The Hopeful Populist

Attention Elites: Your World Is Ending

2011-10-06T19:55:00.001-07:00

Tax the Rich

2011-10-02T12:02:00.001-07:00

Idiot Elites

2011-09-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

New England Brahmins: People who rape the world, and whose children think of themselves as Luminous and Enlightened Beings. Money is poison.

My All-Time Favorite "Scamming the scammers" story

2011-09-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Guy gets a typical 419 scammer email from an "exiled dictator" - "We need you to hide our millions, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. [etc.]"

Guy responds, and after a few emails and calls (during which he keeps "forgetting" to give them his account and routing numbers), "discloses" to scammers that he wants to sell some stolen laptops in their country - they can keep 20% of the proceeds (they're like, "Oh Sure. We'll send you your 80% share, honest...") -- the only wrinkle is he doesn't have enough funds to pay for the shipping, so he will need them to pay shipping charges collect.

After hemming and hawing and guy threatening to walk, the scammers agree.

Guy then buys two used washing machines on craigslist for 20 or 30 bucks, removes the motors and guts, and then fills them to the very top with cement. Then he crates them up and ships them, air freight, to their country.

Hilarity and death threats ensue.

Krugman Gets It

2011-09-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

Krugman (a hero of mine) on the "affinities" of the WSJ:

Maybe subscribers buy the paper for the reporting (although if you ask me, that’s been going downhill since the Murdoch takeover). But as far as I can tell, lots of people still take the editorial page’s pronouncements seriously, even though it seems likely that you could have made a lot of money by betting against whatever that page predicts.

[...]

I guess it’s an affinity thing. The WSJ editorial page comes across as the work of people who love the rich (unless they support liberal causes), hate liberals and the poor, and feel personally affronted by lucky duckies too poor to pay income taxes; and a significant number of well-heeled readers see this and say, “those are my kind of people!”

Proposed Slogan for Obama's 2012 Re-election campaign:

2011-09-04T19:39:00.001-07:00

"Vote for us: we'll make sure things will get worse more slowly than under a Republican President."

Good Question

2011-09-03T12:45:00.001-07:00

"Which Side Area You On?" by Florence Reese

Come all you poor workers, good news to you I’ll tell,
How the good old union has come in here to dwell.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

We’re starting our good battle, we know we’re sure to win.
Because we got the gun thugs lookin’ pretty thin.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

You go to Harlan County, there is no neutral there.
You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

They say they have to guard us to educate their child.
Their children live in luxury, our children almost wild.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

Gentlemen can you stand it, oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a gun thug or will you be a man?
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner, he’s now in the air and sun.
he'll be with you, fellow workers, till every battle’s won.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?

Concerning the Unholy Clusterf*ck in DC

2011-07-23T14:49:00.000-07:00

David Atkins has a great post up over at Digby's joint.

I think he's pretty much nailed the basic problem: the New-Deal-to-Great-Society era is a fading memory, and the energy behind those initiatives has been allowed to dissipate.

You've got a hard-right Republican Party, and (by historic standards, at least) a center-right technocratic party in the Dems. There is no real, actual left in this country. The big "progressive" victories are:

1. Mitt Romney's healthcare plan got passed;
2. Gays can now serve openly in the imperial forces;
3. The results of Wall Street's Panic of 2008 stopped getting worse.

Nothing in the economic system has been reformed in any substantive way. Wall Street and the Rich have been allowed to go back to adding helipads to their yachts and destroying my retirement savings unmolested.

Andrew Sullivan is onto something here:

Money quote:

I read George Will’s retread column from the 1980s today and simply cannot fathom what he is talking about. Except, I fear I can. He is channeling Mitch McConnell. Boehner and McConnell have one goal and it is has nothing to do with the economy. It is destroying this president and this presidency. They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal. The propaganda channel dreamt of by Roger Ailes in the Nixon era will continue to pump poison into the body politic, until they defeat the man whose legitimacy as president they have never truly accepted.

They would rather destroy what’s left of the economy (and work hard, through a useless and thoroughly corrupt media, to then hang the resulting depression on the White House) than let a democrat be perceived to succeed in any way. If they succeed at this, things will get almost unimaginably dire in the US. The Republican Party has truly gone insane.

What they imagine they'll do is destroy Obama, get their guy in in 2012, then do the things they refuse to do now (some form of massive stimulus) and use that as proof that “their” ideas work better than Obama’s.

The Wisconsin situation is a preview of what would follow.

I think the Republicans perceive, with plenty of justification, that final victory is within their grasp: with the destruction of the last vestiges of the only institutions capable of diluting the power of their plutocrat constituency (those institutions being unions and the social safety net), the working class (which will consist of everyone but the plutocrats) will be frightened and servile.

...except that was always a pipe dream; the reality is that desperate people do desperate things. Given the paranoiac, violent and apocalyptic character of much of the rank-and-file right these days, it may take the form of a right-wing authoritarian regime. (I predict that one of such a regime’s efforts will be to restore the unchallenged dominance of white males in our society, with probably extremely dire consequences for racial and cultural minorities.)

It may take the form of a left-wing revolution of some kind (I consider this extremely unlikely – as I said, there is no functioning, real-actual-left in the United States of any real consequence.)

Or, it could be that things will just collapse into disorder. A slow, grinding descent into anarchy and dissolution of the United States as a united, functioning political entity. This is the more likely possibility, in my view.

I’ve always kind of wondered what it was like to live in the Mediterranean region in Late Antiquity. I believe I am now getting a pretty clear sense of the experience.It's the fall of the western empire, except with thousands of hydrogen bombs up for grabs.

Geesh.

Indianapolis Winter Night

2011-04-22T10:02:00.001-07:00

Walking out the Army gate late
on a snowy evening in early March
Lumened streetlight halos in the holy snowfall
Grace and quiet against the storm of young blood
Houses quiet and sleepy soundless lawns
A yellow warm door-glass leaks a private laugh
Jump boots squeak and shush in icy rime
To Californian eyes and ears and skin, a myth
Like a fairy world enchanted by endless futures
But then a pang of home and this time it's real
And then flakes mingle with diamond tears.

Rain Resurrection

2011-04-20T22:14:00.001-07:00

Rain and mist and sluicing roof-water
Soft and splattery roar in the garden
While in the breeze a gentle memory
Of yellow raincoats and child-games
And an ocean-spent dream of oars
There, a soft and new-green leaf cloud
As the Lazarus garden stirs in winter's tomb:
Summer somnolence promised in the blessed wet.

The Forgotten

2011-03-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Mother Teresa used to say that the greatest pain for the poor she fed and comforted was not the physical facts of their poverty, not the chronic hunger, the infections untreated, the million little inconveniences that complicated their lives and burdened them. No; it was that they believed themselves to be Invisible; People Who Don't Matter; The Forgotten. This was the most poignant pain they experienced.

The Forgotten.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

” ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ “

Luke 16:19-31

America teems with the Forgotten; there are entire cities inhabited by no one but them. We know those cities by the names of Watts, Compton, The South Bronx, Richmond California, East Oakland, East Palo Alto, and many more.

These places are filled with suffering, but also grace; grace that not only sanctifies those who dwell in these places, but grace also waiting to sanctify those who live in more comfortable circumstances but learn to remember these places, and have the courage to go and serve Christ there.

And make no mistake; Christ is there waiting for you.

I lived until I was 14 in Richmond, California.

Richmond consists of The Flats - that portion of the city west of Interstate 80 and on the coastal plain next to San Francisco Bay, where the poor people live, and The Hills, which overlook the flats.
I lived in The Flats.

My great friend Sertha grew up down the street from me, and he, my late older brother Mark, Sertha's younger brother Ray, and I used to hang out together. I have great memories of playing street football with them, building forts in our back yards; kid stuff.

I also have more troubling memories of fleeing a park with Ray when we saw guns being drawn and a murder gathering, but also Ray comforting me when one of the neighborhood thugs singled me out for persecution.

Sertha was murdered about 20 years ago, in a minor drug deal gone wrong. Ray saw the aftermath, and 20 years later is still so devastated that he still lives with his mother. He needs your prayers. I look at the 11th station of the cross, and think of Ray:

Christ Speaks:

Can you imagine what a crucifixion is?

My executioners stretch my arms;
They hold my hand and wrist against the wood
and press the nail
until is stabs my flesh.
Then, with one heavy hammer smash,
they drive it through --
and pain
Bursts like a bomb of fire in my brain.

They seize the other arm;
and agony again explodes.

Then raising up my knees
so that my feet are flat against the wood,
they hammer them fast, too.

---------------

My next door neighbors were an old couple, the Penders. Mrs Pender had a stroke, and so she walked with a walker, but her heart was as warm and pure as a tropical lagoon. She had only to smile at you, and suddenly the problems you had seemed to fade into insignificance. She used to take me in sometimes when the streets got hairy, and feed me hot chocolate, and tell me that she just knew I was going to grow up and be someone really special. (She's surely long dead, and I'm sure she's praying for me. Sleep in heavenly peace, Mrs. Pender. I'm still trying to live up to your belief in me.)

From my neighborhood in Richmond, you could see, about a mile away and on the other side of the freeway, The Hills and the comparatively lavish homes of middle- and upper-middle class folks. The people in those houses, to us, seemed situated across some invisible and unbridgeable divide. On those occasions when we ventured up into those hills, we were greeted with cold stares and parents pulling their kids inside. We were Other, and a threat.

When I began middle school in the hills, I was shocked by the attitudes of the kids in my school. My dear childhood friends and neighbors lived in "Niggertown" and were dismissed as "Zulus" and worse.

My friends and neighbors were People Who Don't Matter.

That's when I got my first clear view of a deep wound in American life.

Those kids in the hills (and their parents: the kids didn't emerge from the womb with those attitudes) were immeasurably poorer for not knowing the people I knew; they were deprived of the joy of being held by Mrs. Pender; they never met the kind police woman who probably did more than anyone to keep me from entering a life of crime; they never sat on the porch with my down-the-street neighbor - an older boy who'd had polio - and had the experience of basking in the warm generosity of his overflowing heart; they never walked my friend Ray's bike home for him after a spectacular bicycle wreck.

The violence and the tattered social fabric in Richmond is a poignant expression of the outrage -- more than that, the the unutterable pain -- of priceless children of God who have been told, with words and the bleeding wounds of a million injustices large and small, that they are the Forgotten, the People Who Don't Matter.

These are the kinds of people Christ described as "the last [who] will be first."

The gulf between the flats and the hills is replicated all across the United States, and this is a terribly diminished country for it.

Richmond, and the many places like it, stand as monuments to a deep sickness and sinfulness in American life. They are searing indictments of our greed and selfishness.

May the God Who made us all, break our hearts. May we all be reunited across the gulf that divides us. May we not only come to understand one another, but may God so reconcile us with one another that we truly, deeply realize our brother- and sisterhood, and then weep tears of joy in each others' arms, flooded with gratitude that our long separation from our brothers and sisters is at an end.

Andy Williams and Middle Age

2011-03-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

I remember watching this show about a billion years ago, cuddled in my father's arms in my PJs. Dad loved this show, and I enjoyed his enjoyment as much as I enjoyed the show itself.

It is sad to think that a show like this - sophisticated (Andy Williams practically invented the concept of "suave") and soothing - would probably be impossible today. In a world where Lady Gaga crawls around in her panties on MTV on a regular basis, maybe we've lost something important.

But then, maybe this is just middle age nostalgia talking.

Japan Nuclear Plant Situation looking Very Ominous

2011-03-14T20:11:00.001-07:00

It appears that a massive release of nuclear contamination may be coming. Prayers and thoughts with the Japanese. Yeesh.

