Such aching loneliness...

Michael Jackson's passing fills me with sadness - he always seemed a tragic figure to me. His talent was colossal, almost overwhelming to consider.

A couple months ago, I was surfing the web and came across the video below, and watching it, and knowing what I knew about his [lack of a] childhood, the cruelty of his father, the distortions that early superstardom imposed on his personality, and so on -- I found the video almost impossibly moving.

Maybe it is just that I know the story of his life, but it seemed to me that as I watched him sing this song, I got a glimpse at a frightened, lonely, bewildered child, aching in vain for the kind of friend he was rhapsodizing about in this song. I didn't know him personally of course, but I got the sense that he lived (and died, now) carrying an immense burden of pain.

I hope he has found some peace.

Mr Guthrie got me thinkin'...

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

-- Woodie Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land

Progressives, these are our people. These are the people we fight for. These are the people who ought to haunt our thoughts and consciences and inspire our dreams as we work and advocate and build our future. These folks ought to get taken care of first: the rest can come after.

These are the people who ought to be able to go to the Doctor, not in shame at not having the money to pay, but in hope of finding a treatment for their sickness, and proud of their country for taking care of folks like them.

These are the people who wish that using the term "trailer trash" would be a public scandal -- a career-ender for any politician foolish enough to utter it.

These are people like the woman I know in the ghetto, a woman who lost 2 grandchildren to murder and is bleary-eyed with grief, and yet somehow lifted by hope as she works valiantly in programs that help at-risk youth. She prays, every night, for the ones she helps, and also for the ones she has lost to prison or murder. She deserves every program and counselor (and prayer) we can send to her and the people that she cares for with fiercely protective love.

When America was a Communist Country

Note the top tax rate in the 1950s; north of 90%. During the greatest economic upsurge in the history of any country on earth. A broad and solid middle class. Relative labor peace (and high unionization rates). Social stability to the point of being boring.

Yes, In a Nutshell...

Captain Obvious (aka, Robert Reich)

Bottom line: Genuine financial reform will be almost as difficult to achieve as real universal health care. Immense private interests are amassed against the public interest in both cases because staggering amounts of money are at stake. But they are the two most important domestic issues right now. Keep careful watch, and weigh in.

Immense private interests are amassed against the public interest

There's your problem right there.

More on War-fetishizing and "Manliness" on the Right

A good friend of mine told me a story once of calling in an airstrike on a bunch of NVA regulars in a treeline about 150 yards away.

He spent the next few minutes (minutes he wishes desperately he could forget) listening to the ... consequences when napalm incinerates human beings - men about his age, just as frightened as he was, who were loved by their mothers just as much - screaming their lungs out as they were incinerated. The ones who were caught in the main blasts died pretty quickly, as they inhaled burning napalm which destroyed their lungs and suffocated them. The ones who were on the edge took long, agonizing, screaming minutes to expire.

Killing people didn't make him feel manly or heroic or powerful. He says the way he felt that day gave him a glimpse of what being in hell might feel like.

Umberto Eco talked about one of the features of "Ur-fascism" was a cult of masculinity.

Regarding the Color Change on the Blog...

...Andrew is right.

What is it with New Yorkers, anyway??

What I want to know is, why does everyone who lives within about 50 miles of New York act the way they do?

I work in a customer service call center, and we all hate calls from NY and northern NJ - there are certainly exceptions, but with many, MANY callers the premise of everything they say seems to be that my only desire in life is to cheat them out of what is rightfully theirs.

They are blunt, demanding, tactless, and display a bottomless sense of entitlement.

When I talk to folks like that, my approach is the following: "What is the minimum I'm required to do - by law - to help this person?"

On the other hand, if I'm talking to some sweet little old lady in Iowa who's practically in tears because her product is confusing her, I will walk through the fires of hell to make her as happy as I possibly can. No sacrifice is too great. I'll end the call by giving her a nice, big coupon for her next order.

"Class War"

Why do they only call it class warfare when we fight back?

