to be able to have more meaningful conversations with their doctors about cures and treatments.” To assist in this goal of empowerment, pharmaceutical companies have recently turned to celebrity pitch makers as “the next step to reach out to consumers.”

DTC may have reached its zenith with the formation of a home shopping television network exclusively devoted to selling pharmaceuticals.

The seed of conversion of patient to consumer has been carefully and deliberately planted, and now the debasement of the healthcare debate shows just how well the tree has borne fruit.

This Is Because Obama Took Our Guns Away

2011-04-19T12:52:00.000-05:00

More casualties of the liberal war on guns:

Officials say three students have been injured after a Houston kindergartner brought a gun to school that accidentally discharged when it fell out of the child's pocket.

Houston Independent School District Assistant Police Chief Robert Mock says the students were injured by fragments after one bullet discharged in the school's cafeteria about 11 a.m. Tuesday.

This tragedy could have no doubt been prevented if only those kids had been allowed to pack heat. All the best districts are doing it.

Some Friendly Advice

2011-04-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

When we as a nation figure out the silver bullet that ends drug trade violence in this country, then we might have a right to start telling other countries what they should be doing from the safe and comfy white-collar offices of Punditburg, especially when our own consumption and our own gun laws fuel the engine of that violence.

Such slaughter usually goes unnoticed in the U.S. press. Should it come to the attention of our newspapers, it will be written off as part of a cartel war. This is a fiction. Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. In Juarez, more than 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.

The border should not be an issue in American life, but rather our window on the world. All our foolish beliefs are refuted here. Free trade is creating the largest human migration on earth. Our belief that drugs can be successfully outlawed has created the second-most-profitable industry in Mexico and a gulag of U.S. prisons. Our effort to fortify the border has created a wall and a standing army of agents, and it has failed to stop people or kilos from moving to our towns. Our refusal to even seriously consider the notion of overpopulation will eventually destroy large portions of the earth’s ecosystems. And we are equally reluctant to face one nagging fact about Mexico: 40 percent of its federal budget comes from oil sales, and the president of Mexico has said publicly that the oil fields will be exhausted in the next decade. What then?

Someday a history of our border policies will be written. It will require a Marxist—Groucho, not Karl.

Or a David Simon:

BILL MOYERS: But it still is a lie, isn't it?

DAVID SIMON: And it always will be. I don't think we have the stomach to actually evaluate this. And--

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

DAVID SIMON: Well--

BILL MOYERS: We don't have the stomach?

DAVID SIMON: Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don't think-- since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

BILL MOYERS: Which says?

DAVID SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.

And if that's how we feel about our own people, what do you think we're going to do for the Mexicans? Besides puke out a toilet-full of cant, I mean.

And Brig. Gen. Beauregard Claghorn Commanded the Attack on Fort Sumter

2011-04-15T16:47:00.001-05:00

Since we seem to be in the center of one of the biggest historical revisionism storms in living memory, and since Civil War commemorations are offering plenty of opportunity for gale force winds, it's gratifying to read this from Jamie Malanowski, who has made a study of the era:

Recently I read “Troubled Commemoration,” an account of the Civil War Centennial by Robert J. Cook, and I learned that I had experienced exactly what the centennial organizers envisioned: an event that promoted tourism and commercial enterprise and, oh yeah, taught a little bit of history as well.

I also learned that people besides me also had a good centennial (in 1961). Segregationists, for example, were able to turn the centennial of the war into a celebration of the Confederacy. Flying the Confederate battle flag, they used secession as an origination myth for the never-defeated cause of states’ rights, which was the philosophical underpinning of the racist laws and practices they defended...

...the Emancipation Proclamation (did not) have a particularly great centennial. Political leaders in the south made it clear that this great moral landmark had no business being mixed up with a commemoration of the Civil War. So the proclamation had its own ceremony, one that put it in a Cold War context. It was cast as pivotal moment in the cause of global freedom, as something more meaningful in 1962 to Third World people who were emerging from colonialism and who had to choose between east and west, than to black Americans who were fighting for their civil rights. No African-American speakers were even part of the program until Thurgood Marshall, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, was added at the last minute.

Yes, I have noticed that one of the enduring traits of the American love of freedom has been the exclusionary way it is applied to its own citizens, as the tone deafness of Teabaggery makes so abundantly clear. And not for nothing did Gore Vidal refer to us as The United States of Amnesia. Malanowski brings it home:

The only comfort that comes from reading Cook’s book is the realization that thanks to the struggles of so many of our fellow citizens, we live in a much better country today. But 50 years later, as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, we must realize that for those of us who care about history and this particular event, work still remains to be done. There remains a basic ignorance about the Civil War, an ignorance that fosters myths and fabrications, and deforms our understanding of ourselves.

For example, when asked about the cause of the war, far too many people will say that there were many reasons. Slavery was one; states rights, tariffs and northern aggression were others. This is sad, because when you read the words spoken by the leaders of the rebellion, when you read their secession ordinances, there is only one reason: slavery — the preservation of slavery, the extension of slavery, the expansion of slavery.

Six hundred thousand Americans did not die for anything as nebulous as states rights or tariffs. They died because slaveholders wanted to preserve their human property and expand their slaveholding empire, and they were willing to demolish the union and bring tragedy to nearly every family in this land in order to protect their right to own human beings.

Bless their hearts.

Leechcraft

2011-04-15T05:30:00.001-05:00

Via Mark Thoma, David Cay Johnston wonders why decades of having it their own way haven't yet demonstrated to the Right that their economic sacred cow is a sham:

For three decades we have conducted a massive economic experiment, testing a theory known as supply-side economics. The theory goes like this: Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperity—so much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates. The late Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who wanted to shut down public parks because he considered them socialism, promoted this strategy. Ronald Reagan embraced Friedman’s ideas and made them into policy when he was elected president in 1980.

For the past decade, we have doubled down on this theory of supply-side economics with the tax cuts sponsored by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, which President Obama has agreed to continue for two years.

You would think that whether this grand experiment worked would be settled after three decades. You would think the practitioners of the dismal science of economics would look at their demand curves and the data on incomes and taxes and pronounce a verdict, the way Galileo and Copernicus did when they showed that geocentrism was a fantasy because Earth revolves around the sun (known as heliocentrism). But economics is not like that. It is not like physics with its laws and arithmetic with its absolute values.

Tax policy is something the framers left to politics. And in politics, the facts often matter less than who has the biggest bullhorn.

And as in everything else, it's the rich who have the biggest and the best. And the bull coming out of that horn includes 9 myths that he enumerates and eviscerates in the article (the poor pay higher relative taxes than the rich; some corporate tax breaks destroy jobs) before finishing up with this:

Here is a question to ask yourself: We started down this road with Reagan’s election in 1980 and upped the ante in this century with George W. Bush.