THIS is what I'm talking about: The PEOPLES PARTY

2011-03-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Dr. Robert Reich, this is from a flyer being passed around in Wisconsin:

It's emerging from the heartland - from Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa -- and it is spreading across the nation. It doesn't have a formal organization or Washington lobbyists beyond it, but it's gaining strength nonetheless. Like the Tea Party did with Republicans in 2010, the People's Party will pressure Democrats in primaries and general elections leading up to 2012 and beyond to have the courage of the party's core convictions. But unlike the Tea Party, which has been co-opted by the super-rich, the People's Party represents the needs and aspirations of America's vast working middle class, along with the less fortunate.

The People's Party is dedicated to the truth that America is a rich nation - richer by far than any other, richer than it's ever been. The People's Party rejects the claims of plutocrats who want us to believe we can no longer afford to live decently - who are cutting the wages and benefits of most people, attacking unions, and squeezing public budgets. The People's Party will not allow them to turn us against one another - unionized against non-unionized, public employee against private employee, immigrant against native born. Nor will the People's Party allow the privileged and powerful to distract us from the explosive concentration of income and wealth at the top, the decline in taxes paid by the top, and their increasing and untrammeled political power.

We have joined together to reverse these trends and to promote a working people's bill of rights. We are committed to:

1. Increasing the pay and bargaining power of average working people. We'll stop efforts to destroy unions and collective bargaining rights. Protect workers who try to form unions from being fired. Make it easier for workers to form unions through simple up-or-down votes at the workplace.

2. Requiring America's super-rich to pay their fair share. Increase top marginal tax rates and the number of tax brackets at the top. Treat income from capital gains the same as ordinary income. Restore the estate tax. Revoke the citizenship of anyone found to be sheltering income abroad.

3. Protecting and expanding government programs vital to the working middle class and the poor. These include Social Security, K-12 education, Pell Grants for disadvantaged students, public transportation, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

4. Ending corporate welfare and cutting military outlays. Trim defense spending. End special tax subsidies for specific corporations or industries - at both state and federal levels. Cut agricultural subsidies.

5. Saving Social Security while making it more progressive. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from Social Security taxes. Make up the difference - and any need for additional Social Security revenues - by raising the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

6. Ending Wall Street's dominance of the economy and preventing any future taxpayer-funded bailout. Break up Wall Street's largest banks and put a cap their size. Link pay on the Street to long-term profits rather than short-term speculation. Subject all financial transactions to a one-tenth of one percent transactions tax.

7. Fully enforcing regulations that protect workers, consumers, small investors, and the environment. Raise penalties on corporations that violate them. Expand enforcement staffs. Provide more private rights of action.

8. Providing affordable health care to all Americans. The new health law isn't enough. We'll fight for a single payer - making Medicare available to all. End fee-for-service and create "accountable-care" organizations that focus on healthy outcomes.

9. Slowing and eventually reversing climate change. We'll fight to limit carbon emissions. Impose a ceiling on emissions or a carbon tax on polluters. Return the revenues from these to the American people, in the form of tax cuts for the working middle class.

10. Getting big money out of politics. We'll fight to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overrule Citizens United v. FEC. Require full disclosure of all contributions for or against any candidate. Provide full public financing for all presidential, gubernatorial, and legislative candidates in all general elections.

A few of the places it's happening:

* Madison (ongoing).

* Des Moines (ongoing).

* March 10: Indianapolis. Gather at 10am and rally at 11:30am at Statehouse, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis. Rallies will continue at the capitol until the impasse is over.

* March 11: St. Louis. Downtown at 3:30 pm at Kiener Plaza. SB 1 is expected to be voted on in the Senate the week of 3/7 or 3/14.

* April 4: In cities across America. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day - Demonstrations to show that "We Are One."

Spaghetti Sacramental

2011-03-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

Grateful Face of Christ
Showing Yourself in the faces
In the stories
In the Sacred vulnerability
Of the Holy Homeless
Breaking my heart and
Filling my heart
I give them noodles
And in return you give me You
I am not worthy, not nearly,
But you forgive, and more
You show me what it is
To be you:
Your other Self.

How to Rock

2011-03-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

The Kinks' guitar playing is pretty primitive, and it sounds like they recorded this using mono equipment...inside a metal shipping container...with a microphone they accidentally ran over in the parking lot...but the lack of polish is more than made up for by the sheer manic, propulsive animal *energy* of the thing. One of the great rock songs.

Sixties Berkeley

2011-03-05T23:50:00.000-08:00

Kodachrome and orange and bouffant
Gloves and perfume and jaunty pillbox
Mommy's hand at Woolworths
Gentle hippies wearing blankets,
They are smiling and sullen at once
The smell of teargas,
Running freaks and soldier's jeeps and then
Mom's rage-grip on the steering wheel
She's Cursing Nixon and napalm
And afraid for her children,
Who sing "Up up and away
In my beautiful balloon."

Wisconsin and Ohio: The Place Where We Began the Counter-offensive?

2011-03-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Looks like the unions and their supporters in Ohio may face a challenge of their union-busting legislation at the ballot box. Progressives in Wisconsin are planning to gather signatures for a recall election for the Republican lawmakers who support the stripping of collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin state workers.

On a side note, I'm reminded of all the "progressives" who've whined over my years of blogging that "street protests will do no good/are just soooo 'sixties'/are ineffective in the era of [insert title of currently popular and brainless TV show here] blah blah blah."

What the union members and supporters are doing in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere is doing their jobs as citizens by involving themselves in the process.

They do enough of that, and all the bread and circuses in the world won't hold back progress.

On the other hand, if all you do is whine about what hopeless dolts your fellow citizens are while sitting on your hands, well then yeah, things will continue to suck.

TO HELL WITH DESPAIR.

Robert Reich Gives a Nice Summary

2011-03-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie.

Yes indeed.

Today's unemployment news is good only in the sense that the raw numbers are moving in the right direction; unemployment decreased from 9.0 to 8.9 percent.

But, as Reich says, the new jobs ain't like the old ones:

The National Employment Law Project did just that. Its new data brief shows that most of the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay significantly lower wages than the jobs lost (8.4 million) between January 2008 and February 2010.
While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

This is not a recipe for sustainable prosperity and broadly-rising standards of living. It's a recipe for an America where there are a few oligarchs doing just great, while the bulk of us shop at dollar stores and barely get by.

The thing is, most people alive right now remember a different economic reality; one where prosperity was broadly shared and Americans were proud of having the world's highest standard of living.

They and I won't accept an America where there are a few people at the top making obscene heaps of money, while the vast bulk of the population lives one paycheck away from penury. Such an America is one that cries out to the heavens for justice. Such an America is a nation where social stability will begin to seriously degrade.

There seems to be this idea in the heads of our political elites that the United States is exempt from political instability because we're America and thus apart from history (hubris much?).

Unless our political and economic structures are reformed, our elites are going to learn that the US is solidly within the river of history, and that river will flood, and they will learn that history has neither pity nor remorse.

Cui Bono?

2011-03-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

Kyle Cupp discusses the implications and limitations of consensus, in the context of global warming:

Consensus implies the existence of other views and, indeed, dissent. As consensus does not equal truth, truth demands that others get a hearing and that our ears remain open to the voice of dissent or what Lyotard called paralogy, the innovation of new concepts that emerge in thought oppositional to the established ways of thinking.

Of course, keeping an open ear doesn’t mean we refuse to act when consensus urges a course of action. Knowledge is never absolute, and prudence dictates that we act without perfect knowledge.

Despite what prudence dictates, no action will be forthcoming until something more compelling than the money and power available to politicians who serve the interests of the oligarchy who benefits from America's fossil fuel addiction. As I said in his commbox:

There seems to be an emerging strategy in the political organs that serve the interests of the Plutocracy: deny global warming until it is too late to act to mitigate it (such actions having the effect of limiting their ability to make as much money as possible), then break out the no-use-crying-over-spilt-milk arguments after it is safely too late to do anything about it.

Apropos of Nothing Much...

2011-03-02T14:57:00.000-08:00

May I just say that Deepak Chopra has struck me, every time I've heard him, as a guy who's grown rich from saying reassuring and flattering things to affluent people, who then pay good money to attend his seminars to receive further flattery and aggrandizement? Sort of "spiritual anesthetic" for the NPR set.

American "Manhood"

2011-02-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

I am around a half-century old, and as such, was probably in the last cadre of Americans saddled with the notions of American manhood that would have been recognizable to DH Lawrence:

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

I have come to realize that the notions I was raised on and which I absorbed from a million TV westerns and adventure shows was a fraud, and a terribly destructive one.

I have done so much in my life in an ultimately fruitless attempt to live up to a species of manhood modeled in a million ways in my youth - I hunt deer, drink scotch, volunteered for the US Army in my youth like all the generations of men in my family did, and so on.

I got a hint that what I was searching for was an illusion during my tour in the Army.

When I was fresh out of basic, I had a Sergeant I’ll call Sergeant Williams, who had been in Vietnam. I was telling him one day about my eagerness to see action and so on (I was an especially clueless human being when I was young.)

He looked at me a moment and then said, “Let me tell you a story.”

He then told me a story from when he had been a much younger man, and was out on a patrol in the boonies in Vietnam.

His unit took fire from a treeline, and a couple guys were hit. Amid the noise of the firefight, his lieutenant came to him, handed him the radio, and said, “we have fast-movers [an air strike] coming in – talk them in.”

Williams marked their position with smoke, and guided the planes in…and they dropped napalm on that treeline. He then spent the next few minutes (minutes he would give anything to forget) listening to men about his age — just as scared as he was, loved by their mothers just as much — burning to death.

Because of him.

“That day gave me some idea of what Hell might be like” said Sgt. Williams, eyes fixed in the middle distance.

Clueless me said, “Yeah, Sarge, burning is a tough way to go…”

He looked at me sharply then, and, stabbing his finger into his chest, said: “No, Talbot. I’m talking about the way I felt that day.”

-----

John Wayne. John Wayne. John Fucking Wayne.

But the thing is, John Wayne himself couldn't live up to his own image - he smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day, and pounded down enough scotch to put a bison into a coma. He couldn't do it either. John Wayne himself couldn't be John Wayne.

Well, I'm done with that. No more.

That mythic American manhood doesn't really exist. It never did.

My God, but I'm tired of chasing ghosts.

Blue Islands in a Sea of Red

2011-02-25T12:30:00.000-08:00

For all Meteor Blade's justifiable anger concerning Broun's irresponsible failure to condemn his constituent's nutty comment, I think there's a deeper question that needs to be addressed, and that is this: Why are so many working-class white people, in the south and elsewhere, so angry?

This is a question that it would be good for progressives to explore in some depth. Be prepared to be surprised.

You know, this reminds me of the Question Everyone Made Sure To Forget after 9/11/01: "Why do they hate us?" People forgot that because everyone who did ask it was accused of "wanting to give the terrorists therapy" and so on. But it was a good question - and our failure to seriously explore it as a country has severely hindered our response to that event.

And so it is with the eliminationist rhetoric oozing up from the right. To say "well, Rush and Savage are ginning it up" is facile but not really satisfactory, in my view; a hard question that progressives would do well to ask is, "in what sense is their anger justifiable, or at least comprehensible? Why do they hate us?"

Look at a county-by-county breakdown map of the 2008 presidential election results:

See all that red? I see that as a problem. Yes Obama won, and convincingly, but blue islands in a sea of deeply alienated red is not a recipe for the survival of the United States as a cohesive whole. We need to give the folks in that sea of red reason to vote for the "D" on the ballot, or the US will sooner or later cease to be viable as a unified, cohesive entity.

