America, The Exceptional (I)

Another week (and month) gone by, swallowed whole by the insatiable work monster.

I'd be as oblivious to the outer world as most of my fellow Amurkans, if it weren't for listening to audio. And listening is about all I can do to keep from climbing the (not so sturdy) cubicle wall, during 40 hours of (mostly) copy/pasting data.

I do try to get a quick glance at sites while waiting for database pages to load, and this was one of those weeks where I sent myself at least 20 links, for a closer look over the weekend.

While there's the potential for feeling as overwhelmed by all that information as by the office workload, the stories may be details from disparate places, but are never unrelated.

As we embark on an era of Shared Sacrifice—the rich will sacrifice paying taxes; everyone else will sacrifice public services (in many cases, a sole source of income or medical care)—a CBO report can't help but suggest how bogus the bi-partisan Establishment scam is.

The still-employed have already accepted being forced to work more for less. Now the Roberts thugs have decided (among other matters of corporate interest) the case of women workers who sought redress from Walmart.

Those women may earn only $8 an hour, but they certainly have the right to hire a lawyer—just individually, without the added strength of being able to act as a group.

Effective rights? That's for corporations. Or for a legacy Republican in need of office without the "irreparable harm" of votes being counted.

Another angle to power vs. its absence: Sam Seder, on this Advertising Age story about marketers and income disparity.

"Mass influence is over," says Sam, who concludes—

You wonder why the establishment in this country doesn't care about the middle class? Ad Age has given you the answer: "We don't need to sell to these people anymore. It's enough that they will buy food... gas; everything else we sell will be to the richest, because they're the only ones with the money."
...

They don't need you to be consumers anymore. So why in the world would they care if you've got a job? Why in the world would they care about your stagnant wages? The underclass—and by that, I mean 80% of us—no longer have the leverage to get the plutocrats to give a shit about us. And because those plutocrats also control our government, because they have more money to influence the electoral process and the legislative process, we have no leverage with these people any more.

It's certainly true that multinationals in no way need a domestic middle-class as consumers.

Political marketing is another story: that's directed at the (white) masses 24/7.

Typical result is this latest launch into uncritical media fawning over someone who is indeed what she once would have been considered by the same media: an insane and dangerous demagogue who should stay on the outer fringe of American discourse.

But, nope: as Matt Taibbi says of the real history of the media's new political star–

This background is significant considering Bachmann's leadership role in the Tea Party, a movement ostensibly founded on ideas of limited government. Bachmann says she believes in a limited state, but she was educated in an extremist Christian tradition that rejects the entire notion of a separate, secular legal authority and views earthly law as an instrument for interpreting biblical values. As a legislator, she not only worked to impose a ban on gay marriage, she also endorsed a report that proposed banning anyone who "espoused or supported Shariah law" from immigrating to the U.S. (Bachmann seems so unduly obsessed with Shariah law that, after listening to her frequent pronouncements on the subject, one begins to wonder if her crazed antipathy isn't born of professional jealousy.)

While Europeans may take to the streets, our exceptional country has only tip-of-the-iceberg reports from all over.

On our God-given right not to be oppressed by medical care, for example, there's this and this.

The right to elect psychopaths to screw the unemployed.

The political right of local Republicans to take down state economies, just as they aim to do on the national level.

And they have the right to a two-fer in their war on women: demonizing women plus jeopardizing their health, by passing crap like this latest.

Well, add "demonizing science"; it's really a three-fer.

Exceptional as it all was, some bits of news slipped through.

While Ohio Republicans were busy passing the country's most radical (so far) anti-abortion law, other Ohioans finished their signature drive for a vote on their governor's end to public employee collective bargaining rights. They needed 231,000 signatures; they got over a million more.

It's not that they won't try, but (fingers crossed): one million seems a trifle high for even Republicans to manage disqualifying them all from voting.

A little light about that boring/mean/both-sides-do-it/politics thing: shed by someone who keeps trying to make the most of his media access.

And in a country being pushed back to feudalism—where an ideologue like the wife of "Doctor" Bachmann can be foisted on the populace—there was one little piece of progress for equal rights.