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Marie Antoinette would feel right at home here

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

I would urge everyone to read these two posts (here and here) at Hullabaloo. The first about the fact that what the occupy movement is all about is a pervasive sense of injustice: that the mass of people is being treated unfairly by financial and governmental elites.

The second illustrates the utter cluelessness of those elites, the immediate subject being billionaire Bloomberg’s dinner with a number of said elites to urge them to further screw the people who have borne the brunt of the devastation visited on this country by those very elites. It’s a cluelessness perhaps nicely, if optimistically, illustrated in this drawing that’s been hanging on my office wall for lo these many years.

Elites

I don’t know what a revolution would or could look like in this country, but I may soon find out. Needless to say, it wouldn’t end well. It’s often said that FDR saved capitalism from itself, and if not for his actions, so detested by the elites of his day, there would have been a revolution in this country in the thirties. There seems to be no one in this country’s political elite who understands the forces at work. Some fiddle while Rome burns, while others just add fuel to the fire.

The country is ripe for a demagogue who can give voice to the anger that is so pervasive. That’s to be feared, but it’s almost inevitable if our overlords continue to see our economic salvation as more tax cuts for the rich paid for by more suffering inflicted on everyone else. We’ve lucked out so far that the opposition party has disgorged only clowns and opportunists, all of whom are as clueless as the Bloombergians.

Speaking of Bloomberg, he appears to be getting increasingly tone deaf these days. Besides holding a swank dinner party to encourage the elites to impoverish the rest of us, he is repeating the oft debunked trope that it was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and not the banks that caused the financial crisis.

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The Heritage Foundation does not believe in the magic of the market

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The Heritage Foundation has issued a report which concludes, in the words of the Laura Clawson at the Daily Kos, that public school teachers are overpaid and stupid. Her analysis stands on its own, but I can’t resist adding another observation.

If one applies the free market principles that the Heritage Foundation always claims to believe in, its conclusion can’t possibly be true. If teachers were stupid and overpaid, then smart people would gravitate toward teaching and take the jobs away from the overpaid stupid people. On the other hand, it is possible that teachers are underpaid and stupid, in which case, the free market solution would be to raise their salaries, thereby attracting smart teachers. The present right wing solution is to de-unionize the teachers, which would take care of the “fact” that they are overpaid, but it wouldn’t do much to deal with the alleged stupidity, which of right ought to be the primary concern, assuming (a ridiculous assumption, I know) that we all share a common objective of giving first quality education to our kids.

This all, of course, assumes that people teach only for the money and are motivated by nothing else. There are, undoubtedly, stupid teachers, just as there are probably smart Republicans, but for the most part, they are smart and underpaid. Not a one of them but does more good than any hedge fund manager.

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Cain channels Clarence Thomas

Monday, October 31, 2011

We have strange rules in this country. A black conservative is allowed to charge that racism is at work whenever he’s attacked, even when, as in Herman Cain’s case, the attacks are obviously based on fact and race is not implicitly or explicitly involved. The correct response, apparently, is for whites, particularly liberals and the press, to back off, as they did with Clarence Thomas, thus emboldening the next right wing black, this time Herman Cain, to try the same dodge.

On the other hand, when a guy like Obama is the victim of actual race based attacks by an entire organization, such as the tea party, and assorted Republican politicians using ever less coded code words, (examples picked more or less at random here, here, and here) it is terribly impolite for anyone to point it out. We are simply not allowed to call racists, racists. We are now more or less agreed that racism is a bad thing, but only right wingers are allowed to allege they are victims.

By the way I realize the Cain story probably came from the Perry camp, but that doesn’t undermine my argument. Cain trotted out the “high tech lynching” charge to get the press to back off.

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Summer is well and truly gone

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Our lawn sculpture appears to be weeping. He also appears to have a runny nose, which I didn’t notice when I took the picture.

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Friday Night Music, getting obscure

Friday, October 28, 2011

Thank God for the power of Google. Periodically it has occurred to me to put up this song, but usually when I’m away from my computer. I always liked it, but I could never remember either the title of the song or the name of the band, though the lyrics (“the world is, a bad place,… a terrible place to live….Oh, but I don’t wanna die”) have stuck with me. A great song by a group called Marmalade, who I suspected faded into oblivion right after this song dropped off the charts. Actually, according to the entry on Wikipedia they had some other hits, mostly in Great Britain, including a cover of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and there’s a video of the group from a few years ago, apparently bereft of any of the original members, lip-syncing this very song. This video is of the genuine article, so far as I can ascertain.

Now if I could only find a video of Dr West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band singing The Eggplant that ate Chicago.

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Bank of America getting ready to stiff American taxpayers again

Friday, October 28, 2011

Matt Taibbi is urging Occupy Wall Street to encourage people to pull their money out of the big banks, starting with Bank of America, which has just, apparently legally, and with the encouragement of the Fed, just offloaded trillions of dollars of bad bets onto the taxpayers.