How long does it take to conclude that a policy has failed to fulfill its promises? And as you think of that, keep in mind George Washington. When he fell ill his doctors followed the common wisdom of the era. They cut him and bled him to remove bad blood. As Washington’s condition grew worse, they bled him more. And like the mantra of tax cuts for the rich, they kept applying the same treatment until they killed him.

Luckily we don’t bleed the sick anymore, but we are bleeding our government to death.

The leeches are passing votes in the Capitol. And the doctors who apply them are celebrating their latest bonuses and looking forward to bigger ones in the future.

Our Shiny International Face

2011-04-14T05:43:00.000-05:00

This is how they see us outside our sacred borders:

The world had better start paying attention to the US government’s inability to govern. The prevailing mood over this has been strangely complacent. Six months of the fiscal year gone and only now a ramshackle budget? Government brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements?

And on Ryan's Big Idea:

Unfortunately, the Republicans’ plan is no good. In the first place, it offers no basis for compromise with Democrats. The paradox of US politics is that the system, with all its checks and balances, insists on compromise, whereas its practitioners – now more than ever – see compromise as defeat. Every American reveres the constitution; every politician and political activist recoils at the outcome it was designed to provide.

And wrapping it up:

Forget the comic squabble over fiscal 2011. What counts is the long-term fiscal outlook. It is not funny, and the solution to the problem is nowhere in sight.

That about nails it. We are seen as a 10-car pileup, and there's no ambulance on the way, because we cut the funding.

With Regard to the Parrots of the Beltway....

2011-04-12T05:52:00.001-05:00

...I want a moratorium on the use of the word "serious". Seriously.

The Kid Who Wrecked Your Bike Blames You For Breaking His Arm When He Did It

2011-04-10T07:32:00.005-05:00

On raising the debt limit, from a guy who's been on the public tit for a minute:

“We want to see real structural, cultural-type changes tied to this debt ceiling. We’re not interested in a one-off kind of savings, or anything small,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a first-term Republican from South Carolina. “There has got to be game-changing kinds of changes to get us to vote for it.”

He dismissed warnings about default as “just posturing,” and said Democrats should bear the responsibility for passing any measure to increase the borrowing limit.

“It’s their debt,” he said. “Make them do it. That’s my attitude.”

Here's a typical Teabagger hood ornament who either has no problem lying bald-faced because it makes his nihilistic agenda sound better, or is so ignorant of the last 10 years that he missed the ratcheting up of the national debt under his heartthrob Dubya. To its credit and my own amazement, the Times points out that Bush was also responsible for that debt. What, no paragraphs of "some say...others believe..."? It does go on to point out that as the rest of the world's financial markets watch in dismay, our inability to come to an accord on raising the debt ceiling could seriously disrupt the world economy. Professional economy-disruptor Robert Rubin wouldn't like it, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But look out! Here come the usual suspects to the rescue:

So attention is turning to a bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the Senate. The senators, three from each party, have met for 10 months to negotiate a comprehensive plan on taxes, entitlement programs and military spending. They have considered recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission in December.

“It would be nice to have it in a package form by the debt-limit” debate, said Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican of Georgia. But even if the six agree, he added, “hitting everyone else with something this major, it’s going to take some time to be digested. Plus you’ve got to go through the various committees.”

That Gang of Six consists of mouth-frothing right-wing extremists Saxby Chambliss, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo, and Republican-lite Dems Mark Warner and Kent Conrad. Dick Durbin always gets stuck in there somewhere because his genuinely moderate record gets spun as somehow liberal. But there is not one real liberal in there, not one progressive, and there never is in these circus sideshows. Regardless, I suppose everyone thinks this kind of equivocating worked out so well for health care reform that we'll be stuck with these posturing preludes to bad law for the foreseeable future. After all, the lasting peace of the filibuster solution has been so gratifying, hasn't it?

This is what passes for "getting things done" now. And after Obama's recent display of pride in avoiding the shutdown by giving the hostage-takers even more than they originally demanded and taking even more away from the ones on the bottom, (it's historic!) I suppose there's no sense in hoping he will do anything to keep the upcoming clusterfuck from devolving into further debasement and fiscal ruin.

If Not For That Goddamn Professional Left....

2011-04-09T11:07:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to go into it. You can read it here for yourself. This is my weary response:

Good job cutting loose all the thoughtful, genuinely concerned electorate who had faith in Obama and watched that faith betrayed by bullshit excuses over time. Nothing says “Please hear my side of it” like continuous ad hominem rants against those who you want to listen.

And minorities who are continually ignored? How about American Indians? When is the last time I read extended, repeated, and heartfelt posts on Balloon Juice about the wrongs they experience daily?

When he was elected, against all seeming odds, Obama was given a chance to put into practice all the ideals he constantly professed on the campaign trail. And we know he won’t get everything he wanted….but that could be understandable if one could point to even one extended fight he put up for any of those ideals. Instead, he has thrown one after another of those ideals under the bus, (to use a popular trope) and each time has tried to spin it to appear he has fought the good fight, and that the result has been “historic”, if not the outcome he had devoutly to be wished. The poor, the homeless, the forgotten, the people on the edge or in the deep oubliettes Bush created and Obama codified—-do you really expect these teeming masses to step back and say, “It’s OK, Obama gave it his best shot.” No. Because he didn’t, and every day people hurt and die because of his decisions to play the odds instead of fighting for what is right, and what his own campaign promises made clear.

Game is over. He is not the person I thought I was voting for, and that is not my fault.

Enough with the circling of the wagons. This long-game bushwa of relying on not getting what you want immediately for the delayed gratification of getting what you want eventually, is simply not working. If you can't get what you want, and you can't even get what you need, the very least you should do is prevent the opposition from getting either.

Please, Sir--Can I Have Some More?

2011-04-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

If the public wants that, the public is a ass.

Sadism as Ideology

2011-04-06T18:13:00.000-05:00

Esquire nails the sado-sexual zeitgeist powering up the creeps on Capitol Hill:

And the sadism is running now through the institutions of government. We have made our peace with torture to the extent that support for it now is as much a litmus test for being a Republican as opposition to abortion is. (The Democrats, of course, choose to deplore it without condemning it.) The Supreme Court's majority opinion in the recent Thompson V. Connick decision — delivered, fittingly enough, by Justice Clarence Thomas, the walking Freudian petri dish who once opined that he saw nothing wrong with chaining inmates to a post in the hot sun — pretty much advises a man who was stuck on death row for fourteen years because of egregious prosecutorial misconduct to stop wasting the Supreme Court's time and be grateful his sorry ass wasn't fried a decade ago.

And, in the Congress, there is Congressman Paul Ryan, who is angling right now to make a career out of political sadism...