Suburbs to be bulldozed

Jim Kunstler has speculated that, due to gasoline getting ever more expensive from here on out (aside from economic collapses like 2008-2009), the auto-dependent outer suburbs many people live in are going to become unworkable and will basically be abandoned soon.

And now, there are proposals to actually raze entire districts of cities.

It's kind of weird to think that the way the country has occupied the landscape since 1950 or so is soon going to vanish forever.

Please Excuse my Cuss-Words

Here's the thing, rich people: you've been running the country for your benefit, not ours - to the point where the entire fucking system is now coming unglued. You have warred and underpaid and cripple-em-with-debt-ed your way into a big fucking crisis, and all I have to say to you is:

SCREW YOU.

In the last 30 years, your compensation has increased to the point where you are making hundreds of times what your average employee is making. I'm sorry, but you don't work 300 times as hard as I do, you don't experience 300 times the stress I do (want stress? Try getting by on what I'm making some time - it'll be not just "fire the nanny" but "kids, we'll be eating spam for the rest of the month.")

When was the last time you were out of money? And not, stuck in Paris in the summer after college and waiting for mommy and daddy to wire more money, but more like the following situation:

Money in checking account: $8.23
Money in Savings account: $36.18
Days til payday: 8
Proportion of that paycheck that will go to rent: 90%
Proportion of the post-rent remainder of your check needed to buy food until your mid-month paycheck: 108%
Reaction: "Oh, fuck."

That's spelled S-U-F-F-E-R-I-N-G, and millions and millions and millions of people are experiencing it, not just now, but for fucking YEARS because of what you have done and what you have failed to do.

To the politicians who are too afraid to stand up to this corrupt, wicked bunch:

FUCK YOU TOO.

What is so damned hard to figure out about our situation?

We need to organize the working poor into unions who will fight to raise their poverty wages; we need to re-industrialize the economy so that we're taking raw materials and using them to create things of real value and can afford to pay good wages, as opposed to an economy based on hallucinatory "returns" on financial instruments based on abstractions of other financial instruments.

We need living wage laws, and a real, functioning social service system. Government-provided, free daycare for anyone who needs it. Single-payer healthcare. Mixed-use development that is aimed at creating communities with a mix of incomes, rather than a population divided into either "exclusive" communities or slums. Geographically dividing the upper middle class and above from the poor is a good way to destroy the social fabric of a country.

We need a tax system that rewards work, but in which wealthy people pay a higher and higher price for each incremental increase of income, and that pays support to poorer folks in larger amounts as you go down the wage ladder.

We need to support small farmers with crop subsidies and cash supplements to their incomes, while providing incentives to use their land wisely, especially incentives to grow their crops as near to pure-organic as is practicable.

We need more taxes, especially on the rich. Way more taxes. Why is the media treating the huge deficits in California and the federal government as great big, gee-what-can-we-do mysteries?? You either need to:

1. Cut services (which will cause already suffering people's lives to become constant, desperate emergencies, which in turn will result in lots of social unrest and eventually, if it gets bad enough, armed revolution) OR

2. Raise taxes substantially on people who can afford to pay more, which will result in lots of huffing and puffing from the Limbaugh and business right (but I repeat myself), and if it gets bad enough, ridiculous, badly written polemical crypto-fascist novels featuring characters named "John Galt".

All of this would seem to be obvious to me, but that's only because I'm barely getting by.

Too many people call themselves lefties because they drive Priuses, are pro-choice and treat the nanny like a member of the family. Methinks they need a reminder of what real, actual leftism looks like.

Barbara Ehrenreich on what this recession/depression is doing to the poor

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

[...]

Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.

Indeed. Unless things change for the better, and soon, violence against the system may become all but inevitable.

Manliness?

What is this bullshit on the right I come across regularly that equates war-making with manliness? Just ask a European over the age of about, oh, 70 or so how "manly" and heroic war is. And don't shut your ears when he tells you stories about how his family lived in a bombed-out cellar in some obliterated city for a year and a half, surviving on aid packages, bread and the occasional cat.

Try and describe how glorious and manly war is, and he is rightly going to look at you as if you are insane.