Romney’s lament.
Okay, I know only the refrain really works, but it’s always good to hear the Beatles. And I think, despite the fact that this clip is from Shindig, that it’s a true live performance, and not lip synced, and according to the person who posted the video on youtube, it is in fact a live performance.
A bankruptcy judge has approved bonuses for the job creators who successfully steered Hostess into bankruptcy.
The update on the sale of the company’s brands comes as Hostess seeks approval in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York in White Plains, N.Y. to give its top executives bonuses totaling up to $1.8 million as part of its wind-down plans. The company says the incentive pay is needed to retain the 19 corporate officers and “high-level managers” during the liquidation process, which could take about a year.
Two of those executives would be eligible for additional rewards depending on how efficiently they carry out the liquidation. The bonuses would be in addition to their regular pay. A spokesman for Hostess noted executives will need to meet certain goals to get the bonuses.
(via Huffington Post)
As for the jobs they destroyed created:
In court Thursday, an attorney for Hostess noted that the company is no longer able to pay retiree benefits, which come to about $1.1 million a month. Hostess stopped contributing to its union pension plans more than a year ago.
These guys just have to be rewarded for cleaning up their own mess, because, apparently, only they have the smarts to do it.
Seems to me we’ve heard this before.
Oh, I remember now:
CBSNews says that AIG will be suspending “bonuses” for executives and will instead replace them with “retention payments.” We’re not entirely sure what the difference is and the government doesn’t know either.
(via The Consumerist)
Failure’s just another word for so much left to gain.
It’s just a shot away:
A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk”, stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.
Marton Gyongyosi, a leader of Hungary’s third-strongest political party Jobbik, said the list was necessary because of heightened tensions following the brief conflict in Gaza and should include members of parliament.
Opponents have condemned frequent anti-Semitic slurs and tough rhetoric against the Roma minority by Gyongyosi’s party as populist point scoring ahead of elections in 2014.
…
Jobbik registered as a political party in 2003, and gained increasing influence as it radicalized gradually, vilifying Jews and the country’s 700,000 Roma.
The group gained notoriety after founding the Hungarian Guard, an unarmed vigilante group reminiscent of World War Two-era far-right groups. It entered Parliament at the 2010 elections and holds 44 of 386 seats.
The centre-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has struggled to pull Hungary out of recession as many European countries suffer from an economic crisis.
(via Reuters)
Back in April I speculated about the damage that a prolonged recession could pose to democracies in Europe that are far more fragile than we think. I sort of crowed when Paul Krugman wrote along the same lines a few months later.
Here in America we have not traditionally scapegoated Jews, preferring to concentrate on, in order of preference (more or less), Black people always, Indians before we exterminated them, communists (mainly a fantasy threat, but if you believe it’s real…) and, lately, gays. It’s such a crowd that the Jews would have trouble forcing themselves in. But in Europe it’s a different story. Jews are the scapegoat of choice. This kind of stuff doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a byproduct of the times; when people feel threatened they need someone to blame, and most often the victim is chosen for them by politicians whose function is to divert their attention from the people and institutions actually responsible for their troubles.
It is almost certainly true that anti-Semites will always be with us, but it’s not likely that their rhetoric would attract support like that the Jobbik party has attracted in Hungary unless there was a deep seated unease that such people can exploit. Most of that unease is a direct result of the counterproductive austerity policies foisted on most of Europe, and which, unless a miracle occurs, a “grand bargain” will foist on this country.
The Republicans are single minded in the pursuit of power and the pursuit of policies favorable to the rich. To these objectives one can add the goal of impoverishing the rest of us, though why they feel that need is unclear.
Democrats, on the other hand, are single minded in their insistence that they must surrender every political advantage and every electoral victory that fate or the Republicans may place in their path.
At least Republicans know what they want and have a reasonably good idea of how to get it. As Dean Baker pointed out recently, Ross Douthat is quite clearly and fairly openly advocating means testing of Social Security as a path forward toward the Republican Holy Grail of destroying the program. Again, it is not clear why they want to impoverish older Americans when doing so would give very little real comfort to the rich, but reason not the need.
Instead, reason me this. Why do Democrats such as James Clyburn line up to give bi-partisan cover to this sort of thing? Is the approval of the Beltway punditocracy so important to these people that they are willing to completely demoralize their base while gaining nothing even from a purely political standpoint, putting aside the right and wrong of the thing? Do they really think that aiding the Republicans will get them votes? Haven’t they learned that you’re not going to wean the crazies away from the Republicans no matter what you do, but you can certainly dampen your own turnout by trying. The gun nuts, the fundamentalists and the racists are lost to them. If they concentrate on the small rational majority they can win, as the last election proved. The ironic thing (at least I think it’s ironic; but maybe it’s something else) is that if the Democrats do assist the Republicans, those same Republicans will turn right around and try to make political points out of “Democrat” cuts to Social Security or Medicare that the Democrats will have enacted because of Republican demands. These delusions aren’t merely the province of a few Congressman. Apparently the Obama people still believe that the problem is partisanship and they can induce the Republicans to rise above it, and to do so they are fully prepared to betray their supporters in order to get illusory concessions from the Republicans.