Fascinating stuff

2011-02-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

Sam Rocha, one of my co-bloggers over at the Catholic Blog I contribute to, Vox Nova, gave an amazing talk about race and identity at the college where he teaches. Well worth the time to watch it.

Hilarious Blog Found.

2011-02-20T16:54:00.000-08:00

She actually seemed to like throwing up. To the simple dog, throwing up was like some magical power that she never knew she possessed - the ability to create infinite food.

Good for hours of convulsive laughter. Go read it.

"A Precious Thing of Terrible, Unfathomable Beauty

2011-02-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

Will Wilkinson at the Economist {Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan]

The surge of overwhelming bliss that has overtaken Egyptians is the rare beautitude of democratic will. The hot blush of liberation, a dazzled sense of infinite possibility swelling millions of happy breasts is a precious thing of terrible, unfathomable beauty, and it won't come to these people again. Whatever the future may hold, this is the happiest many people will ever feel. This is the best day of some peoples' lives. The tiny Dionysian anarchist on my other shoulder is no angel, but I cannot deny that there is something holy in this feeling, that it is one of few human experiences that justifies life—that satisfies, however briefly, our desperate craving for more intensity, for more meaning, for more life from life. Whatever the future holds, there will be disappointment, at best. But there is always disappointment. Today, there is joy.

Mother Teresa Had It Right

2011-02-09T12:05:00.001-08:00

Make us worthy, Lord, to serve our fellow human beings throughout the world who and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our hands this day their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give peace and joy.

Amen.

-Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Note to self: Listen to that little, nagging voice next time.

2011-02-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so...I notice this afternoon that my toilet won't flush, even after repeated plunging with the toilet plunger.

Then I get the brilliant idea to use water pressure to clear the jam, so I get one of those hose-attachment drain-unplugging thingies from the hardware store, and come home to my apartment and put it into the the toilet, then go outside and downstairs to the hose valve and turn it on full blast, thinking the harder the better.

Coming back in the front door, I hear an ominous sound from the bathroom. I brace myself, look into the bathroom, and see a fountain of sewage erupting out of the bathtub drain. At great force.

My bathroom looked and smelled like the aftermath of a Category 8 eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano of poop.

I think the Roto Rooter guy is going to have PTSD after looking at the place. I'm just wondering if I should tell the landlord about this.

One Last Time: John Galt Doesn't Care About You.

2011-01-31T15:20:00.000-08:00

When I read the solutions to our economic malaise put forward by non-economic-progressives – and especially by those on the right, but even by a few folks who identify as libertarian left – what I hear is that we, the little people, ought to want to suffer a little more in order to make sure that our reptilian corporate masters become incrementally wealthier, so that they can then build factories and office buildings and then we "parasites" can have jobs; when those factories succeed and prosper, no one but the owners can benefit, because They’re Supposed To Have All The Money (or something...I’m paraphrasing here, plus it’s been awhile since I’ve read Ayn Rand.)

Think about this: Obama cutting most people’s taxes, and raises taxes only on the rich (and that higher tax paid by the rich would still be lower than during the administration of that communist monster, Ronald Reagan) is described as "socialism."

That is glaring evidence to me that the whole game is rigged, by the people who have the means to so rig it.

My fear is that the consequences of this situation (yawning inequality, declining wages, a disintigrating safety net, and so on) will be blamed on racial and ethnic scapegoats, who will then be persecuted, rather than on those who ought to take the blame.

Of course, when things completely unravel, I imagine Our Reptilian Corporate Masters will just pull their yachts out into international waters and watch our cities burn – and then decamp for their next victims, who will then be hollowed out and bled dry.

It is the dawn of Locust Capitalism.

A Rigged Game

2011-01-31T11:26:00.001-08:00

There is not enough purchasing power in the hands of people who will spend it.

Fix that, and you fix the economy.

The thing is, the things that will fix that (more-progressive tax rates and wealth redistribution) are labeled as communist socialist that's what Stalin did and he killed millions genocide radical (etc. etc. etc.)

The oligarchs have the whole game rigged in their favor. Until that changes, nothing else will.

Just So We're Clear

2011-01-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

I see the most fundamental cause of the continuing economic crisis as this: purchasing power (in the form of the median household income) hasn't been growing fast enough for the last 30 years to support economic growth.

Our Reptilian Corporate Masters came up with what they thought was a great substitute: encouraging the people who weren't getting raises to take on more and more and more debt - either the usual way (credit cards) or by encouraging them to pull hallucinated "equity" out of their inflated houses.

Now that hallucinated "wealth" is gone, the credit cards are maxed, and, since no one's gotten a raise for the last 30 years, there is nothing to support economic growth in the country. At all (exports? not when a billion Chinese will work for a fraction of a living wage in America.)

Paul Krugman has predicted that full employment won't return until some time in 2018.

That's not a recipe for social stability - to put it very, very mildly. I fear for the country.

What is Needed

2011-01-27T21:09:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Schell at The Nation gets at something essential, something glaringly missing, from Obama's State of the Union Speech on Tuesday:

It’s true that the United States educational system is measurably slipping. It’s also true that the country’s infrastructure has decayed badly. And yes, the United States would benefit from whatever technical innovation it can bring off, just as any country would. But none of those problems, needful of attention as they are in their own right, is the chief cause of the United States’s economic doldrums—its stubborn high unemployment, its persisting housing bust, its galloping economic inequality. These were the fruit of an economic crash brought on by a misguided, corrupt, incompetent, larcenous, unregulated financial establishment. The relevant remedies are not better technology or some contemporary equivalent of sending a man to the moon. (In any case, although Obama insisted “We do big things,” he didn’t offer one.) The remedies needed are a re-regulation and reconstruction of the financial system, plus a major, Keynesian style stimulus program to create jobs and purchasing power, and so to jar the economy out of its stupor. But none of that was in Obama’s speech. On the contrary, his proposal to freeze spending for five years threatened more economic stagnation.

(Emphases mine.)

The basic cause of the American economic predicament is that purchasing power (that is, the inflation-adjusted paychecks ordinary workers get) has not appreciably increased in over 30 years. People not making enough money to keep the economy growing means the economy can't grow.

Actually, not quite true.

The economy can still grow, but since wages aren't increasing (except for a few people at the top, who, precisely because there aren't very many of them, can't make up for the shortfall in consumer spending) the only recourse for consumers is buying things on credit cards - i.e., growth financed through debt. This is exactly what we've seen in the years since the median wage stopped growing:

The thing is, financing economic growth by increasing personal indebtedness is literally not sustainable, because eventually, the credit cards are maxed out, and then everyone needs to pay down their debts before they can begin spending again. While this is happening, the economy shrinks, since people are not spending on anything except essentials. This results in layoffs, which means some people can no longer keep up their debt payments, which results in bankruptcies, which results in the banks who are owed that money raising interest rates to cover the increased risk, which results in more bankruptcies, which means more trouble for banks, etc.

Eventually, confidence in the entire system begins to erode, which leads to a general panic and the entire financial system grinding to a halt.

See October 1929 and September 2008 for an idea of what that looks and feels like.

It's an experience that it is best to avoid, if at all possible. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to come up with policies designed to prevent that situation from ever happening again.

Growth through debt leads eventually to systemic crisis - we know this.

Growth from rising incomes leads to sustainable and widely-shared prosperity - we know this.

If two things happen, the United States will be poised for its greatest economic upsurge in history.

Thing Number One: Debt needs to be paid down, and the acquisition of new debt needs to be discouraged.

I propose that there is a one-time, 20% federal tax on all financial assets over $2 million - assets in IRA's and 401(k) plans would be exempt, provided the particular accounts were held on, say, September 15, 2008 (this would prevent using retirement accounts as an anticipatory shelter.) Yes, the stock and bond markets would take a hit; can't be helped, and the stock market is way over-valued anyway, by historical standards. The stock market should be there to finance capital investment, not to enrich Wall Street greedheads.

Such a tax would generate revenues sufficient to pay off the entire national debt owed by the United States government - and also enough to both balance this year's budget, and to send every taxpayer a check for $20,000. Tell them: "This is YOUR bailout."

THAT should be sufficient to get things moving in a big way.

Thing Number Two: Going forward, the aim of economic policy should be to get the real median wage growing on a consistent basis.

How? Here are some basic, proven ideas.

1. Give workers a bigger voice in how profits are distributed. A great way to do that is by encouraging union membership. Let me put this bluntly: the government ought to do everything it can to encourage unionization across all economic sectors. A good start would be repealing the Taft-Hartley act, and passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

2. Use the tax system to discourage out-sized payouts for corporate executives and banksters. Restore the tax brackets (adjusted for inflation) to what they were in 1955. Top marginal tax rate: 91.5 percent.
This will discourage the obscene paychecks Our Reptilian Corporate Masters currently award themselves, and encourage them (through deductions) to do economically beneficial things with the money.

3. Re-regulate the financial sector. Restore and strengthen the Glass–Steagall Act. Break up the big banks to the point that the insolvency of one won't threaten the economy. (While I'm at it: impose a retro-active tax of 100% on all non-salary compensation of every executive of every financial institution that received federal bailout money. It might not prevail in the ensuing litigation, but it would be fun to watch them squirm. I mean, screw these people.)

All this would, of course, cause keening howls of outrage and pain on Wall Street and the executive suites of America's corporate headquarters, and confusion and alarm amongst the Wall Street Fetishists on CNBC. There isn't a violin small enough.

We Need a Movement

2011-01-22T14:37:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong:

Perhaps Washington is simply too disconnected [from the economic hardship of most Americans]: my brother-in-law observes that the only place in America where it is hard to get a table at dinner time in a good restaurant right now is within two miles of Capitol Hill.

Sometime in the late seventies, the Dems started dumping their traditional "party of labor and the common man/woman" role, and became the party of the social-libertarian/technocratic faction of the top 20% of the income scale.

This is what allowed the Republicans (starting with Reagan) to begin their destruction of the safety net. They did this in the service of their only real constituency: The Richest One Percent of Americans and their minions and courtiers.

So, you have the representatives of the top one percent of the income scale (the Republican Party) competing with the Democratic Party to be the representatives of the nineteen percent of the income scale right below them.

The problem, of course, is that the 80 percent below them haven't gotten a meaningful raise in 30 years; no one is representing their interests.

That's also why the safety net has been systematically weakened (a frightened and submissive workforce is what Our Reptilian Corporate Masters most desire).

That's why everyone has such crippling student loan debt - and this is increasingly true even of people who attend state colleges and universities - make class mobility prohibitively expensive to guard the privileges of those at the top, and keep those with student loan debt focused on educational choices that will lead to high-paying jobs, rather than the kind of education that will show them the deeply corrupt nature of the game.

This benefits the wealth and status of Our Reptilian Corporate Masters, who are the only people whose interests are being served by the current system; until and unless this changes, the current bad economic situation won't get appreciably better for the great majority of Americans.

Ever.

The Circle That Will Never Be Squared is having the yawning inequality of wealth we have in the United States, having a "safety net" that is being weakened, leaving millions in the cold (and that is becoming increasingly literal) - and also having social stability. You can't have both.

Ever.

History tells us that these kinds of situations can either be reformed (see TR and the trust-busters, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, FDR and the New Deal, and so on) or, if the oligarchs have so tight a grip on the levers of power, including the means of mass communication, that they can prevent reform, then eventually the people will rise up. This can go badly wrong, and is best avoided, if possible.

If there were a real, actual "Left" in this country, there would be mass protests and agitation about the glaring injustices of the current plutocracy. The tea party (not the astroturfing financiers; I'm speaking here of the rank-and-file) is a worrying sign that the character of the eventual reckoning may be racist, nativist and involve scapegoating of the weak and vulnerable.