Obviously Goldman, Sachs has become the great symbol of investment banking corruption, and other companies like AIG and Countrywide have become poster children for problems with businesses like insurance and mortgage-lending. But when it comes to commercial banking, Bank of America is as bad as it gets.

The markets, of course, have lately come to agree, as B of A has lately been downgraded again to just above junk status. The only reason the bank is not rated even lower than that is that it is Too Big To Fail. The whole world knows that if Bank of America implodes – whether because of the vast number of fraud suits it faces for mortgage securitization practices, or because of the time bomb of toxic assets on its balance sheets – the U.S. government will probably step in to one degree or another and save it.

The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.

This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.

There is a very easy way to stop the banks from pulling this sort of stuff: reinstate Glass-Steagal. The fact that no one in power is actually talking about doing that is telling. Instead, we have the spectacle of the “Volcker rule”, which poor Volcker has disavowed. Rube Goldberg couldn’t have come up with something so complicated, and, once the lobbyists are done with it, it will be so full of holes that it will be worthless.

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Only in America

Thursday, October 27, 2011

This country is going certifiably insane:

Under direction from Gov. Scott Walker (R), Wisconsin’s GOP-led legislature is drawing up rules to allow the public to carry guns into the state Capitol. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the Assembly plans to allow guns onto the Assembly floor and into the viewing galleries and are meeting today to set the rules. Those toting guns into the galleries would still have to follow existing rules, “including one that bars the use of still cameras and video cameras.”

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U.S. government to legalize lying

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

It’s always okay if done in the name of the security state:

The Justice Department is proposing new Freedom of Information Act rules allowing the government to inform the public that records do not exist even if they do.

The judiciary has rolled over and played dead while the government has kept its crimes secret in the name of security. This just makes it official. The rule of law is for the little people.

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Just plain weird

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

In case you haven’t seen it. One of the most bizarre political ads ever made.

Where do these people come from? Do you ever meet them in real life? How is it that they rule the world? Block is a creature of the Kochs, by the way.

UPDATE: Colbert’s take:

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Documenting the atrocities, an exercise in futility

Monday, October 24, 2011

There’s a blog out there, whose name escapes me, which had a regular feature asking that readers document the atrocities committed weekly on the Sunday talk Shows. I’ve noted before that Steve Benen spends a lot of time doing exactly that on his blog at the Washington Monthly. He does it very well, as here, where he makes the point that Mitch McConnell becomes intellectually incoherent when presented with evidence that the GOP talking points of the day are not supported by the facts.

For my own part, I have come to the sad realization that documenting the atrocities is more or less an exercise in futility. Does it get through to anyone who doesn’t already realize that we are governed by liars and thieves? Does the media, on whom these lies and distortions are regularly vomited, even care?

Contrary to Benen’s charitable view, it’s quite clear that McConnell clearly understood the question he was asked, and replied with a GOP talking point because that’s what they do, and because it always works. Here’s the exchange Benen quotes:

CROWLEY: Let me show you, because I know that Republicans have always said and continue to say that regulation is stifling business, stifling jobs growth. But there are a couple of figures out there that we found from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, one of them is on the reasons for initial unemployment claims, this is for the first and the second quarter.

Government regulation a little over 2,000 claims for unemployment were blamed on government regulation. Insufficient demand, 55,000. The National Federation of Independent Businesses did a survey. They asked small business owners, the very people you’re talking to, what is the single most important problem, they said poor sales. Government regulation was at 18 percent, taxes was at 18 percent, poor sales, 28 percent of people said that’s what the problem is.

So are you focusing on the wrong problem?

MCCONNELL: Well, you know why people aren’t buying. They’re unemployed. I mean, the private sector is not going to get going here until the government gets its foot off the throat and lets people who know how to create jobs and grow businesses do that.

Look, Candy, all of these people are not making this up. I don’t think people who are running companies are making it up. They realize what is making it difficult for them to grow and expand.

New health care mandates, the financial, the lenders, the new Dodd-Frank bill, crawling all over everybody, not big banks but small banks, all over my state, making it more and more difficult for them to lend.

Spouting talking points didn’t in this instance, as it usually does, because Candy Crowley, being the bulldog that she is, followed up and refused to let go until she got a straight answer and exposed the many and sundry lies in McConnell’s answer.

No, I kid, this is what she really did:

CROWLEY: Let me pick up where we left off right after a quick break. We’ll be right back with you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CROWLEY: Senator, I want to move us on to some politics here. I had a discussion with Senator Joe Biden earlier in the week, and he had something to say about Republicans I want you to listen to.

So Candy picked up where she left off, by changing the subject entirely Had she actually exposed his lies, he might not have come back on the show, and she can’t have that. Not that she’s interested in real journalism anyway. She’s with the 1%, like all the other talking heads, and she’s quite comfortable letting the GOP have its way.

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