Paul Ryan is a thoroughgoing fraud. He went through high school and most of college on Social Security survivor benefits after his father's death. He voted for almost all the Bush programs — including both off-the-books wars — that ballooned the deficit he so piously condemns now. And this week, as he rolled out his lunatic conception of a federal budget, Paul Ryan produced the definitive statement of his political philosophy: There are those Americans who deserve to live and those Americans who don't. Period. All of the former are very, very wealthy. All of the latter are poor, or struggling, or old. Paul Ryan believes the true mission of government is to bring as much pain to the parasites as it can because, by doing so, it can liberate the genius of those people who deserve to live. When Paul Ryan dreams of a free nation, it is one in which the seventy-two-year-old spouses of seventy-five-year-old patients are free to go out and shop in a rigged insurance market for the $100,000-plus they're going to need over a lifetime of tending to that patient. If they insisted on feeding themselves, and even risking the odd vacation, over the course of their working lives and they failed to anticipate what might befall them, then the spouse is going to have to starve and the patient is just going to have to sit there in his own filth, until market forces determine that they should die.

Look at him when he talks about dismantling the hard-won protections of the shrinking middle class. He is so positively lubricious about it that his teeth seem to be sweating. Pain (not his) purifies the nation. Pain (not his) makes us free. This is what Paul Ryan dreams of when he dreams of a free people.

Excerpts don't do it justice.

Why is it that the most sensible assessments of our current mess always read like one, long, tortured scream?

My Emancipation Proclamation

2011-04-05T18:03:00.000-05:00

On the heels of Obama's election-mongering kickoff, I found Glenn Greenwald's observation to be right on time:

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).

In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do: accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base). Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.

And I'd say all the efforts of my husband and his political friends and connections during the last election were thrown into perfect irrelevance after deed was done and the oath was taken. Despite the fact that Obama's networks continue to ply us with never-ending e-mails, the connection has been broken. Time and again we have watched him betray his own promises and ostensible ideals, and time and again we have watched him throw in the towel before the fight even began. And when we dared to complain, we were called names and made the butt of his mouthpieces' jokes, and it was made known to us in no uncertain terms that we were to sit down and shut up until he decided it was time for us to elect him again. In the meantime, he continued to sell us out to his Treasury cadre and cave to the bellowing brutes of the John Birch Society and the Chick Publications yokels of Christian Reconstructionism. The choice as I see it now rests on how we want our deaths served up to us: fairly quickly with no bullshit, as the New Social Darwinist Party intends, or in the piecemeal death-of-a-thousand fashion that has become Obama's trademark way of giving the Right everything it asks for. And don't tell me how he's done some good things. Even George Bush signed into being the largest national protected area that ever existed in the United States. But does it really matter to the children of Iraq who lost their eyes and arms?

I have no interest in being played for a sucker anymore. All through my adult life I've had a history of voting for people I believe in, and I'll be damned if I am going to stop now. Obama can kiss my ass, and get his rich buddies on Wall Street to knock on doors for him.

The Right-Wing Solution to Breeding Strays: Build Your Own Death Panel!

2011-04-05T05:11:00.001-05:00

Robert Pear has an amusing angle on the Paul Ryan/Radical Right jihad on sick people in the New York Times:
"But while saving large sums for the federal government, the proposals on Medicaid and Medicare could shift some costs to beneficiaries and to the states."
"COULD"? Is that some kind of attempt to fudge the obvious? The plan is quite clear, and has been ever since Ryan rolled out his loathsome "roadmap": cut spending by taking away the safety net and thus reducing people's ability to access heath care. Throw them a tiny, inadequate bone guaranteed to shrink as their hunger grows, and direct them to the free market to waste what little they get on high deductibles and high co-pays. The fact that they will get less health care, and by extension become sicker and sicker, is offset in callous right-wing minds by the Holy Grail of reduction in health care spending.

There is nothing innovative or admirable about this kind of thinking. Of course you reduce government spending by cutting off money to sick people and people who are trying not to be sick. We could also save money by cutting off the funding to arm our military while telling them to buy their own weapons in the free market. We could save money by cutting off payments to Congress while telling them to buy their own offices and perks. But how many people would join the military or run for office? The real thinking behind this kind of proposal was revealed last year by Republican South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer when he said that feeding the poor just allows them to keep breeding. To these extremists, the needy or potential needy are nothing but stray, breeding animals, and their solutions are the equivalent of the shelter killing room.

Simon Legree Was Really Just Lending His Productive Genius to the World

2011-04-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

Here is the future for labor in this country if the union-bashers and the radical right-wing extremists get their way.

The Triumph of the 1%

2011-04-03T08:16:00.001-05:00

I guess this (via Yglesias) makes it official:

The Democratic party is now as snuggled up to business and corporate interests as the Republicans. And note how the drop in business PAC money to Repugs in the last 2 election cycles equates to the increases to Dems. And as the article demonstrates further down, the contributions given by labor--that bugaboo of our kleptocracy and the Pavlovian bell of the lumpenbourgeoisie--have been miniscule compared to the flood of cash from the Chamber of Commerce, its dons, and its minions. At this point, business knows it really doesn't matter who gets in anymore, because their kept pols will be taking care of them regardless.

As Joseph Stiglitz knows, it's nothing more than the 1% taking care of itself.

I believe that our Darwin-hating electorate would find all this eminently satisfying (survival of the fittest and all that) if they only had the brains to grasp it. But they don't have to...their betters are doing it for them. When they wake up one day with their entire extended families crammed into one rented apartment because the house went into foreclosure and Grandma has no safety net, and doing self-surgery in the bathroom because they can't afford the glorious free market health system, and going to work with bronchitis because they can't afford to take a day off from the blessedly union-free Wal-Mart where they ended up having to work, the reactionary Right will find new scapegoats for them to blame, scapegoats whose powerlessness and irrelevance will ensure that no serious challenge will ever be mounted to the real criminals behind their woes.

You'll Feel Better If You Mambo

2011-04-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

To Perez Prado:

What a guy.

The Unbearable Cruelty of Republican Toadying

2011-04-01T05:31:00.005-05:00

I long ago stopped trying to chronicle the many outrages against humanity committed in the last year by the ideological extremists of the Republican party, aided and abetted by the corporatist/conservative wing of the Democratic party. But one odor wafts higher than every other stink being emitted by the ALEC-seeded legislation now being flung like shit from the monkey houses of states' capitols right now: the war on working people:

The Florida House of Representatives approved a bill in March that would establish the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation. Like the law signed in Michigan on Monday, the measure would reduce the number of weeks the unemployed could collect benefits from the standard 26 weeks to 20.

But the House proposal in Florida — in a high-unemployment state that already has some of the lowest benefits — takes it one step further by tying benefits to the unemployment rate. If the rate falls, so do the number of weeks of benefits. If the rate dips below 5 percent, the jobless would collect only 12 weeks of benefits, the lowest level.

This has workers worried in Florida, where the unemployment rate, while continuing to inch down, is 11.5 percent, considerably higher than the nation’s rate of 8.9 percent. Michigan’s rate is 10.4 percent...

The House version, which would take effect Aug. 1 if signed into law and affect people who apply after that date, would also make it easier for businesses to fire employees, who would then not be eligible for unemployment benefits..