If this comes to pass, the Tea Party's astroturfing rich will have the bulk of the responsibility for the consequences; but the scandalous silence of what passes for the American "Left" will be seen as having helped enable the disaster.

We need a mass movement from the left, for social and economic justice. We need a left-ish answer to the Tea Party.

Lady Day

2011-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

Billie Holiday, in a live performance that shines with her greatness.

On President Obama's Remarks in Tucson

2011-01-12T22:35:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most remarkable speeches I've seen him give. I have my issues with Obama, but this was simply masterful.

I hope this can bring some sobriety to the discussion.

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here – they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called “Faces of Hope.” On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child’s life. “I hope you help those in need,” read one. “I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America.

Barack Obama

Amen.

Update:

This section is especially apropos of the venomous discourse inspired by this incident:

[W]hen a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Occam Would Be Proud Of Me For This

2011-01-04T20:36:00.001-08:00

Look: the Democratic Congress and the Democratic President didn't pass truly progressive legislation because they didn't want to. They didn't want to because doing so would cost Our Reptilian Corporate Masters power, and then Our Reptilian Corporate Masters would close the purse strings and the Democrats would drown in Republican money.

Which, you know, happened anyway.

The biggest "Progressive Victory" is that gay people will now be able to join the imperial forces and fight and die to defend the interests of Our Reptilian Corporate Masters.

The imbalances in wealth and income between Our Reptilian Corporate Masters and everyone else are manifestly unjust; this is The Only Challenge That Matters when it comes to promoting a Progressive Agenda. That is the rotten root from which grows practically everything else.

We need to find a way, from the grassroots up, to address and correct the structures that perpetuate and aggravate those imbalances - traditionally this has meant steeply progressive tax rates, support for labor and financial regulation.

Unless some countervailing power prevents it, capitalism always concentrates wealth, and thus power, in the hands of a thinner and thinner slice of folks at the top. This can either be reformed (progressive taxation, support for labor, financial regulation, etc.) or if it isn't, we need to resign ourselves to living in a society more or less constantly on the verge of armed revolution.

Let's Get Clear On Something

2010-12-14T20:43:00.000-08:00

Thomas Frank has said that, for a purportedly rightist party, the Republicans talk an awful lot about class resentment, but in a strangely inverted way: they define the elites in terms of cultural preferences rather than economics - "elitist, Volvo-driving, Latte-sipping, gay-loving liberal snobs in their big cities, sipping lattes and looking down their noses at the humble, hard-working common folk out in 'flyover country.'"

Thomas rightly points out that the one thing never mentioned by Republicans is the role of economics in the class structure.

The reason Republicans get away with this is the Democrats changed from having their policies grounded in economic fairness, and instead increasingly defined themselves by cultural issues. As the Republicans started defining themselves as champions of working people (a definition that, if you look at their economic policies, is ludicrous) the Democrats stopped talking about economic fairness and went along with defining themselves more along cultural lines.

One of the most disheartening things about the Democratic Party's haplessness is that it has allowed the Republicans to incrementally dismantle the hated New Deal, which they want to do because the New Deal costs Our Reptilian Corporate Masters power.

Our Reptilian Corporate Masters hate New Deal style policies because what they desire is a frightened, submissive, and most of all low-wage workforce, because that will allow them to Make More Money, And Thus Have More Power. The New Deal was absolutely hated by the oligarchy because it took away a lot of means of asserting absolute dominance over working people.

This is why single-payer health care represents such a threat to the Republicans' real constituency (the Oligarchy): fear of losing medical benefits keeps people from daring to step out of line and demanding better wages or working conditions.

This is why Our Reptilian Corporate Masters absolutely love crippling student loan debt: it is a potent tool to hold over folks to keep them from threatening the system. They want a population that is "educated" along the lines of vocational training (the knowledge that one is incurring a large debt tends to focus one's mind on the income potential of one's major...) rather than what used to be considered an "education" before the rise of Our Reptilian Corporate Masters in the late 19th century.

This is why raising taxes, and especially making our tax system more progressive (i.e., raising the tax rates as one goes up the income scale) is spoken of as That Which Must Not Be Done, if you listen to Republican rhetoric.

The thing is, actions have consequences, and the tiger the Republicans rode to success in the 2010 mid-terms will eventually start asking awkward economic questions of the Republicans, and then their venal fraud will be made plain. I pity them when that day comes.

True Hope is Subversive of Power

2010-11-30T16:40:00.001-08:00

I seem to be on a Chris Hedges tear today. And I quote:

On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

We are in truly dire times; the time for hoping in Obama is past; we ordinary Joes need to get busy resisting.

All Hail Our Reptilian Corporate Masters

2010-11-30T16:26:00.001-08:00

In a previous era, the role of the Court Jester was to use humor to tell uncomfortable truths to the king. Courtesy of the Onion:

20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America

WILMINGTON, DE—The nation looked on in reverence Friday as 20,000 citizens were decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive in the name of Corporate America, continuing the age-old annual rite to ensure bounteous profits in the coming fiscal year.

"Corporate America has always provided us with plenty," said High Priest James N. Cahill, who opened the ceremony by plunging the horn of a bull into a fair-haired child's abdomen and using the freshly spilled blood to write the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average upon sacred parchment. "JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and all in the great pantheon of publicly traded entities will continue to watch over us so long as we appease them each year with human lives."

Chris Hedges, On the Failure of the "Liberal Class"

2010-11-29T20:45:00.000-08:00

While I obviously don't agree with him in every particular, I think his diagnosis of the central problem is basically right: the Democratic Party has allowed (even encouraged at times) the dismantling of the New Deal institutions that had been put in place to protect the economically vulnerable from the predations of greed and the power of the wealthy.

I see the Tea Party movement (the rank and file, not the astroturfing financiers) mostly as a symptom of the betrayal of the lower two-thirds of the US wealth scale by the institutions in our society whose historical role has been to defend them. The Democratic Party has been deeply corrupted by the limitless wealth available to the oligarchy who seek, and the evidence would indicate too often succeed at, buying their souls.

Someone once asked Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio, why people in southeastern Ohio were becoming a reliable Republican voting bloc. He answered, "Because the Democrats stopped talking to them."

Precisely.

The thing is, eventually the people in Southeastern Ohio and the rest of the underclass across the nation will reach a point where they Will Not Be Ignored. I pity whatever institutions are in the path of their wrath then. I don't think the United States as a functioning entity will survive the coming convulsions. In fact, in many respects it is already gone, sacrificed on the twin altars of Greed and Imperialism.

How to drive on Las Vegas' Strip on a Saturday night:

2010-11-20T17:10:00.000-08:00

1. Move car forward 5 inches, then stop.

2. Get out of car, cross street to Ceasar's Palace, enter lobby, ask concierge where the buffet is.

3. Ask buffet people when dinner starts.

4. Stop by bar, order and drink a scotch.

5. Go back out to car, start, and move forward 5 inches, to keep up with the "movement" of traffic.

6. Go over to the Bellagio, and play a few hands of blackjack.

7. Ask the pit boss how many people he's caught cheating, and have a 5 minute conversation about how he loves his job.

8. Stroll casually out to car, stopping on the way to flirt with waitresses.

9. Get in car, start, and move forward 5 inches, to keep up with the "movement" of traffic.

10. Discover that the Las Vegas Department of Fucking Up Traffic has the left 4 lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard blocked off because someone ran over a squirrel or something.

11. Start making calls inquiring about having your car heli-lifted out of traffic, so that you can make it home before your retirement age.

12. Realize when you're passing the Mirage that they have that icky Celine Dion "Titanic" song blaring from speakers.

13. Search in vain for some long, sharp instrument to destroy your eardreams.

14. Remember that your car has a radio.

15. Turn on radio and turn volume up to 11.

16. Realize that pedestrians are looking confused as to why an agitated-looking man has the NPR national news turned up so loud that his dashboard is melting.

17. Fail to care.

Interesting Interview - Maddow and Jon Stewart

2010-11-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to TPM

2010-11-12T09:23:00.001-08:00

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, which is indispensable reading for progressives, is turning 10 years old today. All the best, Josh, and many more.

New New Deal Needed

2010-10-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter With Kansas and other books)is a hero of mine. He remarked in a review of hack Joe Klein's book of a couple years back, Politics Lost:

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

This is precisely what is called for in the present environment - and this is precisely what the oligarchy is spending millions of dollars to prevent from being discussed.

Wheat Fields Wavin'

2010-10-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

So, I chucked the job, cashed out my 401(k), and began a road trip on October 6th. More soon.

Some Thoughts On Bullies and The Other

2010-10-17T00:19:00.001-07:00

First of all, read this. All the way through. I advise finding a box of Kleenex before you do.

Then read his follow-up post, here.

I will post some of my own story soon, but I need to find a place of balance from which to post it. For now, let me offer a couple thoughts.

That second post is what I've been trying to get at with some of my previous reflections here and at Vox Nova: it is when we make someone an Other that we begin the descent into sin and barbarism. I had some particularly harrowing childhood experiences with bullies, involving (this is no exaggeration) literal torture. But looking back, the most difficult part of it was that as I was being tortured, I could feel the incredible, agonizing pain emanating from every pore of the ones inflicting torments upon me. As I suffered my own pains, I also felt theirs in a profound way. I empathized with their pain even as I suffered. I could see how sad, how desolate, the world must have looked through their eyes.

This was indescribably painful; it was also what saved me.

Republicans Suck

2010-10-15T01:13:00.000-07:00

Because I've been getting served google ads pushing Republican candidates, I will say categorically that I would rather swim in nuclear waste than vote for any Republican, period.

[Update] Ok,, I just deleted the ad code.

The Bill Gates Index

2010-10-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

My brother Mike keeps a "Mike Talbot/Bill Gates Index", in which he calculates how many years he would have to work at his present salary, and saving every penny of his income, to equal Bill Gates wealth. The Index stands at One million four hundred and seventeen thousand years.

Sin

2010-08-11T12:48:00.001-07:00

Station 6: Veronica Helps Jesus

Christ Speaks: Can you be brave enough, my other self, to wipe my bloody face?
Where is my face, you ask?
At home whenever eyes fill up with tears,
at work when tensions rise,
on playgrounds,
in the slums, the courts, the hospitals,
the jails
– wherever suffering exists –
my face is there.
And there I look for you
to wipe away my blood and tears.

I reply: Lord, what you ask is hard. It calls for courage and self-sacrifice, and I am weak. Please, give me strength. Don’t let me run away because of fear.
Lord, live in me, act in me, love in me. And not in me alone – in all of us – so that we may reveal no more your bloody but your glorious face on earth.

Clarence Enzler,
Everyone's Way of the Cross

I have seen the face of Christ - in the aged face of a kindly black woman who answered the door when I was selling door to door in the ghetto. I prepared to give her my pitch, but she looked with such tenderness into my eyes that I could not try to make her want something she didn't need. She had looked past my salesman veneer, and in her beatific smile I was confronted with the devastating love of Christ Himself. It was as if she took attentive, simple joy in my existence, and saw me as God sees me. I mumbled something about how whatever it was I was selling wasn't something she needed, and I was sorry to have bothered her. I felt like weeping.

I have seen the face of Christ - in the tears and simple, terrible anguish of an 11-year-old kid whose best friend had been killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. He could only say, over and over as if saying it would bring his friend back: "He was my friend...he was my friend..."

I have seen the face of Christ - in the tent cities of the recently homeless, formerly middle-class people who are learning to break the spell of isolation and alienation they had accepted without question in the suburbs, and are now realizing - at a terrible price - the fundamental interconnectedness we all share.

