So Let's Raise Hell

Wall Street Died And Went to Heaven
Rodney Spoilt, a charmer and a cheat, went broke one day when several of his buncos blew up in his face. No problemo. He went to fabulously rich uncle Chauncey Cashcow and took out a “loan” to tide him over. Don’t worry, Unc said, there’s plenty more where that came from. So just go about your business, whatever it may be. And don’t forget to quaff plenty of La Tache and Margaux while you’re at it.
That’s the Vanity Fair version of the happy circumstances on Wall Street at the moment. Whatever pecuniary problems you may have, rest assured that you don’t have to worry a whit about the masters of the universe. They’ve attained nirvana. There has never been a more perfect time on the planet for the big buck boys.
The government gives them gobs of money. They invest some and keep the rest. How much? No one’s really counting. If the investments pay, they keep the proceeds. If they tank, the government covers their losses and gives them more spondulicks with which to speculate.
This ‘crisis” stopgap is supposed to be “regulated” at some time in the future. But then again it may not be--at least, not seriously so. Some Dems and virtually all Reps believe that the free market goose must be indulged, even if it now devours golden eggs instead of laying them. To do otherwise would be “socialistic.”
So it’s like Bonnie and Clyde being told that they will no longer have to rob banks because an ATM will be reserved for them to make withdrawals whenever the fancy strikes.
They say the great unwashed are seething at this scheme. Every poll and survey rates the great bank bailout as about as popular as swine flu. But Barack Obama, the guy who approved it, still tops the hit parade of politicians. And there are naught but scattered protests out in the heartland. When do folks really start putting their (dearth of) money where their mouth is?
A Depression baby, I was raised on tales of people who were poor but politicized. Their activism was the sunlight glinting through the gray clouds of misery. Everyone was marching, picketing, sitting in, throwing rent parties, planting veggie gardens, joining movements. When families were dispossessed hundreds showed up to defy the sheriff and move the furniture back into the house. It was all very social, if not to say socialistic.
Now it seems everyone is having their own private little depression alone at home. The jobless and foreclosed are mistakenly blaming themselves instead of the system. Or they think a rising stock market is a sign of recovery. Or they’re hoping that Obama, Geithner, Summers, Goldman and Sachs will make everything okay again. Or, worst of all, they’re paying attention to yahoo magpies like Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity who will only lead them deeper into the slough of stupidity. Come on, people. The least you can do is rent the Grapes of Wrath and get a bit worked up.

Hail the Philadelphia Lawyer

Great ExSpecterations
For decades lefties like me were told by our liberal friends that we should “work inside” the Democratic party rather than start third parties that can’t win but only “spoil” Dem chances for electoral success.
The part they always forgot to mention is that the Dems, faithful servants of business as usual, maintain a highly effective internal system for weeding out lefties, reformers and other such troublemakers seeking to stir their stasis. Accordingly, you don’t see the Dems giving anything more than lip service to progressive policies. And you certainly don’t get any budding Herbert Lehmans, Bill Moyers or Ralph Naders on Dem tickets. No, the Dems are far more comfortable with tired old tories like Arlen Specter, who, facing ouster by the yahoos who took over the Reps in Pennsylvania, jumped the fading GOP and joined the flourishing Dems
While the numerically determinist among the Dems cheered because they had presumably gained a veto-proof 60 vote Senate, Specter himself warned his new party not to count on it. He said he’d be his own man as he was with the Reps, where he artfully combined black-hearted reaction with yellow-bellied moderation.
At his press conference that night, Obama said the same thing. He didn’t expect a rubber stamp congress, he offered, because independent thinkers like Specter must be free to go their own way. The Reps, along with thousands of other parliamentarians from Ottawa to Oslo must have fallen off their well-polished seats.
The whole idea of party politics, as invented and refined by the Brits four hundred years ago, was to whip members into line to get the party’s program passed. This is exactly how the Reps, under the ruthless Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, ran congress in the Bush years.
Obama said that because the Dems have no actual need for such discipline. That’s because they don’t really have a program to pass. As I never get tired of noting, the Reps stand for business and the Dems for as usual.
Take a close gander and you’ll see that Obama’s domestic initiatives, with the exception of his gift to Wall Street that keeps on giving, are, in the words of the immortal Billy Dannreuther in Beat the Devil, more pomp than circumstance. And even these proposed “changes,” as we are constantly reminded, are subject to Obama’s exquisitely pragmatic sensibilities (Google pragmatism and Obama and you’ll get a half million results).
So the sere Specter should fit in just fine with the Dems. And if Obama ever needs a shamelessly implausible alibi, excuse or cover story, recall that Specter authored the preposturous “magic bullet” theory in the JFK killing.