This, in a state with 11.5% unemployment. I won't even go into the heart-breaking vignettes the story outlines for the age 60+ Floridians living this nightmare; you can read them for yourself. The clown behind this brainstorm claims creating jobs is the most important goal (this is the usual doublespeak parroted by these ALECheads just before they turn the screws on the working classes), and to do that, "business" needs help from the state. Help like throwing everyone off the dole and into the street, so that now-desperate people who line up by the hundreds for a shot at a couple dozen jobs will become even more desperate.

Make no mistake; this is not about creating jobs, this is about wage repression. Business has made record-level profit and sat on record excess money and capital during this ghastly period, while avoiding hiring by squeezing the last drops of productivity out of its skeleton crews of employees. Every excuse business has given for why it hasn't been hiring has been exposed for the lie it is. As those reasons have been eliminated, one after another, by a servile Congress and administration, hiring remains anemic.

Contrary to the propaganda vomiting out of the US Chamber of Commerce, business is NOT about creating jobs. Business is about making profit for those at the top, and payroll is an inconvenient barrier to this goal. If business could entirely eliminate all payroll, all employees, and carry on entirely with machinery instead, it would do so in a heartbeat. In the interim, what business wants is the elimination of its taxes, the elimination of all labor, safety, financial and environmental regulations, and the elimination of its workers' rights and safety nets. Helpless workers are the next best thing to serfs, and in this regressing-to-feudal culture, serfs are blessedly cheap, interchangeable, and disposable to the puppet-masters who pull the strings of the kept politician.

For the Record

2011-03-31T13:34:00.002-05:00

Exonerating the Guilty is a Thankless Job, But, As Usual, The Atlantic is Up to the Job

2011-03-27T07:02:00.001-05:00

What is it about being confronted by the weak and powerless that brings out the douchebag in so many people? You don't want to give money to the needy? Don't do it! But at least have the decency to shut the hell up about it. And for Christ's sake stop embarrassing yourselves by trying to pretend that it's some kind of superior moral stance.

Let Me Help You Stanch That Bloodflow With This Chainsaw

2011-03-26T09:08:00.001-05:00

So Obama has selected the Bush Torturer-in Chief to serve on a White House task force on the psychological well-being of military families:

...Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, "with great pride," that he has now been selected to serve on the "White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family." In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday...

James treated numerous detainees who were abused, degraded, and tortured, yet never took any steps to stop or even report these incidents. Last year, Steven Reisner -- senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, who also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University -- told Democracy Now: "there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantánamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists" and that psychologists were at these facilities "to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees."

He headed the BSCT program. The worst abuses continued under his watch. So of course it falls on the Democratic avatar of CHANGE to elevate him to a courtier of the inner sanctum. There aren't enough irony quotes in the whole world to contain the vomitus pouring out of this administration.

Feeling This

2011-03-25T17:41:00.000-05:00

After a shitty, shitty few weeks, and all of a sudden I'm overcome by a feeling of brief mortality.

And also:

Welcome Vernal Equinox

2011-03-20T16:06:00.000-05:00

Spring in Green Park, London:

Another chance at life.

The Mouth of Hell has Many Doors

2011-03-20T10:39:00.002-05:00

I'm still mulling over my feelings about the Libya attack. I would love to be able to claim a purity of thought about war; I know it's evil, and I know that evil is committed when it's waged, even if the reason for the war has the most humane of intent. War is one of those human endeavors that can take even the purest of motives and twist them into thousands of acts of horror. Apologists minimize these brutalities with the exonerating concepts of "collateral damage", and "troubled soldiers" and "Zimbardo effects",and even though we know every fresh invasion will unleash the same predictably terrific results, we behave as if, each time, we are being presented with a fresh enigma to solve, and we keep repeating the same old pantomime. The attack on Libya, whatever the motive, will rain down horror into the lives of innocents, who will have to live with the results for the rest of their lives, if they live at all---we can always make that bet with confidence.

I also know that the motives that have impelled my country to war have never been humanitarian, although that hasn't stopped us from claiming the high road when it served our purposes. Even World War II, the so-called "good war", was entered into for reasons having nothing to do with the Holocaust or the predations of the Axis powers; Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and right after that Germany and Italy declared war on us. As for the rest? None of them were necessary, except Bosnia, which the usual war hawks fought tooth and nail. All across the world, over a hundred years, the victims of genocide and nameless horrors have suffered and vanished from the earth while we ignored their misery and did business with their tormentors. Cambodia. Rwanda. Congo. Zimbabwe. Kenya. Algeria. Peru. Argentina. Guatemala. Nicaragua. The Philippines. Haiti. Franco's Spain. Chechnya. Palestine. Egypt. Cote D'Ivoire. South Africa. Burma. Tibet. Sudan. Sierra Leone. Uzbekistan. Too many more to name...and none of them were of interest to us, even when they cried out to us for help.

Now we have a pretty clear case of rebels fighting for freedom against a totalitarian dictator, known murderer, and true terrorist. And they have continuously called for help from us and the rest of the world, in the form of a no-fly zone. The Arab League has given its blessing to this, and European nations are willing to take the lead. We have nothing particular to gain materially, since the oil Libya produces makes up a miniscule amount of what we use. Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are being begged for help, and we have no plutocrats waiting in the wings to descend on a new colony, ready to make billions by raping the infrastructures and the national Treasury.

For me, the answers are elusive. I'm still on the fence, even as the New York Times reports that the air strikes have begun. Mike Mullin says “operations yesterday went very well.” But Stratfor's analysis considers the costs of civilian deaths on the ultimate outcome:

If (Gadhafi’s troops) perceive that surrender is unacceptable or personally catastrophic, they may continue to fight. At that point the coalition must decide if it intends to engage and destroy Gadhafi’s ground forces from the air. This can be done, but it is never a foregone conclusion that it will work. Moreover, this is the phase at which civilian casualties begin to mount. It is a paradox of warfare instigated to end human suffering that the means of achieving this can sometimes impose substantial human suffering itself. This is not merely a theoretical statement. It is at this point at which supporters of the war who want to end suffering may turn on the political leaders for not ending suffering without cost. It should be remembered that Saddam Hussein was loathed universally but those who loathed him were frequently not willing to impose the price of overthrowing him.

We may have hated Bush, but would we have thrown our support behind a foreign army invading to "liberate" us from him? I doubt it, and it was that inability to put ourselves in the shoes of the Iraqis that resulted in the horrors that eventually played out.

But then, we never cried out to the world to come and save us from him in the first place.

You Dropped a Button in the Plate and Spewed Up in the Church

2011-03-17T17:28:00.000-05:00

McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head
There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands
You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands

When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone
Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair

And in the Euston Tavern you screamed it was your shout
But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out
They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains
So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair

You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl
There was lousy drunken bastards singing "Billy In The Bowl"
They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch
So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church

Now you'll sing a song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks
And they'll take you from this dump you're in and stick you in a box
Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground
But you'll stick your head back out and shout "We'll have another round"
At the graveside of Cuchulainn we'll kneel around and pray
And God is in His heaven, and Billy's down by the bay

If I could have only taken the day off...