I have seen the face of Christ - in the face of a homeless man to whom I had promised an extra cup of Kool-Aid after the meal hall had shut its doors. I remembered and took him his cup. The look of gratitude in his face at having been remembered is something that broke my heart. Christ was saying "thank you." My only thought was, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you..."

I will hold the Christ-light for you,
in the night-time of your fear,
I will hold my hand out to you,
speak the peace you long to hear.

I am convinced that the most devastating effects of sin come from inventing a "them" that is apart from "us."

There is no "them" - but there is most assuredly an "us." Every fellow human on this earth, no matter how remote geographically or ideologically, is "us."

We Americans spend our days immersed in lies - advertising is ubiquitous. On the train on the way to work, billboards beside the highway, television, radio, the web, magazines, newspapers - filled with lies designed to tell us that some product they are pitching can fill the yawning emptiness in our souls. Some of us make our living writing copy for those ads. Most of us, to one degree or another, buy into the basic idea being peddled - that the product being pitched can fill the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by the Love of God.

What do you think God thinks of the immersive BS that fills our eyes and ears and minds every day? That says if we buy a luxury car, have a kitchen that features stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops and a professional-looking grill, have that kitchen located in a coveted section of an exclusive neighborhood (who or what is being "excluded" and why?), then we can finally find the contentment we've been aching for? (Real Estate ads, incidentally, can read like a catalog of sins, a veritable how-to book for achieving alienation.)

This whole edifice exists because, at the most fundamental level, you and I have built it - some of us directly, most of us by just going along without meaningful protest or objection. We've just gone quietly along, afraid to question (perhaps even to ourselves) the virtue of a system that is our only realistic way of making a living (mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.)

What we've built we can change.

Please pray for me, that I may find the courage to challenge the soul-impoverishing Machinery of Night. I will pray the same for you.

Amen

2010-07-19T21:02:00.001-07:00

What Digby said

2010-07-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

And wouldn't you know it, people seem to be falling back on tired, conservative tropes. I think that might be because nobody in the damned Democratic party can be bothered to explain to them any other way of thinking about this. (It's a "center-right" country dontcha know.) So yeah, a little ideology would be quite helpful, but only if we actually want to solve these problems rather than hasten the pace of the country's implosion.

Right - and I don't think "implosion" is hyperbole on her part. Conservatives would rather destroy the country than let the Democrats score a point. I'm sensing that this is something that no one on his staff wants to tell the president.

Memo to Rahm

2010-07-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

David Kurtz, over at Talking Points Memo:

Democrats in Congress wield the power of the majority and the advantages of incumbency but they're also facing a potential trouncing at the polls in November.

So how are congressional Democrats planning to use the tools still at their disposal to hold on to their majorities?
...

OK, well, I mean what popular proposals are Democrats planning to make Republicans vote against between now and the August recess, when the 2010 campaigning really heats up and they can beat them up over their no votes?
...

Um, OK, what about a coordinated legislative strategy on jobs and the economy that builds relentless pressure on Republicans as the elections approach making them vote for popular items that drive a wedge between them and their base?
...
Alright then, maybe a coordinated communications strategy with the White House?
...
Hmmm, how 'bout coordinated communications strategy amongst themselves?
...
Ookaay, perhaps agreement that they're on the same team?
...
Collective recognition that losing in November is a bad thing?
...
Yeah, I should have known better than to ask.

Memo to Obama political team: what good does it do to "put [incremental] points on the board" if the other team is outscoring you??

My 8 year old nephew could come up with better strategies than the clowns at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Oh, and Rahm? Yeah, yeah, you're a fucking genius. Right.

My only question is, COULD YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW YOU COULD BLOW A LEAD LIKE YOU HAD IN JANUARY 2009? All you had to do was look beyond the trees of particular policies and see the forest of opportunity you had in 2008 to COMPLETELY REMAKE THE POLITICAL CONVERSATION IN AMERICA ALONG PROGRESSIVE LINES.

But no: you did the fucking DLC thing and tacked to the right (ALWAYS to the right) which communicated to the American people that THAT'S WHERE YOU THINK THE SOLUTIONS ARE: ON THE FUCKING RIGHT!

And now you and the Democrats are, ludicrously, facing a trouncing in November.

Do me a favor, Rahm: when the Democrats get their asses handed to them in November, I know you'll want to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies, or "Extremists" or Liberals or all the other people you're helping the Republicans to demonize, but instead of wasting our and the country's time on that, why not do the honorable thing and resign?

Renaissance or Status Quo?

2010-07-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall, on the signs of a Republican resurgence in November:

In general, I think the big political tell over the last couple months is the mounting evidence of a stalled recovery coupled with the fact that administration is basically backed into a position of immediate fiscal retrenchment which means we may be tossed back into the water. But this time with our hands tied behind our back.

My own sense is that the first 19 months of Democratic control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government has been a missed opportunity, and an enormous one.

When Obama and the new congress took office, they had a country which was staring terrified into the abyss, angry at the oligarchs who created that abyss, and ready to be led in a new direction by the soaring rhetoric of Hope from their new president. The Reagan/Gingrich-Era conservative revolution was about played out, and people were ready for a change.

This was a shining, golden opportunity for a charismatic Democratic leader to begin a New Era in American political life. The story the Right had been selling for decades - that if only government got out of the way of business, it would boom and benefit everyone - was now easy to dismiss as the fairy tale it was: Between 1980 and 2010, the productivity of the average America worker increased by over 40%, while the median wage barely budged. All the benefit of those productivity increases went to the top of the wealth ladder, and stayed there. People were actually talking about things in just those terms.

The thing is, none of this has changed. The opportunity is still there, if only the Democrats will only seize it.

Speaking of David Brooks

2010-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

His latest column is the usual concern-trolling nonsense I expect from his unctuous, oily mouth. The real treat is in the comments that follow it:

Twice a week you write a column, and the thesis of that column is always the same: we, the little people, ought to want to suffer a little more in order to make sure that our reptilian corporate masters become incrementally wealthier.

Here, the superstructure you build upon your predetermined thesis is that those entrepreneurs in Racine and Yakima, to whom you have surely actually spoken rather than just making them up, are more concerned about debt than they are about the recession. Facts do not back up your assertion. Repeated public polling has shown that Americans are much more concerned about jobs than they are about debt. You dismiss the stimulus bill, whose only real problem was that it wasn't large enough, by claiming it didn't create jobs, when the more accurate statement would be that it didn't create NET jobs: it merely prevented millions more jobs from being lost.

And, of course, we could balance spending on stimulus by raising revenues, specifically by raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy. But since you are paid very, very well by our reptilian corporate masters, you would never suggest that taxing them at the 70% rates that were commonplace until the upper class really took power with the ascension of Reagan, as such a restoration of the progressive tax code would force them to purchase a slightly less opulent second yacht. And how would THAT look?

You mock the more liberal among mainstream economists by basically calling them eggheads whose theories don't work in the real world. But the truly laughable and demonstrably false economic theory is the one which claims that making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of everyone else will result in greater prosperity for the nation. It has been tried, over and over again, and we've been trickled down on enough. This country needs more stimulus and unemployment spending, not less: while there are indeed long-term debt issues, these can be addressed quickly and easily by cutting military spending and restoring the progressive tax structure that made America prosperous throughout the mid-20th century.

NY Times's cluelessness, and the Decline of Trad Media: Related?

2010-07-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

[T]his is just the Times typically looking at the nation's problems through the lens of the upper class -- as Linda puts it, "stories about the recession where people struggle along without their nanny, and find that the recession reconnected them with their soul, instead of making them live in a refrigerator box."

David Brooks specializes in the "Recession Is Good For Our Souls" Genre of editorializing.

Brad DeLong for White House Chief of Staff

2010-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

The situation is grim. So why isn't everybody running around with their hair on fire?

Why aren't there irresistible political demands for more government action to steer us toward a better economic recovery --or at least to hedge against a double-dip in what seems likely to be called not a "recession" but a "depression" when historians get around to writing about it?

I have my theories:

1. widening wealth inequality and an upgrading of the class position of reporters and pundits, who are no longer ink-stained wretches immersed in mainstream America;
2. the collapse of union power, which ensures that nobody who sees real workers on a daily basis sits at the table when the deals are made;
3. increasing job security for the powerful in Washington, aided by the growth of the lobbying apparatus that envelops the mixed-economy government;
4. the collapse of professional integrity among the Washington press corps, which no longer dares to call balls and strikes as it sees them, preferring to say only that the Democrats say it was a strike and the Republicans say it was a ball, and that opinions on the shape of the earth differ.

I don't know which theories are right. But the situation does leave me feeling like one crying in the wilderness. (Say not "we are children of the market!") I cry out to boost aggregate demand -- by banking policy, by monetary policy, by fiscal policy, by spending increases, by tax cuts, by anything -- I don't care what! (Well, I do, but not by much)

This really gets at the heart of things. The American leadership (in government and the press) are failing their fellow citizens.

1. The President needs to pull himself together (cough fire Rahm cough) and address the country's suffering with that famous eloquence of his -- and then follow up with effective policies, or else risk destabilizing the country.

2. We on the left need to make ourselves way, way more active and visible to those who lead the country. We no longer have the luxury of self-indulgent despair. We need to get busy.

Some Thoughts on Middle Age

2010-07-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

I think back to me at 18, and for all the tumult of being that age, my life stretched before me with seemingly limitless, even frightening, promise. I had not yet known failure of any significant scope. I had yet to have my heart broken. I was going to change the world, dammit, and I wanted answers, and clear ones at that.

Things seemed simpler, or maybe it was easier to convince myself they were. Men in my peer group typically did a stint in the armed forces, and I enlisted in the Army with scarcely a thought to the justice of my country’s causes, or the effects of propaganda on my decision-making.

If my body ached, it was my own damned fault (well, mine and rum’s, anyway...). Time had yet to start insisting on its supremacy, had yet to supply me with the pains of its passage – pains of both body and mind. I understand the temptation in men my age to vainly try to hold on to a mercilessly vanishing youth — but that would require me to surrender wisdom, too, and more; being 18 again would mean the erasure of some memories by which I mark the years, experiences which have softened and mellowed the fabric of my soul.

I would lose the morning I got up before dawn, walked out into a meadow and watched the sun come up over the Vermont mountains and frosted-blue grass and fiery autumn woods. I would lose my first real love, and the way her face looked that one night as the moon lit its contours with blue and sacred light; I would lose the moment, praying the Stations, when Christ showed me His pain with such tenderness that I wept and gave Him some of mine.

Bob Seger once said in a song, "I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then."

Me? Nah. For all the melancholy and aches and increasing limitations, I’ll keep the lessons I’ve learned.

A Gun is Not a Penis

2010-06-21T21:19:00.001-07:00

I mean, here's the thing: I hunt deer. I am a gun owner (well, technically not currently, but you know what I mean...). Guns are not Magical Totems Of Manly Power. They are a means of getting venison and wild turkey, both of which are delicious.

Lots (most?) of my fellow lefties are against hunting, and there's a lot to be said for that. Me, I think that, if I'm going to eat meat, it's more moral to kill an animal myself - one who's had a nice life roaming the woods munching on leaves and mating with does - as opposed to eating a cow that was raised in a pen, and spent the last few weeks of its life knee-deep in its own shit in a stockyard someplace. And, of course, not eating meat at all is something I can totally respect.

A lot of American gun-fetishism just seems childish to me.