I Barely Understood the Old One

They've Changed The System Again
If you’ve noticed, the stock market is soaring while the economy is sinking. Every bit of bad news on Main Street is treated as good news on Wall Street. Today’s announcement of a six percent annual decline in business brought a triple digit bounce in the Dow.
This is the celebration of what East German kids used to learn in Marxism-Leninism class as the triumph of state monopoly capitalism, or what Mussolini-era Italians knew as the corporate state. Don’t confuse it with socialism. That's when the state takes over business. This is business taking over the state. Or, more accurately, a merger of business and the state--in business’ favor, of course.
The nation’s few ideological free marketeers are shocked and appalled. But Wall Street is pleased and the public, as usual, is parked on a dead end road between ignoramia and oblivia. I market at a Stop&Shop and gas up at a Citgo. I ask and ask, but few, if any, at the former know or care that the store is owned by a Dutch conglomerate or at the latter that the station is franchised by Hugo Chavez and the good people of Venezuela. Why in blazes should they give a hoot that the nation’s investment banking has been turned over from Goldman Sachs to its graduates at the Fed and Treasury?
It’s much easier this way. Up until the great fall, the banksters had a job of it writing weird paper like credit default swaps and peddling it to other banksters, pension funds, school boards and your aunt Millie’s supposedly safe and sound bond fund. That took work and nail biting because no one understood the products.
Now, under state monopoly capitalism, Washington gives zillions to Wall Street, which smartly uses it to buy stocks rather than stupidly lending it to losers. It doesn’t matter if the stocks are dogs: the rising tide of fed bucks floats even garbage scows. Sure, this bubble will again burst, and probably soon. But the banksters will have pocketed their profits and left us to pay for the clean-up yet again.
What’s happened is that Obama and company have so far successfully life-boated the banksters off the foundering U.S.S Economy. Only the life boat is an ocean-going yacht and the rescued are enjoying drinks on the sun deck watching the Economy sink and giggling at the awful screams of the passengers. But not to worry. Treasure ports in China and the Persian Gulf are beckoning. The sinking of the U.S.S. Economy will soon fade into another old sailor's tale.

I'm On The Waitlist

No, That's The Picnic Button!
I’ve been waiting, lo these many decades, for the times for recrimination and panic. Whenever they seem to be nigh, as with the current fallout from ignominy in Mesopotamia and influenza in Mexico, I am told by bigshots that they are not quite here yet--again!
I’m hopeful they’ll finally arrive before I join the great majority. I would love to recriminate all over Dick Cheney, George Bush, Condi Rice and company, preferably in the new Yankee Stadium with full bore coverage by HBO, so I can curse.
I would also enjoy a good panic, so long as I didn’t get trampled by other panickers. I live on a fairly quiet street. I imagine I could simply run aimlessly up and down it for a bit, my arms aflail, while I intoned incoherent imprecations. I would hope then that an attractive neighbor would take me in her embrace and endeavor to calm me down.
A newsreader on public radio just told me that rather than simply panicking I should plan. I take that to mean that I should devise a panic scenario for use when the time comes. Maybe I could ride a unicycle around antically and aflail, annoying the neighborhood dogs. Meanwhile, Pres. Obama has added that "there is no cause for alarm." If there's no alarm, how are people going to know when to panic? I'd like to recriminate with him about that.

Geithner’s Gobbledygook

Obama Almost Like FDR
Tuning to the temporizing tergiversations by Tim today at the Senate reinforced my notion about the slight difference between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama. FDR was willing to sacrifice the banks and brokers to save the system. Obama is willing to sacrifice the system to save the banks and brokers.