2011-03-14T18:15:00.000-05:00

...I could have retained some semblance of dignity and pretended to some modicum of intelligence. These changes wrought by arbitrary time shifting fuck my head up something fierce. Why do we always seem to mess with things that need no messing with, but leave the things crying out for attention to flail and die in the wilderness?

The Stuffed Man, The Hollow Man

2011-03-13T14:13:00.003-05:00

"...Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men."

--T.S. Eliot

This is the way our dreams end
Not with a bang, but a pink slip.

Bravo, Barry. You could not have eviscerated your own ideals better with a samurai sword. But as seppuku is the course taken by the man of honor, you would not have chosen that method, anyway.

The Lament of Kings

2011-03-13T06:09:00.002-05:00

The rich are unhappy and unfulfilled. (Actually an insightful piece).

Maybe a life-threatening disaster or two would help them sort things out.

Certainly a crack like this doesn't help.

Hating On The Unions Won't Get You A Pension, But Joining One Might

2011-03-12T17:21:00.003-05:00

This was so epic that I had to purloin the whole thing. From Matt Yglesias:

Is employee compensation driving state budget woes? No:
In the short-term, the problem for state budgets is that the recession
caused a drop in tax revenues. In the longer-term, the main issue is
Medicaid costs.

And while we're at it, let's revisit the actual state of public pensions:

The drop in pension values was caused by Wall Street, not unions;
Since 2000, through good times and bad, states themselves failed to pony up the contributions they were committed to make while workers continued to pay into them;
Calculations by the Right that pensions will go broke assume a "riskless rate of return" of 4-5%, when in fact pension returns have been well above that for decades (8-9% since 1984) and are likely to continue to be so (they have already recovered much of their losses);
A realistic estimate of the shortfall is from $750 billion to $1 trillion over 30 years. If the funds only saw a return similar to Treasury bonds--4.5%--they would still earn $850 billion over that 30 years and cover or nearly cover the shortfall within the needed period;
If states increase their domestic product by merely .2% over that 30 years, or increase funding by 1% of their budgets, it would be enough to eliminate any shortfall;
And finally, public pensions can afford to pay 100% of benefits for the next 15-20 years with no changes at all.

In the meantime, God save Japan.

Tom Corbett: Husbandry Ace

2011-03-10T21:12:00.001-05:00

Corbett began his budget address by comparing fixing state government to pruning an overgrown apple tree. Funny. Old Farmer C. hasn't raised many apple trees lately, because if he did, he'd know that pruning limbs causes even more of them to grow back, the better to make more fruit. But old Tom has a different idea: cut those suckers back and seal them up, so instead of a thriving, heavily-laden plant, he'll have a lifeless stump. Won't have any food to feed the citizens, but he won't be spending any money on fertilizer, either. It's a win-win for the gardener from Hell!

His Imperial Wrongness

2011-03-10T13:10:00.000-05:00

The kept press notices Chris Christie's credibility gap:

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong...

Some overstatements have worked their way into the governor’s routine public comments, like a claim that he balanced the budget last year without raising taxes; in truth, he cut deeply into tax credits for the elderly and the poor...

When New Jersey narrowly lost $400 million in the federal Education Department’s Race to the Top competition last summer because of missing data in its application, Mr. Christie held a news conference blaming “bureaucrats in Washington” and said state officials had tried to supply the missing numbers at a hearing. It did not take long for the Obama administration to release a recording showing that, in reality, federal officials had requested the information at the hearing, and the New Jersey team had not had it.

Mr. Christie fired Bret D. Schundler, his education commissioner at the time, accusing him of lying about the hearing. But Mr. Schundler said he had warned the governor before the news conference that what he was about to tell reporters was false...

A few months later, in November, when the Assembly speaker, Sheila Y. Oliver, a Democrat, and the governor were sparring over pension issues, she said she had requested a meeting with the governor. Mr. Christie called that “a lie.” Ms. Oliver’s office promptly produced text messages from the Assembly staff making the request...

After the record snowfall in December, Mr. Christie defended his decision to stay on vacation in Florida with his family, saying that he had spoken with the acting governor, Stephen M. Sweeney, during the storm. When Mr. Sweeney, a Democrat and the State Senate president, said they had not talked, the governor attributed his own misstatement to lack of sleep.

That's our Chris: never wrong and always right...and he'll rip your face off if you say different. Well he has a lot of face-ripping to get to, given the volume of wrongness he's generated over his brief tenure.

And why is this suddenly a story? Where was the media when he first tossed out all these lies? I'll tell you: sitting in the audience with stars in their eyes, all gaga over a public official whose rude, crude, bullying behavior made for great infotainment, and writing about his "style", as though he had any; buying into groundless agitprop about Christie's supposed popularity. The fact that he has been ripping out the garden along with the weeds hasn't been nearly as fun to cover, has it? Lots better to play videos showing him intimidating working people and turning the state police into his personal goon squad for bouncing constituents out of public meetings. The man is a liar and a hypocrite, and his cruelty is like catnip to the kept press.

Mordor Takes All

2011-03-10T06:33:00.000-05:00

Scum.

Ancient Travelers

2011-03-06T17:40:00.000-05:00

Remember all those times when you were a kid, and you looked up at the stars, and swore you didn't really belong on this planet? That you were just waiting, like Peter Gabriel in Solsbury Hill, for them to "come to take me home"?

Well, maybe you knew something:

Richard Hoover's paper, along with pictures of the microscopic earthworm-like creatures, were published late Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology, which is available free online.

Hoover sliced open fragments of several types of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which can contain relatively high levels of water and organic materials, and looked inside with a powerful microscope.

He found bacteria-like creatures that he calls "indigenous fossils," which he believes originated beyond Earth and were not introduced here after the meteorites landed.

"He concludes these fossilized bacteria are not Earthly contaminants but are the fossilized remains of living organisms which lived in the parent bodies of these meteors, e.g. comets, moons, and other astral bodies," said the study.

"The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets."

Gerald Kersh wrote a story about that.

Botswana or Bust!

2011-03-05T07:10:00.000-05:00

Did everyone forget that all our problems were solved by the POS known as the "Affordable Care Act"? I guess so, because here's the zombie health insurance debate back for more brains, via Ezra Klein:

It’s very important that health-care reform leaves a lot of room for insurers to experiment with different benefit designs and ways to keep people healthy. That could slow the growth in health spending, which is why I think the administration should be as vague as possible when defining “essential benefits.” But just making insurance progressively less generous doesn’t do you much good, and may in fact do you some harm. It’s hard to imagine any good that’s going to come from a deductible that’s above five figures: If you’re paying $10,000 out of pocket for health care in one year, you’re probably quite sick and just doing whatever the doctor tells you. Meanwhile, the sorts of intensive insurance programs that might keep people from getting so sick will probably be fairly generous, even as they’re cheaper in the long-run.