The Chattering Class Club

2010-05-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

DougJ has an amusing rant over at Balloon Juice - "meta" talk on the left blogosphere can get tiresome, but this is right on:

And things aren’t getting any better. I spent the last week with too weak a WiFi signal to post, comment, or do much of anything internet-related besides read the RSS feed on my phone. Obviously, it’s my fault for what I’ve chosen to put on my Google reader, but the entire fucking thing was Kevin Drum congratulating Matt Yglesias on how well he countered Ezra Klein’s point about Megan McArdle. And half the time the topic was how clubby SCOTUS had become.

Cokie is dead, long live Ana Marie Cox.

Johnny Reb They Ain't

2010-05-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

Hunter, as usual, is hilarious:

And I admit, a small bit of me almost hopes they manage pull off their own little Beer Belly Rebellion, just so the New Oklahoma Drunken Asshole Redneck Wolvereeeeenes Coors Light Freedom Brigade could finally go up against the U.S. Army like they want and get a nice, barrel-end view of all the pretty gadgets our tax dollars have been buying to use against crazy people waving guns around.

FDR Populism

2010-04-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

If, for some strange reason, you really want your heart broken some time, read FDR's first or second second inaugural addresses or virtually any utterance of Harry S Truman (the ones about economics, anyway) and then compare and contrast with the current Thing That Used To Be Liberalism.

FDR:

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties, over Vietnam and (to a lesser extent, civil rights); blue collar and union guys vs. the "New Left" college radicals. That split has consistently and only served one constituency well, really; the rich. It is worth remembering that the central, core, consensus issues that have united the left's most dominant constituency (the New Deal coalition) were economic in character.

The consensus left position, the set of beliefs that really distinguished you as "left," used to be very simple, and went like this:

It is legitimate and necessary to use the power of the central government (through progressive taxation, income redistribution and support for labor) to restrain the tendency of big business to concentrate wealth in the hands of an elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distinctive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change.

FDR again:

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

When the Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy, I'd love it if the Democrats countered that by pointing out that the Republicans have been trying that for years, and really just want to give more money to their rich friends and weaken the government's ability to stick up for working folks. They might also say that we Democrats want to pass a big jobs bill to give our constituency, ordinary Joes and Janes, a chance to practice their legendary work ethic and provide a future for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Krugman and others have been calling for the Democratic Party to take the golden opportunity of the current crisis to break out the economic populist rhetoric to sell economic populist policies.

This would seem to be an obvious and winning strategy that could plausibly lead to a couple generations of electoral and ideological dominance.

More Like This Please

2010-03-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

Funniest Facebook Status Update in, Like, Ever

2010-03-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

Well, that didn’t take long---a death panel showed up in my living room this morning. They have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. At the moment I have 'em repainting the rumpus room. This could work out well, I'm thinking.

It IS Waterloo, Alright...

2010-03-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

One of Life's Enduring Mysteries

2010-03-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

Here’s the thing I’ve never understood. If I walk into a club looking like a nice, respectable guy who is likely to be considerate, caring and a good provider, women will ignore me in droves; but if I walk into a club with tattoos on both arms, a scar on my face and generally create the impression that I’m a likely to be little tardy calling my parole officer, I’ll be freakin’ mobbed. WTF is up with that, anyway? Can someone of the female persuasion just explain this to me, please??

To the American Right: Get a Pair, Okay??

2010-02-08T21:06:00.000-08:00

"Freedom was attacked today, and freedom will be defended."
So said George W. Bush on September 11th, 2001. It struck me then, and still strikes me today, as fundamentally wrong.
"Freedom" was not attacked that day; symbols of American economic and military dominance were attacked. Power was attacked that day, not "freedom."

Bush's War on Terror was and is a huge mistake, and needs to be
declared null and void. Responding to the attacks of September 11th as
if they were an act of war, and not a criminal act, is giving Al Qaeda
and Osama bin Laden precisely what they want; legitimacy as "holy
warriors" when they only deserve infamy as brutal criminals. They need
to be opposed with skilled international policing, not a big, stupid,
endless "war."

More on all that in my next post.
But there is one other thing I want to say, regardless of the above.
May I be blunt, here? The American right seriously needs to get a pair.
Begging the government to torture people who frighten you doesn't make
you a tough, clear-eyed realist; it makes you a bed-wetting, sniveling
coward who dishonors every brave American who fought to obliterate and
bring to justice Hitler's torture brigades and the rapists of Nanking.
Look -- It used to be that Americans defined their enemies as Those Who Torture:

I mean, really: What is the big, unprecedented deal about Al Qaeda
anyway? Yes, 9/11/01 sucked, and I'd definitely rather not go through
that again. That said: the extremist criminals killed just under 3000
people that day, and destroyed or damaged under 20 buildings and 4
aircraft. That was bad, no argument there...but "an enemy unlike any
other"??! Pull yourselves together.
Worse than the Civil War (a million killed and wounded)??
Worse than World War II? (Somewhere between 45 and 60 million total
killed, including up to 11 million gassed, hanged and machine-gunned by
the Nazis and Japanese, and virtually every city in central Europe and
East Asia reduced to lego-sized, smoldering fragments?)
Worse than The Cold War? I mean, think about this for a second: the
United States spent 40-odd years under the constant threat of having the entire country vaporized by ruthless, amoral totalitarians who had publicly and repeatedly vowed our destruction.
And now you're begging the government to torture people whose most recent attack amounted to some pathetic, deluded criminal failing to detonate his own underwear??
Your childish, pants-wetting cowardice would be funny in a pitiable
sort of way, except for the fact that you've convinced so many of my
fellow Americans that Torturing People Is The Only Way To Defeat The
Magically Powerful Terrorists. No, that's not funny at all: it fills me
with shame, but also righteous rage. Osama is laughing in whatever
cave he's holed up in.

Oh - and the "Greatest Generation" you fetishize? You dishonor them
and the sacrifices they made with your pitiful cowardice. The ghosts of those who fell on a thousand battlefields (who, by the way, were really, actually Defending Freedom) have every reason to be ashamed of you.
</rant off>

We need "More and Better Leadership"

2010-02-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

Digby, yesterday:

I also think that Democrats really don't like to govern because it makes them feel exposed. They have prostituted themselves to business and adopted neo-liberal principles, but they have to pretend that they are representing working people and the poor.

Well, there's your problem right there.

If you really want your heart broken, read FDR's first or second second inaugural addresses or virtually any utterance of Harry S Truman (the ones about economics, anyway) and then compare and contrast with the current Clusterfuck That Is The Democratic Party.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties; blue collar and union guys vs. the "New Left" college radicals. That split has consistently and only served one constituency well, really; the rich. It is worth remembering that the central, core, consensus issues that have united the left's most dominant constituency (the New Deal coalition) were economic in character.

The consensus left position was simple, and went like this: It is legitimate and necessary to use the power of the central government (through progressive taxation, income redistribution and support for labor) to restrain the tendency of big business to concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distictive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change. The Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy; the Democrats point out that the Republicans have been trying that for years, and really just want to give more money to their rich friends and weaken the government's ability to stick up for working folks, but we Democrats want to pass a big jobs bill to give our constituency, ordinary Joes and Janes, a chance to practice their legendary work ethic and provide a nice life for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Kruigman and others have been calling for the Democratic Party to take the golden opportunity of the current crisis to break out the economic populist rhetoric to sell economic populist policies.

This would seem to be an obvious and winning strategy that could plausibly lead to a couple generations of electoral and ideological dominance. So, why are we not seeing it?

What has happened is that the Democratic Party leadership has become corrupted by proximity and fealty to the wealth and power of our economic elites. Incrementalism and pressuring the current bunch has not worked, because they are too corrupted; we need new and better leadership. It's time to clean house. The leadership has failed us. It's time to acknowledge that and replace them.

Why? Why won't the Democrats do the populist thing?

2010-01-26T09:38:00.000-08:00

I'm really not getting this: it would seem to me that the best way to insure a new era of Democratic domination would be to:

1. Enact real, actual health care reform, along European lines. This will be popular, and would show the Republicans to be fear-mongering assholes;

2. Some combination of banking reform (revive Glass-Steagal, say) and way high taxes on banking industry bonuses to impose consequences on the banking industry for being reckless and for nearly destroying our economy

3. Populist tax increases on the wealthy and near-wealthy;

4. The EFCA, to give workers more of a chance to bargain for a larger piece of the economic pie.

This would seem to be obvious to me; the fact that nothing the administration is doing even faintly echoes any of this does not fill me with optimism about our chances in 2010 and 2012.

Howard Dean quoted Truman back in the '04 campaign: "If you run a fake Republican against a real Republican, the real Republican will win every time." The Obama administration does not seem to get that this is an absolutely essential insight.

WTF happened to the Party of the Common Man?

2010-01-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

To answer my own question: once they were purchased by the money powers, it was all pretty much over for the Common Man. Republicans: "Yeah, we'll fuck you. Hard." Democrats: "So will we, but we'll feel real bad about it, and besides, we'll use Vaseline."

I am sick to fucking death of political parties that stand up for oligarchs and plutocrats, while letting working people die from a thousand cuts. I mean, fuck these people.

It's time to look at other options in terms of political strategies, folks.

Given the Supreme Court's more or less formal establishment of a plutocracy, they (the plutocrats) have too much money to be opposed through conventional, "inside the box" methods. They will attempt to bury Obama in a tsunami of slick, expensive propaganda that will get the (slickly re-branded between now and 2012) Republicans into power.

Well, fuck that.

A strong progressive movement will lead Obama and the Democrats where we need him and them to be.

It has become clear to me that progressives need to build a movement, a strong one, that is populist in character. A strong enough movement will not be ignorable by Obama and the chickenshit, kowtowing-to-plutocrats Democratic leadership in the House and Senate.

"We want the Wall Street Fatcats to pay a price for messing up our country; we want the greedy rich to start paying their fair share again; we want our government to work for us again, rather than for a few rich puppeteers who currently pull the strings. WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK."

...like that. Not conciliatory, but scrappy. Not Bill Clinton, but Harry S Truman.

Not covered in plutocrat pocket lint, but making it clear that their only "owners" are the concerns and interests of ordinary working people - the heroes who built this country, and whose labor and virtue keeps it strong. The people whose sons and daughters do the actual fighting in our nation's wars, while plutocrats profiteer and plunder and won't send their kids off to defend this country.

The Democrat's fundamental problem is not so much what they stand for or how they explain it or not being clear enough about their "values" - No. It is that they have become foggy about who they stand with: working people. The working and middle classes. The Republicans have been able to present themselves as populists(!) because the Democrats forgot their role in society; It is the job of Democrats to use the government to help balance society by (through progressive taxation and income re-distribution) reining in the tendency of capitalism to concentrate incomes and wealth at the top and thus provide stability. See how simple that is? We defend working people from the worst tendencies of greedy plutocrats. THAT is our core mission. THAT's who we stand with.

Successful Politics is way more about "Who" than it is about "What".

New New Deal

2010-01-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

When the left was most ascendant, the issues they rode to that success were economic in character. Think of the decades-long dominance of the New Deal coalition.

The premise of those economics were clear: one of the important roles of the central government is to counter-balance the power of big business and the rich - through things like:

1. Steeply progressive tax rates (the top marginal tax rate (the rate charged in the highest portion of rich folks' income) during even the administration of that notorious Leninist, Ike, was between 91 and 94 percent)

2. Support for Unions in the Wagner Act and other initiatives, to give bargaining power to labor, either directly (for union members) or indirectly (for other workers in unionized industries whose wages rose to match the union workers')

3. Public Works to take up slack in the labor market during recessions (the interstate highway system, the TVA, and much else.

4. Strong support for a minimum wage, to exert pressure "from the bottom" on wages further up the income scale

...and much, much else.