Idioms for Idiots

Translate This!
In a fast-moving world like ours where busy people don’t have the time to absorb facts and think logically, the media are there with an assortment of stupid cliches specifically shaped to bamboozle the already bewildered. One of these idiotisms was cranked up in recent days to peculiarize populist participants at the 34 nation Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. It was the old standby “anti-American.”
As used by our pols and pundits, it has not the slightest thing to do with anyone’s opinion of America or things American. It is simply, and at all times, a euphemism for disobedience. Thus, if Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is described on the evening news as “anti-American,” all it means is that he does not obey the rules and regs of the empire.
By the same token, Chavez would not have to do anything “pro-American” to absolve himself of the charge. Since our empire is multinational, he could turn his country’s oil wealth over to British Petroleum, its secret police over to the Israeli Mossad, its auto business to Toyota and its entertainment sector to Sony and be considered as red, white and blue as Siegfried and Roy.

The Perfect Excuse

Let Bygones Be Obamagones
President Obama is actively attacking an addling array of issues. The economy, the empire the environment and education loom large--and that's just the e's. But whatever progress he makes on these, I’m getting the feeling that he will be remembered for solving an even more basic human concern. I think Barack Obama, a lawyer and constitutional scholar, will rid us of crime.
Imagine a world without need for cops, courts or confinement because criminality has become passe, yesterday’s concern!
Imposssible, you skepticize. How could one counselor, even a cool one with that LA Law look, put an end to felonies, misdemeanors, violations and even mere infractions? By the Obama Doctrine, say I.
What’s the worst crime in the book? Making aggressive war on another nation, say the world’s lawgivers. What comes close? Torturing people for any reason. Culprits get shot and shut away for doing such things? Why? Because they resort to individual, subjective defenses. But what if they had a common and unarguable defense?
That’s what President Obama has given them. He has said of aggressive war and torture that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
But isn’t that the one and only job of every prosecutor, judge and jury member in the world? Hasn’t every murder, rape, embezzlement and overtime parking offense occurred in the past?
Obama is on to something humongous here. His doctrine is even more brash than the rash Bush Doctrine, which, unbeknownst to Sarah Palin, held that any country could attack any other country that it felt might do it dirt on some future occasion.
The Bush Doctrine merely trashed the modern nation-state system born in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended 30 years of gore between bloodthirty papists and murderous protestants. War weary princes and priests got together and agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty. It didn’t always work, to be sure, but it was a useful rule until Bush treated it as so much stool.
The Obama canon is aimed not at the mere law of nations but at law itself. I can envisage the Albanian churl confessing to the hetman, Yes, I stole the chicken, but it’s already eaten and what is to be gained by regurgitating it? Or I can see the Mafioso admitting to the rub-out and adding, Why make a big deal of it, judge, he’s already fish food.
For all of its magnanimity, the Obama Doctrine has been intoned in a modest manner by its author. Now the question is how soon can it be universally acclaimed and applied? Advise us, Mr. President, when will we mere citizens be as free of our bad old deeds as the good old boys in Washington?

Quotes Courtesy of Conservatives

Isms No Longer Fizzin'

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. --Henry L. Mencken

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind the government by furnishing it with the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect these disasters seem never quite to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” --General Douglas MacArthur

A century ago, politicians got elected by warning us of the threat of thespianism and ever lurking heterosexualism. The danger of mopery was also much bruited.
Then when anarcho-syndicalism became the rage and desperate men started throwing bombs at kings and capitalists, our pols scared us with augurs of anarchy. When the Russians made a revolution in 1917, anxiety about anarchism was supplanted by the specter of Soviet socialism. In the thirties leftists warned us about fascism. Since conservative Americans were well-disposed towards this particular ideology, fear of it didn’t really catch on until we went to war with fascists in 1941.
After the war, communism crudesced as the consternation of choice, lasting the next half century. It was an amazing commercial success. Americans scarfed up any product that could even remotely be associated with anti-communism, from missiles that couldn’t fly to foreign puppet armies that couldn’t fight. When communism collapsed of its own brutal incompetence, we were left without what I call a pejorism for a few years.
9/11 added terrorism to our fright folio . It really didn’t make any sense since terrorism was not a country, an ideology or a movement, but merely a tactic as old as history. Since American public discourse has rarely been rational, making war on a trope wasn’t really a problem for us.
Then came the 2008 election in which word-wacky Reps threw the whole putrid pail of pejorisms at Barack Obama. He was, all at once, charged with being a terrorist, Islamist, Marxist, socialist, fascist, communist, and an atheist who had spent too much time in a Christian liberationist church when he wasn’t forging his birth certificate and conspiring with like-minded moperists to bring about the ruin of everything American in the cause of everything foreign and devilish. Not only that, he used a teleprompter and his wife occasionally bared her arms and nearly reignited the American Revolution by coming close to goosing the Queen of England. But hardly anyone was listening any longer.
To the yahoos’ dismay, it seems that isms are like replays of Gilligan’s Island or nostalgia for Kate Smith: they have run their course. Throw around the smear “socialist” and no one but a few Cold War crones have the foggiest. We have long since entered the age of Leno’s Jaywalkers when the ordinary man or woman in the street bubble their lips when asked who Washington, D.C. was named for.
Americans were never really comfortable with isms. Ignorant of ideology, they never really knew what they meant besides something nasty. Even our soldiers gave them up years ago. You notice that they now assign the simple rubric ”bad guys” to anyone anywhere they have been tasked to blow away.
Good Idea. It’s more in keeping with our character if we insult our adversaries as “bad guys," “jerks,” "A-holes" or, as Mencken might have said, “hebetudinous roperipes.”