"It’s very important that health-care reform leaves a lot of room for insurers to experiment with different benefit designs and ways to keep people healthy"? No. It's not. Health insurers are not in the business to keep people healthy. They are in the business to make money. They make money in the US by being parsimonious with their benefits and charging high premiums. Denying health care by making it so expensive that people spend their money on more immediate-seeming needs (or do their own home surgery) is not solving the problem, and this is basically the "solution" conservatives and insurers have chosen.

And all this dreck about how people need to take responsibility for their own health is a thinly veiled way of saying, "Don't make me worry about caring for the sick and dying." We live in a toxic soup of an environment, and rig the game so our poorest citizens live in the very worst environments under the most challenging conditions, and then rail at them for not pulling themselves up from the mess by their bootstraps. And the better off we are, the more we rail. In 2008 the World Health Organization released released a report of health disparities that included the following findings:

The world's poor tend to die prematurely and log more life-years spent ill or suffering or depressed also because they are more likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods, have limited access to clean drinking water, be forced to endure long, sometimes arduous commutes to work, labor in unsafe environments and have little representation in the governance of their local society. If you're about to lose your job, the effects of eating too many trans fats may not be high on your list of worries. "Behavior and lifestyle are determined by the circumstances in which people find themselves," Marmot says simply....

...this "gradient," or the degree to which different groups are unequal in health, is far steeper in the U.S. than in most other industrialized countries. One reason, according to commissioner David Satcher, a former U.S. Surgeon General, may be that the U.S. comprises a more diverse population than other places, mixing a high proportion of recent immigrants with long-time American dwellers, which makes it all the more difficult to tackle social determinants early in life. "Two," Satcher says, "[the U.S.] invests probably less in improving that social gradient. There are countries that really invest in making sure that all children have quality education regardless of the education of their parents. There are countries that invest in making sure that everybody has access to a [minimum] level of quality of [health] care. We're one of the few countries that does not do that."

But fear not, American deficit hawks! It can be done:

Marmot cites the national pension plan in Botswana, which shows that even poor nations manage to provide income security to their elderly; and an Indian rural employment guarantee, which assures workers a minimum number of days of paid manual labor for the state, demonstrating that the poor can still give workers some measure of job security.

Let Botswana lead the way!

Every damn one of us is only one car accident or sudden fall from medical bankruptcy, so don't give me this crap about how the unicorns would play in the chocolate fountains if only fat people would go on a diet and the smokers we rely on for taxes to care for our elderly would just stop smoking.

Really, the hypocrisy is just breath-taking.

All You Need to Know About the Budget Crisis

2011-03-04T11:48:00.002-05:00

Brought to you by David Cay Johnston (bold mine):

We take you now to the official data for important news. Federal tax revenues in 2010 were much smaller than in 2000. Total individual income tax receipts fell 30 percent in real terms. Because the population kept growing, income taxes per capita plummeted.

Individual income taxes came to just $2,900 per capita in 2010, down 36 percent from more than $4,500 in 2000. Total income taxes and income taxes per capita declined even though the economy grew 16 percent overall and 6 percent per capita from 2000 through 2010.

Corporate income tax receipts fell 27 percent and declined 34 percent per capita, even though profits boomed, rising 60 percent.

Payroll taxes increased slightly overall, but slipped per capita because the nation's population grew five times faster than the number of people with any work. The average wage also declined slightly.

You read it here first. Lowered tax rates did not result in increased tax revenues as promised by politician after pundit after professional economist. And even though this harsh truth has been obvious from the official data for some time, the same politicians and pundits keep prevaricating. Some of them even say it is irrelevant that as a share of GDP, income tax revenues are at their lowest level since 1951, when Harry S. Truman was president.

No matter how many times advocates of lower tax rates said it, tax rate cuts did not pay for themselves, did not spur economic growth, did not increase jobs, and did not make America better off.

At some point you have to say to yourself, "Self, nothing I can say, no data or documents I can present, no oath I can take, will convince the professionally ignorant of the world of what mere observation would reveal to them. Self, it is time for a vacation." Even Galileo gave up preaching to the unconverted.

Solidarity...Not

2011-03-01T06:46:00.002-05:00

Here in PA some of us attended the Harrisburg "We are Wisconsin" rally last Saturday, and while the turnout of 1000 was respectable, I was surprised not to see a more concerted presence from the state unions. Now I know why:

March 8 is when Pennsylvania gets its first look at the new fiscal reality as interpreted by Corbett and his pro-business administration.

Whereas Walker is using Wisconsin budget deficits as an ideological excuse for gutting collective bargaining rights, Corbett is said to have started a dialogue with unions.

“From every indication we get from the Corbett administration, it’s a given these are going to be difficult times, but the governor wants to sit down with us, said David Fillman, executive director of AFSCME, which represents 45,000 of the Pennsylvania’s 75,000 state workers.

“The draconian proposal in Wisconsin is not present in Pennsylvania,” he added.

AFSCME so hopes Corbett will stick to Marcellus Shale giveaways as a policy priority that the union chose not to participate in the “We Are Wisconsin” rally at the Capitol this weekend.

“We don’t have a problem here in Pennsylvania, and we don’t want to bring any spotlight to a nonproblem. We are very supportive of the Wisconsin workers, but right now we are just doing local events in Pennsylvania,” Fillman said.

Over the long years, AFSCME's leadership here in PA has been known for timidity in negotiations. Members in my own union, SEIU, have complained on more than one occasion of the spoiling of contract negotiation terms by AFSCME, which was known to roll over on its belly at the drop of the Boss's hat when SEIU would have tried to fight on for more. The fact that AFSCME in PA maintains such a huge majority among public unions has always ensured that their negotiations would establish the baseline for all the rest of us, and as soon as they completed their negotiations, the rest of the unions simply threw in the towel and accepted the same deal.

So the fact that Fillman is making such scaredy-cat noises already about not wanting to make Corbett mad, so much so that he will not even make a nominal show of support to his brothers and sisters in Madison, can only mean the rest of us will be thrown under the bus as soon as Corbett makes a frowny face.

Last night I watched the American Experience doc on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory massacre, and the pictures of young and old women being beaten by hired thugs and police as they tried to stand together for their rights made me wonder: how many of us have the heart to stand like that, under far less dangerous conditions, for the very thing they died for? Not David Fillman, you can bet on it.

UPDATE: I forgot to comment on Fillman's remark that "We don't have a problem here in Pennsylvania..." This kind of idiotic assertion is exactly what is wrong with the negotiating brains at AFSCME. Corbett threw down the gauntlet to labor during his campaign: 10% across the board cuts to agencies, sweeping changes to workers' hard-earned pensions including a "special session" (read: constitutional amendment), and he has backing through the Koch brothers. I don't know what the hell Fillman thinks is going to happen here. A cotillion?

Union Songs

2011-02-26T18:48:00.002-05:00

My husband's grandfather died in the steel mills. God save the unions. Been to 2 rallies in 3 days...maybe the worm is turning. 100,000 people in Madison today.