The Democratic Party would do well to build a new identity whose foundation is economic and strongly populist. There are too many people who call themselves "liberal" because they are pro-choice, eat organic food and drive a Prius - while opposing things like Single-Payer Healthcare, raising the minimum wage, ensuring a supply of affordable housing for everyone, the Employee Free Choice Act and much else. You know, the kinds of things New Dealers would do (and benefit electorally from.)

I sometimes wonder whether Harry Truman would even recognize the Democratic Party today.

Andrew Sullivan's Palin obsession: This is getting creepy

2009-12-29T00:20:00.000-08:00

I mean, why not start following her around until she gets a restraining order? Dude, enough.

Excellent Diary at Daily Kos

2009-12-28T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is excellent analysis:

I'll start with this matter of "corporatism." Glenn Greenwald was essentially correct in identifying corporate power as the primary obstacle for progressives, as the main opposing force we face. Unfortunately a lot of the discussion about his article has focused on the issue of "left-right alliances," obscuring the truth of the matter.

If you want to defeat the right, we must defeat corporatism. This is a truth I thought we'd all learned during the decade now ending, but apparently we did not.

The right-wing in the United States is still a fringe movement when you look at its overall numbers. {Tea-partiers] are a noisy but tiny group not worth the concern. Even after 30+ years of right-wing dominance of our politics, their ideas remain fundamentally unpopular.

Not Breaking: System Is Rigged

2009-12-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

I would like to be able to say that this surprises the hell out of me, but sadly, it does not.

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

My one and only post about Brittany Murphy

2009-12-23T16:22:00.000-08:00

I didn't personally know Brittany Murphy. No one I know knew Brittany Murphy. It is probably a safe assumption that no one commenting here on my blog knew Brittany Murphy.

How about the media do a straight news story (amounting to maybe a couple paragraphs)? The people reading the news story might offer a quick prayer for Brittany and those who loved her. And then (and here's the thing) move on.

Or, to put a slightly finer point on it: why should I expend any energy whatsoever caring and discussing and speculating about this whole "situation" beyond the above point? I mean, whether drugs or anorexia or, I don't know, cocaine-fueled bestiality orgies caused her death is really none of my fucking business, you know?

Whose interests are served by mass hysteria surrounding celebrities? "Cui Bono?" - Who benefits?

There is hope.

2009-12-15T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hookay then. The Democratic leadership in the Senate hands the Narcissist from Connecticut the payback he's sought since his defeat in the 2006 primary. Is this surprising? Sadly, no.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to let that Droopy-Dog, weasel-voiced, reprobate piece of crap "Senator" take away my hope.

Lieberman is a compromised, covered-in-fatcat-pocket-lint, sold-out son of a bitch. We knew this. I knew he'd find a way to screw the left back for screwing him in '06.

Now, here's the thing: Does his petty, childish payback sting? You betcha. Will he get the final laugh? Not on your life. Ultimately, we progressives are going to make the Joe Liebermans of the world irrelevant. That will hurt him far more than anything we can do now.

The way forward for progressives is becoming crystal clear: we need to recognize that we are NOT in power; we need to oppose, in public terms:

1. First and always, the Republican Party and the money powers they represent;

2. Secondly, Democrats who won't stand up to them.

This means agitating from the left, targeting both the Republicans and the weak-kneed, beholden-to-the-money-powers Democratic Leadership.

If we can learn anything from the ridiculous fiasco this is becoming, it is that Our Job Is Not Done.

I had hopes for the possibilities presented by a charismatic young president and big majorities in congress; I envisioned Obama using his personal popularity and charisma to drag the Democratic Congress kicking and screaming to a rebirth of progressive politics in the United States. It is now apparent that those hopes have been shown to be premature, at least for now.

2008 was a false dawn: the real dawn will come, but we need to keep working for it.

We have a movement, but we need to strengthen it. We need to keep building a progressive movement from the bottom up. It is clear that Obama and the current congressional Democratic leadership are NOT (at least so far) the "change we seek," as Obama put it during the campaign: WE, the activist base, are the change we seek. We need to build our movement to the point that we can no longer be ignored by the Democratic leadership. We have made incredible progress, but we're not there yet. We will get there, believe me. The leadership of our party obviously (at this point) are not willing to lead the country in a truly progressive direction - so, once again it is up to US to force the issue.

That does not mean I have no hope, however.

Look, folks; The progressive grassroots/netroots movement has always been about Building a Movement. Crashing the Gates.

Yes, we're looking at defeat now; but let this be a reminder that we have work to do ourselves, continuing to build a movement that, eventually, will not be ignorable or dismissible by the powers that be. The old order is doomed, because they have, ultimately, only money and the superficial power it brings; we have us. 80% of the country (everyone other than the top 20% of the income scale) is getting screwed by the Powers That Be. Our long-term victory will be won ultimately by pointing that out every chance we get. The Truth Will Out.

If we do not give in to despair, if we keep moving, keep building, not letting the corruption of the Democratic Leadership make us give up hope on OUR movement, then we will eventually have our our victory.

Despair? That's letting the Powers That Be win. We are already stronger than they are. They just need to see it, and we need to get strong enough to show them. We have now seen the enemy, and They Will Be Ours.

Best Snarky Comment On Sarah Palin Ever. EVER.

2009-12-06T10:42:00.000-08:00

This is hilarious:

President Palin decides to send 200,000 more troops into Afghanistan. But unable to find it on a map, she mistakenly sends them to Argentina. When the liberal elite media run the story of her blunder, she responds, "You know, Joe Sixpack doesn’t know where Afghanistan is. You east coast media types need to stop obsessing over geometry. Smaller government is what we need to get government off our backs. Tax cuts for small businesses so they can put more money on the table. We’re a strong nation and we will win the war on drugs that started in Afghanistan. And when the fish swim, the turkey is done." With that she flies back to Alaska to give birth to her grandson, Algebra.

Little Green Footballs' Founder Comes To His Senses

2009-12-01T16:40:00.000-08:00

Charles Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, has decided to leave the right wing behind, due to the mounting evidence that the American Right has wandered off into an absurdist crazyland:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

Your 5 Minute Physics Lesson For Today

2009-11-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

Snopes tackles the physics of Santa Claus, in which the incineration of a quarter million reindeer is postulated.

The Machine

2009-11-26T10:06:00.000-08:00

There are millions of ex-manufacturing workers who used to make good livings making things here in the USA. The "New Economy" had and has no real place for them: the Old Economy is the only place that offered them a way to use their skills and gifts in a way that afforded them the basics of life plus a little fun.

Again: the economy offers people with less than a college degree precious few (and vanishing) ways to support a family in anything approaching comfort.

Here's the thing: there are millions of folks who are, to be blunt, not smart enough, or are temperamentally unsuited, (or increasingly, too poor) to go to college. Are they to be consigned to working at 7/11 and making 9 bucks an hour? Don't we as citizens have an obligation to see that they have work available to them that will allow them to support their families in a dignified manner, and maybe even allow them to put something away for college for the kids and even something for their golden years?

These questions have not been asked of Americans in any public and consistent way for years - decades even. The very clause, "we, as citizens, are obligated to..." is, in the libertarian, Hobbesian world of economic mercilessness we've allowed to flourish, a nonsensical phrase full of meaningless words. We are no longer "citizens" -- active participants in the building of our civilization -- but "consumers", defined by our economic worth; mere cogs in the soul-impoverishing machinery of "wealth creation" and economic oligarchy; passively doing our part to keep the whole corrupt machine humming, nothing demanded of us but to Consume.

I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the thing that most creeped me out about the movie The Matrix was the sense I had that it was not really about some future dystopia, but rather a piercing parable for the present world we live in; there is this sort of Machine that we all participate in, so immersive that we can't escape its greedy maw, can't but serve its needs rather than the needs of our brothers and sisters.

To break out of this losing game, we must realize - we must RESOLVE - that, to coin a phrase, the Economy is made by and for us, and not us for the economy.

Martin Luther King Jr. used to say "You can't ride a man's back unless it is already bent." It took decades for the ceaseless propaganda of the Machine to bend our backs; it only takes a moment, an instant, to decide to straighten your back and thus undo all its work.

Sing a Song for Freedom

2009-11-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

Oh Mary. You were a national treasure. Your heart was golden, you helped the Cause, and to top it all off, you were one fabulous babe. RIP, Mary Travers.

If You're Management, Don't Call Yourself a Lefty

2009-11-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

There is this conceit among the management class (particularly members of that class who style themselves as left-of-center) that if we just send former workers in the devastated production sector to college so they can become "knowledge workers" or something, then that will make up for destroying the industries that provided them a decent living. Former President Clinton used to harp on this a lot when he was president.

The blunt truth is, that plan isn't going to work, at least not in a place possessing the scale and complexity of the United States. The Swiss can be the world's bankers; The Arabs can be the world's oil company; the United States, if it is going to be a prosperous place, needs to be a place where the main engine of prosperity is taking raw materials, making something valuable out of them, and then selling those valuable things at a profit.

We can't be a first-tier economy by selling each other life insurance and software; we need to make things. Physical, need-machine-tools-to-make-them things - cars, boats, clothing, machine tools, electronics. The Democrats used to know this, and acted accordingly; now they are the members of the management class who want to send line workers to college so they can become computer programmers. My Democratic Party has become a sold-out, pathetic shell of its former glory. It's made itself absolutely ridiculous. It's become ineffective and delusional. Call the rest home and make the arrangements already: they're done.

Since when did being a lefty become about cultural stuff?

2009-11-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

It seems to me at times that the political fights in this country are between rich people: economic libertarians on the right and social libertarians on the "left" duking it out over the legal status of fetuses and gay people, and gee, there's no time left after discussing those issues to talk about how working people are getting screwed over more and more and more.

The democrats have been all but useless on economic issues for 30 years; the "kitchen table issues" that Truman focused on are long forgotten. NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagal, EFCA, the abandonment of Progressive taxation and a million other cuts have bled the working class into economic ruin, and the Democratic Party has stood by (Yes, Clinton made some pious noise about sending all those former assembly line workers to college so they could be knowledge workers or something, which sounds nice but is actually kind of ridiculous.)

Here's the thing, Lefties: people are flocking to militias and birtherism and tea parties because the left stopped talking to them - or rather, the problem is the left offers words (but even those, rarely) but precious little else.

Granite Counter Tops and Stainless Steel Refrigerators.

2009-11-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

Can we all agree that we will stop equipping kitchens with granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances?

I mean, yeesh. 10 years ago it seemed sort of, I don't know, fresh and cutting edge. But now? It's been done to death and seems like just mindless conformity. If the next apartment I move to has a stainless steel refrigerator, I'm painting the damned thing.

Granite Counter tops and stainless steel appliances. Granite Counter Tops and stainless steel appliances.

Make. It. Stop.

The thing is, granite is hard to clean and dulls knives, and stainless steel, once it gets a scratch, is really hard to get looking good again; ditto with stains on granite.

What is it with stainless, anyway? It looks (to my eyes) sort of cold and clinical. I expect stainless refrigerators in a setting like, I don't know, the morgue? In my kitchen, I'd like a little warmth, thank you.

(Un)ethical Hunting

2009-11-16T12:57:00.000-08:00

So on opening day of rifle season, Gov. Pawlenty of Minnesota wounded a deer, failed to track it down, and then went off to a fundraiser while his staff attempted to find the animal he shot.

As a hunter, this is one of those things that gets me steamed. To wound an animal and then neglect to track it down is one of the more egregious violations of hunting ethics, and is grossly irresponsible, especially if you are an authority figure. Once you put a bullet in a deer, you have a moral obligation to immediately track that animal down and finish it off - both to end its suffering, and to ensure that the meat isn't wasted. Pawlenty apparently found blood but no buck at the place he last saw the animal, but rather than immediately begin tracking the wounded animal he returned to camp to "ponder his next move?" No, Governor: you know (or should know) that your "next move" is to, right then, track down that animal and end its suffering. Sending your staff out to beat the brush after breakfast isn't nearly good enough. He's not only neglecting his own responsibilities; he's also setting a bad example for young hunters. If one of my hunting buddies did that, he would never be invited back.