The Republicans keep teeing up the football and the Democrats, like poor Charlie Brown, keep coming back for more.
It has been endlessly noted that the Republican party appears to have lost touch with reality. It denies science and shouts down, rather than engages with, those who question its articles of faith. Witness, for example, its recent suppression of a Congressional Research Office report, which reached the unsurprising conclusion that low tax rates on the rich neither create jobs nor stimulate growth. Lately the party has been taking some hits over its estrangement from reality. It wouldn’t care, except it is also losing, and there are some that believe the two facts are not unconnected.
So now it looks like Republicans are trying a new tack. If reality doesn’t comport with your bullshit, then change reality, at least when you can.
The Republican propaganda machine has quite deliberately spread the meme that an increase in taxes for those earning $250,000.00 or more would effectively raise taxes on such a person’s entire income. In fact, it only raises taxes on income above the $250,000.00 level. In other words, if I make $251,000.00, the higher tax rate applies only to the $1,000.00 by which my income exceeds $250,000.00. (Would that it did, but that’s another subject). That way, the higher marginal rates can never serve as a disincentive to earning more. Earning more can never leave you with less. Even New York Times reporters can’t seem to understand the concept, see, e.g., this story in which a woman actually states she is trying to limit her income so that she won’t be subject to a higher tax on her entire income. Even the Times’ public editor couldn’t stomach the fact that her stupid misperception went unremarked, and gave her opinion that maybe a person reporting on tax issues should point out some basic facts.
But back to the Republicans. In order to bring reality more into line with their lies, the Republicans are now proposing that we in fact do what they have implied Obama wanted to do: tax those folks at a higher rate on every cent of their income, meaning that it would cost you plenty to earn a dollar over the cutoff. Nate Silver explains:
If the tax bubble were implemented, but the tax code were otherwise unchanged, then someone making $400,000 would owe $140,000 in federal income taxes, $23,000 more than she does now, increasing her overall tax rate to 35 percent from about 29 percent.
Someone making $4 million would owe $1.4 million in taxes, also reflecting a $23,000 increase. But the increase would be minimal on a percentage basis, since it comes from a larger pool of income. Their overall tax rate would rise to 35.0 percent from 34.4 percent.
(via New York Times/Nate Silver)
So the Republicans are actually proposing that we align reality to their propaganda, thereby harming the only mildly rich, while giving the obscenely rich a free pass. Why is this not surprising?
Sad but not surprising news out of Bangladesh:
MUMBAI — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.
It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.
“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”
Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an antisweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have been easily avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.
(via NYTimes.com)
It was just a little more than 100 years ago that more than a hundred workers, most if not all of them women, died in a fire at the Triangle Waistshirt Factory in New York City. The doors had been locked to discourage petty theft and unauthorized breaks. Many of them died using the on,y exit available: the window. Barbarous working conditions have now been exported to the third world, where they can be safely hidden away, and where events like this will pass largely unnoticed by the ultimate consumers and unopposed by pesky unions. Perhaps there’s some small amount of progress in the past hundred years; so far as we know these women weren’t locked in the factory as were the New York women, though little good that did them. Strange how in these days of globalization we have had no problem structuring treaties that more than amply protect the “rights” of capital, yet it is beyond our capacity to protect the rights of workers.
The gloating continues.
While helping to prepare our Thanksgiving Dinner I chose to play the American Songbook album of songs by lyricists Yip Harburg. Actually, I didn’t know all the songs were by Harburg, only that the cover art said “American Songbook”. It was a fairly random pick, except I was looking for something “American”, for after all, I was celebrating the greatest American holiday.
Of course I didn’t really concentrate on the music, but I did catch these lyrics from a song called The Begat, from a musical named Finian’s Rainbow:
When the begat got
to gettin’ under par
They begat the daughters
of the D.A.R.They begat the babbits
of the bourgeoisie,
They begat the misbegotten G.O.P.
Not surprising from the guy who wrote Brother, Can you Spare a Dime, but doesn’t it prove that some things never change? Anyway, it occurred to me that this piece, from the same musical, could be considered a sort of anthem of Romney’s 47%, which by the way, is apparently the percentage of the vote he will end up getting. The song is called When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich, and truly can it be said again that nothing ever changes, except the ethnicity of the perceived idle poor.
From the comments to the video I gather that the film version of the musical was disappointing, mainly due to poor direction and camera work.
By the way, Harburg, whose name shall live forever if only because he wrote Over the Rainbow, was blacklisted by Hollywood due to his political views.
Four years ago Al Franken won a Senate seat after a six month court battle. One of the more bizarre sidelights to the battle was the revelation that someone had voted for the “lizard people”. Here’s the ballot:
At the time I had no idea what the motivation for this was, and I don’t believe this story at all, in which a publicity seeker tried to take credit for the ballot and referenced some conspiracy theory about lizards.
Most likely lots of Douglas Adams fans got the reference, but I never saw anything in the political blogosphere about it at the time. However, yesterday, while re-reading Adams’s, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, something clicked, and I can now say that I have at least a modicum of respect for the Minnesota voter. Anyway, I thought I’d pass my findings along.