They had you crying but you came up smiling
They had you crawling and you came up flying
They had you crying and you came up smiling
And the last laugh, baby is yours

You Can Lead A Horse's Ass to Oxford, But You Can't Make Him Think

2011-02-22T19:31:00.001-05:00

Jesus. If stupid was gold, we'd be the richest damned country in the world.

Oh, wait...

Personhood, Personhood, Riding Through the Glen

2011-02-05T10:33:00.002-05:00

see more Celeb Look-A-Likes

Of course, the difference is that no one is trying to pass legislation stipulating that Cookie Monster is a person.

The Sacred Oath of Hypocrisies

2011-01-29T09:47:00.000-05:00

In writing the last post I came across this quote from former Chief Justice William Rehnquist writing for the majority in a case that, in part, challenged the use of school vouchers at parochial schools in Ohio:

"The incidental advancement of a religious mission, or the perceived endorsement of a religious message, is reasonably attributable to the individual aid recipients not the government, whose role ends with the disbursement of benefits."

I was struck by the logic of the argument here: that since the government isn't giving the money directly to the parochial school, the possible religious proselytizing that may result is on the person going to school, not the government, because the government responsibility "ends with the disbursement of benefits". And Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas, the only conservatives of that year who remain on the Court today, all signed off on the opinion. The argument itself is flawed to me, or else why bother codifying laws against criminal facilitation, conspiracy, or being an accessory? Still the way Kennedy phrased it, basically saying "this is how I want it and so this is how it shall be" is particularly royal. So neat.

Except that, according to conservatives now, when it comes to vouchers to individuals who need health insurance who might use some of the money to purchase legal abortion, suddenly the government's role does not end with the disbursement of funds, because even if it gives money to recipients without directing what health services that money is to be spent on, somehow it becomes culpable, and meow meow meow. And the Constitution. And also Henry Hyde. The difference, of course, is that the government wouldn't have been giving those vouchers with the knowledge that they would be used for abortion, but with the knowledge that they could be, in some circumstances, some day, by some people. The difference is that while there is precedent for a Constitutional prohibition against supporting a particular religion via government monies, there is no similar law telling government not to support the public health via monies. Rather, the Constitution specifically states that the government has the power to lay and collect taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States. And if you're going to object on the grounds that the money is used to snuff out human life, you better do something about the money the government uses to put people to death in the name of the State--including "innocent life".

Not that they should lose any sleep over it. The Supreme Randians have demonstrated in the past they are not above doing a 180 so they can flog their own ideologies, so it will be interesting to see, should this issue come before them, how they manage to argue themselves out of the precedent they set in 2002.

The Long, Long Subversion of Public Education

2011-01-29T08:39:00.001-05:00

Everybody talks about education, but nobody really wants to do anything about it. From Walter Karp's 1985 essay and review, "Why Johnny Can't Think":

The public schools of America have not been corrupted for trivial reasons. Much would be different in a republic composed of citizens who could judge for themselves what secured or endangered their freedom. Every wielder of illicit or undemocratic power, every possessor of undue influence, every beneficiary of corrupt special privilege would find his position and tenure at hazard. Republican education is a menace to powerful, privileged, and influential people, and they in turn are a menace to republican education. That is why the generation that founded the public schools took care to place them under the suffrage of local communities, and that is why the corrupters of public education have virtually destroyed that suffrage. In 1932 there were 127,531 school districts in America. Today there are approximately 15,840 and they are virtually impotent, their proper role having been usurped by state and federal authorities. Curriculum and text. books, methods of instruction, the procedures of the classroom, the organization of the school day, the cant, the pettifogging, and the corruption are almost uniform from coast to coast. To put down the menace of republican education its shield of local self-government had to be smashed, and smashed it was.

The public schools we have today are what the powerful and the considerable have made of them. They will not be redeemed by trifling reforms. Merit pay, a longer school year, more homework, special schools for "the gifted," and more standardized tests will not even begin to turn our public schools into nurseries of "informed, active and questioning citizens." They are not meant to. When the authors of A Nation at Risk call upon the schools to create an "educated work force," they are merely sanctioning the prevailing corruption, which consists precisely in the reduction of citizens to credulous workers. The education of a free people will not come from federal bureaucrats crying up "excellence" for "economic growth," any more than it came from their predecessors who cried up schooling as a means to "get a better job."

Only ordinary citizens can rescue the schools from their stifling corruption, for nobody else wants ordinary children to become questioning citizens at all. If we wait for the mighty to teach America's youth what secures or endangers their freedom, we will wait until the crack of doom.

And to his list of ineffectual "reforms" we can add charter schools and school vouchers. Although supposedly intended to give poor kids a shot at a decent option in the face of failing public schools, studies so far indicate that the majority of charters perform either no better or even worse than the public schools they are supposed to supplant. No, the real winners in the charter school shell game are the owners and investors, who game the system for tax breaks and siphon off badly-needed public resources, and whose millionaire/billionaire sugar daddies are using all the influence their bucks can buy to destroy the public system and turn education into just another part of their portfolios. And as for school vouchers, a GAO study found very limited to no improvement in student performance, while the amount of a typical voucher ($2-3K) against the typical cost of a private school ($8549) makes it difficult for a poor family to find a school they can afford.

It's bad enough that we have to battle the business model schools are being held to as it is; when you throw in the deliberate sabotaging of the system with charters and vouchers, the picture that emerges is of a nation that is in no way interested in real education for its citizens, but rather only business opportunities for the wealthy to create obedient wage slaves and money-making investments in a rigged system. As for the ordinary people who really just want their kids to learn to read and write? Well, they've been hypnotized for so long by the sparkly promises of the snake oil salesmen of the Cato Institute and their local pols that they're ready to swallow anything with a pleasing label. Hope you're enjoying that American stereotype of rugged individualism, because from here on out, you're on your own. Better learn how to install your own water treatment plant while you're at it.

The Future Belongs to Wuss

2011-01-26T16:50:00.000-05:00

The Third Way's solution to handling liberals:

But yet I know, where'er I go, that there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth

2011-01-26T06:31:00.000-05:00

An antidote for last night's spectacle: the real state of the Union. A collage by Thom Yorke and Talib Kweli via Marc at Pandagon:

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

--Wordsworth

Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Guilty

2011-01-19T10:50:00.001-05:00

In the New York Times today, David Leonhardt comes very close to having an epiphany, at least what passes for epiphany at a news organ addicted to tales of over-the-top weddings and how much house $3 million can buy. Why, he wonders, does the recovery remain so jobless despite a rising GDP, high corporate profits, and a hard-working, efficient workforce?

But beyond these immediate causes, the basic structure of the American economy also seems to be an important factor. This jobless recovery, after all, is the third straight recovery since 1991 to begin with months and months of little job growth.

Why? One obvious possibility is the balance of power between employers and employees.