Stewart Does Beck

2009-11-06T18:52:00.001-08:00

This is both hilarious and dead-on:

Spoke too soon

2009-10-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

Looks like Joe Lieberman has de facto resigned from the Democratic caucus: we'll see whether the Dem leadership calls his bluff: if they do and he does not fold, the leadership needs to make his break from the Party official by stripping his committee assignments and excluding him from caucus meetings.

I kind of expected something like this from him, but yesterday lulled me into a sense of hope.

That's More Like It

2009-10-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

It ain't over til it's over, as Yogi Berra would say, but it looks like the chances are now very good for Health Care Reform, real health care reform, to pass Congress and be signed by the President. Personally, I would have preferred single payer or a hybrid along the lines of what the Germans do, but it has a robust "Public Option" and is a huge, HUGE step forward. My congratulations to President Obama and the Congressional Democrats for an unassailable triumph.

I will be so bold as to predict that this is the beginning of the end for the radical right faction of the Republican Party.

Grayson v. Broun - a joy to watch

2009-10-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

TWC

2009-10-13T20:47:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one who hates the way the Weather Channel covers the west? "Atlanta has received almost half an inch of rain today, causing slick roads. Oh, and there was some flooding and mudslides and stuff in California. We go now to Jane who has more details on the Atlanta situation..."

To My Idiot Democratic Party: A Rant

2009-10-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

From a blogger I occasionally read who goes by the name of "Digby" (no relation to frequent Vox Nova commenter Digby Dolben) - in the context of a review of Michael Moore's new film:

It's extremely disheartening to see the administration and so many Democrats in congress completely ignore the political and policy ramifications of failing to engage in fundamental financial reform and fiery populist rhetoric at a time like this. This [tea party] movement is happening in a vacuum created by a lack of interest in this topic by liberals who are so enamored of being members of the new "creative class" and the like that they aren't paying attention to the cynicism and anger that's reaching critical mass among average working stiffs out there. It's easy to dismiss it, but very, very foolish. The issues Moore raises in this film will be answered on the right with authoritarianism, militarism, immigrant bashing and violence. It's a recipe for disaster unless the left takes this on in direct, political terms.

I'm getting more and more peeved at people who think of themselves as "liberals" because they drive Priuses, are pro-choice, eat organic food and treat the nanny like a member of the family: sorry to be the one to break it to them, but that's horse dung.

Being a liberal used to mean protecting ordinary working stiffs from the excesses of their boss's boss's boss. It meant standing up for unions by supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, refusing to shop at Walmart, Whole Foods and other union-busting stores.

Being a liberal means recognizing that the government has an important role in helping balance society by equalizing the distribution of society's goods through: 1. A (way more than now) progressive tax system, and 2. redistribution of wealth through both direct payments, and indirectly through support for public education (K through college) that is heavily subsidized and of excellent quality, and other public services.

The top marginal tax rate during the administration of that fiery Leninist, Ike, was between 91 and 94 percent. The meant that 94 percent of the top portion of your income (translated into today's dollars, that portion above about $2 million) went straight from your bank account to the government. This had a chilling effect on executives awarding themselves obscene bonuses, because taxes would just eat up the majority of it before you could purchase a congressman with it. The structure encouraged a flattening of income distribution, and that's exactly what happened.

(This is amazing: Republican president Dwight Eisenhower was more (genuinely) liberal than virtually any Democrat of national significance today? I think I see the real problem many Americans have with the Democratic Party: they refuse to be real, actual Democrats.)

Harry Truman is not just spinning in his grave: he's going to pop out of the ground, stalk up to Capitol Hill and start kicking people's tails at this rate.

We STILL don't have health care? What the hell?? You know how to fix this: either single payer, or a hybrid system like in some European countries. The fix isn't about "give dump trucks full of money to insurance companies," I can assure you. Get. It. Done.

Look, Dems: the job of the Democratic Party is to protect Joe and Jane average from the rapacious greed and exploitative power of capitalism's captains - the folks Roosevelt called "the Money Power." Do your jobs, okay?

The thing is, if you do, you'll have power for the next few decades, I promise you. You'll be heroes to millions, just like the New Dealers were.

Or, you can sell your souls to support what this nation has become: a plutocracy, and plutocracies tend to be either reformed (see 1930s New Deal) or end in considerably more grief (see various armed revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia.) I much prefer (and could only endorse) the "reform" route of the two choices, but the choice is in your hands, Dems.

American Plutocracy

2009-10-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

What we have now is a plutocracy, and plutocracies tend to be either reformed (see 1930s New Deal) or end in considerably more grief (see various armed revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia.) I much prefer the "reform" route of the two choices.

One thing that bugs me about people who call themselves "liberals" is that there are enough upper income ("creative class") people calling themselves that that any mention of the typical means of reform (steeply progressive tax rates and income redistribution) is greeted like the rantings of Marxists, rather than the thoroughly sensible, historically proven ideas they actually are.

Storm Coming In

2009-10-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

The heat of summer is soon to be a distant memory. This is an "El Nino" year in California, which means torrential rains during the wet season (Oct-Apr).

This coming Monday the weather service is predicting the first storm of the season, and it promises to be a wallopaloozer: 60mph winds, up to 8 inches of rain spread over 2 days.

As dramatic and potentially hazardous as that is, I really see it more as a reason for hope: California has been in a moderate drought for a number of years, and the copious rains of an El Nino year are great news for that.

But also, the beginning of every rainy season in California is somewhat analogous to Spring in the "4-seasons" parts of the US: it is the season of new life. The oaks, laurels and madrones are becoming stressed at the end of the dry season, the grasses are long-golden and rattle dry in the wind; the creosote and ceanothus bushes are looking pretty twiggy and dessicated, the creeks have slowed to a few pools and trickles, and a fine layer of dust coats the leathery leaves of summer-dried eucalyptus up on the ridgetops. It is as if nature is crying out for rebirth and renewal.

But just lately there has been a hint of humidity in the winds, as over the horizon in the Pacific the autumn rains prepare to break at last through the last ramparts of summer heat and overrun the mountains and fields with blessed, long-missed rain.

[Update: now may be close to 10 inches in some areas. Yeesh.]

2009-10-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan posts a note from a reader:

There is no denying that religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, has inspired and fostered many wonderful people. I think of Peter, humble and contrite and transformed after his denial; Mary Magdalen, of whom nothing need be said; the fathers of the Egyptian desert and their almost unbearable kindness and gentleness; Francis of Assisi and his Lady Poverty;

Francis de Sales, who found a way to be both a prelate and a saint; and in our own times, Dorothy Day, who practiced a Christianity as radical as Christ's own, while remaining a faithful daughter of the Church. And I say nothing of the countless mute, inglorious saints whom only God knows.

But the Church as an institution is mired in the world to its own great detriment. The worst thing that ever happened to it was Constantine's conversion and its consequent establishment. For the Church itself should have remained a pilgrim. No cathedrals and episcopal palaces. No mitres, croziers, and gorgeous vestments. No princes of the Church. Just plain men and women going out to find and care for lost sheep, the wisest among them showing the way by example and quiet counsel.

It might have gone that way. It could yet. But the need to overawe people and demand obedience from them is powerful and seductive. It is a part of that world that the kingdom of heaven is not of.

There are certainly things there to criticize - mainly the generally protestant take on history: the Church wasn't "established" in the wake of Constantine, for example, and it depends what he means by "demand obedience." But the idea that my Catholic Church's presentation of itself could definitely be more along the lines of the presentation of its Founder -- humble, prophetic, identifying itself far more explicitly with the poor in its public face, "afflicting the comfortable," and so on -- is something that has occurred to me as well.

Is Libertarianism the Real Problem?

2009-09-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to think that libertarianism is actually a big part of the problem, on both sides of the political "divide". Right Libertarians say "keep your government hands off my riches" and if people are poor or without healthcare it's no business of the government; Left Libertarians say "keep your government hands off my body" and if fetuses are "terminated" that's no business of the government. I see both as failures of solidarity. They are a failure to see that we should not consider ourselves as solitary atoms moving through space untouched by the needs and dreams and gifts of others: we fail to see that we are parts of molecules and compounds that need one another as much as hydrogen and oxygen need each other to make water.

The question to ask of the Great Libertarian Civil War is, "Cui Bono?" Who benefits from all this noisy, trumped-up "conflict?" Is it possible that it is a way of preventing another faction - a faction that questions the libertarian premises of both "sides" - from having a seat at the negotiating table?

I imagine that amazing progress could be made on several fronts - abortion and healthcare, to name two - if both parties had the fortitude to kick their libertarian factions to the curb, and ask themselves what their constituents actually need.

Joni Mitchell Story

2009-09-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

I had a friend who was dying of Cystic Fibrosis, who loved Joni Mitchell - just a huge, huge fan. A mutual friend wrote Joni a letter thanking her for the joy she had brought into our friend's life.

Joni looked up our friend's phone number, and called her one day out of the blue, and talked with her for an hour or so.

William Safire

2009-09-27T17:58:00.000-07:00

William Safire, 79, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and language maven for the New York Times, whose penchant for the barbed and memorable phrase first manifested itself in speeches he wrote for the Nixon White House, died Sept. 27 at Casey House, part of Montgomery Hospice in Rockville. A longtime friend and former colleague, Martin Tolchin, said Mr. Safire had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Safire obviously had different politics than myself, but he (along with William F Buckley) was a conservative I could respect. RIP, Bill.

Yep

2009-09-24T19:01:00.000-07:00

Quit Blaming Baby-Boomers

2009-09-24T16:31:00.000-07:00

I get really sick of hearing about how the Baby Boomers Ruined Everything. I mean, think about this for a second: the idea that a bunch of hirsute, peace-loving hedonists (who were themselves but a fraction of the boomers) Destroyed Civilization in The Sixties is just…yeesh. I mean, how fragile would civilization have to have been for that to be true?

“Baby-Boomers” has definitely become a caricature in certain culture-war contexts.

Please, Won't you Help?

2009-09-22T13:33:00.001-07:00

Hat Tip - My friend Tara on Facebook

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Republicans = "The Borderer Party"

2009-09-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

Interesting diary at Daily Kos. The diarist describes the historical origins of the culture that makes up the current Republican base: "Borderers" who emigrated to the United States originally from the borderlands between Scotland and England.

For 700 years, the kings of Scotland and England violently disputed the borderlands between the two countries, while warlords on both sides of the border fought among themselves, the strife ceasing only briefly under the 17th-century reign of James VI. This resulted in the creation of a tenancy system designed to maintain reserves of fighting men for local nobles. The lack of established authority created a power vacuum that was exploited by criminals, including whole outlaw clans that prospered by banditry and rustling livestock. The perennial violence made the region wretchedly poor. It also intensified the importance of blood relationships; loyalty to family and clan were valued more highly than loyalty to the crown. With little or no trust in established authority, borderers resolved disputes through retaliation and payment of blood money.

When the region was pacified in the 17th century, entire clans were executed or banished -- and many of the banished clans made their way to America. "The so-called Scotch-Irish who came to America thus included a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land," Fischer writes in Albion's Seed (630). Meanwhile, back in Britain, old warrior families were replaced by capitalist entrepreneurs who exploited the region's people as laborers and miners rather than fighters, and rack-renting and eviction became common. This led to even more Borderer migration to American shores.