Good News in Hard Times

Massive Demonstrations Sweep Nation
Outdoing the massive manifestations in Europe, tens of millions of ordinary Americans took to the streets today protesting the sinking economy that bails banksters while letting workers drown in debt and desperation.
The depth and discipline of the demonstrations indicated that a huge and highly organized movement of progressive-minded Americans was on the move, demanding jobs, economic justice, a decent health care system, an end to imperial wars, and a political system that reflected the will of a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry.
President Obama took time from the G20 meeting in London to salute the demonstrators back home. He called upon them to keep up pressure on congress to get his sweeping reform program enacted. He pointed out that in FDR’s time during the Great Depression, the president told his labor secretary that if she really wanted rights for workers, she would have to create the political will to make them irresistable so that he had no excuse not to support them.
Though hard times persisted in America, the mass demonstrations were peaceful and optimistic as if people were beginning to understand that with unity and knowledge they had the power to take over their own lives
April Fool’s!

Dad, can I borrow the picket sign?

Teenagers Gone Worldly
NPR’s Paris corespondent, Eleanor Beardsley, had a piece the other day about French high school kids joining the massive wave of protests against the government’s handling of the economic crisis. She reported that there are two national unions of high schoolers and that les étudiants were legendarily successful at shutting down their lycees and taking to the streets in enormous numbers when issues vexed them.
To explain this oddity to us apolitical Americans, she got the editor of a French student magazine to say that lots of kids went on strike simply to play hookey while others got into politics because French schools are all study (what a weird concept) so that students had no extracurricular sports and clubs to occupy their free time. That’s more or less like saying that I write a political blog because I don’t have a beer can collection to work on.
In fact, the French, unlike Americans, tend to be political. That means they’re open to taking public action on public problems, while we prefer private and profitable responses. As old Karl pointed out, classes in France, from poor to rich, tend to defend their own interests. The bottom is represented by the left, the top by the right, while the middle wavers between the two. Of course, it doesn’t always work out so neatly. But that framework remains useful for parsing the tidings from Gaul. It certainly helps to explain the tidal wave of protests now roiling the glorious landscape.
Because the French are political they are frequently on strike and because they often win strikes they enjoy a range of civic, social and workplace benefits unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic. This reinforces the notion that politics and strikes work. Such subversive ideas reside in the back of the head of even the most mindless French teenager who skips school more to draguer les filles than to protest the latest efforts by the Sarkozy regime to succor the rich and screw the poor.
In France, the rich and powerful have learned to respect the clout of workers and students. This has hardly harmed capitalism but has made their capitalists a tad less avaricious and arrogant than our plutocrats. You can see that in the current scandal over bonuses and stock options for corporate execs. Those in France, in the upper six and low seven figures, would be considered chump change here. Nevertheless, French masters of the universe have been tripping over each other to renounce and return them.
Even the New York Times is reluctantly admitting that its thick social safety net will mean far less recession hardship and hock in western Europe than it will here. In place and well-funded unemployment benefits are long-term and generous. No one has to worry that losing a job will lose them health care or free college for the kids. Debt levels are low because Europeans still prefer to pay for things with money they have. And if the bosses get too obstreperous, there’s always the option of effective mass protest, even by politically hip teeny boppers.