It so happens that a flying saucer lands on Harrods, and somewhat as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a shiny robot emerges from said saucer and says, much like in The Day the Earth Stood Still “We come in peace”, but adds, much unlike in The Day the Earth Stood Still “take me to your lizard”. Ford Prefect, the alien friend of hapless earthling Arthur Dent, explains to poor Arthur that the robot comes from a planet in which the people enjoy the blessings of Democracy.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No”, said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did”, said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hopping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so that all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh, yes”, said Ford with a shrug, “of course”.
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
So, this year, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that, for the most part, the right lizards got in, and we must all acknowledge that the unknown voter in Minnesota had a bit of a point.
Today, we mourn collectively, North and South, rich and poor, black and white, Democrat and Republican, religionists and atheists. Is there a person living who can recall an event since the Kennedy assassination that has brought the nation so together? Hostess, the maker of the iconic Twinkie, has been Romneyed, plundered by takeover artists and financial pirates, and is no more. But in this hour of sorrow, we must learn to put things into perspective, for in all such tragedies there are things from which we can take solace.
I, for instance, have never actually eaten a Twinkie, having been averse from an early age to creamy substances, be they composed of real cream or chemical stews. There was no redeeming feature in the substance surrounding the cream that tempted me to overcome this aversion. Not so, I confess, with the Twinkie’s cousin, the Hostess Cup Cake. How was I to know that while the color was chocolate, any chemical resemblance between it and the holy substance that was worshipped by our neighbors to the South long before Columbus, was purely coincidental? And don’t even get me started on Ring Dings, for which I also overcame my aversion to cream, which I purchased numberless times from the little grocery store near the spot where, as a paperboy, I waited for the man from the Hartford Times to deliver my papers. He was often late- always, he said, because the presses broke down, and I always believed him, but alas I now know that it was more likely his spirit had broken down, and he was comforting himself at a bar while I shivered in the cold and comforted myself with Ring Dings. At all events, I can date my last Ring Ding from on or prior to the date I last delivered a newspaper, and my last Hostess cupcake from long before then.
But let us not forget Wonder Bread, which I, along with probably 80% of my contemporaries, ate in vast quantities on an almost daily basis in those golden years. This bread like substance, we were assured, built strong bodies 8 ways, a number increased at one point to 12 under the pressures of competition, no doubt from Sunbeam, which manufactured a similar substance. We believed it, and who knows, it may be true. While the growth does not occur in the three spatial dimensions with which we are familiar, nor even in the fourth dimension of time, it may very well occur within those tiny curled dimensions posited by string theory. The possibility cannot, at this point in our state of knowledge, be completely gainsaid.
Still, along with so many of my contemporaries, if asked, I would have said that I took some small measure of comfort in knowing that these products were still on the supermarket shelves, even though, like almost all of those contemporaries, it would never cross my mind to buy them. Nonetheless, like Velveeta cheese, they served as an ever present reminder and bridge to times past. They will be missed, for at least a couple of weeks, after which we will all go about our business and forget all about them.
Only religion can make people this cruel:
An Irish woman has died after she was denied an abortion, even though she was having a miscarriage, because the medical staff found a fetal heartbeat and so would not intervene.
31-year-old Savita Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to University Hospital Galway on October 21 with severe back pain and nausea. She was found to be having a miscarriage.
When her condition worsened she and her family repeatedly asked that a doctor induce labor so she could be treated. Despite their pleas, staff at the hospital said that Ireland is a “Catholic country” and because they had detected a fetal heartbeat, and that the fetus could not survive on its own, they would not intervene.
(via Care2 Causes)
The fetus was not going to survive in any event, but what of that? Can anyone doubt that Jesus would have left the woman to die? Well, actually many could, but then, Jesus wasn’t a Catholic. This case may eventually, along with the increasing secularization of Ireland, lead to liberalization of Ireland’s draconian abortion laws. To be fair, the hospital could have legally performed the abortion, but apparently there’s a lot of wiggle room available and these folks chose to wiggle.
It appears the anti-abortionists in Ireland are every bit as dogmatic as our homegrown members of that club:
However, so-called pro-life groups have clamored to downplay this story, with the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Children saying in a statement:
“It is not ethical to induce delivery of an unborn child if there is no prospect of the child surviving outside the womb. At 17 weeks’ pregnancy Mrs Halappanavar’s child was clearly not viable outside the womb, as there is no scientific evidence that unborn children are capable of surviving outside the womb at such a young age. Rather than removing the protection of the womb from unborn children, the ethical response to emergency situations in pregnancy is medical treatment of the mother for the conditions causing the emergency. In the case of infection, this is usually timely administration of antibiotics. It is also not ethical to end the life of an unborn child, via induction or any other means, where the child is terminally-ill.”
So there you have it. The viability of a fetus, or for that matter a zygote, doesn’t matter. It must be allowed to die a natural death. The mother’s death is merely collateral damage, or as some Republicans might say, something “God intended”.