Yes, he comes close, he's practically sitting on it, but then he backs off like a mule at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Because what he sees there is a truth that clearly scares the bejeezus out of him, as you can tell by his verbal scuttle away from the brink. Unions have withered, he says, courts are business-friendlier, and "many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees." But since when was this not mostly true? To work in this country means not only acceding to an employer's schedule and accepting his wages (excepting in cases where unions have forced codification of basic human rights into federal law), but also absorbing a thousand smaller humiliations: random drug tests for jobs that entail no safety issues or probable cause, bullying disguised as supervision, requirements of specific off-the-clock behavior in the name of health insurance cost containment that are reminiscent of the days when single women could not be seen with men on pain of termination. Employers have the power. And employers, especially today, represent the group most responsible for the jobless situation: the wealthy.

But watch his gyrations as he works assiduously to avoid the word and the blame that goes with it. He repeats that favorite koan of supply-side Econ 101, that "only by lifting economic growth will we put people back to work". Yet his own graphic shows that as GDP has risen since 2008, the number of employed continued to plummet, and has now, at best, merely stagnated at an incredibly high level. So whose growth is it we're talking about? Certainly not the unemployed masses, or those lucky enough to find work after a layoff at half their previous wage or worse.

Then he posits that "policy makers could also help the unemployed by spreading economic pain more broadly among the population." He doesn't explain exactly who this population is that should have some pain, but given that the poor have always felt it, and the middle-class has been having its share for years, it really only leaves one group...who shall remain nameless, thank God, or someone from the Business Section might get his nose out of joint.

He lauds Germany and Canada for averting layoffs by job-sharing and cutting wages and hours, while wondering why Americans, whose average wages have risen faster than inflation since 2007, still retain such high numbers of unemployed. But that "average" wage is skewed by the wages of the top few into irrelevance, if not falsehood. Inflation has been almost extinct, so anything that exceeds it, exceeds it by a pittance. Both Germany and Canada have strong unions and workers whose actual wages are better than those of Americans. And unlike America, in both countries credit never took the place of the real earning increases that a fairer distribution of employer profits would have allowed, so the phenomenon of debt carried by American workers to negate their declining wages did not undermine their economies to the same extent.

He also lauds Germany for its work-sharing program, while ignoring the fact that Germany has had a power-sharing tradition of workers sitting beside management on the boards of its companies since the end of WWII, a tradition specifically engineered by policy-makers from the U.S. In our lifetime power between workers and bosses in Germany has never been the kind of unequal feudal arrangement we have in the U.S. The fact that Germany has performed so well over the decades, and taken so little relative pain since the crash, has a great deal to do with the fact that employees had some control over the natural rapaciousness of the moneyed class, yet Leonhardt has to take a crack at unions in the U.S. anyway:

One problem is that too many labor unions, like the auto industry’s, have been poorly run, hurting companies and, ultimately, workers.

One problem is that unions had nothing at all to do with Detroit's management into oblivion, which occured not once, but twice (first in the 70s. They had nothing to do with management decisions to put allthe eggs into the SUV/truck basket while doing relatively little R&D and long-range planning in preparation for a paradigm shift that anyone who follows the oil business could see coming down the pike for decades. Without the kind of genuine power-sharing inherent in the German approach, unions have relatively little power over a company. They don't set its goals, and they don't make decisions in the boardroom, and those are the kinds of things that really determine whether a company succeeds of fails.

And then he finally goes there:

The list of promising solutions to the jobs slump can go on and on. Reforming the disability insurance system so it does not encourage long-term joblessness would help.

Yes, this idea that the disabled are dragging us into the pit has gained traction lately, and when you run out of other targets, you have to dig deep to avoid naming the guilty. I would suggest that Leonhardt take some time from his busy day and read Charles Pierce's horror story "The Era of Big Government Is Over And Marcus Stephens Is Dead", of how that same system, pummeled by lies from Right back in the 90s, murdered a young boy to prove it wasn't allowing the lazy little goldbricker to steal from the coffers of his betters.

You want things to change? You really have to learn how to name names.

The Self-Satisfaction of Retroactive Accomplishment, Periodical Edition

2011-01-17T11:50:00.000-05:00

In 1963, The Atlantic ran the text of MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Here they reprint it on the occasion of the day. Given the direction the magazine has taken over the past 12 years, the reprint dramatically illuminates the change. Once upon a time they took such a man seriously, despite the smears and libels against him by the regressive elements of the nation. Now, they publish work on behalf of those very same regressive elements. If a man like King were to appear tomorrow, they would send their smallest thinkers to McArdelize him, and question how serious such a leftist rabble-rouser could be.

What Self-Centered Men Have Torn Down, Men Other-Centered Can Build Up

2011-01-17T09:50:00.000-05:00

In celebration of Martin Luther King Day, a portion of his Nobel acceptance speech:

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that We Shall overcome!

The Implausible Deniability of the Clueless Nation

2011-01-14T16:41:00.002-05:00

What's the point of this, may I ask, other than to rouse the rabble into righteous indignation?

TUCSON — Law enforcement officials said Friday they have multiple photos of Jared L. Loughner posing with a Glock 9mm pistol next to his naked buttocks and dressed in a bright red g-string. It is the same model of weapon as the one the police say Mr. Loughner used last Saturday to kill six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and to wound 14 others, including an Arizona congresswoman. The photos were turned over to the police by Walgreens, where Mr. Loughner had taken them to be developed. In some of the photos he is holding the gun near his crotch, and in others, presumably shot in a mirror, he is holding the gun next to his buttocks, the police said. It was not yet clear when the photos were taken or whether Mr. Loughner had ordered prints.

Goddammit, what does the Times pay these people for? I want to know whether he ordered prints!!! And what did he pay? Is it cheaper to get juvenalia developed in Walgreens, or should I be taking my ancient reproductive methods to the CVS? What's the point of specious public speculation on the mindset of a would-be assassin if they can't even tell us whether he got them on sale?

But hey, now we've got some sensational material to seed the public imagination, and keep the cuckoo clocks spinning another 24 hours, chirping out bad guesses as to what made him do it?

Listen, we don't need to know what motivated this poor sap, or what his sexual kinks were. All we need to know is we can chalk up another spectacular fail for the nation's pitiful mental health system, and for the usual suspects around Loughner who remember in hindsight that he was "scary", and "creepy", but never quite scary or creepy enough to do anything about at the time. How many more times do we have to be told by neighbors that the suspect was a quiet guy, who kept to himself, but seemed nice enough; or by old girlfriends that they would never have believed he had it in him, or that he freaked them out but not enough to worry about; or by teachers that he was a loner who drew funny pictures? When is "Whooocouldanode?" finally going to replace "In God We Trust" on our currency, or the universal sign for "clueless schmuck" replace the stars and stripes on our flag? Because our dismantling of the safety net for the mentally ill certainly had nothing to do with this, did it? And we're all too good as Christians to have sat on our haunches watching American Idol while we let this happen. Shit just happens, doesn't it? But it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.