A Kickstart from the Divine

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

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

I need a happy ending.

To the Lessons of the Past Unlearned

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

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

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

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

It's hot.

Comments

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

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.